this week in theater

INDECENT

INDECENT takes audiences behind the scenes of controversial drama THE GOD OF VENGEANCE (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Vineyard Theatre
Gertrude and Irving Dimson Theatre
108 East 15th St. between Union Square East & Irving Pl.
Extended through June 19
www.vineyardtheatre.org

A quartet of current or returning shows in New York City are as much about their back stories as the central plays themselves, all of which date from the 1920s. The first two are straight-up revivals, reconstructed after years of intense research: The National Yiddish Theatre has resurrected The Golden Bride, from the Golden Age of Yiddish theater; the operetta returns to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in July following a widely hailed production at the end of last year. I’ll Say She Is at the Connelly Theater revives the Marx Brothers’ long-lost Broadway debut, lovingly patched together by Groucho impersonator Noah Diamond. The two others are plays-within-plays. On Broadway at the Music Box Theatre, Shuffle Along goes behind the scenes to detail “the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.” And now, in the Vineyard Theatre’s New York premiere of Indecent, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) and director Rebecca Taichman (Familiar, Marie Antoinette) take a powerful look at Sholem Asch’s controversial drama The God of Vengeance, which, when it came to Broadway in 1923, resulted in the arrest of members of the cast and crew on obscenity charges. (The new play was inspired by Taichman and Rebecca Rugg’s 2000 The People vs. the God of Vengeance.) The hundred-minute show alternates between scenes from Asch’s (Max Gordon Moore) first play and what went into the creation of The God of Vengeance, which was decried as being anti-Semitic even by Asch’s friends and colleagues, as it tells the story of a devout Jewish man (Tom Nelis) who is running a brothel in his basement in order to be able to afford a better life for his daughter (Adina Verson), who instead falls in love with one of the prostitutes (Katrina Lenk). Lemml (Richard Topol) serves as the narrator of Indecent, explaining how he became the stage manager of The God of Vengeance as it toured Europe and America but is unable to remember how the play ends.

Madje (Adina Verson) and Sholem (Max Gordon Moore) have no idea what a furor his first play will cause (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Much of the cast takes on multiple roles; Nelis also portrays Asch’s mentor as well as Rudolph Schildkraut, the star of The God of Vengeance, Verson is also Asch’s wife, Madje, and Steven Rattazzi plays another colleague of Asch’s in addition to producer Harry Weinberger. (The excellent cast also features Mimi Lieber.) Even the Klezmer musicians, violinist Lisa Gutkin, accordionist Aaron Halva, and clarinetist Mike Cohen, occasionally double down. The primary controversy revolves around a lesbian kiss, which is reenacted over and over with poetic grace, the women dressed in angelic white costumes (by Emily Rebholz). Most of the action occurs on a slightly raised wooden platform (the scenic design is by Riccardo Hernandez), with the cast often sitting on chairs lined up against the back wall, on which Tal Yarden’s projections give the time and place, announce when there’s a “blink in time,” and tells the audience what language is theoretically being spoken, which is particularly effective when Lemml speaks in his non-native tongue and suddenly is talking in broken English. There are a few musical numbers, including “Bei Mir Best du Schon (Means That You’re Grand),” and David Dorfman’s choreography is subtly sensational, especially a breathtaking moment when the cast members of the show-within-a-show each grabs their suitcase, which are piled on top of one another, evoking a vertical Zoe Leonard installation. And when it’s all over, it becomes clear why Lemml doesn’t remember the ending, a haunting conclusion that you won’t soon forget.

THE GREAT AMERICAN CASKET COMPANY

(photo by Kelly Klein, Calloway Productions)

THE GREAT AMERICAN CASKET COMPANY invites you to look at life, death, and legacy in historic Green-Wood Cemetery (photo by Kelly Klein, Calloway Productions)

Green-Wood Cemetery
Fifth Ave. and 25th St., Brooklyn
Thursday – Sunday through June 26, $75, 7:00
www.green-wood.com/gacc

As if there weren’t already enough ghosts and dead bodies in historic Green-Wood Cemetery, which boasts such “famous residents” — that’s their phrase, not ours — as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boss Tweed, Leonard Bernstein, Horace Greeley, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the Brooklyn landmark is now hosting The Great American Casket Company, presented with BREAD Arts Collective and Modern Rebel, the latter specializing in “badass events that give back.” The show, which runs Thursday to Sunday through June 26, is billed as a “roving, immersive theatre experience” that examines “life, death, and personal legacy” with a large cast of musicians, actors, and aerialists and numerous rules. We’re not sure how immersive we want to get in a cemetery, even such a lovely one as Green-Wood, but we’ll be checking out the production soon and will report back. That is, if we are able to.

