Kimberly Brown will celebrate new book at Rubin Museum on November 4 (photo courtesy Kimberly Brown)
Who:Kimberly Brown What:Book launch Where:Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave. When: Friday, November 4, free, 6:30 – 8:30 Why: “Unsuccessful attempts to deny, bypass, or discharge pain create disappointment or frustration and increase our suffering. Why do I still feel so angry? When am I going to stop being so tired? These can also make our feelings even more powerful, insistent, and overwhelming, because they need to be heard and cared for by you before they can resolve,” meditation and mindfulness teacher Kimberly Brown writes in her new book, Navigating Grief and Loss: 25 Buddhist Practices to Keep Your Heart Open to Yourself and Others. Brown’s follow-up to July 2020’s Steady, Calm, and Brave: 25 Practices of Resilience and Wisdom in a Crisis,Navigating Grief and Loss pairs chapters with guided practice; for example, “There Is Nothing Wrong with You” is linked with “Stay,” “When People Behave Badly” with “Forgive and Remember,” and “Mourning and Social Media” with “Skillful Speech.”
“I wrote the book to share the practices that supported me after my dear friend Denise died, and when my elderly dad had a health crisis during the pandemic, and included chapters on divorce and job loss too because not all painful losses are deaths,” Brown explained in a Substack post. “I hope it will remind everyone that profound loss doesn’t have to overwhelm or destroy us because we can learn useful and simple tools to meet our pain and sadness with kindness and wisdom, and open our beautiful hearts to ourselves and everyone else — to connect in our sorrows as well as our joys.” Brown will be at the Rubin Museum on November 4 to sign copies of the book as part of the institution’s free K2 Friday Nights program. Brown is one of the teachers in the museum’s Mindfulness Meditation series on Mondays; you can listen to past sessions here. In addition, on November 15 at 7:00, Brown will celebrate the book’s release with an online party hosted by Mindful Astoria.
Duke Riley exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum features hundreds of maritime-related existing artwork and painted salvaged plastic (photo courtesy of the artist)
Who:Duke Riley, Kizzy Charles-Guzman, Larissa Belcic, Michelle Shofet, Ajay Singh Chaudhary What:Panel discussion Where:Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Pkwy. at Washington St. When: Wednesday, November 3, $16, 7:00 (exhibition continues through April 23, 2023) Why: For more than twenty years, Boston-born, Brooklyn-based multimedia installation artist Duke Riley has been trying to save the planet, one pigeon, one fish, and one piece of garbage at a time, creating immersive works that explore the state of the environment, with a focus on water. In 2007’s “After the Battle of Brooklyn,” he reenacted the Revolutionary War mission of the one-manned primitive submarine known as the Turtle in New York harbor. In 2012’s “The Rematch,” he restaged the mythological Chinese race that established the zodiac and the measurement of time in a yearly cycle, using a dozen gondolas with live animals, a person wearing an animal mask, and an opera singer performing a song told from the animal’s perspective. In 2013-14, “See You at the Finish Line” at Magnan Metz Gallery documented fifty homing pigeons that Riley bred and trained to travel back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean from Key West to Cuba. And in 2016’s “Fly by Night,” he trained two thousand pigeons, each fitted with a remote-controlled LED light, to soar through the sky and over the sea at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in a dazzling, glowing dance.
Continuing through April 23 at the Brooklyn Museum, Riley’s “DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash” furthers his investigation of our relationship with the natural world. The show consists of several hundred objects, from seventeenth- to twentieth-century porcelain and earthenware with portraits and maritime themes on them to dozens of works by Riley, part of his “Poly S. Tyrene Memorial Maritime Museum” series, in which he draws intricate designs on salvaged plastic garbage — bottles, combs, frames, brushes, flip-flops, coffee cups, a Whiffle ball — echoing the craft of scrimshaw, carvings on whale bone and teeth. They are arranged in glass cases, a few horizontal ones that recall the still-lifes of Giorgio Morandi; some of the portraits are of oil, food, chemical, and plastics industries lobbyists and CEOs.
The exhibition also features the short video Wasteland Fishing, in which Riley goes fishing with lures he made out of recycled trash, many of which are on view in wall cases with such titles as Mother Ocean and Monument to Five Thousand Years of Temptation and Deception III; colorful, kaleidoscopic mosaic panels made of broken shells, cigarette butts, and other effluvia, including one with the message “Tomorrow Is a Mystery”; the videos Beach Clean Up and Newtown Creek; and interventions in the museum’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jan Martense Schenck and Nicholas Schenck Houses, including a plastic chandelier and Riley’s work table. The ink-on-canary-paper The View from the Mouth of the Newtown Creek During Final Days of Battle is a heavily detailed map of boats, skeletal police, merfolk, plastic garbage, tombstones, and more, with an AR component that leads visitors to stories of the history of the polluted Newtown Creek in Brooklyn.
