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New York Times
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: A Party With 17 ‘Old Friends' and 41 Sondheim Songs
Fast approaching the number of musicals Stephen Sondheim wrote is the number of revues written about him. The first, to my knowledge, was a 1973 fund-raiser held on the set of the original production of 'A Little Night Music.' It featured so many stars, speeches and songs that even truncated, even then, its recording filled two LPs. I snapped that album up and wore it out. The cover alone was fascinating, with the titles of nine of his shows spelled out in intersecting Scrabble tiles. (Something like nine more shows were to come before his death in 2021 — and one after.) Threaded through those tiles like a secret theme was Sondheim's name itself. I was younger then, a teenager, but that secret theme became part of my life's music. How then to hear a new Sondheim revue with fresh ears and fresh heart? As the latest, 'Old Friends,' says right in its name, we are already well acquainted. Whether onstage, online, in cabarets or, like 'Old Friends,' on Broadway, all such compendiums play their own game of Sondheim Scrabble. Though there are many hundreds of songs in the catalog, compilers must pick from the same limited subset of favorites, arranging them in various concatenations and outcroppings. Occasionally a 10-point rarity turns up, but most of the choices are deeply familiar to those who have followed the man's work. 'Old Friends,' which opened on Tuesday at Manhattan Theater Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is in that sense a lot like its predecessors. The 41 numbers it features come from the main pool, with an emphasis on songs from 'Sweeney Todd,' 'Merrily We Roll Along,' 'Company,' 'Follies' and 'Into the Woods.' Most of them were brilliant in their original context; many remain so outside it. Some are sung spectacularly by a bigger-than-usual cast of 17, led by Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. Others are middling, a few are misfires. I don't mean to make light of the greatest-hits format. Even the 10,000th rendition of 'Send in the Clowns' (sung devastatingly by Peters) or the 1,000th of 'The Ladies Who Lunch' (sung ferociously by Beth Leavel) can be transporting. And if you think that Salonga's 'Everything's Coming Up Roses' would be redundant in a season that also features Audra McDonald singing it three blocks away in 'Gypsy,' you'd be wrong. Bringing her own version of frustrated ambition to it, Salonga makes it new. Well, newish. Even when vocally and emotionally specific, the performances here are often physically generic. Revues, free to reimagine the spatial circumstances of a song, too often resort to the same blank slate of a black stage and a bright spotlight. Though directed by the British choreographer Matthew Bourne — the show began life as a one-night gala in London — 'Old Friends' has a stodgy quality that I find surprising. A couple of boxy towers, sometimes representing tenements (for 'West Side Story' selections) and sometimes castles (for 'Into the Woods') dominate Matt Kinley's set design, moving back and forth as if in a very slow chess endgame. The movement of the performers is often similar, except when it's hectic. Another cliché of the form is the exaggerated bonhomie that is meant to disguise the fact that the performers are not characters with relationships to play. They must apparently pretend to be shocked and delighted by everything their castmates are doing nearby, miming hearty laughter over the slightest high jink. Likewise, so many lyrics are encrusted with needless gesture that they come to resemble illustrated versions of Bible stories for children. That might be fine in a Jerry Herman revue — not to belittle him, but it's a different style. Sondheim's work is more complex, its pastiche of popular musical genres providing cover for its deeply psychological content. Up-tempo numbers like 'You Could Drive a Person Crazy' and 'Getting Married Today' (both from 'Company') are thus at a disadvantage when stripped of their anger. They can be sung with great proficiency, as they are here, but without real urgency they aren't funny. Still, two comedy numbers, both outliers, are terrific: 'Live Alone and Like It' from the movie 'Dick Tracy,' crooned jauntily by Jason Pennycooke, and 'The Boy From …' by Sondheim and Mary Rodgers, given a new, nutty take by Kate Jennings Grant. But in general, 'Old Friends' does much better with the explicitly darker numbers, whether offered as uprooted solos like Peters's, small scenes (the 'Agony' duet from 'Into the Woods') or generous sequences (a suite of five songs from 'Sweeney'). The anthemic 'Sunday' — the first act finale of 'Sunday in the Park With George' — may be more modestly staged than in full productions, but borrowed as the first act finale here too, it gives the same goose bumps. Helping tremendously are the 14-person orchestra playing arrangements (by Stephen Metcalfe) that, magically goosed by Mick Potter's sound design, are richer than we have any right to expect. Which brings us naturally to the show's producer, Cameron Mackintosh. One of the theater's few billionaires, he has lavished a lot on what could easily have been a small show with four stools. Peters and Salonga are part of that, of course; you can't put them in rags. The costume designer Jill Parker's spangle budget alone would have broken the bank of a typical Manhattan Theater Club presentation. It is perhaps more salient that Mackintosh and Sondheim were, as the title says, old friends. This seems to have given Mackintosh, who also 'devised' the revue, permission to indulge in a little self-puffery. In an introduction, Peters explains that its songs have mostly been drawn from shows 'our producer Cameron Mackintosh put together with Steve.' Not a small amount of the video imagery (projection design by George Reeve) underlines the connection, including a clip of Sondheim (and Andrew Lloyd Webber) singing Mackintosh's praises. Icky perhaps, but that's what everyone does. I'm doing it now: standing in front of the portrait of a hero. I'm sorry. But also grateful, because I want to tell you that there was a man who found the exact combination of five notes to describe the opportunities of a blank canvas and the specific thumping bass line to signal the unleashing of homicidal glee. A man who discovered that 'bump it' rhymes with 'trumpet,' that 'stocks' rhymes with 'Braques' and 'dollars' with 'Mahler's.' These gems had been waiting in the 12 tones of the Western scale and the million words of the English language, unobserved, until he came along with his flashlight and pickax. Any opportunity to experience how the feelings he channeled and the connections he made have mined our psyches and reshaped our world is an opportunity even old friends should take.
