El Ultimo Sueño de Frida y Diego

 

B-

Having greatly enjoyed the two most recent new productions of the Met season, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Innocence,  I was hoping for a trifecta with this New York premiere. Alas, it was not to be. While I admire the ambition of composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz, the result of their efforts is a mixed bag. The overstuffed production by director/choreographer Deborah Colker is partly to blame. The libretto is almost a mirror of the Orpheus story. Instead of Diego going to the Underworld to bring Frida back, Frida returns from the Underworld on the Day of the Dead to bring Diego back. That’s the plot in a nutshell, except that it is padded by a totally unrelated subplot about a Garbo impersonator who wants to bring joy to a devoted fan with a visit from her. There are also philosophical meditations on art and life that don’t easily lend themselves to dramatization. The libretto does little to flesh out the two main characters. Isabel Leonard and Carlos Alvarez are credible in the title roles, but Leonard’s voice often did not project well over the orchestra. Most notable vocally and dramatically was Gabriella Reyes, as Catrina, Keeper of the Dead. Nils Wanderer was fine as Leonardo, the Garbo impersonator. I’m sure Jon Bausor’s cluttered sets have many allegorical meanings that I missed. The costumes, by Bausor and Wilberth Gonzalez, are a riot of color. Colker’s staging often crams the excellent large Met chorus onstage either to move around aimlessly or just stand there. Dancers occasionally reflect or emphasize the narrative. Finally, there’s the score, ably conducted by Yannick Nezet-Seguin. It provides a lush sonic carpet to support the voices but has virtually no highs or lows. There were no arias with a clear ending that provided opportunity for applause. All in all, it was a disappointment. Running time: two hours 25 minutes including one intermission.

Indian Princesses

B

This gentle seriocomedy now at Atlantic Theater Company in a coproduction with Rattlestick Theater is named for an actual YMCA program founded in 1954 whose purpose was to foster the bond between fathers and their young daughters through outdoor activities and crafts. As sensitivity to cultural appropriation increased, all Native American references were removed and it was renamed Adventure Princesses, under which name it still operates today. In the present play, we meet five members of a small new “tribe” in a midwestern city and the men in their lives. The time is specified as the recession of 2008, which actually is not that relevant to the story. The religiose Glen (the always excellent Frank Wood) is the tribe’s founder and his hapless granddaughter Samantha (Haley Wong) is its first member. Chris (Greg Keller, also an actor I am always glad to see), a lawyer from New York, has brought his two stepdaughters Lily (Annisa Marie Griego) and Hazel (Serenity Mariana), who actually have some Native-American blood. Mac (Pete Simpson), a construction worker who is mourning the recent death of his wife, has reluctantly enrolled his shy daughter Andi (Rebecca Jimenez), who, at 12, is the oldest of the group. Wayne (Ben Beckley), an out-of-work techie, is adoptive father to Maisey (Lark White), who is black. In decreasing order of importance, the story intertwines the relationships among the girls, between them and their father figures, and among the men. Moments of pathos occasionally punctuate moments of humor. The acting is all top-notch and the themes touched upon, including overzealous attempts to protect daughters from the real world, parental failure to be attentive, racism, the beauty and difficulty of friendships and the fear of new ideas are worthy of our attention. Almost all the characters created by playwright Eliana Theologides Rodriguez are vividly written and portrayed. The production values are high – the set design by Emmie Finckel captures the look of an all-purpose room at a Y and the costumes by Sarafina Bush sync well with the characters – and the direction by Miranda Cornell is assured. It’s a perfectly respectable effort which the audience received warmly, but somehow it never fully engaged me. Perhaps if I were either a father or a daughter I would have appreciated it more. Running time: one hour 50 minutes; no intermission.

