this week in theater

HADESTOWN

Hermes (André De Shields) narrates the love story between Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) and Orpheus (Reeve Carney) in Hadestown (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Walter Kerr Theatre
219 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 5, $109-$249
www.hadestown.com

After a thirteen-year gestation period, Anaïs Mitchell’s sizzling-hot Hadestown has descended on Broadway, burning it up to packed houses at the Walter Kerr Theatre. Mitchell wrote the book, music, and lyrics to the Tony-nominated show, which has transformed since 2006 from a small presentation in Vermont with friends and a 2010 concept album to evolving productions at New York Theatre Workshop, the Citadel in Canada, and London’s West End. The fiery musical is a potent combination of the Greek myths of Persephone and Hades, Orpheus and Eurydice, flavored with the American version of the proletarian struggle against capital. The narrative journeys from Persephone’s raucous jazz bar into the underworld, telling the tragic mythological fable of a doomed love affair between Orpheus (Reeve Carney), here written as a naïve, wide-eyed dreamer, and Eurydice (Eva Noblezada), who becomes a practical and realistic young traveler trying to survive in supremely hard times. They meet at a railway station on the road to hell, which is run by the devious King Hades (Patrick Page) and his far more sympathetic wife, Persephone (Amber Gray), from atop their not-quite-ivory tower. “Now some may say the weather ain’t the way it used to be / But let me tell you something that my mama said to me: / You take what you can get / And you make the most of it / So right now we’re living it,” Persephone sings.

Down below, in hell, a workers chorus of factory slaves (Afra Hines, Timothy Hughes, John Krause, Kimberly Marable, and Ahmad Simmons) toils away in horrific heat. The proceedings are narrated with devilish charm, Our Town-style, by Hermes (André De Shields), the messenger god. “It’s a sad song / It’s a sad tale, it’s a tragedy / It’s a sad song / But we sing it anyway,” he explains. When the desperate Eurydice is lured by Hades, Orpheus can save her only by writing the most beautiful song ever written as the Fates (Jewelle Blackman, Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer, and Kay Trinidad) keep a close watch on it all.

Hades (Patrick Page) and Persephone (Amber Gray) survey their domain in sizzling Broadway musical (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Director Rachel Chavkin (Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812; Small Mouth Sounds) marvelously melds a steampunk aesthetic with New Orleans bravado and depression-era gloom, maintaining an energetic fast pace to what, at its heart, is a simple, poetic love story. Mitchell’s music, performed by onstage musicians (pianist Liam Robinson, violinist Dana Lyn, cellist Marika Hughes, guitarist Michael Chorney, trombonist Brian Drye, double bassist Robinson Morse, and percussionist Ben Perowsky) as if at a honky tonk, range from R&B, soul, and jazz to folk, blues, country, and pop with enthusiastic orchestrations by Todd Sickafoose and rousing choreography by David Neumann that avoid typical Broadway melodrama. Rachel Hauck’s set, anchored by Hades’s grim, looming tower, seems to breathe smoke and fire. Michael Krass’s costumes include some ravishing touches, from Persephone’s green velvet dress and Hades’s impeccable pinstripe suit to Hermes’s spectacular sharkskin ensemble.

Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) makes a decision she’ll regret as the Fates hover over in Hadestown (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Page (Spring Awakening, Coriolanus), whose booming baritone echoes throughout the theater, and Carney (Penny Dreadful; Hello, Stranger), who plays Orpheus with a sweet innocence, are worthy adversaries, having already battled it out in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, in which Carney was the web-throwing superhero and Page the villainous Green Goblin. Noblezada (Les Misérables, Miss Saigon) does well as the underwritten, underdeveloped Eurydice, while Gray (Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812; An Octoroon) has a stomping good time as Persephone. Mitchell and Chavkin make a strong connection between the burgeoning love between the young Orpheus and Eurydice, who are fighting fate for a chance at a life together, and Hades and Persephone, who lost their spark long ago and might not be able to get it back. There are also references to modern-day climate change, capitalism, and politics without getting heavy-handed, offering the hope of spring. “Wipe away your tears, brother / Brother, I know how you feel / I can see you’re blinded / By the sadness of it all,” Persephone declares. “Look a little closer and / Everything will be revealed / Look a little closer and / There’s a crack in the wall!”

