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

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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      Broken Women, Made Whole Onstage

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      In Kornel Mundruczo’s “Pieces of a Woman” and an Annie Ernaux adaptation, “Memory of a Girl,” stage directors explore post-traumatic psychology and the workings of mental recall.HAMBURG, Germany — Anyone who saw the 2020 film “Pieces of a Woman,” on Netflix or the big screen, will not soon forget its 22-minute single-take opening scene of a home birth. For those who haven’t yet seen Kornel Mundruczo’s movie, I won’t be revealing too much by saying that things take a turn for the worse in that technically dazzling sequence.The effect is remarkably similar to what Mundruczo, a Hungarian director, put onstage for the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw in his 2018 production of “Pieces of a Woman,” which was recently performed at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. (The piece is in TR Warszawa’s repertory and will next tour to Naples, Italy, in March.) The birth takes place largely behind closed doors, and the audience watches a live video feed that is projected onto the front of the closed set. As in the film, Mundruczo gives us the birth in a single, heart-stopping shot, with no cuts to enable the audience to catch its breath.While comparisons between films and the plays they are based on have their limits, the stage version is altogether richer, more intimate and more fully imagined than the one onscreen.The play’s author, Kata Weber, who is Mundruczo’s wife, treats the harrowing birth as a prologue to a magisterially drawn-out dinner. Clocking in at close to two hours, it’s a family meal that feels like a one-act drama in its own right.Magdalena Kuta as the stern foster mother in “Pieces of a Woman”.Natalia KabanowIt’s been six months since the tragic evening that opens the play, and the grieving woman and her husband show up for roast duck and painful revelations. Unlike the film, which was a vehicle for its star, Vanessa Kirby (who won the best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival as well as an Oscar nod), the stage version is less a character study than a portrait of the ways that relationships among parents, children, siblings and partners fray in the aftermath of a tragedy.In the main role, Maja, Justyna Wasilewska, is emotionally naked and intense in her grief, yet also full of dazzling wit and vivacity. But Mundruczo surrounds her with six actors whose extraordinary performances make this a true ensemble piece. There is Dobromir Dymecki as Maja’s charming engineer husband, Lars, who, afraid to confront his grief head-on, lapses into immaturity and inappropriate behavior. There is Magdalena Kuta as Maja’s stern foster mother, who has invited a lawyer relative (Marta Scislowicz, who is more cautious than calculating) in hopes of convincing Maja to take legal action against the midwife. For all the sharp words, machinations and recriminations, the extended scene is neither somber nor bleak. Instead, the serious themes are shot through with humor, pathos and ironic reversals that bring to mind Chekhov or Bergman. When Maja and her competitive stepsister (Agnieszka Zulewska) twirl around the dining room with gymnastic ribbons to the 1980s Italian pop hit “Felicità,” the exuberant moment provides a sort of wordless catharsis. Although Maja has suffered an unimaginable blow, we understand that she’s far from broken: not because she’s moved on, but because she has the fortitude to own her pain. Defiantly, she recognizes her loss, yet refuses to be defined by it.The determination to acknowledge and understand past trauma as a way of moving on from it also animates the work of Annie Ernaux. This French writer has been setting her life down on the page for nearly five decades, in both autobiographical fiction and memoir. Her 2016 coming-of-age memoir “A Girl’s Story” appeared in English in 2020 and introduced American readers to her precise and incandescent style.Dobromir Dymecki (at window), Marta Scislowicz (seen from the back), Agnieszka Zulewska and Magdalena Kuta in “Pieces of a Woman.”Natalia KabanowA new chamber adaptation of the novel at the Residenztheater in Munich, “Erinnerung eines Mädchens” (“Memory of a Girl,” as per the book’s title in German and in French), is directed by the young Italian Silvia Costa, who distributes passages taken verbatim from Ernaux’s memoir among three performers from the theater’s permanent acting ensemble.Sibylle Canonica, Juliane Köhler and Charlotte Schwab each bring slightly different readings to the text and to Ernaux’s half-century-old recollections. The play begins in 1958, when the 18-year-old Annie Duchesne takes a job as a counselor at a summer camp and has her first sexual experiences, including a messy encounter with the older head counselor, with whom she falls in love. Although the tone is often cool and dispassionate, the effect is poetic and intimate as Ernaux investigates the storehouse of her memories with directness, honesty and analytic rigor.The trio of middle-aged