Praise for the Reimagined Myth of "Eurydice"

In most tellings of the myth about the ill-fated love story between Orpheus and Eurydice that famously has him going to the underworld to bring her back from the dead, he gets top billing and sometimes he even flies solo in the title as in the 17th century opera “L'Orfeo” or the 1959 film “Black Orpheus.” But that’s not the case with Sarah Ruhl’s 2003 play Eurydice, which is currently being revived at Signature Theatre.  

Ruhl's version not only centers the story on Eurydice but offers a rival for her affection in the form of her dead father whose love for his daughter is so strong that he maintains his memories of their times together on earth even though it’s made clear that such recollections are usually wiped away in the afterlife.

Ruhl wrote the play while she was mourning the death of her own father and those feelings of grief and longing ripple through Eurydice. She had originally intended to be a poet and Ruhl's plays, particularly her early work, sometimes have the enigmatic quality of modernist verse, which can make them challenging to grasp. 

But the director Les Waters has made a specialty of translating Ruhl’s works, having staged 14 productions of them (click here to read an interview with the two of them). This is Waters' third go at Eurydice and although I didn’t see his earlier ones or the opera that Ruhl created in 2020 with the composer Matthew Aucoin, it’s hard to imagine a more hauntingly effective production than this.

That’s due in large part to the moving performances by Maya Hawke in the title role and Brian D’Arcy James as her father. There’s been a lot of badmouthing about nepo babies, the children of famous people who get prominent roles in movies and plays, and I confess that I rolled my eyes when I heard that Hawke was getting this one. But what’s seldom said in such conversations is that—credit nature or nurture—talent sometimes runs in families. 

Or at least so it seems with Hawke, the daughter of the much-acclaimed actors Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, who imbues Eurydice with a passionate intelligence that allows her to be simultaneously feisty and vulnerable and totally deserving of having the play named after her (click here for more about the actress). 

I had no reservations about D’Arcy James, who I’m convinced can do anything. And here he makes the father the ideal parent we all yearn to have as he tenderly reassures Eurydice when she arrives in the afterlife, patiently rekindles their relationship and then selflessly lets her go when Orpheus comes to reclaim her.

There are elements in this production—the commedia-costumed chorus called the Stones, the tricycle-riding Lord of the Underworld—that still left me scratching my head. But perhaps because I’m still working my way through a profound loss of my own, I found particular comfort in the play’s final image that suggests that in the end, and even beyond in oblivion, real love survives. 

Let Down By "Lights Out: Nat 'King' Cole"

Several years ago, I reported a piece on the Smithsonian's "American Popular Song" album, which was intended to be a collection of the best rendition of each song in the Great American Songbook. But the head curator told me that so many of the songs were best sung by Nat King Cole that they had to go with the second-best rendition for many of those tunes or they'd have ended up with an entire Nat King Cole album. So that was one of several reasons that I was looking forward to seeing Lights Out: Nat "King" Cole, the new musical that opened this week at New York Theatre Workshop.

Another reason was that the show is a passion project of Colman Domingo, who we theater lovers have claimed as one of our faves long before he became the twice Oscar-nominated actor that he now is. One other reason was that it stars Dulé Hill, a triple-threat performer—can act, can sing, can really dance—returning to the New York stage for the first time in a decade. 

And yet another reason—sadly relevant in this historical moment—is that the show focuses on the final episode of Cole’s pioneering TV show which ran for just one year between 1956 and 1957 because national advertisers wouldn't sponsor a show starring a black entertainer because they were afraid that doing that might alienate their white southern customers.

So I think you will understand how much it pains me to have to say how disappointed I was by Lights Out. Domingo has recruited Patricia McGregor, the artistic director at NYTW and one of the few black women to lead a major theater company, to co-write and direct the show (click here to read about their collaboration). But despite years of workshops and tryouts (earlier versions were done in Pennsylvania and L.A.) the show remains a work in progress.

Domingo and McGregor have imagined Lights Out as a fever dream that Cole has in the minutes before he goes on air for his final episode and is trying to decide whether he should bow out with the elegant graciousness that has become his trademark or let loose all the anger and frustration he's felt at both the major slights and micro-aggressions he’s had to endure throughout his career.

