this week in theater

TICKET ALERT: BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH IN LETTERS LIVE NEW YORK

Benedict Cumberbatch and special guests will perform Letters Live at the Town Hall May 18-19

Who: Benedict Cumberbatch and surprise guests
What: Letters Live New York
Where: The Town Hall, 123 West 43rd St. between Sixth Ave. & Broadway, 212-997-6661
When: Friday, May 18, and Saturday, May 19, $62-$202 (use presale code LLNYC), 8:00
Why: On May 18-19, Letters Live will make its New York City debut, with Oscar nominee and Olivier and Emmy winner Benedict Cumberbatch and special guests reading letters at the Town Hall. Past events have featured letters by David Bowie, Mohandas Gandhi, Maya Angelou, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Kurt Vonnegut, Charlotte Brontë, Tom Hanks, Katherine Hepburn, Richard Burton, Patti Smith, Abraham Lincoln, James Baldwin, and Che Guevara, read by Gillian Anderson, Sir Ian McKellen, Kylie Minogue, Russell Brand, Thandie Newton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rose McGowan, LeVar Burton, Mark Hamill, Anjelica Huston, James Corden, Oscar Isaac, Mary J Blige, Jude Law, Nick Cave, Sir Ben Kingsley, and others. Presale tickets for the epistolary presentation, which was inspired by Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note anthologies and Simon Garfield’s To the Letter, are now available using the code LLNYC. Part of the proceeds will be donated to 826NYC and the Entertainment Industry Foundation.

FREE TICKET ALERT: A PRELUDE TO THE SHED

prelude-180403

A PRELUDE TO THE SHED
Tuesday, May 1, to Sunday, May 13, free with advance tickets
Tenth Ave. at West Thirty-First Sts. (entrance on West Thirty-First)
theshed.org

If you’ve wondered what that strangely curious building going up on West Thirtieth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves. is, we now know. It’s called the Shed, which bills itself as “the first arts center designed to commission, produce, and present all types of performing arts, visual arts, and popular culture.” The Shed, a 200,000-square-foot structure designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with the Rockwell Group, will open next spring with intriguing, exciting projects by Steve McQueen and Quincy Jones; Gerhard Richter and Steve Reich; Anne Carson with Ben Whishaw and Renée Fleming; Trisha Donnelly; Agnes Denes; and others. “The original idea for the Shed was relatively simple: provide a place for artists working in all disciplines to make and present work for audiences from all walks of life,” Shed artistic director and CEO Alex Poots, formerly director of the Park Ave. Armory, said in a statement. “Our opening programs begin to show how these artists, art forms, and audiences can thrive together under one roof.” But before the Shed officially opens, it will be holding a preopening program, “A Prelude to the Shed,” in a flexible, transformable venue in an undeveloped lot at Tenth Ave. and West Thirty-First St., designed by architect Kunlé Adeyemi of NLÉ Works and conceptual artist Tino Sehgal. “‘A Prelude to the Shed’ is an exploration of architecture as an extension of human body, culture, and environment. Can architecture be more human?” Adeyemi explained in a statement. “This curiosity led us to reconfigure a steel shed into a comfortable interface to interact with people physically; inside and outside, in light and darkness, individually and collectively. Using simple technologies, we made the structure so that it can be moved and transformed by people, enabling its participation in different formats of art, education, events, and public life.”

“A Prelude to the Shed” takes place May 1-13 (rendering courtesy of NLÉ Works)