New York Times
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Denis Arndt, Who Was a First-Time Tony Nominee at 77, Dies at 86
Denis Arndt, a former helicopter pilot whose acting career reached its zenith when he made his Broadway debut at age 77 in the comedy 'Heisenberg' and earned a Tony Award nomination, died on March 25 at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 86. His wife, Magee Downey, confirmed the death. She said the specific cause was not known. Mr. Arndt built his reputation as a stage actor at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the 1970s and '80s. He later became a familiar face on television series like 'L.A. Law' and 'Picket Fences' and played one of the detectives who interrogate Sharon Stone in a famous erotically charged scene in 'Basic Instinct' (1992). He first appeared in 'Heisenberg,' a two-character play by Simon Stephens, which the Manhattan Theater Club produced at City Center's Studio at Stage II in 2015. The play transferred to the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway the next year. Mr. Arndt played Alex, a reserved, 75-year-old Irish-born butcher, who is in a London train station when he is unexpectedly kissed on the neck by Georgie (Mary-Louise Parker), a loud, impulsive and mysterious 42-year-old American. Her boldness ignites a romance. Ben Brantley, reviewing 'Heisenberg' in The New York Times, called Mr. Arndt and Ms. Parker 'the sexiest couple on a New York stage now.' Mr. Arndt, he wrote, 'makes what has to be the most unlikely and irresistible Broadway debut of the year. He lends roiling, at first barely detectable energy to the seeming passivity of a man who, on occasion, finds himself crying for reasons he cannot (nor wants to) explain. But this ostensibly confirmed celibate oozes a gentle, undeniable sensuality.' In an interview with The Times during the run of the play, Mr. Arndt spoke ecstatically about the chemistry he felt onstage with Ms. Parker, who was appearing in her seventh Broadway show. 'I feel compelled to give her my complete attention,' he said. 'I see the goddess. I do. I truly do.' Mr. Arndt, Ms. Parker told The Times, 'is everything I could want — passionate and so smart and so sensitive.' The Heisenberg of the play's title is the Nobel Prize-winning German physicist Werner Heisenberg, known for his uncertainty principle. That principle is not mentioned by the characters, but his name evokes the unpredictability of their romance. Mr. Arndt was nominated for the Tony for best actor in a play in 2017 but lost to Kevin Kline, who won for his performance in the Noël Coward comedy 'Present Laughter.' When Mr. Arndt and Ms. Parker reprised their roles at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2017, Charles McNulty of The Los Angeles Times wrote, 'Arndt lends poignant majesty to his character's rediscovered sensuality.' Denis Leroy Arndt was born on Feb. 23, 1939, in, Clyde, Ohio, and later moved with his parents and two younger sisters to Spokane, Wash. His father, Bryce, was a railroad switchman, and his mother, Arline, owned a seamstress shop, where she made curtains. He started acting in high school, but after graduating he enlisted in the Army, where he spent about a decade. He trained as a helicopter pilot and later flew missions in Vietnam, receiving two Purple Hearts when his aircraft came under fire. He enjoyed flying — 'You had the machine in your hand, and it became an extension of your central nervous system,' he told The Times — and worked as a commercial pilot in Alaska after his discharge. He studied history at the University of Washington on the G.I. Bill, but he did not graduate and soon began acting in Seattle theaters. In the 1970s, he started a long association with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in Ashland. Mark Murphey, who shared the stage with Mr. Arndt in 'Hamlet,' 'Romeo and Juliet' and 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' said in an interview: 'As an actor, he was in the moment; he was different every time, every night was different. He was just incredibly vital and riveting. He just had that edge.' Mr. Arndt played the lead in 'King Lear,' Eugene O'Neill's 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' and other plays at the festival and often performed at other theaters on the West Coast. He also appeared in Michael Weller's 'The Ballad of Soapy Smith' at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 1984 and 'Richard II' at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 1987. In 1988, he left the Oregon festival, where he was playing Hickey in O'Neill's 'The Iceman Cometh,' to join the cast of 'Annie McGuire,' a new sitcom starring Mary Tyler Moore, as her husband, a construction engineer. He had already done some film and television work, but a commitment to a series with a star like Ms. Moore was something new in his career. The Sunday Oregonian newspaper reported at the time that some people at the festival were upset that Mr. Arndt had left. But, he told the newspaper, landing a role in a high-profile network series was a reward for his years of stage work. 