Who: Works by and/or featuring Moko Fukuyama, Joshua William Gelb, Gabrielle Hamilton, Jace, Elmore James, Jamal Josef, Katie Rose McLaughlin, Sara Mearns, Zaire Michel, Zalman Mlotek, Alicia Hall Moran, Patrick Page, Barbara Pollack, Seth David Radwell, Jamar Roberts, Tracy Sallows, Xavier F. Salomon, Janae Snyder-Stewart, Mfoniso Udofia, Anne Verhallen What:This Week in New York twentieth anniversary celebration Where:This Week in New York YouTube When: Original air date: Saturday, May 22, free with RSVP, 7:00 (now available on demand) Why: In April 2001, I found myself suddenly jobless when a relatively new Silicon Alley company that had made big promises took an unexpected hit. I took my meager two weeks’ severance pay and spent fourteen days wandering through New York City, going to museums, film festivals, parks, and tourist attractions. I compiled my experiences into an email I sent to about fifty friends, rating each of the things I had done. My sister’s husband enthusiastically demanded that I keep doing this, and This Week in New York was born.
Affectionately known as twi-ny (twhy-nee), it became a website in 2005 and soon was being read by tens of thousands of people around the globe. I covered a vast array of events – some fifteen thousand over the years – that required people to leave their homes and apartments and take advantage of everything the greatest city in the world had to offer. From the very start, I ventured into nooks and crannies to find the real New York, not just frequenting well-known venues but seeking out the weird and wild, the unusual and the strange.
For my tenth anniversary, we packed Fontana’s, a now-defunct club on the Lower East Side, and had live music, book readings, and a comics presentation. I had been considering something bigger for twenty when the pandemic lockdown hit and lasted longer than we all thought possible.
At first, I didn’t know what twi-ny’s future would be, with nowhere for anyone to go. But the arts community reacted quickly, as incredible dance, music, art, theater, opera, film, and hybrid offerings began appearing on numerous platforms; the innovation and ingenuity blew me away. The winners of twi-ny’s Pandemic Awards give you a good idea of the wide range of things I covered; you can check out part one here and part two here. (Part III is now up as well.)
I devoured everything I could, from experimental dance-theater in a closet and interactive shows over the phone and through the mail to all-star Zoom reunion readings and an immersive, multisensory play that arrived at my door in a box. Many of them dealt with the fear, isolation, and loneliness that have been so pervasive during the Covid-19 crisis while also celebrating hope, beauty, and resilience. I’ve watched, reviewed, and previewed more than a thousand events created since March 2020, viewing them from the same computer where I work at my full-time job in children’s publishing.
Just as companies are deciding the future hybrid nature of employment, the arts community is wrestling with in-person and online presentations. As the lockdown ends and performance venues open their doors, some online productions will go away, but others are likely to continue, benefiting from a reach that now goes beyond their local area and stretches across the continents.
On May 22 at 7:00, “twi-ny at twenty,” produced and edited by Michael D. Drucker of Delusions International and coproduced by Ellen Scordato, twi-ny’s business manager and muse, honors some of the best events of the past fourteen months, including dance, theater, opera, art, music, and literature, all of which can be enjoyed for free from the friendly confines of your couch. There is no registration fee, and the party will be available online for several weeks. You can find more information here.
Please let me know what you think in the live chat, which I will be hosting throughout the premiere, and be sure to say hello to other twi-ny fans and share your own favorite virtual shows.
Thanks for coming along on this unpredictable twenty-year adventure; I can’t wait to see you all online and, soon, in real life. Here’s to the next twenty!
Who: Def Leppard, Noel Gallagher, Simon Le Bon and John Taylor, Living Colour, Evan Rachel Wood, Rob Thomas, Gary Oldman, Walk the Moon, Jake Wesley Rogers, Ricky Gervais, Gail Ann Dorsey, Bernard Fowler, Judith Hill, Earl Slick, Charlie Sexton, Joe Sumner, more What: Annual birthday party for David Bowie Where:RollingLiveStudios.com When: Saturday, January 8, $25, 9:00 (available through January 16) Why: January 8, 2022, would have been David Bowie’s seventy-fifth birthday. Rolling Live Studios will again host an online celebration featuring performances and special appearances from a wide range of artists to honor the Thin White Duke, who passed away on January 10, 2016, at the age of sixty-nine. Among the participants are Def Leppard, Noel Gallagher, Simon Le Bon and John Taylor from Duran Duran, Living Colour, Evan Rachel Wood, Brian Henson, Rob Thomas, Gary Oldman, Ricky Gervais, Gail Ann Dorsey, and Bernard Fowler — who tore up the joint at last year’s party — covering tunes from throughout Bowie’s extraordinary career. There will also be a tribute to the thirty-fifth anniversary of Labyrinth, Jim Henson’s sci-fi puppet flick in which Bowie played Jareth, the king of the goblins; Bowie wrote five songs for the film: “Underground,” “Magic Dance,” “Chilly Down,” “As the World Falls Down,” and “Within You.”
The house band will include Earl Slick, Charlie Sexton, Alan Childs, Steve Elson, Mark Guiliana, Omar Hakim, Stan Harrison, Tim Lefebvre, Gerry Leonard, and Carmine Rojas. “It’s an honor to be able to continue to share David Bowie’s music with the world,” event organizer and longtime Bowie pianist Mike Garson said in a statement. “I’m excited for everyone to be able to experience this very special show we’ve got in store in celebration of what would have been David’s seventy-fifth birthday, with the bandmates he recorded and performed with, plus a great group of guest artists who he was such an influence to.” The show is dedicated to photographer Mick Rock, “the Man Who Shot the ’70s,” who died this past November in Staten Island at the age of seventy-two. Tickets are $25, with various bundles including merch and a virtual Q&A ranging from $30 to $5,000; $$2 from each purchase will benefit Save the Children, which Bowie raised money for at this fiftieth-birthday concert at Madison Square Garden on January 9, 1997.
