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      Theater to Stream: ‘Assassins’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’

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      Highlights include a virtual production of Adam Rapp’s “The Sound Inside” and a new reading series by Roundabout Theater Company.In March of last year, Classic Stage Company announced that its revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Assassins” was postponed. “The production was to begin performances on April 2,” the email said. “C.S.C. intends to resume rehearsals and present ‘Assassins’ in the coming months.”Fast forward 13 months, and the company is indeed presenting “Assassins,” or at least a stopgap event until the director, John Doyle, can fully proceed. Still, fans will enjoy “Tell the Story: Celebrating Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s ‘Assassins,’” a tribute to the show — which is told from the perspective of people who have tried, successfully and not, to kill an American president — featuring chats (including with Sondheim and Weidman), performances and testimonies, with actors from the 1990 premiere and the 2004 Broadway production joining the Classic Stage Company cast.This is a rare opportunity to hear, for example, three John Wilkes Booths (Victor Garber, Michael Cerveris and Steven Pasquale) talk about their craft — and killing Lincoln. Among Doyle’s most alluring casting moves: Tavi Gevinson as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Judy Kuhn as Sara Jane Moore. Even the theater superfan Hillary Clinton will weigh in on the show’s impact. Thursday through Monday; classicstage.orgMaggie Bofill, left, and Ephraim Birney “The Sound Inside.”Pedro Bermudez‘The Sound Inside’A drama as suspenseful as any thriller, Adam Rapp’s brilliant two-character Broadway debut considers how fiction can be uncomfortably close and personal. TheaterWorks Hartford’s digital version was hatched by the stage director Rob Ruggiero and the filmmaker Pedro Bermúdez, with Maggie Bofill as a Yale professor of creative writing and Ephraim Birney (the son of Reed Birney) as a student both troubled and troubling. Through April 30; twhartford.orgFrom left, Jessie Buckley, Lucian Msamati and Josh O’Connor in “Romeo and Juliet.”Rob Youngson‘Romeo and Juliet’With Jessie Buckley (“Fargo”) and Josh O’Connor (“The Crown”) as the unluckiest lovers ever, the swoon factor is high in Simon Godwin’s staging of Shakespeare’s tragic romance for the National Theater. Watch also for Deborah Findlay (a Tony Award nominee for “The Children”) and Tamsin Greig, who almost hijack the show as Juliet’s nurse and mother. April 23-May 21; pbs.orgSecond ChancesAfter a prologue set in 1600, the Chilean theater collective Bonobo’s “Tú Amarás” (“You Shall Love”) jumps to a present-day medical conference, where the arrival of aliens weighs on the proceedings. The Baryshnikov Arts Center captured the play’s New York premiere in February 2020, and is now featuring it as part of the center’s digital season. April 22-29; bacnyc.orgAnother small show getting a welcome encore online is Lizzie Vieh’s dark comedy “Monsoon Season.” All for One Theater is streaming a performance filmed during the play’s 2019 run at the Rattlestick Theater in Manhattan. Danny (Richard Thieriot) and his ex-wife, Julia (Therese Plaehn), live in a world of tech-support jobs, wannabe YouTube influencers and crummy apartments. The couple are almost never onstage at the same time yet share a weird chemistry, until an even weirder finale. Through Sunday; afo.nyc‘The Norman Conquests’In 2009, a terrific British cast led by Stephen Mangan and Jessica Hynes barreled through an inspired Broadway revival of this Alan Ayckbourn trilogy, in which each play