this week in theater

WAITRESS

Becky (Keala Settle), Jenna (Jessie Mueller), and Dawn (Kimiko Glenn) serve pies and more in WAITRESS (photo by Joan Marcus)

Brooks Atkinson Theatre
256 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 1, $69-$159
877-250-2929
waitressthemusical.com
www.brooksatkinsontheater.com

Tony-winning star Jessie Mueller has quickly become one of those Broadway sensations you can watch do just about anything, even when she serves up a dish of lukewarm Lifetime schmaltz like Waitress. Mueller, who has risen well above her material in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, does the same in this American Repertory Theater musical, an adaptation of Adrienne Shelly’s 2007 film, which was accepted to Sundance shortly after Shelly was murdered in Greenwich Village at the age of forty. Mueller plays Jenna Hunterson, a waitress in Joe’s Pie Diner, where every morning she makes such delectable, original delights as Marshmallow Mermaid Pie, Fallin’ in Love Chocolate Mousse Pie, and Jenna’s First Kiss Pie. “You want to know what’s inside? Simple question, so then what’s the answer?” she sings. “My whole life is in here, in this kitchen baking.” Desperate to escape an abusive marriage to Earl (Nick Cordero), she is distraught to learn she’s pregnant. When diner owner Joe (Dakin Matthews) suggests she compete in a pie contest with a prize of twenty thousand dollars, she thinks she may have discovered her way out, but her life gets even more complicated when she becomes attracted to her new gynecologist, the married Dr. Pomatter (Drew Gehling). Her coworkers, the sharp-tongued Becky (Keala Settle) and the wallflower Dawn (Kimiko Glenn, in the role played by Shelly in the movie), provide emotional support and comic relief, while Jenna’s coping skills include memories of baking pies with her late mother and imagining what she’ll make next, creating in her mind such telling desserts as I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby Pie, Betrayed by My Eggs Pie, and I Can’t Have an Affair Because It’s Wrong and I Don’t Want Earl to Kill Me Pie. But Jenna can’t stop spending time with Dr. Pomatter despite knowing better. “It’s a terrible idea me and you,” they sing in a duet. Jenna: “You have a wife.” Dr. Pomatter: “You have a husband.” Jenna: “You’re my doctor!” Dr. Pomatter: “You’ve got a baby coming.” Both: “It’s a bad idea me and you / Let’s keep kissing till we come to.” Unfortunately, by the time they come to, it’s too late.

Dr. Pomatter (Drew Gehling) and Jenna (Jessie Mueller) seek a sweeter life in adaptation of Adrienne Shelly’s 2007 romantic comedy (photo by Joan Marcus)

Mueller shines once again in Waitress, making the most of what is essentially a hard-to-believe contemporary bodice ripper disguised as a romantic musical comedy. She has a comforting stage presence, blending confidence and vulnerability in charming ways, even as we watch her character make absurdly ridiculous decisions. She, Settle (Hands on a Hardbody, Priscilla Queen of the Desert), and Glenn (Orange Is the New Black, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots) share a warm camaraderie, recalling the trio of waitresses from the television series Alice, along with Eric Anderson (Soul Doctor, Kinky Boots) as Cal, the gruff cook. Christopher Fitzgerald (Young Frankenstein, Finian’s Rainbow) nearly steals the show as Ogie, going all out as a stalker-like major nerd who is interested in Dawn and is not afraid to let everyone know about it. His stirring rendition of “Never Ever Getting Rid of Me” is a genuine showstopper. The songs, by five-time Grammy nominee Sara Bareilles, are relatively harmless, mixing in multiple genres, but former waitress Jessie Nelson’s (I Am Sam; Corrina, Corrina) book never really gets cooking, jumping around too much while taking underdeveloped or overdone turns. Director Diane Paulus (The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, Hair, Pippin) does what she can with the mediocre material, wisely making sure that Mueller is front and center as much as possible on Scott Pask’s set, which changes from the diner to the doctor’s office to Jenna and Earl’s home. Waitress serves up a few very tasty slices, but it takes more than that to make a wholly satisfying pie.

