this week in theater

CASTING

CASTING
Gymnopedie
1139 Bushwick Ave.
March 15-17, $23.18
castinginnyc.eventbrite.com
gymnopedie.nyc

Winner of the Los Angeles Immersive Invitational Grand Prize, Koryn Wicks’s Casting is making its New York City debut March 15-17 at Gymnopedie in Bushwick. Most performers dread the audition process, but in this case up to twelve audience members at a time will participate, trying to land a big role. The thirty-minute work was created by Wicks (I love you so much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH; To Die in the Valley I’ve Loved) and a team of collaborators that includes writer Sam Alper, singer-songwriter Hanah Davenport, lighting and video designer and dancer Morgan Embry, sound designer and composer Alex Lough, and actors Audrey Rachelle and Jonathan Gordon. Tickets are $23.18 for your chance to be the star of the show.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

DEAD OUTLAW

Elmer J. McCurdy (Andrew Durand) faces an unusual reckoning in Dead Outlaw (photo by Matthew Murphy)

DEAD OUTLAW
Audible Theater’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 7, $87-$126
www.audible.com

In 1976, while setting up to shoot an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, crew members discovered a body hanging in a tree. They could not rebuild him; he was not going to be another bionic man.

The true story of that mummified creature is told in Dead Outlaw, making its world premiere at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre through April 7. It’s from the same team that collaborated on the Tony-winning The Band’s Visit, but it’s unlikely to have the same impact and get as many visits.

Elmer McCurdy was born in 1880 in Searsmont, Maine; as dysfunctional as the first part of his life was, what happened to him afterward was an even stranger (mis)adventure.

Following a difficult childhood, Elmer (Andrew Durand) hops a train, searching for something else. He travels to Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, picking up odd jobs, drinking too much, shacking up with the lovely Maggie (Julia Knitel), serving in the military, and, slowly but surely, becoming a hapless outlaw. He joins up with the Jarrett brothers, led by Walter (Jeb Brown), but he fails miserably at his responsibility, breaking into safes.

When he is eventually killed at the age of thirty-one, no one in his family claims his body. Johnson (Eddie Cooper), the local coroner, uses arsenic when embalming the corpse in order to preserve it until someone shows up to take Elmer, but soon he is charging admission for people to gawk at the body, kicking off a whole new career for the dead outlaw, culminating in a second autopsy in 1976 by Dr. Thomas Noguchi (Thom Sesma), the LA medical examiner who handled such famous deaths as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Natalie Wood.

Coroners have questions about a strange body in Audible world premiere (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The strange tale is narrated by the bandleader (Brown), who plays guitar and trades lead vocals with Erik Della Penna, who plays guitar, lap steel, and banjo. The rest of the excellent band consists of music conductor Rebekah Bruce on keyboards, Hank on electric guitar, Chris Smylie on bass, and Spencer Cohen on drums, performing in a honky tonk shack that rolls around the stage with the help of multiple people. Arnulfo Maldonado’s set also features painted Western murals on the back wall and stanchions to the left and right, while Sarah Laux’s period costumes are exemplary.

The music and lyrics are by multiple Tony winner David Yazbek (Tootsie, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), who has been haunted by the life and death of McCurdy for thirty years, and Della Penna (Toby and the Big Top), with a book by Tony winner Itamar Moses (The Ally, Bach at Leipzig) and direction by Tony winner David Cromer (Our Town, Uncle Vanya).

The first part of the play is a jaunty frolic, with rocking country tunes and Brown serving as a terrific master of ceremonies. The show opens with the rollicking “Dead,” in which Brown and Della Penna proclaim, “You came with noth’n, / you’ll leave here just the same,” rattling off the names of deceased people, from John Gotti, John Dillinger, Babe Ruth, Honoré de Balzac, Bert Convy, and Anne Frank to, in a later reprise, several well-known figures who are still alive. Each chorus about the dead ends, “And so are you,” a reminder that no one is immune from eventually leaving this mortal coil.

In “Normal People,” Erik and Elmer explain, “Don’t know what I want to be / Just as long as it ain’t me, / Like normal people,” emphasizing Elmer’s relatable lack of identity. In “Nobody Knows Your Name,” Elmer opines, “It isn’t right, it isn’t fair / It’s like you’re born but you’re not anywhere / And once you’re gone / It’s just the same / When nobody knows / Nobody knows your name.”