offers a different perspective on the same hectic weekend in the country. If you want another take on these farcical shenanigans, the streaming platform Acorn and Broadway HD have made available the British mini-series adaptation from 1978. It’s deliciously drenched in 1970s aesthetics — behold the brown palette — with Tom Conti in the pivotal role of Norman. acorn.tv and BroadwayHDFrom left, Florencia Lozano, Jimmy Smits and Daphne Rubin-Vega in “Two Sisters and a Piano.”via New Normal RepNew Normal RepIt takes moxie to create a theater company these days. Welcome to the emerging New Normal Rep, which is presenting Nilo Cruz’s “Two Sisters and a Piano.” In the play, which predates Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Anna in the Tropics” by a few years, the siblings of the title are under house arrest in the Havana of 1991. The cast of this virtual production, directed by the playwright, includes Daphne Rubin-Vega, a veteran of both shows, and Jimmy Smits, who was also in “Tropics.” April 21-May 23; newnormalrep.orgThe ReFocus ProjectThe powerhouse Roundabout Theater Company is launching an initiative to help rethink what constitutes the American theatrical canon. For the first year, which focuses on 20th-century works by Black playwrights, Roundabout has partnered with Black Theater United and unearthed promising texts for readings. The first is Angelina Weld Grimké’s “Rachel,” from 1916, which is thought to be the first professionally produced play by a Black woman in the United States (April 23-26). The following week brings Samm-Art Williams’s “Home,” originally produced by the Negro Ensemble Company before transferring to Broadway in 1980. (April 30-May 3). roundabouttheatre.orgThe Gay ’80sDid the recent Russell T Davies mini-series “It’s a Sin” leave you wanting more? Two solo shows explore a similar milieu: the lives of gay men in the 1980s. Ben SantaMaria’s semi-autobiographical solo play “Really Want to Hurt Me,” captured in 2018, depicts the coming-of-age of a young gay man (portrayed by Ryan Price) in 1984 Britain. bensantamaria.comThe protagonist of “Cruise” discovers he is H.I.V. positive in 1984 and spends the following four years living life to its fullest. Written and performed by Jack Holden, who was inspired by a story he heard while working at a hotline, this play is getting a digital run before a physical one (if all goes as planned) in May. Thursday through April 25; stream.theatreRosalyn Coleman in “The Woman’s Party.”via Clubbed Thumb‘The Woman’s Party’The Clubbed Thumb company, whose discoveries include “What the Constitution Means to Me” and “Tumacho,” is serializing Rinne Groff’s play, about the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment, over three episodes released weekly. The show, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad, tracks the arguments among feminist activists as they wrangled over goals and strategy. This should be catnip to the terrific cast, which includes Alma Cuervo, Marga Gomez, Marceline Hugot and Emily Kuroda. April 22 through August; clubbedthumb.orgBen Thompson, left, and David Ricardo-Pearce in rehearsal of “The Lorax.”Manuel Harlan, via The Old Vic‘The Lorax’As part of its In Camera series (“Lungs,” “Three Kings”), the Old Vic Theater in London is bringing back its 2015 production of Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax” for a handful of livestreamed performances that jointly celebrate the book’s 50th anniversary and Earth Day. Max Webster directs David Greig and Charlie Fink’s adaptation of the eco-minded story. “I am the Lorax,” the title character says. “I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” Wednesday through Saturday, with free performances for schools on April 22; oldvictheatre.com More

