Latest news with #MinettaLaneTheater
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Hugh Jackman smiles and signs autographs for fans amid divorce drama
has been seen in public for the first time since his ex Deborra-Lee Furness filed for divorce. The 56-year-old actor exited his off-Broadway play Sexual Misconduct Of The Middle Classes on Friday to greet fans who stood outside New York City 's Minetta Lane Theater. He was all smiles as he signed his autograph and took photos with fans and then said 'Thanks for waiting'. Big star: The actor was seen smiling outside the Minetta Lane Theater on Friday As he made his way to a nearby Citi bike rack, fans continued to approach him. His co-star Ella Beatty - Warren Beatty and Annette Bening's 25-year-old daughter - left the theater separately and also took the time to greet fans and sign autographs. When asked about working alongside Hugh she told 'I love Hugh. He's the most wonderful person.' She refused, however, to comment on how he's holding up amid his ex's divorce filing. Instead of responding, she kept quiet and continued to greet fans. revealed earlier this week that the 69-year-old Australian producer had filed a petition for divorce in New York on May 23, nearly two years after they announced their separation. In fact, everything between the couple had been ironed out behind the scenes since multiple court documents on behalf of Furness' attorney were also filed, including the settlement, a proposed judgment of divorce, and certificate of dissolution. All that needs to be done now is for the judge to sign off on the judgment. Furness shocked fans by releasing a statement using the word 'betrayal' when speaking about her 'traumatic journey.' In a statement sent to Deborra-Lee said: 'My heart and compassion goes out to everyone who has traversed the traumatic journey of betrayal. It's a profound wound that cuts deep, however I believe in a higher power and that God/the universe, whatever you relate to as your guidance, is always working FOR us.' She continued: 'This belief has helped me navigate the breakdown of an almost three-decade marriage. I have gained much knowledge and wisdom through this experience. Even when we are presented with apparent adversity, it is leading us to our greatest good, our true purpose. 'It can hurt, but in the long run, returning to yourself and living within your own integrity, values and boundaries is liberation and freedom.' She concluded her statement with the 'one thing' that she has learned, which is 'that none of this is personal,' adding, 'We are all on our individual journeys and I believe that the relationships in our lives are not random. 'We are drawn to people, we invite them in, in order to learn our lessons and to recognize and heal the broken parts of ourselves...I remain grateful.' After Furness' statement, a source had revealed exclusively to Jackman's 'bitter reaction' to her statement. Jackman was blindsided by her words, the source said, as he believed they had an 'understanding' they would not publicly trash one another after having a 'secret agreement'. 'Hugh was extremely disappointed after reading what his ex had said,' the insider explained. 'There was no stipulation that she could not address this but there was an unwritten understanding that she would not trash him to the press. 'She got around this by not naming him - instead focusing on how she felt.' The couple had been married for 27 years and have two adopted children together - their son Oscar, 25, and a daughter Ava, 19. Furness has received a 'handsome spousal support payment,' according to an insider who spoke to which she is 'pleased with'. 'There was some back and forth regarding this financial agreement but, in the end, she got what she believed she deserved,' the source added. 'Both are coming out of this financially secure.' A separate source said the divorce is 'non contested,' meaning there was not a major disagreement between the couple divorcing. 'They have worked out the details in advance and everything is ironed out in terms of a settlement, alimony and the expenses for the future of their children,' they said. 'They are amicable and they are both fully committed to being the best parents that they can be.' Jackman, who is dating Sutton Foster is 'looking forward to the future and not looking back.'
New York Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Creditors' Review: Who Pays the Price for a Bankrupt Marriage?