In Elmer’s case, it’s not just the same once he’s gone, as evidenced by Johnson’s statement that “death is a business.” But from that point on, as Elmer’s death refuses to die, the musical unravels like a mummy falling apart at the seams. The music shifts genres as Elmer’s corpse makes the rounds, losing the flow of the narrative, which also gets caught up in too many details. Instead of having individual songs for so many stops on Elmer’s body’s journey, it might have been better to have condensed them into one or two numbers. “Andy Payne,” for example, about a Cherokee farmer (Trent Saunders) running a race, might be electrifying on its own but here feels like it belongs in a different show. In addition, some of the continuity is lost as the audience watches actors and stagehands move the heavy set, which happens much more in the second half of the hundred-minute work.

Jeb Brown is a standout as the master of ceremonies in Dead Outlaw (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Durand (Shucked, Head Over Heels) is much braver than Elmer, especially as he spends a substantial portion of the show standing up in a coffin. Brown (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Becomes a Woman) is the heart and soul of Dead Outlaw, charming and amiable as both the bandleader and Jarrett. Cooper (Parade, Assassins), Knitel (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Bye Bye Birdie), Ken Marks (Hindle Wakes, Airline Highway), Dashiell Eaves (Coram Boy, Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine), Saunders (Hadestown, Aladdin), and Sesma (Arden of Faversham, A Man of No Importance) provide solid support in multiple roles, although it can get confusing who’s who.

Elmer McCurdy had a pathetic life, mostly of his own doing, and an even more pathetic death, which he had nothing to do with. His bizarre story deserves to be more well known, especially now, in a time when people are encouraged to take control of their personal narrative and define who they are. If only Dead Outlaw hadn’t veered off course, losing focus on how it was defining itself.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ILLINOISE

Illinoise reimagines Sufjan Stevens album as a dance-theater piece (photo by Stephanie Berger)

ILLINOISE
Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Monday – Saturday through March 26, standby only
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Justin Peck and Sufjan Stevens’s eighth collaboration is a poignant and exhilarating exploration of young love, grief, and the search for personal identity, with its fingers firmly on the pulse of today’s youth culture.

The DC-born Peck, thirty-six, is a Tony-winning dancer, choreographer, director, and filmmaker and the resident choreographer of New York City Ballet. The Detroit-born Stevens, forty-eight, is a Grammy- and Oscar-nominated singer-songwriter and soundtrack composer. The longtime friends have previously worked together on pieces for NYCB, Houston Ballet, Miami City Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and Pacific Northwest Ballet, including Year of the Rabbit, Everywhere We Go, and Reflections.

Their latest, the dazzling Illinoise, opened Wednesday night for a sold-out run continuing in Park Ave. Armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall through March 26. [ed. note: The production is moving to Broadway, running April 24 to August 10 at the St. James.]

The ninety-minute dance-theater work is based on Stevens’s 2005 concept album, Illinois, aka Sufjan Stevens Invites You to: Come on Feel the Illinoise. “I feel like specifically Illinois and Chicago are sort of the center of gravity for the American Midwest,” Stevens told Dusted about the genesis of the record.

Henry (Ricky Ubeda) and Carl (Ben Cook) go on a road trip in Illinoise (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The original story, by Peck and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview, Marys Seacole), introduces us to a young man named Henry (Ricky Ubeda) as he ventures from a small town in the middle of nowhere, Illinois, to Chicago and then New York City. He joins up with a group of eleven free-living young people who are like a modern-day version of the hippies from Hair. Sitting around a campfire (consisting of lanterns), they take journals out of their backpacks and share stories from their lives.

The dancers never speak or sing; Adam Rigg’s multilevel wooden set features three small platforms for a trio of vocalists: keyboardist Elijah Lyons and guitarists Shara Nova and Tasha Viets-VanLear. They wear wasp sings, which refer to the song “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!,” in which they sing, “Oh, I am not quite sleeping / Oh, I am fast in bed / There on the wall in the bedroom creeping / I see a wasp with her wings outstretched.” Eleven other instrumentalists, from drums, strings, woodwinds, and horns to bass, banjo, percussion, and mandolin, are scattered across the top level.

Morgan (Rachel Lockhart) looks for signs from the ancestors underneath a billboard of a canceled Andrew Jackson (“Jacksonville”). Jo Daviess (dance captain Jeanette Delgado) is surrounded by evil-masked figures in black robes representing the Founding Fathers (“They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!”). Wayne (Alejandro Vargas) encounters serial killer John Wayne Gacy in a clown outfit, realizing that we all have secrets to hide (“John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”). And the aptly named Clark (Robbie Fairchild) removes his glasses and shirt and becomes Superman, one of many, believing, “Only a steel man came to recover / If he had run from gold, carry over / We celebrate our sense of each other / We have a lot to give one another” (“The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts”). The costumes are by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, with masks by Julian Crouch and props by Andrew Diaz.