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      Review: A Perfect Storm of Weather and Racism in ‘shadow/land’

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      Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s play about Black women struggling to survive Hurricane Katrina gets an ear-tingling podcast production.In its heyday, Shadowland, a New Orleans dance hall, bar and hotel, provided its Black clientele, many of them visiting jazz musicians, with the dignity and amenities (including air conditioning) they were barred from enjoying at whites-only establishments.But on the day that Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s floridly powerful new play “shadow/land” begins — Aug. 29, 2005 — that heyday is long gone, and the place is in bad disrepair. Mostly memories live there now.If the date doesn’t ring a bell, that’s part of the reason Dickerson-Despenza must have felt the need to write “shadow/land” in the first place. It is the opening salvo in a planned 10-play sequence about Hurricane Katrina and its long, too often invisible tendrils of disaster.That the disaster is literally invisible here, in a thrilling Public Theater production that renders the play as a podcast, is all to the good. As directed for the ear by Candis C. Jones and performed by actors with extraordinary voices, “shadow/land,” may be better in your headphones than it would have been onstage.Surely its densely poetic language and cataclysmic events would be too much to take in a realistic context. Even without that, the play demands a lot, bending the familiar genre in which families wrangle over property — a genre that includes Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and Horton Foote’s “Dividing the Estate” — toward bigger aims and expressionistic ends. Depending on your taste for it, the imperfect joinery of those modes in “shadow/land” is either a problem or a mark of a handmade and intensely personal art. For me it was both.In any case, the story is compelling. Though 80 years old and in middle-stage dementia, Magalee, the primary owner of Shadowland, shows no interest in closing what has been for many decades a proud family business. Her daughter Ruth, tired of the responsibility and cost involved, and knowing that their corner of New Orleans is in the last throes of decline, is eager to sell to a developer who promises a “face lift for the neighborhood.”On the overdetermined day Katrina will hit, she has come to take her mother to higher ground — and to force her to sign the inevitable “papers” she hopes will free them from their straitened, careworn lives.But living carefree is not a freedom equally distributed in a world that, as Dickerson-Despenza reveals it, is steeped in racism, especially the environmental kind. Ten minutes into the play, the storm announces itself with a violent gust of wind, a shattered window and a clock that falls portentously from the wall. Most of the city’s richer and whiter population has already evacuated, but Ruth and Magalee have waited too long; the day before, the roads were already “more congested than a chile with pneumonia,” Ruth says, and soon enough a live oak has “fainted” on top of her car.As the floodwaters rise within Shadowland, the conflict between mother and daughter intensifies: Ruth calling for help to get out, Magalee clinging to what’s left of an identity that has merged with the building’s.These scenes are framed by interjections from a griot, or traditional Black storyteller. This character, whom Dickerson-Despenza added for the audio version, speaks even more lushly than the others, a choice that may seem like linguistic icing or overkill depending on your tolerance for lines like “stars bedazzle a sprained black sky as the City untangles its raw limbs.”Still, as delivered by the New Orleans poet Sunni Patterson, the largeness of the wording comes to seem like the precise correlative for the largeness of the disaster.The balance of naturalism and otherworldliness is more complicated for the other two actors, but just as successfully achieved. As Magalee, Lizan Mitchell is wonderfully salty in her maternal mode and heartbreakingly childlike in her delusions. And as Ruth, Michelle Wilson (a star of “Sweat” at the Public and on Broadway) manages to create a fully rounded human character — with a husband, a lover, and a daughter to think of — while also serving as the play’s eyewitness to the terrible things happening outside the window.If that’s too much for a 70-minute play to wrangle, the problem is a better one for a playwright to take on than too little. In “[hieroglyph],” the second installment in Dickerson-Despenza’s Katrina Cycle — which I saw last month, in a filmed production from the San Francisco Playhouse and the Lorraine Hansberry Theater — the mechanism by which mere events were turned into drama was also noticeably clunky. Its characters, including a 13-year-old girl and her father, survivors of Katrina who wind up in Chicago with secrets to unpack, often seem to be serving the author’s needs instead of their own.There are times when “shadow/land” suffers from the same condition, one sign of which is the tendency of Ruth and Magalee to provide back story by telling each other (and thus us) things they would both already know.But this play is saved — and, more than that, lifted — by its tragic vision. The production also makes an enormous difference. Delfeayo Marsalis’s haunting music, bent and blurred through memory and, thanks to Palmer Heffernan’s immersive sound design, often morphing into the sound of the storm itself, helps us understand that what’s at stake is not just a building but an entire cultural history.That’s a big project, even before you multiply it by 10. Nor are the aftereffects of Katrina the limit of Dickerson-Despenza’s current theatrical interests. Her play “cullud wattah,” set against the backdrop of the Flint water crisis, last week won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for playwriting; the Public, which originally planned to produce it last summer, hopes to try again as soon as it is safe to do so.An astonishing start for a 29-year-old writer. Though Dickerson-Despenza says she does not consider herself primarily a theater artist but a “cultural worker” making space for Black women, she may, like her “shadow/land” characters, find that the emergencies of our day have a different fate in mind for her.shadow/landAvailable at publictheater.org and on major podcast platforms. More

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      Edinburgh Festivals Will Go Ahead, in Person and Online

