Allison Charney and Errin Brooks star in virtual adaptation of Verdi’s Otello
Who:The Town Hall,PREformances Chamber Music Collaborative What: Virtual performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello Where:The Town Hall online When: November 18-25, $20-$35 Why: The Town Hall’s new Opera at Home series, consisting of abridged versions of classic works shot in quarantine during the pandemic lockdown, kicks off with Giuseppe Verdi’s 1887 Otello, an adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s most beloved tragedies that is streaming November 18-25. The Town Hall is teaming up with the PREformances Chamber Music Collaborative for the sixty-minute presentation, which features tenor Errin Brooks as Otello, soprano and PREformances artistic director Allison Charney as Desdemona, actor Jordan Charney (Allison’s father) as the Narrator, and Craig Ketter on piano. There will also be a live Zoom talkback with the artists and creative team on November 22 at 8:00.
“The Town Hall, once the home of the classical music debut, is very excited to bring accessible opera to the masses,” artistic director Melay Araya said in a statement. “The history of classical vocalists at the hall is one of great pride, and diversity in classical music has been a thread throughout the hall’s one-hundred-year history. With a legacy that includes the debuts of Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price, the Town Hall is excited to bring diverse voices and high-quality, accessible classical programming to a wider audience.” Brooks, the Charneys, and Ketter performed scenes from Otello as part of PREformances’ Like the Wind concert at Merkin Concert Hall in March 2020; in addition, during the pandemic, PREformances and the Town Hall collaborated on the seven-part online free series The Season of Hope.
Who:Red Bull Theater What: Online reading and discussions about Shakespeare’s Pericles Where:Red Bull Theater YouTube and Facebook When: Livestreamed events October 4, 11, 18, 25, 28, free with advance RSVP Why: Last year Red Bull Theater presented “Othello 2020,” a deep dive into the Shakespeare tragedy through performances and discussions. This year Red Bull is digging into one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known works, Pericles, about the Prince of Tyre, who sets out on a series of adventures when the answer to a riddle goes awry. In a statement, Red Bull founding artistic director Jesse Berger explains, “Shakespeare’s Pericles is at the heart and soul of Red Bull in many ways: our founding play, Jacobean in period, hopeful in spirit, and about the power of imagination at its core. ‘It hath been used as restoratives,’ the poet Gower says right at the beginning of the play. To me, this play is about restoring hope and peace after a period of turmoil and tragedy. I’ve always loved the idea of this play as a hero journey, and a play about the healing power of storytelling itself. As the play that began the life of our theater company, it seems most appropriate that we explore this play anew, continuing our journey — toward our twentieth year of existence as a company, reemerging out of the pandemic shutdown, and inviting new voices to be in creative conversation with the play and the Western classical canon.”
Red Bull’s inaugural production, in 2003, featured Daniel Breaker in the title role, with Raphael Nash Thompson as Gower and Cerimon; on October 4, Thompson, who also portrayed Gower in Sir Trevor Nunn’s version at TFANA in 2016, performed the prologue “To sing a song that old was sung” and discussed the play in a RemarkaBULL Podversation with Red Bull associate artistic director Nathan Winkelstein that you can watch here. “Exploring Pericles in 2021” began on October 11 and continues October 18, with BIPOC artists Grantham Coleman, Kimberly Chatterjee, Callie Holly, Mahira Kakkar, Jordan Mahome, Anthony Michael Martinez, Clint Ramos, Kenny Ramos, Madeline Sayet, and Craig Wallace delving into what Pericles means today. On October 25, Kent Gash will direct a livestreamed benefit reading of the play, with Coleman as Pericles. The programming concludes October 28 with an interactive Bull Session featuring Gash, scholar Noémie Ndiaye, and members of the company.
“Over the last two decades, Pericles has been produced around the world more often than in the entire twentieth century,” writes Ndiaye, an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. “The play was wildly popular in its own time, and it is now poised to become one of the twenty-first century favorite rediscovered Shakespearean plays. It may have caught the attention of contemporary theatermakers invested in diversifying Shakespeare in part because its geographical location, which moves between ancient Lebanon, Turkey, Libya, and Greece, makes it suitable for cross-cultural multiracial casting. And, certainly Pericles is a fertile terrain for racial investigation. Yet at the same time, the play’s consistent characterization of ‘fairness’ (a word used twenty-three times) as the feminized object of Pericles’s desire and the curative means of his salvation frames his journey as a romantic quest for whiteness and white world-making at the dawn of modernity. It is that fraught and complex racial terrain with which contemporary theatermakers must reckon when they stage Pericles today, finding new creative ways of doing Shakespeare better, Shakespeare with us and for us.”
