Lately I’ve been thinking more than ever about grief and death. I’m not a support group kinda guy, but when I heard about The Voices in Your Head, I knew I had to go.
I found solace — and nearly nonstop laughter — in Those Guilty Creatures’ immersive, site-specific group therapy black comedy, which continues at St. Lydia’s storefront dinner church in Brooklyn through January 29.
The space has been renamed St. Lidwina’s, after the Dutch patron saint of chronic pain and ice skating. The church has a large front window and door, looking more like a cozy shop than a place of worship. When you arrive, you are asked to check off your name on a sign-in sheet; to protect your anonymity, there are no last names, although people passing by outside can peek in and see you.
In the center of the room are more than two dozen unmatched chairs arranged in a large oval. In the back is a working kitchen where the facilitator, Gwen (Vanessa Kai), greets everyone while making tea and cookies. Several attendees engage in friendly conversation and chitchat. Shortly after Gwen calls the meeting to order, it becomes apparent that a handful of the participants are in the cast.
“It’s funny, when I was at my lowest, I was going to all these different meetings; it felt like dating, trying to find the right match, and they were all so . . . maudlin? I thought, there has to be another way. So, I started this group,” Gwen says. “Evidently, there was a need. So, we’re all here, we’ve met the criteria, but, broadly, I like to think of this as a place to share a sensibility. Laughter comes easier for me in here than out there. Everyone has their own relationship to grief; I’ve been considering mine, but what about anti-grief? We seek that through shared stories, activities, and discussions. . . . We aim to hear three stories each week, which, hopefully, helps us exchange some weird-ass joy.”
The audience becomes immersed in the grief of others in The Voices in Your Head (photo by HanJie Chow)
Sharing their sensibilities are the vivacious and outgoing Regina (Daphne Overbeck); Vivian (Marcia DeBonis), who believes in “Death, Embarrassment, Trauma”; Caleb (Christian Caro), who doesn’t want to be sad in college and can’t stop texting; the ultraserious Sandra (Erin Treadway); and the practical Hadiya (Jehan O. Young), who loves “the morbid stuff.”
They are eventually joined by first-timer Blake (Patrick Foley), who is determined to turn his story of loss into a Netflix special, and Ted (Tom Mezger), who actually attends the church and saw a flier.
Over the course of sixty fun, lively minutes, the group discusses Kelly Clarkson, hot cater waiters, self-care, vacuuming, exfoliating, sand, and other items and issues as they explore their personal misfortunes. A role-playing session that puts some of the group members in specific social situations doesn’t go quite as expected. During a break, the characters gossip, revealing more about who they are.
At the center of it all is the arbitrariness of death and Gwen’s assertion that we should “just approach the nature of the loss with a sense of humor. It helps us hold a certain space.”
The Voices in Your Head takes place in the storefront of a Brooklyn dinner church (photo by HanJie Chow)
The cast is uniformly excellent, led by Kai (The Pain of My Belligerence,KPOP) as the not-necessarily-so-stable Gwen, the always terrific DeBonis (Mary Page Marlowe,Small Mouth Sounds) as the chatty but caring Vivian, Treadway (Spaceman,War Dreamer) as the dour Sandra, Young (Speech,The Johnsons) as the purposeful Hadiya, Overbeck (Typed Out: A Princess Cabaret,Nightgowns) as the wonderfully over-the-top Regina, and Caro making his off-Broadway debut as the inattentive Caleb, but Foley (Circle Jerk,The Seagull/Woodstock, NY) nearly steals the show with his unforgettable Christmas story.
Created by Grier Mathiot and Billy McEntee and gleefully directed by Ryan Dobrin, The Voices in Your Head is as smart as it is hilarious. It’s not so much about how we deal with death than how we deal with life. Everyone reacts differently to tragedy and loss, but, as Gwen points out, “We need to hear each other’s laughter.”
The Voices in Your Head is not interactive — the audience should leave the talking to the actors — but feel free to mingle afterward and share your own thoughts about this engaging and involving experience.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Uncle George (Colin Lane) goes for a stroll in Irish Rep revival of Brian Friel’s Aristocrats (photo by Jeremy Daniel)
ARISTOCRATS
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West Twenty-Second St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through March 3, $60-$125
212-727-2737 irishrep.org
The Irish Rep continues its 2023–24 Friel Project with what it does best, an exquisite revival of a superb Irish drama, in this case Brian Friel’s 1979 Aristocrats.
In 2005, when the company was in danger of losing the lease on its home on West Twenty-Second St., Friel, a native of Northern Ireland, praised the Irish Rep’s excellence, writing about cofounders Charlotte Moore and Ciarán O’Reilly, “The ground they occupy has now been made sacred by them. They have made their space hallowed. It would be unthinkable if 132 West Twenty-Second St. were to slip from them and become secularized. It must remain under their wonderful guardianship.”
