this week in theater

BROADWAY WEEK SUMMER 2015

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME is among nearly two dozen Broadway shows offering half-price tickets September 7-20 (photo by Joan Marcus)

Multiple venues
September 7-20, buy one ticket, get one free
www.nycgo.com/broadwayweek

Tickets are now on sale for the summer edition of Broadway Week, which runs September 7-20 and offers theater lovers a chance to see new and long-running shows for half-price as well as have an opportunity to pay a $20 fee to upgrade to better seats. Twenty-two shows are participating, but they’re already starting to sell out, with the most popular selections being Aladdin, Fun Home, and The Lion King. Among the other choices are The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, An American in Paris, Hand to God, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The King and I, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Kinky Boots, Something Rotten!, the rebooted Les Misérables, Matilda the Musical, Spring Awakening, and such longtime mainstays as Wicked, Jersey Boys, Chicago, and The Phantom of the Opera. You can look all you want, but the two-for-one list still does not include The Book of Mormon, unfortunately.

MERCURY FUR

Brothers Darren (Jack DiFalco) and Elliot (Zane Pais) are caught up in some shady dealings in Philip Ridley’s MERCURY FUR (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 27, $25-$75
www.thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org

British playwright Philip Ridley — who also writes children’s books, pens screenplays, song lyrics, and poetry, directs films, is an experienced photographer, and has staged multimedia installations and performance art projects — has a special relationship with his audience. In Tender Napalm, which enjoyed a limited run at 59E59 in 2012, the audience sat in two rows across a narrow, horizontal space between which two actors shared their dreams and fantasies in abstract soliloquies. If a patron had to use the rest room (there was no intermission), he or she would have to walk right through the action, and would not be allowed back in. There’s a similar conceit in Mercury Fur, Ridley’s confrontational 2005 work being revived by the New Group at the Signature’s Linney theater, which has been transformed by Derek McLane into a dilapidated room in an abandoned New York City housing project, strewn with debris, the windows boarded up. On two facing sides, the audience sits in folding chairs, ratty couches, or decaying love seats; on the other two sides, people sit high atop walls that offer occasionally limited views of what is happening below. Once again, there is no intermission, so getting up to use the facilities would be rather noticeable, and reentry is only at the discretion of management. Then again, Mercury Fur has been known to cause audience members to leave and not want to come back; in fact, Ridley’s publisher rejected it, refusing to release a printed edition. (Ridley defiantly took the play, and his backlist, to a different company.) Which is all rather beside the point, as the two-hour Mercury Fur is a bold, engrossing work that is not afraid to challenge audiences as it digs deeply into the dark part of the soul, revealing the lengths to which humans will go when faced with imminent disaster. As the David Leavitt epigraph in the published play states, “Sometimes brutality is the only antidote to sorrow.”

Things don’t go so well at a bizarre party in the New Group revival of MERCURY FUR (photo by Monique Carboni)

As the play opens, nineteen-year-old Elliot (Zane Pais) and his younger brother, sixteen-year-old Darren (Jack DiFalco), are cleaning up a ramshackle apartment, preparing it for a special party. Elliot is by far the stronger of the two, telling his not-too-swift sibling, “You know what you’re like? A fucking anvil round my neck. The lifeboat’s sinking and I’m bailing it out like a good egg but I’ve got this fucking anvil getting heavier and heavier dragging the whole thing down.” The brothers, who soon touch each other’s hearts in a sweetly innocent moment, are working for Spinx (Sea McHale), a dangerous tough guy who throws parties for wealthy people in which they can do any degraded thing they want, for a price. Afterward, the entire building will be burned down, leaving no evidence of the depravity that occurred there. In this case, with WWIII on the horizon, a Wall Streeter called Party Guest (Peter Mark Kendall) has very specific, and deviant, plans for the ten-year-old Party Piece (Bradley Fong), involving gold lamé, Elvis Presley style. Also on hand for the festivities are Lola (Paul Iacono), a scantily clad transgender makeup artist; Spinx’s date, the Duchess (Emily Cass McDonnell), who is brought along unexpectedly, complicating things for Elliot, who sells hallucinogenic butterflies, and Darren, who likes to eat those colorful treats; and Naz (Tony Revolori), a fifteen-year-old who is squatting in the building and wants to join in the fun, thinking it’s going to be a regular party. Oh, how wrong he is.

