live performance

AN AMERICAN SOLDIER

The company of An American Soldier rehearses for New York City premiere (photo by HanJie Chow)

AN AMERICAN SOLDIER
Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC)
251 Fulton St.
May 12-19, $54-$183
pacnyc.org

PAC NYC continues its wide-ranging inaugural season with the New York premiere of An American Soldier, an opera that tells the true story of what happened to Asian American army private Danny Chen in 2011 during the war in Afghanistan. The harrowing store of hate and harassment features a libretto by Tony and Grammy winner David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly, Soft Power), with music by Huang Ruo (M. Butterfly, Book of Mountains and Seas); the two-hour work, which debuted as a one-act in 2014 and was expanded in 2018, is directed by Obie winner Chay Yew (Cambodian Rock Band, Sweatshop Overlord), with choreography by Ann Yee (Sunday in the Park with George, Caroline, or Change).

Tenor Brian Vu stars as the Chinatown-born Pvt. Chen, with mezzo-soprano Nina Yoshida Nelsen as his mother, soprano Hannah Cho as his high school friend Josephine Young, and baritone Alex DeSocio as Sgt. Aaron Marcum, his main tormentor. The cast also includes Christian Simmons, Ben Brady, Joshua Sanders, James C. Harris, Shelén Hughes, and Cierra Byrd in multiple roles. The thirty-five-piece orchestra will be conducted by Carolyn Kuan.

A coproduction with Boston Lyric Opera and American Composers Orchestra, An American Soldier features sets by Daniel Ostling, costumes by Linda Cho, lighting by Jeanette Yew, sound by David Bullard, and projections by Nicholas Hussong. There will be only five performances May 12-19, and tickets are going fast. The May 16 show will be followed by a panel discussion with Hwang, Kuan, and Ruo, moderated by Ken Smith, and the May 18 presentation will be followed by a talk with Chen family spokesperson Banny Chen, civil rights lawyer Elizabeth OuYang, Hwang, and Ruo, moderated by CeFaan Kim.

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

SHIMMER AND HERRINGBONE

Fashion takes center stage at Talking Band’s Shimmer and Herringbone (photo by Maria Baranova)

SHIMMER AND HERRINGBONE
Mabou Mines@122CC
150 1st Ave. at Ninth St.
Wednesday – Sunday through May 19, $35
talkingband.org

Amid the flurry of Broadway openings — no fewer than nineteen between March 7 and April 25, the cutoff to be eligible for the Tonys — you may have missed the celebratory event of the season, the fiftieth anniversary of Talking Band, the independent downtown company founded by Ellen Maddow, Paul Zimet, and Tina Shepard in 1974. The avant-garde troupe has staged more than sixty productions since 1975’s The Kalevala, and this year it has treated us to three exquisite new shows in a span of three months.

In February, TB presented the moving and intimate The Following Evening at PAC NYC, a collaboration with 600 Highwaymen that explored personal and professional legacy, starring real-life couples Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone of 600 Highwaymen and Maddow and Zimet of TB. In March, Maddow, in her mid-seventies, and Zimet, in his early eighties, teamed up for the brilliant Existentialism at La MaMa, a dazzling meditation on aging.

TB concludes its unofficial trilogy with the hilariously inventive and profound Shimmer and Herringbone, which opened last night at Mabou Mines@122CC for a limited run through May 19.

In his 1905 short story “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” Mark Twain wrote, “As Teufelsdröckh suggested, what would man be — what would any man be — without his clothes? As soon as one stops and thinks over that proposition, one realizes that without his clothes a man would be nothing at all; that the clothes do not merely make the man, the clothes are the man; that without them he is a cipher, a vacancy, a nobody, a nothing.”

The ninety-minute Shimmer and Herringbone takes place in the titular clothing store, where a handful of oddball characters across three generations — old friends, former lovers, not-so-strangers — shop with the help of eclectic dressing room attendant Rhonda (Maddow), who shares tidbits of carefully phrased philosophy as they seek to change their clothes, their style, and, in several cases, their lives, to not be a nobody or a nothing.

When Rhonda asks one customer, “Did you find what you were looking for?,” she’s referring to more than just a new scarf or jacket.

She says to another shopper, “Where are you going, if you don’t mind my asking?,” a question that requires a bigger answer than the shoe department.

Melanie (Tina Shepard), Colin (Jack Wetherall), and Lilly (Lizzie Olesker) wonder about pigeons and life in world premiere play (photo by Maria Baranova)

At the beginning of the play, Lilly (Lizzie Olesker) and her daughter, the twentysomething Bree (Ebony Davis), find the elderly Melanie (Tina Shepard), who speaks in non sequiturs, facedown on the floor. Grace (Louise Smith) is a realtor who isn’t sure how she knows Colin (Jack Wetherall) and runs away when she sees Lilly, an ornithologist who is embarrassed that she doesn’t recognize Gus (James Tigger! Ferguson), who appears to know her very well.

As they slowly discover more about one another, the characters not only dig deep within themselves but try to understand how they are seen by others — and how they have changed over the years.

“I see this face and I wonder — could that be me?” Grace says, later adding, as only a real estate agent can, “My face is falling apart like an old house.”

Reaching out, Colin talks to Grace about the apartment where he’s lived for more than thirty years. “Suddenly, about a month ago, I woke up and everything looked drab, everything was in the wrong place. The rug that I inherited from my mother was tatty and raveled around the edges, the kitchen table was greasy, and my favorite chair looked like a toadstool with its undersides oozing toxins. It’s like I have changed, but my apartment is stubbornly, defiantly sitting in the past, and I can’t stand it,” he says. Grace responds, “That’s been happening to people a lot lately,” implicating the audience itself.

