#240331 - MARCH in Review, Part 2.
Brian Eugenio Herrera's #TheatreClique Newsletter for March 31, 2024
WELCOME to #TheatreClique — my irregular newsletter dedicated to encouraging you to click out to some of the most interesting, intriguing & noteworthy writing about drama, theatre & performance (at least, so says me)…
This Week's #TheatreCliquery:
This installment of #TheatreClique brings my latest installment in my current experiment in theatre commentary. But to begin, I lift one of my favorite two unexpected duets of the past week…
In Review : MARCH 2024, Part 2.
Capturing brief “capsule” commentaries on my recent theatregoing, with click-worthy links to others writing about the same shows or theatremakers.
THE SEVEN YEAR DISAPPEAR
Written by Jordan Seavey. Directed by Scott Ellis. • Off-Broadway (NYC) • Signature Theatre Center: Alice Griffith Jewel Box Theatre • March 2024
A tricky contraption of a play that defies ready summary, but here's my go: Naphthali is the adult child of Miriam, a legendary big80s performance artist known for processing her life through her work. At the moment she is to commence a major new commission, Miriam disappears, without word and without a trace, for seven years — an act that sends Napthali into a deeply self-destructive spiral that is part quarter-life crisis and part collapse of the self. But the play is hardly so straightforward in its telling. Rather, in Scott Ellis's production, Jordan Seavey's script becomes a slick, slippery, scary puzzle-box of an almost noir-ish mystery play — set within the gleaming white box of the art world — that stages the trauma of familial estrangement undergirding the experience of coming to maturity as a millennial gay man. The crucial theatrical conceit of this play/production is that there are two actors and 10-12 characters, with Taylor Trensch playing Naphthali and Cynthia Nixon playing Miriam and, consequentially, everyone else. Because the actor playing Miriam is also the actor playing everyone else, the presence/voice of Miriam haunts (or overdetermines or overlays) Napthali's every interaction — which is I think, ultimately, kinda the whole point of the play. The questions that drive Napthali — who is my father? do I matter to anyone? am I a prop in the performance that is my mother’s life? — are unanswerable by anyone but Miriam and so Miriam haunts his every encounter and interaction, even though she's not there. I’m also of the mind that this play is deeply and profoundly embedded in the question of what does it mean to come of age as a millennial gay man — born amidst the the trauma of the Reagan/AIDS era, entering your teens in the Will&Grace-era when AIDS is still scary but no longer necessarily a death sentence, arriving to young adulthood in the Obama era alongside Prep and gay marriage, and landing in your 30s amidst a roiling political/economic instability and new modes of gender/sexual fluidity. This history surrounds Napthali's internal mess of questions which both chart Napthali’s propulsive self-destruction and find “answers” in a remarkable final scene that also underscores how the traumas that attend our birth and early childhood may never be fully known by us or spoken to us but do inevitably haunt, propel and shape the people we are to become. A fascinating, rich, deep, disturbing, unruly play — somehow both over- and under-served by this production — that ultimately offered many more rewards than I might have anticipated.
see also…
Exeunt’s Lane Williamson captures the vivid complexity of The Seven Year Disappear;
The Queer Review’s founder James Kleinmann details the “much that is to relish” of The Seven Year Disappear.
ILLINOISE
Music by Sufjan Stevens. Book by Jackie Sibblies Drury and Justin Peck. Directed and Choreographed by Justin Peck. • Off-Broadway (NYC) • Park Avenue Armory for the Arts • March 2024
An utterly enthralling work of music theatre that uses the theatrical potency of the musical voice (and nary a spoken word) to propel a loose constellation of stories by and from young people who are drawn to a campfire to share about ancestors, grief, fear, history, and hope. The Sufjan Stevens music is gloriously liquid as it creates a soulful, sensual surround for the movement of the dance-driven story. There is a minor narrative through-line as Henry (a marvelous Ricky Ubeda) leaves his beloved Douglas (Ahmad Simmons) to follow an undeniable call to join the campfire. Once arrived to the campfire, Henry remains a reluctant storyteller, deferring to four others telling their stories — of ancestors, admirable and loathsome and terrifying, that in different ways double as stories of the fears that attend aspiration. Finally, Henry tells his story — about the transcendent joys and devastating traumas of first love and first loss — revealing how his grief has been so churned with his guilt that he's unable to live forward in the light of the loves open to him, both at the campfire and with Douglas. The show’s arc tracks Henry's capacity to tell his story, within the community of the campfire and with Douglas as a witness. I'm not sure I ever fully connected emotionally, and it took me a minute to hook into it narratively, but bathing in the swell of the music was enough to keep me fully and contentedly engaged. As an aside, I'm struck by the use of three vocalists here to sing the narrative underscoring, within songs that are only obliquely telling the story of the show. Here I'm reminded not only of the Fates in Hadestown and the Urchins in Little Shop, but also the triplings in Fun Home, The Cher Show, and The Notebook, so I am left contemplating the ways that the constellation of three voices is becoming a musical theatre thing, especially as a way to allow the music to carry a depth of feeling that exceeds narrative time. A dazzling, absorbing piece, featuring astonishingly skilled and abidingly warm dancers and incredible music.
see also…
at The New Yorker, Zach Helfand briefly profiles the collaborative dynamic between Illinoise director/choreographer Justin Peck and librettist Jackie Sibblies-Drury;
at them, freelancer Abby Monteil details how Illinoise “captures the queerness of Sufjan Stevens’ landmark album.”
SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE
Music & lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by James Lapine. Directed and Choreographed by Eamon Foley. • Regional (Deal, NJ) • Axelrod Performing Arts Center • March 2024
Director/choreographer Eamon Foley (PU’15) reimagines this now canonical musical in startlingly effective ways. Foley's crucial move is to strip the physical set down to five rolling ladders, each with a fixed bench in front (and some additional modular pieces in Act2); Foley’s staging thereby relies on the bodies of the performers and the lighting design (by Paul Miller) to convey the shift in location, mood, and scenario. Perhaps more conspicuously though, Foley also adds a ballet ensemble, mostly to theatricalize the movement in George's brain. The ballet dancers dance "on pointe" in a coy conspicuous reference to the pointillism of Seurat's paintings; each is clad only in a single-hued full-body leotard, thereby embodying one or another color in movement. This simple addition often proves remarkably effective. The dancer's movement on pointe follows the "bum-bum-bums" in Sondheim's music/lyrics to physicalize George’s brush touching canvas, while their more full-bodied movements convey the swing of his brush as it angles toward and away from the canvas. Most essentially though, the ballet corps also animates the (often chaotic) abstract activity and motion, filling George's brain. The use of the ballet corps to manifest the abstract busyness of George's brain is a deft gesture on Foley's part that continues to yield reward as the show continues. As examples, in the dog song, the puppet dog is first animated by a member of the singing ensemble but — as George dips deeper into his painter-brain to get inside the dog — a dancer moves in to maneuver the puppet; and, perhaps most profoundly, in the second act, the dancers are sculpturally posed almost as statues, onstage but inactive, each wearing the same grey blazer as George2, and they are active only when George2 deploys them as his placeholding surrogates in “Putting It Together” — until his artistic imagination is reactivated on his trip to Paris. This use of the dancing ensemble to "stage" the interior activity of George's artistic (and probably neurodivergent) brain proves to be quite powerful, in that it allows us "in" to George's experience, always reminding us why George is so distracted. He works from life (ie. Dot the model) but he also works from the flurry of thoughts in his head (ie. the dancers). And as abstract as the conceit might seem, somehow it fortifies the most viscerally moving staging of Sunday in the Park I have yet to encounter. (I don't know that I've ever exited a production of this musical and seen so many people with tear-dampened faces.) The emotional impact of this staging participates in the evolving interpretation (thanks, Sarna Lapine!) of understanding Sunday in the Park as being mostly "about" Dot, not George. Here, Dot/Marie is played with winningly accessible verve by Talia Suskauer, bringing her Elphabian belt and contemporary wit to the character with great warmth. And Graham Phillips carries the role of George with an easy charisma, perhaps benefitting from the ballet corps as an extension of his character (in that he is not forced to convey his chaotic mental state with the kind of brutal, abrasive insensitivity so often seen in the role). With the singing and dance ensemble in place, Foley’s Sunday becomes almost a two-hander, a portrait of a grand love in which Dot understood more about art and life and legacy than George ever did, thereby allowing the time-transcendent reconciliation of the final moment to be at once a family reunion and an unloosening of the artistic spirit. This is not to say that the production is perfect (no production ever is) but rather to underscore the fact that this staging offers as a powerful "proof of concept" for Foley's big idea — one that could (and possibly should) have a life beyond a three-weekend run at a JCC on the Jersey Shore...
see also…
Call Time’s Katie Birenboim hosts a roundtable chat with her collaborators Eamon Foley and Talia Suskauer about staging Sunday at Axelrod;
Out in Jersey’s Allen Neuner captures how the Axelrod Sunday’s “creative redesign of the original is worth seeing, no matter how familiar one might be with the story.”
THE WICKED STAGE: SONGS ABOUT SHOW BUSINESS
Curated and hosted by Christine Pedi. Musical direction by Michael Lavine. Featuring performances with and by John Bolton, Marilyn Maye, Zal Owen, and Lee Roy Reams • Cabaret • 54Below: REMOTE • March 2024.
About a decade or so ago, I discovered that you could listen to SiriusXM beyond the confines of your car and so I began including the SiriusXM Broadway channel in the rotation of the music I would play as I traipsed through my day. Along the way, I discovered that I really liked the company of my new office-mate Christine Pedi (aka the host of SiriusXM On Broadway’s daytime block of programming). Aside from being a formidable vocalist and a deft comedian, Christine Pedi’s main shtik-in-trade is as her generation's pre-eminent musical theatre vocal impressionist. If the boomers had Marilyn Michaels (and the millennials have Christina Bianco), we GenXers can claim Christine Pedi. And listening to Christine Pedi talk about her career has nudged me to learn more about two inveterate genres of NYC performance that I'd previously only paid glancing attention to: parody musicals (ala Forbidden Broadway, in which Pedi appeared many times over the years) and cabaret (where Pedi has become a revered presence). Over the years, I've become a fond fan of Pedi, so much so that I feel like I'm supporting a friend when I buy a ticket to one or another of her shows. So when I realized I had an open evening at home, I figured why not zoom into 54Below's remote broadcast of Christine's latest show, featuring songs about show business. I hadn't fully understood that Christine would be mostly hosting but it was a pleasant, fun, diverting evening. Highlights included: Broadway vet Lee Roy Reems telling an amazing Ruby Keeler story before singing "I Only Have Eyes" for you; accompanist Michael Lavine leading a sing-a-long of the chorus of "There's No Business Like Show Business" while filling in the verses entirely with lyrics scrapped by Irving Berlin; cabaret fixture John Bolton singing a fascinating audition song "Call Me Back" from the obscure musical Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen; and witnessing the 95yo legend Marilyn Maye do a three-song cycle. There's a reason Marilyn Maye is a legend and, even via livestream, her formidable skill, charisma, and dexterity as a musical performer was palpable. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, my favorite songs of the night were two by Christine Pedi: "I Love a Film Cliche" from A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine, which perfectly showcased Pedi's gift for accents, character voices, and comic timing; and a breathtaking alternate-lyric version of "We Got Trouble" by none other than Joe Keenan, which swapped "River City" for "Regional Theatre" and riffed on the idiosyncrasies, absurdities, and solipsisms of doing "classical theatre" on tour... All told, it was a fun and diverting bit of musical theatre frippery. (As it happened, later in the evening, I happened to tune into the latest Skivvies show — streaming freely on the Joe's Pub YouTube channel — which offered a very similar but very downtown hit of the same cabaret sauce.)
see also…
at TDF, independent writer/editor Allison Considine profiles how Christine Pedi’s experience with low vision has shaped her work;
at The New York Times, writer/performer Melissa Errico profiles Marilyn Maye on the occasion of her 95th birthday.
THE NOTEBOOK
Music & lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson. Book by Bekah Brunstetter. Directed by Michael Greif and Schele Williams. • Broadway (NYC) • Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre • March 2024.
