this week in broadway

NOISES OFF

Riotous Roundabout revival of NOISES OFF goes behind the scenes of theater madness (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 6, $67-$152
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

There’s a reason why so many critics consider Michael Frayn’s 1982 farce, Noises Off, one of the funniest plays ever written; it is a nonstop hilarious riff on the presentation of theater itself, and in its latest incarnation, a Roundabout revival at the American Airlines Theatre, it is performed with pinpoint precision timing that will have you gasping in admiration even as you nearly fall out of your chair laughing. The three-act romp begins as a small company is in its final tech rehearsal for the world premiere of Robin Housemonger’s sex comedy Nothing On before opening night at the Grand Theatre in Weston-super-Mare. (A fake program for the imaginary Nothing On is slipped inside the Noises Off Playbill to heighten the reality of the fictional play-within-a-play; Housemonger is credited with such previous works as Briefs Encounter and Socks Before Marriage.) Director Lloyd Dallas (Campbell Scott) has a lot on his plate: The actors can’t remember their lines, and his star, the aging doyenne Dotty Otley (Andrea Martin), is confused about where the sardines are. The fictional Nothing On itself is a wicked sendup of British country-house drama: Dotty is Mrs Clackett, elderly housekeeper for the Brent family’s country home, where dapper house agent Roger (David Furr as Garry Lejeune) is attempting a tryst on the sly with ditzy blonde bombshell Vicky (Megan Hilty as Brooke Ashton) while the owners, milquetoast nosebleeder Philip Brent (Jeremy Shamos as Frederick Fellowes) and his wife, the practical Flavia (Kate Jennings Grant as Belinda Blair), arrive for their own secret rendezvous (secret from Inland Revenue, that is; they are avoiding the scourge of the British upper class: income tax). Then a burglar (Daniel Davis as alcoholic has-been Selsdon Mowbray) arrives to add to the confusion. Doors are slammed, entrances are missed, doors are slammed, lines are botched, props are misused, and yet more doors are slammed. As evening turns into morning, the cast and crew — which also includes tense and nervous assistant stage manager Poppy Norton-Taylor (Tracee Chimo) and stage manager Tim Allgood (Rob McClure), who has a highly inappropriate last name — struggle to put it all together, for of course, the show must go on.

Megan Hilty nearly steals the show as pouty vixen Brooke Ashton at the American Airlines Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

The first act is set up as if the audience is watching the rehearsal of Nothing On; for the second act, the living room is flipped around so the audience sees it from the other side, revealing the backstage shenanigans one month later at the Theatre Royal in Ashton-under-Lyne. (The wonderful sets are by Emmy and Tony winner Derek McLane.) Frayn (Copenhagen, Benefactors) and director Jeremy Herrin (Wolf Hall Parts 1 & 2) now reveal the behind-the-scenes madness that goes on during the first act. The audience has already learned all of the cues, the entrances and exits, but witnessing it from this vantage point is utterly fascinating. The cast and crew’s secret liaisons slowly emerge, and the melodramatics escalate as they enter or leave the play-within-a-play, resulting in some riotous physical comedy while also getting a little too bogged down and repetitive. But all of that is necessary to make the third act one of the smartest and funniest you’ll ever have the pleasure to experience. The show is now concluding its tour at the Municipal Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees, where the company is once again performing the first act. Only this time, all of the actor’s quirks and failures, inside jokes and relationship problems from the first two acts collide in a delirious extravaganza of fun and nonsense worthy of John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers. Martin (Pippin, My Favorite Year), Davis (Wrong Mountain, Talking Heads), Furr (The Importance of Being Earnest, Accent on Youth), Jennings Grant (The Lyons, Proof), Hilty (Wicked, 9 to 5: The Musical), and Shamos (Clybourne Park, The Assembled Parties) do an exceptional job switching between their dual roles, with Martin in particular excelling and Hilty (who will not be performing February 12-14) nearly stealing the show with her squeaky voice and absurdly mannered body positions. (Noises Off debuted on Broadway in 1983 with Dorothy Loudon, Victor Garber, Brian Murray, Deborah Rush, Douglas Seale, and Amy Wright and was revived in 2001 with Patti LuPone, Peter Gallagher, Faith Prince, T. R. Knight, and Katie Finneran. The 1992 Peter Bogdanovich film starred Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, Christopher Reeve, John Ritter, Nicollette Sheridan, Denholm Elliott, Julie Hagerty, Mark Linn-Baker, and Marilu Henner.) Herrin does a marvelous job of maintaining the frenetic pace while allowing the characters to develop their unique personalities; he has a ball playing with the audience’s expectations, keeping everyone on the edge of their seat, both gaping in wonder and trying not to fall over in laughter. And through it all are those doors.

In “A Glimpse of the Noumenal,” a fake condensed essay from Eros Untrousered — Studies in the Semantics of Bedroom Farce that appears in the Nothing On program, JG Stillwater writes, “A recurring and highly significant feature of the genre is a multiplicity of doors. If we regard the world on this side of the doors as the physical one in which mortal men are condemned to live, the world or worlds concealed behind them may be thought of as representing both the higher and more spiritual plane into which the postulants hope to escape, and the underworld from which at any moment demons may leap out to tempt or punish. When the doors do open, it is often with great suddenness and unexpectedness, highly suggestive of those epiphanic moments of insight and enlightenment which give access to the ‘other,’ and offer us a fleeting glimpse of the noumenal.” This second Broadway revival of Noises Off — the title refers to offstage sounds — is chock full of epiphanic moments that are as noumenal as they are phenomenal, in more than just the Kantian meaning. It gives the audience an inside look at the potential catastrophes that await live theater, yet performed to near perfection in a joyful tribute to the glory of the stage.

OUR MOTHER’S BRIEF AFFAIR

A park bench is the main setting in Richard Greenberg’s OUR MOTHER’S AFFAIR (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 6, $60-$140
ourmothersbriefaffairbroadway.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

Our Mother’s Brief Affair, Richard Greenberg’s eleventh collaboration with Manhattan Theatre Club, starts off promisingly enough, but a bizarrely bombastic reveal shortly before intermission derails the rest of this quiet family drama. Tony winner Linda Lavin stars as Anna, a variation of a character previously introduced in Greenberg’s Everett Beekin and played by Bebe Neuwirth in 2001 at Lincoln Center. On one of her many deathbeds yet again, the Burberry-loving Anna tells her son, Seth (Greg Keller), that she had an affair with a man (John Procaccino) back in 1973, when she took Seth to Juilliard for his weekly music class. Although Seth, an obituary writer used to examining people’s lives in death, thinks she’s just making up another story, his twin sister, Abby (Kate Arrington, in her seventh Greenberg work), confirms its truth. Anna’s confession becomes even more shocking when she tells them who the man is, a minor but real person in the Cold War and a figure of revulsion to New York’s Jewish intelligentsia. The name is less than well known enough to require a sort of extended live footnote, so the show comes to a screeching halt as Seth and Abby explain who he is and what he did. Greenberg’s choice of partner for Anna is so head-scratchingly strange that the play simply can’t get back on track.

Anna (Linda Lavin) and her lover (John Procaccino) recall the good old days in Richard Greenberg play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lavin (The Lyons, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife), at seventy-eight, adds some sex appeal to her role as a mother with secrets of her own that are finally coming out, as she claims once again to be facing the end. Procaccino (Incident at Vichy, Nikolai and the Others), one of New York theater’s busiest, and most dependable, actors, is laden down with playing a historical figure that overwhelms his presence. Keller (The Who and the What, Of Good Stock) and Arrington (Grace, The Iceman Cometh), as dysfunctional gay twins, are expository characters who never quite develop their own personalities. Santo Loquasto’s easygoing set consists of a few chairs and a park bench, where Seth, Abby, Anna, her husband (also played by Procaccino), and her lover go back and forth between 1973, 2003, and 2006, with everyone watching what unfolds regardless of what time period they are from, which is occasionally unnerving. MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow never quite pulls together the time shifts and plot reveals; despite a fine lead performance by Lavin, Our Mother’s Brief Affair — which was originally staged as a slightly shorter one-act in 2009 by South Coast Rep, with Jenny O’Hara, Arye Gross, Marin Hinkle, and Matthew Arkin and directed by Pam MacKinnon — feels more like a short story, or a subplot from another play, unable to sustain itself, particularly because it just can’t support the major twist that pulls the rug out from under whatever possibilities it might have had.

THE COLOR PURPLE

Sisters Celie (Cynthia Erivo) and Nettie (Joaquina Kalukango) enjoy a beautiful moment before being separated in THE COLOR PURPLE (photo by Matthew Murphy, 2015)

Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre
242 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 1, $75 – $195
colorpurple.com

The Color Purple achieves the extremely rare, elusive grand slam with its stirring new Broadway revival. Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her 1982 novel about a horribly abused and mistreated girl in the Depression-era American South. Stephen Spielberg’s 1985 film, starring Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, and Oprah Winfrey, was nominated for eleven Oscars (but won none). In 2005, the book and film were turned into a Broadway musical, earning ten Tony nominations and winning one (LaChanze for Best Performance by a Leading Actress). And now the revival is poised for yet more awards in a streamlined version at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. London native Cynthia Erivo makes a rousing Broadway debut as Celie, a fourteen-year-old Georgia girl whose pa (Kevyn Morrow) has gotten rid of her two children and is trying to pawn her off on a nasty farmer known as Mister (Isaiah Johnson), who would prefer to marry Celie’s younger sister, Nettie (Joaquina Kalukango). “She worse than I thought,” Mister complains. “Don’t even look like kin to Nettie. Maybe I —” Pa cuts him off by saying, “Maybe you’ll put Celie in charge of yo chirren fore they git big enough to kill you in the night.” Mister’s son, Harpo (Kyle Scatliffe), has married the bold, strong Sofia (Danielle Brooks), who isn’t going to tolerate any disrespect. “Wives is like chirren,” Mister tells his son. “Nothing better for ’em than a good sound beating,” to which Sofia responds with “Hell No!,” a defiant number delivered with power and grace by Brooks, singing out for women everywhere. “Why you so scared / I’ll never know / But if a man / raise his hand, / Hell no!” she declares. The town is soon sent into a furor when Shug Avery (Jennifer Hudson) returns, a popular singer whom all the men, including Mister, one of her many former lovers, melt over. “Drinkin’ all the gin / Lovin’ all the mens / Strumpet in a short skirt / Got no pride!” the women sing, while the men proclaim, “Oh Lord, let me cross / into her promised land.” Shug takes a liking to Celie while also still desiring Mister, setting up a conflict in which Celie must decide whether she can have a better life.

Director and set designer John Doyle turns the Jacobs Theatre into a juke joint in streamlined, intimate revival (photo by Matthew Murphy, 2015)

Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Marsha Norman (’night, Mother; The Secret Garden) and with music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray, The Color Purple is a beautifully rendered revival, evoking the book and film while also standing on its own. Two-time Tony-winning director John Doyle (Sweeney Todd, Company) keeps things relatively simple. His folksy set features ramshackle wooden walls on which dozens of chairs hang, essentially the only props used in the production; the characters take the chairs off the walls, sit on them, then put them back; the many extra chairs serve as a kind of invitation to the audience to be part of this close-knit community. Norman carefully navigates the characters’ religious faith, avoiding preachy moments; Celie tells Shug at one point, “I prayed to God my whole life and what he done. Nuthin’.” Shug replies, “Celie, you better hush. God might hear you,” to which Celie responds, “Let ’im hear me. If God ever listened to a poor colored woman, the world would be a different place.” Rising British star Erivo (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Sister Act) and Brooks (Taystee on Orange Is the New Black) are smashing in their Broadway debuts, the former bringing down the house with the legitimate showstopper “I’m Here,” the latter a force all her own as Sofia, who represents so much of the pain and suffering experienced by African Americans, as well as the determination to ultimately fight back. Carrie Compere, Bre Jackson, and Rema Webb are delightful as the three gossiping church ladies who form a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the proceedings with a clever sense of humor; Compere in particular has an impressive presence and theater-rattling voice that should lead to bigger roles. Surprisingly, the weakest part of the show are the songs given to Hudson (Dreamgirls, The Secret Life of Bees) in her Broadway debut; Hudson is laden with standard, syrupy ballads that don’t fit in with the rest of the Gospel and R&B numbers, although her costumes, by Ann Hould-Ward, are divine. The Color Purple has turned the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre into a thrilling, inspirational juke joint, bringing yet another life to Walker’s remarkable story.

BROADWAYCON

Lin-Manuel Miranda and other members of the cast and crew of HAMILTON will take part in the first annual BroadwayCon (photo by Joan Marcus)

New York Hilton Midtown
1335 Sixth Ave. between 53rd & 54th Sts.
January 22-24, $50 Explorer Pass, $95 Day Pass
www.broadwaycon.com
www3.hilton.com

The first-ever BroadwayCon is being held January 22-24 at the Hilton in Midtown, with dozens of Great White Way stars participating in panels, workshops, autograph and Q&A sessions, meet and greets, and live performances. Weekend passes are sold out, but you can still get single-day tickets to see cast and crew members from such shows as Fun Home, Hamilton, Spring Awakening, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Les Misérables, Rent, Wicked, School of Rock, and many others. Below are only some of the highlights.

Friday, January 22
Something Wonderful: A Look Behind The King and I, with Christopher Gattelli, Donald Holder, Scott Lehrer, Bartlett Sher, Michael Yeargan, and Catherine Zuber, moderated by Ted Chapin, Beekman, 2:00

The BroadwayCon 2016 Opening, with surprise guests, MainStage, 3:30

History Is Happening in Manhattan: The Hamilton Panel, with Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Jonathan Groff, Christopher Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., and Phillipa Soo, moderated by Blake Ross, MainStage, 5:00

Autograph Session: Rent, Nassau, 9:00

The BroadwayCon Jukebox, with Kerry Butler, Jenn Colella, Anthony Rapp, Ryann Redmond, Stark Sands, and Alysha Umphress, moderated by Ben Cameron, MainStage, 9:30

Saturday, January 23
Autograph Session: Fiddler on the Roof, Americas Hall I, 10:20 am

Master Class: Anthony Rapp, Gramercy West, 11:00 am

A Conversation with Sheldon Harnick, MainStage, 12:30

Dance, Ten: Broadway’s Choreographers, with Christopher Gattelli, Lorin Latarro, and Kathleen Marshall, moderated by Michael Gioia, Nassau, 3:00

Divas, Darlings, and Dames: Women in Broadway Musicals of the 1960s, with Stacy Wolf, Beekman, 4:00

Sunday, January 24
Audition Q&A with Bernie Telsey, Gramercy West, 9:00 am

Obsessed! Live: Disaster! Edition, with Roger Bart, Kerry Butler, Kevin Chamberlin, Max Crumm, Lacretta Nicole, Adam Pascal, Faith Prince, Jennifer Simard, and Rachel York, moderated by Seth Rudetsky, MainStage, 11:00 am

I Can Do That! Broadway Siblings, with Karmine Alers, Yassmin Alers, Andrew Keenan-Bolger, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and Maggie Keenan-Bolger, Sutton, 12 noon

The “Pippins and Wickeds and Kinkies, Matildas, and Mormonses” Singalong, Sutton, 3:00

The First Annual BroadwayCon Cabaret, with Nick Adams, Alex Brightman, Jeremy Jordan, Lesli Margherita, and Krysta Rodriguez, moderated by Rob McClure, MainStage, 11:00 pm

MISERY

Bruce Willis and Laurie Metcalfe star in stage adaptation of Stephen King’s MISERY

Broadhurst Theatre
235 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 14, $59 – $169
www.miserybroadway.com

It’s extremely difficult to pull off a successful suspense thriller on Broadway. After Deathtrap and Wait Until Dark, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with another solid example. So it was with high expectations that Misery opened on Broadway in November. The story of an unbalanced obsessive keeping her favorite novelist hostage in her home began with Stephen King’s superb 1987 novel, one of his first and best non-supernatural books. Three years later, director Rob Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman turned it into a nail-biting film, a gripping psychological thriller starring an Oscar-nominated Kathy Bates and James Caan. Unfortunately, the material can’t pull off a hat trick, as the much-anticipated stage version, with wryly comic action hero Bruce Willis making his Broadway debut as writer Paul Sheldon and Tony-nominated theater and television veteran Laurie Metcalf taking on the role of deranged nurse Annie Wilkes, is dull and lifeless, delivering only occasional moments of shock and tension. After a serious car accident in a small snow-laden town in 1987 Colorado, Sheldon is rescued by Wilkes, who brings him to her isolated home and repeatedly tells him, “I’m your number one fan.” She lives for his Misery Chastain series, popular bodice rippers set in the nineteenth century. Wilkes claims that the roads are closed and the phone lines are down, so she will take care of his busted shoulder and two broken legs, dispensing painkillers on a regular schedule. Barely able to move, Sheldon cautiously learns to deal with Wilkes’s clearly disturbed personality, which can instantly swing from ridiculously sweet to frighteningly violent. When Wilkes finds, reads — and hates — the manuscript of his latest book in the car, things get bad, but the plot takes an even nastier turn when Sheldon’s latest Misery book is published and Wilkes is not exactly happy with the ending. “A writer is God to the people in a story; he made them up just like God made us up,” she screams at him. “As far as Misery goes, God just happened to have a couple of broken legs and be in my house, eating my food.”

Both Paul Sheldon and Bruce Willis look for a way out of MISERY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Misery never finds its groove. Willis (Die Hard, Pulp Fiction), a likable actor who last appeared on a New York stage in an off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love in 1985, brings no depth or range to Sheldon, playing him with the same smirking, even keel throughout; at times it feels as if he is merely reading his lines instead of performing them. Metcalf (Roseanne, November), who has become one of New York’s most dependable and enjoyable actors to watch in such shows as Domesticated and The Other Place, is unable to infuse Wilkes with the intense flashes of evil so expertly captured by Bates in the film, and Annie’s trademark phrases (“cockadoodie,” “dirty bird”) come off as silly. The sledgehammer scene will have you jumping out of your seat, but more because of how it’s technically achieved. In his Broadway directorial debut, Will Frears maintains a flat level that is in desperate need of energy, missing from the start with the lack of chemistry between the two leads. Goldman, who has written such books and screenplays as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and The Princess Bride, has trimmed the story down to ninety minutes, cutting out critical parts of Wilkes’s back story and making the sheriff (Leon Addison Brown) more of a stock character instead of the investigative cop he is in the book and film. Of course, Frears, the son of accomplished film director Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Launderette, The Queen), doesn’t have access to the equipment of the movies or outdoor locations here; he cannot zoom in on Sheldon’s and Wilkes’s faces or use quick edits and swift camera movement to build tension. David Korins’s rotating set helps contribute some much-needed action to the claustrophobic proceedings, but it’s not enough to revive this Misery.

