Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      Broadway Play “Clyde's” Will Be Livestreamed

      by

      The digital experimentation born of the pandemic shutdown is continuing: the final 16 performances of Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s” will be streamed, for $59.The coronavirus closures prompted many theaters around the country to experiment with online offerings. Now, even though theaters have reopened, a new Broadway play is planning to try streaming some performances.Second Stage Theater, a nonprofit that operates a small Broadway house, plans to sell a limited number of real-time, virtual viewings in January for the final 16 performances of “Clyde’s,” a dramedy about a group of ex-cons working at a sandwich shop. The show, by the two-time Pulitzer winner Lynn Nottage, opens Tuesday.The decision to stream some performances, which Second Stage views as an experiment, suggests that some of the survival strategies theaters embraced during the pandemic could have a lasting effect on the art form.“Over the 18 months when we had to pivot, and shift a lot of storytelling to Zoom, that opened up a new door of opportunity for many of us who make theater,” Nottage said. “What we’re hoping is that folks who are reluctant to come out because of the virus, or for whom theater is not accessible, will have access because of this streaming.”They are not aiming for a mass audience. The streams will cost $59, which is the same price as the least expensive ticket at the box office, so as not to undercut in-person sales. (There will also be a $30 ticket for people aged 30 and under, as with in-person performances.)The virtual tickets will be limited in number — probably to around 200 to 300 a performance — because as part of an agreement with labor unions, the theater will cap the number of streaming tickets sold so as not to exceed the total capacity of the theater over the course of the play’s run.The move is significant because, even though the Metropolitan Opera has been streaming performances to cinemas for years, and a number of leading symphony orchestras have long been streaming their concerts, Broadway has been resistant to such a step, in part because of quality concerns, in part because of the cost of compensating artists, and in part because of a fear of eroding the appetite for in-person attendance.In 2016, when BroadwayHD live-streamed a single performance of the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of “She Loves Me,” the event was so unusual that it was recognized by Guinness World Records; a few months later, the same company also live-streamed a performance of Roundabout’s “Holiday Inn.”The pandemic prompted theaters to take digital work more seriously: with their buildings closed, many Off Broadway and regional theaters, as well as some prominent theaters in Britain, embraced streaming as one way to continue connecting to audiences. There were complications both mundane (which labor unions represent theater artists onscreen?) and existential (what is theater, anyway?), but one upside was increased access for people unlikely to attend in-person performances because of disability, geography or finances.For Broadway shows, there were some limited pandemic experiments with filmed performances, but not livestreaming. A “Hamilton” movie, using footage shot and edited in 2016, was released during the pandemic by a streaming platform, as was a filmed version of David Byrne’s “American Utopia”; the musicals “Come From Away” and “Diana” filmed invitation-only run-throughs during the pandemic, and those filmed performances were also released on streaming platforms.Now, as theaters reopen, some are discussing the pros and cons, as well as the feasibility, of a so-called hybrid model, in which stage shows can be seen either in-person or at home. Second Stage, working with the company Assemble Stream, earlier this fall offered its subscribers an opportunity to livestream some performances of an epistolary Off Broadway play, “Letters of Suresh”; encouraged by that experience, the nonprofit decided to try the hybrid approach for “Clyde’s,” which is its first post-shutdown Broadway show.“In-person activity is our priority, but we’ve learned a lot from the pandemic, as far as finding other ways of engaging with audiences,” said Khady Kamara, the executive director of Second Stage. There are a number of potential audiences — those still leery of public gatherings, those who live outside the New York area, those with a variety of accessibility concerns — and Nottage said she also hopes at some point that the play could be streamed in prisons.Kamara said the theater would livestream “Clyde’s,” which stars Uzo Aduba and Ron Cephas Jones, in real time during performances from Jan. 4 to Jan. 16 — it can’t be watched on demand.Is there a risk that the project will dissuade people from coming to see the show at the theater? “I really believe that the magic of being inside the theater, and being so close to the stage, is not something that goes away,” Kamara said. “I think that most people are still going to want to go with the in-person experience.”The performances will be captured by five to seven cameras mounted by Assemble Stream inside the Helen Hayes Theater; the footage will be edited, remotely, in real time, as with a live television broadcast, according to Katie McKenna, the company’s vice president of marketing and business development.Kamara and McKenna said the theater would not need to remove any seats to accommodate the cameras, and that the cameras would not obstruct any patron’s sightlines; the cameras will be operated remotely. “Our goal is to be as nondisruptive as possible,” McKenna said.Neither party would detail the financing arrangement, but Kamara said, “To begin with, we’re not looking at this as a revenue stream, as much as we’re looking at it as an additional avenue for us to provide access to the work that we put on our stages.”And will Second Stage seek to stream other Broadway shows in the future? Kamara described the “Clyde’s” streaming as a pilot project. “We are learning, and will continue to learn, and we’ll see what the future holds,” she said. “Certainly, if there is a market for it, hopefully we’re able to continue to offer it.” More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘West Side Story’ Star Ariana DeBose Is Always Ready for Her Next Role