White Snake Projects’ Death by Life: A Digital Opera in One Act redefined what live online opera could be
On July 4, 2020, I published Part I of the twi-ny Pandemic Awards, hoping that it would be the first of hopefully only two such postings celebrating the amazing innovation and creativity in dance, film, theater, food, opera, art, literature, music, and other forms of entertainment made online since March 2020.
As the pandemic lockdown proceeded, I followed that up with Part II on January 1, 2021. And now, a year later, comes the third — and final — edition of twi-ny’s Pandemic Awards, honoring the best, and most unusual, online presentations of 2021. To see some of the video highlights from March 2020 through last May, check out the “twi-ny at twenty” anniversary gala here.
Even as the omicron variant tears through New York City and the world, entertainment venues are back open, and more people are visiting museums, theaters, sports venues, and other forms of indoor and outdoor entertainment. Meanwhile, there is still much happening exclusively online. This Week in New York will continue to track virtual and hybrid productions of all kinds from across the globe, in addition to live performances happening in the five boroughs, so keep following this space for the best, and the worst, in live and recorded in-person and virtual events.
Happy 2022 to all — may you and your friends, family, and loved ones stay safe and healthy!
BEST FUTURISTIC PLAY
Edward Einhorn’s Alma Baya, Untitled Theater Company No. 61, A.R.T./New York. Edward Einhorn delves into isolation and living in pods in this in-person/online show about what might happen next.
BEST IMMERSIVE HISTORICAL DRAMA
Arlekin Players Theatre, Witness. Igor Golyak uses Arlekin’s Zero Gravity Lab to place viewers aboard the MS St. Louis in this interactive exploration of antisemitism.
BEST SHORT PLAY SERIES BY ONE PLAYWRIGHT
Steppenwolf Now, “Three Short Plays by Tracy Letts”:Night Safari, The Old Country, The Stretch. Steppenwolf did exemplary online work during the pandemic lockdown, including this triple crown of short one-acts by Tracy Letts, featuring Rainn Wilson, Letts, and William Petersen and Mike Nussbaum voicing puppets in a diner.
BEST GIFT ACCOMPANYING AN ONLINE PLAY
Third Rail Projects, Return the Moon. Immersive site-specific theater experts Third Rail Projects sent viewers a package including an exquisite little cut-paper diorama in conjunction with its interactive virtual show.
BEST FILMED OUTDOOR PLAY
Amy Berryman’s Walden, TheaterWorks Hartford. Twin sisters and an Earth Advocate argue over the future of the planet in Amy Berryman’s superb play about loss, loneliness, and reconnection, filmed in front of a socially distanced live audience in the woods by the Connecticut River.
BEST ZOOM PLAY TAKING PLACE ON ZOOM
Jake Shore’s Adjust the Procedure, Spin Cycle and JCS Theater Company. Zoom fatigue had not quite settled in yet when Jake Shore’s play about a university facing a crisis over the course of several Zoom meetings was released.
BEST USE OF LIVE CHAT IN A PLAY
Arlekin Players Theatre, chekhovOS /an experimental game/. The audience gets to vote on which Chekhov play Arlekin will perform, then argue in the chat about anything they want, including the quality of the production itself, with administrators encouraging all responses.
BEST ACTOR
Jason Alexander, Rob Ulin’s Judgment Day, Barrington Stage Company; Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig, Spotlight on Plays. Jason Alexander was a riot in two virtual readings, as a greedy lawyer whose life is changed by a near-death experience in Judgment Day, which had an encore streaming in July, and as Mervyn Kant in Sisters, playing to his home camera with effusive glee.
Kathleen Chalfant elegantly performs Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking for Keen Company benefit
BEST ACTRESS
Kathleen Chalfant, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Keen Company; Karen Malpede’s Blue Valiant, Theatre Three Collaborative. Theater treasure Kathleen Chalfant read directly from the published book of Joan Didion’s poignant memoir with an exquisite elegance, performed from her home, lending it a mesmerizing intimacy. She went outside for Blue Valiant, a play about a horse and a mother’s relationship with her daughter that was written by Karen Malpede specifically for Chalfant, who was lovely acting alongside George Bartenieff as pianist Arthur Rosen gave life to the horse in an unusual way.
BEST ACTRESS IN A FILMED PLAY ON A STAGE
Charlayne Woodard, The Garden, Baltimore Center Stage. Charlayne Woodard, who presented a stellar online version of her one-woman show Neat for MTC, returned to the stage for her two-character play The Garden, in which she and Caroline Stefanie Clay starred as a daughter and a mother trying to reconnect after a series of tragic events.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A VIRTUAL PLAY
Elizabeth Heflin, Michael Gotch’s Tiny House, Westport Country Playhouse. Elizabeth Heflin was wonderful as a cynical mother visiting her daughter and her environmental-nut husband in the mountains on the Fourth of July, as fireworks fly.
BEST PLAYWRIGHT FINALLY GETTING HER DUE
Adrienne Kennedy, “The Work of Adrienne Kennedy: Inspiration & Influence,” Round House Theatre / McCarter Theatre Center. If you didn’t know much about hugely influential playwright Adrienne Kennedy, Round House Theatre and McCarter Theatre Center changed that with excellent virtual productions of He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, Sleep Deprivation Chamber, Ohio State Murders, and Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side, along with a series of online discussions celebrating the now-ninety-year-old experimental legend.
