this week in theater

THE EMPLOYEES: A WORKPLACE NOVEL OF THE 22nd CENTURY

The Employees is set aboard a spaceship with strange objects in tow (Pelenguino Photo)

THE EMPLOYEES
Theaterlab Gallery
357 West Thirty-Sixth St., between Eighth & Ninth Aves., third floor
Through June 30, $25-$50
www.themilltheatre.org

“I don’t think we as a category are going to survive,” one of the characters says in Jaclyn Biskup and Lauren Holmes’s fantastical adaptation of Danish poet and author Olga Ravn’s futuristic 2020 book, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century. It’s not clear whether she is talking about humans or humanoids.

The play consists of statements made by four members of the crew of the Six Thousand Ship, comprising humans and humanoids who have collected mysterious objects from the planet New Discovery. Paul Budraitis, Molly Leland, Christopher McLinden, and Aurea Tomeski, wearing white space uniforms, sit on chairs in the four corners of a small, white room; behind each of them hovers a ghostly, floating sheet, while in front of them is a narrow fluorescent light, as if they’re under investigation. The audience of no more than twenty sit along three walls in the same white chairs, equating everyone; at the front, production stage manager Sam Kersnick operates the light and sound, bathing the room in soft, glowing colors and sonic tones. The four crew members occasionally get up and switch seats while a strange object gleams in the middle, radiating like a beating heart.

The narrative unfolds in abstruse, nonlinear testimony that is not always easy to decipher but builds a cryptic, provocative environment as the characters discuss dreams, crying, memories, the unconscious, and death.

“I don’t like to go in there. The three on the floor seem especially hostile. I can’t understand why I feel I’ve got to touch them,” Chris admits. “Two of them are always cold, one is warm. You never know which is going to be the warm one.”

“I hope the work is progressing. I hope you’re doing it well, the work you have to do. I hope he’s not going to die, even if I do know it’s likely,” Molly says.

Aurea reports, “Do you think of me as an offender? I like to be in the room. I find it very erotic. The suspended object, I recognize my gender in it. Or at least the gender I have on the Six Thousand Ship. Every time I look at the object, I can feel my sex between my legs and between my lips. Maybe that’s why you think of me as an offender. Half human. Flesh and technology. Too living.”

“You can still save yourselves. I don’t know if I’m human anymore. Am I human? Does it say in your files what I am?” Paul asks.

These are thoughts we all have at one point or another, even if we don’t use those exact words as we try to find and establish our place in a quickly changing world dominated by big corporations, one in which continued technological advancement and the prospect of ever-more-pervasive AI fill us with both hope and fear.

Four characters share their thoughts on their mission in futuristic play (Pelenguino Photo)

Nora Marlow Smith’s brilliantly white set traps the actors and audience together in the room; when the door is closed, there is no way out, as if we are all on the space ship with no egress. Kristy Hall’s costumes add to the antiseptic atmosphere as Jackie Fox’s lighting and Sabina Mariam Ali’s sound enhance the sci-fi feel.

The worthy ensemble does a convincing job of walking the fine line between human and humanoid; although they are more realistic than Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, just as Data searches for his godlike creator, Dr. Noonien Soong, the four crew members aboard the Six Thousand Ship refer several times to Dr. Lund and his “children.” Molly, who met Dr. Lund before the ship departed, explains, “I didn’t know who I belonged to in his view. Whether I was human or just something that was animate. Even though I was born and brought up and my documents all said human, there was something about his behavior that made me think he didn’t consider me to be an equal, and for a few brief and terrifying seconds I felt I was artificial, made, nothing but a humanoid machine of flesh and blood.”

Seamlessly directed by Biskup (Venus, The Private of Lives of Eskimos [Or 16 Words for Snow]), The Employees is an intimate and intriguing look at where we might be heading a hundred years from now; whether escape will be possible has yet to be decided.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BREAKING THE STORY

Bear (Louis Ozawa) and Marina (Maggie Siff) risk their lives to get to the truth in Breaking the Story (photo by Joan Marcus)

BREAKING THE STORY
Second Stage Theater
Tony Kiser Theater
305 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 23, $42-$82
2st.com/shows

“If it bleeds, it leads,” William Randolph Hearst purportedly said in the 1890s, during the golden age of yellow journalism.

Foreign correspondent Marina Reyes (Maggie Siff) uses that phrase early on in the hard-hitting Breaking the Story, but in this case, the blood is her own. “I’m bleeding. I’m bleeding,” she says repeatedly throughout the eighty-five-minute play.

