Brian “HallowDreamz” Henry and GALLIM’s Andrea Miller will present new collaboration at the Joyce (photo courtesy GALLIM)
GALLIM
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
May 31 – June 4, $51-$71
212-691-9740 www.joyce.org www.gallim.org
Brooklyn-based GALLIM returns to the Joyce this week to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary, presenting new and repertory pieces May 31 – June 4. “After a necessary process of metamorphosis during the last three pandemic years, GALLIM emerges with a new generation of dancers, creativity, diverse perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds that inspire and enrich our work,” founding creative director and Guggenheim Fellow Andrea Miller said in a statement.
The evening begins with state, a short trio that A.I.M by Kyle Abraham debuted at the Joyce in 2018; it will be performed by India Hobbs, Vivian Pakkanen, and Emma Thesing, with music by Reggie “RIVKA” Wilkins. FROM (DESDE) is a 2019 collaboration with Juilliard for eight dancers, set to Nicolas Jaar’s ”John the Revelator” and “Killing Time.” The highlight is likely to be the world premiere of song, a collaboration with Krump master Brian “HallowDreamz” Henry that features live painting by abstract expressionist Sharone Halevy and music by RIVKA; HallowDreamz is a former gang member from Bed-Stuy and now dancer and teacher who explores survival in this solo.
Following intermission, Castles is an abridged reimagining of 2013’s Fold Here, inspired by Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” about a blind man visiting his late wife’s family in Connecticut who asks the narrator to describe cathedrals being shown on a television program they are watching; the company performs to original music by Andrzej Przybyłowski and Will Epstein and songs by Brian Eno, Paul Whiteman, and Tim Hecker. No Ordinary Love is an excerpt from 2022’s Duets for Jim, a duet performed by Chalvar Monteiro from Alvin Ailey and Issa Perez or Thesing and Marc Anthony Gutierrez, with music by Sade.
The finale is 2019’s company piece SAMA, which combines the ancient Greek word for body and the Slovenian word for by herself, with music by Jaar, Vladimir Zaldwich, and Frédéric Despierre, as the body searches for space amid the digital revolution.
“In this first full season following the pandemic, we celebrate our history and our collaborators while pursuing work that honors diversity, inclusion, equity, and access,” GALLIM executive director Erin Fogarty added. “This is the crucial path to creating meaningful art and continuing much needed conversations across generations, genres, and disciplines.”
(The June 1 performance will be followed by a Curtain Chat.)
SUMMER, 1976
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 18, $84-$338 www.manhattantheatreclub.com
“Life is an awful, ugly place to not have a best friend,” Sarah Dessen writes in her 1998 young adult novel Someone Like You.
YA novels are often obsessed with portraying teen friendships, while adult friendships generally receive less attention. Two current plays anchored by terrific performances remedy that neglect, focusing exclusively on adult same-sex cisgender platonic relationships. In Pulitzer Prize winner David Auburn’s Summer, 1976 two women meet through their young children, while in Pulitzer Prize finalist Rajiv Joseph’s King James two men bond over their love of basketball star LeBron James. While neither two-character show is a slam dunk, they both got plenty of game.
In MTC’s Summer, 1976 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Diana (Laura Linney) and Alice (Jessica Hecht) spend most of the ninety-minute play sitting on opposite sides of a long, rectangular table, their chairs facing the audience, who they address directly. At the beginning, Diana, an artist and teacher at Ohio State, tells us how much she doesn’t like Alice’s daughter, Holly. Alice, whose husband, Doug, is an economist at the university, then explains how she “sort of immediately hated” Diana but realizes she will have to put up with her because Alice’s daughter, Gretchen, is getting along with Holly. Diana is a much stricter mother who doesn’t hide what she believes is her superiority over Alice. “Parents who can’t or won’t control their kids aren’t upset when you do it for them. They’re grateful and ashamed,” she says, describing Alice as a “sleepy-eyed little hippie.”
After passing a joint to the serious, sophisticated Diana, the free-spirited Alice complains, “She fucking bogarted it for like five minutes, and I was like, come on, lady, I only took it out because it was the only way I could imagine getting through the next ten minutes before I could make an excuse and leave.” But soon after that they actually become friends, sharing intimate details about their fears and desires, discussing interior decoration choices, a sexy house painter, the sanctity of marriage, highbrow vs. lowbrow television, music, and literature, and a complicated “cashless, self-sustaining system” Doug has developed to barter baby-sitting time in their community.
The final scene takes place about twenty-five years later, when we learn how their two-month friendship impacted the rest of their lives.