Who:Boomerang Theatre Company What: Live, free Shakespeare Where: The Ladies Tea Room at the Prince George Hotel, 15 East Twenty-Seventh St. When: September 24-26, free with advance RSVP (donations accepted) Why: Just because summer is officially over on September 22 doesn’t mean that there will be no more free Shakespeare. Boomerang Theatre Company, the troupe that has been bringing the Bard to city parks since 1999, is kicking off its fall season with a free, indoor, modern-day production of William Shakespeare’s popular farce, The Comedy of Errors. The show will have four performances September 24-26 in the elegant Ladies Tea Room at the Prince George Hotel, featuring Erika Amato as the Abbess, Emily Ann Banks as Angelo, Nicholas-Tyler Corbin in several roles, Amy Crossman as Dromio of Syracuse, Jessica Giannone as Dromio of Ephesus, Anthony F. Lalor as Antipholus of Ephesus, Roger Lipson as Balthazar, Anthony Michael Martinez as Antipholus of Syracuse, Lance C. Roberts as Egeon and Pinch, Shannon Stowe as the Courtesan, Yeena Sung as Adriana, Logan Thomason as Luciana, and Viet Vo as Duke Solinus.
“The Comedy of Errors, which is at its heart about mistaken identity, reconciliation, and new possibilities, reminds us that comedy and escapism can be a way to cope with the challenges life presents us. At this moment of reopening, it is important to not only reflect on the last eighteen months but also celebrate coming together again,” director Scott Ebersold said in a statement. “So, that is exactly what the ensemble and I are doing: We’re getting all dressed up, and we’re throwing a party! We’re celebrating the return of live theater, the joy of artistic collaboration, and just how fun it is when things go terribly wrong!” Although advance tickets are sold out for what is Boomerang’s twentieth free Shakespeare production, there is a waiting list and walk-up possibilities. As Balthazar says in Act 3, Scene 1, “Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast.”
Lincoln Center’s ambitious Restart Stages program, welcoming back audiences with free outdoor multidisciplinary performances, continues this week with one-time-only shows by three distinct creators, available through the TodayTix lottery. On Tuesday, August 3, at 7:00, Company SBB//Stefanie Batten Bland serves up Look Who’s Coming to Dinner, a new take on Stanley Kramer’s 1967 film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The movie, which was nominated for ten Oscars and won for Best Actress and Best Original Story and Screenplay, is about an interracial couple portrayed by Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton who are celebrating their engagement by visiting her parents, a liberal couple played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn who are not exactly thrilled at first to see who their daughter will be marrying. SBB has been busy during the pandemic, presenting such works as Kolonial for BAC, This Moment for Works and Process at the Guggenheim, Unnatural Contradictions for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Mondays at Two, exploring safe spaces, isolation, racial injustice, and the coronavirus crisis, in addition to a three-week residency at the Yard on Martha’s Vineyard that culminated in the dance-theater installation Embarqued: Stories of Soil.
Debra Ann Byrd brings her one-woman show, Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey, to Restart Stages this week (photo by Christina Lane / Shakespeare and Company)
If you missed Debra Ann Byrd’s Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey at Shakespeare & Company’s Roman Garden Theatre earlier this month, you can catch it on Wednesday, August 4, at 7:00 on the Isabel and Peter Malkin Stage at Hearst Plaza at Lincoln Center. Directed by Tina Packard, the one-woman show of song and text details Byrd’s experiences as a Black woman attempting to be a classical actress, detailing a life that has included foster care, teen pregnancy, trauma, abuse, and single parenting on a path to play Othello (while also becoming the founding artistic director of the Harlem Shakespeare Festival).
In February 2021, Ryan J. Haddad’s one-man show, Hi, Are You Single?, streamed from Woolly Mammoth, where it was filmed live onstage in front of a limited, socially distanced, masked audience made up of members of the staff and crew, one of the first to do that; the bittersweet autobiographical piece follows Haddad, who has cerebral palsy and requires a walker, as he searches for love in all the wrong places. Haddad can currently be seen in “Wings and Rings,” a short film he made with set designers Emmie Finckel and Riccardo Hernández for Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon’s installation The Watering Hole at the Signature. In the ten-minute work, Haddad relives a terrifying moment from his childhood involving swimming in a pool. On Thursday, August 5, at 7:00, at Restart Stages, Haddad will premiere his latest solo show, Dark Disabled Stories, in which he discusses a crosstown bus, a bathroom stall, and Gramercy Park as he encounters strangers and confronts ableism wherever he goes.