Marina is a popular television reporter who has suddenly decided to retire and announce her decision in her speech accepting the Distinguished Achievement in Conflict Journalism award. She has recently returned to the United States after nearly getting blown up covering a dangerous story in an undisclosed country; the headlines initially proclaimed, “American Journalist Missing, Presumed Dead.” She tells Bear (Louis Ozawa), her longtime cameraman, “Distinguished Achievement. It’s like they wanna give me a Lifetime Achievement Award in case I die out there next time, but they don’t want to be obvious about it. Anyway, joke’s on them ’cause there won’t be a next time.”

Her return begins a series of life-altering decisions: She buys a big house in an expensive suburb of Boston near her daughter Cruz’s (Gabrielle Policano) new college, Wellesley, and decides to marry Bear that weekend, at the new house, which is more of a vacation home.

Alexis Scheer’s Breaking the Story features a talented ensemble (photo by Joan Marcus)

The wedding brings together Marina’s best friend, socialite and philanthropist Sonia (Geneva Carr), who takes charge and designs a more elaborate affair than anyone seems to want; Marina’s freewheeling mother, Gummy (Julie Halston); Cruz, an aspiring pop star whose most recent song, “Yesterday’s Revolution,” has just gone viral; and Nikki (Tala Ashe), a young, Peabody-winning ladder climber who wants to interview Marina for her podcast even though Marina considers her to be her archenemy. Showing up later is her ex-husband, Fed (Matthew Saldívar), a reporter who now anchors his own show and wants to win Marina back.

New journalism and established reporting face off in Nikki and Marina’s exchanges: At one point Nikki accuses Marina of giving a platform to fascists and dictators, and Marina argues, “It’s our job to tell the whole story, Nikki! Not just the part of the story we agree with! . . .” Nikki responds, “Objectivity is a myth.” A perturbed Marina answers, “Of course it is! Objectivity has never been the point! We’re here to represent facts and ask questions so that people can make up their own mind. Balance. Fairness. Accuracy. All perspectives. The whole story.”

But even as she prepares for this new life, Marina is haunted by PTSD nightmares and the whole story of what happened at the Sapphire Hotel.

Bear (Louis Ozawa) and Marina (Maggie Siff) discuss their past and future in Breaking the Story (photo by Joan Marcus)

Myung Hee Cho’s set is an expanse of grass with miniature hills and a pair of silhouetted houses that serve as doorways; Elaine J. McCarthy’s projections of news reports and peaceful flowers fill several screens in the back. Darron L West’s sound shifts suddenly from conversation to explosions to live music written by Dan Ryan and performed by Policano, although it is difficult to make out all the lyrics.

Written by Alexis Scheer, whose previous works include Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, Christina, and the Broadway adaptation of the book of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bad Cinderella, and astutely directed by Obie winner Jo Bonney (Cost of Living Fucking A), Breaking the Story has some shaky scenes, including a surreal cake tasting, but they’re countered by touching moments of connection, highlighted by a moving heart-to-heart between Marina and Gummy, who makes a surprising confession.

Theater gem Halston (Hairspray, You Can’t Take It with You) sparkles as she quickly morphs from a troubled refugee who is looking for her daughter into the hilarious Gummy. Ozawa (The Tutors, Warrior Class) is cool and calm as Bear, eminently likable even when he considers working with Nikki.

But the show belongs to Siff (Curse of the Starving Class, The Ruby Sunrise). Whether out in the field in the middle of a bombing or walking around barefoot on the green grass of her new home, she is magnetic as Marina tries to balance and make sense of the disparate parts of her life. The choices she faces are ones we all must deal with in our relationships with parents and children, colleagues and rivals, friends and lovers, and career and retirement, except, in Marina’s situation, danger is front and center, a violent and bloody death an imminent possibility.

“You’re like this sacred artifact I’ve stolen from the temple and now this ancient monster curse has been unleashed until I put you back,” Bear tells Marina, who replies, “And you only have ’til the stroke of midnight until I disintegrate and the whole world turns to ash.” It’s not exactly a Cinderella story.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

HOW LONG BLUES

Whirling dervishes light up Little Island in Twyla Tharp’s How Long Blues (photo by Nina Westervelt)

HOW LONG BLUES
The Amph, Little Island
Pier 55, Hudson River Park at West Thirteenth St.
Wednesday – Sunday through June 23, $25
www.littleislandtickets.com
www.twylatharp.org

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.]