      by

      After dancing in ‘Hamilton’ and playing Anita in Steven Spielberg’s new musical adaptation, the actress has her sights on a part entirely her own.On a recent fall evening, the actress Ariana DeBose was ordering soup at a cafe near her apartment in New York’s Upper East Side, the lower half of her face covered by a commemorative mask from the reopening of the Broadway show “Six.” DeBose, 30, has no professional relationship to the musical — a poppy reimagining of the lives of Henry VIII’s wives with an emphasis on female empowerment — but her boldly displayed endorsement of the production set a perfect tone for our conversation that night about the women, artists and opportunities that have contributed to making her one of the most sought-after musical theater actresses of her generation. Few performers are shy when it comes to discussing their influences and obsessions, but in DeBose’s telling, it’s impossible to separate any step of her career from the people who helped her get there.She has indeed been in good company. Growing up in Raleigh, N.C., DeBose began dancing competitively at age 7 — she says she “started with the whole ‘ballet, tap, jazz’ of it all” — and dreamed of becoming a backup dancer for Madonna. Soon after finishing high school, she was a finalist on the reality TV show “So You Think You Can Dance.” And over the past decade, she has starred in six back-to-back Broadway musicals and booked two stage-to-screen adaptations, the most recent of which, Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” comes out next month. But while her list of collaborators includes greats like Lin-Manuel Miranda — she played a supporting role in the original production of “Bring It On: The Musical” in 2011 and the Bullet in “Hamilton” from 2015 to 2016 — as well as Robert De Niro (“A Bronx Tale”), Adrienne Warren (“Bring It On”), Diane Paulus (“Pippin”), LaChanze (“Summer: The Donna Summer Musical”) and the entire starry cast of Ryan Murphy’s “The Prom” (2020), it’s her offstage relationships especially that would make any up-and-comer swoon.While still in high school, she joined the actors Charlotte d’Amboise and Terrence Mann’s musical theater summer intensive, Triple Arts, at Western Carolina University, and the legendary stage couple took DeBose under their wing, coaching her for auditions and encouraging her to skip college and go straight to Broadway. Following that advice paid off — “I had the benefit of learning in real time,” DeBose says — and she was soon cast in “Bring It On.” When the cheerleading acrobatics that that show required began to take a toll, DeBose’s mother suggested she rush a different show to cheer herself up, and she caught a performance of the 2011 revival of “Follies.” She was so mesmerized by the veteran actress Jan Maxwell’s turn as former showgirl Phyllis Rogers Stone that she left a note for her at the stage door afterward. Months later, DeBose received a call from a friend who was starring alongside Maxwell; apparently, Maxwell, having related to the professional doubts DeBose had expressed in her note, had taped it to her dressing room mirror for inspiration. The two women struck up a friendship that lasted until the older actress’s death in 2018.Proenza Schouler coat, $7,500, proenzaschouler.com; and Panconesi earrings.Photograph by Cheril Sanchez. Styled by Yohana LebasiSuch a charmed arrival onto the New York theater scene is almost unheard of and, aware that her current wealth of opportunities is rare, DeBose is determined to prove herself worthy of them. “I don’t ever want anybody to look at my work and think, ‘Why does she have that when they could’ve hired someone else?’” she says. “I don’t ever want to ask myself, ‘Did I do enough?’” It’s not impostor syndrome, she assures me, but rather a perfectionist impulse — one that led her, for example, to brush up on her little-used tap skills last year for her role as an old-timey schoolmarm in Apple TV’s musical series “Schmigadoon!” (2021); in between shooting in Vancouver she would take Zoom classes and watch YouTube tutorials in her hotel room.In other ways, too, there is something distinctly 21st century about DeBose’s career. Besides being an openly queer woman of Afro Latinx descent, she has bounced from role to role — often with little time to prepare — in a way that is reflective of our current gig economy. In the 1960s and ’70s, a performer with her skill set might have been cast in a single musical and ridden the wave of its success for years, touring with the production around the world and resting on the laureled association. But DeBose’s ability to move quickly through roles has reaped its own rewards: She has earned a Tony nomination and won a Chita Rivera Award — both for her most recent Broadway appearance, as Disco Donna, one of the leads in “Summer” — among other accolades. Her dancing in that show, as in each of her performances, had the precision and dynamism of a lifelong performing arts kid who stopped formal training just before conservatory programs could overwrite her natural inclination toward wild abandon. And so she can put her mark on choreographic work whether it is more exacting, as in “Hamilton,” or looser, as in “Bring It On.” She credits her versatility, too, to her knack for meeting directors and choreographers where they are. “Most creators are very intense, and each has their own brand of intensity, their own language,” she explains. “I think part of the reason I’ve been able to continue to book jobs is because I chose to learn how to speak other people’s artistic languages quickly.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Channeling Anger in ‘A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’