John Lee Beatty’s set features a three-sided gridlike wooden backdrop with two doorways that the characters can use as an exit but don’t, sticking around to hear what the other one has to say. Japhy Weideman’s lighting and Hana S. Kim’s projections change day to night, adding blue sky and twinkling stars. Tony winner Daniel Sullivan (If I Forget,Lost Lake) can’t quite get a firm grasp of Auburn’s (Proof,The Columnist,Lost Lake) narrative, which is too slight and gets bumpier as the conclusion approaches.
Tony nominee and four-time Emmy winner Linney (My Name Is Lucy Barton,The Little Foxes) and Tony nominee Hecht (Letters from Max,The Orchard) form a terrific duo, the former firm and direct, the latter loose and quixotic. For much of the show they are separated by the length of the table, occasionally reaching for each other but unable to make contact.
At a talkback following the matinee I saw, they couldn’t stop touching hands and shoulders, as if they suddenly required meaningful physical connection. It also was clear that the two of them have become real-life friends because of the show, which added a lovely note to the afternoon.
Matt (Chris Perfetti) and Shawn (Glenn Davis) bond over basketball and LeBron in King James (photo by Craig Schwartz)
KING JAMES
MTC at New York City Center – Stage I
131 West Fifty-Fifth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 18, $79-$99 www.manhattantheatreclub.com
Rajiv Joseph shoots and scores with King James, making its New York premiere at MTC at New York City Center.
The play is divided into four quarters, like a basketball game, as two lonely twenty-one-year-old Cleveland Cavaliers fans unexpectedly come together as they follow the exploits of superstar LeBron James, beginning in 2004 and jumping to 2010, 2014, and 2016, four seasons that served as turning points in the career of the leading scorer in the history of the sport — as well as for the two characters.
In February 2004, during the King’s rookie campaign, inexperienced bartender Matt (Chris Perfetti) is desperate to sell the remainder of his family’s season tickets so he can pay off at least some of his numerous debts. Matt, who wants to open a downtown sports bar, is biding his time at the empty La Cave du Vin, playing around with a ball of newspaper and a trash bin, when wannabe writer Shawn (Glenn Davis) arrives, seeking to purchase the tickets. Both men are from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, not far from LeBron’s hometown of Akron; Matt grew up going to games with his father, while Shawn has never been to the arena to see a Cavs match.
After they come to an agreement, their friendship builds over the years: Shawn gets to know Matt’s parents, who run a curiosity shop called Armand’s, the name of their treasured stuffed armadillo; they argue over whether LeBron is better than Michael Jordan; Matt repeatedly explains what the problem with America is; and LeBron moves on to several different teams, forcing Matt and Shawn to reevaluate their loyalty as well as their relationship.
“Being a fan is like having a religion,” Matt says. Shawn replies, “Yeah, and like most religions, it’s rotten to the core. Like at Sunday school, the way they talked to us about Jesus? That’s exactly how I feel right now. Like I’m being punished because He happened to be a Savior.” Matt wisely asks, “Jesus or LeBron?”
Shawn is always the more introspective of the two, pushing LeBron’s choices onto his own identity. “LeBron for the win. LeBron for the win, all these times, and then he just fucking leaves,” he opines after James signs with the Miami Heat. “And I’m like . . . You get burned and you’re like . . . Who am I? Why am I like this? I don’t know. I think maybe I just need to work on myself for a little bit.” It’s those kinds of rationalizations and realizations that lift King James above a mere play about sports to a drama about anyone searching inside themselves, looking to have a better season; the beauty of the show is that you don’t have to know anything about basketball to appreciate it, although it certainly helps if the names Mark Price, Brad Daugherty, David Robinson, and Isiah Thomas ring a bell.
Unfortunately, it takes one seriously bad bounce when it forces race into the equation — Matt is white and Shawn is Black — but it manages to overcome that miss well before time runs out.
Shawn (Glenn Davis) and Matt (Chris Perfetti) reach a turning point in MTC production (photo by Craig Schwartz)
Todd Rosenthal’s set switches from La Cave du Vin, an elegant wine bar that used to be a church, complete with stained glass that gives it a holy feel, further equating LeBron with Jesus, to Armand’s, a messy shop overstuffed with random tchotchkes and knickknacks that are like lost parts of people’s lives. Samantha C. Jones’s costumes range from Cavs jerseys to the cheesy bowling-style shirts Armand’s employees must wear. DJ Khloe Janel keeps the joint rocking in a booth to the right of the stage, where she pumps tunes by Prince, Fleetwood Mac, and others before and after the show and during halftime — er, intermission — just as if we were at an NBA arena. Feel free to sing and dance and say hello.
Tony-winning director Kenny Leon (Topdog/Underdog,A Soldier’s Play) coaches it all like a champion, keeping the rock in play, slowing things down and then going in for the jam.
Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,Describe the Night) grew up a Cavaliers fan in the 1980s and ’90s, so he clearly knows his stuff, understanding just how much sports is and isn’t life. (The play arrives in New York City at a fascinating point as James, currently a Los Angeles Laker, might retire following a four-game sweep at the hands of the Denver Nuggets for the Western Conference Championship.)
Joseph wrote the part of Shawn specifically for Davis (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,Downstate), knowing when to shoot and when to dish it off to Perfetti (Moscow x 6,The Low Road), who takes the ball and runs with it, hitting layups and swishing from beyond the three-point line.
Basketball metaphors aside, King James is an all-star (sorry) examination of male friendship, the ups and the downs, the victories and the defeats — which I know only too well, having been a Knicks fan for more than fifty years.
As O. Henry wrote in Heart of the West, “No friendship is an accident,” which is ably demonstrated by both Summer, 1976 and King James.
SHOCKWAVE DELAY
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
The Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
June 1-11, $35-$40 (use code FAM10 for $10 tickets)
212-475-7710 www.lamama.org
In her artistic statement for her latest show, Shockwave Delay, Bessie-winning multidisciplinary artist and creator Yoshiko Chuma explains, “My work has been called ‘choreographed chaos.’ I have intentionally avoided presenting an ordered universe in my work because I don’t see an ordered universe in my life. I don’t usually think of myself as a choreographer. Sometimes, I think of myself as a counterpoint composer, pitting note against note, placing several singular voices in parallel motion, creating a new harmony. Sometimes, I still consider myself a journalist because my work tends to begin with an outside point of view. I’m interested in the little personal issues of everyday life and how they can affect survival. It is a struggle for me to expand my concepts into something larger that an audience can share. I am always looking for a twist or a variance. Some people have called my work ‘spectacle,’ but I don’t think in these terms. ‘Organized happening’ is a term that might better suit me.”
Running at La Mama June 1-11, Shockwave Delay should be a fascinating “organized happening,” in part a culmination of a forty-year oeuvre but not a retrospective. The world premiere consists of ten unscripted docudramas overlapping twenty chapters melding sound, text, and movement, considering war and utopia in relationship to the circle of life through music, film dance, and theater, early iterations of which have been staged at numerous venues over the last handful of years. It will be performed by a rotating cast of actors (Jim Fletcher, Eileen Myles, Kate Valk), dancers (Agnê Auželyte, Ursula Eagly, Claire Fleury, Mizuho Kappa, Stephanie Maher, Miriam Parker, Emily Pope, Owen Prum, Ryuji Yamaguchi, Yoshiko Chuma), musicians (Robert Black, Jason Kao Hwang, Christopher McIntyre, Dane Terry, Aliya Ultan), and other special guests, ensuring that every performance will be unique. The team also includes visual artists Tim Clifford, Claire Fleury, Elizabeth Kresch. Jake Margolin & Nick Vaughan, Van Wifvat, and Kelly Bugden and photographers Hugh Burckhardt and Julie Lemberger. The June 11 finale will be followed by an auction of archival items accumulated by the School of Hard Knocks since its founding in New York City in 1982. In addition, forty artists and collaborators will be named to Chuma’s “Final Exam: Graduation.”
The Osaka-born Chuma adds, “It has been seventy-nine years since WWII, but Japan still smells of occupation, as if it is a US colony. The United States is my home, but the country’s aggressive influence over the world intrigues me artistically. In the sixties and early seventies, there were a growing number of anti-American and anti-war demonstrations in Japan. I was swept up in this sentiment and attended and ultimately led a number of demonstrations. A demonstration is a like a ‘production,’ and this was truly where I received my artistic training. I was not the type to stand in front of a microphone and rally the crowd, so I did the publicity papers for the demonstrations. I was a silent agitator. I still am an agitator, both silent and not so silent. Art can be revolutionary, but is not always. Art must be guided, and there are limits. I can organize people in space, but it’s hard to organize people in life.”
There’s no telling what might happen at each show, so don’t delay to get tickets to what promises to be a series of unpredictable and awe-inspiring events.
Wangechi Mutu, Shavasana I, bronze, 2019 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Who:Wangechi Mutu, Vivian Crockett, Margot Norton What: Discussion about current exhibition “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” Where: New Museum Theater, New Museum, 235 Bowery at Prince St. When: Thursday, June 1, $10, 6:30 (exhibition continues through June 4, $12-$18) Why: In the catalog for “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” cocurators Vivian Crockett and Margot Norton discuss various elements of the exhibit, which is named after a 2003 watercolor with collage on paper in which two figures have human bodies and animal heads. The Nairobi-born, New York City–based multimedia artist responds, “Multitudes of stories need to be listened to and taken into consideration. I still have a lot of heartache about how schools teach and marginalize so many histories and art. I’m thinking about the association between animals and primitivity and between so-called ‘inferior’ or ‘lower’ creatures and that which is female and African. I’m a big lover of animals and nature. Why do we insult one another with the names of these incredible creatures that we share this world with? Coming from Kenya, where we still have so much natural beauty, it’s hard to express how powerful that is. You have to take into consideration how small humans are and how symbiotic our relationships with nature and with each other really are.”