I’LL SAY SHE IS

A suspicious Napoleon (Noah Diamond as Groucho) and Josephine (Melody Jane as Beauty) face their personal Waterloo in long-awaited Marx Brothers revival I’LL SAY SHE IS (photo by Stefan Timphus)

Connelly Theater
220 East Fourth St. between Aves. A & B
Thursday – Sunday through July 3, $35
212-352-3101
www.illsaysheis.com

In his opening night review of the Marx Brothers’ Broadway debut, I’ll Say She Is, at the Casino Theatre on May 19, 1924, Robert Benchley wrote in Life magazine, “Not since sin laid its heavy hand on our spirit have we laughed so loud and so offensively. . . . I’ll Say She Is is probably one of the worst revues ever staged, from the point of view of artistic merit and general deportment. And yet when the Marx Brothers appear, it becomes one of the best.” That pretty much sums up the show’s long-awaited revival, from the husband-and-wife team of Groucho impersonator Noah Diamond and director Amanda Sisk, running at the Connelly Theater in the East Village through July 2. The original production was followed in quick succession by The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, both of which were made into classic films, but I’ll Say She Is languished in a kind of obscurity, never revived, while gaining some notoriety among fans as the “lost” Marx Brothers musical. But through an intense investigation of reviews, photographs, partial scripts, and various people’s personal recollections and writings, Diamond has resurrected the show in true DIY fashion. In the low-budget show, partially funded by fans from around the world, Diamond plays Groucho, with Seth Shelden as Harpo, Matt Roper as Chico, and Matt Walters as Zeppo, performing a comedy featuring original book and lyrics by political cartoonist Will B. Johnstone and music by Tom and Alexander Johnstone. The brothers are looking for jobs, so they bombard the office of theatrical agent Mr. Lee (Mark Weatherup Jr.) with their Al Jolson impressions. At first Mr. Lee wants them out of there, but he eventually shows the crazed quartet a front-page story that declares, “Society Woman Craves Excitement! Beautiful heiress promises her hand, heart, fortune to man who can give her a thrill. She is a victim of suppressed desires. She has complexes because she has never been in love.” So the boys head over to the mansion owned by “dignified dowager” Mrs. Ruby Mintworth (Kathy Biehl), who takes care of her downtrodden niece, Beauty (Melody Jane), who is seeking more out of life. And she certainly finds it when Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo show up. “I’m getting dizzy! / Put me in a tizzy. / Let’s get busy. / Gimme a thrill!” she sings. That’s all the brothers need to try to entertain Beauty — as well as, of course, the audience in the Connelly Theater.

Full-fledged I’LL SAY SHE IS returns to the stage after ninety-two-year absence (photo by Stefan Timphus)

First things first: No one can fully impersonate the Marx Brothers, four unique talents, each with his own special charm. But Diamond, Shelden (who learned how to play the harp for the role), Roper, and Walters do a more-than-acceptable job, even as they’re constrained by a relatively small stage that doesn’t let them fully cut loose. As expected, Diamond, who has been channeling Groucho since he was fourteen, succeeds the best, ripping off the mustachioed Marx Brother’s one-liners with infectious glee. “It’s very difficult to tell sometimes if you’re walking toward me or a horse is walking away,” he says to Chico. When they arrive at the mansion, Ruby (think Margaret Dumont) says, “I am not the woman you’re looking for,” to which Groucho instantly replies, “You can say that again.” He also regularly acknowledges the existence of the audience. When the “Four Horsemen of the Apoplexy” go into Beauty’s reception room, Groucho declares with a sense of the obvious, “Well, we are in the parlor!” then adds, “What a stupid remark that was.” And when he tosses away his toy sword and it slides off the stage, almost hitting someone in the first row, Diamond turns it into a funny running gag. As Benchley pointed out more than ninety years ago, the show stalls during the musical numbers, which not coincidentally happen to be when the brothers are usually offstage. Joe Diamond’s set re-creates the original, looking like a large, colorful birthday cake, with minor markers added as the story ventures into Central Park, the Financial District, an opium den, and a courtroom. But as with the 1924 production, the best scene takes place at Versailles, where Napoleon (Groucho/Diamond) suspects Josephine (Beauty/Jane) of cheating on him. “Napoleon, you said you’d be in Egypt tonight. You promised me the Pyramids and the Sphinx,” Josephine says. “That remains to be seen. As far as I’m concerned, the whole thing sphinx,” a suspicious Napoleon answers, later adding, “When I look into your eyes, I know that you are true to the French Army. I only hope it remains a standing army.” The French bit is a madcap romp with smart and crisp rapid-fire dialogue; it’s also one of the scenes for which Diamond, who just published the companion book Gimme a Thrill: The Story of I’ll Say She Is, the Lost Marx Brothers Musical, and How It Was Found, had the most amount of original material. Much of the rest of I’ll Say She Is feels cobbled together, albeit as a labor of love that will have you forgiving many of its shortcomings. (For example, they never can quite get the curtain to completely close, and there’s a barrier on one side of the stage that makes it difficult for the actors to enter and exit.) But if you take it all in stride, you’re likely to have a fun time at what a 1924 Philadelphia ad called “a fast action girlie musical-dancing-comedy combination.” Marx Brothers fans will enjoy a bonus, recognizing several skits and numerous jokes that ended up in the brothers’ films.