'The idea of being invited to play marbles with the big kids is something we all aspire to,' he said. (He would return to the Oregon festival in 2014 as Prospero in 'The Tempest' and in multiple roles in 'The Great Society,' the second of Robert Schenkkan's plays about President Lyndon B. Johnson.) 'Annie McGuire' lasted only 10 episodes, but Mr. Arndt soon became a regular presence on television. He played lawyers in recurring roles on 'L.A. Law,' 'Picket Fences" and 'The Practice' and was seen on 'Boston Legal,' 'Life Goes On,' 'Supernatural,' 'Grey's Anatomy,' 'The Good Fight,' 'How to Get Away With Murder' and 'Mr. Mercedes.' In addition to his wife, Mr. Arndt is survived by two daughters, McKenna Rowe and Bryce Brooks, and a son, Tanner Arndt, from their marriage; three daughters, Tammy, Laurie and Kirsten Arndt, and a son, Scott, from his marriage to Marjorie Arveson, which ended in divorce; and many grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. Mr. Arndt was not the first choice for 'Heisenberg,' but he stepped in quickly when Kenneth Welsh, who was originally cast in the Off Broadway production, left four days before rehearsals were to begin. 'I was prepared for this,' Mr. Arndt told The Los Angeles Times. He added, 'My insight, chemistry, with this woman, her incredible skill — it's too much fun to use all the tools in my box.'
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘We Had a World' Review: Through the Fourth Wall and Into the Past
At the onset of Joshua Harmon's wonderfully textured new play, 'We Had a World,' Josh (played by Andrew Barth Feldman) is in his tighty-whities, scribbling in a notebook with a mechanical pencil at a desk on a corner of the stage. Just then his Nana — his dying Nana, to be specific — shows up onstage with a request. She has an idea for a play her grandson should write, a vicious 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf'-style work about their family. The play we're seeing, in the intimate basement-esque New York City Center Stage II of the Manhattan Theater Club, is the playwright's answer to his grandmother's request. It's not as vitriolic as Nana had asked for, but it is an all too relatable unpacking of the longstanding resentments and challenging dynamics of a family, particularly the ones between two of the central women in his life, his mother and his grandmother. If there's viciousness here, it's the complex, often vicious nature of the truth. 'We Had a World' is a memory play in which Josh breaks the fourth wall to guide the audience through notable incidents of his childhood and adult life relating to his mother and grandmother. Though the play opens with a phone call between Josh and his Nana at the end of her life, he jumps back chronologically to explain growing up with his grandmother, Renee (Joanna Gleason), an eccentric Manhattanite who takes him to the theater to see 'Medea' and to exhibitions of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. She sneaks them in to catch movies for free and they make regular visits at the Met Museum. He credits his grandmother with helping him find his future vocation in the theater. But it's not long before he discovers a secret about Renee: she's an alcoholic, which is the source of years of animosity between her and Josh's mother, Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), a tough lawyer with a chip on her shoulder. 'We Had a World' gradually works its way back to, and a little bit past, Renee's decline and death, though not in a way that's at all predictable or even linear. Josh remembers and cleverly revises the story as he goes, with Renee and Ellen appearing onstage not just as puppets in his story, manipulated by his telling, but also as autonomous characters who express their own opinions (often, hilariously, at his expense) and intrude to offer their perspectives on events. Harmon's script doesn't feel as didactic or self-consciously stagy as many contemporary memory plays can be; it strikes an impressive balance of negotiating a story with many adverse emotional perspectives and moving parts while also maintaining a sense of honesty. I don't just mean honesty in the sense of facts — though the verifiable biographical facts in Harmon's story, and a bit of recorded material at the end, lend a gravitas to the characters and occurrences. I mean honesty in the sense of emotional transparency, the very real mix of love and resentment and insecurities and doubts that define all relationships, especially those within a family. Though the script successfully condenses several eras of Harmon's life and captures the quirks and particularities of his mother's and grandmother's personalities, the performances really give the material its extra emotional heft. It takes less than 15 minutes to fall in love with Gleason as Renee, the native New Yorker with a dark sense of humor, a love for ornate French furniture and an inexplicable pseudo-British accent. And Serralles's Ellen feels most real when she is at her most defensive and sardonic, though her shifts into the character's more openly vulnerable moments still show some seams. Feldman, who played the title role onstage in 'Dear Evan Hansen' and starred opposite Jennifer Lawrence in the 2023 film 'No Hard Feelings,' is fantastic throughout as Josh — awkward and