On June 1 at 6:30, Mutu, whose multidisciplinary, immersive Banana Stroke at the Met was a highlight of Performa 17 in 2017, will be at the New Museum to talk more with Crockett and Norton about the exhibit, which consists of more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, collages, videos, and drawings, incorporating such elements as red soil, pulp, bells, bones, beads, shells, and glass, filling all six levels of the New Museum. Her hybrid works mix art historical references and pop culture with sociocultural themes dealing with race, femininity, myth, colonialism, immigration, Afro-futurism, and the African diaspora. The human and natural world both fight and envelop each other through an interconnectedness she depicts in fascinating visual stories.
In the seventh-floor Skyroom, the bronze sculpture Shavasana I is all by itself, a life-size figure on the ground, feet in high heels and hands extended, the rest of her form covered by a woven yoga mat; the title references śavāsana, the corpse pose that takes its name from the Sanskrit word for “dead body.” The large-scale Crocodylus sculpture features a futuristic being riding atop a crocodile that is revealing its huge, sharp teeth; the two figures meld into one at the back. In the Subterranea collage series, Mutu has placed a different character in each of its six parts, their arms outstretched amid sci-fi-esque branches, sinews, and flowers. In the thirteen-minute black-and-white video Eat Cake, a disheveled Mutu wears a long gown and sits under a tree in a forest, bending down to eat a chocolate cake, shoveling bites into her mouth with her hand, evoking Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, but here caught up in consumerism, racism, misogyny, slavery, and humanity’s destruction of land.
In the six-minute Cutting, Mutu, seen from a distance, silhouetted against the setting sun in a Texas border city shortly after 9/11, uses a machete called a panga to chop repeatedly at a log; the panga is not only a farm tool but was also wielded by Rwandan militia during the genocide there. In the animated The End of eating Everything, Santigold portrays a creature reveling in consumption and greed in a world that needs explosive renewal. On June 4, Eat Cake,The End of eating Everything,Amazing Grace, and the extraordinary My Cave Call will be screened in the New Museum Theater.
Red gouges in the wall in the shape of Kenyan lakes make it seem like the natural world is bleeding in Moth Collection, in which seventy-five feathered moth-human hybrids are arranged in chalk boxes, referencing colonization, genocide, institutional education, self-destruction, and categorization. “There’s something vast and unknowable or inexplicable about how all of us fit together,” Mutu says in the catalog. “The amount of creatures that have been killed to study and understand is also obscene. There’s this hypocrisy in trying to understand something, conserve it, and take care of it while killing thousands for experimentation.” During one installation of the piece, she hurt her elbow. She explained, “I felt like I was hurting myself in trying to express how enraged I was, which was not helping. I wanted to find a way to resolve and understand what was happening to me and other people who come to the United States and who cross borders. I felt deep sadness and became obsessed with the Rwandan genocide, which I felt had a lot to do with borders and confining or defining a people through colonization and eugenics.”
In the lobby gallery, In Two Canoe features a pair of fantastical hybrid beings sitting in a canoe that serves as a self-contained bath or fountain, their limbs extending like roots, merging with each other, the canoe, and the landscape. At the far end is For Whom the Bell Tolls, a creature made of red soil, paper pulp, and wooden bells. Below black splotches on the wall, dark gray emergency relief blankets form a silhouette of Kĩrĩnyaga, which is the name of Mount Kenya as well as a 1998 science fiction novel about an African utopia written by white American author Mike Resnick.
On June 3 at noon, the New Museum will host “Teen Summit: Beyond the Essence, More than Critical,” in which Youth Spectrum Arts members and teaching artists troizel and Eden Chinn will answer the question “What happens after we observe what occupies the space of the museum? Art isn’t simply there to be beautiful; it has a message that can inspire action.”
Ellen Lauren and Violeta Picayo portray two versions of the same character in first-ever revival of Evelyn Brown (A Diary) (photo by Steven Pisano)
EVELYN BROWN (A DIARY)
La MaMa Downstairs Theater
66 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Friday – Sunday through June 4, $30 www.lamama.org
What does a dramaturg do? In the case of the first-ever revival of María Irene Fornés’s long-lost Evelyn Brown (A Diary), dramaturg Gwendolyn Alker spent five years reconstructing the script from fragments and interviews with members of the original cast and crew. The show opened in 1980 at Theater for the New City, just a few blocks from where it is now being remounted in a beautiful production continuing at La MaMa’s Downstairs Theater through June 4.