Friel passed away in 2015 at the age of eighty-six, coincidentally during a major renovation of the Irish Rep’s hallowed space.
Since its beginnings in 1988, the Irish Rep has staged ten of Friel’s works, including Making History,Molly Sweeney,Dancing at Lughnasa,The Freedom of the City,Afterplay, and The Home Place. The Friel Project kicked off with Translations last fall and continues in March with Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which the troupe previously presented in 1990 and 2005, before concluding with Molly Sweeney, seen at the Irish Rep in 2011 and online in 2020.
Moore first directed Aristocrats in 2009; fifteen years later, she is helming another exemplary production. The story, partially inspired by such classic Chekhov family tales as The Cherry Orchard,Three Sisters,Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, takes place in Ballybeg Hall in County Donegal in the mid-1970s, as the fortunes of a Catholic family have turned. (Friel wrote adaptations of Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya and set several other plays in the fictional Ballybeg, which means “small town.”)
Alice (Sarah Street) is suspicious as Casimir (Tom Holcomb) shares more information with Tom (Roger Dominic Casey) in Aristocrats (photo by Jeremy Daniel)
Charlie Corcoran, one of New York City’s finest scenic designers, has created a lovely indoor-outdoor set that features a flowered trellis and (fake) grass by an unseen tennis court, a porch swing, a desk in an old, dusty study raised a few steps, and a rear hallway with no front wall, so the audience can see people coming and going. The open set hints at the many secrets that will soon be revealed.
The decaying estate is run by Judith (Danielle Ryan), who lives there with her youngest sister, Claire (Meg Hennessy), who is getting married to a middle-aged widower with four young children; their father, former District Justice O’Donnell (Colin Lane), who has dementia; and their uncle George (Lane), a dapper old gent who rarely speaks. Their brother, Casimir (Tom Holcomb), has traveled from Hamburg for the wedding festivities, arriving without his wife, Helga, and their two children. The fourth sibling, the cynical Alice (Sarah Street), and her husband, the brash bully Eamon (Tim Ruddy), have also come, but it seems that they would prefer to be anywhere else.
As the play opens, family friend and handyman Willie Diver (Shane McNaughton) is installing a baby alarm on the top of a bookcase so the family can hear any noises coming from their father’s room, alerting them if there are any problems. An American scholar, Tom Hoffnung (Roger Dominic Casey), is at the estate researching a book he’s writing on “the life and the life-style of the Roman Catholic big house — by no means as thick on the ground but still there; what we might call a Roman Catholic aristocracy — for want of a better term. . . . And the task I’ve set myself is to explore its political, cultural, and economic influence both on the ascendancy ruling class and on the native peasant tradition.”
Casimir is only too happy to share the estate’s history with Tom, telling stories about such regular literary visitors as Sean O’Casey, G. K. Chesterton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and W. B. Yeats. But Eamon has a different perspective, advising Tom that the book should be “a great big blockbuster of a gothic novel called Ballybeg Hall — From Supreme Court to Sausage Factory.”
Casimir, who can’t get through on the phone to his wife in Germany, continually plays a game with Claire, a trained classical pianist who suffers from anxiety, guessing the pieces she is playing from an offstage room; they also challenge each other to an invisible game of croquet, representing their vanishing lifestyle. Alice, who has a suspiciously bruised face, drinks too much. Judith, who participated in the Battle of the Bogside, smokes too much. The O’Donnells are a family on the decline, existing in their own world, refusing, or unable, to confront the reality that’s staring down at them.
Judith (Danielle Ryan) and Eamon (Tim Ruddy) can’t forget the past in Friel revival at Irish Rep (photo by Jeremy Daniel)
Moore has a firm grasp on the proceedings, having previously directed five other Friel plays at the Irish Rep; the narrative flows smoothly, then hits hard when revelations come. The sound and original music by Ryan Rumery and M. Florian Staab immerse the audience in the elegiac world the O’Donnells are trying to hold on to, representative of an evolving Ireland as the Troubles pit the Catholics against the Protestants. Birds chirp and Claire’s piano emits beautiful melodies, but that is just background noise that can’t hide the truth. David Toser’s costumes range from casual to elegant to old-fashioned, further evoking the family’s loose relationship with time and change.
The expert cast is highlighted by Holcomb, who portrayed Chekhovian dreamer Conrad Arkadina in Woolly Mammoth’s adaptation of Aaron Posner’s reimagining of The Seagull, the fabulous Stupid Fucking Bird. The tall, thin Holcomb glides through the play, an unreliable narrator who is lost in a snow-globe fantasy.
Street, Hennessy, and Ryan are lovely as the three very different sisters; one of the most tender moments is when Alice and Claire are entwined on the swing, the former more mother than sibling to the latter. McNaughton is warm and friendly as Willie, Casey is stalwart as the observant Tom, and Lane makes the most of his short appearances as Uncle George and the father. Ruddy is strong as Eamon, a tough man who sees through much of the charade. “Between ourselves, it’s a very dangerous house, professor,” he tells Tom. He also refers to the lack of discussion of his mother-in-law as “the great silence.”