earnest, often uncomfortable amid the drama, yet always attempting to view his loved ones with openness and fairness. The small thrust stage works well for Feldman, who effortlessly connects with the audience as he transitions from playing the innocent, wide-eyed young child tagging along with his offbeat Nana to the more self-assured, though still lost, writer of several acclaimed plays. Trip Cullman's understated direction and John Lee Beatty's similarly bare-bones set design (a desk, a record player, two tattered love seats, some metal chairs) allow for the focus to remain on the actors and the material, while Ben Stanton's lighting provides a subtle way to signal sudden switches in the story's setting. Harmon's script so authentically re-creates his relationships and experiences that the play's largest fault is how it leaves you wanting more from the tiny narrative wrinkles and secondary characters that are only partially explored. The delightful surprise of 'We Had a World' is not just its personal nostalgia but a more universal one: Josh isn't just mourning certain eras of his relationships or his childhood with his grandmother; he's mourning the New York City of his youth, a time before he felt the urgency of threats to the environment or to democracy. So 'We Had a World' isn't exactly the contentious drama Nana requested, but it's something much more compassionate and real.
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Dakar 2000' Review: Which One Is the Liar?
We can't say we weren't warned. Boubs, the narrator of Rajiv Joseph's new play, kicks off the show by informing the audience that 'all of it is true. Or most of it, anyway.' That 'most of it' does a lot of work in 'Dakar 2000,' which just opened at Manhattan Theater Club. But while ambiguity and uncertainty have long been great fertilizers for storytelling, Joseph's two-hander about a couple of Americans in Senegal remains strangely uninvolving. Some of the things Boubs (Abubakr Ali), a Peace Corps volunteer, tells the State Department employee Dina (Mia Barron, from 'The Coast Starlight' and 'Hurricane Diane') may well be fabrications. Over the course of her friendly but insistent interrogation of Boubs, who was involved in a truck accident, we begin to suspect that Dina is no slouch, either, at fudging the facts. 'You're a good liar!' she tells Boubs at one point. 'I don't begrudge that skill set.' It's a useful one for playwrights, too. Mining his own history, Joseph ('Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,' 'King James') did go on a Peace Corps mission in Senegal after college, an experience he credits as instrumental in his becoming a writer. It's unclear whether, as happens to this play's hero, Joseph was ever asked to possibly fingerprint an alleged terrorist who was passed out, or maybe dead, in his hotel room. Has Joseph been the Le Carré of the Rialto all these years? But while the possibility of exciting action always hovers on the periphery, May Adrales's low-energy production is bereft of any tension. That is an achievement of some kind for a show dealing with covert operations, and one in which a character is traumatized (or claims to be) by the 1998 bombing of the United States embassy in Tanzania. 'Dakar 2000' begins promisingly as Dina grills Boubs about his accident, then starts making demands. It's fun to watch her run rings around him, and Joseph and the cast keep the action moving as we ponder what Dina really wants, and whether Boubs is a useful idiot, a cunning faux-naïf, an idealistic young man, or all of the above. That Dina appears to be haunted by apocalyptic feelings — the play takes place during the chaotic, unsettled final lead-up to Y2K, when the world felt as if it was built on shifting sands — should make the stakes even weightier. Instead of capitalizing on that loaded context, though, the play gradually deflates, unable to maximize its own premise and hampered by possibly self-serving moves — a raised eyebrow is the only possible reaction to the improbable notion that Boubs could manipulate the worldlier, more experienced Dina into getting what he needs. 'Dakar 2000' reminded me of an earlier Manhattan Theater Club offering, Erika Sheffer's 'Vladimir,' which played in October and focused on the travails of an investigative journalist in Russia. Both plays flaunt elaborate production designs that look good in the abstract but distract from the story instead of enhancing it (in 'Dakar 2000' it's Shawn Duan's projections and the set by Tim Mackabee with its turntable and ostentatious elevated catwalk). Worse, both lapse into triteness as they try to deal with the intersection of the geopolitical and the personal. Paradoxically, 'Dakar 2000' loses the most steam when it leans on the flirtation between Boubs and Dina. Whether the characters actually are attracted to each other does not matter all that much, but we need to buy that they are at least pretending to be. Alas, the actors struggle to communicate the allure of seduction tinged by danger, and by the time we reach the borderline wacky climax, it feels as if we're watching a misguided adaptation of Graham Greene by Shonda Rhimes. Though that could be more fun than what's actually onstage.