The one-act play was adapted from the handwritten journal of Evelyn Brown, a housekeeper in rural Melvin, New Hampshire. Brown, who was born in 1854 and died in 1934, details her daily activities in the 1909 notebook, which was given as a gift to Fornés but is now missing. The protagonist is portrayed by Ellen Lauren as Evelyn and Violeta Picayo as Evelyn Brown, her younger self, in roles originated by Margaret Harrington and Aileen Passloff, respectively. It opens with a blindfolded Evelyn standing front and center on Donald Eastman’s poignant set, which consists of numerous entries and a floor made of unfinished wooden paneling, the white doors contrasting with the dark hallways.
Evelyn removes the blindfold and starts reciting from memory (all spelling, punctuation, and capitalization is transcribed verbatim from the script): “January 1st. Here with Aunt Kate in Wolfboro. spent the day with her went down to Nat’s Store with her also to the Post Office. Got a letter from the Church in Alfred, also a New Years present from Dr. Gardner. in the evening Margaret and I called on Mrs. Davis and Mable.” Between each day, she does a little dance, shuffling her feet backward and forward in a rectangular shape, almost like a square dance but without a partner.
“Second. Cold this morn 6 below zero. have got to go to Melvin. Went over to Plumie’s and took dinner, then Wesley J- came for me and I came with him to Melvin. Stopped here to Charlie’s found the School Teacher still here.”
Evelyn Brown appears, initially watching from the back before joining Evelyn to make Mrs. Hiram Hill’s domestic bread. Both women wear patterned aprons over button-down shirts and long skirts; the costumes are by Fornés’s longtime designer Gabriel Berry. It’s an extremely funny scene as they carefully go through the recipe, only skipping the recommended time for boiling, rising, and baking the ingredients, which scatter across the table and floor as they slice, mash, and knead. It’s an excellent introduction to the next series of daily accounts, which highlight the monotony, drudgery, and sameness of their existence.
They write about doing the laundry. Sweeping and ironing. Preparing and serving meals. Doing the dishes. Dusting. Making beds. Going shopping. Tending to the baby. We learn tidbits about Mr. and Mrs. Porter, Aunt Lydia, Arthur Caverly, Mrs. Gordon, Lizzie, Rob Hunt, and Lillian, about who in the community has died and what the weather is.
María Irene Fornés revival at La Mama is a labor of love (photo by Steven Pisano)
Evelyn Brown and Evelyn “read” entries from empty prop journals as they sit at opposite sides of a long table, slowly climbing on top of it and twisting their bodies in experimental gestures and movements. Evelyn explains where all the cleaning supplies and tools are stored.
Evelyn Brown brings a chair onstage, sitting on it for a moment, then moving it to different locations and sitting on it again and again; Christina Watanabe’s lighting casts her in a glow that is part ghost, part superstar. Evelyn’s recorded voice is heard, taking us through the end of March and into April. (The sound design, which also features music by Mary Z. Cox, is by Jordan Bernstein.)
A long section involves the two women setting, moving, and resetting a series of tables with great precision, a symbol of time passing as the tables get bigger and smaller, including one for children.
The premiere of Evelyn Brown (A Diary) was directed by the Cuban-born Fornés, who died in Manhattan in 2018 at the age of eighty-eight, leaving behind a legacy that includes nine Obies and such plays as The Conduct of Life,Mud,The Danube,Fefu and Her Friends,Drowning, Molly’s Dream, and Pulitzer Prize finalist What of the Night? Revival director Alice Reagan (Fornes’s Promenade and Enter the Night) has done a superb job resurrecting the play, which documents what is/was called “women’s work” with grace and elegance.
Its inherent feminism is reminiscent of Chantal Akerman’s 1975 drama Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, about a widowed housewife going through the motions of a drab, repetitive existence, although the film is a humorless three and a half hour affair while Evelyn Brown (A Diary) is a potent seventy minutes, with its fair share of laughs. (However, both feature a potato-slicing scene.) It is also reminiscent of the extraordinary reimagining of Ping Chong’s Lazarus in the same theater this past fall, which also incorporated recorded dialogue, a protagonist with much of his face covered, an intricate table-setting scene, and a theme of otherness. In Evelyn Brown (A Diary), it’s like the Evelyns exist in their own space, separate from everyone else, othered.
Lauren (Chess Match No. 5,Radio Macbeth) and Picayo (Three Little Girls Down a Well,Sense and Sensibility) are outstanding, each one connecting with the audience in their own way. Picayo is more innocent and optimistic as Evelyn Brown, making eye contact with audience members and smiling and laughing more than Lauren, who, in the later version of the same character, does what she needs to do but lacks the hope of her younger self. She takes great care of her responsibilities, but she is far more practical.