BEST NONTHEATRICAL INDOOR LOCATION FOR A PLAY
Sharon Karmazin’s home, George Street Playhouse. George Street board member Sharon Karmazin generously turned over her house to the New Jersey company for excellent virtual filmed productions of Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates and Becky Mode’s Fully Committed, allowing each one-person show to shine.
BEST OLD-FASHIONED RADIO PLAY
Lucille Fletcher’s 1943 Sorry, Wrong Number, Keen Company. Keen Company made it feel like you were listening to the radio in 1943 with its audio production of while Lucille Fletcher’s Sorry, Wrong Number, in which Marsha Mason thinks she has overheard a murder plot and desperately wants to stop the potential killing.
BEST ILLUSTRATED SHORT PLAY
Rajiv Joseph’s Red Folder, Steppenwolf Now. Carrie Coon narrates Rajiv Joseph’s devilishly clever and insightful short Red Folder, a kind of graphic novel come to life about being different.
BEST PLAY FILMED WITH AN AUDIENCE
Ryan J. Haddad’s Hi, Are You Single?, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. Ryan J. Haddad’s autobiographical one-man show was recorded in front of a small, socially distanced audience of crew members at Woolly Mammoth; the moment when he is joined onstage by a man wearing a mask was as alarming as it was invigorating.
BEST PLAY ABOUT PARANOIA X the Experience. Aaron Salazar and Jason Veasey’s interactive online show casts the viewer as a trainee for the mysterious conglomerate known as WE, which appears to disdain individuality in favor of a faceless collective, touching a nerve as vaccines started promising an eventual return to normalcy.
BEST SCIENTIFIC PLAY
Jake Broder’s UnRavelled. This virtual collaboration between the Global Brain Health Institute and Trinity College Dublin told the true story of a doctor who started channeling composer Maurice Ravel through extraordinary paintings that had her husband worried about her mental stability; the play was accompanied by a discussion featuring the doctor who treated her.
BEST USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN A PLAY
The Javaad Alipoor Company’s Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran. Javaad Alipoor and Peyvand Sadeghian used Instagram Live to relate the true story of a 2015 fatal car accident in Tehran, going backward in time to explore government corruption, unchecked capitalism, climate change, and the impact social media has on the younger generation.
BEST SOCIAL DISTANCING IN A PLAY
Mike Bartlett’s Cock, Studio Theatre; Kelli Goff’s The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls, Baltimore Center Stage. As companies started filming theatrical productions back on their stages, without an audience, they still kept the actors apart from one another, which was done intuitively in Mike Bartlett’s Cock and Kelli Goff’s The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls, both of which are structured to involve touch and physical closeness.
STRANGEST ONLINE PLAY Sloppy Bonnie: A Roadkill Musical (for the Modern Chick!), No Puppet Co., OZ Arts. Leah Lowe, Krista Knight, and Barry Brinegar add goofy cartoonish animation to the online version of this full-tilt campy musical about a road trip that leaves dead bodies in its wake, filmed live in front of a Nashville audience that can’t know what fun we are having watching it at home.
Odd Man Out offers a theatrical journey in a box to be experienced at home (photo by twi-ny/ees)
BEST AT-HOME INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE
Martín Bondone’s Odd Man Out, Teatro Ciego and theatreC. Writer Martín Bondone and codirectors Carlos Armesto and Facundo Bogarín’s immersive memory play arrives at your home in a box containing elements for four of the senses as you listen on headphones while blindfolded, following the story of a blind musician returning to Argentina.
BEST COMEDY FILMED ON A STAGE
Terrence McNally’s It’s Only a Play, George Street Playhouse. After presenting two excellent online solo shows, Bad Dates and Fully Committed, filmed in a board member’s home, George Street Playhouse returned to its New Jersey stage for a stellar rendition of Terrence McNally’s hysterical comedy about theater that had me laughing out lout time and time again.
BEST SURPRISE ENDING OF A VIRTUAL PLAY
Christopher Chen’s Communion, American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.). It would be unfair to reveal what Stacy Ross tells us at the conclusion of Christopher Chen’s online, interactive Zoom show, which comes complete with breakout rooms and is skillfully directed by Tony winner Pam MacKinnon.
BEST REVIVAL SERIES
MTC’s Curtain Call, The Niceties,Three Days of Rain,The Past Is the Past,Neat. Manhattan Theatre Club looked back in presenting virtual versions of past productions, in most cases reuniting the original casts, including the late Lisa Banes and Jordan Boatman in Eleanor Burgess’s The Niceties, about an allegation of racism at a prestigious university, as well as Patricia Clarkson, John Slattery, and Bradley Whitford in Richard Greenberg’s family mystery Three Days of Rain and Charlayne Woodard re-creating her one-woman autobiographical show Neat.
BEST MUSICAL FILMED ON A STAGE
Heather Christian’s Animal Wisdom, Woolly Mammoth and San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. Heather Christian reimagined her 2017 show, Animal Wisdom, for online viewing, recording it with her band onstage at DC’s Woolly Mammoth, incorporating aspects of the pandemic while Christian faces ghosts from her past.
BEST SITE-SPECIFIC INDOOR FILMED MUSICAL
Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, Out of the Box Theatrics, Holmdel Theatre Company, and Blair Russell. Jason Michael Webb’s adaptation of Jason Robert Brown’s 2001 two-character sung-through musical about the end and beginning and end of a relationship follows Nasia Thomas and Nicholas Edwards through a cramped New York City apartment as concepts of time and space are obliterated.