Duke Riley, The View from the Mouth of the Newtown Creek During Final Days of Battle, ink on canary paper, 2021 (photo courtesy of the artist)
“In 2003 I sailed a 26′ dilapidated sloop into the creek and illegally tied it up to an abandoned bulkhead, expecting to get chased off in a matter of days. As days turned into years, other boats began to appear around me and continued to do so long past my departure from the creek in 2013,” Riley explained in a label for the 2022 Biennale of Sydney, which commissioned the piece. “There are currently more than thirty derelict boats moored in the creek, mostly clustered together, with people living aboard full time. At first glance, the people that remain there are living out a romantic maritime dream. A rent-free life enviable to the rest of us caught up in the demands of living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. In reality, for most this alternate existence is coupled with harsh winters without heat and a lack of plumbing, running water, and basic amenities that many of us take for granted. The most notable downside is the continuous and potentially lethal exposure to a highly carcinogenic environment caused by living on top of a federal Superfund site. Most have no financial means to leave and live elsewhere but are constantly in fear of being told to leave in the middle of the night.”
On November 3 at 7:00, Riley will be at the museum for the special program “Brooklyn Talks: Artists and Activists on Climate Grief,” a panel discussion with NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice executive director Kizzy Charles-Guzman, Larissa Belcic and Michelle Shofet of Nocturnal Medicine, and Brooklyn Institute for Social Research executive director Ajay Singh Chaudhary, who will serve as moderator. Riley will focus on his works made of found plastic and how everyone can fight local pollution and global marine devastation. And on March 12, 2023, Riley will give a tour of the exhibition as part of the museum’s “Artist’s Eye” program.
Gabriel Byrne points to key moments in his life in Walking with Ghosts (photo by Emilio Madrid)
GABRIEL BYRNE: WALKING WITH GHOSTS
Music Box Theatre
239 West Forty-Fifth St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 30, $58-$288 gabrielbyrneonbroadway.com
Recounting a dream at the beginning of his one-man show, Walking with Ghosts, Gabriel Byrne remembers seeing himself as “the man I am now longing to see the world as a child again, when every sight and sound was a marvel.” He laments how the places of his youth, “the chapel, the cinema, the factory, the fields are all gone.” He admits, “And I feel like an intruder in my own past. Emigrant, immigrant, exile. Belonging everywhere but nowhere at all.”
Adapted from Byrne’s widely acclaimed 2021 memoir, the play affirms the Tony, Grammy, and Emmy nominee belongs on the stage and on the big and small screen, a humble actor of immense talent who is instantly likable, winning our hearts from the very start. If only he dug a little deeper, reaching for our souls.
Casually dressed in a button-down shirt, slacks, vest, and jacket (the costumes are by Joan O’Clery), Byrne takes us through several dozen episodes from his life organized as individual, chronological scenes that don’t always flow seamlessly one into the next. Byrne ambles slowly around Sinéad McKenna’s spare set, consisting of a desk, a chair, three large frames, and a shattered mirror as Byrne paints his verbal self-portrait taking a long, intimate look at himself. McKenna’s soft lighting occasionally creates an upside-down shadow of Byrne on the facade above the stage, immersed in an amorphous primordial cloud. As much as we learn about Byrne over the course of two acts and two hours and fifteen minutes (with intermission), there is much more we do not learn. He is a superb storyteller in the classic Irish tradition; early on, he recalls taking the bus on his first day of school and seeing a drunk man singing. “That man, my mother said, is a famous writer. His name is Brendan Behan, and he’s known all over the world. And he’s on the wrong bus, the poor creature.”
Behan had a wild abandon, but Byrne rarely breaks out of his steady demeanor, whether discussing sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of a priest, seeing a friend of his drown, drudging through a series of jobs, or having high tea with his mother at a fancy hotel. Each episode is given equal weight, although he does perk up when he talks about film and theater, going to the movies with his grandmother and joining a troupe of amateur actors. “I realized then I had been so lonely, and this new sense of belonging and purpose overwhelmed me to tears,” he wistfully explains. “You are welcome here, they had said. Welcome. I felt at last that I belonged.”