If a man hates women but also everyone else, is he still a misogynist? I ask for an acquaintance: August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright whose three tempestuous marriages were not enough to exhaust his fury at wives, muses, temptresses and others. Also, it would seem, at himself. His excess of rage found its way into plays — 'Miss Julie' (1888) and 'The Dance of Death' (1900) are today the most famous — that feature male characters only slightly less awful than the women in their lives. That ought to be unbearable, and not just as an affront to feminism; his pox-on-both-your-genders cussedness can sometimes feel self-canceling as drama. Still, Strindberg sticks to the canon of European classics like a tick: ugly, bloodthirsty, alive. The contradiction is at its most vexing in 'Creditors,' a follow-up to 'Miss Julie' that flips the earlier play's love-triangle geometry so that one woman and two men stand at its vertexes instead of one man and two women. Believe me, two men are worse: The lone woman, in this case a writer named Tekla, is literally outmanned. When Adolph, her second husband — having fallen under the influence of Gustav, his new friend — prosecutes Tekla for the theft of his happiness, Strindberg barely allows a defense. That 'Creditors' is nevertheless wretchedly compelling has previously been sufficient to keep it onstage. Perhaps in a post-#MeToo age no longer. At any rate, the production that opened Sunday at the Minetta Lane Theater — starring Liev Schreiber as Gustav, Maggie Siff as Tekla and Justice Smith as Adolph, now called Adi — sets out to shift the play's balance of power and mostly succeeds. In Jen Silverman's thoroughgoing adaptation, Tekla is given full voice, and the men are finally held to account. The new version, set in a vague present, opens like the original in the parlor of an out-of-season seaside hotel. There, Adi, a young painter, and Gustav, a teacher of 'dead languages,' are discovered in the depths of a whiskey-enhanced discussion of women and art. At first idly, then with what appears to be solicitude, and finally with the glee of a cat cornering a mouse before killing it, Gustav pokes into Adi's professional failures, connecting them to Tekla's galling success. Having dumped her first husband after humiliating him in a popular roman à clef, what's to stop her from doing the same to her second? The author of dramedies that foreground women — among them 'The Roommate,' 'The Moors' and 'Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties' — Silverman is not about to let that wife-as-witch framing stand. Still, Strindberg's three-part structure, with its bear-trap teeth, is too ingenious to mess with. In the second part, Adi, empowered or perhaps just empoisoned by Gustav, confronts Tekla with his newfound and possibly bogus insights into what he had thought was a happy marriage. Because Smith is so sincere and appealing, his vulnerability reading as openness instead of petulance, we are at first willing to allow his line of thought. But this is where the adaptation begins a slow turn. As written, and as played quite winningly by Siff, Silverman's Tekla is neither a kitten nor a harridan. She is confident and positive and, quite obviously, in love with her husband, at least as she has known him until now. Still, alert to his newfound possessiveness and jealousy, which eventually expresses itself in an act of violence, she draws a line in the sand of their marriage. The act of violence, so viscerally damning, is not in the Strindberg. But the fragility of traditional marriage certainly is, and Silverman underlines it. Every feeling and its opposite are readily available to either partner, so that even a slight disruption of their equilibrium can result in wild swings toward loathing. Adi sputters; Tekla snarls. What he once loved in her, and vice versa, quickly becomes what neither can abide. Still, in this version, Tekla remains the more sensible spouse, far abler in dealing with disputes. Her strength is further tested when she is forced, in the third part, into a final face-off with Gustav, the expert underminer. In the Strindberg, Gustav is coolly victorious; he destroys Tekla emotionally and her husband physically. That's almost the reverse of what happens now, both in plot and tone. Not cool at all, Schreiber's fascinatingly peculiar Gustav is incandescent with wrath, but also deeply depressed. How Silverman uses this to argue for the antithesis of Strindbergian revenge makes for a weird if wonderfully surprising kicker. Some will complain that this 'Creditors' is therefore not Strindberg at all, that Silverman's alterations run directly counter to his intentions. Both statements are true, but I'm not sure why they have to be criticisms. Yes, something of the brisk inevitability of the original is lost in the revision's strengthening of Tekla and softening of the others, and yes, the dialogue leans occasionally into feminist sloganeering. There is even a nod toward a form of marriage that the original, even if it imagined it, could not have dramatized. But the play is, as Silverman pointedly puts it on the title page of the script, 'after Strindberg' — more than 135 years after. If it detracts from 'Creditors' or its bleak realism about men and women, no harm done; the original still exists. And if it instead enhances 'Creditors' for contemporary audiences and refutes a false idea about men and women, it may do some good. Certainly Ian Rickson's direction does. His 'Creditors' staging is as trenchant, smooth and unburdened by overproduction as is his concurrent staging of 'Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes' with Hugh Jackman and Ella Beatty. (The two shows alternate at the Minetta Lane through June 18.) The same design team — sets by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones, costumes by Ásta Bennie Hostetter, lighting by Isabella Byrd, sound by Mikaal Sulaiman — achieves a similar less-is-more effect, supporting the story without becoming the story. The understated visuals do for the eyes what the sonic hush (there are no microphones) does for the ears, forcing the audience to concentrate on the words and to find the spectacle within them. The specific merits of 'Creditors,' numerous though they are, are similarly in service to something larger. Like 'Sexual Misconduct,' it is part of an experiment called Audible x Together, which aims to reinvigorate the Off Broadway ideal of engaging theater with excellent actors for diverse audiences at reasonable prices. Though half of the 400 seats for any single performance are sold at market rates — and it must be said that the market is not, in fact, very reasonable — a quarter are given free to community groups through the Theater Development Fund and a quarter cost $35 if you can find them. Quibble with the model; pick at the play. But in imagining a way forward instead of whimpering in despair, Audible x Together is doing something akin to what Silverman does with 'Creditors.' You might say they both look for the value in the past but don't get stuck in it. They play it forward.
