Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      ‘Diana’ Musical Sets Netflix Run — and Broadway Opening Night

      by

      In an unprecedented move, a recording of the show will start streaming in October, while audiences can see it live (if theaters reopen) in December.“Diana,” a new musical about the idolized but ill-fated British princess, managed to get through nine preview performances before Broadway shut down last March.Now, one year, one pandemic, and one Oprah interview later, the show is ready to try again, with a new strategy and a new context.In a first for a Broadway show, a filmed version of the stage production will start streaming before the musical opens. “Diana,” which was shot over a week last September in an audience-less Longacre Theater, will begin streaming on Netflix on Oct. 1, and then two months later, on Dec. 1, will resume previews on Broadway.The musical’s producers announced Tuesday that they intend to open Dec. 16, which is 625 days after its originally scheduled, but pandemic-postponed, opening night. The producers are putting their Broadway tickets on sale now, and counting on the Netflix film, which will have an open-ended run, to boost interest in the stage production.“I think people will see the movie and will say, that’s a show I want to see in person,” said Frank Marshall, a prominent filmmaker who is one of the musical’s lead producers. Another lead producer, the Broadway veteran Beth Williams, acknowledged that the plan involves “a slightly more complicated rollout,” but added “we feel like it’s an incredible opportunity to put ‘Diana’ in front of the global Netflix audience, and then give them an opportunity to see it live.”Broadway, of course, remains closed in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus, and producers expect that most full-scale plays and musicals won’t attempt to start performances until after Labor Day. “Diana,” which chronicles the life and death of the Princess of Wales, who was the first wife of Prince Charles, is among the first shows to put tickets on sale and to choose a specific date for a target opening.The scheduling, Marshall said, was a matter of trying to anticipate how the country’s post-pandemic reopening will unfold, and trying to coordinate the two projects to strengthen them both. “We wanted to make sure our marketing plans aligned,” he said. “I’m very optimistic about the fall, for both movies and for Broadway.” (A spokesman for the show declined to say how much Netflix paid for the streaming rights.)The musical, featuring Jeanna de Waal in the title role, is directed by Christopher Ashley and choreographed by Kelly Devine, who previously collaborated on “Come From Away”; it was written by Joe DiPietro and David Bryan (the Bon Jovi keyboardist), who created the Tony Award-winning “Memphis.”Through virtual and in-person work, the show, which had a pre-Broadway production at La Jolla Playhouse, was revised early in the pandemic. The producers said they do not expect further revisions, and expect their cast to remain intact.Diana has remained an object of public fascination in the years since her death in a 1997 car crash. But her story also has a contemporary sequel, as her younger son, Harry, and his wife, Meghan, stepped away from their royal duties, and, in an interview this month with Oprah Winfrey, he said that “my biggest concern was history repeating itself.”The lives of Diana’s children are not the subject of the new show. “You see Diana become a mother, but her children are not in the musical,” Williams said. “We’re telling the story of a complicated marriage, and at the same time we’re telling a coming-of-age story, and we’ve always seen it as a celebration of Princess Diana, whose legacy will live forever.”The producers said they don’t yet know what sort of safety protocols might be required for cast, crew, or ticket holders at the in-person production. Will there even be an opening night party? “There will be a celebration,” Williams said. “It’s too soon to know what that will look like.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Crowns, Kinks and Curls,’ Getting to the Roots of Black Hair

