this week in theater

WITNESS

Lauren Elias, Anna Gottlieb, Gene Ravvin, and Nathan Malin discuss antisemitism while on board the virtual MS St. Louis in Witness

WITNESS
Arlekin Players Theatre
Livestreamed select days through January 23, $25
www.arlekinplayers.com/witness

It’s been three quarters of a century since the Holocaust ended, so there are fewer and fewer survivors and witnesses alive to tell the true stories of what happened in the camps of Eastern Europe during WWII. Meanwhile, antisemitism continues to surge around the world amid Holocaust deniers and politicians who misuse and abuse the horror for soundbites and social media memes. Arlekin Players Theatre investigates these issues in its latest interactive online show, Witness. An immersive work that explores antisemitism and desperate migration, the play relates the fate of the MS St. Louis, the German ship that carried more than nine hundred Jewish refugees in May 1939, to the problems of today.

The luxury liner was transporting men, women, and children fleeing the approaching Holocaust, but the ship was turned away by Cuba, Canada, and the United States. Conceived and directed by Arlekin founder and Russian Jewish immigrant Igor Golyak and written by Moscow-based Nana Grinstein with Blair Cadden and Golyak, Witness puts the audience on board the St. Louis, where it begins with a talent show that is based on actual events.

The emcee (Gene Ravvin) believes he is in the present, in a green-screen studio, as he introduces the parade of performers: Liesl Joseph (Esther Golyak) and Gisela Klepl (Elizabeth Sarytchev), who perform “Skating on Glass!” as older versions of themselves (Rimma Gluzman and Polina Vikova) recall Kristallnacht in voice-over; Fritz Buff (Alex Petetsky), who constructs a house of cards and anticipates “joyful days” ahead; Fira (Julia Shikh), who boils a book banned in the USSR; a magician named Marik (Misha Tyutyunik) and his assistant (Jenya Brodskaia); and superheroes Anna (Anna Furman), Olga (Olga Aronova), and Vika (Vika Kovalenko), who call themselves the Elusive Avengers. The audience at home votes on each performance and gains points as they participate.

During each skit, the audience can click on pop-ups to learn more about the contestants, all of whom were real, as well as the actors portraying them. Short biographical sketches include their immigration status and, in the case of the passengers, their fate after the ship was refused entry to America. News crawls onscreen range from the 1930s to the 1990s, which initially confuse the emcee until he figures out what is going on. “The good news is that not only those Jews who left Hamburg in 1939 are sailing with us but also all the Jews that left anywhere are also here,” he explains. “First wave, second wave, third wave. A whole ocean of waves. From USSR, from Germany, from Spain, from Hungary. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, and always. We are all together, ladies and gentlemen. We’re all together. If there is a place to leave, the Jews will find a way.”

After the talent show, the emcee walks through a long, narrow hallway on the ship, encountering people discussing antisemitism, assimilation, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, dual loyalty, and Israel’s right to exist and defend itself as well as frightening vignettes occurring in some of the cabins. Every word of dialogue is based on interviews Golyak conducted with nearly a hundred people; the narrative is smartly organized to avoid clichés, stereotypical rhetoric, and didactic moralizing.

“So basically what they are is Jews who think if we just bend over a little more, if we just assimilate a little bit better than we did in Germany, that somehow miraculously everything will be different than it was in Germany,” Leah (Lauren Elias) says. “And it’s not going to be. I mean, come on. It feels like the only acceptable party line for Israeli people and Jewish people right now is like, ‘Oh my god. We’re sorry we didn’t all die in World War Two. We know that would have been so much easier for you. We are so sorry for the inconvenience.’”

Joseph (Nathan Malin), talking with Leah and Rachel (Anne Gottlieb) about the public reaction to the real-life stabbing of an Orthodox rabbi in Brighton, admits, “Unless you want to tar yourself as unwanted and as a bad person, you keep your mouth shut and you just duck your head, you know?”

Camera operator Austin de Besche films some of the cast during the making of Witness

Lady Liberty (Darya Denisova) occasionally appears to share her thoughts as the emcee repeats, “This can’t happen here. This can’t happen here!” Leah responds, “No, no, no, it can. And it does.”