BEST REIMAGINING OF A ONE-WOMAN PLAY
Studio Theatre, Dael Orlandersmith’s Until the Flood. Studio Theatre associate artistic director Reginald L. Douglas reimagines Dael Orlandersmith’s gripping one-woman show about the police killing of Michael Brown as a piece for three Black women actors of different ages, who portray multiple characters as they move about the empty DC theater.
Dan Lauria and Wendie Malick are warm and welcoming in Sitting and Talking
BEST TWO-CHARACTER ZOOM PLAY ABOUT CONNECTING
Lia Romeo’s Sitting and Talking, Miles Square Theatre. Dan Lauria and Wendie Malick are delightful as two older single people attempting to connect through online dating, trying to dig themselves out of the loneliness they are both experiencing, and not just because of the pandemic.
BEST SOLO SHAKESPEARE PLAY
Patrick Page, All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain, Shakespeare Theatre Company. Patrick Page gives a master class in Shakespeare, focusing on his many villains in this triumphant one-person show filmed onstage at STC.
BEST PODCAST PLAYS
Wallace Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors and The Designated Mourner, Gideon Media. The original casts of these two prescient plays by Wallace Shawn reunited for outstanding audio versions, with Julie Hagerty, Jennifer Tilly, Emily Cass McDonnell, Deborah Eisenberg, and Larry Pine joining Shawn.
BEST ONLINE FILM FESTIVAL DOC NYC 2021. The twelfth annual DOC NYC festival went hybrid, presenting more than two hundred films online and in theaters that look at where we are as a society today, in the midst of a pandemic that has killed more than five million people around the world, including several important films about Covid-19 and how we have responded to it.
BEST INTERACTIVE FILM Republique, the Interactive Movie. Created by director Simon Bouisson and writer Olivier Demangel, Republique puts the viewer in control of the action, choosing which of several unfolding scenes to watch during a terrorist attack in the Paris Metro.
Bob Dylan’s bizarre Shadow Kingdom delighted and confounded fans
BEST INCOMPREHENSIBLE MUSIC PRESENTATION Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan. Leave it to the enigma that is Bob Dylan to present a virtual production that had fans wondering whether any of it was recorded live, as microphones hid Dylan’s mouth throughout and the unidentified masked musicians might or might not have been actually playing their instruments; the lively chat ranged from angry fans wanting their money back to devotees proclaiming it was the best twenty-five bucks they had spent during the pandemic.
BEST DUET
Dorit Chrysler and Alexander Calder, “Calder Plays Theremin,” Museum of Modern Art. Berlin-based composer and sound artist Dorit Chrysler activated two works in MoMA’s “Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start” exhibition by using four theremins and a Moog Model 15 analog synthesizer to create a gorgeous eight-minute suite in four movements.
BEST BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO A LATE ROCK STAR “A Bowie Celebration: Just for One Day!,” Rolling Live Studios. Pianist Mike Garson transformed the annual David Bowie birthday tribute into a superstar online event, with Bowie songs performed by such Bowie acolytes as Yungblud, Michael C. Hall, Ian Hunter, Anna Calvi, Boy George, Trent Reznor, Perry Farrell, Macy Gray, Adam Lambert, Andra Day, Duran Duran, Peter Frampton, David Sanborn, Rick Wakeman, Ian Astbury, William Corgan, Gary Oldman, Gavin Rossdale, Joe Elliott, Bernard Fowler, Corey Glover, and Catherine Russell, among others.
Robyn Hitchcock played a series of home gigs in Nashville and London, joined by his partner and pets (including Perry the lobster)
BEST INFORMAL AT-HOME MUSIC SERIES
Robyn Hitchcock, Live from Tubby’s House. Taking a page out of British raconteur Richard Thompson’s book, who performed living-room concerts from his Jersey home with his partner, singer-songwriter Zara Phillips, fellow British raconteur Robyn Hitchcock performed a series of home concerts from Nashville and London over Mandolin and StageIt, accompanied by his wife, singer-songwriter Emma Swift, her pup Daphne, and their beloved cats, Ringo Baez and Tubby Grossman, a follow-up to their 2020 Live from Sweet Home Quarantine shows.
BEST INDOOR DANCE FILMED ON A STAGE
Yin Yue Dance Company, Ripple, 92nd St. Y. Harkness Promise Award recipient Yin Yue’s Ripple, filmed live in front of an audience at 92Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall, was a gorgeously flowing multipart work that was followed by a fascinating talk with the company.
BEST OUTDOOR DANCE FILMED ON A STAGE STREB Extreme Action, Jacob’s Pillow. Elizabeth Streb and her Extreme Action team returned to Jacob’s Pillow for the first time in twenty years, presenting twelve repertory works filmed live on the outdoor stage in front of an audience, with Streb offering commentary between pieces, an excellent aperitif to the company’s stirring live show at Manhattan West.
Stephen Petronio Co. remimagines Trisha Brown’s Group Primary Accumulation for its digital Joyce season
BEST OUTDOOR DANCE NOT ON A STAGE
Stephen Petronio Company, Accumulation, Joyce Digital Season. As part of its digital season at the Joyce, Stephen Petronio continued his Bloodlines program, in which he interprets seminal works by important choreographers, with a mesmerizing outdoor mixed-gender performance of Trisha Brown’s Group Primary Accumulation, filmed from high above, as if the four dancers are just another part of the natural world.
BEST DANCE ABOUT EMERGING FROM LOCKDOWN
Stefanie Batten Bland, Kolonial, Baryshnikov Arts Center. For her BAC digital commission, Stefanie Batten Bland contributed the filmed piece Kolonial, in which she and six other dancers try to burst out of a trapped isolation.
