Weekly Margin 2025, W13: Maybe Happy Ending, Love Life, Nye, The Half-God of Rainfall

3/25/25: Maybe Happy Ending

a repeat visit

3/27/25: Love Life

What: City Center Encores! presents the 1948 Kurt Weill/Alan Jay Lerner musical about an unhappy couple whose children cause them to look back on their relationship to see where it went wrong--with each time we visit them being a different point in America's history, even though the four family members do not age, spanning from 1791 to 1948, when the show itself premiered. Does that sound weird? It kind of is, but it's easy enough to follow in the moment.

And?  This is a classic example of how valuable the Encores! series is: a show that is not often revived (in this case, there isn't even a surviving cast album), presented with full orchestra and high-caliber talent, to give new voice to the score. And often with this sort of thing, we can see why that show isn't often revived. Though this production ran for a year, it's rather unfocused in its concept (though perhaps with a stronger director than we have here, that focus would be more precise: there's a clear framing lens of vaudeville acts around this archetypal nuclear family, though I missed the consistent flavor that would have made that clear enough that the Pippin-esque finale didn't feel so far out of left field.

The family themselves don't really become people I invest in, but I think this show must have hit very very differently in 1948. My dad writes about the mythologizing of America in musicals like Oklahoma!, The Music Man, and Guys and Dolls. He also writes about the marriage trope, wherein the central couple's union represents the cohesion of community as a whole. This musical is a prime candidate for both those lenses--a look back at America's history through the frame of this family, but even more so, the nation's precarious state of maintaining unity in the wake of the Second World War, which had ended only three years previously (I wonder now why there wasn't a chapter in the show that took place during the Civil War, but then we probably know the answer to that one). America was very divided over this war--whether to enter the fray or not (not even touching on how many supported Hitler's campaign), and then the devastating outcome of our use of nuclear force. Is this the sort of thing a nation can survive and still feel united? Though the musical itself doesn't address any wars (the closest it gets to commentary of any sort are Susan's campaign for the right to vote, and a scene set during the Prohibition Era), it is meant to present the couple with the same degree of uncertainty. Indeed, their final moment is the two of them carefully reaching across a tightrope to each other, trying to hold their balance and hopefully hold each other as well. It's not just the future of their family--it's the future of our nation's soul.

So I can see what's interesting about this show, conceptually (and it must have been something with its original Michael Kidd choreo!) without having particularly gotten a lot emotionally out of the Encores! staging. That being said, the music is lush (even if Alan Jay Lerner is outed here as recycling a lyric and song concept from this show later for Gigi), and my god, the voices. Brian Stokes Mitchell, always a powerful voice, infuses everything he does with such warmth and joy (even back in 2020 when he stood at his open window every night to sing "The Impossible Dream" to anyone walking by) that you can't help but love him. Kate Baldwin matches him for warmth and powerful vocals. And then the ensemble! Stunning voices and harmonies throughout, in a score that really does make a point to feature many of its players. John Edwards, as both the Hobo and the M.C., has an extraordinary baritone and it's a treat to hear him sing.

Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell as Susan Cooper and Sam Cooper,
with the ensemble. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Streaming Theater-Related Content I Watched

• National Theatre at Home's Nye.
• Wilma Theater's The Half-God of Rainfall.

Weekly Margin 2025, W12: Operation Mincemeat, BOOP!, Fog and Filthy Air

 3/18/25: Operation Mincemeat

What: The Broadway transfer of the West End hit, a tongue-in-cheek musical adaption of the real-life British mission of deception in World War II.

And? Y'all, this show is a goddamn delight. The five actors--three of whom also cowrote the piece--have perfected the timing of their physical comedy to help make this sharp, hilarious, and without falter. Jak Malone, who won an Olivier for this production, is a particular standout in his various roles, and manages to break everyone's heart with a six-minute song sung in total stillness--that's when you know the audience is hooked. Ben Stones, responsible for the set and costume design that help facilitate the countless quick character changes and space shifts, is a magician with his designs full of trap door surprises and delights that keep us gasping and laughing. This one's a real treat.

Claire Marie Hall, Zoe Roberts, David Cummings, and Natasha Hodgson.
Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

3/19/25: BOOP! The Musical

What: A new splashy musical about Betty Boop who, tired of her life in the spotlight, escapes to the real world to discover they love her just as much. Sort of Enchanted/Barbie vibes, but with Betty Boop.

And? This show knows who its audience is, and is catering to it like mad: tourists in town looking for a brightly colored, dance-filled, feel-good musical. I found myself questioning if I've missed the immense popularity of a cartoon I vaguely remember from childhood. More than that, though, I was often disappointed by what I felt were missed opportunities by the designers. When we're first introduced to Betty Boop's world, of cartoonish grey-scale, it's delightful and imaginative, and a balanced use of projections and practicals. But I desperately want more contrast once we journey to the real world. In those scenes, the use of projections feels lazy, like they just didn't feel like building real things. But the whole point that keeps getting hammered in is that this is real, everything here is real, so why can't the design reflect that? Form and content, baby! That being said, the costume design is pretty great (and has a beautiful reveal at the top of the second act), and the lighting design does wonders to balance the look and feel of the characters when we're seeing both worlds at once onstage: bathing the real world in warmth while washing out the cartoon world. Even the vocals were tailored to this contrast, as we heard the more legit singing of Betty's film colleagues contrasted with the hard-belt (and no vibrato) of her real-world love interest. I also think they could shave off a half hour on this show if they cut Faith Prince's character (I love her, but she's wasted here and not plot-essential). But the performers in general are great: good voices and good stylized delivery in particular from Jasmine Amy Rogers as Betty, and Stephen DeRosa as Grampy.

Stephen DeRosa, Jasmine Amy Rogers, and Phillip Huber as Grampy, Betty
Boop, and Pudgy. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

Margin Notes: Fog and Filthy Air

Fog and Filthy Air

Seen on: Thursday, 3/20/25.

Robert Homeyer as Father. Photo by Peter Welch.

Plot and Background

Theater For the New City presents Tom Diriwachter's new play, inspired by true events, about Tim, a playwright working as a waiter in a restaurant, who travels by bus to Memphis in the middle of the night to rescue his parents, staying in a purgatorial motel and unable to drive themselves home.

What I Knew Beforehand

That it was about a family in crisis.

Thoughts:

Play: It's hard, with plays based on real events, to decide how faithful you must stay to reality, and when you are allowed to take liberties. This play ultimately feels like its intent is an apology and a tribute to Tim's (playwright Tom Diriwachter's stand-in) parents, flawed as they are. In the play itself he is frustrated with them, frustrated with their inability to take his writing seriously or to communicate with him frankly. But when Tim himself is offstage the audience sees the deep love his parents have for each other, the way his mother protects her husband from the creeping frailty of his own faculties. The play then is Tom/Tim apologizing for not seeing that at the time, but recognizing it now, decades later. However, beyond that, I don't know what the play itself is actually about. Its focus drifts, as well as its conviction as to whether what we're even seeing is real or not. The poster image includes a line from the show invoking "the Devil's eyes" haunting the father as he drove; the characters repeatedly refer to the motel room as Hell (though to me it reads more as a purgatory, with a very Godot/Dumb Waiter energy of wondering if the characters can actually leave), and I wonder if the playwright hoped for the play to leave the literal into some bizarre otherspace where perhaps all three characters are dead and the story is about them accepting that truth. But maybe it really is just about a father having a nervous breakdown, and his wife and adult son gently helping him collect himself enough to go home.

Long I Stand

This weekend I took a walk in a forest blanketed with pale crepe-paper leaves. And I thought of the Robert Frost poem. People tend to focus on the moral of it: "I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference." But that's an ending, a look back. That's the writer's purview, of course. But what's always stuck with me was the opening pause: 

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

Long I stood. It's the pause, the wonder. That phrase has haunted me for years; I kept trying to write a meditative story on the paralysis of choice, with that phrase as its title. Choice doesn't have to paralyze, but we don't need to rush the choice either. We can take a pause, take a breath, knowing we are only one traveler. Long we can stand, before we choose our next path. I grew up in a small town but I'm a city girl. As an introvert, the only way I can keep loving the city is to leave it every now and again. To visit the other path. It's not an either-or, though. It's both. We need both. It's the contrast that makes it matter, like how music has to be about change--otherwise it's just noise.

This weekend I practiced Shinrin Yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing, to let the sound and the feel, the smell and the taste of the forest wash over you. To take your path slowly and with intention.

I've been thinking about what March means. It's a month of transition, of shucking winter off, of stomping through the mud until we reach a warm rebirth. It's also a time of griefs, many griefs. It was March 2000 when we found out the cancer had returned, even after a bone marrow transplant. It was March 2020 when my city shut down, when writers who had shaped my world began dying around us. It was March 2021 when we grieved a year of isolation and loss. March 2023 had myriad griefs for me. March 2024 had the grief of watching people I thought were friends lionize men who celebrated the destruction of my people, my family. March 2024 was when I finally began the conversation of starting on antidepressants, when the griefs were too numerous to hold. March is also my birthday month.

The day before I left for my weekend away, I saw Redwood, a new musical about a woman who, unable to process her grief for her son, flees New York City for the California Redwoods. That too put grief in my head this weekend, as I stared at my own little forest in Massachusetts.

This weekend I had a hot stone massage on my birthday. The music playing under was a piano piece that was sometimes lively and tripping, sometimes desperate, sometimes quiet and ponderous, like water slipping easily over stones (I've always associated piano pieces with the movement of water). This music felt like grief to me, but not the dirgeful trudge of it, the weighted drowning over it. More the ways our minds and bodies try to cope with its heaviness. Movement, distraction, and the chosen moments when we look it in the face before turning away again.

And I thought that it's been five years of grief, March after March after March after March after March of it, slipping through and slipping by and trying to choose our moments of looking it in the face before we turn away again.

March is a good month for it.

This weekend I talked to a tarot reader about my burnout. I talked to an acupuncturist about my anxiety. I talked to a yellow wood about the best way to use my voice.

Most of my online "activism" takes place on one of the few platforms I'm still on (Facebook), and--I don't think it's helping. Maybe it is, maybe there are people quietly reading but not replying, quieting reading and taking strength in knowing they're not alone. Maybe there are people who know I'm not a monster and therefore if I've been advocating so staunchly on what is clearly an unpopular side for Left-leaners, there might be something worth interrogating. I don't know.

But it doesn't feel like I'm helping most of the time. I haven't seen additional people take up the call as a result of anything I post. The primary engagement I get lately is from gentile men who think they understand antisemitism better than I, a Jewish woman, or who think they understand the Middle East better than I, a woman who's had family in Israel since before I was born and who has been paying attention since I was five and saw a picture of my cousin napping in the bomb shelter, his face obscured by a gas mask. It's exhausting every time one of these men sea lions in, not even to engage with me, but to engage with a straw version of me, imputing thoughts I don't have to me, words I haven't said to me. These people who haven't engaged with me in a meaningful way in a decade, either in person or online, but I'm one of the few people posting about this, so they're going to spend their anger on me.

This weekend I turned forty. Life is short, and getting shorter with every passing year. I have one life to live, and I'm standing here in this yellow wood deciding how I want to live it. I'm probably going to be posting less, we'll see. But I'm no longer going to engage with these angry men who don't actually want to have a conversation with me. They don't get to poison my days anymore. Life is short, and they're not entitled to another second of mine.

If you do want to have a conversation with me, if you have questions, I am here for that. I am here for you. It's never too late to say that there are things we've misunderstood, that we've been taken in by one of the world's most powerful propaganda machines, activating a centuries-old latent bias. It's not too late. I have always believed in our ability to change. I've seen it firsthand. But if you want that conversation with me, you have to start it, and you have to start it in good faith, with an interest in listening, with questions. Not with attacks, not with assumptions.

But please know that this is a big energy drain to me each time it happens. This isn't an academic exercise or a hunt for a dopamine hit. This is my family, my life, my blood. This is real and deeply personal to me.

This weekend I sat quietly with myself. This weekend I stood long in a yellow wood.

I hope it's made a difference.

Moon rise in Lenox, Massachusetts. Photo by Zelda Knapp.

Weekly Margin 2025, W11: We Had a World, Redwood

3/11/25: We Had a World

What: MTC presents the world premiere of Joshua Harmon's memory play about the complicated dynamics among himself, his mother, and his alcoholic grandmother.

And? Memory plays really can be a crap shoot, but this one is exquisite. It dives into the complexities not only of unreliable narrators, but the unreliability of memory itself, including the stories we tell ourselves to explain what's happened to us. It's bolstered by a profoundly powerful cast of only three (and in fact the night I went, we were treated to understudy Courtney Balan playing Jeanine Serralles's role of Ellen, and you'd never know she doesn't play it every night. The heartbreak and strength she brings to every moment, the lived-in relationships she has with characters both on- and off-stage, it's all there and rich and wonderful and awful. Similarly, Andrew Barth Feldman and Joanna Gleason as Joshua and Renee both just seem like people living and interacting on stage, not performing characters.

This is all the more remarkable for how presentational the frame of this production is. Pre-show, the furniture is draped in tarps with City Center stamped on them, as a crew member slowly prepares the space for performance. The furniture used does not match the descriptions given by the characters but seem instead to be leftovers from other productions, rehearsal hall stand-ins. And then Barth, clad in only his underwear, nods to the crew member to cue the light change that starts the play. As the piece progresses the three characters argue about which parts of the story need to be told, and when, and why. Three people, three truths. They talk to us, and to each other, about the story they're telling, even as we see the exposed bones of their storytelling tools, reminding us all this is still a play, by a playwright and about a playwright, with a family who is watching him write this new play in front of and about them. Perfectly directed by Trip Cullman, with a brilliant scenic design by John Lee Beatty (the transformation! I adored it): a gem of a production.

Jeanine Serralles, Andrew Barth Feldman, and Joanna Gleason as Ellen,
Joshua, and Renee. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.

3/13/25: Redwood

What: A new musical by Tina Landau and Kate Diaz about a woman who, unable to process the death of her son a year ago, abandons her wife in New York to drive to the redwoods of California.

And? This one is getting mixed responses, from what I can tell. It's fine, but the songs have too much same-ness to them, especially when sung by Idina Menzel: her belt is tremendous but it seems to be the only flavor she has. I wanted more variety of vocal texture to help track her emotional journey through the show. I will say, this was the finest work I've seen from Michael Park in the supporting role of Finn. And the Jewish representation was nice, too. The scenic/projection design by Jason Ardizzone-West and Hana S. Kim, respectively, while stunningly detailed from my mezzanine seat, has even more towering majesty from the angle in the orchestra.

Khaila Wilcoxon and Idina Menzel as Becca and Jesse. Photo by Matthew
Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.