Arlekin, which has previously dazzled viewers with the one-woman State vs. Natasha Banina and the daring hybrid chekhovOS /an experimental game/ (featuring Jessica Hecht and Mikhail Baryshnikov), a pair of livestreamed interactive shows that pushed the boundaries of online productions, again breaks new ground through its Zero Gravity (zero-G) Virtual Theater Lab with Witness. Set designer and costumer Anna Fedorova, virtual designer Daniel Cormino, sound designer Viktor Semenov, and director of photography and editor Anton Nikolaev make it feel like it’s all taking place on board the St. Louis, with rolling waves and flying birds outside as the ocean liner heads toward its supposed destination.

During the talent show, the audience on the ship looks like ghosts, which in essence is what they are today. At one point, the screen goes dark for several minutes as binaural recordings play through your headphones, as if you’re a passenger, not knowing what’s coming next, or from where. It sent chills through my bones.

As always with Arlekin’s works, each presentation is followed by a talkback in which members of the cast and crew delve into the making of the work, although Golyak is careful not to give away too many secrets. Some of the discussions include experts on antisemitism and the Holocaust, and the audience is encouraged to share experiences in the lively chat. The night I saw Witness, numerous people (including me) described instances of antisemitism they have encountered. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, it is noted, “Bearing witness, so they will know, until the last generation.” A compelling and necessary piece of sociopolitical documentary theater, Witness reminds us all just how important that is.

CANDACE BUSHNELL: IS THERE STILL SEX IN THE CITY?

Candace Bushnell holds nothing back in charming journey through her life and career (photo by Joan Marcus)

IS THERE STILL SEX IN THE CITY?
Daryl Roth Theatre
101 East Fifteenth St. at Union Square
Tuesday – Sunday through February 6, $69 [ed. note: show closed December 19 due to Covid]
istherestillsexinthecity.com
www.darylroththeatre.com

“Good news only” is how Candace Bushnell always answers the phone in her one-woman show, Is There Still Sex in the City? Good news only it will be.

The ninety-minute play is an endearing, self-aware production in which Bushnell, now sixty-three, shares intimate details of her life and career, centering around the gargantuan success she has had with the creation of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), the fictional characters on the HBO smash Sex and the City, based on her series of columns and 1996 book of the same name. The play might be timed to capitalize on the return of Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda in the brand-new follow-up, And Just Like That . . . ,” but Is There Still Sex in the City? stands on its own as an entertaining, appropriately gossipy public confessional from a writer who changed the way the country looked at the lifestyles of women of all ages, sexual and otherwise.

Bushnell, who prefers to be known as Candi (“with a little circle where the dot goes”), leads us from her childhood in Connecticut, where her father pitied her because she was flat-chested — “I’m afraid no man is ever going to love you,” he warns — to her freshman-year flight to New York City when she was nineteen, determined to abandon college and become a writer and win the Pulitzer Prize.

At first she relates, “This New York is not my boyfriend. Pimps stalk Penn Station looking for runaways. Heroin addicts are nodding out on the streets. There’s three card monte, pickpockets, boomboxes, and Hare Krishna parades. It’s dirty. There’s no pooper scooper law, and there’s dog poop everywhere.” But it isn’t long before she is hanging out with the rich and famous, partying at Studio 54, jetting off to Europe, reveling in the abundant sex and drugs — and eventually telling everybody about it, first as Stripe Savage, writing such pieces as “How to Act in a Disco,” then under her real name in a must-read column for the New York Observer.

Candace Bushnell answers the question Is There Still Sex in the City? in one-woman show (photo by Joan Marcus)

“This New York is my boyfriend,” she says later. “Who needs a man when Manhattan itself is abuzz? Maybe it’s the cosmos. Maybe it’s the cocaine.” Her bestselling book, Sex and the City, becomes a hot HBO show, but that doesn’t necessarily result in personal fulfillment as her relationships with Melrose Place creator Darren Star, a much older famous writer, the unnamed actual Mr. Big, and others ultimately fizzle. But she learns to take matters into her own hands as she shares what she is doing today, which is a long jump from where she thought she would be — while still working toward that Pulitzer.

Directed by choreographer Lorin Lotarro (A Taste of Things to Come) with a spicy sweet sense of humor, Is There Still Sex in the City? answers many of the questions people have about Bushnell and her life. It features popular period songs by Sheryl Crow, Cyndi Lauper, Donna Summer, MC Hammer, and Right Said Fred, a parade of fantastic outfits courtesy of costume designer Lisa Zinni, an adorable set by Anna Louizos with an elegant royal couch, a monitor with projections (old photos, TV clips, animation) by Caite Hevner, and stacks of cubes with books, knickknacks, and shoes — lots and lots of shoes, all of which, Bushnell admits, are from her own closet — colorfully lit by Travis McHale.