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Hugh Jackman in a Twisty Tale of ‘Sexual Misconduct'
We first see the willowy Ella Beatty, half of the cast of 'Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,' lugging furniture onto the stage of the Minetta Lane Theater. If you've heard that the play, by Hannah Moscovitch, is part of an Off Broadway experiment called Audible x Together — featuring big names, spare décor, short runs and rock-bottom prices — you may find yourself wondering whether the backers had penny-pinched on a crew. If so, they might have let the other half of the cast do the lugging: Hugh Jackman has the guns. But the backers — Audible is a division of Amazon and Together is Jackman's venture with the hugely successful producer Sonia Friedman — are not exactly impoverished. Art, not parsimony, is the source of Beatty's labors. Setting the stage for the terrific, tightly plaited knot of a play, the curious opening will pay off later. So will every seemingly casual moment of Ian Rickson's long-game staging, from lighting (by Isabella Byrd) that often, weirdly, illuminates the audience, to Jackman's manhandling of an actual lawn mower. Jackman plays Jon Macklem, a critically acclaimed yet best-selling author who teaches literature at a 'world class college.' He has not had as much success in his domestic career, being the kind of Kerouac cliché who spends years, as he puts it, 'racking up ex-wives like a maniac.' Currently he is separated from his third. Soon another cliché enters: the 'grossly underwritten' sex-object character that lust-addled novelists (a description Macklem cops to) write about to 'expose their mediocrity.' That's Beatty's Annie. Though she is a 19-year-old student in one of his classes, and he is starting to grizzle at the edges, their affair begins. 'The erotics of pedagogy,' Macklem, only half-mortified by the phrase, explains. It is here you may say to yourself: I've seen this before. The questionable relationship between male mentors and female students is almost its own genre in plays ('Oleanna') and novels ('Disgrace') — perhaps because it is almost its own genre in life. (I immediately thought of Joyce Maynard and J.D. Salinger.) But Moscovitch clearly wants to complicate that narrative by shaping it almost entirely from the man's point of view. Macklem speaks perhaps 80 percent of the words in the play, spinning long, disarming, verbally dexterous monologues. Annie's lines are more like this: 'I shouldn't / I don't know why I / Said that / Sorry I'm mm.' Beatty, recently seen in Ibsen's 'Ghosts,' is all but ghostly here; she delivers Annie's halting vagueness so precisely that she at first seems merely underpowered as an actor. In fact, she's fulfilling the play's plan perfectly: Even if overwhelmed by Macklem's force majeure, she cannot seem like a victim. All but demanding his sexual attention, she tells Macklem that his books, in their crudity, taught her 'what I like.' She devours him hungrily, comparing him favorably to boys she has slept with. She shows him her own fiction, and laps up his besotted praise. She understands from the start, she says later, exactly what the 'exchange' was. So you're left to wonder: Who's grooming whom? And for what? With Macklem especially, the play wants to keep the issue of culpability unsettled as long as possible. That's a tough job, given the way time has trained us to presume absolute guilt in such situations; the affair takes place in 2014, a few years before #MeToo acquired its hashtag. Nor does Macklem's temper, which flares when Annie behaves in ways he considers irrational, give us confidence in his ability to transcend his ego. In those moments he seems merely bullheaded and cutting, a lot like that lawn mower. Who but Jackman could keep us guessing despite that? His onstage seductiveness has always been frank yet cheerful, its sharkiness couched in charm. When he played Peter Allen in 'The Boy From Oz,' women (and men) in the audience begged for his sweaty T-shirt at the end of the show. (In exchange for a donation to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, he obliged them.) To take advantage of that appeal, Rickson has Jackman deliver a lot of his lines directly to the audience, at one point while seated at the lip of the stage with his legs dangling down as if he were Judy Garland. But Jackman goes well beyond the brief. On the night I attended, when a woman in Row B started coughing loudly, it was clear that the man who'd played the exuberant, audience-coddling Allen — Garland's son-in-law — was not about to leave her uncared-for. Ad libbing, he offered her a bottle of water — and was