In addition to the four plays, the Irish Rep will also be paying tribute to Friel with several special events. On February 26, violinist Gregory Harrington, joined by pianist Simon Mulligan, will perform “Melodies for Friel: Echoing through the Landscape of Ballyweg,” and the Friel Project Reading Series continues through May 2 with readings of eleven Friel plays, anchored around a March 26 benefit presentation of the Tony-winning Dancing at Lughnasa.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
A therapist (Peter Friedman) and his new patient (Sydney Lemmon) fight for survival in Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job (photo by Danielle Perelman)
JOB
Connelly Theater
220 East Fourth St. between Aves. A & B
Wednesday – Monday through March 3, $32-$127 jobtheplay.com connellytheater.org
Last fall, Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job became one of the hottest tickets in town, spurred not only by the quality of the production but by a TikTok rave from moschinodorito, aka actor Connor Boyd.
The show, with the same cast and crew, is now having an encore run through March 3, moving from SoHo Playhouse to the Connelly Theater on the Lower East Side.
Below is my original review from last October; tickets are likely to go fast, so get your resumes in now. . . .
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The title of Max Wolf Friedlich’s intense generational thriller, Job, can be pronounced either with a soft o, meaning the type of work someone does, or with a hard o, referring to the biblical figure. Both characters in the world premiere at SoHo Playhouse will have to display patience and an innate understanding of their employment if they are going to survive this intense tale.
The show takes place in January 2020 in the San Francisco office of a therapist named Loyd (Peter Friedman), a sort of 1960s throwback who has to determine whether Jane (Sydney Lemmon) can return to her position in the tech world after having suffered a terrible psychological meltdown that went viral. As the play opens, Jane is holding a gun on Loyd.
“Thanks for squeezing me in,” she says plaintively, sitting down. “My pleasure. In general, do Wednesdays at this time work?” he asks, trying to ignore that his life appears to be in grave danger. For the next eighty minutes, Jane and Loyd play a kind of verbal cat-and-mouse game as facts slowly emerge explaining how it came to this.
Jane insists she is not a gun person but that her mental state is on the edge. She tells him, “I can’t imagine how scary that was for you — it was scary for me too — but I promise, I swear like . . . I will do whatever you need me to do just . . . I can’t be outside right now, I — I haven’t slept in a couple days, I haven’t — I can’t be outside, I just need to get back to work.”
Jane (Sydney Lemmon) believes she desperately needs to get back to work in Job (photo by Danielle Perelman)
Meanwhile, Loyd, responding to the shame Jane says she feels for having the gun, explains, “I’m not an especially spiritual person — at least not in the traditional sense — but I will contend that the people who wrote the Bible down were some very very clever people. We’re told that Adam and Eve eat the sort of magical wisdom apple, right? They eat the apple, realize they’re naked, and then . . . they feel shame. So shame is the very first feeling mentioned in the Bible — wisdom and shame are connected.”
Those two elements also arise in the Book of Job. “But where can wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? Man does not know its value, nor is it found in the land of the living,“ Job says to his friends. Shortly after, God says to Job, “Your enemies will be clothed in shame, and the tents of the wicked will be no more.”
As the two protagonists continue to battle it out, an underlying theme begins to emerge, one of the young fighting against the old. Jane is in her twenties, working in the tech profession in a role that didn’t exist a mere ten years before, while Loyd, in his sixties, is a laid-back Berkeley grad with outdated sensibilities.
“It’s the field that’s the problem,” Jane tells him. “Because people with your job come into work wanting to connect trauma A to trauma D, so they always do — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy or whatever.” When Jane explains how a creepy guy on a train both hit on her and insulted her at the same time, Loyd defends it as “a misguided attempt at being friendly — generational miscommunication.” She also asks Loyd, “Like why are you so terrified of progress?”
Loyd delves into Jane’s upbringing, looking for clues regarding her meltdown, but keeps coming up empty. “It was a perfectly nice granola middle class existence — nothing to cry about,” she insists. Jane, however, often turns the tables on Loyd, asking him personal questions that he does answer, perhaps out of fear knowing that there’s still that gun in her bag. But once he’s said enough, a major twist leads to an intense finale.
Loyd (Peter Friedman) is the arbiter of Jane’s fate in world premiere at SoHo Playhouse (photo by Danielle Perelman)
No matter how you pronounce it, Job is a nail-biter about patience, wisdom, and, primarily, responsibility, about people being accountable for their actions and living up to their obligations. Both Jane, who works in “user care,” and Loyd have jobs in which they help people, though in different ways, through a kind of protection.
