this week in theater

OH, HELLO

George St. Geegland (John Mulaney) and Gil Faizon (Nick Kroll) make their Broadway debut in OH, HELLO (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lyceum Theatre
149 West 45th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 22, $59- $159
ohhellobroadway.com

It’s no mean feat to turn brief comedy sketches into feature-length productions; just ask Saturday Night Live, which has produced such critical flops as It’s Pat, A Night at the Roxbury, Superstar, The Ladies Man, and MacGruber. Yet somehow, Upright Citizens Brigade regular Nick Kroll and former SNL writer John Mulaney, who started performing as opinionated aging showbiz hangers-on Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland, respectively, in the East Village club Rififi in 2005 and later at the Cherry Lane Theatre and on the Comedy Central series Kroll Show from January 2013 to March 2015, have transformed their absurdist two-minute bits into the Broadway smash Oh, Hello, an uproarious send-up of celebrity culture and the Great White Way itself. The goofy, sloppy Faizon and the eccentric, possible serial killer St. Geegland, the hosts of the cable access show Too Much Tuna, have finally reached the big time, making it to Broadway with a play about themselves, a pair of old Upper West Side vaudeville types whose rent is suddenly going up from $75 to thousands a month. Desperate to keep their longtime abode, Faizon, who still hurts from losing a CBS announcing gig decades before, and St. Geegland, the author of the seminal works Next Stop, Ronkonkoma and Rifkin’s Dilemma, try to score a gig on NY1, as if that will make everything right. Amid self-deprecating riffs and a deep, abiding love for the music of Steely Dan, the two old guys manage to put on quite a show.

Septuagenarian Upper West Side pranksters prepare for entrance of F. Murray Abraham in OH, HELLO (photo by Joan Marcus)

Oh, Hello, named after the two men’s trademark greeting, is a clever and inventive one hundred nonstop minutes of hilarity, as fellow Georgetown grads Mulaney and Kroll — who were inspired to create the characters after seeing a pair of elderly men, attached at the hip, both purchasing a copy of Alan Alda’s autobiography Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, at the Strand — try to crack each other up as much as the audience, particularly in their offbeat, offhanded pronunciations of various words and phrases that just make no sense. Scott Pask’s ramshackle set matches Faizon and St. Geegland’s dishevelment to a T, made up of leftover detritus from other shows, including family photos from an August Wilson play. Inside references abound, some that you will get, and some that you won’t, but little does that matter. There are even jokes about Alda, Bobby Cannavale, Aziz Ansari, and Griffin Dunne — Griffin Dunne? — but it turns out that each of those actors have made surprise guest appearances on the prank show Too Much Tuna. (We got John Oliver the night we went, and the Last Week Tonight host couldn’t stop laughing, which was infectious.) Kroll and Mulaney never miss a chance at a visual gag or a ridiculous pun, from the bit of shirt peeking through Faizon’s zipper, to both of them ripping unseen tech intern Ruvi Nandan, to John Slattery and Jon Hamm supposedly serving as their understudies. Two-time Tony nominee Alex Timbers, who has directed such elaborate productions as Here Lies Love, Rocky, and Peter and the Starcatcher in addition to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, goes with the flow, relishing all of the shabby DIY madness. And yes, there is definitely too much tuna. It genuinely doesn’t matter whether you like Mulaney or Kroll individually or whether you were a fan of Kroll Show; everyone is welcome to say Oh, Hello.

REQUEST CONCERT

Danuta Stenka gives a bold, bravura performance in hypnotic revival of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s REQUEST CONCERT (photo by Richard Termine)