The play is no mere time capsule of 1909 New Hampshire or 1980 New York City avant-garde theater; in 2023, it still feels fresh and relevant, radical and alive, in a gorgeous and tender production that deserves wide notice.
Young and old Neil Diamond (Will Swenson and Mark Jacoby) explore their life and legacy in A Beautiful Noise (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
A BEAUTIFUL NOISE: THE NEIL DIAMOND MUSICAL
Broadhurst Theatre
235 West Forty-Fourth St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 7, $84.50-$318.50 abeautifulnoisethemusical.com
There are few things I dread more in theater than jukebox bio musicals, which generally consist of a fawning, glossed-over book and mediocre orchestrations of famous songs that always sound better on the albums made by the star who’s being celebrated. For every well-received Jersey Boys, about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, there are unfortunate, overblown, clichéd shows about Michael Jackson,Cher,Tina Turner,the Temptations,Donna Summer, and Carole King. That’s not a good track record.
But every once in a while an extremely clever jukebox musical hits Broadway, taking familiar, existing songs and building an exciting and original story around them. Rock of Ages was a hugely entertaining tale constructed out of songs by such ’70s dinosaurs as Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, and Quarterflash. American Idiot re-created the fictional narrative of a Green Day concept album without Broadway-fying the music. Jagged Little Pill examined American suburbia through Alanis Morissette’s oeuvre. And Head Over Heels smoothly inserted hits by the Go-Go’s into a little-known Elizabethan drama like they were a natural fit.
A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical, scheduled to run through January 7 at the Broadhurst, is a major disappointment. The frame story is that the Brooklyn-born Diamond (Mark Jacoby) is meeting with a therapist (Linda Powell) to explore key moments in his life and career. “This isn’t going to work,” he tells her. He’s not kidding.
The book, by four-time Oscar nominee Anthony McCarten (The Collaboration,The Two Popes), goes back and forth between the present day, as Diamond begins to open up to his doctor, who is making him revisit his songs in the huge volume The Complete Lyrics of Neil Diamond, and the past, as his younger self (Will Swenson) rises from shy Brill Building songwriter to folkie to pop superstar. Along the way we meet his parents, Rose (Bri Sudia) and Kieve (Tom Alan Robbins), his early supporter Ellie Greenwich (Bri Sudia), predatory producer Bert Berns (Robbins), and the women who would become his wives, Jaye Posner (Jessie Fisher), Marcia Murphey (Robyn Hurder), and Katie (unseen).
Neil Diamond (Will Swenson) goes for the glitter in jukebox bio musical (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
Tony-winning director Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) can’t find the right rhythm as the narrative meanders, and Tony-nominee Swenson (Hair,Les Misérables) swaggers as Diamond but is unable to embody him as the show presents us with spiritless versions of “I’m a Believer,” “Solitary Man,” “Song Sung Blue,” “Cherry, Cherry,” “Love on the Rocks,” “America,” “Cracklin’ Rosie,” and the obligatory singalong “Sweet Caroline.” (The arrangements are by Sonny Paladino, with orchestrations by Paladino, Bob Gaudio, and Brian Usifer.)
David Rockwell’s set is plenty flashy, with bright lighting by Kevin Adams, standard choreography by Steven Hoggett, and a wide range of costumes by Emilio Sosa. I found myself more involved with the woman a few rows in front of me who kept taking her phone out to video several songs than the actual narrative.
“I don’t . . . I don’t like to talk about myself,” Diamond tells the doctor early on. A Beautiful Noise doesn’t have that much to say about Diamond that we don’t already know (or need to know), so if you really need to hear his music — and you should, because his catalog is one of the best in the business — stream one of his albums or find a tribute band playing in your area.
A delightful cast parties its way through & Juliet (photo by Matthew Murphy)
& JULIET
Stephen Sondheim Theatre
124 West Forty-Third St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 21, $89-$338 andjulietbroadway.com
Meanwhile, something inspiring and exhilarating is happening over at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, where they are taking a new spin on the Bard, whose catalog is unquestionably the best in the business. David West Read’s & Juliet does a fantastic job with a sensational concept: Anne Hathaway (Betsy Wolfe) argues that her husband, William Shakespeare (Stark Sands), screwed up the ending of Romeo and Juliet, and she has decided to change it so Juliet (Lorna Courtney) actually survives and is now in search of a new life, without Romeo (Ben Jackson Walker).
Soutra Gilmour’s lively set prepares the audience from the start, with the curtainless stage containing a large neon sign of the title, the word Romeo having fallen off, as well as a glistening jukebox ready to fill the room with great music. Bill Sherman’s orchestrations and arrangements will delight you, no matter what your preconceived feelings are about the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Robyn, Demi Lovato, Katy Perry, *NSYNC, and Justin Timberlake. But for good measure, Bon Jovi, Ellie Goulding, and P!nk are added to the mix (and Céline Dion!).
