this week in theater

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF is back on Broadway in a toned-down yet still rousing version from Bartlett Sher (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Broadway Theatre
1681 Broadway at 53rd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 4, $35 – $157
fiddlermusical.com

One of Broadway’s genuine treasures is back where it belongs, on the Great White Way, in a wonderful production that breathes new life into the old chestnut. Based on stories by Sholem Aleichem, the musical version of Fiddler on the Roof debuted on Broadway in September 1964, where it ran for 3,242 performances through July 1972. The show was directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with a cast that included Bea Arthur, Bert Convy, Austin Pendleton, Maria Karnilova, and, of course, Zero Mostel as Tevye the milkman, an honest, hardworking husband and father who is balancing his religious beliefs and Jewish tradition with raising five daughters who are developing modern minds of their own in the small village of Anatevka in early-twentieth-century imperialist Russia. Over the years, Tevye has been portrayed as a larger-than-life figure with a special relationship with the Almighty; in addition to Mostel, the dairyman has been portrayed by Herschel Bernardi, Topol (onstage and in the Oscar-winning film), Alfred Molina, Paul Michael Glaser (who was Perchik in the movie), and even Harvey Fierstein. Taking the reins this time around is the terrific Danny Burstein, the fifty-one-year-old Mount Kisco native and five-time Tony nominee (Cabaret, Follies), who walks onto the stage from the audience, immediately announcing that Tevye is one of us, just another human being facing life’s adversities. Burstein’s scaled-down Tevye allows six-time Tony nominated director Bartlett Sher (The King and I, South Pacific with Burstein) to let Joseph Stein’s sterling book shine. The people of Anatevka are struggling to make ends meet, always fearful that the next pogrom could be waiting right around the corner. Tevye’s horse is lame, so he is pulling his cart by himself, adding to his stress and strain. Yente the matchmaker comes by to tell Tevye’s wife, Golde (Jessica Hecht), that she has chosen the much older butcher and wealthy widower Lazar Wolf (Adam Dannheisser) to marry their oldest daughter, Tzeitel (usually played by Alexandra Silber, but we saw a fine Tess Primack in her stead), who is madly in love with the poor tailor, Motel (Adam Kantor). Soon two more of Tevye and Golde’s daughters are trying to bypass the traditional arranged marriage: Hodel (Samantha Massell) falls for Bolshevik revolutionary and teacher Perchik (Ben Rappaport), while Chava (Melanie Moore) is courted by non-Jewish Russian officer Fyedka (Nick Rehberger). Through it all, Tevye looks to the heavens, continuing his ongoing conversation with God, wondering when things are going to get better.

Golde (Jessica Hecht) and Tevye (Danny Burstein) discuss a dark “dream” as Grandma Tzeitel (Lori Wilner) looks on in FIDDLER (photo by Joan Marcus)

Sher’s heartwarming version of Fiddler takes place on Michael Yeargan’s relatively spare sets, which drop down from above and roll in from the sides, facades of houses and storefronts and a local bar in brown wood palettes. Israeli-born, UK-based choreographer Hofesh Shechter adds modern-dance flourishes to Robbins’s original choreography that keep things fresh and moving. Despite Ted Sperling’s overly standard and uninventive musical orchestrations, the songs, with music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, hold up marvelously, boasting such rousing set pieces as “Tradition,” “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” “To Life,” and “Tevye’s Dream,” the last an always delightful moment that lets the creative team sparkle and show off as Grandma Tzeitel (Lori Wilner) and Fruma-Sarah (Jessica Vosk) share their thoughts on Tzeitel’s upcoming nuptials to Lazar Wolf. “Sunrise, Sunset,” which can easily become treacly, is tender and beautiful here, and Sher and Burstein tone down “If I Were a Rich Man” into a more solemn musing than a bold demand. And we dare you not to shed a tear when Burstein and Hecht ask the deeply touching question: “Do You Love Me?” They could address the same question to the audience, which would answer back with an enthusiastic yes. Every decade has its Fiddler, which has previously been revived on Broadway in 1981, 1990, and 2004, and now the 2010s has one it can call its own. Sher, Burstein, and the rest of the cast and crew have done a fantastic job of delivering a thrilling Fiddler on the Roof that upholds tradition — while celebrating life and love in the face of dark times that are as relevant today as they were way back when.