BEST ONLINE DANCE FESTIVAL “WOMEN / CREATE! A Virtual Festival of Dance,” New York Live Arts. The ninth annual “WOMEN / CREATE!” festival went digital with impressive works by Karole Armitage, Meagan King, Sidra Bell, Jennifer Muller, Tatiana Desardouin, and Jacqulyn Buglisi, followed by a rousing discussion.
BEST BALLET FILMED ONSTAGE
George Balanchine’s Emeralds, San Francisco Ballet. I let out a gasp as the curtain rose on San Francisco Ballet’s glorious version of George Balanchine’s Emeralds, the most dancers I had seen onstage together since the pandemic lockdown had started, and then gasped over and over again at the beautiful production, with stunning costumes and spectacular movement.
BEST ONLINE ART PROGRAM
David Zwirner, Program; Hauser & Wirth, .Philip Guston: On Edge. David Zwirner’s all-day online symposium featured discussions with artists, critics, curators, filmmakers, designers, and others, including Barry Jenkins, Hilton Als, Emily Bode, and Peter Schjeldahl, along with visits to Zwirner galleries around the world. Meanwhile, in conjunction with its superb exhibition “Philip Guston 1969-1979,” Hauser & Wirth hosted “Philip Guston: On Edge,” a symposium at the SVA Theatre that included William Kentridge responding to Guston’s The Studio as well as other strong presentations by Trenton Doyle Hancock and Rachel Rossin and conversations with Charles Gaines, Art Spiegelman, Max Hollein, Massimiliano Gioni, George Condo, Katy Siegel, Randy Kennedy, and Jasmine Wahi.
BEST ART MEDITATION
Pace Gallery, Monday Meditation at the Rothko Chapel. Pace offered a lovely opportunity to reflect on life from wherever you were while watching a peaceful shot inside Houston’s nondenominational Rothko Chapel as part of its fiftieth anniversary.
BEST ONLINE ARTS DISCUSSION SERIES
The New Museum, “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America.” Even if you weren’t ready yet to venture into arts institutions, the New Museum supplemented its outstanding “Grief and Grievance” exhibition with a series of talks with more than a dozen of the participating artists, all of which are still available online for free.
BEST LIVESTREAMED OPERA
White Snake Projects, Death by Life: A Digital Opera in One Act and A Survivor’s Odyssey: The Journey of Penelope and Circe. Cerise Lim Jacobs’s activist opera company, White Snake Projects, continued its inspiring, barrier-breaking livestreamed digital presentations with Death by Life, which dealt with systemic racism and mass incarceration, and A Survivor’s Odyssey: The Journey of Penelope and Circe, an inventive take on Odysseus which places the power in the hands of the women characters.
BEST DIGITAL OPERA FILMS Opera Philadelphia,Soldier Songs, The Island We Made, We Need to Talk, Blessed, Save the Boys. Opera Philadelphia redefined what opera could be in an online world during the pandemic lockdown, presenting a series of spectacular filmed operas about loneliness, legacy, and personal identity in these hard times; The Island We Made contained some of the most stunning visuals of the year.
Audience members take photos of themselves using props sent to their home in The Wandering
BEST PARTICIPATORY OPERA The Wandering, Actor and curator Calista Small, baritone and actor Jeremy Weiss, designer Charlotte McCurdy, theater artist Christine Shaw, filmmaker Lara Panah-Izadi, and animator Zach Bell took a unique look at the life of Austrian composer Franz Schubert in a multipart, multidisciplinary immersive production that included props sent to the at-home audience.
BEST OPERA MINISERIES
Boston Lyric Opera, Desert In. Boston Lyric Opera’s Desert In is a tantalizing and titillating eight-part soap opera that combines loss and loneliness with the supernatural, with Justin Vivian Bond as the lounge singer, Jon Orsini as the son, Jesus Garcia as Rufus, Edward Nelson as his new husband, Ion, Alan Pingarrón as Federico, Isabel Leonard as Cass, and Talise Trevigne as Sunny, all delighting in the delicious dastardly doings.
MOST ADVENTUROUS OPERA ADAPTATION
Boston Lyric Opera / Operabox.tv, The Fall of the House of Usher. Director James Darrah’s inventive virtual adaptation of Philip Glass and Arthur Yorinks’s 1988 opera, The Fall of the House of Usher, combined puppets, stop-motion animation, the refugee crisis, and a mysterious host in retelling Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tale of the demise of a once-prominent family.
Uncle Floyd is back with Tuesday night watch parties of clips from old episodes
BEST VIRTUAL TV WATCH PARTY This Was the Uncle Floyd Show. David Bowie, John Lennon, Iggy Pop, Paul Simon, and the Ramones were among the fans of The Uncle Floyd Show, a faux-kiddie program that ran on various outlets, from local cable access channels to NBC, from 1974 to 1998, a supremely low-budget panoply of improvised sketches, music parodies, beloved puppets, and appearances by internationally renowned rock stars; the shows were never rerun and will never be available on DVD, so Floyd and his right-hand man, Scott Gordon, are hosting fifty-minute livestreamed clip compilations over StageIt hosted by tech Luddite Uncle Floyd Vivino himself, with a rousing, worshipful chat featuring longtime fans and some of the original cast and crew members. Snap it, pal!!
It’s been three quarters of a century since the Holocaust ended, so there are fewer and fewer survivors and witnesses alive to tell the true stories of what happened in the camps of Eastern Europe during WWII. Meanwhile, antisemitism continues to surge around the world amid Holocaust deniers and politicians who misuse and abuse the horror for soundbites and social media memes. Arlekin Players Theatre investigates these issues in its latest interactive online show, Witness. An immersive work that explores antisemitism and desperate migration, the play relates the fate of the MS St. Louis, the German ship that carried more than nine hundred Jewish refugees in May 1939, to the problems of today.
