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MACBETH

Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga star as a devious husband and wife in Sam Gold’s unusual take on the Scottish play at the Longacre (photo by Joan Marcus)

MACBETH
Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 10, $35-$425
macbethbroadway.com

As you enter the Longacre Theatre to see the latest conjuring of Macbeth, the thane’s first appearance on the Great White Way since Terry Hands’s 2000 version with Kelsey Grammer lasted just thirteen performances, the sparse stage is a scene of activity. On one side, three people are cooking soup while listening to a podcast. Various others wander about or are busy in the wings. Front and center, the ghost light glows — a superstition that is believed to keep at bay supernatural beings who haunt theaters and can curse shows, although it usually is turned on only after everyone has left and the venue is empty. During the pandemic lockdown, many theaters kept their ghost lights on in the hope of eventually returning. Thus, once inside the Longacre, you feel as if you’ve walked into some kind of rehearsal that is getting ready to close up for the night.

More than any other of his major works, Shakespeare’s 1606 tragedy invites experimentation of a high order. In the past fifteen years, I’ve seen no fewer than ten adaptations of the Scottish play, including an all-women version that took place at a contemporary girls school, a re-creation of Orson Welles’s radio production, a presentation that required the audience to make its way through a dark heath to get to their seats, one set during the cold war and prominently featuring a bevy of video projections, another occurring inside the head of an institutionalized man, and a mashup with a Japanese manga that moved the action to a blue boxing ring.

Like King Lear, it also attracts big-name star power; among those who have portrayed the thane of Cawdor in New York since 2006 are Sir Patrick Stewart, Ethan Hawke, Sir Kenneth Branagh, Alan Cumming, Liev Schreiber, and Corey Stoll. Now comes James Bond himself, Daniel Craig, in a production helmed by Tony and Obie winner Sam Gold, who is responsible for the much-derided 2019 Broadway revival of Lear with Glenda Jackson in the title role.

Macbeth (Daniel Craig) speaks with a pair of murderers (Danny Wolohan and Michael Patrick Thornton) in Shakespeare adaptation (photo by Joan Marcus)

While the trio, who turn out to be the three witches (portrayed alternately by Phillip James Brannon, Bobbi MacKenzie, Maria Dizzia, Che Ayende, Eboni Flowers, and Peter Smith), continue stirring the pot, Michael Patrick Thornton, who plays the nobleman Lennox, wheels onto the stage and provides a curtain speech about James I’s obsession with witches in the seventeenth century while also asking the audience to, all at once, shout out the name of the show, which is supposed to bring bad luck when spoken inside a theater. Very few people joined in.

Gold has pared down the production to the point where no single actor is the star; there’s an equality among the diverse cast that does not force us to swoon at either Craig or Oscar, Emmy, and Olivier nominee Ruth Negga as Lady Macbeth and instead allows the audience to appreciate the other participants. The text is delivered without many flourishes, as famous lines come and go at a regular pace, with some favorites getting cut; for example, the witches never say, “Double, double toil and trouble.” The actors are dressed in Suttirat Larlarb’s contemporary costumes; Macbeth’s succession from military jacket to paisley bathrobe to fluffy white fur coat is a hoot.

Christine Jones’s set is the antithesis of royalty; the “thrones” are two old, ratty chairs, and the banquet table lacks fancy dinnerware. The crown worn by King Duncan (Paul Lazar) is just plain silly, like a high school prop, but even funnier is when Lazar, following the monarch’s murder, removes his fat suit in front of us and proceeds to play other characters. There is much doubling and tripling of actors, so it’s not always clear who’s who. Amber Gray excels as Banquo and her ghost but is seen later as a gentlewoman. Danny Wolohan is Seyton, a lord, a murderer, and a bloody captain who has lost part of one leg. Emeka Guindo is both Fleance and young Siward. Downtown legend Lazar also shows up as old Siward and the porter, who, in front of the curtain, discusses with Macduff (Grantham Coleman, though I saw understudy Ayende) and Lennox how drink affects sexual prowess. To further the comparison, Macbeth later pops open a can of light beer.

