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New York Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Two New Works, the Power of Generational Connections
Adam Gwon's new musical, 'All the World's a Stage,' is an unassuming, 100-minute marvel that follows a closeted math teacher at a rural high school in the 1990s. Like some of that decade's gay-themed indie movies, including the earnest 'Edge of Seventeen' and 'Trick,' this musical is not looking to reinvent the wheel with its storytelling, but is charming, specific and appealing in its rendering of gay life outside the mainstream. Ricky (Matt Rodin), a 30-something teacher with a new job, befriends a kind secretary, Dede (Elizabeth Stanley), and meets Sam (Eliza Pagelle), a rebellious student in whom he finds a kindred love of theater and simmering need to break free from societal expectations. They bond over 'Angels in America,' the new risqué play and the source of her monologue for an acting scholarship audition. But her selection threatens the school administration's conservative sensibilities. At the same time, Ricky is striking up a romance with Michael (Jon-Michael Reese), the owner of a gay-friendly bookstore in a slightly more progressive town where he's settled down. When Ricky's two worlds inevitably collide, they do so with well-crafted wit. Gwon's yearning, pop-classical score flows together beautifully, yet is composed of numbers distinct enough to allow the four excellent cast members to flex their skills. That balance between individuality and unity proves a key theme, expressed in the title's idea that each of us is always adapting our performance across circumstances. (He also has fun with some clever lyrics, at one point setting up 'hara-kiri' to seemingly rhyme with 'Shakespearean.') The director Jonathan Silverstein draws warm portrayals from his troupe (matched by a quartet playing onstage) in his modest, efficiently staged Keen Company production at Theater Row. Jennifer Paar's costumes are instantly evocative; button-up shirts and wire-frame glasses for the teacher and bomber jackets for his pupil. Patrick McCollum's movement work is gently expressive and Steven Kemp's scenic design is similarly to-the-point, with a bookcase or chalkboard rolled in as needed, a lone student desk and an American flag hanging ominously in the corner. Gwon locates in each of his archetypal characters a unifying love of art. Whether it's Dede's penchant for schmaltz like 'The Notebook,' or the radical zines Michael sells, they all seek escape through culture. This disarmingly powerful show aims for the same, and lovingly succeeds. At the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, Shayok Misha Chowdhury is engaging in his own generational classroom performance in 'Rheology.' Chowdhury, a writer and director whose 2023 play 'Public Obscenities' wove together academia and deep sentiment, this time enlists his mother, the physicist Bulbul Chakraborty, for a theatrical take on exposure therapy. The short, presentational piece in which they both star is clear in its ambitions: Chowdhury cannot bear the thought of losing his mother, so decides to see what staging her death might feel like. How this all unfolds is its own delight, with a lively structure that's a mishmash of scientific lectures, traditionally staged scenes and meditations on how the two have grown closer by seeing each other passionately pursue their work. Mother and son have a natural stage presence that prompted me to consider the nature and reality of performance. (When I saw the show, just as I thought it was all too heady, an audience member ran out crying during a frank discussion of parent mortality.) As in 'Public Obscenities,' Chowdhury plays with form and language. The show is performed in English and Bangla, and uses supertitles, live camera feeds, singing, and a cello accompaniment, by George Crotty, reminiscent of the melodrama in both Bollywood and in Bernard Herrmann's film scores. Krit Robinson's lablike set, Mextly Couzin and Masha Tsimring's lighting, Tei Blow's sound and Kameron Neal's video designs shine in a surreal moment toward the end. Like his earlier works, 'Rheology,' named after the study of the flow behavior of substances, combines Chowdhury's Bengali heritage and knack for rigor (his father, too, was a scientist) with his own artsier, more American tastes. For a promising artist in New York theater, it feels like a special new intervention in the sandbox he's claimed for his exploration.