Clark (Robbie Fairchild) turns into Superman at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Those tales serve as a prologue to the main narrative, which Henry reluctantly conveys, involving a Jules and Jim–like relationship between him and his childhood friends Carl (Ben Cook) and Shelby (Gaby Diaz) and, later, his first adult love, Douglas (Ahmad Simmons). Jealousy, illness, and loyalty bring them together and tear them apart as they try to find their place in a difficult world — from politics to family to religion — that often doesn’t even try to understand them. “Tuesday night at the Bible study / We lift our hands and pray over your body / But nothing ever happens,” they sing in “Casimir Pulaski Day,” named for the Polish freedom fighter who was a general in the Continental Army and became known as the Father of American Cavalry.

Ultimately, in the finale, “The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders,” they declare, “What have we become, America?”

Illinoise explodes with energy but is anchored by an underlying tenderness. Have no fear if you’re not a fan of Stevens; Nathan Koci’s music direction and supervision and Timo Andres’s arrangements and orchestrations lift the score, and some of Stevens’s more twee lyrics disappear into the overall thrilling zeitgeist.

Innate hope and charm emanate from the dancers, highlighted by Lockhart, Delgado, Vargas, Fairchild, and Byron Tittle, who portrays Estrella and adds tap to a movement language that blends contemporary and ballet. The four leads — Ubeda, Cook, Diaz, and Simmons — imbue their characters with deep emotional conflicts that can be as stirring as they are heartbreaking; several scenes play out like a twenty-first-century silent movie in color. The cast also features Christine Flores as Anikova, dance captain Craig Salstein as I-94 East Bound, and Kara Chan as Star, with Jada German, Zachary Gonder, Dario Natarelli, and Tyrone Reese making up the swing.

Not everything works, and the timeline can get confusing, but Peck and Sibblies Drury pull no punches. Garth MacAleavey’s sound design reverberates throughout the hall, while Brandon Stirling Baker’s lighting bursts forth in multiple palettes and cleverly informs us of the location, accompanied by projections on a billboard above the band.

Each attendee receives a program modeled on the journals used by the performers, in red, blue, orange, or green and with a different wasp wing image on it. Inside are several handwritten entries by Henry, complete with illustrations and even a blotch that Henry explains is a “tear mark b/c I made myself cry in my new journal like a dork.” He also writes, “I couldn’t feel anything. Maybe I couldn’t feel it because I am too obsessed with my own past.”

Illinoise will make you feel. And if you are so inclined, there are several blank pages at the back of the program where you can share and reflect.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY: DOUBT: A PARABLE / BROOKLYN LAUNDRY

Sister Aloysius (Amy Ryan), Sister James (Zoe Kazan), and Father Flynn (Liev Schreiber) have a serious talk in Doubt (photo by Joan Marcus)

DOUBT: A PARABLE
Todd Haimes Theatre
227 West Forty-Second St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 14, $68-$344
212-539-8500
www.roundabouttheatre.org

“What do you do when you’re not sure? That’s the topic of my sermon today. You look for God’s direction and can’t find it,” Father Flynn (Liev Schreiber) says at the beginning of the first Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 Pulitzer- and Tony-winning Doubt: A Parable. “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone.”

Shanley has two plays running concurrently in New York City, both dealing with doubt and certainty. Roundabout’s production of Doubt has been extended at the Todd Haimes Theatre through April 21, while Manhattan Theatre Club’s world premiere of Brooklyn Laundry has been extended at City Center through April 14. (A sold-out revival of Shanley’s 1983 two-character Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, starring Christopher Abbott and Aubrey Plaza, completed a limited run at the Lucille Lortel in January; it covered some of the same themes as the other two.)

Doubt and Brooklyn Laundry both feature four characters, rotating sets, high-powered performances, real-life inspiration, and, with just a few exceptions, a series of scenes between two characters. But while the former flows seamlessly as the plot unfolds, the latter is bumpy and much less structured.

Doubt takes place in St. Nicholas Church in the Bronx in 1964, during the Second Vatican Council, which sought to update Catholicism in response to the modern world, moving away from scholasticism and centuries-old doctrine and theology toward new ways of relating to lay people, priests, and nuns. Not everyone was on board, and some still aren’t sixty years later.