INSPIRATIONAL BROADWAY

A bevy of Broadway favorites will gather at B. B. King’s to benefit BIV on February 15

Who: Michael McElroy & the Broadway Inspirational Voices with special guests Billy Porter, Joshua Henry, Marcus Paul James, Adam Pascal, Telly Leung, Jarrod Spector, La Chanze, Lindsay Mendez, Chad Kimball, and Norm Lewis
What: All-star benefit for Broadway Inspirational Voices
Where: B. B. King Blues Club & Grill, 237 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave., 212-997-4144
When: Monday, February 15, $30-$175, 7:30
Why: Founded in 1994, Broadway Inspirational Voices is a nonprofit dedicated to “providing hope to inspire and transform youth in need through music and the arts.” On Presidents Day, B. B. King Blues Club & Grill will host a benefit for the organization’s outreach programs; the evening will be led by BIV founder Michael McElroy (Big River) and members of the BIV choir ensemble, joined by a sensational group of special guests comprising Tony winners, nominees, and other Broadway favorites. The diverse cast features Billy Porter (Kinky Boots), Joshua Henry (The Scottsboro Boys), Marcus Paul James (Motown the Musical), Adam Pascal (Rent), Telly Leung (Allegiance), Jarrod Spector (Beautiful), La Chanze (The Color Purple), Lindsay Mendez (Wicked), Chad Kimball (Memphis), and Norm Lewis (Porgy & Bess), performing Broadway, Gospel, pop, and rock songs under the musical direction of James Sampliner (Honeymoon in Vegas).

SNOW WHITE

Company XIV follows up its marvelous version of CINDERELLA with a less-than-magical SNOW WHITE (photo by Mark Shelby Perry)

Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between MacDougal St. & Sixth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 12, $30-$105
companyxiv.com
minettalanenyc.com

This past fall, New York-based Company XIV staged a terrific adults-only version of Cinderella, which they billed as a “Baroque Burlesque Ballet.” It was clever, inventive, bawdy, raucous, touching, provocative, and, perhaps most of all, a hell of a lot of fun. The troupe, led by artistic director Austin McCormick, alas cannot capture the fairy-tale magic again in its follow-up, a similarly staged retelling of the traditional German favorite Snow White. First published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm, Snow White is about jealousy, vanity, friendship, and romantic love, but McCormick sacrifices plot and character development in his edition, instead focusing on repetitive set pieces that, though many are wonderfully presented, never cohere into a compelling narrative. Laura Careless, who starred in Company XIV’s mesmerizing, wholly original Lover. Muse. Mockingbird. Whore, is Die Königin, the Queen, who is determined to be the fairest of them all, and she is — until the arrival of the young and beautiful Schneewittchen, Snow White (Hilly Bodin). The Queen keeps coming up with ways to kill her competition, but Snow White keeps managing to survive this battle of wits and vanity.

The cast also includes Nicholas Katen, Malik Shabazz Kitchen, Mark Osmundsen, and Davon Rainey as the Königlicher Hofstaat (the Queen’s Men), Marisol Cabrera, Lea Helle, and Marcy Richardson as a trio of showgirls who put on brief puppet shows involving the Seven Little Men, and Courtney Giannone as Der Prinz (the Prince), whose spectacular performance on the Cyr wheel is barely an afterthought, character-wise. Zane Pihlstrom’s set and costumes don’t have the same panache they did in Cinderella, nor do the songs, a mix of Franz Schubert, Tove Lo, Troye Sivan, Britney Spears, Miguel, and George Frideric Handel sung by Rainey (who was sensational as the evil stepmother in Cinderella) and Richardson. (Giannone also performs Chopin, Debussy, and Prokofiev at the piano.) And the acrobatics, which also feature pole and aerial hoop dances, are extraneous in this context, while Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s projections and live video feeds eventually grow tiresome despite flashes of ingenuity. So what went wrong? This immensely talented troupe, which has also staged the fab Rococco Rouge and the seasonal hit Nutcracker Rouge, has just thrown too much at us in Snow White without considering the story itself, perhaps assuming the narrative doesn’t matter because we all know what happens anyway. But the best fairy tales stay with us from childhood because of the story, which gets left behind in this imaginative but disappointing production that unwisely chooses style over substance.