As the characters share stories from their past that often include details about what they were wearing at the time, Bree is having none of it. When Rhonda asks her, “Can I help you?,” the youngest member of the group quickly replies, “I don’t need help.” When her mother is considering whether she should return a shirt, Bree declares, “It’s just a blouse,” a phrase that sticks out like blasphemy.

Through it all, a string trio consisting of Rachel Feldhaus, Marija Kovacevic, and Agustin Uriburu performs in a far corner, sometimes adding soothing background music and sometimes playing to the characters, who sit down and watch them while having conversations.

Gus (James Tigger! Ferguson) and Rhonda (Ellen Maddow) find common ground through dress in Shimmer and Herringbone (photo by Maria Baranova)

Shimmer and Herringbone is another delightful triumph from Talking Band, reminiscent of its 2022 production Lemon Girls or Art for the Artless, which also featured Olesker, Shepard, Smith, Wetherall, and writer and composer Maddow and was directed by Zimet. The new piece is cowritten by Maddow and Zimet and directed by Zimet, in collaboration with costume designer Olivera Gajic, whose outfits nearly steal the show, from black leather and leopard print to fluffy slippers and feathery hats.

The narrative unfolds on Anna Kiraly’s cozy set, which is centered by four lighted dressing-room doors that the shoppers enter and exit and is also used for Kiraly’s projections of social media posts, images of clothing and the moon, abstract shapes, birds on a wire, and a short film. The soft lighting is by Mary Ellen Stebbins, with sweet and touching choreography by Sean Donovan. A kind of angel at a way station, Rhonda is often pushing along a mannequin or a rack of clothes that were rejected. The characters occasionally sit on concrete slabs like park benches at the front, almost touching the audience.

In addition to the classical music played by the string trio, there are pop songs and poetry, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Blue “Gene” Tyranny to the combo of Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith. Gus, who fashions himself a literary junkie, references Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Borges, Hemingway, and Kerouac as he morphs into James Joyce, who once wrote, “Mother is packing my new secondhand clothes. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life!”

The centerpiece of the show is ornithologist Lilly’s spark bird, the New York City pigeon. Also known as the Columba livia and the rock dove, the bird is not only ubiquitous — it’s believed there are about four million in the city, compared with nine million people — but it is hard for the average person to tell them apart. Human beings have the ability to choose clothing that can assist in defining who they are, both outside and inside, but pigeons don’t have that option. It’s even difficult to identify their gender, as Lilly notes, which becomes relevant late in the play.

At one point, Grace explains that part of her job is “staging” a house, evoking the staging of a play: cleaning it out from top to bottom, then painting the walls white and adding cream carpets and innocuous artworks, allowing the buyer to make it their own home. Each character entering Shimmer and Herringbone is like that plain house, ready to redecorate themselves in their own personal style.

When Bree sees Melanie dragging a large garbage bag, she asks her what’s in there. “Nothing,” Melanie answers. “Stuff that’s been clogging up my closets, burdening my soul for half a century.” How many of us would love to go through our closets and get rid of old clothes that feel like a burden?

“So you want to find something that reflects who you are,” Rhonda says to Grace, who is worried about suffering buyer’s remorse, as if a new outfit is as important as a new home.

Isn’t it?

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

NOT A SENSATION: THE WHO’S TOMMY / LEMPICKA

The Who’s Tommy is back on Broadway in a bewildering revival (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

THE WHO’S TOMMY
Nederlander Theatre
208 West Forty-First St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 21, $89.75-$319.50
tommythemusical.com

Watching Lempicka at the Longacre, where it just announced an early closing date of May 19 — it was scheduled to run until September 8 — I was struck by how similar it was to The Who’s Tommy, which is packing them in at the Nederlander.

Each show focuses on a unique title character — one a fictional “deaf, dumb, and blind kid” who has been part of global pop culture since 1969, when the Who’s rock opera was released, the other a far lesser known real Polish bisexual painter named Tamara Łempicka, who was born in Warsaw in 1898 and died in Mexico in 1980.

Both musicals were presented at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego prior to opening on Broadway, both involve world wars and fighting fascism, both feature ridiculously over-the-top choreography, and both use empty frames as props that detract from the protagonist’s creative abilities. And as a bonus coincidence, Jack Nicholson, who portrayed the specialist in Ken Russell’s 1975 film adaptation of Tommy, is a collector of Lempicka’s work, having owned Young Ladies and La Belle Rafaela.

While there are elements to like in Lempicka, there is virtually nothing worth singing about in Tommy.

In his Esquire review, John Simon called Tommy “the most stupid, arrogant, and tasteless movie since Russell’s Mahler. To debate such a film seems impossible: anyone who can find merit in this deluge of noise and nausea has nothing to say to me, nor I to him.” Although I’m not as vitriolic as Simon, I felt similarly about the movie — and now about the current Broadway revival.

The Who’s double album is a masterpiece about a young boy who witnesses a violent death and loses the ability to see, hear, and speak. The record delves into Tommy’s mind as he is abused and harassed by relatives and strangers but finds surprising success at pinball. The loose narrative allows the listener to fill in the blanks by using their imagination.

That imaginative space was taken away by the bizarre film, but the original Broadway musical version from 1993, with music and lyrics by Pete Townshend of the Who and book by Townshend and director Des McAnuff, did an admirable job of bringing the somewhat convoluted tale to the stage, earning ten Tony nominations and winning five trophies, for director, choreographer, score, scenic design, and lighting. With McAnuff again directing, this iteration earned a solitary nod as Best Revival of a Musical, which is one too many.

Mrs. Walker (Alison Luff) tries to help her young son in The Who’s Tommy (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

It’s 1941, and Captain Walker (Adam Jacobs) goes off to war. His pregnant wife (Alison Luff) is devastated when the military arrives at her doorstep and tells her that her husband has been killed in action — even though he is actually in a prison camp. Four years later, Captain Walker returns home to find his wife has taken a new lover (Nathan Lucrezio); the men get into a scrap, and the captain shoots the lover dead. Four-year-old Tommy (Cecilia Ann Popp or Olive Ross-Kline) witnesses the scene, and his parents plead with him, “You didn’t hear it. / You didn’t see it. / You won’t say nothing to no one / Ever in your life.” The boy takes those words to heart.

