Tag Archives: Hubert Point-Du Jour

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK

Kenny Leon moves Much Ado About Nothing to modern-day Atlanta in Shakespeare in the Park adaptation (photo by Joan Marcus)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Tuesday – Sunday through June 22, free, 8:00
shakespeareinthepark.org

Danielle Brooks gives a powerhouse comedic performance as Beatrice in Kenny Leon’s jaunty, rollicking adaptation of William Shakespeare’s ever-charming romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing, which opened Tuesday night at the Public’s open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where it continues through June 22. Leon has moved the proceedings to modern-day Atlanta, complete with cell phones, contemporary music, and an impressive car that pulls up at the back of Beowulf Boritt’s welcoming set — the large, grassy courtyard and four-story estate belonging to Gov. Leonato (Chuck Cooper), boasting a pair of red, white, and blue political banners declaring, “Abrams 2020,” referring to former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (who recently was in the audience). The show opens with Beatrice singing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” soon joined by Leonato’s daughter, Hero (Margaret Odette), and her ladies-in-waiting, Ursula (Tiffany Denise Hobbs) and Margaret (Olivia Washington), singing “America the Beautiful,” a stark contrast highlighting the polarized state of our nation as the songs overlap. Following a brief protest march with signs condemning hate, the dapper Don Pedro (Billy Eugene Jones) arrives with his contingent after a military victory, including his close friend Count Claudio (Jeremie Harris), his guitar-strumming attendant, Balthasar (Daniel Croix Henderson), and the don’s brother, the bastard Don John (Hubert Point-Du Jour).

Beatrice (Danielle Brooks) gossips with her besties in Much Ado About Nothing in Central Park (photo by Joan Marcus)

Claudio immediately falls for Hero while Beatrice, Leonato’s niece, and Benedick (Grantham Coleman), a lord who fought alongside Don Pedro, throw sharp barbs at each other, neither in the market for a spouse. (The first time Beatrice says his name, she emphasizes the last syllable.) But Don John, who is no Don Juan, has decided that since he is miserable, no one else is to be happy, so he calls upon his henchmen, Borachio (Jaime Lincoln Smith) and Conrade (Khiry Walker), to stir up trouble and cast would-be lovers against one another. “I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace,” Don Pedro says. “Though I cannot be said to be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I am a plain-dealing villain. I am trusted with a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog; therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me.” Mistaken identity, misunderstandings, a masquerade ball, spying, lying, and private letters all come into play in one of the Bard’s most beloved comedies.

Tony nominee Brooks (The Color Purple, Orange Is the New Black) is phenomenal as Beatrice, taking full advantage of her size, her vocal talents, and her expert timing. She moves and grooves across the stage, reciting her lines with an easygoing, conversational flow and rhythm, an innate sense of humor, and a magical command of the language that breathes new life into the Bard’s words. “I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he killed? For indeed I promised to eat all of his killing,” she proclaims early on. It’s all Coleman (Buzzer) can do to not get swept up in the hurricane that is Brooks; on the rainy night I went, he even took a hard spill on the wet ground, wiping out on his back but getting up quickly, able to joke about the nasty fall. (It reminded me of a special moment I saw in the previous Shakespeare in the Park production of the play five years ago, when John Glover, as Leonato, pulled off an unforgettable, far less dangerous maneuver after a storm.)

Beatrice (Danielle Brooks) and Benedick (Grantham Coleman) explore a love-hate relationship in Bard romantic comedy (photo by Joan Marcus)

Tony winner and longtime Atlanta resident Leon (American Son, A Raisin in the Sun) has the women take charge in this version, the men relegated to the back seat in the all-person-of-color cast. He even has a woman, Lateefah Holder, portray Constable Dogberry, although her shtick becomes too repetitive (but is very funny at first). Among the males, the always dependable Cooper (Choir Boy, The Piano Lesson) stands out, steady and forthright, while Odette (The Convent, Sign Me) is a sweetly innocent Hero. The fresh choreography is by Camille A. Brown, with snappy costumes by Emilio Sosa and original music by Jason Michael Webb. But at the center of it all is Brooks, who is in full command as a Beatrice for the ages.