New Group artistic director Scott Elliott (Sticks and Bones, Hurlyburly) directs this Off-Broadway premiere with pre/post-apocalyptic punk flair, keeping the aggression level high while maintaining an intoxicating yet uncomfortable intimacy. You can’t look away, even when you know what’s going to happen, even though most of the ultraviolence takes place offstage. The play includes elements of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, J. G. Ballard and Tennessee Williams, so you never know which direction it will turn. The brave, talented cast — which features several actors with little or no professional stage experience, including Revolori, who recently won accolades for his portrayal of Zero the lobby boy in Wes Anderson’s Oscar-nominated The Grand Budapest Hotel — holds nothing back as events spin out of control and an overwhelming sense of doom dominates the proceedings. The characters live in a frightening world, one that is even more terrifying because it doesn’t feel that much removed from our current situation, as if all of this is waiting for us, just around the corner. With Mercury Fur, the New Group, which staged Ridley’s The Fastest Clock in the Universe in 1998, takes a good look at the future, and it is not a happy prospect.

JOHN

Everyone has a story to tell in world premiere of Annie Baker’s JOHN at the Signature (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 6, $25-$55
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

“Tell me a story,” Jenny (Hong Chau) says to her boyfriend, Elias (Christopher Abbott), near the beginning of Annie Baker’s wonderful John, her follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick. It’s a direct reference to what we, the audience, are essentially saying when we take our seats in a dark theater, something that Baker makes abundantly clear throughout John’s smoothly paced three-hour-and-fifteen-minute running time. Jenny and Elias have arrived at a tchotchke-filled bed and breakfast owned by the sweetly doddering Mertis (Georgia Engel) in Gettysburg, where the guest rooms are named for Stonewall Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Joshua Chamberlain. The Civil War setting is an apt metaphor for the battle between the sexes, as Elias and Jenny are tense and nervous, suffering through a rough patch in their relationship; Mertis, who prefers to be called Kitty, is on her second husband, although he is never seen or heard; and Kitty’s best friend, the blind Genevieve (Lois Smith), thinks that her ex-husband, John, has driven her legitimately insane, filling her brain with deadly scorpions. “Everyone knows someone named John,” Genevieve says, and indeed, we all do, with all the demons that implies. While Elias wants to explore the history of Gettysburg, Jenny complains that he chews his food too loud and that she is suffering through a bad period; more important, she is scared of one of Kitty’s myriad decorations, an American Girl doll named Samantha, the same model that terrorized her as a child. There is something unspoken between Elias and Jenny, a wall that is threatening to collapse all around them. Meanwhile, Genevieve believes that the house is haunted, as if personal ghosts, as well as those from the country’s deadliest war, are hovering in the air; although there are little touches of the supernatural amid Baker’s trademark hyperrealism, it’s really the characters themselves who are haunted.

Kitty (Georgia Engel), Elias (Christopher Abbott), and Genevieve (Lois Smith) riff on theater and real life in Annie Baker’s JOHN (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Baker and regular collaborator Sam Gold, who has directed nearly all of Baker’s plays, including Circle Mirror Transformation, The Aliens, and The Flick, which has been extended through January 2016 at the Barrow Street Theatre, reveal the artifice behind the theater and the art of storytelling in John, making it a central focus of the narrative. Kitty opens and closes the curtain before and after each act, pushing and pulling it across the stage, and she regularly moves the hands of a grandfather clock to indicate time shifts, as Mark Barton’s lighting increases or decreases with the passing hours. (The set design is by Mimi Lien.) Kitty calls the breakfast nook next to the living room “Paris,” alluding to the magic of the theater, which can turn a New York City stage into a foreign land. “Do you ever feel watched, Jenny?” Kitty asks. “Like someone is watching you?,” a direct reference to the audience. A later joke, in which one character says to another, “What are you still doing there?,” is a riff on the audience still in their seats after more than three hours, experiencing this play that unwinds at the mundane speed of life. At the end of the second act, after Kitty has closed the curtain and the house lights have come on, Genevieve takes the stage and explains, “I’m going to tell you a story but I’m going to do it in under five minutes,” another funny reference to the length of John. Near the end, Jenny says, “I want to hear the rest of the story,” but Elias responds, “The rest of the story doesn’t exist yet.” Those lines get to the heart of Baker’s play, which is about both fictional storytelling and real life; the former usually comes with everything wrapped up in a neat little bow, but the latter does not always provide easy answers, if any answers at all. The actors are uniformly excellent, particularly Engel (The Drowsy Chaperone, Baker’s Uncle Vanya) in a role written specifically for her, and Gold’s (Fun Home, The Realistic Joneses) direction makes the hours go by surprisingly smoothly. John is a beautifully rendered work by an extremely talented playwright who’s got her finger firmly placed on the pulse of modern existence, and contemporary theater.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: CYMBELINE

Posthumus (Hamish Linklater) and Iachimo (Raúl Esparza) make a dangerous bet as Philario (Patrick Page) looks on (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Through August 23, free, 8:30
shakespeareinthepark.org

Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s later, lesser-known plays, is not easy to bring to the stage. It’s a sort of greatest-hits mash-up of previous Bard themes and plot devices, lacking in memorable lines and named after a relatively minor character. So Tony-winning Shakespeare in the Park veteran Daniel Sullivan has added a large dose of whimsy to what turns out to be a rather charming and modern romantic comedy. In fact, whereas the first folio identifies it as “The Tragedy of Cymbeline,” a framed backdrop that is visible throughout nearly all of the Public Theater presentation calls it “The Story of Cymbeline,” as tragedy becomes farce. With war threatening between Britain and Rome in ancient times, King Cymbeline (Patrick Page) has banished Posthumus Leonatus (Hamish Linklater), a commoner who is married to, and very much in love with, his daughter, Imogen (Lily Rabe), so she can instead wed the queen’s not-too-swift progeny, Cloten (Linklater). Meanwhile, in a 1950s-era Vegas-y Rome, Posthumus boasts about his wife’s virtue, leading the Italian playboy Iachimo (Raúl Esparza), after performing a glitzy Sinatra-like number, to lay a wager that he can bed Imogen and despoil her honor. The bet is overseen by Philario (Page), a sharp-dressed gangster who is Posthumus’s host. As the queen conspires to poison Imogen, both Iacomo and Cloten attempt to woo the princess, who soon sets out for Wales disguised as a boy to set things straight with her one true love. But on the way she gets lost in the woods and is taken in by an oddball anarchist family consisting of a bent-over father (Kate Burton) and his two would-be sons (David Furr and Jacob Ming-Trent). It all leads to a dizzying finale with more than two dozen revelations coming fast and furious.

The cloddish Cloten (Hamish Linklater) makes his case to marry Imogen (Lily Rabe) (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Sullivan (Proof, Twelfth Night) has a ball revealing the artifice behind the production while also taking the story to some surprising extremes. Riccardo Hernandez’s set features a pair of large gold frames and boxes and props from other Shakespeare productions (Hamlet, King Lear), reminding everyone of the machinations behind it all. There are several rows of audience members on either side of the stage who do indeed get involved in the action, while some of the actors sit at the back of the stage between their scenes. Rabe and Linklater, who are partners in real life and have previously appeared together in Seminar on Broadway and in The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing at the Delacorte, are at their best in Cymbeline, she as the strong-willed and sexy Imogen, he going back and forth between the noble-to-a-fault Posthumus and the dumb-and-dumber Cloten (complete with Jim Carrey–like wig), pausing in his line readings for maximum double-entendre effect. Page (Casa Valentina, Cyrano de Bergerac) is gallant as the king and Philario, balancing power with a conscience; Burton is nicely wicked as the queen and almost unrecognizable as Belarius; four-time Tony nominee Esparza (Company, Taboo) is appropriately smarmy as Iachimo, who spans two eras; Teagle F. Bougere (A Raisin in the Sun, Macbeth) is solid as Roman ambassador Lucius and court doctor Cornelius, particularly in the grand finale; Steven Skybell (Pal Joey, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) is engaging as Pisanio, Posthumus’s loyal servant who dedicates himself to Imogen; and Furr (As You Like It, The Importance of Being Earnest) and Ming-Trent (Hands on a Hardbody, Shrek the Musical) bring a sweet nature to their portrayals of the mountain brothers as well as the play’s narrators. Yes, it’s lesser Shakespeare, and at nearly three hours it runs too long (even with the excision of the Jupiter dream sequence), but Sullivan’s fanciful production is a whole lot more fun than Cymbeline usually is. (Don’t forget that in addition to waiting on line at the Delacorte to get free tickets, you can also enter the daily virtual ticketing lottery online here.)

BROADWAY IN BRYANT PARK

Broadway in Bryant Park features a sneak peek at George Takei musical on August 6

Bryant Park
40th to 42nd Sts. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, August 6, free, 12:30
Series continues Thursdays through August 13
www.bryantpark.org

The annual summer Broadway in Bryant Park series features performances Thursday afternoons at 12:30 from several current and upcoming Broadway musicals, and August 6 has a real treat in store, a sneak peek at Allegiance, which tells the story of George Takei’s childhood, spent in part in a Japanese internment camp in California; the show begins previews on October 6 and stars Lea Salonga, Telly Leung, and social media sensation Takei. Also on the August 6 bill is the Tony-winning hit A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, the new Amazing Grace, the Shakespeare spoof Something Rotten!, and the off-Broadway revival of Ruthless! The series concludes August 13 with selections from Once Upon a Mattress, The King and I, Dames at Sea, Spring Awakening, and Mrs. Smith’s Broadway Cat-Tacular!

AMAZING GRACE

Mary (Erin Mackey) and John (Josh Young) try to find love in turbulent times in new Broadway musical (photo by Joan Marcus)

Nederlander Theatre
208 West 41st St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 20, $65-$139
877-250-2929
amazinggracemusical.com

As the new Broadway musical Amazing Grace opens, a man (Tony winner Chuck Cooper) stands at the side of the stage and announces, “There are moments when the waves of history converge. When the transformation of one man can change the world,” declaring, “It is a story that must be told.” There may indeed be a fascinating tale behind John Newton, the writer of the title song, a beloved Protestant hymn, but this is not necessarily it. Tony nominee Josh Young (Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita) stars as Newton, the ne’er-do-well son of the regal Captain Newton (Tony nominee Tom Hewitt), an important businessman and slave trader in the port town of Chatham, England. John has just returned from a stint on the high seas, where he meets up on the docks with Mary Catlett (Erin Mackey), his “dearest friend in the world,” and is chastised by his father, who takes away his son’s mariner’s license and demands he return to England, the family business of slaving, and his studies. Against his father’s orders, John runs a slave auction that turns disastrous when abolitionists intercede, leading to bloodshed and an escape. It doesn’t take long for John to find himself at odds with everyone else as Mary starts meeting secretly with the abolitionists, the dandy Major Gray (Chris Hoch) begins wooing Mary, and his father demands that he find the missing slave. John then sets off on a dangerous journey that only gets worse because of his haughty attitude and love of the drink, heading toward rock bottom at full speed.

John Newton (Josh Young) battles with his father (Tom Hewitt) in AMAZING GRACE (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Playbill points out that Amazing Grace is Christopher Smith’s “first work of professional writing,” and it shows as the musical continues, bogged down by clichés and obvious plot twists. Smith, who wrote the music and lyrics and cowrote the book with Arthur Giron (Moving Bodies, A Dream of Wealth), strives to take us deep into the heart and soul of John Newton, exploring the travails that resulted in his composing one of the most famous songs ever written, but it turns out that Newton’s story is not nearly as compelling as the song itself. The cast is terrific — Hewitt (The Rocky Horror Show, Another Medea) and Cooper (The Life, Memphis), as the Newtons’ slave and John’s closest friend, are particularly impressive, and Mackey (Chaplin, Wicked) is in fine voice. But director Gabriel Barre (Summer of ’42, The Wild Party) never finds a consistent rhythm as the production attempts to navigate racism and white privilege but cannot escape mundane sentimentality and political correctness, especially in a banal finale. Part of the problem is that slavery is a one-sided conflict, and it is difficult to have sympathy for Newton even as he is being redeemed. The producers tried hard to avoid major religious overtones, given the title song’s association with the concept of redemption, and they achieve that in the first act, but the second act turns out to be far more preachy, complete with religious implications. Still, Amazing Grace, which has been in the works for eighteen years, has its moments, concluding with a sing-along of the complete eighteenth-century hymn that continues to have such an emotional impact, sung recently by President Obama at the funeral for shooting victim Rev. Clementa Pinckney in Charleston, South Carolina.

LINCOLN CENTER OUT OF DOORS: A CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE OF GEOFFREY HOLDER

The life of Geoffrey Holder will be celebrated at special free program at Lincoln Center

CARMEN & GEOFFREY (Linda Atkinson & Nick Doob, 2006)
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Amsterdam & Columbus Aves.
Saturday, August 1, free, 1:00
firstrunfeatures.com
lcoutofdoors.org

Carmen & Geoffrey is an endearing look at Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder’s lifelong love affair with dance — and each other. The New Orleans-born de Lavallade studied with Lester Horton and went to high school with Alvin Ailey, whom she brought to his first dance class. Best known as a pitchman for 7UP (the “uncola”) and playing the intriguing Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die, Trinidadian Holder was a larger-than-life gentle giant who was a dancer, choreographer, composer, costume designer, actor, stage director, writer, photographer, painter, and just about anything else he wanted to be. The two met when they both were cast in Truman Capote and Harold Arlen’s Broadway show House of Flowers in 1954, with Holder instantly falling in love with de Lavallade; they remained together until Holder’s death this past October at the age of eighty-four. Directors Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob combine amazing archival footage — of Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker, Ulysses Dove, de Lavallade dancing with Ailey, and other splendid moments — with contemporary rehearsal scenes, dance performances, and interviews with such stalwarts as dance critic Jennifer Dunning, former Alvin Ailey artistic director Judith Jamison, and choreographer Joe Layton (watch out for his eyebrows), along with family members and Gus Solomons jr, who still works with de Lavallade, and Dudley Williams, who just died last month. The film was made on an extremely low budget, and it shows, but it is filled with such glorious footage that you’ll get over that quickly. Carmen & Geoffrey, along with additional rare archival footage, is screening August 1 as part of the free Lincoln Center Out of Doors program “A Celebration of the Life of Geoffrey Holder” and will be preceded by the panel discussion “The Life and Work of Geoffrey Holder” with Doob and Atkinson, moderated by Leo Holder, Geoffrey and de Lavallade’s son. Fans should also check out the new exhibition “The Genius of Geoffrey Holder,” on view through August 29 at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.