Tag Archives: Brittany Bradford

THE COMEUPPANCE

Old friends gather for a pre-reunion reunion in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance (photo by Monique Carboni)

THE COMEUPPANCE
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
The Pershing Square Signature Center
480 West Forty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 9, $49-$159
thecomeuppance.net/info

At the end of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance, making its world premiere at the Signature, there were tears in my eyes. I wasn’t sobbing because of something that had happened in the plot or to any specific character but because of how brilliant the play is; its sheer beauty, from the writing and staging to the acting and directing, simply overwhelmed me, and I needed time to gather myself before heading home.

The Comeuppance is a fiercely intelligent, diverse revision of the Breakfast Club for the twenty-first century, an alternate version of the Athlete, the Brain, the Criminal, the Princess, and the Basket Case looking back at their lives two decades later and not necessarily liking what they see. A small band of high school friends have gathered for a pre-reunion twentieth reunion — Emilio (Caleb Eberhardt), an ex-pat artist living in Berlin returning to the US with a piece in the Whitney Biennial; Caitlin (Susannah Flood), the smartest student in school, who married an older man with two kids; Kristina (Shannon Tyo), a military doctor with five children; and Ursula (Brittany Bradford), the host of the party who spent years taking care of her elderly grandmother and now lives alone in her grandmother’s house. As the characters slowly congregate on Ursula’s porch, they reveal hints about their past and foreshadowings of the future. The simmering conflicts are ignited when Kristina surprises everyone by bringing along Paco (Bobby Moreno), whose traumatic five tours of duty in the Marines have left him heavily medicated, which does not stop his boisterousness.

The acerbic and direct Emilio makes his displeasure known, arguing that Paco was not in the same class with them and was not a member of their outsider “gang,” M.E.R.G.E., which stands for Multi-Ethnic Reject Group. “Does that spell ‘Merge’ or ‘Merg?’” Paco asks. “It’s a soft G,” Emilio, Ursula, and Kristina quickly bark out in unison. Kristina claims that Paco was an associate member because he was dating Caitlin, but that explanation doesn’t satisfy Emilio, who starts alluding to an incident that occurred between the couple. Meanwhile, Ursula, who has recently lost an eye so has difficulty with depth perception, is adamant that she will not be going to the reunion, and they are all upset that Simon has just canceled via text message. They also debate whether it is a good idea to arrive in a limo, which Kristina ordered, further establishing that the reunion has a different meaning for each of them.

“In high school, every stupid prom, every homecoming, we were always randomly showing up in a limo like somehow it was a thing that people did in real life,” Emilio says. “But we’re not teenagers anymore. Now we’re just adults showing up in a limo,” Caitlin contends. “But isn’t the point of this dumb event reliving high school for the night? I think people will think it’s funny. Maybe it is a little conceptual,” Emilio replies. Caitlin: “‘Conceptual?’ What does that mean?” Emilio: “Don’t worry about it. Listen: It’s just a little nostalgia.” Caitlin: “Well, you don’t still live around these people. I do.” Emilio: “So?” Caitlin: “So, for some of us, it may not be in our best interest to show up looking like shitheads.”

An ensemble cast excels in gorgeous world premiere at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

They gossip about other students, talk about Zoom happy hours, defend the life choices they’ve made, and down glass after glass of spiked jungle juice as the late limo gives them time to explore who they were and who they are, while Emilio stirs the pot with his willingness to brutally criticize the others, loudly pointing out what he believes to be their flaws and their bad decisions. Early on, he shares three German words with Ursula: schadenfreude, torschlusspanik, and kuddelmuddel, which all come home to roost.

They also bring back an old method they used to cut off someone when they were rambling: pretend to snap their neck with a “KRK.” Little do they know how relevant that is, as throughout the 130-minute intermissionless play, every character delivers a monologue from Death, who lurks inside each of them. Their regular voices are joined by an otherworldly echo as Death, lit as if it is glowing from inside the body, directly addresses the audience, offering tidbits about its responsibilities and personal preferences.

The show begins with Death announcing from inside Emilio, “Hello there. You and I, we have met before, though you may not recognize me. People have a tendency to see me once and try hard to forget it ever happened — though that never works — not for very long.”

