this week in theater

HARLEM WEEK: A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM AND MORE

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.]

THE COTTAGE

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

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.]

ORPHEUS DESCENDING

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.

THE SAVIOUR

Máire Sullivan (Marie Mullen) glows in the bask of postcoital sex in The Saviour (photo by Carol Rosegg)

THE SAVIOUR
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 13, $50-$90
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

The first half of the world stage premiere of Deirdre Kinahan’s The Saviour at the Irish Rep is gorgeous. On the morning of her sixty-seventh birthday, Máire (Marie Mullen) is basking in the glow of having had sex with a much younger man the night before. Lying in bed with a cigarette, the widowed mother and grandmother, during a long monologue to Jesus, says, “Get a grip on yourself, Máire Sullivan! I can hear you say that, Jesus. And you’re right. Do you know you’re right . . . I’m acting ridiculous. At my age! I hope you’re not getting all jealous now or anything? Are you, Jesus?”

But when a man (Jamie O’Neill) arrives, the play takes a decidedly different tack, one that raises several important issues but also turns its back on what had come before.

A devout Irish Catholic, Máire is in her glory after “heaving and shunting” with Martin. She is explaining herself to Jesus, hoping her lord and savior understands her new feelings. “Sex has always been a means to an end. Foisted on me when I didn’t want it or offered for a bit of peace,” she says. Barefoot and in a long white nightgown (the costumes are by Joan O’Clery), Máire gets up and walks over to her night table, putting on makeup and fixing her hair; there is actually no glass in the mirrors she is using, so we can see her in a frame as she gussies herself up. “I mean, I didn’t even know that sex was possible at my age,” she tells Jesus.

Waiting for Martin to come upstairs with breakfast and coffee, she shares scenes from her hardscrabble life. Her mother died when she was young, so her father, who found work in England, sent her off to the Magdalene Laundries, Irish sweatshops operated by nuns that were primarily a place to hide and punish pregnant teenagers.

“In the convent in Stanhope Street you gave your name away at the door,” she sadly recalls. “And I don’t think Daddy knew that when he put me in there. . . . Stanhope Street wasn’t really a school. A reformatory for whores and hussies! But I wasn’t one of them. Was I? No. I was good,” she says unsurely, as if having to convince herself.

She is haunted by the experience, remembering, “You didn’t ask any questions of the silence. Because we worked in silence. Lived in silence. Silence was our penance . . . for being orphaned girls. Forgotten girls. Bad girls. Or just . . . girls.”

But mostly, she is anticipating Martin coming upstairs and showering her with yet more attention — and sex. But that’s not quite what she has in store for her birthday.

Máire (Marie Mullen) and an unexpected figure (Jamie O’Neill) face some hard truths in The Saviour (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Ciarán Bagnall’s set is a slightly elevated turntable that revolves between the creaky bedroom, highlighted by a cross high on one wall, and the kitchen, with an open space stage right. Bagnall’s lighting and Aoife Kavanagh’s sound turn eerie whenever Máire drifts back into her memories of Stanhope Street, when the show briefly becomes a ghost story.

I cannot begin to tell you how uplifting it was to watch an actress of a certain age portray a woman who is euphoric about having had sex. Tony winner Mullen (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Gifts You Gave to the Dark) radiates as Máire details some of the events of the previous night, and the audience celebrates along with her as she carefully brushes her hair and shuffles around the bedroom, animated by this new lease on life, suddenly filled with hope and promise.

But Kinahan (Embargo, Halcyon Days) and director Louise Lowe (The Book of Names, The Party to End All Parties) then pull the rug out from under everyone’s feet when the visitor, ably played by O’Neill (Staging the Treaty, Luck Just Kissed You Hello), starts sharing some difficult truths about Máire, going all the way back to when she was raising her children. The Saviour abruptly becomes an issue play bringing up controversial topics instead of being about an older woman experiencing a positive life change. In addition, it grows repetitive, covering the same angles multiple times.

I felt like it was a kind of theatrical bait-and-switch; it might be my own fault for wanting the play to go in another direction, but, a week later, I still feel let down and betrayed. Perhaps I was so invested in Máire’s exhilaration that I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my enjoyment of that reaction. I can’t help but wonder whether it would have been so bad to have an older, decidedly unglamorous character simply enjoy sex in a show for a full seventy minutes.

