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New York Times
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Lowcountry' Review: A Flat-Footed First Date
There's exposition, and then there's a high-debit download like in the opening scene of 'Lowcountry,' at Atlantic Theater Company. David (Babak Tafti) is making dinner, changing into clean clothes, neatening things up around his down-at-the-heels studio apartment. All the while he is on the phone with Paul (Keith Kupferer). David is on speaker, so we hear both sides, which allows the playwright Abby Rosebrock to deliver — more or less smoothly — heaps of background information. It also lets the audience seize on the production's gist: unafraid of melodramatic turns, heavy-handed, often logic-defying. David, we learn, once had to wear an ankle monitor, is involved in a custody battle, is a sex pest and works as a line cook at a Waffle House — a Bojangles takeout bag is another hint that we're in the South. (The scenic designer Arnulfo Maldonado and the costume designer Sarah Laux do what they can to evoke a guy with more problems than dollars.) On the other end of the line, Paul is David's sponsor in a recovery program, and his purported concern and care barely hide a whiff of bossy paternalism. With only a disembodied voice, Kupferer, who was superb last year in the acclaimed film 'Ghostlight,' injects a vaguely unsettling dimension to his character's good ol' boy — or rather good ol' grandpa — persona. You can almost picture Paul, pacing by his pool on a phone, dispensing support that smells strongly of controlling judgment. Then again, he knows David better than we do. And the younger man, who's preparing for a first date with a woman he met on Tinder, is, indeed, lying to Paul: He's not actually going on a picnic — she's coming to his place for dinner. That Tally (Jodi Balfour, from the series 'Ted Lasso' and 'For All Mankind') is willing to meet a stranger at his home rather than in a neutral spot is one of several mysteries bobbing about in her wake. She looks comfortable in her own skin but also leans heavily on self-deprecating jokes that suggest fault lines. She appears forthright, but many of her answers to David's getting-to-know-you questions are vague, which of course makes them more tantalizing. Tally shares that she was into self-help to deal with the aftermath of 'Garden-variety sex stuff and workplace stuff, workplace abuse wage-theft poverty blah blah blah …' Then she coolly informs David that Bill Clinton killed her mother. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘A Freeky Introduction' Review: Pleasure Principles
In 'A Freeky Introduction,' the writer-creator, NSangou Njikam plays a quasi-deity, M.C., holy hedonist named Freeky Dee. He is a poet delivering sybaritic couplets above the thrum of R&B tunes. He is a missionary preaching the gospel of freakdom: 'All of us are aftershocks of the Divine orgasm.' (The Big Bang, Freeky argues, was an explosive one.) The result is a sort of hip-hop hallelujah — a work of interactive theater that's funny and familiar in its embrace of Black culture, yet flattened at times by a lack of specificity. Freeky Dee is also a storyteller. He opens the show, now at Atlantic Stage 2 in Manhattan, with the tale of an eagle destined to fly, but born into a nest of bullying buzzards — a not-so-subtle allegory about one species that must resist the self-appointed superiority of another. Accompanied by DJ Monday Blue onstage, Freeky Dee is the sole performer who acts out these scenes, including his pursuit of a fine lady named Liberty ('French, with a splash of Africa' and wearing 'a crown that looked like sun rays coming out her forehead' — you get it). Njikam, who wrote and starred in the lively and semi-autobiographical 'Syncing Ink,' is a fan of salacious reinterpretations. Under Dennis A. Allen II's well-paced direction for this Atlantic Theater Company production, he delivers them with the charisma of a folkloric trickster. DJ Monday Blue's sounds and samples lend a rock-steady groove — a feast of R&B and hip-hop staples. Whenever Freeky Dee sets up for a spoken-word set, the standing bass and sax lines of 'Brother to the Night,' from the movie 'Love Jones,' ring out. It's a knowing wink — sonic choices that affirm Black cultural memory as its own special canon. Audience participation also becomes a form of communion for Njikam and Blue. At times, we're ordered to recite an affirmation-laden 'Mirror Song' or do kegel exercises in our seats. The show is always edging the sacred up against the sexual, which set designer Jason Ardizzone-West reinforces, adorning square columns with divine contradiction: half evoke West and North African etchings of figures kneeling in spiritual offering; while the other lean into smut — peach and eggplant emojis, thirst drops, figures on their knees for a different purpose. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Times
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Marie and Rosetta review — a tribute to the godmother of rock'n'roll
If talent alone were all that mattered, everyone would be familiar with the name of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the raucous gospel singer and guitarist who laid the groundwork for rock'n'roll long before anyone thought of putting Elvis Presley in a recording studio. George Brant's play, first staged by the Atlantic Theater Company in New York in 2016 and now receiving its UK premiere at the Rose Theatre in London, creaks in places, but Monique Touko's production — a collaboration with Chichester Festival Theatre and English Touring Theatre — is lifted by incandescent vocals from the R'n'B singer Beverley Knight. As in that curious bio-musical The Drifters Girl — which asked us to admire a manager who was quite the martinet — Knight again portrays a
New York Times
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Little Adds Up in the Elusive ‘Grief Camp'