      by

      Keli Goff’s series of vignettes feature Black women recounting how their hair affected their school lives, relationships or careers.I have 4b hair that remained virgin hair, mostly styled in box braids and cornrows with extensions, until I was 13, when I got my first relaxer. My scalp has known chemical burns, hot comb burns, curling iron burns, flat iron burns and the unrelenting throbbing that comes with hours of tight root-wrenching braiding. I got my big chop at 21 and have been natural — years of T.W.A.s and twist-outs and wash ‘n’ go’s — ever since.Do you get what I’m saying, or am I speaking another language?I’ve written about my hair before, and every time I do I’m well aware of the vocabulary, which I’m sure is unfamiliar to many non-Black readers. Though it’s not just a matter of terms or phrases: Black women often encounter unprovoked opinions and wrong assumptions from employers, strangers — even family and friends — about what their hairstyle says about their professionalism, their social status or their relationship to Blackness.The personal, cultural and political implications of Black hair are at the root of the well-meaning but less than inspired “The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls.” (And yes, pun definitely intended.)Written by Keli Goff and produced by and filmed at Baltimore Center Stage, “Crowns, Kinks and Curls” is a series of vignettes, each one featuring a Black woman recounting how her hair affected her school life, relationships or career. The piece channels the spirit of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls,” though the writing, albeit earnest, is far less poetic.The actresses Stori Ayers, Awa Sal Secka and Shayna Small embody all of the fictional women, donning different do’s to do so. (Nikiya Mathis handled the eclectic mix of hair and wig designs.) Most of the scenes are monologues, though occasionally two or three women meet, say, in the office of a mostly white law firm, where an older straight-haired lawyer named Sharon (Ayers) berates a younger one, Ally (Sal Secka), for wearing her hair in braids: “I’m sorry, I can’t let you meet a major client looking like this.”Gaby (Small), with sleek face-hugging Josephine Baker-style finger waves, recalls her mother’s distress that she cut her “good hair” for her wedding day, showing how hair reflects the generational trauma held by some Black women. Wanda (Ayers), in bouncy mocha and champagne blonde curls, recounts how an ex-boyfriend reproached her for pressing her natural hair for an interview, illustrating how “authentic Blackness” is often policed even within the Black community.And so every tale has its moral, none of which should be new to any Black woman. They certainly weren’t for me, a woman who has had white people make awkward comments about my hair, ask questions and even ask to touch my crown in admiration.Which is to say “Crowns, Kinks and Curls” excited me more conceptually than it did in its actual execution, which was all perfectly serviceable, from the performances to Bianca LaVerne Jones’s staging, to Dede Ayite’s set, with a big, puzzling backdrop of large flowers.Scenes span recent history, some taking place during the Obama Administration and others referencing former President Trump and 2019’s Crown Act against hair-based discrimination. These glimmers of vibrancy underscore the timeliness of the topic, given how the social consciousness of Blackness has shifted since the Obama era.In one humorous monologue, Sal Secka, wearing an Afro pony — ethereal and exquisitely cloudlike — plays a woman named Adaora who has accompanied her biracial daughter to see the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and cheer on the Black princess.In a somber scene, two unnamed women (Sal Secka and Ayers) unwrap and unpin their hair in silence, as “Strange Fruit” is sung offstage; they are preparing to go to a funeral for a Black husband and son unjustly killed. It’s the one sequence in which hair is not so explicitly the topic of discussion, but rather is powerfully positioned as part of a larger expression of the Black experience, particularly at this moment in history.In a somber scene, Stori Ayers unwraps and unpins her hair in silence.Diggle/Baltimore Center StageThe show’s program includes a brief timeline of the history of Black women’s hairstyles and hair practices, referencing enslaved women’s use of head wraps and braids before enduring the Middle Passage, along with the work of hair pioneers like Madam C.J. Walker and George E. Johnson Sr. There’s so much to be mined in the history of Black hair that “Crowns, Kinks and Curls” feels like it has missed opportunities to go further — or even incorporate real stories.Why not use the smart, funny and vulnerable voices of real Black women? Why not devise scenes that are more than neatly prepared monologues?And because it is a rarity to see Black women talking about their Black hair onstage, what I saw only made me hungry for more: I wanted to see more Black women of different shades, in not only wigs and weaves but also their own natural ‘fros. I was disappointed, in scenes where women were supposed to be wearing natural hair, to see false approximations.I believe this very capable show — which had a creative team entirely comprising Black women, to my utter delight — can be more. I hope it happens if and when it’s staged in person, as it’s the kind of work I both want and need to see, as a Black female critic and as a Black woman writing about an art form that too often fails people of color.So as I undid my own head of flat twists this weekend in preparation for a much-needed trip to the salon, this earnest request crossed my mind: more Black women, and more (and more and more) of those curls.The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and CurlsThrough April 18; centerstage.org More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in Television

      Craig muMs Grant, Actor and Slam Poet, Dies at 52

      by

      He was a star of the HBO series “Oz” under the name muMs, which he also used on the poetry circuit both before and after finding success on television.Craig muMs Grant’s biggest success as an actor was the role of Poet on the HBO prison drama “Oz,” but fans of that series were accustomed to seeing him credited simply as muMs. It was a name he adopted as a young man when he was exploring rap and slam poetry, influences that he said changed his life.“Before hip-hop,” as he put it in “A Sucker Emcee,” an autobiographical play he performed in 2014, “I couldn’t speak.”Mr. Grant compiled a respectable career as an actor. He appeared on “Oz” throughout its six-season run, which began in 1997, and turned up in spot roles on series including “Hack,” “Boston Legal” and “Law & Order” and its spinoffs, and in movies like Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” (2000). But before his “Oz” breakthrough he was a familiar presence on the slam poetry circuit in New York and beyond; he was in the 1998 documentary “SlamNation” as part of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s slam team.He returned to his poetry/rap roots often, even after “Oz” gave him a measure of fame — appearing onstage with the Labyrinth Theater Company in New York, where he was a member of the ensemble, and performing at colleges and small theaters all over the country.Mr. Grant, third from left, in an episode of the HBO series “Oz” in 1997. He played Poet, a drug addict who writes verses while incarcerated.HBO“I love words,” he told The Indianapolis Star in 2001. “Anybody ever wanted to buy me anything for Christmas or my birthday, they can buy me a dictionary. The bigger, the better.”Mr. Grant died on Wednesday in Wilmington, N.C., where he was filming the Starz series “Hightown,” in which he had a recurring role. He was 52.His manager, Sekka Scher, said the cause was complications of diabetes.Craig O’Neil Grant was born on Dec. 18, 1968, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a locksmith and carpenter at Montefiore Hospital, and his mother, Theresa (Maxwell) Grant, was a teacher.Mr. Grant graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx and was taking college courses in Virginia when, he said, he started exploring writing, seeking to infuse poetry with the energy of the rap music he enjoyed.“The problem with poetry is, a lot of the audience sometimes has a short attention span,” he told the Indianapolis paper years later. “So poetry has to have rhythm to capture people who can’t listen for so long. They’ll just close their eyes and ride the rhythm of your voice.”He took the name “muMs” when he was around 20. He was in a rap group, he told The Philadelphia Daily News in 2003, and still had a bit of a youthful lisp, so a friend suggested he call himself “Mumbles.”“I thought about that for a week and shortened it to muMs,” he said, and then he turned that into an acronym for “manipulator under Manipulation shhhhhhh!” That phrase, he told the Indianapolis paper, symbolized the notion that “as great as I want to become or as great as I think I am, I can always go to the edge of the ocean, stand there and realize I’m nothing in comparison to the universe.”Back in New York, he didn’t succeed as a rapper. But he began performing spoken-word poetry at places like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which is where someone involved in developing “Oz” saw him and recommended that Tom Fontana, the show’s creator, give him a look. Mr. Grant auditioned by performing one of his poems, and he was cast as Poet, a drug addict who writes verses while incarcerated.Mr. Grant, who lived in the Bronx, joined Labyrinth in 2006 and appeared in various roles in its productions. He also began writing plays, including “A Sucker Emcee,” in which he told his life story largely in rhymed couplets while a D.J. working turntables provided a soundtrack.Mr. Grant is survived by his partner, Jennie West, and a brother, Winston Maxwell.In 2003 Mr. Grant released a spoken-word album called “Strange Fruit,” taking the title from the song about lynchings famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939.“Today, strange fruit means we’re the product of everything Black people have been through in this country — Middle Passage, Jim Crow, segregation,” he told The Baltimore Sun in 2004. “It’s a new way of looking at it. The metaphor of strange fruit means life and birth for me, where it used to mean lynching and death. Blacks have been doing that for years, taking the bad and flipping it, making the best of a bad situation.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      New York Theaters Are Dark, but These Windows Light Up With Art

