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CARRIE MAE WEEMS: THE SHAPE OF THINGS

Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Shape of Things” continues at the armory through December 31 (photo by Stephanie Berger Photography/Park Avenue Armory)

THE SHAPE OF THINGS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 31, $18
www.armoryonpark.org
carriemaeweems.net

“How do we measure a life?” Carrie Mae Weems asks in her multichannel installation Cyclorama — Conditions, a Video in 7 Parts, the centerpiece of her Park Ave. Armory presentation “The Shape of Things.” Over footage of several women and one man, she asks, “Do we measure it by the forgotten / or by the remembered / by all the near misses and the exhaustion / or by the ability to endure / how / do we measure it by race / by class / by gender / by beauty / and by your lover’s love or your hater’s hate / or by pushing against the wind / against the tide / against family / against tradition / how / or do we measure it by the suffering of our friends and our enemies alike / or by the beginning / or by the end / by the way we confront life / or by the way we confront death?”

“The Shape of Things” is a masterful multidisciplinary examination of where we are today as a nation as we face systemic racism, health and income inequality, police brutality, and the perpetuation of the Big Lie. Through the seven sections of Cyclorama, organized in a large circle of screens, Weems mixes archival footage with new material shot in Syracuse, the Flea Theater, and the Watermill Center of such performers as Nona Hendryx, okwui okpokwasili, Vinson Fraley, Francesca Harper, Carl Hancock Rux, Basil Twist, and dozens of others, depicting modern times as a dangerous circus where Black and brown bodies are in constant threat. The final text is adapted from a commencement address Weems, a MacArthur Fellow, gave to the graduating class of SVA in May 2016 at Radio City Music Hall.

In front of Cyclorama is Seat or Stand and Speak, where attendees can sit in a chair or stand on a box and shout into megaphones. All Blue — A Contemplative Site is a dark space with a few steps leading to a door that opens to the moon and stars, a place of reflection, meditation, and hope. Across the way is Lincoln, Lonnie and Me, a 2012-14 work about presence and absence that is like a “Pepper’s Ghost” carnival sideshow with minstrel elements. Visitors enter an enclosed area bathed in red and stand behind a velvet rope, watching holographic-like projections of ghostly characters as we hear Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”; Weems reads a revised version of the Gettysburg Address; visual artist and activist Lonnie Graham speaks on social change; excerpts from Weems’s 2008 video Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment play, including a reenactment of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; and Weems dresses up as a Playboy bunny to Urge Overkill’s cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.”

The long side gallery features a row of several dioramas paying tribute to victims of racism, from It’s Over — A Diorama, consisting of a swan, candles, balloons, a globe, a fallen column, and photographs, to framed portraits from Weems’s “Missing Links” series from The Louisiana Project, in which she dresses up as various animals in suits, with such titles as “Happiness” and “Despair,” to The Weight, a diorama with three pink helium globes rising out of sculptures of African women’s heads, balancing the tenuous world. Also be on the lookout for a painting of Minerva, shown as a Black goddess, hanging in the hall among the portraits of white military heroes.

From December 9 to 11, dozens of performers activated the space, with live music and dance, film screenings, and panel discussions. But you don’t need others to help you activate the space for yourself as Weems places us firmly in the past, present, and future of an America that is getting more and more difficult to measure every day.

WITNESS

Lauren Elias, Anna Gottlieb, Gene Ravvin, and Nathan Malin discuss antisemitism while on board the virtual MS St. Louis in Witness

WITNESS
Arlekin Players Theatre
Livestreamed select days through January 23, $25
www.arlekinplayers.com/witness

It’s been three quarters of a century since the Holocaust ended, so there are fewer and fewer survivors and witnesses alive to tell the true stories of what happened in the camps of Eastern Europe during WWII. Meanwhile, antisemitism continues to surge around the world amid Holocaust deniers and politicians who misuse and abuse the horror for soundbites and social media memes. Arlekin Players Theatre investigates these issues in its latest interactive online show, Witness. An immersive work that explores antisemitism and desperate migration, the play relates the fate of the MS St. Louis, the German ship that carried more than nine hundred Jewish refugees in May 1939, to the problems of today.