In his off-Broadway debut, director Michael Herwitz keeps the drama at high-boil, making good use of Scott Penner’s basic set, a few chairs facing each other atop a rectangular, carpeted platform, with two small tables, an ottoman, and a lamp. Mextly Couzin’s lighting features several eerie blackouts, accompanied by Jessie Char and Maxwell Neely-Cohen’s effective sound. The costumes by Michelle Li consist of casual pants and an unbuttoned shirt for Loyd and green pants and a belly-revealing striped shirt for Jane.
Ever-reliable Tony nominee Friedman (The Nether,Ragtime) is phenomenal as an easygoing therapist who suddenly find his life on the line, while Lemmon (Tár,Helstrom) — the daughter of Chris Lemmon and granddaughter of Jack Lemmon — is exceptional in her off-Broadway debut, stretching her long body, clasping her hands, and holding tight to her gun as she slowly reveals some hidden truths. (Friedman played series regular Frank on Succession, while Lemmon appeared in three episodes as Jennifer, who’s starring in Willa’s play.)
The twist is a biggie and will turn some people off, as will the open-ended finale. But everything up to those points is taut and nerve-racking. It’s not going to hurt any of the participants to have this Job on their resume.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Four actors portray multiple characters in Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” in our own words (photo by Bronwen Sharp)
PUSHKIN “EUGENE ONEGIN” IN OUR OWN WORDS
BRIC Arts Media House
647 Fulton St., Brooklyn
Tuesday – Sunday through January 28, $52.11-$67.93 bricartsmedia.org krymovlabnyc.com
This past October, Moscow-born director, designer, and visual artist Dmitry Krymov made a smashing debut with his new company, Krymov Lab NYC, in Big Trip, two shows that ran in repertory at La MaMa. I saw Three Love Stories Near the Railroad, wild and woolly, wholly unpredictable retellings of Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Canary for One,” followed by a pair of scenes from Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms. The other presentation was the oddly titled Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” in our own words, another strange but clever and gratifying journey that is enjoying an encore run through January 28 at BRIC Arts Media House as part of the Under the Radar festival.
In the hallway, you are told that this is a children’s show and that, in order to gain entry to the BRIC Ballroom, you need to select a puppet from among the dozens and dozens scattered around what would have been the coat check room. The handmade puppets, created by Leah Ogawa and Luna Gomberg, are adorably grotesque, made of papier-mâché and assorted random items that serve as eyes, ears, or limbs. You are expected to hold on to your child-puppet throughout the wild and woolly, wholly unpredictable proceedings, a hilarious ninety minutes of meta-theatrics.
Four actors — Inna Natanovna (Anya Zicer), Pyotr Naomovich (Jeremy Radin), Oleg Lvovich (Jackson Scott), and Alla Borisovna (Elizabeth Stahlmann) — walk on Emona Stoykova’s sparse stage dragging bags of goofy props that they lay out on a table on one side and a row of chairs on the other. Addressing the audience directly, Pyotr says, “Hello. We come tonight to explain you about Evgeny Onegin, a very famous narrative poem. A novel, made of many little poems, written by Alexander Pushkin — the most great, most wonderful, amazing, fantastic poet in all history of Russia. Greatest poet of all time. Your parents ask us, four old Russian immigrants, to tell you story about Onegin and Pushkin.”
And so they do, but definitely not as you might expect.
Pyotr Naomovich (Jeremy Radin) and Inna Natanovna (Anya Zicer) move along the plot in unique ways at BRIC (photo by Bronwen Sharp)
Inna, Pyotr, Oleg, and Alla portray themselves and multiple characters from “Evgeny Onegin” and Pushkin’s personal life. Some require more significant costume changes than others, and many of the outfits look like they might have come from the performers’ own closets. (The costumes are by Gomberg, with lighting by Krista Smith, sound by Kate Marvin, and projections by Yana Biryukova, all of which are purposely low-tech.)
In the 1830s novel in verse, Pushkin introduces readers to the title character, a dandy who inherits a country estate. The landowner’s daughter, Tatyana Larina, falls in love with Onegin, who has become friendly with poet Vladimir Lensky, who is about to marry Olga Larina, Tatyana’s younger sister. When Onegin and Olga dance together at a celebration, Tatyana and Vladimir are none too happy, and things devolve from there as Pushkin explores class, gender, naïveté, and unrequited love.
The story is regularly interrupted by a heckler (Kwesiu Jones), logistical issues, literary arguments, and tangents about the art of theater itself, some of which involve “stage manager” Natalie Battistone. As Pyotr explains at one point, “From the traproom, you can rise and fall! This trick is often used in opera and ballet performances by devils! But we don’t talk about devils. Very superstitious people, theater people, ptew! No devils — we don’t want to give you nightmares, okay? We tell you, instead, about angels. . . .”
Several audience members in the first row are asked to participate. The actors keep a feather afloat by blowing on it for no apparent reason. Onegin’s spleen (depression) is examined. One of the men becomes the lower half of a ballerina’s body. A pair of oddball contraptions are employed to elucidate characters’ motivations. Onegin is compared to Pushkin. Clothes come off, revealing an unexpected surprise. A buxom nanny opens a window, then closes it, then opens it, then . . .