THE FATHER

André (Frank Langella) doesn’t make it easy for his daughter, Anne (Kathryn Erbe), to help him in THE FATHER (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 12, $70-$150
thefatherbroadway.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

In early 2014, Frank Langella played King Lear at BAM, a thought-provoking counterpoint to his latest show, the U.S. premiere of Florian Zeller’s The Father. As Lear, the seventy-eight-year-old Langella, who has won three Tonys and two Obies, battled his failing mind and body while two of his three daughters fought over his wealth and power and the third only wanted to love and care for him. As eighty-year-old André in Zeller’s Olivier-nominated, Molière Award–winning play — not to be confused with August Strindberg’s The Father, currently running at Theatre for a New Audience — Langella is an elegant Paris gentleman dealing with the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease while his loving daughter, Anne (Kathryn Erbe), tries to care for him despite his mistreatment of her. After scaring off yet another home nurse, André yells at Anne, “I don’t need her! I don’t need her or anyone else! I can manage very well on my own!” But it’s becoming more and more apparent that he can’t, as he gets lost in a psychological maze of the past and the present, not knowing who is who and where he is while refusing to acknowledge what is happening to him, instead turning the tables on those around him. “I’m worried about you,” he says to a woman (Kathleen McNenny) who claims to be Anne but he does not recognize. “Don’t you remember? She doesn’t remember. Are you having memory lapses or what? You’d better go and see someone, my dear.” He also mixes up Anne’s significant others, either boyfriends or husbands (Charles Borland and Brian Avers) who may or may not be moving to London with her. And he compares his latest caretaker, Laura (Hannah Cabell), to his beloved other daughter, Elise, whom he wildly praises while disparaging Anne. “You have two daughters?” Laura asks suspiciously. “That’s right,” he says. “Even though I hardly ever hear from the other one. Elise. All the same, she was always my favourite. . . . I don’t understand why she never gets in touch. Never.” In addition, André seems to be forgetting whose apartment he’s in and whether he’s living on his own or with Anne, which makes him angry and upset. “I don’t need any help from anyone and I will not leave this flat,” he firmly declares. But he’s of course in dire need of help.

André (Frank Langella) ponders his frightening future in Florian Zeller play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Translated from the French by two-time Tony winner Christopher Hampton (Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Sunset Boulevard) and directed by Tony winner Doug Hughes (Frozen, The Royal Family), Zeller’s play, a companion piece to The Mother, uses clever stagecraft to depict André’s heartbreaking descent. Scenes sometimes repeat or overlap, and having multiple actors play Anne and her partners transfers André’s confusion to the audience, which is also sometimes not sure who is who or if what is happening is only in André’s fading mind. Each scene ends with a sudden darkness, and when the lights come back on (courtesy of lighting designer Donald Holder), bits of Scott Pask’s fashionable French-flat set, from books to furniture, have disappeared, echoing the cognitive losses inside André’s head. André is also obsessed with time, as if, deep down, he really does understand the fate that awaits him but is unwilling to face the truth. He keeps thinking someone has stolen his watch, and he continually refers to time. “Time passes so fast,” he says wistfully. Later he opines, “If this goes on much longer, I’ll be stark naked. Stark naked. And I won’t even know what time it is.” Langella (Frost/Nixon, Dracula) goes from bold and confused to touchingly gentle as André, imbuing him with a Lear-like regalness and an aristocratic refinement even when tap-dancing; it’s a beautifully moving performance from one of America’s finest actors. Zeller, Hampton, and Hughes avoid genre clichés or sentimentality, using clever subtlety to tell a very sad, unfortunately increasingly common tale.

COMPAGNIA FINZI PASCA: LA VERITÀ

You can expect the unexpected in (photo by Andrea Lopez)

You can expect the unexpected in Compagnia Finzi Pasca surreal tribute to Salvador Dalí (photo by Andrea Lopez)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
May 4-7, $25-$80
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
finzipasca.com

In November 2012, Daniele Finzi Pasca presented the surreal Donka: A Letter to Chekhov, combining music, dance, storytelling, acrobatics, and circus arts in paying tribute to Russian writer Anton Chekhov. Finzi Pasca and his Swiss troupe, Compagnia Finzi Pasca (Icaro, Bianco su Bianco), are back at BAM this week, honoring Spanish surrealist and master showman Salvador Dalí. Running May 4-7 at the Howard Gilman Opera House, La Verità is a collaboration between Pasca and his fellow company founders, show cocreator Julie Hamelin Finzi; music and sound designer Maria Bonzanigo, who shares choreography credit with Finzi Pasca; set and prop designer Hugo Gargiulo; costume designer Giovanna Buzzi; and artistic consultant Antonio Vergamini. Pasca also designed the lighting with Alexis Bowles, and Roberto Vitalini did the videos. The backdrop for the mayhem is a re-creation of the mural Dalí made for the Metropolitan Opera’s 1944 ballet, Mad Tristan, for which Dalí also designed the sets and costumes. The anonymous owners of the mural approached Finzi Pasca to use it in a production, and what developed was La Verità, an extravaganza in which anything can happen. “The language of acrobatics, of physical theatre may easily conquer a territory where it is neither night or day, where light doesn’t touch reality but designs it, invents it or reinvents it,” Finzi Pasca explains on the company website. “The language of the acrobats titillates our unconscious, making us see inner landscapes that appear truer than reality. Dalí’s landscapes are set during night or day? The answer: neither; Dalí’s images belong to another dimension, the dimension of dreams.”

THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

Mrs. Candour (Dana Ivey), Lady Sneerwell (Frances Barber), and Lady Teazle (Helen Cespedes) take part in idle chatter in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

Red Bull Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theater
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 8, $80-$100
212-352-3101
www.redbulltheater.com

Red Bull Theater’s wonderfully playful adaptation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s classic 1777 farce, The School for Scandal, offers a master’s course on the subject of malicious idle chatter. The headmistress of this unofficial institution is Lady Sneerwell (Frances Barber), a wealthy widow with an ax to grind. “I am no hypocrite to deny the satisfaction I reap from the success of my efforts,” she tells her vitriolic star pupil, gossip columnist Snake (Jacob Dresch), continuing, “Wounded myself, in the early part of my life by the envenomed tongue of slander, I confess I have since known no pleasure equal to the reducing others to the level of my own injured reputation.” Joined by single heiress Maria (Nadine Malouf) and aristocratic gadfly Joseph Surface (Christian Conn), the group discusses the nature of gossip. “For my part, I confess, madam, wit loses its respect with me, when I see it in company with malice. What do you think, Mr. Surface?” the prim and proper Maria asks, to which Joseph replies, “Certainly, madam. To smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another’s breast is to become a principal in the mischief.” Lady Sneerwell chimes in, “Pshaw, there’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill nature. The malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick. What’s your opinion, Mr. Surface?” Joseph again shares his barbed judgment, explaining, “To be sure, madam, that conversation where the spirit of raillery is suppressed will ever appear tedious and insipid.” But the gossip they spread is anything but good-natured teasing, carefully aimed at directly affecting its targets. Referring to the never-seen Mrs. Clackit, Snake boasts, “To my knowledge, she has been the cause of six matches being broken off and three sons being disinherited, of four forced elopements, as many coerced confessions, and two divorces.” One of their current targets is Sir Peter Teazle (Mark Linn-Baker), an older city knight and avowed bachelor who has married the much younger Lady Teazle (Helen Cespedes), who is happily going through his money while flirting with Joseph, who prefers Sir Peter’s ward, Maria, who has a hankering for Joseph’s younger brother, Charles (Christian DeMarais), who is drinking away his fortune. The silly dandy and ersatz poet Sir Benjamin Backbite (Ryan Garbayo) also has his heart set on Maria. The Surface brothers have been receiving funds from their uncle, Sir Oliver (Henry Stram), who has been traveling the world for sixteen years but at last returns, deciding to test his nephews’ loyalty by appearing in disguise to determine whether they are still worthy of his financial support. And ruling over it all is the master gossip herself, Mrs. Candour (Dana Ivey), who declares without a hint of irony, “Tale-bearers are just as bad as the tale-makers — but what’s to be done, as I said before — how will you prevent people from talking?”