As he grows up (played by Quinten Kusheba or Reese Levine at ten and Ali Louis Bourzgui as a teenager and adult), he is taken advantage of by his uncle Ernie (John Ambrosino) and cousin Kevin (Bobby Conte) while his mother and father try to cure him by taking him to a psychiatrist (Lily Kren), a specialist (Sheldon Henry), and a prostitute known as the Acid Queen (Christina Sajous). But he shows no interest in life — although he does spend a lot of time looking at himself in a large mirror — until he winds up at a pinball machine, where he proves to be a wizard and soon becomes a hero to millions, the modern-day equivalent of a YouTube gamer going viral. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean everything is suddenly coming up roses for him.

McAnuff, choreographer Lorin Latarro, set designer David Korins, projection designer Peter Nigrini, costume designer Sarafina Bush, lighting designer Amanda Zieve, and sound designer Gareth Owen bombard the audience with so much nonsense that it is impossible to know what to look at or listen to at any given moment; it’s like the London Blitz has taken over the theater for 130 overcharged minutes (with intermission), complete with dancing uniformed fascists. The orchestrations by Steve Margoshes and Rick Fox are fine, but this has to be about much more than just the Who’s spectacular songs, too many of which tilt here. The barrage of empty frames and projected images might hurt your neck and give you a headache, while the vast amount of unnecessary movement and strange costume choices will have you bewildered, as will the decision to have no actual pinball machines onstage, just a pretend table.

Luff (Waitress, Les Misérables) and Jacobs (Aladdin, Les Misérables) avail themselves well amid the maelstrom, as do the younger Tommys, but Bourzgui, in his Broadway debut, fails to bring any nuance to the character, whether he is patrolling the stage following his younger selves or being chased by Sally Simpson (Haley Gustafson). He’s certainly no Roger Daltrey, on the record or in the film.

This hyperkinetic mess is no sensation, lacking emotional spark as it takes the audience on a less-than-amazing journey for which there appears to be no miracle cure.

Tamara de Lempicka (Eden Espinosa) examines her work in biographical Broadway musical (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

LEMPICKA
Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 19, $46-$269
lempickamusical.com

Many of the technical aspects of Lempicka are oddly similar to those of Tommy. Just as Tommy never plays an actual pinball machine, Tamara de Lempicka (Eden Espinosa) never actually paints; she often stands in front of an easel with no canvas, carefully moving a brush in her hand. Riccardo Hernández’s set is laden with empty frames much like those in Tommy. Paloma Young’s costumes for the fascists are overwrought, like Sarafina Bush’s in Tommy.

However, Bradley King’s lighting makes sense, playing off Lempicka’s Art Deco style and angular figuration, while Peter Nigrini’s projections provide necessary historical context and spectacular presentations of her work.

But the biggest difference is in the two leads. Espinosa gives a powerful, yearning performance as Lempicka, a woman caught between her traditional family — husband Tadeusz Lempicki (Andrew Samonsky) and daughter Kizette (Zoe Glick) — and her lover, Rafaela, beautifully portrayed by Amber Iman. (Rafaela is a conglomeration of Lempicka’s girlfriends rather than any one of her individual historical lovers.) She is also trapped by her desire to become an artist and go out clubbing at a time when women were expected to stay home and take care of the household.

The story is bookended by an older Lempicka sitting on a park bench in Los Angeles in 1975 with an easel; at the beginning, she recites a kind of mantra: “plane, lines, form. / plane, color, light.” A moment later, she sings, “Do you know who I am? . . . An old woman who doesn’t give a damn / that history has passed her by / History’s a bitch / but so am I / How did I wind up here?”

In 1916, during WWI, Lempicka marries lawyer Tadeusz, whose prominent family wanted him to wed a woman of higher status. (The book, by Carson Kreitzer and Matt Gould, plays fast and loose with some of the facts for dramatic purposes.) Tadeusz is arrested in the Bolshevik Revolution, and Lempicka goes to extreme lengths with a commandant (George Abud) to get him released. After losing everything, they start all over in Paris, where Tadeusz takes a job at a small bank and Lempicka mops floors. While he is obsessed with finding out what she did to get him freed, she explores her art, experiencing Paris’s nightlife and meeting Rafaela, a prostitute, at a lesbian club run by Suzy Solidor (Natalie Joy Johnson), who later opens the hot La Vie Parisienne.

Lempicka is energized by her new lifestyle, but her husband is growing suspicious — and jealous when, helped by the Baron Raoul Kuffner de Diószegh (Nathaniel Stampley), his wife (Beth Leavel), and Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Abud), Lempicka’s art career starts taking off. “We do not control the world,” Marinetti tells Lempicka. “We control one flat rectangle of canvas.”

When using Kizette as a model, Lempicka can’t differentiate between art and life. Kizette pleads, “mama, look at me / mama, look at me / see me / keeping so still / while your eyes dart back and forth / me / the canvas / me / the canvas / me / me / mama, look at me.” But all Lempicka can offer is, “eyes, Paris blue . . . flecked Viridian green . . . my daughter / shape and volume / color and line.”

Rafaela (Amber Iman) creates a sensation in Lempicka (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

Lempicka garnered well-deserved Tony nominations for Espinosa (Rent, Wicked) for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical, Iman (Soul Doctor, Shuffle Along) for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical, and Hernandez and Nigrini for Best Scenic Design of a Musical. In key supporting parts, Johnson (Kinky Boots, Legally Blonde) and Abut (Cornelia Street, The Visit) overdo it, while Glick (Unknown Soldier, The Bedwetter) is sweet as Kizette and Tony winner Leavel (The Drowsy Chaperone, Crazy for You) stands out as the Baroness, but both could use more to do.

