Who:Rodd Cyrus,Carl Raymond What: Inaugural Friday lunch conversation Where:The Coffee House at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South When: Friday, March 20, $85, 11:30 am Why: Back in November, I wrote in a Substack post about meeting actor Rodd Cyrus after seeing Ragtime at Lincoln Center; I was there with a group of women from Wellesley organized by Rodd’s mother. Cyrus plays Harry Houdini, who enters by dangling on a wire and declaring, “He made his mother proud.”
Now you can meet Cyrus as well when he is the special guest at the inaugural Coffee House Club lunch at the National Arts Club. He will be interviewed by writer, lecturer, tour guide, and social and culinary historian Carl Raymond, host of the Gilded Gentleman podcast.
Cyrus was born in Boston and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and is of Iranian-English-Irish-Welsh-Italian-American heritage. In addition to starring in Ragtime, he is a regular on Elsbeth, has appeared in such plays as James Joyce’s Exiles and Maija García’s Valor and such films as Doctor, Doctor and 72 Hours, and portrayed Giuseppe Naccarelli in The Light in the Piazza at Encores!
“Rodd’s story is not only a great theatrical story; it’s a uniquely American story,” Raymond told twi-ny. “To be playing the role of immigrant superstar Harry Houdini in this revival along with his own personal story makes his portrayal unique and deeply important.”
The prix fixe lunch includes beet and mixed green salads, a choice of a turkey club sandwich, mushroom power bowl, rigatoni alla Bolognese, or chicken Marsala, and nostalgic sweets for dessert.
Only a few tickets remain to be part of this exciting event.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
BUG
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 8, $92-$407 www.manhattantheatreclub.com
It’s been several weeks since I saw the Broadway debut of Tracy Letts’s Bug, and I’m still feeling all itchy and out of sorts, scratching myself all over, thinking I’m being invaded by tiny killer insects.
Straight psychological horror plays don’t have a particularly impressive history on Broadway. While there have been plenty of successful spooky musicals, the same has not been true of legitimately frightening dramas. Recently, Levi Holloway’s thrilling Grey House got short shrift, closing early, and while Stranger Things: The First Shadow keeps going strong at the Marquis, it’s not pure horror, especially with its awkward Oklahoma! high school musical subplot. The last time I felt so shuddery after a Broadway play might go all the way back to watching Frank Langella from the front row of the Martin Beck Theatre in the 1977 smash Dracula.
Bug premiered in London in 1996 and came to New York eight years later, starring Shannon Cochran, Michael Shannon, Michael Cullen, Amy Landecker, Brían F. O’Byrne, and Reed Birney. It was adapted into a film in 2006, directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist,The French Connection) and featuring Ashley Judd, Harry Connick Jr., and Michael Shannon.
Its Broadway bow at the Samuel J. Friedman is led by the sizzling hot Carrie Coon, Letts’s wife, a four-time Emmy nominee who has delighted in such series as The White Lotus,The Leftovers,Fargo, and, currently, The Gilded Age. In Bug she plays Agnes White, a forty-four-year-old woman living in a motel room outside of Oklahoma City. The opening moment is stark and beautiful: Agnes stands near the door, smoking a cigarette and holding a wineglass, looking outside as if the world is not for her. The phone rings but nobody says anything on the other end; Agnes assumes it’s her ex-husband, Jerry Goss (Steve Key), calling from prison. “I got a gun,” she warns the caller.
Next she’s having a crack, coke, and booze party with her best friend, the wild R.C. (Jennifer Engstrom), and a guy R.C. just met, a veteran named Peter Evans (Namir Smallwood). Agnes is suspicious of Peter, saying, “He’s a fuckin’ maniac, for all I know. . . . He’s a maniac DEA ax murderer, Jehovah’s Witness.” R.C. assures her he’s okay, as does Peter, whose first words are, “I’m not an ax murderer.” Agnes takes a liking to Peter and lets him stay while R.C. goes off to another shindig.
