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TWI-NY TALK: SCOTT SIEGEL

Barbara and Scott Siegel go out on the town nearly every night

Barbara and Scott Siegel are out on the town nearly every night (photo by Russ Weatherford)

BROADWAY BY THE YEAR
The Town Hall
123 West 43rd St. between Sixth Ave. & Broadway
Sunday, February 23, Monday, March 30, Monday, May 11, and Monday, June 22, 8:00, $47-$57 per show, $180-$220 subscription for all four programs
212-840-2824
www.thetownhall.org
www.siegelpresents.com

In the December 31 edition of “The Siegel Column” for Theater Pizzazz!, the husband-and-wife team of Scott and Barbara Siegel examined the state of the Broadway musical, writing, “The current crop of new musicals — both brand new and new productions of revivals — are tanking left and right. What’s up?” Their theory? “Producers are banking too heavily on good reviews from the New York Times.” The Siegels know what of they speak; for years, they have been regulars on the city’s theater and music scene, covering Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway shows in addition to cabaret. Both are voting members of the Drama Desk, where Barbara chairs the nominating committee, so she has to see more than three hundred productions every season. Meanwhile, Scott hosts a multitude of music-related events in addition to attending hundreds of shows with his wife as well. “It’s like a rollercoaster going from show to show,” Barbara says, “but the ride is accompanied by a fantastic scoring of Broadway music.”

Scott’s signature event is “Broadway by the Year,” which is about to begin its fifteenth year at Town Hall. Since 2001, Scott has been pairing performers with musical numbers from a particular Broadway season, but for the fifteenth anniversary, he will be honoring quarter-centuries, paying homage to the Broadway musicals of 1916 to 1940 on February 23, followed by 1941 to 1965 on March 30, 1966 to 1990 on May 11, and 1991 to the present on June 22. The February 23 show will feature a host of Tony, Grammy, and Drama Desk winners and nominees, including Tonya Pinkins, Steve Ross, Karen Ziemba, Emily Skinner, John Easterlin, and Nancy Anderson. While preparing for this and other shows, Scott discussed theater, music, and the many hats he wears.

twi-ny: This year you’re celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of “Broadway by the Year.” Did you ever anticipate that it would be still going strong all this time later?

Scott Siegel: When the series got started, I could never have guessed that it would reach a fifteenth season and that we would be sponsored by Bank of America. Nor would I have guessed that last year we would have changed the format to have over one hundred stars over the course of our season — which we are boldly attempting to do again this year. Getting so many stars willing to commit their time to our shows is almost as great a testament to our staying power as the loyal subscriber base that makes the whole series possible.

twi-ny: How did it initially get started?

SS: That’s a long story. Suffice it to say that I had a concept that Town Hall embraced and they asked me to produce it for them. At that time, I was exclusively a writer/critic. I had not produced anything whatsoever before the very first “Broadway by the Year.” Believe me, having your first experience as a producer putting together a show in a 1,500-seat landmarked theater is pretty daunting. But at its very core, “Broadway by the Year,” while it may have more bells and whistles by way of production values, is still very much the same concept now as it was fifteen years ago. Essentially, I put the music first and foremost; the historical context that I provide from the stage is there only to set up the songs (and hopefully entertain a little bit, too).

Scott Siegel hangs out with the cast of Broadway by the Year in 2014 (photo by Maryann Lopinto)

twi-ny: For your fifteenth season, you’re hosting four presentations, each one representing twenty-five years. Do you have a particular favorite quarter-century?

SS: Generally, I prefer the twenties and thirties the most because that’s when there were so many great composers / lyricists at work. All that Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, Porter, Romberg, etc.

twi-ny: What was it like in the early years, when you were just starting out, to get stars to participate?

SS: Wonderful question! I’ll tell you the secret. Provide singers with great material, a lot of support, a fun and rewarding experience, and they tell their friends. The very first concert had Jason Graae, Heather MacRae, and Sally Mayes — just those three. Not long after, I saw Liz Callaway at Joe’s Pub and went backstage to say hi and ask her to do the next “Broadway by the Year.” Before I could ask her, however, she said, ‘My friend Jason Graae just did one of your concerts and had a ball. Can I do one?’ Liz has been one of our regulars, appearing in one of the concerts almost every season since then. That’s how I got over one hundred stars last year and why I’ll get them this year :).

twi-ny: You also put together “Broadway Unplugged” and the Nightlife Awards, have written many books and columns, have led film seminars, had a radio show, are producing “Maxine Linehan: Beautiful Songs” at the Metropolitan Room — and still find the time to go to hundreds of Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway shows with your wife. You must be out nearly every night of the year.