      by

      The Irish Repertory Theater is streaming poetry readings, and Playwrights Horizons and St. Ann’s Warehouse are showcasing art dealing with race and injustice.Like many cultural organizations, the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan has streamed pandemic programming on its website.But a few days ago, the theater added a new sort of broadcast to its repertoire, setting up two 60-inch screens in windows that face the sidewalk, installing speakers high up on the building facade and airing a collection of films that show people reading poems in Ireland, London and New York.On a recent morning, Ciaran O’Reilly, the Rep’s producing director, stood by the theater on West 22nd Street, gazing at the screens as they displayed Joseph Aldous, an actor in Britain, reading “An Advancement of Learning,” a narrative poem by Seamus Heaney describing a brief standoff with a rat along a river bank.“These are not dark windows,” O’Reilly said. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”In the past year, theaters and other performing arts institutions in New York have turned to creative means to bring works to the public, sometimes also injecting a bit of life into otherwise shuttered facades. Those arrangements continue, even as the State of New York has announced that arts venues can reopen in April at one-third capacity and some outdoor performances, like Shakespeare in the Park, are scheduled to resume.The panes of glass, though, have provided a safe space. Late last year, for instance, the artists Christopher Williams, Holly Bass and Raja Feather Kelly performed at different times in the lobby or in a smaller vestibule-like part of the building in Chelsea occupied by New York Live Arts. All were visible through glass to those outside.Three more performances by Kelly of “Hysteria,” in which he assumes the role of a pink-hued extraterrestrial and explores what Live Arts’ website calls “pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity,” are scheduled for April 8-10.The Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s photographs of sculptures are on display at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother street-level performance took place behind glass last December in Downtown Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Ballet staged nine 20-minute shows of select dances from its “Nutcracker.”The ballet turned its studio into what its artistic director, Lynn Parkerson, called a “jewel box” theater; chose dances that kept masked ballerinas socially distanced; and used barricades on the sidewalk to limit audiences.“It was a way to bring some people back to something they love that they enjoyed that they might be forgetting about,” Parkerson said in an interview. “It did feel like a real performance.”She said that live performances were planned for April and would include ballet members in “Pas de Deux,” set to Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Gavotte et Six Doubles,” with live music by the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.Pop-up concerts have been arranged by the Kaufman Music Center on the Upper West Side, in a storefront — the address is not given but is described on the center’s website as “not hard to find” — north of Columbus Circle.Those performances, running through late April, are announced at the storefront the same day, to limit crowd sizes and encourage social distancing. Participants have included the violinist Gil Shaham, the mezzo-soprano Chrystal E. Williams, the Gabrielle Stravelli Trio and JACK Quartet.St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn is displaying Julian Alexander and Khadijat Oseni’s “Supremacy Project,” public art that addresses the nature of injustice in American society.The word “supremacy” is superimposed on a photograph of police officers in riot gear, and there are images by Michael T. Boyd of Sandra Bland, Elijah McClain and Emmett Till.And at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown, the Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day is placing photographs of sculptures of human figures in display cases, encouraging viewers to reckon with definitions of beauty and race. Those displays are part of rotating public art series organized by the artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein and the set and costume designer David Zinn.The aim, Finkelstein said in January when the series was announced, was to display work that “makes constructive use of dormant facades to create a transient street museum” and to “remind the city of its buoyancy and originality.”O’Reilly, at the Irish Rep, said the theater heard last year from Amy Holmes, the executive director of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, who thought the theater might provide a good venue to air some of the short films the organization had commissioned to make poetry part of an immersive experience.The series being shown at the theater, called “Poetic Reflections: Words Upon the Window Pane,” comprises 21 short pieces by the Irish filmmaker Matthew Thompson.“These are not dark windows,” said Ciaran O’Reilly of the Irish Repertory Theater. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThey show contemporary poets reading their own works as well as poets and actors reading works by others, including William Butler Yeats and J.M. Synge, and were produced in collaboration with Poetry Ireland in Dublin, Druid Theater in Galway, the 92nd Street Y in New York and Poet in the City in London.“I think there is something special about encountering the arts in an unexpected way in the city, especially an art form like poetry,” Holmes said.The readers in the films include people who were born in Ireland, immigrants to Ireland, people who live in Britain and a few from the United States, like Denice Frohman, who was born and raised in New York City.Frohman was on the theater’s screens on Tuesday night, reading lines like “the beaches are gated & no one knows the names of the dead” from her poem “Puertopia,” when Erin Madorsky and Dorian Baker stopped to listen.Baker said he saw the films playing in the window as symbolizing a “revitalization of poetic energy.”Madorsky had regularly attended theatrical performances before the pandemic but now missed that connection, she said, and was gratified to happen upon a dramatic reading while walking home.She added that the sound of the verses being read stood in contrast to what she called the city’s “standard” backdrop of blaring horns, sirens and rumbling garbage trucks.“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “There’s something so soothing about her voice, it just pulled me in.” More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Coming to Broadway: Vaccinations for New York’s Theater Workers