Writer-director Krymov was preparing a production of The Cherry Orchard in Philadelphia in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Condemning Vladimir Putin’s actions, he became an exile, moving to New York City with his wife and starting Krymov Lab NYC. If these first two vastly inventive and entertaining shows are any indication of what is to come, Putin has cost Russia something very valuable indeed.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Volcano gushes forth over four episodes and nearly four hours at St. Ann’s Warehouse
VOLCANO
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
January 10-21, $54 stannswarehouse.org
Luke Murphy’s Volcano is an eruption of ingenuity, a multimedia, multidisciplinary melding of past, present, and future bathed in mystery.
Continuing at St. Ann’s Warehouse through January 21 as part of the Under the Radar festival, the nearly four-hour presentation takes place in a large transparent box, with the audience sitting on two sides in rising rafters. Alyson Cummins and Pai Rathaya’s set is a ramshackle room with drooping wallpaper, television monitors, a disco ball, a black trunk, toy figurines, and other odd, seemingly random items.
Every time an old-fashioned radio suddenly blurts on, two unidentified men, portrayed by Irish writer, director, and choreographer Murphy (X) and London-born dancer and actor Will Thompson (Y), they grab a camera on a tripod and try to film themselves dancing. Other times they glide into compelling duets in silence, interrupted by light and sound glitches that make it feel like they are under someone else’s control. Which, to some extent, they are.
The two men are participants in the Amber Project, a 1950s-like space mission. “We at the Amber Project are ready to take the next step in the exciting and illustrious heritage of exploration and technological advancement,” a spokesman tells them on the monitors. “This Alinia rocket with the mission designation Pod 00 will soon hurl a crewless spacecraft into orbit — the first of a series of interstellar vehicles, similar to the one which will soon carry two travellers past the reaches of our solar system for the first time.” But what’s really going on?
Volcano pours out over the course of four forty-five-minute episodes — “Frequency,” “Realia,” “Gift,” and “Pod 261” — with two five-minute pauses and one standard intermission in between. If you’re looking for easy answers to what’s happening, you’re not going to find them.
“I’m confused. And I’m scared. I don’t know anything. It’s like my mind’s a library and I just went to a section of shelves I don’t normally go to, and all the book are gone. . . . I don’t even know what books are supposed to be there. And that scares me. I . . . keep wondering . . . What are we doing?” Y says at one point. “I keep wondering whether the things I recognize, the things that make me feel comfortable . . . Do I trust them because I know them, or do I trust them because I don’t know anything else? . . . Now, I know something’s changed here, but I can’t tell if I’ve lost focus on something I used to see or if I’m only now noticing what I couldn’t see before. And mainly . . . I’m wondering who knows all the things I don’t. And that . . . that makes me scared.”
The abstract, surreal narrative breaks out into a game show, a weather report, Amber Project testimonials, magic tricks, a nod to virtual reality pioneer Morton Heilig, and songs by Hot Chip, the Beach Boys, Dirty Beaches, and Billie Holiday. Visual references are made to Superman, Marilyn Monroe, Michelangelo, and iconic 1960s sci-fi television.
The dialogue doesn’t make things much clearer, only adding to the conundrum:
Y: You know, I feel like we’ve got a real opportunity here, you know? X: I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Y: Well, you know, we can’t walk away from this; we should, you know, grab the bull by the horns. X: You were saying you felt confused? Y: This feels . . . this is important. X: I believe you, I think.
And:
Y: Do you ever just wanna do something different? X: What do you mean? Y: Never mind.
Volcano is a technical marvel, mixing analog and digital in complex and humorous ways; the lighting is by Stephen Dodd, with sound by Rob Moloney. The prefilmed videos were directed by Pato Cassinoni, with a cast that includes Adam Burton, Amaya Gill, Ciaran Bermingham, Emily Terndrup, Ghaliah Conroy, Gina Moxley, John McCarthy, Lily Ockwell, Mufutau Yusuf, Pearse Donoghue, Rocio Dominguez, and Sile Maguire.
Does Volcano need to be as long as it is? Probably not. Should the audience have to wait about two and a half hours before a proper intermission? Not really. But if you give in to its conceits, it’s not unlike binging a limited sci-fi series that is as perplexing as it is riveting, with the added bonus of captivating choreography.
Murphy (Slow Tide,Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte) and Thompson are a dynamic duo, immersed in a cryptic world that reveals humanity losing its grip on reality — but always with a ray of hope somewhere out there on the horizon.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Leslie Odom Jr. stars as the title character in the prescient and uproarious Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
PURLIE VICTORIOUS: A NON-CONFEDERATE ROMP THROUGH THE COTTON PATCH
Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through February 4, $58 – $298 purlievictorious.com
Kenny Leon’s revival of Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch was already a special experience; they’re now upping the ante with a series of talkbacks as the show heads into its final weeks at the Music Box Theatre.
