Those of us who are shellshocked at the political upheaval are faced with a choice — try to ignore, actively escape, or engage? Can theater help us decide, and then help any of those choices happen? Can it help us manage?
The life story that pioneering theater artist Anna Deavere Smith tells in “Healing Arts,” written in what feels like a different era (last year), makes an argument for engagement. A chapter in a book edited by Renee Fleming entitled “Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness,” Smith writes that she had wanted to “join the revolution,” but soon realized “the revolution was over,” and fell into theater as a fluke, eventually developing her groundbreaking form of documentary theater. At one point, she wonders whether interviewing strangers with a tape recorder and then performing as them, was“an antidote to the scars left on me from growing up in a segregated town? Would this allow me to get closer to America? My grandfather had said ‘If you say a word often enough, it becomes you.’ I would try to become America….”
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
Six more shows at the January theater festivals. Three of the festivals ended over the weekend, but several continue at least until the end of the month.
Under the Radar:
Old Cock. How to be a dictator
This 51-minute play starring a chicken may seem a startling evolution for the political playwright Robert Schenkkan, whose Broadway playwriting debut, “The Kentucky Cycle,” was six hours long, took us through 200 years of the dark side of American history, and won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Drama…But “Old Cock” does ultimately reflect its playwright’s usual concerns with the uses and abuses of political power.
Show/Boat: A River
Why has “Show Boat” been renamed “Show/Boat: A River?” The title change turns out to be typical of what’s being billed as a “daring reimagining” of the 1927 musical. Many of director David Herskovits’s choices are awkward; their purpose is often unclear; and they undermine what’s worthwhile about the production.
Prototype:
Eat the Document.
This opera, which tells a story about early 1970s radicals who become fugitives for some three decades…is based on a 2006 novel with the same title, written by Dana Spiotta. The novelist in turn took her title from a 1966 documentary film about Bob Dylan.
Exponential:
Two hip takes on dystopia:
Cool Zone
largely an entertaining, homemade homage to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse…In its Exponential webpage, Cool Zone is described as “a fascist brainwashing program disguised as a public access children’s TV show” from the 1980s, but the ominousness unfolds somewhat more artfully than this blunt summary suggests.
“To Bridge Ten Millennia” is by a troupe that calls itself CAROL, which stands for Concrete Aggregate Ritual of Life. CAROL strikes me as the kind of committed, diligent and deeply cryptic avant-garde company that, if it lasts for another decade or so, will be the subject of at least one PhD thesis. In the meantime, the current show felt mostly like a series of feints. This started with its description on its Exponential webpage, which doesn’t seem to describe it at all.
PhysfestNYC:
The Fluxus Brothers Present Good Art Bad Art
an hour of undeniable weirdness but also of history, humor and even, albeit obliquely, provocative cultural commentary. The Fluxus Brothers – actual brothers Mason Rosenthal and Benjamin Rosenthal, along with “Dada” Morgan FitzPatrick Andrews – functioned as the equivalent of a tribute band to the Fluxus art movement of the 1960’s and 70s, but also as straight-faced pranksters creating Fluxus-inspired pieces of their own,
The Week in New York Theater News
Today is the start of Broadway Week, which offers 2-for-1 tickets for performances from January 21 to February 9. (Book using code BWAYWK25. “upgraded seats” code BWAYUP25.)
Cabaret cast change: Starting March 31, country music star Orville Peck will make his Broadway debut as the Emcee, and two-time Tony-nominated Eva Noblezada will star as Sally Bowles.
Titanique is getting a new crew: Andrew Keenan-Bolger as Victor Garber starting Jan 31, Lea Delaria as Ruth starting Feb 4
“True Love Forever,” one of my favorite shows of 2024, returns for Valentine’s Day weekend: February 13 – 15, 6:30pm and 9pm at ART X NYC
The bank building at 305 West 43rd Street that Second Stage turned into the Off-Broadway theater named after Tony Kiser twenty-five years ago, but gave up in December, has been taken over by Seaview productions.
Seaview, which was founded in 2012 by Greg Nobile when he was 20 years old, has produced some two dozen Broadway shows (including Tony winners Parade and Stereophonic, and forthcoming The Last Five Years, and Good Night and Good Luck), but, more relevantly, is also a producer of such commercial star-driven Off-Broadway shows with high ticket prices as “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” and “Hold On to Me Darling” The theater will be renamed Studio Seaview and begin presenting Off-Broadway shows this spring.
More on the news from Broadway Journal and the New York Times, which puts it in context: “In recent years Audible, which is owned by Amazon, began leasing the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village; A24, the film studio, purchased the Cherry Lane Theater in the West Village; and Netflix assumed control of the Paris Theater in Midtown.” But the most significant paragraph in this news is probably this one: “The length of Seaview’s lease is uncertain. The building is owned by Trans World Equities Inc., and Nobile said “the site will likely be developed at some point.” He said the landlord told Seaview it would give at least a year’s notice before the theater company would need to vacate the building.”
The Times is quietly acknowledging digital theater in a new roundup Theater productions to stream now
·In Memorium
Joan Plowright, 95, four-time Broadway veteran , Tony winner for A Taste of Honey (co-starring Billy Dee Williams), widow of Laurence Olivier
Jules Feiffer, 95, a political and cultural cartoonist whose influential comic strip ran in the Village Voice from 1956 to 2000, was also a (Carnal Knowledge) and a Broadway playwright, “Little Murders” 1967, which had more success in later London and Off Broadway productions, and “Grown Ups,” 1981)
Lynn Taylor-Corbett, 78, “a Tony Award-nominated choreographer and director whose colorfully varied career included commissions for New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater as well as Broadway musicals, like ‘Swing!,’ and films, like Footloose.’”
