live performance

BIRTHDAY CANDLES

Ernestine (Debra Messing) lives a relatively simple life in Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles (photo by Joan Marcus)

BIRTHDAY CANDLES
American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 29, $39-$250
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

“Have I wasted my life?” Ernestine (Debra Messing) asks her mother, Alice (Susannah Flood), at the beginning of Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles, continuing through May 29 at the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre.

Haidle’s Broadway debut is a touching and bittersweet, if at times Hallmark-y, look at ninety years in the life of an average American woman in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The play is built around her annual preparation of her birthday cake, a recipe handed down from mother to daughter in their family. Each scene takes place in the same kitchen, which never changes. Ernestine wears essentially the same costume (by Toni-Leslie James) in every scene as she ages, the time shifts indicated only by a sharp chime that arrives in the middle of the action and contextual clues given by the dialogue and the outfits of the other characters, which range from her boyfriend and future husband, Matt (Tony nominee John Earl Jelks), to her numbers-obsessed neighbor, Kenneth (Enrico Colantoni), who has a serious crush on her, to a parade of children, their spouses, their children, etc. (Jelks, Crystal Finn, Susannah Flood, and Christopher Livingston play multiple roles, their character not always immediately apparent as the next generation arrives. I saw understudy Brandon J. Pierce stepping in for Livingston.)

Ernestine serves as a witness to birth and death, illness and infidelity, success and failure, devoid of any references to the outside world. Whereas Jack Crabb, portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in Arthur Penn’s 1970 epic revisionist Western Little Big Man, spends his 121-year life on the road, meeting famous people (General Custer, Wild Bill Hickok), encountering a diverse series of events (battles with Native Americans, saloon shootouts, getting married and operating a small store), and watching everything change around him, Ernestine lives in a self-contained bubble, with no inkling of what is happening in society at large; there are no references to politics, sports, entertainment, anything that can put us in a specific time and place, only what is occurring within the family at any given moment, and always on her birthday. Another signifier is Ernestine’s annual measurements penciled on a doorframe; she grows taller until she begins shrinking as an old woman. Birthday Candles also recalls Thornton Wilder’s 1931 The Long Christmas Dinner, a one-act play that covers ninety years of the Bayard clan without ever leaving the dining room.

The show opens as Ernestine is turning seventeen, filled with the excitement of all that life offers. “I am a rebel against the universe. I will wage war with the everyday. I am going to surprise God!” she announces to her mother, who is more concerned with teaching her daughter the basic but cherished recipe for the cake.

Ninety years pass by in ninety minutes in Birthday Candles (photo by Joan Marcus)

“Eggs, butter, sugar, salt. The humblest ingredients,” Alice tells Ernestine. “But when you turn back and look far enough, you see atoms left over from creation,” implying that the history of the family — perhaps of humanity itself — is embodied in the cake.

Ernestine responds, “Stardust. The machinery of the cosmos is all here, I get it. Will you help me with my audition?”

Ernestine is practicing for the lead in her high school’s gender-switching production of Queen Lear, signaling that Birthday Candles is going to be a matriarchal tale about mothers and children; the men play second fiddle. “Madam, do you know me?” Alice reads as Cordelia. Ernestine, as the queen, answers, “You are a spirit, I know. When did you die?” In King Lear, the elderly monarch starts losing his mind as he deals with his three daughters, the calculating Regan and Goneril and the youngest, Cordelia, the only one who truly loves him. By having Alice reading the part of Cordelia and Ernestine portraying Lear, Haidle is alerting us to the casting choices and plot that follow.

As time marches on, new characters enter and old characters depart, the future replacing the past. Jelks portrays Ernestine’s husband, Matt, and their son, Billy; Finn is Billy’s wife, Joan, and their daughter, Alex; and Flood is Ernestine’s mother, Ernestine’s daughter, Madeline, and Alex’s daughter, Ernie. Finn and Livingston also appear as a surprise couple. People discuss their jobs, their relationships, and their personal identities in a vacuum. At one point, Madeline tells her parents and brother, “I don’t have a definition anymore. There aren’t any. In me. Or in the world.”

The actors make only small adjustments as their characters age, except for Messing once she passes her real-life age of fifty-three. Her slow decline as she survives so many of the others is heartbreaking, but she’s not about to stop making that cake on her birthday, no matter how old she is or who is around to enjoy it with her.

