In “GIANT”, currently in previews on Broadway, beloved children’s author Roald Dahl (John Lithgow) plays a high stakes game with his literary reputation.

It is 1982 and Dahl has written a book review that passionately denounces Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and holds Jews collectively responsible the invasion. Two representatives of Dahl’s publishing company converge on his country home in attempt to persuade him to issue a public apology. Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey), Dahl’s British publisher and Jessie Stone (Aya Cash), sent from the New York publishing office. The stakes on the table are the potential loss of Dahl’s vast readership, his financial success as an author, and a possible knighthood. The knighthood is a particular fond hope of Dahl’s younger, upper class partner Felicity (Rachael Stirling).

What follows is a tense, well matched battle between Dahl and the three characters who want him to issue an apology. The subject of the battle are the nuances of antisemitism in its entanglement with criticism of Israel. The playwright Mark Rosenblatt has turned this abstract subject into a satisfying and consistently gripping play. But the core of the production’s success is John Lithgow’s perfomance. Lithgow at 80 is still at his peak. He embodies his Dahl with a charm that is both child-like in its sweetness and destructiveness. And Bob Crowley’s direction showcases Lithgow’s ability to keep the audience on its toes in a constantly shifting flipping of sympathies and antipathies. It’s grand theater.

Jessie, the envoy sent from the American publishing house, becomes the primary antagonist in her attempt to corner Dahl into acknowledging that his anti-Zionism has merged with antisemitism. Aya Cash’s Jessie is petite and appealingly feminine but a serious pugilist. Her throwing down of the gauntlet to challenge Dahl ends the first act and makes us want to come back for the next match.

Before the play’s end, when Dahl delivers his infamous 1983 interview to The Spectator (quoted by the playwright verbatim) which is outrightly antisemitic, Dahl asks Jessie if she can no longer read his books to her son because:

“If it’s in me, then surely it’s in the books too?”

Jessie responds that she still loves his books. She can make a separation of Dahl, the antisemite, from Dahl, the literary genius. A separation that Dahl refuses to do when it comes to Jews and Zionism.

The plea that Jews as a diasporic community should be seen as separate from criminals like Netanyahu is an important one as synagogues are targeted in the US and Europe because of Israel and the US’s military actions. It is a plea that I share myself. But what the play elides or is perhaps complicit with in its elision is that the UK and other European governments have attempted to shut down political criticism of Israel by criminalizing it as antisemitism. And in the US, antisemitism has been criminalized as a tool by an authoritarian government to consolidate power. And beyond that, antisemitism is a visceral reaction, based on ancient hatreds and largely unsusceptible to a debate within the safe confines of the theater.

So after the audience rose to give Lithgow and the ensemble a deserved standing ovation and as soon as the actors had left the stage, I felt the applause switched off almost immediately like a light switch. Broadway, unlike the West End, is situated in a country where the debate over Israel is forcibly shut down long before it gets to the level where Rosenblatt is letting it play out. Only today, Laquaa Kordia, a student at Columbia University was finally released after a year in an ICE prison simply for exercising her first amendment rights by voicing her horror at the genocide in Gaza.

On February 5th, the New York City Ballet premiered Alexei Ratmansky’s “The Naked King”. The premiere was only a few days before the half-time performance of Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl but it had a similar flavor of nose-thumbing at our contemporary Emperor.

The ballet is a reworking of the 1936 ballet “Le Roi Nu” with music by Jean Françaix and it faithfully follows Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of a grandiose Emperor hoodwinked by three trickster tailors into humiliating himself.

From the beginning of the piece, the feet of the Emperor (Andrew Veyette) were rarely allowed to touch the ground. They were lovingly received, cupped, and held by the welcoming hands of the Emperor’s flunkies who propelled their living god about the stage in a series of arduous ballet lifts.

The Emperor’s Queen (Miriam Miller) was treated to a similar disdain for gravity by her partner, the Queen’s Lover (Peter Walker). Miller and Walker were one of the highlights of the ballet with Walker in particular radiating a gloriously smarmy adoration of his queen which dovetailed traditional ballet roleplaying with the contemporary bootlicking of the Trump administration’s loyalists.

This weightlessness lavished on the Emperor and his Queen by their loyalists was contrasted with the clomping and angry steps of the commoners (the corps) who would eventually succeed in staging a revolution against the Emperor in the final moments of the ballet.

The ballet had a comic tone but it was equally grotesque and menacing. After the Emperor had been exposed by the small Boy (Oliver Lobo Ellena) who shouted his truth from the stage, the court of flunky loyalists attempted to maintain power but then crumbled and finally, one by one, fled the stage and their Emperor abandoning him to his fate.

The Emperor is left alone, exposed, vulnerable and we wonder if there will be a violent retribution but then suddenly a commoner simply kicks him into the wings. Begone! From the upper balconies of the David H. Koch Theater you could hear a spontaneous cheer ring out. But from the expensive seats in the orchestra, where I was sitting, there was silence.

The NYCB is still scheduled to perform on tour at the Trump Kennedy Center in June, only a few weeks before the venue is closed indefinitely by the Trump administration. Two other major U.S. ballet companies, the American Ballet Theater and the San Francisco Ballet, are also slated to perform in the venue before it closes. What is it about ballet that it is always one step away from flattering a King, a Czar or a Dictator?

Yet with “The Naked King”, Ratmansky has redeemed the New York City Ballet. He has put his institution on record for not only challenging the Trump administration but he has done so by brilliantly translating his mastery of ballet choreography into a comic but disturbing dance ritual of obeisance and ultimately resistance to authoritarianism.

Beckett’s 1957 radio drama “All That Fall” casts its spell, hovering over a miniature tabletop Irish village.

Maddy Rooney (Randy Danson), an elderly lady takes her habitual walk to her village’s train station to pick up her blind husband, Dan (Tony Torn). On the way to the station, Maddy encounters other village characters, each a typically Becketian creation, full of existential gripes and miseries but also lovingly drawn and instantly recognizable as people in our own lives. The train and Maddy’s husband are uncharacteristically late and a shadow of a sinister mystery begins to fall on the deceptively cozy village life.

In JoAnne Akalaitis’ production of Beckett’s radio drama, the voices of the characters are played on recorded audio and, except for a brief introduction via a slide show, never appear physically embodied on stage. What we do see is an exquisite tabletop miniature landscape of an Irish village by scenic designer Thomas Dunn. The landscape features small homes and a network of twisting paths that lead to and from the town’s train station which looms above the village.

The tabletop landscape is charming at first but there is not enough happening on it even with its detailed lighting cues to hold one’s attention. Beckett’s poetic sound world starts to create its own images which begin to fight with the production’s prosaic miniature world. Yet eventually Beckett wins and the play lifts you up and carries you under its wings. This turn was largely due to the second appearance on the audio of actor Tony Torn, as Maddy’s blind husband. Torn brought an exhaustion and menace to the character that propelled the story to its shocking conclusion.

In his radio play, Beckett gives his audience an almost classical whodunnit melodramatic right hook of an ending yet the story still remains ambiguous. Are we watching a village whodunnit with motives, crimes, and outcomes or are we watching our own lives full of seething anger and frustrations where the only crimes committed are ones in our daydreams or nightmares?

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We are still communicating but we are algorithms

Founded in 2016, The Exponential Festival is a relative newcomer to NYC’s theater festival culture. In Amanda Horowitz’ wry comedy “Fashion” (which played at the Bushwick performance space “Life World”) humans interact under the verbal dictates of their apps.

The first half of Horowitz’ piece introduces us to a dryly comic world of encounters that seem largely to be taking place in the physical world. But in the second half of the piece, the text places us in a drama composed entirely of the text messages of three people. A young woman (Carolyn Kettig) exchanges sexually charged messages with a young man (Lorenzo Bueno) and wedged in between their flurry of sexting are the messages of the young woman’s grandmother (Annie O’Sullivan). None of these characters seem destined to meet in the physical world, their intimacies are entirely digital, yet Horowitz stages them on the physical plane of the performance space. At one point the sexting voice of the young woman is put into the mouth of the grandmother who also briefly physically embodies its youthful sexuality. It is a disturbing and uncomfortable shift but it is also quite tender and beautiful as old and young flesh merge into a kind of intricate fugue. Will our online transgressive sexual play, after being monetized and resold as data sets, seem one day as quaint and dusty as a familiar old song?

The piece does suffer a bit from the writer/director malady. The second half seems to eclipse the first in focus and it also goes on too long, circling around the same ideas. That is a shame because with a bit of editing, Amanda Horowitz’ wry and tender comedy would be even more remarkable.

What a difference a decade makes in the growth of an Algorithm.

An elderly woman in the future, Marjorie (June Squibb) shares her receding memories with her “Prime”, an AI assisted digital projection of her long dead husband Walter (Christopher Lowell) in a revival of Marjorie Prime, Jordan Harrison’s 2015 play at 2nd Stage Theater.