PRE-EXISTING CONDITION

C (Sarah Steele) and A (Tatiana Maslany) discuss a difficult situation in Pre-Existing Condition (photo by Emilio Madrid)

PRE-EXISTING CONDITION
Connelly Theater Upstairs
220 East Fourth St. between Aves. A & B
Monday – Saturday through August 3, $49-$125
preexistingconditionplay.com
www.connellytheater.org

Don’t worry that the protagonist in Marin Ireland’s gripping and powerful major playwriting debut, Pre-Existing Condition, holds what appears to be a spiral-bound copy of the script throughout the play’s sleek and steady seventy-five minutes, sometimes glancing at the words, other times clutching it to her chest like Linus’s blanket in Peanuts. Known only as A, the character never lets go of the script, not because the actor has not yet learned all of the lines, but because it’s a constant reminder of a horrific, life-altering event in the character’s recent past. Over the show’s two-month run, A will be played by Emmy winner Tatiana Maslany (who I saw), Tony nominee and director Maria Dizzia, Tavi Gevinson, Tony winner Deirdre O’Connell, and Julia Chan — and each will hold that script.

It’s been seven months since A was brutally struck by her partner. No longer with the man, she speaks with an attorney, a psychiatrist, a few close friends, her parents, an old acquaintance, her parents, and others, but no one is able to help, instead only adding to her torment and confusion by subtly blaming her for first provoking the attack and then refusing to take her lover back.

She tries to date, but she’s clearly not ready, especially when the men she meets cannot, or will not, understand her situation. (All the men and A’s mother are played by Greg Keller, although I saw his understudy, Gregory Connors; the rest of the women are portrayed by Sarah Steele and Dael Orlandersmith.)

A finds some respite in group therapy run by two caring women who have developed a support program; during those sessions, the two facilitators talk directly to the audience, as if we are all part of this community, because when it comes down to it, we are; domestic violence can occur at any moment, in any family.

In one exchange with B, A questions her own responsibility.

B: do you still feel like it’s your fault?
A: yeah.
B: it’s not.
A: well.
B: you couldn’t have known.
A: but . . . couldn’t I? I mean, I’m not that stupid, right? I mean. I guess I’m realizing something kind of horrible about myself which is that I always thought that like women who got hit by their boyfriends were like . . . they were like . . .
B: (long pause) they were like what?
A: trash. They were like trash. (pause)
B: mmhm.
A: and the thing is that’s exactly what I felt like. Feel like. (pause) Trash. (pause) (pause) And there are days when I feel like maybe I always was trash and this experience just made me see that finally. Clearly. And it has really nothing to do with the, like, huge shame or guilt or any of that, anything even directly relating to this incident, it just starts to feel like a very very deep truth. That I’m trash. And I always was.
B: you believe that still? Right now at this moment?
A: Oh yeah yeah, of course. Sure. No, that hasn’t ever gone away since it started. It’s almost a peaceful thought, which I guess is what makes it feel like it must be true?

Dael Orlandersmith plays multiple roles in new play by Marin Ireland (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Later, A explores another aspect of her feelings that no one seems to get. “I’m so fucking exhausted by all of this. All of this. All of the taking it seriously and the. All of it,” she tells B. “I don’t — okay. I don’t want the big task of my life now to be ‘dealing with this.’ It’s fucking eating up everything.”

When a friend (C) mentions the possibility of her offering forgiveness, A states, “I don’t want to. Forgive. I don’t want to forget it. . . . I don’t want to also be guilty of forgetting it.”

As the healing process — whatever it encompasses — continues, the audience empathizes more and more with A, realizing that her pain and trauma could be anyone’s pain and trauma, that any one of us could be sitting in that chair in the middle of the room, being consumed by some type of tragedy.

The California-born, Obie-winning Ireland is one of New York’s finest actors, having appeared in such powerful plays as On the Exhale, Ironbound, Marie Antoinette, the intimate Uncle Vanya that took place in a Flatiron loft, and reasons to be pretty, which earned her a Tony nomination.

She was busy during the pandemic, acting in short virtual works for charity and conceiving “Lessons in Survival” at the Vineyard Theatre with Peter Mark Kendall, Tyler Thomas, and Reggie D. White, in which a company known as the Commissary reenacted historic speeches, interviews, and conversations by activists and artists from revolutionary times (including James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Bobby Seale, and Muhammad Ali). Pre-Existing Condition is its own kind of lesson in survival, a deeply personal one.

Julia Chan, seen here with Greg Keller, is one of five rotating actors portraying the protagonist in gripping play (photo by Emilio Madrid)

In 2012, Ireland and her boyfriend at the time, Scott Shepherd, were in London, starring as the leads in the Wooster Group’s Cry, Trojans!, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida. One day she came to rehearsal with a black eye after Shepherd viciously hit her; he did not deny doing it. How Ireland was treated by the company and others following the event led her to lobby for systemic change in the theater.

“I continue to wonder where responsibility and accountability should be for what happened,” Ireland told the New York Times in 2015. “Many actors don’t know what to do when behavior — physical, sexual, harassment, bullying — crosses a line.”

Pre-Existing Condition is not a revenge drama, nor is it a self-help guide. It’s a brutally honest and provocative look at the psychological and bodily wounds that humans inflict and receive. Director Dizzia, an actor who has appeared in more than seventy movies and TV shows and theatrical productions, earning a Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Featured Actress for In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), allows Ireland’s story to unfold at a modest pace, luring the audience at the Connelly’s tiny upstairs theater into its many intricacies. Louisa Thompson’s spare set consists of a handful of chairs that match those the people in the first row sit in, implicating all of us; the actors switch chairs, but some are left empty, evoking ghosts who cannot be there. In the back are piles of more chairs, representing other survivors to come.

Drama Desk winner Steele (The Humans, I Can Get It for You Wholesale) is charming in multiple roles, wearing a Patti Smith T-shirt and jeans as she engages with A from multiple points of view. Solo specialist Orlandersmith (Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance, Forever) is wonderfully gentle as various therapists. Understudy Connors (The Poisoner, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window), taking over this night for the always terrific Keller (Dig, Shhhh), is stalwart as the men in A’s life, the good and the bad.

Maslany (Grey House, Mary Page Marlowe) is sensational as the tormented A, searching for a way out of her lonely predicament. The Canadian actor’s expressive facial gestures and meticulous body movements, filled with uncomfortable pauses, are mesmerizing, daring us to try to find the way forward for A; in fact, it is not until the closing moments that Maslany makes any eye contact with the audience, bringing us further into her world, and concluding with an extraordinary coda.

A’s personal answers may not be in the pages she’s clinging to as if some kind of life line, but Ireland’s play does offer a fascinating blueprint of what we all should be paying a lot more attention to.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

DARK NOON

Thulani Zwane is one of seven South African actors exploring the history of violence in America in Dark Noon (photo by Teddy Wolff)

DARK NOON
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 7, $34-$64
stannswarehouse.org

“People gotta talk themselves into law and order before they do anything about it. Maybe because down deep they don’t care. They just don’t care,” former marshal Martin Howe (Lon Chaney Jr.) says in Fred Zinnemann’s Oscar-nominated 1952 western High Noon.

The lawless of the wild West, specifically involving the European settlers’ lack of care in their treatment of Native Americans and, later, Chinese immigrants, is skewered in Tue Biering’s biting satire, Dark Noon, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit now at St. Ann’s Warehouse through July 7. Presented by Biering’s Copenhagen-based fix+foxy and performed by seven mostly BIPOC South African actors, the traveling show is reminiscent of Between Two Knees, the low-budget farce that ran earlier this year at PAC NYC by the Native American sketch comedy troupe the 1491s that zeroed in on the violence and disrespect Indians experienced at the hands of the US government between 1890 and 1973. Inspired by Hollywood westerns and, primarily, High Noon, writer-director Biering and codirector and choreographer Nhlanhla Mahlangu focus on the several hundred years prior to 1890, as the white colonialists steal land from the Native Americans and line their path west with their dead bodies. Both productions are too long (Between Two Knees was 145 minutes with intermission, Dark Noon is 110 minutes without) and overly repetitive but feature funny improvisation, although Dark Noon shoots and misses more frequently.

The audience sits on three sides of the large staging area, which at first consists only of a small booth in one corner and a big screen behind it. Multiple mobile cameras and microphones capture the action as the cast — Bongani Bennedict Masango, Joe Young, Kaygee Letsholonyana, Lillian Tshabalala, Mandla Gaduka, Siyambonga Alfred Mdubeki, and Thulani Zwane — is baptized in white face powder and makes its way through cannibalism, invasive immigration inspections, fighting the elements, battling so-called pioneers, a slave auction, forced assimilation, being moved to government reservations, the Civil War, the gold rush, Asian hatred, and the building of the transcontinental railroad. As events unfold, they are narrated by one of the actors in the booth and broadcast live on the screen, from a football game between the Settlers and the Natives to the development of towns centered around roofless saloons, brothels, and churches, which are constructed of wooden beams and planks.

Early on, after a senseless shootout, one of the narrators (Tshabalala) explains, “Once, life was fragile. People were living by the law of the gun. . . . It was a time when white lives didn’t matter.” Later, another narrator (Young), talking about the war over land between the white settlers and the Native population, declares, “The American cycle of violence was born.”