From May 1 to 13, visitors with advance free tickets can see live music and dance, panel discussions, art installations, and more. (There should be some walk-up availability as well.) Each session includes Sehgal’s continuous, immersive dance/sound piece This variation, which interacts with choreographer William Forsythe’s Pas de Deux Cent Douze, a reimagining of the central duet from his 1987 ballet In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. On some nights, Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray will lead “D.R.E.A.M. Ring Dance Battles,” part of FlexNYC. Several nights will feature live solo concerts by ABRA, Arca, and Azealia Banks; on other nights there will be panel discussions organized by Bard professor Dorothea von Hantelmann with Shed senior program adviser Hans Ulrich Obrist and chief science and technology officer Kevin Slavin. Among the topics are “Transformative Topologies: Past, Present, and Future Functions of Art Institutions,” “Beyond the Mind/Body Division: Neuroscience, Technology, Spirituality,” “Agnes Denes: Animale, Rationale, Mortale,” and “A Global Dialogue That Is Not Globalization,” boasting such international thinkers as Manthia Diawara, Tim Morton, Avital Ronell, Barbara Browning, Moncell Durden, Nelson George, Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson, Akeel Bilgrami, Joy Connolly, Tim Ingold, Emily Segal, and Richard Sennett. And on May 5 and 12 at 11:30 am, Asad Raza, Jeff Dolven, and D. Graham Burnett’s “Schema for a School” experimental course for students will be open to the public. “Prelude” will also pay tribute to architect Cedric Price’s unrealized 1961 building “The Fun Palace” with an archival interactive display. We’re out of breath already, and this is only the preopening. So we’ll let von Hantelmann sum it all up: “Art institutions — museums, exhibitions, theaters, concert halls, festivals — have always been spaces in which a social structure becomes manifest. To find ritual forms that correspond to contemporary forms of life and to the social structures of the early twenty-first century, that is the aspiration to which this project is dedicated.”

SURFER GIRL

surfer girl

The Foley Gallery
59 Orchard St. between Grand & Hester Sts.
Tuesday & Wednesday, April 10 – May 30, $30 ($15 flash sale now), 7:30
animustheatre.org
www.foleygallery.com

In November 2014, Animus Theatre Company presented a twelve-hour reading festival at Circle in the Square of Leslye Headland’s “Sin Cycle Plays,” consisting of Assistance, Bachelorette, Cinephilia, Reverb, Surfer Girl, and The Accidental Blonde (with one more to come). On Tuesdays and Wednesdays from April 10 to May 30, the company, in association with the Dirty Blondes Theater Company, will be taking Headland’s Surfer Girl in a whole new direction. The New York premiere of the work moves to a conceptual performative environment designed by painter and installation artist Chaney Trotter at the Foley Gallery on the Lower East Side, instead of its originally intended, more traditional theater setting. Every week, the one-woman show will pair a different actress (Courtney Shaw, Erin Leigh Schmoyer, Karen Eilbacher, Amy Northup, Sara Canter, and three TBA) with one of four directors (Alex Correia, Taphat Tawil, Jen Wineman, and Noah Himmelstein). Thus, Surfer Girl, which investigates the sin of sloth, will be seen through multiple lenses by Animus because of the changing performers and directors, each performance different from the others. There will also be a cash bar with beer and wine for postshow mingling; opening night will be followed by a discussion with Headland, who has also written and/or directed the films Bachelorette, Assistance, About Last Night, and Sleeping with Other People and is currently making an untitled Netflix series with producer Amy Poehler and star Natasha Lyonne.

THREE TALL WOMEN

Laurie Metcalf helps Glenda Jackson to her favorite chair as Alison Pill looks on in Three Tall Women (photo © Brigitte Lacombe)

Golden Theatre
252 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 24, $47 – $159
threetallwomenbroadway.com

Edward Albee’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Three Tall Women, is finally making its Broadway debut, in an elegant, exquisitely rendered production directed by Joe Mantello at the Golden Theatre, featuring American actress Laurie Metcalf, Canadian actress Alison Pill, and British legend Glenda Jackson. The two-act intermissionless play, an ingenious depiction of aging, among other things, takes place in the 1990s in the lush bedroom of a sneering, wealthy widow identified in the program as A (Jackson), who is in her early nineties. She lives with her wisecracking, pessimistic caretaker, B (Metcalf), who is fifty-two. They have been joined by the deadly serious C (Pill), a twenty-six-year-old sharply dressed lawyer who needs A to sign some forms she’s been ignoring. Each woman represents a different class and generation, youth, middle age, and old age, each with different values, desires, and expectations, but as B likes to point out, everyone is on their way toward death. “Start in young,” she says, referring to children. “Make ’em aware that they’ve got only a little time. Make ’em aware that they’re dying from the minute they’re alive.” Amid visits to the bathroom, anecdotes about the past, and legal papers to be signed, the women deliver rapid comebacks with plenty of snark as they consider the state of their lives. But then a paradigm shift occurs, and in the second act there is a slight but key change in the set and in the characters, who are no longer quite what they were previously. Once the audience realizes what is happening, there are likely to be more than a few thrilled gasps of recognition as Albee peers ever deeper into the life of the female species, leading to an utterly breathtaking finale.