clearly ready to deliver it in person. She said no, but I was surprised that the 400 other theatergoers didn't start hacking immediately. He had them just where Macklem wanted Annie, and possibly vice versa. For an audience no less than an individual, the steep slope of powerful attraction is difficult to negotiate. Neither Macklem nor Annie (she's given no last name) is sure-footed. He's an overinflated balloon, blowing himself through life. She's, well, 19. Beyond any other consideration — attraction, power, psychology, class — her absolute age, not the gap in their ages, is what Moscovitch wants us to consider. Annie is not yet a fully grown human; she barely has the emotional wherewithal to handle her impulses, to know which ones she can safely indulge. Lest I spoil the ingenious working out of the story, I won't say more except that we meet Annie again when she does have that wherewithal. That both she and Macklem have aged we see at once by the simplest of means: posture, diction, a change of clothes for her, a change of glasses for him. (The costumes are by Ásta Bennie Hostetter.) Whether either character has grown is a different question, one you'll have to decide for yourself. Is revenge growth? Is growth itself revenge? That's the thrill of Rickson's production: It doesn't tell you what to think but, in its big payoff, gives you plenty to consider. Better yet, it achieves that payoff with minimal fuss. The set (by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones) needs only a few chairs, a desk and a lamp to place you anywhere you need to be. Mikaal Sulaiman's sound consists mostly of faint music, the kind you sometimes think you hear while falling into a dream. There are no microphones; the actors' actual voices are hitting your actual ears. If this is theater on a shoestring, let the theater never have shoes. And though I'll wait to proclaim the Audible x Together experiment a sustainable success — at least until its next production, 'Creditors,' with Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff and Justice Smith, opens later this month — 'Sexual Misconduct' is proof of concept even as a one-off. Those cheap tickets buy you not only a seat at the Minetta Lane but also a place in the living conversation of raw yet thoughtful theater. Plus maybe, if you cough enough, a bottle of water.
New York Post
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
‘Dead Outlaw' review: Wild corpse musical is too tame on Broadway
Theater review DEAD OUTLAW One hour and 40 minutes, with no intermission. At the Longacre Theatre, 220 West 48th Street. There's a nagging similarity between the 20th-century criminal Elmer McCurdy and 'Dead Outlaw,' the eccentric musical about him. McCurdy was killed in a shoot-out with police after a bungled train robbery in 1911. And then, in a stomach-churning turn of events, his mummified corpse was carted around the country for decades as an attraction in unsavory traveling tourist museums. Advertisement 'Dead Outlaw,' which opened Sunday at the Longacre Theatre, has also been schlepped a distance — from the cool and intimate Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village to a big Broadway house uptown. It, too, has become a bit stiff in the process. I quite enjoyed the scrappy first incarnation last year, and still admire the score by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna that stitches together rockabilly, campfire songs, lounge music and folk into an eerie Americana soundscape that's punchy and unsettling. Advertisement And the clever conceit of the show from writer Itamar Moses — that McCurdy is a mostly silent cadaver for half the runtime — is smart and sad; a stinging comment on the grotesque lengths some (many, really) will go to make a buck. But in the Broadway version of 'Dead Outlaw,' directed by David Cromer, there is a lot of dead air. 4 'Dead Outlaw,' which opened on Broadway, tells the story of a bandit who became a famous corpse. Matthew Murphy Well, except in the glass-shattering opener, a rascally screamer called 'Dead' that's blared by an onstage band in a shoebox that looks like a college dropout's garage. The playfully rude lyrics rattle off people who are no longer alive (the joke is that many of them actually are) and concludes with 'and so are you!' Think of the unifying cry as 'Ich bin ein Elmer!' Advertisement The group's frontman is actor Jeb Brown, perfectly cast with a husky radio voice, who becomes the narrator — Mr. Rogers after midnight. At first the effect is like listening to a weird-but-true podcast before bed. Soon, though, the 'and then this happened's become — forgive me — overkill. Elmer, both when