this week in theater

BLOOD COUNTESS

Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Sara Fellini) is surrounded by her husband (Luke Couzens) and a demon (Jillian Cicalese) in spit&vigor’s Blood Countess (photo by Giancarlo Osaben)

BLOOD COUNTESS
The Players Theatre
115 MacDougal St. between West Third & Bleecker Sts.
Thursday – Sunday through February 5, $52-$99
www.spitnvigor.com

I specifically chose Friday the thirteenth to see spit&vigor’s Blood Countess, about real-life Hungarian serial killer Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed. I had previously enjoyed the NYC-based company’s The Wake of Dorcas Kelly, about an eighteenth-century Irish murderer, and the livestreamed Luna Eclipse, which involved yet another serial killer, the Axeman of New Orleans.

Alas, this Friday the thirteenth proved to be unlucky.

I cannot in good faith review the production, as several unforeseen distractions prevented me from having the experience the talented troupe intended. During the first ten minutes, a man sitting across the aisle from me continually checked his cell phone. The fourth time was enough for me; I got up and asked him to please keep it off. He looked at me as if I were a lunatic; I told him the light was distracting — turning on a cell phone in a dark theater instantly gets the attention of anyone in the proximity of the digital abuser — and he begrudgingly turned it off. As I sat back down, both he and the woman with him gave me accusatory stares, as if I had done something untenable. Later in the first act, the woman turned her cell phone on, bathing her face in a majestic glow; if she had left it on for one second longer, I would have said something again, but I did not want to interfere with other people’s experience or with the cast itself in the small, intimate Players Theatre.

However, another light bothered me as well; the set includes several long, vertical mirrors, and during the scenes that take place in the countess’s living room, one of the lights reflected right into my eyes, forcing me to twist uncomfortably in my chair to avoid the glare. It is general admission, so I could have moved, but I did not want to get up again and disturb those around me or onstage.

Evil doings are afoot in Blood Countess at the Players Theatre (photo by Giancarlo Osaben)

Finally, and inexplicably, during the first half of the second act, another conversation could be distinctly heard. My wife and I could not tell whether it was coming from the comedy club or the theater on either side of the Players, from The Dog Show upstairs, or from a radio or television in a connected apartment. At times we could make out specific words and statements, and the noise came at inopportune moments. At one point, a threatened young woman asked a priest about her stay at the countess’s estate, “Will I die there, Father?” and one of the people in the disembodied conversation let out a loud “Ha ha ha!”

When Elizabeth tells her Goth-Shakespearean fool, “I’m exhausted. The sound of their chirpy voices is a knife in my head,” I thought it might have been an ad-lib, especially when that was shortly followed by Elizabeth’s pronouncement: “I need more wine. If I hear another giggle I think I will chop them all up now and gorge myself.”

The horror-comedy, which runs 135 minutes with intermission, was written by Kelleen Conway Blanchard and is directed by producer Nick Thomas. I have to give kudos to the cast for soldiering on despite this terrible interference: visual designer Sara Fellini as the countess; fight choreographer Luke Couzens as Ferenc Nádasdy, Elizabeth’s husband; Sara Santucci as Dorkus, the embattled family maid; Perri Yaniv as the priest; Samantha Haviland as Fitzco, the evil harlequin fool; Andrea Woodbridge as Elizabeth’s high-brow mother; Jillian Cicalese as the demonic Horned Woman, in a stunning costume on stilts; and Chloé Bell, Silvana Carranza, and Cait Murphy as potential victims.

Thus, while I feel I can’t objectively review the show, I can say that I was rooting for one more murder, the bloodier the better: whoever was responsible for that baffling, godforsaken noise, especially on Friday the thirteenth.

OHIO STATE MURDERS

Audra McDonald stars in Adrienne Kennedy’s long-in-coming Broadway debut, Ohio State Murders (photo by Richard Termine)

OHIO STATE MURDERS
James Earl Jones Theatre
138 West Forty-Eighth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 15, $114-$244
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

One of my favorite virtual presentations during the pandemic lockdown was “The Work of Adrienne Kennedy: Inspiration & Influence,” a collaboration between DC’s Round House Theatre and Princeton’s McCarter Theatre Center, a deep dive into the career of playwright Adrienne Kennedy, who was born in Pittsburgh in 1931 and has only recently become more well known for her outstanding oeuvre. The Round House and McCarter hosted panel discussions and staged excellent recorded productions of He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, which made its world premiere at TFANA in 2018; Kennedy’s very personal 1996 play, the Obie-winning Sleep Deprivation Chamber, which she wrote with her son, Adam P. Kennedy; the world premiere of Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side, adapted from a 1999 story; and 1992’s Ohio State Murders, one of Kennedy’s Alexander Plays, featuring her alter ego, writer Suzanne Alexander. (Chicago’s Goodman Theatre also put on an exemplary livestreamed version of Ohio State Murders.)

