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      ‘Covenant’ Review: When Inner Turmoil Is Its Own Ghost Story

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      The playwright York Walker makes a promising New York debut at Roundabout Underground.Much is made over whether one is “with God” or not in “Covenant,” a striking new Southern gothic work by York Walker. Following a town’s reaction to a bluesman’s mysterious homecoming in 1930s Georgia, this small, potent Roundabout Underground production sustains a scorching end-of-days tune as much through its electric cast and design elements as by Walker’s script and Tiffany Nichole Greene’s swift direction.Like each of the play’s four women, the 24-year-old Avery (Jade Payton) craves salvation. But she’s not seeking a flight to heaven, like her overbearing Mama (Crystal Dickinson), or from neglect, like her younger sister, Violet (Ashley N. Hildreth). Rather, she desires a certain kind of freedom. Ruthie (Lark White), a lovelorn neighbor grappling with her nascent sexuality, feels the same.A chance at that freedom appears when a childhood friend, Johnny (Chaundre Hall-Broomfield), returns to town after a yearslong absence, touring faraway juke joints. A smooth-talking guitarist, Johnny has dropped his stutter and — rumor has it — picked up prodigious musical skills from a pact with the Devil.Walker nods at the legend of Robert Johnson, the real-life bluesman whose startling technique gave rise to a claim that he had traded his soul for success playing “the Devil’s music.” But, though that mystery informs this play’s effective ghost story, “Covenant” is more interested in unraveling the women’s trust in faith, self and one another to examine how feelings become codified into mythology.The pious Mama thinks she can spot a dark spirit when she sees one and forbids Avery from spending time with Johnny. Seduced by his promise of a life bigger than her repressive own, she doesn’t obey, naturally, and soon comes home one night with bruises and a funny look in her eye. As the locals chatter, gossiping about midnight sightings of Johnny at the graveyard, the play probes each woman’s relationship to fact and fiction.Greene’s suspenseful production indulges in some elegant horror trappings, with characters often plunged in darkness, holding a single match as they share tales of cheating spouses and bad decisions — personal freedoms marked as evil because they stray from cultural dogma.Lawrence Moten’s claustrophobic set turns the audience into the cramped congregation of a Gothic Revival church, the action taking place on either side of its nave and lit by Cha See. Steve Cuiffo’s illusions and Justin Ellington’s sound design, both chilling, lean deep into the story’s supernatural suggestions.But the play’s terror is best conjured by Walker’s dialogue, which weaves rumor into legend and is delivered in gradient shades by an excellent cast. As Avery and Johnny, Payton and Hall-Broomfield play their scenes alluringly straight, and in her forceful turn as Violet, Hildreth believably generates powerful, skeptical chemistry with White’s awe-struck Ruthie.And Dickinson’s sanctimonious Mama comically punctuates each “lord” and “God” with the emphatic righteousness of a “T” sound, and with her beaded eyeglass chain (courtesy of Ari Fulton’s costumes) appears to have tears permanently fixed on her face.The violence of her devotion is made eerily physical in a choreographed prayer sequence (with movement overseen by Stephen Buescher) that shows the carnality often inherent in religion, which can traffic as much in darkness as in the light it claims to seek.If Walker reverse-engineers certain beats a bit too cleanly in order to expose the characters’ hypocrisies, his twists and developments are still satisfying. Working with great economy, Walker’s “Covenant” is an auspicious New York debut for a playwright who clearly has a gift for richly textured work.CovenantThrough Dec. 3 at the Black Box Theater, at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      West End Theatergoers Grumble as Prices for the Best Seats Surge