The subject of how black celebrities were mistreated in mid-century America—selling out at nightclubs around the country but only allowed to enter them through the back door—is a fascinating one and the idea of framing that experience as a fever dream is terrifically intriguing. But the storytelling here is convoluted and McGregor’s direction is so additionally muddled that it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. 

And there is a lot going on in the show's 90-minutes of running time. Cole’s celebrity friends Eartha Kitt and Peggy Lee pop up to duet with him. Parodies of period commercials are performed. Ghosts from the singer’s past, including his mother, appear to give him advice. Openly racist versions of his white agents and producers turn up to harass him, even hurling the n-word at him.  And all of this is set, juke-box-musical style, to a playlist of Cole’s greatest hits, from “Mona Lisa” to “Unforgettable.”

The actors do what they can. Hill deftly mimics Cole’s smooth vocal stylings and as a former Tap Dance Kid, he brings both the noise and the funk during a dance battle (tap choreography by Jared Grimes) that is a true showstopper. The other challenger in that battle is Daniel J. Watts, who plays Sammy Davis Jr. as the mischievous trickster orchestrating Cole’s fever dream, daring him to stand up for himself and for black people as a whole.  

Cole and Davis were friends in real life (click here to watch them make fun of one another)  but the show never makes clear why Davis, who proudly allied himself with the otherwise all-white Rat Pack lead by Frank Sinatra and later endorsed Richard Nixon for president, has been assigned the role of Cole’s black conscience. 

Still, I’m very glad they gave him that role because Watts runs with it and is hands down the best part of the show. He not only mimics Davis perfectly but brings both a much needed energy to the antics he’s called to perform and a sharp edge to the questions about race that I had hoped the entire production would more ably explore.    

Why Just About Everyone Loves Kara Young

This is a slightly different post than I use write but maybe like me, you have wondered why the nominators for so many different theater awards seem to love the actress Kara Young so much that they keep nominating her for their awards. Over the past four years, Young has picked up more than two dozen nominations, including four consecutive Tony nods for best featured actress in a play. And she won that one last year for her performance in the much celebrated revival of Ossie Davis’ Purlie Victorious. 

The short answer to that “why” question is probably that Young is just good. But I think there’s something more to it than that. Young is one of those rare actors who has the ability to infuse each character she plays with her own personality (click here to read a bit more about her) and at the same time is able to fulfill the vision that the playwright intended for the character: so her performances are simultaneously comfortably familiar and reliably surprising. 

Part of that is casting her in the right roles. But a larger part of it is simply Young’s innate artistry. I remember the first time I saw her back in 2018 in a small off-Broadway production. I wasn’t crazy about the play but I was fascinated by the young actress at the center of it and I kept asking myself—and probably annoyingly my companion—“who is she?” 

Young popped up in a stream of productions after that, usually playing a streetwise teen and I started worrying that directors were just hiring her to do the same thing over and over again. But then I realized that she was coloring each character slightly differently, layering in the nuances that allowed her to sidestep the stereotype.

And then came Purlie Victorious. Ossie Davis had originally written the role of the naïve by spunky Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins for his wife Ruby Dee, a tough act to follow.  Then Melba Moore put her Tony-winning spin on Lutiebelle in the musical Purlie, another tough act to follow.  But Young proved more than up to the challenge. Her Lutiebelle was uniquely hers: loopy, sexy, altogether endearing and yes, Tony worthy.

Last summer, Young took on what struck me as her first fully adult role as a woman contemplating getting back together with an ex in Douglas Lyons' romcom Table 17 and she aced that one too. 

But now she’s being praised for her performance in Purpose, Branden Jacobs-Jenkin’s newly-anointed Pulitzer Prize winner about the dysfunctional family of a Civil Rights icon who bears more than a passing resemblance to Jesse Jackson. 

Young plays the outsider whose presence forces the family to confront the cost their public lives have exerted on their private ones. And hitting all the notes—hilarious and heartbreaking—that Jacobs-Jenkins has crafted for the character has made Young a frontrunner for yet another Tony win.

The Angry Young Women in "John Proctor is the Villain" and "Five Models in Ruins, 1981"

A new genre has been developing over the past few years, one that in tribute to the post-war change in British theater I’ve been calling “angry young women plays.”  