Bushnell occasionally plays “Real or Not Real,” asking the audience to call out their responses to such questions as “Did I sleep with the hot Calvin Klein underwear model from episode 2?” She doesn’t mind receiving random hoots and hollers and shouts of support, particularly as she reveals her ten life lessons, the first of which is: “I’m a feminist. A mini Gloria Steinem. Have been ever since kindergarten, where I discovered women could only have four jobs: nurse, teacher, secretary, or librarian.”

Bushnell is so warm and gracious that you will forgive a missed line reading here and there, and the Daryl Roth Theatre in Union Square is far too big for such an intimate production. But Is There Still Sex in the City? is a fab treat, a funny and candid New York story that everyone can relate to in one way or another, whether you are a fan of Sex and the City or have never watched or read it. And before or after the show, you can enjoy a cosmo in the downstairs Candi Bar. Like Bushnell says, “Good news only!”

[ed. note: The good news only went so far, as the show had to close on December 19 after Bushnell contracted Covid-19. The plan is for it to eventually return to New York City when the tour gets up and running again.]

MRS. DOUBTFIRE

Daniel Hillard (Rob McClure) goes to extreme measures to see his kids in Mrs. Doubtfire (photo by Joan Marcus)

MRS. DOUBTFIRE
Stephen Sondheim Theatre
124 West 43rd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 8, $79 – $229
mrsdoubtfirebroadway.com

Robin Williams and Stephen Sondheim must be turning over in their graves — or urns. The musical adaptation of Chris Columbus’s overrated hit 1993 movie, Mrs. Doubtfire, in which Williams plays the title character, a divorced actor who dresses up as an older Scottish nanny in order to spend more time with his children, opened earlier this month at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on West Forty-Third St., less than two weeks after the musical genius passed away at the age of ninety-one. Williams died in 2014 at the age of sixty-three.

Mrs. Doubtfire the musical is a labored, inorganic embarrassment, a jaw-droppingly inauthentic mess that is scheduled to run for at least six months on the Great White Way. Tony nominee Rob McClure, the talented star of such duds as Chaplin and Honeymoon in Vegas, dives into the shtick headfirst, but four-time Tony-winning director Jerry Zaks is trapped by Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell’s leaden book and Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick’s trite music and lyrics. Williams was able to make the film somewhat palatable, but McClure never has a chance with the Broadway version.

Just as the movie felt like a retread of Sydney Pollack’s 1982 romantic comedy, Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman plays an unemployed actor who dresses up as an unfashionable older woman in order to get a part on a soap opera, Mrs. Doubtfire the musical offers little we haven’t already seen in the 2019 musical adaptation of Tootsie, which earned ten Tony nominations, winning two awards.

Andre (J. Harrison Ghee) and Frank (Brad Oscar) preen for Wanda Sellner (Charity Angél Dawson) as Daniel (Rob McClure) looks on in Mrs. Doubtfire (photo by Joan Marcus)

Nearly every musical number feels forced and unnatural, as if Zaks (La Cage aux Folles, Hello, Dolly!), choreographer Lorin Lotarro (Waitress, Merrily We Roll Along), and the Kirkpatricks (Something Rotten!) looked around David Korins’s set to find random objects to incorporate into the dancing. When Daniel and the kids start playing air guitar with brooms, well, I considered jumping onstage and sweeping them all away, for the benefit of the audience as well as the performers. Meanwhile, the Spanish restaurant where a critical late scene occurs should be shut down for improper use and storage of musical theater.

The show is primarily set in the Hillard home, where father Daniel (McClure) has plenty of time to hang around with his three kids, Lydia (Analise Scarpaci), Christopher (Jake Ryan Flynn), and Natalie (Avery Sell). While his wife, Miranda (Jenn Gambates), is working hard, putting together a fashion line with her hunk of a partner, Stuart Dunmire (Mark Evans), Daniel is like a fourth child, running around the house with the three of them and breaking things. Lydia finally has had enough and throws him out; when the judge awards full custody to Lydia, Daniel is distraught, ready to do whatever he can to spend time with them again. He is watched closely by court liaison officer Wanda Sellner (Charity Angél Dawson), who will ultimately report back to the judge whether Daniel has an acceptable place to live and a regular job and, therefore, should be allowed to have shared custody.