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      Concern is growing that a night at the theater in London is becoming unaffordable, especially when a production has starry names, like Kenneth Branagh’s “King Lear.”When hundreds of playgoers lined up outside Wyndham’s Theater in London this week, the mood was excited. They had come to see Kenneth Branagh, the revered Shakespearean actor, directing and playing the title role in “King Lear.”But some were still thinking about the price they’d paid to be there.Alan Hooper, 75, a retired teacher, said that, at the box office that morning, he was offered a seat in the first balcony for 200 pounds, around $240, or a standing place for a fraction of the cost. He chose to stand for the show’s two-hour run time. West End prices, Hooper said, were “out of control.”Another audience member, George Butler, 28, said that he was overjoyed to have secured two tickets for 20 pounds, or about $24, each, even if they were in the nosebleeds. “Theater is becoming very elitist,” Butler said. “The minute there’s a well known person in a play, it’s unaffordable.”London’s theater world is increasingly simmering with complaints over soaring ticket prices, and a perception that they are creeping closer to Broadway levels. Even as producers insist that a fraction of tickets must be sold at steep prices to offset cheap seats for low earners, concern is growing that a night at the theater is becoming an unaffordable luxury.The West End’s own stars are fueling the fuss. In April, Derek Jacobi, the veteran actor, told The Guardian newspaper that potential theatergoers were now having to think “more than twice” about attending shows. A few months later, David Tennant stirred debate when he told a Radio Times podcast that rising prices were “strangling the next generation of an audience coming through.”Leicester Square in London’s West End. British actors have spoken out about soaring ticket costs, noting that the prohibitive expense was limiting theater’s reach.Jane Stockdale for The New York TimesThis fall, theater message boards and social media erupted in indignation when tickets for a production of “Plaza Suite,” starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, went on sale with a top price of £395, around $477 — a level rarely heard of in London.Yet it was unclear whether these few high-profile cases reflected a wider problem. Alistair Smith, the editor of The Stage, a British theater newspaper, said it was difficult to analyze whether ticket prices were increasing across the board, because producers release so little sales data.To fill the gap, his newspaper annually surveys the cheapest and most expensive tickets across the West End. This year’s results, Smith said, showed that the average price for tickets in the most expensive price group was £141, or about $170 (a decade ago, the figure was a much lower £81). This year’s average was still “a long, long way behind Broadway,” he said, adding that the cost of the priciest tickets had barely changed since 2022, despite soaring household costs.However, Smith added, the average price of the least expensive tickets had risen by more than inflation to £25, or $30. “It would be a concern if that trend continues,” he said.For many West End producers, the perception of a price hike is a source of growing frustration. Patrick Gracey, a producer who sits on the board of the Society of London Theater, said that the news media published articles about high ticket prices because it “gets clicks.” Those stories were “misleading audiences about the availability of affordable tickets,” he said.Last year, Gracey said, theatergoers paid an average £54, or about $66, to see a West End show. (The average price on Broadway last week was double that at $125, according to data from The Broadway League.)Producers were facing soaring costs, Gracey added. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, some theaters saw their energy costs spike as much as 500 percent, and there were similar jumps in set-building material prices. Last year, West End actors and technical staff secured a pay deal that saw their wages rise, too.The average West End theater ticket price in 2022 was about $66: high, but considerably less expensive than Broadway tickets.Jane Stockdale for The New York TimesEven with those pressures, Gracey said producers were working to keep theater accessible and were offering cheap tickets for those who couldn’t splurge. “It’s only possible to offer those tickets because some people are paying top price,” he said.The producers of “King Lear” said in an emailed statement that they were offering 150 tickets per performance at £20 — equivalent to 19 percent of the house. Those included 17 in the front row, with the rest in the back rows of the theater’s three tiers.The problem was with audience perception, said Nick Hytner, a co-founder of the Bridge Theater. Producers needed to develop “a compelling counternarrative” that theater was affordable or else young people would decide that the art form wasn’t for them. Discounting the worst seats at the back of cramped Victorian theaters didn’t cut it, he said, adding that theaters need to develop more innovative approaches to pricing.Some theatergoers have justified the price of tickets for a once in a lifetime experience of seeing actors like Branagh onstage.Jane Stockdale for The New York TimesOne West End show that is trying something new is “Operation Mincemeat,” a musical set in World War II. At every performance, all the seats in the house cost the same price, but that amount rises gradually throughout the week, from £39.50 on Mondays to £89.50 on weekends. Jon Thoday, the managing director of Avalon, the show’s producer, said that the production lost money on Mondays, but added that the pricing strategy was good for the musical’s long term future because it brought in a younger audience.“There will always be a fuss about ticket prices, unless others change,” Thoday said.At “King Lear” earlier this week, theatergoers weren’t complaining about Branagh’s show, at least. Marshall Shaffer, 31, a movie journalist visiting from New York, said he had paid $403 for two tickets. “I did not think that was necessarily a bargain,” he said, “but Branagh’s probably the premiere Shakespeare interpreter of his time, and I think it’s worthwhile.”Another audience member, Penny Smith, joked that she’d had to “sell a child” to buy her ticket, but said she was happy to pay to see Branagh. Plus, she said with a laugh, the tickets were “a darn sight cheaper than New York. Have you seen the prices there?” More