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: WUNSCHKONZERT
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 26-29, $25, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Danuta Stenka is absolutely mesmerizing in Request Concert, Laznia Nowa Theater and TR Warszawa’s intense, ingenious revival of German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1971 hyperrealistic play, a treatise on the state of loneliness and isolation in contemporary society. As the audience enters BAM’s intimate Fishman Space at the Fisher, Polish star Stenka (Krum, Angels in America), as Fräulein Rasch, is already onstage, standing still, midstep, returning home from her job as a stenographer. The stage, designed by Simona Biekšaitė and Zane Pihlstrom, is a studio apartment complete with kitchen, washing machine, shower, sofa bed, and bathroom in the center of the theater, on a wooden platform just off the ground. The audience is encouraged to walk around the set as Fräulein Rasch meticulously goes about her nightly routines, changing into comfy clothes, making dinner, checking the mail, and watching television, all done with an exquisite care consumed by emptiness and melancholy. She never speaks as she butters pieces of crispbread, takes drags off a cigarette, uses the (working) toilet, glances at the haute couture fashion show on TV, and pages through IKEA and Costco catalogs. Aside from a red chair, her apartment is all white and gray, small and drab yet coldly functional, with no identity of its own. It all combines for a heartbreaking portrait of solitude, made all the more sad by Stenka’s slow, studied movement and deep stares filled with longing and, perhaps, fear. The only dialogue comes from a radio program she listens to, with host Ari Shapiro (of NPR) reading letters about new lovers and happy families and playing related songs by the Beach Boys, Leonard Cohen, Bob Marley, and a band that Shapiro sings with, Pink Martini. When Fräulein Rasch sits down at her laptop, she turns on a Sims-like video game in which she has created her own alternate universe, a man, a woman, and children living in a computer-animated room based on her own surroundings. Her isolation is devastating.

Gracefully directed with sensitivity and subtlety by Yana Ross (Bambiland), Request Concert is like a modern-day version of Chantal Akerman’s 1973 minimalist classic, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, only live and in person, with the audience getting close enough to touch the performer, as there are no barriers separating Stenka from the people walking around the set, hypnotized by her every gesture; not a single action is wasted in a brave and bold tour de force. It’s so realistic that at times you’ll feel like you’re infringing on Fräulein Rasch’s privacy, wanting to look away, but you won’t be able to. We learn almost nothing about her, yet we learn everything; she is no one, yet she is everyone, the set both a zoolike cage and a mirror on ourselves. The only reason we know that she is a stenographer — a job that requires a certain anonymity and lack of personal identity, taking down the words of others with precise exactitude — is because it says so in the program. For nearly seventy-five minutes, Fräulein Rasch, and Stenka, avoids making eye contact with anyone until. . . . Well, to say more would deprive those lucky enough to score a ticket the surprise of a hypnotic finale you won’t soon forget. The show is best experienced by moving around what essentially is a living installation, following Fräulein Rasch’s captivating boredom and ritualistic behavior from every angle; standing in one place the whole time is actually unfair to those attempting to take full advantage of this unique and critical element. For those who do need to sit, there are chairs in the balcony, offering a different perspective.

PLENTY

Codename Lazar (Ken Barnett) and Susan Traherne (Rachel Weisz) unexpectedly meet at a WWII drop site in Public Theater revival of PLENTY (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Newman Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 1, $90-$95
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org

“I don’t know why anybody lives in this country,” Alice Park (Emily Bergl) tells her best friend, Susan Traherne (Rachel Weisz), at the beginning of David Hare’s Plenty, which explores the failed promise of plenty in post-WWII England. The show is being revived at the Public, where it made its U.S. debut in 1982, directed by Hare, and later moved to Broadway, where it earned four Tony nominations, including Best Play. This first major New York City revival is a compelling if not wholly successful production that travels back and forth in time, shuffling between 1943 and 1962 in nonlinear fashion. The story centers on Susan, a strong woman who speaks her mind, even as she starts losing control of it. She goes from being a secret courier in France during the war to a diplomat’s wife to a feminist who refuses to rely on a man to make her happy. “I’d like to change everything but I don’t know how,” she tells Alice. Susan meets a series of men she carefully manipulates, from her caring dullard of a husband, Raymond Brock (a finely mustachioed Corey Stoll), who works for old-fashioned ambassador Leonard Darwin (the always excellent Byron Cummings), and Mick (LeRoy McClain), a potential baby daddy, to Sir Andrew Charleson (Paul Niebanck), head of the Foreign Office, and Codename Lazar (Ken Barnett), an English paratrooper. Susan declares exactly what she’s thinking, not worried about who she might offend or how it will affect her marriage or reputation. But true happiness is just out of reach, a parable of England’s efforts to resurrect itself after the war. “This is hell,” Susan says. “No doubt,” Alice agrees, a far cry from the “peace and plenty” they, and all of England, were expecting.

