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Fierstein, not Weinstein, and certainly not the hurricane... Today's NYTimes reports: Harvey Fierstein to Play Bella Abzug in New Solo Show Harvey Fierstein, who donned a dress — and won a Tony Award — playing Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray,” is stepping back into women’s clothes for his next role. Expect hats to be part of the wardrobe. Manhattan Theater Club announced on Thursday that its 2019-20 season will include the world premiere of “Bella Bella,” a new solo show written by and starring Mr. Fierstein, which casts him as Bella Abzug, the outspoken New York congresswoman and activist. In a news release, press representatives for the theater described “Bella Bella” as “raucous, heart-rending and absurdly humorous.” A synopsis gives the following description of the show: Set in 1976, on the eve of her bid to become New York State’s first female Senator, “Bella Bella” finds this larger-than-life, truth-slinging, groundbreaking, hat-wearing icon squirreled away in the bathroom of a midtown hotel awaiting that night’s election results while a coterie of family and celebs await her entrance. Kimberly Senior (“Disgraced”) will direct the production, which will be staged at the theater’s Off Broadway space at New York City Center — Stage I, beginning Oct. 1, with opening night scheduled for Oct. 22. Mr. Fierstein’s breakthrough play, “Torch Song Trilogy,” in which he played a drag queen, was recently revived on Broadway under the name “Torch Song.” He has written the book for the musicals “Kinky Boots” and “La Cage Aux Folles.” Manhattan Theater Club presented his play “Casa Valentina,” about a group of heterosexual men who cross-dress at a Catskills vacation home, on Broadway in 2014.

James Corden will host this year’s Tony Awards. Mr. Corden, a musical theater enthusiast who won a Tony Award himself in 2012, for starring in the comedy “One Man, Two Guvnors,” will preside over the award ceremony on June 9 at Radio City Music Hall. The ceremony will be broadcast on CBS, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern. This will be the second time that Mr. Corden, who is the host of CBS’s “The Late Late Show,” will host the awards — he previously did so in 2016. In addition to “One Man, Two Guvnors,” he also appeared on Broadway in a 2006 production of “The History Boys.” The Tony Awards, formally called the Antoinette Perry Awards, are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, and honor work done on Broadway during the previous season. This year’s ceremony will honor shows that open by April 25; the nominees will be announced on April 30.

The casting of Hugh Jackman was a business decision, not a creative one. Producers want to be assured that the show will sell as many tickets as possible and every seat is occupied (by full price, if not premium price customers). Jackman has a global reputation and will attract not only NYer's but tourists because of his stage and movie roles. He is a marquee name star. Finally, he still has legions of female fans who will wet themselves silly watching him up on stage. And, who knows, I bet he, and his wife, have a big piece of the action.

I have my doubts on this one...I'll keep an eye out, but I doubt I'll be purchasing a full-price seat, maybe TDF... NYPost columnist, Michael Reidel reports: Revamped ‘Beetlejuice’ may have the juice for Broadway after all A Washington Post critic sprayed a can of Raid on the out-of-town tryout of “Beetlejuice” last fall. Peter Marks called the $20 million musical “overcaffeinated, overstuffed and virtually charmless.” “Beetlejuice,” named for the bawdy ghost of Tim Burton’s 1988 hit movie, was bound to have tasteless jokes, but Marks thought the musical tipped over into “foul directions.” The show, he concluded, needed “a trip back to the lab where they fix musicals.” And that’s exactly where it went. A source tells me that director Alex Timbers sat down with the creative team and went through the show “beat by beat,” expunging all that was tasteless, lewd and inappropriate in the post-#MeToo era. He also demanded better jokes and songs. “He realized the show as written can’t be done in the cultural landscape we’re living in,” another source says. “He wanted to get rid of what was gross and cheap, and find another way of telling the story.” The extent of the revamping surprised many theater insiders at a run-through this week. Expectations remain low, frankly, but there’s considerable buzz that “Beetlejuice,” which begins previews March 28 at the Winter Garden, is no longer dead on arrival. Scott Brown and Anthony King adapted Burton’s screenplay for the stage. King is a comedian who once ran the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy club in New York. Brown is the former drama critic for New York magazine. Their previous collaboration, “Gutenberg! The Musical!,” was tedious for adults, hilarious for teenagers. They brought that sensibility to “Beetlejuice,” but then the Harvey Weinstein scandals came along, and what may have been funny a few years ago is uncomfortable now. One scene featured a Girl Scout selling cookies door-to-door while being chased by male ghosts with their tongues hanging out. That scene was the