The luxury liner was transporting men, women, and children fleeing the approaching Holocaust, but the ship was turned away by Cuba, Canada, and the United States. Conceived and directed by Arlekin founder and Russian Jewish immigrant Igor Golyak and written by Moscow-based Nana Grinstein with Blair Cadden and Golyak, Witness puts the audience on board the St. Louis, where it begins with a talent show that is based on actual events.
The emcee (Gene Ravvin) believes he is in the present, in a green-screen studio, as he introduces the parade of performers: Liesl Joseph (Esther Golyak) and Gisela Klepl (Elizabeth Sarytchev), who perform “Skating on Glass!” as older versions of themselves (Rimma Gluzman and Polina Vikova) recall Kristallnacht in voice-over; Fritz Buff (Alex Petetsky), who constructs a house of cards and anticipates “joyful days” ahead; Fira (Julia Shikh), who boils a book banned in the USSR; a magician named Marik (Misha Tyutyunik) and his assistant (Jenya Brodskaia); and superheroes Anna (Anna Furman), Olga (Olga Aronova), and Vika (Vika Kovalenko), who call themselves the Elusive Avengers. The audience at home votes on each performance and gains points as they participate.
During each skit, the audience can click on pop-ups to learn more about the contestants, all of whom were real, as well as the actors portraying them. Short biographical sketches include their immigration status and, in the case of the passengers, their fate after the ship was refused entry to America. News crawls onscreen range from the 1930s to the 1990s, which initially confuse the emcee until he figures out what is going on. “The good news is that not only those Jews who left Hamburg in 1939 are sailing with us but also all the Jews that left anywhere are also here,” he explains. “First wave, second wave, third wave. A whole ocean of waves. From USSR, from Germany, from Spain, from Hungary. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, and always. We are all together, ladies and gentlemen. We’re all together. If there is a place to leave, the Jews will find a way.”
After the talent show, the emcee walks through a long, narrow hallway on the ship, encountering people discussing antisemitism, assimilation, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, dual loyalty, and Israel’s right to exist and defend itself as well as frightening vignettes occurring in some of the cabins. Every word of dialogue is based on interviews Golyak conducted with nearly a hundred people; the narrative is smartly organized to avoid clichés, stereotypical rhetoric, and didactic moralizing.
“So basically what they are is Jews who think if we just bend over a little more, if we just assimilate a little bit better than we did in Germany, that somehow miraculously everything will be different than it was in Germany,” Leah (Lauren Elias) says. “And it’s not going to be. I mean, come on. It feels like the only acceptable party line for Israeli people and Jewish people right now is like, ‘Oh my god. We’re sorry we didn’t all die in World War Two. We know that would have been so much easier for you. We are so sorry for the inconvenience.’”
Joseph (Nathan Malin), talking with Leah and Rachel (Anne Gottlieb) about the public reaction to the real-life stabbing of an Orthodox rabbi in Brighton, admits, “Unless you want to tar yourself as unwanted and as a bad person, you keep your mouth shut and you just duck your head, you know?”
Camera operator Austin de Besche films some of the cast during the making of Witness
Lady Liberty (Darya Denisova) occasionally appears to share her thoughts as the emcee repeats, “This can’t happen here. This can’t happen here!” Leah responds, “No, no, no, it can. And it does.”
Arlekin, which has previously dazzled viewers with the one-woman State vs. Natasha Banina and the daring hybrid chekhovOS /an experimental game/ (featuring Jessica Hecht and Mikhail Baryshnikov), a pair of livestreamed interactive shows that pushed the boundaries of online productions, again breaks new ground through its Zero Gravity (zero-G) Virtual Theater Lab with Witness. Set designer and costumer Anna Fedorova, virtual designer Daniel Cormino, sound designer Viktor Semenov, and director of photography and editor Anton Nikolaev make it feel like it’s all taking place on board the St. Louis, with rolling waves and flying birds outside as the ocean liner heads toward its supposed destination.
During the talent show, the audience on the ship looks like ghosts, which in essence is what they are today. At one point, the screen goes dark for several minutes as binaural recordings play through your headphones, as if you’re a passenger, not knowing what’s coming next, or from where. It sent chills through my bones.
As always with Arlekin’s works, each presentation is followed by a talkback in which members of the cast and crew delve into the making of the work, although Golyak is careful not to give away too many secrets. Some of the discussions include experts on antisemitism and the Holocaust, and the audience is encouraged to share experiences in the lively chat. The night I saw Witness, numerous people (including me) described instances of antisemitism they have encountered. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, it is noted, “Bearing witness, so they will know, until the last generation.” A compelling and necessary piece of sociopolitical documentary theater, Witness reminds us all just how important that is.
Clyde (Uzo Aduba) keeps a close watch on her employees in new Lynn Nottage play (photo by Joan Marcus)
CLYDE’S
Helen Hayes Theater
240 West 44th St.
Through January 16, $49-$149 (livestream January 4-16, $59) 2st.com/shows/clydes
If there’s a better living American playwright working today than Lynn Nottage, you’ll have to convince me.
The Brooklyn-born two-time Pulitzer Prize winner is back on Broadway with the delectable comedy Clyde’s, continuing at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater through January 16. The ninety-minute play is set in the kitchen of a roadside diner in Berks County, Pennsylvania, run by the fierce and dominating Clyde (Uzo Aduba), who spent time in jail and exclusively hires ex-cons. But Clyde is no saint, helping the downtrodden out of the goodness of her heart; instead, she abuses her staff with vicious delight, insulting them with zinging barbs, threatening their employment, and sexually harassing them.