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      Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ to Return to Broadway Next Fall

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      A new production, directed by Kenny Leon, will feature a diverse cast and will aim to speak to contemporary America.“Our Town,” one of the most revered and enduring American dramas, will return to Broadway next fall in a new production directed by Kenny Leon.Leon has become among the more prolific directors working in New York. Just this year he has directed a revival of “Purlie Victorious,” currently running on Broadway, as well as the summer production of “Hamlet” at Shakespeare in the Park and the spring Off Broadway basketball-fan drama “King James” for the Manhattan Theater Club. He directed two Broadway revivals last season, the Tony-winning “Topdog/Underdog” as well as “Ohio State Murders,” and he has another one coming next spring, “Home.”Leon said he had long wanted to direct a Broadway production of “Our Town,” a 1938 play by Thornton Wilder. He has tackled the play twice in Atlanta, where he lives, first in 2010 with a full production at the True Colors Theater Company, which he co-founded, and then in 2017 with a one-night reading, starring Scarlett Johansson and the cast of an Avengers movie, to benefit hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.“I grew up thinking it wasn’t a play for me, but later in life I thought, ‘If you just include more people, it’s a play about our time and our planet and each other,’” he said in an interview.“The cast will not be all Black and it will not be all white and it will not be all famous,” he said. “I want all of us to feel included, and I want the play to speak to each and every heart in America.”The lead producer is Jeffrey Richards and no cast or theater has been announced. This will be the sixth production of “Our Town” on Broadway; the last one opened in 2002. More

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      ‘Boy Parts,’ the Play, Is a Winking Pastiche of Trauma Tropes

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      A London production adapted from Eliza Clark’s debut novel refuses to justify its unreliable narrator’s violence, but lacks narrative depth and complexity.How far can you go in the name of art? For Irina, nothing is off-limits. She’s a photographer who takes pictures of young men, with a particular preference for guys that are unprepossessing, shy and biddable. Irina’s “thing” is capturing male vulnerability, so she photographs her subjects in compromising poses; she takes liberties with consent, and violates their dignity in increasingly troubling and violent ways.Irina is the antiheroine of “Boy Parts,” adapted from Eliza Clark’s 2020 debut novel of the same name, and running at the Soho Theater, in London, through Nov. 25. It’s an engrossing and darkly funny one-woman show, but doesn’t quite make the best of its provocative premise.Aimée Kelly plays the role with a winning blend of caustic humor and narcissistic self-pity: She’s highly strung, manipulative and insecure. By modulating her voice and posture, Kelly also plays various other characters, including Flo — Irina’s best friend, whose almost canine devotion is rewarded with casual contempt — and a succession of hapless young men, portrayed a sympathetic, slouchy charm. Irina’s motivations are both aesthetic and political: She idolizes the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini — the director of the infamously graphic feature “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” — and wants to subvert the traditional power dynamics of objectification in the visual arts, by putting men on the receiving end of a violating gaze.Gillian Greer’s adaptation successfully transposes the unsettlingly blithe, almost jaunty narrative style that won over so many of the novel’s readers. (Despite garnering only modest coverage in the mainstream press, it became a viral hit on TikTok.) But some of the finer subtleties are lost. In the novel, Irina’s friends, while predominantly in her thrall, have occasional moments of clarity, in which they see her for what she was. Onstage, Irina metes out her sadism with relatively little pushback, but those telling little flashes of interpersonal tension would have lent themselves to stage adaptation, and Greer could have teased them out more.The set, by Peter Butler, is bare except for a single stool; a screen at the back of the stage shows a photograph of the garage Irina uses as her studio, switching images to denote different settings. But otherwise, and ironically — given that this is a tale about photography — the visual medium is almost entirely eschewed: We see no actual artworks, and events are relayed mostly through anecdote rather than action. The opening strains of Goldfrapp’s 2000 single “Lovely Head” provide an intermittent soundtrack, with doleful whistling and harpsichord creating a suitably gloomy atmosphere.The one-woman show format is apt, in a way, since the story revolves around an unreliable narrator. By standing in for all the other characters, Kelly as Irina has complete control over the narrative, and the absence of any other physical presence gives a literal expression to Irina’s self-absorption.But the format has its limitations. Toward the end of the show, there is a climactic scene in a gallery where Irina exhibits the photographs we’ve been watching her create. It’s an event that can make or break her career, and the place is meant to be teeming with people, but Kelly’s aloneness on the stage feels too palpable. Moreover, the production is poorly paced, and the gallery scene feels rushed, which exacerbates a sense of anticlimax. After all that leisurely buildup, the play’s momentum fizzles out in a matter of minutes.There is, of course, a tradition of thrillers in which a woman engages in the sort of creepy antics more typically associated with men, dating back to movies like “Fatal Attraction” (1987) and “Single White Female” (1992). The tendency, in recent years, has been to dignify the tawdry sensationalism of such stories by offering up pathological explanations for problematic behavior — a theme that has become drearily familiar in contemporary fiction — or, as in Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman” (2020), framing criminal exploits as morally legitimate revenge missions. In “Boy Parts,” Irina issues a pointed rejection of the trauma plot: “Maybe I just like to hurt people,” she says. She is bad, simply because she is bad.It’s refreshing, but it’s also something of a narrative dead end. There are no subplots here, no moral ambiguities, no ifs or buts. There just isn’t enough else going on to provide satisfying complexity or depth as Irina hurtles from one misdeed to the next in a steeplechase of cruelty and self-sabotage.The audience may project tongue-in-cheek irony onto it, if they so please. The trouble, in the end, is that a winking pastiche of schlock doesn’t look and feel all that different from schlock itself.Boy PartsThrough Nov. 25 at the Soho Theater, in London; sohotheatre.com. More