(In addition to waiting on line at the Delacorte and the Public to get free tickets, you can also enter the daily virtual ticketing lottery online here. The play is almost never canceled because of bad weather, so going on a rainy day is a great idea, as a lot of seats become available due to no-shows.)

TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS

Tiny Beautiful Things brings to life Cheryl Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” advice column (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Public Theater, Newman Theater
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 10, $75
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org

Writer and star Nia Vardalos and director Thomas Kail’s adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s beloved Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar has moved from the Public Theater’s tiny Shiva Theater to the Newman, where more tears will flow through December 10. Conceived by Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Company), Kail (Hamilton, Dry Powder), and journalist Marshall Heyman, Tiny Beautiful Things brings to life many of the “Dear Sugar” advice columns Strayed wrote anonymously, answering readers’ questions about life and love by sharing many of her own deeply personal tales, getting to the bottom of “when you are simultaneously happy and sad and angry and grateful and accepting and appalled and every other possible emotion, all smashed together and amplified.” The show takes place in Sugar’s (Vardalos) cramped home, where set designer Rachel Hauck has removed the walls between rooms, as if knocking down psychological barriers. Sugar primarily sits at her kitchen table typing away on her laptop, reading and answering questions posed by a trio of actors, Teddy Cañez, Hubert Point-Du Jour, and Natalie Woolams-Torres, who wander through the rooms almost like ghosts, their funny, strange, and sometimes heart-wrenching stories awakening parts of Sugar’s past, helping her face her own problems.

Nia Vardalos wrote and stars in Tiny Beautiful Things at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

Fans of Strayed’s (Wild) column and books come to the show with a strong connection to the material and react accordingly, with knowing nods, laughter, and sobs. Those not familiar with Strayed and not particularly keen on advice columns are likely to find the show rather syrupy. Despite fine performances all around and stellar direction by Kail, Tiny Beautiful Things is overly long and repetitive even at a mere eighty-five minutes. Sugar might be wearing a CBGB T-shirt and her laptop bears the sticker “Question Authority,” but there is hardly anything radical or cutting edge about the play. It accomplishes what it set out to do, using inventive staging to delve into the kinds of life issues that many of us face, but how involved you get in it all depends on how cathartic advice columns make you feel.

SOJOURNERS / HER PORTMANTEAU

Abasiama Ufot (Jenny Jules) puts her hand to her heart as she brings together her two daughters, Adiagha Ufot (Chinasa Ogbuagu) and Iniabasi Ekpeyoung (Adepero Oduye), in Her Portmanteau (photo by Joan Marcus)

New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 11, $69
www.nytw.org

New York Theatre Workshop’s presentation of two works from Mfoniso Udofia’s ambitious nine-part Ufot Family Inner Cycle, continuing through June 11, consists of a pair of works of surprisingly different quality, one strong and intimate, the other earnest and distant. At the beginning of the beautiful Her Portmanteau, a circular portion of the center of the stage revolves like a luggage carousel at an airport, with various items and suitcases passing by several times. Each one represents an unseen person, traveling to a destination or returning from a trip; a collection of four sharp red valises of different sizes represents a family. Thirty-six-year-old Iniabasi Ekpeyoung (Adepero Oduye) enters, looking for her suitcase, grabbing an old red one all by itself. Clearly upset, she uses a pay phone to make a call, speaking an African language. She is soon approached by thirty-year-old Adiagha Ufot (Chinasa Ogbuagu), who has come to pick her up because her mother, Abasiama Ufot (Jenny Jules), is late, having GPS problems. “My ZipCar’s parked right outside. We can . . . I’m here to take you back with me . . . to my apartment in Inwood. . . . I mean on the island . . . I don’t know how to explain. . . . My apartment in the city,” Adiagha says, unclear if Iniabasi understands what she’s saying. Instead, Iniabasi remains nearly silent and reluctantly accompanies Adiagha. She is still unsettled after going up the five flights to Adiagha’s apartment, where they are joined by Abasiama. Iniabasi eventually starts talking, but she’s not pleased with the situation. “I come here and find a woman who very suddenly, strangely has a completely different face from the pictures I have and who can’t even speak her real language. Yawping at me in English! What am I to think,” she says. Adiagha, meanwhile, declares, “We are so happy. I wish you could see my insides. Joy! . . . Joy!” It is soon revealed that Abasiama gave birth to both of the women, but by different men. While Iniabasi remained in Lagos with her father, Adiagha and Abasiama immigrated to Massachusetts.