Ernestine’s (Debra Messing) life flashes before our eyes in Noah Haidle’s Broadway debut (photo by Joan Marcus)

One who is always there with her is her pet goldfish, given to her by Kenneth when they were seventeen and named Atman, the Sanskrit word for an individual’s essence, or soul. Kenneth explains, “The Katha Upanishad is the first to use the concept of Atman as a beginning argument of achieving liberation from human suffering. I quote, and please forgive my basic translation. ‘Like fire spreads itself throughout the world and takes the shape of that which it burns, the internal Atman of all living beings, while remaining one fire, takes the form of what He enters and is at the same time outside all forms.’” He points out that goldfish have only three-second memories and “then the world begins anew.” That’s one way to forget the pain, although the pleasurable moments vanish as well; Ernestine’s life is filled with plenty of both.

Haidle (Vigils, Smokefall) has created an emotional, gripping tale that is haunted by the fear of death as it explores various concepts of love, between married couples, parents and children, siblings, owners and pets, and a devoted neighbor. Director Vivienne Benesch, who helmed the play’s world premiere at the Detroit Public in 2017, manages the time shifts with aplomb as characters come and go through several open doorways on Christine Jones’s welcoming kitchen set, over which hangs dozens of household objects — remnants of a long life — in addition to the phases of the moon, a reminder of time itself.

Emmy winner Messing (Will & Grace,Outside Mullingar) is enthralling as Ernestine, who could be any of us. The different paths her life takes, each twist and turn, lead to familiar small dramas that are fully relatable; as she ages, it is hard not to consider what your own future holds. I am not a crier, but I have to admit that I was wiping away tears in the final scenes, and I was not the only one.

Colantoni (The Distance from Here, Fear) is utterly charming in his Broadway debut as Kenneth, an oddball who spends more than half a century pining for Ernestine, a regular reminder of the things in life we want that are so close but can so often be just out of reach. The rest of the cast is excellent as well, with a memorable comic turn by Finn as Joan, who has no filter and talks to herself out loud.

At a 1974 press conference, Muhammad Ali said, “If a man looks at the world when he is fifty the same way he looked at it when he was twenty and it hasn’t changed, then he has wasted thirty years of his life.” Did Ernestine waste her life? It’s a question we all ask ourselves as our birthdays come and go.

TWO BY SYNGE: IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN / THE TINKER’S WEDDING

The Irish Rep’s Two by Synge features several musical interludes (photo by Carol Rosegg)

TWO BY SYNGE: IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN / THE TINKER’S WEDDING
Irish Repertory Theatre, W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through May 22, $50
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

I am here to sing — pun intended — the praises of the great John Keating, currently starring in the theatrical twinbill Two by Synge: In the Shadow of the Glen & The Tinker’s Wedding at the Irish Rep. It’s a rave long in coming. If you don’t know the name, you must not have visited the Irish Rep much in the last quarter century, during which time the Tipperary native has appeared in more than a dozen productions (as well as numerous Shakespeare adaptations at TFANA).

Keating, a wiry fellow who stands six-foot-three with wildly curly hair and an immediately recognizable face, portrayed the fearful, deeply religious Shawn Keogh in John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World at the Irish Rep in 2002; he is not the same John Keating who illustrated a 1927 edition of the work.

Directed by Irish Rep founding artistic director Charlotte Moore, Two by Synge consists of a pair of early short works about Irish peasantry, which the Dublin-born Synge based on stories he heard and saw, then wrote about at the urging of his friend and colleague W. B. Yeats. They take place in the company’s downstairs W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre, a tiny, intimate black box where you can practically reach out and touch the actors — while getting the sensational opportunity to revel in Keating’s extraordinary talent.

It begins with The Tinker’s Wedding, Synge’s bawdy tale of a poor couple, Sarah Casey (Jo Kinsella), the onetime Beauty of Ballinacree, and Michael Byrne (Keating), a tinker, who want to get married. Their relationship is more out of necessity than true love.

A couple of peasants want the local priest to marry them in The Tinker’s Wedding (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Sarah harasses Michael, arguing, “It’ll be small joy for yourself if you aren’t ready with my wedding ring. Is it near done this time, or what way is it at all?” He replies, “A poor way only, Sarah Casey, for it’s the divil’s job making a ring, and you’ll be having my hands destroyed in a short while the way I’ll not be able to make a tin can at all maybe at the dawn of day.” Sarah says, “If it’s the divil’s job, let you mind it, and leave your speeches that would choke a fool.” Michael retorts, “And it’s you’ll go talking of fools, Sarah Casey, when no man did ever hear a lying story even of your like unto this mortal day. You to be going beside me a great while, and rearing a lot of them, and then to be setting off with your talk of getting married, and your driving me to it, and I not asking it at all.”