Gabriel Byrne considers the choices he’s made in one-man show (photo by Emilio Madrid)
Byrne doesn’t delve into his many successes — from Miller’s Crossing,The Usual Suspects, and Jindabyne on film to In Treatment,Madigan Men, and The War of the Worlds on television and his Eugene O’Neill Broadway trilogy of Long Day’s Journey into Night,A Moon for the Misbegotten, and A Touch of the Poet — but instead focuses on smaller key moments in his career, without name-dropping who he’s worked with or what movies or shows he has been in. He does ruminate on his breakthrough, on the popular Irish television series The Riordans, and he regales us with the night he spent drinking with Richard Burton, but he doesn’t mention the name of the eight-hour film they did together, 1983’s Wagner, or the other members of the cast, which included Vanessa Redgrave, Marthe Keller, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Sir Ralph Richardson.
The seventy-two-year-old Byrne also avoids most of his personal life as an adult, never bringing up his relationships with women (he’s been married twice) or his three children. Perhaps he didn’t want to rehash anything that was previously in his 1994 autobiography, Pictures in My Head, and Pat Collins’s 2008 documentary, Gabriel Byrne: Stories from Home, but the gaps are clear.
Directed by three-time Emmy winner Lonny Price (Sunset Boulevard,Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill), Walking with Ghosts has an elegance and charm about it, but in this case the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts; there are excellent chapters, but we don’t get enough of the bigger picture.
Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro wonderfully captures the joys and fears of being a child
MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (TONARI NO TOTORO) (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave. Film: Friday, November 4, $15, 7:00 Talk: Thursday, November 10, $20, 6:30 japansociety.org www.nausicaa.net
The Royal Shakespeare Company is currently presenting a live-action stage adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved My Neighbor Totoro at the Barbican, where it is receiving glowing reviews. The show was written by Tom Morton-Smith and is directed by Phelim McDermott, with a score by longtime Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi and puppetry by Basil Twist. As part of its monthly anime series, Japan Society will be screening a 35mm print of the 1988 film on November 4 at 7:00, followed November 10 at 6:30 by a discussion with Twist (Symphonie Fantastique,Dogugaeshi) about the making of the show.
In many ways a precursor to Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Spirited Away, the magical multi-award-winning My Neighbor Totoro is a fantastical trip down the rabbit hole, a wondrous journey through the sheer glee and universal fears of childhood. With their mother, Yasuko, suffering from an extended illness in the hospital, Satsuki and her younger sister, Mei, move to a new house in a rural farming community with their father, anthropology professor Tatsuo Kusakabe. Kanta, a shy boy who lives nearby, tells them the house is haunted, and indeed the two girls come upon a flurry of black soot sprites scurrying about. Mei also soon discovers a family of totoros, supposedly fictional characters from her storybooks, living in the forest, protected by a giant camphor tree. When the girls fear their mother has taken a turn for the worse, Mei runs off on her own, and it is up to Satsuki to find her.
Basil Twist will be at Japan Society to share behind-the-scenes stories of the Totoro stage show
Working with art director Kazuo Oga, Miyazaki paints the film with rich, glorious skies and lush greenery, honoring the beauty and power of nature both visually as well as in the narrative. The scene in which Satsuki and Mei huddle with Totoro at a bus stop in a rainstorm is a treasure. (And just wait till you see Catbus’s glowing eyes.) The movie also celebrates the sense of freedom and adventure that comes with being a child, without helicopter parents and myriad rules suffocating them at home and school. Twist’s talk will go behind-the-scenes of the RSC production, discussing the creation of puppets based on animated characters and sharing backstage images.
Either/Or celebrates the music of Chiyoko Szlavnics at Tenri on November 2 (photo by Matthew Billings)
Who:Either/Or What: Live concert celebrating the music of Chiyoko Szlavnics Where:Tenri Cultural Institute of New York, 43A West Thirteenth St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves. When: Wednesday, November 2, $10-$20, 9:00 Why: For nearly twenty-five years, Berlin-based composer and visual artist Chiyoko Szlavnics has been expanding her unique music, using self-generated drawings to spur works that incorporate architectural and mathematical philosophies and concepts of psychoacoustic phenomena. Szlavnics, who plays the sax and the flute, has written chamber pieces and works for duos and solo electronics, including “The First Place: At the Entrance,” “For Eva Hesse (with CN),” “Freehand Poitras,” “The Spaces Between Them,” and “Ephemeralities: Listening Being(s).”