Jenny Jules stars as Abasiama Ufot in both Sojourners and Her Portmanteau(photo by Joan Marcus)

Jenny Jules stars as Abasiama Ufot in Her Portmanteau (photo by Joan Marcus)

Over the course of 105 minutes, they tell stories about their life, both good and bad, sharing anecdotes from the old days, when they were together, including Adiagha’s visit to Nigeria as a child, filling in the details of what has happened to them during the past several decades. But it’s not all friendly; Iniabasi feels as deprived as ever, and she lets her mother and half sister know it as they try to reconnect and become a family again. Her Portmanteau features terrific performances by Jules, Ogbuagu, and Oduye, who wonderfully capture the realistic twists and turns as the characters feel one another out and search for their place in this new arrangement. Udofia (The Grove, runboybun) and director Ed Sylvanus Iskandar (These Seven Sicknesses, The Golden Dragon) are in no rush to reach any conclusions, letting things develop naturally on Jason Sherwood’s homey set, above which an angled rectangular ceiling ominously hovers, serving as a window to the outside world, a mirror of themselves, or an ever-present psychological weight.

Ukpong Ekpeyoung (Hubert Point-Du Jour) teases his pregnant wife, Abasiama Ufot (Ogbuagu), in Mfoniso Udofia’s Sojourners (photo by Joan Marcus)

Her Portmanteau is being performed in repertory with Sojourners, an Ufot family play that takes place thirty years earlier, in 1978, when Abasiama (Ogbuagu) is in Texas, eight months pregnant, in an arranged marriage to Ukpong Ekpeyoung (Hubert Point-Du Jour), her energetic, charming, but untrustworthy husband who disappears for days at a time. Ukpong is jobless and supposedly studying economics, but he spends most of his time listening to American R&B, dreaming of making a new life in the United States, while Abasiama is diligently studying biology and working the night shift in a tiny booth at a gas station, where she meets fast-talking troubled young prostitute Moxie Wilis (Lakisha Michelle May). The rotating stage also introduces us to Disciple Ufot (Chinaza Uche), a religious man who sits in front of a typewriter, exploring the causes and effects of Nigerian immigration. As Abasiama approaches her due date, the characters intertwine, accepting certain responsibilities while giving up on others. Also directed by Iskandar, Sojourners lacks the charm and immediacy of Her Portmanteau. It’s too long at more than two and a half hours, and the characters and their situations feels more standard and predictable. The narrative is also far too choppy, bouncing around from scene to scene without a smooth flow. Even the soundtrack is less interesting, with overly familiar American songs. However, despite the disappointing Sojourners, we’re very much looking forward to the next chapter in this family drama. You can see the two shows on different nights or back-to-back on weekends, in either order, as each fills in critical information about the other. In addition, NYTW has teamed with Eat Offbeat to provide between-show meals for twenty dollars, which need to be reserved in advance.

SENSE OF AN ENDING

A journalist (Joshua David Robinson) seeks the truth about a horrific massacre from Sister Justina (Heather Alicia Simms) in SENSE OF AN ENDING (photo by Carol Rosegg)

59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Through September 6, $18
www.59e59.org