The luxury liner was transporting men, women, and children fleeing the approaching Holocaust, but the ship was turned away by Cuba, Canada, and the United States. Conceived and directed by Arlekin founder and Russian Jewish immigrant Igor Golyak and written by Moscow-based Nana Grinstein with Blair Cadden and Golyak, Witness puts the audience on board the St. Louis, where it begins with a talent show that is based on actual events.

The emcee (Gene Ravvin) believes he is in the present, in a green-screen studio, as he introduces the parade of performers: Liesl Joseph (Esther Golyak) and Gisela Klepl (Elizabeth Sarytchev), who perform “Skating on Glass!” as older versions of themselves (Rimma Gluzman and Polina Vikova) recall Kristallnacht in voice-over; Fritz Buff (Alex Petetsky), who constructs a house of cards and anticipates “joyful days” ahead; Fira (Julia Shikh), who boils a book banned in the USSR; a magician named Marik (Misha Tyutyunik) and his assistant (Jenya Brodskaia); and superheroes Anna (Anna Furman), Olga (Olga Aronova), and Vika (Vika Kovalenko), who call themselves the Elusive Avengers. The audience at home votes on each performance and gains points as they participate.

During each skit, the audience can click on pop-ups to learn more about the contestants, all of whom were real, as well as the actors portraying them. Short biographical sketches include their immigration status and, in the case of the passengers, their fate after the ship was refused entry to America. News crawls onscreen range from the 1930s to the 1990s, which initially confuse the emcee until he figures out what is going on. “The good news is that not only those Jews who left Hamburg in 1939 are sailing with us but also all the Jews that left anywhere are also here,” he explains. “First wave, second wave, third wave. A whole ocean of waves. From USSR, from Germany, from Spain, from Hungary. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, and always. We are all together, ladies and gentlemen. We’re all together. If there is a place to leave, the Jews will find a way.”

After the talent show, the emcee walks through a long, narrow hallway on the ship, encountering people discussing antisemitism, assimilation, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, dual loyalty, and Israel’s right to exist and defend itself as well as frightening vignettes occurring in some of the cabins. Every word of dialogue is based on interviews Golyak conducted with nearly a hundred people; the narrative is smartly organized to avoid clichés, stereotypical rhetoric, and didactic moralizing.

“So basically what they are is Jews who think if we just bend over a little more, if we just assimilate a little bit better than we did in Germany, that somehow miraculously everything will be different than it was in Germany,” Leah (Lauren Elias) says. “And it’s not going to be. I mean, come on. It feels like the only acceptable party line for Israeli people and Jewish people right now is like, ‘Oh my god. We’re sorry we didn’t all die in World War Two. We know that would have been so much easier for you. We are so sorry for the inconvenience.’”

Joseph (Nathan Malin), talking with Leah and Rachel (Anne Gottlieb) about the public reaction to the real-life stabbing of an Orthodox rabbi in Brighton, admits, “Unless you want to tar yourself as unwanted and as a bad person, you keep your mouth shut and you just duck your head, you know?”

Camera operator Austin de Besche films some of the cast during the making of Witness

Lady Liberty (Darya Denisova) occasionally appears to share her thoughts as the emcee repeats, “This can’t happen here. This can’t happen here!” Leah responds, “No, no, no, it can. And it does.”

Arlekin, which has previously dazzled viewers with the one-woman State vs. Natasha Banina and the daring hybrid chekhovOS /an experimental game/ (featuring Jessica Hecht and Mikhail Baryshnikov), a pair of livestreamed interactive shows that pushed the boundaries of online productions, again breaks new ground through its Zero Gravity (zero-G) Virtual Theater Lab with Witness. Set designer and costumer Anna Fedorova, virtual designer Daniel Cormino, sound designer Viktor Semenov, and director of photography and editor Anton Nikolaev make it feel like it’s all taking place on board the St. Louis, with rolling waves and flying birds outside as the ocean liner heads toward its supposed destination.