      by

      Annie Ryan’s stage adaptation of the Eimear McBride novel is given a lucid and intimate revival at the Irish Repertory Theater.The girl is 5, doing somersaults in a skirt, her little-kid underwear showing as she tumbles.“It’s disgusting,” her scandalized grandfather huffs. “How is she supposed to be a child of Mary?”The Virgin Mary, that is. If you grew up Roman Catholic, the phrase “child of Mary” might already be familiar. Likewise the notion of moral purity it connotes, ingrained early in the narrator of Eimear McBride’s formidable rush of a novel “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,” whose solo-show stage adaptation by Annie Ryan is getting a gorgeously lucid, intimate production at the Irish Repertory Theater.Both the novel, published in the United States in 2014, and the stage version, first seen in New York in 2016, predate the rise of the #MeToo movement. But they reflect an anger that was building and that McBride was able to articulate in the speed-of-thought story of a girl, whose name we never learn: a child who draws strength from what she has been taught to believe is her badness, but is left unguarded against others’ actual evil.Directed by Nicola Murphy on Irish Rep’s tiny second stage, Jenn Murray rides the current of the monologue like a river, navigating its rapids and eddies, and stretches of calm, with a deftness that easily brings the audience along. On a spare set by Chen-Wei Liao, abetted by Michael O’Connor’s lighting and underscored by Nathanael Brown’s subtle music and sound design, Murray slips in and out of a crowd of characters with near-total legibility.The girl is in utero when the play begins, but sentient all the same, and already fond of her toddler big brother. The whole play is spoken to him, her most precious person, who, by the time she is born, is surgery- scarred, with branches of a tumor left in his brain.Their mother, abandoned by her husband and frightened for her son, clings to religion. She might love her daughter. Mainly, she seems repelled by her.As a small child reveling in naughtiness, the girl races into the rain to swear lavishly — “My bad words best collection,” she calls it — where no one else can hear. Part of the pain of the play is watching that exuberant defiance ground down by shaming rules that dictate permissible female behavior and blame those who, by their own choice or someone else’s, don’t comply.She is 13 when her aunt and uncle come to visit. The others leave the house, and the uncle, stomach-lurchingly, seizes his chance. He goes to the girl’s room, charms her, kisses her. She thinks he wants more, but he protests: “I’m not that man.” He is, though, and he does. She is a child and he ought to be her protector. When sex hurts her, he says, “You’ll be fine.”This isn’t true then or in the years that follow, as his predation works its warping damage and what feels to the girl like her own sexual empowerment morphs into egregious, long-term self-harm.In college, she won’t speak the secret of her uncle’s abuse even to her best friend.“What is there to say?” she asks. She’s learned her lessons well.A Girl Is a Half-Formed ThingThrough Dec. 12 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘The Alchemist,’ a Play in Search of Comedy Gold