pathetically alive and famously deceased, is played by Andrew Durand, an easy-to-like actor who audiences will remember as the romantic lead from 'Shucked' and 'Head Over Heels.' As his resume of curiosities would suggest, he's Broadway's go-to guy for 'odd.' 4 Elmer McCurdy's body toured the country for years after he died. Matthew Murphy Durand is adorably awkward as Elmer tries and tries and fails and fails to make it as even a D-List bandit. Advertisement A violent drunk who hops from town to town, adopting new identities along the way, Durand's Elmer softly croons a lovely Ben Folds-y tune called 'Normal' and hollers a feverish one called 'I Killed A Man in Maine.' In the rambunctious latter, he hurls objects across the stage and attempts to knock down Arnulfo Maldonado's set. In the second half, with sunken eyes and a razor-sharp jaw line — and I mean this as a compliment — he plays dead very well. The guy rarely ever blinks. 4 Julia Knitel (left) plays a variety of roles in 'Dead Outlaw,' but most movingly a little girl named Millicent. Matthew Murphy The show becomes more intriguing as the story grows wilder. Its most involving and moving number, in more ways than one, is called 'Millicent's Song' and is sung by a little girl whose dad has acquired Elmer's body and is storing it at their house. At first she's rightly horrified by the sight, but soon starts sweetly confiding to the dead man like a therapist. Time passes as she grows up, funny evolves into poignant, and her conversations with the unchanging Elmer mature. Julia Knitel sings sublimely, and the song creatively ticks down the years, rather than having the narrator announce when and where we are. Again. 4 'Dead Outlaw' gets more intriguing as the story grows weirder. Matthew Murphy There's also a memorable cruise-ship ditty called 'Up to the Stars,' smoothly performed by Thom Sesma as the coroner as if he's Michael Buble is another dark delight. It's something out of 'Six Feet Under.' You'll either be tickled by the coroner's punchlines ('Natalie Wood? Natalie Won't') or horrified and offended. Advertisement The musical has many diamonds in the rough. They're just not polished properly by Cromer's staging, which is awfully haphazard and diffuse for a typically sure-thing director. Scenes far off to the side feel quickly cobbled together, even though the show premiered more than a year ago. 'Outlaw' reminds me of the rebel rock musical 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson' crossed with a bone-dry Coen Brothers film. There's room for something so subversive on Broadway. But not when the production's energy level is that of a funeral parlor at 8 a.m.
New York Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Dead Outlaw' Review: This Bandit Has Mummy Issues
Out on the plains, around a campfire, the violent drifter sings a beautiful song. 'The sky is black but filled with diamonds / You can almost hold them in your hands' goes the yearning lyric, with a fingerpicked accompaniment and twangs from a lap steel guitar. But listen a little longer. 'Up there God is preaching,' the man continues, bitterly. 'Laughing while you're reaching.' And then this amateur Nietzsche, wondering why he should care about a universe that evidently does not care about him, jumps up with his gun to go rob a train. That's the gorgeously perverse opening of 'Dead Outlaw,' the feel-good musical of the season, if death and deadpan feel good to you. As directed by David Cromer, in another of his daringly poker-faced stagings, the show is to Broadway what a ghost train is to an amusement park, with screams and laughs but much better music. That it should be on Broadway at all is a scream and a laugh. Developed by Audible, and performed last year at the 390-seat Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, 'Dead Outlaw' was a critical darling and insider hit, the kind that seems to do best doing least. No matter how cosmic its concerns, it was deliberately small — eight performers, five musicians, one set — and deliberately niche. It was not, in other words, for all markets. Yet here it is, surprisingly intact, at the 1,048-seat Longacre Theater, where it opened on Sunday in the biggest market of all. You know what else is surprisingly intact? That singing bandit. Born Elmer McCurdy in 1880, he spends his first 30 years on earth alive, the next 65 not. The embalmer did a good job. The funny-gross story is largely true, and feels even truer as pared to the bone by Itamar Moses in the musical's terse, brisk, sure-footed book. After that campfire prologue, and a barnburner of a welcoming number that establishes the theme — 'Your mama's dead / Your