Father Flynn (Liev Schreiber) shares a moment with Sister James (Zoe Kazan) in the church garden (photo by Joan Marcus)

The school is run by the hard-nosed, impossibly strict principal Sister Aloysius (Amy Ryan), a member of the Sisters of Charity, who has no time for art, music, dancing, ballpoint pens, Frosty the Snowman, Father Flynn’s long fingernails, or the monsignor, who she thinks is oblivious. She believes that “satisfaction is a vice” and “innocence is a form of laziness.” When young teacher Sister James (Zoe Kazan) stops by her office, Sister Aloysius starts drilling her on classroom methods, claiming she’s too lenient with her students. She wants her to pay more attention but won’t say exactly what Sister James should be looking for. “I must be careful not to create something by saying it. I can only say I am concerned, perhaps needlessly, about matters in St. Nicholas School,” the older nun says with suspicion.

Later, in the church garden, Sister Aloysius asks about Donald Muller, the first Black student in the school; she is sure that Donald, an altar boy, will get bullied, but when Sister James points out that Father Flynn has taken him under his wing, Sister Aloysius immediately tightens up. “So it’s happened,” she says, as if she has been waiting for this moment.

She learns that Father Flynn had a private talk with Donald in the rectory. Later, in her office, she demands that Father Flynn tell her what happened. The priest refuses, arguing that it was a sensitive, personal matter while understanding exactly what the principal is accusing him of without her saying it out loud. When he is eventually forced to talk about it, he explains that he was only protecting the child and did nothing wrong. That’s not enough for Sister Aloysius, who still suspects him; he storms out, and she tells Sister James, who believes the father, “These types of people are clever. They’re not so easily undone. . . . I’ll bring him down. With or without your help.”

What follows is a tense cat-and-mouse game between the principal and the priest; Sister Aloysius even calls in Donald’s mother (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), who shocks her with her response to learning that her son might be in danger from a predatory priest.

Sister Aloysius (Amy Ryan) has some harsh words for Mrs. Muller (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) in Broadway revival of Doubt (photo by Joan Marcus)

Doubt debuted on Broadway in 2004, with Brían F. O’Byrne as Father Flynn, Cherry Jones as Sister Aloysius, Heather Goldenhersh as Sister James, and Adriane Lenox as Mrs. Muller; all four cast members received Tony nominations, with Jones and Lenox winning, along with awards for Best Play and Best Director (Doug Hughes). In 2008, Shanley adapted the play into a feature film, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn, Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius, Amy Adams as Sister James, and Viola Davis as Mrs. Muller, all of whom were nominated for Oscars, along with Shanley’s adapted screenplay, which expanded the story to include more than fifty roles.

Director Scott Ellis (Take Me Out, The Assembled Parties) masterfully directs the ninety-minute play, never letting the tension break as the audience wonders whether Father Flynn actually abused Donald. The story was partly inspired by Shanley learning years later that his high school mentor was a sexual predator, as well as his deep respect for nuns. Except for one scene between the two sisters and the father, all the others feature two characters talking about intolerance, faith, gossip, love, God, and what, or who, to believe.

David Rockwell’s sets move between Sister Aloysius’s austere office and the garden, with a projection in the back of buildings next to the church. Everything disappears and windows drop from above when Father Flynn delivers his homilies. Linda Cho’s costumes are primarily dark habits and vestments. Kenneth Posner’s lighting and Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound maintain the eery, mysterious feeling of impending doom.

Bernstine (The Amateurs, Our Lady of 121st Street) is powerful as Mrs. Muller, who is not afraid to make her unique point of view known, and Kazan (Love, Love, Love; A Behanding in Spokane) is wonderful as the doe-eyed innocent who is in over her head.

Two-time Tony nominee Ryan (Love, Love, Love; A Streetcar Named Desire) is almost unrecognizable as Sister Aloysius, the cagey principal who trusts no one except God. She portrays her as diamond-hard, a cold, steely woman without kindness or compassion but she’s not quite a villain, although you’d have to look hard to find a soft spot; you hope she is wrong about Father Flynn not only because he is a more relatable person but because you want her not to win. (Or do you?) Schreiber (Les Liaisons Dangereuses, A View from the Bridge) is utterly brilliant as her prey, his eyes mesmerizing, his gestures works of art; he is almost otherworldly when giving his sermons, then down to earth when teaching the boys basketball.

“Now, the thing about shooting from the foul line: It’s psychological,” Father Flynn explains. “The rest of the game you’re cooperating with your teammates, you’re competing against the other team. But at the foul line, it’s you against yourself. And the danger is: You start to think.”

He’s talking about a lot more than basketball.

Owen (David Zayas) and Fran (Cecily Strong) take stock of their lives in Brooklyn Laundry (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

BROOKLYN LAUNDRY
Manhattan Theatre Club
MTC at New York City Center – Stage I
Tuesday – Sunday through April 14, $119-$129
212-581-1212
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

“You believe in God?” Fran Costello (Cecily Strong) asks Owen (David Zayas) shortly after meeting him.