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      ‘The Who’s Tommy’ Will Return to Broadway This Spring

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      An acclaimed revival of the musical plans to open in March at the Nederlander Theater.“Tommy” is returning to Broadway.A Chicago-born revival of the classic rock opera, which got strong reviews and sold well at Goodman Theater over the summer, will open at the Nederlander Theater in March.Set in and around London over a number of years starting during World War II, the show is about a boy who stops communicating after several early traumas, embraces and excels at pinball, and begins to have messianic delusions. The story is considered an expression of generational anger.The musical, whose full title is “The Who’s Tommy,” began as a concept album in 1969, and the original stage production opened on Broadway in 1993. It won five Tony Awards, including for its score by Pete Townshend of the Who. Townshend not only wrote the music and lyrics, but is also credited with writing the book with Des McAnuff, who directed the original and is now directing the revival.Writing in The Chicago Tribune, the critic Chris Jones called the revival “truly a ready-for-prime-time stunner” and said “Broadway has nothing else like this wizardry going on.”The revival’s lead producers are Stephen Gabriel and Ira Pittelman. Gabriel said he had loved the show since his high school band played the songs at a school dance, and jumped at producing the project when McAnuff said he wanted to revisit the material.“What we saw in Chicago reaffirmed my original thought that the piece was ahead of its time,” Gabriel said. “I always knew the music would resonate again, but I think the story, with its themes of trauma and bullying, goes toward conversations we have today — that’s discussed more freely and thoughtfully now, and when the show presents those themes, the audience leans in.”The revival is scheduled to begin previews March 8 and to open March 28; casting has not yet been announced. The show is being capitalized for up to $17 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; Gabriel said he expected the actual budget to be closer to $15.5 million.“Tommy” is at least the fifth musical revival announced for this season, joining “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Spamalot,” “The Wiz” and “Cabaret.” More

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      ‘The Great Gatsby’ Review: A Musical Take on Tragic Desire

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      This new version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic remains largely faithful to the novel, but it trades subtle prose for a straightforward production.F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” requires no critical endorsement. His slim 1925 novel still takes up permanent residence in the book bags of students across the nation. Often it is crushed under tomes of greater size, but what “Gatsby,” lacks in length it makes up for in heart, opulence and tragedy. A new musical adaptation trades Fitzgerald’s subtle blend for a blunter approach.“The Great Gatsby,” now playing at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., replicates its literary prototype. Jay Gatsby (Jeremy Jordan) is the elusive seigneur of a mansion in West Egg, a fictional Long Island town. His newfound wealth fronts lavish parties that brim with bubbly and gossip. He is satisfied by none of it.What Gatsby most craves is Daisy (Eva Noblezada), a product of old money who lives across Manhasset Bay with her adulterer of a husband, Tom Buchanan (John Zdrojeski). Gatsby hatches a plan to have Daisy’s new-to-New York cousin Nick Carraway (Noah J. Ricketts) move in next door to him, with the intent to lure Daisy. But the scheme results in calamity.Though the musical remains largely faithful to that plot, Kait Kerrigan, the book writer, takes liberties with the point of view. Her Nick is no neutral narrator ransacking his memories, but a morally upright man who condemns both Gatsby’s initial pursuit of Daisy and the flagrant behavior of other characters. While others indulge in whiskey and sex, Nick sings desperately about wanting to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Under the direction of Marc Bruni (“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical”), all the characters get a moment like this to divulge their desires. The result is a more democratic story freed from Nick’s control, but also one stripped of compelling subtext and Fitzgerald’s enviable prose.Jason Howland’s swanky score follows suit. There are traces of contemporary influence (groovy rock refrains, pop music rhythms), yet the overall sound, particularly in the ensemble numbers (with rousing choreography by Dominique Kelley) conjures 1920s percussive swing. What Howland does best is compose solo songs that showcase his leading actors. When speaking, Jordan’s Gatsby is grounded and debonair, which makes it all the more thrilling when his voice scurries up to a delicious falsetto. Noblezada (“Miss Saigon”) captures Daisy’s longing with an emotive and powerful voice.Company members provide great support, particularly Samantha Pauly as the rambunctious Jordan Baker, Daisy’s unmarried best friend. Pauly taps into the skills she previously displayed in “Six,” carrying pop belts with a modern-day spunk that counter Noblezada’s ballads in a meeker tenor. It makes for two characters that effectively foil one another, but oddly belong to different decades.The design team’s choices do not suffer this confusion. Art Deco abounds in Paul Tate DePoo III’s scenery and projection, whether the geometric décor in Gatsby’s home to the haunting projections of the hazy Long Island Sound. Cory Pattak, the lighting designer, intricately balances darker emerald tones and bouncy bright ones. The overall effect, further complemented by Linda Cho’s dazzling costumes, is bewitching. More than once I wished I were sitting farther back in the audience because a production this lush, however unadventurous in narrative direction, deserves, like the novel, the long view.The Great GatsbyThrough Nov. 12 at Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, N.J.; papermill.org. Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      ‘Make Noise Enough’: Excavating Shakespeare’s Songs