Sarah tries to force the local priest (Sean Gormley) to perform the ceremony, but he is not about to do so without getting some form of payment, as Sarah and Michael are not church regulars and she does not live the life of a model Christian. “A holy pair, surely! Let you get out of my way,” the harried priest declares, attempting to leave them, but Sarah is adamant. Soon arriving is Michael’s mother, Mary (Terry Donnelly), a well-known drunk who has a way of ruining everything. She tells the priest, “Isn’t it a grand thing to see you sitting down, with no pride in you, and drinking a sup with the like of us, and we the poorest, wretched, starving creatures you’d see any place on the earth?” When the priest threatens again to not marry the couple, Sarah and Michael come up with a bizarre plan to ensure their union.

The Tinker’s Wedding — which Synge never got to see performed, as he died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of thirty-seven, more than seven months before its 1909 debut — is a bit too jumbled at first but eventually finds its legs. Daniel Geggatt’s set features stone walls, a fireplace, a small gate, and the facade of a house that resembles a huge Native American drum. Keating is a joy to watch, whether he is front and center or drifting off into the background, tinkering with the ring or a tin can. In full character, he follows the action with intricate gestures, from smiles and nods of agreement to frowns and head shakes. His eyes gape open in wonder and shudder in fear. While that might be what good acting is about, he takes it to another level, in the simplest moments as well as the turning points.

Keating (The Naturalists, The Winter’s Tale) is even better in the second play, the significantly superior In the Shadow of the Glen, the first of Synge’s works to be staged (in 1903). Keating plays a tramp in a shoddy coat (courtesy of costume designer David Toser) who has wandered in from a storm to seek temporary shelter in the home of Nora Burke (Kinsella) and her husband, Dan (Gormley), who is lying lifeless in the bed. (The set is essentially the same save for the “drum,” which has been rotated to reveal the bedroom.) She seems relatively nonplussed by the corpse, and the tramp is taken aback.

“It’s a queer look is on him for a man that’s dead,” the tramp points out. Nora responds, “He was always queer, stranger, and I suppose them that’s queer and they living men will be queer bodies after.” The tramp adds, “Isn’t it a great wonder you’re letting him lie there, and he is not tidied, or laid out itself?” She answers, “I was afeard, stranger, for he put a black curse on me this morning if I’d touch his body the time he’d die sudden, or let any one touch it except his sister only, and it’s ten miles away she lives in the big glen over the hill.” Tramp: “It’s a queer story he wouldn’t let his own wife touch him, and he dying quiet in his bed.” Nora: “I’m thinking many would be afeard, but I never knew what way I’d be afeard of beggar or bishop or any man of you at all. It’s other things than the like of you, stranger, would make a person afeard.”

The tropes of a classic ghost story turn on a fabulous plot twist and the arrival of the Burkes’ neighbor, young farmer Micheal Dara (Ciaran Bowling) — the character Keating played in his first professional performance in 1994 — in whom Nora sees a rescuer from her sudden predicament. “What way would I live and I an old woman if I didn’t marry a man with a bit of a farm, and cows on it, and sheep on the back hills?” she asks.

A tramp finds himself caught between a young farmer (Ciaran Bowling) and a woman (Jo Kinsella) mourning her husband in J. M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Keating (Autumn Royal, The O’Casey Cycle) is again magnificent in Glen, his body movements and shifting of his eyes utterly hypnotizing. He is an actor’s actor, making everyone around him better; watching him watching the other characters also offers another way into the play for the audience, no matter how successful it already is, and In the Shadow of the Glen is just that, a short but satisfying foray into the fear of death that hovers over Irish stories. Moore (The Streets of New York, The Playboy of the Western World) and lighting designer Michael O’Connor makes sure to never have Keating fade too far into the background as members of the rest of the fine cast take center stage.

The two shows, which total seventy-five minutes, also include six songs, two by Synge, three traditionals, and one original by Gormley, “A Smile upon My Face,” which comes between the two comedies. Yes, despite such lines as “It’s a cruel and a wicked thing to be bred poor,” said by Sarah Casey, Two by Synge is very funny.

In his preface to The Tinker’s Wedding, the playwright explained, “The drama is made serious — in the French sense of the word — not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live. We should not go to the theatre as we go to a chemist’s, or a dram-shop, but as we go to a dinner, where the food we need is taken with pleasure and excitement. . . . Of the things which nourish the imagination humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic element in man; and where a country loses its humor, as some towns in Ireland are doing, there will be morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire’s mind was morbid. In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people, from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of life, that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that these country people, who have so much humor themselves, will mind being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country have been laughed at in their own comedies.”

Whenever you’re not sure if something is funny or not, just follow Keating’s lead and he’ll make sure you’re on the right path.

BETTER THINGS: ADVANCE SCREENING / PAMELA ADLON IN CONVERSATION WITH ISAAC MIZRAHI

Who: Pamela Adlon, Isaac Mizrahi
What: Advance screening and discussion of Better Things (92Y Recanati-Kaplan Talks)
Where: 92nd St. Y, Buttenwieser Hall, 1395 Lexington Ave. between 91st & 92nd Sts., and online
When: Saturday, April 23, $25 in person, $20 online (talk only), 7:00
Why: One of the best virtual talks during the pandemic was 92Y’s conversation between Better Things cocreator, producer, director, cowriter, and star Pamela Adlon and actor and comedian Mario Cantone. Emmy winner Adlon, who plays Sam Fox, a single mother of three girls and a former child star still working in the business, and Cantone, who plays her agent, Mal Martone, cracked up each other, and the online audience, as they talked about the hit comedy and dealt with Zoom issues. After five seasons that began in 2016, Better Things is concluding its run on April 25 with its final, fifty-second episode, entitled, “We Are Not Alone.”

But on April 23 at 7:00, you can say goodbye to Sam; her daughters, Max (Mikey Madison), Frankie (Hannah Riley), and Duke (Olivia Edward); Sam’s expat mother, Phil (Celia Imrie); Rich (Diedrich Bader), Sam’s best friend; Mal; and other characters when the 92nd St. Y presents an advance, in-person-only screening of the finale, followed by a live discussion between Adlon (King of the Hill, Louie), herself a single mother of three daughters, and Brooklyn-born fashion designer and television presenter Isaac Mizrahi, that can also be accessed online. Better Things is an extraordinarily funny and moving show that is, first and foremost, about family, dealing with familiar issues in unique ways as three generations of women face the challenges of daily existence with charm and humor. If you haven’t been watching, start bingeing now.

JANE LEE HOOKER: ROLLIN’ RECORD RELEASE PARTY

Who: Jane Lee Hooker, Tom Clark and the High Action Boys
What: Record release party
Where: Hill Country, 30 West Twenty-Sixth St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
When: Friday, April 22, free with RSVP, 8:00
Why: At they show in the fun video for “Drive” from their brand-new album, Rollin’, fab New York blues rockers Jane Lee Hooker will not be arriving at Hill Country for their record release party in a snazzy Mercedes convertible. But on April 22, singer Dana Danger Athens, guitarists Tracy Hightop and Tina T-Bone Gorin, bassist Mary Z, and drummer Lightnin’ Ron Salvo will still find their way to the barbecue joint for some tasty tunes from the band, which formed in 2015 and has previously released Spiritus and No B! The new record, made during the pandemic, features such songs as “Drive,” “Jericho,” and “All Good Things,” in which Athens promises “all good things comin’ your way.”

Athens explained in a statement, “Somehow, amidst the chaos of a global pandemic, we were able to write and record what I feel is our best work as a band yet.” Gorin added, “Astounding that some things, like writing music with each other, will always be a beautiful and safe world, even during a worldwide health disaster like Covid-19.” And Hightop said, “We were really able to take our time and do these amazing songs justice. This album is just next level in so many respects. I can’t wait to get out there and play these songs in front of an audience!” Opening up for JLH is longtime city faves Tom Clark and the High Action Boys (Cross-Eyed and Bow-Legged). Expect “all good things comin’ your way.”

HEATHER CHRISTIAN: ORATORIO FOR LIVING THINGS

Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things is an exhilarating journey through time, space, and shared human experience (photo by Ben Arons)

HEATHER CHRISTIAN’S ORATORIO FOR LIVING THINGS
Ars Nova at Greenwich House
27 Barrow St. at Seventh Ave. South
Tuesday – Sunday through May 15, $35-$65
arsnovanyc.com/oratorio

Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things is a gloriously exhilarating ninety-minute celebration of life, art, and nature, an immersive journey through the complex quantum, human, and cosmic time and space of our daily existence.