Jeremy Chernick’s special effects feature lots of blood, some of which is added to the simmering soup (along with innards). As Macbeth warns, “Blood will have blood.”

Three witches (Phillip James Brannon, Bobbi MacKenzie, Maria Dizzia) stir up a cauldron of trouble in Macbeth (photo by Joan Marcus)

So what’s it all about? Though uneven, Gold’s adaptation subverts our expectations about stardom, Broadway, and Shakespeare. It’s hard to believe that this is the same story told with such fierce elegance by Joel Coen in his 2021 Oscar-nominated film, The Tragedy of Macbeth, with a dominating Denzel Washington as Macbeth and a haunting Frances McDormand as his devious partner. In fact, under Gold’s supervision, the real standout is Thornton, who relates to the audience with a sweet warmth and playful sense of humor. However, as Macbeth also says, “And nothing is, but what is not.”

Gold (Fun Home; A Doll’s House, Part 2) previously directed Craig (Betrayal, A Steady Rain) as Iago in an intimate and compelling Othello at New York Theatre Workshop and Oscar Isaac in Hamlet at the Public; Negga has played Ophelia at London’s National Theatre and Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse. The ads for Macbeth might push the star draw of this new production, but that is not what Gold is focusing on.

He may not be making any grand statements about lust, greed, and power, but he is investigating the common foibles of humanity, the desires we all have and our considerations of how far we will go to achieve them. Is he completely successful? No, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t given us an intriguing, provocative, unconventional, absurdly comic, and, yes, highly entertaining production of one of the greatest tragedies ever written.

As Lady Macbeth advises, “What’s done, cannot be undone.”

CHASING ANDY WARHOL

Audience members chase Andy Warhol through the East Village in immersive production (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

CHASING ANDY WARHOL
Astor Plaza, Broadway at East Eighth St.
Thursday, Friday, and Sunday through June 12, $80
online slide show
www.chasingandywarhol.com
www.batedbreaththeatre.org

The world has spent more than half a century chasing Andy Warhol. Our obsession with Drella, as he was known to his close friends — a combination of Dracula and Cinderella — developed quickly from his carefully constructed public image, his genre-busting films and Pop art, his (and our) fascination with celebrity, and the beautiful and unusual people he surrounded himself with, beginning with his emergence as an art superstar and fashion icon in the 1960s and continuing well past his death in 1987 at the age of fifty-eight.

In the last few years alone, works by or about Warhol, born Andrew Warhola Jr. in Pittsburgh, have been part of such exhibitions and films as “Andy Warhol: Photo Factory” at Fotografiska, the Todd Haynes documentary The Velvet Underground, “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the Brooklyn Museum, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,”“Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks at the Guggenheim,” and “Alice Neel: People Come First” at the Met in addition to the brand-new Netflix series The Andy Warhol Diaries.

Now comes Chasing Andy Warhol, a guerrilla-theater-like immersive presentation by the Manhattan-based Bated Breath company in which an audience of no more than sixteen at a time follows Andy Warhol through the streets of the East Village, not far from many of his old haunts. The show begins in Astor Plaza, where you are given an old red plastic View Master to look at some photo collages to get you in the mood. Then an excited young “tour guide” (Jmonet Hill, Annika Rudolph, or Fé Torres; I saw Rudolph, who was delightfully energetic), carrying a small suitcase and a boombox (through which she blasts the soundtrack) and identifying herself as the world’s biggest Andy fan, is surprised by a pair of Warhols in blue dresses and heels — one of whom pops a small balloon that has the word “art” on it. They run off, and she sets out to find him.

As she leads us down Lafayette and Bowery to Great Jones and Bleecker, there are wigged Warhols in blue, black, and white everywhere (Kat Berton, Grayson Bradshaw, Alysa Finnegan, Teal French-Levine, Youran Lee, Marisa Melito, Luca Villa), but she is after the “real” one in red (Jake Malavsky, Brandon P. Raines, or Kyle Starling). The multiple Andys evoke Warhol’s silkscreen style of printing multiple images of Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse, flowers, Elvis Presley, and other subjects in different colors.

