this week in shakespeare

HAMLET / ORESTEIA

Alex Lawther is impressive as Hamlet in Robert Icke’s dazzling production at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

HAMLET/ORESTEIA
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
In repertory through August 13, $45-$199
www.armoryonpark.org/hamlet
www.armoryonpark.org/oresteia

An overwhelming sense of grief and severe family dysfunction link Robert Icke’s ingenious pairing of Hamlet and Oresteia, running in repertory at Park Ave. Armory through August 13. You might not immediately think of the two tragedies, one written in English by William Shakespeare around 1600 about an introspective Danish prince, the other a Greek trilogy penned by Aeschylus in the fifth century BCE focusing on the conflicted son of a powerful king, as theatrical brethren, but Icke masterfully weaves them together over the course of seven thrilling hours.

Following up his superb one-person reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People starring Ann Dowd in a pandemic-reconfigured Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the armory, Icke returns with this extremely satisfying duo, which tackle similar themes in these contemporary versions. Whereas Icke makes subtle tweaks to Hamlet, he institutes much heavier changes to Oresteia.

They both take place on Hildegard Bechtler’s expansive, relatively shallow horizontal set, with entrances at either side and a glassed-in back room with sliding doors that are alternately transparent, translucent, or opaque. For Hamlet, business chairs and a comfy L-shaped couch are brought on- and offstage in between rectangular marble stanchions, while for Oresteia, the furniture includes a long dinner table with benches, marble Greek pillars with exposed stone walls, and a large bathtub in the rear. Bechtler also designed the modern-day costumes, with intricate lighting by Natasha Chivers and sound by Tom Gibbons.

Hamlet, superbly played with a tender vulnerability by twenty-seven-year-old British actor Alex Lawther, is dismayed to find that his recently widowed mother, Gertrude (Jennifer Ehle), has married her late husband’s brother, Hamlet’s father, Claudius (Angus Wright), who is now the king of Denmark. The two seem very much in love, making out on the couch. But when Hamlet’s father’s ghost (David Rintoul), who appears on closed circuit security cameras wandering the empty, dungeonlike halls of Elsinore castle, tells his son that Claudius murdered him, Hamlet, who has been considering going back to school in Wittenberg, becomes obsessed with revenge, yet he lacks the resolve to take any kind of significant action in his life.

Klytemnestra (Anastasia Hille) and Agamemnon (Angus Wright) face each other across the family dinner table in Oresteia (photo by Joan Marcus)

Meanwhile, he seems destined to marry Ophelia (Kirsty Ryder), the daughter of Claudius’s chief adviser, Polonius (Peter Wight), and sister of the strong-willed Laertes (Luke Treadaway). Soon bodies are piling up, as Hamlet says, “with blood of fathers mothers daughters sons.”

In Oresteia, Agamemnon (Angus Wright), the king of Mycenae, is told by a seer, “By his hands alone. The child is the price. Fair winds.” Agamemnon and his brother, Menelaus (Peter Wight), need to sail their ships to Troy but are becalmed in Aulis, and Agamemnon interprets the prophecy to mean that he must kill his six-year-old daughter, Iphigenia (Elyana Faith Randolph or Alexis Rae Forlenza), in order to appease the gods and get the winds moving. The king is desperate to find another way, but both his brother and his herald, Talthybius (Josh Higgott), insist the deed must be done. When the queen, Klytemnestra (Anastasia Hille), deciphers the prophecy, she is of course furious, declaring, “You’re ill. You’re mad. To kill our child?” But she might not be able to stop him.

Ten years later, when Agamemnon returns from the war, bringing with him teenage captive Cassandra (Hara Yannas), he finds his family vastly changed. Bright young Orestes (Hudson Paul or Wesley Holloway) has grown into a conflicted teenager (Treadaway), daughter Electra (Tia Bannon) is jealous of Cassandra, and cousin Aegisthus (Angus Wright) has usurped Agamemnon’s place in the family. Soon bodies are piling up, and Klytemnestra warns Orestes, with more than a touch of wishful thinking, “You do not want blood on your hands.” Fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons are all in jeopardy.