Well, I'll Let You Go

B-

This 21st-century midwestern Our Town wannabe by first-time playwright Bubba Weiler has arrived off Broadway after a Brooklyn production at the Space at Irondale, where it received a Critic’s Pick designation from the New York Times and an enthusiastic review in the Wall Street Journal.  I therefore arrived at Studio Seaview with high expectations that I soon regretted. I might have had a more positive response had I approached it cold. Maggie (the always watchable Quincy Tyler Bernstine) is a recent widow whose husband Marv died under murky circumstances in which he may or may not have been a hero. The uncertainty freezes Maggie in her grief, preventing her from even planning a funeral, because she no longer feels confident that she knew him well enough to decide whether he even deserves one. The play consists of seven scenes during which one of the other seven actors shares the stage with Maggie. A la Wilder, there is a narrator (Matthew Maher) who sets the scene and fills in information about the characters. The other characters are Wally (Will Dagger), Marv’s extremely dependent cousin; Joanie (Constance Schulman), a ditsy funeral director; Julie (Amelia Workman), Maggie’s longtime friend and Marv’s brother’s wife; Jeff (Danny McCarthy), Marv’s brother; Angela (Emily Davis), a woman from Maggie’s past that she has forgotten; and Ashley (Cricket Brown), Angela’s daughter. Each scene builds on the previous one, adding a bit of information to explain the circumstances of Marv’s death. There are a few satisfying red herrings along the way. The plot is interesting and well thought out. What frustrated me was that the play was good enough that I wished it had been better. Strangely, the play opens with the two weakest and least essential scenes so it took me a long time to become invested in the story. After what I thought was a natural place to end, there were two more scenes that I wasn’t sure added to the whole. I wish that a play doctor had been engaged to tighten the play up because at almost two hours I was getting restless (especially on the theater’s uncomfortable seats). Another problem was the casting of the important role of narrator; the present actor, the only one new to his role, flubbed several lines and had a distracting lisp. The comic tone of the scene with the funeral director seemed at odds with the rest of the play. Frank J. Oliva’s set is bare bones, with folding chairs and table and props rolled in as needed. For the final scene, the set undergoes a transformation that is a direct steal from David Cromer’s Our Town; the payoff is much less here. Avery Reed’s costumes are apt. Director Jack Serio’s pace during the first few scenes is so slack that it is difficult to build interest. All that being said, I am not sorry I saw the play. I just wish it had been polished further before it reached the stage. Running time: One hour, 50 minutes without intermission.
 

 

Cable Street

A

Every Spring 59E59 Theaters hosts a series of productions imported from the UK. To kick off the current season, they have chosen this ambitious musical about an event little known outside the UK, the Battle of Cable Street in early October 1936. Cable Street is a side street in the East End of London which was largely populated by Jews and Irish. The Jews were mostly tailors and the Irish worked on the docks, where the Jews could not get jobs. The residents were just scraping by during the Depression, beset by rent increases and threats of eviction. Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), planned a provocative march through East End to intimidate its residents. When they appealed to the government to cancel the march, the government not only refused but sent police to protect the BUF marchers. The British Communists, busy recruiting for the Freedom Brigade in Spain, were initially reluctant to help but were persuaded that it was also important to fight Fascism at home. And so, when the Fascists arrived in the East End, protected by police, they met barricades that forced them to use some of the side streets including Cable Street, where they were met by a coalition of Communists, Jews and Irish. Chaos ensued. While this might not seem a likely subject for a musical, Tim Gilvin (music & lyrics, orchestrations & vocal arrangements) and Alex Kanefsky (book) have created a work that is consistently engrossing, entertaining and even educational. The clever framing device of a present-day tour guide (Jez Unwin) taking people through the East End and, to provide comic relief, repeatedly encountering a Jack the Ripper tour group, leads us to the story. The tour members shed their coats and become the neighborhood residents of 1936. The story focuses on three families – one Jewish, one Irish and one British. The Sheinberg family has two sons, Sammy (Isaac Gryn) and Moishe (Ethan Pascal Peters), the former a hotheaded boxer who lies about his name to get a job operating a press and the latter a devout scholar. The Kennys have an open-minded daughter Mairead (Aoife MacNamara, u/s for Lizzy-Rose Esin Kelly), who works in a Jewish bakery. Ron Williams (Barney Wilkinson) is a Brit from the North who has been driven by the closure of the mills to move to London with his alcoholic mother Edie (Preeya Kalidas) to find work. The book concentrates on Sammy, Mairead and Ron, but there are many other characters who are played by the other fine actors (Max Alexander-Taylor, Debbie Chazen, Michael Dantes, Natalie Elisha-Welsh, Romona Lewis-Malley and Annie Majin) who assume multiple roles irrespective of gender or race. They are all excellent, but I especially enjoyed MacNamara, Wilkinson and Unwin, who manages to be convincing as the tour guide, the devout Jewish father and the head Fascist thug. The music is a mix of Irish folk, Jewish liturgical, British music hall, rock and roll and rap and runs the gamut from ballad to anthem. The lively choreography by Jevan Howard-Jones adds much to the production. The costumes by Lu Herbert befit their characters well. The minimalist set by Yoav Segal consists mainly of a well-worn wooden counter, a few tables and several chairs that are moved around constantly to create different settings. Director Adam Lenson keeps things moving at a brisk, almost relentless, pace. At one point in the play, father Sheinberg says that the Jews will never be fully accepted as British and should keep a low profile. On a day when two Jews were stabbed in London, I have to wonder if he was right. Running time: two hours 30 minutes, including intermission.