Marjorie is cared for by her daughter Tess (Cynthia Nixon) and her son in law Jon (Danny Burstein) whose marital relationship is disintegrating. Their human suffering is contrasted to the hopeful, helpful, learning algorithm of the “Prime” Walter. A “Prime” can’t experience suffering but perhaps that deficiency can help it show humans how deficient they are at appreciating their fleeting lives.

It is a beautiful and poetic premise and the play has exquisite ideas about humanity and artificial intelligence which float in and out of the almost purposely banal narrative of humans struggling with grief and mortality. The problem is that these ideas are barely dramatized. The play unfolds largely in a series of episodic scenes that are essentially monologues as they are often in dialogue with an artificial intelligence mirror. Each human character has ample moments to suffer onstage and June Squibb (96 years old), Cynthia Nixon, and Danny Burstein, all seasoned Broadway veterans, do not disappoint.

When the play premiered in 2015, Barak Obama was President and tech still had a bit of its utopian bloom left on it. In between then and now there has been a marriage of tech and authoritarian capitalism. Yet in Harrison’s 2015 play, “Primes” exist in a world where the profit motive is present only in a whisper. By the end of the play, as a group of “Primes” talk among themselves without human interference, Harrison gives us a hint of the future. And by 2025, in Harrison’s The Antiquities, we have been brought up to date to the dystopian present where the algorithm is no longer a caretaker of humanity but a dominator of it.

Lynn Nottage on cultural censorship in the U.S.

The Broadway revival of “Marjorie Prime” is being produced by the nonprofit 2nd Stage Theater. When it premiered in 2015 it was part of a spate of plays that dramatized Alzheimer’s and the loss of memory. Harrison’s play reaches through and past that single subject in an admirable way but it is still part of a genre that was meant to appeal to the aging subscriber base of U.S. nonprofit theaters.

Like most NYC nonprofit theaters, 2nd Stage has been battered by a series of storms in the past five years. Already losing their aging audiences, Covid appeared at the least opportune time and many longtime audiences never returned to the theatre. The most recent storm has been the second Trump administration.

Lynn Nottage, a great contemporary playwright, along with other artists have organized the Fall of Freedom, a two day series of events addressing cultural self-censorship in the U.S..

Here is Nottage speaking to the current state of the arts:

What we’ve encountered with regard to large museums is that they feel very fearful of retribution from the government... There are more nos than yeses because of anticipatory obedience. Artists aren’t afraid, but the institutions are afraid, and they are beginning to make decisions based on their fear of losing grants and losing their major donors. And that trickles down to the artists who are beginning to lose opportunities. As a result, exhibitions are being canceled. Plays are not being programmed.

In March of 2026, Yale Rep will stage a revival of Rhinoceros, Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 absurdist play about acquiescence to authoritarianism. If anyone knows anything about caving into rich and powerful bullies, it’s the Ivy League. But in NYC, as Nottage so aptly states, the nonprofit theaters have jumped the gun on acquiescence by obeying the bullies even before being asked to do so.

A casino bid in Times Square is defeated by the neighborhood.

There are only two concentrated urban theatre districts in the West: London’s West End and New York City’s Times Square. Paris is a great theater town but its theaters are democratically spread out throughout its neighborhoods. Only New York and London possess a densely packed neighborhood dedicated specifically to the pursuit of theatrical pleasures.

Not to put too rosy a hue on Times Square which for much of its life excelled at the sleazy come-on and the fleecing of suckers from out of town. Yet on September 17th, 2025, New York City saved its theater district by rejecting a casino bid that had very little to offer it aside from the opportunity of the gambling industry to put its hands in the pockets of a Broadway audience nyc had painstakingly kept alive through lean times.

And not only was the Times Square casino defeated, all three of the proposed Manhattan casino bids were defeated one by one in the coming days. The drama played out in the city’s public hearings held by different Community Advisory Committees (CAC) where members of the affected neighborhoods could say their piece.

A playwright friend who does not suffer fools gladly and who lives in the neighborhood participated in one of the CAC hearings. He noticed a number of people who appeared to have been invited to testify by the developers and who had been paid to give their testimony. Always ready to inflict a good tongue lashing on his foes, my friend got on record by informing the paid shills: “If you don’t live in the neighborhood, you have no voice in this.”

When the vote went down it was four against and two for the casino. The two pro votes were cast by the deputies of the Mayor and the Governor. After the bid’s defeat, CEO Eric Holliday of SL Green threw a much viewed tantrum directing his rage against the nobodies who had squashed his dream. Holliday had reportedly lost a 10 million dollar bonus that hinged on the deal passing. Was Holliday experiencing the first stage of grief in the dawning awareness that nyc might no longer be world’s most uncontested happy-place of the Developer King? Not likely but a girl can dream.

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Lincoln Center honors White Christian Nationalism

Campus flag flown at half-staff in honor of Charlie Kirk.

On September 12th, 2025, guests arriving to the performing arts campus of Lincoln Center were greeted by the American flag flown half-staff in honor of white nationalist Charlie Kirk as ordered by Presidential fiat.

There might be some speculation as to why this act might not have been a Kirk memorial. Lincoln Center’s operations might have simply forgotten to raise the flag again after Sept. 11th’s “Patriot Day”. Yet that recognition is specific in ending that day-long honor at sunset. Or perhaps the two flag poles that flank the campus are a part of the NY city or state park system and thus out of the jurisdiction of Lincoln Center. Yet the Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul has been vilified by right wing media for not requiring the Presidential order to have been carried out in NY State.

singleticket abhors the politics of murder but is disheartened to have one of his places of cultural refuge honor a white supremacist. This gesture of cowardice follows on the heels of General Manager Peter Gelb’s fundraising windfall of Saudi Arabian money for the cash-strapped Metropolitan Opera’s 2025/26 season. singleticket does understand that opera, symphony and ballet are not free. He grew up listening to the radio broadcasts from the Met sponsored by Texaco, a despoiler of the planet. When he goes to the New York City Ballet, he settles his rear end happily into the plush seats of the David H. Koch Theater, named after another despoiler of the planet. He has managed to live with similar Gentlemen’s Agreements with arts funders who have been in bed with Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin. I suppose watching an opera while trying not to think about it being made possible through the beheading of journalists or the state executions of homosexuals is do-able on my part. As Quentin Crisp would say, it’s simply a matter of not losing one’s nerve.

Luddite Theater on The High Line

Gnomes and machine-wreckers assemble for a festival of resistance to tech.

Saturday, September 27 was the S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E. rally (Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and the Passionate Hemorrhaging of Our Neo-liberal Experience) organized by The Lamp Club.

The rally began on nyc’s High Line, a public park of green spaces that was once an elevated train route. Organizers handed out beautifully made gnome hats to participants and passerby’s. Everyone was invited to join. Distinct characters began to reveal themselves. There was a human AI that singleticket interfaced with:

singleticket: “AI, which are more delicious strawberries or grapes?

AI: “Many people believe that strawberries are more delicious than grapes while others believe that grapes are more delicious than strawberries.”

There was also the “Apple Baby”, a baby born from a ipad screen, knowing nothing but the constant connectivity and addiction to apps. Shadowing the Apple Baby was the Gnome-Father-Death in a purple conical hat who would take an important part in the drama later.

Suddenly the march began. We were instructed that we would visit the nearby Tesla showroom and then the Apple Store on 14th St. The Rude Mechanical Orchestra led the way with a rendition of “Which Side Are You On?”.

After visiting the Tesla showroom the march continued to the public space in front of the Apple store where a law court was assembled and tech was put on trial. Is the Apple Baby’s life, disconnected from human contact and delivered up to the markets of digital connectivity at birth, worth anything in terms of human value?

We heard from the prosecution and the defense. The defense was appropriately slicker and more convincing. “We would be lost without our phones, without our connectivity. More than lost, we would lose our jobs and perhaps our citizenship, all of our human rights.” But as this was a hopeful gathering, the prosecution prevailed and the sentence was death. What followed was too ugly to recount, but Gnome-Father-Death appeared to render justice to a lone iphone with a stone, an implement representing the Gnomes’ deep relationship to earth.

The crowd that arrived to see the Little Island’s production of Charles Ludlam’s “Galas” felt a bit like a cult of queer geriatrics showing up for a rave. There were certainly younger folk among them but it looked like many in the audience were old enough to have seen the original production of this parody/homage to opera diva Maria Callas back in 1983. How much more of a treat to find that this current take on “Galas” feels completely at home in 2025.