Peter explains to Agnes that he makes people nervous and uncomfortable with his talent for picking up on things, telling Agnes that he is a preacher’s son just looking for a connection to other people. When Peter starts hearing a chirping he can’t identify, Agnes at first thinks it’s a cricket. “Don’t kill him. It’s bad luck,” she says. It turns out to be the battery in the smoke alarm, which Peter claims is “more radioactive than plutonium.” He gets rid of it outside, disposing of a warning system that both of them will need as they go down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories centered around Peter’s insistence that the room is crawling with dangerous bugs that are immune to standard sprays. “They’re blood-sucking aphids,” he later tells R.C. and Agnes, “and we’re infested.”
By the time Dr. Sweet (Randall Arney) arrives, it might already be too late.
A Steppenwolf production presented by Manhattan Theatre Club, Bug is a dark dive into paranoia, perhaps even more relevant today than it was in 1996 or 2006, given the vast reach of social media, where anyone can say anything about whatever they want and watch their beliefs, regardless of facts and the truth, spread across the internet and, potentially, into mainstream society — and the government.
The play is like the bizarre offspring of Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant 1974 The Conversation, in which Gene Hackman stars as Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who soon thinks he himself is the target being bugged, and — stay with me, now — the 1941 Popeye cartoon Flies Ain’t Human, in which the spinach-gulping hero tries his darnedest to kill flies in his home, even using a rifle.
Takeshi Kata’s hotel-room set is appropriately claustrophobic, especially in the second act. Heather Gilbert’s lighting maintains the dark mysteries hovering over it all, while Josh Schmidt’s sound ranges from a chilling quiet to brash noises.
Tony winners Letts (The Minutes,Mary Page Marlowe) and director David Cromer (Meet the Cartozians,Prayer for the French Republic) allow the plot to slowly slither along until some major set changes during intermission — which the audience can watch — ratchet up the tension for the even creepier second act as the characters’ perspectives on reality shift dramatically.
Tony nominee and Obie winner Coon (Mary Jane,Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is hypnotic as Agnes, a strong-minded, independent woman who gets caught up in something she may not be able to get out of; you can’t take your eyes off her as her immediate future grows more and more ominous. Smallwood (Pass Over,Pipeline) portrays Peter with a keen ambiguity; you never know what he’s going to say or do. Their long nude scene together — the reason audience members must place their phones in Yondr pouches for the duration of the show — binds them to each other in a moving and emotional way. (The naturalistic costumes are by Sarah Laux.)
Bug is a taut, involving thriller, with authentic scares that get under your skin. It will also make you feel genuinely threatened the next time you’re itchy, searching for a creepy crawly creature — or following a military industrial complex conspiracy theory — with an unusual taste for human blood.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Bryce Pinkham leads a supercharged ensemble in Chess Broadway revival (photo by Matthew Murphy)
CHESS: A COLD WAR MUSICAL
Imperial Theatre
249 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 3, $74-$571 chessbroadway.com
There are practically as many versions of the musical Chess as there are opening gambits in the fifteen-hundred-year-old game of intense strategy and mental acuity. With an original book by Tim Rice, music by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, and lyrics by Rice and Ulvaeus, the show has gone through multiple adaptations since the release of the concept album in 1984, from concert versions to music videos to full theatrical presentations in the West End in 1986, on Broadway in 1988, and around the world, attracting major directors (Trevor Nunn, Des McAnuff, Jim Sharman, Rob Marshall) and actors (Josh Groban, Judy Kuhn, Raúl Esparza, Carolee Carmello), featuring significantly changed books (by Richard Nelson, Robert Coe, and Rice himself, several times) involving song swaps and deletions and major plot alterations, often due to shifting world politics, primarily between Russia/the Soviet Union and the United States.
The current Broadway production, scheduled to continue through May 3 at the Imperial Theatre, where it’s breaking house box-office records, is the first iteration I’ve seen, and I found it to be a ton more exciting than watching, well, a chess match. Tony-winning director Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening,American Idiot) has teamed up with Emmy-winning film and television writer, actor, and director Danny Strong, making his Broadway debut, to reimagine the show, and it’s a major triumph filled with clever and insightful moves, despite occasionally delving into soapy melodrama, while not overplaying the cold war connections between the 1980s and today.
“Nineteen seventy-nine. The entire world is on high alert, trapped in a never ending confrontation between two opposing ideologies: communism and democracy,” the Arbiter (Bryce Pinkham), a kind of narrator and referee who oversees the proceedings, announces at the start. The ensemble belts out, “No one can deny that these are difficult times,” and the Arbiter responds, “It’s the US vs. USSR / Yet we more or less are / To our credit putting all that aside / We have swallowed our pride. . . . / No one’s way of life is threatened / by a flop.” The ensemble adds, “But we’re gonna smash their bastard / Make him wanna change his name / Take him to the cleaners and devastate him / Wipe him out, humiliate him / We don’t want the whole world saying / ‘They can’t even win a game!’ We have never reckoned on coming in second / There’s no use in losin’.”
Just in case you’re not already considering how the plot aligns with the foreign policy of President Donald Trump compared to that of Ronald Reagan, who was commander-in-chief when the show was written, the American chess master is named Freddie Trumper (Aaron Tveit), who is in love with his second, the beautiful theoretician Florence Vassy (Lea Michele). They are preparing for a major match against the brilliant Anatoly Sergievsky (Nicholas Christopher), whose handler is the devious Alexander Molokov (Bradley Dean). Molokov is quick to remind Anatoly what happened to the previous Soviet champion who lost to an American, but Anatoly tells him, “I do not fear sharing the same fate as Boris Ivanovich. The State cannot execute a man that is already dead.” But Molokov is relentless in his defense of his country, later using Anatoly’s estranged wife, Svetlana (Hannah Cruz), against him.
As the players travel to Merano, Stockholm, and, most famously, Thailand, where they spend a memorable night in Bangkok, relationships come together and fall apart, loyalty is tested, and the SALT II treaty is hotly debated as the KGB and the CIA fight to assert their prominence, with the game of chess as its centerpiece.
Freddie Trumper (Aaron Tveit) and Florence Vassy (Lea Michele) have a complicated personal and professional relationship in Chess (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Inspired in part by the famous 1972 world championship between American Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union held in Reykjavík, Iceland, which was seen as a microcosm of the ongoing battle between the US and the USSR, Chess is a thrilling evening of theater, highlighted by Pinkham (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,Ohio State Murders), who serves as an engaging ringleader to the proceedings, addressing the audience directly and including playful contemporary references. He is often accompanied by a terrifically talented ensemble performing Lorin Latarro’s dazzling choreography; the singers and dancers are like a glorious symphony that makes you instantly forget the book’s occasional meanderings and messiness.
The orchestra is spread across David Rockwell’s glittering multilevel set, which boasts columns of chess pieces and live and archival video footage by Peter Nigrini. The costumes, by Tom Broecker, glitter as well, particularly for the ensemble, with flashy lighting by Kevin Adams and blasting sound by John Shivers.
Yes, there are too many songs, Freddie’s transition to being an announcer is annoying, the love triangle is messy, the politics are oversimplified, and the ballads are histrionic, but Mayer and Strong keep the actual chess to a minimum, and every time the show threatens to give in to the lowest common denominator, Pinkham and the ensemble swoop in to rescue it as the endgame approaches.
This Chess is certainly no flop.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Robin Rainey (Christiani Pitts) and Dougal Todd (Sam Tutty) are about to have a time to remember in Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) (photo by Matthew Murphy)
TWO STRANGERS (CARRY A CAKE ACROSS NEW YORK)
Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 5, $69-$299 twostrangersmusical.com
Broadway shows set in New York City have a difficult task getting things right, needing to satisfy tourists as well as native New Yorkers, who will immediately criticize any geographic or sociocultural mistakes while tiring of genre clichés about the City That Never Sleeps. For every Hell’s Kitchen, there’s a New York, New York.
Happily, the charming new Broadway musical Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) gets things right.
It begins with Dougal Todd’s (Sam Tutty) arrival in New York City from London, with a childlike gleam in his eye and a bounce in his step, a wide-eyed ingénue deliriously excited to see as much as he possibly can during his short visit, his first ever overseas. “New York is kind of my second home,” he tells Robin Rainey (Christiani Pitts), who has picked him up at the airport. “The Empire State, the White House, the Golden Gate Bridge.” After a wild and woolly two days — in which, among other things, he stood outside the Freedom Tower, Katz’s Deli, and the Tenement Museum because he couldn’t afford to go inside — he still has that gleam and bounce, a sweetly infectious and innocent worldview that rubs off on both Robin and the audience.
Dougal lives at home with his mother, “big Polly,” and works in a local movie theater. His only ambition seems to be to keep marveling at life. He’s in New York to attend the wedding of his father, Mark, who deserted them before Dougal’s birth. “Technically he didn’t leave me because I wasn’t actually born yet,” he explains to Robin.
Raised by her grandmother in Brooklyn, Robin toils at Bump ‘n’ Grind Coffee in the East Village and just tries to survive day to day, hiding away any dreams she might have of finding the right career or the right partner. Robin’s older sister, Melissa, who is thirty, is marrying Mark, an extremely successful fifty-seven-year-old businessman. Robin disapproves of her sister’s choice and is irritated when Dougal starts playfully referring to her as Auntie Robin, since they are both in their midtwenties.
“My town: / where everyone has an apartment to spare with a skyline view, / where even improbable dreams come true. / Where everything comes with a smile, a high five, and a side of cheese; / I’m down on my knees,” Robin sings sarcastically. Dougal responds enthusiastically, “She’s called the Big Apple / No one knows why / But she’s my kind of town and I’m her kind of street-smart guy. / I’ll stroll up the Broadway / I’ll order a beer / I’ll scream at the Statue of Liberty / ‘Hey lady! I’m walkin’ here!’”
Melissa has given Robin two important responsibilities: picking up the wedding cake and bridal stockings. When Dougal insists on going with her to the bakery, they head off on a whirlwind adventure that takes them from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high.
Robin Rainey (Christiani Pitts) and Dougal Todd (Sam Tutty) reach highs and lows in delightful new musical from England (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Two Strangers might refer to itself as a musical comedy, but it is closer to a play with music. Composers and lyricists Jim Barne and Kit Buchan (Catastrophe Bay,Mona Loser) have written a terrific book that firmly establishes the two characters and their individual and mutual quests. Nearly all the songs feel organic to the story, further defining Dougal and Robin on the outside and the inside. Dougal expresses his longing for his father in “Dad,” singing “‘Dad,’ Is that a word that I can use for you? / It’s been a while since we had news from you / Since your picture left the frame.” In “What’ll It Be,” Robin confesses, “And I stare / through the windows at the world / — this bit of world / that I can see — / and I try / not to think about that girl / who looked like me . . . / . . . who laughed, / and danced, / and knew what she was facing; / who believed / the world / was hers to find a place in; / and I tell myself / this year could be the right year / but we both know / this time tomorrow I’ll be right here. . . .”
Two numbers do fall flat, “On the App,” in which Dougal encourages Robin to swipe through Tinder while on the subway, and “Under the Mistletoe,” a Christmas fantasy they sing in the back of an Uber; it would also trim the show to a more streamlined 110 minutes or so without an intermission. Otherwise, the songs glitter under Tim Jackson’s inventive direction and choreography, Tony Gayle’s sound design that takes us from the airport to the subway to a nightclub, and Lux Pyramid’s lovely orchestrations, performed by an onstage orchestra consisting of conductor Ted Arthur on keys, Kevin Ramessar on guitar, Lee Nadel on bass, Rocky Bryant on drums, and Jessie Linden on percussion. Soutra Gilmour’s rotating set features a collection of monochromatic luggage that open up to reveal a minibar, a bed, and other elements, cleverly lit by Jack Knowles with LED strips and spots. Gilmour also designed the costumes, which offer a late surprise.
Tutty (Dear Evan Hansen) is adorable in his Broadway debut; you just want to run up and hug him (but please don’t). Dougal looks at the city in the way not only tourists but longtime denizens should, with wonder and happiness and promise. Pitts, who has appeared in such other New York City shows as A Bronx Tale and King Kong, is heart-wrenching as Robin, who believes she has hit a dead end and needs to be reenergized. Their chemistry is evident from their first meet-cute bump.
Two Strangers opens with suitcases becoming radios that broadcast sports, weather, and news alternately from America and England until they meld together. It’s a delightful metaphor for what follows, an award-winning show about a British man and an American woman that has successfully journeyed across the pond and is now selling out at the Longacre Theatre, where, afterward, you will experience New York City with a gleam in your eye and bounce in your step.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Will Harrison leads an excellent cast in harrowing true story (photo by Matthew Murphy)
PUNCH
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through November 2, $94-$235.50 www.manhattantheatreclub.com
Will Harrison makes an electrifying Broadway debut as a young Nottingham man whose life changes forever on a wild night in James Graham’s Punch, continuing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through November 2 though deserving of a longer run. However, the final shows can be livestreamed with a twenty-four-hour replay for $75.
Harrison stars as Jacob in the true story, based on the memoir Right from Wrong by Jacob Dunne, which explores bullying, drugs, class, and restorative justice. One night, Jacob and his large gang of friends are out drinking and snorting as they barhop through Nottingham, Jacob in search of some action.
“This is the problem, no one likes to admit . . . Doing bad things . . . creates good feelings. It just does,” Jacob tells the audience. “Because there is no other high in the world, forget your fuckin’ skunk or spice or smack or scratch, none of it can beat the buzz that comes with beatin’ up a slippin’ bastard in defence of a mate. The look in their eyes when they’re impressed, grateful, respectful . . . and even a bit fuckin’ scared of you now too . . . Barrelling back to someone’s house, covered in blood and validation. . . . Being chased and chasing highs, rushing round, scoring drugs and doing deals, seeking out parties and pulling girls. People dancing, trance like, getting high, snogging. Problem for someone like me is that cause I’d lived on the outskirts, coz mum had kept our heads down . . . not a lot of people knew us. And thriving and surviving in this world is all about your reputation, who you are . . . Which means I . . . have to always go farther, drink faster, walk taller. And most importantly . . . fight. Fight harder. Harder than anyone else.”
Chasing those highs, nineteen-year-old Jacob unleashes a massive punch on a random stranger just for kicks, but when the young man, twenty-eight-year-old James Hodgkinson, dies as a result of the altercation, Jacob is sent to prison while James’s parents, David Hodgkinson (Sam Robards) and Joan Scourfield (Victoria Clark), deal with the tragic loss of their son and contemplate whether they should forgive Jacob.
The energetic, fast-paced first act shifts between the punch and its immediate aftermath and a group therapy session led by Sandra (Lucy Taylor, who also plays Jacob’s mother and a probation officer), where Jacob shares his story with others. Sandra describes it as a place for “talking and listening. Difficult conversations.” Those conversations center on restorative justice, as Jacob, Joan, and David decide if they are going to meet face-to-face.
Victoria Clark and Sam Robards star as parents facing a horrific tragedy in Punch (photo by Matthew Murphy)
The first half of Punch unfolds like a thrilling boxing match, with aggressive, breathtaking movement by Leanne Pinder as Jacob and his friends make their way across and under set and costume designer Anna Fleischle’s reimagining of Trent Bridge in Nottingham, propelled by Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s scorching original music and sound design. Robbie Butler’s lighting is like a character unto itself, a large, nearly complete circle hovering above the stage, consisting of rows of chasing lights that change color; it made me think of a boxing ring even though it isn’t square.
Graham (Ink,Dear England) and first-time Broadway director Adam Penford slow things down after intermission, as if the fighters have tired out, their tanks running out. Yes, it’s based on what actually happened, but it involves a whole lot of sitting around and talking, falling short of the knockout blow. Two-time Tony winner Clark (Kimberly Akimbo,The Light in the Piazza) and Robards (The 39 Steps,Absurd Person Singular) are powerful as James’s parents, tenderly dealing with a situation that is every mother and father’s nightmare.
But the play belongs to Harrison, who was born in Ithaca and raised in Massachusetts. He fully inhabits the British Jacob, physically and psychologically; you can’t take your eyes off him. Harrison made an impressive off-Broadway debut in 2023 as a young navy medic in Keith Bunin’s The Coast Starlight at Lincoln Center and has followed that up with this Tony-worthy performance; he is a rising star with a bright future.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter star in Broadway smash version of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (photo by Andy Henderson)
WAITING FOR GODOT
Hudson Theatre
141 West Forty-Fourth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 4, $98.56-$558.88 godotbroadway.com www.thehudsonbroadway.com
“There’s nothing to do,” Vladimir tells Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s 1953 masterpiece Waiting for Godot.
There’s plenty to do for Beckett fans in New York City right now, much but not all of it a most excellent adventure.
The talk of the town is Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter reprising — well, channeling? — their roles from 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the 1991 and 2020 sequels in Godot at the Hudson Theatre. Action star Reeves is making his Broadway debut as Estragon (Gogo) in Jamie Lloyd’s bumpy adaptation, while Winter returns to the Great White Way for the first time in forty-four years as Vladimir (Didi).
Reeves and Winter follow in the formidable footsteps of such duos as Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, and Robin Williams and Steve Martin and, for the most part, hold the audience’s attention. Gogo and Didi usually find themselves in a strange, dark wasteland, with only a single bare tree, a country road, and a solitary stone as they contemplate life and death, heaven and hell, and existence and humanity, but Lloyd and set designer Soutra Gilmour locate them inside a giant tube that is part tunnel, part circular skateboard ramp, part existential void in space. Resembling abandoned vaudevillians in all black, sporting impressive bowlers (the costumes are also by Gilmour), they sit at the edge of the tube, feet dangling, waiting for the mysterious Godot to arrive and, perhaps, bring meaning to their sad, pathetic lives.
They are visited instead by the loud, blustery Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden) and his menial, an apparent servant named Lucky (Michael Patrick Thornton). Pozzo usually leads Lucky around by a rope around his neck — evoking master and slave, circus ringleader and animal performer while referencing the rope Gogo had mentioned earlier when he and Didi considered hanging themselves — but here Lloyd has the verbally abusive Pozzo pushing Lucky, who is in a wheelchair, altering their dynamic. Curiously, Lucky breaks the fourth wall several times, acknowledging the audience and encouraging them to clap after he does his dance (with his head and hands). In addition, a young boy (Eric Williams or Zaynn Arora) shares important information with Gogo and Didi.
Lloyd (A Doll’s House,Sunset Blvd.) has slimmed down the show to just over two hours including intermission, so the pacing works well. Lloyd’s decision to get rid of nearly all the usual props, including a key carrot that Gogo chews in an annoying manner, seems like overkill. There’s a perpetual droning hum of doom hovering over the proceedings (the sound is by Ben and Max Ringham), contrasting Jon Clark’s subtle lighting shifts, highlighted by dazzling surprises at the end of each act.
Reeves and Winter may not display a wide range of emotions, but they avail themselves well enough to keep the audience engaged. At one point Didi says, “This is not boring you I hope,” looking out at us, and we essentially answer no.
Bill and Ted enthusiasts may whoop when Gogo says, “Back to back like in the good old days,” and the two actors stand back to back and play air guitar, echoing what they do in the film series, but the reference feels out of place in a show that exists in a barren emptiness and is about nothing (and everything).
“The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing,” Bill says in the first movie, quoting Socrates. Ted responds, “That’s us, dude.”
Party on, dudes!