Innocence

A

Apparently lightning can strike twice in the same place. Following the enormous success of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay earlier this season, the Metropolitan Opera now has a second brilliantly adventurous new work on its stage, Simon Stone’s production of Kaija Saariaho’s final opera, Innocence. Opera is not usually a place I look to for social relevance, but this opera’s topic is one we hear about practically every week – a school shooting. While that may not seem like a promising topic for an opera, Saariaho and her excellent librettists, Sofi Oksanen and Aleksi Barriere, prove otherwise. A student at an international school in Finland kills ten classmates and a teacher. Ten years later a young man (Miles Mykkanen) is getting married to a Romanian orphan (Jacquelyn Stucker) he met on holiday. We soon learn that the young man is the shooter’s brother and the waitress (Joyce DoDonato) called in as a last-minute substitute to serve at the wedding is the mother of Marketa (Vilma Jää), one of his victim’s. The groom’s parents (Rod Gilfry and Kathleen Kim) give the initial appearance of having been able to move forward with their lives, but they really haven’t; nor have the families of the victims, nor the survivors, nor the teacher (Lucy Shelton) and the priest (Stephen Milling) who overlooked warning signals. Even one of the victims appears from beyond the grave and begs to be released from her mother’s grief. The opera’s title is ironic, because no one connected to the incident, including some of the victims, is blameless. Will the waitress tell the bride about her brother-in-law’s crime? What facts about the crime has classmate Iris (Julie Hega) kept hidden? Can anyone put the shooting far enough behind them to have a reasonably normal life? The music, conducted by Susanna Mälkki, serves the story beautifully, from providing an ominous undercurrent for the large part of the libretto that is spoken to the outbursts of emotion in the arias. Among the strong singers, it’s hard to single anyone out, but Stucker, Jäa, Shelton and Hega made an especially strong impression. As the libretto skillfully intertwines the various strands, the remarkable set by Chloe Lamford rotates in synch, revealing a catering hall, a classroom, a kitchen, a supply closet, a school cafeteria, a lavatory and other locations. (It works so well that I forgive her for the ugly set of the current Broadway production of Death of a Salesman.) The costumes by Mel Page fit each character well and the lighting by James Farncombe is excellent. The five acts are performed without intermission in one hour 45 minutes. I highly recommend it, but unfortunately only two more performances remain. 

The Balusters

 