THE TOTAL BENT

The legendary Papa Joe Roy (Vondie Curtis Hall) preaches in Bluntgomery, Alabama, in THE TOTAL BENT (photo by Joan Marcus)

Anspacher Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor P.
Tuesday through Sunday through June 26, $45
212-539-8500
publictheater.org

On March 3, 1968, at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “In the final analysis, God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make but by the total bent of our lives. In the final analysis, God knows that his children are weak and they are frail. In the final analysis, what God requires is that your heart is right. Salvation isn’t reaching the destination of absolute morality, but it’s being in the process and on the right road.” In Stew and Heidi Rodewald’s The Total Bent, the follow-up to their 2008 Broadway hit, Passing Strange, finding that right road is no easy journey. Set during the civil rights movement in 1960s “Bluntgomery, Alabama,” The Total Bent begins in a recording studio, where former R&B star and would-be faith healer Papa Joe Roy (Vondie Curtis Hall) is making what he hopes will be his crossover comeback album, with songs written by his son, Marty (Ato Blankson-Wood). “He forgave my sins / and then we made amends / And you know, that’s why, that’s why / that’s why he’s Jesus and you’re not, whitey,” Joe sings in the opening number. It immediately sets the audience, which is primarily Caucasian, on edge; Stew even makes note of the racial imbalance later in the show. Joe and Marty argue over the past and the future, the power of God and Satan, and the importance of protest. “My new songs rise to the beat of bus boycotter’s feet / Wanna take the struggle to church / And drag gospel into the street,” Marty says, while Joe points out his son’s propensity for high heels and Danny Kaye movies. And then Stew, playing guitar, chimes in, “Crossover: Black artists trying to win white audiences with a watered-down sound.” (The crack band, which includes Stew on guitar, Rodewald on bass, musical director Marty Beller on drums, John Blevins on trumpet, and Brad Mulholland on saxophone, hangs out at the back of Andrew Lieberman’s small, homey stage, relaxing on chairs, couches, and a church pew.) “Any real money in this protest shit?” Joe asks, to which Marty responds, “Jesus, Joe, it’s music to serve a liberation movement!” “So, no?” Joe replies. Joe then sings, “Shut up! / And get back on the bus / and take a back seat with a smile.” Joe’s legacy is displayed when two young men, Andrew (Jahi Kearse) and Abee (Curtis Wiley) — evoking a more contemporary kind of Amos and Andy — sneak into the recording studio twenty years later and almost melt in fear at the sight of Joe’s ghostly, glowing mic. “I can’t even bring myself to touch it,” Andrew says. “It’d be like touchin’ Tutankhamun’s wee-wee,” Abee adds, to which Andrew shoots back, “Must you always act a fool around white folks,” acknowledging the existence of the audience. (The show makes repeated references to itself as a musical theater production in front of a crowd, which gets particularly funny when a band member takes an actor’s line, much to the actor’s dismay, or when a character wonders aloud when the band had time to learn a song that was supposedly just created off the cuff.) Soon Andrew and Abee are backup singers for Marty, who has become an all-out rock star, strutting like the love child of Prince, James Brown, and Mick Jagger.

