Latest news with #WomenontheVergeofaNervousBreakdown
Time Out
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
If the leading lady of a daytime telenovela was to read too many pop-psychology books while downing a double Espresso Martini, you might get something close to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. This musical comedy based on Pedro Almodóvar's 1988 cinema cult classic is given a neon-lit, red-curtained makeover at Sydney's Hayes Theatre. With precision taking a backseat to passion, director Alexander Berlage (Cry-Baby, American Psycho) delivers a stylish descent into screwball mania. The action takes place in Madrid, Spain, where Amy Hack 's (Yentl) heartbroken actress, Pepa, is having a terrible, very bad day, which we see play out from depressive start to high-flung resolution. Her lover Iván breaks up with her over answering machine, and thus, her Odyssey-styled mission to find and confront him begins. Along the journey, Pepa butts heads with Iván's scorned ex-wife Lucia (Tisha Keleman), his son and his own frustrated fiancée, as well as her wildly unravelling best friend, Candela (Grace Driscoll). With a book by Jeffrey Lane (known for his musical adaption of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) and music and lyrics by David Yazbek (Dead Outlaw), the original Broadway production of Women on the Verge had a relatively short lifespan – closing soon after it received poor reviews, and even poorer ticket sales. This is where Berlage's adept hand at re-inventing cult flops takes charge – finding a space for his avant-garde style through sharp angles, frenetic choreography, and psychosexual vignettes. His style is well matched by Phoebe Pilcher 's discordantly placed, evocative and frenzied lighting design, which effectively fills the space with the heat of the Spanish sun. Alexander Berlage (Cry-Baby, American Psycho) delivers a stylish descent into screwball mania Berlage has a reputation for breathing new life into former musical flops, and likewise, this production aims to move the material beyond a generic film-to-stage adaptation and lean into a clever, subversive vision. Women on the Verge skewers the most Shakespearean of plot points – love – and of course, the root cause of everyone's problems – men. (And underneath that is Greta Gerwig's favourite nemesis: the patriarchy.) The men in the piece may seem as vapid as those in the Barbie movie, but the bite of the women is more akin to Fleabag – dishevelled as they may appear, you don't want to cross them on a bad day. Hack demonstrates the utmost commitment to her characterisation of Pepa, with subtle nuances in her emotional state giving way to strident outbursts – she is quite literally the picture of a woman on the verge. Her accent is held firm through both dialogue and song, while her flinging and flailing of bags, sunglasses and telephones is a superb lesson in choreographed chaos. Driscoll's lust-lorn model, Candela, holds elastic characterisation and physicality, taking outlandish shapes and forms that are at times absurdly hilarious. Her patter song, 'Model Behaviour', reads like both an ode and challenge to the late great Stephen Sondheim himself. Meanwhile, Keleman's overlooked and vengeful wife Lucia is a woman who now seeks to get back the years lost to an untrustworthy man. As her son, Carlos, Tomas Kantor is our most grounded male character, still led by his base instincts, yes, but at least he has a good heart through which the blood is pumped. Playing opposite as his fiance, Nina Carcione 's doe-eyed stare cuts through the space, drawing attention to her excellent knack for non-verbal comedic timing. Chiara Assetta 's choreography is tasked with the olympic-sized hurdle of navigating around the congested set, and meets the challenge. The use of streamers instead of solid walls allows hands, faces, and limbs to appear and disappear with ease, while a large bed for one red-hot set piece blocks out a great portion of the space. It's swiftly executed choreography that has our characters dancing around, over and throughout the sharp angles of Hailley Hunt 's set design, which quite aptly reflects the slowly decaying psychosexual tensions of the show's characters. The production's take on Spanish characteristics is somewhat hit and miss. Sometimes, in the same vein as Lady Gaga in House of Gucci: thickly accented, but imbued with enough commitment to the bit that it works. But at the same time, also a little like Jared Leto in House of Gucci: absurd, over-the-top, and somewhat inconsistent. Aaron Robuck 's narrator/taxi driver seems an innocuous enough plot device in the grand scheme of the piece, and the character's disjointed nature isn't helped by Lane's underdeveloped book. Popping up throughout to (quite literally) transport Pepa between main set pieces, accordion in hand, the script takes what is meant to be the show's MC and replaces it with a big question mark on his purpose. On opening night, the sound levels seemed unbalanced – a weakness in a piece driven by dense lyrics and rapid tempo. Dylan Pollard 's musical direction, whilst being able to give the score a toe-tapping beat that's liable to make your hips shake, drowned out the enunciation from our fast-talking, thick-accented characters. Nonetheless, this stylish production makes a meal out of an undercooked script, and Hack's leading performance is especially worthwhile – her Pepa is as lived-in and layered as she is hysterical. The most poignant, powerful and purposeful moments of the show come when all five women are together in unison, particularly in the final moments, which offer the most quiet and peaceful state of the evening. This is what it looks like when women on the brink take back their power – in four-part harmony.
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.