Charles (Christian DeMarais) and his disguised uncle, Sir Oliver (Henry Stram), frame their immediate future in THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

In his directorial debut, Marc Vietor assuredly guides all the delicious madness, but he has to play second fiddle to Andrea Lauer’s sensational period costumes and Charles G. LaPointe’s outrageous wig and hair design; Dresch’s green reptilian getup as Snake is worth the price of admission alone, as is the way he marvelously squirms and slithers onstage, and Ivey’s wig is like a character unto itself. The excellent cast has tons of fun on Anna Louizos’s set, which folds into drawing rooms in various residences. Ivey and Barber are particularly adroit at chomping on the scenery and spitting out their wickedly delicious calumny. Several characters present asides directly to the audience, which works for the most part except for Stram, whose attempts are hard to understand. The Dublin-born Sheridan, who wrote such other plays as The Rivals, A Trip to Scarborough, and Pizarro and was also a politician who served in the British Parliament for more than three decades, doesn’t hold anything back in this consistently engaging satirical comedy of manners, beginning with the names of the characters themselves; in addition to Candour, Snake, Sneerwell, Backbite, Surface, and Teazle, there are Crabtree, Midas, Bumper, and Careless onstage as well as references to Prim, Brittle, Clackit, Knuckle, Kumquat, and Gadabout. In his diary entry for December 17, 1813, Lord Byron wrote, “Lord Holland told me a curious piece of sentimentality in Sheridan. The other night we were all delivering our respective and various opinions on him and other hommes marquans and mine was this: — ‘Whatever Sheridan has done or chosen to do has been, par excellence, always the best of its kind. He has written the best comedy (School for Scandal), the best opera (The Duenna — in my mind, far before that St. Giles’s lampoon, the Beggars’ Opera), the best farce (The Critic — it is only too good for an after-piece), and the best address (Monologue on Garrick); and, to crown all, delivered the very best oration (the famous Begum Speech) ever conceived or heard in this country.” It is with no mere prattle that I say that Red Bull Theater has done us all a service by resurrecting this play that is nearly as old as our country, which itself has never stopped loving and spreading gossip, which can now go viral over the internet in the matter of minutes. “There’s no stopping people’s tongues,” Mrs. Candour says. “The license of invention some people take is monstrous indeed,” Joseph adds. Thank goodness those sentiments are true, for they result in such a rich and savory treat as The School for Scandal.

VINTAGE THEATER ON A MODERN STAGE: THE GOLDEN BRIDE

MCNY event will go behind the scenes of the making of classic Yiddish musical THE GOLDEN BRIDE (photo by Ben Moody Cameron Johnson)

Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd St.
Wednesday, May 4, $25, 6:30
212-534-1672
www.mcny.org
nytf.org