Fear is central to both narratives. While Hamlet delivers his despair and anxiety directly to the audience in famous soliloquys, Oresteia unfolds in flashbacks as Orestes shares his memories with an unidentified woman (Ryder) who appears to be his therapist. Orestes tells her, “I watch it again, happening for the first time but — too late, too late to stop it. It pours out of me. But what if what’s next is — ? What if it’s better left sealed up, undisturbed?” The doctor responds, “We have to understand the truth.” Orestes: “What if it’s a dream? What if it’s a lie?” Doctor: “Then those lies reveal something about you. ‘Our self’ isn’t an absolute thing. It’s handfuls of memories and moments and people — and we form them into who we think we are. For most of us, it’s only partly true: one version of truth. A story.” Orestes: “A story. A story I’ve been through before. As a child. But I don’t know where it ends —”

Claudius (Angus Wright) and Gertrude (Jennifer Ehle) hold hands, much to Hamlet’s (Alex Lawther) consternation (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Looking backward and forward while fearing the end is also a leitmotif for each play. “I try and look forward rather than backward,” Agamemnon says. Hamlet explains, “I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down / for yourself sir should be old as I am / if like a crab you could go backward.” At dinner, Electra confesses, “I know. I was late. I have apologized. Let’s all just move forward.” When Orestes insists to the doctor that he can’t remember the past, she implores, “You will remember something. We just have to begin. Travel back along the road, all the way back to where it began.” Hamlet says to his mother, “Repent what’s past / Avoid what is to come.”

The words “end” or “ending” are repeated throughout all seven hours. “It’s ending. It is ending,” Agamemnon says. Hamlet explains to Claudius, “We fat all creatures else to fat us and we fat ourselves for maggots / that’s the end.” Talthybius tells Agamemnon and Menelaus, “No one thinks this thing is close to the end. It’s cut in deep, it’s gone too far for that. And our enemy is prepared, planning years beyond — so there’s no road to the end of this that’s swift.” Ophelia, losing control of her wits, babbles to Laertes, “I would give you some violets but they withered all when my father died / they say he made a good end / and will he not come again? / and will he not come again? / no no he is dead.”

Both works also explore the power of dreams. Hamlet famously says, “To die to sleep / to sleep perchance to dream / ay, there’s the rub / for in that sleep of death what dreams may come / when we have shuffled off this mortal coil / must give us pause.” Orestes asks the doctor, “What happens when I dream? What is knotting together with what — what is being made? Fear and wishes and — and if it’s me, if it’s just inside me with no meaning elsewhere, can’t I create something better than this, can’t I choose imagined hope rather than imagined fear?” Shortly after Klytemnestra awakes from a bad dream, Cilissa (Marty Cruikshank), Orestes’s nurse, recalls of him as a baby, “He screamed and screamed at night. Never a good sleeper.”

Icke, who is only thirty-five and was an associate director with the Almeida in London from 2013 to 2019, is now the Ibsen artist in residence at Ivo van Hove’s Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, and he has picked up van Hove’s obsession with using cameras to present live feeds on screens. (The projections are by Tal Yarden for Hamlet and Tim Reid for Oresteia.) In addition to the video surveillance that reveals Hamlet’s father’s ghost, there are news reports about young Fortinbras leading Norway’s military marching toward Denmark; press interviews with Agamemnon; and Claudius closely watching The Mousetrap, the play-within-a-play in which Hamlet discloses to Claudius that he knows he murdered his father. In addition, the screens are used for countdowns, ticking away the seconds during fifteen-, ten-, and five-minute intermissions in Oresteia like a doomsday clock. Meanwhile, articles of evidence and the exact times of characters’ deaths are detailed above the set like breaking news.

Klytemnestra (Anastasia Hille) can’t hold the pain inside any longer in Oresteia (photo by Joan Marcus)

Icke digs into 1960s music icons by featuring several Bob Dylan songs in Hamlet — one does not generally associate Dylan, and such tunes as Things Have Changed (“Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose / Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose / People are crazy and times are strange / I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range”) and All Along the Watchtower (“There must be some kind of way outta here / Said the joker to the thief / There’s too much confusion / I can’t get no relief), as the soundtrack for a party with lots of dancing and balloons (of course, “Masters of War” would not exactly be the best choice either) — while Iphigenia sings verses from the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” in Oresteia (“God only knows what I’d be without you”).