It’s a cycle of violence that is as prevalent as ever in the twenty-first century.

Dark Noon is scattershot, as scenes go on too long and themes repeat, and the livestreaming of the action is overused; with things happening so fast, it’s often hard to know where to look. However, despite all the fear, hate, and death, the play is also filled with an incisive sense of humor as it challenges ideas of religion, racism, immigration, the justice system, and capitalism (in the form of Coca-Cola), evoking what happened in South Africa during apartheid and what is still going on today in America, including at the southern border; it’s as if not as much has changed as we like to think since those shoot’em-up days of yore, celebrated in the films of John Ford, Howard Hawks, John Sturges, Delmer Daves, and John Wayne.

The energetic cast is in full motion the entire 110 minutes, singing and dancing and switching between roles and Camilla Lind’s costumes at lightning speed as Johan Kølkjær’s set slowly builds up over time; a coda in which the actors get personal is genuinely affecting. There is also a significant amount of fun audience participation; if you’re interested, then go for the $30 Gold Rush seats.

There’s a decided lack of audience participation in High Noon; as the twelve o’clock showdown approaches, the principled Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) finds that he is going to have to face the murderer Frankie Miller by himself, since all the capable men in Hadleyville turn away from him. But he keeps on fighting the good fight, just like every one of us should, regardless of the odds, on a mission to quell the seemingly neverending American cycle of violence.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

A TALE OF TWO ACTORS: STEVE CARELL AND MICHAEL STUHLBARG ON BROADWAY

Steve Carell did not receive a Tony nod for his Broadway debut in Uncle Vanya (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

UNCLE VANYA
Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through June 16, $104-$348
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

PATRIOTS
Ethel Barrymore Theatre
243 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 23, $49–$294
patriotsbroadway.com

When the 2024 Tony nominations were announced on April 30, there were several notable names missing, particularly that of Steve Carell. The Massachusetts-born Carell, sixty-one, is currently finishing up his Broadway debut as the title character in Heidi Schreck’s muddled new translation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, running at the Vivian Beaumont through June 16. The show received a single nomination, for Carell’s costar William Jackson Harper as Best Actor in a Play, for his portrayal of Dr. Astrov; Schreck and director Lila Neugebauer focus so much on the doctor that the play ought to be renamed Dr. Astrov.

Carell, who cut his comic chops at Second City in Chicago and on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, has been nominated for an Emmy eleven times for his role as Michael Scott on The Office, and he received a Best Actor Oscar nod for his portrayal of the real-life multimillionaire and murderer John Eleuthère du Pont in Foxcatcher. Carell has also appeared in such films and television series as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Little Miss Sunshine, The Big Short, and The Morning Show as well as the very dark limited series The Patient.

One name that might have been a surprise was that of Michael Stuhlbarg. The California-born Stuhlbarg, fifty-five, is currently finishing up his role as the real-life Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky in Peter Morgan’s bumpy but ultimately satisfying Patriots, running at the Ethel Barrymore through June 23. The nomination was the only one for the play, which is directed by Rupert Goold.

All five of the nominees are known for their work on television; in addition to theater veteran Harper, who played Danny Rebus on the reboot of The Electric Company and Chidi Anagonye on The Good Place, the nominees include Emmy winner Jeremy Strong of Succession for An Enemy of the People, nine-time Emmy nominee and Tony winner Liev Schreiber of Ray Donovan for Doubt: A Parable, and Tony and Grammy winner and Emmy and Oscar nominee Leslie Odom Jr. of Smash for Purlie Victorious (A Non-Confederate Romp through the Cotton Patch).

A two-time Emmy and Tony nominee and Obie and Drama Desk winner, Stuhlbarg has appeared in such films as A Serious Man, Call Me by Your Name, and The Shape of Water; has portrayed such villains on TV as Arnold Rothstein in Boardwalk Empire, Jimmy Baxter in Your Honor, and Richard Sackler in Dopesick; and has seven Shakespeare plays on his resume in addition to Cabaret, The Pillowman, and The Invention of Love on Broadway.

Michael Stuhlbarg received his second Tony nomination for his role as Boris Berezovsky in Patriots (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Uncle Vanya and Patriots are both set in Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, around the time of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika program, although the exact time of Schreck’s narrative is never specifically stated. Vanya has sacrificed happiness in order to manage the family estate with Sonia (Alison Pill), his niece. When professor Alexander (Alfred Molina) — who was married to Vanya’s late sister, Sonia’s mother — and his younger, sexy wife Elena (Anika Noni Rose), arrive at the estate with plans to sell it, Vanya, who is in love with Elena and is not a terrific businessman, is forced to take stock of his life, and he doesn’t like what he sees.