But it all gets turned upside down and inside out when Daniel hatches the plan to pretend he’s Mrs. Euphegenia Doubtfire — and gets the job as his children’s nanny, taking care of them every weekday afternoon. He has to keep his secret from Lydia as well as the kids, but Wanda is on the prowl, suspicious that something nefarious is going on.

A game cast never has a chance in Mrs. Doubtfire (photo by Joan Marcus)

Brad Oscar and J. Harrison Ghee, as Daniel’s brother, Frank, and Frank’s partner, Andre, respectively, are supposed to provide comic relief (it’s already a comedy, right?) as the designers behind Daniel’s transformation into Mrs. D, but their jokes quickly become repetitive (for example, how Frank has to speak extra loudly every time he tells a lie), and laughing at flamboyant gay minor characters is not as much fun as it was once upon a time. And the scenes with Peter Bartlett as hapless kids’ show host Mr. Jolly (accompanied by Jodi Kimura as humorless channel president Janet Lundy) are not very jolly, unless you find laughing at doddering elderly men hysterical.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” the opening number prophetically asks. The show had to shut down for more than a week because of positive Covid cases; for those of you who had tickets during that time, consider yourselves lucky. [Ed. note: The musical is going on hiatus from January 10 to March 14 “out of concern for the potential long-term employment of everyone who works on Mrs. Doubtfire, and the extended run of the show.”]

THE STREETS OF NEW YORK

Irish Rep revival of The Streets of New York shines a light on greed, poverty, and the power of love (photo by Carol Rosegg)

THE STREETS OF NEW YORK
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 30, $50-$70
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

As the pandemic lockdown lifted and the city opened back up, Irish Rep artistic director Charlotte Moore decided to revisit the company’s 2002 hit, The Streets of New York. “In this time of Covid, I was sure it would be appropriate to rewrite my original director’s note,” Moore explains in the program. “But upon rereading the original, so many things are exactly the same that I have changed my mind. There is still great poverty and hunger, and the heartbreak of lost love never changes. Add to that a worldwide pandemic and a masked society and Boucicault’s eighteenth-century world seems to fit right into our twenty-first with its darkness and restrictions.”

Moore adapted Dublin-born Dion Boucicault’s 1857 play The Poor of New York, itself based on Édouard Louis Alexandre Brisebarre’s Les Pauvres de Paris, adding more than a dozen songs to the Dickensian tale of greed and hardship. The result is a delightful, indelible tale that feels just right for this moment in time, one that I can envision becoming an annual holiday tradition.

The show begins on the eve of the Panic of 1837, which led to an economic depression. “The poor man’s home is a filthy street / You sell your shoes for a scrap of meat,” a man sings. An older couple adds, “The violence of poverty breeds everywhere / And a cloud of injustice hangs in the air/ And till it clears / It could be years / But till it clears / We must survive / And stay alive / On these unholy, shadowy, crime ridden, black hearted, / Blood sodden, filthy, mean / Streets of New York!”

Wealthy banker Gideon Bloodgood (David Hess) is preparing to abscond with his Nassau St. bank’s money when sea captain Patrick Fairweather (Daniel J. Maldonado) arrives after hours to entrust Bloodgood with his life savings before going on a voyage, seeking the banker’s protection of the financial security of his wife and two children. Fairweather departs but returns moments later, changing his mind and demanding his fortune back. But the greedy Bloodgood is not about to surrender his newfound gains, and when Fairweather suddenly drops dead, Bloodgood decides to dump the body and keep the money — but not before one of his clerks, Brendan Badger (Justin Keyes), grabs the signed deposit receipt, hiding it away for a rainy day.

The Puffy family (Polly McKie, Richard Henry, and Jordan Tyson) find a way to smile amid their drudgery in The Streets of New York (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Twenty years later, Bloodgood, accompanied by his ever-faithful butler, Edwards (Price Waldman), is basking in his vast success, built on the cash he stole from Fairweather. While Bloodgood is looking for a suitable husband for his spoiled daughter, Alida (Amanda Jane Cooper), Fairweather’s children, Lucy (DeLaney Westfall) and Paul (Ryan Vona), and widow, Susan (Amy Bodnar), are living in abject poverty in the dangerous area of New York City known as Five Points. Their poor but goodhearted landlord, Dermot Puffy (Richard Henry), has fallen behind on his mortgage payments, so the heartless Bloodgood threatens to evict Puffy, his wife, Dolly (Polly McKie), and their daughter, Dixie (Jordan Tyson), which would leave the Fairweathers homeless as well.

The Fairweathers hope to be saved by Lucy’s childhood love, Mark Livingstone (Ben Jacoby), scion of a well-heeled, prosperous society family, while Alida plots to marry Mark herself to restore the Bloodgood name to respectability even as she fools around with the philandering Duke Vlad (Maldonado). Like her father, it’s only money and appearances that matter. “Isn’t it wonderful to be in control / Who cares if Daddy has to sell his soul / To keep me in accoutrements / To keep me in the things I want / To keep me happy,” Alida selfishly admits. “Allowed to be horrid and rude to everyone / A sense of entitlement is so much fun / I ride whilst poorer people walk, (with a frown) or run! / Oh! How I love being rich!”

As Christmas approaches, some are destined to be showered with yet more wealth while others seem bound for anonymity, struggling to survive day by day in the perilous gutters of an uncaring metropolis. The very best kind of mustache-twirling melodrama ensues as the plot leaps and twists to its conclusion.

Robber baron Gideon Bloodgood (David Hess) and his obnoxious daughter (Amanda Jane Cooper) boss around their butler (Price Waldman) in The Streets of New York (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Moore, who with Irish Rep producing director Ciarán O’Reilly created some of the most compelling and innovative online shows during the pandemic, goes back to the basics with The Streets of New York. Linda Fisher’s period costumes feel authentic, and Hugh Landwehr’s set, covered with giant bills and help wanted ads, is centered by a large wall that the actors and masked staff members move around, magically morphing into the Bloodgoods’ opulent home and office as well as doomed tenements in Five Points.

The five-piece orchestra is partially visible offstage right, consisting of Melanie Mason on cello, Jeremy Clayton on woodwinds, Karen Lindquist on harp, Sean Murphy on bass, and Joel Lambdin on violin, performing lovely orchestrations by music director Mark Hartman and associate conductor Yasuhiko Fukuoka.

Two-time Tony nominee Moore, who previously directed Boucicault’s London Assurance in addition to plays by O’Casey, Yeats, Friel, and Synge and such musicals as Meet Me in St. Louis and Love, Noël: The Letters and Songs of Noël Coward, gives ample room for the material, which often evokes operetta, to breathe on the cramped stage, the two and a half hours (with intermission) never slowing down for a minute. Moore’s lyrics do what they’re supposed to, help develop the narrative and give depth to the characters; nary a word is extraneous. Barry McNabb’s choreography shines in the vaudevillian duet “Villains,” a riotous showstopper featuring Hess and Keyes. Cooper brings down the house in her engaging solo, “Oh, How I Love Being Rich,” her obnoxious coquettishness channeling Bernadette Peters and Kristen Chenoweth. (She’s worked onstage with Chenoweth several times.) Hess stands out as the scoundrel Bloodgood, reveling in his egomaniacal affairs, while Jacoby is heart-wrenching as a man who just wants to do the right thing but is thwarted at every turn.

Still caught up in a pandemic and social justice movement that have magnified the sorry state of income inequality in America, The Streets of New York doesn’t feel old-fashioned as much as fresh and prescient. We all want a “taste of the good life,” as the Puffys explain, but it’s not always within reach. However, the power of love — and a delightful musical — has the ability to transcend suffering and bring light to lead us out

CAROLINE, OR CHANGE

Caroline, or Change returns to Broadway in marvelous revival at Studio 54 (photo by Joan Marcus)

CAROLINE, OR CHANGE
Studio 54
254 West 54th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 9, $49-$250
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

A few days before seeing Michael Longhurst’s Broadway revival of Caroline, or Change at Studio 54, I was at another theater waiting for a play to begin when the two men next to me started talking about the show, saying that friends of theirs considered it the best musical of the young century. Who am I to disagree?