I was excited when I heard that Ohio State Murders would mark Kennedy’s Broadway debut, at the age of ninety-one, in a new production starring six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald and inaugurating the James Earl Jones Theatre (previously the Cort), named after the ninety-one-year-old award-winning actor. And then I was devastated to find out that the show would be closing about a month early, shutting down January 15 instead of February 12 (following a December 8 opening), despite mostly rave reviews, the latest in a series of notable Black plays posting early closing notices since the end of the lockdown, including Ain’t No Mo’, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Chicken & Biscuits, and Thoughts of a Colored Man. I was even more shocked after seeing Tony winner Kenny Leon’s splendid production.

As the audience enters the theater, a recording of a 2015 interview with Kennedy, conducted by her grandson, Canaan Kennedy, plays on a loop, with the playwright talking about her life and career, focusing on having a family and studying and teaching at universities. Beowulf Boritt’s intellectual set consists of more than a dozen bookshelves at multiple angles, on the floor and hanging from the ceiling, as if Alexander is surrounded by an education that will not be available to her or other Black people. A metaphoric chill is in the air from a tear on the back wall through which appears a video projection of falling snow.

Ohio State Murders takes place at Ohio State University in Columbus, where Kennedy earned her BA. The frame story is that Suzanne has returned to Ohio State to give a lecture. She begins: “I was asked to talk about the violent imagery in my work; bloodied heads, severed limbs, dead father, dead Nazis, dying Jesus. The chairman said, we do want to hear about your brief years here at Ohio State but we also want you to talk about violent imagery in your stories and plays. When I visited Ohio State last year it struck me as a series of disparate dark landscapes just as it had in 1949, the autumn of my freshman year.”

Audra McDonald shifts between past and present in Ohio State Murders at James Earl Jones Theatre (photo by Richard Termine)

Suzanne goes on to share a heartbreaking tale of what happened to her at the school, involving a white English professor, Robert Hampshire (Bryce Pinkham), her violin-playing roommate, Iris Ann (Abigail Stephenson), her landlady, Mrs. Tyler (Lizan Mitchell), dorm head Miss Dawson (Mitchell), Aunt Louise (Mitchell), close friend Val (Mister Fitzgerald), and law student David Alexander (Fitzgerald), who will become her husband. Hampshire has a particular fondness for Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which deals with a rape/seduction and a strong-willed woman, and King Arthur, about whom Hampshire reads, “‘Till the blood bespattered his stately beard. / As if he had been battering beasts to death. / Had not Sir Ewain and other great lords come up, / His brave heart would have burst then in bitter woe: / ‘Stop!’ these stern men said, ‘You are bloodying yourself!’ ” Meanwhile, Suzanne is deeply affected after seeing Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent classic, Battleship Potemkin, about the 1905 Russian Revolution. Tess, Arthur, and the film all relate to Suzanne’s personal experience at college and illuminate the sources of her violent imagery.

McDonald (Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune) is marvelous as Suzanne, a role usually performed by two actors, one in the present, one in the past. (The original had Ruby Dee and Bellary Darden, while Lisagay Hamilton and Cherise Boothe shared the part in the New York premiere from TFANA in 2007.) Despite the tragedies and disappointments that hover around Suzanne, McDonald portrays her as remarkably even-tempered, almost to the point of being detached from the horrific truth. She weaves between 1950 and today with a graceful ease and a mere adjustment to her costume (a button-down blouse and long skirt, designed by Dede Ayite). Tony nominee Pinkham (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, Love’s Labour’s Lost) is calm and steady as Hampshire, who hides a dark secret. It’s always a pleasure to see Mitchell (On Sugarland, Cullud Wattah), who switches between three roles.

Tony winner Leon (Topdog/Underdog, A Soldier’s Play) maintains a gentle, almost frustrating pace, giving room for Kennedy’s words to tell the story without melodramatic embellishment. Justin Ellington’s sound and Allen Lee Hughes’s lighting enhance the mysterious atmosphere that pervades the play, along with Jeff Sugg’s projections and Dwight Andrews’s original music.

Following the curtain call, which includes the cast honoring a large photograph of Kennedy, the interview starts again. As with the rediscovery of Alice Childress, the Charleston-born Black playwright who made her posthumous Broadway debut last season with 1955’s Trouble in Mind, followed shortly by TFANA’s production of her 1966 drama Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, Kennedy’s is a voice that deserves to be heard, must be heard; her plays, many of which are experimental and challenge traditional narrative techniques, shine a light on racial injustice in America over the last half century and more, up to today. See Ohio State Murders on Broadway while you still can and help celebrate Adrienne Kennedy while she is still with us.

SOME LIKE IT HOT

Christian Borle and J. Harrison Ghee star in Some Like It Hot on Broadway (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

SOME LIKE IT HOT
Shubert Theatre
225 West Forty-Fourth St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave
Tuesday – Sunday through September 3, $94-$278
somelikeithotmusical.com

Call it “Some Like a Plot.”