Boris of Patriots is a stark contrast: He seeks out the many pleasures the world has to offer, determined, since childhood, to be a success with power and influence, unconcerned with the bodies he leaves in his wake. Cutting a deal with Alexander Stalyevich Voloshin (Jeff Biehl), Boris assures the politician that he is going to be a rich man. “No good being rich if I’m dead,” Voloshin says, to which Boris responds, “It’s always good being rich.” Boris believes he is in control of Russia when he chooses to groom a minor functionary as president, intending to make him his puppet, but the man, Vladimir Putin (Will Keen), ultimately has other ideas and soon becomes Boris’s hated enemy.

Carell hovers in the background of Uncle Vanya, giving the stage over to the other characters, similar to how Vanya has surrendered taking action in his life. He often sits and mopes on a couch in the back, fading into the shadows; even when he pulls out a gun, he is too meek and mild. For the play to work, the audience needs to connect emotionally with Vanya, but Carell can’t quite carry off the key moments.

Stuhlbarg leaps across Miriam Buether’s multilevel stage with boundless energy in Patriots as Boris battles Putin over the heart and soul of Russia. Boris has no fear, until he realizes that Putin is a lot more than he ever bargained for. “I will make sure the Russian people learn to love our little puppet,” Boris says, but it’s too late. “The fact is I am president,” Putin declares. Boris responds, “And I put you there!!!!!” To which Putin replies, “That’s opinion. Not fact.”

Carell may be more of a household name than Stuhlbarg, but the latter gained notoriety when, on March 31, a homeless man struck him with a rock near Central Park, and Stuhlbarg, much like Boris most likely would have done, chased after him until the police caught up with the attacker outside of the Russian consulate on East Ninety-First. The consulate was a fitting location for the two-time Tony nominee.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

JUKEBOX HEROES 2: HELL’S KITCHEN / THE HEART OF ROCK AND ROLL

Ali (Maleah Joi Moon) and Knuck (Chris Lee) have each other’s back in Hell’s Kitchen (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

In 1981, Joan Jett shouted, “I love rock n’ roll / So put another dime in the jukebox, baby / I love rock n’ roll / So come and take your time and dance with me / Ow!”

When was the last time any of us put a dime — or quarter, or dollar, or credit card — into a jukebox? However, the jukebox musical, a show built around existing songs, usually by a specific artist, is thriving, and it costs a whole lot more than loose change to see one.

The genre kicked off as the ’80s began, shortly before Jett released “I Love Rock n’ Roll,” with such instant favorites as Beatlemania (the Beatles), Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Fats Waller), and Eubie! (Eubie Blake), but it really found its groove in the 2000s, with The Boy from Oz (Peter Allen), Jersey Boys (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons), and king of them all, Rock of Ages, which created a compelling narrative based on songs by Styx, Journey, Bon Jovi, Pat Benatar, Foreigner, Twisted Sister, Steve Perry, Poison, Night Ranger, Europe, Whitesnake, and, well, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.

There are several keys to a successful jukebox musical, whether biographical or fictional: It has to be able to attract fans and nonfans of the music or musician; it needs to sound more like a Saturday-night cover band than a traditional Broadway orchestra; and if it’s basically historical, it should be honest and thorough, while it should be clever and bold if telling a new tale. Biomusicals about Neil Diamond, Tina Turner, Carole King, Cher, Michael Jackson, Motown, and the Temptations all were lacking that certain something, if not more, while Head over Heels did a terrific job incorporating the songs of the Go-Go’s into a sixteenth-century romance, & Juliet extended Romeo and Juliet with the music of Swedish producer Max Martin (made famous by the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Robyn, Demi Lovato, Katy Perry, *NSYNC, and Justin Timberlake, among others), and Jagged Little Pill used Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album to entertainingly explore a suburban family’s dysfunction.

This season saw the Broadway premiere of two exciting, though very different, jukebox musicals that stand apart from the pack. Although they showcase songs by artists I never play at home, I was thrilled to see them performed onstage by excellent casts.