      by

      Red Bull Theater brings on the cons and their marks in this adaptation of the 17th-century Ben Jonson work.Let’s face it: Some people don’t just ask to be conned, they practically beg for it. Their greed, be it for money, sex or power, makes them vulnerable to the most extraordinary fabrications: the more outlandish the promises, the harder they fall for them. Conveniently, their hubris and self-confidence shelter them from the fact that they are gullible idiots.Such perfect marks are matched with perfect swindlers — shrewd, resourceful, prone to fart jokes — in the Ben Jonson comedy “The Alchemist,” now being revived by the Red Bull company. Naturally, shenanigans and slapstick ensue, spiced with an abundance of saucy double, and sometimes single entendres.For the occasion, Red Bull has reunited the team behind its 2017 hit adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Government Inspector”: the playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who translated Jonson’s dense Jacobean text into a vernacular that is easier on 21st-century New York ears, and the director Jesse Berger, who seems to have never met a door that could not be slammed in a hurry. The pairing is felicitous, though the result is not as consistently funny as their earlier show, especially in the slack second act. Admittedly, very little is.After his master leaves plague-infested London for his home in the country, “for he could well afford to,” the butler, Face (Manoel Felciano), and his accomplices Subtle (Reg Rogers) and Dol Common (Jennifer Sánchez) use the now-empty city house to entertain a series of visitors ripe for the fleecing.There is, for example, Dapper, who wants a good-luck charm to improve his gambling odds and is made to believe a simple flea, conveniently near-invisible, will do the trick. The expert comic actor Carson Elrod fleshes out Dapper with a veritable arsenal of mimicry and affectations that make his every appearance a delight.Other targets are more satirically pointed, like the pious Ananias (Stephen DeRosa), who is from “a Protestant sect banished to Holland for the crime of being perfect,” or the excellently named Sir Epicure Mammon (Jacob Ming-Trent, in fine form), who covets the philosopher’s stone that could turn any metal into gold — Jonson’s approach is here very similar to that of Molière.From left, Jacob Ming-Trent and Manoel Felciano in “The Alchemist.”Carol RoseggSir Mammon’s appetites are boundless, and he is bewitched by the suggestion that a single mystery word can trigger the comely Dol into a carnal frenzy. “He that makes the stone must be virtuous, he that buys it, not really,” he says. “Tis the genius of Capitalism.”Hatcher dispenses such anachronisms judiciously — a joke referring to the James Bond universe is milked for all it’s worth, especially visually — but mostly he avoids the trap of over-relying on them for easy laughs. (The modern model of a classic play being jolted into the present remains David Ives’s “The School for Lies,” a dizzying rewriting of Molière’s “The Misanthrope.”)The dialogue often zings, and Berger orchestrates the farcical comings and goings on Alexis Distler’s bi-level set at the requisite madcap pace — at the performance I attended, the excellent Rogers (who played the director of the musical-within-the-musical in “Tootsie”) ad-libbed a line about all the stairs he had to climb.But the show is better at setting up the plot than at resolving it when we return from intermission — it is, after all, easier to throw a bunch of pins up in the air than it is to juggle them.Luckily, the cast members continue to exert themselves relentlessly in the service of laughter, from mere exaggerated inflections to all-out clowning. If acting is a form of conning, theatergoers, too, are willing victims.The AlchemistThrough Dec. 19 at the Red Bull Theater, Manhattan; redbulltheater.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      In 'Tick, Tick … Boom!,' Robin de Jesús Showcases His Range