I was sucked in from the opening moments, when Black maid Caroline Thibodeaux, spectacularly portrayed by Sharon D Clarke, is downstairs in the basement of the Gellman home in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in late 1963. She’s doing the laundry and listening to the radio, explaining, “Nothing ever happen under ground in Louisiana / Cause they ain’t no under ground in Louisiana / There is only under water.” She is joined by the Washing Machine (Arica Jackson, in a bubbly costume), who tells her, “Consequences unforeseen. / Consequences unforeseen. / Put your faith and clothes in me, / a brand-new nineteen-sixty-three / seven-cycle wash machine,” and the Radio (a 1960s-style girl group consisting of Nasia Thomas, Nya, and Harper Miles in matching sparkling outfits and antennae), who agree, “Tough and dreary and all dishevel, / sixteen feet below sea level.” The demonic Dryer (a devilish Kevin S. McAllister) declares, “Laundry mine now! / You know the story: / Let’s make this basement a purgatory. / Time has come / Time has come / Time has come to suffer heat!”

Caroline is an unhappy single mother raising four kids on the thirty dollars a week she makes working tirelessly for the Gellmans, who are Jewish: The recently widowed Stuart Gellman (John Cariani), who prefers to play the clarinet rather than to say much or face reality; his new wife, Rose Stopnick Gellman (Caissie Levy), who can’t help feeling like an unloved replacement for the deceased, beloved Betty and who misses her old Upper West Side neighborhood; and Stuart’s eight-year-old son, Noah (alternately played by Gabriel Amoroso, Adam Makké, or Jaden Myles Waldman), who has developed a secret relationship with Caroline. He goes down to the basement to hang out with her, lighting her cigarettes and watching her work, even though, as she tells him, “I got no use for you. This basement too darn hot for two.”

Maid Caroline Thibodeaux (Sharon D Clarke) has some sharp words for Noah Gellman (Adam Makké) in poignant, prescient show (photo by Joan Marcus)

When Rose catches Noah leaving change in his pocket yet again, she chastises him and decides to let Caroline keep whatever she finds, to both punish Noah and supplement Caroline’s meager wages. But Caroline does not want any charity, instead collecting the money in a bleach cup and returning it to the boy — until she doesn’t, and things take a sharp turn.

Pulitzer and Tony-winning book writer Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Homebody / Kabul) references change in many ways throughout the show’s one hundred and fifty minutes (with intermission). As Caroline, three-time Olivier winner Clarke (Death of a Salesman, The Amen Corner) carries the weight of 1960s racism and inequality on her shoulders; Caroline is thirty-nine, while Clarke is fifty-five, and it’s easy to believe that the constant wear and tear on Caroline’s daily existence has aged her unfairly.

She is deeply unsatisfied with her position in life but also feels that there is no way out, that she has no choice but to play the role of the lowly black maid. While waiting for the bus (McAllister) with fellow maid Dotty Moffett (Tamika Lawrence), who is going to night school to better herself, Caroline says, “I don’t like the way you do. You change.” Dotty responds, “You the one that change! . . . Sorry you is sick and shame. Sorry you drinking misery tea. Sorry your life ain’t what it should be.”

As they continue to talk, the Moon (N’Kenge, in a dazzling round seat dangling from the rafters), a celestial presence watching from above, finally appears, promising, “Change come fast and change come slow / but change come, Caroline Thibodeaux.” Caroline replies, “Nothing ever changes under ground in Louisiana.”

At the Gellmans’ Chanukah party where Caroline, her sixteen-year-old daughter, Emmie (Samantha Williams), and Dotty are preparing dinner, Rose’s father, the progressive Mr. Stopnick (a scene-stealing Chip Zien), shouts, “The old world’s ending! Negroes marching! Change is coming! Down with the filthy capitalist chazzerim!” But Stuart’s parents (Joy Hermalyn and Stuart Zagnit) are having none of that, pleading, “Let’s not dwell on ugly things! Let’s thank God for the joys He brings! Watch the colored candles melt! Spin the dreidel for Chanukah gelt!”

During Chanukah, children often receive chocolate gelt, shaped like change: nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars. Earlier, when Caroline is considering keeping the money Noah has been leaving in his pocket, she opines that her ten-year-old son, Jackie (Alexander Bello or Richard Alexander Phillips), has to see the dentist, her eight-year-old son, Joe (Jayden Theophile), wants candy, and her oldest son, Larry, who is fighting in Vietnam, needs a care package with cookies. Chanukah gelt, both real and confectionary, is not going to solve their problems.