The English argue over their future in return of David Hare’s PLENTY to Public Theater (photo by Joan Marcus)

Hare is undergoing quite a resurgence recently, with major revivals of Skylight on Broadway and The Judas Kiss at BAM (and around the world) and his latest film, Denial, which he wrote for director Mick Jackson, now in theaters, also starring Weisz. In Plenty, Weisz, in the role originated by Kate Nelligan and later played on film by Meryl Streep in 1985 and onstage in London by Cate Blanchett in 1999, is superb as Susan, bringing a wide range of emotions to a character whose fears are getting the best of her even as she fights for her personal freedom. (The film also starred Tracey Ullman as Alice, Charles Dance as Brock, John Gielgud as Darwin, Sting as Mick, Ian McKellen as Charleson, and Sam Neill as Lazar; the original Public Theater production featured Nelligan, Edward Herrmann, Kelsey Grammer, and Dominic Chianese.) Some of the scenes fall flat, feeling out-of-date, particularly when Susan, Brock, and the aptly named Darwin meet with the Burmese ambassador (Pun Bandhu) and his wife (Ann Sanders) and briefly discuss the Suez Canal crisis, which has little impact on contemporary American audiences. Mike Britton’s set features a large horizontal wall that rotates to change scenes, with interstitial jazz by David Van Tieghem as the story goes from Susan and Brock’s house to Darwin’s office to a WWII drop site. Five-time Tony-nominated director David Leveaux (Nine, Anna Christie) never quite reaches a steady narrative flow, as the jumps in time can be confusing. In addition, many of the British references get lost as the disillusioned Susan represents the highs and the lows, the promise and the failure experienced by the country over the course of thirty years. “Oh yes. New Europe. Yes yes,” Darwin says to Brock and Susan early on. “Reconstruction. Massive. Massive work of reconstruction. Jobs. Ideals. Marvellous. Marvellous time to be alive in Europe. No end of it. Roads to be built. People to be educated. Land to be tilled. Lots to get on with. . . . Have another gin.” Or as Brock puts it, “Of course our people are dull, they’re stuffy, they’re death. But what other world do I have?” It’s a world that Susan won’t accept, and it destroys her as well as nearly all those around her.

TICKET ALERT — A ONE-NIGHT-ONLY PRESENTATION: LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE

love-loss-and-what-i-wore

Who: Lucy DeVito, Carol Kane, Natasha Lyonne, Rosie O’Donnell, Tracee Ellis Ross
What: One-night-only reading of Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron’s Love, Loss, and What I Wore
Where: Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd St. Y, 1395 Lexington Ave. at 92nd St., 212-415-5500
When: Sunday, February 5, $15-$48, 8:00
Why: In August 2008, Linda Lavin, Karyn Quackenbush, Leslie Kritzer, Kathy Najimy, and Sara Chase starred in a benefit performance of Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron’s new play, Love, Loss, and What I Wore, a series of monologues based on the 1995 book by Ilene Beckerman that explores the female condition in contemporary America through discussions about clothing and accessories. Over the years, in other benefits, off-Broadway runs, and national tours, the show has become a rite of passage for actresses and comedians; cast members have included Marlo Thomas, Tyne Daly, Blythe Danner, Samantha Bee, Veanne Cox, Sally Struthers, Rhea Perlman, America Ferrera, Brooke Shields, Debi Mazar, Jane Lynch, Christine Lahti, Kristin Chenoweth, Joy Behar, Parker Posey, Marian Seldes, Melissa Joan Hart, Fran Drescher, Florence Henderson, and Kristen Wiig, among many others. Now the 92nd St. Y, in conjunction with original producer Daryl Roth, is presenting a one-night-only reading of the play, featuring Lucy DeVito, Carol Kane, Natasha Lyonne, Rosie O’Donnell, and Tracee Ellis Ross and directed by Karen Carpenter, who helmed the original New York and Los Angeles productions; O’Donnell and Lyonne were in the original cast at the Westside Theatre in 2009, followed shortly by DeVito, Ross, and Kane. The special event isn’t until February, but tickets are already going fast, especially at such reasonable prices.