But if anything, The Saviour, originally produced online during the pandemic in June 2021, is a distinctly Irish tale, one that delves into family, religion, and societal ills in which happy endings are far from guaranteed.

UNCLE VANYA

Jack Serio’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is set in a private Flatiron loft (photo by Emilio Madrid)

UNCLE VANYA
Private Flatiron loft
Wednesday – Monday through July 16, $58.54-$247.54
Extension: August 8 – September 3, $58.37-$275.29 ($39 lottery)
vanyanyc.com

Jack Serio’s superb production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is the theatrical event of the summer, and the one likely to be seen by the fewest people. It’s billed as being “hyper-intimate,” and it lives up to that description in just about every way.

Tickets were released without much fanfare on May 17 and sold out almost immediately; a mere forty seats were available for each of sixteen performances at an undisclosed private loft in the Flatiron District. The day before my show, I got an email advising me of the exact address and letting me know that “seating is general admission on a mix of chairs and comfortable high-back stools.” Because there is only one bathroom inside, we were told, “Please plan accordingly and use the restroom prior to your arrival if possible.” We were also warned not to come earlier than the designated time. “Please do not arrive prior to this time, as we will not be able to admit you into the building. We also cannot allow guests to congregate outside the building prior to or after the performance. Remember, this is a residential building and we’d like to be respectful to our neighbors.”

It made it all seem wonderfully secretive, as if we were part of some kind of clandestine club. There is no signage at the building; I was fully expecting there to be a hush-hush knock before I was led to a tiny elevator that can fit only a few people at a time. We got off at the second floor — stairs are not an option, up or down — where we were met with a large sign with information about the cast and creative team, so I knew I was in the right place. (Note that although the run is sold out, rush lottery tickets are available for each performance.)

The main space is a narrow, rectangular room with two farm tables pushed together at the center. The audience sits on either side, in the first row of chairs or the second row of taller high-back stools. The night I went, more than half the seats already had names on them, so there was a bit of confusion for those whose names were not taped to a seat; several groups of two or three ended up sitting apart from one another because of the scarcity of available, unmarked chairs. (The pricing structure ranges from general admission to reserved, so if you purchased the former, be sure to get there early.) Meanwhile, songs by Bob Dylan and Neil Young played in the background.

Ványa (David Cromer) can’t hide his love for Yeléna (Julia Chan) in hyper-intimate Chekhov production (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Walt Spangler’s cozy set features a working kitchen at one end and a couch beneath a window looking out at the courtyard at the other, with double metal doors leading to the fire escape, which is used as an entrance and exit throughout the show. Stacey Derosier’s lighting consists of two rows of track lights and a handful of carefully placed small stage lights, with flashlights and candles that cast mysterious glows. Carrie Mossman’s props include mirrors and old family photos on exposed brick walls and on the piano in one corner. Christopher Darbassie opts for a naturalistic sound design, which, the night I went, was enhanced by real rain and thunder. Ricky Reynoso’s costumes are contemporary but not fancy, save for Yeléna’s chic dresses, and several characters walk around in socks, slippers, or bare feet.

Serio uses Paul Schmidt’s 1999 translation, which felt fresh and vibrant to me, perhaps because all the recent productions of the play I’ve seen have been radical reimaginings or mashups (Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, New Saloon’s Minor Character: Six Translations of Uncle Vanya at the Same Time, Aaron Posner’s Life Sucks.) in addition to Richard Nelson’s 2018 adaptation for the Hunter Theater Project.

At an undefined time and location — although there are no cell phones — a group of friends and relatives have gathered at a country farm run by Ványa (David Cromer) and his niece, Sónya (Marin Ireland). Sónya’s father, the elderly, ailing professor Alexánder Serebriakóv (Bill Irwin), has arrived from the city with his second wife, the much younger and elegant Yeléna (Julia Chan), with plans on what to do with the estate they are tiring of. Both Ványa and Ástrov (Will Brill), a local doctor, are in love with Yeléna and not afraid to show it. Sónya, whose mother, Ványa’s sister, died many years before, is obsessed with Ástrov but too embarrassed to tell him, as she is afraid that she is too plain for him. Mrs. Voinítsky (Ann McDonough), Sónya’s grandmother, spends most of her time reading, drinking tea, and pontificating on such subjects as principles and change. Telégin (Will Dagger), known as Waffles, lives on the farm and helps out, still faithful to his wife, who left him for another man the day after they were married. And the longtime family nurse, Marína (Virginia Wing), knits and ruminates on the past.