“Gradient of Detail,” by Chiyoko Szlavnics, is part of Either/Or program at Tenri Institute
On November 2 at the Tenri Cultural Institute of New York, Either/Or, the flexible experimental music ensemble that was founded by Richard Carrick in New York City in 2004, will present “Intimacy of Detail: The Music of Chiyoko Szlavnics,” an evening featuring the composer’s “(a)long lines: we’ll draw our own lines,” for flute, trombone, violin, violoncello, percussion, and sine tones; “Constellations I-III,” for piano and sine tones; and “Gradients of Detail,” for string quartet. The ensemble will consist of EO director Carrick on piano, Jennifer Choi and Pala Garcia on violin, Margaret Lancaster on flute, Hannah Levinson on viola, Alex Lough on electronics & sound, Chris Nappi on percussion, John Popham on cello, and EO curator Chris McIntyre on trombone. Tickets are $10 to $20 for what promises to be an immersive sonic experience.
Who:Theater Schaubühne Berlin What:Hamlet Where:Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theater at the BAM Strong, 651 Fulton St. When: October 27 – November 5, $74-$175 Why: Five years ago, Lars Eidinger electrified Brooklyn with his stunning portrayal of Richard III, the wildest and best I have ever seen, in Thomas Ostermeier and Theater Schaubühne Berlin’s ferocious adaptation at the BAM Harvey Theater. Eidinger, Ostermeier, and Schaubühne Berlin are back at the Harvey with their frantic take on the Bard’s Hamlet, running through November 5. The tragedy has been seen here in New York in numerous recent versions and reimaginings, from Robert Icke’s staging at Park Ave. Armory in repertory with The Oresteia and James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Fat Ham at the Public to Potomac Theatre Project’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet at Atlantic Stage 2, Dead Centre’s Hamnet at BAM Fisher, and Yaël Farber’s variation starring Ruth Negga at St. Ann’s Warehouse.
You can expect Eidinger to be a prince of Denmark unlike any other in this 165-minute adaptation, directed by Thomas Ostermeier and translated into German by dramaturg Marius von Mayenburg. The cast pairs Damir Avdic as Horatio and Guildenstern, Konrad Singer as Laertes and Rosencrantz, Robert Beyer as Osric and Polonius, amid other dual depictions, but it is Eidinger front and center, a mesmerizing actor who never holds anything back. You have been warned.
Update: It takes only minutes to realize that this Hamlet will resemble nothing you’ve ever seen. It opens with Eidinger, who at forty-six is about twice the age of his title character, beginning the “To Be, or Not to Be” soliloquy, which is supposed to unfurl in Act III. But he delivers only a few lines before joining the funeral of his murdered father, the former king, while his mother, Gertrude, and uncle, Claudius, stand under an umbrella at the burial. A cemetery worker has trouble with the coffin, water is sprayed from a hose, and the already unbalanced Hamlet, looking a bit doofy in his suspenders, falls face-first into the dirt over his father’s grave.
It’s Hamlet as vaudeville shtick, but with a camera that Hamlet uses to film himself and others as nefarious truths come out. Jan Pappelbaum’s set features lots of dirt and two white tables that move between the front and back of the stage, separated by a hanging curtain on which the live video is projected. (The costumes are by Nina Wetzel, music by Nils Ostendorf, video by Sébastien Dupouey, and lighting by Erich Schneider.)
A few moments later, when Claudius says, “But now, my nephew Hamlet, and my son — ,” a shocked Hamlet, unaware that his mother is betrothed to his uncle, does a double take and wonders aloud, “What? I didn’t get that,” then says to himself the more well known line, “A little more than kin, and less than kind.”
Eidinger is given free rein by Ostermeier, like an improv comic portraying the prince of Denmark. At one point, Eidinger jumped off the stage and approached a young man sitting front and center in the first row, wearing a black mask and a hoodie. Eidinger, who speaks German as Hamlet but English when he goes off-script, tried to get the man to interact with him, with no luck, leading to some yucks. Later, Eidinger tossed a shovel that accidentally bounced off the stage and landed near a woman in the audience. In the middle of his dialogue, Eidinger realized what happened and asked the woman if she was okay. It’s often hard to know what is scripted and when Eidinger is going with his instincts; just wait till you see his fencing battle with Laertes.
Even when he’s not lumbering across the stage (and off it), Hamlet is toying around, as if he has ADHD, banging on the table like a spoiled child and putting silly things on his face. The rest of the cast — Damir Avdic as Horatio and Guildenstern, Konrad Singer as Laertes and Rosencrantz, Robert Beyer as Osric and Polonius, Urs Jucker or Thomas Bading as Claudius and the ghost king, and Jenny König as Gertrude and Ophelia, a pairing that intensifies Hamlet’s cries of incest — is merely in service of Eidinger.