New York Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
13 Off Broadway Shows to Tempt You in April
Theater in New York is nearing its seasonal crescendo, with stages Off Broadway and beyond teeming with activity. Of the many notable productions happening in April, here is a baker's dozen to tantalize you. The composer-lyricist Adam Gwon, best known for the chamber musical 'Ordinary Days' and more recently for the charming 'Macbeth' riff 'Scotland, PA,' sets his new musical in the 1990s in a conservative small town, where a gay high school teacher is helping a student to prepare for a statewide theater competition. With a cast of four that includes Elizabeth Stanley ('Jagged Little Pill'), Jonathan Silverstein directs for Keen Company — his swan-song production as artistic director of the theater, which commissioned this musical. (Through May 10, Theater Row) The Obie Award-winning director Jack Serio loves intimate, nontraditional venues — like the lofts where he staged his breakthrough production of 'Uncle Vanya' — and he has one for this new play by Ken Urban ('Nibbler'). With the audience at close range, arrayed around a living-room-like space, Ryan Spahn and Juan Castano play a married couple enduring a sexual dry spell, and Julia Chan plays the long-lost high school girlfriend whose reappearance rattles their relationship. (Through April 20, East Village Basement) A major production of any Caryl Churchill play becomes a reason for pilgrimage by the faithful. Now here is a program of four brief works by the 86-year-old playwright, a master of shape-shifting and the short form; three are from 2019, one from 2021. Her longtime interpreter James Macdonald, who staged Churchill's 'Top Girls' on Broadway, directs a large cast that includes the Tony Award winner Deirdre O'Connell and John Ellison Conlee. (Through May 11, Public Theater) The cleverly inventive, very funny playwrights Emma Horwitz ('Mary Gets Hers') and Bailey Williams ('Events,' 'Coach Coach') are also the performers of this comedy, which appeared in an earlier form at last year's Exponential Festival of experimental work. A co-production of New Georges, which incubated the show, and Rattlestick Theater, it is directed by Tara Elliott. (Through April 26, Here Arts Center) 'Derry Girls' fans, assemble. Saoirse-Monica Jackson, who starred as Erin on that hit TV series set in Northern Ireland, makes her New York theater debut with this backstage comedy by Ciara Elizabeth Smyth, directed in its world premiere by Nicola Murphy Dubey. In an ensemble cast that also includes Kate Burton, Jackson plays a member of the Dublin-based Irishtown Players, rehearsing a Broadway-bound show whose author has diluted an ingredient the actors are determined to strengthen: its Irishness. Part of the Origin 1st Irish Festival. (Through May 25, Irish Repertory Theater) The Broadway star Norm Lewis ('The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess') headlines this drama by Lonne Elder III, playing a widowed barber and former vaudevillian in 1950s Harlem, where he and his grown children live upstairs from the not exactly busy shop. The Negro Ensemble Company — which gave the show its first professional production in 1969, with Douglas Turner Ward in the lead — teams up with the Peccadillo Theater Company and Eric Falkenstein for this revival, directed by Clinton Turner Davis. (April 11-May 18, Theater at St. Clement's) The Obie-winning playwright-director Shayok Misha Chowdhury ('Public Obscenities') recruited his mother, Bulbul Chakraborty, a physicist and professor, to create and perform this new show with him. A co-production of the Bushwick Starr, Here and Ma-Yi Theater Company, it takes its title from what Merriam-Webster defines as 'a science dealing with the deformation and flow of matter.' Chakraborty studies sand. Her son studies her. This is a kind of memoir. (April 15-May 3, Bushwick Starr) There is a certain sort of effusively unhinged experimental theater that feels particular to downtown Manhattan. The collaborations between Robert Lyons (late of the scrappy, shuttered New Ohio Theater) and Daniel Irizarry are absolutely this brand of weird. Written by Lyons and directed by Irizarry, who also stars, their new show is set in academia, where a professor is losing his grip on reality and grad students are hallucinating a manifesto. Also, there will be rum. (April 18-May 4, La MaMa) Lincoln Center Theater's small, adventurous upstairs stage, LCT3, breaks its recent quiet with the world premiere of this dark comedy by Caitlin Saylor Stephens ('Modern Swimwear'), starring Elizabeth Marvel as a fashion photographer shooting a Vogue cover in Europe. Morgan Green directs. (April 19-June 1, Claire Tow Theater) Witchfinder General is a job title so absurdly dystopian that surely it must be made up, but there really was one in 17th-century England: Matthew Hopkins, who hunted down women he suspected of being witches. In Joanna Carrick's play, which she directs in the Brits Off Broadway festival, Hopkins's stepsister is a skeptic amid the religious panic he fans. Then the death of her babies tempts her toward the comfort of finding someone to blame. (April 24-May 11, 59E59 Theaters) Marisa Tomei and the dancer Ida Saki perform this new dance theater piece, which puts a contemporary female lens on the myth of Sisyphus. In this retelling — written, choreographed and directed by Celia Rowlson-Hall ('Smile 2') — Sisyphean labors come with being a woman in the world. (April 24-April 26, Baryshnikov Arts) James Joyce's mammoth 1922 novel, 'Ulysses,' had to battle its way to publication in the United States. Initially it was banned here as obscene — until a judge ruled, in 1933, that though its effect 'is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.' Borrowing from period radio style, this 90-minute comic drama by Colin Murphy re-enacts and remixes that landmark free-speech fight. Conall Morrison directs this production, an import from Ireland. (April 30-June 1, Irish Arts Center) Anika Noni Rose (a Tony winner for 'Caroline, or Change') and Aisha Jackson ('Once Upon a One More Time') star as sisters from Ohio who follow their artistic ambitions to New York in this Encores! revival of the 1953 musical comedy classic. With music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and a book by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, it's directed by Zhailon Levingston, who last year co-directed the much-acclaimed radical refresh 'Cats: The Jellicle Ball.' (April 30-May 11, New York City Center)