“Yeah, why not? You want your dry cleaning?” he responds.

Inspired by having his clothes lost by a local laundromat, John Patrick Shanley’s Brooklyn Laundry is a slight but enjoyable seventy-five-minute trip into a quartet of people facing turning points in their lives. Fran is a cynical thirty-seven-year-old office worker, the youngest of three siblings; her sister Trish (Florencia Lozano) lives in a hospice trailer in Pennsylvania with her two young kids, her ex-husband in jail; her sister Susie (Andrea Syglowski), who lives with her husband and their six-year-old son in the city, is the responsible one; and the fiftyish Owen owns three laundries and hasn’t been with a woman since his fiancée left him two years before.

It’s not exactly love at first sight for Fran and Owen when she comes in to drop off a bag of laundry, where she has a credit because they lost her laundry six months ago. “You’re like my fiancée was,” he says. “She’s . . . ?” Fran begins. “Gone. She was like you. Smart, one inch from terrific, but gloomy,” he continues. She answers, “I don’t think I’m gloomy. I think what I’m suffering from is reality.” Owen: “Some folks look life in the mouth.” Fran: “You’re not one of those people who think I’m manifesting, are you?”

He asks her on a date, and she reluctantly agrees. “Why would you want to have dinner with a person who’s in the middle of an episode?” she asks. He responds, “I don’t know. Everybody has a bad day.”

Fran goes out with Owen and meets up with Trish in Pennsylvania and Susie in Brooklyn as she takes stock of her sad, lonely life; her problems are not about to just come out in the wash.

Susie (Andrea Syglowski) and Fran (Cecily Strong) have a family squabble in John Patrick Shanley world premiere for MTC (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

The concept of sleep is an underlying theme of the play. At one point, Susie says to Fran, “It’s a wake-up call,” and Fran responds, “Was I asleep?” Sleep is brought up by all four characters, which harkens back to Doubt. “Oh. I can’t sleep,” Sister Aloysius tells Father Flynn, who asks, “Why not?” The nun says, “Bad dreams. Actually one bad dream and then I haven’t slept right since.” Later, she says to Sister James, “Maybe we’re not supposed to sleep so well.”

Santo Loquasto’s set rotates from Owen’s laundry, which appears to be fully operational, chugging away as the audience enters, to the bedroom in Trish’s trailer, Fran’s studio apartment, and the restaurant where Fran and Owen go to dinner. Suzy Benzinger’s costumes are naturalistic, Brian MacDevitt’s lighting is sharp, particularly in the dinner scene, and John Gromada’s original music and sound maintain the mood, along with Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.”

All four actors are exceptional; Lozano (Placebo, One Wet Brain) imbues the dying Trish with a keen sense of humor, Syglowski (Dig, Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven) brings humanity to the angry and frustrated Susie, Strong (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Schmigadoon!) empowers Fran through all her awkwardness, and Zayas (Cost of Living, Anna in the Tropics) proves once again why he’s one of the best around, portraying the unpredictable and frightfully honest Owen with charm to spare.

Written and directed by Oscar, Tony, and Obie winner and Emmy nominee Shanley (Outside Mullingar, Prodigal Son), Brooklyn Laundry contains unexpected dialogue with clever undertones. When Owen tells Fran she can keep a quarter that fell on the floor, she says she doesn’t want it, so he asks, “What? You afraid of a little change?” Trish loves the artificial flowers she’s had for twenty years. “You can wash them. They never fade,” she says, as opposed to clothing, or people. When Owen and Fran are at dinner, she is upset that chicken is not on the menu, so he urges her, “This is exactly when reality becomes super important. You must choose from what exists on the menu, Fran, and not choose the invisible thing in your mind.”

However, each scene seems to exist in its own mind; they never come together as a whole, unfolding like loosely connected stories with chapters missing.

“What do you do when you’re not sure?” Father Flynn asks in Doubt, a nearly perfectly executed drama. Meanwhile, Brooklyn Laundry feels unsure of itself, unable to sleep well.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE

Chris Domig and Len Cariou star in touching revival of Tuesdays with Morrie (photo by Jeremy Varner)

TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE
St. George’s Episcopal Church
209 East Sixteenth St. at Rutherford Pl.
Through March 23, $20-$55
www.seadogtheater.org

“I never give advice,” Morrie Schwartz tells Mitch Albom in Tuesdays with Morrie.

Maybe not, but nearly everything that comes out of his mouth are words to live by — and die by.

Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie, the true story of the friendship between sports reporter Albom and Brandeis professor Schwartz, started as a 1997 book, subtitled An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson. Mick Jackson turned it into a popular 1999 film, starring Jack Lemmon as Schwartz and Hank Azaria as Albom. It won four Emmys, including Outstanding Made for Television Movie, and put the memoir at the top of the bestseller list for a combined twenty-three weeks. In November 2002, Albom and Jeffrey Hatcher adapted the book into an off-Broadway play directed by Obie winner David Esbjornson.

The show is now back in a warm, intimate revival from Sea Dog Theater running in the long, narrow chantry at St. George’s Episcopal Church through March 23, anchored by two wonderful performances.

As the audience enters the space, Mitch (Chris Domig) is sitting behind a grand piano at the center of the room, playing jazz tunes. After a few songs, Morrie (Len Cariou) enters, joining Mitch on the piano bench and enjoying the music. The play proper soon begins, with Mitch directly addressing the audience, telling us about a college class he had taken with Morrie called “The Meaning of Life.” Mitch, the only student, remembers, “There was no required reading, but many topics were covered: love, work, aging, family, community, forgiveness . . . and death.” Those are the same topics covered in the play.

Mitch, who is thirty-seven, and Morrie, who is seventy-eight, switch back and forth between talking to the audience and reenacting scenes from their past together. Mitch took all of Morrie’s classes at Brandeis; the two became fast friends, with Mitch calling his mentor “Coach.” When Mitch graduates in 1979, he promises to keep in touch, but sixteen years pass with no contact, until he sees his old teacher on Nightline, explaining to Ted Koppel that he has ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Feeling guilty, Mitch goes to see Morrie; when his teacher asks him what happened, Mitch responds, “Life happened.”

What Mitch thought would be a one-time visit becomes a weekly event, and Mitch begins recording his Tuesday discussions with Morrie, who has found it somewhat surprising that people are so interested in him now. “I’m not quite alive, I’m not quite dead, I’m ‘in-between,’” he says. “I’m about to take that last journey into the great unknown. People want to know what to pack.”

Morrie might not ever give advice, but he speaks in memorable aphorisms that avoid being overly treacly:

“Dying is only one thing to be sad over. Living unhappily is something else.”

“Why be predictable?”

“Aging is not just decay . . . . A tree’s leaves are most colorful just before they die.”

“Age is not a competition.”

“There’s no ‘point’ in loving; loving is the point.”

Mitch (Chris Domig) worries about his dying friend, Morrie (Len Cariou), in Tuesdays with Morrie (photo by Jeremy Varner)

The two men share stories from their lives, delving into career choices, music, romantic partners, parents, and children. Initially, Mitch is tentative and anxious, regularly on his phone as he prepares for his next column, interview, or television appearance. He does slow down a bit as Morrie grows more and more ill, the end approaching, which makes Mitch more sad than Morrie. Mitch might have told us early on, “I don’t need a ‘life therapist,’” but he is learning so much from Coach — and so are we.

Tuesdays with Morrie feels right at home in St. George’s, even as it features two Jewish characters; Guy DeLancey’s set and lighting center around the piano and cast glows on the pillars, and Eamon Goodman’s sound, from the dialogue to actor and composer Domig’s expert keyboard playing to a snippet of a pop standard, are never lost in the high-ceilinged room over the course of the play’s easygoing hundred minutes.

Tony winner and Emmy nominee Cariou (Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music) is gentle and touching as Morrie; at eighty-four, Cariou has both the stage and the life experience, and it shows in his every gesture and turn of phrase. You can’t help but love being in his presence, as actor and character.

Domig, the cofounder of Sea Dog Theater, is terrific as the self-involved, super-ambitious Mitch, who has never stopped and smelled the roses. Domig is almost too nice; Morrie tells Mitch that he can be “mean-spirited,” something I noticed while watching Albom for several years on the Sunday morning ESPN program The Sports Reporters. Cariou and Domig also dodge around some of the more clichéd and melodramatic aspects of the script with the help of director Erwin Maas; the trio has spent a lot of time working together on the project, beginning with a reading at St. George’s in 2021, and they clearly have developed an infectious camaraderie.

“Are you at peace with yourself?” Morrie asks Mitch.

After seeing this adaptation of Tuesdays with Morrie, your answer will be a lot clearer.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE CONNECTOR

The Connector takes place at a New York City magazine publisher in the mid-1990s (photo by Joan Marcus)

THE CONNECTOR
The Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
511 West Fifty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 17, $74-$139
mcctheater.org

Beowulf Boritt’s set is the star of The Connector, an otherwise hit-or-miss new musical conceived and directed by Daisy Prince, with a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman and music and lyrics by Tony winner Jason Robert Brown.