These new works more or less follow a certain formula: a group of women get together to engage in an activity as in Clare Barron’s 2018 Pulitzer finalist Dance Nation, then they start noting how society has misunderstood or mistreated them as in Liliana Padilla’s How To Defend Yourself which ran at New York Theatre Workshop a couple of years ago and finally they perform some kind of ritual to exorcise their frustrations and rally their abilities to deal with them as they do in Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord.   

Intentionally tapping into both comedy and tragedy, these plays give lots of young actresses a chance to show off the full range of what they can do. And they give those of us in the audience fair warning that young women are tired of taking shit and ready to do something about it. Or at least that’s how I felt after recently seeing two shows that hewed to the angry young women formula—one doing it smartly, the other doing it messily.

The smart one is John Proctor is the Villain, playwright Kimberly Belflower’s sharp response to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and it has been nominated as best play of the season by the Tony, Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk awards.  

Miller used the Salem Witch Trials that began in 1692 to comment on the McCarthyism of the 1950s. His protagonist John Proctor has an affair with his teenage servant girl but Miller casts him as the play's noble hero for refusing to name his neighbors or himself as being—as the surrounding hysteria charges—allies of Satan.

Belflower focuses her play on a group of high school students in a small Georgia town as they read Miller’s play, debate all of John Proctor’s behavior and try to figure out what to do with the men in their own lives—boyfriends, fathers, teachers—during the height of the #MeToo revelations.

And so Belflower has crafted both a literary critique of one of the most popular classics in the midcentury canon and a social commentary on the ways in which today's young women are dealing with toxic masculinity.

She’s aided by a terrific cast of young actresses. Sadie Sink, one of the stars in the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” has picked up a Tony nomination (click here to read more about her) but under the surehanded direction of Danya Taymor, they’re all giving kickass performances. Their characters’ moment of catharsis, set to one of the best playlists of the season, left me with a big grin on my face.

More messy is the production of Five Models in Ruins, 1981 that opened this week in LCT3’s Clair Tow theater. Its conceit is that a group of models have been hired for a Vogue magazine fashion shoot that will photograph them in a dilapidated English country house wearing the also-ran bridal gowns that Diana Spencer rejected for her wedding (costume designer Vasilija Zivanic’s dresses are not only witty imitations of some name-brand designers but also say a lot about each of the characters wearing them).

Playwright Caitlin Saylor Stephens has assembled the expected crew of twentysomething models—an eager newbie, a drug-addled prima donna, a jaded old-timer, a wisecracking outsider—but she doesn’t know what to do with them. And so they just stand around griping for most of the play’s 100-minute. running time.

Some of what they say about what they've experienced in the business is truly disturbing, justifying any anger they might have. But the models are more often treated as superficial twits and too much of what they say is just blather.

The play’s most potentially interesting character is the female photographer who is finally getting the chance to shoot a cover for the magazine. Although that could be because she’s played by the always watch-worthy Elizabeth Marvel (if you get to the theater early you’ll be treated to a silent pre-show of Marvel moving the set’s furniture around while fully in character). 

But even Marvel has a tough time with the storyline about how the photographer’s failing love affair is inhibiting her work. And there’s more than a hint that she may have gotten the job because she was sleeping with someone influential. I mean what the hell kind of feminism is that supposed to be representing? 

And even worse is director Morgan Green’s decision to let the climactic scene go on and on and on and on for almost four minutes, sending the audience out of the theater feeling exhausted instead of exhilarated.

Celebrating the OCC's 75th Anniversary— and Its Nominees for the 2024-2025 Season

The 2024-2025 theater season ends on Sunday with the dual openings of the musicals Dead Outlaw and Real Women Have Curves. And I’m exhausted. But it’s the kind of good exhaustion that comes from doing something you love. For over the past four weeks, I’ve seen 22 shows as I worked my way through all the final Broadway and major off-Broadway openings so that I could fulfill my responsibilities as a nominator for this year’s Outer Critics Circle Awards, which were announced yesterday. 