Oratorio is Obie winner Christian’s follow-up to Animal Wisdom, a confessional of music and storytelling dealing with the personal and communal aspects of ritual and superstition, grief and loss, ghosts and the fear of death, and I Am Sending You the Sacred Face, a solo virtual musical about Mother Teresa, performed in drag in a closet by Theater in Quarantine’s Joshua William Gelb.

The Ars Nova production takes place in a reconfigured, in-the-round Greenwich House, where the audience sits in a few steeped rows of rafters, each section separated by a dozen steps; it’s such a small group that you feel specially privileged to be there. Twelve lovely performers (Sean Donovan, Carla Duren, Ashley Pérez Flanagan, Brian Flores, Quentin Oliver Lee, Angel Lozada, Barrie Lobo McLain, Ben Moss, Onyie Nwachukwu, Dito Van Reigersberg, Kirstyn Cae Ballard, and Divya Maus) in casual, carefully considered dress move up and down the stairs and through the tiny center stage area, over which dangles a glowing orb that evokes an unstructured, abstract globe or meteor. At the top of either side is the outstanding band: Johnny Butler on woodwinds, Jane Cardona on piano, Clérida Eltimé on cello, Odetta Hartman on violin, John Murchison on upright and electric bass, and Peter Wise on percussion.

Greenwich House has been transformed into a unique communal space for Oratorio for Living Things (photo by Ben Arons)

Throughout, the singers make warm, intimate direct eye contact with the audience, signaling we are all on this planet together and need to live in unison with one another and nature. Christian’s libretto, which is handed out to each audience member as they’re seated, is in English and Latin; the lights are usually dimmed just enough to still allow you to follow along, but you certainly don’t have to.

As Christian notes in a program letter, “Don’t worry! You do not need a degree in astrophysics, antique languages, or microbiology to ‘get’ this piece. In fact, one would argue that Oratorio for Living Things could function as a Rorschach test. It’s made to engage with you at whatever level you’d like to do so.”

However, it can become a bit distracting when a lot of heads are buried in the white libretto instead of watching the performers, particularly when they’re right in front of them. But this is a judgment-free zone. (The comforting set is by Kristen Robinson, with costumes by Márion Talán de la Rosa, lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, and sound by Nick Kourtides.)

The score morphs from classical oratorio to jazz, gospel, blues, and a burst of Godspell-like musical theater as Christian guides us through canticles, hymns, choruses, and poems with such titles as “Beginning (Infinite Fractal),” “Alligatum (membranes),” “Dust to Dust (water),” “Hydrogen and Helium: History of Violence,” and “Vesuvius,” which contains the warning: “Now we have arrived at something truly Frightening.”

In “Memory Harvest,” individual singers recall major and minor moments from their past, one example of which is: “I’m five years old and my cousin is seven years old and we jump from one foot to the other standing on the side of the road across from the train tracks. Our excitement builds as the train approaches, our arms flailing, pump up and down, we want the engineer to pull the chain to blow the train whistle. And he does.”

In “Carbon/DNA Iteration 4: Building DNA via Ticker Tape on Time Spent,” the performers use numbers to quantify life, including such observations as “Three and a half hours throwing away unopened mail / Forty minutes putting lids on Tupperware / Eighteen days looking for a bathroom / One year in the ‘Bag Drop’ line / Eleven days trying to remember why you came into the room / Four hours changing pants / Two and a half years being too cold / Four years and eleven days being too hot.” It’s a gorgeous, often very funny look at the little things that add up, equating a wide range of items that we all have in common and which feel particularly meaningful as we emerge from a pandemic lockdown that severely limited our presence in society and has led to so much grief and loss.

Twelve singers and six musicians envelop the audience in Heather Christian’s glorious Oratorio for Living Things (photo by Ben Arons)

Obie-winning director Lee Sunday Evans (Dance Nation, Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya) has just the right touch to make it all flow seemingly effortlessly, like a babbling brook where you rest and casually reflect on the beauty of everything. Evans also makes sure we don’t feel like we’re trapped in science class amid mentions of entropy, energy, evolution, chloroplasts, mitochondria, diatoms, and covalent bonds.

