Sierra Boggess, Norm Lewis and Adam Jacobs star in the new world premiere musical 'Monte Cristo'

 

Sierra Boggess, Norm Lewis and Adam Jacobs together in a new musical sounded like a theatre lover’s dream but unfortunately these dependable Broadway veterans can’t overcome Peter Kellogg’s weak book for Monte Cristo, the York Theatre’s world premiere production at Theatre at St. Jean’s.  Adapting Alexandre Dumas’s epic 1844 novel of betrayal, vengeance and redeeming love as a musical is a great idea, and maybe after considerable reimagining and rewriting it can work.  Peter Flynn directs.

Jacobs plays Edmund, an uneducated young man content with his life thanks to his love, which is reciprocated, for Mercedes (Boggess), a refined young lady who accepts his marriage proposal but before they can wed Villefort (Lewis), a lawyer, has him arrested for treason to protect his fortune and place in society after learning that Edmund unwittingly delivered a letter written by Villefort’s father that is deemed treasonous.  

When Edmund escapes from prison 19 years later he seeks his revenge.  The events are complicated and Kellogg’s script left me feeling confused.  I asked my friend, who had Googled the plot before coming, to make sure I was following correctly.  Neither of us had read the book but one should not have to in order to follow a play.  The plot wraps up quickly as Edmund settles his scores with ease and the play concludes with a saccharine ending.

I usually appreciate seeing a new musical in the intimacy of Off-Broadway but I felt several elements needed to be enlarged: the story, the space and the running time, which is just over two hours.  Fortunately Anne Mundell went light on her scenic design.  Siena Zoe Allen and Amanda Roberge created lush costumes.

Kellogg, whose script is also based on Charles Fechter’s play, does better with his lyrics to Stephen Weiner’s beautiful music.  The song “Dangerous Times,” sung by the ensemble, could have been written for our times: 

“Be careful whom you speak to.

Someone over there is taking note.

Somebody’s writing down who your friends are.

Somebody is recording how you vote.

There’s a man who sits on a shaky throne.

How much longer, only blood will tell.

But the lofty never fall alone.

The innocent are crushed as well.

Edmund and Mercedes have a lovely duet early on with “You Guide Me Home” and Boggess’s gorgeous soprano is moving in “How Did I Get so Far Away?”  I am happy to say no one in the cast let loose with the dreadful belting that is so popular on Broadway, but then I wouldn’t have expected Lewis, Boggess or Jacobs to do so.  They don’t have to.  They have the beautiful, pure voices to just sing. 

Daniel Radcliffe's powerful solo performance fills the stage, and the aisles as well

 

Daniel Radcliffe, the actor, should be at the top of the list that the character he is playing is creating in Every Brilliant Thing, Duncan MacMillian’s inter-active one-person play at the Hudson Theatre. Brilliant is the word that best describes his energetic and compassionate portrayal of the life of a man shaped by his mother’s first suicide attempt when he was 7. The title refers to the list of happy things he begins compiling for her, a list he continues through the next 20 years of his life, which will include his own depression as an adult. 

MacMillian, with Jonny Donahoe, found a creative way to deal with such serious material. Rather than have Radcliffe alone on the stage telling his story, they broaden his world by having him improv with audience members throughout the show’s 70 minutes. Dressed in a lavender sweatshirt, black pants and white sneakers, with his boyish (Harry Potter) face fully bearded, he is perpetual motion as he cues pre-selected folks when it’s time for their contribution to the narrative. Most have been given numbered cards with printed answers but in some of the best scenes he interacts with people who have been assigned roles, such as his father, the school librarian and his wife.  Radcliffe, under Jeremy Herrin and MacMillian’s direction, handles this potentially risky storytelling with precision and grace. In addition to acting out his script he must remember where every number is in the audience so when he calls one out he knows whether to be looking up at the balcony or to the right or left at the people seated in a U shape onstage  He participates in the selection, along with production staff, by chatting with audience members throughout the theatre for a half hour before the show begins.

“The list began after her first attempt,” he says, addressing the audience from the stage that will remain devoid of any set, with the house lights remaining on.  “A list of everything brilliant about the world.  Everything worth living for.”

He then called out the number one and a woman from the balcony shouted out “ice cream.”  This pattern continued with “water fights," "staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV” and more of what a 7-year-old boy thinks makes life worth living.

When he returns to school he is sent to the counsellor, “who was actually just Mrs. Patterson from the library.  She was a wonderful woman, the sort of person you looked at and immediately trusted.”

When she asks how he is feeling he replies, “My mother’s done something stupid.”

They sit in silence until “she did a truly remarkable thing.  A very unexpected, incredibly unusual thing.  Even now, I can’t quite believe she did it.”

She took off a shoe and sock and put the sock on her hand and it magically became a friendly dog who had a conversation with him.  (He’s never given a name in the show.). “It was hard to stay grumpy after that.”

The woman playing her clearly enjoyed it and received hearty applause, as did all the other brave souls who took parts. 

The calling out of numbers continues throughout the show, growing into the hundreds of thousands as the years go by and he struggles with his own mental illness and the failure of his marriage.  It’s not giving anything away to say he will be all right.  Anyone who develops such a coping method as young as 7 has resilience. 

And it has been touching people around the world. The show comes to Broadway following a successful run in London’s West End where four other actors, male and female, also performed the role. It has been performed in 62 countries and translated into 42 languages

When we entered the theatre Tuesday night I was immediately captivated by what sounded like a live jazz band.  Jazz is my favorite form of music, beginning and ending each day for me, coming from my old jazz station, WAER, at Syracuse University, which I listen to now online.  I didn’t see any musicians listed in the Playbill so it must have been recorded.  Tom Gibbons is the sound designer.

The show ends as the character announces his millionth brilliant thing. (We don’t hear all the numbers in between.  They make big skips.) “Listening to a record for the first time.  Turning it over in your hands, placing it on the deck and putting the needle down, hearing the faint hiss and crackle” (we hear this, for those of us old enough to remember that exciting sound) “at the sharp metal point on the wax before the music begins, sitting and listening while reading the sleeve notes.”

He sits surrounded by boxes filled with pages of his list and pages and pages surrounding him on the stage floor.  Then, in an absolutely perfect ending that belongs on his list of brilliant things, Nina Simone’s recording of “Ooh Child,” a song I have loved since 1970 when it was a hit for the Five Stairsteps, begins.  It felt as if the words were descending from on high to embrace him.

Ooh child

Things are gonna get easier

Ooh child things’ll get brighter 

Some day, yeah

We’ll put it all together and we’ll get it undone

Some day

When your head is much lighter

Some day, yeah,

We’ll walk in the rays of the beautiful sun 

Some day

When the world is much brighter . . .

Marcel on the Train

 Long before he was a world renown mime, Marcel Marceau practiced silence of a different kind.  At 20 he was given charge of a group of 12 year olds from a French orphanage for Jewish children with the task of taking them by train from Limoges to Rouen.  From there they would hike into Switzerland and freedom from the Nazis who occupied their country.  This journey is portrayed in Marshall Pailet and Ethan Slater’s play Marcel on the Train, presented by Classic Stage Company. 

While this sounds like a fascinating idea for a play, under Pailet’s direction the story never comes to life.  I didn’t feel the least bit of suspense about whether they would get to Switzerland; their eventual safety was made clear as the play went on in segmented glimpses of their futures.  The characters, especially the children (who are played by adults), are so undeveloped I had little interest in them.  The only one who stood out was Berthe (Tedra Millan) and that was because she was a constant complainer. 

Slater plays Marceau but most of the time I didn’t know what he was portraying in his mimes.  I did like the silhouettes of birds he created with his hands to calm the children when their train is stopped and they hear German voices outside.  Studio Luna provides the lighting design.

Scott Davis makes good use of the small rectangular performance space in creating the inside of a train with little more than two rows of benches and tables.  Caitlyn Murphy is the props supervisor.

The show runs an hour and 40 minutes without an intermission. 

'Only Bears,' a new queer romantic comedy

 

I met Adam Willey-Kern in 2005 when I produced Elizabeth Swados' oratorio "Missionaries" about the rape and murder of four American churchwomen in El Salvador on Dec. 2, 1980, and the faith that kept them in that country despite the danger. We performed the choral drama at my church, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, for the 25th anniversary of that horror, which made front page coverage around the world. Adam played Archbishop Oscar Romero who was slain while preaching at mass in March of that year.

Only Bears, a new queer romantic comedy short conceived as a proof of concept for a larger episodic omantic dramedy, has launched a Seed&Spark crowdfunding campaign following the project’s approval for fiscal sponsorship through Film Independent.

The short stars real-life married actors Adam Kern (Inheritance, One Dollar, I See You) and Jeff Willey as fictionalized versions of themselves—two mid-40s bears attempting to carve out one intentional day of reconnection in Los Angeles, only to have it repeatedly derailed by traffic, screenings, strangers, and the general chaos of queer social life. Written and produced by Kern, Only Bears explores midlife queer partnership, identity, and intimacy with humor and heart. A graduate of the Cornish School of the Arts, Willey previously appeared in director Aaron Jin’s short Gay Jesus.

Logline: Over the course of one wildly unpredictable day, two married bears attempt to rekindle their intimacy—but between traffic, screenings, queer social chaos, and a stranger handing them a gently used pizza, life keeps acting like the pushy “third” in their relationship.

The project will be directed, shot, and edited by David Haverty of Odd Dog Pictures. The screenplay blends grounded realism with heightened fantasy elements—mirroring the way memory, anxiety, and desire interrupt everyday life—which Haverty translates visually through a fluid shift between naturalistic scenes and playful fantasy sequences.

The ensemble cast includes Santana Dempsey (Law & Order: SVU, Kenan, Scandal, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), Ian Verdun (Siren, The Creator, Outlands, The Rookie), Teri Gamble (Mrs. Davis, Modern Family, Superstore), and Cassandra Capocci (The Goldbergs, Freakier Friday). The original score is composed by singer-songwriter Tom Goss (Bear Soup, Nerdy Bear, Gay Stuff), who also appears in a cameo.

Kern’s producing work spans short film, theatre, and immersive storytelling, including the Harvard/American Repertory Theatre/Moscow Art Theatre–affiliated Pilot Season Survival Guide, projects with Cleveland Play House and The 5th Avenue Theatre, and his role as a partner and former co-owner of Shadow of the Run, an immersive theatre company based in Cleveland. He is currently developing a slate of film projects alongside a large-scale immersive theatrical adaptation, An Awfully Big Adventure: A Wake in Neverland.

Only Bears was developed with guidance from casting director Risa Bramon Garcia, who encouraged Kern to write directly from lived experience. The resulting script balances sharp comedy with emotional specificity, centering queer bodies, bodies of size, and long-term relationships that are rarely afforded narrative complexity or joy onscreen. The team plans to use the short as a creative and tonal blueprint for a scripted episodic expansion currently in development.