first to go. The female characters in the first draft were “a bit ditzy,” a production source says. Ditzy is gone now as well. Eddie Perfect, an Australian songwriter, wrote the score. He also wrote the songs for “King Kong,” which isn’t going to win any Tony Awards. Marks called his music “predictably peppy,” with “serviceable power ballads.” Insiders complained that the score lacked a coherent sound, coming across like a hodgepodge of styles. The show has since been re-orchestrated to meld its calypso, rock and pop styles. Gone is a boy-band parody that fell flat. In its place is a new number for Miss Argentina, who, after slitting her wrists, was sent to the netherworld to become a bureaucrat. “If I knew then what I know now,” she says in the show, as she did in the film, “I wouldn’t have had my ‘little accident.’ ” A source who’s not involved in the show saw the run-through and says, “It’s been revamped for the better,” but added the end is still a little weak. Not weak are the sets, by David Korins (“Hamilton”), and the puppets, by Michael Curry, who worked with Julie Taymor to create Broadway’s blockbuster “The Lion King.” Korins’ macabre sets dazzle the eyes, while Curry has taken puppetry to a whole new level with a creature called a sandworm that overwhelms the stage. But you can’t count on sets and puppets to recoup $20 million: It’s the script and score that make a hit.

Saw an early preview of this new jukebox musical based on the the Motown group, the Temptations. Based on the biography, of the only surviving member of the original group, founder, Otis Williams, this high powered, high energy, powerhouse musical packs a lot of punch with hit laden musical numbers that topped the charts. The musical does not delve too deeply into the jealousy, drugs, and sexual antics of this group, and rightfully so, the audience is there to celebrate, not to mourn. The cast is superb. The guys who portray the group members are excellent. The supporting cast is great. Simple sets, good costumes, great choreography emulating the signature style of the group, and most importantly a house orchestra that tears the roof off the theater! I had a great time. Motown music was a big part of the soundtrack of my life. I thought it interesting that the audience was primarily fifty shades of gray and much older than I would have expected, but they loved it. Everyone around me agreed that it was a terrific musical. A rousing standing O at the end, and we were all sad that the performance was over. Opens March 21.

NYPost says... Raunchy, gutsy ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ showcases glorious Kelli O’Hara THEATER REVIEW "KISS ME, KATE" Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes, with one intermission. Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St. Whether she’s hitting high notes or swatting her male co-star, Kelli O’Hara — funny and fierce — is reason enough to see “Kiss Me, Kate.” This 70-year-old hodgepodge of showbiz shenanigans and Shakespeare is hardly the tightest tale ever told. But it’s got a jewel box full of hummable Cole Porter gems, including the lush “So in Love,” the frisky “Why Can’t You Behave” and the rousing “Another Op’nin,’ Another Show.” In this Roundabout Theatre revival, O’Hara and Will Chase play film star Lilli Vanessi and producer-director-actor Fred Graham, sparring ex-spouses whose personal battle bleeds into their roles as Katharine and Petruchio in a touring musical of “The Taming of the Shrew.” Supporting players Lois Lane and Bill Calhoun (Stephanie Styles and Corbin Bleu) add their own romantic antics. All told, Bella and Sam Spewack’s un-PC story makes “Kiss Me, Kate” an Actors’ Equity and human resources nightmare. But all’s well that ends well, thanks to Scott Ellis’ witty staging, which brims with visual gags and cheekiness. Set designer David Rockwell keeps things moving seamlessly as the action glides back and forth between Baltimore, where the play within the play is trying out, and the Bard’s Italy. And Warren Carlyle’s choreography is dynamite: “Too Darn Hot” sizzles and, in another number, Bleu sings and taps his heart out — even upside down. The musical’s book has been tweaked, though not always for the better, to minimize misogyny. Kate’s no longer called a “wench,” nor is she spanked — instead, she gives Petruchio plenty of swift kicks in the rump. And when she sings Shakespeare’s line, “I am ashamed that women are so simple,” the “women” turn into “people.” Gender-parity achieved, yes? No. As laudable as these efforts are, Lilli still performs against her will, thanks to a subplot about debt-collecting goons. And several songs are steeped in pervy references, including a “Tom, Dick or Harry” whose emphasis lies firmly on Dick. A love letter to the theater? This “Kiss” is like a series of naughty sexts. But the stars make the most of it. Chase, a Broadway vet and star of TV’s “Nashville,” makes a convincingly pompous and preening chauvinist, especially when he’s singing “I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua.” And O’Hara radiates command every step and note of the way. She puts her stamp on her roles with wry comedy, physical abandon and rapturous singing. In this battle of the sexes, O’Hara takes the “Kate.”