Fifty years ago, Tony-winning composer Jule Styne, five-time Tony-nominated lyricist Bob Merrill, and two-time Tony-winning book writer Peter Stone turned Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning 1959 comedy, Some Like It Hot, into the Broadway musical Sugar, which ran for more than a year and was nominated for four Tonys. In 2002, Tony Curtis, who played Joe in the film, portrayed Osgood Fielding III in a national road tour revival.

Lighting does not strike thrice with the latest Broadway adaptation, titled Some Like It Hot, a lukewarm show scheduled to run at the Shubert into September. Among other things, book writers Matthew López and Amber Ruffin fiddle with the original plot so much that it ends up insulting the film as well as the audience, updating the story to supposedly make it more palatable for modern times.

The basic narrative is still intact. It’s 1933, and saxophonist Joe (Christian Borle) and stand-up bassist Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee) are having a difficult time making ends meet in Depression-era Chicago. After witnessing a gangland killing, they need to get out of town fast, and they disguise themselves as women — Joe as Josephine, Jerry as Daphne — to get jobs with Sweet Sue’s all-woman Society Syncopators, who are on a train trip heading to a big gig. Spats Columbo (Mark Lotito) and his goons are on the two men’s trail, with Detective Mulligan (Adam Heller) not far behind, tracking down Spats for racketeering, loan sharking, bootlegging, and now murder. Meanwhile, Joe has fallen madly in love with the lead singer of the Society Syncopators, Sugar Kane (Adrianna Hicks), and creates a fake male character in order to win her affections, while an older millionaire, the goofy but charming Osgood Fielding III (Kevin del Aguila), has taken an immediate shine to Daphne. Mistaken identity, slapstick comedy, clever dialogue, and more than a touch of misogyny ensue in the film, but the musical shoehorns in themes of race and gender identity that are as inconsistent as they are disrespectful to the original and the themes themselves.

Auditioning for a nightclub manager, Joe is furious when the man rejects Jerry because he’s Black, leading into the song “You Can’t Have Me (If You Don’t Have Him),” in which Joe actually sings, “Yes, he’s my brother through and through / Like the Marx, the Wrights, the Grimm! / Yeah, you can’t have ‘tea’ without the ‘two’ / And you can’t have me if you don’t have him.” Jerry: “You can’t break up a winning team.” Joe: “Like that crutch and Tiny Tim.” Jerry: “And you can’t have ‘ah’ without the” — Joe: “‘choo!’” It’s not exactly Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier on the run, shackled together in The Defiant Ones. Meanwhile, most people won’t get the inside joke when the manager and Jerry refer to Jerry as Houdini, a role Curtis played in a 1953 biopic.

The big show that Sweet Sue believes will make or break the band is in California instead of Florida as in the film, perhaps because California is a more liberal state and Florida is no favorite of the LBGTQIA+ community and allies. The casting is not race-blind; sometimes it’s important that a character is Black, and sometimes it’s not, which left me scratching my head more than once. Meanwhile, instead of Joe impersonating an oil scion who sounds like Cary Grant in order to woo Sugar, as in the film, in the musical Joe pretends to be screenwriter Kiplinger Von Der Plotz, who speaks in an insensitive fake-German accent (referencing the Austrian Wilder), saying such things as “Ah! Break a leg! Or, as we say in Vienna, ‘Brekken . . . ein lekken . . . gedorf.’”

Classic Hollywood film is transformed into a lukewarm musical at the Shubert (photo by Matthew Murphy)

One major new twist does work, and that involves Jerry’s transformation into Daphne, a change that the character embraces, even if it does screw around with the finale, one of the most famous final lines in Hollywood history, delivered by Joe E. Brown.

Faced with movie roles created by Curtis as Joe/Josephine, Jack Lemmon as Jerry/Daphne, Marilyn Monroe as Sugar, George Raft as Spats, Joan Shawlee as Sweet Sue, and Pat O’Brien as Agent Mulligan, the cast tries its best to make us forget about those actors, but it’s a mountainous task. Ghee (Mrs. Doubtfire, Kinky Boots) is wonderful as Jerry/Daphne, using his long, lithe body to challenge preconceptions and prejudices about race and gender. Unfortunately, Borle (Little Shop of Horrors, Something Rotten!) appears to be in a completely different show, lost in vaudeville shtick that even he doesn’t understand. In addition, while Ghee’s transformation into Daphne is both delightful and believable, Borle always looks like himself as Josephine, with nary an adjustment of voice or movement.