I can see why Ludlam’s play would remain a fascination for queer theater artists because his plays were purpose-built for that reason years ago. The better ones like “Galas” maintain the power of a Tarot deck, to be reshuffled by each new generation of queer artists. Eric Ting, a director whose work I have been following with increasing excitement, lets Ludlam’s play speak for itself. The text has its longeurs, along with its homage to Maria Callas it also delves into a personal meditation on performance and the business of performance. And the addition of actual opera arias performed by Anthony Roth Constanzo, where the original text does not call for them, slows things down a bit. But Ting and his collaborators have orchestrated a remarkable party. Raja Feather Kelly’s movement is silly, fierce, and also smartly focused on the story-telling work at hand. Hahnji Jang’s costume design is a delicious mix of haute couture and thrift store scraps.

It is the ensemble that really shines in this production. Ludlam was always the diva but he knew he couldn’t maintain a troupe on starvation wages without giving each of them juicy roles to play on stage. Samora La Perdida does a delicious turn as a superstar cat-walking Pope. Caleb Eberhardt is sinister and sinuous as Galas’ lover, the Greek tycoon Aristotle Plato Socrates Odysseus. But it is two veterans of nyc performance who turn in surprisingly nuanced and affecting portrayals. Mary Testa, as Galas’ more than slightly mad maid, finds that right balance between the ridiculous and the tragic. And Carmelita Tropicana as Galas’ long suffering husband and business manager Giovanni Baptista Mercanteggini anchors the production with a portrayal of love and fidelity that will break your heart.

Anthony Roth Constanzo looks lovely and finds an emotional core of loneliness and artistic striving that animates his Callas/Galas. Yet he is not funny, there is nothing of the clown about Roth Costanzo. The fulcrum between clown and tragedian is the line that Ludlam tailored his gown to hang on. No matter, I can think of few greater moments of bliss in the theater than what I experienced last night listening to Roth Constanzo singing Casta Diva with the full Blood Moon shining down on Galas from the East and the shimmering Hudson spreading out on either side of her in the West.

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Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” at TFNA

At Theater for a New Audience’s revival of Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” a similar kind of good faith communication with the present and the original text is going on. There is a Repertory Theatre traditionalism to much of director Simon Godwin’s work. But with two notable differences that make his productions of classic plays must-see events.

The first difference is that there is a sense that Godwin actually reads the texts with a penetrating insight into the playwright’s vision and that insight always yields new and surprising revelations about the play and its characters. In Godwin’s 2023 “King Lear” at Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC, he brought out the play’s startling kinship to Shakespeare’s late romances. Here was the traditional gore and sadism but also coupled with a gentle whimsy and humor. Here too in Ibsen’s later work, Godwin brings out an intense and affecting mixture of comedy and tragedy. One audience member who was sitting behind me often broke out in peals of laughter that sounded eerily like sobs.

The other difference is that Godwin casts not for repertory versatility but for a canny fit for the specific role. The revelation of this production is the performance of Hedwig by Maaika Laanstra-Corn. This is a Hedwig that feels completely contemporary in sensibility yet perfectly attuned to the 19th century. Laanstra-Corn’s Hedwig is part excitable child, part a portrait of a person struggling with disabilities, and part prophetically wise soul of the household. The trajectory of Hedwig’s disintegration is harrowing to watch but, under the spell of this remarkable actor, impossible to look away from.

There are a few aspects to Godwin’s work that I could criticize. In the early preview I saw there were often abrupt shifts in dramatic tone and it felt to me as if the actors had not yet figured out how to let them land. Godwin’s stage aesthetics lack a cohesive style or idea. The witty, slightly satirical, costumes by Heather C. Freedman do not quite match the grandeur of Andrew Boyce’s main set. From a short perusal of Boyce’s design work it appears as if Godwin has intentionally restrained the designer’s instincts for jeweled colors and lacquered forms. Yet that is to the director’s credit, I can happily sacrifice handsome stage pictures if I can have the real, living play on stage and that is exactly what Godwin consistently gives his audiences.

An Enduring Obsession

Terrence Rattigan’s 1950 tale of obsessive love “The Deep Blue Sea” is a play which UK audiences have returned to over and over again as if in an effort to sound the depths of a new despair and to hear Rattigan’s case of what to do with it.

Hester Collyer (Tamsin Grieg) has abandoned her previous life as the wife of a prosperous judge to devote herself body and soul to her younger lover Freddie Page (Hadley Fraser), a former WWII test pilot. They have both landed in a threadbare rented flat with no money but a surfeit of erotic passion. Though the boyish Freddie remains true to Hester, Hester herself cannot bear the choice she has made in her life and as the curtain opens on the first scene we see her near lifeless body on the stage after a suicide attempt.

A Deadly Eros

Tamsin Grieg plays Hester as a warrior who fights for her obsession. Grieg’s Hester is powerful and redoubtable and has a hold not only on her lover Freddie but on the other characters in her orbit as well. Her Hester also has a chameleon’s skin which can adapt to the desires of people she wants to manipulate. These quick turns of character are handled with a dizzying finesse by Grieg who makes good use of her rich and versatile stage voice. But underneath this battle to hold on to her lover is a roiling tempest of emotions which, when Grieg unleashes it, is chilling to behold.

Like Grieg’s Hester, there is something a bit mythological about Hadley Fraser’s Freddie. Fraser is a terrifying embodiment of an aging Cupid who has lost his wings, all ruddy cheeks and a center of gravity that seems to propel him from the crotch. But Freddie clearly loves his Venus mommy, so much so that he might be prepared to sacrifice his life for hers. Fraser mines all these conflicting drives with tremendous skill. And Grieg and Fraser’s sexual chemistry, though it seems unlikely, is made to live convincingly on stage.

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Life Beyond Hope

As Miller, a former doctor who has had his license stripped from him by the courts, Finbar Lynch brings the play’s great philosophical and moral core to vivid life. Lynch’s Miller is more than slightly sinister, carrying himself with a willowy irony while storing up evidence to make a clinically exacting diagnosis. Though crushed by life Lynch’s Miller is as formidable a warrior for survival “after hope” as Grieg’s Hester is a warrior for her own self-destructive passions. Lynch alone is a reason to see this revival.

Selena Cadell as the landlady Mrs. Elton, gives a glowing performance of a discreet and nurturing collector of lost souls.

Repertory Traditionalism

The production is a transfer from Theater Royal Bath, recently famous for offering a political refuge to Terry Gillian’s production of “Into the Woods” after it was cancelled due to allegations of Gillian’s anti-Trans comments. The director Lindsay Posner is known as David Mamet’s UK director. The co-producer Access Entertainment is endowed by the oligarch Len Blavatsky and is lead by Danny Cohen, a former BBC producer who has launched a series of public attacks against his former employer for its coverage of Gaza which he viewed as sympathetic to Hamas.

The production’s conservatism is no mistake. There is no default Lecoq inspired movement in the production. The previous major London production with the great, late Helen McCrory was overburdened with it. What director Posner offers us instead is a presentational style of performance where the actors often telegraph important information with shrewdly selected glances and physical gestures. It’s all highly calibrated but very effective.

With one exception, the production appears to have cast all white actors. Does that racial authenticity of the period in which the play is set make the societal prison of Rattigan’s play more intense? I doubt it. It’s the actors, the direction, and most importantly the play that make this production so powerful. Rattigan’s play has been allowed to speak for itself and at least for this viewer, its feminism, its distrust and disgust of the power to punish, and its promise of a solidarity among society’s outcasts has never been voiced with such clarity.

A Dark Variety Show

In “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.” at The Public Theater, we are treated to three short plays and two exhilarating circus routines in the first half of the production.

“Glass” follows the story of a young girl made entirely of glass. It is, rather predictably, a fatalist tale. Yet like Hans Christian Anderson, the pain that the glass-girl experiences reverberates in our own experience and is rendered with great tenderness.

“Kill” offers a long monologue to the wonderful actor Deirdre O’Connell who plays a Greek god or goddess perched aloft on a cloud. The goddess recounts the bloody history of the House of Atreus in her own eccentric way. She begins only as a lofty observer, almost as an audience member, taking no responsibility for the brutal acts of the humans on the earth because as deities, “We don’t exist”. Yet as the tide of blood rises and the bodies begin to pile up generation after generation, the goddess becomes more and more horrified.

“What If If Only” plays with the possibility and anguish of time. A man (Sathya Sridharan) ruminates over the loss of a loved one. The loved one appears as a kind of spirit of the remembered past, giving the man the possibility to remember or to forget his beloved. That apparition opens up a flood of other personifications of the past, present and future who crowd the stage each with their bounded force of time.

The gymnastic and juggling routines that separate these short pieces are performed by the exquisite Junru Wang and the saucy Maddox Morfit-Tighe. These two gravity defying routines where limbs and objects are sent into the air to elegantly twist and turn make a nice rhyme with the experimental forms of Churchill’s plays. It is a matter-of-fact poetic addition to the production. It is entertaining and apt.