One of the best productions is taking place indoors, but not in a theater with an audience. I wouldn’t be giving anything away if I told you that there is no happy ending in the Irish Rep’s virtual revival of Marina Carr’s The Cordelia Dream, streaming online through August 8. The brutal, relentless two-act, ninety-minute play was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and debuted in 2008 at Wilton’s Music Hall in London. Charlotte Moore and Ciarán O’Reilly of the Irish Rep, in association with casting director and producer Bonnie Timmermann, enlisted director Joe O’Byrne to helm a new version filmed at the New Theatre in Dublin, as part of the innovative company’s continuing onscreen works made during the pandemic.
The play takes place in a dark, eerie room where an elderly man (Stephen Brennan) lives alone, drinking by himself and playing his piano. He is visited one day by his long-estranged daughter (Danielle Ryan); they have not seen each other in many years, and their discomfort and hostility are immediately apparent in their initial exchange.
Man: You. Woman: Yes. Me. Man: Well. Woman: It wasn’t easy . . . seeking you out. Man: Wasn’t it? Woman: I stayed away as long as I could. Man: You think I’m going to die soon? Woman: Maybe. Man: You want to kiss and make up before the event? Woman: Some people visit each other all the time. Man: I’m not some people. You of all people should know that. Woman: Can I come in or not?
There is no love lost between father and daughter; it’s as if an older Cordelia has come to see her aging father, both filled with resentment, no reconciliation in sight. “Love needs a streak of darkness. The day is for solitude. Morning especially. Morning is for death,” he says. “And afternoons?” she asks. “At your age they’re for transgressions, at mine they’re for remorse,” he replies. “You know about remorse?” she wonders. “I’m an expert on it,” he answers.
Both characters are revealed as cold and cruel as details of their lives emerge in the corrosive conversation. He is an extremely talented but failed composer attempting to create his magnum opus before he dies, while she is a famous composer who has not been able to enjoy her success. He accuses her of wasting her gifts, claiming his superiority, unashamed of his hatred of her. He is glad that none of her children are named after him; he even criticizes the wine she brought. “You are very mediocre,” he declares. “Does mediocre need ‘very’ in front of it?” she asks. “When talking about you. Yes, it does,” he replies with bitterness.
She is there to say her piece, not about to cower from him. “You haven’t left me alone,” she says. “You’ve retreated to this sulphurous corner to gather venom for the next assault. You? Leave me alone? You haunt me.”
She has also come to tell him about a dream she has had, about their life and death, about the four howls and the five “never”s in Shakespeare’s grand tragedy. “You think you’re Cordelia to my Lear. No, my dear. You’re more Regan and Goneril spun,” he spits at her. “And you’re no Lear,” she shoots back, soon leaving.
She returns five years later, but it is not quite the same. His mental faculties are decreasing, not unlike the mad Lear’s, thinking her to be the goat-faced, dog-hearted dark lady of his nightmares, a reference to the character Shakespeare addresses in Sonnet 130 and others, whom he loves but cannot outright compliment, disparaging her instead. He recalls moments from his past but is foggy. “Your self-delusion is complete,” she says. “Men should not have daughters,” he opines. The acerbic cat-and-mouse dialogue continues as they eviscerate each other till nothing’s left.
Fiercely directed by Joe O’Byrne (McKeague and O’Brien present “The Rising,”Frank Pig Says Hello), The Cordelia Dream is a merciless, unyielding depiction of an unredeemable relationship between a father and daughter. With biting language, Carr (Woman and Scarecrow,Marble) brilliantly compares the creation of a work of art to the birth of a child and all the responsibilities that are supposed to accompany it. The play is intimately photographed and edited by Emmy winner Nick Ryan, with ghostly set design by Robert Ballagh and sound and original music by Emmy nominee David Downes, the actors naturally lit by a few lamps and a window that offers brief reprieves from the enveloping darkness that makes it feel like it is all a dream.