SS: I’m exhausted just hearing all of that. Actually, the only time either of us takes a break is when we break down, getting sick. It really helps that we love what we do. And every day is different, so it never gets boring.

twi-ny: What would an actual break entail for you?

SS: We’re often asked that. On the rare times when we leave New York, it’s usually to do the same stuff we do here someplace else. A musical festival in Quebec City — things like that. We’re not the types to lie on a beach in the sun.

Scott Siegel is celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of his popular Broadway by the Year series as Town Hall

Scott Siegel is celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of his popular “Broadway by the Year” series at Town Hall

twi-ny: You and Barbara appeared on The Joe Franklin Show. What was that experience like?

SS: Barbara is the shy one. She didn’t appear on the show, but I did the TV show with Joe several times, and I was on his WOR radio show many times as well. Whenever Joe would see me, he would always greet me with “Mr. Siegel, make it legal,” and ask me if I knew who sang that song. I would always answer Sophie Tucker, and he would always pretend to be amazed that I knew that. Joe was a genuine New York character and I’m glad I had the chance to know him.

twi-ny: In your opinion, what’s the current state of the Broadway musical?

SS: Such a big question. For the most part, today’s Broadway musicals are tourist attractions; they have to be in order to be successful. A show can only run for about three months, at most, with the core New York theater audience. That’s why the more daring and interesting musicals are off-Broadway. When one of them takes off with great reviews and major buzz, it can move to Broadway and compete — like Fun Home, which is coming to Broadway from the Public. But it’s an uphill battle. I’m always impressed when a show without stars, just good music, a good book, and talented actors, can swim upstream and succeed, like Memphis and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. They are the wonderful exceptions to the rule.

twi-ny: What are some of your favorites that are playing right now?

SS: As for brand-new musicals that are running right now, I’m a fan of Honeymoon in Vegas. The music and lyrics are terrific — and the show is so beautifully crafted. It just works like an old-fashioned, well-made Broadway musical. I would say about Hamilton, at the Public, that it’s going to be considered one of the most important musicals of our era.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: RAILROAD EARTH LIVE AT eTOWN HALL

Who: Railroad Earth
What: An Evening with Railroad Earth: Winter Tour 2015
Where: Brooklyn Bowl, 61 Wythe Ave. between North 11th & 12th Sts., 718-963-3369
When: February 19-21, $20, 8:00
Why: Relentless touring jam band Railroad Earth will be making a three-night stand at Brooklyn Bowl this week, highlighting tracks from their upcoming DVD, Live at Red Rocks (Black Bear, April 7, 2015), which boasts such favorites as “Long Way to Go,” “Chasin’ a Rainbow,” “Dandelion Wine,” “Elko,” and “Mighty River” recorded last August, as well as last year’s Last of the Outlaws (Black Bear, January 2014) and songs from throughout their nearly fifteen-year career. Featuring lead singer Todd Sheaffer on guitar, Tim Carbone on violin and guitar, John Skehan on mandolin, bouzouki, and piano, Andrew Altman on bass, Carey Harmon on drums, and Andy Goessling on multiple instruments including guitar, banjo, dobro, mandolin, flute, pennywhistle, and saxophone, Railroad Earth plays an alluring mix of country, folk, pop, rock, and Americana that never fails to take their intensely devoted audience on a beautiful ride. They’ll also be at the Mountain Jam Festival in Hunter on June 4.

FIXATION: PANDORA’S BOX

Louise Brooks sets hearts and minds afire in G. W. Pabst’s PANDORA’S BOX

CABARET CINEMA: PANDORA’S BOX (DIE BÜCHSE DER PANDORA) (G. W. Pabst, 1929)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, February 20, $10, 9:30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org