During the talent show, the audience on the ship looks like ghosts, which in essence is what they are today. At one point, the screen goes dark for several minutes as binaural recordings play through your headphones, as if you’re a passenger, not knowing what’s coming next, or from where. It sent chills through my bones.

As always with Arlekin’s works, each presentation is followed by a talkback in which members of the cast and crew delve into the making of the work, although Golyak is careful not to give away too many secrets. Some of the discussions include experts on antisemitism and the Holocaust, and the audience is encouraged to share experiences in the lively chat. The night I saw Witness, numerous people (including me) described instances of antisemitism they have encountered. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, it is noted, “Bearing witness, so they will know, until the last generation.” A compelling and necessary piece of sociopolitical documentary theater, Witness reminds us all just how important that is.

CANDACE BUSHNELL: IS THERE STILL SEX IN THE CITY?

Candace Bushnell holds nothing back in charming journey through her life and career (photo by Joan Marcus)

IS THERE STILL SEX IN THE CITY?
Daryl Roth Theatre
101 East Fifteenth St. at Union Square
Tuesday – Sunday through February 6, $69 [ed. note: show closed December 19 due to Covid]
istherestillsexinthecity.com
www.darylroththeatre.com

“Good news only” is how Candace Bushnell always answers the phone in her one-woman show, Is There Still Sex in the City? Good news only it will be.

The ninety-minute play is an endearing, self-aware production in which Bushnell, now sixty-three, shares intimate details of her life and career, centering around the gargantuan success she has had with the creation of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), the fictional characters on the HBO smash Sex and the City, based on her series of columns and 1996 book of the same name. The play might be timed to capitalize on the return of Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda in the brand-new follow-up, And Just Like That . . . ,” but Is There Still Sex in the City? stands on its own as an entertaining, appropriately gossipy public confessional from a writer who changed the way the country looked at the lifestyles of women of all ages, sexual and otherwise.

Bushnell, who prefers to be known as Candi (“with a little circle where the dot goes”), leads us from her childhood in Connecticut, where her father pitied her because she was flat-chested — “I’m afraid no man is ever going to love you,” he warns — to her freshman-year flight to New York City when she was nineteen, determined to abandon college and become a writer and win the Pulitzer Prize.

At first she relates, “This New York is not my boyfriend. Pimps stalk Penn Station looking for runaways. Heroin addicts are nodding out on the streets. There’s three card monte, pickpockets, boomboxes, and Hare Krishna parades. It’s dirty. There’s no pooper scooper law, and there’s dog poop everywhere.” But it isn’t long before she is hanging out with the rich and famous, partying at Studio 54, jetting off to Europe, reveling in the abundant sex and drugs — and eventually telling everybody about it, first as Stripe Savage, writing such pieces as “How to Act in a Disco,” then under her real name in a must-read column for the New York Observer.

Candace Bushnell answers the question Is There Still Sex in the City? in one-woman show (photo by Joan Marcus)

“This New York is my boyfriend,” she says later. “Who needs a man when Manhattan itself is abuzz? Maybe it’s the cosmos. Maybe it’s the cocaine.” Her bestselling book, Sex and the City, becomes a hot HBO show, but that doesn’t necessarily result in personal fulfillment as her relationships with Melrose Place creator Darren Star, a much older famous writer, the unnamed actual Mr. Big, and others ultimately fizzle. But she learns to take matters into her own hands as she shares what she is doing today, which is a long jump from where she thought she would be — while still working toward that Pulitzer.

Directed by choreographer Lorin Lotarro (A Taste of Things to Come) with a spicy sweet sense of humor, Is There Still Sex in the City? answers many of the questions people have about Bushnell and her life. It features popular period songs by Sheryl Crow, Cyndi Lauper, Donna Summer, MC Hammer, and Right Said Fred, a parade of fantastic outfits courtesy of costume designer Lisa Zinni, an adorable set by Anna Louizos with an elegant royal couch, a monitor with projections (old photos, TV clips, animation) by Caite Hevner, and stacks of cubes with books, knickknacks, and shoes — lots and lots of shoes, all of which, Bushnell admits, are from her own closet — colorfully lit by Travis McHale.