Over the course of a few days, relationships entangle, secret loves are revealed, and one of the most famous gunshots in theater history echoes through the room.

Ástrov (Will Brill) can’t hide his love for Yeléna (Julia Chan) in Uncle Vanya (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Serio (This Beautiful Future, On Set with Theda Bara) maintains a fine line between intimate and immersive or interactive in the two-and-a-half-hour show (with intermission). Although the actors are almost always only a few feet away from the audience, they don’t make eye contact; it’s almost like a fly-on-the-wall documentary of a family falling apart, with no idea how to save itself. Cromer (The Waverly Gallery, A Raisin in the Sun) portrays Ványa as a broken man who seems to have already given up on life, essentially sleepwalking through the days, resigned to never be content. “Oh, God, my mind’s a mess,” he wails.

Brill (A Case for the Existence of God, Oklahoma!) imbues Ástrov with an innate selfishness that is the yin to Ványa’s yang. In this space, Ástrov’s environmentalism is even more prophetic than usual. “We were born with the ability to reason and the power to create and be fruitful, but until now all we’ve done is destroy whatever we see,” he says, talking about more than just trees, an ever-present pencil tucked behind one ear. “The forests are disappearing one by one, the rivers are polluted, wildlife is becoming extinct, the climate is changing for the worse, every day the planet gets poorer and uglier. It’s a disaster!”

You can feel the professor’s pain as Irwin (Old Hats, On Beckett) shuffles across the space, failing to recognize how his decisions impact everyone else, especially Ványa, who says of him, “A retired professor, a has-been, a moldy mackerel with a college degree. He has gout, rheumatism, migraines, his liver’s swollen with jealousy and envy.” Chan (2:22 A Ghost Story, The Great Canadian Baking Show) is alluring as Yeléna, who is well aware of her power over men. Dagger (The Antelope Party, Corsicana) offers welcome interludes as Telégin plays his acoustic guitar.

Sónya (Marin Ireland) can’t hide her love for Ástrov (Will Brill) in Jack Serio’s Uncle Vanya (photo by Emilio Madrid)

But Ireland (On the Exhale, Marie Antoinette), a New York City treasure, steals the show as Sónya, an ingénue who thinks she is ugly and undeserving of happiness. Telling Yeléna of her feelings for Ástrov, she opines, “It hurts so much! And it’s all so hopeless. It’s completely hopeless!” Ireland makes full use of the set; she sits on top of the couch and looks out the window longingly. She jumps on the kitchen island and speaks to Ástrov by tender candlelight. Wearing a baseball cap backward, she contorts her face and body in mesmerizing ways that capture the heartache in her soul. Sónya just wants to love, and be loved; she is the most human character in the play, the one most of us can identify with the closest.

The intimacy — or hyper-intimacy, if you will — allows us to understand the people who populate this farm in a deeply profound way. They exist in a world that is passing them by, stirring our compassion and inspiring us to wish to avoid the same fate.

[Ed. note: The play is being brought back August 8 – September 3 for an encore run, with a few cast changes: Thomas Jay Ryan (Dance Nation, Eureka Day) is taking over as Serebriakóv, with Dario Ladani Sanchez (Juliet & Romeo, a wake for david’s fucked-up face) as Yefim.]

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

JUKEBOX HEROES, TAKE TWO: ONCE UPON A ONE MORE TIME / ROCK AND ROLL MAN

Six fairy-tale characters reimagine their future in Once Upon a One More Time (photo by Matthew Murphy)

ONCE UPON A ONE MORE TIME
Marquis Theatre
210 West Forty-Sixth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through September 3, $59.75-$319.50
onemoretimemusical.com

In May, I wrote about a pair of jukebox musicals, the extremely disappointing A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical, which unsurprisingly received no Tony nominations, and the absolutely delightful & Juliet, which earned nine nods but unfortunately took home none. The former was a disjointed look at the life and career of the Brooklyn-born megastar, while the latter was a clever follow-up to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in which his wife, Anne Hathaway, decides to pen a sequel in which Juliet survives and, leaving behind the dead Romeo, heads to Paris to start a new life, set to existing tunes written or cowritten by Swedish producer Max Martin for the Backstreet Boys, Robyn, Demi Lovato, Bon Jovi, Katy Perry, *NSYNC, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, and others.