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      The Edinburgh International Festival, canceled last year, said it would proceed in August thanks to three specially built pavilions.Three pavilions will be built to host events for the Edinburgh International Festival this summer.Edinburgh International FestivalLONDON — The Edinburgh International Festival, a showcase of international dance, music and theater, will go ahead in front of audiences this August, the festival’s organizers said on Tuesday.The festival, which normally floods the city with tourists, was canceled last year because of the coronavirus pandemic. But events will be staged Aug. 7-29 in three pavilions across Edinburgh, Fergus Linehan, the festival’s director, said in a telephone interview.The pavilions will be specially built to maximize air flow and allow social distancing, he added.The festival’s program will be released in June, Linehan said; the organizers are still waiting for a decision from the Scottish government about how many people will be allowed to attend. But the ongoing pandemic and the limits it has placed on international travel mean it will have a different flavor from normal.“In terms of the people onstage, we’re not going to be flying in a big dance company from the U.S., or an opera company from Paris,” Linehan said. “But there are individual artists coming.”The festival, which began in 1947 with the aim of uniting people through culture after World War II, is known for large-scale performances, especially of big classical and operatic works. The 2019 festival, for instance, featured the Orchestre de Paris performing epic pieces by Beethoven and Berlioz, as well as several presentations by the Komische Oper Berlin. That will also change this year. “We can’t have that many musicians onstage, and we can’t have those big choral bits,” Linehan said, but he insisted smaller works would be just as exciting and innovative.Many performances will be streamed free for international audiences, he added.Coronavirus cases have fallen rapidly in Scotland this spring thanks to an extended lockdown and a strong vaccination program. On Monday, there were only 199 new cases reported among a population of around 5 million, and no deaths within 28 days of a positive test, according to Scottish Government figures.But many restrictions are still in place, including on cultural life. Museums cannot reopen until Apr. 26. Other cultural activities cannot restart until May 17 at the earliest, and even then, only with small audiences.The Edinburgh International Festival is one of a host of arts events that normally take place in the city each summer. The festival’s organizers insist the others will occur in some form, too.A spokeswoman for the scrappy Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which normally features thousands of small theater and comedy shows, said in an email that organizers were working toward an event to run Aug. 6-30. It was still unclear if the Fringe would be “digital, in person, or both,” she added.The Edinburgh International Book Festival will also proceed from Aug. 14 with in-person events “if circumstances permit,” a spokeswoman said in a telephone interview.The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, a popular series of parades involving bagpipe performances by armed forces from around the world, is also set to go on. It started selling tickets last October but has not provided any updates since. On Tuesday, its organizers did not respond to a request for comment.Linehan said he hoped the International Festival’s announcement would give confidence to other events to press ahead with plans. His festival won’t make any money, he said, but that didn’t matter. “This is a really momentous moment for us,” Linehan said, adding: “It’s really important we get back to live performance.” More

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      Jeremy O. Harris's Grad School Reunion

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      Standing, from left: SOHINA SIDHU, actress, 29; JULIAN SANCHEZ, actor, 25; JONATHAN HIGGINBOTHAM, actor, 33; MAIA MIHANOVICH, actress, 24; AMAUTA M. FIRMINO, screenwriter, 29; HUDSON OZ, actor, 30; JEREMY O. HARRIS, playwright, writer, producer and performer, 31; and SYDNEY LEMMON, actress, 30. Seated, from left: PATRICK FOLEY, actor and playwright, 30; EDMUND DONOVAN, actor, 30; […] More

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      Paul Ritter, British Stage, Film and TV Actor, Dies at 54