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      In Shakespeare, music is an integral part of the action. But the First Folio, which turns 400 this year, failed to transmit how it should sound.Musicians from the early-music ensemble Collectio Musicorum were practicing a 17th-century round on a recent afternoon in Manhattan. The tune was jaunty, full of the cantering rhythms and mimetic horn calls that fit a song about hunting. But sung in canon, some of the notes bumped roughly against one another in daring dissonance. The singers broke off, looking at their conductor for guidance.Jeff Dailey, the group’s director, glanced up encouragingly from his music stand. The dissonances they were hearing were not a mistake, he said, then added: “If you want to make it any more chromatic, like you’ve just killed a deer, you could do even more shouting than singing. Remember, you’re drunk at this point.”The performers were preparing a program of songs, ballads and rounds from Shakespeare plays that brings to life the tunes scholars think might have been part of the earliest productions. Some of the numbers that will be featured in a concert on Friday at the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side are exquisite settings for voice and lute by composers like Robert Johnson and Thomas Morley.But there are also humble songs laced with innuendo, the kind that would have appealed to the groundlings in the cheap section of the Globe Theater, like the one Dailey and his singers were rehearsing, “What shall he have that kill’d the deer?” from “As You Like It.” A nobleman commands a forester to “Sing it: ’tis no matter how it be in tune, so it make noise enough.”This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of what is known as the First Folio, which comprises 36 Shakespeare plays, half of which had never been published previously. Put out by members of his company only a few years after his death in 1616, in the weighty format normally reserved for important religious works or histories, the First Folio determined how Shakespeare’s writings would be transmitted.Dailey leads singers in a rehearsal. From left, Christopher Preston Thompson, Chad Kranak and Alex Longnecker.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBut the folio failed to transmit one vital part of Shakespeare’s vision: the music. His plays are punctuated by drum rolls, fanfares and dances, indicated in stage directions. And they are teeming with verses meant to be sung. In the First Folio these verses are clearly marked as “song” in the stage instructions and set apart typographically with italics. Singing is essential for rendering Ophelia’s madness, Ariel’s magic and the inebriated antics ratcheting up the comic confusion in “Twelfth Night.”In much of Shakespeare, Dailey said in an interview, “music is an integral part of the action.” But figuring out what it sounded like is another matter.Music printing was a specialized craft, and it would have been too expensive for even a luxury edition like the First Folio to include notated music. And though settings of Shakespeare lyrics appear in many 17th-century English song collections and lute books, these often date to later decades, making it difficult to determine their origin. A few popular songs can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time, but even then, Dailey said, “it’s a chicken and egg question: Did Shakespeare include them because they were famous, or did they become famous because they had been in his plays?”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesIn 2004, the musicologist Ross W. Duffin published “Shakespeare’s Songbook,” which sets hundreds of lyrics to tunes he identified as likely matches. Among them is the hunting round “What shall we have” that was first published, with textual variants, in a collection from 1652. In a manuscript in the Folger Library, Duffin found a version appearing to date back as far as 1625, with a text that more closely aligns with the First Folio. That’s nearly contemporaneous with the play’s publication, but it’s still a quarter century off from 1599, when scholars think Shakespeare first wrote “As You Like It.” In the play, moreover, a single forester is bidden to sing it, whereas this is a round for four voices. Which characters would have joined in onstage?Another song from the play, “It was a Lover and his Lass,” survives in a setting by Morley printed in 1600, which some see as evidence that it was the original song, perhaps even commissioned by Shakespeare. Yet even such a seemingly clear attribution raises questions in performance. Morley’s setting is for a solo voice, whereas in the play it is sung by two pages.“How do you then perform it?” Dailey asked. “Do you have two singers sing it in unison? Do you have two actors alternate verses? Or do you compose an additional part for the second singer?”In concert, Dailey will have his performers take turns with the verses and then sing the refrain in unison. But Duffin, in a recent article, makes a case for reconstructing the song as a duet. He argues that the lute accompaniment in Morley’s printed version is so unusually awkward that it was probably adapted from a previous version for two voices.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesRecords show that Shakespeare and Morley were neighbors, leading some to conjecture that they were friends and collaborators. But Duffin sees no reason to believe that Shakespeare ever commissioned specific music. The clues linking him to Johnson, a master lutenist and the author of artful settings in the plays, are also inconclusive. “The evidence that he was the composer of the King’s Men is so circular,” Duffin said in an interview, referring to Shakespeare’s company of actors. “Everybody wants him to be. The songs are beautiful, but were they the original songs? Probably not.”Much of Duffin’s research has focused on the humble tunes that were the currency of popular culture in Shakespeare’s time. He said ballads in particular were so ubiquitous that an actor presented with a particular meter and rhyme schema would have known which tune to supply. Looking into the names of actors listed in the First Folio, he said he found evidence that many were “tumblers, jugglers and song-and-dance men,” adding that they would have brought their musical skills into the theater.A few popular songs can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time. But, Dailey said, “did Shakespeare include them because they were famous, or did they become famous because they had been in his plays?”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesDuffin believes that there is even more music in Shakespeare’s works than is evident from the italicized lines in the First Folio. He has identified dozens of what he calls “snatches” of songs embedded in dialogue that turn out to be the opening lines or key phrases of popular songs. These would have sparked a shower of associations in contemporary audiences.In “Winter’s Tale,” a brief allusion to a ballad about a murderously jealous husband would have raised the stakes for an audience following the play about a jealous king. In “Twelfth Night,” an otherwise out-of-context reference to “The 12th Day of December” would have been recognized as the title of a famous ballad about a battle, evoking the noise of war in a scene of domestic mayhem.“Everybody would have known these ballads from down the pub,” Duffin said, “so when he quotes a line everybody would have made the connection.”Part inside jokes, part cryptic crossword clues, these brief references would have made performances interactive experiences for contemporary audiences. In 1623, the readers of First Folio would have still been able to listen between the lines, as it were. But over time, the brilliance of Shakespeare’s imagination would come to be defined by what the First Folio was able to capture: the language, divorced from the real and imagined music of the plays. More