B+

Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire and Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) have a long, fruitful history together, going back to Fuddy Meers in 1999. Other plays by him that were produced at MTC include Kimberly Akimbo (not the musical), Wonder of the World, Rabbit Hole, Good People and Ripcord. Marylouise Burke, the perky, petite actress with a unique voice who has come to be regarded as his muse, has been featured in five of them, including the present comedy of manners, The Balusters. In case you do not know what a baluster is, Merriam-Webster tells us that “a baluster is a vertical, often curved or vase-shaped pillar that supports a handrail on a stairway, porch or balcony, collectively forming a balustrade." To the nine members of the Vernon Point Homeowners Association, who are tasked to preserve the landmarked status of their urban enclave, allowing a neighbor to remodel a porch with historically inaccurate balusters would be the first step on the road to hell. The long-time president of the association is Elliot Emerson (Richard Thomas), the local realtor and unofficial gatekeeper of the neighborhood, who has consistently bullied the other members to get his way. The vice-president is Melissa Han (Jeena Yi), who as an East Asian and a lesbian, scores double points for diversity. The ditsy secretary is Penny Buell (Burke), who continually confuses Melissa for another Melissa, who is Pakistani, much to her chagrin. Willow Gibbons (Kayli Carter), whose partner is trans, is the group’s political correctness enforcer. Isaac Rosario (Ricardo Chavira) is a successful contractor who may or may not exploit his workmen. Brooks Duncan (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) is a partnered gay travel writer who keeps forgetting to close his back gate. Ruth Ackerman (Margaret Colin) is flamboyant and needs lots of attention. Alan Kirby (Michael Esper) is a feckless private school teacher who rarely gets things right. Kyra Marshall (Annika Noni Rose) is the newest member, in whose beautifully restored home the monthly meeting is set. She is determined to make a good impression and recover from a previous foray into board membership that ended badly. Lastly, we meet Luz Baccay (Maria-Christina Oliveras), Kyra’s housekeeper, who recently stopped working for Elliot. Kyra wants to have a stop sign installed on her corner where there have been a few crashes and near misses. Elliot is opposed for aesthetic reasons. We witness meetings of the entire group as well as smaller groupings. There are lots of laughs, mostly at the foibles of the members. Larger issues, such as racism, classism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, DEI and preservation vs. progress are lightly touched upon rather than addressed. It seemed like a cross between the recent Eureka Day which was funnier and The Minutes which was nastier. The acting is uniformly strong. Derek McLane’s classically balanced set is elegant. Emilio Sosa’s costumes are apt. The lighting by Allen Lee Hughes does neat tricks between scenes. Director Kenny Leon let things sag occasionally. At just under two hours without an intermission, it might benefit from a slight trim. If you want to see ten talented actors go after each other amusingly while poking gentle fun at our societal shortcomings, you will enjoy yourself. If you are looking for something with more bite, you might not. Before leaving you, I must confess that I am a victim of the John-Boy effect: It is extremely difficult for me to picture Richard Thomas either as an old man or as a villain.

 

Fallen Angels

B-

This early play by Noel Coward, now in previews at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre, is definitely one of his minor works. When it first played Broadway in 1927, it only ran for 36 performances. It has more slapstick and less wit than I associate with Coward. Nevertheless, it provides three juicy roles for actresses and can be featherweight fun at its best moments. Julia Sterroll (Kelli O’Hara) and Jane Banbury (Rose Byrne) are friends since childhood who now live with their respective husbands of several years Fred (Aasif Mandvi) and Willy (Christopher Fitzgerald) on different floors of the same building. The Sterrolls have a new maid, Saunders (Tracee Chimo), who is a voluble expert on any topic that arises. The heat of passion has long since been extinguished in their marriages. On the morning that their husbands are leaving for a weekend golf trip, the two wives each receive a postcard from Maurice Duclos (Mark Consuelos), a Frenchman with whom each had an affair before her marriage, announcing that he is arriving in London imminently. After an initial urge to flee to avoid testing their unresolved feelings for him, they change their minds and decide to face him and see what happens. They dress for dinner and jump at each phone call, hoping it will be from him. The humor at the center of the play is entirely based on the effects of drunkenness, which I find a low form of humor. After many cocktails and too much champagne, the two wives get very drunk and let all their rivalries and grievances come out. Mayhem ensues. When Maurice finally arrives, it is almost anticlimactic. The women get the better deal here. O’Hara and Byrne both turn out to be experts at pratfalls and other physical comedy. In the first scene, I had trouble understanding Byrne, who speaks very rapidly. Chimo is a delightful scene stealer. As the husbands, Mandvi and Fitzgerald don’t really have much to do except to act smug and entitled. Consuelos still shows traces of the red hot lover of their dreams. David Rockwell’s set design is an Art Deco knockout. Jeff Mahshie’s gowns are gorgeous. Director Scott Ellis shows an affinity for the material. Taken as sheer fluff, the play somewhat succeeds. The audience seemed to be loving it. If there’s any message, I suppose it’s that men shouldn’t take their wives for granted. Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission.