Frank Wood plays an ailing golden retriever in Danny Tejera’s Toros (photo by Joan Marcus)
TOROS
Second Stage Theater Uptown, McGinn/Cazale Theater
2162 Broadway at Seventy-Sixth St.
Through August 13, $60-$75 2st.com/shows/toros
Three twentysomething friends who attended the same international grade school in Madrid reconnect in Danny Tejera’s beguilingly quirky and unpredictable Toros. Juan (Juan Castano) is a wannabe DJ who works on his music in the garage. Toro (Abubakr Ali) has just returned from an unhappy stint in New York City. And the free-spirited Andrea (b) teaches kindergarten when she’s not rolling joints. All three live at home as they try to figure out what they want to do with their lives, spending their evenings drinking, smoking, going to clubs, and hoping there is something better out there.
All the while, Juan’s ailing, elderly golden retriever, Tica (Frank Wood), is curled up in her bed at the front corner of the stage. Throughout the show, she adjusts her positions, lets out small snores, howls, and barks, and moves awkwardly across the floor, her ancient bones wasting away. The dog soldiers on but is a constant reminder that everyone is eventually going to die, and it might be ugly and painful.
The bullheaded Juan — “toro” means bull in Spanish — is a nasty guy who is mean to Toro, unable to say anything kind. Toro is a lost soul who can’t decide whether he wants to be with his friends or be alone. Andrea is the only one of the trio who has a firm grasp of who she is, although the recent tragic death of her sister has her reevaluating her future. Another death impacts the way they interact with themselves and the world.
Tejera (Scary Faces Happy Faces) and director Gaye Taylor Upchurch (Wish You Were Here,Animal) don’t make it easy for the audience at Second Stage’s McGinn/Cazale Theater, but only in the best ways. Each of the characters has serious flaws and does things that they can’t take back even if they wanted to. The dialogue, which is mostly in English with occasional Spanish, crackles with unexpected lines.
Toro (Abubakr Ali) scratches Tica (Frank Wood) while Juan (Juan Castano) tends to his music in Toros (photo by Joan Marcus)
Set designer Arnulfo Maldonado has crafted an intricate and realistic garage, complete with a fancy car under a white sheet, gardening equipment, and a bathroom that continually overflows. Curiously, there is a wall of plants and trees right outside the garage, which would prevent the car from pulling out into the driveway; perhaps it’s meant to imply that the characters are trapped. (Juan and Toro work for Juan’s father’s real estate company, finding houses for others as they are still stuck living with their parents.)
On the subway home, we heard a few people who had been at the show questioning that scenic choice as well — the designer achieved a thought-provoking response, as do the unique writing, acting, and direction. I’ve seldom been on a train coming home from the theater with as many lively discussions going on.
Castano (A Parallelogram,Transfers), b (American (Tele)Visions,Unprincess Non-Bride), and Ali (We Live in Cairo,Kiss) are terrific as childhood friends who don’t necessarily have much in common anymore, but Wood steals the show as Tica, who is onstage nearly the entire smoothly paced ninety minutes. “Tica” can be translated as ethics, which is something that Juan can learn a lot about.
“All the things people usually want: money, or fame, or — raising a family or doing social work — I was just like, none of that seems that great or useful anyway, you know?” Toro says. “And — I just sort of like, stopped believing in reality. . . . Like, it just seemed like, no matter what I saw in front of me, it was all so obviously performed.”
There’s nothing obvious about the wonderfully performed Toros.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Imelda (Arielle Jacobs) and Ferdinand Marcos (Jose Llana) dance their way to power in Here Lies Love (photo by Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy, and Evan Zimmerman)
HERE LIES LOVE
Broadway Theatre
1681 Broadway at 53rd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 3, $49 – $299 herelieslovebroadway.com
“Why don’t you love me?” Imelda Marcos (Arielle Jacobs) asks in Here Lies Love, the fast-paced extravaganza thrilling audiences at the reconfigured Broadway Theatre. Obviously, she hasn’t been paying attention, too obsessed with greed, corruption, and power.
Here Lies Love started out as a 2010 concept album about Marcos by former Talking Heads leader David Byrne and musician and DJ Fatboy Slim, featuring Tori Amos, Steve Earle, Martha Wainwright, Natalie Merchant, Florence Welch, Cyndi Lauper, Nellie McKay, and others. The full-on show opened at the Public’s LuEsther Hall in 2013, when I called it “a spectacular, must-see event, an immersive, endlessly creative theatrical experience.” It’s still all that and more.
Set designer David Korins has ripped out most of the seats in the theater, so hundreds of people gather on the floor, where large rectangular platforms (nearly four feet high) are pushed around by stagehands while other crew members guide the audience like airplane safety ground handlers so revelers don’t get smushed. There are a few mezzanine rows on two sides of the theater; at one end there are two dozen rows of more traditional balcony seating, while at the other is the main stage. In the center of the room is a giant disco ball, evoking Marcos’s New York City penthouse, where she had one installed over a dance floor, and Studio 54, where she liked to party with celebrities.
Throughout the ninety-minute show, Peter Nigrini projects archival news footage, sociopolitical information, images of Johanna Poethig, Vicente Clemente, and Presco Tabios’s 1986 Lakas Samabayanan (“People’s Power”) mural, and live action, documenting Imelda’s determined rise from a poor childhood by winning a local beauty contest and moving to Manila, meeting and falling in love with the ambitious Ferdinand Marcos (Jose Llana), a military veteran and lawyer with major political aspirations.
Soon she’s swept into a life of position and wealth, although her public statements seem touchingly ingenuous. “The most important things are love and beauty. / It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor. / To prosper and to fly — / a basic human right. / The feeling in your heart that you’re secure,” she sings in the opening title number. “Is it a sin to love too much? Is it a sin to care? / I do it all for you. / How can it be unfair?” Most of the lyrics are taken directly from interviews, films, and public statements made by the characters; “here lies love,” for example, is the phrase Imelda wants engraved on her tombstone.
The Marcoses’ rise to power is being challenged by reformer Ninoy Aquino (Conrad Ricamora), a provincial mayor and governor who briefly dated Imelda before becoming a senator who correctly predicted what she and Ferdinand would do to the Philippines. “Out ev’ry night in New York and Paris / Champagne and dancing — while back here at home / People barely surviving — they’re living in shanties! / Our country’s in trouble — but the party goes on!” he declares, earning himself the top spot on their long list of enemies.
Here Lies Love follows the story of Imelda Marcos (Arielle Jacobs) through music and dance (photo by Billy Bustamante, Matthew Murphy, and Evan Zimmerman)
Another sad observer of Imelda’s transformation into an egotistical despot is her childhood friend Estrella Cumpas (Melody Butiu), who in some ways represents both the audience and the people of the Philippines. Once wealth and power come her way, Imelda quickly dumps Estrella. In one of the most touching scenes in the show, Estrella watches Imelda on her wedding day, but she is kept on the other side of a gate. Estrella is intent on standing by her friend as long as she can, explaining, “I know that you are in there somewhere / Letters get misplaced in the mail / Guess that there was some confusion / Amidst those throngs and swells / Did you see me outside? / Did you see me wave? / When you passed in your car / Ah, well, that’s okay — / How she looked when she passed by / How she looked when she passed by.” But Imelda has moved on, trying to erase her poverty-stricken past from her official story.
In 1965, Ferdinand became the tenth president of the Philippines, and for more than twenty years he ruled with an iron fist, having his rivals jailed and murdered, cheating on Imelda, silencing the media, establishing martial law, and lying to the populace as he grew ridiculously rich.
Shortly after the wedding, a press attaché (Jeigh Madjus) announces, “And the whole world can see / They’re our Jackie and John . . . What a picture they make / I’m so proud for us all.” But that’s not at all the way things turned out.
Tony-winning director Alex Timbers (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,Moulin Rouge!) infuses Here Lies Love with nonstop energy spreading across the theater; while the central action follows Ferdinand, Imelda, and Ninoy, the ensemble moves and grooves to Olivier nominee Annie-B Parson’s electric choreography on podiums in the balcony, as if featured dancers in a nightclub. A ladder is occasionally wheeled to the balcony so the main characters can interact with the audience there.
The staging works on multiple levels, but, most important, it helps attendees experience some of what the Filipino people felt during the Marcoses’ ascent. At first, the crowd on the floor is sucked into Ferdinand’s populist campaign, cheering, shaking hands with him and Imelda, and eagerly posing with them for photos and videos. But soon after, they are at an Aquino rally, joining in the rage against the Marcoses’ rampant corruption.