It can be a bit much in the 105-minute first act, which can get so chaotic it loses the narrative thread; if you’re not familiar with the story, you’re unlikely to know what’s going on all the time, especially with the doubling of characters who don’t change costumes. But the show comes together fabulously in the forty-five-minute second act — Eidinger even assures us that it’s much shorter than the first act — as the plot is more apparent and Hamlet (and Eidinger) is somewhat more focused if still as wildly unpredictable. There’s a method to his madness, even if Polonius’s classic pronouncement, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t,” has been cut from the production. You also won’t hear anything about a “rogue and peasant slave,” “pernicious woman,” or “damned villain,” but Hamlet will command you to “please switch off your mobile phones!”
Hamlet explains, “It’s all just theater and yet also reality.” Throughout Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet is battling reality, encountering ghosts and interpreting events through his own warped world view. But Ostermeier and Eidinger continually remind us that we are watching theater. And what theater it is, unique, original, flabbergasting, exciting, hilarious, and downright strange.
Ralph Fiennes as Robert Moses in David Hare’s Straight Line Crazy (photo by Kate Glicksberg)
STRAIGHT LINE CRAZY
The Griffin Theater at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building at Hudson Yards
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 18
646-455-3494 theshed.org
David Hare’s sparkling, intense Straight Line Crazy, which opened Wednesday night at the Shed’s Griffin Theater, begins with Ralph Fiennes walking down Bob Crowley’s T-shaped stage, barefoot and wearing a suit. He does not need to introduce his character to the New York City audience; he is portraying infamous urban planner Robert Moses. Before he can say anything, the sold-out crowd erupts in entrance applause for the two-time Oscar and Emmy nominee and Tony winner. In a brief monologue, Moses says, explaining his penchant for swimming, “The further I swim the happier I am. At night, best of all. So how do I feel when people say ‘We were worried. You were gone so long. We called the coast guard.’ How do I feel? I tell them, ‘Why did you panic? Nothing’s going to happen to me.’”
A moment later, Helen Schlesinger, in frumpy attire — Crowley also designed the costumes — approaches, announcing, “I’m Jane Jacobs.” The audience again bursts into applause, but it’s not for the British television and theater actress as much as for her character, a woman whose name is instantly familiar to so many New Yorkers as Moses’s longtime archnemesis even though, as she points out, they never met. Explaining her original lack of interest in architecture, she states about her change of mind, “What made me think about architecture was that moment when I realized I was going to die. I remember thinking, what will be left of us? After we’re gone? And I remember reading that only two things remain. Cities and songs.”
Straight Line Crazy begins in 1926, as Moses, the chairman of the New York State Council of Parks (and later secretary of state and Parks and Recreation commissioner), is hard at work developing plans for the building of the Southern State and Northern State Parkways on Long Island. He sees the automobile as the future and is determined to bring access to Jones Beach to the masses, despite strong pushback from such wealthy landowners as the Morgans, the Whitneys, and the Fricks.
Jane Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger) won’t give up the fight against Robert Moses in Straight Line Crazy (photo by Kate Glicksberg)
“Every summer those few adventurous souls who dare to head this way are brought to a halt, as their overheated engines expire on badly maintained tracks,” Moses tells Henry Vanderbilt (Guy Paul). “Everything possible is done to discourage them. Well, no longer. My new parkways will make travelling as attractive as arriving.” Vanderbilt promises “impassioned and intransigent opposition to all your plans . . . unified, organized, and unyielding.” But there’s nothing Moses enjoys more than a good fight. When Vanderbilt calls him a revolutionary, Moses responds, “To the contrary. The very opposite. My aim is to forestall revolution, not to incite it.” However, his revolution is strictly for cars; he adamantly refuses to include any form of public transportation, no buses or trains.
Moses is a bold, severe man, unwilling to accept that he’s ever wrong, unable to consider compromises or concessions of any kind, unafraid of brazenly skirting the law. He speaks in aphorisms whether discussing plans with the two main members of his team, the fictional duo of Finnuala Connell (Judith Roddy) and Ariel Porter (Adam Silver), or the rambunctious, cigar-chomping New York governor, Al Smith (Danny Webb). “I made the mistake of thinking that if I proposed something which was logical, reasonable, and effective, people would at once see its merits and fall in behind it. . . . They blocked it at every turn,” Moses tells Porter. He says to Connell, “I’m a ditchdigger, I’m not an academic. I put academia behind me. It’s for the young. It’s for the inadequate. . . . The people lack imagination. The job of the leader is to provide it.”