ALLEGIANCE

Kei Kimura (Lea Salonga), her grandfather, Ojii-chan (George Takei), and brother, Sammy Kimura (Telly Leung), are relocated to an interment camp in ALLEGIANCE (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 14, $45-$149
allegiancemusical.com
www.shubert.nyc

Seventy-four years ago today, Japan staged a surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, leading to America’s entry into WWII. It also led to one of the most shameful acts in U.S. history, as more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcefully removed from their homes and imprisoned in internment camps. The fictionalized story of one such family is told in the Broadway musical Allegiance, a timely, overly earnest, yet involving tale running at the Longacre Theatre. Allegiance tells the story of the Kimura clan, whose farm is seized by the U.S. government while they are marched to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, where they live behind barbed wire, under strict rules — all because of their Japanese last name and ancestry. The family consists of elderly patriarch Ojii-chan (George Takei), single father Tatsuo Kimura (Christòpheren Nomura), daughter Kei Kimura (Lea Salonga), and son Sammy Kimura (Telly Leung). Sammy wants to join the U.S. Army, fighting for the right to defend the country in which he was born; meanwhile, his father, a Japanese native, refuses to sign a loyalty oath to America after the family’s internment, and Frankie Suzuki (Michael K. Lee), who also lives in the camp and has struck up a friendship with Kei, leads a protest when Japanese Americans suddenly become eligible for the draft. Caught in the middle is Mike Masaoka (Greg Watanabe), the real-life California-born national secretary of the Japanese American Citizens League, who is collaborating, in good faith, with the U.S. government over the treatment of the people in the camps.

Sam Kimura (George Takei) remembers where it all went wrong with his sister (Lea Salonga) (photo by Matthew Murphy)

As has been well documented, Allegiance was inspired by the true story of Star Trek veteran and social media sensation Takei, who was five years old when his family was forced at gunpoint to leave their Los Angeles home in 1942 and move first to a horse stable, then to the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. The character of Sam Kimura, whom Takei plays as an old man at the beginning and the end — the main events are told in flashback — is based on not only Takei but also his father, Norman Takei, and war hero Ben Kuroki. The book, by composer and lyricist Jay Kuo (Insignificant Others), co-lead producer Lorenzo Thione, and Marc Acito (Birds of a Feather), is both passionate and predictable, trite and treacly, with underdeveloped subplots (primarily Sammy’s relationship with nurse Hannah Campbell, played by Katie Rose Clarke), and the songs are cliché-ridden and overzealous, featuring such giveaway titles as “Do Not Fight the Storm,” “What Makes a Man,” “Our Time Now,” and “Stronger than Before.” The cast is accomplished, led by Tony winner Salonga (Miss Saigon, Les Misérables), but Stafford Arima’s (Altar Boyz, Carrie) direction is fairly static and Andrew Palermo’s (The Other Josh Cohen) choreography lacks imagination. One wonders if the very urgent story would have been served better as a straight play instead of an overwrought, melodramatic musical. But the main reason the show exists is because of the tireless dedication of Takei, in his Broadway debut. Over the last several years, Takei, who played Lt. Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek for three years on television and then in six big-screen adventures, has become a leading figure in the battle over same-sex marriage (he married his longtime partner, Brad Altman, in September 2008) as well as other social causes (he has more than 9 million likes on Facebook and nearly 1.8 million followers on Twitter), and he was the subject of the 2014 documentary To Be Takei. Takei almost single-handedly has kept alive the truths behind the Japanese American internment camps, an issue that relates directly to the current controversy over Syrian refugees and possible databases of Muslim Americans. “These worrisome developments only strengthen my resolve to keep telling our story and remembering the past so we do not repeat it,” he notes on a handout that comes with the Playbill. Takei, with his big, welcoming smile, riotous sense of humor, and fearlessness in standing up for what he believes in, is an inspiring American, and it is heartwarming watching him in such an important, if not completely successful, Broadway production, one that will very likely have you teary as you leave the theater. For more on the show and Takei, you can follow his online “Trek to Broadway” here.

KING CHARLES III

Charles (Tim Pigott-Smith) wonders just who he is now that his mother is dead and he is king (photo by Joan Marcus)

Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 31, $37 – $159
www.kingcharlesiiibroadway.com

In the 2006 film The Queen, writer Peter Morgan and director Stephen Frears imagine what went on behind closed doors as Queen Elizabeth II (an Oscar-winning Helen Mirren) and Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) debate how to publicly handle the tragic death of Princess Diana. In the 2015 Broadway drama The Audience, writer Morgan and director Stephen Daldry re-create private weekly meetings Queen Elizabeth II (a Tony-winning Mirren) has had with prime ministers going back to Winston Churchill, imagining what they talked about in the sitting room. Both of those productions looked back at the past; in the Olivier Award-winning drama King Charles III, writer Mike Bartlett and director Rupert Goold delve into the near future, imagining an England in which the queen has just died and her son, Prince Charles (Tim Pigott-Smith), finally ascends to the throne. “I never thought I’d see her pass away,” Kate Middleton (Lydia Wilson) says, to which Charles drolly replies, “I felt the same.” Charles almost immediately flouts tradition when, at his first weekly audience with Prime Minister Tristram Evans (Adam James), he refuses to merely listen to what Evans has to say but instead decides to use his royal authority to seriously question the efficacy of a bill that would severely limit freedom of the press. Evans is especially upset at Charles’s response given what happened to Princess Diana. “I would have thought of all the victims you’d feel the strongest something must be done,” Evans boldly declares. “As a man, a father, husband, yes I do. But that’s not who we are when sat with you,” Charles answers. “In here, not just am I defender of the faith but in addition I protect this country’s unique force and way of life.” Charles also chooses to meet with opposition leader Mark Stevens (Anthony Calf) on a weekly basis as well, causing the two men to cross the aisle and strategize together, since every bill must be signed by the king in order to become the law of the land, and Charles is opting to use this ceremonial right to keep the monarchy relevant. Meanwhile, the wild Prince Harry (Richard Goulding) has fallen for Jess (Tafline Steen), a young radical he met at a nightclub. It all makes Charles’s longtime press secretary, the rather stoic and old-fashioned James Reiss (Miles Richardson), more than a bit frustrated. “What am I?” Charles wonders now that he is king.

Prince William (Oliver Chris) and Kate (Lydia Wilson) look at a future without Queen Elizabeth in royal Broadway drama (photo by Joan Marcus)

King Charles III arrived at the Music Box Theatre from across the pond with much fanfare (befitting royalty), but it turns out to be rather dry and ordinary, with a stiff upper lip that often gets in the way. As a tribute to old-time England, much of the dialogue is recited in blank verse, with Charles occasionally delivering brief soliloquies to the audience, but the Shakespearean elements (there are ghosts as well, among references to Macbeth and Hamlet) feel out of place, even on Tom Scutt’s medieval-style set, a castle room circled by fading portraits of previous kings. Perhaps part of the problem is that we are too familiar with the characters involved, which also include Camilla Parker Bowles (Margot Leicester); none of the actors completely capture who they are portraying, and the story is overly simplistic, particularly in its depiction of Charles’s sons, who have been real-life tabloid fodder since birth. Bartlett (Cock, Bull) and Goold (American Psycho, Macbeth) keep things too direct, not letting their imaginations go far enough, and they offer nothing new to the main argument over questions of personal and professional privacy when it comes to matters of the press. And Charles’s choice over whether to sign the bill is not exactly Paul Scofield’s Sir Thomas More searching his conscience over whether to sign the Oath of Supremacy to Robert Shaw’s King Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons, but what is? The most interesting character is Jess, perhaps because she is fictional; maybe Bartlett and Goold would have fared better had they turned this into a roman a clef instead. Pigott-Smith (Educating Rita, Enron) is at his best when Charles is trying to figure out just where his responsibilities now lay, to both the royal family and England itself, but the story ultimately lets him down. King Charles III was an intriguing idea, but the execution, much like the real Prince Charles’s public persona, turns out to be rather dull and unsurprising.