The reviews are in and they are good.... NYTimes says: Review: A Fair Fight Makes ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ Lovable Again They may have lived in unenlightened times, but the men and women behind “Kiss Me, Kate” still knew plenty about the compromises of marriage. Take Cole Porter, who wrote the 1948 musical’s peerlessly witty songs. Though gay, he wived it wealthily (and happily) with the socialite Linda Lee Thomas. Not so blithe were his book writers: Bella Spewack was pressured to share credit with Samuel Spewack, her estranged husband, even though she did most of the work. You could even count Lilli and Fred, the show’s lead characters: flamboyant exes who star as Katharine and Petruchio in a musical version of “The Taming of the Shrew.” They are named for the Lunts, Lynn and Alfred, married actors who made Broadway meals of the same Shakespearean roles, catfighting onstage and off. And let’s not forget Shakespeare himself. In one of the world’s great exit lines he willed his wife his second-best bed. I raise all this marital prehistory not to excuse the elements of the original “Kiss Me, Kate” that rankle our sensibilities today — its gender stereotypes and wife-slapping argument for womanly submission — but to suggest how the latest Broadway revival, which opened on Thursday in a production starring the sublime Kelli O’Hara, could be so enjoyable anyway. Turns out, the authors’ take on marriage is more complex and insightful than we may recall. And where they did wander into material now rightly seen as toxic, a few changes in emphasis and one major revision allow us to enjoy it in a new light, as a two-way “taming,” distorted not by malice but through the mocking filter of farce. It helps to recall that good farce is always knockabout, regardless of gender; it’s a pleasure to roar at suffering that is big and fake and somebody else’s. “Kiss Me, Kate” is cleverly constructed to provide that pleasure squared. In the outer, backstage story, Lilli (Ms. O’Hara) and Fred (Will Chase) clearly belong together, if only they could stop fighting long enough to notice. In the inner, onstage story, Kate and Petruchio must discover love by discovering themselves, when their psychological armor is at last yanked off them. The two stories quickly merge, Lilli’s fury over a perceived slight by Fred feeding her performance of Kate’s fury when manhandled by Petruchio. Though even Shakespeare let her fight back, with words and elbows, the serious glee with which Ms. O’Hara pummels Mr. Chase — you could call the show “Kick Me, Kate” — goes a long way toward defanging the usual impression of violence from only the other direction. When Lilli argues that she’s just a “realistic actress,” we can’t fault Fred for responding, “You’re a thug!” What she isn’t, in Ms. O’Hara’s interpretation, is a punching bag or a flirt. Her Lilli, more refined and less broadly comic than some, is a haughty diva who must learn humility, not because she’s a woman but because she’s too proud. How she got that way is never really explained, any more than the source of Kate’s “irksome, brawling” nature is in Shakespeare. But we see the answer in Ms. O’Hara’s cautious eyes, always on the lookout for adoration or mistreatment — and, men being what they are, often finding both. We also hear the contradiction in her delicious renditions of the Porter songs, so that a merry operetta spoof like “Wunderbar” hints at ambivalence, and a formal beguine like “ ,” sung so gorgeously it almost melts the theater, touches a kind of terror. Even her scalding take on Kate’s “ ” (“he may have hair upon his chest but, sister, so has Lassie”) is