Bushnell occasionally plays “Real or Not Real,” asking the audience to call out their responses to such questions as “Did I sleep with the hot Calvin Klein underwear model from episode 2?” She doesn’t mind receiving random hoots and hollers and shouts of support, particularly as she reveals her ten life lessons, the first of which is: “I’m a feminist. A mini Gloria Steinem. Have been ever since kindergarten, where I discovered women could only have four jobs: nurse, teacher, secretary, or librarian.”

Bushnell is so warm and gracious that you will forgive a missed line reading here and there, and the Daryl Roth Theatre in Union Square is far too big for such an intimate production. But Is There Still Sex in the City? is a fab treat, a funny and candid New York story that everyone can relate to in one way or another, whether you are a fan of Sex and the City or have never watched or read it. And before or after the show, you can enjoy a cosmo in the downstairs Candi Bar. Like Bushnell says, “Good news only!”

[ed. note: The good news only went so far, as the show had to close on December 19 after Bushnell contracted Covid-19. The plan is for it to eventually return to New York City when the tour gets up and running again.]

THE FIFTH SEASON

Fifth Ave. celebrates the season with holiday sculptures on midtown sidewalks (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Who: Men Singing Carols
What: Free performance for National Caroling Day
Where: The Pulitzer Fountain, 764 Central Park South, across from the Plaza Hotel at Fifth Ave.
When: Monday, December 20, free, 4:00
Why: As part of the Fifth Avenue Association’s “Fifth Season” celebration, Men Singing Carols will perform for free in front of the Pulitzer Fountain by the Plaza Hotel at 4:00 on National Caroling Day, Monday, December 20.

Fifth Ave. sculptures accept donations for City Harvest (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Queens-based a cappella group, founded in 2013 by husband and wife Greg Kefalas and Jen Arvay Kefalas along with Doug Cordes, features bass Kefalas, tenor II Jeffrey Funaro, tenor II Nick Prior, bass Patrick Martini, and bass Seth Bleecker, singing jazz-inflected holiday favorites, nonstandards, and mashups.

A little girl prepares to go for a ride on Fifth Ave. (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The fountain, designed by Thomas Hastings in 1916 and topped by Karl Bitter’s Pomona, has been transformed into a winter oasis, featuring five thousand feet of lighting, thirty-two animal sculptures handcrafted in Brooklyn from Harlequin Designs, two dozen icebergs, and more, with polar bears, penguins, a snow monkey, a snow leopard, and other animals moving around to music by Paul Brill.

A dreidel spins along Fifth Ave. as part of holiday display (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Fifth Season” continues on Fifth Ave. with lit-up sculptures of toys, a Santa mailbox, a dreidel, a hot-air balloon, and a truck shuttling presents through which visitors are encourage to make donations to City Harvest.

MRS. DOUBTFIRE

Daniel Hillard (Rob McClure) goes to extreme measures to see his kids in Mrs. Doubtfire (photo by Joan Marcus)

MRS. DOUBTFIRE
Stephen Sondheim Theatre
124 West 43rd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 8, $79 – $229
mrsdoubtfirebroadway.com

Robin Williams and Stephen Sondheim must be turning over in their graves — or urns. The musical adaptation of Chris Columbus’s overrated hit 1993 movie, Mrs. Doubtfire, in which Williams plays the title character, a divorced actor who dresses up as an older Scottish nanny in order to spend more time with his children, opened earlier this month at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on West Forty-Third St., less than two weeks after the musical genius passed away at the age of ninety-one. Williams died in 2014 at the age of sixty-three.

Mrs. Doubtfire the musical is a labored, inorganic embarrassment, a jaw-droppingly inauthentic mess that is scheduled to run for at least six months on the Great White Way. Tony nominee Rob McClure, the talented star of such duds as Chaplin and Honeymoon in Vegas, dives into the shtick headfirst, but four-time Tony-winning director Jerry Zaks is trapped by Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell’s leaden book and Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick’s trite music and lyrics. Williams was able to make the film somewhat palatable, but McClure never has a chance with the Broadway version.