actresses whom Costa enlists to narrate Ernaux’s reminiscences suggest not so much a splintering of the self as a multiplication of consciousness. Canonica, Köhler and Schwab move about the intimate black box of the Residenztheater’s smaller stage, the Marstall, performing a near-continuous series of actions. Some, like the frequent costume changes, clearly suggest fluid transitions between time periods and locations; others, such as elaborate rituals involving screens, mirrors, glasses of milk, rocks, string, dirt and clay figures of body parts, hint at the mysterious mechanisms of memory. The production’s powerful coda, in which the actresses enter a hidden photo lab and print a portrait of the young Ernaux (it’s featured on the book’s cover in the United States), suggests that mental recall works like a darkroom where the past can be developed, enlarged and fixed. The staging is delicate, but with a solid structure and rhythm that usher the viewer through the brisk 80-minute production. The way that Costa makes a spoken word performance flow gently and organically is impressive. One of the few missteps is Ayumi Paul’s jarring original score, which occasionally overwhelms the subdued emotions onstage and makes it hard to hear the actresses.From left, Charlotte Schwab, Sibylle Canonica and Juliane Köhler in “Memory of a Girl” at the Residenztheater in Munich.Sandra ThenWatching this show put me in mind of one of the Residenztheater’s best recent productions, Bastian Kraft’s reimagining of “Lulu,” in which Frank Wedekind’s antiheroine was brought to life by three actresses, including Köhler and Schwab. That multiplication made sense, in part, because of the myriad archetypes of womanhood that the character embodies.By contrast, it is difficult to know what the multiple casting in “Memory of a Girl” is meant to convey. It could simply be that Costa wanted to take advantage of the excellent actresses at her disposal. But I wonder if there was a deeper purpose to the way that the director divided the role beyond providing a more dynamic way of bringing the book to the stage than entrusting the text to a single performer.“Am I to dissolve the girl of 1958 and the woman of 2014 into a single ‘I’?” Ernaux wonders in “Memory of a Girl.” The interrogation of a splintered or dissociated consciousness may appear to be uniquely suited to the art of writing. Yet Costa, like Mundruzco, finds eminently theatrical means to make us understand a woman who is broken and made whole again.Pieces of a Woman. Directed by Kornel Mundruzco. In repertory at TR Warszawa in Warsaw.Memory of a Girl. Directed by Silvia Costa. Through Dec. 28 at the Residenztheater Munich. More

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      Review: Three Generations Awaiting Justice in ‘Cullud Wattah’

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      Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s play follows one family of women affected by the water crisis in Flint, Mich.Water can be a force for life or death. That the municipal supply of Flint, Mich., is slowly killing three generations of Black women living under one roof isn’t a dramatic revelation, but the grim, yearslong reality embodied in Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s “Cullud Wattah.”In a haunting and eye-opening production, directed by Candis C. Jones and which opened on Wednesday at the Public Theater, the playwright excavates the human costs behind familiar and devastating headlines.“Lead in thuh wattah,” five actors sing as the show opens. A riff on the spiritual “Wade in the Water” aligns present-day woes with Black traditions of perseverance. Emerging from the darkened periphery with jugs in hand, they recount the circumstances of the crisis like morbid poetry: When the city switched its water supply, who is responsible, how tea began to smell of sewage and rashes spread across their bodies.Urgency in the face of deadliness, “Cullud Wattah” points out, is not afforded to Black communities on the margins. The setting is November 2016, 939 days since Flint had clean water, and the repercussions continue to cascade.Marion (Crystal Dickinson) is a third-generation union assembly worker at General Motors, the city’s flagship employer. Her pregnant sister, Ainee (Andrea Patterson), is in recovery from crack addiction. The slight but indomitable Big Ma (Lizan Mitchell) keeps everyone in line, including Marion’s daughters, Reesee (Lauren F. Walker), a queer freethinking teenager with spiritual ties to the continent, and a sly 9-year-old named Plum (played by the adult actress Alicia Pilgrim), who has been undergoing treatment for leukemia.Out of both love and necessity, the women support and care for one another. Marion adjusts Plum’s wig before her first day back at school. Ainee applies lip liner to her sister when tremors in Marion’s hands flare up, from illness or nerves about dating again after her husband’s death.The set design, by Adam Rigg, suggests a house stripped to its raw wood foundations, with hundreds of bottles of murky water lined up and suspended in the air, one for each day it continues to flow from the tap. Bottles of clean water sit atop the refrigerator. (A filter promised by the city should arrive any day now.) The lighting design, by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, is anxious and spectral, while Kara Harmon’s costumes lend the women an everyday earthiness.From left, Mitchell, Patterson and Dickinson in the play, which, our critic writes, excels most when generating heat from familial conflict.