However, the songs were not chosen randomly; they were all written or cowritten by Swedish producer Max Martin, who’s clearly an experienced hitmaker of the highest order. (The conceit of sticking with one songwriter’s work doesn’t always pan out, as evidenced by Bat Out of Hell, with famously bombastic songs Jim Steinman wrote for Meat Loaf and others.)
The story begins in Elizabethan England, as Will is about to present the world premiere of Romeo and Juliet, but Anne steps in the way, asking, “What if . . . Juliet didn’t kill herself? . . . I mean, what do I know, but it seems like she’s got her whole life ahead of her, she’s only had one boyfriend. Maybe she doesn’t kill herself just because he killed himself?”
Against his better judgment, Will collaborates on the new plot, making Romeo a serial cheater and creating a new best friend for Juliet, a gender-neutral character named May (Justin David Sullivan). To avoid being sent to a nunnery by her parents (Nicholas Edwards and Veronica Otim), Juliet takes off for Paris with May and Angélique (Justin David Sullivan and Melanie La Barrie), her nurse and confidante. Anne writes herself into the play and portrays the carriage driver.
In Paris, they go to a Renaissance Ball, where Juliet meets a musician named François DuBois (Philippe Arroyo, although I saw the excellent understudy Brandon Antonio), whose testosterone-fueled father, Lance (Paulo Szot), is the host of the fancy soirée. “As you can see, I play the virginal,” François tells Juliet, who responds, “Me too. I feel like doing it once shouldn’t count.”
Juliet (Lorna Courtney) looks for love in charming Broadway musical (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Pretty soon there’s all kinds of couplings and uncouplings going on as Angélique and Juliet sing “Oops! . . . I Did It Again,” May and François lead the company through “I Kissed a Girl,” Anne and Juliet duet on “That’s the Way It Is,” Lance, François, and May team up on “Shape of My Heart,” and everyone joins in on “Can’t Stop the Feeling!”
Directed with virtuoso aplomb by Luke Sheppard (The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole,In the Heights), who turns the proceedings into a kind of affectionate adult fairy tale, & Juliet is a rousing success. It tackles misogyny, homophobia, gender bias, and other forms of social injustice with a playful sense of humor and a genuine heart, from Paloma Young’s elegant costumes, which mix the traditional with the modern, Howard Hudson’s frenzied lighting, Andrzej Goulding’s dazzling projections, and Gareth Owen’s explosive sound. Jennifer Weber’s appropriately energetic choreography keeps it all moving through Gilmour’s set, which includes miniature landmarks, fun furniture, and, yes, a balcony.
Native New Yorker Lorna Courtney (Dear Evan Hansen,West Side Story) is thoroughly engaging as Juliet, a young woman ready to take control of her own life. Sullivan portrays May with a touching bittersweetness, and La Barrie is eminently likable as Angélique, who remains by Juliet’s side even when she thinks she’s making some very bad choices. Two-time Tony nominee Sands (Kinky Boots,To Kill a Mockingbird) and Wolfe (The Mystery of Edwin Drood,Falsettos) make a great pairing as a husband and wife battling over more than just theatrical conventions and expectations.
At its heart, the wonderful show is centered around Emmy winner Read’s (Schitt’s Creek,The Performers) terrific book, which provides plenty of room for character development while never missing an opportunity for a clever literary laugh.
At one point, Juliet declares, “This is already the best night ever, and all we’ve done is leave my bedroom!” Angélique explains, “Juliet, we have to go. If your parents see you, you’ll be forced to join the nunnery.” Anne cuts in, proclaiming, “Well, we will have none of that.” Angélique asks, “What?” May says, “Ew.”
“Sorry, my husband makes puns. It’s a force of habit,” Anne clarifies, even explaining the joke for those who might not have gotten it immediately.
Sisters gather at the family home in Flatbush to figure out what happens next (photo by Monique Carboni)
BERNARDA’S DAUGHTERS
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West Forty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 4, $37-$87 thenewgroup.org www.nationalblacktheatre.org
Carlos J. Soto’s set is a harbinger of what is to come in the world premiere of Diane Exavier’s Bernarda’s Daughters, a powerful and moving coproduction from the New Group and National Black Theatre that opened at the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center this week. The audience sits on three sides of the staging area, a sparse room with several painted wooden boxes on the floor and the skeleton of a house, with only the frames of doors and windows, occasionally illuminated in a string of LED lights. While it appears that the five protagonists in the title can leave at any moment, just walk through the empty doors or even climb through the windows, they are trapped by both fear and legacy. For ninety minutes the characters discuss their futures, but it always ends up with them back in the house, their life at a standstill.