The casting between the two plays is shrewdly resourceful. Wright is terrific as Claudius, Agamemnon, and Aegisthus, standing tall, speaking firmly, but not afraid to show the cracks in their armor. Peter Wright is stalwart as the loyal but ill-fated Polonius and Menelaus. Rintoul portrays the Player King and the ghost, haunting Claudius and Hamlet, respectively. Other key dualities that bring the works together include Bannon as Guildenstern and Electra, Treadaway as Laertes and Orestes, Abubakar as Marcellus and Calchas, Higgott as Horatio and Talthybius, Ryder as Ophelia and the doctor, Hara Yannas as Bernardo and Cassandra, and Athene Ross Waiton (in Hamlet only) as Francisco and the gravedigger, who makes a memorable appearance from under the stage, warbling Dylan’s “Sugar Baby.” Lia Williams was scheduled to play Gertrude and Klytemnestra but had to pull out after injuring her Achilles heel; Ehle and Hille are excellent as her respective replacements.

Both Hamlet and Orestes are onstage virtually the entire show, watching the proceedings when they’re not directly involved. They experience devastating loss that rips at their souls, and each has the opportunity to commit murder to avenge wrongdoing. Instead of wielding “a bare bodkin,” Hamlet puts a gun to Claudius’s head, while Orestes pulls a knife on one of his parents. But revenge will not necessarily relieve them of their deep trauma. “You must know your father lost a father / that father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound / in filial obligation for some term / to do obsequious sorrow / but to persever / in obstinate condolement is a course / of impious stubbornness / ’tis unmanly grief,” Claudius tells Hamlet. Referring to a murder in his family, the doctor tells Orestes, “You survived that trauma. We’re barely there in the moment it happens — we hardly feel it as it hollows us out — what hurts is the next second; awakening into what’s left — And I don’t think you’ve woken up. I’m not sure you want to wake up.” Orestes asks, “Why would I?” The doctor responds, “Fear. Of where you might be. Where you might really be.”

In a world turned upside down by a global pandemic that has killed nearly six and a half million people, Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, climate change that is threatening the future of the planet, mass shootings in the United States committed with automatic assault weapons, and an insurrection that continues to jeopardize American democracy, many of us are afraid of where we might really be.

As Electra asks, “How do you mourn?” It’s a question we are all facing these days, in one way or another, a question brilliantly explored in Icke’s dueling plays.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: RICHARD III

Robert O’Hara’s Richard III is set among moving gothic arches (photo by Joan Marcus)

RICHARD III
Central Park, Delacorte Theater
Tuesday – Sunday through July 17, free, 8:00
publictheater.org

There’s a moment early on in Robert O’Hara’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard III that defines the rest of the play. When Richard (playwright and actor Danai Gurira), the Duke of Gloucester, is wooing Lady Anne (Ali Stroker) after having murdered her husband, the prince, and her father, the king, he gives her his dagger so she can kill him. “If thy revengeful heart cannot forgive, / Lo, here I lend thee this sharp-pointed dagger, / Which if thou please to hide in this true breast / And let the soul forth that adoreth thee, / I lay it naked to the deadly stroke / And humbly beg the death upon my knee—” Richard says. She plunges the dagger into his chest, but alas, it is merely a prop that Richard takes back and fake stabs himself with a few times.

Richard smiles and the crowd laughs, but it prepares us for a different kind of Richard III, and a different kind of Richard. The scene is key to the success of the play; if Richard can woo Lady Anne, who passionately despises him, then he can in turn win over the audience to root him on while he treacherously lays waste to anyone and everyone in his way on his journey to acquiring the crown.

Richard is usually portrayed by a white man with a humped back and a menacing limp. But here he is played by a Zimbabwean American woman, looking magnificent in black leather with gold details and a closely shaved head with ominous designs. There’s no limp and no hunch, recalling Jamie Lloyd’s recent staging of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac at the BAM Harvey, where a stunning James McAvoy wore no embarrassing proboscis, perhaps the hottest Cyrano in history.

So it’s a hard sell when Gurira admits, “I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, / Nor made to court an amorous looking glass; / I, that am rudely stamped and want love’s majesty / To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, / Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, / Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world scarce half made up, / And that so lamely and unfashionable / That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.”

Ratcliffe (Daniel J. Watts) has some stern words with Richard III (Danai Gurira) in Shakespeare in the Park production (photo by Joan Marcus)

Despite that anomaly, we are with Gurira’s Gloucester from the very start, in a prologue taken from the third part of Henry VI as he stabs the king. Gurira’s monologues to the audience are not as intense as we are used to; this is a more likable Richard, and that works, for the most part. Gurira, who is well known as Michonne on The Walking Dead and Okoye in Black Panther and has appeared on Broadway in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and at the Delacorte in Measure for Measure, has a charismatic mystique as she marches across Myung Hee Cho’s minimalist set, consisting of eleven large gothic arches that rotate around the stage and occasionally flicker with colored lights. (The lighting is by Alex Jainchill, with fashionable costumes by Dede Ayite and sound and music by Elisheba Ittoop.)

But O’Hara (Slave Play, Barbecue), who has previously directed Gurira’s Eclipsed and The Continuum, never finds the right pace as the show labors through its two hours and forty minutes (with a twenty-minute intermission). We are too often waiting for something to happen instead of it just happening; the electricity rarely sparks.

There are stylish moments, but too many scenes feel like set pieces that stand on their own but do not flow into one another. Tony winner Stroker (Oklahoma! Spring Awakening) is lovely as Lady Anne, especially when she shows up later in a blinged-out wheelchair. Monique Holt (Cymbeline, Romeo & Juliet), who is deaf, adds a unique aspect to the Duchess of York, but not everything she signs is translated. One of the assassins, played by Maleni Chaitoo, is also deaf. And Rivers is portrayed by Matthew August Jeffers, who has a rare form of dwarfism.

Danai Gurira and Matthew August Jeffers rehearse in masks for Richard III (photo by Joan Marcus)

Interestingly, while Gurira’s Richard has no physical disabilities, Richmond and King Edward IV are played by Gregg Mozgala (Cost of Living, Merchant of Venice), who has cerebral palsy, which affects how he walks; Mozgala starred as a high school version of Richard III in Teenage Dick at the Public in 2018.

Sharon Washington (Feeding the Dragon Wild with Happy), who portrayed Lady Anne at the Delacorte in 1990, brings down the house as Queen Margaret, who sees through Richard immediately. She lets loose after declaring, “I can no longer hold me patient,” making us yearn for her return after she exits. The cast also features Sanjit De Silva as Buckingham, Skyler Gallun as the Prince of Wales, Paul Niebanck as George, Michael Potts as Lord Stanley, Ariel Shafir as Lord Hastings, Heather Alicia Simms as Queen Elizabeth, Matthew August Jeffers as a standout among the ensemble, and Daniel J. Watts as Catesby / Ratcliffe.

Richard III kicks off the sixtieth anniversary season of Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte; the inaugural presentation, in 1962, was The Merchant of Venice with George C. Scott as Shylock and James Earl Jones as the Prince of Morocco. Richard III has been staged at the Delacorte in 1966 with Philip Bosco, 1983 with Kevin Kline, and 1990 with Denzel Washington. Among the others who have portrayed the devious duke onstage are Scott, Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen, Kevin Spacey, Al Pacino, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alec Guinness, Peter Dinklage, Mark Rylance, and Lars Eidinger, who was spectacular in Thomas Ostermeier’s adaptation at BAM in 2017. Gurira is a worthy addition to that list, even if the production itself leaves too much to be desired in a hopefully glorious summer.

RemarkaBULL PODVERSATION: EXPLORING LADY MACBETH WITH ISMENIA MENDES

Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) reaches out to her royal husband (Isabelle Fuhrman) in inventive reimagining of Shakespeare tragedy (photo by Richard Termine)

Who: Ismenia Mendes, Nathan Winkelstein
What: Livestreamed conversation about Lady Macbeth
Where: Red Bull Theater online
When: Monday, May 9, free with advance RSVP (donations accepted), 7:30
Why: Macbeth is all the rage now, with a much-derided version starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga currently playing at the Longacre on Broadway and Joel Coen’s film version with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand having garnered three Oscar nominations. One of the best and most innovative adaptations in decades was staged by Red Bull Theater at the Lucille Lortel in 2019, directed by Erica Schmidt and set at a girls school. The fierce and furious, sexy and sinister ninety minutes starred Isabelle Fuhrman as Macbeth and Ismenia Mendes as Lady Macbeth.

In conjunction with the streaming release of the 2019 production, available on demand May 16-29, Red Bull is hosting its latest RemarkaBULL Podversation, “Exploring Lady Macbeth,” with Mendes (Troilus and Cressida, Henry V) and associate artistic director and host Nathan Winkelstein performing the “How now! what news?” scene, followed by a discussion and an audience Q&A. In the dastardly dialogue, Lady Macbeth tells her husband, “What beast was’t, then, / That made you break this enterprise to me? / When you durst do it, then you were a man; / And, to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place / Did then adhere, and yet you would make both: / They have made themselves, and that their fitness now / Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, / And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you / Have done to this.” Previous RemarkaBULL Podversations, which are always a treat, have featured Kate Burton, André De Shields, Elizabeth Marvel, Chukwudi Iwuji, Patrick Page, Lily Rabe, Jay O. Sanders, Michael Urie, and others and can be viewed for free here.