Brennan (A Life,The Pinter Landscape) commands the screen with an immense presence, his white-haired, white-bearded character skewering his daughter with relish, unafraid of any consequences. Ryan (Harry Wild,Wild Mountain Thyme), who made her professional debut in 2007 playing Cordelia and Brigitte in the Edinburgh Fringe award winner Food, portrays the lost woman with a graceful finesse as she tries to unburden herself of the many ways she claims he destroyed her life. The harrowing work hits even deeper at a time when loved ones are reuniting after the long pandemic lockdown, with hugs and kisses, smiles of relief and unabashed joy, none of which is evident in these two characters who harbor a disturbing, apparently unsalvageable history.
THE PUBLIC THEATER’S MOBILE UNIT
Multiple locations in all five boroughs
July 31 – August 29, free publictheater.org
The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit is back on the road after being sidelined by the pandemic lockdown last year, bringing free pop-up Shakespeare to locations across the five boroughs. “I always felt that we should travel,” Public founder Joseph Papp said once upon a time. “I wanted to bring Shakespeare to the people.” The Public has been doing just that in one form or another since 1957; this summer the Mobile Unit, in its tenth year, will be bringing two productions to plazas and squares from July 31 to August 29. Each presentation begins with the National Black Theatre’s Stage for Healing and Resilience, which will provide a space for reflection, meditation, and sharing. That will be followed by Verses @ Work — The Abridged Mix, Mobile Unit in Corrections artist Malik Work’s one-man show that incorporates verse, video, live music, musical theater, jazz, hip-hop, spoken word, and dance. Coproduced by the Public with NBT and directed by Vernice Miller, the autobiographical piece, inspired in part by Homer’s Odyssey, was nominated for a 2017 Audelco Award for Best Solo Performance and was turned into a film; Work has also staged a one-man adaptation of Timon of Athens and teaches Shakespeare, acting, and hip-hop theater. The free afternoon concludes with the hourlong Shakespeare: Call and Response; conceived by director Patricia McGregor, it features Sofia Jean Gomez, Teresa Avia Lim, Reza Salazar, and Work interacting with the audience through text, music, dance, and improv, playing multiple roles anchored by an MC and DJ duo rapping in iambic pentameter, with scenic design by Diggle, costumes by Katherine O’Neill, sound by Jorge Olivo, and choreography by Paloma McGregor (Patricia’s sister).
“The Mobile Unit is the purest expression of the Public’s conviction that the culture belongs to everyone. Our return this summer is a thrilling and responsive artistic expression born from this historical moment. We are responding to the call of community and creating a unifying embodiment of theater for this city,” Public artistic director Oskar Eustis said in a statement. Mobile Unit director Karen Ann Daniels added, “It is essential for the Mobile Unit to build something that could speak to the moment — a unique format that would reinvigorate our communal spaces and our connection to each other. We all came to the table with a strong sense that it is only through the creation of our art, and inviting our community’s participation in it, that we could offer healing, resilience, and the unbridled joy of the simple act of gathering.” The tour begins July 31 and August 1 at Astor Plaza, moving August 5-6 to Roberto Clemente Plaza, August 7-8 to Johnny Hartman Plaza, August 12 and 28-29 to Osborn Plaza, August 13 and 20 to Albee Square, August 14-15 to 125th Street Plaza, August 19 and 26-27 to Minthorne Street, and August 21-22 to Myrtle/Wyckoff Plaza; all shows are at 4:30 except for August 7-8, which start at 2:00. Also joining in the “Summer of Joy” will be the People’s Bus, a community-led initiative that repurposes a retired NYC prisoner transport vehicle into a mobile center that provides “resources and education to restore and build trust in our democracy.”
SEIZE THE KING
Marcus Garvey Park, Richard Rodgers Amphitheater
Through July 29, free (no RSVP necessary), 8:30 www.cthnyc.org
There’s a lot you won’t find in Seize the King, Will Power’s modern-day reimagination of Shakespeare’s Richard III, being staged by the Classical Theatre of Harlem at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park through July 29. There’s no mention of a discontented winter, proving to be a villain, or horses to trade for a kingdom. Writer Power and director Carl Cofield have streamlined the timeless story about the hunger for power to ninety minutes, performed by five actors portraying more than a dozen and a half roles; don’t wait around for Clarence, the Duchess of York, Queen Margaret, Sir William Catesby, Sir James Tyrrell, Henry Tudor, or the Archbishop of Canterbury to take the stage. But what you will find in the triumphant production is an exciting updating of a tale that’s all too familiar and one that keeps repeating itself. “When he comes back, will thou be ready?” the audience is asked at the end. “Can you keep the devil down in the hole?”
