Glass Clouds Ensemble rehearse for special site-specific performance at Earth Matter farm on Governors Island (photo courtesy Glass Clouds Ensemble)
Who:Glass Clouds Ensemble What: Live performance and farm tour Where:Urban Farm, Governors Island When: Saturday, June 29, free with advance RSVP, 2:00 Why: On June 29 at 2:00, New York–based contemporary chamber music collective the Glass Clouds Ensemble will be on Governors Island performing “Like the Feather Tip of a Giant Bird,” a program featuring a piece inspired by Earth Matter NY’s Compost Learning Center and Soil State Farm, next to the Oval and Hammock Grove; the concert will be followed by a tour of the farm, which “seeks to reduce the organic waste misdirected into the garbage stream by encouraging neighbor participation and leadership in composting.” The trio, consisting of violinists Raina Arnett and Lauren Conroy and soprano Marisa Karchin, recently performed at Green-Wood Cemetery in Jody Oberfelder’s moving And Then, Now; the Governors Island program will include a new commission by guest composer Hannah Selin inspired by the farm as well as works by John Downland and Barbara Strozzi, Conroy, and Arnett, joined by special guest Alex Vourtsanis on theorbo.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Eiko Otake and Margaret Leng Tan will perform Stone I at Green-Wood Cemetery June 26-29 (photo by Maria Baranova)
Who:Eiko,Margaret Leng Tan What: Site-specific performance Where:Green-Wood Cemetery, Fifth Ave. and 25th St., Brooklyn When: June 26-29, $30 (use code 10off to save $10), 8:30 Why: “Deep deep below I saw the machine-scarred surfaces of stones that I was not supposed to be seeing,” interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake said about her exploration of the Gylsboda Quarry during her residency in Sweden last June. For Stone I, taking place June 26-29, Eiko will be joined by Margaret Leng Tan, Queen of the Toy Piano, for a site-specific performance at Green-Wood Cemetery that incorporates video taken by Thomas Zamolo at the quarry and Green-Wood with live movement and sound at the Historic Chapel, investigating time, tension, and density in relation to the stone, the planet’s natural resources, and the environment. Tickets are $30 (use code 10off to save $10) to experience what promises to be a unique and memorable event at a spectacular location.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
André De Shields makes the grandest of grand entrances as Old Deuteronomy in Cats: The Jellicle Ball (photo by Matthew Murphy)
CATS: “THE JELLICLE BALL”
Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC)
251 Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 8, $68-$309 pacnyc.org
The Pride celebration of the summer and, hopefully, beyond is happening seven times a week at PAC NYC, where Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch’s electrifying reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats — yes, that Cats — is running now through September 8, not quite forever, but not bad.
I have never before seen Cats, in any version — not the original 1982–2000 musical (which won seven Tonys and a Grammy), the 1998 film version, the 2016 Broadway revival, or the 2019 movie that not even Taylor Swift could save (and earned six Golden Raspberries). I haven’t read T. S. Eliot’s 1939 source book, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, either. When I told two friends of mine, longtime Cats haters, that I was going to The Jellicle Ball, they looked at me like they’d rather watch paint dry. Which is unfortunate for them, because Cats: “The Jellicle Ball” is an absolute blast.
Rachel Hauck has transformed the John E. Zuccotti Theater into a fashionable immersive ball, with a central catwalk, the audience sitting on three sides, and cabaret tables along the runway. A DJ (Capital Kaos) finds a dusty copy of the Cats soundtrack and puts it on, a clever nod to the original. Munkustrap (Dudney Joseph Jr.), the master of ceremonies, keeps things moving at a fast pace. The crowd is encouraged to be loud, and they hoot and holler as a cast of nearly two dozen parade up and down and all around the space, looking fabulous in Qween Jean’s spectacular costumes, which range from fluffy and colorful to raw and raunchy, from playful and funny to sexy and scary, topped off by Nikiya Mathis’s outrageous hair and wigs. Adam Honoré sprays colored spotlights across the room and incorporates a disco ball, while sound designer Kai Harada turns up the volume. Brittany Bland’s projections take us from day to night with cool visuals and pay tribute to early BIPOC LGBTQIA+ heroes.
Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles meld hip-hop and queer Ballroom culture into their vibrant choreography, with touches of traditional musical theater, since, of course, this is still Cats, following the same structure as the original and making very few tweaks to the story and lyrics; there are nods to Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, the television series Pose and RuPaul’s Drag Race,The Wiz, and a dash of Hair in its throwback counterculture vibe.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball is an intoxicating mélange of music and movement (photo by Matthew Murphy)
At the Jellicle Ball, dancers compete for trophies in such categories as Old Way vs. New Way, Voguing, Opulence, Hair Affair, and Butch Queen Realness. The preliminaries are judged by two people selected from the audience — and clearly chosen because of their wild outfits. (A few brought handheld fans, knowing just when to snap them open to match what was happening onstage.)
But it’s Old Deuteronomy (André De Shields) who will decide which furry feline will ascend to the Heaviside Layer. Among those making their case for top cat are Victoria (Baby), cat burglars Mungojerrie (Jonathan Burke) and Rumpleteazer (Dava Huesca), the curious Rum Tum Tugger (Sydney James Harcourt), virgin voguer Electra (Kendall Grayson Stroud), the mysterious Macavity (Antwayn Hopper), and housemother Jennyanydots (Xavier Reyes).
Emma Sofia stands out as Cassandra and Skimbleshanks, shaking the joint as an MTA conductor in “The Railway Cat.” Robert “Silk” Mason is in full glory mode as the conjurer Magical Mister Mistoffelees. Ballroom icon “Tempress” Chasity Moore brings heart and soul to Grizabella, the formerly glamorous gata who now lives off the street, delivering a powerful “Memory.” And Ballroom legend and Paris Is Burning emcee Junior LaBeija — the inspiration for Billy Porter’s Pose character, Pray Tell — gets duly honored as Gus the theater cat, carried out in a makeshift throne as he sings his eponymous song. LaBeija is one of numerous Trailblazers whose brief bios can be found on panels in the hall surrounding the theater, including Dorian Carey, Pepper LaBeija, Octavia St. Laurent, and Rauch.
But this is André De Shields’s world; we only live in it. The Tony, Obie, and Grammy winner (Hadestown,Ain’t Misbehavin’) makes the grandest of grand entrances, emerging from behind a glittering doorway and suddenly appearing before us in a plush purple suit and a lionlike cloud of silver, purple, and white hair, marking him as King of Pride. He floats slowly down the catwalk, basking in the tremendous adoration and adulation, then takes his royal seat at the end, a uniquely supreme being who is the ultimate judge of us all.
The music is performed by a crack eight-piece band: conductor Sujin Kim–Ramsey, Lindsay Noel Miller, and Eric Kang on keyboards, Justin Vance and Amy Griffiths on reeds, Andrew Zinsmeister on guitars, Calvin Jones on electric bass, and Clayton Craddock on drums, bringing funk and plenty of ’70s synth pop to the score, under William Waldrop’s direction.
Of course, this is still Cats, so not everything makes sense — what does “jellicle” even mean? — a few elements are repeated, and utter mayhem threatens at any second in this ferocious production, which is as unpredictable and entertaining as, well, cats.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
On opening night of Twyla Tharp’s How Long Blues at the 680-seat outdoor Amph on Little Island, a storm threatened. At one point, as rain began to fall, a dancer slipped on the stage, and project funder Barry Diller looked over at Tharp and wondered if they should stop the performance. Tharp shook her head, and the show went on, the weather adding a touch of magic and menace.
Little Island has hosted live music, dance, and storytelling the past several summers, but How Long Blues is the first work specifically commissioned for the sculpted oasis on the Hudson River, near the Whitney, kicking off a season of such pieces. The eighty-two-year-old Tharp incorporates her signature melding of contemporary movement and classical ballet into a rough-hewn narrative inspired by Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague, a parable about fascism set against an epidemic. The book begins, “The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194– at Oran. Everyone agreed that, considering their somewhat extraordinary character, they were out of place there.” How Long Blues might be a bumpy ride, but it feels like it belongs in the space, particularly as the wind swept through and the percussion was mistaken for thunder.