      by

      Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the city would create a vaccination site for theater workers to try to help Broadway shows reopen by the fall.Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said on Thursday that the city plans to open a Covid-19 vaccination site on Broadway, as well as a mobile vaccination unit and pop-up sites specifically for theater industry workers.Jeenah Moon/ReutersMayor Bill de Blasio announced on Thursday that the city plans to create a coronavirus vaccination site on Broadway that will be reserved for theater industry workers, promising to dedicate city resources to help Broadway theaters reopen for live performances in the fall.At a news conference, Mr. de Blasio said that in addition to the Broadway vaccination site, there would be a mobile vaccination unit to serve theater workers beyond Broadway. The sites will be staffed by theater workers, many of whom have been relying on unemployment insurance since Broadway shut down over a year ago.“This is going to be a year to turn things around,” Mr. de Blasio said. “It’s time to raise the curtain and bring Broadway back.”TIMES EVENT On April 29, subscribers can explore Australia’s theater reopening and lessons for Broadway, with conversations and songs from “Moulin Rouge!,” “Frozen,” “Come From Away” and more.The city’s plans will not change the state’s rules around vaccine eligibility, which currently allow residents older than 50 to sign up for shots, as well as those in certain job categories and with certain health conditions. Mr. de Blasio said that the sites would be set up over the next four weeks or so and that vaccination eligibility is expected to be much more broad by then.“We want to get the Broadway community involved, and the Off Broadway community, in vaccinating their own folks, by definition a very high percentage of whom are eligible right now,” he said. “We also know that in just a matter of four or five weeks, at latest, everyone will be eligible. I won’t be surprised if that even is sooner.”There will also be pop-up coronavirus testing sites located at or nearby Broadway and Off Broadway theaters to make sure that there is ample testing available as the theater industry tries to get back on its feet. The city will be assisting Broadway theaters in developing plans to manage crowds as they flow in and out of venues.This month, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that arts, entertainment and events venues can reopen April 2 at 33 percent capacity, with a limit of 100 people indoors or 200 people outdoors, and higher limits if patrons show they have tested negative for the coronavirus. But Broadway producers say it is not economically feasible to run commercial productions at reduced capacity, and although there are likely to be some special events inside theaters this spring and summer, full-scale plays and musicals are not likely to open until after Labor Day.In the months leading up to a full revival, there will be a period of preparation needed to mount plays and musicals, including rehearsals and stage maintenance, which will involve actors and stagehands returning to work in close quarters. That period will require ample testing accessibility, Mr. de Blasio said.Mr. de Blasio urged the state to create clear guidelines for the theater industry around mask usage, as well as on how audience members can prove they were vaccinated or received a negative coronavirus test result before a performance. He did not mention a similar effort for other performing arts workers outside the theater industry. The mayor’s office said that once eligibility rules are expanded, this newly announced vaccination site would not turn away workers in the performing arts industry who are outside the theater sector.Some public officials are anxious about the revival of arts and entertainment next week and are calling for more caution. On Wednesday, Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, urged Mr. Cuomo in a news conference to hold off on the planned reopenings — which will include theaters, music venues and comedy clubs — citing his concern for the spread of the virus variants. New York and New Jersey currently have the highest per capita rates of Covid-19 cases in the country, averaging 39 and 47 new cases per 100,000 people in the last week, respectively.“We have to scale back the rush to reopen,” Mr. Williams said. “One of the side effects of rushing to reopening is that it makes people feel safe to start doing things again.”Mr. de Blasio was joined at the virtual news conference by two Broadway performers, André De Shields, a Tony winner for “Hadestown,” and Telly Leung, whose roles have included starring in “Aladdin.” Both of them welcomed the mayor’s support.“We’re ready, we’ve stayed in shape, our voices are strong,” Mr. De Shields said. “All we need is a stage.”Mr. Leung said reopening would require safety measures for performers and audience members.“This pandemic has hit our industry particularly hard,” he said. “We all have a long way to go as a community, but I really do think that today is a really good first step in our healing.”The Broadway League, which represents theater owners and producers, and Actors’ Equity, the labor union representing 51,000 stage actors and stage managers around the country, welcomed the mayor’s announcement. The union, which has barred its members from working in all but a few dozen productions before live audiences during the past year, has been eager to see its members vaccinated to make the return to the stage safer.Mary McColl, the union’s executive director, said in a statement that the mayor understood that theater workers could not socially distance, making testing and vaccine availability “critical for maintaining a safe workplace.”“Our community has suffered catastrophic losses,” the Broadway League said in a statement, “and the sooner we can return to share our stories in a safe and secure way, the better our city will be.” More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Theater Review: ‘Polis/Reset’ at the Volksbühne in Berlin