TOOTSIE THE MUSICAL

Michael Dorsey (Santino Fontana) and Jeff Slater (Andy Grotelueschen) lament their situations in Broadway musical adaptation of Tootsie (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Marquis Theatre
210 West 46th St. at Broadway
Tuesday – Sunday through December 22, $79-$469
tootsiemusical.com

Robert Horn moves Sydney Pollack’s 1982 hit, Tootsie, from television soap opera to self-reflective Broadway musical in the book for the Broadway musical adaptation of the film, a ten-time Oscar nominee, continuing at the Marquis Theatre through December 22. The movie starred Dustin Hoffman as Michael Dorsey, an impossibly difficult thespian who dresses as a woman, Dorothy Michaels, to land a job on a daytime soap; he lives with his goofy best friend, Jeff Slater (Bill Murray), is close with his ex-girlfriend, determined actress Sandy Lester (Teri Garr), and falls for one of his costars, Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange). In the Broadway version, Dorsey/Michaels is played with flair and panache by Santino Fontana, who dresses as a woman to play the nurse in Ron Carlisle’s (Reg Rogers, who was played in the movie by Dabney Coleman) disastrous musical sequel to Romeo & Juliet entitled Juliet’s Curse. (The role of Julie’s father, who has the hots for Dorothy and is played in the film by Charles Durning, is excised from the show.) Fontana changes hair and costumes at near-record pace as he flits between his ever-growing role onstage while trying to maintain his offstage relationships and keep his ruse a secret from everyone except Jeff (Andy Grotelueschen).

Dorothy Michaels (Santino Fontana) has some pointers for Julie Nichols (Lilli Cooper) as they rehearse Juliet’s Curse (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Michael battles on-set with the womanizing Carlisle; angers his agent, Stan Fields (Michael McGrath, in a very different role from the agent played by Pollack in the film); auditions for the same part Sandy (Sarah Stiles) covets; and haplessly attempts to woo Julie (Lilli Cooper). While the arc of his instant success worked in the movie more than three dozen years ago, it often strains credulity here, particularly during the show-within-a-show’s opening night. But getting there can be lots of fun, with antic choreography by Denis Jones and tongue-in-cheek music and lyrics by David Yazbek, although Scott Ellis’s (The Elephant Man, Kiss Me, Kate) direction is bumpy and inconsistent, Simon Hale’s orchestrations of the ballads are overly conventional, and Dorsey is occasionally too unlikable as the production stumbles over making itself relevant in the #MeToo generation.

Sandy Lester (Sarah Stiles) wears her heart on her sleeve as Jeff (Andy Grotelueschen) looks on in Tootsie (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Tony nominee Stiles (Hand to God, Avenue Q) nearly steals the show as the desperate Sandy, bringing the house down with “What’s Gonna Happen?,” documenting her futility in both life and career; Tony nominee Rogers (Holiday, The Royal Family) is appropriately slimy as the sleazy, self-important director; Fiasco veteran Grotelueschen (Into the Woods, Cyrano de Bergerac) is warm and funny as Jeff; and Julie Halston (On the Town, Anything Goes) supplies solid support as producer Rita Marshall. William Ivey Long’s costumes and Paul Huntley’s hair and wig design are absolutely fabulous, and David Rockwell’s constantly-in-motion set has its own choreography. There was a sweet, unscripted incident the night I went, the first performance after the production had been nominated for eleven Tonys; when Stan tells Michael he might be up for a Tony, the audience burst into spontaneous applause for several minutes as Fontana (Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, Brighton Beach Memoirs), who earned a well-deserved nod for Best Actor in a Musical, sheepishly grinned and blushed: a meta-moment in a production built around its own kind of meta.

EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED AND WOULD HAPPEN

Heiner Goebbels explores the last hundred years of European history in Everything that happened and would happen (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
June 3-9, $40-$95
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org

German composer and artist Heiner Goebbels constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs the last hundred years of European history in Everything that happened and would happen, making its American premiere at Park Ave. Armory through June 9. Reconfigured for the armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall — it was originally staged in a former railway depot in Manchester — the multimedia, polyphonic spectacle starts as soon as the doors open, so be sure to get there early. The audience sits in rising rafters on the west side of the hall, watching a team of dancers in black (Juan Felipe Amaya Gonzalez, Sandhya Daemgen, Antoine Effroy, Ismeni Espejel, Montserrat Gardó Castillo, Freddy Houndekindo, Tuan Ly, Thanh Nguyễn Duy, John Rowley, Annegret Schalke, Ildikó Tóth, Tyra Wigg) carry seemingly random objects onstage — long tubes, metallic seashells, a gold sun, large cloths that they hang from above — position them carefully, then remove them.