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      ‘Lyonesse,’ With Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas, Is a Starry Mess

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      In London, Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas do their best in a new play that careers between near-slapstick one minute and speechifying the next.“We dream big,” says a no-nonsense film executive early in “Lyonesse,” the starry, if overstuffed, new play that opened Wednesday night at the Harold Pinter Theater, in London. And so, too, does this West End debut from Penelope Skinner, a British playwright whose works have long enlivened small theaters on both sides of the Atlantic.The themes arrive thick and fast across nearly three hours: #MeToo, cancel culture, the tyranny of men and many others. But not even Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas, the production’s commercial draws, can transform the scattershot material into a coherent whole.It takes courage to open a new play in the West End without a previous run somewhere else, but “Lyonesse” whimpers where it should roar. You emerge less enlightened than bewildered at the inability of so much talent — including the show’s usually excellent director, Ian Rickson — to come up with something better.James shoulders the bulk of the narrative, playing Kate, an eager-beaver movie exec whose habit of continually apologizing doesn’t inspire confidence in her judgment.Her boss, Sue (Doon Mackichan), nonetheless has enough faith in Kate to send her on a mission to Cornwall, southern England, where she meets Elaine (Scott Thomas), an actress who has emerged from a decades-long hibernation and wants to tell her story on film.Doon Mackichan plays Sue, Kate’s boss, who sends Kate to Cornwall to work on a film project about a long-forgotten actress.Manuel HarlanThe women’s first encounter isn’t especially auspicious, though Elaine’s entrance certainly catches the eye. Waddling onstage in Wellington boots, a swimming cap and a fur coat worn over a swimsuit, she suggests an English seaside equivalent to Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.” She also comes bearing an ax that she’s been using to chop up furniture, and you feel from her bizarre behavior that she could put it to other uses, as well.“It is time for me to step into the light,” Elaine announces with a flourish, and at first, you think she will send Kate packing, frustrated by this new arrival’s flightiness and her inability to light a fire. Instead, the two bond over a shared desire to take ownership of their lives. Elaine is reckoning with the fallout of a brutal relationship with a now-dead film director, just as Kate, a generation younger, chafes at the control exerted by her own film director husband, Greg (James Corrigan, in the play’s lone male role).Freed from her own difficult relationship, Elaine encourages the impressionable Kate to leave Greg and start afresh. But any hope of a clean break is dashed when Sue suggests that he be hired to direct the film of Elaine’s life.Keeping an eye on these complications, and others, is Elaine’s calm neighbor and friend, Chris (Sara Powell, first-rate), a poet who develops feelings for Kate that aren’t reciprocated.Sara Powell as Chris, Elaine’s neighbor.Manuel HarlanAnd yet the play’s tone is so wayward — near-slapstick one minute, speechifying on societal ills the next — that any focus is lost. Skinner writes tremendous parts for women, as her earlier plays “Linda” and “The Village Bike” have shown. But the principal performers in “Lyonesse” are sufficiently confounded by the gear shifts in the writing that you start to look toward the gentler presence of Chris for respite. The playwright is clearly drawn to this secondary character, too, and Chris ends the play onstage alone.The likable James has an animated stage presence, but it’s hard to believe that a serious company would employ such a flibbertigibbet. Chattiness in both life and art can grate, and so it proves here.Scott Thomas looks fantastic as the willfully daffy Elaine. And as a onetime film star herself, who has enjoyed a renewed career onstage, she may understand Elaine’s desire, however misguided, to put herself in the public eye once more. The role couldn’t be further from the cool, cryptic women Scott Thomas often plays, so is a welcome change of pace.But the fact remains that the character of Elaine never rings true: She’s an amalgamation of eccentricities, most of which feel borrowed from elsewhere. For her big set piece, Scott Thomas careers about the living room of Lyonesse, her decaying house, in a wig, recounting the details of Elaine’s bruised and bruising life.But when she later poses the question, “What if I’m no longer spellbinding?,” it feels like time for the character, and the play, to face facts.LyonesseThrough Dec. 23 at the Harold Pinter Theater in London; lyonesseonstage.com. More