      by

      In the film, this queer Puerto Rican actor gets to showcase his range, stepping into a more mature role as Michael.The T-shirt says it all: “This body was built on arroz con gandules.”Arroz con gandules, or rice with pigeon peas, is a Puerto Rican classic, and Robin de Jesús wears the shirt with pride under a burnt orange jacket. When mounds of maduros (fried sweet plantains) arrive with our entrees, each is topped with a tiny Puerto Rican flag. De Jesús, 37, approves.The actor’s family is from rural Puerto Rico, and he grew up in a working-class community in Norwalk, Conn. Known for larger-than-life roles like a gay teenager who dabbles in drag in the movie “Camp,” a spirited maid in the Broadway revival of “La Cage aux Folles” and a boisterous interior decorator in both the play and film versions of “The Boys in the Band,” he wanted to diversify his work.Then along came “Tick, Tick … Boom!.” De Jesús was deeply intentional in auditioning for the role of Michael, an actor turned advertiser, in the film, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda.“What kept coming up for me was, ‘I want a quiet performance.’ I want a quiet, subtle, nuance,” de Jesús said at lunch. “And I know that, if I do that, I can showcase maturity.”The movie (in theaters and on Netflix) is an adaptation of a musical about the writing of a musical. The original “Tick, Tick … Boom!” was written by Jonathan Larson — who would later go on to write the rock musical “Rent” — and first performed in 1990. The film tells the tale of an aspiring composer (also named Jonathan and played by Andrew Garfield) pouring himself into yet another musical, this one called “Superbia.” It takes place in the early ’90s, against the stark backdrop of the AIDS epidemic.As his 30th birthday looms, Jonathan’s anxiety manifests as a persistent ticking. He worries about the upcoming workshop of “Superbia,” upon which everything seemingly hinges — and about whether he can succeed in the performing arts at all.Michael, his former roommate and best friend since childhood, has tapped out of the threadbare artist lifestyle, opting instead for a plush career in advertising and a glittering high-rise apartment. He was tired of waiting for hours in line for an audition, just to be cut off after six measures of a song and called the wrong name: “Juan, Pedro, Carlos, lo que sea.”De Jesús with Andrew Garfield in “Tick, Tick … Boom!”Macall Polay/NetflixThat’s not to say that Michael has hardened into a formal shell; he stays playful and supportive of Jonathan’s dreams. We first meet him visiting Jonathan at work in the Moondance Diner, where he drops off copies he made of the “Superbia” script.“Boo-boo, you need to ask yourself,” Michael tells Jonathan, “In this moment, are you letting yourself be led by fear? Or love?”De Jesús said, “I knew that Michael did not have to be pulled and buttoned up, that he was someone who navigated being an artist, a creative, someone who was down and hip, and cool with also doing advertising.”“It didn’t have to just be one thing,” he continued.Although de Jesús has appeared in many major movies, he assumed some other, bigger film star might snag the role of Michael. So he took a risk in his audition. Miranda was impressed.“I’ve seen a lot of productions of ‘Tick, Tick … Boom!’ and a lot of the time the guy that gets cast as Michael is someone who looks very at home being a business guy, very dapper, very smooth,” Miranda said in a phone call. “What’s fun about Robin as a choice is that you 100 percent believe this is an artist who thrives in this world. It’s an artist with a business suit on.”Miranda and de Jesús go way back. (So far, in fact, that de Jesús sang at Miranda’s wedding.) In 2005, de Jesús made his Broadway debut in “Rent” as a member of the ensemble and an understudy for Angel, a young drag queen. That same year, he joined the original cast of “In the Heights,” Miranda’s first musical, with a book by Quiara Alegría Hudes.“Quiara and I realized every time he had the ball, he just put a crazy spin on it and knocked it out of the park,” Miranda said of de Jesús. “I am mixing my tennis and baseball metaphors, but so would Robin.”De Jesús earned a Tony nomination for his role as Sonny in “In the Heights.” He received subsequent nominations for “La Cage aux Folles” in 2010 and “The Boys in the Band” in 2019. This year, he presented at the Tony Awards with Andrew Garfield.But so many of his roles came across as youthful or outsize. De Jesús was ready for something fresh.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘Trouble in Mind,’ 66 Years Late and Still On Time