      by

      The drama behind the scenes at the Volksbühne in Berlin has surpassed any onstage. A series of premieres involving vengeful gods, inescapable fates and tragic flaws seems apt.Sing, o muses of the house of unceasing calamities!Over the past three years, the drama behind the scenes at the Volksbühne in Berlin has surpassed any onstage. To say that the company has struggled would be putting it mildly: Depending on your point of view, the goings-on have increasingly resembled either a Greek tragedy or a satyr play.Since 2017, dysfunction if not outright misfortune has dogged the venerable theater, which, like most in Berlin, is publicly run. It began when the minister of culture at the time fired the longtime artistic director Frank Castorf, who had led the house for 25 years and was known to rule with an iron fist. Berlin politicians passed the torch to Chris Dercon, a former director of the Tate Modern in London.Berliners vehemently objected; the theater was briefly occupied by protesters. Feces were left in front of Dercon’s office. He quit only months in and was replaced by Klaus Dörr, who was supposed to fill the vacancy until René Pollesch, one of Germany’s leading dramatists and a veteran of Castorf’s Volksbühne, took over as artistic director in 2021.Last week, Dörr abruptly resigned over sexual harassment allegations. Yet in the midst of a trying season for theaters worldwide, the Volksbühne has plowed ahead with an ambitious series of premieres inspired by ancient Greek drama and myth called “Polis/Reset.”Although the cycle examines the relevance of its classical sources from the contemporary perspective of our world’s environmental and economic ills, the themes of unappeased gods, inescapable fates and tragic flaws seem oddly appropriate to the Volksbühne in light of its long-running bad luck.Half of the eight productions planned for “Polis/Reset” are streaming on the Volksbühne’s website. The shows are a diverse crop, but they all confront, to varying degrees, the existential issues facing humanity in the Anthropocene, the era in which humans are the dominant influence on the natural world.An omnidirectional camera, center, was used to present “Anthropos, Tyrant (Oedipus)” as a livestream in 360 degrees.Thomas Aurin“Oedipus is the last king of the Anthropocene. This is our last winter. No one will escape this catastrophe,” an actor intones early in “Anthropos, Tyrant (Oedipus),” an associative and sometimes pedantic stage essay by the writer-director Alexander Eisenach. Of the productions in the Volksbühne’s series, this one, loosely based on Sophocles’ Theban Plays, most directly addresses environmental and economic devastation. In the middle of the performance, the marine biologist and climate expert Antje Boetius delivers a lecture on the Anthropocene that is informative, though dry.I enjoyed some of the snappier slogans, such as “Tragedy has become the language of science” and “Awaking the wrath of the gods is not a metaphor. It’s very real.” But it is possible to agree while still feeling that the show is rough around the edges.Since it couldn’t be shown in front of a live audience, the theater presented it as a livestream in 360 degrees: It was filmed with an omnidirectional camera, and viewers at home were able to control their perspective of the stage. The effect was kind of cool, although it seemed more like an interesting experiment with technology than a full-fledged production. My internet connection was too weak to view it as intended, in razor-sharp 4K.Oedipus and the other rulers of the ancient world were judged by their ability to keep nature in balance and the deities happy. The director Lucia Bihler put an environmentally conscious spin on the divine wrath in “Iphigenia. Sad and Horny in Taurerland,” a reworking of Euripides’ two Iphigenia plays that is peppered with cheeky dialogue by the young Austrian writer Stefanie Sargnagel.Vanessa Loibl, left, and Emma Rönnebeck in Lucia Bihler’s “Iphigenia. Sad and Horny in Taurerland.”Katrin RibbeIn the original, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and commander of the Greek fleet, sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis to gain favorable winds for sailing. Bihler’s staging suggests environmental parallels: with the deities’ refusal to bestow nature’s fortune on humanity and with the notion of mortgaging the future that child sacrifice represents. In the evening’s irreverent second half, Iphigenia (the young American-born actress Vanessa Loibl) is whisked away to the island of Tauris, where she works in a call center alongside a vulgar, funny gang of women who put up with verbal abuse from prank callers.Iphigenia’s sacrifice is the preamble to “The Oresteia,” Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy about Agamemnon’s family. The young German director Pinar Karabulut has tackled Eugene O’Neill’s 1931 play cycle, “Mourning Becomes Electra,” which transposes the action of “The Oresteia” from ancient Argos to New England shortly after the Civil War. Although there is much to admire in Karabulut’s muscular production, it turns O’Neill’s tragic cycle into a dreary and sordid soap opera.On the plus side, the production looks great: sleek and stylish, with colorful costumes and props dominated by reds and blues. The atmosphere of surreal domestic horror is heightened by visual allusions to David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby.” Those scenes are effectively unsettling, but they also seem irrelevant. Another element that doesn’t quite work is a bracing monologue about race delivered by Malick Bauer, the only Black actor in the company’s performing ensemble. Written by a dramaturge, Laura Dabelstein, the soliloquy is a very politically incorrect disquisition about prejudice in Germany, designed to shake the audience up, among other ways, with the repeated use of the N-word. It’s a powerful text and Bauer delivers it with conviction, but it feels like a forced bid for timeliness.Paula Kober, left, and Manolo Bertling in Pinar Karabulut’s “Mourning Becomes Electra.”David BaltzerO’Neill’s play stands in a long line of works refashioned from Greek sources. One of the earliest is the Roman poet Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” written in A.D. 8 and comprising roughly 250 myths. In this epic poem, women turn into trees and birds, drowned men become flowers, and gods transform themselves into animals.Like “Iphigenia,” Claudia Bauer’s “Metamorphoses [overcoming mankind]” doesn’t strain for relevance. It’s an arresting production that combines surreal pantomime and song. For the majority of the performance, the actors wear blank masks. They become mythical characters through movement accompanied by live music (featuring the accordion virtuoso Valentin Butt) and voice-over narration delivered by actors whose faces are projected above the stage.“Metamorphoses” proposes the transformative world of myth as an alternative to the Anthropocene. Even though there is much violence in Ovid, including cannibalism and rape, the production holds up the enchanted symbiosis between man and nature as a sort of utopia. Of the Volksbühne’s digital streams, it’s the one with the most rhythm and verve, thanks to skillful filming and editing. It’s also the only one I’m dying to see live once theaters reopen.The cast with blank masks in Claudia Bauer’s “Metamorphoses [overcoming mankind].”Julian Röder“Polis/Reset” is a step toward making the Volksbühne a place for engagé theater that tackles burning issues. Castorf, the former artistic director, didn’t go in for topicality. It’s hard to imagine him ever structuring a season around environmental themes.The recently departed Dörr deserves credit for replenishing the acting ensemble. This versatile group of 17 has been the most consistently exciting thing about the new Volksbühne, and many of them, including Bauer and Loibl, are prominent in “Polis/Reset.”It remains to be seen whether Pollesch will be able to lift the curse placed on the house by the theatrical deities when he arrives in the fall. He faces formidable artistic and managerial challenges. I pray that Pollesch, who, like Castorf, favors intense theatrical partnerships with a small group of collaborators, doesn’t send the acting ensemble packing when he takes over. That would be a real tragedy. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Kurt Weill’s Path From Europe to Broadway Was a Straight Line