Tony-winning director Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812) has too much going on, unable to get a firm grip on the action, while Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography brings too much attention to itself. Kreitzer’s music, with orchestrations by Cian McCarthy, meanders too much, often feeling out of place as the narrative changes locations and emotional depth, while Gould’s lyrics range from the absurd (“The Beautiful Bracelet,” a love song to a piece of jewelry; “Women,” in which the ensemble declares, “Suzy / You’ve made an Oasis / we live through the days / till we can be Here / Where Everything — and Nothing / is Queer”) to the obvious (“Pari Will Always Be Pari,” “The New Woman”) to the heartfelt (a pair of lovely duets between Espinosa and Samonsky on “Starting Over” and Iman and Samonsky on “What She Sees”).

“I can see the appeal,” Rafaela sings, and it is easy to see the appeal in a show about Tamara de Lempicka. Unfortunately, this one is not it.

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

SYMPHONY OF RATS

The Wooster Group revisits Richard Foreman’s avant-garde Symphony of Rats (photos © Spencer Ostrander)

SYMPHONY OF RATS
The Wooster Group
The Performing Garage
33 Wooster St. between Grand & Broome Sts.
Through May 9, $20 rush tickets, $35 in advance, 7:30
thewoostergroup.org

In 1988, the Wooster Group staged Richard Foreman’s Symphony of Rats, written, directed, and designed by Foreman, the treasured avant-garde playwright and founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. In 2022, the company asked Foreman if it could present a new adaptation. Foreman responded, “You can do whatever you want! I hope it’s completely unrecognizable.”

Mission accomplished.

The 2024 iteration of Symphony of Rats is a hallucinatory journey into outer and inner space that begins with a fever dream in which Ari Fliakos offers, “Symphony of Rats is about the President of the United States as someone no different from the rest of us: a mixed-up, stupid, fallible person bounced back and forth by forces outside his control. The President is receiving messages by means other than the known senses, and he doesn’t know whether to trust them or not, just as we all receive messages . . . from our unconscious, . . . or God, . . . or the media, . . . or our past experience . . . , and often don’t know . . . whether to validate them by paying attention to them and acting upon them, or to dismiss them as . . . irrational impulses we hope will pass.”

It’s a necessary prelude, as everything that follows, under the precise direction of Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk (who appeared in the 1988 original), is beautiful madness.

Ari Fliakos and Jim Fletcher star in Symphony of Rats at the Performing Garage (photo © Spencer Ostrander)

Fliakos plays the President, who sits in a wheelchair commode at a pair of tables at the front of the set. To his left is Guillermo Resto, who makes deep-voiced declarations through a basketball hoop on its side. To his right are Niall Cunningham, Andrew Maillet (who provides additional sound and video), and assistant director and stage manager Michaela Murphy, fiddling on laptops. Jim Fletcher moves around the stage, portraying a doctor, a scientist, a gnarly rat, and other characters.

LeCompte’s set also includes blackboards, clotheslines on which cardboard is pushed and pulled, an old easel, a narrow column with a basketball on top, a changing scenic backdrop, and projections of an adorable circular digital being who climbs up and down a pole and goes for a walk in its stick-figure-like body.

Over the course of eighty wildly unpredictable minutes, the actors break out into new tunes by Suzzy Roche (“The Door Song,” “The Human Feelings Song,” “The Ice Cream Song”), study an impressive fecal log that comes out of the President, debate going to the chaotic Tornadoville, contemplate ingesting a magic lozenge, discuss evolution and children’s books, recite William Blake’s “Tyger Tyger,” and watch clips from Ken Russell’s 1969 cinematic adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and Steve Beck’s 2002 horror film Ghost Ship. There’s an MST3K aspect to the whole show, which features sound and music by Eric Sluyter, video by Yudam Hyung Seok Jeon, lighting by Jennifer Tipton and Evan Anderson, phantasmic costumes by Antonia Belt, and dramaturgy by Matthew Dipple. Tavish Miller’s technical direction is a marvel as complex audiovisual elements pop up everywhere.

Although you should not be obsessed with figuring out the details of what constitute the plot, there are references to the President’s mental well-being, world hunger, sleeping leaders, and environmental catastrophe, evoking the current sad state of the planet. There’s also a scene in which the President juggles the globe à la Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.

“Trust me, trust me. It’s so much fun to be inarticulate, Mr. President. Trust me. It really is so much fun,” Jim advises. Later, the President admits, “I think I’m losing my mind.”

Everything in Symphony of Rats might not be immediately recognizable, but it is most certainly not inarticulate, providing provocative fun as only the Wooster Group can.

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

“OH, MARY!”

President Abraham Lincoln (Conrad Ricamora) and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln (Cole Escola) have a rare pause in “Oh, Mary!” (photo © Emilio Madrid)

“OH, MARY!”
Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Through May 12; moves to Lyceum Theatre June 26 – June 28, $49-$298
www.ohmaryplay.com

Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!” is the funniest, most outrageous show I’ve seen this season. I was finally able to catch it after several extensions at the Lucille Lortel — and now it’s on its way to Broadway, opening June 26 at the Lyceum. Nearly a week after seeing it, I’m still laughing about it.

In the eighty-minute farce, Escola plays the desperately unhappy Mary Todd Lincoln. It’s nearing the end of the Civil War, and President Abraham Lincoln (Conrad Ricamora) has had enough of the first lady, who has a fondness for booze; he’d rather spend private time with one of his young officers, Simon (Tony Macht). Mary wants to return to her previous career in cabaret, much to Abe’s displeasure, so he tells Mary’s chaperone, Louise (Bianca Leigh), to come up with other activities to keep Mary busy — and away from him. Abe himself suggests that Mary study acting, which he considers a far more respectable profession than cabaret, hiring a teacher (James Scully) who will change the course of the couple’s life.