The original premiered on Broadway in 1961, with a cast that included Davis as fast-talking preacher-dreamer Purlie Victorious Judson, Ruby Dee as Lutiebell Gussie Mae Jenkins, Sorrell Booke as cotton plantation owner Ol’ Cap’n (Stonewall Jackson) Cotchipee, Alan Alda as his ne’-er-do-well son, Charley, Tony-nominated Godfrey Cambridge as obedient servant Gitlow Judson, Helen Martin as his wife, Aunt Missy, who runs the house, and Beah Richards as Idella Landy, who watches out for Charley.
Leon has assembled another ace cast for his sparkling adaptation, a prescient play so funny and on point that you’ll be wondering why you haven’t heard about it before — although some will recall the 1970 musical version, Purlie, which featured Cleavon Little as Purlie and Melba Moore as Lutiebell. Leslie Odom Jr. is phenomenal as the title character, who wants to pretend that Lutiebell (a scene-stealing Kara Young) is his cousin Bee so she can collect her late mother’s $500 inheritance from Ol’ Cap’n (Jay O. Sanders) and Purlie can reclaim Big Bethel as his church. Missy (Heather Alicia Simms) is highly suspicious of the plan, while Gitlow (Billy Eugene Jones) doesn’t want to get involved in anything that might upset Ol’ Cap’n. When Charley (Noah Robbins) goes missing, Idella (Vanessa Bell Calloway) is beside herself, but Purlie isn’t about to let anything get in the way of his acquisition of Big Bethel. Meanwhile, Derek McLane’s evolving sets are so fabulous that the last one draws gasps of approval and applause from the audience.
“There’s a whole lotta things about the Negro question you ain’t thought of!” Purlie proclaims to Lutiebell. “The South is split like a fat man’s underwear; and somebody beside the Supreme Court has got to make a stand for the everlasting glory of our people!”
Purlie Victorious must close on February 4; they’ve added a series of “Victorious Talkbacks” that began January 11 with Adrienne Warren and continues January 18 with Moore and January 25 with Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad team up again in Gutenberg! The Musical! (photo by Matthew Murphy)
GUTENBERG! THE MUSICAL!
James Earl Jones Theatre
138 West Forty-Eighth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 28, $74-$498 gutenbergbway.com
Lightning doesn’t strike twice for Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, who first teamed up for the nonstop juggernaut The Book of Mormon in 2011, both earning Tony nominations. The dynamic duo is back in the double-exclamation-pointed Gutenberg! The Musical!, which are two bangs too many. It’s scheduled to close January 28.
Written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, the two-act version premiered off Broadway in 2006 with three-time Tony nominee Christopher Fitzgerald and Obie winner and Tony nominee Jeremy Shamos. In this new iteration of the meta-musical, Bud Davenport (Gad) and Doug Simon (Rannells), both from Nutley, New Jersey, have rented the James Earl Jones Theatre for one night to present their show, a musical about fifteenth-century German printer Johann Gutenberg, to a group of producers. They play all the characters, identifying them by putting on different hats, which say “Drunk #1,” “Helvetica,” “Bootblack,” “Trimmer,” and “Gutenberg,” among others.
Directed by Tony winner Alex Timbers, it starts out very funny, particularly as they discuss how they are including a serious issue in order to make sure the show is important — antisemitism — but as the story continues, it gets repetitive, going around in circles (literally and figuratively) as Bud and Doug keep interrupting the musical-within-a-musical to explain what they are doing, and why. The 2006 production was one act and forty-five minutes, and that feels about right; at two acts and two hours, it drags like a Saturday Night Live sketch that doesn’t know when to end.
The night I went, the best moment came when a woman from the audience shouted out to Bud, “You’re hot,” which Gad and Rannells ran with, cracking up themselves and the crowd with some fun improvisation.
There are plenty of good scripted lines — “In an actual production this song would include a gospel choir and lasers,” Doug notes; “I wish I was gay! But I’m just . . . not,” Bud opines — but the laughs dry up like, well, an underused, out-of-date printing press.
SPAMALOT
St. James Theatre
246 West Forty-Fourth St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 28, $49-$225 spamalotthemusical.com
Monty Python’s Spamalot is back on Broadway and as hilarious as ever in this updated version gleefully directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes.
With a book and lyrics by Python Eric Idle and music by John Du Prez and Idle, the endlessly punny show debuted on Broadway in 2005, with Tim Curry as King Arthur, Sara Ramirez as the Lady of the Lake, Hank Azaria as Sir Lancelot, David Hyde Pierce as Sir Robin, Michael McGrath as Patsy, Christopher Sieber as Sir Galahad, and Christian Borle as Prince Herbert, garnering fourteen Tony nominations and winning for Best Musical, Best Director (Mike Nichols), and Best Featured Actress (Ramirez). Based on the 1975 comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail, one of the funniest movies ever made, Spamalot still holds up, skewering everything in its path.