The show takes place in the offices of a well-respected magazine called the Connector. On the back wall is a rectangular grid of more than one hundred folded-over magazine spreads on which lighting designer Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew projects various images in addition to, for one fabulous scene, a Scrabble board; neon lights form multiple shapes in different colors on the black floor, also a grid. Off to the sides are mounds and mounds of paper. Tables, desks, and chairs are wheeled on an off to indicate trips to different offices and outdoors.

The magazine is run by Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula), who is determined to continue the legacy of the magazine’s founder, Aubrey Bernard, who started the Connector in 1946. It’s 1996, and the conglomerate VorschlagXE are their new partners. When enthusiastic young journalist Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) arrives, O’Brien is immediately impressed by the recent college grad and gives him a job. It isn’t long before Dobson is getting major stories published in the magazine, much to the chagrin of assistant copy editor Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz), whose pieces keep getting rejected by O’Brien, and Tom Henshaw (Fergie Philippe), a dependable but unexciting writer.

As Dobson’s stories become more and more popular, fact checker Muriel (Jessica Molaskey) has more and more questions, as does loyal Connector reader Mona Bland (Mylinda Hull), who regularly sends in letters to the editor with praise and criticism, and Martinez, who is suspicious of how Dobson is writing so many articles so quickly.

Ethan Dobson’s first story is about the prowess of Scrabble mastermind Waldo Pine (Max Crumm) (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Connector was inspired by the fraud perpetrated by Stephen Glass at the New Republic in 1998. Much of the show rings true, but just as much doesn’t. From 2001 to 2004, I served as editor in chief of a free local New York City newsmagazine with a small staff, consisting of a news editor, a features editor, and a managing editor. We all proofread and fact-checked one another’s articles as best we could, right at the time that use of the internet exploded around the country. I just find it too difficult to buy how easily O’Brien falls under the spell of the overly cocky and annoying Dobson, ignoring all the warning signs, even as he is distracted by VorschlagXE executive Veronica (Ann Sanders).

One of the show’s aims is to relate its plot to the fake news that now dominates social media and overtly biased television programs and publications, but the connection doesn’t come through. When O’Brien makes a toast early on, proclaiming, “To our fabled history of writers and editors, who still search, reach, and fight for the truth. To our beloved, well-educated, politically active readers,” it’s as if they are already outliers, ill-prepared for what is to come. “Together, we shall thrive and grow for many more decades, pushing forward, staying true to the tenets Aubrey Bernard held so dear!” he adds.

The Connector is a musical, but it feels much more like a play with musical scenes, never quite cohering as a whole. Karla Puno Garcia’s choreography ranges from barely there in the introductory number to fun and fanciful in Waldo’s celebration to head scratching during Dobson’s visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Brown’s (Parade, The Last Five Years) arrangements and orchestrations crackle, but the songs, performed by a small band behind the backdrop, lack consistency as they go from ballads to hip-hop to klezmer. Director Prince, who has previously helmed Brown’s The Last Five Years and Songs for a New World, is unable to get the scenes to smoothly flow into each other. And while there are laughs, a pair of cheap shots at Texas and New Jersey in “So I Came to New York” linger badly.

Ethan (Ben Levi Ross) and Robin (Hannah Cruz) become friends and rivals in The Connector (photo by Joan Marcus)

Bakula (Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down, Guys and Dolls), who was nominated for a Tony as Best Leading Actor in a Musical for 1988’s Romance/Romance, has a firm grasp of his character in his return to the New York stage, while Cruz (Only Gold, Suffs) excels as Martinez, Molaskey (A Man of No Importance, Sunday in the Park with George) is right on point as the fussy Muriel, and Crumm (Emojiland, Disaster!) nearly steals the show as Waldo.

The cast also includes Daniel Jenkins as Connector lawyer Zachary, Michael Winther as cable host Brian Lamb, Danielle Lee Greaves as Jersey City mayoral aide Sheryl Hughes, Ashley Pérez Flanagan as copy editor Florencia Moreno, and Eliseo Román as Nestor Fineman, the fictional head of the real-life New York Press, which was the archrival of the publication I ran twenty-plus years ago.

In the end, The Connector has some worthwhile articles but could use more editing to cut down on the excess.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE HUNT

Tobias Menzies stars as a man accused of a horrible crime in The Hunt (photo by Teddy Wolff)

THE HUNT
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 24, $64-$84
718-254-8779
stannswarehouse.org

In 2012, St. Ann’s Warehouse presented the US premiere of Grzegorz Jarzyna’s mesmerizing adaptation of Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm’s 1998 Dogme 95 film, Festen (The Celebration), about a birthday party at which the adult son of the honoree suddenly accuses his father of having sexually abused him and his twin sister when they were children.