      by

      Alice Childress’s 1955 play about power and race in the theater is a satire and a tragedy that deserves to be a classic.So far this season, five plays by Black authors have opened on Broadway, each with something urgent to say. Whether despairing (“Pass Over”) or lighthearted (“Chicken & Biscuits”), broadly representative (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”) or laser-beam specific (“Lackawanna Blues”), they are talking to us now, like a newspaper come to life. Like newspapers, too, they are remade every day; when I caught up with “Thoughts of a Colored Man” recently, it had been updated with a hot take on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.Yet for sheer crackling timeliness, the play most of the moment is in fact the oldest: Alice Childress’s “Trouble in Mind,” which opened on Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. Originally produced in 1955 in Greenwich Village, but derailed on its path to becoming the first play by a Black woman to reach Broadway — a distinction that went to Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” four years later — it is only now getting the mainstream attention it deserves, in a Roundabout Theater Company production that does justice to its complexity.And justice, both broadly and narrowly, is the point. What begins as a backstage satire of white cluelessness and Black ingratiation gradually broadens and darkens into something far more mysterious: a peculiarly American tale of lost opportunity.Because Childress uses the play’s structure to express her theme, the ingratiation naturally comes first, and Charles Randolph-Wright’s lively staging leads with warmth and humor. As a mostly Black cast assembles on a perfectly period set (by Arnulfo Maldonado) to begin rehearsing an “anti-lynching” melodrama called “Chaos in Belleville,” their high-spirited chatter is often about fabricated résumés, mutual acquaintances and glorious triumphs past.Yet for Wiletta Mayer (LaChanze) — and for us as we listen — that past is already beginning to crack open. Though she rhapsodizes to the stage doorman (Simon Jones) about a song she once performed in a show called “Brownskin Melody,” she and her colleague Millie Davis (Jessica Frances Dukes) have more often been reduced to “flower” or “jewel” roles: stereotyped Black women with names like Gardenia, Magnolia, Crystal and Opal. In her most recent job, Millie says, “All I did was shout ‘Lord, have mercy!’ for almost two hours every night.”“Chaos in Belleville,” by a white playwright, is no better, despite its supposedly sympathetic theme. In it, Wiletta is set to play Ruby, and Millie to play Petunia: women working for a white family in the Jim Crow South. When Ruby’s son, Job, gets in trouble after daring to vote, the women are left, as usual, to wail and sing.LaChanze and Cooper, who, our critic writes, gives a brilliant, horrific aria that makes you see as if you were behind his eyes a lynching that his character witnessed as a child.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWiletta has no question that the play “stinks.” But then so does any mainstream play she can reasonably hope to book. An idealistic young actor like John Nevins (Brandon Micheal Hall) — who has been cast, in his first Broadway outing, as Job — may feel pride on becoming a part of the theater, but Wiletta knows better.“Colored folks ain’t in no theater,” she says. They are merely in a business.As such, she and Millie — soon joined by Sheldon Forrester (Chuck Cooper), an old hand playing Ruby’s husband — are experts at not rocking the boat. They dress beautifully (in costumes by Emilio Sosa) and feign enthusiasm. In a hilarious yet devastating scene, Wiletta advises John that, in order to feel comfortable, white producers and directors need Black actors to be walking contradictions. They should be “natural” talents yet experienced, not too needy and yet not too cocky, have no opinions except good ones and laugh at every joke.If this seems extreme, read about the experiences of Black theater artists today. The question they have been asking, in manifestoes and Twitter threads, is whether the systemic imbalance of power backstage is in any meaningful sense different from racism.Some 66 years ago, that was precisely Childress’s question as well, and once the white characters appear it starts to get answered. We see that even the most powerless of them — a put-upon stage manager (Alex Mickiewicz), a Yale-trained ingénue (Danielle Campbell) and a neurotic journeyman (Don Stephenson) — have more agency in their profession than any of the Black characters do. The journeyman, though not very good, never lacks for work. (Stephenson, though, is expert.) The ingénue complains that if “Chaos in Belleville” fails she’ll have to move back to her parents’ house in Connecticut, blithely unaware that Sheldon is probably one week’s salary short of homelessness.But it is of course the director, Al Manners (Michael Zegen), who sits at the top of the pecking order, pecking away at everyone’s nerves. An egoist whose veneer of open-mindedness is easily stripped away, he regularly explodes in nasty snits that today would be understood (and yet perhaps tolerated) as big-man harassment. Though he calls Wiletta “darling” and “my sweetheart,” his growing intransigence in response to her growing dissatisfaction is the primary source of conflict within the play.From left, Don Stephenson, Michael Zegen, Brandon Micheal Hall, LaChanze, Danielle Campbell and Jessica Frances Dukes in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTheir fight is a fascinating knot of racial politics and dramatic theory. In Zegen’s apt take, Manners has the reptilian insouciance of a would-be Elia Kazan, bringing to the stage the new techniques of Method acting he has learned as a hack in Hollywood. Yet Manners’s demands are completely incoherent, and as Wiletta fails to satisfy him despite “justifying” and “relating to” the nonsensical dialogue she’s given, she realizes that “Chaos in Belleville” is in fact racist — and, in defending it, so is he.LaChanze gets that arc just right in a wonderfully rangy and compelling performance. At first confident that she can continue to game an unfair system, her Wiletta becomes almost existentially confused as insight floods in; when finally she regains her clarity and resolves not to participate in her own degradation, it has the weight of both victory and defeat in one choice.By then, we understand that “Trouble in Mind,” its title taken from a classic blues song about suicide, is, for all its backstage comedy, a tragedy of waste — not, like lynching, the waste of what happens so much as the waste of what doesn’t.All the Black characters, but none of the white ones, know that tragedy intimately. At one point, Sheldon, who spends most of “Chaos in Belleville” saying “Yes, sir” and “Thank you, sir” and whittling pointlessly at a stick, casually remarks that unlike that play’s author and director he has actually witnessed a lynching. Cooper then gives us a brilliant, horrific aria, filled with Method detail, that makes you see as if you were behind his eyes, and at the same time makes you understand how much of America’s talent has been squandered.That includes Childress, a figure who looks in hindsight a lot like Wiletta. It was because she refused to license a softened ending that “Trouble in Mind” did not make the move to Broadway after its Off Broadway success; none of her later work made it to Broadway either. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important — or that, in our day, as this eye-opening production demonstrates, we can’t make it important again.Trouble in MindThrough Jan. 9 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘In the Southern Breeze’ Review: A Dark Night of the Soul