Helping to put together the OCC's slate of nominees is a task I never take lightly but it’s one that I’m particularly proud to be a part of this year because this season marks the 75th anniversary of the OCC, which was started by a group of critics who didn’t write for the major New York newspapers (there were seven of them) but who were just as passionate about the theater as those who did.

The major force behind the OCC back then was John Gassner, who emigrated with his family from Hungary to this country when he was eight. He had planned to go to medical school but gave that up while still a college student at Columbia University to pursue his true love of theater. 

Over the following years, Gassner, who died in 1967 at the age of just 64, headed the play department at the Theatre Guild, wrote and edited several books, taught playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, chaired the drama jury for the Pulitzer Prize for many years and served as an early booster of and mentor to many of the leading midcentury playwrights including Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. So it’s fitting that every year, the OCC gives a special award in his honor to a new playwright.  

This year’s nominees for the Gassner Award are an eclectic group but all of their works deal in one way or another with important contemporary topics including climate change, free speech and gender politics. They are:

Amy Berryman for Walden


George Clooney and Grant Heslov for Good Night, and Good Luck


Marin Ireland for Pre-Existing Condition


Lia Romeo for Still


Emil Weinstein for Becoming Eve

It's been a fascinating season (whittling down our choices was tough) and the competition for awards—ours and others—is going to be fierce and fun to watch over the next six weeks until the Tonys are given out on June 8. 

Our OCC winners, who will be voted on by our full membership, will be announced a few weeks before that on Monday, May 12 and we’ll celebrate them at a ceremony on May 22, which is always one of my favorite events of the year. In the meantime, below is the full list of our nominees:  

 

*OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY


Cult of Love


The Hills of California


John Proctor Is the Villain


Purpose


Stranger Things: The First Shadow


*In case you're wondering, we nominated both Job and Oh, Mary! when those productions ran off-Broadway last season; in fact, Oh, Mary!'s co-stars Cole Escola and Conrad Ricamora graciously announced all of our nominees
for this year

*OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL

Boop! The Musical


Death Becomes Her


Maybe Happy Ending


Operation Mincemeat


Real Women Have Curves

*And we nominated both Buena Vista Social Club and Dead Outlaw when those productions ran off-Broadway last season 


OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY

The Antiquities


Grangeville


Here There Are Blueberries


Liberation


Table 17
 

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

The Big Gay Jamboree


Drag: The Musical


We Live in Cairo


OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A PLAY

Beckett Briefs: From the Cradle to the Grave


Glengarry Glen Ross


Romeo + Juliet


Vanya


Yellow Face
 


OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL

Cats: The Jellicle Ball


Floyd Collins


Gypsy


Once Upon a Mattress


Sunset Boulevard
 


OUTSTANDING LEAD PERFORMER IN A BROADWAY PLAY

Kit Connor, Romeo + Juliet


Laura Donnelly, The Hills of California


Mia Farrow, The Roommate


Jon Michael Hill, Purpose


Louis McCartney, Stranger Things: The First Shadow
 


OUTSTANDING FEATURED PERFORMER IN A BROADWAY PLAY

Kieran Culkin, Glengarry Glen Ross


LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Purpose


Francis Jue, Yellow Face


Mare Winningham, Cult of Love


Kara Young, Purpose
 


OUTSTANDING LEAD PERFORMER IN AN OFF-BROADWAY PLAY 

Caroline Aaron, Conversations with Mother


F. Murray Abraham, Beckett Briefs: From the Cradle to the Grave


Jayne Atkinson, Still


Adam Driver, Hold On to Me Darling


Anthony Edwards, The Counter


Paul Sparks, Grangeville
 


OUTSTANDING FEATURED PERFORMER IN AN OFF-BROADWAY PLAY

Betsy Aidem, Liberation


Sean Bell, The Beacon


Michael Rishawn, Table 17


Richard Schiff, Becoming Eve


Frank Wood, Hold On to Me Darling
 


OUTSTANDING LEAD PERFORMER IN A BROADWAY MUSICAL

Darren Criss, Maybe Happy Ending


Jeremy Jordan, Floyd Collins


Audra McDonald, Gypsy


Jasmine Amy Rogers, Boop! The Musical


Nicole Scherzinger, Sunset Boulevard


Jennifer Simard, Death Becomes Her


OUTSTANDING FEATURED PERFORMER IN A BROADWAY MUSICAL

Danny Burstein, Gypsy


Jak Malone, Operation Mincemeat


Michele Pawk, Just in Time


Christopher Sieber, Death Becomes Her


Michael Urie, Once Upon a Mattress
 


OUTSTANDING LEAD PERFORMER IN AN OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