Along the way, as the tour guide shares snippets about Warhol’s life and art, we encounter a puppet of child Andy (operated by Taylor McKenzie or Kayla Prestel) watching Ginger Rogers (Finnegan) posing in an empty white frame; Warhol and the puppet looking into a mirror that describes one of his medical disorders, Saint Vitus’ dance, which affected his movement; Andy engaging in a flirtatious dance with a hot basketball player (Mitchell Ashe) involving a wheeled fashion rack; a movie star (Katherine Winter) posing for paparazzi in front of a Chase bank (Chase — get it?); a dance in an alcove of stone chess tables; and fated meetups with Valerie Solanas (Alessandra Ruiz, who also plays Warhol’s mother, Julia) — just wait till you see what she uses for a gun — and Edie Sedgwick (Antonia Santangelo) in a glittering short dress.

Andy is never without his camera, and the audience is encouraged to take photos and video, but don’t get too caught up in documenting it or you’ll miss lots of cute small touches and clever references. A significant part of the fun is also watching people on the street passing by, wondering what’s going on. Of course, they immediately know it’s Warhol — has there ever been a more recognizable figure in New York City? — and many of them stop and take pictures, big smiles on their faces. But as one of the lucky sixteen audience members, wearing a clearly visible yellow Andy sticker, you can’t help but feel special, like you’re part of Warhol’s inner Factory circle. And the cast, which performs the seventy-five-minute show in forty-five-minute overlapping intervals, deserves extra kudos for strutting their stuff on the sidewalks of New York, particularly during these fraught times, where anything can happen at any time.

Chasing Andy Warhol is created and directed by Bated Breath artistic director Mara Lieberman, with fanciful choreography by Rachel Leigh Dolan, jubilant costumes by Christopher F. Metzger, sets by Christian Fleming, Meg McGuigan, and Jerry Schiffer, lighting by Joyce Liao, and sound and projections by Mark Van Hare. I have to admit that I was disappointed in two of the company’s recent indoor productions, Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec and Beneath the Gavel, but now I’m kicking myself for having missed its immersive, outdoor, on-the-move Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec, which they staged during the pandemic.

Chasing Andy Warhol concludes in an empty bar, where Warhol’s legacy as the original social media superstar is briefly explored. Could there ever have been a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok without Warhol’s obsession with public image and infectious celebration of celebrity and oneself? And, in turn, our obsession with Warhol, who managed his public persona like no one else?

“I am a deeply superficial person,” Warhol said. He also pointed out, “It’s not what you are that counts; it’s what they think you are.” In Chasing Andy Warhol, Lieberman and her talented team delve into the complex enigmatic character in unique, spirited ways, without avoiding his blemishes, as they pursue the mystery that was, and ever will be, Andy Warhol.

HOMECOMING: DANCE

Who: Marc Nuñez and Gotham Dance Theater, Candace Brown and Soul Project Dance
What: World premiere dance works
Where: The Tank’s Proscenium Theater, 312 West 36th St.
When: April 29 – May 13, $35-$50
Why: The Tank’s 2022 Homecoming Season, which began with Miriam Pultro’s rock requiem Glass Town, the Cybertank fiction game Feast, and Ioli Andreadi and Aris Asproulis’s history play Filiki Eteria: The Brotherhood behind the Revolution, continues with a pair of world-premiere dances dealing with crisis, adversity, and recovery.

First up is Gotham Dance Theater’s re:motions, running April 29 to May 8. Directed and choreographed by Marc Nuñez, who founded GDT in 2015 as a contemporary and street dance company dedicated to social involvement and diversity, the piece, a melding of music, movement, and theater, looks at love and loss in a world overtaken by technology; it will be danced by writer Nadia Khayrallah, rehearsal assistants Davonna Batt and Michaela Ternasky-Holland, and Sarina Gonzalez, Celinna Haber, Jasmine Huang, and Stephanie Shin, with spoken-word narration by Lyndsay Dru Corbett.