Justin Townsend’s lighting is flashy and bold, splashing flickering colors everywhere. Clint Ramos’s colorful costumes are inspired by such traditional Filipino styles as the terno and the barong. M. L. Dogg and Cody Spencer’s pumping sound shakes the house, led by a fast-talking DJ (Moses Villarama) who keeps the party going even after the show is over. Music director J. Oconer Navarro guides the band across tender ballads and splashy disco and pop, with Joe Cruz on guitar, Derek Nievergelt on bass, and Jacqueline Acevedo, Gustavo Di Dalva, Brandon Ilaw, Paula Winter, and Yuri Yamashita on percussion.
Broadway’s first all-Filipino cast has Llana (The King and I,The 25th Annual Putnam Country Spelling Bee), Ricamora (The King and I,Soft Power), and Butiu (Doctor Zhivago,South Pacific) reprising their roles from the Public Theater production, and all three embody their characters with skill and confidence; Butiu is particularly touching as the friend left behind, essentially representing all the people the Marcoses steamrolled. Jacobs (In the Heights,Between the Lines) is almost too likable as Imelda, although you run out of sympathy for the woman known as the Iron Butterfly by the end. Jasmine Forsberg (Broadway Bounty Hunter,A Grand Night for Singing) is Maria Luisa and Imelda’s inner voice.
Through August 13, Tony winner Lea Salonga (Miss Saigon,Once on This Island) brings down the house as Aurora Aquino, Ninoy’s mother, singing the heartfelt “Just Ask the Flowers” dressed in all black, surrounded by black umbrellas. Kristina Doucette plays Ninoy’s wife, Cory; Timothy Matthew Flores is their son.
Oscar, Grammy, and Tony winner Byrne (Joan of Arc: Into the Fire,American Utopia) and Grammy winner Fatboy Slim (“Praise You,” “The Rockafeller Skank”) have ingeniously transformed the story of despicable despots into a cautionary tale and all-out dance celebration — and with only one mention of shoes.
Ferdinand died in 1986 at the age of seventy-two; Imelda, who concluded a nine-year run in the Philippine House of Representatives in 2019, is still alive, now ninety-four, and their son Bongbong, aka Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was elected president of the country in a landslide in 2022.
“Don’t let them look down on us,” Imelda calls out in “Please Don’t.” It seems she has little to worry about.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
John Malkovich, Hyung-ki Joo, and Aleksey Igudesman star in The Music Critic, coming to the Beacon for one night only
Who: John Malkovich, Aleksey Igudesman,Hyung-ki Joo What:The Music Critic, play with live classical music and opera Where:Beacon Theatre, Broadway at 74th St. When: Saturday, October 28, $66-$257, 7:30 Why: In such films as Being John Malkovich and cable series as The New Pope, two-time Oscar nominee and Emmy winner John Malkovich (Places in the Heart,In the Line of Fire) has shown that he has a wickedly clever sense of humor, especially when it comes to himself. Since appearing on Broadway four times from 1984 to 1987 (Death of a Salesman,Arms and the Man,The Caretaker,Burn This), his stage work in New York has been limited. In 2011, he starred as the title murderer in The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer at BAM, and two years later he portrayed Giacomo Casanova at City Center in The Giacomo Variations; both traveling productions combined classical music, opera, and theater.
On October 28, Malkovich will return to the city for one night only with his latest traveling show, The Music Critic, in which he plays a cynical expositor who argues that Antonín Dvořák “indulges in ugly, unnatural music,” calls Johannes Brahms a “giftless bastard,” and claims that “the music of Debussy has the attractiveness of a pretty, tubercular maiden.” It was created and conceived by Russian violinist, poet, author, director, composer, and conductor Aleksey Igudesman, who performs in the international hit with his longtime comedy partner, Korean-British pianist, composer, and educator Hyung-ki Joo; both trained at the prestigious Yehudi Menuhin School. The irreverent comic duo of Igudesman & Joo has previously staged such productions as And Now Rachmaninoff,And Now Mozart, and BIG Nightmare Music.