The kitchen crew consists of Tish (Kara Young), a single mother with an unreliable ex; Rafael (Reza Salazar), a twentysomething who is enamored with Tish; and the wise sage Montrellous (Ron Cephas Jones), a sandwich guru who avoids talking about his personal life. They are joined by Jason (Edmund Donovan), who is fresh out of the big house, complete with white supremacist gang tattoos on his face, neck, and arms.
“He tell you what happens if I catch any of you morons stealing? Breaking my rules?” Clyde tells Jason, referring to Rafael. “I don’t go to the police. I deal with it my way. Understand?” Later, Rafael warns Jason, “Bro, it’s real. Do not cross her. She’ll make you suffer.”
Montrellous is the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Yoda, the Zen master of the kitchen. He raises sandwich making to an art. “You know why I love the sandwich?” Montrellous says. “’Cuz it’s a complete meal that you can hold between your fingers. It’s the most democratic of all foods. Two pieces of bread, and between, you can put anything you want. It invites invention and collaboration.” Rafael responds, “Jesus, I make a sandwich every day, but somehow your shit always tastes like the truth.” Montrellous adds, “It’s about order, baby. I’m interested in the composition, it’s not merely about flavor. Dig? I think about the balance of ingredients and the journey I want the consumer to take with each bite. Then finally how I can achieve oneness with the sandwich.” It’s also a metaphor for (re)building one’s life.
Rafael (Reza Salazar), Tish (Kara Young), Montrellous (Ron Cephas Jones), and Jason (Edmund Donovan) search for the perfect sandwich in Clyde’s (photo by Joan Marcus)
Whenever Montrellous begins to wax poetic about potential combinations, the lights take on a sepia tone, as if sacred word is descending from the heavens. (The expert lighting is by Christopher Akerlind.) Tish and Rafael make offerings of their own unique flavor profiles, looking to Montrellous for his approval like students trying to please their teacher (or father). Jason, who at first doesn’t care about kitchen hygiene or carefully developed recipes, soon takes part as well, learning that the sandwich is much more than just a bunch of stuff between two slices of bread.
But no matter how hard they try to make the perfect sandwich, Clyde continually shoots them down, not giving a damn about quality but only that they fill orders as fast as they can. In one hysterical scene, she pops up over and over again in the cut-out window, from multiple angles, leaving order slip after order slip as Tish, Rafael, Jason, and Montrellous hustle to keep pace. She also occasionally brings in questionable ingredients that probably fell off a truck somewhere, insisting the staff use them no matter the expiration date or the stench. It all comes to a head when investors are scheduled to meet with Clyde to help her out of some financial problems.
Takeshi Kata’s functional kitchen set serves as a kind of way station, a limbo or purgatory where the characters exist between their prior incarceration and the freedom of the real world. Clyde is like the judge, jury, and executioner over what Nottage calls in a program note a “liminal space,” as she constantly reminds them where they’ve been while disparaging any hope they might have for a better future. As Montrellous says, “And you know what they say, ’cuz you left prison don’t mean you outta prison. But, remember everything we do here is to escape that mentality. This kitchen, these ingredients, these are our tools. We have what we need. So, let’s cook.” He later explains, “This sandwich is my strength. This sandwich is my victory. This sandwich is my freedom.”
As the fiery Clyde, three-time Emmy winner Aduba (Orange Is the New Black, Mrs. America), who has appeared in such stage works as Coram Boy,Godspell, and The Maids, might refuse to taste any of Montrellous’s sandwiches, but she devours the scenery. She storms into each scene in a different outrageously jaw-dropping costume by Jennifer Moeller, with dazzling colors and remarkable shoes. Aduba and Emmy winner Cephas Jones (This Is Us,Hurt Village) complement each other beautifully, Montrellous’s calmness balancing her fiery fury.
Clyde (Uzo Aduba) and Montrellous (Ron Cephas Jones) have different ideas about the future in new Broadway play (photo by Joan Marcus)
Salazar (Richard II,Oedipus El Rey) and Young (All the Natalie Portmans,Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven) form a delicate but poignant duo, facing their own demons and dependencies. Donovan (Greater Clements,Lewiston/Clarkston) ably fits well right in the middle of it all, lending an intriguing unpredictability to Jason, who’s struggling to get through every day and avoid going back to prison.
Kate Whoriskey, who previously directed Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Sweat and Ruined, knows just what to do with Nottage’s words, bringing them to life with a scintillating intelligence, capturing the rhythm of her language and the depth of her characters. Clyde’s might be hilariously funny, but it is serious about the revolving door of the prison system, immigration, income inequality, sexism, racism, greed, and power, its own seven deadly sins.
In just the last dozen years or so, Nottage has given us Sweat,Ruined,Mlima’s Tale,The Secret Life of Bees, and revivals of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine, with the Michael Jackson musical MJ and an opera adaptation of her 2003 play, Intimate Apparel, up next. That’s quite a banquet. And as a bonus dessert, performances from the Hayes Theater will be simulcast live online January 4-16 ($59), filmed by five to seven cameras.
In his final appearance on The David Letterman Show in October 2002, musician Warren Zevon, discussing his terminal cancer, said about life, “Enjoy every sandwich.” With Lynn Nottage, that’s an easy order to fill.
The Cherry is back with the hybrid What Happens if I Don’t through December 12
AND WHAT HAPPENS IF I DON’T
Cherry Artspace and online
102 Cherry St., Ithaca
December 3-12, $25-$35 in person, $20 livestream www.thecherry.org
The pandemic lockdown might have shuttered venues around the country, but it also offered theater lovers the opportunity to see innovative online productions from companies that are out of one’s geographic range. Since April 2020, I have enjoyed works from Baltimore Center Stage, San Francisco Playhouse, DC’s Studio Theatre and Woolly Mammoth, Steppenwolf in Chicago, Hartford Stage in Connecticut, Boston Court Pasadena and Barrington Stage in Massachusetts, and Chichester Festival Theatre and the Bristol Old Vic in England, among others, all while sitting at my computer.