Various people read passages from Patrik Ouředník’s 2001 Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, a tragicomic, stream-of-consciousness look at the twentieth century, exploring war, racism, colonialism, collective memory, liberal democracy, the Holocaust, Barbie dolls, and more. Sentences are occasionally projected on hanging sheets designed with trees, maps, and architectural structures, in addition to unedited footage from Euronews’s No Comment, with no narration or context; the night we attended featured very recent live, often violent images from Syria, Colombia, and other nations. (The video design is by Rene Liebert.) In one corner smoke oozes out of a cave, creating a face. Rocks storm down in an avalanche. The dancers roll column-like plinths across the stage, pedestals without busts; later, one performer climbs on top of one and reads from Ouředník’s book.

Everything that happened and would happen has been reimagined for the Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The dissonant score, from John Cage’s Europeras 1&2, is played by Camille Émaille on percussion, Gianni Gebbia on saxophone, Cécile Lartigau on ondes Martenot, Nicolas Perrin on guitar and electronics, and Léo Maurel on several specially built, unusual instruments. (The props are from Goebbels’s 2012 production of Europeras 1&2.) Willi Bopp’s stunning sound design has music and words emerging from numerous speakers throughout the hall, as if a choreographed sonic dance. Goebbels is a master of deception; while you’re watching one element, others will sneak up on you, offering surprises galore, evoking life itself — and war, specifically, but without the immediate threat. A long, narrow beam becomes a mobile trench. Black monoliths creep up out of the darkness. At one point I felt as if Birnam Wood was stealthily approaching; another reminded me of George Washington crossing the Delaware (even if it’s not from the last century). The dancers and musicians improvise, furthering the anything-can-happen atmosphere.

Perhaps what’s most invigorating about the 135-minute-plus intermissionless show — Goebbels’s third project at the armory, following Stifter’s Dinge in 2009 and De Materie in 2016 — is that despite the serious topics that are broached, abstract and not, Goebbels leaves it up to us to interpret what we are experiencing; he gives us the building blocks from which we can form our own narrative. “Everything that happened and would happen doesn’t participate in all the attempts to have yet another opinion as to the meaning of what has happened; quite the opposite. Guided by a deep mistrust in the transmission of a one-directional message, I don’t even try,” Goebbels explains in his director’s note. “Everything that happened and would happen seeks to open up a space of images, words, and sounds generous enough to avoid the impression that somebody on stage is trying to tell you what to think. It is a space for imagination and reflection, in which the construction of sense is left for everyone to assemble.”

Words, images, movement, and sound come together in unique, contemplative ways in Heiner Goebbels’s return to the armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

It can be slow going, and several members of the audience did not make it to the end, which is too bad, because Everything that happened and would happen proves to be a provocative durational exploration of the past, present, and future fusing together, a multimedia barrage on the eyes and ears that demands our attention even as the mind wanders. Even when not much appears to be going on, something is, of course, mimicking life and the choices we make as we go about our day; Goebbels metaphorically hands us the controls and we watch and listen to what we want to, self-curating the presentation. Ouředník writes, “Historians said that historical memory was not part of history and memory was shifted from the historical to the psychological sphere, and this instituted a new mode of memory whereby it was no longer a question of memory of events but memory of memory.” On opening night, at the close of the show, Goebbels himself was helping the ushers steer the audience to the exits on the far side of the stage, forcing everyone to march along a battered landscape and take stock of where we are at this very moment in time, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. It’s a fitting finale to an adventurous evening of intoxicating, memorable theater.