Stephen Rea is mesmerizing as a man listening to his past in Krapp’s Last Tape (photo courtesy Patricio Cassinoni)
KRAPP’S LAST TAPE
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl.
Through October 19, $83-$130 nyuskirball.org
“Nothing to say,” an old man declares in Samuel Beckett’s 1958 autobiographical classic, Krapp’s Last Tape, a fascinating kind of companion piece to Waiting for Godot.
In 2012, Irish actor Stephen Rea decided to go into a studio and perform the prerecorded sections of Krapp’s Last Tape, in case he was ever asked to do the one-man show, in which a dissatisfied man listens to tapes his younger self made thirty years before. Rea is now touring the play, which continues at the NYU Skirball Center through October 19.
Jamie Vartan’s spare set features a desk in the center, an overhead hanging light, and a door at the back, stage right. Paul Keogan’s shadowy lighting maintains an old-fashioned vaudeville black-and-white feel. The past is present in both Vicky Featherstone’s taut staging and the theme of the play.
The show begins with Krapp slowly opening a hilariously long drawer and removing a banana. He eats the fruit — the yellow of the banana stands out from the otherwise colorless gloom — and tosses the peel onto the floor, where, of course, he soon slips on it. He does not make the same mistake twice.
To celebrate his birthday, he is going to listen to one of his old reel-to-reel tapes, the one he made when he turned thirty-nine, discussing his life. He brings in the machine and a stack of tapes, carefully searching for box three, spool five, taking great delight in saying the word “spool” over and over again. “Thirty-nine today, sound as a bell, apart from my old weakness, and intellectually I have now every reason to suspect at the . . . crest of the wave — or thereabouts,” he listens to his old self explain. “Good to be back in my den, in my old rags. Have just eaten I regret to say three bananas and only with difficulty refrained from a fourth. Fatal things for a man with my condition. Cut ’em out! The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness round me I feel less alone. In a way. I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to . . . me. Krapp.”
Not much has changed in those thirty years; his loneliness in the darkness is palpable. He looks up the meaning of “viduity,” sings, and recalls a romantic evening on a lake. But the tape does not provide him with happiness; he barks out, “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that’s all done with anyway.”
What’s next? Well, the play’s French title is La Dernière Bande, or “The Last Tape.”
Krapp’s Last Tape has previously been performed by such actors as Patrick Magee, Harold Pinter, Brian Dennehy, and Michael Gambon; I’ve seen it with John Hurt at BAM and, earlier this year, F. Murray Abraham at the Irish Rep. The play, a haunting examination of time, memory, and the futility of language, works best in more intimate quarters; it gets a bit lost at the Skirball, even at only about fifty minutes.
Rea (A Particle of Dread,Cyprus Avenue) inhabits the character with a graceful elegance despite Krapp’s pathetic, sad-sack circumstances, at times recalling Buster Keaton, one of Beckett’s favorites. It’s a bravura performance that I would have loved to see in a significantly smaller venue.
Druid production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame comes to Irish Arts Center for monthlong run (photo by Ros Kavanagh)
ENDGAME
Irish Arts Center, JL Greene Theatre
726 Eleventh Ave. between Fifty-First & Fifty-Second Sts.
October 22 – November 23, $25-$86 irishartscenter.org
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” Nell tells Nagg in Samuel Beckett’s 1957 chess-inspired Endgame, which takes place during some kind of apocalypse as four characters contemplate their fate in a dingy basement dungeon, two of them living in garbage cans.
In a conversation in the Skirball program for Krapp’s Last Tape, Stephen Rea tells director Vicky Featherstone and Dr. Tanya Dean, “Endgame is a tough thing. I remember Beckett saying he loved Endgame, and he didn’t like Waiting for Godot. And I said, ‘Well, it’s been absorbed.’”