Marty (Ato Blankson-Wood) takes on his father during the civil rights era in THE TOTAL BENT (photo by Joan Marcus)

Passing Strange, which went from the Public Theater to Broadway to the big screen, made into a 2009 film by Spike Lee, was largely autobiographical. It would be interesting to know how much, if any, of The Total Bent, which has been extended at the Public’s Anspacher Theater through June 26, might be about Stew himself. Stew’s long-term band is called the Negro Problem, and, as a black man dealing with success in the white world, it could be easy to see his own inner conflicts in the characters of Joe and Marty. Regardless, however, The Total Bent is a lively, powerful show, with dynamite performances by Hall (Dreamgirls, Chicago Hope) and Blankson-Wood (Hair, Lysistrata Jones). David Cale provides comic relief as British music producer Byron Blackwell, while Kenny Brawner and Damian Lemar Hudson play a pair of deacons. Director Joanna Settle, who also helmed Stew and Rodewald’s Family Album, keeps everything more or less in line even as Stew’s book goes from esoteric to mystifying to impenetrable. Near the end of his March 3, 1968, speech, Dr. King said, “For you can stand up amid the storms. And I say it to you out of experience this morning, yes, I’ve seen the lightning flash. I’ve heard the thunder roll.” You can hear and see the thunder and lighting in The Total Bent, even if it doesn’t make complete sense. (Up next for Stew and Rodewald is Notes on a Native Song, a concert-novel tribute to James Baldwin.)

SHUFFLE ALONG

Savion Glover’s choreography powers SHUFFLE ALONG (photo © Julieta Cervantes)

SHUFFLE ALONG, OR THE MAKING OF THE MUSICAL SENSATION OF 1921 AND ALL THAT FOLLOWED
Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 9, $69 – $169
shufflealongbroadway.com

Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed has some of the best music and dancing you’ll find on Broadway right now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the book to support it. The show tells the story of the historic 1921 production of Shuffle Along, a landmark musical featuring music by Eubie Blake, lyrics by Noble Sissle, and book by vaudevillians F. E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles; Blake played the piano onstage (there was no orchestra pit at the 63rd Street Music Hall), while Sissle starred as detective Jack Penrose, Miller was mayoral candidate Steve Jenkins, and Lyles was candidate Sam Peck. The 1921 cast also included Lottie Gee as Jessie Williams, Gertrude Saunders as Ruth Little (later replaced by Florence Mills), and Adelaide Hall as a Jazz Jasmine in the large ensemble. George C. Wolfe (Jelly’s Last Jam, Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk) wrote the book for and directs the new show, which went through significant revisions during previews — at one point it was clocking in at more than three hours (the final version is two hours and forty minutes), and six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald (The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill), who plays Gee, had to take time off for illness. (It was later revealed that she is pregnant and will be going on maternity leave July 24, when Carolina Chocolate Drops singer Rhiannon Giddens will take over her role.)

Eubie Blake (Brandon Victor Dixon) plays piano for Lottie Gee (Audra McDonald) in SHUFFLE ALONG (photo © Julieta Cervantes)

Savion Glover’s choreography is energetic and exhilarating while incorporating multiple genres, as are Ann Roth’s dazzling period costumes. But the relating of the behind-the-scenes efforts of a group of black men and women trying to storm Broadway is trite and clichéd, dragging down the rest of the show. Brandon Victor Dixon (The Color Purple, Motown: The Musical) and Joshua Henry (Violet, The Scottsboro Boys) are fine as Blake and Sissle, respectively, but Brian Stokes Mitchell (Man of La Mancha, Kiss Me, Kate) as Miller tries his best with dry lines, and Billy Porter (Kinky Boots, Miss Saigon is miscast as Lyles. Brooks Ashmanskas (Something Rotten, Fame Becomes Me) is fun as all the white men. It all makes for way too bumpy a ride, despite such songs as “Broadway Blues,” “Affectionate Dan,” “Honeysuckle Time,” “Love Will Find a Way,” “You Got to Git the Gittin’ While the Gittin’s Good,” and “(I’m Just) Wild About Harry,” with rousing orchestrations and arrangements by Daryl Waters (After Midnight, Memphis). The Playbill comes with a bonus re-creation of the original program (and some extra information) from when the show opened May 23, 1921, at the 63rd Street Music Hall. Shuffle Along wants to be both historic and historical, instead losing its focus as it gamely attempts to meld substance with style.