The sixty-minute premiere features two-time Tony winner Michael Cerveris (Fun Home,Assassins) as Nobel Prize–winning French philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness,Existentialism and Humanism) and longtime ABT and Tharp dancer and choreographer John Selya as Camus (The Stranger,The Rebel); the two were close friends — Camus at one point was going to star in and/or direct Sartre’s play No Exit — until ideological differences over communism and freedom led to a public falling out. None of that is apparent in How Long Blues.
Cerveris spends most of the show walking around Santo Loquasto’s set with a copy of Le Figaro, smoking a pipe, wearing a headset, and watching the action, occasionally sitting on one of the audience benches. Selya, in a dapper suit, wanders back and forth across the stage, pursuing nearly every woman after one of his lovers jumps into the Hudson. Camus was a well-known philanderer who cheated on his wives; his second spouse, pianist and mathematician Francine Faure, was hospitalized with depression and attempted suicide.
How Long Blues features surprising props and set changes (photo by Nina Westervelt)
The score, by thirteen-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer T Bone Burnett and composer, musician, and violinist David Mansfield, who were both part of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid-’70s, is a curious thing. Much of it is prerecorded even though there is a seven-piece band (John Bailey on trumpet and fugelhorn, Justin Goldner on guitar, tenor banjo, and bass, Wayne Goodman on trombone, Mark Lopeman on sax and clarinet, Jay Rattman on saxophone, George Rush on bass and tuba, and Paul Wells on percussion) in addition to underutilized vocalist Andromeda Turre, all of whom are placed in two balconies at the west corners of the space. The song selections are also not particularly illuminating.
An unhoused man plays “My Way” on a trumpet. There’s an excerpt of the Sound of Feeling’s cover of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” along with Mardi Gras Indian group the Wild Tchoupitoulas’s “Meet de Boys on the Battlefront” and “Brother John” and music by Jelly Roll Morton, Muddy Waters, Cab Calloway, and Count Basie. Cerveris eventually puts the headset to good use, delivering beautiful versions of the blues classic “St. James Infirmary” and Leonard Cohen’s ubiquitous “Hallelujah.”
Dancers Piper Dye, Jourdan Epstein, Oliver Greene-Cramer, Kyle Halford, Colin Heininger, Daisy Jacobson, Claude CJ Johnson, Pomme Koch, Skye Mattox, Nicole Ashley Morris, Hugo Pizano Orozco, Ryan Redmond, Victoria Sames, Frances Lorraine Samson, and Reed Tankersley bound about the stage in Loquasto’s ever-changing costumes as the choreography moves from the turn of the twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first, from lavish, glittering parties and vaudevillian shtick to whirling dervishes and working-class drama at the docks. Props include a piano, a Sisyphus-like rock (Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942), a trio of doors, and a soccer ball (Camus loved European football and was a goalie in his younger days). Adding to the bizarreness is a group of cartoonish characters in oversized costumes with giant heads.
It might not be Pina Bausch, but Tharp’s How Long Blues is an entertaining start to Little Island’s summer of commissions, which continues with such presentations as Davóne Tines in Robeson, Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, Pam Tanowitz’s Day for Night, and Anthony Roth Costanzo in The Marriage of Figaro.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Inside Light is a multimedia marvel at Park Ave. Armory (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
INSIDE LIGHT
Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Friday, June 14, $70, 6:30
212-933-5812 www.armoryonpark.org online slideshow
“I hope that the future will bring us auditoriums with permanent technical installations where we can listen to music like Weltraum as often as we like — including the individual layers, sounds, and tones in listening seminars,” Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote in the program notes for his 141-minute 1992 Weltraum (Outer Space). “Listeners may perceive every sound from beginning to end, experience every movement and maintain their concentration.”
While it might not be permanent, the experimental German composer has found a home at Park Ave. Armory, where his work has been staged to dramatic impact. In 2012, the New York Philharmonic performed Stockhausen’s tri-orchestral Gruppen (Groups), with 109 musicians divided into three ensembles. In 2013, the armory presented Oktophonie, a sixty-nine-minute layer from Act II of Dienstag aus Licht, the Tuesday portion of his 1977–2003 twenty-nine-hour opera cycle Licht: The Seven Days of the Week, set in an immersive environment created by Thai contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.