Hicks (Six) gives more agency to Sugar, famously played by Monroe as a dumb blond with a heart of gold, but she still has to sing such lines as “Tell the boys in the band Sugar’s giving up sax / I’m California bound / Cause I’m safer in the long run with an all-girl band / And it’s time to say adieu to every one night stand.” NaTasha Yvette Williams (Chicken & Biscuits, Porgy and Bess) nearly brings the house down whenever Sweet Sue McGinty belts one out, but a surprise revelation diminishes what was previously an intelligent, dedicated character. Lotito is hamstrung as Spats, but Del Aguila (Frozen, Rocky) has fun as Osgood.

Director and choreographer Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon, Mean Girls) cannot leave well enough alone, turning nearly part of Scott Pask’s set into a prop for a dance, no matter how improbable; a late scene with rows of doors drones on and on and on and was better done in Bugs Bunny cartoons. There’s also an inordinate amount of tap-dancing by Joe and Jerry as the Tip Tap Twins, which sent my tap-dancing-fan friends into paroxysms of joy but brought the narrative to a screeching halt every time for me. The music, by Marc Shaiman, and the lyrics, by Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who have previously collaborated on such Broadway musicals as Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, are unmemorable.

Turning movies into Broadway musicals is often problematic, especially when adapting a beloved, star-studded Hollywood classic. While changes and updates are often necessary and welcome, they are ideally done within the spirit of the original, or at least make sense and don’t feel haphazard. As Sue says in the musical, “Our entire future depends on this show being perfect.” But as we know from the film, “nobody’s perfect.”

ONTROEREND GOED: Are we not drawn onward to new erA

ONTROEREND GOED: Are we not drawn onward to new erA
Under the Radar Festival
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-8, $45
publictheater.org
www.bam.org

“We are stardust, we are golden / We are billion-year-old carbon / And we’ve got to get ourselves / Back to the garden,” Joni Mitchell sang in her 1969 song “Woodstock,” an ode to the festival that can also be read, especially today, as a call for environmental change, with its references to smog, war, and returning to the land to set one’s soul free.

Belgian theater company Ontroerend Goed goes back to the garden in its deliciously clever experimental tableau, Are we not drawn onward to new erA, running January 4-8 at BAM’s Fishman Space as part of the Public Theater’s annual Under the Radar Festival. The seventy-five-minute production unfurls like a palindromic puzzle, not just in the title but in the narrative itself. As the play begins, a small tree is near the center of the stage; in a far corner a woman sleeps, then notices the tree. A man enters and shortly picks an apple from the tree, which they proceed to share. The eating of the forbidden fruit kicks off a descent into humanity’s destruction of the planet.

A cast of six (Angelo Tijssens / Giovanni Brand, Charlotte De Bruyne / Leonore Spee, Jonas Vermeulen / Ferre Marnef, Karolien De Bleser / Britt Bakker, Maria Dafneros / Kristien De Proost, Vincent Dunoyer / Michaël Pas) soon gathers, speaking a mysterious language that evokes Stephen Hawking, AI voices, and characters in the Red Room in Twin Peaks. (The official BAM website says that there is “no spoken language,” but that is not quite the case.) The everyday but distinctive costumes are by Charlotte Goethals, with lighting, video, and sound by Jeroen Wuyts and Babette Poncelet.

Then, at the midway point, a twist occurs that might take you a moment to figure out, but when you do, you’ll be hooked, scanning Philip Aguirre’s set for clues as Spectra Ensemble plays William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops,” made from deteriorating tapes (involving magnetic coating pulling away from its plastic backing) and completed on September 11, 2001, when the American composer watched the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center from his Brooklyn roof. Basinski has referred to the magnum opus as “an elegy,” but director Alexander Devriendt uses it as a bastion of hope in the second half of the show.

Are we not drawn onward to new erA is more than just a gimmick-driven production; it’s an engaging attempt to make us ask whether we can turn back time, whether it is still possible to save the Earth — and have fun while doing it. As Joni Mitchell also prophetically sang, in 1970, “Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone? / They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

BROADWAY REVIVALS: THE PIANO LESSON / DEATH OF A SALESMAN / 1776

John David Washington plays the role Samuel L. Jackson originated in Broadway revival of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

THE PIANO LESSON
Ethel Barrymore Theatre
243 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 29, $74–$318
pianolessonplay.com

“We live in a recycled culture,” Stephen Sondheim told Frank Rich of the New York Times in March 2000. Sondheim explained that there are “two kinds of shows on Broadway — revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles.”

Broadway revivals are a curious thing. They are often vehicles with built-in star power — Hugh Jackman in The Music Man, Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! — offering new takes on beloved, household-name shows, for better or worse, something that is unique to theater. In pop music, artists cover hit songs but also do deep dives into another musician’s catalog, resurrecting little-known gems. In cinema, directors remake successful movies — there’s not a whole lotta interest in redoing bad films — but how many remakes were at least equal to or better than the original? (I’ll wait.) And in literature, well, you can’t rewrite a book that has already been written. “It has to do with seeing what is familiar,” Sondheim said to Rich. That’s why so many movies are made into Broadway musicals, generally packing in the crowds despite less-than-enthusiastic reviews.