TRIPTYCH (EYES OF ONE ON ANOTHER)

Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) takes a unique multimedia look at the work of Robert Mapplethorpe (photo by Maria Baranova)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
June 6-8, $30-$60, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The controversial work of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe has been undergoing a renaissance over the last few years, with documentaries, gallery and museum shows, and, perhaps most influentially, Patti Smith’s award-winning memoir about her life with Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. Now comes composer Bryce Dessner and librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle’s multimedia Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), playing at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House June 6-8. The sixty-minute theatrical oratorio is divided into three sections based on Mapplethorpe’s XYZ portfolios, which explore sadomasochism, flowers, and African American male nudes, respectively. The first part centers on Smith’s poem “The Boy Who Loved Michelangelo,” set to a Monteverdi madrigal; the second on Dessner’s personal reaction to the 1990 Mapplethorpe obscenity trial in Cincinnati, the composer’s hometown; and the third on poet and performance artist Essex Hemphill’s “The Perfect Moment,” which was critical of Mapplethorpe’s depiction of black bodies. “Aesthetics can justify desire, / but desire in turn / can provoke punishment. / Under public scrutiny / the eyes of one man / are focused on another. / Is it desire, equality, / disgust, or hatred?” he writes. Meanwhile, in a program note, dramaturg Christopher Myers asks, “Is it possible to imagine these men who are photographed with the impersonal intimacy of flowers, or bronze sculptures, as full human beings, with desires and pleasures of their own? Can we read the desire of the photographer, his conflicts and self-denials, in his steadfast commitment to a classical language that recasts leather daddies and daddy’s boys into upper middle class living room fantasies? Where in this thorny bramble of gazes, objectification, outrage, and intimacy do our own wants and expectations as an audience live?”

The production, which features giant projections of rarely shown Mapplethorpe photographs, is directed by Kaneza Schaal, with music performed live by Roomful of Teeth (Cameron Beauchamp, Martha Cluver, Eric Dudley, Estelí Gomez, Abigail Lennox, Thomas McCargar, Thann Scoggin, and Caroline Shaw), joined by soprano Alicia Hall Moran and tenor Isaiah Robinson; Brad Wells is the music director and conductor, with Jessica McJunkins on violin, Tia Allen on viola, Byron Hogan on cello, Kyra Sims on French horn, Ian Tyson on clarinet and bass clarinet, Laura Barger on piano and harmonium, Donnie Johns and Victor Pablo on percussion, and James Moore on guitar. The set and costumes are by Carlos Soto, lighting by Yuki Nakase, and video by Simon Harding. On June 7 at 6:00, the talk “Mapplethorpe in Performance with Bryce Dessner, Kaneza Schaal, and Korde Arrington Tuttle” will be held in the BAM Hillman Attic Studio.

HEINER GOEBBELS: EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED AND WOULD HAPPEN

everything that happens

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
June 3-9, $40-$95
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org

In 2009, German composer and artist Heiner Goebbels brought Stifter’s Dinge to Park Avenue Armory, a work for five pianos, sans performers, an architectural, musical, kinetic collage with the voices of William S Burroughs, Malcolm X, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In 2016, his multidisciplinary De Materie featured a lighted zeppelin and a flock of sheep. His latest spectacle to come to the Wade Thompson Drill Hall is Everything that happened and would happen, running June 3-9. Originally staged in a former railway station in Manchester, the 160-minute intermissionless piece, reconfigured for the armory, combines unedited footage from Euronews’s No Comment, music from John Cage’s “Europeras 1&2,” and text based on Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. “Heiner Goebbels is an artist who defies classification. Composer, visual artist, theatrical pioneer, philosopher, and poet of the stage, he has for decades created compelling productions using a wide variety of performers,” armory artistic director Pierre Audi said in a statement. “The Drill Hall thrives on art forms flirting with each other, teasing us, provoking us, challenging us. Goebbels is the ring master par excellence who offers us a production especially inspired by the armory space. The result is an immersive experience that leaves each of us, the spectators, with our own experience and interpretation.”

The work, which was co-commissioned by Park Avenue Armory, 14—18 Now, Artangel, and Ruhrtriennale and explores a century of world history, is conceived and directed by Goebbels, with lighting by Goebbels and John Brown, sound by Willi Bopp, and video by Rene Liebert, with five musicians (Camille Emaille, Gianni Gebbia, Cécile Lartigau, Léo Maurel, Nicolas Perrin) and twelve performers and dancers (Juan Felipe Amaya Gonzalez, Sandhya Daemgen, Antoine Effroy, Ismeni Espejel, Montserrat Gardó Castillo, Freddy Houndekindo, Tuan Ly, Thanh Nguyễn Duy, John Rowley, Annegret Schalke, Ildikó Tóth, Tyra Wigg). On June 6 at 5:30, Goebbels will take part in an artist talk with Gelsey Bell.