Just as the movie felt like a retread of Sydney Pollack’s 1982 romantic comedy, Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman plays an unemployed actor who dresses up as an unfashionable older woman in order to get a part on a soap opera, Mrs. Doubtfire the musical offers little we haven’t already seen in the 2019 musical adaptation of Tootsie, which earned ten Tony nominations, winning two awards.

Andre (J. Harrison Ghee) and Frank (Brad Oscar) preen for Wanda Sellner (Charity Angél Dawson) as Daniel (Rob McClure) looks on in Mrs. Doubtfire (photo by Joan Marcus)

Nearly every musical number feels forced and unnatural, as if Zaks (La Cage aux Folles, Hello, Dolly!), choreographer Lorin Lotarro (Waitress, Merrily We Roll Along), and the Kirkpatricks (Something Rotten!) looked around David Korins’s set to find random objects to incorporate into the dancing. When Daniel and the kids start playing air guitar with brooms, well, I considered jumping onstage and sweeping them all away, for the benefit of the audience as well as the performers. Meanwhile, the Spanish restaurant where a critical late scene occurs should be shut down for improper use and storage of musical theater.

The show is primarily set in the Hillard home, where father Daniel (McClure) has plenty of time to hang around with his three kids, Lydia (Analise Scarpaci), Christopher (Jake Ryan Flynn), and Natalie (Avery Sell). While his wife, Miranda (Jenn Gambates), is working hard, putting together a fashion line with her hunk of a partner, Stuart Dunmire (Mark Evans), Daniel is like a fourth child, running around the house with the three of them and breaking things. Lydia finally has had enough and throws him out; when the judge awards full custody to Lydia, Daniel is distraught, ready to do whatever he can to spend time with them again. He is watched closely by court liaison officer Wanda Sellner (Charity Angél Dawson), who will ultimately report back to the judge whether Daniel has an acceptable place to live and a regular job and, therefore, should be allowed to have shared custody.

But it all gets turned upside down and inside out when Daniel hatches the plan to pretend he’s Mrs. Euphegenia Doubtfire — and gets the job as his children’s nanny, taking care of them every weekday afternoon. He has to keep his secret from Lydia as well as the kids, but Wanda is on the prowl, suspicious that something nefarious is going on.

A game cast never has a chance in Mrs. Doubtfire (photo by Joan Marcus)

Brad Oscar and J. Harrison Ghee, as Daniel’s brother, Frank, and Frank’s partner, Andre, respectively, are supposed to provide comic relief (it’s already a comedy, right?) as the designers behind Daniel’s transformation into Mrs. D, but their jokes quickly become repetitive (for example, how Frank has to speak extra loudly every time he tells a lie), and laughing at flamboyant gay minor characters is not as much fun as it was once upon a time. And the scenes with Peter Bartlett as hapless kids’ show host Mr. Jolly (accompanied by Jodi Kimura as humorless channel president Janet Lundy) are not very jolly, unless you find laughing at doddering elderly men hysterical.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” the opening number prophetically asks. The show had to shut down for more than a week because of positive Covid cases; for those of you who had tickets during that time, consider yourselves lucky. [Ed. note: The musical is going on hiatus from January 10 to March 14 “out of concern for the potential long-term employment of everyone who works on Mrs. Doubtfire, and the extended run of the show.”]

THE STREETS OF NEW YORK

Irish Rep revival of The Streets of New York shines a light on greed, poverty, and the power of love (photo by Carol Rosegg)

THE STREETS OF NEW YORK
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 30, $50-$70
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

As the pandemic lockdown lifted and the city opened back up, Irish Rep artistic director Charlotte Moore decided to revisit the company’s 2002 hit, The Streets of New York. “In this time of Covid, I was sure it would be appropriate to rewrite my original director’s note,” Moore explains in the program. “But upon rereading the original, so many things are exactly the same that I have changed my mind. There is still great poverty and hunger, and the heartbreak of lost love never changes. Add to that a worldwide pandemic and a masked society and Boucicault’s eighteenth-century world seems to fit right into our twenty-first with its darkness and restrictions.”