THE GRAND PARADISE

A mother (Tori Sparks) reevaluates her life in THE GRAND PARADISE (photo by Darial Sneed)

Third Rail Projects
383 Troutman St. between Wyckoff & Irving Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 4, $95-$150
718-374-5196
thegrandparadise.com

First and foremost, you need to understand that what happens at the Grand Paradise stays at the Grand Paradise. Over the course of your visit, you’re likely to be rubbed, grabbed, hugged, massaged, slow-danced, and led into private rooms, but it’s all in great fun. In 2013, Brooklyn dance-theater troupe Third Rail Projects introduced a set of characters, a traveling family, in the site-specific Roadside Attraction, which took place in and around a retrofitted 1970s camper. That nameless family has now made it to Florida, where they have gathered at the Grand Paradise, a New Age-y vacation resort that is the immersive offspring of Fantasy Island and The Love Boat (and partially inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s multiplatinum Rumours album). In a renovated one-story warehouse in Bushwick, sixty audience members join Mom (Tori Sparks), Dad (Tom Pearson), their younger daughter (Kate Ladenheim), their older daughter (Ashley Handel), and her boyfriend (Niko Tsocanos) for two hours of unpredictability with the singing Siren (Lily Ockwell), Midas (Roxanne Kidd), a cabana boy (Sebastiani Romagnolo), Venus (Emma Hoette), Jett (Rebekah Morin), the Libertine (Jeff Lyon), and the Lady (Lea Fulton) and the Gentleman (Brendan Duggan), among others, many of whom perform short dance pieces. At the beginning, you can wander through rooms at your own pace to familiarize yourself with the surroundings, but soon you will be guided by actors — and separated from whomever you came with — as the narrative starts to unfold, involving sexual freedom, the search for personal identity, the passage of time, fear of death, midlife crises, and the Fountain of Youth. Each of the five main characters (there are several casts for different performances) experiences a kind of reawakening — compelling, emotional stories we followed with great interest. But what they discover is not necessarily what they were initially after.

A possible Fountain of Youth beckons at the Grand Paradise (photo by Darial Sneed)

The Grand Paradise is directed, designed, written, and choreographed by Third Rail Projects artistic directors Zach Morris, Jennine Willett, and Pearson, the masterminds behind the popular immersive production Then She Fell, a multisensory takeoff of Alice in Wonderland that has been playing at the Kingsland Ward at St. Johns institutional facility in Williamsburg since 2012. Among the places you will encounter as you journey through the resort are a beach with a hunky lifeguard (Zach McNally), a disco, a motel room, and the Shipwreck Lounge, where you can buy a tropical drink. All through the night, Aqua Twin Girl (Elisa Davis) and Aqua Twin Boy (Joshua Reaver) swim in an aquarium while hustlers William (Robert Vail), Grace, (Katrina Reid), and Farrah (Lauren Muraski) and the activities director (Alberto Denis) keep you always occupied. (As opposed to immersive-theater standard-bearer Sleep No More, you are not left to your own devices quite as much in The Grand Paradise, although you certainly have more than an acceptable amount of free will.) Kudos go out to the cast, composer and sound designer Sean Hagerty, costumer Karen Young, and environment designer Elisabeth Svenningsen, who have gone full tilt in making sure your stay is a very pleasant one. The extremely specific rules include no cell phones or cameras, and you must check all coats and bags. Participants are told not to open any closed doors, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be adventurous, peering through windows, peeking into drawers, opening shutters, and following a character when they beckon you into the private unknown. But alas, we’ve already said too much. Bon voyage!

PRODIGAL SON

Jim Quinn (Timothée Chalamet) shares his dreams with Louise Schmitt (Annika Boras) in John Patrick Shanley’s latest memory play (photo © 2016 by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Through March 27, $90
212-581-1212
prodigalsonplay.com

John Patrick Shanley’s Prodigal Son is exactly the kind of play that makes us love the theater: a beautifully written, directed, and acted work about believable people we can respect, in realistic situations that entertain and educate us about ourselves and others. Prodigal Son, which Shanley both wrote and directs, is the culmination of his unofficial autobiographical trilogy, which began with 1991’s Beggars in the House of Plenty and continued with 2004’s Doubt: A Parable; all three have been first presented by Manhattan Theatre Club. In this world premiere, which opened last night at City Center, Timothée Chalamet stars as Jim Quinn, a bright but confused adolescent from the Bronx who is off to the Thomas More Preparatory School in New Hampshire after having problems at previous educational institutions. “Do you remember fifteen? For me, it was a special, beautiful room in hell,” he tells the audience at the start. The school’s founder and director, Carl Schmitt (Chris McGarry), a devout Catholic, decides to take a chance on the tough-talking, working-class Jim. “We don’t have another boy like him,” he explains to Alan Hoffman (Robert Sean Leonard), the head of the English department who becomes a mentor to Jim. A lonely kid obsessed with poetry, Nazis, and defending and supporting his older brother who is a soldier in Vietnam (the play takes place from 1965 to 1968), Jim gets into fights with fellow students, steals odd objects, drinks apricot brandy, and breaks other rules that should get him expelled, but Mr. Schmitt sticks with him. “He’s the most interesting mess we have this year,” he says to Mr. Hoffman. But as much trouble as he is, Jim is also an extremely clever young dreamer with fascinating insight into life. “It’s a prison to think things are impossible,” he says to his math-nerd roommate, Austin Lord Schmitt (David Potters), Mr. Schmitt’s nephew. Later, meeting with Louise Schmitt (Annika Boras), Mr. Schmitt’s wife and an English teacher at the school, Jim says, “People are born somebody. They don’t choose who they are. I was born me. I don’t get to be somebody else, even if I want to be someone else.” “Do you want to be somebody else?” Mrs. Schmitt asks. “What’s it matter? I can’t be,” he responds. “I’m Jim Quinn. I was born Jim Quinn and I’ll die Jim Quinn.” It all comes to a head as graduation nears and Jim’s immediate future is very much in doubt.