In a swirling, exciting conversation with Smith, Moses explains, “I never ask favors. I ask my due.” On his way out, Smith tells Porter and Connell, “Hard to leave a meeting with Moses without feeling you’ve been robbed. But just as hard to know what the fuck you’ve been robbed of.”
Meanwhile, in the background, Jacobs starts making her case against Moses. “If you think fighting power is fun, I’d advise you to think again,” she says to the audience. The second act moves to 1955, as Jacobs is leading the battle against Moses’s plan to run a sunken highway right through the middle of Washington Square Park. While he claims it is to liberate traffic and offer a desperately needed throughfare into Lower Manhattan, Jacobs, along with fellow activists Shirley Hayes (Alana Maria), Sandy McQuade (Al Coppola), Carole Ames (Krysten Peck), Nicole Savage (Mary Stillwaggon Stewart), and Lewis Mason (Andrew Lewis), are arguing against the project.
Robert Moses (Ralph Fiennes) lets Gov. Al Smith (Danny Webb) know what’s on his mind in Straight Line Crazy (photo by Kate Glicksberg)
Also expressing her displeasure is one of Moses’s newest employees, Mariah Heller (Alisha Bailey), a Black architect with dreams of supporting the public good while harboring nightmares about how Moses’s destruction of the South Bronx negatively impacted her family. “You’re no different from anyone else, Mr. Moses,” she says to him. “Sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong. And in this particular instance, you’re handling things wrong.” Heller represents all the people of color who were seemingly cast aside by Moses through five decades of racist and classist public planning, as brought to light in Robert Caro’s seminal biography, The Power Broker, and by other historians.
But after all that time, Moses is as intransigent as ever. With Porter and Connell still at his side, Moses is even more cold and distant, ultimately a lonely, ill-tempered man whose reputation — for achievements that include Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, the West Side Highway, the United Nations, the state park system, and the Robert Moses Causeway — has been torn down by the wrecking ball of time, faster than it was built.
Directors Nicholas Hytner (Miss Saigon,The History Boys) and Jamie Armitage (Six,Southern Belles) manage to keep things interesting despite several stagnant scenes with lots of sitting and standing around as characters explicate and speechify. George Fenton’s original music, which is thankfully not used very often, is faint and distracting, complicating George Dennis’s sound design.
Webb (King Lear,Pennyworth) injects much-needed electricity as Smith, who is willing to go toe-to-toe with Moses, swilling bourbon, chomping on a stogie, and loudly pontificating on his relationship with the people of New York. You practically get swept up by the wind swirling around him as he marches across the stage.
Silver (Masters of the Air,Sons of the Prophet) and Roddy (Translations,Knives in Hens) are solid as two longtime Moses employees who understand their boss all too well and have remained loyal despite his failure to see them as individuals with lives outside the office. There’s not much Bailey can do in the thankless, anachronistic role of Heller, who openly calls Moses out on his racist tactics; her character seems forced, included primarily as a way for Hare (Plenty,Skylight) to address Moses’s biases.
Fiennes (Schindler’s List,The English Patient), who previously played architect Halvard Solness in Hare’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder and teamed with Hare and Hytner in Hare’s coronavirus play, Beat the Devil, is dazzling as Moses, a larger-than-life figure played by one of the greatest actors of his generation. Fiennes’s previous stage appearances in New York City came on Broadway in 1995 in Hamlet, at BAM in 2000 in Coriolanus and Richard II, and back on Broadway in 2006 in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, all as the title character. When he stands atop an enormous layout of New York on the floor, a man bigger than the city itself, you can the sovereignty that is surging inside him is palpable.
Fiennes’s turn as the iconoclastic Moses was greatly anticipated here: The show’s entire run sold out and resale tickets are available online for between $800 and $1800. It is a giant of a performance; Fiennes, who played Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films, commands the stage with a powerful authority and determination that matches that of Moses himself, although he is much more generous with the actors surrounding him than Moses was to his supporting cast.
It is also fitting that the show, a London Theatre production, takes place at the Shed, the entertainment venue at Hudson Yards, home to a chic, high-end mall and a tourist-attraction sculpture (the Vessel) with a sad history of attracting suicides, next to the West Side train lot, the High Line, and the Javits Center, where buses compete with car traffic. I think not even Moses would know what to make of it all.