LETTER TO A MAN

Mikhail Baryshnikov goes inside the mind of Vaslav Nijinsky in Robert Wilson’s LETTER TO A MAN (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

BAM Harvey
651 Fulton St.
October 15-30, $35-$130
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Robert Wilson and Mikhail Baryshnikov, who teamed with Willem Dafoe in 2014 at BAM for The Old Woman, have returned to Brooklyn for another avant-Expressionist multimedia marvel, Letter to a Man. Continuing at the Harvey through October 30, the mostly one-man show is based on the diaries of Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, who electrified the dance world before his schizophrenia had him in and out of mental institutions from 1919, when he was twenty-nine, until his death in 1950 at the age of sixty-one. Conceived, directed, and designed by Wilson, who has previously dazzled BAM audiences with such consciousness-expanding works as The Blue Rider, Einstein on the Beach, and Woyczeck, Letter to a Man is built around snippets from the diary Nijinsky kept in early 1919, shortly before being hospitalized for the first time. Performed by Baryshnikov, dressed in a sharp tuxedo and white-painted face, and various disembodied voices as if they’re echoing in Nijinsky’s head, the text, adapted by Christian Dumais-Lvowski and filled with references to God, sex, war, and death, features such devastating lines as “I am standing in front of a precipice into which I may fall. I am afraid to fall,” “I will eat everyone I can get hold of. I will stop at nothing,” and “I went in the direction of the abyss.” Baryshnikov moves exquisitely across the stage, with small dance flourishes that are breathtaking, particularly because no footage of Nijinsky performing exists. A. J. Weissbard boldly lights Wilson’s surreal set, with vaudeville-style flashing stage lights in the front, mesmerizing shades of white and blue, and dark shadows as Baryshnikov stands in front of a large window that could be in an asylum or a church. Wilson includes such elements as a burning cross, a fiery red circle that references Nijinsky’s paranoid drawings of eyes in the diaries, and branches that evoke Nijinsky’s only extant choreographic work, Afternoon of a Faun.

Mikhail Baryshnikov acts out Vaslav Nijinsky’s inner demons in multimedia work at BAM (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The show gets its title from Nijinsky’s fourth notebook, which consists of letters he wrote but never sent; in this case, the “man” in question is Ballets Russes founder and artistic director Sergei Diaghilev, who is never specifically named in the diaries but had a severe falling out with his star dancer and lover after Nijinsky married Romola de Pulszky in September 1913. Although Wilson is treading on familiar territory from a technical standpoint, Letter to a Man is still a mind-blowing tribute to both Nijinsky and Baryshnikov, who along with Rudolf Nureyev redefined ballet in the twentieth century. The music, selected by Hal Willner, ranges from classical to pop, from Arvo Pärt and Henry Mancini to Tom Waits’s “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” and Napoleon XIV’s novelty hit, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!,” bringing levity to the proceedings as Nijinsky’s battle with mental illness intensifies. The mysterious projections are by Tomek Jeziorski; Jacques Reynaud designed Baryshnikov’s costumes, which include a straitjacket, while choreographer Lucinda Childs collaborated on the movement. As with most of Wilson’s works, there are many striking, memorable images that are likely to stay with you for a long time, from Baryshnikov sitting in a chair up on a wall in an almost blindingly white space to him slowly inching backward on a dark beam, moving away from the aforementioned large window, from him approaching a projection of a battlefield to performing a little soft shoe. It’s a glowing tribute that is fraught with sadness, memorializing a special dancer who was overcome by a debilitating disease.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: REQUEST CONCERT

Danuta Stenka (KRUM) returns to BAM in one-woman show, REQUEST CONCERT, at BAM Fisher (photo by Klaudyna Schubert)

WUNSCHKONZERT
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 26-29, $25, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Polish companies Laznia Nowa Theater and TR Warszawa (Nosferatu, Festen) have teamed up for Request Concert, a one-character show running at the BAM Fisher October 26-29. Translated by Danuta Żmij-Zielińska from German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1971 hyperrealistic play, Request Concert features Danuta Stenka as Fräulein Rasch, an average woman going about her average life, a fifty-year-old stenographer returning home after a day at work. Taking aim at loneliness in modern society, the seventy-five-minute production is directed by Yana Ross, with music by Aśka Grochulska and Tomasz Wyszomirski, lighting by Mats Öhlin, and multimedia set design by Simona Biekšaitė. “Karl Marx defines a time ripe for revolution when the masses are fed up with oppression and the elite is no longer able to control them,” Ross explained shortly before the play’s premiere in Poland. “But what if the financial elite has adapted with the times and worked out a way to keep the masses more or less occupied with consumerism, keeping them busy with enough daily small rewards and pleasures to forget the pain of a senseless cycle of life?” All tickets for the dialogue-free show, being staged in the round at the intimate Fishman Space, are $25, and attendees are encouraged to walk around to experience Fräulein Rasch’s futility from all angles.