May 4-13 brings Candace Brown’s While We Wait: A Tale of Fallen Fruit to the Tank’s Proscenium Theater, the evening-length debut from the dancer, teacher, director, and choreographer’s new company, Soul Project Dance. Exploring love and community while inspiring and uplifting both the artists and the audience, the work will be performed by Julia Alaimo, Andrew Mulet, Hamly Tavarez, Jada Clark, Masumi Hambayashi, Byron Tittle, Nicole Cardona, Jackie Torres, Caitlin Marks, Jay Mills, LJ Bologna, and Leah Joy Faircloth.

FIDDLER’S JOURNEY TO THE BIG SCREEN

Star Chaim Topol and director-producer Norman Jewison kid around on the set of Fiddler on the Roof

FIDDLER’S JOURNEY TO THE BIG SCREEN (Daniel Raim, 2022)
Angelika Film Center
18 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, April 29
www.angelikafilmcenter.com
zeitgeistfilms.com

Daniel Raim takes viewers behind the scenes of the making of one of the most beloved musicals of all time in Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen, opening April 29 at the Angelika. Raim follows the development of the 1964 Broadway smash Fiddler on the Roof, which ran for 3,242 performances and won nine of the ten Tonys it was nominated for, into the classic 1971 film that was up for eight Oscars and won three.

The documentary is anchored by a series of talks with Fiddler’s director and producer, Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison, who had previously made The Cincinnati Kid, In the Heat of the Night, and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming and would go on to direct and produce Jesus Christ Superstar, A Soldier’s Story, and Mooonstruck. One of the first things we learn about Jewison is that he isn’t Jewish.

Recalling the initial meeting he had with United Artists executives, Jewison recalls, “[Studio head] Arthur Krim looked at me and he says, ‘What would you say if we were to say we want you to produce and direct Fiddler on the Roof?’ And my heart came up into my mouth and I thought, Oh my G-d. And I looked over, waited, and they waited, and they all kind of leaned forward. They thought, What is he waiting for? And then I said, ‘What would you say if I told you I’m a goy?’” He got the job because, as Krim explained, “We want a film for everybody.”

Documentary goes behind the scenes of the making of Fiddler on the Roof

Raim incorporates old and/or new interviews with vibrant lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who turns ninety-eight on April 30 (the score was composed by Jerry Bock, who passed away in 2010); musical director and conductor John Williams, who is featured extensively; production designer Robert F. Boyle, who was Raim’s professor at AFI; cinematographer Oswald Morris; American film critic Kenneth Turan; and Israeli star Chaim Topol, who nabbed the role of Tevye from Zero Mostel, who played the anguished, deeply religious father on Broadway. The film is worth seeing just for the lovely interviews with the three actresses who portrayed the three oldest daughters, none of whom marry the men their parents prefer: Rosalind Harris (Tzeitel), Michele Marsh (Hodel), and Neva Small (Chava). “What a gift I was given,” Marsh, nearly in tears, remembers.

Discussing his approach to the cross-cultural nature of the story, which was based on the 1894 Yiddish tales of Tevye the dairyman by Sholem Aleichem, Jewison points out, “Themes of family is universal; everybody has a family — good or bad, right or wrong, we all have a family, and we all have our little problems. But we all end up sitting around the table. And I thought, this is so common, this is something people can understand. They can understand a family. They can understand Golde. They can understand Tevye; they can understand his problems with life and his relationship to G-d. I think all of these things, all put together, make the story of Fiddler on the Roof so compelling.”

More than a dozen years in the making, Fiddler’s Journey can be a bit scattershot and is supplemented with occasional narration by Jeff Goldblum that feels like filler, consisting primarily of excerpts from Jewison’s This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me, Alisa Solomon’s Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof, and Morris’s Huston, We Have a Problem: A Kaleidoscope of Filmmaking Memories. Unfortuntely, these distract from the main narrative, which is packed with fabulous details about everything from the construction of the synagogue, Frank Sinatra’s desire to play Tevye, and the stocking Boyle placed over the lens of the camera to the influence of Marc Chagall’s paintings, Harris understudying Bette Midler onstage, and the involvement of Isaac Stern.