Nick Adams, Drag: The Musical


Marla Mindelle, The Big Gay Jamboree


Nkeki Obi-Melekwe, Safety Not Guaranteed


Alaska Thunderfuck, Drag: The Musical


Taylor Trensch, Safety Not Guaranteed
 


OUTSTANDING FEATURED PERFORMER IN AN OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

Ali Louis Bourzgui, We Live in Cairo


Paris Nix, The Big Gay Jamboree


Eddie Korbich, Drag: The Musical


J. Elaine Marcos, Drag: The Musical


Andre De Shields, Cats: The Jellicle Ball


Henry Stram, Three Houses
 


OUTSTANDING SOLO PERFORMANCE

David Greenspan, I'm Assuming You Know David Greenspan


Khawla Ibraheem, A Knock on the Roof


Sam Kissajukian, 300 Paintings


Andrew Scott, Vanya


Sarah Snook, The Picture of Dorian Gray
 


OUTSTANDING BOOK OF A MUSICAL (BROADWAY OR OFF-BROADWAY

Will Aronson and Hue Park, Maybe Happy Ending


David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts, Operation Mincemeat


Daniel Lazour and Patrick Lazour, We Live in Cairo


Bob Martin, Boop! The Musical


Marco Pennette, Death Becomes Her
 


OUTSTANDING SCORE (BROADWAY OR OFF-BROADWAY)

Will Aronson and Hue Park, Maybe Happy Ending


David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts, Operation Mincemeat


David Foster and Susan Birkenhead, Boop! The Musical


Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez, Real Women Have Curves


Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, Death Becomes Her
 


OUTSTANDING ORCHESTRATIONS (BROADWAY OR OFF-BROADWAY)

Will Aronson, Maybe Happy Ending


Doug Besterman, Death Becomes Her


Joseph Joubert and Daryl Waters, Pirates! The Penzance Musical


Daniel Lazour and Michael Starobin, We Live in Cairo


Andrew Resnick, Just in Time
 


OUTSTANDING DIRECTION OF A PLAY

Trip Cullman, Cult of Love


Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, Stranger Things: The First Shadow


Sam Mendes, The Hills of California


Phylicia Rashad, Purpose


Danya Taymor, John Proctor Is the Villain


OUTSTANDING DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL

Michael Arden, Maybe Happy Ending


Christopher Gattelli, Death Becomes Her


Robert Hastie, Operation Mincemeat


Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, Cats: The Jellicle Ball


Jerry Mitchell, Boop! The Musical
 


OUTSTANDING CHOREOGRAPHY

Jenny Arnold, Operation Mincemeat


Warren Carlyle, Pirates! The Penzance Musical


Christopher Gattelli, Death Becomes Her


Shannon Lewis, Just in Time


Jerry Mitchell, Boop! the Musical
 


OUTSTANDING SCENIC DESIGN 

Miriam Buether, Jamie Harrison, and Chris Fisher, Stranger Things: The First Shadow