Last week I encountered a similar situation when I saw two new musicals, one an unsatisfying biographical chronicle, the other a surprisingly clever reimagining of a fairy-tale world using nothing but songs by Spears, the Princess of Pop, who has sold nearly 150 million records but has won more Golden Raspberries (3) than Grammys (1).

At the Marquis Theatre, Once Upon a One More Time is a load of fun despite a fairly ludicrous setup: After generations of following the rules enforced by the Narrator (Adam Godley), who makes sure to keep every female character in her place from story to story, Cinderella (Briga Heelan), Snow White (Aisha Jackson), Rapunzel (Gabrielle Beckford), Sleeping Beauty (Ashley Chiu), Princess Pea (Morgan Whitley), and Little Mermaid (Lauren Zakrin) start to realize there might be something else out there for them after the O.F.G. — the Original Fairy Godmother (Brooke Dillman) — gives Cin a copy of Betty Friedan’s 1963 game-changer, The Feminine Mystique, which helped usher in second-wave feminism. And they explore their situations through such Spears hits as “Lucky,” “Toxic,” “Womanizer,” “Oops! . . . I Did It Again,” and “. . . Baby One More Time.”

Prince Charming (Justin Guarini) turns out to be quite the dog in Britney Spears musical (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Cinderella is the first to consider that she might have a choice in her future, which upsets the Narrator. “Yes. Listen, I’ve been doing this a long time. And believe me, if I change so much as an intonation, the children go full Rumpelstiltskin,” he tells her. “They want things the same, every time. The narrative is very clear. We’re not here to make fairy tales, we’re here to follow them. Don’t overthink it. Oh, and don’t furrow your brow! We want you delivering lines, not wearing them. There. Better. Happy ever after.”

When Snow notices that Cin appears to be a bit off, she says, “Hey, you seem ‘stuck.’ Doc gives me pills for when I get like that.” Cinderella turns her down, then points out that Snow White’s latest needlepoint, “Happy ever after,” is filled with typos. Snow replies, “Huh. I guess neither of us knows what happy ever after’s supposed to look like. . . . All right, I gotta go get chased through the woods by a terrifying man in pitch blackness.”

When Cin discovers that her Prince Charming (Justin Guarini) is also Snow’s Faithful, the misogyny that is baked into traditional fairy tales rises to the surface and begins to turn things upside down and inside out. Not only do the young women — including Belle (Liv Battista), Goldilocks (Amy Hillner Larsen), and Red (Justice Moore) — start reevaluating the state of their being, but Prince Erudite (Ryan Steele) and Clumsy (Nathan Levy) wonder if they can explore their potential relationship as well. Meanwhile, Cinderella’s Stepmother (Jennifer Simard) and her two stepsisters, Belinda (Ryann Redmond) and Betany (Tess Soltau), lie in wait, willing to play by the rules in order to land Prince Charming or even Prince Brawny (Joshua Daniel Johnson), Mischievous (Kevin Trinio Perdido), Gregarious (Mikey Ruiz), Suave (Josh Tolle), or Affable (Stephen Scott Wormley).

Cinderella (Briga Heelan) discovers a whole new world in a book by Betty Friedan (photo by Matthew Murphy)

If you took Six, & Juliet, Into the Woods, Head Over Heels, Wicked, and Bad Cinderella and put them into a blender, you would come up with something like Once Upon a One More Time. Not all of it works; at two and a half hours with intermission, it is repetitive, and the last fifteen minutes or so should be chopped off, as it basically explains to us what we’ve already seen. The whole Betty Friedan element is still puzzling to me — I understand why they chose that book, but the whole idea of making it a key part of the plot and (sort of) getting away with it is mind-boggling to me — as are the Narrator’s threats to send rule breakers to a place called Story’s End.