The wealth of material includes archival stills and film footage, Mentor Huebner’s storyboards, and photos by Roman Vishniac that inspired the look of the movie, which was shot in Lekenik in what was then Yugoslavia. There are also in-depth looks at such treasured songs as “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” and “Do You Love Me?”

The Fiddler on the Roof movie might be fifty years old now, but its impact is as powerful and, sadly, as relevant as ever. “One of the things that Fiddler is about: Nothing is permanent,” Turan says. Long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine — Aleichem was born and raised in Kyiv — the show (most recently revived in Yiddish by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage) and the film captured the pain of refugees forced to leave their home. Raim’s (Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story, The Man on Lincoln’s Nose about Boyle) documentary was completed prior to the invasion, but it’s impossible to watch it without thinking about all the Anatevkas we see on the news every day, in Ukraine and around the world.

(Raim will be at the Angelika on April 29 and 30 for Q&As following the 7:25 screenings, joined by Small and Harris.)

THE YES MEN CLOSING RECEPTION / CATALOG LAUNCH

Gilda, Dow’s Golden Skeleton, is part of Yes Men retrospective at carriage trade (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Who: The Yes Men
What: Exhibition closing reception and catalog launch
Where: carriage trade, 277 Grand St.
When: Friday, April 29, free, 6:00
Why: For a quarter-century, the Yes Men — Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (or Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) — have been confronting corporate greed and environmental neglect through “identity-correcting” hijinks in which they portray fake entrepreneurs and spokespeople at actual press conferences, conventions, and television news programs. They build realistic sham websites and use forged IDs to gain entrance to locations they have no business being at as they take on George W. Bush, Dow Chemical, the World Trade Organization, ExxonMobil, the New York Times and the New York Post, HUD in New Orleans, the US Chamber of Commerce, Shell Oil, VW, and, most recently, the United Nations COP26 summit. They pull off the pranks with ingenuity, bold daring, and a wild sense of humor, as evidenced by their hysterical “SurvivaBall,” which is on view at carriage trade’s small but terrific Yes Men retrospective.

The show, which has been extended several times because of popular demand, features Dow’s Golden Skeleton, named Gilda, a gold skeleton wearing a beauty contest sash that declares her an “acceptable risk”; a wall of fake Chevron street ads, riffing on the company’s “We Agree” campaign, making such claims as “I can see sludge & dead birds from my window” with a photo of Sarah Palin, “I’m living like there’s no tomorrow because there isn’t one” with a photo of Don Draper from Mad Men, “We lie and we don’t care — we love money — fuck the world!” with a photo of Jim Carrey from Liar Liar, and “To prove us likes you us will smash your planet” with a picture of Bizarro Superman; a vitrine of ExxonMobil Vivoleum phallus candles made from the skin of the “late” climate change victim Reggie Watts; and copies of a fake New York Times edition that proclaims, “Iraq War Ends,” “Maximum Wage Law Succeeds,” and “Ex-Secretary Apologizes for W.M.D. Scare,” which you can take home and read to your heart’s delight. There is also a case of newspaper and magazine articles and legal cease and desist orders sent to the Yes Men, a collection of fake IDs they’ve used, a pictorial history of the Golden Phallus stunt, and a room where twenty of their short and full-length films are on continuous rotation, from 1996’s Bringing IT to YOU! to 2021’s “Total Disaster” excerpt from The Fixers.

On April 29 at 6:00, carriage trade will be hosting the closing reception of the exhibition, along with the launch of the seventy-two-page catalog ($25; $20 at the reception). There’s no telling who might be there and in what capacity, so be ready for anything. (For more on the show, check out Montez Press Radio’s interview with Jacques Servin and carriage trade’s Peter Scott here.)