Escola mines every line for hilarity while director Sam Pinkleton, who is primarily a choreographer, never misses an opportunity for physical comedy gold. Lincoln is not a brave, thoughtful leader but a complaining buffoon. “God, we’re screwed! We might as well surrender and kill ourselves now!” he tells Simon when the outcome of the war is still in doubt. When Simon advises they should meet with General Burnside, Honest Abe admits, “Let’s go. After dealing with my foul and hateful wife all morning, a little war might be a breath of fresh air.” Later, when Abe is looking to blow off more steam, Simon says that would make him very happy too. Abe asks Simon, “Would it? Would it put a big smile on your face to see me release everything I’ve got pent up?” Simon responds, “Of course. I want you to take it easy, sir.” To which Abe adds, “Oh, I’ll take it easy. And you’ll take it hard.”

Escola gleefully gobbles up the scenery as Mary appears in a drunken stupor, jumps on her husband’s desk, and gets oh-so-close to her daring acting teacher. She’s not exactly the most on-the-ball of first ladies. Each time the president mentions the North and the South, Mary asks, “The south of what?” Quoting Shakespeare, she recites to her teacher, “To be or not to be, that is a great question.” Excited to learn about subtext, she attempts to impress her teacher by explaining, “Well, a character might say, ‘Chicken tummy time’ when what they really mean is, ‘I’m hungry,’ only it doesn’t come out quite right because they’re inbred. Is that subtext?”

Mary Todd Lincoln (Cole Escola) is in search of alcohol and more in “Oh, Mary!” (photo © Emilio Madrid)

While some of the subtext is completely made up, some is based on fact or the gossip of the time. It has long been rumored that Lincoln might have had a thing for Union officer and law clerk Elmer E. Ellsworth, which was explored in Roger Q. Mason’s 2022 streaming play, Lavender Men. Mary did have a difficult life, losing three children and suffering from mental illness that Dr. John Sotos diagnosed in his 2016 nonfiction The Mary Lincoln Mind-Body Sourcebook as the effects of pernicious anemia, but she also was well educated, spoke French fluently, and had studied dance, music, and the social graces. Escola never merely makes fun of her but instead celebrates her with nonstop hilarity.

The set by dots is true-blue and unpretentious, from Lincoln’s White House office, complete with a portrait of George Washington looking down on the absurd proceedings, to a wood-paneled saloon. Holly Pierson’s period costumes are right on point, highlighted by Mary’s full-skirted black gown, as are Leah Loukas’s wigs, particularly Mary’s pigtails and Abe’s black hair and full beard. Cha See keeps it all well lit, with fun music by Daniel Kluger, who designed the sound with Drew Levy.

Escola, who scored with the online pandemic comedy special Help! I’m Stuck!, is magnificent as Mary, fully embodying her as they have a blast with her foibles while also honoring what she went through. It’s an unforgettable breakthrough performance by a writer-actor with a bright future. Ricamora (Here Lies Love, The King and I) is simply fabulous as more than just Escola’s, er, straight man, giving Honest Abe some surprise edges. Scully (The Erlkings), Leigh (The Nap, Transamerica), and Macht (The Alcestiad) all excel in their supporting roles.

The title of the show refers to the prayer to the Virgin Mary seeking protection from sin, but it also is a twist on the catchphrases Mary Tyler Moore’s character often said to her husband, “Oh, Rob,” and her boss, “Oh, Mr. Grant,” on The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, respectively; Moore changed television as a successful actress, singer, dancer, and producer, so Escola reverses the dynamic, seeing Moore as a kind of role model for Mary Todd Lincoln in a time warp.

The tongue-in-cheek lunacy even extends to the two-sided program card, which is styled like the one for Our American Cousin, the play Abe and Mary were watching at Ford’s Theatre when he was assassinated.

But the play gets serious as well. At one point, Mary asks her teacher if he has ever had a great day. She clarifies, “I mean a truly great day. The kind of day so great it imbues every single sad or boring or terrible day that came before it with deep meaning because from where you stand on this great day, all those days were secretly leading to this one. And you stand there, high on the hilltop of this great day, watching the sun set on your past, and it all looks so beautiful and so perfect and you think, ‘if only I could stay here, where I can see everything so clearly, where all of my hopes feel rewarded and all of my pain finally makes sense.’ But you can’t stay there. You have to come down the hill and walk into tomorrow and it becomes so clear that the sad days and the boring and the terrible days aren’t secretly leading anywhere.”

Any day that includes “Oh, Mary!” is a great day; we might not be able to stay there, but we can keep on laughing as we come down that hill and walk into tomorrow.

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

ORLANDO

Taylor Mac stars as the title character in Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando at the Signature (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

ORLANDO
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through May 12, $45-$119
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Will Davis’s Signature revival of Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando starring Taylor Mac was one of the most hotly anticipated off-Broadway shows of the season. Sadly, it turns out to be one of the most disappointing.

In 1927, Virginia Woolf, struck by sudden inspiration, wrote Orlando: A Biography, a story about a person who wakes up one morning a different gender and experiences life over five hundred years; it was based on Woolf’s relationship with her friend and lover, author and garden designer Vita Sackville-West. “I have written this book quicker than any; & it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writer’s holiday,” Woolf noted in a letter.

In 1998, Ruhl, just out of Brown University, was asked to write a theatrical adaptation of the novel, which had been made into a film in 1992 written and directed by Sally Potter and featuring Tilda Swinton in the title role. In a burst of enthusiasm, Ruhl wrote the first draft “aided by the intrepid speed of youth,” she explains in a program note to this new production.

Perhaps everyone needed to slow down when it came to this fussy revival.