Later, inside Ursula, Death admits, “You’ll have to pardon me. I come and go. I get shy. Historically, I’ve been rarely met with anything other than fear or anger or regret and, as I’m sure you can imagine, that sort of energy gets . . . taxing. So I chose long ago to abandon any material form of my own and err on the side of the covert. I prefer now to move in and out of whatever vessel inspires me because, when I’m not working, I, like you, am a watcher. I like to watch. . . . I inhabit a body like this if my desire is to speak and, if I have one weakness, it’s for gossip. I suspect you share it. I don’t know what it is, but I find all creatures so interesting, their idiosyncrasies, their interiorities, their secrets. Their stories. These machines of will. And, like any good gossip, I’m always wanting to talk but, you know, finding the right listeners can be a challenge. So you should know you are very special.”

Death serves not only as a character in the play but as a vessel for Jacobs-Jenkins to espouse on the art of theater itself, the playwright as psychopomp. Jacobs-Jenkins, a two-time Pulitzer finalist and Obie winner whose previous works include Girls, Everybody, War, Gloria, Appropriate, Neighbors, and An Octoroon, tells stories that examine humanity’s idiosyncrasies, interiorities, and secrets, in search of an audience of watchers and listeners who are critical to the success of his craft. When Death says, “You should know you are very special,” it is Jacobs-Jenkins telling that to us.

In fact, the playwright continued to make changes throughout the rehearsal and preview process based on audience response; while that is not unusual, it was extensive in this case, and it shows. It’s a masterful production, radiantly directed by Obie winner Eric Ting (The Far Country, Six Apples), who maintains a steady, absorbing pace; you won’t even remember that there’s no intermission, not wanting to leave these characters even for a minute.

Ursula (Brittany Bradford) and Emilio (Caleb Eberhardt) wonder what could have been in The Comeuppance (photo by Monique Carboni)

Arnulfo Maldonado’s intimate set is practically in your lap, a cozy front porch with a few steps, a swing, a big chair, and wooden railings; a screen door leads into the house. Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting and Palmer Hefferan’s sound keep it all real, as do Jennifer Moeller and Miriam Kelleher’s naturalistic costumes.

Bradford (Fefu and Her Friends, Wedding Band) has a subtle power as Ursula, Flood (Make Believe, Plano) has a sensitive edge as Caitlin, Moreno (72 Miles to Go . . . , Lazarus) carries an impending sense of doom as Paco, Tyo (Regretfully, So the Birds Are, The Far Country) has a firm determination as Kristina, and Eberhardt (Choir Boy, On Sugarland) is a force as the sardonic, insensitive Emilio, who doesn’t know when enough is enough, especially when he’s right. Ursula might have studied mixology, but this group is like a toxic cocktail.

The Brooklyn-based Jacobs-Jenkins was born in DC in 1984, the year before John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club came out. He is the same age as the characters in The Comeuppance, who were rocked by Columbine and whose adulthood essentially began with 9/11, continued with the Iraq and Afghan wars, and then hit a peak with the Covid pandemic, death surrounding them every step of the way. Their youthful innocence is gone, even though a few of them are still trying to hold on to it.

But going back is not the answer, no matter how tenuous the immediate future might be, and just because you were friends in high school doesn’t mean you have to be friends now, in real life or on social media. The twenty years that have passed since prom were good to some and not so good to others, but all five M.E.R.G.E.rs have soul searching to do in order to face the personal demons buried deep within them.

The show is also likely to make you do some soul searching as well. All I know is that, while I wipe away these tears, I’m rethinking going to my next high school reunion.

WEDDING BAND: A LOVE/HATE STORY IN BLACK AND WHITE

Brittany Bradford is sensational as a Black woman in love with a white man in Alice Childress’s Wedding Band (photo by Henry Grossman)

WEDDING BAND: A LOVE/HATE STORY IN BLACK AND WHITE
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 15, $90-$125
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

Alice Childress is finally having her moment. Born in South Carolina in 1916 and raised in Harlem, the playwright, actress, columnist, and novelist made her posthumous Broadway debut last fall with Trouble in Mind, which was heading for the Great White Way in 1957 until producers pulled it after Childress would not make any changes. A rare revival of her 1966 play, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, opens tonight at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. While it’s exciting to see Childress at last receive acclaim, both productions turned out to be disappointing.

The back story as to why these plays had nearly disappeared is primarily that Childress ultimately stood by her scripts, refusing to touch a single word. However, after having now seen both of them, I’m of the belief that each could have used at least a little revision in certain places to avoid repetition and overwrought melodrama; Childress is a master at building characters, but too many of her scenes languish. You can read my take on Trouble in Mind here; my thoughts on Wedding Band continue below.