Ken Urban paints a searing, intimate portrait of the Rwandan genocide and the concept of forgiveness in the gripping and powerful Sense of an Ending. It’s Easter weekend in 1999, and two Hutu nuns, the younger Sister Alice (Dana Marie Ingraham) and the older Sister Justina (Heather Alicia Simms), sit in a Kigali prison waiting to be tried in a Belgian court for crimes against humanity. Attempting to resurrect his career after a plagiarism scandal, New York Times journalist Charles (Joshua David Robinson) arrives to do a story on the nuns, initially determined to prove their innocence, unable to believe that the two religious women could have taken part in a horrific massacre at their church. But as Charles speaks with the nuns, a Rwandan Patriotic Front corporal named Paul (Hubert Point-Du Jour), and Dusabi (Danyon Davis), a bitter Tutsi who claims to have survived the brutal, cold-blooded murders, he learns more than he bargained for. “There isn’t a famine, war zone, atrocity I haven’t seen,” Charles tells Paul, who responds, “You’ve never seen anything like what’s behind this door,” referring to the entrance of the church, which hovers over the play like a doorway to hell.

An RPF corporal (Hubert Point-Du Jour) watches over two nuns and a journalist in play about Rwandan genocide (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Winner of the L. Arnold Weissberger Playwriting Award for Best New American Play, Sense of an Ending takes place in a tiny black-box theater where the audience sits in two rows on three sides of the stage, which contains three benches. Scene changes are indicated by small shifts in sound and lighting, although some of the sound effects are hard to make out; at one point, background noise sounded like it could have been coming from one of the other theaters at 59E59. Director Adam Fitzgerald (Methtacular!, Urban’s The Awake) maintains a tense, threatening undercurrent throughout the play’s ninety minutes, although Urban (The Happy Sad, The Correspondent) ties it all up a little too neatly in the end. The acting is uniformly strong, led by a particularly moving performance by Point-Du Jour (A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes, The Model Apartment) as Paul, a straightforward Tutsi soldier who shows unexpected depth. At its heart, Sense of an Ending, which debuted at London’s Theatre503 in May with a different director and cast, is about truth, forgiveness, and faith, reminiscent of Nicholas Wright’s A Human Being Died That Night, which ran at BAM this past spring and examined the case of South African mass murderer Eugene de Kock. “All I want is the truth,” Charles says to Dusabi, who replies, “You have come to the wrong place, my friend, if you are looking for truth.” Sense of an Ending continues through September 6; the September 3 show will be followed by the talk-back “Moving Forward: Rwanda and Its Citizens, Post-Genocide” with Jesse Hawkes, executive director of Global Youth Connect, and Rwandan genocide survivor and human rights activist Jacqueline Murekatete.

A FABLE

Luke (Gordon Joseph Weiss) and Angela (Samantha Soule) strike a deal in David Van Asselt’s very adult fairy tale (photo by Paula Court)

Cherry Lane Mainstage Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 28, $66
212-989-2020
www.rattlestick.org
www.cherrylanetheatre.org

On the way out of A Fable, Rattlestick artistic director and cofounder David Van Asselt’s very adult fairy tale running at the Cherry Lane, my companion could barely even look at me, muttering, “The less said about this the better.” A Fable is a bewildering fiasco, an antiwar romance complete with the pre-advertised “extreme acts of violence including rape, gunshots, stabbing, and poisoning” as well as a touch of perplexing burlesque. Director Daniel Talbott (Scarcity, Slipping) and the cast seem lost as the fractured narrative attempts to mix Homer, Sophocles, and Shakespeare with the Brothers Grimm in a kitchen-sink approach that even includes a few mind-numbing songs by Liz Swados (Runaways, Trilogy). The story involves a soldier named Jonny (Hubert Point-Du Jour) whose army unit has raped and beaten a young woman named Chandra (Dawn-Lyen Gardner), along with her mother (Liza Fernandez) and father (Alok Tewari), and left them for dead. Of course, Jonny instantly falls for Chandra. Soon Jonny is off on a downward-spiraling journey trying to reunite his true love with her father, each scene more baffling than the previous one. Meanwhile, the proceedings are sort of being manipulated by Angela the angel (Samantha Soule) and Luke the devil (Gordon Joseph Weiss). It’s impossible to tell if this multigenre exercise is supposed to be camp, serious, tongue-in-cheek, or all three, resulting in a confounding mess that digs an early hole it can’t get out of. Indeed, the less said the better, and we’ve already said too much.