The legacy of Stockhausen, who died in 2007 at the age of seventy-nine, is now being celebrated at the armory with the meditative and mesmerizing Inside Light, comprising five sections over nearly six hours; although it ostensibly relates the story of Eve, the archangel Michael, and Lucifer, don’t search too hard for a narrative. Conceived by armory artistic director Pierre Audi, the multimedia extravaganza takes place in a huge oval at the center of the massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where audience members can use BackJack chairs or spread out on the floor; try not to get too settled in, as it’s strongly advised that you occasionally walk inside and outside the space to enhance the experience, moving your chair as different segments unfold and even listening from the hallway.
The stunning installation, by Urs Schönebaum, whose previous breathtaking lighting at the armory includes Claus Guth’s Doppelganger and William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load, features a large screen hanging at the west end, constructed of eleven connected pieces that increase in height from the edges to the center; at the east end are five vertically oriented screens of slightly different widths, separated by critical negative space. A thin, oval strip of light encircles the area, and some two dozen ceiling lights are arranged in a wide spiral, surrounded by speakers. The enveloping, prerecorded sound design, from basset-horns and keyboards to wind, ocean waves, and ominous laughter that wash over the audience, is by musician and longtime Stockhausen collaborator Kathinka Pasveer, with expert engineering by Reinhard Klose.
The droning, contemplative music is accompanied by hit-or-miss video projections by Robi Voigt. Hypnotic black, white, and gray grids shimmer, evoking Sol LeWitt and Tetrus, while a misty green is haunting. (I advise staring at the white and gray grids, then shutting your eyes quickly to see the reverse images in the darkness.) Reddish-orange abstract shapes are less interesting, moving like mathematical fractals. Feel free to close your eyes and just listen, or get up and walk around when the visuals fail to engage. However, Schönebaum’s lighting is spectacular, as beams of white, red, blue, and green intersect across the vast space, spots shine down on the floor, a planetlike object emits at times nearly blinding dullish color, and an empty square of white lights hovers above like a UFO about to beam up audience members.
Inside Light can be experienced in two parts, the first consisting of Montags-Gruss (Monday Greeting and Eve Greeting), Unsichtbare Chöre from Donnerstag (Invisible Choirs from Thursday), and Mittwochs-Gruss (Wednesday Greeting), the second Freitags-Gruss (Friday Greeting) and Freitags-Abschied (Friday Farewell), but it’s best experienced in one full marathon, which I saw on June 8 and is being repeated June 14, beginning at 6:30 pm, with a one-hour dinner break. Be sure to check out the Mary Divver Room, where you’ll encounter some of the inspiration for Voigt’s videos.
As previously noted, don’t stay glued to your seat; get up, turn your chair around, walk across the space, and let the music guide you. However, watch out for a transformative moment when the horizontal screen, displaying a black-and-white grid, appears to start moving into itself, something I won’t soon forget.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Sam Green and Yo La Tengo will team up for live documentary at Alice Tully Hall
LINCOLN CENTER’S SUMMER FOR THE CITY: THE EPHEMERAL CINEMA OF SAM GREEN
Alice Tully Hall
1941 Broadway at Sixty-Fifth St.
June 13-16, choose-what-you-pay ($5 minimum) www.lincolncenter.org 32sounds.com
Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City heads indoors for the three-part series “The Ephemeral Cinema of Sam Green,” consisting of a trio of documentaries by the American filmmaker featuring on-site narration by Green and live music.
On June 13 at 7:30, JD Samson and Micheal O’Neill will be performing Samson’s score to 2022’s 32 Sounds, with the audience listening on headphones that will be distributed at the theater. On June 14 at 4:00 and 8:00, Kronos Quartet (David Harrington, John Sherba, Hank Dutt, Paul Wiancko) will be on hand to accompany 2018’s A Thousand Thoughts, which Green wrote and directed with Joe Bini about the history of the group. And on June 16 at 7:30, local faves Yo La Tengo (Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, James McNew) will play along with 2012’s The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, which explores the career of the twentieth-century futurist.