subtly shaded to demonstrate that hate is only part of the problem. If no one else is singing at that level — Mr. Chase, charmingly vain in the book scenes, lacks only the effortlessness necessary to ace his numbers — Porter’s score remains an astonishing encyclopedia of musical comedy style. (The new orchestrations by Larry Hochman are a noticeable improvement on those used in the 1999 revival starring Marin Mazzie and Brian Stokes Mitchell.) Zooming through time from Italianate pavanes to Latin pastiche to vaudeville turns to “hot” jazz and beyond, the songs, in their variety, establish the idea that different eras bring different perspectives on love to the table. Directed by Scott Ellis and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, the Roundabout Theater Company production at Studio 54 embraces the same shifting of perspective throughout. David Rockwell’s sets, in a naturalistic mode for the backstage scenes, flip back several eras to primitive painted borders and cutout flats for the “Shrew” material. Jeff Mahshie’s costumes toggle among Renaissance motley, 1950s casuals and timelessly smashing outfits for Lilli. Likewise, Mr. Carlyle’s often thrilling choreography offers a bountiful assortment of takes on male-female physicality. Lilli and Fred waltz to “ ” but the ensemble, led by James T. Lane, do precoital Fosse-esque beatnik moves to “Too Darn Hot.” ( .) In “Tom, Dick, or Harry,” Kate’s sister, Bianca (Stephanie Styles), and her three suitors (Corbin Bleu, Will Burton and Rick Faugno) thrill in the midcentury MGM style. That too many other numbers disappoint is a problem not just with the choreography but also with the overall staging, which by the middle of the second act seems to run out of invention. In the song “Bianca,” Mr. Bleu executes amazing calisthenic feats (at one point he tap dances upside-down beneath a stair landing), but the big picture gets lost. The wit of Bianca’s “Always True to You in My Fashion” disappears amid too much stage business. And “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” usually a double-entendre showstopper for two comic gangsters (John Pankow and Lance Coadie Williams), just slows the show down instead. John Guare’s 1999 script revisions, retained here, don’t help. That production bumped up the role of Harrison Howell, Lilli’s fiancé, from vague Southern gentleman to MacArthur-like general. Meant to highlight Lilli’s choice between safe conformity and difficult freedom, the character still feels as shoehorned as the Porter standard (“From This Moment On”) interpolated for him to sing. But the revisions made for the current production are more sensitively achieved. In the simplest, a framing device invoking the ghostliness of the empty stage establishes the show as a theatrical throwback. The biggest comes at the end, when the lyrics to Kate’s song “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple,” which Porter largely lifted from Shakespeare, get a heavy reworking. (Amanda Green is credited with “additional material.”) Now it’s “people” who are so simple, and not just women but all lovers who must learn subservience. Purists may squawk — though similar changes have long since shown up in feminist productions of “The Taming of the Shrew.” For me, the adjustments, especially Ms. Green’s and Ms. O’Hara’s, are completely successful. They not only reorient the story as a warning to all sexes, but also provide a workaround for a musical that our cancel culture seemed ready to throw on the bonfire of the inanities. How nice to find “Kiss Me, Kate” rescued from that fate: still speaking to us — or better yet, singing — from the not so buried past.

