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.

Matthew Broderick is delightfully sleazy as Tartuffe at NYTW

 

Matthew Broderick’s wisely low-keyed performance in the title role and playwright Lucas Hnath’s très moderne translation make New York Theatre Workshop’s revival of Tartuffe seem like a new work rather than Molière’s 1664 satire of religious piety that we have seen for years.  It’s hilarious, and a perfect play to mirror the religious hypocrisy of our own time.

Under Sarah Benson’s direction Broderick avoids the temptation to exaggerate Tartuffe’s vileness, allowing the wittiness of the verses to shine.  When well-written plays go wrong it’s because the actors and director fail to follow a major performance rule: TRUST THE TEXT.  Luckily that’s just what this cast and director do.

Tartuffe-like characters flourish in all eras, a charlatan posing as a devoutly religious man who inspires blind acceptance from his followers.  In the play it’s fun to watch.  In our current day, though, it’s frightening what heights of power these blind followers will bestow on one person.  Our very democracy is at risk.

In the play, what’s at risk is the fortune of one wealthy French aristocrat, Orgon (David Cross), who we learn at the start has become so enamored of Tartuffe that he dismisses his family’s concerns and even plans to marry off his only daughter, Mariane (Emily Davis), to the sleazy swindler who, unbeknownst to him, has already tried to seduce his wife, Elmire (Amber Gray).  It’s delightful to watch Broderick ingratiate his way into the foolish Orgon’s household.  We experience Mariane’s horror when her father tells her, “It comforts me to know that a man of divinity will get to be the one who takes your virginity.”

He even looks slimy thanks to Enver Chakartash’s costumes, which are bright and lush for the other characters.  Tartuffe is dressed in a black frock coat and hat, with a wig of long gray hair. (Wig and hair design by Robert Pickens).  But to Orgon he is a spiritual man who should be rewarded and he signs over his entire fortune and estate to him.

The NYTW production is one of two revivals of Tartuffe presented Off-Broadway this fall.  André De Shields brought the self-righteous fraud to the House of the Redeemer, an Episcopal event site on the Upper East Side with seating for 100.  NYTW seats 199. 

Hnath was unaware that that production was in the works until this summer.  He had been thinking about writing a new play in Molière’s style when he decided to create a new version of the original French text using a 1930s English translation, working every day for nine months going line by line to understand the meaning and then devising rhymes, with plenty of profanity, to match.  

One character I would have liked to have seen played bigger was Dorine, the maid who does little work but has plenty to say about the family she serves.  As played by 64-year-old Lisa Kron, she’s slow moving, sitting around commenting on the goings on and doing little work.  I can’t help comparing her to the first Dorine I saw when Baltimore’s Center Stage presented the show in February 1976.  A just-getting-started Christine Baranski stole the show with her sassy, sharp-tongued, lively portrayal.  She became part of the repertory of actors at that exceptional regional theatre where her headshot hung on the wall of the bar/cafe.  That performance will always be Dorine for me.

Stephen Schwartz's 'The Baker's Wife' brings a little bit of French flavor to the East Village

 

The first time I heard of The Baker’s Wife was in 1993 when I bought “Patti LuPone Live.”  To set up a song she tells the audience, “There’s a musical theatre joke that if Hitler was alive today his punishment should be to send him out on the road with a musical in trouble.  We were that musical, The Baker’s Wife.”  Then she sang the lovely song “Meadowlark,” making me wonder why the show was so bad with such a pretty song, which she sang with full heart and obvious appreciation.

The next time I heard of The Baker’s Wife was in 2008 when I received a review copy of the CD “Patti LuPone at Les Mouches.”  It had been recorded in 1980 when LuPone had been performing 27 weeks  of midnight shows at the Greenwich Village nightclub.  After mentioning that her next song would be “Meadowlark,” someone in the audience voiced approval, to which she replied, “You’ve been here before.  Nobody know about that gobbler.”  Again I was curious about the musical and wondered if I’d ever get to see it.

I finally did, last night, thanks to Classic Stage Company, which has given this 1976 musical a shining and joyful production.  Stephen Schwartz’s songs, which are both funny and moving, are well presented by the excellent cast of 20, although I wish director Gordon Greenberg and book writer Joseph Stein had done some cutting.  This sweet little story, based on Marcel Pagnol’s 1938 film, set in a rural French village in Provence in 1935 would be better served as two hours with no intermission rather than its two and a half hours.  The second act dragged for me.

The story opens as folks gather in the village square in eager anticipation of the arrival of the new baker.  They have been without bread for three weeks since their baker got drunk, fell in a ditch, broke his neck and died.  For the French, this is a grande horreur — being without their fresh bread, not the death of the baker.  Denise (Judy Kuhn), wife of the café owner, describes life there in the opening song,

Ev’ry day as you do what you do ev’ry day/You see the same faces who will fill the cafe./And if some of these faces have new things to say/Nothing is really different.  

Kuhn, a multiple Tony, Olivier and Grammy Award nominee, is a winning commentator throughout.

When the baker, Aimable Castagnet  (Bill English last night filling in for Scott Bakula), arrives with his wife, Geneviève (Ariana DeBose), the villagers joyously surround them and comment among themselves on why such a beautiful young woman would marry such an old man.  Much is made throughout about the age difference and it certainly is a major plot element but I think it would have been more obvious with Bakula, who is 71, than English, who is 63 but with his boyish face could easily pass for a decade younger.  DeBose is a mature and sexy 34.  