Right now on Broadway you can see seven revivals on the Great White Way, with several more coming. There are currently four revivals in the fall season, only two of which are exemplary, honoring the spirit of the original. I’ve already raved about Kenny Leon’s adaptation of Suzan-Lori Parks’s superb Topdog/Underdog at the Golden.

At the Ethel Barrymore, Tony nominee LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s version of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is exquisite, a stirring adaptation of the fourth play in Wilson’s ten-part Pittsburgh Cycle, this one set in in 1936. (Each play takes place in a different decade of the twentieth century.) It’s a truly American story of race, colonialism, slavery, family, and the ghosts of a shameful history; the play premiered at Yale in 1987 and on Broadway three years later, earning five Tony nominations including Best Play.

At Yale, Samuel L. Jackson starred as Boy Willie, a dreamer with a plan to sell a truckload of watermelons and the family heirloom piano in order to buy a hundred acres of land where his forebears had toiled for the Sutters first as slaves, then as sharecroppers. Thirty-five years later, Jackson, who is married to LaTanya Richardson Jackson, is Doaker Charles, Boy Willie’s (John David Washington) sensible uncle, who lives with Boy Willie’s widowed sister, Berniece (Danielle Brooks), and her young daughter, Maretha (Nadia Daniel or Jurnee Swan). Berniece, whose husband, Crawley, died several years before, is not about to sell the piano, into which her great-grandfather, Willie Boy, carved powerful images of their ancestors and stories from their lives.

Boy Willie has unexpectedly arrived with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher), a shy ladies’ man who takes a liking to Berniece, who is being courted by the local preacher, the boring Avery Brown (Trai Byers). It’s Avery who delivers one of the most important points of the play when he tells Berniece, who refuses to play the piano anymore, “You got to put all of that behind you, Berniece. That’s the same thing like Crawley. Everybody got stones in their passway. You got to step over them or walk around them. You picking them up and carrying them with you. All you got to do is set them down by the side of the road. You ain’t got to carry them with you. You can walk over there right now and play that piano. You can walk over there right now and God will walk over there with you. Right now you can set that stack of stones down by the side of the road and walk away from it. You don’t have to carry it with you. You can do it right now. . . . You can walk over here right now and make it into a celebration.”

Another surprise arrival is Doaker’s older brother, Wining Boy (Michael Potts), who serves as the comic relief. Wining Boy is a gambler and former piano player who shows up only when he needs money. “That piano got so big and I’m carrying it around on my back. I don’t wish that on nobody,” he tells Boy Willie. “Now, there ain’t but so many places you can go. Only so many road wide enough for you and that piano. And that piano get heavier and heavier. . . . But that’s all you got. You can’t do nothing else. All you know how to do is play that piano. Now, who am I? Am I me? Or am I the piano player? Sometime it seem like the only thing to do is shoot the piano player cause he the cause of all the trouble I’m having.”

In the second act, a partying Boy Willie brings home Grace (April Matthis), who might be the most perceptive of the group. “Something ain’t right here,” she tells Boy Willie and Lymon.

Beowulf Boritt’s set features the kitchen and living room, with the upstairs open, without doors or walls, hinting that secrets are going to be exposed. The cast is outstanding, led by the confident and self-assured Jackson. I’ve seen several other productions, with Brandon J. Dirden as Boy Willie at the Signature in 2012, directed by Wilson mainstay Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and with a Tony-nominated Charles S. Dutton as Boy Willie at the Walter Kerr in 1990, directed by Wilson’s longtime cohort Lloyd Richards; it’s a testament to the writing that all three productions were excellent, staying true to Wilson’s words and story, which were inspired by onetime Pittsburgh resident Romare Bearden’s 1983 painting, which itself was inspired by Henri Matisse’s 1916 The Piano Lesson and 1917 The Music Lesson. The play might take place in 1936, but it has a timeless quality that still hits hard in 2022.

Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke star in reimagined Death of a Salesman (photo by Joan Marcus

DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Hudson Theatre
141 West Forty-Fourth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 15, $58-$297
salesmanonbroadway.com

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Miranda Cromwell’s reimagining of Arthur Miller’s 1949 classic, Death of a Salesman, running at the Hudson Theatre through January 15. What seemed like a slam dunk turns out to be a forced, disjointed narrative despite the timelessness of the original.

The play still is set in Brooklyn in 1949, but the Loman family is Black: patriarch Willy (Wendell Pierce), his devoted wife, Linda (Sharon D Clarke), and their ne’er-do-well sons, former high school football star Biff (Khris Davis) and Happy (McKinley Belcher III), a womanizing dreamer not unlike Boy Willie in The Piano Lesson. The sixty-three-year-old Willy has been having difficulty on the road, losing customers and experiencing driving issues. We never learn exactly what it is he’s selling, but it’s not important; he represents hardworking Americans who toil down to the bone, rarely able to catch a break or get ahead in life.