Jon Hartmere’s (bare, The Upside) book is otherwise witty and clever, no doubt helped by five-time Tony nominee David Leveaux serving as creative consultant. The crack ten-piece band keeps Spears’s songs down to earth, avoiding haughty orchestrations, although several ballads threaten to go over the top. In their first Broadway show, directors and choreographers Keone and Mari Madrid (Beyond Babel, The Karate Kid) cut loose with ecstatic Spears-inspired dance numbers performed by an exuberant cast.

Anna Fleischle’s appealing set features trees and the facades of houses raised and lowered, an elegant staircase, a multilevel platform laden with stage lighting, a balcony, windowlike screens in the back, and a giant quill in a bubble hanging from the ceiling, daring anyone to grab it and rewrite the fairy tales. Sven Ortel’s projections range from the night sky to scary woods to magic castles, with fanciful lighting and plenty of glowing spots by Kenneth Posner and raucous sound by Andrew Keister.

Many of Loren Elstein’s costumes are based on outfits Spears wore in videos and concerts, with wigs by Nikiya Mathis that further our immersion into all things Britney, as if each fairy-tale character represents a separate part of her history. In her Broadway debut, Heelan is absolutely delightful as Cinderella, a stand-in for anyone ready to burst out with their own story. Jackson (Paradise Square, Waitress) is lovely as Cin’s best friend, Guarini (American Idiot, Wicked) has a field day as the self-absorbed, selfish prince who gets to belt out “Oops! . . . I Did It Again,” and two-time Tony nominee Godley (The Lehman Trilogy, Anything Goes) is just right as the Narrator, who is terrified of change. But two-time Tony nominee Simard (Company, Mean Girls), as she so often does, steals the show as the evil stepmother who always has a plan up her corset.

Once Upon a One More Time bites off more than it can chew, but it’s no poison apple it’s nibbling on but is instead shiny, fresh, and crisp, even if it’s occasionally sour.

While the show is not about Spears’s controversial life — it arrives on Broadway less than two years after Spears was freed from her father’s conservatorship — there are fairy-tale aspects to her early career, followed by bittersweet personal and professional entanglements that titillated the public and impacted her reputation. Once Upon a One More Time helps reestablish that original image.

Leo Mintz (Joe Pantoliano) and Alan Freed (Constantine Maroulis) come up with a plan to spread the gospel of rock and roll in musical (photo © Joan Marcus 2023)

ROCK & ROLL MAN
New World Stages
340 West 50th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through September 1, $90-$164
rockandrollmanthemusical.com
www.newworldstages.com

When my mother was a teenager in the mid-1950s, she would sneak out of her apartment and catch rock and roll shows at the Brooklyn Paramount, seeing all the greats, the originators of the art form. I grew up with that music, treasuring two small boxes of 45s that contained many of the best singles ever recorded, by Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Moonglows, the Coasters, the Platters, the Drifters, and others.

All of those artists and more are featured in Rock & Roll Man, a new musical about legendary DJ Alan Freed (Constantine Maroulis) that is making its New York premiere at New World Stages. It opens at the Paramount with Freed’s 1958 Holiday Rock and Roll Extravaganza, kicking off with my favorite song from that era, “Sh-Boom” by the Bronx-based Chords: “Life could be a dream / If I could take you up in paradise up above / If you would tell me I’m the only one that you love / Life could be a dream, sweetheart.” Unfortunately, after a promising beginning, the rest of the show proves not to be a dream of paradise.

The goofy premise is that on the last night of his life, January 20, 1965, amid Beatlemania and the Vietnam War, the Pennsylvania-born Freed is dreaming that he is being tried in an imaginary Court of Public Opinion by Judge Mental (Eric B. Turner) in the trial of The World versus Alan Freed; with the help of his lawyer, Little Richard (Rodrick Covington), Freed must defend his legacy against relentless prosecutor J. Edgar Hoover (Bob Ari), who has charged him with “the destruction of the American way of life by inventing the genre of music which you named rock and roll,” claiming that Freed is a “fraud . . . a modern day snake oil salesman who concocted this foul form of music solely for the purpose of self-promotion and illicit profit . . . then foisted it on our unsuspecting youth, manipulating them into a world of juvenile delinquency, alcohol, narcotics, and . . . SEX!!!!!”