Rachel Hauck, Swept Away


Rob Howell, The Hills of California


Dane Laffrey, Maybe Happy Ending


Derek McLane, Death Becomes Her



OUTSTANDING COSTUME DESIGN

Gregg Barnes, Boop! The Musical


Wilberth Gonzalez and Paloma Young, Real Women Have Curves


Rob Howell, The Hills of California


Qween Jean, Cats: The Jellicle Ball


Paul Tazewell, Death Becomes Her
 


OUTSTANDING LIGHTING DESIGN

Kevin Adams, Swept Away


Natasha Chivers, The Hills of California


Jon Clark, Stranger Things: The First Shadow


Ben Stanton, Maybe Happy Ending


Justin Townsend, Death Becomes Her
 


OUTSTANDING SOUND DESIGN

Paul Arditti, Stranger Things: The First Shadow


Adam Fisher, Sunset Boulevard


Peter Hylenski, Death Becomes Her


Peter Hylenski, Maybe Happy Ending


John Shivers, Swept Away
 


OUTSTANDING VIDEO PROJECTIONS

59, Stranger Things: The First Shadow


Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom, Sunset Boulevard


David Bergman, The Picture of Dorian Gray


Hana S. Kim, Redwood


Finn Ross, Boop! The Musical

In case you're counting, Death Becomes Her lead the pack with 12 nominations and Stranger Things: The First Shadow was the most nominated play with 7 nominations. Other multiple nominees were Maybe Happy Ending with 9, Boop! The Musical with 8, The Hills of California and Operation Mincemeat with 6 each, Drag: The Musical and Purpose with 5 each and Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Sunset Blvd. and We Live in Cairo with 4 each. And then we spread our appreciation around to lots of other shows.

It's a Smackdown Between Show and Business in "Irishtown," "I'm Assuming You Know David Greenspan" and "minor•ity"

 

The ever present tension between art and commerce moves centerstage in three recently opened off-Broadway productions—Irishtown at the Irish Repertory Theatre, I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan at Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, and Colt Coeur's production of minor•ity at the WP Theater—all three aiming to tickle theater insiders while also pointing out the more worrisome cracks in the current state of the art form.

Irishtown is set in the rehearsal room of a Dublin-based theater company that is preparing to bring a new production to New York. It’s a big deal for all of them: the high-strung playwright Aisling is eager to cash in on her recent hit, the British director Poppy needs a fresh start after leaving the Royal Shakespeare Company under mysterious circumstances, the veteran actress Constance sees the show as her last chance at the big time and the ambitious ingenue Síofra is more than willing to sleep her way to the top. Meanwhile Quin, the only male in the group, is a mansplaining malcontent.  

But everyone politely makes nice to everyone else until Quin raises the uncomfortable question of whether Aisling’s play, a #MeToo drama set in a British courtroom, is Irish enough. Where he wonders is the fiddle-playing, the poetic mysticism, the village drunk, the philandering priests, the downtrodden peasants or, at the very least, the trauma brought on by The Troubles?

The troupe’s attempts to add some of those elements because they think that’s the only kind of Irish work American audiences will pay to see allows the real-life playwright Ciara Elizabeth Smyth to poke some good-natured fun at the familiar tropes that turn up in so many Irish plays, including those that are usually done by the Irish Rep., which gets points for willingly going in on the joke.

But Smyth’s play also poses more serious questions about why certain cultural representations end up on our stages, limiting the kinds of stories that people from those groups get to tell about themselves and the ways that rest of us think about them.

The entire Irishtown cast—anchored by Kate Burton playing against type as the questionably talented Constance and Saiorse-Monica Jackson, a star of the popular TV series “Derry Girls,” appropriately annoying as Síofra (click here to read more about that actress)—is totally game as the fictional troupe improvises bits that pay comic homage to Samuel Beckett’s bowler-hatted simpletons and the ritualistic jig in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. But the direction by Nicola Murphy Dubey is so frenetic that they end up pushing too hard and Smyth’s smart satire collapses into just so-so farce.   

The playwright Mona Pirnot goes even more meta theatrical with I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan. She not only wrote the play as a one-man show for the downtown acting icon to perform (click here to learn a little more about him) but she also uses it to tell the story of how the show came to be and to explain why it’s so hard for playwrights today to do the kind of work they most want to do. 

I have to be honest and say that I wasn’t looking forward to this show because Pirnot practices the kind of writing popularized by the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård who dispassionately blends memoir, fiction and cultural critique into hyper-realistic accounts of his life that are far too solipsistic for me. 

Similarly, Pirnot's previous work I Love You So Much I Could Die was a solo piece in which she spent the entire time with her back to the audience while a computer voice read texts about a tragic event in her life (click here to read my review of that one). 

So I was pleasantly surprised by how playful and just plain old funny I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan turned out to be. It’s about a group of women playwrights who get together for an informal reading of one of their plays. They’re all at various stages in their writing careers. 