Moore adapted Dublin-born Dion Boucicault’s 1857 play The Poor of New York, itself based on Édouard Louis Alexandre Brisebarre’s Les Pauvres de Paris, adding more than a dozen songs to the Dickensian tale of greed and hardship. The result is a delightful, indelible tale that feels just right for this moment in time, one that I can envision becoming an annual holiday tradition.

The show begins on the eve of the Panic of 1837, which led to an economic depression. “The poor man’s home is a filthy street / You sell your shoes for a scrap of meat,” a man sings. An older couple adds, “The violence of poverty breeds everywhere / And a cloud of injustice hangs in the air/ And till it clears / It could be years / But till it clears / We must survive / And stay alive / On these unholy, shadowy, crime ridden, black hearted, / Blood sodden, filthy, mean / Streets of New York!”

Wealthy banker Gideon Bloodgood (David Hess) is preparing to abscond with his Nassau St. bank’s money when sea captain Patrick Fairweather (Daniel J. Maldonado) arrives after hours to entrust Bloodgood with his life savings before going on a voyage, seeking the banker’s protection of the financial security of his wife and two children. Fairweather departs but returns moments later, changing his mind and demanding his fortune back. But the greedy Bloodgood is not about to surrender his newfound gains, and when Fairweather suddenly drops dead, Bloodgood decides to dump the body and keep the money — but not before one of his clerks, Brendan Badger (Justin Keyes), grabs the signed deposit receipt, hiding it away for a rainy day.

The Puffy family (Polly McKie, Richard Henry, and Jordan Tyson) find a way to smile amid their drudgery in The Streets of New York (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Twenty years later, Bloodgood, accompanied by his ever-faithful butler, Edwards (Price Waldman), is basking in his vast success, built on the cash he stole from Fairweather. While Bloodgood is looking for a suitable husband for his spoiled daughter, Alida (Amanda Jane Cooper), Fairweather’s children, Lucy (DeLaney Westfall) and Paul (Ryan Vona), and widow, Susan (Amy Bodnar), are living in abject poverty in the dangerous area of New York City known as Five Points. Their poor but goodhearted landlord, Dermot Puffy (Richard Henry), has fallen behind on his mortgage payments, so the heartless Bloodgood threatens to evict Puffy, his wife, Dolly (Polly McKie), and their daughter, Dixie (Jordan Tyson), which would leave the Fairweathers homeless as well.

The Fairweathers hope to be saved by Lucy’s childhood love, Mark Livingstone (Ben Jacoby), scion of a well-heeled, prosperous society family, while Alida plots to marry Mark herself to restore the Bloodgood name to respectability even as she fools around with the philandering Duke Vlad (Maldonado). Like her father, it’s only money and appearances that matter. “Isn’t it wonderful to be in control / Who cares if Daddy has to sell his soul / To keep me in accoutrements / To keep me in the things I want / To keep me happy,” Alida selfishly admits. “Allowed to be horrid and rude to everyone / A sense of entitlement is so much fun / I ride whilst poorer people walk, (with a frown) or run! / Oh! How I love being rich!”

As Christmas approaches, some are destined to be showered with yet more wealth while others seem bound for anonymity, struggling to survive day by day in the perilous gutters of an uncaring metropolis. The very best kind of mustache-twirling melodrama ensues as the plot leaps and twists to its conclusion.

Robber baron Gideon Bloodgood (David Hess) and his obnoxious daughter (Amanda Jane Cooper) boss around their butler (Price Waldman) in The Streets of New York (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Moore, who with Irish Rep producing director Ciarán O’Reilly created some of the most compelling and innovative online shows during the pandemic, goes back to the basics with The Streets of New York. Linda Fisher’s period costumes feel authentic, and Hugh Landwehr’s set, covered with giant bills and help wanted ads, is centered by a large wall that the actors and masked staff members move around, magically morphing into the Bloodgoods’ opulent home and office as well as doomed tenements in Five Points.