One of the little gems has been Ithaca’s nonprofit Cherry Artists’ Collective, which has presented Felt Sad, Posted a Frog (and other streams of global quarantine), which interwove six stories dealing with isolation, A Day, a hybrid green-screened show that cleverly revealed its process between scenes, and the two-character onstage Hotel Good Luck, which looked at time, space, and loss in surprising ways.
The company’s latest work is its first indoor show in front of an audience since the coronavirus crisis closed everything down. Berlin-based Serbian playwright and screenwriter Iva Brdar’s And What Happens if I Don’t is being performed in the theater and streaming live through December 12 from the Cherry Artspace. I saw one of the streams, filmed with multiple cameras (including one overhead); the play begins with the small audience entering the intimate space, sitting on chairs and risers on three sides of the room, and ends with the crowd leaving, adding to the overall live experience for those at home. The sixty-minute narrative features eight actresses — Adara Alston, Barbara Geary, Naandi Jamison, Elizah Knight, RJ Lavine, Elizabeth Mozer, Jen Schilansky, and Amoreena Wade — portraying thirteen girls and women who, as they grow older, from birth to seventy-eight, share stories about life lessons, both good and bad, they learned from their mothers; each scene also involves a threatening male figure, from a father and a traffic officer to a creepy man at a public pool and a Customs agent.
What Happens if I Don’t explores outdated gender roles in a series of monologues
In “On Ears, age 0,” the only thing a father can say to his newborn daughter (Jamison) is that she has nice ears, which warps her view of the rest of her body. In “On Concrete, age 18,” a teenager (Alston) is told by her mother to avoid sitting on concrete or else she will become a “sterile, hysterical, unfulfilled woman.” In “On Toilet Seats, age 29,” a woman’s (Wade) mother insists she not sit directly on toilet seats unless she wants to get a disease. Other words of advice relate to urinating` in pools, people with dimples, eating fruit, and plucking out gray hairs.
Each scene starts with the character, dressed in modern-day casual clothing, attempting to jump rope held by two of the other actors, a constant reminder of the joys and fun associated with childhood that go away as one ages and discovers more about the not-so-carefree world. Each character is also joined at one point by three angels who remind her that she is “polite, kind, and very well behaved,” understanding what is expected of her as a girl and a woman. Places to sit (a chair, a small bench, a large wooden farm spool) are moved around to sharp sound effects for every vignette, under eighteen lightbulbs in lampshades hanging from the ceiling at different heights. (The sound and music is by Lesley Greene, with lighting by Chris Brusberg, costumes by Iris Estelle and Sasha Oliveau, and livestream design by Greg Levins and Karen Rodriguez.)
Director Susannah Berryman (Holy Ghosts,Daisy Pulls It Off) gives the cast an ample amount of freedom, resulting in a loose, natural feel despite the serious turns; it’s a show by women, about women, but the male need for power and control hovers over all of it as Brdar (Geraniums Can Survive Anything,Rule of Thumb) explores sexism, misogyny, and old-fashioned gender roles. And What Happens if I Don’t also asks the question “Is mother always right?” (The answer is decidedly no.) The show consists of a series of monologues, but the eight cast members stand together throughout, supporting one another as they battle systemic stereotypes that are still all too real in 2021.
Lauren Elias, Anna Gottlieb, Nathan Malin, and Gene Ravvin on board the virtual MS St. Louis in Witness
Who:Arlekin Players Theatre What: Interactive livestreamed show Where:Zero Gravity (zero-G) Virtual Theater Lab When: December 10 – January 23, $25 Why: Perhaps no other theater company has taken to virtual, interactive productions like Arlekin Players Theatre. The Boston-based troupe first presented the powerful solo show State vs. Natasha Banina, followed by chekhovOS /an experimental game/, which featured Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jessica Hecht, and Darya Denisova, who had played Natasha Banina. Next up for the innovative, forward-thinking company, which incorporates aspects of gaming into its work, is Witness, conceived and directed by Arlekin founder Igor Golyak. The livestreamed, interactive show, developed through Arlekin’s Zero Gravity (zero-G) Virtual Theater Lab, was inspired by the true story of the MS St. Louis, the German ship carrying nearly a thousand Jewish refugees in May 1939 escaping the approaching Holocaust, only to be turned away by Cuba, Canada, and the United States.
Camera operator Austin de Besche films some of the cast during the making of Witness
Golyak was born in Kiev, but his family moved to Boston when he was eleven to get away from rampant anti-Semitism. He later returned to Russia to study theater. Witness is written by Nana Grinstein with Blair Cadden and Golyak, with scenic design and costumes by Anna Fedorova, virtual design by Daniel Camino, and a live and filmed cast that includes Denisova as Lady Liberty, Gene Ravvin as the emcee, Lauren Elias as Leah, Anne Gottlieb as Rachel, Nathan Malin as Joseph, Polina Vikova as Gisela Klepl, Alex Petetsky as Fritz Buff, and others, along with voice actors. “Where do unwanted people go?” the play asks. It’s a question that is still critical today, given the ongoing immigration crisis. The interactive drama runs December 10 through January 23, with every performance followed by a talkback with members of the cast and creative team and/or experts on Jewish migration. Tickets are $25; several performances are already sold out, so get your tickets now to see the company I’ve called “The future of online productions.”