Upadana, or attachment is one of the three Buddhist poisons, along with aversion and ignorance. The Rubin Museum’s latest Brainwave series, “The Attachment Trap,” featuring film screenings and discussions and intimate talks that pair scientists with performers, explores the notion of the attachment trap, which it describes as “a metaphor for a core Buddhist principle: by holding tightly to external sources of happiness, we prevent ourselves from being truly free.” Running through April, the series includes Jake Gyllenhaal and neuroscientist Moran Cerf talking about “The Actor’s Dream,” writer Kevin Sessums and neuroscientist Carl Hart examining “I Left It on the Mountain,” and game designer Eric Zimmerman and neuroscientist John Krakauer attempting to answer the question “Is Life a Game?” Another key component of the Brainwave festival is the Friday-night film program, this year titled “Fixation,” consisting of movies that deal with attachment, which can also be interpreted as desire or greed. The series began, appropriately enough, with Brian De Palma’s Obsession and continues February 20 with G. W. Pabst’s 1929 silent Weimar classic, Pandora’s Box. Based on plays by Frank Wedekind, Pandora’s Box stars Kansas-born Louise Brooks as Lulu, a good-time girl who loves drinking, dancing, and the attention of men. Lulu, in a trend-setting hair bob and bangs, seemingly just can’t say no, whether it’s as the mistress of married newspaper publisher Dr. Ludwig Schön (Fritz Kortner) or her aging first patron, the father-figure Schigolch (Carl Goetz). Schön’s grown son, Alwa (Francis Lederer), and Countess Augusta Geschwitz (Alice Roberts) also have taken quite a fancy to Lulu. Even after Dr. Schön gets engaged to the well-connected socialite Charlotte Marie Adelaide von Zarnikow (Daisy D’ora), he can’t stay away from Lulu, despite knowing the harm that could bring to his reputation and his future. He helps finance and publicize a variety show that Lulu joins through trapeze artist Rodrigo Quast (Krafft-Raschig), a friend of Schigolch’s. But when Dr. Schön brings his fiancée to see the revue, jealousy takes center stage, and things starting going downhill for Lulu in myriad ways, including murder, blackmail, prison, and sex slavery.

Lulu (Louise Brooks) and Dr. Ludwig Schön (Fritz Kortner) share a dangerous love in PANDORA’S BOX

Brooks, a former Ziegfeld dancer who also starred in Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl, is riveting as Lulu, a role that almost went to Marlene Dietrich, who ended up playing the lascivious Lola in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel instead, a film with similar themes. Brooks practically floats through Pandora’s Box, as nearly every character puts her up on a pedestal, desiring her in one way or another — most often, of course, sexually. But she is no mere beautiful angel whose life spirals out of control because of others, nor is she a devious devil out to destroy all in her path; however, she does make her bed and is ultimately forced to lie in it, as most clearly evidenced by her outrageously sly smile upon getting caught in flagrante backstage with Dr. Schön by his fiancée. (The revue scene is a staggering tour de force of acting and directing, with Sigfried Arno as the haggard stage manager, providing necessary comic relief.) The relationship between Dr. Schön and Lulu is reminiscent of the ill-fated romance between Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) and Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) in Welles’s Citizen Kane, which might not be mere coincidence, as Kane coscreenwriter Herman Mankiewicz escorted an eighteen-year-old Brooks to see No, No Nanette on Broadway in 1925 and, after he became alcoholically incapacitated, Brooks ghost-wrote his New York Times review, a scene that also worked its way into Kane. More than eighty-five years after its release, Pandora’s Box is still a racy, surprising cautionary tale well ahead of its time, centered by a legendary performance by Brooks, one that is easy to get attached to; Brooks made her last onscreen appearance in the 1938 John Wayne Western Overland Stage Raiders and, after trying her hand at a number of more menial jobs, became a successful film writer, with her works collected in the well-received 1982 book Lulu in Hollywood. The 9:30 Cabaret Cinema screening of Pandora’s Box at the Rubin will be introduced by documentarian Lana Wilson (After Tiller); tickets are $10, but admission to the museum is free starting at 6:00, so get there early to check out such current exhibits as “Witness at a Crossroads: Photographer Marc Riboud in Asia” and “The All-Knowing Buddha: A Secret Guide.”