      by

      In Mansa Ra’s heart-bruised new play, racism is a lethal force that menaces generations of Black American men.The script for Mansa Ra’s heart-bruised new play, “In the Southern Breeze,” at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, has two epigraphs — one from the Amiri Baraka poem “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” the other from Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”Those opposing impulses — despair and perseverance — duel over the course of this dramatic dark night of the soul, which opens with a nameless contemporary American (Allan K. Washington), named simply Man, arriving home and stripping off the smile he wears, of necessity, in the hostile world outside.It’s the expression he calculates, as a Black man, to signal that he’s both nonthreatening and educated enough not to be messed with. “The Obama Deluxe,” he calls it.That little slam gets a big laugh. Only a few minutes in, humor is already a tension release in a show that will talk of suicide, slavery and the lethal force of racism in Black men’s lives throughout United States history. And Ra, like this show’s excellent cast of five, proves adept at lightning-quick switches between the crushing and the comical.Tormented by anxiety, depression and panic attacks, the isolated Man is struggling to carry on. Submission to the unseen, ever-present noose that hangs over him — “Every Black man’s boogeyman,” he calls it — has begun to seem like a comfort.“Sometimes it beckons me,” he says toward the end of that first scene, which, hearkening back to Baraka’s poem, Ra titles Volume 19. Volume 20 is this play’s other bookend. The longest of the three scenes — the surreal and moving center, in which Man does not appear — is Volume 1.In a handsome production by Christopher D. Betts, all of it takes place on a grassy expanse stretching into the distance, with a spiritual, “Fare Ye Well,” as a solacing aural motif. (The set is by Emmie Finckel, the lighting by Emma Deane, the costumes by Jahise LeBouef and the sound by Kathy Ruvuna.)As the play shifts into Volume 1, the wary, eager Madison (Charles Browning) enters, looking for the caravan that will take him north to meet his wife. It is 1780, as far as he knows, and he is running from slavery, barefoot.But the first person he encounters is Lazarus (Victor Williams), a Tennessee sharecropper from 1892. Then a 1970s Black Panther named Hue (Biko Eisen-Martin) stumbles in, followed shortly after by Tony (Travis Raeburn), a young AIDS activist from the early 1990s. It takes most of them a while to figure out why they’re all gathered there, under that unseen noose, and how many eras have collided.“Hold the phone,” an incredulous Hue says to Madison. “You really a slave?”“Hold the what?” a baffled Madison replies.“In the Southern Breeze” pays tender tribute to previous generations of Black Americans and bears unblinking witness to the white violence that has marred and menaced them. Hearkening back to that quote by Dr. King, it also acknowledges the progress toward justice through the ages.This play is a more formally ambitious, far-reaching work than “Too Heavy for Your Pocket,” with which Ra made his New York debut in 2017, when he was known as Jiréh Breon Holder.What stumps him here, in Volume 20, is how to let his unnamed 21st-century Man reject existential exhaustion in a way that doesn’t seem pat. Like Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” rewritten for its recent Broadway run to allow more space for joy, this play wants to illuminate an uplifting path out of pain. But its final section turns muddled and didactic, its poeticism forced.Finding hope, it turns out, is the tricky part.In the Southern BreezeThrough Dec. 12, in person and streaming, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Manhattan; rattlestick.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Tick, Tick … Boom!’ Review: A Bohemian’s Rhapsodies