      by

      Weill’s early, Weimar-era works reveal the qualities that found a natural home in his golden age American musicals.Kurt Weill is often described as if he were two composers. One spun quintessential sounds of Weimar-era Berlin in works like “The Threepenny Opera,” and the other wrote innovative earworms for Broadway’s golden age. His career was bifurcated, so the story goes — split not only by a shift in style, but also by the Atlantic Ocean, when he fled Nazi Germany and eventually settled in the United States.Yet it’s possible to trace an unbroken line from Weill’s earliest works, as a teenager, to his final projects for the American stage, before his death in 1950. This path is evident in a recent wave of streamed performances — from his hometown, Dessau, as well as from Berlin, Milan and elsewhere — that together form a rough survey of his European output and reveal a spongy mind, a desire for novelty and a steady progression toward simplicity that found a natural home in his pathbreaking Broadway musicals.The oldest piece on offer came, appropriately, from Dessau, where Weill was born in 1900. Today it’s a dreary town in the former East Germany, but it has a rich cultural heritage: The Kurt Weill Center is inside one of the Masters’ Houses of the Bauhaus school, which is a local landmark and a venue for the annual Kurt Weill Festival. That celebration went online this year, with events including a spirited recital by the young pianist Frank Dupree.Between duets with the trumpeter Simon Höfele, Dupree played “Intermezzo,” a short piano solo from 1917, before Weill had studied with the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck and Ferruccio Busoni or worked under the conductor Hans Knappertsbusch. You can already hear, in this tender work, a gift for melody, as well as the textural sophistication of Brahms.Music history looms over Weill’s early efforts. The First Symphony (1921) — recently streamed by the Berlin Philharmonic under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko — reflects the energetic enthusiasm of a student absorbing works of the post-Wagnerian generation, with an expressionistic nod to Schoenberg and a debt to Mahler. But it has more than a classroom sense of craft; Petrenko made a persuasive case for how tautly constructed and delicately balanced the symphony is within its uninterrupted, chaotic 25 minutes.Kirill Petrenko conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a recent livestream of Weill’s First Symphony.Monika Rittershaus, via Berliner PhilharmonikerAt the same time, Weill was also showing an interest in popular styles, such as in “Langsamer Fox und Algi-Song” — a textbook cabaret number that was charmingly arranged by Dupree for piano and trumpet in his Dessau program. It foreshadows Weill’s embrace of the lowbrow, which he bent to ironic and politically charged effect in “The Threepenny Opera.” But that was still some years off, and until then, his music carried traces of fashionable atonality, with a teeming urge for originality that came out in works like the Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, written in 1924 and featured in a stream by the Berlin Philharmonic’s Karajan Academy.Despite the title, the concerto is also written for percussion and double basses; nonetheless, it’s a gambit of orchestration, pitting a string soloist against an ensemble of much louder instruments. The Karajan musicians and the conductor Marie Jacquot — joined by the coolly able violinist Kolja Blacher — may have played with a timidity that paled some of the piece’s wit. But overall, they validated the claim of the musicologist Kim Kowalke, the president of the Kurt Weill Foundation and author of the landmark study “Kurt Weill in Europe,” that “nowhere is the acuity of the ear more apparent than in the orchestration of the concerto.”Elsewhere — such as in “Der Neue Orpheus,” a cantata for soprano and violin soloists — Weill proved a master of balancing disparate voices, with a keen ear for precise orchestration. It’s why his works from the 1920s rarely call for a large ensemble — and perhaps why so many of them, normally neglected for their modest scale, have been programmed during the pandemic.One that remains overlooked is the short comic opera “Der Zar Lässt Sich Photographieren” (“The Czar Has His Photograph Taken”), written in 1927 and the embodiment of the mocking question Busoni is said to have asked Weill: “What do you want to become, a Verdi of the poor?” (To which Weill responded, “Is that so bad?”) It’s easy entertainment but also revolutionary, not least for its use of a prerecorded tango played onstage from a gramophone.The dramatic works that have recently been staged, however, are significant as well. In Milan, the Teatro alla Scala paired “The Seven Deadly Sins” with “Mahagonny Songspiel,” Weill’s first collaboration with Bertolt Brecht (and the raw ingredients for their full-length opera “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”). Weill’s music was already moving away from its flirtation with atonality, toward deceptive simplicity and a wholesale adoption of dance and jazz idioms; his goal was nothing less than the reformation of music theater.From left, Elliott Carlton Hines, Michael Smallwood, Kate Lindsey, Andrew Harris, Matthäus Schmidlechner and Lauren Michelle in the Teatro alla Scala’s double bill of “The Seven Deadly Sins” and “Mahagonny Songspiel.”via Teatro alla ScalaWeill sought out partnerships with the playwrights and poets he considered the best of their time. He