Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson make their Broadway debuts in 'The Fear of 13'

 

Making his Broadway debut in The Fear of 13, Adrien Brody portrays the true story of Nick Yarris, a man who spent 22 years on death row for rape and murder before being exonerated by DNA.  Under David Cromer’s direction, at the James Earl Jones Theatre, Brody tells that story with anger, humor, empathy and frenetic energy that left me feeling overwhelmed.  As my friend, looking equally exhausted, said at the end, “It’s a lot to take in.”  Especially in under two hours with no intermission.

This is also Tessa Thompson’s Broadway debut.  She offers an engaging portrayal of Jacki Miles, the real life volunteer who visited Yarris weekly in the Pennsylvania prison to offer a bit of humanity in the living hell of a death row existence. 

The play is adapted by Lindsey Ferrentino from David Sington’s 2015  documentary about Yarris who, after his conviction, spent more than two decades in solitary confinement until DNA evidence exonerated him following an arduous wait of year after year of up and down hopes as samples made their way through the snail’s pace of the testing process, some being destroyed along the way.  The play comes to Broadway following a sold-out run at London’s 250-seat Donmar Warehouse.  Brody earned an Olivier Award nomination for his performance.

While Yarris wasn’t guilty of murder, he was on a criminal path when he idiotically through he could get a lesser sentence if he offered the police information about the horrendous murder of a young mother that he read about in a newspaper that had been left behind in his holding cell.  He gives them the name of someone he knows who he assumes is capable of such an act but when the man is found to have an airtight alibi the spotlight turns on Yarris.

An excellent 10-member ensemble plays the parts of attorneys, prison inmates and childhood friends.  They appear in spotlighted scenes with Brody, scattered around Arnulfo Maldonado’s nearly bare set, with Heather Gilbert’s lighting, as Yarris recounts his saga to Miles.  Many of the stories are believable, others sound as if they came from the books he spends his days reading — early on he tell Miles he read 1,000 books in his first three years on death row.  

Being in his cell 23 hours a day — he’s allowed one hour for exercise — he has plenty of time to read, especially since Wesley (Ephraim Sykes), the sadistic guard, refuses to allow the condemned men to talk to one another, requiring silence.  Time shrinks and expands.  As Yarris tells us, “in the blink of an eye 10 years are gone from your life. . . But then you look out the window and it takes all day for the sun to go down.”  

The bond between Yarris and Miles deepens during their weekly meetings to the point where she vigorously works to have his case reexamined using DNA that is then available.  Eventually they marry, touching only as they slide rings under the prison screen.  In real life, they were assisted by The Innocence Project, a nonprofit that works to free people who are wrongly imprisoned.  The organization is partnering with the production. 

The play’s title is never explained.  Harris is one of 13 people to be exonerated from death row; the number 13 has been considered unlucky.  Maybe those are behind the name.  After he was exonerated in 2003 Yarris wrote several books about his experiences of fighting through that grueling process. 

I have long been firmly opposed to the death penalty and have great respect for organizations like The Innocence Project but I found this play to be exhausting.  The first show I saw on this topic was The Exonerated in 2000.  A-list actors from stage and screen sat in a row at a table onstage and read the harrowing accounts of the xperiences of innocent people wrongly imprisoned.  At the end, the real life people came and stood behind them.  One man held his beautiful, happy toddler son and they looked like a Gap ad.  I was in tears.  The creators of the show wisely let the stories speak for themselves rather than further dramatizing them.

Jon Bernthal debuts on Broadway in 'Dog Day Afternoon'

 

The expression “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry” could apply to playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis’ stage adaptation of “Dog Day Afternoon,” Sidney Lumet’s 1975 movie about an infamous, badly botched Brooklyn bank robbery in August 1972. Act One presents some hilarious scenes, most notably when the bank employee hostages debate what bakery has the best donuts as one of their captors negotiates with police to have some delivered. In this farcical exchange even the security guard (Danny Johnson), who has been lying on the bank floor with an apparent heart attack, rallies to put in his two cents.  Act Two shifts into an anguished unrequited love, which, if the script were tighter, would be sad.  Television favorite Jon Bernthal (“The Bear”) makes his Broadway debut under Rupert Goold’s direction at the August Wilson Theatre.

I was happy to see one of my favorite New York theatre actors, Jessica Hecht (in photo), as Colleen, the take-charge head teller.  Even two armed men can’t intimidate her, but then these men -- Sonny (Bernthal) in the role played by Al Pacino in the film and Sal (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, also of “The Bear”) in the role played by John Cazale – are so obviously inept from the beginning that by the end of Act One the tellers and the manager, Mr. Butterman (Michael Kostroff), are sitting with Sonny watching TV and enjoying their donuts.  

Act Two centers around Sonny's love for Leon (Esteban Andres Cruz) who lives and dresses as a woman and to whom Sonny considers himself married. Through both acts Sonny’s been negotiating with Detective Fucco (John Ortiz) who uses the phone at a nearby liquor store.  Fucco humors him, promising he’s working on Sonny’s most outlandish request, a helicopter to take him to JFK and “a jumbo jet airliner with a full bar, stocked kitchen and reclining seats” to fly him, Sal and Leon to any country with no extradition agreement with the United States, opting for “Rhodesia or Algeria.”  Leon, however, doesn’t want to go.  The police have brought him from Bellevue Hospital to the liquor store phone.  He arrives in a hospital gown, drugged out and complains, “I’ve never been so scared in my life, Sonny.  One minute I’m in Bellevue relaxing and the next thing I know all these cops burst in.”  That line drew a big laugh.  No New Yorker would think that city public hospital would be a place where anyone would prefer to stay.  Sonny sobs on the phone trying to convince him.  Bernthal plays it well so it’s a shame Guirgis (who won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for drama for Between Riverside and Crazy) lets it drag on too long. 

Set designer David Korins creates a realistic looking Chase Manhattan Bank outside, which rotates inside easily and alternates back and forth as needed.

The real life bank and the story unfolding around it captivated New Yorkers.  The dog days of summer, an expression I don’t hear anymore, refer to the hot, humid days between early July and mid-August.  I always thought it referred to the way we feel walking around New York City in that disgusting weather, like a dog panting with its tongue hanging out.  (Actually it dates back to the ancient Greeks and Romans and their beliefs about the constellations and the sun at its peak.)  In the time of the robbery, watching it unfold was a break from the news of the day, which centered around the Vietnam war and Watergate.   

The real life Sonny, John Wojtowicz, served five years of a 20-year sentence.  After he was paroled in 1978 he sold the movie rights for $7,500.  He died of cancer in 2006.

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.