“We are all happy to be back on the road, and for the first time also in the USA, participating in an evening which consists of some of the greatest compositions in the history of classical music, paired with the perhaps rather unexpected initial reactions those compositions elicited from some of the world’s renowned music critics, along with some other surprises,” Malkovich said in a statement. Igudesman added, “The Music Critic is a project very close to my heart, and bringing it to the USA is something I dreamed of from its inception. My dear friend John Malkovich in the role of the evil critic is despicable and lovable at the same time and evokes the critic in every one of us.”
The score of The Music Critic features Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann, Debussy, Prokofiev, Eugène Ysaÿe, Giya Kancheli, Astor Piazzolla, and Igudesman; Igudesman and Joo will be joined by cellist Antonio Lysy, violist Hsin-Yun Huang, and violinist Claire Wells. Be prepared for an unpredictable evening of fab music and comic high jinks.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Who: Uptown Dance Academy, the Gospel Caravan, IMPACT Repertory Theatre, Mama Foundation’s Sing Harlem! Choir, Bishop Hezekiah Walker & Choir, Ray Chew & the Harlem Music Festival All-Star Band featuring Nona Hendryx, more What: Annual Harlem Week celebration Where:U.S. Grant National Memorial Park, West 122nd St. at Riverside Dr. When: Sunday, August 13, free, noon – 7:00 pm (festival runs August 9-16) Why: One of the centerpieces of Harlem Week is “A Great Day in Harlem,” which takes place Sunday, August 13, as part of this annual summer festival. There will be an international village with booths selling food, clothing, jewelry, and more, as well as live music and dance divided into “Artz, Rootz & Rhythm,” “The Gospel Caravan,” “The Fashion Flava Fashion Show,” and “The Concert Under the Stars.” Among the performers are the Uptown Dance Academy, the Gospel Caravan, IMPACT Repertory Theatre, the Sing Harlem! Choir, and Bishop Hezekiah Walker & Choir. In addition, Ray Chew & the Harlem Music Festival All-Star Band, featuring Nona Hendryx, will perform a tribute to the one and only Tina Turner, who died in May at the age of eighty-three; Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Miriam Makeba, and Tito Puente will also be honored.
The theme of the forty-ninth annual Harlem Week is “Be the Change: Hope. Joy. Love.”; it runs August 9-16 with such other free events as the panel discussion “Climate & Environmental Justice in Harlem: Storms, Heat & Wildfires,” A Harlem SummerStage concert, Senior Citizens Day, the Uptown Night Market,the Percy Sutton Harlem 5K Run & Walk & Children’s Run, “Choose Healthy Life Service of Renewal and Healing,” Great Jazz on the Great Hill in Central Park with Wycliffe Gordon and Bobby Sanabria, Imagenation Outdoor Film Festival screenings of Beat Street with DJ Spivey and Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes, a Youth Conference & Hackathon, Economic Development Day, an Arts & Culture Broadway Summit, Harlem on My Mind Conversations, a Jobs & Career Fair, and more. “We continue to build a stronger, more united Harlem, radiating hope, joy, and love throughout our beloved city,” Harlem Week chairman Lloyd Williams said in a statement.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy) and Beau (Eric McCormack) discuss their future in The Cottage (photo by Joan Marcus)
THE COTTAGE
Hayes Theater
240 West Forty-Fourth St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 29, $109-$169 thecottageonbroadway.com
“Why do I have a sense of impending disaster?” a character asks early in Tom Stoppard’s 1981 farce, On the Razzle. “One false move and we could have a farce on our hands.”
The best farces build comedy around impending disasters, usually involving class and romance, from Noël Coward’s Present Laughter and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest to Michael Frayn’s Noises Off and Molière’s The Miser. But the less-successful farces are hampered by too many false moves.
Sandy Rustin’s 2014 drawing room comedy of manners, The Cottage, which opened July 24 at the Hayes Theater on Broadway, starts off well enough. As the audience enters the space, the stage is covered by a screen depicting the image of a colorful, idyllic cottage covered in plants and flowers — as well as several pairs of animals engaged in overt sexual behavior; a bra dangles from a tree branch, hinting at what is going on inside. The screen is then raised to reveal Paul Tate dePoo III’s wonderful set, which deservedly gets its own applause. The large room is filled with elegant furniture, sculptures, books, paintings, a bar, a globe, a gramophone, and seemingly endless knickknacks.
It’s June 1923, and Beau (Eric McCormack) is at his family’s cottage in the English countryside, in the midst of his annual tryst with Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy), which has been going on for seven years. Sylvia is ready to take their relationship to the next level, but Beau is apprehensive.
An all-star cast cannot save the Broadway debut of The Cottage (photo by Joan Marcus)
“I wish you were my husband,” she says.
“If I were your husband you would despise me just as you despise Clarke and you would spend your evenings wishing to make love to him and not me,” Beau replies, referring to his brother, Clarke (Alex Moffat), who is married to Sylvia. “Romance, my dear, is for fairy tales. This is not a romance. This is sex,” Beau adds. “Un-wifely sex.”
Beau is none-too-thrilled when Sylvia announces that she has sent telegrams to both Clarke and Marjorie (Lilli Cooper), Beau’s wife, revealing the affair. Clarke and Marjorie soon arrive separately with secrets of their own, followed by Dierdre (Dana Steingold), a whirling dervish who is in love with Beau and is worried that her husband, Richard (Nehal Joshi), will find out where she is and kill him — but not before they all have some fun. “I didn’t expect a party. Will there be games?” Dierdre declares. The fun and games take a drastic downturn in the far-less-effective second act.
Subtitled “A Romantic and (Not Quite) Murderous Comedy of Manners,” The Cottage could be renamed The Farce That Goes Wrong. The all–North American cast (McCormack is Canadian) speaks in overly dramatic British accents. Many of the props offer surprise jokes that quickly become repetitive, while others are just plain head scratchers — antlers, I’m talking about you.
The play, gleefully helmed by the Tony-winning, Emmy-nominated Jason Alexander (Seinfeld,Jerome Robbins’ Broadway) in his directorial debut, does have its fair share of amusing exchanges, particularly in the first act, and there were two genuinely funny moments that appeared to be spontaneous, one involving a shoe, the other a bunch of grapes, resulting in the actors trying their best to hold back their own laughter and failing wonderfully. Unfortunately, there was not nearly enough of that.
Sydney Maresca’s costumes are appropriately genteel, from Clarke’s tweed suit to Sylvia’s white negligee to Beau’s smoking jacket. Justin Ellington’s sound design is overwhelmed by the actors speaking way too loud, which often impacts the believability of the plot; numerous times, characters have discussions they don’t want others to hear, but it’s hard to believe that a person knocking at the front door can’t hear what two people are saying as they shout right on the other side.
The cast is all in, but the lack of subtlety drags the show down; it might have worked better as a ninety-minute one-act instead of two hours with intermission. The actors, particularly Saturday Night Live veteran Moffat and Steingold (Beetlejuice,Avenue Q), display a talent for physical comedy, but a gaggle of gags feels tossed in purely for giggles, not organic to the story. A stage farce needs to be clever and witty first, without the pratfalls, in order to capture the audience; otherwise, as with The Cottage, you end up with an overlong episode of a mediocre sitcom or SNL skit.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
THE LITTLE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL
UNDER St. Marks
94 St. Marks Pl.
August 3-19, $20 streaming, $25 in person www.frigid.nyc/festivals/shakesfest
One of the most important aspects of William Shakespeare’s canon is how open each play is to interpretation and adaptation. The Bard’s works are regularly retold with changes in time and location, race and gender, style and genre. It’s gotten so that it is rarer to see a traditional production than one involving significant alterations, including such elements as contemporary pop music, modern-day political issues, the rise of a minor character, and zombies.
Presented by FRIGID New York, the Little Shakespeare Festival offers Bard fans the opportunity to see seven shows that take unique looks at different aspects of Shakespeare’s genius. Running August 3-19 at UNDER St. Marks in the East Village, the third annual fest is curated by Conor D Mullen, who created As You Will with David Brummer and George Hider, an unscripted evening of improv in which the audience shouts out titles of plays that Shakespeare might have written had he not died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two, and then the cast acts them out; among the past titles are Eight Merry Spiders,That Doth Not Go There, and 1601: A Space Odyssey.
Kristina Del Mar stars in Djingo Productions’ Wheel of Fortune at Little Shakespeare Festival (photo by Miguel Garzón Martínez)
“Sitting in UNDER St. Marks, it’s not too hard for me to imagine William Shakespeare working here,” Mullen said in a statement. “He’d have used his words to turn this space into a Roman dungeon, a Scottish castle, or a moonlit Athenian forest. His actors would have loved having the audience so close they could speak with them directly. And, of course, he would have been very approving of a bar inside the theater, since in his own time audience members who wanted a drink had to leave the theater and visit a local bar. It’s a reminder for me that Shakespeare doesn’t just live on when performed in giant, open air amphitheaters or big, Broadway houses; he also lives in these most humble of places, where I think he would have felt quite at home. Here, with you and me, at the Little Shakespeare Festival.”
Five of the six presentations (one is a double bill) are also available as livestreams so you can watch them in your own home. Barefoot Shakespeare Company’s Lady Capulet, written by Melissa Bell and directed by Emily Gallagher, is a prequel to Romeo and Juliet that explores the role of women in today’s society; Jianzi Colón-Soto stars as Rose Capulet. Djingo Productions’ Wheel of Fortune, written and directed by Jing Ma, is a problem play dealing with isolation, connection, and mass shootings in the digital age. C.A.G.E. Theatre Company’s THE ROOM of Falsehood, written and directed by Michael Hagins, reimagines Tommy Wiseau’s late-night cult favorite, The Room, through a Shakespearean lens. First Flight Theatre Company’s Shakespeare’s Deaths and Shakespeare’s Ladies at Tea, both directed by Frank Farrell, are a forty-five-minute double header in which, first, five actors depict all major deaths in Shakespeare, and then, second, eight female Bard characters sit down for a chat in which they can only speak lines that Shakespeare wrote for them. And in Hamlet Isn’t Dead’s Shrew You! written by David Andrew Laws and directed by Sophia Carlin, four actresses repair The Taming of the Shrew.
Most of the shows run an hour or less (Lady Capulet is 110 minutes); in-person tickets are only $25, while livestream access is $20, in order to get an intimate little taste of Shakespeare in 2023.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Valentine Xavier (Pico Alexander) and Lady Torrance (Maggie Siff) are lost in the dark in Orpheus Descending (photo by Gerry Goodstein)
ORPHEUS DESCENDING
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 6, $97
866-811-4111 www.tfana.org
Imagine an entire season of a nighttime soap opera, set in the south in the 1950s, mercilessly squeezed into two and a half uncomfortable hours and you have Theatre for a New Audience’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending, which opened Tuesday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.
A rewrite of 1940’s Battle of Angels and loosely based on the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus Descending debuted on Broadway in 1957, arriving during Williams’s most fertile period, the seventeen years that brought the world The Glass Menagerie,A Streetcar Named Desire,The Rose Tattoo,Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,Suddenly Last Summer,Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of the Iguana. It ran for only sixty-eight performances and was revived on Broadway by Peter Hall in 1989; otherwise, it has been unseen onstage in New York City, with good reason: It’s a hot mess, particularly in a second act that deteriorates by the minute, and there’s nothing that talented director Erica Schmidt can do to save it.
The play takes place in the Torrance Mercantile Store in a small southern town in the 1950s. The dry goods shop is run by Lady Torrance (Maggie Siff), daughter of an Italian immigrant, a woman thoroughly disappointed with life, married to Jabe Torrance (Michael Cullen), an obstinate, much older racist who seems to be at death’s door. The show opens as Jake is returning from a Memphis hospital with his unpleasant caretaker, Nurse Porter (Fiana Tóibín). Lady’s tragic back story unspools immediately: Her Italian immigrant father died when his wine garden was burned to the ground by the Klan for serving Black customers. In his memory, Lady is building a confectionery adjoined to the store, trying to bring at least some sweetness into her sour existence.
The town is all abuzz when a handsome stranger, Valentine Xavier (Pico Alexander), mysteriously arrives, wearing a snakeskin jacket and carrying an acoustic guitar. The local gossips, Eva Temple (Kate Skinner), Sister Temple (Prudence Wright Holmes), Dolly Hamma (Molly Kate Babos), and Beulah Binnings (Laura Heisler), are all atwitter about Val, serving as a kind of judgmental Greek chorus. Carol Cutrere (Julia McDermott), a sad, oversexed twenty-seven-year-old hellraiser with too much mascara who walks around barefoot in a trench coat and has been banned from town, takes an immediate interest in Val, who asks Carol why she makes such a spectacle of herself. “I’m an exhibitionist!” she declares. “I want to be noticed, seen, heard, felt! I want them to know I’m alive! Don’t you want them to know you’re alive?” Her version of being alive mainly consists of driving up and down the local highway drinking and dancing in every juke joint along the way.
David Cutrere (James Waterston) and Lady Torrance (Maggie Siff) rehash the past in rare Tennessee Williams revival (photo by Gerry Goodstein)
Lady, who once upon a time was in love with Carol’s brother, David (James Waterston), is desperate to be free, in some ways jealous of Carol. When Val tells her about a type of bird that has no legs and so instead must remain perpetually in the air, never touching the ground, Lady is intrigued, as if there is a heaven out there where she can escape her hell on earth. “I don’t think nothing living has ever been that free, not even nearly,” she says.
Vee Talbott (Ana Reeder), the wife of the sheriff (Brian Keane), knows Val is alive, cuddling up to him and showing him her paintings, abstract religious works based on her visions. “I paint a thing how I feel it instead of always the way it actually is. Appearances are misleading, nothing is what it looks like to the eyes. You got to have — vision — to see!” she explains. But nobody in this community can see beyond what they already know.
The more Jabe abuses Lady — upstairs in his room, he often pounds the floor with his cane three times, the sound echoing like a missive from the devil — the more she falls for Val, setting up a space in the store where he can secretly sleep over. Meanwhile, Jabe’s henchmen, Dog Hamma (Matt DeAngelis) and Pee Wee Binnings (Gene Gillette), are ready to do his bidding, eagerly anticipating being able to use their fists and guns. They get their chance in a wildly uneven and incredulous finale that is reimagined by Schmidt, straying from the original with reckless abandon. Oh, and before I forget, and I wish I could forget, there is also a clown (DeAngelis), who is clearly the work of a demon, and a conjurer known as Uncle Pleasant (Dathan B. Williams), who appears from, well, I have no idea.
“Curiosity is a human instinct,” Beulah says at one point, and that’s essentially what this production of Orpheus Descending is, a curiosity. Schmidt has previously directed the unique and unforgettable Shakespeare adaptation Mac Beth for Red Bull, an uneven musical version of Cyrano and the powerful coming-of-age drama All the Fine Boys for the New Group, and the underappreciated and underseen Lucy for Audible. In each of those shows, she displayed a daring feel for narrative, willing to challenge herself and the audience, but her efforts go astray with Orpheus Descending, which is not among Williams’s finest.
Julia McDermott steals the show as Carol Cutrerein TFANA (photo by Gerry Goodstein)
As opposed to the legless bird flying free, the play never gets off the ground. Amy Rubin’s claustrophobic two-floor set features a ceiling and walls that can barely contain the cast; the large, empty spaces to the right and left apparently alternate between the confectionery and Val’s sleeping quarters and places for some actors to sit while waiting to reenter the scene. In addition, the entrances to these areas are inconsistent, with characters sometimes walking through a door and other times around it in what seems like an impossible geography.
The play might not have a great history, but it has attracted marvelous casts. Cliff Robertson was Val, Maureen Stapleton was Lady, and Lois Smith was Carol in its 1957 Broadway bow; Marlon Brando was Val, Anna Magnani Lady, and Joanne Woodward Carol in Sidney Lumet’s 1960 film version, The Fugitive Kind; and Kevin Anderson was Val, Vanessa Redgrave Lady, and Anne Twomey Carol in the 1989 Broadway revival.
At TFANA, only McDermott (Heroes of the Fourth Turning,Epiphany) and Reeder (In the Blood,Sight Unseen) distinguish themselves, the former portraying Carol with a dark sadness, the latter adding an innate, innocent charm to Vee. Alexander (The Portuguese Kid,Punk Rock) is too understated as Val, who barely plays his guitar, while Siff (Billions,Curse of the Starving Class) ably runs the gamut of emotions Lady goes through, but even as the text repeatedly makes her Italian heritage clear, the actress produces an Eastern European accent that befuddles the audience with its incongruity.
Throughout the play, Williams refers to one of his favorite topics, corruption. “I lived in corruption but I’m not corrupted,” Val says. Everyone in Orpheus Descending lives in corruption but most of them are not corrupted as they try to survive in a bardo between heaven and hell. Unfortunately, this version of the story is stuck in the bardo as well; for an irresistible show about Orpheus and Eurydice, you’re much better off heading over to Hadestown at the Walter Kerr on Broadway.