First staged at the New York Shakespeare Public Theater in 1972 (and not seen again in the city till now), codirected by Joseph Papp and Childress (Papp initially insisted that the author direct but he stepped in, giving them both credit) and starring Ruby Dee and James Broderick (with Albert Hall, Polly Holliday, and Clarice Taylor), Wedding Band centers on the controversial relationship between a Black seamstress, Julia Augustine (Brittany Bradford), and her partner of ten years, a white baker named Herman (Thomas Sadoski). Julia has to move around a lot to avoid the racism the two of them encounter when their situation becomes known, no matter how careful they try to hide it.

It’s the summer of 1918, just a few months till the end of WWI and a year before Red Summer, during which white mobs of civilians and veterans attacked Blacks in twenty-six cities, at least in part because of the Great Migration. Julia has rented a small house in a tiny community for Blacks on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina, run by Fanny Johnson (Elizabeth Van Dyke), a faux-elegant landlord who keeps a close watch on her handful of down-on-their-luck tenants.

TFANA’s Wedding Band features a gorgeous open set (photo by Hollis King)

Jason Ardizzone-West’s gorgeous set is a long, open rectangular space with a bed and night table at one end leading to a dirt path flanked by rows of tallgrass; the audience sits on opposite sides behind the knee-high grass. There are no actual doors, so all the characters can see one another whenever they are onstage, entering through the aisles, or wandering across the upper levels of the theater. Stacey Derosier’s lighting keeps most of the audience at least partially illuminated at all times, and Rena Anakwe’s sound design immerses the small crowd in the goings-on. It’s a powerful effect, particularly since the audience members are predominantly white and wearing masks, while onstage the 1918 influenza pandemic is raging across the country.

Among those at Mrs. Johnson’s establishment are Mattie (Brittany-Laurelle), a candy maker who is waiting for her husband, October, to come back from the Merchant Marine with much-needed funds, and their delightful eight-year-old daughter, Teeta (Phoenix Noelle), who plays with the white girl, aptly named Princess (Sofie Nesanelis), whom Mattie cares for; and the widowed Lula Green (Rosalyn Coleman), whose adopted son, Nelson (Renrick Palmer), is home from the war to march in a parade and chase down some women.

When Julia first arrives, she begs for peace and quiet, but Mrs. Johnson and the other residents want to find out everything about her, thumping the Bible as they seek out her sins. Childress points out their poverty from the very beginning; Teeta has lost something, and Mattie is desperate to find it. “Gawd, what’ve I done to be treated this way! You gon’ get a whippin’ too,” Mattie tells her. She explains to Mrs. Johnson, “Dammit, this gal done lost the only quarter I got to my name.”

Julia introduces herself to her new, nosy neighbors, who are taken aback when she quickly reaches into her purse and gives Teeta twenty-five cents. A few moments later the Bell Man (Max Woertendyke) shows up with his traveling salesman’s suitcase of random items; Lula owes him three dollars and ten cents but can’t pay anything now. Julia asks if he has any sheets, and soon the Bell Man, who recognizes her and knows that she is with a white man, is sitting on her bed, implying that she should fulfill his needs if she wants him to remain silent.

She throws him out, saying to the others, “I hate those kind-a people.” Lula responds, “You mustn’t hate white folks. Don’tcha believe in Jesus? He’s white.” Julia replies, “I wonder if he believes in me.”

When her lover, Herman, shows up, Julia is excited to see him. He’s upset because his mother (Veanne Cox) and sister, Annabelle (Rebecca Haden), are being harassed because they’re German, even though they’re American citizens. “It’s the war. Makes people mean,” Julia, who is always understanding of everyone, says. But Herman knows the truth about his family. “A poor ignorant woman who is mad because she was born a sharecropper . . . outta her mind ’cause she ain’t high class society. We’re red-neck crackers, I told her, that’s what.”

When Herman falls ill, it’s not as easy as simply calling a doctor, for their interracial relationship, in an era of anti-miscegenation laws, complicates everyone’s situation.

Bradford (Fefu and Her Friends, Bernhardt/Hamlet, Mac Beth) is spellbinding as Julia, her every move filled with the constant heavy weight on her heart. She portrays her with a gentle compassion until she explodes during Julia’s unforgettable confrontation with Herman’s racist mother.

