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    In ‘Music City’ and ‘Babe,’ Existential Battles of the Heart and Soul

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    Bedlam’s country music show is a rollicking good time. But the New Group’s production of “Babe,” starring Marisa Tomei, is a frustrating one-act lacking cohesion.If country music has a superpower, it’s the ability to spin conventions and catchphrases into affecting narratives. The book for “Music City,” a terrific new jukebox show mining the JT Harding catalog, essentially does the same thing on a larger scale.While Harding’s name might not resonate, his songs have scored sizable plays on streaming services: He is a co-writer of Uncle Kracker’s “Smile,” Blake Shelton’s “Sangria” and Keith Urban’s “Somewhere in My Car.” All of those songs turn up in “Music City,” a rollicking good time that understands contemporary country music — the style and the lifestyle — in a way we don’t often see on New York theater stages.For this Bedlam production, the director Eric Tucker and the scenic designer Clifton Chadick have turned the West End Theater into the Wicked Tickle, a homey Nashville joint specializing in open mics (and evoking that city’s real-life Bluebird Cafe). One such session is underway as audience members file in and take their seats — ticket holders can sign up for a slot in that preshow section and basically warm up the room for the characters.The focus of our attention are the imaginatively named TJ (Stephen Michael Spencer), an outgoing singer-songwriter with a knack for upbeat tunes, and 23 (Casey Shuler), a soulful newcomer with a crack in her voice and a tear in her beer — largely because of the strain of dealing with her addict mother (Leenya Rideout). The two young strivers decide to try writing songs together, and Peter Zinn’s book goes exactly where you think it’s going to go, with antagonists (both played by Andrew Rothenberg) setting up some speed bumps along the way: Bakerman, a drug dealer TJ is indebted to, and Stucky Stiles, a behatted, creatively adrift country star reminiscent of Strings McCrane in “Hold On to Me Darling.”“Music City” is not lacking for earworms (which also include two numbers written for the show and four that had not been previously recorded), but it also understands that almost as important as the songs is how they came to be. TJ and 23 express themselves through music — it is who they are — so when Stucky comes fishing for new material, they must choose who will get to deliver these little pieces of their heart.The only caveat in this very effectively staged production is the superfluous, distracting choreography by John Heginbotham (Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!”), but it is kept to a minimum. “Music City” is a good example of a jukebox done well, highlighting an industry that values songwriting craftsmanship as well as its commercial value and even revisiting some of the questions that were raised in David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic”: What does music mean to the people who are passionate about it? How do you measure success?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Arcadia’ Review: Artistic Ambition Gets Thrown Into Chaos

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      Bedlam’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s time-traveling mind-bender of a play is a meditation on uncertainty.If even commonplace matters of everyday life — weather, traffic, disease — can defy scientific expectations, what hope could there be in predicting human behavior? With “Arcadia,” his 1993 play, Tom Stoppard set out to explore the science of this uncertainty and how it can disrupt our understanding of history. A new staging presented by Bedlam makes a valiant effort to adapt Stoppard’s cerebral probes into chaos theory, Newtonian law, thermodynamics and metaphysics for a 2023 audience, but the result is a muddled one. And that may just demonstrate Stoppard’s frustrating but brilliant point.Act 1 introduces us to the play’s complicated narrative mechanics, as we jump back and forth between the Regency Period of the early 1800s and the early 1990s. The staging of the 1990s years feels even closer to our own when two primary characters — the independent-minded author Hannah (Zuzanna Szadkowski) and one of her love interests, the logic-driven mathematician Valentine (Mike Labbadia) — pull out smartphones and sleek laptops.Stoppard sets the play in Derbyshire, a county in the East Midlands of England, but Eric Tucker, the director, has his actors drop the British accents. So when Hannah and Valentine enter an academic arms race with a smarmy Byron scholar named Bernard (Ian Zafir) who values poetry above all other subjects, they spew hard consonants and short vowels. The North American Englishness of it all makes it slightly easier to hold on to Stoppard’s words.Even in a space as physically intimate as the West End Theater (located on the second floor of a century-old church, which provides an aptly haunting atmosphere), the production feels cold, caught up in its own profundity at the expense of our comprehension. The Bedlam company’s acting is void of real thrill so the bits of Stoppard’s playful wordplay and humor we do catch fall flat in both centuries.There are two exceptions: the luminous Caroline Grogan as Thomasina, a preternaturally wise student, and the stormy Shaun Taylor-Corbett as Septimus, her tenacious tutor. Together, they find themselves on the brink of a major discovery that Valentine will investigate in the 1990s. The pair find a seductive chemistry that blossoms as Septimus opens Thomasina’s mind to entropic (and erotic) possibilities.In Act 2, the eras blur. Timelines that were previously distinct are now stacked on top of one another. After intermission, we’re ushered back into the theater only to discover that Tucker has brazenly swapped the actors’ playing area for our seating area. By doing so, Tucker fulfills Bedlam’s mission statement to “reinvigorate traditional forms” and “collapse aesthetic distance.” But he’s also honoring one of Stoppard’s main provocations — that the unknowability of the past meets the unknowability of the here and now.ArcadiaThrough Dec. 23 at the West End Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 3 hours 5 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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      Broadway and West End Theater Owners Agree to Join Forces