Glenda Jackson holds court in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women at the Golden Theatre (photo © Brigitte Lacombe)

Three Tall Women was inspired by Albee’s troubled relationship with his adoptive mother. “We had managed to make each other very unhappy over the years, but I was past all that, though I think she was not,” Albee wrote in the introduction to the published 1994 edition of the play. “I harbor no ill-will toward her; it is true I did not like her much, could not abide her prejudices, her loathings, her paranoias, but I did admire her pride, her sense of self. . . . No, it was not a revenge piece I was after, and I was not interested in ‘coming to terms’ with my feelings toward her.” It is precisely for those reasons that Three Tall Women works so well. There are no heroes or villains, no black-and-white depictions of good and evil. A, B, and C all have their own strengths and weaknesses; despite the specificity of their lives, they are everywoman, experiencing the ups and downs of everyday existence, since death is the great equalizer. Few male playwrights have drafted such female characters as Albee, who also displayed that vast skill in such other works as The Lady from Dubuque; The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Pulitzer Prize winners A Delicate Balance and Seascape.

Alison Pill, Glenda Jackson, and Laurie Metcalf star in Broadway debut of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women (photo © Brigitte Lacombe)

The eighty-one-year-old Jackson (Strange Interlude, A Touch of Class), in a tight hairstyle that is a character unto itself, is feisty and glamorous in her first Broadway role since she was nominated for a Tony in Macbeth in 1988, having left acting to pursue a career in politics, serving as an MP from 1992 to 2015; her A is a bigoted wealthy widow, mother, and former grande dame who is refusing to come to terms with the maladies that befall the elderly, no matter how rich they might be. The sixty-two-year-old Metcalf (A Doll’s House Part 2, The Other Place) gives a homey charm to the sarcastic spinster B. And the thirty-two-year-old Pill (Blackbird, The Lieutenant of Inishmore) holds her own as the practical C, who has dreams of a great future for herself despite seeing what lies ahead. (Among the other trios to have played the three women are Myra Carter, Marian Seldes, and Jordan Baker at the Vineyard in 1994 and Maggie Smith, Frances de la Tour, and Anastasia Hille in the West End that same year.) Two-time Tony winner Mantello (The Humans, Love! Valour! Compassion!) lets the three actresses strut their stuff with minimal intrusion on Miriam Buether’s opulent bedroom set, which is centered by the stately bed itself, here representing birth, sex, and, ultimately, death.

KING LEAR

Sir Antony Sher bids William Shakespeare adieu in final Bard role (photo by Ellie Kurttz)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
April 7-29, $35-$125, 7:30 (plus 1:30 and 3:00 weekend matinees)
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has a thing for King Lear. Since 2007, it has presented three major productions, starring Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Derek Jacobi, and Frank Langella. During that time period, New York has also seen the tragic ruler portrayed by John Lithgow at the Delacorte, Michael Pennington at TFANA, and Sam Waterston and Kevin Kline at the Public. Now comes sixty-eight-year-old South African-born English actor Sir Antony Sher, in what is being billed as his final Shakespeare role. The two-time Olivier Award winner, Tony nominee, and longtime Royal Shakespeare Company member has previously played the Fool in Lear, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Prospero in The Tempest, Falstaff in both parts of Henry IV at BAM, Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, and the title characters in Richard III, Titus Andronicus, and Macbeth. The RSC production runs at the BAM Harvey April 7-29, directed by Gregory Doran (Sher’s longtime partner), with sets by Niki Turner, lighting by Tim Mitchell, and music by Ilona Sekacz. The cast also features Nia Gwynne as Goneril, Kelly Williams as Regan, Mimi Ndiweni as Cordelia, and Graham Turner as the Fool. In conjunction with the show, RSC assistant director Anna Girvan and members of the company will give a class on April 24 at 1:00 ($25) at the Mark Morris Dance Center “for emerging professional actors,” and Girvan and company members will lead the open workshop “Inside the Storm” on April 26 at noon ($20) at Mark Morris “for curious adult (18+) theatergoers of all abilities.”