Herman (Thomas Sadoski) battles illness as his sister (Rebecca Haden), mother (Veanne Cox), and longtime partner (Brittany Bradford) look on (photo by Hollis King)

The stage setup allows every audience member to follow Bradford’s riveting eyes, depicting the pain of being an independent-thinking Black woman in love with a white man, a relationship that nearly everyone looks down on. It takes on additional meaning as privacy rights are under attack again in the United States in 2022.

The rest of the cast is solid, but director Awoye Timpo (In Old Age, The Loophole, Carnaval), who so smoothly guided the show through the first half, gets too caught up in the mawkishness of the later plot developments, leading to a head-scratching magic-realist finale that feels as tacked on as it is.

Wedding Band is part of TFANA’s CLASSIX residency, which was founded by Timpo with Bradford, A. J. Muhammad, Dominique Rider, and Arminda Thomas to focus on Black performance and works by Black writers across the African diaspora. On May 14 at 4:30, TFANA will host the panel discussion “CLASSIX: In Search of Alice Childress,” with the CLASSIC collective, moderated by Jonathan Kalb. And on May 15 at 4:30, the TFANA Talk “Reflections, with Bianca Vivion Brooks” pairs Bradford with Juliana Canfield, who starred in Adrienne Kennedy’s He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box at TFANA in 2018, a show that also deals with interracial relationships.

I hope to see more plays by Childress, who died in New York City in 1994 at the age of eighty-one and also wrote such novels as A Hero Ain’t Nothing but a Sandwich, Like One of the Family, and A Short Walk. Even in productions that fall short, there are compelling, prescient moments and important, beautifully drawn characters.

As she wrote in a letter to Dee, “Wedding Band is about yesterday and today . . . far away and right at hand . . . old and ever present. It is the past, present, and future . . . recollection, attention, and anticipation . . . It is about the humiliation of an entire nation . . . not a tale of star-crossed lovers. My play is about manless women. Women in need of love, name, protection. It concerns itself with love and the seeking of love in a racist society . . . the love of country, the love of material things, and spiritual love.” Childress is clearly a playwright for these troubled times.

RETURN ENGAGEMENT: MAC BETH

Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) reaches out to her royal husband (Isabelle Fuhrman) in inventive reimagining of Shakespeare tragedy (photo by Richard Termine)

Hunter Theater Project
Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College
East 68th St. between Lexington & Park Aves.
Monday – Saturday, January 6 – February 22, $49 ($15 for students)
www.huntertheaterproject.org

If you missed Erica Schmidt’s Red Bull Theater production of Mac Beth at the Lucille Lortel Theater in mid-2019, it will be back for a return engagement at the Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College as part of the Hunter Theater Project, running January 6 to February 22. Below is my original review of this inventive and engaging work, which features much of the original cast, with Brittany Bradford now as the title character and Dylan Gelula taking over for AnnaSophia Robb.

Erica Schmidt’s beautifully frenetic Shakespeare adaptation Mac Beth — yes, she has made the title two words, perhaps to emphasize the more feminine second half of the title — is an exhilarating demonstration of grrl power, ratcheted up to the nth degree. The Red Bull production is set at a girls school where seven students enact an all-female version of Macbeth. They are dressed in schoolgirl uniforms of buttoned white shirts under tartan tops and skirts, with bloodred socks reaching up to their knees; aggressively ominous and gender-neutral hooded capes are added for the Weird Sisters. (The costumes are by Jessica Pabst.) Catherine Cornell’s set juts into the audience, covered in fake grass with a partially overturned couch, an iron bathtub, a campfire, and water-filled craters, as if the aftermath of a wild sorority bash. (When the characters imbibe, they do so from red plastic cups, a party staple.) And although they speak in the traditional iambic pentameter, they don’t disguise their voices to be more adult, instead sounding like a bunch of kids invigorated by putting on a show exactly the way they want to.