The Heart of Rock and Roll gives reason to jump for joy (photo by Matthew Murphy)

THE HEART OF ROCK AND ROLL
James Earl Jones Theatre
138 West Forty-Eighth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 23, $58-$288
heartofrocknrollbway.com

The music of Huey Lewis and the News is its own kind of ear candy. The San Francisco band, which started in 1979 and is still together — although they no longer tour because Lewis contracted Ménière’s disease, which causes severe hearing loss — has sold tens of millions of records, boosted by twenty top-fifty singles between 1980 and 1994. Among those to wax poetic about the group was fictional serial killer Patrick Bateman in Bret Eason Ellis’s 1991 novel, American Psycho, and the subsequent 2000 film starring Christian Bale and the 2016 Broadway musical with Benjamin Walker, the last of which features Lewis’s “Hip to Be Square.”

In 1985, Huey Lewis and the News garnered their sole Grammy, winning Best Music Video, Long Form for the single “The Heart of Rock and Roll.” Unfortunately, the new Broadway musical The Heart of Rock and Roll was snubbed by the Tonys and received a lone Drama Desk nomination, for Lorin Latarro’s delightful choreography. But don’t let that stop you from seeing this superfun show, now running at the James Earl Jones Theatre.

Jonathan A. Abrams’s book skirts around clichés in telling the story of Bobby Stivic (Corey Cott), a blue-collar dreamer who is forced to choose between a stable, professional career and playing in a band. When Bobby gets fired from his job on the factory floor of the family-run, Milwaukee-based Stone Box Co., which makes shipping supplies (boxes, tape, packing peanuts, bubble wrap), for cutting a bad deal with a stereo company in order to give every employee a Walkman to help boost productivity, he decides he has to make it right. He heads off to a conference in Chicago where he believes he will be able to get the keynote speaker, Swedish furniture mogul Otto Fjord (Orville Mendoza), to become a client.

Tough HR head Roz (Tamika Lawrence), the easygoing Mr. Stone (John Dossett), and his extremely efficient workaholic daughter, Cassandra (McKenzie Kurtz), see Bobby at the trade show, and, discovering that he is representing the company he no longer works for, are not exactly pleased. But when the ever-charismatic Bobby manages to get a meeting with Fjord — in the hotel sauna — Stone considers giving Bobby another chance.

Meanwhile, Bobby’s former bandmates and childhood friends, optimistic guitarist JJ (Raymond J. Lee), realistic drummer Eli (John-Michael Lyles), and fatalistic bassist Glenn (F. Michael Haynie), suddenly snag a gig that could put them on the map, but they need their lead singer and songwriter to return in order to have any potential shot at the big time. And Bobby and Cassandra might have to answer the big question: Do you believe in love? as her high school sweetheart, the smarmy, WASPy Tucker (Billy Harrigan Tighe), is back in town.

Roz (Tamika Lawrence) has some key words for Cassandra (McKenzie Kurtz) in Huey Lewis musical (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Director Gordon Greenberg (Working, Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors) strings it all together like a series of interrelated music videos, except with more depth — but not too much — with the help of Japhy Weideman’s lighting and John Shivers’s sound. Just because you don’t have Huey Lewis and the News on your digital playlist doesn’t mean you won’t be charmed by the poppy songs, performed by a crack eight-piece band. Music supervisor Brian Usifer’s arrangements and orchestrations stay true to the original tunes without getting Broadway-fied under Will Van Dyke’s solid musical direction. There are plenty of familiar hits (“If This Is It,” “Workin’ for a Livin’,” “I Want a New Drug,” “The Power of Love”) along with a new song written for the musical, “Be Somebody,” which is, well, a bit too square.

Derek McLane’s sets (with backdrops that pay homage to the game Connect Four), Jen Caprio’s costumes, and Nikiya Mathis’s hair, wigs, and makeup keep you firmly in 1987 middle America, from the factory to a nightclub to the convention, where Stone’s booth includes such signs as “Too Cool to Spool,” a riff on “Hip to Be Square.” Latarro wonderfully integrates her choreography into parts of the set, using a conveyor roller, lockers, and, most ingeniously, bubble wrap. (Now, that’s tap dancing!)

The Tucker subplot is stale from the get-go, but just about everything else succeeds, especially the various relationships: between father and daughter, bandmates, potential lovers, and ex-employee and HR diva. Lawrence has a field day as Roz, delivering one of the show’s best lines: “If you’re having a business meeting without your clothes on, then HR better be present.” Dossett is heartwarming as Stone, who evokes some of the dads in the 1980s John Hughes movies. Cott, looking like a young Hugh Jackman, is endearing as Bobby, who just wants everyone around him to be happy. And Kurtz is hilarious as the bumbling, adorable Cassandra, her facial gestures alone worth the price of admission.