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow many bottles of water are needed to do things that most people take for granted — washing Thanksgiving vegetables, for example (26) — is the kind of granular detail the play brings into focus.The plot stirs around the effect that toxins have had on the family, both internally and externally. “We all marked,” says Ainee, who walks in the house one day with a flier containing information about a class-action suit. Marion’s job at GM, and a potential promotion to management, means she would risk their livelihood if she were to get involved — the moral compromise of capitalism and the weight of personal responsibility coming to a head.Dickerson-Despenza’s lyrical prose is laced with humor, and she creates lively and warmhearted characters. Which makes it all the more enraging to watch them struggle against a steady poisoning. Her narrative mode is one of querying the past, not so much to expose fresh facts as to ensure that what should already be known is also deeply felt.While the playwright generates affecting emotion throughout, a fair portion of the dialogue is used to deliver exposition and impassioned proclamations about the impact of contaminated water, even when characters are relating to each other. Jones’ fluid and intimate direction mostly keeps the text from feeling too bogged down in these details.“Cullud Wattah” excels most when generating heat from familial conflict. Performances by the winning ensemble members are nimbly attuned to the language of mothers and sisters, from knowing shrugs and sideways glances to the straight-on withering glares. And in the hands of Dickinson and Patterson, fireworks light up the story at its climax, when long-silenced resentments finally detonate in the sort of blaze that only arises from love.Inseparable as real-world calamity has become from the realm of art, Dickerson-Despenza’s “Cullud Wattah” is especially suited to a moment of environmental unrest. After the play comes to an abrupt end, the cast stands in silence before leaving the stage. They don’t return for a bow, as if this had not been a performance but a call to account.Cullud WattahThrough Dec. 12 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Diana, the Musical’ Review: Exploiting the People’s Princess

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      The tabloid press and the monarchy used the Princess of Wales for their own purposes, and now a new Broadway show does the same.“Was there ever a greater tabloid tale?”Sung by a pack of slithering paparazzi amid an explosion of flashbulbs, so begins “Diana, the Musical,” which seems to exist to answer the question. Digging deep into the celebrity-bio-musical barrel, there to squabble for pre-eminence with pop divas and Jersey boys, it may well win the prize as the tawdriest and least excusable wholesaling of a supposedly true story ever to belt its way to Broadway.I doubt that was the intention behind the show, which opened on Wednesday at the Longacre Theater after somehow surviving two disasters: the pandemic, which knocked it down in March 2020; and a filmed version for Netflix (“the year’s most hysterically awful hate-watch,” wrote The Guardian) that did much the same thing earlier this fall. Still, it’s worth asking, as the poor woman’s corpse is forced to rise again, what its authors could possibly have been thinking.The cynical answer, as always, is money. The Princess of Wales, in her short life and long death, has been dragooned into any number of commercial entertainments, including memoirs by her household staff, thinly sourced biographies, a multiseason story line on “The Crown” and, most recently, the movie “Spencer.” Whether middlebrow or low, these works reshape Diana to their own needs, borrowing her familiar, eventful yet unknowable story to sell mere gossip as relatable real-life tragedy.But at least none of those involved any of the following, as “Diana” counterfactually does: the title character getting jiggy with Mstislav Rostropovich to an electrified version of Bach’s first cello suite; Barbara Cartland, the romance novelist, lasciviously pawing Diana’s lover James Hewitt as he arrives half-naked on a horse; a man with AIDS consenting to have his photo taken with the princess by singing, “I may be unwell, but I’m handsome as hell”; and a sort of boxing match between the rivals for Prince Charles’s affections set to the words: “It’s the thrilla in Manila but with Diana and Camilla!”I wish propriety would allow me to tell you as well about the song in which Diana and her butler, Paul Burrell, choose the low-cut, off-the-shoulder “revenge” dress she wears in response to Charles’s 1994 interview blaming the failure of their marriage on her. Only for turning a common vulgarity into an uncommon one could the number