The trouble begins with Arnulfo Maldonado’s sparse set, which is far too large, the actors lost in the vast space, eliminating any sense of intimacy with the audience. There are several black umbrella lights onstage, as if the cast is in a photography studio, voguing for unseen cameras. Various props, from a long table to a royal throne to miniature trees and houses, appear and disappear, often confusingly, as when the houses are left in the back. Oana Botez’s clownish costumes are way over the top and the cast, aside from Mac — Janice Amaya, Nathan Lee Graham, Lisa Kron, Jo Lampert, Rad Pereira, and TL Thompson — is inconsistent, some actors bland, others downright annoying as they portray multiple characters. The hundred-minute play also doesn’t benefit from having an intermission to separate the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the eighteenth to twentieth; not all audience members returned after the break to what was already far from a full house.

The unsteady narrative goes back and forth between the characters engaging in dialogue and speaking in the third person directly to the audience. The break comes after the following exchange, which more than hints at the current controversy over gender identity:

Chorus: We have no choice but to confess . . . he was a woman.
Chorus: No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing.
Their form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace.
Chorus: And here we pause. Orlando had become a woman — there is no denying it.
Chorus: But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as they had been.
Chorus: The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same.
Chorus: Many people have been at pains to prove, first, that Orlando had always been a woman, and secondly, that Orlando is at this moment a man.
Chorus: Let biologists and psychologists argue.
Chorus: It is enough for us to state the simple fact:
Chorus: Orlando was a man till the age of thirty, when she became a woman and has remained so ever since.
Orlando: I want to go home. To England.

A clownish cast of characters is part of disappointing revival (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Over the course of half a millennia, Orlando falls in and out of love, is harassed, meets Shakespeare, and tries their hand at poetry. Orlando also discovers the societal shortcomings of being a woman. “How odd! When I was a young man, I insisted that women be obedient, chaste, and scented. Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires. For women are not — ” Orlando gets cut off, then continues, “obedient, chaste, and scented by nature. They can only attain these graces by tedious discipline. There’s the hairdressing . . . that alone will take at least an hour of my morning . . . there’s looking in the looking glass . . . there’s being chaste year in and year out. . . . Christ Jesus! When I set foot on English soil, I shall never be able to crack a man over the head, or draw my sword and run him through the body, or lead an army . . . All I can do is to pour out tea and ask my lords how they like it.”

Orlando also discovers that despite now being a woman, they are still in love with Sasha, a Russian princess, while beginning to feel the effects of gender discrimination. Orlando soon learns, “One: That you are dead, and therefore cannot hold any property whatsoever. Two: That you are a woman, which amounts to much the same thing.”

Ruhl (Letters from Max, a ritual; The Oldest Boy; Pulitzer finalist In the Next Room, or the vibrator play) and Davis (India Pale Ale, Men on Boats) make those points over and over again as scenes go on too long and some of the play’s unique visuals are repeated until tiresome. Too often it’s like we’re watching an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race mixed with a dose of Forrest Gump instead of a meaningful and funny historical drama dealing with gender inequality, sexual orientation, power, and love. Even the endlessly inventive Mac (A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Bark of Millions) is unable to lift the show.

Woolf’s book might have been ahead of its time, but this production, coming almost one hundred years after the novel, feels dated, stale, and out of place, already past its prime.

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

RACE AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION ONSTAGE: JORDANS / SALLY & TOM / SUFFS

Naomi Lorrain and Toby Onwumere both play characters named Jordan in Ife Olujobi’s new play at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

JORDANS
LuEsther Hall, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 19, $65-$170
publictheater.org

“A reckoning is coming and the likes of you will be crushed by the likes of me!” the enslaved James tells his owner, Thomas Jefferson, in Sally & Tom, one of three current shows with ties to the Public Theater that deal with race and gender discrimination — and a coming reckoning.

At the Public’s LuEsther Hall, Ife Olujobi’s Jordans is set at a modern-day photo studio called Atlas, where some heavy lifting has to be done. The small company is run by the white, domineering Hailey (Kate Walsh), whose staff consists of the white Emma (Brontë England-Nelson), Fletcher (Brian Muller), Tyler (Matthew Russell), Ryan (Ryan Spahn), and Maggie (Meg Steedle) as well as a Black woman named Jordan (Naomi Lorrain), who they all treat, well, like an enslaved woman. While the others bandy about ridiculous ideas regarding Atlas’s future, Jordan has coffee purposefully spilled on her, is told to clean up vomit and human waste, gets garbage thrown at her, and is essentially ignored when she’s not being harassed.

When a photographer (Spahn) is snapping pictures during a photo shoot, he calls out to the model (England-Nelson), “Tell me, who is this woman? What does she want?” It’s a question no one asks Jordan.

Concerned that the company is becoming “vibeless” because their personnel lacks diversity, Hailey hires a Black man also named Jordan (Toby Onwumere) as their first director of culture. When 1.Jordan, as he’s referred to in the script, arrives for his first day, he asks Jordan, “What’s a brotha need to know?” And she tells him: “Well . . . the way I see it is, I work in an office owned by an evil succubus, staffed by little L-train demons, and I spend all day trying not to fall into their death traps. Sometimes it feels kinda like a video game: me running around, dodging flying objects, trying to save my lives for future battles. But then I remember this is my actual life, and I only have one. So.”

Hailey enters and runs her hands over 1.Jordan’s body as if she were evaluating a slave she has just purchased. Maggie demands to know where he is from — and she does not mean where he was born and raised, which happens to be in America. Fletcher, Emma, Tyler, and Ryan bombard him with questions about why his father was not around and was such a deadbeat. The stereotypes keep coming, but 1.Jordan stands firm, even as Hailey asserts to him when they are alone, “I am the owner of this studio.” He has been hired to be the (Black)face of the company and to do whatever he is told. Did I mention that 1.Jordan’s last name is Savage?