PARIS!

Company XIV shows off its can-can-cans in latest immersive Baroque burlesque production (photo by Mark Shelby Perry)

The Irondale Center
85 South Oxford St. between Fulton St. & Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn
Monday to Saturday through November 12, $25 to $525
866-811-4111
companyxiv.com
www.irondale.org

It takes a while for Company XIV’s latest decadent Baroque burlesque extravaganza, Paris!, to get cooking, but once it does, it quickly goes from hot, hot, hot to sizzling. Troupe founder and director Austin McCormick, who has previously reimagined such fairy-tales as Cinderella, Pinocchio, and Snow White, revisits the myth of Paris and the golden apple, which Company XIV first tackled in its streamlined 2012 dance-theater-opera, Judge Me Paris. The company goes all out this time in its temporary new space, the Irondale Center in Fort Greene, which they have outfitted in Louis XIV grandeur, with ornate red velvet couches and chairs, numerous chandeliers, and costumed greeters welcoming you to the festivities. Before the show starts, you can walk around the main floor and the balcony, where some of the performers are getting ready and the heady enticements begin. The first act is surprisingly ordinary for Company XIV, offering little that is new as the emcee, the half-man, half-woman Zeus/Fifi (Charlotte Bydwell), introduces the story, in which the mortal shepherd Paris (Jakob Karr) must decide which of three goddesses — Venus (Storm Marrero), Pallas Athena (Marcy Richardson), or Juno (Randall Scotting) — deserves the golden apple. “My lovely goddesses! Your time has come,” Zeus announces. “Tighten your corsets, stuff your bustiers, dot your moles, and present your most delicious selves to our virginal judge. His ears are half-open, his eyes are half-closed, and his skin is untouched. . . . This young man wants much and it’s yours to give.” There’s a beautiful duet by Paris and Mercury (Todd Hanebrink) and a rather naughty sheep orgy, but things really start to hit their stride in the second act, as soprano Richardson dazzles the audience with unique versions of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” and Adele’s “Skyfall” and performing breathtaking feats on the pole. Countertenor Scotting scores big with two songs by Handel and Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man,” a very funny gender-twisting spoof. In the short third act, Marrero brings the house down with stirring renditions of Daughter’s “Youth” and Rihanna’s “Love on the Brain” as Paris makes his choice.

Venus (Marcy Richardson) reaches new heights in Company XIV’s PARIS (photo by Mark Shelby Perry)

Over the last few years, while searching for a permanent home, Company XIV has performed at such venues as the Minetta Lane Theatre, 428 Lafayette St. across from the Public, and the 303 Bond Street Theatre in an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn; they have found quite a treasure in the Irondale Center, formerly the auditorium of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, which they have outfitted in regal splendor. Throughout the tale, the ensemble of Nicole von Arx, Nicholas Katen, Mark Osmundsen, Cara Seymour, and Taner Van Kuren, wearing various body-revealing get-ups courtesy of the endlessly inventive Zane Pihlstrom, who also designed the set, dances in ever-changing configurations, mixing comic bits into their sexy numbers and occasionally making their way through the audience, where the patrons can order drinks and snacks all night long. (The actors also provide entertainment during the two intermissions, including a lovely flute and cello duet and a playful pregnancy vignette.) The relatively inconsequential text is by Jeff Takacs (with contributions from Bydwell), with fanciful lighting by Jeanette Yew. The emcee is repetitive and takes up too much time, but the rest of the characters excel as they go from group can-cans to intimate solos, duets, and trios. Director and choreographer McCormick limits the complex acrobatic elements of the troupe, focusing more on dance and song, like Martha Graham gone wild, and it works well here, after a slow start. Paris! runs through November 12 — tickets begin at $25 and go up to $525 for those VIPs who want to party like it’s 1699 — and will be followed by Company XIV’s annual holiday favorite, Nutcracker Rouge.