daddy's dead / Your brother's dead / And so are you' — the narrative cuts to Elmer's childhood in Maine, normal on the surface, wackadoodle underneath. Let's just say he already has mummy issues. Drawn to violence even at play, Elmer (Andrew Durand, terrific) is an angry soul, or rather, as a later song puts it, 'just a hole where a soul should be.' As he grows, he tries to fill that hole with alcohol, which can always be counted on to find the fights he's looking for. After one of these fights, he flees to a Kansas boomtown where he hopes he might live a normal life, with a job and a girl. Backed up by a narrator played with wolfish charm by Jeb Brown, he sings, 'Don't know what I want to be / Just as long as it ain't me.' But no, he can't even be that. The songs, by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, set harsh ideas to rowdy music that somehow makes even nihilism catchy. The piquant result, as played with glee by the guitar-forward band, will remind you less of Yazbek's recent Broadway scores — 'The Band's Visit,' 'Tootsie,' 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' and 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' — than of his 2000 debut, 'The Full Monty,' with its scrapy, scrappy grunge. Or perhaps it's his album 'Evil Monkey Man,' with Della Penna on guitars, that feels most like 'Dead Outlaw,' in a genre you might call cheerful melancholy. But after McCurdy is killed in a shootout in 1911, the polarities flip to melancholy cheer. The progress of his embalmed corpse across thousands of miles in seven decades with dozens of abuses is noted in scenes as sharp and vivid as the stations of the cross, albeit funnier. In the song 'Something for Nothing,' it dawns on the undertaker who performed the autopsy (Eddie Cooper) that he can monetize the abandoned corpse. (Two bits a peep.) In 1928, Elmer is the unlikely mascot (and sideshow attraction) for a cross-country foot race. Some years later, stored in the home of a B-movie director — a mummy makes a great extra in an exploitation flick — he becomes the confidant of the director's teenage daughter. 'I'm Millicent,' she says upon meeting him. 'But everyone calls me Millie.' Which in Julia Knitel's dry-as-dust performance is somehow hilarious. By the time Elmer winds up, in 1976, on the dissecting table of Thomas Noguchi, Los Angeles's so-called coroner to the stars, he is a horribly shriveled thing, with DayGlo red skin and deciduous fingers. (The mummy is the work of Gloria Sun, but for most of the second half of the show Durand plays his own corpse, beautifully.) And though Noguchi (Thom Sesma) may be the first man to treat postmortem Elmer with dignity, or at least with clinical propriety, he is like everyone else in getting weird pleasure from his encounter with the corpse, as we learn in his Sinatra-style 11 o'clock number. 'Dead Outlaw' is about that strange reaction. For a show content to offer itself as just a fabulously twisted yarn, that's in fact its big subject: How humans are excited, as if recognizing a long-lost relation, by their intermittent and usually unacknowledged adjacency to death. Cromer makes sure we acknowledge it though, in his uncanny pacing (including a 42-second eternity of silence) and in the work he draws from the designers. That effort is all of a piece: the musicians crammed onto their rotating coffin of a bandstand (sets by Arnulfo Maldonado), the sound (by Kai Harada) full of mournful train whistles and erratic heartbeats, the clothing (by Sarah Laux) rumpled as if for an eternity, the lighting (by Heather Gilbert) often vanishingly dim. So why with all that darkness is 'Dead Outlaw' so funny? Why does a long concrete chute sliding slowly onto the stage without any comment produce a huge laugh? At another moment, why does a safe that shoots off in the other direction do the same thing? In part it's the extreme discipline of the performances. Even playing as many as 13 characters each, the ensemble members (including Dashiell Eaves, Ken Marks and Trent Saunders as sad sacks, hucksters and Douglas MacArthur) never resort to shortcuts or winks. And in part it's the respect the authors show the audience by leaving us to assemble the jokes for ourselves, using the components they provide: contrast, surprise, pattern and disruption. Though that is already surpassingly rare on Broadway, even rarer is the way the show forces us, through pure entertainment and with no pathos, to think about things our intelligence busily helps us avoid. Why are we alive? As long as we are, what should we do about it? And do we have our papers in order? 'Dead Outlaw' does. It should have a hell of an afterlife.