Sierra has gone into the far more lucrative if less satisfying career of writing for TV. Mona, the same-named stand-in for the playwright, remains committed to the theater and is working on an experimental piece centered around the actor David Greenspan even though she knows it’s unlikely to have broad appeal. Meanwhile their host Emmy is at a crossroads, not sure she can afford to follow her playwriting passion while still paying her bills. 

All of them—and a fourth character—are played by Greenspan. Dressed in a casual shirt and dark pants and working on a bare stage except for a covered bench, he whirls around the stage for a full 90 minutes, recreating the disagreements and encouragements the women share with one another. 

Greenspan and his frequent collaborator director Ken Rus Schmoll have worked out a few signifying gestures and slight vocal changes to distinguish each woman. I still was sometimes confused about who was speaking but it ended up not mattering much.  

For there's no question that Greenspan is a beguiling performer and while they’re not new, the arguments that Pirnot makes about the challenges of making art are compelling. At one point the Mona character notes that a playwright can expect to make about $3,000 for the entire run of an off-Broadway production that may have taken them years to write. That's a little less than the average monthly rent for a studio apartment here in the city.

The battle between art and commerce zooms in on the black experience in the Cape Verdean-American playwright Francisca da Silveira's minor•ity, which focuses on three artists of African descent who have been invited to an international festival in Paris where wealthy white donors are looking for artists to sponsor.  

But for those artists that means balancing the integrity of their work with the images of African artists that those patrons prefer. And in some cases that means amping up their accents, trading jeans and designer jackets for traditional tribal garb and spinning tales about ancient African myths or contemporary African woes. 

Da Silevira manages to draw some humor from these choices (and from the shout-outs to the brands supporting the faux festival) but it's a kind of laugh-to-keep-from-crying humor. And because da Silveira is a young playwright (note the overly cutesy punctuation for the play's title) the pieces in minor•ity, don't line up quite as smoothly as one might want.

The show has also clearly been produced on a small budget, although costume designer Celeste Jennings seems to have grabbed most of it and used the money to good effect for her spot-on costumes. 

Luckily, the production has also been blessed with a strong cast, spearheaded by Ato Essandoh, who may be most familiar to some theatergoers as the chief-of-staff to Kerry Russell's American ambassador to England on the Netflix series "The Diplomat."  

Under the confident direction of Shariffa Ali, Essandoh and his castmates Nedra Marie Taylor and Nimene Sierra Wurch dig deep into the angst of these artists struggling to compromise just enough to be able to do their work without compromising their dignity.  

It's always been tough to be an artist. It's even tougher nowadays. These shows, faults and all, are a reminder that those of us who love theater should be grateful that despite such obstacles, artists like da Silveira, Smyth, Pirnot and Greenspan keep finding ways to make it for us.

 

 

The Martin Musicals: "Smash" & "Boop!"

Bob Martin burst onto the Broadway scene back in 2006 with The Drowsy Chaperone, a loving send-up of Broadway musicals that ran for 674 performances, was nominated for 13 Tony awards and won five of them including Best Book of a Musical, which Martin shared with his co-writer Don McKellar. He followed that up by collaborating with Thomas Meehan on the musical adaptation of the movie "Elf". That one only ran for 74 performances but it has since become a Christmas staple. Next Martin collaborated on the book for The Prom, whose relatively short yearlong run belies the true depth of affection that theater folks have for this tale of a group of self-involved performers who put aside their narcissism to help a young lesbian who wants to take a girl to her high school dance. 

So it makes perfect sense to me that producers wanting a big, flashy feel-good musical should turn to Bob Martin. And this season two shows, both of them opening over the past week, did exactly that. The book for Smash, an adaptation of the TV show about the making of a musical, was co-written by Martin and Rick Elice, who, having written Jersey Boys, is no slouch himself. And Martin flew solo with the book for Boop!, a modern-day fantasia about the cartoon character Betty Boop (click here to read a piece about how he managed working on both). 

The strengths and weaknesses of the two shows are the same: Martin’s love for the old-fashioned musicals of yesteryear is evident in everything he does but he seems far better at parodying those old shows than he is at coming up with fresh ideas for new ones.

The underlying storyline for Smash remains the same as it was on TV: a group of theater people try to create a bio-musical about Marilyn Monroe called “Bombshell”. The series, which itself stumbled through only two seasons, had lots of subplots but its central question was whether Monroe should be played by a veteran performer who worked her way up through the ranks or a fresh-faced newcomer—and how far each would go to win the role. 