Today's NYTimes reports: Hugh Jackman to Star in ‘Music Man’ on Broadway Hugh Jackman is returning to Broadway next year in a revival of “The Music Man.” Mr. Jackman teased the idea via Twitter on Tuesday, and on Wednesday the producer Scott Rudin announced a run, which he said would begin previews Sept. 9, 2020, and open on Oct. 22, 2020 at an unspecified Shubert theater. Mr. Jackman, 50, has appeared on Broadway four times. In 2004, he won a Tony Award as best actor in a musical for “The Boy from Oz,” and in 2012 he was granted a special, noncompetitive, Tony for his professional and volunteer efforts in the Broadway community. “The Music Man,” with book, music and lyrics by Meredith Willson, first opened on Broadway in 1957. Mr. Jackman will play Harold Hill, a scam artist who pretends to be a musician and makes money selling instruments and uniforms to boys aspiring to be part of a band in River City, Iowa. The original production won the 1958 Tony Award for best musical, besting “West Side Story.” There was a brief revival at City Center in 1980 starring Dick Van Dyke, and a longer-lived revival, starring Craig Bierko, that opened in 2000. No further casting was announced for the new revival, which will be directed by Jerry Zaks and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, who collaborated on a 2017 revival of “Hello, Dolly!” that was also produced by Mr. Rudin. The “Music Man” announcement was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter. Sure to be a hit. I think he's perfect for the role and this is a musical with a great score.

I personally don't have any interest in this production however it is already a big hit. Review: Anxious Teenagers Learn to ‘Be More Chill’ on a Big Stage It seems you can’t set foot in a Broadway theater these days without running into a noisy passel of high school students. Not in the lobby, though that might be refreshing given the general grayness of theatergoing audiences. The kids I’m talking about have commandeered the stage, to let the world know — preferably in song — that it’s not easy being teen. Usually embodied by performers at least a decade older than the characters they’re portraying, Broadway’s swelling throng of anguished adolescents may all share a common grudge against life (and more often than not a basic plotline). But they mercifully have different ways of expressing their grievances, in shows as different as the sophisticated, brooding “Dear Evan Hansen,” the smart-mouthed “Mean Girls” and the big-hearted “The Prom.” Now, after selling out its limited run Off Broadway last summer, the rabidly eager “Be More Chill,” which opened on Sunday at the Lyceum Theater, has joined the crowded field of shows about hormonally-overcharged outsiders longing for acceptance. While its characters, inevitably, learn that being popular isn’t everything, the show’s investors would no doubt beg to differ. Adapted by Joe Iconis (songs) and Joe Tracz (book) from Ned Vizzini’s appealing young adult novel, “Be More Chill” has already broken the Lyceum house record for a single week of ticket sales. If it sustains that momentum, it will be partly because this latest entry in the puberty musical sweepstakes has traits that undeniably set it apart from its competition. For one thing, it is — by cold critical standards — the worst of the lot, with a repetitive score, painfully forced rhymes, cartoonish acting and a general approach that mistakes decibel level (literally and metaphorically) for emotional intensity. But this ostensible amateurishness may be exactly what sells “Be More Chill” to its young target audience. Alone among Broadway musicals, “Be More Chill” feels as if it could have been created by the teenagers it portrays, or perhaps by even younger people imagining what high school will be like. Though its production values have been souped up since I saw it in August, the show’s current incarnation — which features the same cast and is again directed by Stephen Brackett — remains a festival of klutziness that you could imagine being put together in the bedrooms and basements of young YouTubers. In fact, it was through social media that “Be More Chill” acquired its ever-expanding fan base after an initial, critically dismissed run at Two River Theater in Red Bank, N.J., in 2015. The cast recording inspired a staggering number of storyboard art presentations and lip-synced video performances on YouTube and when it opened Off Broadway, its score had been streamed more than 150 million times. The plot, presented in a droller and less hysterical vein in the novel that inspired it, is a sci-fi variation on the theme of social paranoia that has long ruled teenage entertainment. A nerdy, terminally unhip hero, Jeremy Heere (a self-effacing, sweetly adenoidal Will Roland), is offered a computerized pill, called a Squip, that rewires him to run with the cool crowd. Played by Jason Tam, in the