GOLDSTEIN: A NEW MUSICAL ABOUT FAMILY

The Goldsteins finally agree on something in world premiere musical at the Actors Temple (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Actors Temple Theatre
339 West 47th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Saturday – Thursday through July 29, $79 – $99
goldsteinmusical.com
actorstempletheatre.com

A man gets a whole lot more than he bargained for when he writes a family history in Goldstein, a new musical that opened last night at the Actors Temple Theatre. The frame story of the show, which features a book by Charlie Schulman and music and lyrics by Michael Roberts, is that Louis Goldstein (Zal Owen) is a writer, recent winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his tale, and he’s at the Actors Temple as part of an authors series. “We inherit so many things from our families: the color of our eyes, our senses of humor, even our high cholesterol,” he tells the audience. “But we also inherit our stories. That’s what binds families together. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. My parents and grandparents are no longer with us, but I know in my heart they would have been proud of me for having written this book. Even now I feel their presence like they’ve never left.” Indeed, they are all still there; white sheets are removed from the old furniture on Alexander Woodward’s homey set, bringing back the Goldsteins’ past—and the Goldsteins themsevles, as Louis’s dead relatives appear and relive scenes and argue that he has done them all a disservice with his book. “You distort and deceive, you torture and twist / and, while a fact may be true, its truth may be missed,” his grandfather Louie (Jim Stanek) sings. Louie’s wife, Zelda (Amie Bermowitz), adds, “You write with an axe / but, fine, take all your lies.” Louis handles it all rather well as he shares such stories as his grandmother falling in love with a man (Owen, who plays several parts) on the ship bringing her from Eastern Europe to America; his aunt Sherri’s (Megan McGinnis) desire to go to medical school; his uncle Nathan’s (Aaron Galligan-Stierle) time in the military and marriage to Eleanor (Sarah Beth Pfeifer); and his sister, Miriam (Julie Benko), who is perhaps the most practical of the clan. Not all the stories paint the Goldsteins in a positive light, but Louis sees it all as what made the family what it is, including several long-held secrets that finally come out.

Goldstein follows the ups and downs of an immigrant clan on the Lower East Side (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Goldstein is a quaint, bittersweet musical that moves seamlessly from humor to tragedy. The songs, which include “They Are Here,” “Up Ahead,” “Honest as the Day Is Long,” and “Tell Me All,” are accompanied by an unseen pianist and flutist and tend toward the conversational; there are no big, show-stopping numbers but instead light tunes that don’t get in the way of the plot. Roberts and Schulman, who previously collaborated on New York Fringe winner The Fartiste, and director Brad Rouse keep it relatively simple and straightforward. (The show is inspired by Schulman’s 2000 play The Kitchen, about eighty years in the life of one family; an early reading featured Danny Burstein, Marilyn Sokol, Rachel Botchan, and Larry Block.) Among the nice touches is the use of the center aisle as a pathway for death and birth. Owen (Fiddler on the Roof) is eminently likable as the narrator, a man facing his own personal issues, while McGinnis (Daddy Long Legs, Les Misérables) proves once again that she has a magical voice. The show fits in very well at the Actors Temple, a working shul that boasts photos and bios of such former members and worshippers as Jerry Lewis, Milton Berle, Sandy Koufax, the Three Stooges, Shelly Winters, Hank Greenberg, and Henny Youngman. While Goldstein might deal with a Jewish family, it is really about many of the immigrants who made their way to the Lower East Side in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they sought to balance assimilation with tradition, trying to establish their identity while building a family.