John Patrick Shanley goes back to prep school in PRODIGAL SON (photo © 2016 by Joan Marcus)

Prodigal Son is a deeply personal story, based on Shanley’s real experiences at the real Thomas More school, which was founded and run by the real Mr. Schmitt. (In fact, a special preview of the play was recently held for current and former students and faculty members.) It’s no surprise that the show is highly literate, with discussions of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” Plato and Socrates, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Sigmund Freud, and T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” that avoid getting overly pedantic. The five characters are extremely well drawn, avoiding genre stereotypes while including several shocking plot twists. Chalamet (Homeland, Interstellar), a graduate of the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and who was born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen, is a whirlwind as Jim, gesticulating wildly — much of which was inspired by Shanley’s (Moonstruck, Outside Mullingar) own proclivities — and approaching the world with eyes wide open, hopeful for the possibilities it offers while worried he might never find his place in it. McGarry, who has previously appeared in Shanley’s Doubt, Defiance, Dirty Story, and Where’s My Money?, is steadfast as Mr. Schmitt, a God-fearing man whose convictions are severely tested by Jim. Boras (Chair, The Broken Heart) is radiant as Mrs. Schmitt, a bright and charming woman who is much more than a mere appendage of her husband; her involvement with Jim is critical to his potential success. Santo Loquasto’s engaging set includes a miniature version of the school in the back and bare trees on the sides that move as various rooms slide in and off the stage; the interstitial music is by Paul Simon, with lighting by Natasha Katz. But at the center of it all is the Tony-, Pulitzer-, and Oscar-winning Shanley himself, finally sharing a story he’s wanted to tell for decades. “I wish you could have been there,” Shanley writes in a program note. After experiencing Prodigal Son, you’ll feel like you were.

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

Phoebe Fox, Mark Strong, and Nicola Walker star as a family about to face some ugly truths in A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE (photo by Jan Versweyveld)

Lyceum Theatre
149 West 45th St. between Broadway & Sixth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 21, $30-$135
www.aviewfromthebridgebroadway.com

As you enter the Lyceum Theatre to see Belgium-born, Amsterdam-based director Ivo van Hove’s gripping, Olivier Award–winning transformation of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, the curtain is up, and on the stage is a giant rectangular gray cube. It doesn’t quite reach the bottom, so you can get a teasing glimpse of the floor through a translucent border. On either side of the cube are six rows of rising pews, where some of the audience sits, like a jury waiting to hear the evidence. As if unveiling a magic trick, the cube slowly rises to the rafters, and onstage are Eddie Carbone (Mark Strong) and Louis (Richard Hansell), two Red Hook longshoremen furiously scrubbing their mostly bare bodies like they’re trying to cleanse their inner souls. “Justice is very important here,” a suited observer notes, strolling outside the two-foot-high bench that encircles three sides of the stage, with a nondescript door on the back wall. The easygoing man is Alfieri (Michael Gould), a neighborhood lawyer who is part Greek chorus, part Our Town–like narrator of this twentieth-century tragedy about misguided love, immigration, honor, morality, and, yes, justice. Eddie is the conscience of the play, a hardworking man who holds tight to his convictions, determined to make a better life for his orphaned niece, Catherine (Phoebe Fox), whom he is raising with his wife, Beatrice (Nicola Walker), a stabling influence. When Catherine is offered a job as a stenographer, the overprotective Eddie prefers that she finish school first. “That ain’t what I had in mind,” he says. Eddie and Beatrice take in two of Beatrice’s cousins from Sicily, Marco (Michael Zegen) and Rodolpho (Russell Tovey), illegal immigrants who have snuck into New York on a boat. While Marco is looking to work hard for several years, sending money back home to his wife and kids before making enough to return to Sicily and be with them again, Rodolpho wants to remain in New York and become a performer. When the light-hearted, flashy Rodolpho starts displaying what Eddie considers questionable tendencies — “The guy ain’t right,” Eddie says again and again — while also showing interest in Catherine, Eddie decides to step in between them, setting off a series of battles that have grave consequences.

Passions ignite in Ivo van Hove’s staging of Arthur Miller’s A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE (photo by Jan Versweyveld)

Originally staged as a one-act in 1955 and then turned into a two-act show the next year directed by Peter Brook and starring Richard Harris and Anthony Quayle, A View from the Bridge is a stark examination of the American dream in mid-twentieth-century Brooklyn. Van Hove, who over his twenty-five-year career has created unique interpretations of works by Ingmar Bergman (Scenes from a Marriage, Persona), Luchino Visconti (Ludwig II), John Cassavetes (Faces, Husbands), Henrik Ibsen (Hedda Gabler), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema), Tony Kushner (Angels in America), Eugene O’Neill (Mourning Becomes Electra, Long Day’s Journey into Night), and many others, in addition to helming the recent world premiere of Lazarus, his New York Theatre Workshop collaboration with David Bowie and Enda Walsh, gets to the gritty heart of A View from the Bridge, his first Miller adaptation, to be immediately followed by his version of The Crucible, which begins previews on Broadway at the end of February. Van Hove, who has also directed numerous operas, focuses on the operatic aspects of Miller’s narrative in this Young Vic production, highlighting oversized emotions, sexual jealousy, and fierce power struggles as the characters seem in the grip of psychological forces sometimes beyond their control, playing out to their inexorable conclusion. The stage, designed by van Hove’s longtime partner, Jan Versweyveld, is set up like a boxing ring, as the characters go at one another both verbally and physically; even Alfieri eventually becomes more than just a narrator, getting involved in the action as he steps through the door and into the middle of it all. Inside the “ring,” everyone is barefoot as raw passion bubbles to the surface and ugly truths are spat out. In his Broadway debut, the tall, bald Strong (The Imitation Game, Low Winter Sun) is a sensation, giving a brutally honest performance that has him barely able to stand up for his curtain call at the end, the exhaustion palpable all over his face and body. Fox is sweetly vulnerable as the tough-talking young woman caught between childhood and becoming an adult, still wanting to be that little girl while also exploring her burgeoning sexuality. Tom Gibbons’s sound design features a cinematic score that will not be to everyone’s taste, while the controversial ending will thrill some and disappoint others. And then, after two complex, intense, intermissionless hours, the gray cube comes back down, and the magic is put away until the next performance.

A DREAM OF RED PAVILIONS

Vichet Chum and Kelsey Wang star in Pan Asian Rep’s A DREAM OF RED PAVILIONS (photo by John Quincy Lee)

The Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through February 14, $66.25
212-560-2183
www.panasianrep.org
www.theatrerow.org

The Pan Asian Repertory Theatre bites off more than it can chew in A Dream of Red Pavilions, continuing at the Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row through February 14. Jeremy Tiang has adapted Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century epic Dream of the Red Chamber, one of China’s four great classical novels (along with Water Margin, Journey to the West, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms), into a bumpy, streamlined tale that never develops any kind of pace and rhythm, flatly directed by Tisa Chang and Lu Yu. In the spirit world, a stone named Baoyu (Vichet Chum) offers water to a parched flower, Daiyu (Kelsey Wang). They then descend to earth as cousins in the previously well-off Jia clan, led by court minister Jia Zheng (Fenton Li) and his mother, the family matriarch (Shigeko Sara Suga). Now facing potential financial hardship, the family is excited when eldest daughter Yuanchun (Mandarin Wu, who also portrays the Fairy False), is chosen to be the emperor’s concubine. The tale centers on the love between Baoyu, who was born with jade in his mouth, and the shy, fragile Daiyu, who has to take pills to maintain her health. But Baoyu has been promised to Baochai (Leanne Cabrera), and as his wedding day approaches, the matriarch is hoping for better things for everyone. “A flood of happiness,” she says, “to wash away our bad luck,” which is not quite what happens. Sheryl Liu’s set is relatively simple with a gentle charm, boasting carved wood painted red, and Hyun Sook Kim’s costumes are dramatic, but Douglas Macur’s projections are irrelevant, and Angel Lam’s music is obvious. Of the game cast, Amanda Centeno avails herself the best, playing various maids as well as one of Baoyu’s lovers. But there’s just not enough depth to sustain this epic tale for what turns out to be two very long, very slow hours.