had admired Brecht’s collection “Die Hauspostille,” as well as a radio broadcast of “Mann Ist Mann.” Though they had different temperaments, and were ultimately incompatible, the pair created some of the definitive artworks of Weimar-era Berlin, in which Weill’s music reached its most potent, most subversive political power.Irina Brook’s staging of “Mahagonny Songspiel” for La Scala — conducted clearly if slowly by Riccardo Chailly and featuring the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey and the soprano Lauren Michelle — was an imaginatively scrappy reflection of the New York Times critic Olin Downes’s report from the 1927 premiere, which he described as “a clever and savage skit on the degeneration of society, the triumph of sensualism, the decay of art.”Chailly’s foot-dragging interpretation, which didn’t put enough trust in the music’s dancing rhythms and tempos, is a common problem among Weill performances today. Members of the Berlin Philharmonic came close, but ultimately fell short, in playing the jubilant fox trot “Berlin im Licht” (1928) and the “Threepenny” suite “Kleine Dreigroschenmusik” (1929) in one concert, and Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg’s suite from the “Mahagonny” opera, imprecisely conducted by Thomas Sondergard, in another. Contrast these performances with Dupree’s rollicking arrangement of “Berlin im Licht,” whose smiling spirit wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1920s nightclub.“Kleine Dreigroschenmusik” in particular reveals how the liveliness of dance is essential to a Weill performance. The music has to be enjoyable, even while sticking its tongue out at you; that’s the sly magic of its politics, the triumph of Weill and Brecht’s partnership, admired to this day by composers like David Lang. Otherwise, the piece risks being weighty and ponderous — in other words, no fun.An energetic interpretation can lift even the less successful of Weill and Brecht’s projects. Take “Happy End” (1929) — loved by neither man, but nevertheless packed with hits including “Bilbao-Song” and “Surabaya-Johnny.” For the Brecht Festival, in Augsburg, Germany, the actress Winnie Böwe, joined by Felix Kroll on accordion, salvaged the show by presenting “Happy End für Eilige,” a breathless abridgment that cleverly repurposed the script’s bite in touches like singing the mocking hymn “Hosiannah Rockefeller” from inside an apse.Weill and Brecht parted ways while preparing a revised “Mahagonny” for its Berlin run in 1931. But they were reunited in their exile following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Weill had fled to Paris not long after “Der Silbersee,” which features one of his finest European scores, became a target of Nazi demonstrations and was banned. In his new city, he quickly received a commission from George Balanchine’s Les Ballets 1933.It became “The Seven Deadly Sins,” a “ballet chanté” that tells the story of two sisters — one singing, one dancing — who set out from Louisiana hoping to make enough money in the big city to build their family a little home on the Mississippi River. It’s a bitter tale, prone to aggressive interpretations. But at La Scala, Lindsey struck a balance of ironic beauty and grittier outbursts held in reserve for maximal effect. In Amsterdam, the Dutch National Opera presented its own virtual “Sins,” starring Eva-Maria Westbroek, who approached the role with a sort of generic elegance fascinatingly at odds with unhinged acting, intensified by the multicamera production’s kinetic close-ups and harsh lighting.Eva-Maria Westbroek in the Dutch National Opera’s multicamera production of “The Seven Deadly Sins.”Sanne PeperThere is some of the “Sins” score in Weill’s Second Symphony, which was written at the same time and premiered in 1934. Performed by the Karajan Academy alongside the violin concerto, this symphony is more focused than its 1921 predecessor in the genre, but is also composed with a straightforward language better suited to dramatic than concert works. It’s likable, but to what end?That’s a question you could ask of much of Weill’s music from this interlude between Berlin and Broadway. His inclination to novelty is reflected more in chameleonic adaptation than in innovation. Members of the Berlin Philharmonic recently played “Suite Panaméenne,” which is adapted from “Marie Galante” (1934), a show whose music is clearly eager to be loved — and was, especially the tango “Youkali” and the chanson “J’Attends un Navire,” which became something of an anthem for the French Resistance. There is a confidence and an unpretentious ease in these songs, but they behave like the work of a tunesmith. “J’Attends un Navire” doesn’t sound ironically French, the way schmaltz is skewered in “Mahagonny” as “eternal art”; it just sounds authentically French.But the hallmarks of this period in Weill’s life — high standards for collaborative partners, a knack for internalizing diverse styles, an ear for unforgettable melodies — would soon serve him well in the United States. Some of his best work was still to come: setting Ira Gershwin’s lyrics in “Lady in the Dark”; blending opera and Broadway with Langston Hughes in “Street Scene”; pioneering the concept musical with Alan Jay Lerner in “Love Life.”He just had to get there first. That opportunity would come a year after “Marie Galante,” when Weill left for New York and a project with a fitting provisional title: “The Road of Promise.” More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Building a Better Girl in ‘Honestly Sincere’