Sam Green delves into how we listen and connect with humanity and nature in 32 Sounds
32 SOUNDS (Sam Green, 2022)
Alice Tully Hall
Thursday, June 13, choose-what-you-pay ($5 minimum), 7:30 www.lincolncenter.org 32sounds.com
Sam Green’s 32 Sounds might be about how we hear the world, but it’s also filled with a barrage of stunning visuals that, combined with the binaural audio, creates a unique and exciting cinematic journey.
Green was inspired by his relatively new friendship with experimental composer and musician Annea Lockwood, which blossomed over Skype during the pandemic, and by François Girard’s 1993 biographical anthology Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, in which Colm Feore portrays the Canadian classical pianist most famous for his interpretations of such Bach works as the Goldberg Variations. In 32 Sounds, Green teams with composer, DJ, and musician JD Samson, from such bands as Le Tigre and MEN, to present ninety-five minutes of remarkable delicacy and insight.
The film is best experienced on headphones, which is how it is being shown at Alice Tully Hall, with specially customized headphones with the audio mixed live inside the theater. The sound was recorded binaurally, so the audience can hear speech and movement as if it’s to your left or right, behind you, far away, or close up.
In 32 Sounds, Princeton professor and scientist Edgar Choueiri introduces us to Johann Christoff, a recording device shaped like a human head that “captures sound exactly how you hear it.” Similar technology has been used for such theatrical presentations as The Encounter and Blindness. Hollywood veteran and two-time Oscar winner Mark Mangini (Dune,Mad Max: Fury Road) designed the sound for the film, immersing the viewer into what feels like a three-dimensional universe.
The film kicks off with Green and Samson in a playful scene that sets the stage for what is to follow. “This is a little bit of an odd movie in that we’re going to ask you to do some things,” Green explains. “Simple things, like close your eyes. If you don’t want to do them, don’t worry about it. But the truth is, the more you give yourself to the experience” — Samson then cuts in, finishing, “the more you get out of it.”
The first sound Green explores, appropriately enough, is of the womb, recorded by former midwife Aggie Murch, whose husband is Oscar-winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now,The English Patient,The Conversation). Over a purplish white screen with no figuration, Green discusses Walter Murch’s 2005 essay “Womb Tone,” in which Murch writes, “Hearing is the first of our senses to be switched on. . . . Although our mature consciousness may be betrothed to sight, it was suckled by sound, and if we are looking for the source of sound’s ability — in all its forms — to move us more deeply than the other senses and occasionally give us a mysterious feeling of connectedness to the universe, this primal intimacy is a good place to begin.”
Green then jumps from birth to death, taking out old cassette tapes of voice messages he has saved from decades past, telling us how “they hold the voices of so many people I’ve loved who are gone. I was wondering, How does that work? How does a little piece of eighth-of-an-inch magnetic tape hold a person? Make it seem like they are alive and in front of you more than any photo or piece of film ever could. I was wondering if sound is somehow a way to understand time, and time passing, and loss, and the ephemeral beauty of the present moment, all the things that I keep coming back to in my movies.”
He meets with Cheryl Tipp, curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds at the British Library Sound Archive, who shares the poignant and heartbreaking story of the mating call of the Hawaiian bird the moho braccatus. Lockwood, the subject of a short companion film Green directed, demonstrates how she has recorded the sound of rivers for fifty years, after gaining notoriety for her burning-piano installations.
Foley artist Joanna Fang reveals how she creates sound effects for films using unusual items in her studio, from a bowling ball to a wet cloth. “Art can elevate a truth beyond what is feasibly there,” she says. “And if we pull it off right, hopefully the emotional experience of hearing it and being part of it is enough to make you fully accept the poetry of what you’re hearing. Because isn’t that what we’re all trying to do, trying to take what we’re feeling on the inside and show it to somebody else, or let them listen to it, and have them feel the same way we do?”