Martin and Elice's stage musical has done away with the subplots. And they’ve thrown out the central question too. Instead, they’ve replaced them with a dim sum menu of well-worn backstage tropes: the gay director with an eye for cute chorus boys, the drunk writer who can’t hold his liquor, the overweight stage manager who once dreamed of being onstage, the imperious star who has pretensions of being a method actress. 

But because they don’t want to insult anyone who is gay, has a drinking problem, has a weight problem or is an asshole, they go out of their way to give each of these characters a scene in which they get to redeem themselves. And no matter how well intentioned, that performative earnestness saps the humor. 

Old comic hands like Brooks Ashmanskas as the director and Kristine Nielsen as a vampirish drama coach are capable of pulling laughs out of thin air. But too many supposedly funny bits fall flat, leaving other talented folks like Krysta Rodriguez, John Behlmann and Caroline Bowman adrift.

Stage vet Robyn Hurder is supposed to be the star of the show (click here to read about her) and she belts her heart out but she lacks leading lady “ris” and having to share the show’s signature song “Let Me Be Your Star” with two other actresses (it’s reprised over and over and over again) doesn’t help.  

As they did for the TV show, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman supply the score and their songs are serviceably tuneful. But Martin, Elice and their director, the usually resourceful Susan Stroman, haven’t figured out how to smoothly integrate them into the plot. Although that may be because there really isn’t one.

The best scenes in the show may be the two video montages put together by S. Katy Tucker to make fun of Reddit and TikTok influencers. They made me laugh but they also made me wonder if a show, particularly a wobbly one like this one, can afford to piss off a group that is becoming increasingly, well, influential when it comes to getting butts in seats.

Martin fares better with Boop!  But only slightly. Appearing for the first time in 1930, Betty Boop had big eyes, long lashes and pouty lips pasted onto a big head. And unlike so many cartoon heroines who were thin and had long blonde locks, Betty’s hair was dark and bobbed and she had a curvy body outfitted in a tight Jazz Age-mini dress. Her sassy signature tag line was “Boop Oop a Doop,” 

That innocent sexiness appealed to me when her cartoons started popping up on TV in my girlhood and she appealed to lots of others too (click here to read more about that) but I wasn’t sure that Betty was remembered well enough nowadays and I was nervous about how she’d be treated on Broadway. 

Betty’s short animated features were simple. Men chased her and she hit them over the head with heavy objects to make them stop. But as with Smash, this musical version of her story is filled with lots and lots of storylines: a cartoon character discovering the real world, an orphan misfit pursuing her dream of becoming an artist, a crooked politician running for mayor, a woman realizing her full potential, three separate love stories, including a gay one and a cute puppet dog (copies of it available for sale in the lobby). 

The result is a little bit of Annie, a little bit of Back to the Future, a little bit of The Wiz and a lot of both the movie “Barbie” and Martin’s own Elf adaptation. David Foster has written the bouncy if anodyne music and Susan Birkenhead has done the lyrics, some of them clever. The show is directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, a firm believer that more is more, that kicklines are essential in musicals and that there’s no situation that can’t be helped by a confetti canon.

David Rockwell’s sets and Gregg Barnes’ costumes are thoroughly delightful. In a reverse homage to the classic 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz," Betty’s cartoon life is all in black and white and then everything bursts into color when she transports to the real world of contemporary New York. In one highlight, the ensemble is dressed in costumes that are black and white on one side and candy-colored on the other, allowing them to flit back and forth between Betty's worlds just by turning around as they dance.

But what really makes this show spin is a star-is-born performance by Jasmine Amy Rogers, a 25-year-old former finalist of the Jimmy Awards and a triple threat who has a terrific singing voice, can dance up a storm and knows how to hit every comic note be it with a quip or a sly smile (click here to read more about her). The show wouldn't be even half as good as it is without her. 

The critical reviews are all over the place for both Smash and Boop!. So whether you'll find these shows to be delights or disappointments will depend on what you're looking for in a musical. As for me, I'm afraid I'll be looking elsewhere.