GARY: A SEQUEL TO TITUS ANDRONICUS

Gary (Nathan Lane) and Janice (Kristine Nielsen) have got quite a cleaning job ahead of them in Taylor Mac’s Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Booth Theatre
222 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 16, $39 – $169
shubert.nyc/theatres/booth

Downtown fave Taylor Mac makes quite an impression with his Broadway debut, the eminently strange and hysterically funny Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus. The play is set just after the bloodbath that concludes Shakespeare’s violent tragedy and is prefaced by a monologue by a midwife named Carol (Julie White), who self-referentially explains directly to the audience, “Like God, a sequel hides inside an ending: / When time is up you pray that it’s extending. / For life, to the cultured, and to the philistine / Once felt, is craved ’til thrills become routine. / But once routine the thrills, to thrill, must grow. / And if they don’t, an outrage starts to show. / So double up on savagery and war: / To satisfy you multiply the gore.” She introduces not only the rhythmic nature of the dialogue and the British accents all three characters will speak in but also the Monty Python-like comedy of spurting blood in which anything goes and no joke is too high or low. The Clown (named Gary by Mac and portrayed with extra relish by Nathan Lane), who had delivered a letter to Saturninus in the original Bard play, has avoided execution by agreeing to become a maid. Little does he know that he will have to work with the stern, humorless Janice (Kristine Nielsen) to clean up more than a thousand ragged bodies piled high in the royal banquet room, a fate perhaps worse than death.

Carol (Julie White) find herself in an icky predicament in Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

“I always was a clown who hated clowns,” Gary, who used to juggle pigeons on the street, confesses to the bodies. Belittled by Janice, he tells her he is “more like an everyman who’s a nobody else” and shares his dream of becoming a fool, which he describes as “a clown with ambition.” (Master clown and actor Bill Irwin is credited with the movement.) Janice teaches him the ropes, which involves thoroughly eliminating the remaining gas from each victim and then sucking out their innards and blood using two separate hoses. Mac includes a parade of flatulence and penis jokes that are not the usual Broadway fare while also taking on the current political climate in America. “Ya think the streets are all clean and nifty? Ya know as well as I it’s a hell on earth out there and only getting worse, what with the autocracy turned to a democracy turning back to an autocracy, as we speak,” Janice, who refuses to talk in rhymes or Iambic pentameter, says. A moment later, Gary bursts into tears and Janice uncaringly asks, “What ya crying for?” He answers, “The state of the world.”

The puns and buffoonery keep on coming as Pulitzer Prize finalist Mac (A 24-Decade History of Popular Music) and five-time Tony Award-winning director George C. Wolfe (Angels in America, Topdog/Underdog) push Janice, Carol, and Gary deeper into the mess left behind by the powers that be. The near-endless supply of dead people on Santo Loquasto’s imaginative set evokes the casualties of wars waged by tyrannical governments. “Seems the casualty is how casual it is,” Gary opines. But there are also glimmers of hope. Explaining the surprising emotions he experienced when he was barely saved from being hanged and saw the sky as if for the first time, Gary says to Janice, “Once ya feel that, it’s proof, aint’ it? Proof ya don’t gotta live your life accepting the muck.” He believes he can save the world, which Mac thinks everyone is capable of. Referring to the court, Gary says, “If two maids could turn the hopelessness of a massacre into a coup of beauty, they too can imagine a better world.”

Gary (Nathan Lane) impresses Janice (Kristine Nielsen) for a moment in Broadway comedy (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Tony winners Lane (Angels in America, The Producers) and White (The Little Dog Laughed, Airline Highway) and Tony nominee and Obie winner Nielsen (Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Dog Opera) have a blast together. At the last moment, Andrea Martin, who was cast as Janice, got hurt and had to leave the show, so Nielsen moved from Carol to Janice and White came on as Carol, creating a formidable comic trio with a lot to say about society while making the audience laugh itself silly.