The Weird Sisters (Sharlene Cruz, AnnaSophia Robb, and Sophie Kelly-Hedrick) stir the boiling cauldron in Mac Beth (photo by Richard Termine)

Macbeth (Isabelle Fuhrman) is returning from a successful military campaign with the loyal Banquo (Ayana Workman) when they come upon three witches (AnnaSophia Robb, Sophie Kelly-Hedrick, and Sharlene Cruz, who play multiple roles) who predict that Macbeth will become Thane of Cawdor, then king, while Banquo’s sons will one day rule. Fear, jealousy, and revenge take over as the power grab is on, but with delicious twists; in the Bard’s day, his plays were performed by an all-male cast, but this twenty-first-century all-woman cast — armed with smartphones — revels in the gender shifts without altering the original text. “Are you a man?” Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) asks her husband. Facing a ghost (hysterically played by Workman), Macbeth declares, “What man dare, I dare: be alive again, / And dare me to the desert with thy sword; / If trembling I inhabit then, protest me / The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow! / Unreal mock’ry, hence!” It’s as if they are caught up in a teenage horror flick, with all the adolescent tropes in place but seen only from the girls’ point of view. Even one of the witches’ prophecies takes on new meaning when she predicts, “Be bloody, bold, and resolute: laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.” At one point Lady Macbeth tells a witch, “Unsex me here.”

AnnaSophia Robb and Sophie Kelly-Hedrick play witches and other characters in Bard play set at a girls school (photo by Richard Termine)

Schmidt’s (A Month in the Country, Invasion!) breathlessly paced version flies by in a furious ninety minutes, both sexy and sinister, gleefully performed by the terrific cast led by Fuhrman’s (All the Fine Boys, Orphan) tortured Macbeth and Mendes’s (Marys Seacole, Orange Is the New Black) malevolent Lady Macbeth. Robb (The Carrie Diaries, Bridge to Terabithia), NYU Tisch freshman Kelly-Hedrick, and recent CCNY grad Cruz make strong off-Broadway debuts, playing the witches as well as Duncan, Malcolm, Fleance, Rosse, Angus, Lenox, and other minor characters; in particular, Kelly-Hedrick captures the essence of girlhood — tinged with menace — in her squeaky delivery. Schmidt’s inventive staging also boasts a thrilling storm, a creepy doll, and a touch of gymnastics, although if there was one more loud bang against the tub I was going to scream. Schmidt was inspired to revisit Macbeth by reading stories about girls being murdered in the woods. In Mac Beth, she takes back the power, putting the girls in charge in a gender swap that is as exciting as it is, in this day and age, necessary. Schmidt makes us look at the bloody power plays of Scottish kings as if they are the social dominance battles of high school — and vice versa — and every audience member comes out a winner.

FEFU AND HER FRIENDS

A group of diverse women gathers in an elegant home in María Irene Fornés’s astonishing Fefu and Her Friends (photo by Henry Grossman)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Through December 8, $70-$90
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

María Irene Fornés’s Fefu and Her Friends is a brilliant work of utter genius. Unseen in New York since its debut more than forty years ago, the revolutionary play is part art happening, part theatrical reinvention, now brought back in a dazzling revival by director Lileana Blain-Cruz that opened November 24 at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. It unfolds in three sections: The first on a conventional stage, with the audience watching from standard seating. For the second part, the audience gets up and moves around the space, following four scenes that occur simultaneously but separately, each offering close-up looks at the characters as the crowd goes from bedroom to study to kitchen to lawn before returning to their regular seats for the finale. It’s avant-garde promenade theater at its finest, embedding us in the abstract narrative while also making us feel like we’re spying on extremely personal moments.

The story takes place in the spring of 1935 in the elegant New England country home of Fefu (Amelia Workman), who has invited over seven women for a rehearsal of an upcoming school fundraiser. The title might sound like it’s a family-friendly show, but it’s an insightful and often shocking mature dissection of women’s roles in society, both with and without men. “My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are,” Fefu tells Cindy (Jennifer Lim) and Christina (Juliana Canfield) at the very beginning, shortly before firing a double-barrel shotgun in the offstage direction of Phillip, her husband. The gun might or might not be loaded. “She’s crazy,” Christina says. “A little. She has a strange marriage,” Cindy replies.

Cindy (Jennifer Lim) and Christina (Juliana Canfield) are concerned as Fefu (Amelia Workman) stands in the back in TFANA revival (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