HARKNESS MAIN STAGE SERIES: AMOC’S WITH CARE

AMOC’s With Care comes to the 92nd St. Y this week (photo by Natalia Perez)

Who: Bobbi Jene Smith, Or Schraiber, Keir GoGwilt, Miranda Cuckson
What: New York City premiere of work by AMOC (American Modern Opera Company)
Where: Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd St. Y Harkness Dance Center, 1395 Lexington Ave. at Ninety-Second St., and online
When: In person Thursday, April 28, $30, 8:00; online April 29, noon, to May 1, midnight, $15
Why: In November 2018, married former Batsheva dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber debuted With Care at ODC Theater in San Francisco, a co-commission with AMOC (American Modern Opera Company). The piece, which explores caregiving, carelessness, and loss — as perceived prior to the pandemic, when those issues took center stage — was created by Smith in collaboration with violinist Keir GoGwilt; the latter performs with violinist Miranda Cuckson as current L.A. Dance Project artists-in-residence Smith and Schraiber, portraying a caregiver and a wounded spirit, move around them.

Directed by Smith and featuring music by AMOC cofounder Matthew Aucoin, the work includes chairs, small wooden slats, and sand with dance, music, and spoken word that should take on new meaning in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis. “The original impetus for With Care came out of the last section of my previous work with Keir, A Study on Effort,” Smith said in a statement. “This piece consists of seven efforts, the last of which is the effort of taking care. We thought to expand this study of emotional and physical labor into a theatrical context, investigating the dynamics of caregiving and taking between four characters. Adding Or and Miranda opened a world in which the dynamics of care spiral from empathy to apathy. The more our characters attempt to break free from this cycle, the more they become lost in the maze of their commitments to each other. Yet ultimately the only solace they find is in each other. Never stop caring.”

With Care will be performed live at the 92nd St. Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall on April 28 at 8:00; a recording will be available online from April 29 at noon to May 1 at midnight. For more on Smith and Schraiber, check out Boaz Yakin’s 2019 film, Aviva, and Elvira Lind’s 2017 documentary, Bobbi Jene. The Harkness Main Stage Series continues in May with the Future Dance Festival and in June with Jonathan Fredrickson of Tanztheater Wuppertal.

CREDO: THE DESSOFF CHOIRS PERFORMS MARGARET BONDS

The Dessoff Choirs presents a cantata by Margaret Bonds made in collaboration with Langston Hughes and inspired by the words of W E B. Du Bois

Who: The Dessoff Choirs
What: New York premieres of cantatas by Margaret Bonds
Where: Church of the Heavenly Rest, 1085 Fifth Ave. at Ninetieth St.
When: Thursday, April 28, $20-$40, 6:45 talk, 7:30 concert
Why: “I believe in God who made of one blood all races that dwell.” So begins W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1904 prose poem Credo, which served as inspiration for African American composer, pianist, teacher, and Chicago native Margaret Bonds’s piano/vocal score that is part of the Dessoff Choirs’ presentation of a pair of New York premieres of cantatas by Bonds, taking place April 28 at the Church of the Heavenly Rest. The company, which was founded in 1924 by Margarete Dessoff, previously released the recording The Ballad of the Brown King & Selected Songs, centered around Bonds’s 1954 collaboration with Langston Hughes about Balthazar, one of the three kings who visited the baby Jesus. At the Heavenly Rest, the Dessoff Choirs, joined by a full orchestra, Grammy-winning bass-baritone Dashon Burton, soprano soloist Janinah Burnett, and the Carter Legacy Singers, will perform I Believe: Credo and Simon Bore the Cross, the latter also a collaboration with Hughes.

“Dessoff is dedicated to performing rarely heard choral masterpieces,” Dessoff music director Malcolm J. Merriweather said in a statement. “We are thrilled to cast a spotlight on Margaret Bonds’s neglected but important contribution to the American music canon. She is a forgotten voice for civil rights that must be remembered, appreciated, and cherished. It seems the time has come for Bonds’s voice to be heard.” The program begins with a preconcert talk at 6:45, followed at 7:30 by Dr. Rollo Dilworth’s seven-movement choral symphony version of Credo and Bonds’s Easter cantata, about Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus’ cross; the work was found in a dumpster at a book fair, along with other scores of hers.