Mac, who uses the gender pronoun “judy,” delivers some grand pronouncements without becoming preachy, getting right to the point when Gary declares that the next step should be “not a violent coup. An artistic one. An onslaught of ingenuity that’s a transformation of the calamity we got here. A sort of theatrical revenge on the Andronicus revenge. A comedy revenge to end all revenge. Well, not just a comedy. A sorta folly. Not a spectacle. Or a comedy folly that is a spectacle. Sorta a machination. That’s full of laughter. But more than laughs. But with the laughs. Well, sorta a thinking man’s laughter. But could be a knee-slapper.” Which is just what Mac’s play is.

RED BULL THEATER: MAC BETH

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

Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 9, $77-$117
212-352-3101
www.redbulltheater.com

Erica Schmidt’s beautifully frenetic Shakespeare adaptation Mac Beth — yes, she has made the title two words, perhaps to emphasize the more feminine second half of the title — is an exhilarating demonstration of grrl power, ratcheted up to the nth degree. The Red Bull production, which continues at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through June 9, is set at a girls school where seven students enact an all-female version of Macbeth. They are dressed in schoolgirl uniforms of buttoned white shirts under tartan tops and skirts, with bloodred socks reaching up to their knees; aggressively ominous and gender-neutral hooded capes are added for the Weird Sisters. (The costumes are by Jessica Pabst.) Catherine Cornell’s set juts into the audience, covered in fake grass with a partially overturned couch, an iron bathtub, a campfire, and water-filled craters, as if the aftermath of a wild sorority bash. (When the characters imbibe, they do so from red plastic cups, a party staple.) And although they speak in the traditional iambic pentameter, they don’t disguise their voices to be more adult, instead sounding like a bunch of kids invigorated by putting on a show exactly the way they want to.

The Weird Sisters (Sharlene Cruz, AnnaSophia Robb, and Sophie Kelly-Hedrick) stir the boiling cauldron in Mac Beth (photo by Richard Termine)

Macbeth (Isabelle Fuhrman) is returning from a successful military campaign with the loyal Banquo (Ayana Workman) when they come upon three witches (AnnaSophia Robb, Sophie Kelly-Hedrick, and Sharlene Cruz, who play multiple roles) who predict that Macbeth will become Thane of Cawdor, then king, while Banquo’s sons will one day rule. Fear, jealousy, and revenge take over as the power grab is on, but with delicious twists; in the Bard’s day, his plays were performed by an all-male cast, but this twenty-first-century all-woman cast — armed with smartphones — revels in the gender shifts without altering the original text. “Are you a man?” Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) asks her husband. Facing a ghost (hysterically played by Workman), Macbeth declares, “What man dare, I dare: be alive again, / And dare me to the desert with thy sword; / If trembling I inhabit then, protest me / The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow! / Unreal mock’ry, hence!” It’s as if they are caught up in a teenage horror flick, with all the adolescent tropes in place but seen only from the girls’ point of view. Even one of the witches’ prophecies takes on new meaning when she predicts, “Be bloody, bold, and resolute: laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.” At one point Lady Macbeth tells a witch, “Unsex me here.”

AnnaSophia Robb and Sophie Kelly-Hedrick play witches and other characters in Bard play set at a girls school (photo by Richard Termine)

Schmidt’s (A Month in the Country, Invasion!) breathlessly paced version flies by in a furious ninety minutes, both sexy and sinister, gleefully performed by the terrific cast led by Fuhrman’s (All the Fine Boys, Orphan) tortured Macbeth and Mendes’s (Marys Seacole, Orange Is the New Black) malevolent Lady Macbeth. Robb (The Carrie Diaries, Bridge to Terabithia), NYU Tisch freshman Kelly-Hedrick, and recent CCNY grad Cruz make strong off-Broadway debuts, playing the witches as well as Duncan, Malcolm, Fleance, Rosse, Angus, Lenox, and other minor characters; in particular, Kelly-Hedrick captures the essence of girlhood — tinged with menace — in her squeaky delivery. Schmidt’s inventive staging also boasts a thrilling storm, a creepy doll, and a touch of gymnastics, although if there was one more loud bang against the tub I was going to scream. Schmidt was inspired to revisit Macbeth by reading stories about girls being murdered in the woods. In Mac Beth, she takes back the power, putting the girls in charge in a gender swap that is as exciting as it is, in this day and age, necessary. Schmidt makes us look at the bloody power plays of Scottish kings as if they are the social dominance battles of high school — and vice versa — and every audience member comes out a winner.