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The Imp of the Perverse

After an intermission the audience returns for a final short play “Imp” which proves to be the centerpiece of the production. “Imp” is a departure from the more free-form earlier plays in that it is set in a realistic living room and follows four realistic characters. That is until a magical element is introduced, a mischievous Imp in a bottle trapped by a cork.

Dot (Deirdre O’Connell) is a chair-bound former nurse who lives with her cousin Jimmy (John Ellison Conlee) in a kind of sexless marriage. Together they befriend two younger people who are either being mentored or being prepared for some kind of victimization.

Dot is a bottled up Imp herself, struggling to tamper down a destructive rage inside her and causing herself serious asthmatic harm in the struggle. O’Connell plays Dot with a ferocity that is both scary and endearing. She is the cutest and coziest witch of vengeance you could ever meet. Conlee, as her partner in crime, matches Dot with a mixture of avuncular adorableness and an undercurrent of desperation. “Imp” leaves us at its end with as much of a feel-good ending as can be had in a Churchill play... but then again, perhaps not. The play is still haunting me a day later as are its two fine performances from O’Connell and Conlee.

James MacDonald’s direction here as with the entire evening takes its confident time in establishing the borders of the plays’ worlds and gives its performers exactingly defined spaces to turn each vision into a palpable reality.

Structural Poetics

“Grangeville” in previews at the Signature Theatre is a new play by Samuel D. Hunter (“The Whale”, “The Case for the Existence of God”) about two alienated brothers navigating their geographic and emotional divides.

Arnold (Brian J. Smith), an artist living with his male partner in the Netherlands, is drawn back into Grangeville, the small Idaho hometown he has fled, with his mother’s approaching death. Jerry (Paul Sparks), his brother who has remained in Grangeville, attempts to bring Arnold back into the family but deep emotional wounds prevent them from coming together.

The play dramatizes this coming together as a series of affecting bridges that are crossed by the two brothers. At first the bridges are technological as the digital communications they are using seem to separate them more than connect them. As the brothers grow closer and we learn more of their back stories the playwright Samuel D. Hunter introduces a lovely structural sleight-of-hand.

The two actors take on two other characters with minimal changes to their costumes. The character of the alienated gay brother Arnold morphs for one scene into Jerry’s alienated ex-wife. And Jerry, the brother who remained in Grangeville, morphs into Arnold’s Dutch male partner.

The shift mostly works as the two secondary characters seem to echo many of the needs and aims of the primary characters. There is an odd but pleasing harmony in these secondary scenes, as if a melody was being repeated.

The Show Must Go On

A month before opening Brendan Fraser, a star, dropped out of the production. His reasons for doing so were unstated but the production was upended by his departure. Signature Theatre itself has been in crisis mode with its future uncertain, particularly economically. And Fraser’s departure which the theater was banking on for a much needed infusion of box office cash added woe to woes.

Enter the talented actor Paul Sparks who took over the role of Jerry weeks before the show opened. In Sparks, the production has found its center. He makes his Jerry, an almost thoroughly unlikeable character, a portrait of a flawed, needy human being who is yearning for some kind of absolution. And his portrayal of the secondary character, the brother’s Dutch lover, is a quiet triumph of realism and feeling. I felt that it was the highlight of the production. Paul Sparks is an actor to watch.

Disconnected Dots

The production has been directed by Jack Serio and the text seems to have been mostly well served by him. Yet the production relies on big and voluble emotional moments from the performance of the character of Arnold to punctuate and create scene and act climaxes. These punctuations often feel repetitive and more about the nailing down of a dramatic arc rather than an honoring of the understated flow of Hunter’s play. The production might have done better by resisting these big moments and to have remained understated until its closing physical confrontation.

The fabulous theatrical production design team Dots (“Oh, Mary!” “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window”) created the set, a largely static shadow box with highly stuccoed surfaces which catch the light in alluring way. Even though the theme of the shadow box runs through the play, the set fights with the production rather than aiding it. It has only a slight strip at its back for lighting that is largely about lighting itself and not the actors. For a play with so many shifts of locations, points of view, and characterizations a more versatile and fluid lighting design is called for. Dots hamstrings the play by insisting on its own fixed, formal, and elegant reading.

Exhibiting the Extinct Human Race

In “The Antiquities”, at Playwrights Horizons until February 23rd, playwright Jordan Harrison imagines a post-human world where artifacts of the human race are museum pieces, pondered over by our non-human successors.

In a series of short scenes, the story of the human race’s extinction and the rise of non-human intelligence is told through a series of exhibitions, each with its own digital time stamp. Many of these scenes feel comfortingly nostalgic as we pour over a kind of yearbook of digital breakthroughs; from the dial-up internet to the birth of artificial intelligence. Yet there is a sense of impending doom in all of the varied scenes and as the scenes are projected into the future and our fate becomes explicitly clear, the play acquires the fearsome grip of a horror story.

Although Harrison’s short scenes jump forward and back in time, they are straight-forward and quickly graspable in their theatrical form. The play is not trying to distance us with its form and language. It is trying to reach us emotionally and intellectually. And the plays feels resonant in its inexorable drive towards a non-human future, powered by greed and human passivity. I would not call it a dialectical play, it is clear that Harrison is on the side of humanity and not the machines.

The Cromer Touch

“World Building” is not as easy as it might seem, just ask the Creator. Harrison’s play has multiple levels of game-playing that are tantalizing but often frustrating in their sparseness. The curatorial language that the post-humans use in enticing us into viewing their exhibit is spot on. It is a blend of high academic and low carny barker jargon. The hint that the post-humans are telling the human story with their own biases erupts into full out anti-human propaganda at the play’s end when the human story is rewritten as a triumphant non-human origin story. Yet this intruiging layer doesn’t quite build. We get to know the post-humans only through their anti-human actions but never understand how they might persist, on what energy source or philosophy that serves to get them through eternity. And Harrison’s disparate scenes often end with a punch line and a blackout that awkwardly pushes them into sketch comedy territory.

Enter David Cromer, the U.S. stage’s greatest realist director. Cromer along with co-director Caitlin Sullivan have illuminated the vignettes of Harrison’s play with a convincing realism. Playing upwards of twenty different characters the talented cast create glimpses of believable and compelling human beings in their brief appearances and reappearances. No doubt this technique has been accomplished via a kind of shorthand but it is still an awesome thing to watch. I would love to see Cromer work his magic on other plays that stretch the imagination and play with our perception of reality like this one.

Three Theaters Co-Produce

“The Antiquities” is a co-production of three theaters: Playwrights Horizons and The Vineyard Theatre in New York City, and The Goodman Theatre in Chicago. The co-production model has been used by international opera houses because it allows them to share resources and presumably to stretch their budgets. And the physical production of “The Antiquities” has an operatic feel to it in its sculptural use of light and figures. Paul Steinberg’s scenic design, an enclosure of moving walls covered by sheet metal, is beautifully complimented by the often shimmering costume design of Brenda Abbandandolo. But the real star of the evening is the lighting designer Tyler Micoleau who turns everything we see on the stage, human and inanimate, into luminescent fetishes from a vanished world.

George Wolfe’s revival of the 1959 musical GYPSY is in previews on Broadway at the Majestic Theater. Audra McDonald stars as the Platonic archetype of all stage mothers, Mama Rose. Joy Woods plays her daughter Louise, destined to become the famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. And Danny Burstein plays Herbie, the long suffering lover and agent of Mama Rose.

Until her penultimate number, Audra McDonald brings a confident and beautiful lyric soprano voice to Styne and Sondheim’s songs. This is the most beautifully sung Rose I have ever heard on stage. McDonald’s vocal artistry makes parts of the songs feel like they are being heard for the first time, particularly the ruminating, recitative-like intros and interior connective tissue of the songs.

Yet though McDonald’s phrasing and interpretation of each of her numbers is varied there feels like there is a space separating them from the rest of the show. When McDonald starts to sing it can almost feel like a concert of standards sung by a great vocal performer. I say almost because McDonald also brings the skills of a great actor to her songs. Her “Rose’s Turn” eschews beauty for an ugliness and rawness that had one young man afterwards shouting into his phone that “Audra had walked away with the Tony”.

The problem is that McDonald’s songs still feel atomized from the rest of the narrative. The emotions that explode inside of them are not seen in embryo during the book scenes, they don’t build as an arc. Perhaps that is a choice on the director’s part. The songs are our view into the emotional interior of an emotionally barricaded woman.

George Wolfe’s direction begins promisingly, we seem to be in an historical America that is both color blind but also resonant with an African-American experience of societal rejection and a yearning “to be noticed”. In Rose’s dead end Seattle home her father Pop (Thomas Silcott) takes the bible seriously. This pays off beautifully when Rose later uses a bible for a stunt, another trick in her carpet bag of show business dodges and cons.

Rose’s flight from her grim background is staged imaginatively as a car ride through an equally grim depression era American with dancers representing highway signs. As Rose assembles her future act by picking up poor and hungry children from the side of the road she begins to resemble a kind of showbiz Mother Courage. She may be single-minded and narcissistic but she is also a force of survival. If Wolfe had continued in this vein the revival would have found its idea.

What happens instead is that Wolfe settles for a tasteful, surprisingly conservative reading of the musical. Rose’s obsession with making it in show business is observed by the production but not really activated into something believable and terrifying. But what we do experience is a deep sorrow penetrating the story of a mother and daughter both seeking love through “being noticed” and that love forever eluding them.

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The highlight of the show for me was the second act toe-tapping opener, “Together, Wherever We Go”. For a brief moment, the production sheds its melancholy and McDonald, Woods and Burstein express a pure joy in singing and dancing with each other which radiates out to the audience. It is a particular treat to watch Danny Burstein dance in the character of Herbie, an adorable mixture of stiff, gruff with a bit of dainty gracefulness.

Camile A. Brown’s choreography appears to use Jerome Robbins’ original patterns and movements as a launching pad. Brown’s style favors bursts of tapping footwork and shuffling legwork below the waist and twisting and spiraling movements above it. This whirlwind vocabulary works better with individual dancers but doesn’t quite cohere when spread out to an ensemble. It works excellently with Tulsa’s solo dance in “All I Need Is the Girl” performed by the winning Kevin Csolak.

The orchestra conducted by Andy Einhorn has a lovely, full sound. The orchestrations are credited to four people including John Kander who did the dance arrangements. The playing in the pit is another pleasure of the show.

Santo Loquasto, still going strong at age 80, supplies the handsome production design. There is a focus on the shifting graphic styles of advertisement which are seen on brick walls or glimpsed in the background through the set units. The advertisements promise money, success, beauty and they seem to taunt and haunt the characters who yearn and struggle beneath them.

GYPSY is a musical I have seen many times on stage and on screens and, full disclosure, the productions have begun to blur into one another. Some highlights of past productions that I have seen include: the three hilariously geriatric strippers from Arthur Laurents’ 2009 Broadway production; from the same production, Laura Benanti’s Louise which believably limned the character’s transformation from vulnerability to steely self-sufficiency; and Jonathan Kent’s 2015 West End production that paid a close and unsettling attention to the short distance between the showbiz attractions of cute children to cute strippers. I can add now this surprisingly quiet, rather sorrowful yet touching revival.

The Majestic Theater built in 1927 lives up to its name. Its previous thirty-five year tenant was the long running PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and singleticket has not visited the house since he was much younger.

The theater was designed by Herbert J. Krapp in what wikipedia calls a “Louis XV style” but, in proper American Beaux Arts hodge-podge, it also includes neoclassic and Regency touches.

The theater’s interior is a dreamlike confusion of multiple domed ceilings, staircases, and cascading alcoves. It is a place to get blissfully lost in.

What a thrill that it is once again in circulation.

Nicole Eisenman’s sculpture Fixed Crane went on view in Madison Square Park on Tuesday, October 24th, six weeks before the 2024 Presidential election. 

The central mass of the piece is a capsized steel crane from 1969. It is covered with different shades of red that suggest its original paint but also successive stages of rust and decay. 

The first impression is unmistakable, a phallic object that has been toppled and broken into pieces. Different parts of the crane lie scattered around the grass enclosure that forms the viewing area and we are invited to wander among them the way a visitor to the Roman Forum might wander among its ruins, pondering how the mighty have fallen. 

Yet Eisenman’s collection of ruins is also a “fix”, both an act of corrective leveling of patriarchal forms and an opening for utopian possibilities of what to do with that wreckage. If the sculpture is explored in detail, small figures can be discovered inhabiting the sculpture, making a home inside of it. The debris is “dreaming of what it could be” according to Eisenman in her artist’s statement.

Part of those possibilities are playful. A large nipple ring encircling a part of the crane is a joke that ricochets into multiple territories. It is both an erotic piercing on the steel penis of the crane and a sly joke at the expense at the pop grandiosity of Jeff Koons’ sculptures.

The sculpture is placed within viewing distance of at least one current Manhattan crane project which appears to dwarf the Empire State Building. If there is any architectural marker of the Trump Era in Manhattan it is these vertical man-spreaders. These buildings take no consideration of their neighbors in their pursuit of ever higher altitudes. Their economic libertinage is the point. They are proud of their ability to tower above aesthetics, moderation and history.

The crane, recumbent and horizontal, is also no longer capable of empire building nor of imperial destruction. Nicole Eisenman continues to be active in supporting Palestinian communities under assault by the Israeli military.  For nearly two decades one branch of the Palestine solidarity movement has targeted the tractor company Caterpillar for its role in the destruction of Palestinian homes. The upended tractor cab of “Fixed Crane” also serves as a hopeful end to these cycles of violent overreach and destruction.

The suggestive pairing of the territorial greed and overreach of New York City real estate with the territorial greed and overreach of Zionism triggers uncomfortable associations with historic antisemitism that I might find disqualifying in a non-Jewish identified artist. Yet much of the power of Eisenman’s work, beyond her aesthetic and compositional brilliance, lies in this terrain of political commentary that intentionally knocks down the borders of approved connections and resonances. 

Is the Jewish family at Eisenman’s Seder table complicit in the Israeli military killing of Palestinians? Or are the trails of beet blood on the plates and the child’s playful stabbing also meant to encompass past Jewish suffering, holocausts, and pogroms. Is there also perhaps a roguish joke at the expense of the antisemitic blood libel? I think Eisenman is saying that it doesn’t matter, that the suffering of humanity widens its circles beyond our comforting boundaries of borders and beliefs. The blood of the victims will inevitably mix with the blood of the victims of the victims and it will seep into our most protected spaces.

Before the Kamala Harris defeat Eisenman’s “Fixed Crane” felt a bit too pat to me. It was a world view was that was familiar to me and which I fit into neatly. Yet after the historic defeat of Harris and the Democratic Party, the work has taken on a new significance and its sphere of connections and complicities has widened taking in structures that I had taken for granted.  

Do feminism, anti-Racism, and queer liberation have their own towers, their own arrogant overreach, their own territorial greed? Certainly they do since their destinies became interlaced with the girder of the Democratic Party. What was once our collective projection into the future has been shattered and now finds itself encompassed within the sculpture’s imagined field of debris.

In Robert O’Hara’s new play SHIT. MEET. FAN. (currently in previews at MCC Theater) we attend a cocktail party in the living room of an expansive, expensive duplex in the Dumbo neighborhood of New York City. Eve (Jane Krawkowski) a therapist, and her husband Rodger (Neil Patrick Harris) are the well-heeled hosts. The other guests are Rodger’s three former college fraternity brothers and two of their female partners.

As in all proper drawing room comedies, a parlor game is announced at about the half hour mark in this ninety-odd minute intermission-less play. The game is a form of Truth or Dare involving the guests’ cell phones. When any of the cell phones ring, the guest must answer on speaker phone, exposing their conversation to the party. The remainder of the play is a tumble and rumble of social masks being stripped away and hypocrisies revealed.

Why all of the guests would agree to such an act of social suicide is one question that the play never answers. It might have been better answered in the source material that O’Hara has used for his play, the 2016 Italian film Perfect Strangers. The other question is why any playwright would willingly choose such a clumsy contrivance for the centerpiece of his play, adapted or not. Because there doesn’t appear to be a motivation for this truth telling, the progressive revelations of racial, class and intimate betrayals have a hollow ring to them. The play also doesn’t grant much time for each new revelation to be considered. Yet O’Hara keeps them coming and they are each juicy enough to elicit scattered titters of pleasurable shock from the audience that I saw it with. By the time the play reaches its conclusion the stage feels strewn with the corpses of dead ideals. The play doesn’t seem to know how to end itself so O’Hara quotes (or perhaps the source material quotes) J. B. Priestley and uses his 1932 ending from his drawing room drama of truth telling, “Dangerous Corner”.

There is not much for the performers to play beyond these individual moments of exposure. Billy Magnussen (Frank) and Constance Wu (Hannah) each do a solid job of creating believable characters. And out of the celebrities who received entrance applause, Neil Patrick Harris impressed me the most in creating a fully fleshed out character.

The impressive scenic design by Clint Ramos, even if it is recognizable as Dumbo with its windows looking on to the East River and Manhattan beyond, feels appropriately as placeless and lacking in telling detail as the play’s characters.

Dominique Morisseau is a “meat and potatoes” playwright in the best sense of the term. She doesn’t want her audience to leave her plays without getting a full dramatic experience. In “Bad Kreyól” she takes us to Port-au-Prince, Haiti through the eyes of her protagonist Simone (Kelly McCreary), a conflicted American idealist who has come to Haiti with a dual mission of helping the desperate and helping herself come to terms with the legacy of her Haitian ancestry.

Simone’s mission of aid to Port-au-Prince’s residents gets her involved in two intertwining stories and lives. The first involves her cousin Gigi (Pascale Armand), a tough, single-minded woman who runs a successful clothing boutique near the beach. Gigi may be implicated in the exploitation of women working in the clothing industry, and Simone wants to find out the truth.

The second life Simone inserts herself and her good intentions into is Gigi’s gay male servant, Pita (Jude Tibeau). Pita is a “Restavek,” a kind of foster child that in Haiti amounts to a lifetime of indentured servitude. Pita is gloriously flamboyant and part of the sparkle that makes the magic happen in Gigi’s boutique. Simone encourages Pita to organize for LGBT rights with a predictably dangerous outcome. The play questions these urges on Simone’s part to help those she considers in need. Is her philanthropy selfish rather than selfless, is it just another form of colonialism?

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Yet the real pleasure of watching Morisseau’s play is not in following Simone’s befuddled efforts to help others which leads her to an inevitable comeuppance and finally to a resolution that is both touching and elegantly balanced. The center of Morisseau’s play is the strange, sibling-like relationship between Gigi and Pita and the way they take care of their mutual child, the clothing boutique.

Pascale Armand’s Gigi at first introduction is a woman you wouldn’t want to mess with, both volatile and armored. But as we get to know her, Gigi reveals her fragility and ultimately shows great strength in her vulnerability. It’s an affecting arc of character and Armand seems to inhabit it rather than perform it.

As Pita, Jude Tibeau uses his versatile baritone voice and sinuous body to create a character on stage that seems to shape-shift as we watch him. His Pita can be in one moment joyously, outrageously camp and in another abused, defeated and then suddenly fiercely resilient. He reminded me a bit of a young Geoffrey Holder.

I was at a matinee performance and though the crowd was older it was a diverse older crowd. At one moment in the play when Gigi defends the Haitian people by declaring proudly that they make up their own rules because they have always had to, there was a burst of applause from a section of the audience. That applause acknowledged Haiti’s role as the first black colonized nation to seize its own independence. But perhaps it also acknowledged the historical price of that independence and the present horrific crisis that Haiti is going through.

The Haiti of Morisseau’s play however is in pleasant soft focus. It seems to be taking place in a relatively stable country with functioning airports, international trade and the presence of neoliberal NGO’s. There is a bit of a Disney quality to it which, frankly, came as a bit of a relief. To capture the present moment might require the Plutonian vision of a writer like Roberto Bollaño, but then much of the present world might. That said, in Morisseau’s play the layers of past and present violence, chaos and exploitation are fully present.

The scenic design by Jason Sherwood stages the play on a revolving set which turns to reveal the interior and exterior of Gigi’s jewel-hued boutique and one other location. The revolving set sits underneath a multi-hued proscenium representing the hillside shacks of Port-au-Prince. The costume design by Haydee Zelideth is equally brilliantly colored and is a constant visual treat. Casting for the production is by Sujotta Pace.

The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Sunset Boulevard” is in previews at the St. James Theater. It is based on the 1950 movie directed by Billy Wilder. Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger) is a faded Hollywood star of the silent movie era who dreams of a come back. A young aspiring screenwriter Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) stumbles into her lair and is seduced and victimized by her.

The musical and this production revolve around its Norma Desmond and Nicole Scherzinger is a sumptuously gifted performer. She has a big Broadway theater-filling voice, a striking face and the supple body of a dancer in peak form. Her rendition of “With One Look” stops the show and the audience leaps to its feet, hooting and hollering as if they were at a Taylor Swift concert. But Scherzinger deserves the furor. I don’t believe I’ve seen anything like Scherzinger on a Broadway stage before and her delivery of her songs was thrilling.

Yet Scherzinger has been directed to act like a cross between Cruella DeVil and Vampira. Her stage actions are amplified beyond her already mythic character. When Norma Desmond is rejected by Joe Gillis for the first time she responds not just with a tongue lashing but by literally kicking Gillis in the balls. Later when Norma demands Joe visit her in her bedroom, she spreads her legs like a porn star to emphasize her demand. Jamie Lloyd, the show’s director, seems to not want us to forget Scherzinger’s alma mater “The Pussycat Dolls” and there’s no shame in that. Scherzinger’s movements in the show (choreographed by Fabian Aloise) are a mix of hip-hop moves, twerking and Las Vegas stripper floor work. And for a former silent film actress Scherzinger’s Norma Desmond has a whole battery of contemporary vocal memes at her disposal, from the millennial vocal fry to “Yass Queen” finger-snapping sassiness.

Norma Desmond in this production has an uncanny affinity with the fragmentary magnetism of the hand held phone. Camera persons roam the stage holding small rigs to record the action which is projected on a huge LED screen. Scherzinger delivers her dialogue to the cameras as much as to her lover, pursing her lips at the cameras in a perfect imitation of a Kardashian. It is a brilliant choice on the part of the direction. The contemporary lure of TikTok and Instagram is being layered over the destructive lure of old Hollywood and it harmonizes beautifully. And this multi-layered world of narcissistic attraction is mirrored by Jamie Lloyd’s style of staging which is a relentless series of attention grabbing tricks.

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The orchestrations, credited to David Cullen and Andrew Lloyd Webber, are ugly. A string section is listed in the playbill but the signature Andrew Lloyd Webber orchestral swell of the score sounded filled out with a synthesizer to me. There are some interesting passages played with a guitar which might not be in the original orchestrations. I liked the guitar and it made me want more of an alignment in how the score was being played in the pit with Lloyd’s more adventurous performance style on stage. As it is, the music being played sounds like it is imitating a full orchestra rather than coming up with creative solutions scaled to its present size which might transform the score into something new and surprising.

None of the performers, except for Scherzinger and perhaps David Thaxton as her butler/slave Max Von Mayerling, ever feel like anything other than attractive contemporary actors on a Broadway stage. That might have something to do with the audio and visual obstacle course Lloyd puts them through. As they run through their athletic paces they start to look like the contestants on American Ninja Warrior. It is fun to watch at the beginning but it is a poor substitute for cohesive or cumulative storytelling. Eventually we settle into the rhythm of waiting for the next trick, the next stunt, rather than for a more deeply satisfying development of a theme or an emotional arc.

After Lloyd has unboxed all of the technical toys he will play with in the first act, there is a fun and exhilarating second act opening with the camera following the cast outside of the theater onto the street. But as the show moves towards its conclusion and as the weaknesses of the musical itself become more apparent, Lloyd seems to come up short with new ideas and he begins to throw what feel like random choices into the mix.

The production falls apart as the diva at the center of the story is turned into a kind of Kali, a bloody destroyer goddess. The original film always kept itself poised elegantly between humor and horror. It had a light touch. But in the second act Lloyd and Andrew Lloyd Webber underline everything in bold red ink and the choices and performances are so heavy handed that they start to become ridiculous. The operatic sweep of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score compounds the problem as it is equally heavy handed. To get to the finish line of the story there is a lot of running around, flashing lights, endless fog, ghoulish vocal effects, and dramatic posing the likes of which have not been seen since the days of Edwin Booth. To call this overwrought directorial style “minimalism” is laughable. It is old fashioned give ‘em what they want show business but they are lapping it up in an old fashioned way over at the St. James Theater.

It is amazing to me that I should begin to miss the old landlords of Broadway with their economies that made the climate and seating uncomfortable and the bathrooms unspeakable. But the Ambassador Theater Group, the new owners of the St. James Theater, seem to be intent on turning its audience into boozehounds. The lounge area in the balcony appears to have shrunk to nothing but a gangplank that pushes patrons either into a bar line or into their seats. The old Broadway owners were penny pinchers but visiting their houses still felt like going to the theater.

Richard Maxwell premieres his BUILDING’S I & II at 101 Greenwich St. in the Financial District. The performance space is on the 19th floor of the building which has been taken over by artist Christopher Wool’s installation, See, Stop, Run. Maxwell’s play is staged in one of its corners.

BUILDING’S I & II begins as a story about three siblings who have gathered to mourn the death of their father, the owner of the building in which we are sitting. As the three adult children fight over their father’s legacy it becomes clear that the building represents a brick and mortar asset that has lost its value to digital capital.

The daughter Erla (Sylvia Gorelick) has been named executor and wants to sell the building as quickly as possible before it declines anymore in value. But the oldest son (Bob Murphy) wants to keep the building and his job as the proprietor of a shady pub on the building’s ground floor. The third son, Mikey (Matthew Carey Salyer) agrees with his sister and is ready to fight dirty to overpower the brother who wants to keep the building in the family.

The first part of the play follows this family conflict and builds convincingly to a dramatic climax. When the audience returns after a short break, the second part takes on a completely different tone. The play becomes a kind of philosophic vaudeville with Irish folk inflected music written by Maxwell and played soulfully by the performers. In the second half of the play Erla ponders whether she is Artificial Intelligence. The awareness of this possibility seems to dawn on her in real time as we watch the play. And when the personification of Death comes to visit her, Erla rather glumly insists that she can’t be killed because she is digital capital liberated from humanity.

Maxwell directs his performers in his signature style that features flat line readings. At first glance the style seems to be a full out rejection of realistic acting. The flat line readings are accompanied by a similarly flat delivery style, with performers shifting between two sharp angles: one where the character face each other and the other where the characters shift to face the audience.

This style does two fascinating things. At first it appears to distance the audience from the play and it forces us to focus on Maxwell’s text, for better or for worse. But it also serves as a uniform acting style with all the actors on the same page whether they have been professionally trained or not. And this uniformity pays off when it comes to a performer like Bob Murphy. Murphy is an untrained actor and a former professional boxer and his role as the proprietor of an Irish bar that caters to the mob fits him like a glove. You would need the caliber of a Meryl Streep at her prime to piece together all the cultural vocal cues that Murphy carries with him naturally. And Murphy also has a tough and menacing walk and bearing that would be difficult for an actor to assemble artificially. Surprisingly, Maxwell’s mannered acting style ends up circumventing Method-style technique to arrive at a level of realism that Method-style technique rarely ascends to. Still, these mannerisms tend to disintegrate as the play proceeds and turns more emotionally heated with the result of the actors slipping in and out of the performance style. And it is oddly Bob Murphy, an untrained actor, who gives the most traditionally affecting performance in the show.

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Maxwell’s auteurism has its benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are that he can fashion a production as cohesive as this one without any of his theatrical vision being diluted by the current obsessions of the nonprofit theater world. The nonprofit world also has a glacial development process and Maxwell’s plays usually reach his audience when the zeitgeist he is drawing from is still alive and kicking. The drawbacks are his idiosyncrasies can border on the precious. The program for the show which was available only by QR code, refrained from listing who played what or even the names of the play’s characters. Maxwell’s shows are minimally publicized through emails and messages and they tend to sell out quickly because of a loyal following. This scarcity of access encourages a receptive but monocultural club of an audience. And the surroundings of the Christopher Wool installation (see below for images) emphasizes Maxwell’s comfort in being situated as art gallery theater.

Yet Maxwell’s theater is accessible. It is poetic, aesthetic, and philosophic but it resists the iciness of the traditional avant-garde. It wants to reach you emotionally and intellectually and it does so with great skill and tact. Should Maxwell decide to bring his work to a larger audience I believe they would be receptive. I have seen many of Maxwell’s pieces over the years and from the beginning it was clear he was a gifted theater artist. His work has only grown in stature and power since then.

Christopher Wool’s installation on the 19th floor of a financial district building is, like Maxwell’s play, about the death of the 20th century office space and its possible rebirth. It imagines a new cultural use for these spaces, abandoned by digital capital, much in the same way that 1970’s artists in Soho imagined and created new uses for the industrial lofts of the 19th century, abandoned by the off-shoring of American labor.

Wool uses a vocabulary of materials and a color palette that have been gathered from the historical layers of the building’s stripped down interior.

Below is an image of a sculptural grouping of pieces made out of rebar-like material, a bendable steel used to reinforce concrete. The pieces are painted in a Philip Guston/Pepto Bismol pink which is also the color of RedGard, an industrial mixture of rubber and paint used by contractors for waterproofing. (At the right of the image, performers Bob Murphy, in green, and Matthew Carey Salyer, in white, chat with the audience during the break.)

The floor of the building with its exposed original mosaic flooring inspires the centerpiece of Wool’s show...

… a grand mosaic mural that conjures up a lost civilization, perhaps Roman or Byzantine. The building’s interior materials have been excavated and reassembled into a new canvas for Wool’s post-20th century-industrial temple of the arts.

In “Good Bones”, a young upwardly mobile couple are renovating a house in an historically black Philadelphia neighborhood. But Travis and Aisha, the couple in “Good Bones”, are black and their relationship to the community has complications beyond the typical white gentrifiers. The couple is seen by the black working class neighborhood as both exemplars of black success but also as perhaps the most dangerous of the new gentrifiers.

Travis (Mamoudou Athie) is a restaurateur/chef whose take on soul food is so refined that it feels meant to alienate his adopted community while simultaneously honoring them. Travis’ wife, Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson) works for the city’s developers in soft-soaping the black community into accepting a planned sports stadium that would demolish the neighborhood and displace its black community. But unlike Travis who comes from money, Aisha has grown up in the projects of Philadelphia and her return to the city of her birth means further dramatic complications.

The neighborhood is represented by the two other characters in the play. Earl (Khris Davis) the designer/contractor who is renovating the couple’s home with the painstaking care of an artist and who is distrustful of the couple. And Earl’s little sister Carmen (Téa Guarino), a college student at UPENN who sees the couple’s ambitions as admirable and something to aspire to.

The ensemble of four, lead by director Saheem Ali, is well cast with each performer making honest, convincing choices that bring us into the world of the play. The two actors in the more showy roles are particularly good. Susan Kelechi Watson as Aisha makes her character compellingly understandable as a success story, a woman who has escaped the projects of Philadelphia yet still carries within her a lingering animosity towards her past that borders on vengeance. And Khris Davis as the contractor/designer Earl is already a star walking amongst us. A handsome and charismatic actor, Davis knows how to seduce an audience. It would be hard not to like Davis in whatever role he chose to play, villain or hero or a combination of both.

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Playwright James IJames (“Fat Ham”, Pulitzer Prize in Drama, 2022) is in a more serious terrain here than “Fat Ham”, at least on the surface. He is writing an old fashioned four person living room play which is appropriate for its subject, the interrogation of black bourgeois success. The play is at its best when it focuses on the minutiae of taste and language through which class conflict reveals itself involuntarily. There is a great passage where the characters grumble over the choice of a kitchen cabinet pull when the object being discussed suddenly begins to telescope itself into the house’s past and the past of the community in which the house sits. The effect is a magical one, we end up facing the hard ugly facts of gentrification and race when we thought we were safe discussing the pleasantly innocuous.

Yet when IJames hits his target head on the play becomes leaden and inert. The dialogue begins to sound like pro and con bullet points about gentrification traded between characters, albeit interspersed with humor. Oskar Eustis, the Artistic Director of The Public Theater, in his program note calls these exchanges “dialectics”. That might be the case but it is also bad dialogue. I think Ijames needed a more outrageous dramaturgy here, one that kept its perverse focus on the minutiae in order to indite the whole.

The gorgeous, soaring set design by Maruti Evans is a poor fit for the play. The set’s kitchen looks like the creation of a designer and a clientele chasing Instagram stardom which seems out of character for the people in the play. The design is also scaled for an opera set in Valhalla or a Greek tragedy. There is even a shelf of canopic jars that resemble those that might be found in an Egyptian tomb. IJames’ play does have a subtext of ghosts and hauntings but the design here feels overstated at best and it kept pulling focus from the characters and the play in my opinion. Looking at images from the premiere production at Studio Theatre in DC, which commissioned the play, the set by Misha Kachman feels much more believably scaled to characters and world of the play.

“Good Bones” plays at The Public Theater from September 19 - October 27, 2024. Tickets are priced at $95.

Jeanine Tesori’s contemporary opera GROUNDED had its Metropolitan Opera premiere last night at the opening of the 2024-25 season. The opera’s libretto is by George Brant and is based on Brant’s play of the same name.

GROUNDED is about Jess (Emily D’Angelo), a female F-16 fighter pilot serving in Iraq. Jess is an enthusiastic flygirl, devoted to her terrain of battle which she rapturously calls “The Blue”. She is also devoted to her military comrades and the fighter plane that she has lovingly nicknamed “Tiger”. At the core of Jess’ Valkyrie-like zealousness is a naive belief in military fairness that the fighter pilot always puts herself at risk in her flying missions which equalizes her with her targets who are always, solely, military-age combatants.

Jess’ naiveté is soon put to the test in two ways. First, she becomes pregnant and makes the choice to decommission herself to have her child. She makes this choice under a grueling pressure from her commanding officer which heaps a humiliating double-standard on women serving in the military. But then after Jess has had her child and yearns to return to The Blue she is greeted by a newcomer in military warfare since her five year absence: the remote flyer drone.

The drone makes its first appearance in the opera rising from a trap door like the statue of a conquering god. It is a chilling moment in Michael Mayer’s barebones but sharply focused production. And Jess’ identity is dangerously challenged by this new god, no longer named “Tiger” but now named “The Reaper”, death itself. Jess attempts to commit herself to this new form of warfare but even though the killing is now remote and can be done while living with her family in Las Vegas, the twelve hour shifts and the slippery ease of the killing begins to take a toll on Jess’ psyche and she begins to go slowly mad.

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As Jess, Emily D’Angelo is giving a star performance on the stage of the Met. A strikingly handsome singer/actor with a clear and rich Mezzo-Soprano voice, D’Angelo brings Jess to life and communicates with the audience emotionally and musically everything the opera supplies her with. D’Angelo is on stage for most of the opera and her presence gives an electrical charge to the opera.

Tessori’s musical scaffolding is mid-century modern with gorgeous legato dissonances resolving into harmonics. It sounds at its base like Britten and Copeland. Overlaying this are nods to Western cowboy folk music and to other operas. The unseen “Kill Chain”, a group of disembodied voices that participate in Jess’ remote bombing operations, reminded me of the ghostly offstage chorus in Wagner’s “Dutchman”. And the pounding music that signals invincible military power reminded me of phrases in Verdi’s “Don Carlos”.

Last night, at the end of its first act the implications of the opera’s seriousness in looking directly at the horror American drone warfare had sunk in and for an exciting intermission it felt like I was present at something big, an opera where something was at stake politically and artistically. During the intermission, the opening night crowd of fashionistas looked a bit wobbly on their high heels as if they had been slapped around by the material. However, being the tough bunch they are, they quickly reverted to preening wholeheartedly in asymmetrical dresses; gender-fluid ensembles; and vivid hues of red.

Unfortunately, in the second act something went wrong, or the problems with the opera became undeniable. The narrative drive got lost. Its main character who seemed to be on a classic operatic trajectory towards madness suddenly swerved away from her fate to jump into a completely unmotivated act of heroic humanism. But it wasn’t just the libretto that pulled its punches, it was the score as well.

Tesori’s score appealingly moved back and forth between the tonal worlds of opera and the musical. It was also sumptuously orchestrated (and sumptuously conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and played by the Met Orchestra). But it largely moved from scene to scene illustrating its events without an accumulating power. If there was a musical deep structure in Tesori’s score I did not hear it. And rather than using cumulative musical and dramatic strategies, Tesori and Brant attempted to bring us into the head of their main character by splitting her in two. Thus “Jess” is joined on stage by her alter-ego “Also Jess” (Ellie Dehn). This device felt like another failure of nerve.

In the end we got neither the full import of the horror of American complicity in the remote massacres of women and children in Iraq, Afghanistan, or by timely implication Gaza nor an emotional release through that horror’s elevation to an operatic scale. And that leaves us with neither truth nor beauty. Still, my hat is off to Tesori and Brant and their sponsors of the opera for taking a risk and bringing the ritual and reality of American drone warfare onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in such exacting detail.

Controversy accompanied the opera’s premiere last year at the Washington National Opera when critics pointed out that a drone company, General Dynamics, was listed as the opera’s “presenting sponsor” on its website. After a number of news organizations jumped on the story including Russia Today, the Washington National Opera took pains to make clear that the drone company was a long term season donor and not a creative sponsor of the premiering opera. GROUNDED was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and the commissioning process began in 2014. The opera was also a beneficiary of the Neubauer Family Fund for New Works.

David Henry Hwang, a real life playwright, dramatizes his fictional self in this “semi-autobiographical” play currently in previews for its first Broadway production. The play is set in the mid-1990’s where Hwang’s fictional alter-ego “DHH” (played by Daniel Dae Kim) is navigating the failure of a play, the theft of Asian identity by white actors, and the Federal investigation of his wealthy banker Chinese-American father.

The fact that some of these events are true and others are not (as we are told at the end) gives the play a giddy comic tone that feels appropriately farcical but also a tentativeness as the audience is not sure where many of the scenes and jokes land. Do they land in the realm of truth or are they just made up? And this distinction matters because “Yellow Face” is also a political play. It is about the tentative ground that Americans stand on who face the charge of dual-loyalties.

The first main story that Hwang tells is about the aftermath of the “Miss Saigon” controversy in the 1990’s where producer Cameron Mackintosh, after a protest by Asian-American actors including Hwang, refused to replace his white leading actor in an Asian role with an actual Asian actor. Hwang recounts his experience in this protest but then slowly, cleverly and with great humor starts to twist and turn the controversy into a comic hall of mirrors about show business and identity. And the playwright takes a perverse delight in showing his alter-ego DHH to be as craven and as opportunistic as the MacKintosh’s of the world when it comes to the use of identity to sell an entertainment product. The pretzels of identitarian logic that DHH twists himself into to keep his career afloat are painstakingly enacted onstage by Daniel Dae Kim, who largely keeps this shaggy dog story of a play afloat with his unflagging comic timing.

The second main story the play tells is about Hwang/DHH’s wealthy banker father “HYH” (played by the superb Frances Jue). The father is a Chinese-American capitalist success story who seems to be running off of his own electrical current plugged into the source of the American dream. He is high off of the possibilities of economic and cultural advancement in his adopted country. And the trajectory of the father’s ecstatic belief in American immigrant fulfillment to the crushing of that dream is the emotional core of the play. The father is also the most well drawn character the play. He is both competitive with his son and a loving father; a man devoted to his community and a wannabe backroom player. Jue makes each facet of this man lucid and believable. His performance of the shattering of the father’s dream is affectingly tragic.

The problems with the play are many. It is nearly two decades old and though some of the debates about racial and ethnic identity feel contemporary, others feel stale. The play focuses on the personal within the political, but the political is made blurry with personal score settling. The form of the play also feels stuck in the 1990’s with much of the dialogue being delivered as direct address monologues to the audience. The direction by Leigh Silverman works hard to give a variance to these direct addresses but there is something static and discursive about much of the writing. Silverman does a good job of having the cast punctuate each comic moment but the rubbery double-takes often border on the cutesy. There is a smart projection design by Yee Eun Nam which solves many of the play’s docu-drama problems by isolating and enlarging key words in projected newspaper articles, a technique that is familiar to users of TikTok and Instagram. Arnolfo Maldonado’s production design is exquisite in its restraint and is quietly effective.

Veronica (Laura Donnelly) runs a hotel in the 1950’s seaside town of Blackpool, Lancashire. A single-minded woman, Veronica is raising her four daughters for a life in show business as a vocal quartet in the style of the Andrews Sisters. Show business is gospel to Veronica and her four young daughters are her converts.

“What is a song?” Veronica asks her daughters in a kind of catechism. “A song is a dream… a place to be. Somewhere you can live. And in that place, there are no walls. No boundaries. No locks. No keys.”

Later, in 1976, three of the grown daughter gather in the old hotel to say their goodbyes to Veronica who is upstairs in her bedroom dying of cancer. But the fourth daughter refuses to join them. The three daughters wait for the fourth to arrive as there can be no closure or reckoning with the mother’s gospel of song until she does

Of the four daughters, Jill (Helena Wilson) is the caretaker of the group, a Masha who has bound herself to the care of the household and her mother. Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) is the sexy one who has settled for a disappointing marriage. Gloria (Leanne Best) is the oldest and the bearer of a seething grievance against her mother’s favorite daughter Joan.

Joan (played as a young woman by Lara McDonnell and as an older woman by Laura Donnelly) is the star of the group and the only one who will escape Blackpool for California, the promised land of popular song. Joan is the daughter who Veronica lets most intimately into her confidence, instructing her in her increasingly amoral gospel of show business.

All of the performances are so brilliant in their detailed characterizations that it feels unfair to single out only one. But Laura Donnelly playing both the driven Veronica and her grown daughter Joan gives a performance that is both chameleon-like in that it feels like two completely different women yet also eerily connected because we see the communicating obsessions shared by mother and daughter.

The direction by Sam Mendes is some of the best I have ever seen on a stage. It takes the many strands of Butterworth’s sprawling play and binds them into a cohesive, believable, and emotionally powerful dramatic whole. In a family play where characters mirror and exchange familial roles with each other a director like Mendes is essential to build those shifts of character across an ensemble and his work here is superb. The set by Rob Howell exists solely to dramatize the characters and to build to a shattering moment later in the play. Like Mendes’ direction, the production’s visual elements are not there to draw attention to themselves but to make the story and the performances live as fully as possible on stage.

At first I thought the play might be a blend of Chekhov and the musical “Gypsy” as Butterworth’s last play “The Ferryman” was a pastiche of many other borrowings from classic Irish plays. But even though there are elements that feel borrowed in “The Hills of California” I found it to be perhaps Butterworth’s most emotionally satisfying play. It is a heartbreaking play but it is not sentimental. It is too filled with humor and horror for that. The three act structure that Butterworth uses is deeply satisfying here and it allows us to get to know intimately its characters and their world. Like “Jerusalem”, "The Hills of California” feels like a state of the British nation play that also reflects our own U.S. malaise; the lure of a song that has ended long ago and the fear that it just might haunt us forever.