Inspired by Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, American astronomer Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and German composer Carl Orff’s cantata “Carmina Burana,” Christian imbues Oratorio with an existential hope that fuels who we are as individuals and as a harmonic unit. In the libretto, she describes “Fields” as “a brief indulgence in an environment (now established). A reminder that because something is devoid of human consciousness or observation does not mean that it is empty.” In “Vesuvius: Dormancy,” we are told, “Do not mistake dying for stopping,” and in “Vesuvius: Eruption” that “we are in the middle / we aren’t at the end / of a loop.”

Do whatever you can to see Oratorio for Living Things, which has been extended through May 15; this extraordinary shared pilgrimage is sold out, but standby and rush tickets might be available. As Christian writes in the libretto, “A very smart person once said that given the choice between living in a universe where only some things are known and knowable and living in a universe where either everything or nothing was known, they’d take the former. Because out of mystery evolves curiosity, and out of confoundment evolves wonder.” And that is exactly what Oratorio delivers.

EIKO OTAKE’S THE DUET PROJECT: DISTANCE IS MALLEABLE

Eiko Otake and Iris McCloughan will team up again for “The Duet Project” at NYU Skirball

Who: Eiko Otake, Ishmael Houston-Jones, DonChristian Jones, Margaret Leng Tan, Iris McCloughan
What: “The Duet Project”
Where: NYU Skirball, 566 LaGuardia Pl. at Washington Square South
When: April 15-17, $35
Why: Following decades of dancing with her husband, Koma, in 2014, after Koma injured his ankle, Eiko Otake began exploring solo work as well as duets with other collaborators. In 2017 she launched “The Duet Project: Distance Is Malleable,” teaming up with a wide range of artists, posing the questions “How can two artists collide and return changed but whole? How can two individuals encounter and converse over their differences with or without words? How can we express both explicitly and implicitly what each of us really cares about?” Among those she’s worked with are painter Beverly McIver, filmmaker Alexis Moh, choreographers Merián Soto and Ann Carlson, dancer Chitra Vairavan, musician Ralph Samuelson, and photographer and historian William Johnston. In her choreographer’s note, Eiko explains, “In my new ‘Duet Project: Distance Is Malleable,’ I work with a diverse group of artists, living and dead. Collaborators come from different places, times, disciplines, and concerns. Together, we try to maximize the potentials of our various encounters so as to reaffirm that distance is indeed malleable.”

“The Duet Project” is now making its New York premiere April 15-17 at NYU Skirball, where Eiko’s unique experiments continue with choreographer, curator, and improvisor Ishmael Houston-Jones, painter, rapper, and organizer DonChristian Jones, avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan, and poet and performance maker Iris McCloughan. As Eiko also explains, “This endeavor is as much about conversation as it is about self-curation, developing instincts, desires, strategies, and tools for encounters with or without words. It is also about developing urges, hesitations, and resistance by looking at each other and taking time. Being physically and mindfully together is memory making. Every encounter is to affirm living and also to prepare for one’s inevitable leaving. My body is always leaning forward to the next encounter.”

HARMONY: A NEW MUSICAL

Barry Manilow musical tells real-life story of the Comedian Harmonists (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

HARMONY: A NEW MUSICAL
National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene
Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
Edmond J. Safra Hall, 36 Battery Pl.
Through May 15, $79-$129
nytf.org/harmony

“A Bulgarian singing waiter, a doctor, a bass from the Comic Opera, a musical prodigy, a whorehouse pianist . . . and a Polish Rabbi walk into a bar,” Josef Roman “Rabbi” Cykowski (Chip Zien) says near the beginning of Harmony, the biographical musical that opened tonight at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, presented by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene.

Throughout his nearly sixty-year career, Brooklyn-born songster Barry Manilow has won a Tony, two Emmys, a Grammy, and an honorary Clio for his classic jingles and has released more than three dozen albums (including eight gold and eight platinum records) that have sold more than eighty-five million copies. But his favorite creative endeavor is Harmony, the twenty-five-plus-years-in-the-making musical about the Comedian Harmonists, the real-life a cappella German singing group whose international success was ultimately thwarted by the Nazis; composer Manilow and his longtime collaborator, Queens native Bruce Sussman, who wrote the book and lyrics, seek to restore the Harmonists’ legacy in this glittering show.