DAPHNE’S DIVE

Quiara Alegría Hudes’s DAPHNE’S DIVE is set in a North Philly bar (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 12, $25 through June 5, $30-85 after
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Despite Donyale Werle’s wonderfully close, intimate set, Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Daphne’s Dive turns out to be a surprisingly cold and distant play. The story takes place in a North Philly bar over the course of seventeen years, beginning in 1994, when eleven-year-old Ruby (Orange Is the New Black’s Samira Wiley) literally falls into the lives of bar owner Daphne (Vanessa Aspillaga) and her small group of regulars: her fashionable older sister, Inez (Daphne Rubin-Vega); Inez’s husband, local businessman and emerging politician Acosta (Carlos Gomez); painter Pablo (Matt Saldivar); motorcycle wanderer Rey (Gordon Joseph Weiss); and bikini-clad activist Jenn (K. K. Moggie), inspired by real-life radical performance artist Kathy Change. The set is open on two sides, where the audience sits right on the edges, as if hanging out on the fringes of the small tavern. Each scene of the hundred-minute play begins with a spotlight on Ruby, who announces her age in order to identify how much time has passed; some things change, and some things don’t, but not enough of the story feels natural or authentic. Hudes, who won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Water by the Spoonful, the second play in her Iraq war trilogy (which began with Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue and concluded with The Happiest Song Plays Last), and was nominated for a Tony for her book for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, can’t quite decide where Daphne’s Dive belongs in the canon of works set in bars, the characters hovering indeterminably somewhere between the lovable oddballs of Cheers and the luckless losers of The Iceman Cometh. You desperately want to become more involved in these characters’ lives, but they are never fully fleshed out by Hudes and director Thomas Kail, who has previously directed such wide-ranging productions as In the Heights, Lombardi, Dry Powder, and this little show called Hamilton. The music, however, by Grammy-winning pianist and composer Michel Camilo, is exceptional, nearly worth the price of admission all by itself. Daphne’s Dive is the first of three world premieres Hudes will write for the Signature Theatre in the next five years as part of the Residency Five program.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

Gillian Anderson is sensational as Blanche DuBois in Young Vic adaptation of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE at St. Ann’s (photo by Johan Persson)

St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Extended through June 4
718-254-8779
stannswarehouse.org

Gillian Anderson is sensational as Blanche DuBois in the American premiere of the Young Vic production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, continuing through June 4 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo. Director Benedict Andrews (The War of the Roses, The Return of Ulysses) sets the story in contemporary times, taking place on and around Magda Willi’s long, rectangular platform that shows a bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen and rotates throughout the play, giving audience members, seated on all four sides of the theater, ever-changing views. Things went bad for Blanche in Mississippi, so she arrives in the sweltering hot French Quarter in New Orleans to stay with her younger sister, Stella (Vanessa Kirby), and her husband, Stanley Kowalski (Ben Foster), until she gets back on her feet. But Blanche’s troubles are deeply psychological, preventing her from facing reality, instead living in a dark fantasy world that she walks through almost like a ghost. Anderson brings a haunting yet beautiful maturity to the role, whether downing shots, flirting with men, or sitting on the toilet. She makes the part her own from the very beginning; for more than three hours, we forget about Vivien Leigh, Jessica Tandy, Cate Blanchett, Jessica Lange, Blythe Danner, Ann-Margret, Amy Ryan, Rosemary Harris, and other previous Blanches as Anderson sweeps us away in her character’s damaged mind. Kirby (The Acid Test, Women Beware Women) is excellent as Blanche’s hot younger sister, who has settled into brutal, passionate, lower-class domestic life. Foster (Orphans, Kill Your Darlings) is a different kind of Stanley, showing more vulnerability as he walks around in flip-flops, less physically imposing as previous portrayers, who include Marlon Brando, Alec Baldwin, Hume Cronyn, Treat Williams, Aidan Quinn, John C. Reilly, and Blair Underwood.

Corey Johnson (A Prayer for My Daughter, Death of a Salesman) is almost too gentle as Mitch, Stanley’s friend who falls for Blanche. Andrews’s modernization not only features such somewhat contemporary devices as a cordless telephone but also songs by Cat Power, PJ Harvey, and Chris Isaak, with Alex Baranowski’s loud, thumping EDM exploding in between scenes. Winner of the Olivier Award for Best Revival, this Streetcar brings new insight to an oft-told tale, right up to the heartbreaking conclusion. “No one was as tender and trusting as she was,” Stella tells Stanley at one point. “And people like you forced her to change.” (For a short film directed by Anderson for the Young Vic that serves as a kind of prequel to Streetcar, go here, but be prepared for losing some of that tender mystery that makes Blanche such a fascinating character.)