Election Day is exactly two weeks away, which makes Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Broadway debut feel well-timed given her previous performance as a morally bankrupt politician.  (Read “The Collaborators,” Veep executive producer Frank Rich’s recent article on the coming comeuppance of Trump’s cronies.)  Also feeling relevant to the looming midterm elections was the heavy dose of absurdism on stage this past week – the opening of Lauren Yee’s “King of the Yees” and the brief run of Charles Mee’s “Prelude” – as well as the announcement of the intensely starry Broadway revival of Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros,” the quintessential Theater of the Absurd, in which citizens inexplicably begin turning into rhinoceroses one by one – a metaphor for the rise of totalitarianism.

The Week in New York Theater Reviews

Other Desert Cities

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, making her Broadway debut, dominates this first Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities.” This is not because her performance stands out; it doesn’t. She simply holds her own in a starry five-member ensemble who together portray the fictional Wyeths, a family much like the Reagans – an old Hollywood couple who became a Republican political couple, with children who reject their values…Louis-Dreyfus dominates the new production because she is the reason why top ticket prices directly from the box office have climbed past $1,000. If ATG and the play’s 29 other producers were being honest, they would surely tell you she is the only real reason the revival exists at all. She reportedly wanted to return to the stage after more than four decades, and this is the vehicle in which she wanted to do it. At this point, whatever Julia wants, Julia gets.

King of the Yees

“King of the Yees” is billed as a “kind of true” story about the disappearance of playwright Lauren Yee’s father Larry Yee, a prominent resident of San Francisco’s Chinatown, after the California politician for whom he long volunteered, Leland Yee, was arrested for corruption. But Lauren’s encounter with a Chinese Lion singing and dancing to “All That Jazz” may not be the true part; nor her shootout with a gangster named Shrimp Boy; nor her quest to get hold of Chinatown’s strongest whiskey, its sweetest oranges, and its loudest firecrackers all by sundown in order to find her father, having been instructed to do so by a trio of traditionally-garbed elders whom she encounters by entering through a mystical Chinese door. “King of the Yees,” in other words, is more kind of surreal than kind of true.

Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen

Sophia Anne Caruso as Colette, a French prostitute and diarist in Duncan Sheik’s posthumously produced musical, has a moment that struck me as straight out of his “Spring Awakening,” when she lets out a lovelorn cry full of breathtaking angst and melody.

But “Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen,” reminds me far more often of the most recent Broadway production of “Cabaret,”  because of its general slinky suggestiveness, and its staging on an overcrowded platform in the round, almost always bathed in red. The show is billed as the first American musical adaptation of  a manga (Japanese graphic novel), taking its title, its setting in a “maison close” (legal brothel) in fin-de-siecle Paris, and the names of its characters from a manga by Moyoco Anno. But if there is anything uniquely Japanese about the story, it’s crowded out by all the ways the show feels overly familiar.

Prelude

free, outdoors, 30 minutes long, and awesome; put together by some of the legendary lights of New York’s avant garde to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the pioneering, immersive theater company, En Garde Arts

Guac at The People’s Theater

In a fleeting moment but one that will last forever, Manuel Oliver found out that his 17-year-old son was shot dead, one of the 17 people killed on Valentine’s Day, 2018 at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The next year, Oliver began performing “Guac,” a solo show about his son that has just finished its latest run as the inaugural production of The People’s Theatre: Centro Cultural Inmigrante. The pairing was inspired, a thrilling example of how theater itself can be both fleeting and forever.

The Week in New York Theater News

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis’s Warriors will begin performances at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne on March 9, opening April 8, directed by Jenny Koons and co-directed and choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler with a cast that features Sasha Allen, Jaci Calderon, Aneesa Folds, Amber Gray, Julia Harriman, Sasha Hutchings, Gizel Jiménez, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Casey Likes, Kenita R. Miller, and Donald Webber Jr. The 2024 concept album is being brought to the stage: When the Warriors, a gang from Coney Island, are framed for the shocking murder of a respected leader, Cyrus, at a summit in the Bronx, they must race to get home to Coney Island to prove their innocence and save Cyrus’ hope for peace in a perilous city.

Tatiana Maslany, Tony Shalhoub and John Turturro will star in Ionesco’s ” Rhinoceros” on Broadway instead of “The Full Monty.” (which is being postponed.) The 1961 play that originally starred Zero Mostel will run from April 7, 2027 – June 13 at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater, with an official opening on April 25, in a production directed by Diane Paulus that’s transferring after an acclaimed run at American Repertory Theater.

The full cast of Imitation of Life. at the Shed November 21 – January 3. Joining the previously announced Tony Award winner Adrienne Warren as “Delilah,” Jessica Vosk as “Bea,” Michael Luwoye as “Elroy,” Charlie Thurston as “Archie,” Aleyse Shannon as “Adult Peola,” Scarlett London Diviney as “Young Peola,” Lily Gilliam as “Young Jessie is the ensemble: Kayla Davion, Karli Dinardo, EJ Hamilton, Sheldon Henry, Dan Horn, Aliah James, Evan Latta, Kyle Taylor Parker, Morgan Jeanell Robbins, Martell Dimitri Ruffin, Clifton Samuels, Carla Stewart and Ryan Vona. The swings and offstage covers for the production are Zach Bravo, Skylar Geary, Dava Huesca, Malik Kitchen, Zoe Brooke Reed, and Zoe Rock

Tilda Swinton will make her New York stage debut, returning to the role she originated four decades ago, in Manfred Karge’s Man to Man, opening February 28, 2027 Off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater. In 1930s Germany, a woman puts on her dead husband’s trousers and never takes them off. As the world around her changes, she endures war and dictatorship, hunger and humiliation – always fighting to stay alive