This past December, we raved about National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s utterly delightful revival of the long-lost 1923 operetta The Golden Bride (“Di Goldnene Kale”) at the company’s new home at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The production is back by popular demand this summer, running July 4 through August 28. You can get a behind-the-scenes sneak peek at the show on May 4 when the Museum of the City of New York presents “Vintage Theater on a Modern Stage: The Golden Bride,” being held in conjunction with the exhibition “New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway,” which continues through July 31. The event features a discussion with musical archaeologist Michael Ochs, codirectors Bryna Wasserman and Motl Didner, musical director Zalmen Mlotek, costume designer Izzy Fields, and NYTF executive producer Chris Massimine as well as select songs performed by Rachel Policar, who stars as Goldele, Glenn Seven Allen (Jerome), Jillian Gottlieb (Khanele), and other cast members, followed by an exhibition viewing and reception. The Golden Bride has many similarities to Fidder on the Roof, which is currently playing at the Broadway Theatre; in a fun coincidence, both shows have been nominated for Outstanding Revival of a Musical by the Drama Desk. In addition, Wasserman and Didner are up for Outstanding Director, battling it out against Spring Awakening’s Michael Arden, The Color Purple’s John Doyle, American Psycho’s Rupert Goold, and Fiddler’s Bartlett Sher. (On June 19, MJH is hosting a Fiddler on the Roof sing-along, consisting of a screening of the Oscar-winning 1971 film and appearances by members of the current Broadway cast; attendees are encouraged to come dressed as their favorite character.) If you register for “Vintage Theater on a Modern Stage: The Golden Bride,” you will also receive a free ticket to a preview of The Golden Bride.

THE CRUCIBLE

Walter Kerr Theatre
219 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 17, $42-$228.60
www.thecrucibleonbroadway.com

Director-of-the-moment Ivo van Hove follows up his riveting version of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge with a strange, powerful, problematic take on Miller’s Tony-winning 1953 play, The Crucible. Part of the centennial celebration of Miller’s birth that also included last year’s production of Incident at Vichy at the Signature, The Crucible explores the 1692 Salem witch trials through a context informed by the communist witch hunt of the House Un-American Activities Committee led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1940s and ’50s. Miller based the play on actual events recorded in the seventeenth century, although he changed many of the details of the real-life characters. In Salem, Betty Parris (Elizabeth Teeter) is in a catatonic state following an evening that might have involved magic and witchcraft in the woods with her friends Abigail Williams (Saoirse Ronan), Susanna Walcott (Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut), Mercy Lewis (Erin Wilhelmi), and Mary Warren (Tavi Gevinson). “There be no unnatural cause here,” claims Reverend Samuel Parris (Jason Butler Harner), the local priest and Betty’s uncle, who does not want to believe that this was the devil’s work. He sends for Reverend John Hale (Bill Camp) to back him up. “A precaution only,” Parris says. “He has much experience in all demonic arts.” However, wealthy landowner Thomas Putnam (Thomas Jay Ryan) and his wife, Anna (Tina Benko), who have lost seven babies, are sure that “vengeful spirits” are at work and insist that Parris investigate it as such. Meanwhile, town curmudgeon Giles Corey (Jim Norton) thinks that the Putnams are merely after his land, while Corey’s friend, John Proctor (Ben Whishaw), gets caught in the maelstrom of accusation and emotion, as the otherwise steadfast gentleman may or may not have had an affair with Abigail, his former maid, who was let go by his wife, Elizabeth (Sophie Okonedo). And many eyes turn toward Tituba (Jenny Jules), Parris’s slave from Barbados. “You are God’s instrument put in our hands to discover the Devil’s agents among us,” Hale tells her. When the judge, Deputy Governor Danforth (Ciarán Hinds), arrives, he’s sure that evil is at hand, boasting that four hundred witches are in jail because of him, seventy-two condemned to hang. Even as evidence comes out that supports that there was no witchcraft, Danforth remains determined to force people to name names so he can have them arrested and hanged. “There is a prodigious guilt in the country,” he boldly declares. “Reproach me not with the fear in the country; there is fear in the country because there is a moving plot to topple Christ in the country!”