Black revolutionary and fugitive Nehanda Abiodun listens to a tape of McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now,” transporting her to another place and time. Poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten marvels about “ghost sounds” of his relatives. Bay Area military veteran and environmental journalist Harold Gilliam postulates about sleep and foghorns in the context of “being part of this total community of life and nonlife on Earth.” Lebanese artist and musician Mazen Kerbaj recalls being able to make sound art during bombings when others were trapped in their homes or dying.
Green gives examples of recording “room tones,” a documentary process in which the subject is silent for thirty seconds as the sound recordist grabs the natural sound in order to help with later editing. It’s fascinating watching Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Rebecca Solnit, and others sit or stand uncomfortably as they wait, and we wait; we are not used to seeing such stagnation in a motion picture.
Annea Lockwood has been recording rivers for more than fifty years
Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim uses ASL to describe vibration and how she was taught when she was a child that sound was not part of her life, a concept that infuses her art. “I realized that sound is like money, power, control; it’s social currency,” she explains.
Along the way Green also looks at inventor Thomas Edison, polymath Charles Babbage, electronics engineer Alan Blumlein, and a classic Memorex commercial starring Ella Fitzgerald. We see and hear Glass playing piano, church bells ringing in Venice, Don Garcia driving through the city in his red Mazda blasting Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” and John Cage performing 4’33” outdoors. A Zamboni cleans the ice at a hockey rink. A cat purrs. Evel Knievel jumps over obstacles on his motorcycle. Samson blasts away on a whoopee cushion. Danny drives his Big Wheel through the empty halls of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Different groups dance to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”
Oscar nominee Green (The Weather Underground,A Thousand Thoughts) edited the documentary with Nels Bangerter; the new, sharp cinematography is by Yoni Brook. The visuals range from a deluge of quick cuts of archival footage to nearly blank screens when Green asks the audience to close their eyes and just listen.
While the film is a technical marvel, it also becomes deeply emotional, as Green and several subjects listen to recordings of friends and family no longer with us, something you can’t get out of a photo album. It made me think of the messages I had saved on my answering machine of my mother, who passed away in 2017; while I try to avoid hearing them — they used to pop up after I went through new messages, sending me screaming into another room — it is comforting to know that they exist, that I can hear her whenever I need to. Such is the power of sound.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
DRAMA DESK AWARDS
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl.
Monday, June 10, $105-$205, 6:15 nyuskirball.org dramadeskaward.com
Balcony tickets are still available for the sixty-ninth annual Drama Desk Awards, honoring the best of theater June 10 at the Skirball Center. Founded in 1949, the Drama Desk (of which I am a voting member) does not differentiate between Broadway, off Broadway, and off off Broadway; all shows that meet the minimum requirements are eligible. Thus, splashy, celebrity-driven productions can find themselves nominated against experimental shows that took place in an East Village elevator or Chelsea loft. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of star power at the awards presentation.
Sutton Foster and Aaron Tveit will cohost the event; among the nominees this year are Jessica Lange for Mother Play, Patrick Page for All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain, Rachel McAdams for Mary Jane, Leslie Odom Jr. for Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch, Sarah Paulson for Appropriate, Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara for Days of Wine and Roses, Bebe Neuwirth for Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, Dorian Harewood for The Notebook, and Michael Stuhlbarg for Patriots. The Drama Desk also does not distinguish between male and female; the acting categories have ten nominees each, regardless of gender, with two winners. Thus, d’Arcy James is competing against his costar, O’Hara, for the same prize, although they both could take home the award.
Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara are both nominated for Days of Wine and Roses and will participate in the 2024 Drama Desk Awards (photo by Joan Marcus)
Among this year’s presenters are Laura Benanti, Matthew Broderick, Montego Glover, Lena Hall, James Lapine, Debra Messing, Ruthie Ann Miles, Andrew Rannells, Brooke Shields, Seth Rudetsky, Shoshana Bean, Corbin Bleu, James Monroe Iglehart, and Steven Pasquale. O’Hara will perform a special tribute to William Wolf Award honoree André Bishop, Foster and Nikki M. James will both sing, and Nathan Lane will receive the Harold S. Prince Award for Lifetime Achievement. Others being honored are the How to Dance in Ohio Authentic Autistic Representation Team, lighting designer Isabella Byrd, and press agent Lady Irene Gandy.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