Outside the office, the two Jordans disagree on how to “play the game.” Jordan advises 1.Jordan to keep his head down, follow the rules, and not to show off his accomplishments. “You have to let them think that they own you,” she says. But 1.Jordan is determined to be a success on his terms, not theirs, arguing, “I want the freedom to do what I want without having to beg.”

Soon the Jordans become interchangeable, their roles and responsibilities merging and veering off in strange ways, each seeing the white world they inhabit from a new viewpoint. “Who are you?” Jordan asks. 1.Jordan replies, “Who am I?!” Meanwhile, the racist clichés ramp up even more.

Ife Olujobi’s Jordans is set at a modern-day branding studio (photo by Joan Marcus)

In her 2021 pandemic book No Play, in which Olujobi interviewed hundreds of theater people about the state of the industry as impacted by current events — I was among the participants — she asks in the chapter “the end of all things as we understand them”: “In the context of the racial and social justice movements reinvigorated by last year’s uprisings in response to the police killings of Black people, and in the simplest and most literal terms possible, what does ‘doing the work’ mean to you?”

Jordans — the title instantly makes one think of Michael Jordan’s heavily marketed and branded sneakers — is about doing the work, no matter your race or gender. Olujobi, in her first off-Broadway play, and director Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, On Sugarland) don’t back away from harsh language and brutal situations to make their points about where we have to go as a nation, when to take action, and when to sit back and listen. At a talkback after Donja R. Love’s Soft in 2022, White, who directed the show, told the audience that white people were not allowed to take part in the discussion. It was a sobering experience that has remained with me.

Lorrain (Daphne, La Race) and Onwumere (Macbeth, The Liar) are superb as the two Jordans, who get under each other’s skin both literally and figuratively. In an intimate and potent sex scene, only Lorrain’s vulva is exposed, not for titillation, but to declare that power and success do not require a penis. Walsh (If I Forget, Dusk Rings a Bell) excels as Hailey, who represents white leaders of all kinds.

The narrative has a series of confusing moments, and it’s too long at 140 minutes (with intermission); the scene with influencer Kyle Price (Russell) feels particularly extraneous, draining the story of its thrust. But the finale makes a powerful statement that won’t be easy to forget.

Sally Hemings (Sheria Irving) and Thomas Jefferson (Gabriel Ebert) pause at a dance in Suzan-Lori Parks’s new play at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

SALLY & TOM
Martinson Hall, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 2, $65-$170
publictheater.org

Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks pulls no punches in her sharp and clever Sally & Tom, continuing at the Public’s Martinson Hall through June 2. It’s a meta-tale about different kinds of enslavement, from the start of America to the present day.

An independent, diverse theater troupe called Good Company is rehearsing its latest socially conscious play, The Pursuit of Happiness, the follow-up to Patriarchy on Parade and Listen Up, Whitey, Cause It’s All Your Fault. It’s set in Monticello, Virginia, in 1790, at the plantation home of Thomas Jefferson, who is in the midst of a sexual “relationship” with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves; he first started having sex with her when she was fourteen and he was forty-four. The show-within-the-show is written by Luce (Sheria Irving), a Black woman who plays Sally; her partner, the white Mike (Gabriel Ebert), is the director and portrays Tom. Dramaturg and choreographer Ginger (Kate Nowlin) is Patsy, one of Tom’s daughters; stage manager and dance captain Scout (Sun Mee Chomet) is Polly, Tom’s other daughter; publicist and fight director Maggie (Kristolyn Lloyd) is Mary, Sally’s sister; music, sound, and lighting designer Devon (Leland Fowler) is Nathan, Mary’s husband; Kwame (Alano Miller), who is looking to break out into film, is James, Sally’s older brother; and set and costume designer Geoff (Daniel Petzold) plays multiple small roles.

The opening scene between Sally and Tom sets the stage.

Tom: Miss Hemings?
Sally: Mr. Jefferson?
Tom: What do you see?
Sally: I see the future, Mr. Jefferson.
Tom: And it’s a fine future, is it not?
Sally: God willing, Mr. Jefferson.
Tom: Do you think we will make it?
Sally: Meaning you and I?
Tom: Meaning you and I, of course, and, meaning our entire Nation as well. Do you think we’ll make it?
Sally: God willing, Mr. Jefferson. God and Man willing. And Woman too.

While Tom is keeping his relationship with Sally secret, Mike and Luce do not hide theirs, although Luce is suspicious of Mike’s ex. Art imitates life as what happens in the play is mimicked by what is occurring to the company members. When Luce points out, “This is not a love story,” she might be talking about not only Sally and Tom but her and Mike. When unseen producer Teddy demands that a key speech by Kwame, aka K-Dubb, be cut and threatens to pull his funding, the company has some important decisions to make that evoke choices that Sally and Tom are facing. Jefferson admits to owning six hundred enslaved people, including Sally and her family, while Luce declares, “Teddy don’t own me.” And just as the company was depending on the money promised by Teddy, Sally and James are quick to prod Tom of his vow to eventually free them. “We build our castle on a foundation of your promises,” Sally tells Tom.

“Handing me a book while you keep me on a leash,” James says to Tom. “Do you want me to remind myself of how kind you are? Kinder than other Masters, hoping that I will rejoice every day that you keep me enslaved? Let me proclaim my Liberty: You are not on the Throne! I stand with all Enslaved People who rise up and revolt! I say ‘Yes’ to the Revolutions that explode and that will continue to explode all over this country. I condemn the ‘breeding farms’ not more than a day’s ride from here. I acknowledge all the Horrors and the Revolutions that you dare not think on, and that we dare not speak of in your presence. What would we do if we were to wake up out of our ‘tranquility’? The wrongs done upon us would be avenged. And the world order would be upended!”

As Tom decides whether he should go to New York City at the behest of the president and who he will bring with him, Luce and Mike have to reconsider the future of the play, and their partnership.