ROCKTOPIA

Rocktopia blends classic rock and classical music on Broadway (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The Broadway Theatre
1681 Broadway at 53rd St.
Through April 29, $39 – $187
rocktopia.com

Much of Rocktopia, which opened Tuesday night at the Broadway Theatre, is a curiosity, a blending of classic rock and classical music that in theory might be a cool idea but in execution could be problematic. Rocktopia is a different kind of jukebox musical, with no narrative, consisting of overly familiar songs performed by pop, rock, theater, reality show, and opera singers, a five-piece rock band, the thirty-person New York Contemporary Choir, and the twenty-piece New York Contemporary Symphony Orchestra. Conceived by Trans-Siberian Orchestra member and Broadway veteran Rob Evan (Jekyll and Hyde, Les Misérables) and American conductor Randall Craig Fleischer, the traveling project is an up-and-down affair, as vocal histrionics get carried away, the setlist is about as standard as it comes, and amateurish, seemingly unrelated visuals are projected onto fifteen large, vertical piano keys at the top rear of the stage. But then something magical happens, where it all suddenly comes together for an absolutely smashing last few numbers that brought the crowd to its feet, everyone singing and dancing with an intoxicating fervor.

Celtic violinist Máiréad Nesbit and vocalist Rob Evan rock out at the Broadway Theatre (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The show opens with the pairing of Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” and the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” sung by Evan and Tony Vincent (American Idiot, Jesus Christ Superstar), followed by Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” with Styx’s “Come Sail Away,” performed by Evan, Vincent (The Voice), Chloe Lowery (Trans-Siberian Orchestra), and Kimberly Nichole (The Voice). The double shot gets the point across but without any fireworks, as the melding of the two genres felt too obvious and separate. Special guest Pat Monahan of Train, who will be part of the show through April 6 (Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider is the guest April 9-15, followed by Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander April 23-29), takes center stage to get the Led out (first with Beethoven, then Puccini), but Stravinsky/Hendrix is out of place, as is Mussorgsky/U2, the latter accompanied by documentary footage of poor communities. However, it’s a thrill to see diva Alyson Cambridge, who has performed at the Met and the Washington National Opera, lend class to the festivities by singing Handel’s “Lascia ch’io pianga” and Lucio Dalla’s “Caruso” and also duetting with Evan. On nearly every song, Celtic violinist Máiréad Nesbitt sparkles, playing her fiddle as she flits about the stage like a mad fairy or sprite. There actually is a rhyme and reason for the visuals; in the online Rocktopia study guide, the evening moves from “Creation/Birth,” “Adolescence,” and “Experimentation” through “Dreams,” “Oppression/Rebellion,” and other aspects of the human condition, not that you would know that from what’s happening onstage. And we’re still trying to figure out the inclusion of John Denver in a video tribute to such dead rock stars as Jimi, Janis, Jerry, Jim, George, John, Prince, and Bowie, as well as photos of Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, and, yes, Anne Frank during the theme from Schindler’s List. Meanwhile, the woman vocalists and Nesbitt look like they just stepped out of a Mad Max movie, wearing postapocalyptic gowns designed by Cynthia Nordstrom, and Vincent appears to be doubling for Robin Lord Taylor’s Penguin on Gotham.

Rob Monahan of Train is Rocktopia’s special guest through April 6 (photo by Matthew Murphy)

And then it happens. Samuel Barber meets Queen, Beethoven takes on Journey, and Gershwin intertwines with Queen in all the ways Evan and Fleischer intended, the classical music and the classic rock coming together, weaving in and out of each other, sending electricity across a room that suddenly comes alive as one. Guitarist Tony Bruno, bassist Mat Fieldes, drummer Alex Alexander, pianist and music director Henry Aronson (Rock of Ages, Grease), Nesbitt, the choir, the orchestra, and the singers — if still not the projections — bring down the house, leaving no one in their seat. Sure, it’s cheesy and extremely safe, but it’s also tons of fun if you just let yourself go. It might not be quite the revolution Evan and Fleischer intended, and it’s far more likely to attract fans of American Idol and The Voice and baby boomers who go to Jones Beach to see 1970s retreads rather than classical music lovers who go to the Met and Lincoln Center for opera and the symphony, but you can’t have everything. And what’s wrong with a little mindless entertainment in these hard times?