be regarded as clever.Yet these are merely the most extractable of the horrors that “Diana,” as directed by Christopher Ashley, has on display. The real problem is intrinsic, arising from the choice to tell the story in song at all. Musicals, like laws, are often compared to sausages: You don’t want to know what goes into them. In this case, you don’t want to know what comes out, either; if you care about Diana as a human being, or dignity as a concept, you will find this treatment of her life both aesthetically and morally mortifying.Granted, the authors did not make it easy on themselves. In choosing to cover the entire arc of her fame — from 1980 to ’96, with an epilogue about her death tacked on — they probably doomed themselves to the narrative scrawniness that makes the show so twitchy. (“Spencer” limits itself to three days in 1991.) Roughly, and I do mean roughly, Joe DiPietro’s book touches on Diana’s rise from meek kindergarten helper to surprise candidate for what one song calls “the worst job in England,” to fairy-tale bride, to scorned wife, to doting mother, to England’s favorite royal, to unfaithful wretch, to carousing divorcée, to martyrdom and points beyond.De Waal, who sings in most of the musical’s numbers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOnce you add songs into the mix — and Diana (Jeanna de Waal) sings in 17 of them — there’s no time for coherence, let alone subtlety. De Waal is left to embody each new incarnation of the character as quickly and superficially as she swaps William Ivey Long’s trick costumes, which could tell the story better on their own. They are, at any rate, wittier and sparklier than the score; with music by David Bryan of Bon Jovi, and lyrics by Bryan and DiPietro, the songs are cold and crass — and so, not surprisingly, their Diana is, too.This is not just a matter of de Waal’s bravura yet resolutely unthrilling performance, but also of the framing. In her introductory number, looking back on her life from some point presumably after the divorce but before her death, Diana suggests that it was tactically valuable to be “underestimated” — a word that doesn’t scan as a lyric no matter how mercilessly the songwriters flog it. It doesn’t scan as an idea either; rather, it sets up Diana as a kind of English Evita, a schemer who triumphed, which is bizarre on both counts.Indeed, there is something seriously wrong with a Diana story whose most believable and sympathetic character is Camilla Parker Bowles. But other than the degrading “thrilla” scene, Camilla is mercifully underwritten, allowing Erin Davie room to find something human in her that the real Camilla never could.Roe Hartrampf as Prince Charles and Erin Davie as Camilla Parker Bowles, who comes off as the most believable and sympathetic character in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe other two central players have no such room. Roe Hartrampf’s Charles is basically a Prince of Wails, complaining bitterly and at the top of his voice for the entire show; Judy Kaye’s already one-note battleship of a performance as Queen Elizabeth II is further undercut by her popping up occasionally as Cartland — Diana’s step-grandmother — for supposed comic relief.Choices like these suggest that the authors simply did not know what tone to take and so took every one they could think of. Wanting us to engage with the story seriously, they nevertheless ham it up with randy grannies and cheesy catfights. Seeking to cover 16 years in little more than two hours, they condense or flat-out fictionalize with a wink. In this context, it counts as a kind of discretion that the portrait of Burrell as a trusted confidant (and dress wrangler) neglects to mention that he was later prosecuted for stealing from the princess’s estate — a case hastily dropped after the Queen interceded — and, for an encore, wrote a tacky best-selling memoir.Ashley’s staging follows suit, going for grandeur but, in its haste, reaching only the clamminess of farce. (The chilly sets are by David Zinn.) And in Kelly Devine’s bizarrely noncontextual choreography, the ensemble — whether representing palace flunkies, Knightsbridge snobs or worshipful Dianaphiles — performs the same frenzied gymnastics.Musicals are difficult and expensive. No one says they have to be serious, too. “The Cher Show” and “Jersey Boys,” among many others, would have been much better with less drummed-up significance. Nor will an insufficiency of craft and proportion necessarily sully a modest, invented tale like the one told in “Memphis,” the 2010 Tony Award winner from the “Diana” creative team.But if you decide to write a musical about a real woman, known worldwide, who died tragically while still a young mother, something more rigorous is demanded. “Diana,” though, is lazy and thus neither entertaining nor insightful; though audiences talk back to it at will, it’s not even campy fun. It’s just exploitative, doing to the Princess of Wales pretty much what the tabloid press — let alone the monarchy — did to her in the first place.Diana, the MusicalAt the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; thedianamusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More