MACBETH

Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga star as a devious husband and wife in Sam Gold’s unusual take on the Scottish play at the Longacre (photo by Joan Marcus)

MACBETH
Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 10, $35-$425
macbethbroadway.com

As you enter the Longacre Theatre to see the latest conjuring of Macbeth, the thane’s first appearance on the Great White Way since Terry Hands’s 2000 version with Kelsey Grammer lasted just thirteen performances, the sparse stage is a scene of activity. On one side, three people are cooking soup while listening to a podcast. Various others wander about or are busy in the wings. Front and center, the ghost light glows — a superstition that is believed to keep at bay supernatural beings who haunt theaters and can curse shows, although it usually is turned on only after everyone has left and the venue is empty. During the pandemic lockdown, many theaters kept their ghost lights on in the hope of eventually returning. Thus, once inside the Longacre, you feel as if you’ve walked into some kind of rehearsal that is getting ready to close up for the night.

More than any other of his major works, Shakespeare’s 1606 tragedy invites experimentation of a high order. In the past fifteen years, I’ve seen no fewer than ten adaptations of the Scottish play, including an all-women version that took place at a contemporary girls school, a re-creation of Orson Welles’s radio production, a presentation that required the audience to make its way through a dark heath to get to their seats, one set during the cold war and prominently featuring a bevy of video projections, another occurring inside the head of an institutionalized man, and a mashup with a Japanese manga that moved the action to a blue boxing ring.

Like King Lear, it also attracts big-name star power; among those who have portrayed the thane of Cawdor in New York since 2006 are Sir Patrick Stewart, Ethan Hawke, Sir Kenneth Branagh, Alan Cumming, Liev Schreiber, and Corey Stoll. Now comes James Bond himself, Daniel Craig, in a production helmed by Tony and Obie winner Sam Gold, who is responsible for the much-derided 2019 Broadway revival of Lear with Glenda Jackson in the title role.

Macbeth (Daniel Craig) speaks with a pair of murderers (Danny Wolohan and Michael Patrick Thornton) in Shakespeare adaptation (photo by Joan Marcus)

While the trio, who turn out to be the three witches (portrayed alternately by Phillip James Brannon, Bobbi MacKenzie, Maria Dizzia, Che Ayende, Eboni Flowers, and Peter Smith), continue stirring the pot, Michael Patrick Thornton, who plays the nobleman Lennox, wheels onto the stage and provides a curtain speech about James I’s obsession with witches in the seventeenth century while also asking the audience to, all at once, shout out the name of the show, which is supposed to bring bad luck when spoken inside a theater. Very few people joined in.

Gold has pared down the production to the point where no single actor is the star; there’s an equality among the diverse cast that does not force us to swoon at either Craig or Oscar, Emmy, and Olivier nominee Ruth Negga as Lady Macbeth and instead allows the audience to appreciate the other participants. The text is delivered without many flourishes, as famous lines come and go at a regular pace, with some favorites getting cut; for example, the witches never say, “Double, double toil and trouble.” The actors are dressed in Suttirat Larlarb’s contemporary costumes; Macbeth’s succession from military jacket to paisley bathrobe to fluffy white fur coat is a hoot.

Christine Jones’s set is the antithesis of royalty; the “thrones” are two old, ratty chairs, and the banquet table lacks fancy dinnerware. The crown worn by King Duncan (Paul Lazar) is just plain silly, like a high school prop, but even funnier is when Lazar, following the monarch’s murder, removes his fat suit in front of us and proceeds to play other characters. There is much doubling and tripling of actors, so it’s not always clear who’s who. Amber Gray excels as Banquo and her ghost but is seen later as a gentlewoman. Danny Wolohan is Seyton, a lord, a murderer, and a bloody captain who has lost part of one leg. Emeka Guindo is both Fleance and young Siward. Downtown legend Lazar also shows up as old Siward and the porter, who, in front of the curtain, discusses with Macduff (Grantham Coleman, though I saw understudy Ayende) and Lennox how drink affects sexual prowess. To further the comparison, Macbeth later pops open a can of light beer.