This time around Tony winner James Monroe Iglehart is King Arthur, three-time Tony nominee Christopher Fitzgerald is Patsy, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer is the Lady of the Lake, Tony nominee Ethan Slater is the Historian and Prince Herbert, two-time Tony nominee Alex Brightman has replaced the scene-stealing Taran Killam as Sir Lancelot, and Michael Urie is Sir Robin through January 21, after which he will be replaced by Jonathan Bennett.
While Sir Lancelot doesn’t get to save Sir Galahad from almost certain temptation and no one is asked to answer these questions three to cross the Bridge of Death, you will find just about everything else here, from a killer rabbit, the French taunter, and the Knights Who Say Ni to Dennis’s treatise on the exploitation of the workers, the Plague Village, and Sir Robin’s not-quite-bravery.
There are also tons of self-referential jokes: “We won’t succeed on Broadway / if we don’t have any Jews,” Sir Robin sings. “One in ev’ry show / there comes a song like this / It starts off soft and low / and ends up with a kiss,” the Lady of the Lake explains. “How are we going to put on a Broadway show? Broadway’s a thousand years in the future in a country that hasn’t yet been discovered,” Arthur worries. Also on the menu are “Find Your Grail,” “Whatever Happened to My Part?,” and “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
Annaleigh Ashford and Josh Groban go into devilish business together in Sweeney Todd (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre
205 West Forty-Sixth St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Wednesday – Sunday through May 5, $89-$435 sweeneytoddbroadway.com
Thomas Kail’s revival of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is devilishly delicious. The dark tale of a mysterious master barber who teams up with a macabre pie maker features memorable music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a delightful book by Hugh Wheeler, based on a 1970 play by Christopher Bond.
The 1979 original Broadway production starred Len Cariou as the title character and Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett and won eight Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Score, Best Leading Actor, and Best Leading Actress. The current third Broadway revival opened last March with Josh Groban as Sweeney Todd and Annaleigh Ashford as Mrs. Lovett, earning eight Tony nods and winning for Best Lighting and Best Sound.
On February 9, Tony winner Aaron Tveit picks up the shaving blade as Sweeney, with two-time Tony winner Sutton Foster taking over baking the pies; an unrecognizable Ruthie Ann Miles continues her Tony-nominated performance as the beggar woman.
The exhilarating Buena Vista Social Club continues at the Atlantic through January 28 (photo by Ahron R. Foster)
BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 28 atlantictheater.org
It would not be surprising if the Atlantic Theater’s world premiere of Buena Vista Social Club soon finds itself on Broadway; in the meantime, the sold-out run continues at the Linda Gross through January 28.
The two-hour musical was inspired by Wim Wenders’s 1999 Oscar-nominated documentary about Ry Cooder and his son, Joachim, traveling to Cuba to record an album with an ensemble known as the Buena Vista Social Club. Book writer Marco Ramirez has created a narrative, based on actual events, that goes back and forth between the 1950s, as the Cuban Revolution is simmering, and the economically depressed Special Period of the mid-1990s. Juan De Marcos (Luis Vega), who serves as narrator, explains early on, “Some of what follows is true / Some of it only feels true.” The real Juan De Marcos is a consultant on the show.
In 1996, Juan is trying to convince legendary singer Omara Portuondo (a sensational Natalie Venetia Belcon, in a gorgeous costume by Dede Ayite) to record an album in a Cuban studio with a band he has put together, including singer Eliades Ochoa (Renesito Avich). The possibility of singing some of her old songs takes her back to her youth, when she (Kenya Browne) and her sister, Haydee (Danaya Esperanza), were singing to tourists at the Tropicana until Haydee is enticed by guitarist Compay Segundo (Jared Machado) and pianist Rubén Gonzalez (Leonardo Reyna as a young man, Jainardo Batista Sterling as the older Rubén) to join them instead at the Buena Vista Social Club, a seedy nightspot in a dangerous part of town run by vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer (Olly Sholotan, although I saw understudy Justin Showell). Decades later, Compay (Julio Monge) seeks out Ibrahim (Mel Semé) to join in the recording, but he has no desire to revisit the past.