“New York, New York / Is it everything they say,” JJ sings in the title song. In the case of The Heart of Rock and Roll on Broadway, it most assuredly is.

Hell’s Kitchen ups the ante on Broadway, earning thirteen Tony nominations (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

HELL’S KITCHEN
Shubert Theatre
225 West Forty-Fourth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 19, $74-$318
www.hellskitchen.com

When Hell’s Kitchen made its world premiere this past winter at the Public, there was something missing. In my review, I noted, “With some significant tweaking, Hell’s Kitchen has the chance to be both a critical and popular hit on the big stage.” That’s exactly what has happened. (Note: Much of that original review is repeated verbatim below, with some tweaks to emphasize how the Broadway production has improved.)

On Broadway at the Shubert, the semiautobiographical musical, inspired by the life of Alicia Keys — the singer-songwriter, producer, and art collector who has won sixteen Grammys and has been nominated for two Emmys and one Tony — is now a much tighter, fresher coming-of-age story set in mid-1990s Manhattan, thanks to small changes in Kristoffer Diaz’s book. In her first professional role, Maleah Joi Moon makes an explosive Broadway debut as Ali, a seventeen-year-old girl living with her extremely protective single mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean), in a one-bedroom apartment “on the forty-second floor of a forty-four-story building on Forty-Third Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, right in the heart of the neighborhood some people know as Hell’s Kitchen.” The building is designated as artist housing, and it’s filled with a bevy of artists, including a trumpeter on thirty-two, a dance class on twenty-seven, opera singers on seventeen, poets on nine, painters on eight, a string section on seven through four, and a gospel pianist in the Ellington Room on the ground floor.

It’s summer, and Ali has decided it’s time for her to get busy with the older Knuck (Chris Lee), who drums on buckets in the street with his friends Q (Jakeim Hart) and Riq (Lamont Walker II). Ali and her homegirls, Jessica (Jackie Leon) and Tiny (Vanessa Ferguson), are sure the men are up to no good, but as Ali says, “We need that trouble in our lives.”

That’s the last thing Jersey wants for her daughter, so she enlists her besties, Millie (Mariand Torres) and Crystal (Crystal Monee Hall), and jovial doorman Ray (Chad Carstarphen) to keep an eye on Ali’s comings and goings. Jersey does not want what happened to her — an early, unwanted pregnancy by an unreliable man, a jazz musician named Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon) — to happen to her stubborn daughter.

As she prepares for her potential sexual awakening, Ali becomes intrigued by Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), the elderly woman who plays the piano in the Ellington Room and soon becomes Ali’s mentor. But the trouble that Ali soon encounters is not the trouble she needs.

Mother (Shoshana Bean) and daughter Ali (Maleah Joi Moon) share a poignant moment in Alicia Keys musical (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

Hell’s Kitchen is structured around two dozen Keys songs, from such albums as 2001’s Songs in A Minor, 2003’s The Diary of Alicia Keys, 2007’s As I Am, 2012’s Girl on Fire, 2020’s Alicia, and 2021’s Keys, and three new tunes written specifically for the show, “The River,” “Seventeen,” and “Kaleidoscope.” The orchestrations by Tom Kitt and Adam Blackstone are lively, and Camille A. Brown’s choreography captures the energy of the street on Robert Brill’s scaffold-laden set, enhanced by projections of the neighborhood by Peter Nigrini. The naturalistic costumes are by Dede Ayite, with lively lighting by Natasha Katz and spirited sound by Gareth Owen.

The show is directed with a vibrant sense of urgency by Tony nominee Michael Greif (Dear Evan Hansen, Next to Normal), even more exciting with Diaz’s (The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, Welcome to Arroyo’s) revised book. Moon is magnetic as Ali; you can’t take your eyes off her for even a second. Tony nominee Bean (Mr. Saturday Night, Waitress) is engaging as the overwrought mother, shaking things up with “Pawn It All,” while Obie winner Lewis (Dreamgirls, Ain’t Misbehavin’) nearly steals the show as Miss Liza Jane, channeling Maya Angelou when she says such lines as “I will not allow you to let the pain win,” then bringing down the house with “Perfect Way to Die.” Lee (Hamilton) has just the right hesitation as Knuck, acknowledging the obstacles he faces every step of the way, and Carstarphen (Between the Bars, Neon Baby) is eminently likable as the adorable doorman.

Just as you don’t have to be a Huey Lewis fan to enjoy The Heart of Rock and Roll, you don’t have be an Alicia Keys devotee to get swept away by Hell’s Kitchen. In both cases, it’s well worth putting another dime (or more) in the jukebox, baby.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]