LUNAR NEW YEAR 4713: THE YEAR OF THE RAM (or GOAT or SHEEP)

Sara D. Roosevelt Park and other locations
East Houston St. between Forsythe & Chrystie Sts.
February 19-28, free – $115
www.betterchinatown.com
www.explorechinatown.com

Gōng xǐ fā cái! New York City is ready to celebrate the Year of the Wood Goat (aka the Year of the Ram and the Year of the Sheep) this month with special events all over town, in all five boroughs. The sixteenth New Year Firecracker Ceremony and Cultural Festival will explode in and around Sara D. Roosevelt Park on February 19 at 11:00 am, with live music and dance, speeches by politicians, drum groups, lion, dragon, and unicorn dancers making their way through local businesses, and more than half a million rounds of firecrackers warding off evil spirits and welcoming in a prosperous new year. The Flushing Lunar New Year Parade takes place February 21 at 10:00; following the parade, there will be a family festival at the Queens Botanical Garden ($2-$4, 1:00 – 4:00). Also on February 21 ($5-$12, 1:00 – 4:00), Asia Society will present its annual Family Day: Moon over Manhattan, featuring lion dance and kung-fu demonstrations, live music, and arts and crafts. The New York Chinese Cultural Center will present a Lunar New Year program with folk dances, paper cutting, calligraphy, and lion dances at the Bronx Museum of the Arts on February 21 (free, 2:00 – 4:00). One of our favorite restaurants, Xi’an Famous Foods, will be hosting a culinary Lunar New Year concert at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on February 21 with MC Jin, Wanting Qu, Clara C, Esther & Lara Veronin, the Shanghai Restoration Project, and Mree, benefiting Apex for Youth ($50-$165, 6:00). There will be a performance by Chinese Theater Works, a zodiac-themed scavenger hunt, and sheep meet-and-greets at the Prospect Park Zoo February 21-22 ($6-$8). The Museum of Chinese in America will give Lunar New Year walking tours on February 21-22 ($8-$15, 11:00 and 1:00), followed on February 28 ($10, 11:00 am – 4:00 pm) by its Lunar New Year Family Festival, with lion dances and workshops, food tastings and demonstrations, storytelling, calligraphy, balloon animals, arts and crafts, and the Red Silk Dancers. The sixteenth annual Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade and Festival will wind its way through Chinatown, Sara D. Roosevelt Park, and Columbus Park on February 22 starting at 1:00, with cultural booths in the park and a parade with floats, antique cars, live performances, and much more from China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and other nations.

On February 22 (free – $25, 11:00 – 3:00), the China Institute’s Chinese New Year Family Celebration boasts lion dance and kung-fu performances, gallery tours with receptions, and dumpling and lantern workshops. Dr. Hsing-Lih Chou has curated a Lunar New Year Dance Sampler at Flushing Town Hall on February 22 (free, 2:00). The New York Philharmonic gets into the party spirit with Yo-Yo Ma leading a Chinese New Year musical evening on February 24 at Avery Fisher Hall ($45-$115, 7:30); the program includes the U.S. premiere of Zhao Lin’s Duo concerto for cello, sheng, and orchestra, conducted by Long Yu. Earlier that day, the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company and students from the National Dance Institute will perform traditional dances on Josie Robertson Plaza (free, 4:30). The annual Lunar New Year Festival at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is set for February 28 (free with suggested museum admission, 12 noon – 5:00), with puppet shows, martial arts demonstrations, dances, storytelling, tea presentations and ceremonies in the Astor Chinese Garden Court, and activities inspired by the exhibition “The Art of the Chinese Album.” And the Queens Zoo will honor the goat/ram/sheep February 28 – March 1 with scavenger hunts, arts and crafts, live live performances, calligraphy workshops, and meet-the-sheep programs.

STURTEVANT: DOUBLE TROUBLE

Museum of Modern Art
Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor
The Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Painting and Sculpture Gallery, Gallery 5, fifth floor
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Daily through February 22, $25
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Walking into MoMA’s “Sturtevant: Double Trouble” exhibit, you’re likely to be overcome with a feeling of déjà vu, or perhaps wonder whether you’ve actually sauntered into one of the museum’s painting and sculpture galleries featuring works by a multitude of artists. Ohio-born artist Elaine Sturtevant spent her long career — she died in May 2014, while participating in this first major American survey of her oeuvre — taking the work of others and making it her own, leaving some critics to cheer her bold individuality and others to decry her as little more than a plagiarist. “Same is a copy but it’s not the same,” she said, fiercely defending her method, which delves into wide-ranging questions of authorship, gender, and originality. “Her longstanding concern with the political, economic, and cultural circumstances that underpin art’s creation and consumption is an essential part of her work,” MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry writes in the foreword to the exhibition catalog. “‘Sturtevant: Double Trouble’ draws attention to that aspect of her bold and groundbreaking practice, suggesting that she opens the art history of her time — and ours — in new directions, challenging us to rethink many of our assumptions about what we see, how we value what we see, and the histories that our institutions perpetuate.” Sturtevant didn’t just “repeat” random works of others; instead, she asks viewers to reconsider iconic images by major artists, usually done without the express permission of those artists, aside from Andy Warhol, who let her do whatever she wanted with his films and silkscreens. In “Warhol Flowers,” she has taken an image, generally associated with femininity, by a sexually ambiguous Pop artist, and forced the viewer to reconsider it in multiple ways. In “Johns 0 through 9,” she stencils the numbers zero through nine in the style of Jasper Johns, in encaustic on a ripped piece of newspaper from the business section, adding her own element of the financial nature of art. In “Study for Muybridge, Plate #97: Woman Walking,” Sturtevant has photographed herself, naked, walking in front of re-created paintings by James Rosenquist, Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein. (Interestingly, this past November, Sturtevant’s painting “Lichtenstein, Frighten Girl” sold at Christie’s for more than $3.4 million, up from $710,500 in 2011; multiples of the Lichtenstein lithograph on which it is based, “Crying Girl,” have reached as high as $78,400.)

In “Duchamp Man Ray Portrait,” Sturtevant depicts her face, neck, and head covered in shaving cream, a decidedly male activity, echoing Man Ray’s 1924 gelatin silver print “Duchamp with Shaving Lather for Monte Carlo Bond.” In the collage “Working Drawing Wesselmann Great American Nude Lichtenstein Hot Dog,” Sturtevant juxtaposes works by two seminal artists, making a deliciously wry and decadent statement about women as sex objects. She also copies, er, appropriates, um, pays homage to, uh, skewers, well, echoes, eh, repeats, oh, reconfigures works by Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, Frank Stella, and Robert Gober. There are also several video installations from 2010 and 2012, further repurposing pop-culture imagery in the digital age, including re-creating the decidedly analog “Pac-Man” game as if she herself is eating up and spitting out art history. In the September-October 2005 issue of Index magazine, she told Peter Halley, in reference to criticism of her 1973 show “Studies for Warhols’ Marilyns Beuys’ Actions and Objects Duchamps’ Etc. Including Film,” at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, “The reviews for that show were the same as always — that I was reviewing history, or that the pieces were all copies, blah blah blah. I realized that if I continued to work and get that kind of critique, then the work would get diluted. So I decided to wait until the mental retards caught up. And, indeed they did.” It’s a shame Sturtevant didn’t live long enough to see what everyone had to say about MoMA’s stellar survey, which continues through February 22. (On February 21 at 11:30, there will be a special Gallery Session, “20 Questions in the Wormhole,” which examines the intentions of this fascinating, exciting, and controversial “copycat artist.”)

ECCENTRICS OF FRENCH COMEDY: THE TREE, THE MAYOR, AND THE MEDIATHEQUE

A patch of greenery and an old tree are the center of controversy in Éric Rohmer satire

CINÉSALON: THE TREE, THE MAYOR, AND THE MEDIATHEQUE (L’ARBRE, LE MAIRE ET LA MÉDIATHÈQUE) (LES SEPTS HASARDS) (Éric Rohmer, 1993)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 17, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through February 24
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

Éric Rohmer’s The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque is a delightfully simple, outrageously funny satire that stands apart from the majority of the French auteur’s works, especially his three famous series: Six Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons. “French can be illogical, as we’ll see,” school principal Marc Rossignol (Fabrice Luchini) tells his young students at the beginning, and the same can be said for the French characters in the film as well, each one thinking they are nothing if not completely logical. Rohmer divides The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque into seven chapters, each built around a conditional “if” clause; for example, chapter four begins, “If Blandine Lenoir, at the monthly ‘Tomorrow,” had not, while recording a cultural broadcast, inadvertently unplugged her answering machine…” Each chapter pits philosophical, sociopolitical foes against one another as the small rural town of Saint-Juire-Champgillon prepares to build a new cultural, sports, and media center on an expanse of greenery that is home to a large, beautiful old tree. The center is the pet project of the mayor, Julien Dechaumes (Pascal Greggory), who aspires to higher office, while Rossignol is dead-set against anyone tampering with the natural environment. The battle heats up as magazine editor Régis Lebrun-Blondet (François-Marie Banier) hires freelance journalist Blandine Lenoir (Clémentine Amouroux) to do a story on the town’s situation.

Reporter Blandine Lenoir (Clémentine Amouroux) finds herself in the middle of controversy in wickedly funny Rohmer satire

Arguments abound over parking lots, the relative values of country vs. city, traditional farming vs. new advances, form vs. function, politics and ecology, and chance vs. the imponderable nature of history, involving Rossignol, Dechaumes, Lebrun-Blondet, Lenoir, architect Antoine Pergola (Michel Jaouen), the mayor’s girlfriend, author Bérénice Beaurivage (Arielle Dombasle), and even Rossignol’s ten-year-old daughter, Zoé (Galaxie Barbouth). Oddly, and most refreshingly, the extremely French rational, irrational, scientific, metaphysical, subtle, obvious, logical, and illogical discussions don’t involve any smoking, drinking, or sex. Even so, The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque, which features an endearingly goofy score by Sébastien Erms, is a purely French film from start to finish, a lovely little slice of life that is one of Rohmer’s unsung masterworks. The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque is screening February 17 at 4:00 & 7:30 in the French Institute Alliance Française’s CinéSalon series “Eccentrics of French Comedy” series; the 7:30 show will be introduced by film critic Nicholas Elliott, and both shows will be followed by a wine reception. The series concludes February 24 with Luc Moullet’s The Land of Madness, introduced by theater director Pavol Liska.

CONSTELLATIONS

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 28, $67-$125
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.constellationsbroadway.com

It takes several minutes to get into the flow and rhythm of Nick Payne’s Constellations, a two-character play set in the quantum multiverse, in the “past, present, and future.” Beekeeper Roland (Jake Gyllenhaal) and cosmologist Marianne (Ruth Wilson) meet in a bar, have a brief chat, the lights go out, then they do it again, and again. But each time, something changes — the tone of their voice, the movement of their bodies, their positioning onstage, a word here and there. What at first seems like it might be just a tiresome theatrical exercise turns out to be a captivating, sophisticated exploration of the many roads a relationship (and storytelling itself) can take. Over the course of seventy minutes, there are more than fifty short scenes as Roland and Marianne go through repeated iterations of hooking up and not, discussing their careers, being faithful and unfaithful, and, ultimately, facing mortality square in the face. Once you fall under the spell of the drama’s intellectual conceit, a scene won’t even be over before you’re eagerly anticipating how the next one will be slightly different. Constellations is no mere Sliding Doors rehash in which the protagonists have two choices that will take their lives in alternate directions, nor is it as black and white as the Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within,” in which each character has a good and evil version; instead, it posits that there are parallel universes in which Roland and Marianne are interacting at the same time, each one similar but unique — and each one, ultimately, ending in death, something that never changes.

In writing Constellations, Payne — who previously tackled climate change in If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, in which Gyllenhaal made his New York theater debut — was inspired by the work of Columbia physics and mathematics professor Brian Greene, the superstring theorist and author of the highly influential book The Elegant Universe, giving an intriguing, well-researched scientific edge to the play. While Marianne’s job has her studying the origin of the universe, Roland is a rooftop beekeeper, caring for insects whose very existence might determine the future of the planet. In her Broadway debut, Wilson, whose star has risen dramatically in just a few short years — the thirty-three-year-old actress has won two Olivier Awards and had starring roles in such well-received television series as Luther and The Affair — is sensational as Marianne, combining an innate intelligence with just the right amount of vulnerability. And in his Broadway debut, the thirty-four-year-old Gyllenhaal — who is currently up for an Oscar for his performance in Nightcrawler and has starred in such other films as Zodiac, Brokeback Mountain, and Proof — is a worthy partner as he keeps his character beguilingly unpredictable under the sure hand of Michael Longhurst, who previously directed Gyllenhaal in the Roundabout production of If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet and Wilson in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, when the two were at the University of Nottingham together. The play, which originated in London with Rafe Spall (Life of Pi, Betrayal), who also originated the role Gyllenhaal played in If There Is, and Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky, Blue Jasmine), features a fascinating set designed by Tom Scutt, with lighting by Lee Curran; the actors remain on a central rectangular platform that is surrounded on three sides and above by balloons that represent stars, with different orbs glowing on and off in each scene. Constellations is a challenging, intellectually stimulating and satisfying work, expertly written, directed, and acted, but even with all the thought-provoking science, when it comes right down to it, it’s really just a, er, universal love story, as boy meets girl, then boy meets girl, then boy meets girl….