A vivid, emotional, and theatrically adventurous retelling of the now familiar Nicholas Sparks story of a lifelong love between Allie and Noah, two folks from the opposite sides of the tracks who nevertheless find their way to each other. With the exception of the social/medical obstacles that recurrently pop up to keep Allie and Noah apart, The Notebook is — in a way — a story without conflict but, perhaps because the musical is such an effective "affect machine" (h/t Bradley Rogers), this adaptation sustains an investment in seeing Allie and Noah find their way to each other. The two reasons I prioritized seeing The Notebook amongst the many new musical's jockeying for attention right now are the casting conceit and Maryann Plunkett. To start with Maryann Plunkett: I find Plunkett to be one of the most reliably interesting stage actors and marvel at how her acute attention to her character's inner life and her deft use of her extraordinary voice somehow makes her characters feel effortlessly alive, even though she rarely endeavors much to transform her voice or physicality to the role. I am always fascinated that Plunkett has a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical (for Me and My Girl in 1987), a role she took on shortly after her turn as a replacement Dot in the original Broadway production of Sunday in the Park with George. Plunkett hasn't done a musical on Broadway since so I was fascinated to see her in this and — truly — she anchors the emotional clarity of the piece with extraordinary nuance and verve. Watching Plunkett in the role was maybe the best part of the show for me, along with the deliciously layered vocal arrangements by composer Ingrid Michaelson and co-orchestrator Carmel Dean. Now on to the casting conceit: in a bold bit of theatrical experimentation, the creators of The Notebook adapted the 3-actors/1-role device used to great effect in Tina, The Cher Show, and Fun Home but also doubled it. Here, Noah and Allie are portrayed by three pairs of actors representing the pivotal moments when their love was almost forced apart. But even though these actors play the same characters at different stages of life, the actors do not necessarily share racial or ethnic identities with each other. Instead, simple staging gestures, behavior details, and costume elements confirm clear continuity between the each actor’s characterization of the shared role, as do spoken/sung references to “their” own experiences as those experiences are enacted by another performing body. This “double/triple casting” convention for the principals is counterbalanced by thematic doubling amongst the ensemble (as but one example, the actor playing Allie's nurse also plays her mother, who both are mostly telling Allie what not to do.) Yet even with all the constant doubling, I never got the sense that the audience around me had any difficulty whatsoever following, accepting, or embracing the story told onstage. Instead, I heard laughs where there were supposed to be laughs, gasps where there might should be gasps, and lots of sniffling tears throughout. (That said, I would have loved to eavesdrop on the chartered bus of Jersey housewives — alongside whom I entered the theatre — as they discussed the casting on their ride home.) All of which is to say: The Notebook stands a deftly crafted piece of musical theatre that has the bones to carry it toward a long and successful run on Broadway, on the road, and in the repertoire. We'll see if that happens.
see also…
at Broadway.com, writer/editor Darryn King considers the “quietly bold racial diversity of The Notebook on Broadway”;
also at Broadway.com, veteran entertainment journalist Kathy Henderson talks to Maryann Plunkett about her career and her work in The Notebook.
TEETH
Book by Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs, with lyrics by Jackson and music by Jacobs. Choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly. Directed by Sarah Benson. • Off Broadway • Playwrights Horizon (mainstage), New York City • March 2024.
It's been four weeks since I first saw this wild, raunchy, terrifying, hugely entertaining jolt of a musical. In that time I understand that the production has tweaked the ending, had nearly a full week of performances canceled due to non-Covid related illness, and opened to mixed-but-generally-admiring reviews. So I was thrilled to have the opportunity/occasion to return, if only to measure my initial smacked-upside-the-head response against my perhaps more prepped experience on a second pass. And to put it plainly: I think I loved it even more the second time around. The storytelling felt more muscular and precise, especially with regard to tracking just how deeply unhinged the stepfather/pastor actually is (I think there may have been some simple tweaks to the costuming to convey this). The performances were definitely more confident all around and, though I would not have been able to tease out what was different about the ending, I can only affirm that the clarity of the culminating battle between the two protagonists (Dawn & Brad) was vivid, as was the ominousness and dread of the ending. It was also just wild to also encounter this musical with a largely "GenZ musical superfan" audience, who collectively met each narrative turn (and every teeth clamp) with enormously audible reactions. Indeed, I think my favorite aspect of this encounter was feeling the palpable shift in the audience's mood in the show's very final moments. Folks were hooting and snapping their fingers celebrating the rise of the "feminocracy" only to have that celebratory fervor confronted by the stark ambivalence of the show's actual ending, wherein one heirarchical fundamentalist ideology appears to simply supplant the other's dominance and match its dehumanizing cruelty. All told, a formidable, artful, affecting, and challenging work of musical theatre that really teases at whether and how "the musical" can activate ambivalence and critique.
see also…
at 3Views, playwright Victoria Provost considers how Teeth “gorily and resplendently speaks to my shame” as a person living with vaginismus;
The New York Times’s Rachel Sherman talks to actor/intimacy coordinator Crista Marie Jackson about creating Teeth’s “gory sex scenes.”