John Proctor (Ben Whishaw) tries to get the truth out of Mary Warren (Tavi Gevinson) in Ivo van Hove adaptation of Arthur Miller classic (photo © Jan Versweyveld)

Belgian director van Hove is often hit-or-miss with his shows, which in the last few years in New York City have included David Bowie and Enda Walsh’s Lazarus, adaptations of Ingmar Bergman’s Antigone. While A View from the Bridge was innovative and dynamic, Antigone was confusing and surprisingly lifeless; The Crucible falls somewhere in between. The set, by longtime van Hove collaborator Jan Versweyveld, is head-scratchingly odd, an old schoolroom with twentieth-century overhead lighting and a blackboard on which Tal Yarden’s abstract images are projected at one point. Wojciech Dziedzic’s costumes also mix the seventeenth century with the modern era; if the goal is to relate the witch trials to what is going on in the world today, it doesn’t quite work, since those elements are already part of Miller’s words and don’t benefit from such further obscuration. Philip Glass’s music is pleasurable but unnecessary, and the acting is inconsistent; while Ronan (Brooklyn, The Seagull), Camp (Death of a Salesman, Homebody/Kabul), Norton (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The Seafarer), and Gevinson (This Is Our Youth, Enough Said) excel in their roles, Whishaw (His Dark Materials, In the Heart of the Sea) is rather static, Michael Braun (War Horse, Bad Guys) as Danforth’s right-hand man, Ezekiel Cheever, is too one-note, and Hinds (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Closer) seems lost at times, courtesy of Steven Hoggett’s crowded movement, often speaking with his back or side to the audience, making it hard to hear what he is saying. Fifty-three years after its Broadway debut, in a Tony-winning production starring E. G. Marshall, Beatrice Straight, and Arthur Kennedy, and fourteen years after its Tony-nominated 2002 Broadway revival with Laura Linney, Liam Neeson, and Kristen Bell, The Crucible feels today most relevant in its depiction of the religious nature of evil, with fundamentalists around the world responsible for so much violence and hatred and America in a constant debate over church versus state. Van Hove’s staging muddies various themes, resulting in a somewhat lukewarm rendering of a heated tale.

OPEN STUDIOS WITH WORKSPACE ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE

Workspace Artist-in-Residence Tamar Ettun rehearses at LMCC’s Studios at 28 Liberty (photo by Jonathan Patkowski for LMCC)

Who: Sarah Anderson, Mirene Arsanios, Chloë Bass, Jesse Bonnell, Esteban Cabeza De Baca, Glendaliz Camacho, Adriane Connerton, Nick Doyle, Tamar Ettun, Joel W. Fisher, Nadja Frank, Susan Karwoska, Amy Khoshbin, Lisa Ko, Courtney Krantz, Tora Lopez, Melanie McLain, Rangi McNeil, Irini Miga, Trokon Nagbe, Meredith Nickie, New Saloon, Christina Olivares, Piehole, Ronny Quevedo, Maria Rapoport, Keisha Scarville, Pascual Sisto, Stacy Spence, Yuliya Tsukerman, Jessica Vaughn
What: LMCC Open Studios
Where: LMCC’s Studios at 28 Liberty, 28 Liberty St. between Pine, Liberty, Nassau, & William Sts.
When: Friday, April 29, 6:00–9:00, and Saturday, April 30, 1:00–6:00 (Open Texts 6:00–8:00), free with advance RSVP
Why: The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which “empowers artists by providing them with networks, resources, and support, to create vibrant, sustainable communities in Lower Manhattan and beyond,” is kicking off its annual Open Studios by welcoming visitors on Friday night, April 29, and Saturday afternoon and evening, April 30, to wander through its Financial District space and check out works-in-progress by thirty-one artists artists who have been busy since September immersed in paintings, sketches, photographs, sculptures, videos, poetry, dances, plays, and more. The event is free with advance RSVP; the studios will close Saturday at 6:00 for two hours of spoken-word performances. The Open Studios program continues through October with presentations at 28 Liberty and 125 Maiden Lane and on Governors Island with such performers and choreographers as Okwui Okpokwasili, the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre, Faye Driscoll, Netta Yerushalmy, Amber Hawk Swanson, Ephrat Asherie, Jodi Melnick, and YACKEZ (Larissa and Jon Velez-Jackson).