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New York Times
6 hours ago
- 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.
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Atlantic Theater, IATSE Reach Tentative Agreement for Off-Broadway Workers
Atlantic Theater Company and IATSE have reached a tentative agreement that would cover all production workers employed by the Off-Broadway theater company. The agreement comes after workers at the Atlantic Theater went on strike in January after negotiations for the first union contract covering behind-the-scenes workers, including theatrical electricians and carpenters, painters, wardrobe and costume dressers, fell apart. The strike led to the cancellation of two productions at the Manhattan-based non-profit theater, which has developed several shows for Broadway. More from The Hollywood Reporter Jean Smart Returns to Broadway This Summer in One-Woman Show 'The Queen of Versailles' Musical to Play Broadway's St. James Theater Next Season 'The Seagull' Theater Review: Cate Blanchett Leads a First-Class Ensemble in Glorious Chekhov Adaptation The proposed agreement includes 'significant' compensation increases and benefits, according to a joint statement from the two parties. Atlantic crew members had voted unanimously to unionize with IATSE in February 2024, amid a larger push from Off-Broadway workers. When the strike was called, the two parties had been in negotiations for months, but IATSE said the theater company 'demanded several provisions before continuing its further obligations to bargain with the union' and was unwilling to move off their demands. This led the union to file unfair labor practice charges with the federal government. The decision to unionize the workers came after IATSE organized a meeting in July 2023 and had 100 workers show up. While the topic had been in discussion for years, workers decided to push forward due to the changing theater landscape, which has seen many layoffs of workers after the pandemic, and the desire for health insurance and greater benefits. The production team at the Off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors and at the musical Titanique have also ratified their first union contracts. This would be the first Off-Broadway nonprofit theater company to have a union agreement covering production classifications Best of The Hollywood Reporter How the Warner Brothers Got Their Film Business Started Meet the World Builders: Hollywood's Top Physical Production Executives of 2023 Men in Blazers, Hollywood's Favorite Soccer Podcast, Aims for a Global Empire