A Chanukah party leads to trouble in Caroline, or Change (photo by Joan Marcus)

The outstanding score by Tony-winning composer Jeanine Tesori (Fun Home, Thoroughly Modern Millie), who previously teamed up with Kushner on the opera A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck for Glimmerglass, ranges from R&B, soul, and gospel to blues, klezmer, and folk, with orchestrations by Rick Bassett and Buryl Red that avoid treacly sentimentality. The multilevel set, by Fly Davis, who also designed the costumes, sometimes separates into two parts, creating a gap between Noah’s upstairs bedroom and the other half of the house, but the space it creates is often confusing and uncomfortable. However, the depiction of the washer/dryer and radio is hilarious, their playful movement choreographed by Ann Yee.

Longhurst (Constellations, Europe) keeps the action proceeding at an exciting pace that does not allow pauses for applause after songs, which works beautifully, although the audience can’t help but shower praise on Clarke after a showstopping solo in which Caroline finally asserts herself, proclaiming, “Ya’ll can’t do what I can do / ya’ll strong but you ain’t strong like me.”

Seventeen years after its debut, the semiautobiographical Caroline, or Change is both prescient and timely. Kushner — who grew up in a Jewish family in Lake Charles, with a father who played the clarinet, a mother who had cancer (but did not pass away when he was a child), and a Black maid named Maudie Lee Davis to whom the show is dedicated — makes references to the Spanish flu and a Confederate statue being torn down, and the repeated refrains about being underwater came just before Katrina struck Louisiana in 2005. The Covid-19 crisis and murder of George Floyd brought racial injustice and inequity to the forefront of America yet again, recalling the 1960s civil rights movement.

Caroline, or Change doesn’t provide any easy answers or celebrate any heroes; it is instead a potent reminder that while things have changed over the last sixty years, a whole lot more still needs to change. The best new musical of the twenty-first century? Who am I to disagree?

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY

The Lehman Trilogy takes place on Es Devlin’s stunning stage (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY
Nederlander Theatre
208 West 41st St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 2, $59-$209
877-250-2929
thelehmantrilogy.com

“The prospect of sitting through a nearly three-and-a-half-hour play about the history of Lehman Brothers performed by a mere three actors might not necessarily be your idea of fun,” I wrote about the American premiere of The Lehman Trilogy at Park Avenue Armory in the spring of 2019. But it turned out to be what I called “an epic masterpiece, must-see theater at its finest.”

Still, the prospect of watching it two and a half years later, at the Nederlander Theatre on Broadway with two of the same actors amid a continuing pandemic, was not necessarily my idea of fun. But it turned out to once again be must-see theater at its finest.

Adapted by writer Ben Power and director Sam Mendes from Stefano Massini’s five-hour Italian original, the dazzling play relates the history of the men behind the business, siblings Henry (Simon Russell Beale), Mayer (Adam Godley), and Emanuel Lehman (Adrian Lester), who were born and raised in the small town of Rimpar in Bavaria and arrived, individually, in the United States between 1844 and 1850, operating a fabric store in Montgomery, Alabama. Over the years, they change with the times and the needs of the market, selling raw cotton, coffee, and coal and, eventually, trading money, building a vast empire that came crashing down in the 2008 financial crisis. Henry is considered the head, with the most business sense; Emanuel the arm, able to forcibly get things done; and Mayer the potato, an unequal partner who serves as the mediator. As the firm develops, the evolving name of the company is written and rewritten on glass walls, a constant reminder of where they were and where they are going.

Adam Godley, Simon Russell Beale, and Adrian Lester play multiple roles in The Lehman Trilogy (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The story is told primarily in the third person, an ingenious decision that adds an extra dimension to the characters, giving them each a unique perspective on themselves and their family.

Henry: Every morning, like this morning, they get up at five in their three-room home.
Mayer: They light the lamps with whale oil and wash with one pail of water between them.
Emanuel: This is worse than Germany! Emanuel said on his third day in America.
Mayer: After the slap that Henry laid on his face he never said it again.
Henry: Every morning, like this morning, while Montgomery sleeps, they pray together before leaving.
Emanuel: Just as they did in Bavaria. They put on their hats and go out.
Mayer: Another day.

The narrative is divided into three chapters, “Three Brothers,” “Fathers & Sons,” and “The Immortal,” as their fame and fortune rises through the next generations, which include Emanuel’s ruthless son, Philip (Beale); Mayer’s son, Herbert (Lester), who believes in fairness, stability, and security, not the Lehman tradition of risk taking; and Philip’s son, “Bobby” (Godley), who loves the limelight and becomes the very public face of the company. “No one outside this family can ever truly understand. What we’ve done. Why we did it. What we plan to do next,” Philip says. Bobby answers, “At Yale they teach us that nothing is more outdated as betting on industry. The times are changing, Father. The new century will wipe everything away.” He doesn’t know how right he is.

The play takes place on Es Devlin’s gorgeous set, a large, revolving transparent cube with several office-like rooms. Video designer Luke Halls projects geographic scenes onto the huge semicircle at the back of the stage and onto the floor around the cube, from the vast sea and plantation estates to cotton fields and the New York City skyline. As good as it all looks, the set lacks the magic and power it had in the armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall; it feels too cramped on the Nederlander stage, where, depending on where you’re sitting, you’re unlikely to get its full impact.

The history of the Lehman brothers is told by three actors in sensational production (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Beale (Candide, Uncle Vanya), Godley (Rain Man, Anything Goes), and Olivier winner Lester (Red Velvet, Company), who replaces Ben Miles as Emanuel, are majestic, an absolute marvel. The three men have a commanding presence, balancing humor and gravitas as they move about the cube, using office packing boxes as furniture, arranging them into steps, furniture, and even a piano. (A real piano is played offstage by Candida Caldicot.)

Oscar, Tony, and Olivier winner Mendes (The Ferryman, American Beauty) and Power (Emperor and Galiean, Husbands and Sons) have made a few tweaks to the show in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis and the George Floyd protests. When Mayer discusses how the company benefits from plantations and slaves, Henry notes, “Doctor Beauchamp, who once treated the children of those slaves for chickenpox, now shakes his head the way he once did about yellow fever: ‘Surely you knew it could not last, Mr. Mayer? Everything that was built here was built on a crime. The roots run so deep you cannot see them but the ground beneath our feet is poisoned. It had to end this way.’” But “Mayer doesn’t want to hear. So day and night, he tries to convince himself that, although the war is lost, the South if you look hard enough still stands, is not dead.”

Later, in a Greek diner in Nebraska, Henry relates the story of its owner, Georgios Petropoulos: “He crossed the country in 1918 when the soldiers brought the influenza back from Europe and half a million Americans died. He saw the priests collecting the bodies off the street in Philadelphia, and the protests in San Francisco, against the wearing of masks.” At the Nederlander, employees walk up and down the aisles, making sure all audience members are wearing their masks correctly, over their mouth and nose.

Despite running more than three hours with two intermissions, The Lehman Trilogy flies by, moving faster than the Dow Jones stock ticker. It’s also a whole lot more satisfying, with Power, Mendes, and the outstanding cast taking all the risks and leaving all the rewards for the audience.

PROJECT SHAW: VILLAGE WOOING

Who: Maryann Plunkett, Jay O. Sanders
What: Project Shaw reading of Village Wooing
Where: Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at Ninety-Fifth St.
When: Monday, December 13, $40, 7:00
Why: Gingold Theatrical Group’s long-running Project Shaw, which began in 2009 with the goal of eventually presenting every one of George Bernard Shaw’s sixty-two works, returns to live performances with a concert reading of 1933’s two-character comedy Village Wooing. Real-life husband and wife Jay O. Sanders (Girl from the North Country, Uncle Vanya) and Maryann Plunkett (Me and My Girl, Sweet and Sad) star as A and Z, respectively, who meet on board a cruise liner; he is a writer, while she is the daughter of a postman. They have three conversations, the first on the cruise, the latter two at a village shop where she works. Plunkett and Sanders work together often, most famously in Richard Nelson’s Rhinebeck Panorama, about three upstate families, the Apples, the Gabriels, and the Michaels. Shaw wrote the play after going on his first cruise.

“Though we kept these play readings going online during the last year and a half, and we’ll continue with an online presence, reconnecting with our in-person community is what we’ve most missed,” founding artistic director David A. Staller said in a statement. ”[We’ve just finished] the in-person off-Broadway production of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession and decided to celebrate the end of this challenging year with a party, of sorts, with two of my favorite humans: Maryann and Jay. Just being with them is a party.” The party takes place December 13 at 7:00 at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre; tickets are $40.