The five-piece orchestra is partially visible offstage right, consisting of Melanie Mason on cello, Jeremy Clayton on woodwinds, Karen Lindquist on harp, Sean Murphy on bass, and Joel Lambdin on violin, performing lovely orchestrations by music director Mark Hartman and associate conductor Yasuhiko Fukuoka.

Two-time Tony nominee Moore, who previously directed Boucicault’s London Assurance in addition to plays by O’Casey, Yeats, Friel, and Synge and such musicals as Meet Me in St. Louis and Love, Noël: The Letters and Songs of Noël Coward, gives ample room for the material, which often evokes operetta, to breathe on the cramped stage, the two and a half hours (with intermission) never slowing down for a minute. Moore’s lyrics do what they’re supposed to, help develop the narrative and give depth to the characters; nary a word is extraneous. Barry McNabb’s choreography shines in the vaudevillian duet “Villains,” a riotous showstopper featuring Hess and Keyes. Cooper brings down the house in her engaging solo, “Oh, How I Love Being Rich,” her obnoxious coquettishness channeling Bernadette Peters and Kristen Chenoweth. (She’s worked onstage with Chenoweth several times.) Hess stands out as the scoundrel Bloodgood, reveling in his egomaniacal affairs, while Jacoby is heart-wrenching as a man who just wants to do the right thing but is thwarted at every turn.

Still caught up in a pandemic and social justice movement that have magnified the sorry state of income inequality in America, The Streets of New York doesn’t feel old-fashioned as much as fresh and prescient. We all want a “taste of the good life,” as the Puffys explain, but it’s not always within reach. However, the power of love — and a delightful musical — has the ability to transcend suffering and bring light to lead us out

CLYDE’S

Clyde (Uzo Aduba) keeps a close watch on her employees in new Lynn Nottage play (photo by Joan Marcus)

CLYDE’S
Helen Hayes Theater
240 West 44th St.
Through January 16, $49-$149 (livestream January 4-16, $59)
2st.com/shows/clydes

If there’s a better living American playwright working today than Lynn Nottage, you’ll have to convince me.

The Brooklyn-born two-time Pulitzer Prize winner is back on Broadway with the delectable comedy Clyde’s, continuing at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater through January 16. The ninety-minute play is set in the kitchen of a roadside diner in Berks County, Pennsylvania, run by the fierce and dominating Clyde (Uzo Aduba), who spent time in jail and exclusively hires ex-cons. But Clyde is no saint, helping the downtrodden out of the goodness of her heart; instead, she abuses her staff with vicious delight, insulting them with zinging barbs, threatening their employment, and sexually harassing them.

The kitchen crew consists of Tish (Kara Young), a single mother with an unreliable ex; Rafael (Reza Salazar), a twentysomething who is enamored with Tish; and the wise sage Montrellous (Ron Cephas Jones), a sandwich guru who avoids talking about his personal life. They are joined by Jason (Edmund Donovan), who is fresh out of the big house, complete with white supremacist gang tattoos on his face, neck, and arms.

“He tell you what happens if I catch any of you morons stealing? Breaking my rules?” Clyde tells Jason, referring to Rafael. “I don’t go to the police. I deal with it my way. Understand?” Later, Rafael warns Jason, “Bro, it’s real. Do not cross her. She’ll make you suffer.”

Montrellous is the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Yoda, the Zen master of the kitchen. He raises sandwich making to an art. “You know why I love the sandwich?” Montrellous says. “’Cuz it’s a complete meal that you can hold between your fingers. It’s the most democratic of all foods. Two pieces of bread, and between, you can put anything you want. It invites invention and collaboration.” Rafael responds, “Jesus, I make a sandwich every day, but somehow your shit always tastes like the truth.” Montrellous adds, “It’s about order, baby. I’m interested in the composition, it’s not merely about flavor. Dig? I think about the balance of ingredients and the journey I want the consumer to take with each bite. Then finally how I can achieve oneness with the sandwich.” It’s also a metaphor for (re)building one’s life.