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      A major British theater company, Ambassador Theater Group, says it is “combining operations” with Jujamcyn, the smallest of Broadway’s three big landlords.Jujamcyn Theaters, the smallest of the three big Broadway landlords, is combining its operations with a large British company, the Ambassador Theater Group, or A.T.G.The transaction, confirmed Tuesday by Jujamcyn and International Entertainment Holdings Limited, which is A.T.G.’s parent company, would give A.T.G., which already operates two of the 41 Broadway houses, a more sizable foothold in the heart of America’s theater industry, and would give Jordan Roth, the Jujamcyn president, more resources for showcasing his creative ambitions. Jujamcyn operates five Broadway houses; A.T.G. has 58 venues in Britain, Germany, and the United States.The companies said that the transaction is subject to regulatory approval, but did not say by what entity and in which country. No financial terms were specified.Roth, one of the most colorful characters on Broadway’s business side, will become the creative director of the combined company and its largest individual shareholder, with a seat on the board. There are also significant institutional shareholders: A large Rhode Island-based private equity firm, Providence Equity Partners, has for the last decade been A.T.G.’s majority shareholder, and at the height of the pandemic, when theaters were being financially squeezed by a lengthy shutdown, an Australian company, T.E.G., acquired a minority share of the company.Roth, the 47-year-old son of the real estate titan Steven Roth and the Broadway producer Daryl Roth, has been a singular force in a staid industry, with a disruptive emphasis on customer service in his theaters, a fondness for couture, an exuberant presence on social media, and left-leaning politics sharply at odds with those of his Trump-supporting father.The transaction portends a potential shift from the quirky to the corporate: A.T.G. is a large company, run by a former wine industry executive, Mark Cornell, who will remain as chief executive of the combined company. A.T.G. is fundamentally British, which could be a cause for concern on Broadway, where there is occasional worry about too many London shows — often developed with British government support — swamping work by American theater artists. (After Second Stage Theater, a nonprofit that focuses on work by living American writers, finally acquired a Broadway house in 2015, its artistic director, Carole Rothman, proudly proclaimed that her organization’s Broadway programming would feature “No Brits.”)The companies, which would not make anyone available for comment, did not describe the transaction as either an acquisition or a merger, and it is not immediately clear what “combining operations” will mean for the employees or operations at the five Jujamcyn houses or the two A.T.G. Broadway houses.The Jujamcyn theaters include the Eugene O’Neill, which is the long-term home of “The Book of Mormon,” as well as the Al Hirschfeld (“Moulin Rouge!”), the Walter Kerr (“Hadestown”), the August Wilson (“Funny Girl”) and the St. James (awaiting a new musical called “New York, New York”). Roth is expected to continue to decide what shows run in those five theaters, and he has previously shown a strong interest in work by American writers: Four of the five current Jujamcyn musicals have American origins; “Moulin Rouge!” has Australian roots, but the stage musical was developed in the United States.A.T.G. has an ambitious Broadway track record thus far. The company has for a decade operated one of the biggest Broadway houses, the Lyric, which, lavishly reconfigured for 1,622 seats, has for the last five years been home to “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” A.T.G. has since 2017 also operated one of Broadway’s smaller houses, the Hudson, which with just under 1,000 seats often presents plays; the latest, a revival of “A Doll’s House” starring Jessica Chastain, began previews Monday night. Among the hallmarks of the company’s Broadway presence: fancier food and drink than at most of the American-operated houses.Notably, both “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “A Doll’s House” are produced by companies financed by A.T.G. A lead producer of “Cursed Child” is Sonia Friedman, a prolific and powerful London-based producer whose production company is an A.T.G. affiliate; the director of “A Doll’s House” is Jamie Lloyd, a British director whose production company is also affiliated with the group. (Friedman is also a lead producer of “Funny Girl” and “New York, New York,” both running at Jujamcyn theaters.)The combination of A.T.G. and Jujamcyn — it is not clear what the amalgamated venture will be called — will still be the smallest of the three big Broadway landlords, but now with seven of the 41 theaters. The Shubert Organization has 17 theaters and the Nederlander Organization has nine. Six theaters are operated by nonprofits, one by Disney, and one (Circle in the Square) is independently owned.Jujamcyn, founded in the late 1950s, was named for Judy, James and Cynthia Binger, the grandchildren of the company’s founder. The Binger family sold the company to Rocco Landesman in 2005; Jordan Roth bought a stake in the company in 2009.Roth has been an activist theater owner. In the buildings, he has overseen everything from a redesign of the ice cubes (to reduce the clinking noise) to bringing in a new ticket seller, SeatGeek, to manage ticket sales.He has presented multiple hit shows, among the biggest of which has been “The Book of Mormon,” which has been running since 2011. He also landed “Springsteen on Broadway,” an enormously successful Bruce Springsteen concert show that had runs both before and after the pandemic shutdown.Roth has also been active as a producer, most recently transferring a concert-style production of “Into the Woods” from City Center to the St. James; he was also a producer of the Tony-winning 2018 revival of “Angels in America.”A.T.G. has been expanding its presence in the United States, where it now owns, operates or manages 16 theaters, including not only the two Broadway houses, but also the King’s Theater in Brooklyn, the Colonial Theater in Boston, and theaters in Detroit, New Orleans, San Antonio, San Francisco and Sugar Land, Texas. More