They are soon joined by Emma (Helen Cespedes), Sue (Ronete Levenson), Paula (Lindsay Rico), Cecilia (Carmen Zilles), and Julia (Brittany Bradford), the eight of them as a unit representing the many aspects of the feminine while avoiding trite stereotypes. Over the course of two thrilling hours, the women talk about love affairs, genitals, pain, anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, actress, writer, and teacher Emma Sheridan Fry, happiness, and fear, but they are not the catty characters of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women or the melodramatic ladies of Steel Magnolias. They are also not heroic or iconic figures; they each have their flaws that they either flaunt or hide. No men appear in the play, nor are they the primary subject of discussion, but they hover on the periphery. “I still like men better than women,” Fefu says. “I envy them. I like being like a man. Thinking like a man. Feeling like a man. They are well together. Women are not.” Fefu is arguably the most masculine of the women, shooting guns and fixing a broken toilet. At the other end of the spectrum is the wheelchair-bound Julia, who was paralyzed when standing near a deer that was shot, even though no bullet ever struck her. Thus, in Fornés’s world, women are both hunter and hunted. Adam Rigg’s sets further that idea, as all the rooms feature elements of nature, from wallpaper decorated with plants and flowers to animal lamps, from leaves surrounding Julia’s bed to drawings of plants and animals — along with men and women — hung in the living room.

Julia (Brittany Bradford), Emma (Helen Cespedes), and Christina (Juliana Canfield) share a happy moment in María Irene Fornés masterpiece (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

“We each have our own system of receiving information, placing it, responding to it,” Cecilia says at the start of part three. “That system can function with such a bias that it could take any situation and translate it into one formula. That is, I think, the main reason for stupidity or even madness, not being able to tell the difference between things.” That statement succinctly sums up how the audience experiences the nonformulaic play, which has constructed a unique theatrical environment, “immersive” well before that became its own genre. Montana Levi Blanco’s costumes dazzle, while Palmer Hefferan’s sound design during the second part results in a cacophony of voices as bits of conversation from the other concurrent scenes can be picked up, like in real life. Two-time Obie winner Blain-Cruz (Marys Seacole, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World) beautifully leads the engaging cast and the audience through the Cuban-born Fornés’s (Drowning, The Conduct of Life) masterpiece, which earned her the second of her nine Obies. It’s a stirring journey through time and space, a one-of-a-kind play that must be seen; it will blow your mind.

MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

Merrily We Roll Along goes backward to tell the story of three old friends bursting with dreams (photo by Joan Marcus)

Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 12, $109
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org
www.fiascotheater.com

Ever since it famously flopped on Broadway in 1981, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along has gone through numerous iterations; the show has a beloved score but a challenging narrative. As part of its Roundabout residency, New York–based Fiasco Theater, who delivered a gorgeous Into the Woods at the Laura Pels in 2015 — in addition to several unique takes on Shakespeare at Theater for a New Audience, Classic Stage, and the New Victory in the last few years — now tackles Merrily, but not even this extremely talented company can get past the fatal flaws of the plot. Working in elements from the 1981, 1987, and 1994 versions, including rehearsal drafts, along with the original 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart on which the musical is based, Fiasco has trimmed the play down to its essentials, but there’s still not much meat on the bones. The story begins in 1980, with the six-actor ensemble singing, “Yesterday is done, / See the pretty countryside / Merrily we roll along, roll along, / Bursting with dreams.” The action then travels back in time, through the 1970s, ’60s, and ’50s, following three main characters — Franklin Shepard (Ben Steinfeld), Mary Flynn (Jessie Austrian), and Charley Kringus (Manu Narayan) — as they reverse their development from jaded, unhappy adults to energetic teens “bursting with dreams.”

Fiasco Theater tries to wrap its arms around elusive Sondheim/Furth musical at the Laura Pels (photo by Joan Marcus)

The main problem is that none of the three characters in this tale of friendship, betrayal, and selling out is particularly likable, so their personal trials and tribulations are just not that interesting. Frank is a narcissistic movie producer and musical theater composer who has difficulty remaining faithful to his wives or Charley, his songwriting partner, while Mary burned herself out on her debut novel. Also making the scene are Frank and Charley’s producer, Joe (Paul L. Coffey), and his wife, Gussie (Emily Young); their early supporters the Spencers (again, Coffey and Young); Frank’s first wife, Beth (Brittany Bradford); and Meg (also played by Bradford), the star of Frank’s debut movie. Derek McLane’s set is meant to evoke the backstage area of the Alvin Theatre on Broadway, where the show opened on November 16, 1981, and closed on November 28, after forty-four previews and only sixteen performances. Merrily is very much insider theater, and the set makes that plain, with rows and rows of props, from masks and lamps to cameras and bottles, that reach up to the ceiling, while Paloma Young’s costumes are hung up at floor level, allowing the actors to make quick changes as necessary.