Geneviève had been in love with a married man who refused to leave his wife for her.  Aimable was a devoted patron of the café where she was a waitress, every night sitting at her table and ordering veal au gratin because she had laughed the first time he ordered it.  It was the start of his devotion that he sings about after they are married, “I will try to make you happy.”  Even though it’s a rebound marriage for Geneviève, she seems genuinely fond of her husband and determined to be content with their marriage.  

That is until she meets Dominique (Kevin William Paul), the handsome young servant of the Marquis (Nathan Lee Graham).  He pursues her at every encounter and she tries to resist until, after singing “Meadowlark,” she gives in and they leave town.  The song is about a story Geneviève had loved as a child about a blind lark and an old king who takes her in and she sings for him with a “voice that could match the angels in its glory.”  One day the god of the sun sees the beautiful lark and grants her sight.  He encourages her to fly away with him, “come along,” but “the old king loved her so” that she wouldn’t leave him.  When the king comes down the next day, ”He found his meadowlark had died.  Every time I heard that part I cried,” Genevieve sings, and proclaims she won’t miss her chance.

“Oh, just when I thought my heart was finally numb, a beautiful young man appears before me, Singing ‘Come/ Oh, won’t you come?’”  And she does.

It’s a wonderful song but DeBose ruins it with wild flinging and waving of her arms throughout.  How could Greenberg have allowed that?  It’s annoying. 

Act Two finds the villagers once again longing for their bread because Aimable is so despondent he has stopped baking.  Trying to entice him back into his kitchen they dance and sing around the square in a couple of numbers that show off Stephanie Klemons’ choreography but that I would drop to move the show along.  I did love the scene in which Geneviève and Dominique dance a sensual pas de duex (in photo) as Aimable stands looking on; this is what he is imagining. 

Scenic designer Jason Sherwood uses the tiny performance space well, creating the atmosphere of a tiny French village with flowers climbing the walls at front and back, with three café tables at one end and the storefront of the BOULANGERIE (bakery) at the far end.

I won’t reveal the ending, which I loved.  The show is finishing up its run but you may be able to catch it later since I’m thinking this production is a testing of the waters for a possible Broadway transfer.

The power of Mark Strong and Lesley Manville's performances in Broadway's 'Oedipus' will leave you drained

 

When I was in first grade our teacher used to trick us into being quiet by telling us to put our heads on our desks and listen for her to drop a pin.  It worked.  We were as still and quiet as we could be.  I thought of that Monday night as the tension mounted at director Robert Icke’s riveting reimagining of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex.  The audience was intensely focused on the stage at Studio 54, spellbound by a story for which they already knew the outcome.  But then, it’s unlikely anyone has experienced anything like Icke’s Oedipus.

Mark Strong and Lesley Manville give powerhouse performances as Oedipus and his wife, Jacasta.  When the show played London’s West End last fall the production was nominated for four Olivier Awards, winning one for best revival and another for best actress.  I expect similar results with the Tonys in June, except I would honor Strong and Icke with top honors as well.

A taut two hours with no intermission, the show takes place in the present, although no location is mentioned.  Oedipus is a politician rather than a king and it’s election night after a hard-fought campaign that he is expected to win in a landslide.  

I liked Hildegard Bechtler’s single set, although it doesn’t look like any campaign office I’ve ever been in, and I’ve been in plenty as a former political reporter and press secretary.  It’s far too neat and sparse for a campaign office, even at the start of the effort, but it’s a good choice.  With little more than a large table with chairs at the center and a sofa on the far right, and with Natasha Chivers’s bright lighting, our attention is focused fully on the unfolding story.  One important detail is a digital clock measuring days, hours and minutes, ticking them down as the play progresses.

Before we get to this set, though, Tal Varden’s full stage, floor-to-ceiling video projection shows the candidate surrounded by supporters carrying Oedipus signs on sticks as he continues with his speechifying, using language that could be attributed to Zohran Mamdani or Barack Obama.

“They deliberately dragged us backwards to a time when the rich were rich, and the poor were poor, backwards to when people who weren’t like us deserved persecution, backwards until rumors and lies were the same as truth, and we’ve seen that in this campaign.  My opponent loves the idea this country isn’t my country.  He doesn’t say I couldn’t do the job.  He says I’m not from here.  My identity doesn’t fit.”

And he promises he will release his birth certificate to appease some critics.  Of course, unlike Barack Obama, we will learn that releasing his birth certificate is one promise Oedipus can’t keep.

Another reference to our times is when Jacasta is revealing her painful past.  She talks about the considerably older man who sexually abused her for years when she was a young teenager, which sounds like the testimony we’ve heard from Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.  I was amazed by Manville’s timing of this revelation.  As soon as she uttered the final word the digital clock went to 00.  I never saw her look at the clock and yet she timed her heartbreaking disclosure to the second.  This is especially impressive because Icke didn’t allow Manville and Strong to rehearse the horrifying conclusion until a week before previews began, telling the New York Times they “had to understand what was going to be lost before that loss counted for anything.”

The supporting characters are all skilled but the show belongs to Strong and Manville, who are onstage for nearly the entire, tense, two hours.