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      A familiar face to British theatergoers, he was also well known for his role as an eccentric father on the popular sitcom “Friday Night Dinner.”Paul Ritter, a versatile British actor who appeared in “Harry Potter” and James Bond movies and played a key figure behind the nuclear disaster that was the subject of the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl,” died on Monday at his home in Kent, England. He was 54.His agency, Markham, Froggatt & Irwin, announced the death. He had been treated for a brain tumor.Mr. Ritter was a familiar face to British theatergoers and well known for his role as Martin Goodman, the eccentric father of a London Jewish family, on the popular sitcom “Friday Night Dinner,” seen on Channel 4 since 2011.He played the ill-fated nuclear engineer Anatoly Dyatlov on the award-winning HBO drama “Chernobyl” (2019), the wizard Eldred Worple in “Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince” (2009) and a devious political operative in the James Bond film “Quantum of Solace” (2008).He was also frequently seen in productions at Britain’s National Theater, including “All My Sons,” “Coram Boy” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” in which his performance as the father of a socially challenged teenager was praised as “superb” by Matt Wolf in The New York Times.He appeared in “Art” at the Old Vic in London and as Prime Minister John Major, opposite Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, in a West End production of “The Audience.”Mr. Ritter was nominated for a Tony Award in 2009 for his performance in Alan Ayckbourn’s farce “The Norman Conquests.”He was born in 1966 in Kent. He is survived by his wife, Polly, and two sons, Frank and Noah. More

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      ‘Only Child’ Review: A Magnetic Performer Without a Story to Match

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      The autobiographical solo show from Daniel J. Watts shows off his skill with spoken word and dance, but doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts.What’s your name? What’s your story?In classrooms and job interviews, on dating profiles and first dates, we’re often asked to craft an abridged narrative of our lives, to single out the events and characteristics that best define us. It’s a lot of pressure, and an impossible task, so we settle for formulaic prompts and cheesy icebreakers.The chasm between the raw material of a life and the manipulation of facts into a coherent narrative is wide enough that a writer too shaky on his feet may very well fall right in.That’s where we find Daniel J. Watts, the magnetic creator and star of “The Jam: Only Child,” a filmed rendition of his one-person show, presented for streaming by the Signature Theater in Arlington, Virginia. (The show also had a brief run at the Public Theater in 2020, as part of the Under the Radar festival.)Watts, who earned a well-deserved Tony Award nomination for his performance as Ike Turner in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” has the irrepressible energy and timing of a stand-up comic, and his bouncy jabber-jawed delivery connects even through the screen.And while the production, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, is sleek, stylish and technically sound, the script finds Watts unable to transcend platitudes, relying instead on our current conversations about race and gender to shape his story and give it pertinence.“Only Child” opens with Watts emanating such ease that you can’t help but want to be seduced by the beats and bops of the performance. In denim overalls, a matching jacket and red cap, he cruises out on what looks like the concert platform of the flyest club in town. There’s a mysterious depth to the intimate room, thanks to Adam Honoré’s lighting design, with DJ Duggz behind turntables in the back center, there to accompany the monologue with sounds as varied as Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” and perky, easy listening.With the lackadaisical swagger of the cool kid in school, Watts greets DJ Duggz with a choreographed handshake, then somersaults into a spoken word rhythm, the hybrid of theater and rap that recalls the master of the form, Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Watts gets the connection, declaring himself “somewhere between Sammy Davis, Dave Chappelle, Leguizamo and Lin-Manuel.”)He begins with his 1980s childhood in North Carolina, eating Gushers and Zebra Cakes, watching “ThunderCats” and discovering the fun of lighting things on fire in the bathroom while his single mother isn’t around. He grows up awkward around girls, perennially friend-zoned, and has a breakdown in college that has him question his relationship to masculinity and sexuality. All the while the shadowy absence of his father looms in the background.The show finds Watts describing his North Carolina childhood and struggling with his identity as a Black man.via the Signature TheaterAs a writer, Watts is enamored with metaphor, but his analogies get muddled. Within the first few minutes, he has already described the process of putting together this theatrical memoir, from scraps of poetry and raps and recollections, as unearthing skeletons in the closet, unpacking boxes in an attic and grabbing jars of jam from the pantry shelves.And where is he headed? Despite its title, the show never effectively captures how being an only child affected his development. He describes his admiration for his mother, but she isn’t presented as a fully developed figure. And he glosses over his relationship with his father, until, more than halfway in, he drops the briefest mention of abusive behavior, and refers to the rage he holds onto, before moving along.In casting about for shape to his story, Watts reaches for politics. He uses his college sexual experiences to talk about consent, but his attempt to hold himself accountable for a questionable drunken hookup — plus his regret at the loss of an idol in Bill Cosby after the comedian’s sexual assault allegations — come across as tone-deaf.Similarly, a section in which he shares his anger as a Black man in America, name-dropping many of the unjustly killed Black people in recent years, reads like a grasp for political relevance more than a personal tie-in. Because Watts fails to unpack — or even really mention — his relationship to race until this roll call of victims, it feels incidental, despite how poignantly these tragedies may ring true for him in real life.Late in the 90-minute show, Watts dons tap shoes to dance out a drunken spiral, a physical representation of his tumble down to rock bottom. He trips across the stage with his upper body slumped over, arms carelessly flailing in a pantomime of a man stumbling after one too many beers.It’s a cleverly conceived performance, shifting from spoken word to tap, another medium in which Watts tells us he found comfort. But Watts struggles to transition back to his story, making the routine feel more like a musical interlude set to the sounds of Bob Marley.So what’s the upshot of a show electrically performed yet sloppily composed? Watts seems to fumble for the answer himself, ending on a handful of clichés and bumper-sticker affirmations about living one’s truth and saying yes to life.“Only Child” is a reminder that translating a life into art can take time and distance. Watts has talent to spare, and as for the story — well, doesn’t the saying go that all writing is rewriting?Daniel J. Watts’ The Jam: Only ChildThrough May 7; sigtheatre.org. More