Jeremy Chernick’s special effects feature lots of blood, some of which is added to the simmering soup (along with innards). As Macbeth warns, “Blood will have blood.”

Three witches (Phillip James Brannon, Bobbi MacKenzie, Maria Dizzia) stir up a cauldron of trouble in Macbeth (photo by Joan Marcus)

So what’s it all about? Though uneven, Gold’s adaptation subverts our expectations about stardom, Broadway, and Shakespeare. It’s hard to believe that this is the same story told with such fierce elegance by Joel Coen in his 2021 Oscar-nominated film, The Tragedy of Macbeth, with a dominating Denzel Washington as Macbeth and a haunting Frances McDormand as his devious partner. In fact, under Gold’s supervision, the real standout is Thornton, who relates to the audience with a sweet warmth and playful sense of humor. However, as Macbeth also says, “And nothing is, but what is not.”

Gold (Fun Home; A Doll’s House, Part 2) previously directed Craig (Betrayal, A Steady Rain) as Iago in an intimate and compelling Othello at New York Theatre Workshop and Oscar Isaac in Hamlet at the Public; Negga has played Ophelia at London’s National Theatre and Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse. The ads for Macbeth might push the star draw of this new production, but that is not what Gold is focusing on.

He may not be making any grand statements about lust, greed, and power, but he is investigating the common foibles of humanity, the desires we all have and our considerations of how far we will go to achieve them. Is he completely successful? No, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t given us an intriguing, provocative, unconventional, absurdly comic, and, yes, highly entertaining production of one of the greatest tragedies ever written.

As Lady Macbeth advises, “What’s done, cannot be undone.”

THE FRIGID FESTIVAL

Eleanor Conway’s Vaxxed & Waxxed is part of 2022 FRIGID Festival

FRIGID Festival
The Kraine Theater
85 East Fourth Street between Second Ave. & Bowery
UNDER St. Marks
94 St. Marks Place between First Ave. & Ave. A
February 16 – March 6, $10-$20
www.frigid.nyc

Baby, it was cold outside, but it looks like winter will be warming up just as the sixteenth annual FRIGID Festival comes to town, taking place February 16 through March 6 at the Kraine Theater and UNDER St. Marks in the East Village as well as online. This year’s hybrid presentation from FRIGID New York features nearly two dozen shows, running the gamut from comedy, improv, performance art, and stand-up to storytelling, music, drama, and clowning. Among the mostly solo shows are Mark Levy’s Blockbuster Guy, about when Levy was a nerd working for Blockbuster in Florida; Jude Treder-Wolff’s Human Flailings, about psychotherapist and storyteller Treder-Wolff’s reaction to unexpected betrayal; Brian Schiller’s autobiographical Three Funerals and a Chimp, dealing with family loss; Matt Storrs’s Portly Lutheran Know-It-All, which goes back to Storrs’s days at a religious middle school; Grant Bowen’s A Public Private Prayer, in which Bowen discusses his relationship with God; and Amanda Erin Miller’s Smile All the Time, which includes puppets in prison.

In addition, As You Will provides improvised Shakespeare, two brothers travel back to the American Southwest in 1680 in Dillon Chitto’s Pueblo Revolt (which asks the critical question “Can we keep the pigs?”), Melody Bates’s immersive A Play for Voices is set in the dark, Megan Quick portrays a dog actress performing cabaret in And Toto Too, and Howie Jones challenges the audience in That sh$t don’t work! Does it? Also on the bill are Jean Ann Le Bec’s The Last to Know, Mike Lemme’s Bathroom of a Bar on Bleecker, Ellie Brelis’s Driver’s Seat, Daniel Kinch’s The Story of Falling Don, Molly Brenner’s The Pleasure’s Mine, Will Clegg’s The Lonely Road, George Steeves’s Love & Sex on the Spectrum, Julia VanderVeen’s My Grandmother’s Eye Patch, Mikaela Duffy’s StarSweeper, Keith Alessi’s Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me But Banjos Saved My Life, and Theatre Group GUMBO’s Are You Lovin’ It? Eleanor Conway’s Vaxxed & Waxxed should be interesting since everyone has to show proof of vaccination to get in, meaning she might have to amend her usual question, “Do we have any anti-vaxxers in?”

TWI-NY AT TWENTY: TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY GALA CELEBRATION OF THIS WEEK IN NEW YORK

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!

THE TWI-NY PANDEMIC AWARDS: PART III

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!!