Seize the King begins with the death of the beloved King Edward IV, leaving his young son, Edward V (Alisha Espinosa), as heir to the throne. Edward’s brother, Richard (Ro Boddie), the Duke of Gloucester, was named to be the twelve-year-old Edward’s Lord Protector, but Lord Hastings (RJ Foster) doesn’t trust him, with good reason, as Richard believes that he should be the next king. Hastings tells him, “Edward intended for you to be Lord Protector / Still, his true intention is to insure that his son in two years’ time / Be crowned the reigning king of all, none other but him.” Richard answers curtly, “Of course.” Hastings emphasizes, “Only him.” Richard responds, “Yes, only him,” but he is already plotting his nephew’s demise.
Sides are drawn, with Lord Hastings defending Edward V and his mother, Queen Woodville (Andrea Patterson), while Richard eventually convinces an unsure Lord Buckingham (Carson Elrod) to join him. Richard attempts to woo Lady Anne Neville (Espinosa), the widow of Edward, Prince of Wales, to his cause, addressing her while she is taking a bath. “Sweet you are, love I my syrup thick / Allow me to pour this sweet over your / Stack Pancakes, but much more than pleasures,” he says. The wealthy Lady Anne is on to him immediately but is ready to make a deal. “What need I for you? / Come now, let’s talk bidness. / What offer you?” she declares. “You thought your sweet words would be enough? / Please, I got big jocks jockin’ all the time for these vast lands.”
As all roads lead to Bosworth Field, Power sprinkles in references to Fat Albert, Stairmaster, eating sushi with a fork, birth control, and Mother Teresa as well as to other Shakespeare plays and contemporary politics. “England first,” Buckingham proclaims to the people as if he’s speaking to a MAGA crowd. He crows, “Since good Edward Four ascended to / Heavenly orbs. Now what surrounds us? / Foreign heathens that take ours / Immigrants invade while we sit jobless / They up up up the ladder, up the stairs / While we, at dreadful base, now we step — oh / Now the stairs rickety, they are unusable / Cracked is the wood, trapped are we at base / We now at foot and they at head / Imagine the crown worn by them / And we rebuild stairs for them to ascend.”
Power (Stagger Lee,Steel Hammer), an actor, rapper, teacher, and hip-hop theater pioneer, and actor, teacher, and director Cofield (One Night in Miami,Dutchman), the associate artistic director of the company, previously collaborated on Power’s play The Seven, and they are in sync on Seize the King, balancing the old and the new with an occasional slip toward pedagogy and goofiness. The play, which had its world premiere in August 2018 at La Jolla Playhouse, takes place on Christopher and Justin Swader’s crooked stage, effectively lit by Alan C. Edwards, evoking rampant corruption and Richard’s state of mind; Brittany Bland’s projections range from scenes of war and protest to shimmering water and emphasis on a large crack in the back wall. Samantha Shoffner’s props, including a bathtub, a topiary, and a memorial table, are wheeled on and off by either the actors or dancers Daniela Funicello, Tracy Dunbar, Jenny Hegarty Freeman, Hannah Gross, and Alisa Gregory, who perform Tiffany Rea-Fisher’s lovely choreography to interstitial music by sound designer Frederick Kennedy, from Baroque to hip-hop.
Mika Eubanks seems to have had a ball designing the costumes, especially Queen Woodville’s — she’s styled like Beyoncé — and Richard’s coronation robe, which gets its own scene, proudly exhibited by Greygor the tailor (Foster), who explains, “Look this, crimson cloth of maggot Kermes / Peeled from trees of oak to retrieve the reddish juice / Insect bodies dried out to produce dye / Human bodies dried out to produce cloth / Blood-red pure crimson death to give life / All sacrifice for him no matter cost.”
Boddie plays Richard with a limp but is always standing tall, not hunched over, and is more handsome than the wicked Gloucester is usually portrayed. Foster is terrific as Hastings, a steadfast and honest man, Reverend Shaw, whose piety is for sale, and Greygor, who appears to have walked out of an episode of Pose. Patterson and Espinosa delight in their characters’ verbal battles with Richard, but it’s Elrod who nearly steals the show in multiple roles, from the well-meaning Buckingham and the chorus to a wise gardener and a royal servant who has an unusual message for Hastings and the Queen: “Uh, well, I wasn’t supposed to deliver nothing further but I did hear him say ‘The Queen ain’t shit! I’ma prune her ass’ or something to that effect.” You won’t find that in Shakespeare’s original text.