Rea played Clov in the 1976 Royal Court production of Endgame; I’ve seen the show twice, in 2008 at BAM with Max Casella, Alvin Epstein, Elaine Stritch, and John Turturro, and in 2023 at the Irish Rep with John Douglas Thompson, Bill Irwin, Joe Grifasi, and Patrice Johnson Chevannes. From October 22 through November 23, Galway’s Druid theater company will be presenting Endgame at the Irish Arts Center, with Tony winner Marie Mullen, Bosco Hogan, Aaron Monaghan, and Rory Nolan, directed by Tony winner Garry Hynes. As with Soutra Gilmour’s set for Waiting for Godot on Broadway, Francis O’Connor’s scenic design for Endgame also emphasizes the circularity of life.
Monaghan, who plays Clov, previously starred as Estragon opposite Marty Rea (no relation to Stephen) in Druid and Hynes’s Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center’s 2018 White Light Festival. Hynes also helmed a stunning Richard III starring Monaghan in 2019 as well as The Beauty Queen of Leenane at BAM in 2017, with Marty Rea and Mullen.
Endgame is part of Druid’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. In the play, Clov shouts, “The end is terrific!” But luckily for theatregoers, the end appears to be nowhere in sight for Druid, or for seeing Beckett in New York.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
STROKES OF GENIUS: HIRSCHFELD AT THE ALGONQUIN
The Algonquin Hotel Oak Room
59 West 44th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through September 20, free, noon – 7:00 pm www.alhirschfeldfoundation.org www.algonquinhotel.com
On September 9, theater stars came out of the woodwork — or, actually, their framed caricatures on the walls of the Alqonquin’s famed Oak Room — to celebrate the opening of the new exhibition “Strokes of Genius: Hirschfeld at the Algonquin” as well as the launch of the oversize poster book Hirschfeld’s Sondheim (Abrams ComicArts, $29.99).
Among those on hand to share their stories about being drawn by Al Hirschfeld, the St. Louis–born artist who spent decades making black-and-white portraits of Broadway celebrities, writers, and other famous names, were Tony winners Danny Burstein, John Leguizamo, and Len Cariou, Emmy winner and Tony nominee Lonny Price, Tony nominee and Obie winner Charles Busch, Obie winner Jackie Hoffman, Tony nominee Veanne Cox, and Broadway stalwart Jim Walton. Al Hirschfeld Foundation creative director David Leopold presented several of them with reproductions of the images they are in.
As you walk around the space, you’ll see Cathy Rigby in Peter Pan, Yul Brynner in The King and I, Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner in Star Trek, and Liza Minnelli, George Gershwin, Carol Burnett, Zero Mostel, Katharine Hepburn, Leonard Bernstein, Whoopi Goldberg, Stephen Sondheim, Barbra Streisand, Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, the Grateful Dead, the casts of The Phantom of the Opera,The Sopranos, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the Algonquin Round Table, and a few self-portraits.
Meanwhile, Hirschfeld’s Sondheim consists of ready-to-frame posters of drawings from West Side Story,Passion,Company,Getting Away with Murder,Assassins,Into the Woods, and many more in addition to a graphic timeline; each drawing is accompanied by a brief anecdote. “I can hardly think of a better way to memorialize Steve and his art other than actually watching his shows or listening to his songs,” Bernadette Peters writes in the introduction. “Al, in a single image, captures a memorable emotion, indelibly etching out hearts and memories with Steve’s artistic contributions.”
Longtime theater critic Ben Brantley explains in his foreword, “In these drawings, I have found something like a past-recapturing, Proustian madeleine, made of ink instead of flour and sugar. These seemingly simple pen strokes — and the ellipsis of the white space, which your own, happily collaborative mind fills in — are anything but static. They tremble with energy, tension, and, above all, character, as it is conjured in real time on a stage.”
The exhibit at the Algonquin continues through September 20; an online companion show runs at Helicline Fine Art until November 2.
“It’s hard to imagine twentieth-century Broadway without either Hirschfeld or Sondheim,” Leopold writes in the book’s afterword. “Both men admired each other’s work, and both loved the theater, their legacies strengthened by remaining a presence on the Great White Way with two Broadway houses named in their honor.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