Rafael (Reza Salazar), Tish (Kara Young), Montrellous (Ron Cephas Jones), and Jason (Edmund Donovan) search for the perfect sandwich in Clyde’s (photo by Joan Marcus)

Whenever Montrellous begins to wax poetic about potential combinations, the lights take on a sepia tone, as if sacred word is descending from the heavens. (The expert lighting is by Christopher Akerlind.) Tish and Rafael make offerings of their own unique flavor profiles, looking to Montrellous for his approval like students trying to please their teacher (or father). Jason, who at first doesn’t care about kitchen hygiene or carefully developed recipes, soon takes part as well, learning that the sandwich is much more than just a bunch of stuff between two slices of bread.

But no matter how hard they try to make the perfect sandwich, Clyde continually shoots them down, not giving a damn about quality but only that they fill orders as fast as they can. In one hysterical scene, she pops up over and over again in the cut-out window, from multiple angles, leaving order slip after order slip as Tish, Rafael, Jason, and Montrellous hustle to keep pace. She also occasionally brings in questionable ingredients that probably fell off a truck somewhere, insisting the staff use them no matter the expiration date or the stench. It all comes to a head when investors are scheduled to meet with Clyde to help her out of some financial problems.

Takeshi Kata’s functional kitchen set serves as a kind of way station, a limbo or purgatory where the characters exist between their prior incarceration and the freedom of the real world. Clyde is like the judge, jury, and executioner over what Nottage calls in a program note a “liminal space,” as she constantly reminds them where they’ve been while disparaging any hope they might have for a better future. As Montrellous says, “And you know what they say, ’cuz you left prison don’t mean you outta prison. But, remember everything we do here is to escape that mentality. This kitchen, these ingredients, these are our tools. We have what we need. So, let’s cook.” He later explains, “This sandwich is my strength. This sandwich is my victory. This sandwich is my freedom.”

As the fiery Clyde, three-time Emmy winner Aduba (Orange Is the New Black, Mrs. America), who has appeared in such stage works as Coram Boy, Godspell, and The Maids, might refuse to taste any of Montrellous’s sandwiches, but she devours the scenery. She storms into each scene in a different outrageously jaw-dropping costume by Jennifer Moeller, with dazzling colors and remarkable shoes. Aduba and Emmy winner Cephas Jones (This Is Us, Hurt Village) complement each other beautifully, Montrellous’s calmness balancing her fiery fury.

Clyde (Uzo Aduba) and Montrellous (Ron Cephas Jones) have different ideas about the future in new Broadway play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Salazar (Richard II, Oedipus El Rey) and Young (All the Natalie Portmans, Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven) form a delicate but poignant duo, facing their own demons and dependencies. Donovan (Greater Clements, Lewiston/Clarkston) ably fits well right in the middle of it all, lending an intriguing unpredictability to Jason, who’s struggling to get through every day and avoid going back to prison.

Kate Whoriskey, who previously directed Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Sweat and Ruined, knows just what to do with Nottage’s words, bringing them to life with a scintillating intelligence, capturing the rhythm of her language and the depth of her characters. Clyde’s might be hilariously funny, but it is serious about the revolving door of the prison system, immigration, income inequality, sexism, racism, greed, and power, its own seven deadly sins.

In just the last dozen years or so, Nottage has given us Sweat, Ruined, Mlima’s Tale, The Secret Life of Bees, and revivals of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine, with the Michael Jackson musical MJ and an opera adaptation of her 2003 play, Intimate Apparel, up next. That’s quite a banquet. And as a bonus dessert, performances from the Hayes Theater will be simulcast live online January 4-16 ($59), filmed by five to seven cameras.

In his final appearance on The David Letterman Show in October 2002, musician Warren Zevon, discussing his terminal cancer, said about life, “Enjoy every sandwich.” With Lynn Nottage, that’s an easy order to fill.