As Willie slowly starts to realize that he’s not vital anywhere, his neighbor, Charley (Delaney Williams), keeps offering him a job closer to home, but Willy turns him down, instead relying on his boss, Howard (Blake DeLong), to honor his loyalty, but Howard has his eyes set to the future, one that does not include men like Willy.

Willy tries to find hope and solace in the words and wisdom of his late brother, Ben (the fabulously attired André De Shields), now only a ghost, and his despairing family starts to suspect something is seriously wrong.

One of the great characters in the American canon, Willy has been played onstage and -screen by Lee J. Cobb, Fredric March, George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Pierce is far too loud as Willy, nearly always shouting, bringing no nuance to the role. Clarke is terrific as his long-suffering wife, but Davis and Belcher III never firmly take control of their parts.

Crowell adds a strolling bluesman (Femi Temowo) who occasionally shows up to serenade the audience, but it feels too random. The dinner scene between Willy, Biff, and Happy is moved to a jazz club that seems out of place. Anna Fleischle’s set, primarily the interior of the Loman household, gets confusing with all its imaginary barriers. To me it was like everyone was trying too hard to put their own stamp on the tale, not trusting that the switch to making the family African American gave the play a new depth all by itself.

A casting gimmick tries to put 1776 into a different perspective (photo by Evan Zimmerman)

1776
American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 8, $56-$250
www.roundabouttheatre.org

When it comes to reinterpreting a hit, 1776 takes the cake — and hits the nadir. The 1969 Tony-winning Best Musical focuses on the debates leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence at the second Continental Congress, in Philadelphia. For this Roundabout revival at the American Airlines Theatre, directors Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus have chosen a cast of women, transgender, and nonbinary actors portraying the Founding Fathers (and two of their wives). However, this is no Hamilton.

The show features music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards and a book by Peter Stone. It begins cleverly enough with a row of men’s shoes at the front of the stage, which the characters step into with a kind of feminist glee; it’s a lovely moment, but it’s all downhill from there as the casting becomes the point of the revival. Oh, look, Thomas Jefferson is played by a pregnant woman (Elizabeth A. Davis). Ben Franklin is portrayed by an actor who looks nothing like him (Patrena Murray). The casting feels like a gimmick that dominates everything else when it could have been so much more. It’s not that I’m averse to change; I loved Daniel Fish’s reinvention of Oklahoma! a few years ago. But the changes have to be pertinent, not just made for the sake of change.

At first, it’s engaging and relevant to what’s happening in the sociopolitical spectrum in 2022, as evidenced by John Adams’s (Crystal Lucas-Perry, later replaced by Kristolyn Lloyd) all-too-believable speech: “If you don’t want to see us hanging / On some far off British hill; / If you don’t want the voice of independency / Forever still, / Then, god, sir, get thee to it! / For Congress never will! / You see, we Congress / Piddle, twiddle, and resolve. Eh . . . / Not one damned thing do we solve. . . . Piddle, twiddle, and resolve, . . . / Nothing’s ever solved in Congress.”

Leading the fight against independence are the conservative John Dickinson of Pennsylvania (Carolee Carmello), George Read of Delaware (Nancy Anderson), and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina (Sara Porkalob). They argue about the rules of the vote, a clause involving slavery, and other elements, some of which are based on fact, others unverifiable, and others just plain inaccurate. The only two female characters, Abigail Adams (Allyson Kaye Daniel) and Martha Jefferson (Eryn LeCroy), were most likely not in Philadelphia at the time, although Adams’s “Compliments” is a standout, having more power than the more well known showstopper “Molasses to Rum,” performed by Rutledge.

There are also unnecessary projections that compare 1776 to today, particularly with regard to women in politics, something that did not need to be said but was clear from the rest of the show, which mostly falls flat. The televised January 6 Committee hearings were more interesting than this revival, which highlights the original’s many faults. The 1969 edition was nominated for five Tonys, winning three, while the 1997 revival earned three nominations, taking home none. I can’t imagine this one could top either of those come 2023 awards time.

There’s a reason why Sondheim won eight Tonys (as well as an Oscar, eight Grammys, a Pulitzer, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom) and so many of his shows are revived, on and off Broadway. As he told Rich in 2000, “‘Less is more’ is a lesson learned with difficulty. . . . Reduction releases power.” Just look at the current smash Broadway revival of Sondheim’s Into the Woods at the St. James.

UNDER THE RADAR 2023

A Thousand Ways (Part Three): Assembly brings strangers together at the New York Public Library (photo courtesy 600 Highwaymen)

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL
Public Theater and other venues
January 4-22, free – $60
publictheater.org

The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival is back and in person for its eighteenth iteration, running January 4-22 at the Public as well as Chelsea Factory, NYU Skirball, La MaMa, BAM, and the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch. As always, the works come from around the world, a mélange of disciplines that offers unique theatrical experiences. Among this year’s selections are Jasmine Lee-Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner, Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff’s Our Country, Roger Guenveur Smith’s Otto Frank, Rachel Mars’s Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters, Kaneza Schaal’s KLII, and Timothy White Eagle and the Violet Triangle’s The Indigo Room.

In addition, “Incoming! — Works-in-Process” features early looks at pieces by Mia Rovegno, Miranda Haymon, Nile Harris, Mariana Valencia, Eric Lockley, Savon Bartley, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and Justin Elizabeth Sayre, while Joe’s Pub will host performances by Eszter Balint, Negin Farsad, Julian Fleisher and his Rather Big Band, Salty Brine, and Migguel Anggelo.

Below is a look at four of the highlights.

600 HIGHWAYMEN: A THOUSAND WAYS (PART THREE): AN ASSEMBLY
The New York Public Library, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
455 Fifth Ave. at Fortieth St., seventh floor
January 4-22, free with advance RSVP
publictheater.org

At the January 2021 Under the Radar Festival, the Obie-winning 600 Highwaymen presented A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call, a free hourlong telephone conversation between you and another person, randomly put together and facilitated by an electronic voice that asks both general and intimate questions, from where you are sitting to what smells you are missing, structured around a dangerous and lonely fictional situation that is a metaphor for sheltering in place. The company followed that up with the second part, An Encounter, in which you and a stranger — not the same one — meet in person, sitting across a table, separated from one another by a clear glass panel, with no touching and no sharing of objects. In both sections, I bonded quickly with the other person, making for intimate and poignant moments when we were all keeping our distance from each other.

Now comes the grand finale, Assembly, where sixteen strangers at a time will come together to finish the story at the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch in Midtown. Written and created by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, A Thousand Ways innovatively tracks how the pandemic lockdown influenced the ways we interact with others as well as how critical connection and entertainment are.

Palindromic show makes US premiere at Under the Radar Festival (photo courtesy Ontroerend Goed)

ONTROEREND GOED: Are we not drawn onward to new erA
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-8, $45
publictheater.org
www.bam.org

What do the following three statements have in common? “Dammit, I’m mad.” “Madam in Eden, I’m Adam.” “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” They are all palindromes, reading the same way backward and forward. They also, in their own way, relate to Ontroerend Goed’s Are we not drawn onward to new erA, running January 4-8 at BAM’s Fishman Space. Directed by Alexander Devriendt, the Belgian theater collective’s seventy-minute show features a title and a narrative that work both backward and forward as they explore climate change and the destruction wrought by humanity, which has set the Garden of Eden on the path toward armageddon. But maybe, just maybe, there is still time to save the planet if we come up with just the right plan.

PLEXUS POLAIRE: MOBY DICK
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 12-14, $40
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

The world is obsessed with Moby-Dick much the way Captain Ahab is obsessed with the great white itself. Now it’s Norwegian theater company Plexus Polaire and artistic director Yngvild Aspeli’s turn to harpoon the story of one of the most grand quests in all of literature. Aspeli (Signaux, Opéra Opaque, Dracula) incorporates seven actors, fifty puppets, video projections, a drowned orchestra, and a giant whale to transform Herman Melville’s 1851 novel into a haunting ninety-minute multimedia production at NYU Skirball for four performances only, so get on board as soon as you can.

Brian Mendes and Jim Fletcher get ready for NYCP’s Field of Mars (photo courtesy New York City Players)

NEW YORK CITY PLAYERS: FIELD OF MARS
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 19-22, 24-29, $60
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

I’ll follow Richard Maxwell and New York City Players anywhere, whether it’s on a boat past the Statue of Liberty (The Vessel), an existential journey inside relationships and theater itself (The Evening, Isolde) and outside time and space (Paradiso, Good Samaritans), or even to the Red Planet and beyond. Actually, his newest piece, Field of Mars, playing at NYU Skirball January 19-29, refers not to the fourth planet from the sun but to the ancient term for a large public space and military parade ground. Maxwell doesn’t like to share too much about upcoming shows, but we do know that this one features Lakpa Bhutia, Nicholas Elliott, Jim Fletcher, Eleanor Hutchins, Paige Martin, Brian Mendes, James Moore, Phil Moore, Steven Thompson, Tory Vazquez, and Gillian Walsh and that the limited audience will be seated on the stage.

Oh, and Maxwell noted in an email blast: “Field of Mars: A chain restaurant in Chapel Hill is used as a way to measure the progress of primates, from hunter/gatherer to fast casual dining experience. Topics covered: Music, Food, Nature, and Spirituality. . . . I also wanted to take this opportunity to tell parents regarding the content of Field of Mars: my kids (aged 11 and 15) will not be seeing this show.”