Through flashbacks, Freed returns to Cleveland, where he got his start in radio, teaming up with Record Rendezvous owner and station advertiser Leo Mintz (Joe Pantoliano) to bring rock and roll to the younger generation. Freed immediately draws an integrated audience, with Black and white teenagers listening to his Moondog Show, hanging out at the record store, and going to concerts hosted by Freed and featuring such acts as LaVern Baker (Valisia LeKae).

Freed hits the big time when he moves to New York City and WINS, teaming up with Roulette Records owner and Birdland cofounder Morris Levy (Pantoliano), who allegedly associated with the Mafia. When a district attorney asks him, “Is it true you associate with known mobsters like Vinnie the Chin Gigante and other members of the Gambino crime family?,” he replies, “Look, I grew up in New York City. I know a lot of different people, including a few of the gentlemen you just mentioned. I also know Cardinal Spellman. That don’t make me a Catholic. And by the way, the cardinal loves me. He’s a real mensch.”

Freed and Levy present Little Richard, Frankie Lymon (Jamonté) and the Teenagers, Buddy Holly (Andy Christopher), Chuck Berry (Matthew S. Morgan), Jerry Lee Lewis (Dominique Scott), Bo Diddley (Eric B. Turner), and other breakthrough favorites, fighting off the trend of Caucasian crooners like Pat Boone (Christopher) “sucking the soul [right out of Little Richard’s] songs . . . bleaching ’em lily white,” with the original artists not seeing a penny in royalties when they’re played on the radio or on TV. Introducing Boone’s hot new song “Ain’t That a Shame” — first recorded by Fats Domino, who wrote it with Dave Bartholomew — on American Bandstand, host Dick Clark (Scott) calls himself “one of the good guys playing good clean American rock and roll for all you good clean American teenagers.”

But white performers and producers weren’t the only ones on the take; as Freed keeps growing more successful, FBI chief Hoover comes after him, accusing him of not only corrupting children but of accepting payola, setting up a final showdown.

By including new songs alongside classic oldies, Rock & Roll Man sets itself up with a major problem: Gary Kupper’s (Freckleface Strawberry, Consumer Behavior) original music and lyrics are vastly overshadowed by “Sixty Minute Man,” “Rocket 88,” “Lucille,” “See See Rider,” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Covington and LeKae rip it up as Little Richard and LaVern Baker, respectively, with strong support from Turner as a singer in multiple groups, far outshining Morgan as Berry and Scott as Jerry Lee. The show might have benefited from a more wide-ranging book from Kupper, Larry Marshak, and Rose Caiola, adding much-needed attention to Freed’s family life; there are perfunctory appearances by his daughter Alana (Anna Hertel) and his wife Jackie (Autumn Guzzardi) — which was not the name of any of his three wives. Notably, one of the producers is Colleen Freed, who is married to Alan’s son Lance from his first marriage.

Director Randal Myler (It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues, Hank Williams: Lost Highway), music supervisor and arranger Dave Keyes (with Kupper), and choreographer Stephanie Klemons only lift the show out of first gear when the classic songs are performed, with Keyes on synth, George Naha on guitar, Lee Nadel on bass, Mark Ivan Gross Sr. on reeds, and Rocky Bryant on drums and percussion.

Tim Mackabee’s two-level set morphs from record store to nightclub to radio station to concert stage. Leon Dobkowski’s costumes capture the feel of the era, enhanced by Kelley Jordan’s fab wigs. The projections are by Christopher Ash, with lighting by Matthew Richards and Aja M. Jackson and sound by Ed Chapman.

Tony nominee Maroulis (Rock of Ages, Jekyll & Hyde) has a charm to him but is not given enough character depth, falling short of Tim McIntire’s more energetic portrayal of Freed in Floyd Mutrux’s 1978 film, American Hot Wax. Emmy winner Pantoliano (Great Kills, Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune) seems more at home as Levy than Mintz, and he sings, too. Ari (Bells Are Ringing, Picasso at the Lapin Agile) is like a grizzly bear onstage as several villainous figures.

There’s no need to sneak out of your apartment to see Rock & Roll Man. If you need to hear “Tutti Frutti,” “Maybellene,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Yakety Yak,” and “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” — and you do — you can always come over to my place and listen to the original pressings on my Victrola.