Bernarda’s Daughters was inspired by Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca’s last completed play, The House of Bernarda Alba, which he wrote in 1936, the year he died at the age of thirty-eight. First produced in 1945, the story has been adapted into a musical, an opera, a dance, and several films, with the location changing from Spain to Iran, India, Australia, the American south, and other places around the world, proving the universality of the themes.
Exavier’s version is set in modern-day Flatbush, Brooklyn (my hometown), where five sisters have gathered in the family home: Louise (Pascale Armand), Harriet (Alana Raquel Bowers), Lena (Kristin Dodson), Maryse (Malika Samuel), and Adela (Taji Senior). Their mother is in Haiti, attending the funeral of their father. The play begins with each sister delivering a brief introduction. For example, Louise, a city nurse who has a different mother but the same father as the other four, explains, “Each of us sisters is a room in our mother’s house, our grandmother a countryside. Intimate and immense. If you were to, say . . . put on a play about us, there would be no center-staged couch, no staircase, no fabrication of a gentrifying city just outside the windows, no nod to some ancestral land. Our city is dying and our city is inside of us. There are countries that are dying and those countries are inside of us. We are at the edge of living. We are the world we live in.”
Florence Delva (Tamara Tunie) is concerned about Adela (Taji Senior) in Bernarda’s Daughters (photo by Monique Carboni)
Outside, the noise of construction and protest pierces through their conversations; amid gentrification, there’s been another police shooting of a young, mentally ill, unarmed Black man. “They don’t see the people in the neighborhood. They live in those castles with the police as their front desk,” Adela says of the influx of white people flooding into the neighborhood. “They dial 911 like they’re out of toilet paper. ‘Excuse me, can you just?’ ‘Would you mind?’ It’s sick. I’m so tired of it.” Adela wants to join the march but can’t take action, instead watching it through the window, her face only a few feet from the audience, implicating us in what is happening to their community.
Louise and Harriet have a plan to use land their father left Louise in Jacmel, Haiti, to build a small vacation villa. They all discuss whether they will be moving out of the house — which their parents might have acquired under suspicious circumstances — or staying there with their grandmother, Florence Delva (Tamara Tunie), once their mother returns from her mourning period. When they find out what havoc their parents’ decisions have wrought, however, their lives are suddenly turned upside down.
“Louise, you know you can’t buy, you can’t rent, you can’t be dead here. Shit’s insane,” Adela says. Louise replies, “It’s ridiculous. Whatever happens, just don’t put me in Long Island.”
But as Adela says, “I feel like the house is killing us slowly. . . . You guys have to get out.”
Exavier fills the dialogue with poetic interludes and quotes based on writings and statements by James Baldwin, Louise Glück, Mary Ruefle, Trumbull Stickney, Morgan Parker, Kamau Brathwaite, Toni Morrison, and Florence Miller, whose husband was choked to death in Crown Heights by the police in 1978. In a compelling monologue about sex, sun, cats, and the dead, Maryse, who is a school librarian, says, “I love watching the sun on graves, illuminating names, how bright the light is, blazing the stone, and the sky so blue above recalling the color of bone.”
Later, Harriet says, “You really think I love love so much? You don’t know anything. I’m mourning it! I’m so far past love I never even stood a chance. I was born beyond it. We all were. Love — in this fucking country? My womb was full of rocks. That’s what bodies like ours think of love: babies made of stone. . . . I really think we are the end of it all. And I think that’s what makes us so goddamn American. Because this stupid country is like the waking end of a crazy-ass fever dream. And you trying to out-America everyone you lay down with because the only way to have a little power is to step on somebody else’s back is just wrong! But even worse than that, it’s useless.” Meanwhile, the words free and freedom appear seven times in the play, ideals that seem to be just out of the characters’ reach.
The actors portraying the sisters are outstanding, with native Brooklynite Dodson standing out as the boisterous Lena. The women believably argue and share personal intimacies like real sisters; however, Obie winner Tunie (Building the Wall,Familiar) has her hands full as the over-the-top Florence, who hearkens back to the old days in Haiti but is overdrawn here. The curtain at the rear of the stage feels unnecessary, but Rodrigo Muñoz’s costumes meld Brooklyn with Port-au-Prince, and Marika Kent’s lighting and Kathy Ruvuna’s sound are effective, particularly the never-ending commotion going on outside.
Directed by Dominique Rider with a clear connection to the characters, Bernarda’s Daughters is a potent look at what the Haitian community in New York City has, what it’s lost, and where it might be heading. Like Adela proclaims, “I keep telling you guys. It’s a different Brooklyn out there.” She’s not just talking about Flatbush.