      by

      Liza Birkenmeier’s new play about a shape-shifting teenager makes a fitting contribution to Theater in Quarantine’s revamp of the avant-garde.The gay liberation movement has defined the closet as a smothering, imprisoning space. But it can also be, during moments of transition and danger, a sheltering and even a freeing one.Or so we’ve learned this past year from Theater in Quarantine, the shoestring East Village company that since April 2020 has been producing marvelous live work from the 4-foot-by-8-foot box in which Joshua William Gelb used to store his winter coats. In dozens of plays, performance pieces and dance theater amalgams, Gelb and his collaborators have been repurposing spatial and safety restrictions to build a valuable new outpost of the avant-garde.As it happens, refuge and transformation are the animating ideas behind the company’s latest offering: “Honestly Sincere,” a charming, edgy new play by Liza Birkenmeier that not only streams from a closet but is also set in one. There among her pink and gray tops, 13-year-old Greta Hemberger makes a series of calls on her mother’s cellphone that in their intimacy and awkwardness seem to encompass the whole of early teenage girlhood in one breathless caress.Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, Greta even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in QuarantineIt’s only natural that Greta retreats to her closet; on the cusp of so many kinds of self-discovery, she is also something of a self-embarrassment. She has not, for instance, gotten the role she sought in her school’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie” — the role of Albert, that is, the male lead. But in her private Sweet Apple, she can appear to herself (and to us) as if she had: Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, she even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”And when she calls a friend known only as F (Remi Elberg), she can rehearse real-life personalities too. F won’t mock her for saying pretentious, possibly meaningless things like “I am no longer a bodied animal I am only an effect.” She’ll merely continue the conversation as if nothing more than a burp had interrupted it.This is all very strange and adorable, but Birkenmeier, whose terrific full-length play “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” displayed a similar crafty delicacy, isn’t about to waste time even in a 30-minute sketch. Nor is Greta; she soon gets to the point with F, which is to obtain the phone number of Ethan Blum, a boy she hopes to invite to a dance even though he has a quasi-girlfriend and is probably gay.If her conversation with the adenoidal Ethan (Alexander Bello) weren’t so sweet and hilarious, you would probably be annoyed on his behalf when you realize that Greta is really calling to talk to his older sister Sabel (Hailey Lynn Elberg) on the flimsiest of excuses. She now tries on yet a new personality, a sophisticate prone to gibberish like “diligence is deeply tragic and maybe even unjust,” while still thrilling to the possibility of having a 17-year-old help with her makeup if not with her math.This is all so beautifully acted under the direction of Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin that I forgot that the characters, except for Greta, are disembodied voices on the other end of her phone. And even Greta, in a way, is disembodied, piped as she is through Gelb’s rather fearless 36-year-old cisgender maleness.Whether Greta is cisgender or gay or something else is unclear — probably to her, as well; she’s 13. But in “Honestly Sincere” (the title is taken from another “Bye Bye Birdie” song), Birkenmeier is less interested in pinning down identity than in tracing the lovely way a girl in the comfort of her chosen safe space (and with the help of her chosen technology and friends) sets out to discover it.Which brings us back to Theater in Quarantine and its own chosen space, technology and friends. I’ve not usually been a fan of the avant-garde, which too often strikes me as intellectualized and chilly, fogged in a machismo musk. But these closet productions, fully odd though they may be, are nearly always warmer, more penetrating and more speculative in exploring gender than the works of the old-school male gurus.It matters that so many of them — including Heather Christian’s “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face” and Madeleine George’s lovely “Mute Swan” — are written by women. Their characters, even when embodied by a man, seem safe enough in the cozy closet to represent and thus honor more than just themselves.Honestly SincereOn the Theater in Quarantine YouTube page More