A Fiasco tradition, the cast members who are not involved in the action often sit on the side, watching the proceedings with the audience. The orchestrations and new arrangements by Alexander Gemignani — whose father, Paul Gemignani, was the music director for the show’s brief Broadway tenure — are rather basic and standard; songs such as “Old Friends,” “Not a Day Goes By,” “It’s a Hit,” and “Our Time” need much more nuance and oomph, especially since the vocal chops of the cast are inconsistent. Director Noah Brody (Into the Woods, Measure for Measure) can’t quite get it all to flow together, merrily or not. “Why can’t it be like it was? / I liked it the way that it was,” Mary sings early on. But looking back — and going into the past — is not always the best answer, in real life or in fiction.

BERNHARDT/HAMLET

Janet McTeer stars as Sarah Bernhardt in new play by Theresa Rebeck (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 18, $59-$159
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

When turn-of-the-twentieth-century theater superstar Sarah Bernhardt played the Melancholy Dane in Hamlet at the Adelphi in London, actress and writer Elizabeth Robins wrote in her December 1900 review: “Madame Bernhardt’s assumption of masculinity is so cleverly carried out that one loses sight of Hamlet in one’s admiration for the tour de force of the actress. This is not to say that she gives us a man, but rather Sarah Bernhardt playing, with amazing skill, a spirited boy; doing it with an impetuosity, a youthfulness, almost childish.” Much the same can be said of Tony-winning actress Janet McTeer, who plays Bernhardt playing Hamlet in Theresa Rebeck’s uneven though often exciting Bernhardt/Hamlet, a celebration not only of Bernhardt but of the collaborative process of theater. The Roundabout production, continuing at the American Airlines Theatre through November 18, is set in 1897 Paris, where Bernhardt has decided to play the male part and is rehearsing with Constant Coquelin (Dylan Baker), François (Triney Sandoval), Raoul (Aaron Costa Ganis), and Lysette (Brittany Bradford). Bernhardt’s lover, the married Edmond Rostand (Jason Butler Harner), is not fond of her decision. “You want to be a man,” he tells her. “I do not want to be a man,” she replies. “You crave a man’s power,” he accuses her. “No man has more power than I do,” she says. “Shakespeare does,” he retorts. But she has the last word, proclaiming, “I will not go back to playing flowers for you fools. Not because I am too old. But because I was never a flower, and no matter how much you loved how beautifully I might play the ingenue, it was always beneath me. It is beneath all women.”

Edmond Rostand (Jason Butler Harner) watches Constant Coquelin (Dylan Baker) perform in Bernhardt/Hamlet at the American Airlines Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Bernhardt demands that Rostand rewrite Hamlet specifically for her, but soon he is working on another play, Cyrano de Bergerac, which also gets her juices flowing. The same cannot be said for Rostand’s rightly jealous wife, Rosamond (Ito Aghayere); Bernhardt’s teenage son, Maurice (Nick Westrate); and acerbic critic Louis (Tony Carlin), wielding his poisoned pen with undeserved power. Meanwhile, Czech artist Alphonse Mucha (Matthew Saldivar) hovers around, creating the poster for the controversial show; in Shakespeare’s time, men might have played all the parts, but in the late Victorian/Edwardian era, a woman portraying the title character in the Bard’s greatest work is practically theater — and gender — treason. “And now we come to your tragedy,” Edmond says to Sarah, who responds, “I am not a tragic figure.” Edmond explains, “You are Sarah Bernhardt. But Sarah Bernhardt is a woman. And people do not want to see a woman play Hamlet.” To which Sarah argues, “I do not play him as a woman! I play him as myself.”

Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel (Present Laughter, Hand to God), Bernhardt/Hamlet works best when it sticks to its title, when McTeer plays Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet. A lot of the rest is detritus that only gets in the way. McTeer (Mary Stuart, God of Carnage) is a joy to watch as her character, complete with crazy hairstyle, questions Hamlet’s motives as well as Shakespeare’s, romping around Beowulf Borrit’s handsome sets, which include an outdoor Paris café, the Adelphi stage, and Bernhardt’s elegant dressing room. Rebeck’s (Seminar, Downstairs) plot meanders; it feels like she tries to squeeze too much in and doesn’t trust that the audience will get the shock factor of Bernhardt’s ambition, especially in this modern era in which so much casting is gender (and race) blind. For example, in 2016, McTeer starred as Petruchio in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew at the Delacorte. But then McTeer proclaims, “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I! / Is it not monstrous that this player here, / But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, / Could force his soul,” and all is right again.