The campers in Eliya Smith's new play are not the happy kind. The show is called 'Grief Camp,' after all — though Smith delays even mentioning what ails her characters. And when she finally gets to it, she parcels out information in fragmentary exchanges and scenes. This strategy does help the show steer clear of therapeutic bromides and conventional catharsis, but it creates a different problem: 'Grief Play,' which leans heavily on whimsy, feels unmoored, tentative. Les Waters's staging of this play — Smith's Off Broadway debut — for Atlantic Theater Company is marvelously realized, as much, at least, as Smith's often maddening script allows. The set designer Louisa Thompson has recreated a cabin that feels so lived in, you can almost smell the wet towels and hear the soft creak of the bunk beds. The six teenagers who inhabit it can be tender or they can be aggressive. Sometimes they shut down and sometimes they open up. Always, communication proves slippery. Every morning, the kids are summoned to breakfast by P.A. announcements from the unseen Rocky (Danny Wolohan) that grow increasingly lengthy and surreal as the show progresses. Sometimes, a guitar player (Alden Harris-McCoy) comes in and strums a guitar by the side of the cabin. Is he a counselor? Do those teenagers really want to hear the country song 'Goin' Away Party'? Smith paints the campers in quick brush strokes as they go through their daily activities. The girls have a little more individuality than the boys — the underwritten Bard (Arjun Athalye) and Gideon (Dominic Gross) almost feel like payback for decades, if not centuries of malnourished female roles — but little adds up. The characters harbor emotions yet come across as numb, they have quirks yet are undifferentiated. You could consider this elusiveness as a commentary on grief itself, but it's a challenge to bring an audience along. The most elaborate interactions take place between two characters whose shared scenes pique our attention: the counselor Cade (Jack DiFalco) and the camper Olivia (Renée-Nicole Powell), whose prickly relationship gives this nebulous show a source of narrative tension. He is not much older than his charges and like them he carries an emotional burden. But somehow he appears to incite tumultuous reactions in Olivia, who already has a tendency to hide her distress under a tough attitude and provocative statements — 'Damn need to change my tampon,' she tells Cade, seemingly apropos of nothing. (Referencing Chekhov, the script describes Olivia as 'a Yelena who thinks she's a Sonya,' but she feels more like a Cady pretending she's a Regina.) The other girls include Olivia's sister, Esther (Lark White); Luna (Grace Brennan); and Blue (Maaike Laanstra-Corn), who emerges as another strong personality only because of a childlike yet determined innocence. Blue is writing a musical that, based on what we discover about it, has the makings of Shaggs-like outsider art. She asks the other campers for feedback ('I'd prefer if you kept it sort of granular'), but she is too lost in her peculiar, solipsistic inner world to appear to take it into account. (Her monologue toward the end is not so much a character speaking as a playwright listening to the sound of her own voice.) Waters ('Dana H.,' 'The Thin Place') has an affinity for creating slightly eerie, disquieting atmospheres, and he respects the play's ellipses and its commitment to nonlinear weirdness. This only makes the occasional overcompensation a noticeable misstep. The sound designer Bray Poor can create the illusion of rain falling outside the cabin, summoning the almost subliminal impression that we are right there with the campers — so when actual rain eventually comes down onstage, it's a little jarring. The show is most interesting in its suggestion that the campers are lost in a kind of limbo in which hours and days lose their traditional meaning. 'I just wanted you kids to think about the passage of time and how it feels in the body,' Rocky says toward the end of a particularly verbose P.A. announcement. And here I found myself circling back to oddball Blue and her amorphous musical. What is time for this girl, holding on to childhood but maybe a little curious about whatever awaits, vast and uncertain?
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Buena Vista Social Club' Brings the Thrill of Music Making to Broadway
The spirit of the musical 'Buena Vista Social Club' is evident in its opening scene. Audience members have barely settled into their seats before a group of onstage musicians strikes up the number 'El Carretero,' with the rest of the cast gathered around and watching. Some are leaning in from their chairs, others get up and dance on the side. The music is center stage, and we immediately understand its power as a communal experience that binds people. Therein lies the production's greatest achievement. For a place where music so often plays a crucial role, Broadway hardly ever highlights the thrill of music making itself. Oh, there have been shows that have effectively pulled the curtain on the process — David Adjmi's play 'Stereophonic' takes place inside recording studios, and the most effective scenes in 'Beautiful: The Carole King Musical' are set in one as well. But the interconnections between musicians, songs and a society have rarely been evoked as vividly, and as lovingly, as they are in 'Buena Vista Social Club,' which opened on Wednesday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. (This improved version follows the show's Off Broadway run at Atlantic Theater Company, which premiered in December 2023.) As its title indicates, this production, directed by Saheem Ali, is inspired by the 1997 hit album 'Buena Vista Social Club,' on which veterans of the Havana scene performed beloved sons, danzones and boleros from the traditional Cuban repertoire. Many of those songs and others are in the musical (a booklet in the Playbill introduces each one, with illustrations by the flutist Hery Paz), along with most of those musicians and singers. Or at least versions of them are. Tellingly, the book by Marco Ramirez ('The Royale') identifies the characters by their first names only, as if to underline that this is more of an evocative flight of fancy than a biomusical — Ramirez makes the most of musical theater's notoriously loose relationship with facts. The action travels back and forth between 1956, in the tense time leading up to the toppling of the autocratic Batista regime, and 1996, when the young producer Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham) assembles a backing band for the older singers he's brought into the studio. (The British executive producer Nick Gold and the American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder played important parts in the 'Buena Vista Social Club' album and the Wim Wenders documentary that followed, but the musical doesn't mention them. Instead it focuses on de Marcos's role in putting together the band and singers.) The show toggles between 1996 and 1956, where the young performers Compay (Da'von T. Moody), Omara (Isa Antonetti) and Ibrahim (Wesley Wray) bond over their love of traditional Cuban music. Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
