this week in theater

THE CHANGELING

Red Bull Theater has revived Middleton and Crowley’s THE CHANGELING at the Lucille Lortel (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Red Bull Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theater
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 24, $60-$80
212-352-3101
www.redbulltheater.com

A whole bunch of characters go to a whole lot of trouble to get laid in Red Bull Theater’s adaptation of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s 1622 Jacobean tragedy, The Changeling, but despite all the lust and violence, it ends up being a rather tepid affair. The classic play is set in Alicante, Spain, where the wealthy Vermandero (Sam Tsoutsouvas) has arranged for his daughter, Beatrice-Joanna (Sara Topham), to marry Alonzo de Piracquo (John Skelley). Instead, the strong-willed, fickle young woman has fallen in love with the dapper nobleman Alsemero (Christian Coulson), while Alsemero’s friend, Jasperino (Justin Blanchard), has the hots for Beatrice’s maid, Diaphanta (Kimiye Corwin). One of Vermandero’s servants, the disfigured De Flores (Manoel Felciano), harbors a secret affection for Beatrice. In the local asylum, guard Lollio (Andrew Weems), supposed madman Antonio (Bill Army), and apparent fool Franciscus (Philippe Bowgen) covet Isabella (Michelle Beck), the much younger wife of asylum doctor Alibius (Christopher McCann). As the wedding approaches, dangerous passions lead to subterfuge, mistaken identity, and murder, as blood spills and the body count rises.

Beatrice (Sara Topham) and De Flores (Manoel Felciano) battle lust and passion in Jacobean tragedy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Part of Red Bull Theater’s “Season of Scandal,” The Changeling never seems to grab hold of the audience, unspooling more like a series of vignettes than a fully realized play. The company, which has had great success with recent productions of such other seventeenth-century works as Volpone and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, has previously staged Middleton’s Women Beware Women and The Revenger’s Tragedy, also with founding artistic director Jesse Berger at the helm, but this time around there is not enough life in the revival. The dark, black set, by Marion Williams, features several platforms at the center, a mysterious closet where Alsemero keeps potions that, among other things, can tell if a woman is a virgin, and doors and mirrors behind which the asylum residents, dressed like strange animals, sometimes hover. The play, which has been turned into a 1974 BBC broadcast starring Helen Mirren, Tony Selby, Brian Cox, and Susan Penhaligon and a 1994 television presentation with Elizabeth McGovern, Bob Hoskins, Hugh Grant, and Sean Pertwee, explores the nature of sin, but ’tis a pity that this revival doesn’t take full advantage of all of the immorality, unable to balance the comic aspects with the tragic, the heartfelt with the absurd. (On January 18, Red Bull Theater will hold its next Revelation Reading, of Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, directed by Craig Baldwin and with a cast that includes Bill Buell, Grant Chapman, Stephanie DiMaggio, David Greenspan, Christina Pumariega, Mirirai Sithole, David Ryan Smith, and Stephen Spinella.)

BROADWAYCON

Lin-Manuel Miranda and other members of the cast and crew of HAMILTON will take part in the first annual BroadwayCon (photo by Joan Marcus)

New York Hilton Midtown
1335 Sixth Ave. between 53rd & 54th Sts.
January 22-24, $50 Explorer Pass, $95 Day Pass
www.broadwaycon.com
www3.hilton.com

The first-ever BroadwayCon is being held January 22-24 at the Hilton in Midtown, with dozens of Great White Way stars participating in panels, workshops, autograph and Q&A sessions, meet and greets, and live performances. Weekend passes are sold out, but you can still get single-day tickets to see cast and crew members from such shows as Fun Home, Hamilton, Spring Awakening, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Les Misérables, Rent, Wicked, School of Rock, and many others. Below are only some of the highlights.

Friday, January 22
Something Wonderful: A Look Behind The King and I, with Christopher Gattelli, Donald Holder, Scott Lehrer, Bartlett Sher, Michael Yeargan, and Catherine Zuber, moderated by Ted Chapin, Beekman, 2:00

The BroadwayCon 2016 Opening, with surprise guests, MainStage, 3:30

History Is Happening in Manhattan: The Hamilton Panel, with Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Jonathan Groff, Christopher Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., and Phillipa Soo, moderated by Blake Ross, MainStage, 5:00

Autograph Session: Rent, Nassau, 9:00

The BroadwayCon Jukebox, with Kerry Butler, Jenn Colella, Anthony Rapp, Ryann Redmond, Stark Sands, and Alysha Umphress, moderated by Ben Cameron, MainStage, 9:30

Saturday, January 23
Autograph Session: Fiddler on the Roof, Americas Hall I, 10:20 am

Master Class: Anthony Rapp, Gramercy West, 11:00 am

A Conversation with Sheldon Harnick, MainStage, 12:30

Dance, Ten: Broadway’s Choreographers, with Christopher Gattelli, Lorin Latarro, and Kathleen Marshall, moderated by Michael Gioia, Nassau, 3:00

Divas, Darlings, and Dames: Women in Broadway Musicals of the 1960s, with Stacy Wolf, Beekman, 4:00

Sunday, January 24
Audition Q&A with Bernie Telsey, Gramercy West, 9:00 am

Obsessed! Live: Disaster! Edition, with Roger Bart, Kerry Butler, Kevin Chamberlin, Max Crumm, Lacretta Nicole, Adam Pascal, Faith Prince, Jennifer Simard, and Rachel York, moderated by Seth Rudetsky, MainStage, 11:00 am

I Can Do That! Broadway Siblings, with Karmine Alers, Yassmin Alers, Andrew Keenan-Bolger, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and Maggie Keenan-Bolger, Sutton, 12 noon

The “Pippins and Wickeds and Kinkies, Matildas, and Mormonses” Singalong, Sutton, 3:00

The First Annual BroadwayCon Cabaret, with Nick Adams, Alex Brightman, Jeremy Jordan, Lesli Margherita, and Krysta Rodriguez, moderated by Rob McClure, MainStage, 11:00 pm

UNDER THE RADAR — DOROTHÉE MUNYANEZA / COMPAGNIE KADIDI: SAMEDI DÉTENTE

Dorothée Munyaneza recalls personal horrors of the Rwandan genocide in SAMEDI DÉTENTE (photo by Laura Fouqueré)

LuEsther Hall at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
January 14-17, $25
212-967-7555
www.undertheradarfestival.com
anahi-spectacle-vivant.fr

Rwandan-born, French-based singer, actress, writer, and dancer Dorothée Munyaneza is mesmerizing in Samedi Détente, as she recalls the fateful month of April 1994 in her native country, when she was twelve years old and genocide was about to be unleashed as Hutu sought to eradicate Tutsi. Munyaneza, barefoot and dressed in multiple colorful layers, speaks starkly to the audience, sings, dances atop a table that she later balances on her head, and holds a knife that drips blood through a hospital tube. With a haunted yet determined look in her eyes, she remembers the death of President Habyarimana, of men with guns arriving at their home and separating her family, of how the rest of the world turned their backs on Rwanda. “They all left us in deep shit and blood,” she says. Her harsh, compelling narrative is accompanied by Ivory Coast dancer Nadia Beugré, who at first stands to Munyaneza’s right, covered in a hood as if she is being held hostage, while on the other side French musician Alain Mahé adds music and sound effects and sharpens knives. But the show, running at the Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall through January 17 as part of the Under the Radar Festival, takes a baffling turn in a vignette in which Beugré performs zouglou, a popular dance style from the Ivory Coast celebrating the joy of life while commenting on current affairs.

Munyaneza, who wrote and directed Samedi Détente for her troupe, Compagnie Kadidi, might be using Beugré’s interlude to contrast the horrors of genocide with the feel-good partying that went on around the globe, and particularly in France and Africa, during those harsh months, but instead it disappointingly dilutes what was a compelling narrative. Munyaneza is able to right things before the finale, but one can’t help but wonder how much more powerful Samedi Détente, which was named after a Rwandan radio show that translates as “Saturday Relief,” would have been if it just focused on its central raison d’être. “How to tell the unspeakable? How to speak about leaving a beloved place? About the circumstances in which you had to flee the cradle of childhood, one day, hiding, on roads scattered with bodies, blood, and silence?” Munyaneza, who had a song on the Hotel Rwanda soundtrack and released her debut solo album in 2010, asks in her artist statement, continuing, “I want to speak though the eyes of those who have seen. I want to share the words of those who were there.” For much of Samedi Détente, she accomplishes just that, not needing the additional artifice. (The January 17 performance will be followed by a discussion with members of the cast and crew.)

UNDER THE RADAR — TOSHIKI OKADA: GOD BLESS BASEBALL

Toshiki Okada steps up to the plate with his political allegory, GOD BLESS BASEBALL (photo © Julie Lemberger)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 14-17, $35
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.publictheater.org

Toshiki Okada uses America’s national pastime to explore the relationship between Japan, Korea, and the United States in God Bless Baseball, making its North American premiere this weekend at Japan Society as part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival. The Yokohama-born playwright and director doesn’t begin God Bless Baseball with the traditional “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” but instead with “Mickey Mouse March,” the theme from The Mickey Mouse Club, as two young women, one Korean (Sung Hee Wi), one Japanese (Aoi Nozu), take the stage. Sung and Aoi are marvelous, their odd gestures, a hallmark of Okada’s style, epitomizing “awkward” as they discuss how they don’t understand the rules of baseball. They are standing at the front of controversial visual artist Tadasu Takamine’s primarily black set: a small baseball diamond with four white bases; a pair of scoreboard-like monitors, one for Korean, the other for Japanese surtitles; a bucket of balls; and a twelve-sided polygon high on the wall behind home plate; the quirky costumes are by Kyoko Fujitani. The two women are soon joined by a man (Yoon Jae Lee) who attempts to explain the rules of the game, even though he admits that he is not a fan of the sport. They delve into offense and defense, strikes and innings, free time and boredom, and how their fathers love the game. “OK, so that’s all clear and great but I still don’t really understand like what kind of sport baseball is, ultimately,” the Japanese girl says. “For those of us who don’t understand anything about baseball, it was honestly pretty opaque,” the Korean girl adds. Soon an Ichiro impersonator (Pijin Neji) arrives, carrying a bat and wearing the Seattle great’s number, 51, on the back of his spectacularly hip hoodie. He references the March 2006 controversy when Ichiro, playing for Japan against Korea in the World Baseball Classic, may or may not have dissed his opponents, which set off a new hostility between two nations that already had a bad history. “It was just a misunderstanding,” Ichiro says while taking practice cuts. Things get even more surreal when the polygon starts talking to the characters in a disembodied voice that is part umpire, part godlike figure. “It’s no use lying to me,” the very American voice intones. “Place your hand upon your heart and tell me the truth.”

Okada, who has previously presented such works as Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech and Five Days in March at Japan Society with his chelfitsch theater company, creates just the right mood in this clever allegory, capturing the complications of not only the game of baseball itself but the relationships between parents and children as well as political tensions in Asia. Casting America as the spiritual father of Korea and Japan when it comes to baseball, two cousins who do not get along very well, Okada also throws in a few fastballs at corporate culture, gently mocking sponsorship and the more capitalist aspects of the sport. The four actors are excellent, especially in a late dance segment in which they give up control of their bodies. And as a sweet bonus, when you enter Japan Society, you’ll be met by two women hawking small, adorable bags of Tohato caramel corn. You definitely don’t need to know anything about baseball to enjoy this delightful, metaphorical romp, so don’t be afraid to step up to the plate and take a swing.

MISERY

Bruce Willis and Laurie Metcalfe star in stage adaptation of Stephen King’s MISERY

Broadhurst Theatre
235 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 14, $59 – $169
www.miserybroadway.com

It’s extremely difficult to pull off a successful suspense thriller on Broadway. After Deathtrap and Wait Until Dark, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with another solid example. So it was with high expectations that Misery opened on Broadway in November. The story of an unbalanced obsessive keeping her favorite novelist hostage in her home began with Stephen King’s superb 1987 novel, one of his first and best non-supernatural books. Three years later, director Rob Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman turned it into a nail-biting film, a gripping psychological thriller starring an Oscar-nominated Kathy Bates and James Caan. Unfortunately, the material can’t pull off a hat trick, as the much-anticipated stage version, with wryly comic action hero Bruce Willis making his Broadway debut as writer Paul Sheldon and Tony-nominated theater and television veteran Laurie Metcalf taking on the role of deranged nurse Annie Wilkes, is dull and lifeless, delivering only occasional moments of shock and tension. After a serious car accident in a small snow-laden town in 1987 Colorado, Sheldon is rescued by Wilkes, who brings him to her isolated home and repeatedly tells him, “I’m your number one fan.” She lives for his Misery Chastain series, popular bodice rippers set in the nineteenth century. Wilkes claims that the roads are closed and the phone lines are down, so she will take care of his busted shoulder and two broken legs, dispensing painkillers on a regular schedule. Barely able to move, Sheldon cautiously learns to deal with Wilkes’s clearly disturbed personality, which can instantly swing from ridiculously sweet to frighteningly violent. When Wilkes finds, reads — and hates — the manuscript of his latest book in the car, things get bad, but the plot takes an even nastier turn when Sheldon’s latest Misery book is published and Wilkes is not exactly happy with the ending. “A writer is God to the people in a story; he made them up just like God made us up,” she screams at him. “As far as Misery goes, God just happened to have a couple of broken legs and be in my house, eating my food.”

Both Paul Sheldon and Bruce Willis look for a way out of MISERY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Misery never finds its groove. Willis (Die Hard, Pulp Fiction), a likable actor who last appeared on a New York stage in an off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love in 1985, brings no depth or range to Sheldon, playing him with the same smirking, even keel throughout; at times it feels as if he is merely reading his lines instead of performing them. Metcalf (Roseanne, November), who has become one of New York’s most dependable and enjoyable actors to watch in such shows as Domesticated and The Other Place, is unable to infuse Wilkes with the intense flashes of evil so expertly captured by Bates in the film, and Annie’s trademark phrases (“cockadoodie,” “dirty bird”) come off as silly. The sledgehammer scene will have you jumping out of your seat, but more because of how it’s technically achieved. In his Broadway directorial debut, Will Frears maintains a flat level that is in desperate need of energy, missing from the start with the lack of chemistry between the two leads. Goldman, who has written such books and screenplays as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and The Princess Bride, has trimmed the story down to ninety minutes, cutting out critical parts of Wilkes’s back story and making the sheriff (Leon Addison Brown) more of a stock character instead of the investigative cop he is in the book and film. Of course, Frears, the son of accomplished film director Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Launderette, The Queen), doesn’t have access to the equipment of the movies or outdoor locations here; he cannot zoom in on Sheldon’s and Wilkes’s faces or use quick edits and swift camera movement to build tension. David Korins’s rotating set helps contribute some much-needed action to the claustrophobic proceedings, but it’s not enough to revive this Misery.

UNDER THE RADAR: GERMINAL

GERMINAL brilliantly melds low-tech and high-tech as four characters create a brand-new world from the bottom up (photo by Bea Borgers)

The Newman Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
January 6-9, $25
Festival continues through January 17
212-967-7555
www.undertheradarfestival.com
amicaledeproduction.com

The stars were out in force on January 6 for the opening night of the Public Theater’s twelfth annual Under the Radar Festival. Among those squeezing into the sold-out Newman Theater for the New York premiere of the highly touted international hit Germinal were David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, John Leguizamo, and Denis O’Hare. The eighty-minute piece, inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s posthumously published 1899 novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, uses the magic and mechanics of stage craft to help construct a mysterious new plane of existence, as the characters create a unique theatrical experience while modeling the birth of a civilization. Conceived by Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort of l’Amicale de Production, the vastly entertaining, highly literate, and charmingly goofy show begins with some playful lighting effects, as if the God of Theater has slowly declared, “Let there be light.” Soon Arnaud Boulogne, Sébastien Vial, Ondine Cloez, and Defoort are each using small, handheld machines to manipulate first the lights, then their thoughts, conjuring them onto the back wall. Reminiscent of babies finding their way outside their mother’s womb, the four erstwhile explorers delve into the nature of language, sound, speech, communication, identity, recognition, classification, music, architecture, archaeology, self-expression, and various philosophical conundrums that would make Roland Barthes proud, Samuel Beckett happy, and Bertolt Brecht concerned. Social interaction takes center stage as they seek out connections of all sorts in addition to reason, meaning, and, well, just plain old fun. Boulogne, Vial, Cloez, and Defoort may give the appearance that everything is low-tech and improvised, but Germinal is actually a brilliantly seamless use of modern technology choreographed to the second. As the delighted audience filed out, we couldn’t help but think that if you could put younger versions of Byrne, Anderson, Leguizamo, and O’Hare onstage together in a black-box theater with today’s technology, you just might end up with something very much like Germinal.

AMERICAN REALNESS

Keyon Gaskin’s IT’S NOT A THING is part of American Realness festival at Abrons Arts Center (photo by Duncan Gray)

Abrons Arts Center and other venues
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 7-17, $20 unless otherwise noted
212-598-0400
www.americanrealness.com
www.abronsartscenter.org

The seventh American Realness festival consists of twenty cutting-edge theatrical presentations ($20 each), a movement workshop ($90), and four free lectures and discussions over the course of eleven days, January 7-17, almost exclusively at Abrons Arts Center. There’s so much going on that every day features between six and ten events spread throughout the venue, which includes the Experimental Theater, the Playhouse, the Underground Theater, and room 201. Two performances take place at other venues: The great Jack Ferver, who has a well-deserved rabid fan base for his deeply personal and intimate, often confessional multidisciplinary works, returns to American Realness with Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité) at Gibney Dance (January 13-16), an updated version of a piece that debuted in 2012 at FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival and in which the audience becomes part of the action. And Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen also employs interactivity in her multimedia 69 Positions (January 15-17, $15), which connects sexuality and public space in MoMA PS1’s VW Dome. Back at Abrons, the New York premiere of Heather Kravas’s dead, disappears (January 7-11) integrates Richard Serra’s Verb List into a solo work about words and movement, woman and object. In choreographer Larissa Velez-Jackson’s Star Crap Method (January 9-17), performers Tyler Ashley, Talya Epstein, and Velez-Jackson and lighting designer Kathy Kaufman improvise as they examine the role of sound, light, music, and movement. In the world premiere of Erin Markey’s A Ride on the Irish Cream (January 13-17), Markey and Becca Blackwell bring to life the love between a girl and a pontoon boat/horse. M. Lamar’s Destruction (January 13-16) investigates the white supremacist world order using Negro spirituals. Sadness is at the heart of the New York premiere of Ligia Lewis’s Sorrow Swag (January 7-10), performed by Brian Getnick with live musical accompaniment by George Lewis Jr. Antonija Livingstone, Jennifer Lacey, Dominique Pétrin, Stephen Thompson, Dana Michel, and Brendan Dougherty collaborate on Culture Administration & Trembling (January 7-8), which explores the nature of spectatorship.

The festival also includes Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s #negrophobia (January 8-17), Keyon Gaskin’s it’s not a thing (January 8-11), Fernando Belfiore’s AL13FB<3 (January 9-12), Keith Hennessy and Jassem Hindi’s future friend/ships (January 9-12), Sara Shelton Mann, Hennessy, and Norman Rutherford’s Sara (The Smuggler) (January 11-13), Yvonne Meier’s Durch Nacht und Nebel (January 11-16), Antonio Ramos and the Gang Bangers’ Mira El! (January 12-15), choreographer Milka Djordjevich and composer Chris Peck’s Mass (January 13-15), the world premiere of the Bureau for the Future of Choreography’s Score for a Lecture, and James & Jen | McGinn & Again’s Over the River | Through the Woods diptych (January 16-17). In addition, Kravas, Lewis, Jenn Joy, and Kelly Kivland will discuss “Melancholia and Precarious Virtuosity” on January 8 at 3:30, Claudia La Rocco, Lane Czaplinski, Annie Dorsen, Yelena Gluzman, Katherine Profeta, and others will explore the question “How Should the Present Think About the Future?” on January 9 at noon, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Thomas J. Lax, Soyoung Yoon, and Cassie Mey will delve into “A Charming Uproar: On Documenting Dance” on January 10 at 3:30, Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz will lecture on “I Am Black (You Have to Be Willing to Not Know)” on January 17 at 11:00 am, and Movement Research will host the workshop “Creative Differences” with La Rocco on January 7, 10, and 12 ($90).