a repeat visit, but with an entirely new cast. I'm delighted to report that I loved the replacement cast as much as the original (including Jordan Fisher, making his debut performance in the role, and absolutely breaking hearts with his open, honest face). Philip Boykin's bass voice is so perfectly suited for Hades, and the strength of his lower register alone is worth the price of admission. Solea Pfeiffer brings a more honest edge to Eurydice than I'd seen before, and I love it. And Lilias White and Betty Who both have charisma and presence to spare. Several years into its run, Hadestown hasn't lost any of its vitality.
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| Betty Who and Phillip Boykin as Persephone and Hades. Photo by Matthew Murphy. |
11/21/23: Purlie Victorious
What: The Broadway revival of Ossie Davis's play (perhaps slightly better known for its musical adaptation, Purlie), about the Jim Crow south, and Purlie Victorious's efforts to liberate his sharecropping family, claim a withheld inheritance, and rebuild his church.
And? I knew very little about this play going in, but I loved every moment of it. It's outrageously funny, but somehow always in a well-grounded way: none of these people are cartoons, even if the situations they get into seem outlandish. I did keep thinking how, in lesser hands than director Kenny Leon and this top-notch cast, that Ossie Davis's clever and well-crafted script could have veered easily into caricature, but it never does. Leslie Odom, Jr., is all charisma and smooth fast-talking plans, Kara Young is adorably awkward, and Billy Eugene Jones's vocal and facial agility make him completely captivating to watch every moment he's onstage. Jay O. Sanders, who's always excellent, even manages to make a human out of the monster Ol' Cap'n (one we can't wait to see the destruction of). Derek McLane's scenic design is smoothly agile and achieves a fantastic final transformation that I don't want to spoil here.
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| Jay O. Sanders, Billy Eugene Jones, Kara Young, and Leslie Odom, Jr. as Ol' Cap'n Cotchipee, Gitlow Judson, Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, and Purlie Victorious Judson. Photo by Marc J. Franklin. |
11/22/23: Arcadia
What: Bedlam presents one of my favorite Stoppard plays, a temporal-shifting exploration of hearts, numbers, and the unknowable knowns of life.
And? The good news is, Arcadia is still a tremendous play. I've seen some online reactions saying this isn't Arcadia and while I won't go that far, I don't think director Eric Tucker is demonstrating a real understanding of either the play's themes or its carefully crafted structure. Stoppard has long been a master of matching form to content and in this play he stirs the jam into the rice pudding (per Thomasina's analysis that leads to her preliminary understanding of the heat death of the universe), with very specific timing. When Tucker disrupts that timing fairly early on, it seems a deliberate misunderstanding of how the scenes are structured. And then of course there's the physical structure: a frozen room with a long work table, with a landscape just beyond view whose changing appearance is the focus of characters in both timelines. Not so much several small desks being shuffled around and a full audience and cast reshuffle during the intermission (if this was a demonstration of the jam stirring into the pudding, I might allow it, but they're still dividing actors from audience). Meanwhile, while a number of the cast members demonstrate a good understanding of their characters in a vacuum, there's also a profound misunderstanding of a number of relationships (that I want to blame Tucker for more than anyone else). Hannah is too smart to be ever taken in by Bernard, and to have her entertain the idea of a fling with him weakens her.
Still, at the end of the day, they're not obstructing the text of the play more than this, and judging by the reactions of the audience members directly next to me who didn't know the play, it's still good enough to tell the story with enough clarity.
What: The Shed presents Stephen Sondheim's final musical, in collaboration with David Ives: an adaptation of two Buñuel films, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel.
And? What they've said is true: you can hear when he ran out of time and music. Act two starts with some music sequences that gradually fade out, and all that's left is dialog. I could even wager what moments would have been musicalized if he'd been a young man with unlimited time. The odd thing, though, about the music that is there--through all of act one and part of act two--is how much it feels like a long mirror looking back at his whole career. Or, to put it a meaner way: if you fed his scores to an AI and asked it to write a Sondheim score, it might sound a little something like this. This progressive chord is Into the Woods; that pattered warning about the end of the world is the Mizner brothers in Road Show. This interval is from Passion, that melody riff is for sure from "The Blob" in Merrily. I'd always thought that what was impressive about Sondheim scores is that the music fit the story and the moment; that the shows didn't sound like each other. Here We Are is contemporary, it's absurdist, it's definitely about New York, and maybe all of that together leads to that melting pot America likes to brag about so much: as it is so many cultures blending (or not) and bouncing off each other, maybe it is also all of Sondheim's various moves and musical tricks that come together here.
So I don't necessarily know what I think about that yet. The show itself is a strange story and not fully my cup of tea, but at the same time I appreciate how different it is in story and style from Sondheim's other collaborations. The ensemble cast is terrific, top to bottom, especially Micaela Diamond and Rachel Bay Jones as sisters Fritz and Marianne. And there was no way I wasn't going to see Sondheim's final musical.
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| Micaela Diamond, Amber Gray, Steven Pasquale, Bobby Cannavale, Rachel Bay Jones, and Jeremy Shamos as Fritz, Claudia, Raffael, Leo, Marianne, and Paul. Photo by Emilio Madrid. |
11/24/23: Kimberly Akimbo
a repeat visit. still fantastic
11/25/23: Scene Partners
What: Vineyard Theatre presents a new play by John J. Caswell, Jr., about a woman in her 70s, newly widowed, who travels to Hollywood to become a movie star.
And? This was super weird and I'm not really sure what to say about it.
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| Dianne Wiest and Josh Hamilton. Photo by Carol Rosegg. |
11/25/23: All the Devils are Here
What: The New York transfer of Patrick Page's one-person tribute to Shakespeare's villains.
And? Sort of a repeat visit, as I watched this online when he did it in 2021 with Shakespeare Theatre Company. The writing of it isn't always the most interesting (though the way he interprets and interacts with Shakespeare, as evident in the talkback after our performance, is highly engaging), but his performance is strong.
What: CSC presents a revisal of the Jerome Weidman-Harold Rome musical (revisions by Weidman's son John), about an unscrupulous young man trying to climb the ranks in the garment district in 1937 New York.
And? Usually when the main character is such a completely remorseless sociopath, there's at least something engaging about the writing to carry us through it (Iago, Richard III, J. Pierpont Finch). Here, the writing wasn't enough to elevate it to something I enjoyed watching, even if it was nice to see the Jewish representation. Good performers, great staging by Trip Cullman, and I'm curious how much this script differs from the original. Edit with update: a friend of mine sent me a detailed list of revisions, which actually tells a fairly different story, but I still get the sense this show isn't for me.
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| Rebecca Naomi Jones, center, with Sarah Steele, Greg Hildreth, Santino Fontana, Judy Kuhn, and Adam Chanler-Berat as Ruthie Rivkin, Blanche Bushkin, Teddy Asch, Harry Bogen, Mrs. Bogen, and Meyer Bushkin. Photo by Julieta Cervantes. |
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