this week in theater

THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN

Cripple Billy (Daniel Radcliffe) and Helen McCormick (Sarah Greene) both dream of becoming Hollywood stars in THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN (photo © Johan Persson)

Cort Theatre
138 West 48th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 14, $27 – $142
www.crippleofinishmaan.com

Daniel Radcliffe continues to show his range and distance himself from Harry Potter — if that’s really possible — in the Broadway premiere of Martin McDonagh’s splendid little comedy The Cripple of Inishmaan. Radcliffe, who previously on the Great White Way had a thing for a horse (Equus) and sang and danced his way up the corporate ladder (How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying), stars in McDonagh’s 1996 play as Cripple Billy, an unfortunate orphan with a twisted arm and a near-debilitating limp who spends an inordinate amount of his time looking at cows on the close-knit Irish island of Inishmaan. When gossipmonger Johnnypateenmike (Pat Shortt) arrives at Eileen (Gillian Hanna) and Kate’s (Ingrid Craigie) food shop with news about Hollywood coming to the nearby island of Inishmore, where Robert Flaherty is filming Man of Aran, Billy instantly wants to go and be part of the movie, seeing it as his opportunity to get away from all the abuse heaped upon him and make something of his life. But first he must convince boat owner Babbybobby (Pádraic Delaney) to take him across the water. Also desperate to get out is tough-talking flirtatious redhead Helen McCormick (Sarah Greene), who is sure she will become a star as soon as Hollywood sets its eyes on her. Of course, nothing goes quite as planned in this bittersweet tale.

A production of the new Michael Grandage Company led by Tony-winning director Michael Grandage (Frost/Nixon, King Lear), The Cripple of Inishmaan is a wickedly delightful slice of Irish life, complete with eccentric characters, poetic dialogue, and wacky situations that are firmly entrenched in the tradition of Irish storytelling. Hanna and Craigie are a hoot as the aunties who raised Billy after his parents drowned, Shortt is a riot as the town crier who shares news for food and just might be poisoning his alcoholic mother (June Watson), and Conor MacNeill does a fine turn as Bartley McCormick, Helen’s brother who is obsessed with sweets and telescopes. Greene is sensational as Helen, fiery and sexy whether insulting others or smashing eggs over their head, nearly stealing the show from Radcliffe, who plays Billy with a heartwarming and endearing sensitivity. At its heart, The Cripple of Inishmaan is about overcoming the obstacles one is born with, rising above setbacks while finding one’s place in life, and in a way that applies to Radcliffe’s career as well. At intermission, the security guards start putting up the barricades as fans already begin lining up at the stage door, preparing to wait another hour and a half to get his autograph and snap his picture; it would be a shame if they do so without actually having seen The Cripple of Inishmaan, which will have many saying, “Harry who?”

IN THE PARK

The rather eccentric Edgar Oliver examines seminal moments from his childhood in latest monologue (photo by Dixie Sheridan)

Axis Company
One Sheridan Sq. between West Fourth & Washington Sts.
Thursday – Saturday through June 7, $30-$40, 8:00
212-352-3101
www.axiscompany.org

Cliché be damned — we really could listen to Edgar Oliver read the phone book, if there was such a thing as a phone book anymore. Oliver’s affected yet elegant and luxurious voice is part Shakespearean thespian, part late-night horror-film host; just the way he pronounces “ar” is an aural wonder, sounding enchantingly otherworldly. He has honed his craft at the Moth, sharing personal stories told with a literary flourish. In his latest monologue, In the Park, running through June 7 at the Axis Theatre in Sheridan Square, Oliver (East 10th Street, Helen and Edgar) takes the audience through his favorite place, Prospect Park, as he revisits seminal childhood moments that helped shape the man he has become. “All throughout my life — when I think of myself and what I have done — what I hope to do — when I look in the mirror — I am measuring myself against that boy,” he says, relating a story about riding the train from his family home in Savannah to Baltimore, where he, his sister, and his mother vacationed in the summers. He had just recalled falling instantly in love with a young man he saw for only a few seconds, evoking Mr. Bernstein’s (Everett Sloane) remembrance in Citizen Kane of seeing a young woman with a white parasol on a ferry. “I would like to go back to that fatal second before love takes place and suffer the transformation over and over,” Oliver says. “What a sweet and terrible wounding it was!”

His poignant, poetic journey through Prospect Park and his past includes such lush phrases as “the green-gold grass,” “the magic of the rain,” “the distant landscape of the sky,” “the silent song of solitude,” and “my own young, murderable beauty.” The sixty-minute show, directed by Axis artistic director Randy Sharp (East 10th Street, Last Man Club), is set on a bare stage, where Oliver generally stands still, inflecting with his arms and head, occasionally walking a few steps to his right and left and then, rather oddly, moving like Frankenstein’s monster. On opening night, Oliver, who hosts the Science Channel’s Odd Folks Home, stumbled a few times and appeared to lose his place at one point, but those slight missteps were forgivable given his otherwise intricate and intimate performance, during which he makes extended eye contact with members of the audience. “My heart was seized with melancholy and with longing,” he says, recalling a car trip to a store when he was six or seven. “It was as though the sky were sorrow — and I longed to go away forever into it. And I realized that I loved sorrow and that I loved melancholy and that I loved life.” Those sentences, delivered with an eerie majesty, encapsulate what In the Park is about as a rather eccentric man with unusual speech habits explores who he was, who he is, and who he might have been — or perhaps still could be.

TICKET ALERT: JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR ARENA SPECTACULAR

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR ARENA SPECTACULAR
Madison Square Garden
Seventh Ave. at 33rd St.
Tuesday, August 5, $64.10 – $304, 8:00
www.jesuschristsuperstar.com
www.thegarden.com

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar will be treading on hallowed ground when it comes to Madison Square Garden for a one-night-only performance on August 5. Pope John Paul II visited the World’s Most Famous Arena in 1979, and the Messiah himself, Mark Messier, lifted the Holy Grail — er, the Stanley Cup — on Garden ice twenty years ago next month. The rock opera, which opened on Broadway in October 1971, was made into a film in 1973, and was resurrected by Des McAnuff on the Great White Way in a rousing revival in 2012, will start touring the U.S. in a massive version billed as an “Arena Spectacular,” a traveling road show with a cast and crew of 150 that will arrive in 12 articulated buses and 7 sleeper buses. And what a cast, reaching near-biblical proportions with Sex Pistols and PiL punk legend Johnny Rotten playing King Herod; instead of screaming “God save the queen / She ain’t no human being” or “I am an antichrist / Don’t know what I want,” Mr. Lydon will be belting out to the King of the Jews: “So You are the Christ / You’re the great Jesus Christ / Prove to me that You’re divine / Change my water into wine.” The production, directed by Laurence Connor (Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera) and choreographed by Kevan Allen, also features Incubus lead vocalist Brandon Boyd as Judas Iscariot, former *NSYNC star and appropriately initialed JC Chasez as Pontius Pilate, Former Destiny’s Child member Michelle Williams as Mary Magdalene, and British actor-singer Ben Forster (no, not the dude who plays Driver Perkins on Thomas the Tank Engine) returning to the title role he won on a reality TV show. (Seriously, we didn’t make any of this up, not a single word.) Ticket prices range from $64.10 for the cheap seats to $304 for the Superstar Premium VIP Experience, which comes with a photo-op meet-and-greet with at least two lead cast members, a preshow party, a dedicated concierge, and more. Everybody, now: “Hosanna Heysanna Sanna Sanna Ho / Sanna Hey Sanna Ho Sanna….”

THE FEW / ANNAPURNA

Tasha Lawrence, Gideon Glick, and Michael Laurence star in Rattlestick production of Samuel D. Hunter’s THE FEW

THE FEW
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl. between Eleventh & Perry Sts.
Wednesday – Monday through June 22 (extended), $55
866-811-4111
www.rattlestick.org

Quite by coincidence, we saw The Few and Annapurna on successive nights last week, and we couldn’t have been more struck by how oddly similar the two New York premieres were. Each work is a ninety-five-minute one-act contemporary drama written by an award-winning playwright and is set in a cluttered trailer, where a character unexpectedly returns to a former love after having been away for years. And in each case, letters play a key role in the plot. However, whereas one play is exciting and gripping, with surprise twists, the other drags on repetitively, with a late shock that comes out of nowhere and deflates the story. Writer Samuel D. Hunter (A Bright New Boise), director Davis McCallum (London Wall), and actress Tasha Lawrence (Wilder Wilder Wilder), who worked together on the widely hailed Playwrights Horizon hit The Whale, reunite for The Few, a sharply incisive tale running at the Rattlestick. The tale begins a few months before Y2K, as a down-and-out Bryan (Michael Laurence) suddenly shows up at his old trailer, where his abandoned love, QZ (Lawrence), has heroically kept the small paper they founded, The Few, going for four years. But she’s turned the idealistic journal about connecting lonely interstate truckers into a venue for personal ads and hired their unseen third partner’s nerdy nephew, Matthew (Gideon Glick), who pushes a reluctant Bryan to return The Few to its original lofty purpose. (We know, we know; just how interesting can a small paper for and about interstate truckers be? It turns out that it can be quite fascinating.) Glick (Spring Awakening) is a jittery marvel as Matthew, his tentative, stuttering delivery an excellent foil to the raw tension brought out by Lawrence and Laurence. McCallum’s aggressive, unpredictable direction prepares the audience for an explosion, and when it comes, just watch out.

Real-life husband and wife Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally play former spouses reunited after twenty years in the New Group production of Sharr White’s ANNAPURNA (photo by Monique Carboni)

ANNAPURNA
The Acorn Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 1, $75
212-560-2183
www.thenewgroup.org
www.theatrerow.org

In the New Group production of Annapurna, written by Sharr White (The Other Place, The Snow Geese) and directed by Bart DeLorenzo (Passion Play, Fast Company), Emma (Megan Mullally) suddenly shows up at Ulysses’s (Nick Offerman) run-down trailer in the mountains of Colorado. The former spouses haven’t seen each other in twenty years, since she walked out on him, taking their son with her. Emma arrives lugging several suitcases, apparently planning on staying a while, but Ulysses, wearing a butt-revealing apron and a life-sustaining backpack with an oxygen tube, wants no part of her, preferring to remain a hermit. They battle over the past, leading to a reveal that is like a reverse deus ex machina, draining the drama of any subtlety and making it about something else in a manipulative way. Real-life husband and wife Offerman (Parks and Recreation) and Mullally (Will & Grace) certainly have a familiarity with each other, but their characters’ affectations, especially Emma’s whininess, grow tiresome quickly. The conflict dries up long before the lights go out for the final time — DeLorenzo and lighting designer Michael Gend like to flip the switch like a kid with a new toy — so the last darkness comes as a relief. Annapurna lacks the energy and passion that drives The Few, the latter a far more successful exploration of responsibility, lost love, past misdeeds, and being a part of something that is bigger than oneself.

ZÜRICH MEETS NEW YORK: A FESTIVAL OF SWISS INGENUITY

Zürich Meets New York festival honors upcoming centennial of the Dada movement

Multiple locations
May 16-23, free – $20
www.zurichmeetsnewyork.org

In The Third Man, one of the greatest movies ever made, Harry Lime (Orson Welles) tells his childhood friend Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), “You know what the fellow said — in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Of course, Switzerland has contributed a whole lot more to international culture and history than the cuckoo clock — and by the way, who doesn’t love the cuckoo clock? — as evidenced by this month’s Zürich Meets New York: A Festival of Swiss Ingenuity. From May 16 to 23, more than two dozen events will be taking place around the city, from concerts and dance to panel discussions and film screenings, from art exhibits and seminars to theater and scientific conversations, with a particular focus on the one hundredth anniversary of the Dada movement, which was born at the Cabaret Voltaire. Aside from “How Black Holes Shape Our Universe,” a multimedia presentation at the Explorers Club that requires a $20 ticket, everything else is absolutely free, although most events require advance RSVP. Below are only some of the highlights; other participants and programs include Dieter Meier of Yello, game developer Tim Schafer, Jungian analyst Christopher Hauke, complexity scientist Dirk Helbing, financial economist Didier Sornette, IBM director of research John E. Kelly, novelists Renata Adler and Ben Marcus discussing the work of Max Frisch, and a pair of documentaries about artist Urs Fischer.

Friday, May 16
“Collegium Novum Zurich: Live Music & Silent Films,” David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts., featuring screenings of shorts by Hans Richter, James Sibley Watson Jr. and Melville Webber, René Clair, and Joris Ivens with live musical accompaniment, free with advance RSVP, 7:00

Saturday, May 17
“Giants Are Small: Dada Bomb,” Dada performance art journey, free with advance RSVP, 7:00

Sunday, May 18
through
Thursday, May 22
“Dada on Tour,” art exhibition in a “nomadic” tent, Whitebox Art Center, 329 Broome St. between Chrystie St. & Bowery, free, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm

Monday, May 19
“What Can Robots and Economics Teach Us About Humanity?,” with Rolf Pfeifer and Ernst Fehr, moderated by Maria Konnikova, New York Academy of Sciences, 7 World Trade Center, 250 Greenwich St., 40th Floor, free with advance RSVP, 7:00

Monday, May 19
through
Thursday, May 22
“Dada Pop-Up: The Absurdities of Our Times,” opening will include spontaneous performances and exchanges, Whitebox Art Center, 329 Broome St. between Chrystie St. & Bowery, free, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm

Tuesday, May 20
and
Wednesday, May 21
“Simone Aughterlony/Antonija Livingstone/Hahn Rowe: In Disguise,” dance performance with choreographer Simone Aughterlony, performer Antonija Livingstone, and composer Hahn Rowe, the Kitchen, 512 West 19th St. between Tenth and Eleventh Aves., free with advance RSVP, 8:30

CABARET

Michelle Williams and Alan Cumming star in return of CABARET to Studio 54 (photo by Joan Marcus)

Studio 54
254 West 54th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 4, $47-$352
212-719-1300
www.cabaretmusical.com

The Roundabout has brought back its exciting 1998 Tony-winning revival of Cabaret, once again turning Studio 54 into the lasciviously decadent Kit Kat Klub in pre-WWII Berlin, where a debauched Emcee (Alan Cumming) hosts an evening of naughty nightclub fun during the rise of the Third Reich. The audience sits at small, round tables in the orchestra section (and regular seats in the mezzanine) as the Emcee introduces music and dance and hovers in the background as the narrative plays out onstage. Michelle Williams makes a strong Broadway debut as Sally Bowles, a British ex-pat who performs at the Kit Kat Klub and takes an instant liking to American writer Cliff Bradshaw (Bill Heck). In order to make money, Cliff teaches English to Ernst (Aaron Krohn) and others and also does favors for him. Meanwhile, Sally moves in with Cliff, who lives in a boardinghouse run by the spinsterish Fraulein Schneider (Linda Emond), who is being subtly courted by successful fruitier Herr Schultz (Danny Burstein). When Ernst proudly reveals he is a member of the Nazi party, the relationships among the characters go through a swift and sudden change, setting in motion one of the greatest second acts in Broadway history.

Herr Schultz (Danny Burstein) and Fraulein Schneider (Linda Emond) consider a dangerous love in CABARET (photo by Joan Marcus)

Adapted from John van Druten’s 1951 play, I Am a Camera, which itself was based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, this version of Cabaret, directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, the Bridge Project) and codirected and choreographed by Rob Marshall (Chicago, Into the Woods), uses elements of both Harold Prince’s original 1966 show as well as Bob Fosse’s Oscar-nominated 1972 film to craft a new way to experience this ultimately heart-wrenching sociopolitical tale, which features a marvelous score by John Kander and Fred Ebb and a powerful book by Joe Masteroff. Robert Brill’s two-level set features the scantily clad Kit Kat Girls, Kit Kat Boys (the daring costumes are by William Ivey Long), and musical director (Patrick Vaccariello) upstairs, often seen behind a large, tilted frame that hangs from the ceiling, surrounded by bulbs that slowly go out over the course of the evening. Meanwhile, the story plays out on the main floor, as relationships develop and fall apart. Heck (The Orphans’ Home Cycle) is relatively bland as Cliff, but the rest of the cast is excellent: Williams (Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine) more than holds her own in a role made famous by Liza Minnelli and also played by such stars as Miranda Richardson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Deborah Gibson, and Brooke Shields, among others, nailing such familiar songs as “Mein Herr,” “Maybe This Time,” and the title song. Burstein (Talley’s Folly, Golden Boy) and Emond (Death of a Salesman, 1776) give added depth to their touching characters, who are caught in the middle of what is happening in Germany, while Cumming (Macbeth, The Good Wife) has a blast reprising his Tony-winning role, offering a very different take from Oscar and Tony winner Joel Grey as he makes his playfully raunchy way through such classics as “Willkommen,” “Money,” and “If You Could See Her.” It all leads to one of the most striking and harrowing final images you’ll ever see onstage.

THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY

Robert (Steven Pasquale) and Francesca (Kelli O’Hara) contemplate just what they’re getting themselves into in stage adaptation of hit book and movie (photo by Joan Marcus)

Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre
236 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Through May 18, $59-$141
www.bridgesofmadisoncountymusical.com

During the first act of the musical version of The Bridges of Madison County, it looks like this sentimental story of a married woman who has a brief tryst with a traveling photographer in 1965 will successfully pull off the triple play, going from wildly successful book to hit movie to smash Broadway musical. But then comes the second act. The mushy melodrama was first told in Robert James Waller’s critically maligned 1992 novel, which has sold more than fifty millions copies worldwide, then in Clint Eastwood’s 1995 film, starring an Oscar-nominated Meryl Streep and Eastwood, which earned more than $180 million at the box office. For the Broadway musical, which has just posted its early closing notice of May 18, director Bartlett Sher (The Light in the Piazza, Awake and Sing!), Pulitzer Prize-winning book writer Marsha Norman (’Night, Mother; The Color Purple), and composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown (Parade, The Last Five Years) have significantly tweaked the narrative, abandoning any framing story and lowering the ages of the protagonists, making things that much hotter — even throwing in a surprise flash of nudity. But none of that can help change the seriously flawed main focus, a suburban wife’s pie-in-the-sky fantasy, the same kind of thing that has brought Fifty Shades of Grey mainstream success.

Bud (Hunter Foster) notices something different about his wife in THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Just after her husband (Hunter Foster) and teenage kids (Caitlin Kinnunen and Derek Klena) take off for a few days to present their prize steer at a state fair, bored Italian housewife Francesca Johnson (Kelli O’Hara) is instantly drawn to National Geographic photographer and crunchy loner Robert Kincaid (Steven Pasquale), who has come to Winterset, Iowa, to shoot a series on the covered bridges in Madison County. Francesca and Robert consider pursuing their magnetic attraction even as nosy neighbor Marge (Cass Morgan) can’t stop sharing gossip with her unconcerned husband, Charlie (Michael X. Martin), and soon find themselves caught in the searing heat of the moment, consequences be damned. But then comes the second act, when everything that had been built up so well — from the supporting characters to the simmering passion of the protagonists to Michael Yeargan’s imaginative moving sets (the minimalist bridge design was inspired by Lars von Trier’s Dogville) — starts falling apart in a flurry of sappy, maudlin scenes that trap the creative team, resulting in a long, needless tacked-on ending that goes on and on (and on). O’Hara and Pasquale are excellent in their roles, singing with sweet operetta-like flourishes, but the later material, which ranges from the repetitive to the nonsensical, fails them as the story gets mired in its rather insulting fantasia, which really is a shame, because with a bit more tweaking, this might not be closing on Broadway so quickly and hitting the road for a national tour in 2015, which is likely to be a bigger success away from the Great White Way.