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      Williamstown Festival Will Take the Shows Outside

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      After a lost live 2020, the theater will stage a musical at a museum’s reflecting pool and an immersive show, all over town, based on real events.The Williamstown Theater Festival, which was forced by the pandemic to convert its 2020 season into a series of audio plays, will present live performances again this summer, though not in its indoor venues.Instead, the festival announced on Wednesday three shows that will be staged outdoors throughout the festival’s college-town home. Alongside new plans for scaled-down seasons at Tanglewood and at the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival, it marks a tentative step toward business as usual for the culture-rich region of Massachusetts.The Williamstown season will open on July 6 with “Outside on Main: Nine Solo Plays by Black Playwrights,” to be staged on the front lawn of its main venue. The series, curated by the writer and director Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), includes short works by the writers Ngozi Anyanwu, Charly Evon Simpson, Ike Holter and Zora Howard, among others.The world premiere of the musical “Row,” with songs by Dawn Landes and a book by Daniel Goldstein, will be staged at the reflecting pool of the nearby Clark Art Institute starting July 13. The show, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is about a woman who intends to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean.Initially slated to be produced last summer, “Row” was recorded as part of the festival’s deal with Audible, and will be released April 8 on that platform.The third show, “Alien/Nation,” is a world premiere immersive production that asks audiences to journey through Williamstown by foot or car and “plunge themselves into the center of stories inspired by real events that took place in Western Massachusetts in 1969,” according to a news release.Scheduled to run from July 20 to Aug. 8, it is the brainchild of the Tony Award-nominated director Michael Arden and a company called the Forest of Arden, who devised it along with the playwrights Jen Silverman and Eric Berryman. Early last summer, Arden and some of his collaborators created a similar, experimental piece called “American Dream Study” in New York’s Hudson Valley.The festival typically presents seven shows per summer; according to a publicist, digital-only productions are still to be announced.The Berkshires ended up a national center of attention last summer when Berkshire Theater Festival’s “Godspell,” staged outdoors in a tent next to its main venue, became the first musical production in the country to get approval by the leading actors’ union since the theater shutdown.This summer Berkshire Theater Festival has announced outdoor productions of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “Nina Simone: Four Women,” while Shakespeare & Company will open its season with Christopher Lloyd in the title role of “King Lear.”Barrington Stage Company, another notable theater in the region, promises a seven-show season that features a Gershwin revue and the comedy “Boca” outdoors and four shows indoors, including two world premieres and a solo play about Eleanor Roosevelt. More