The story is told in flashback by the older Rabbi, who details how the group formed and became a sensation despite some initial stumbles; he pontificates on many of the choices they made, especially those by his younger self (Danny Kornfeld), while sometimes joining them in song. Originally known as the Melody Makers, the ensemble was put together by actor and composer Harry Frommerman (Zal Owen) and consisted of Rabbi, Comic Opera bass Robert “Bobby” Biberti (Sean Bell), medical student Erich Collin (Eric Peters), piano player Erwin “Chopin” Bootz (Blake Roman), and singing waiter Ari “Lesh” Leshnikoff (Steven Telsey). In addition to their glorious harmonies and goofy charm, they used their voices as instruments, making it sound like they were performing with a band.

Ruth (Jessie Davidson) is ready to fight what’s coming in Germany in Harmony (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

As their fame spreads, Rabbi falls in love with Mary (Sierra Boggess), a Christian who considers converting to Judaism but is also worried about the growing anti-Semitism emerging from the National Socialists, and Chopin marries Ruth (Jessie Davidson), a staunch Jewish activist who is ready to fight against the rise of the far right. As Nazi officers start showing up at their concerts, including a standartenführer (Andrew O’Shanick) and his wife, Ingrid (Kayleen Seidl), who are huge fans, the Comedian Harmonists realize they are caught in the middle of something a lot bigger than themselves and have to take a long, hard look at their personal and professional futures.

Harmony premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 1997, with Danny Burstein as Rabbi and Rebecca Luker as Mary. (The two got married in 2000 and remained so until Luker’s tragic death in 2020.) Manilow and Sussman, writing partners for more than forty years, have continued to tweak the show since then; today it feels oddly prescient as dictators and the far right gain power around the world and so many oppressed people become refugees as they try to escape bad situations that are only getting worse. It is also an excellent way to celebrate the little-known a cappella group, as there are only limited archival footage and audio recordings available online, in addition to a 1991 German documentary, a 1997 German biopic, and a 2010 English-language book.

The six actors portraying the Comedian Harmonists are terrific, forming a cohesive unit in, well, perfect harmony. Director and choreographer Warren Carlyle (After Midnight, On the Twentieth Century) has fun with the sextet, particularly in a scene in which they have no pants. Characters often enter and leave through the aisles, approximating the feel of watching the Comedian Harmonists in a 1920-’30s theater rather than a contemporary venue. And the Museum of Jewish Heritage is just the right place to stage this show, an institution dedicated to preserving the Jewish experience before, during, and after the Holocaust.

Chip Zien gives a bravura performance as Rabbi Josef Roman Cykowski and others in Harmony (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The musical is about a tight-knit ensemble, but it’s worth seeing for Zien (Into the Woods; Caroline, or Change) alone; a New York City theater treasure, Zien is spectacular as Rabbi, who can’t help but get emotional as he watches mistakes his younger self and the troupe make. Zien also dazzles by taking on a number of minor roles, changing costumes — and wigs — lightning fast as he transforms himself into Marlene Dietrich, Richard Strauss, and Albert Einstein. (The costumes, which range from humble street clothes to pristine tuxedos to Nazi uniforms, are by Linda Cho and Ricky Lurie, with hair and wigs by Tom Watson.) Zien leaves Ana Hoffman to regale us as Josephine Baker, who did in fact perform with the Harmonists.

Three-time Tony winner Beowulf Boritt’s set is anchored by a wall of mirrors that reflects the performers — and the conductor, who leads the orchestra from a pit in the right side of the audience — and also on which are projected archival photographs, text identifying the time and place, and Nazi symbols. Among the locations are various nightclubs in Berlin, Tivoli Park in Copenhagen, a movie set in Cologne, a night train to Munich, the tailor shop where Mary works, and Carnegie Hall, where the Comedian Harmonists headlined in 1933.

Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman rehearse with the cast of Harmony (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

At 165 minutes (with intermission), the show, featuring music direction and additional arrangements by John O’Neill, is at least a half hour too long, dragging primarily during the romantic numbers; there’s much more life when the German boy band is performing and when the political tension increases — to a point where the characters are making potential life-or-death decisions.

And as much as Harmony is specifically about the Comedian Harmonists, it also reminds us how we all should be with others, particularly in times of strife. As the cast sings in the title song: “Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah, / Oom-pah oom-pah oom-pah, / Harmony, / We sing in harmony / Like the robins in Herald Square. / Harmony, / The thing is harmony, / Always knowing there’s someone there. / In this joint / All encounters with counterpoint / End in harmony. / And it’s clear / No man’s a solo here. / Not even me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! / No solo mio! / Just harmony.”