Sally & Tom is about a small theater company putting on historical drama (photo by Joan Marcus)

Presented in association with the Guthrie Theater, Sally & Tom might not be top-shelf Parks — that illustrious group includes Topdog/Underdog, Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), In the Blood and Fucking A, and Porgy and Bess — but it’s yet another splendidly conceived work from one of America’s finest playwrights. Parks and director Steve H. Broadnax III (Sunset Baby, The Hot Wing King) breathe new life into a familiar topic, which has previously been explored in film and opera as well as television, music, and literature.

Irving (Romeo and Juliet, Parks’s White Noise) and Tony winner Ebert (Matilda, Pass Over) are terrific as the real couple from the past and the fictional contemporary characters, their lives becoming practically interchangeable on Riccardo Hernández’s set, which contains Monticello-style pillars, the actors dressed in Rodrigo Muñoz’s period costumes. The score was written by Parks with Dan Moses Schreier; Parks, an accomplished musician, composed and played the songs for her intimate 2022–23 Plays for the Plague Year, and on April 29 she appeared at Joe’s Pub with her band, Sula & the Joyful Noise.

“You will be ashamed that you were proud to father a country where some are free and others are enslaved! Where some have plenty and others only have the dream of plenty!” Kwame proclaims to Tom. “All them pretty words you write, Mr. Jefferson, they’re all lies! You’ll soon be ashamed by the lies that this country was built on, Mr. Jefferson! Ashamed by the lies on which we were founded, and on which we were fed, and on which we grew fat!”

As Jordans and Sally & Tom reveal, those lies are still with us, more than two hundred and thirty years later.

Shaina Taub wrote the book, music, and lyrics and stars in Suffs on Broadway (photo by Joan Marcus)

SUFFS
Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 5, $69 – $279
suffsmusical.com

The reckoning forges ahead at Suffs, Shaina Taub’s hit musical that began at the Public’s Newman Theater in 2022 and has now transferred to the Music Box on Broadway in a rearranged and improved version.

Most Americans are familiar with such names as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but Taub focuses on the next generation of women who fought for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in the second decade of the twentieth century: Alice Paul (Taub), Inez Milholland (Hannah Cruz), Doris Stevens (Nadia Dandashi), Lucy Burns (Ally Bonino), and Ruza Wenclawska (Kim Blanck).

The musical focuses on generational conflict and disagreements about strategy that have characterized all sorts of progressive movements in the United States; an older, more sedate crowd wants to work within the system, while young radicals want to bust it open with outright aggression.

In Suffs, the youngsters decide to take on the powerful National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), led by Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella) and Mollie Hay (Jaygee Macapugay), a group that does not want to ruffle any feathers. While Carrie sings, “Let mother vote / We raised you after all / Won’t you thank the lady you have loved since you were small? / We reared you, cheered you, helped you when you fell / With your blessing, we could help America as well,” Alice declares, “I don’t want to have to compromise / I don’t want to have to beg for crumbs / from a country that doesn’t care what I say / I don’t want to follow in old footsteps / I don’t want to be a meek little pawn in the games they play / I want to march in the street / I want to hold up a sign / with millions of women with passion like mine / I want to shout it out loud / in the wide open light.”

While Carrie is content to set up pleasant meetings with President Woodrow Wilson (Grace McLean) that are either nonproductive or canceled, Alice has no patience, demanding that action happen immediately. After seeing Ruza give a rousing speech at a workers rally, Alice asks her to join their movement. “Look, I want no part of your polite little suffragette parlor games,” Ruza says. Alice responds, “Well, that’s perfect, because when we take on a tyrant, we burn him down.”

One of the most troubling aspect of the fight for twentieth-century women’s suffrage is its relationship with Black-led racial justice and civil rights movements. Suffs does not ignore the issue and instead makes it a major plot point. When Black journalist and activist Ida B. Wells’s (Nikki M. James) offers to bring her group to join the march, Alice initially rejects her, fearing that southern white donors will pull their funding, but Ida won’t take no for an answer.

“I’m not only here for the march,” Ida tells Alice and the others. “My club has also come to agitate for laws against lynching; my people cannot vote if they are hanging from trees.” She also proclaims in the showstopper “Wait My Turn”: “You want me to wait my turn? / To simply put my sex before my race / Oh! Why don’t I leave my skin at home and powder up my face? / Guess who always waits her turn? / Who always ends up in the back? / Us lucky ones born both female and black.”

Despite the march’s surprising success, the suffragists still have their work cut out for them if they are going to convince the powers that be that women deserve the right to vote.

Inez Milholland (Hannah Cruz) leads the charge for women’s right to vote in Suffs (photo by Joan Marcus)

Taub’s (Twelfth Night, As You Like It) lively score, with wonderful orchestrations by Michael Starobin, and sharp lyrics keep the show moving at a fast pace, matching Alice’s determination to break down political malaise by getting things done ASAP. Tony nominee Leigh Silverman (Merry Me, Grand Horizons) directs with a stately hand that never lets the energy slow down.

Taub fully embodies Alice, a fierce, driven fighter you would want on your side no matter the issue. Tony nominee Colella (Come from Away, Urban Cowboy) is a terrific foil as Carrie; their battles are reminiscent of those between Gloria Steinem and Phyllis Schlafly over the ERA in the 1970s — which Alice also was a part of. Tony winner James (The Book of Mormon, A Bright Room Called Day) brings down the house with “Wait My Turn,” and, in their Broadway debuts, Bonino is lovable as Lucy, Blanck (Octet, Alice by Heart) is a force as Ruza, Cruz rides high as Inez, Dandashi is sweet as the nerdy Doris, and Tsilala Brock adds a sly touch as Dudley Malone, President Wilson’s chief of staff.

As in Jordans and Sally & Tom, Taub’s Suffs explores various aspects of race- and gender-based discrimination, and each offers a very different conclusion.

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