      by

      Andrew Garfield stars as Jonathan Larson, the composer and lyricist of “Rent,” in this meta-musical directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda.For his feature directing debut, the “Hamilton” honcho Lin-Manuel Miranda points his spotlight at the composer who inspired his own creative awakening: Jonathan Larson.That artist heard little applause in his lifetime. He died at age 35 from an aortic aneurysm the day before the first preview of his breakthrough hit, “Rent.” In addition to “Rent,” Larson left behind the 1991 meta-musical “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” a self-portrait of the artist as an angst-ridden wretch, which Miranda has reverently dusted and polished like a sacred totem for a select cult. When Larson introduces himself as “a musical theater writer, one of the last of my species,” the line prods fans to protest that his as-yet-unwritten rock musical would galvanize a generation of creators. Miranda, who saw “Rent” at 17, is palpably thrilled to gain access to his hero’s hovel on Greenwich Street, here recreated with exactitude — right down to the Scorpions cassette.“Tick, Tick … Boom!” is an autobiography of anxieties. Larson, played with kinetic desperation by Andrew Garfield, fixates on success. How can he get it? How long can his wallet can hold out for it? How much might his all-consuming ambition cost him emotionally? Larson stakes his hopes on wowing producers with a head-scrambling sci-fi operetta called “Superbia.” At the same time, his dancer girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Shipp, primarily tasked to look beatific), threatens to slink off to a teaching job in the Berkshires, and his best friend, Michael (Robin de Jesús), sells out for a corporate salary and an apartment big enough to host the film’s only full-on dance number. (The charismatic de Jesús celebrates his walk-in closet by letting Garfield spin him in the air like a Christmas puppy.)“Compromise or persevere?” Garfield’s striver croons, convinced that his impending 30th birthday — the time bomb in the title — will mark his decline from future superstar to “waiter with a hobby.” Foreshadowing carries the film. Even the songs cop that Larson was not yet the lyricist he would become. The lyrics dwell on chirpy observations about his diner job, his writer’s block, his favorite swimming pool (another location in the film) and, of course, his prescient fear of mortality, which is the only reason Steven Levenson’s screen adaptation has dramatic heft.Miranda’s devotion to his idol keeps him from expanding the musical’s myopic fretting into a universal story of sacrifice and resolve. Garfield at least gives Larson an endearing vulnerability. While he isn’t a lifelong singer like Vanessa Hudgens (in a supporting role as a cast member in Larson’s show-within-the-show), Garfield holds up his half of their duet with a capable voice that creaks just enough to sound sincere. As a dancer, Garfield is a gleeful pogo-bopping creature in the homespun key of David Byrne. His gangly limbs fill the frame, and the cinematographer Alice Brooks even follows his lead by eschewing pizazz for the humble grays of a walk-up apartment in winter. Instead, it’s up to a constellation of stage legends to bring the glitz — and boy, do they, in a centerpiece number with so many cameos that this small-scale film briefly becomes Broadway’s “Avengers.”Tick, Tick … Boom!Rated PG-13 for unmelodic cursing and a whiff of drug use. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters and on Netflix. More