EDDIE IZZARD: CHARLES DICKENS’ GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Eddie Izzard works some magic in one-woman adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, (photo by Bruce Glikas)

GREAT EXPECTATIONS
The Greenwich House Theater
27 Barrow St. at Seventh Ave. South
Tuesday – Sunday through January 22, $60-$99
www.eddieizzardgreatexpectations.com

Eddie Izzard is absolutely delightful portraying approximately twenty characters in her one-woman retelling of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, continuing at the Greenwich House Theater through January 22. Adapted by Izzard’s brother, Mark, into a taut two hours (with intermission) from the five-hundred-plus-page 1861 novel, it’s a classic British coming-of-age story divided into three stages of the life of one Philip Pirrip. The Aden-born, two-time Emmy-winning, Tony-nominated actor, comedian, and activist — who is exactly 150 years younger than Dickens to the day — looks fabulous in spiky blond hair and a steampunk goth costume (by Tom Piper and Libby da Costa) consisting of a ruffled V-neck white blouse, form-fitting black coat, black skirt, black stockings, and knee-high lace-up black boots. Piper’s set features lush red drapery in the front and the dilapidated facade of a white house with graying, torn curtains in the back, emblematic of the faded royalty of Miss Havisham, one of the most memorable figures in all of literature.

Izzard is Pip, the book’s narrator, who sets the tone and scene in the opening monologue:

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip. I never saw my father or my mother, never saw any likeness of either of them, for their days were long before the days of photographs, that wondrous new invention. Ours was the marsh country, south and east of London by the Thames river, within twenty miles of the sea. On a raw afternoon towards evening I found out that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana, wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that five little stone lozenges, arranged in a neat row beside, were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine. I also discovered that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard was the marshes, and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea, and that Pip was the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all.

Pip is seven when the tale begins, living with his sole remaining sibling, his mean sister, who is married to the kind blacksmith Joe Gargery. Wallking through the marshes, Pip is accosted by a dangerous-looking man, Abel Magwitch, who declares, “Hold your noise, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!” He demands that Pip bring him food and an iron file, and Pip obliges, seeing no other choice, stealing the items, including a Christmas pork pie, that was meant for such family and friends as Mr. Wopsle, Uncle Pumblechook, and the Hubbles. “I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, just as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong,” he admits, a theme that runs through his life, which takes its next turn when he is summoned by the mysterious spinster Miss Havisham, who wants the poor Pip to play with her adopted daughter, Estella.

Eddie Izzard is superb as Pip and everyone else in Great Expectations (photo by Bruce Glikas)

Pip, who learned how to read from the orphan Biddy, is desperate to become a gentleman, and the surprise opportunity arises when a London lawyer named Jaggers arrives, explaining to Joe that a benefactor wishing to remain anonymous is offering Pip the chance to study in the city and, indeed, become a gentleman. “I have come to relieve you of your apprentice,” Jaggers says to Joe. “The communication I have to make is that this young fellow has great expectations.”

Those “great expectations” lead Pip to meet London tutor Matthew Pocket, son of Herbert Pocket, Miss Havisham’s cousin; Jaggers’s clerk, Mr. Wemmick; rival scholar Bentley Drummle; Magwitch’s fellow convict, Compeyson; the merchant Clarriker; and Clara Barley, who takes a liking to Herbert. The adaptation has cut a few figures from the story, including Miss Havisham’s younger half-brother, Arthur; blacksmith Dolge Orlick; Wemmick’s friend Miss Skiffins; and another of Pip’s fellow students, Startop.

Izzard, who has appeared in such films as Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen, The Lego Batman Movie, and Whiskey Galore!, such television series as The Riches, Hannibal, and Powers, and such plays as The Cryptogram, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and Race, is dyslexic; as a challenge, she recorded Great Expectations as an audiobook, the first major literary work she had ever read, and in doing so decided to make it into a solo show. She has a graceful, commanding stage presence onstage, smoothly transitioning between roles with just a twist of her body and a slight change of voice; the subtle movement direction is by Didi Hopkins. Izzard’s clear familiarity with the text and understanding of the material help her develop a quick rapport with the audience, who cannot help but root for Pip, a character previously played by such actors as John Mills, Roddy McDowall, Michael York, and Ethan Hawke.

The Izzards and director Selina Cadell (Love for Love, The Life I Lead) create a menacing Victorian atmosphere, especially when it comes to Miss Havisham; when she is in a scene, Tyler Elich/Lightswitch turns down the lights onstage and up on either side of the audience, an eerie glow building slowly to correspond with the ghostliness of Miss Havisham’s existence. You can practically see and smell the (nonexistent) decaying, rat-eaten bride-cake in the corner, the remnants of her being left at the altar many years before.

“As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had begun to notice their effect upon me and those around me and I knew very well that it was not all good,” Izzard says as Pip about halfway through the play. Izzard lives up to expectations, and it is all good.