Although it does get sidetracked by bits of treacly melodrama, Buena Vista Social Club is splendidly directed by Tony nominee Saheem Ali, with energetic choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck on Arnulfo Maldonado’s inviting two-level set. The band is fantastic, performing such songs as “Silencio,” “Dos Gardenias,” “Veinte Años,” “El Carretero,” and “Y Tu Que Has Hecho?” Each member is worthy of mention: David Oquendo, Avich, and Monge on guitars, Javier Díaz, Mauricio Herrera, and Román Díaz on percussion, Guido Gonzalez on trumpet and flugelhorn, Hery Paz on woodwinds, Gustavo Schartz on bass, and Eddie Venegas on trombone. The performance of “Candela” alone is worth the price of admission, one of the best musical scenes of the year.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The Whole of Time offers a new look at Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (photo by Maria Baranova)
THE WHOLE OF TIME
Torn Page
435 West Twenty-Second St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Thursday – Monday through January 27, suggested donation $44 www.tornpage.org
About halfway through the US premiere of Argentinian playwright Romina Paula’s The Whole of Time, there’s a powerful, poignant scene between Antonia (Josefina Scaro), a young woman who prefers to spend her life inside her family’s house, and Maximiliano (Ben Becher), a leather-jacketed macho friend of her brother’s.
When Maximiliano asks her what she does with her life, she replies, “Oh, nothing.” Startled, he says, “What do you mean nothing?” She answers, “Yeah, nothing. At least according to the terms you’re asking me, nothing.” She tells him confidently that she doesn’t work or go to school. “You must do something,” he presses. She responds, “No, I don’t believe in doing.” Her younger brother, Lorenzo (Lucas Salvagno), who is reading Moby-Dick, calmly explains, “Antonia doesn’t go out.”
Lorenzo exits, and Maximiliano continues to ask her about her lifestyle choice, which he cannot understand. “This is who I am, I’m this way,” she declares. He asks, “But don’t you think it’s sad?” They disagree over what’s considered free or wasted time and what happiness is. As they move in closer to each other, she puts on Rata Blanca’s “La leyenda del hada y el mago,” a song about magic, love, and loneliness in a fairy-tale world.
Lorenzo and then their mother, Ursula (Ana B. Gabriel), enter, cutting off whatever might have been happening between Maximiliano and Antonia. “Oh, thank God you’re alive!” Ursula proclaims. Lorenzo interjects, “Awake, Mom. Thank God we’re awake.”
Unfortunately, that’s the only scene with any life to it; the rest of the play is a befuddling snooze.
Ben Becher and Josefina Scaro bring the heat to The Whole of Time (photo by Maria Baranova)
Translated from the original Spanish by Jean Graham-Jones, The Whole of Time is a contemporary reimagining of Tennessee Williams’s memory play The Glass Menagerie, but it goes way off track. It takes place in a small rectangular room at Torn Page, the Chelsea home where actors Rip Torn and Geraldine Page lived. Torn and Page starred onstage and onscreen in Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth and were friends with the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner (for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). An audience of no more than twenty-two people sit in two rows of folding chairs on one side of the room, across from the set that features a table where Antonia spends time on her laptop, an old armchair where Lorenzo reads, a fireplace, a vanity table, and a chifforobe; the back wall is a swriling blue, evoking Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico City. The set and video design is by Tony Torn, Rip and Geraldine’s son, who also directs the play; Donald Gallagher painted the backdrop.
It begins with a discussion about Mexican artist Marco Antonio Solís’s song “Si no te hubieras ido” (“There’s Nothing More Difficult Than Living without You”) that leads them to Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair and talk of murderers. Projections on the back wall above the fireplace include a video of Solís performing his song and images of works by Kahlo, including the self-portrait and Portrait of My Father. The family lives in Argentina but Antonia and Lorenzo were born in Mexico; Ursula is from Hungary, which Antonia notes is like Kahlo’s father, photographer and painter Guillermo, who was born in Germany, died in Mexico, and might or might not have had Hungarian-Jewish roots. (Frida claimed he did, whereas a 2005 book debunked that using genealogy studies.)
Scaro, who strongly resembles Sarah Silverman and is the cocurator of events at Torn Page, is terrific as Antonia, a young woman not realizing that she has trapped herself; instead of having a limp like Laura in The Glass Menagerie, her physical affliction is represented by her obsession with Kahlo, who suffered severe injuries in a bus crash when she was eighteen and lived in terrible pain the rest of her life. Becher, who also serves as the preshow bartender, is seductive and charming as Maximiliano — the gentleman caller — a tough guy with a tender heart who just wants to enjoy life. Salvagno and Gabriel do what they can with their indistinct characters, he playing a calm, unassuming son and she a mother who still wants to dance and party, trying to find quick happiness that remains elusive. There’s a pall over the family, but it’s not the abandonment of the patriarch that hovers over Menagerie.
Jay Ryan’s lighting design is sparse, usually the standard lighting in the room, with occasional turns into darkness. Torn was sitting in one corner, often checking his cell phone, next to stage manager Berit Johnson, who works tech, which can be distracting if you’re sitting nearby. At one point, two characters were on either side of the space, engaged in a conversation that made audience members swivel their heads back and forth like they were watching a lackadaisical tennis match. There are a couple of avant-garde touches, but they feel out of place. Even at a mere seventy minutes, the production lags, meandering in and out of the story in confusing ways.
In The Glass Menagerie, Tom tells the audience, “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” That’s precisely what’s missing from The Whole of Time.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