That same year, Danish writer-director Vinterberg released his terrifying Oscar-nominated drama Jagten (The Hunt), in which Mads Mikkelsen stars as a kindergarten teacher falsely accused of sexually abusing a six-year-old student in a small, tight-knit town.

Writer David Farr and director Rupert Goold’s adaptation of The Hunt for the Almeida Theatre is now having its US premiere at St. Ann’s; it’s a haunting tale of hunters and their prey.

Tobias Menzies makes a dazzling US stage debut as Lucas Bruun, a forty-year-old educator who is teaching at the Sunbeam Infants School in an isolated village in Northern Denmark after his previous employer closed. He has separated from his wife, Susanne, and is frustrated that he is not getting enough time to spend with their sixteen-year-old son, Marcus (Raphael Casey).

A teacher (Tobias Menzies) is given a surprise present by one of his students (Aerina DeBoer) in The Hunt (photo by Teddy Wolff)

After a special event, his favorite student, five-year-old Clara Kallstrom (alternately played by Aerina DeBoer or Kay Winard), tells school head Hilde (Lolita Chakrabarti) that Lucas exposed himself to her, which is not true. Soon the entire town, including Clara’s parents, Mikala (MyAnna Buring) and Theo (Alex Hassell), who are Lucas’s closest friends, has turned against him, branding him a pariah.

Curiously, as his world crumbles around him, the fiercely private Lucas doesn’t stand up for himself, never proclaiming his innocence, even though we saw the encounter in question and know he did not do anything wrong. He begs the school and Clara’s parents to let him talk to the girl in order to straighten everything out, but no one wants him near her or the school. Even his buddies in the Men of the Lodge, a group of hunters who love singing, shooting, and boozing it up, immediately ostracize him, making him the hunted. The only support he receives is from his dog, Max, and Marcus, who shows up unexpectedly at his doorstep.

“Talking to you is like scaling a fucking castle wall. You know that?” Mikala tells him.

But he’s not about to let anyone in, even with his life in danger.

The Hunt takes place on Es Devlin’s fascinating set, a house-shaped cube that switches from transparent to opaque in a flash; it rests on a turntable, so it occasionally spins, and there is a trapdoor so characters can appear and disappear. Neil Austin’s lighting includes neon lines on the floor, ceiling, and wall and in and on the cube itself, while Adam Cork’s sound is highlighted by songbirds who represent the freedom that is just out of Lucas’s reach.

Despite the plentiful open space, the cube gives the show a claustrophobic feeling, whether it’s being used as a church or the men’s lodge, stuffed with people, or for a lone antlered forest creature signaling potential doom.

Es Devlin’s set is a character unto itself in US premiere of Almeida production at St. Ann’s (photo by Teddy Wolff)

Ritual and social convention hover over the narrative. The show opens with Hilde directly addressing the audience, introducing the children’s harvest festival play. “Welcome, everyone. It’s lovely to see so many familiar faces,” she says. “We are a small community. The happiness of our children is everything. Our hopes and dreams rest in these tiny souls. And to spend each day with them is a kind of heaven.”

In the next scene, the Men of the Lodge are in bathing suits, going for a manly swim, belting out, “Oh, eight men they go swimming / In the water oh so cold / The eight men they are hunters / The eight men they are bold / The eight men they are heroes / They never will grow old / Their bodies made of iron / Their hearts are made of gold / The hunters undefeated / Are mighty to behold. They dance in unison to Kel Matsena’s testosterone-filled choreography, which takes a darker path as Christmas approaches.

Emmy winner Menzies, best known in America for his roles on Outlander and The Crown, is riveting as Lucas, a highly principled man who has too much faith in others. He remains soft-spoken even as his freedom is being stolen. Buring and Hassell excel as Lucas’s best friends, who are not sure what or whom to believe. The rest of the ensemble is strong, including Chakrabarti as the school head whose job it is to protect the children, Casey as the son who has faith in his father, Howard Ward as a school administrator and the local pastor, Rumi C. Jean-Louis or Christopher Riley as Clara’s school pal Peter, and Adrian Der Gregorian, Ali Goldsmith, Shaquille Jack, Danny Kirrane, and Jonathan Savage as the other Men of the Lodge.

Farr (Night Manager, The Homecoming) and Goold (Patriots, Ink) occasionally stray from the film’s story, with uneven results; a few scenes are awkward, but they right the ship for a poignant finale.

At two points, characters suddenly appear at the back of the audience and make their way to the stage, as if any one of us could be them. Would we be the accused, the accuser, or the townspeople who have to look deep inside themselves? None will like what they find.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]