show’s slickest performance, the Squip materializes to Jeremy looking like Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix” and proceeds to dictate his life. That basic premise recalls which gratifyingly suggested that those who rule the status quo are really mindless pod people. At first Jeremy — the anxious son of a morose single Dad (Jason SweetTooth Williams) who mopes around the house in his underwear — is ecstatic just to fit in. But like the leading characters of “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Mean Girls,” Jeremy learns that popularity comes at a dehumanizing price. His hour of reckoning takes place during a performance of a school play about a zombie apocalypse, during which he wrestles with his bad cyber angel. He is assisted by his bestie, the forever gauche Michael Mell (the highly emotive George Salazar), whom Jeremy had abandoned on the road to social success. He is also inspired by selfless love — for the madcap Christine Canigula (a hyperkinetic Stephanie Hsu). This all sounds like more fun than it is — at least for anyone over the age of 21. (That’s a generous cutoff point.) The acting, singing and dancing (choreographed by Chase Brock) are all, to put it kindly, frenetic. The set (by Beowulf Boritt), lighting (Tyler Micoleau) costumes (Bobby Frederick Tilley II) and projections (Alex Basco Koch) bring to mind bright fan fiction comic books drawn in fluorescent crayon. Despite a lively production number that brings the classic “Telephone Hour” scene from into the present (as “The Smartphone Hour,” led by the powerhouse Tiffany Mann), the show’s cultural and technological frames of reference aren’t truly of the moment. Much of “Be More Chill” could have been staged in the late 20th century, when the first “Matrix” movie came out, without seeming out of place or even prescient. But it may be its very lack of chillness that has allowed “Be More Chill” to capture so many young hearts. None of the characters on stage really look like enviably glamorous popular people, but friendly nebbishes imitating the social elite with slapdash satirical broad strokes. The rhymes in Mr. Iconis’s lyrics feel like they might have been improvised on the spot by class-cutting stoners behind the gym. (An example from the showstopping “Michael in the Bathroom”: “I’d rather fake pee/Than stand awkwardly.”) Doubtless much care and calculation has gone into remounting “Be More Chill.” But it still has the goofy karaoke quality of kids performing boisterously for other kids. It doesn’t try to dazzle its audience with glossy professionalism. For better or worse, this may be the only show on Broadway that a tween could see and think happily, “Hey, I could do that at home.”

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Another Soho Rep Sold Out Show! Fleabag On a very limited run. Once again I am perplexed and frustrated why producers do this. Ben Brantley raves in today's NYTimes: Review: Phoebe Waller-Bridge Gives New York a Fabulous ‘Fleabag’ Every one of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s facial features is intensely expressive, and that includes both eyebrows. But it’s her mouth that holds center stage at the SoHo Playhouse, where her fabled — and genuinely fabulous — “Fleabag” opened on Thursday night. That mouth has been incarnadined in the deepest red, so it seems to have an autonomous life that’s at odds with the cool, pale skin that surrounds it. And it rarely stays the same shape during this one-woman play about sex, longing and what churns beneath them, directed with finely gauged precision by Vicky Jones. Ms. Waller-Bridge’s lips shrink to the size of a postage stamp to evoke a subway pickup her character calls Rodent Face (handsome only from the eyes up). They morph into a rapt rectangular gape to summon a guinea pig listening to rock music, and curve into an alarming, complicitous leer to tell us about eating “a very slutty pizza.” Then there’s that open, teeth-exposing, wonder-filled smile that poises sheer delight on the brink of a bottomless despair, two states of feeling that somehow both negate and enhance each other. The same ambivalence infuses the ever-surprising sentences that fall from her mouth like jewels and toads in a fairy tale. Emotions never come singly in “Fleabag,” in which Ms. Waller-Bridge’s onstage alter ego (the title character) describes grieving, fornicating, drinking and insulting her way through contemporary London. You are possibly already familiar with the title and basic story of “Fleabag.” That’s also the name of Ms. Waller-Bridge’s and began its second British broadcast season this week. But the “Fleabag” that has set up camp in New York through April 14 is a 65-minute monologue first seen five years ago at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. That show became the basis for the series, which was picked up in the United States by Amazon, and it made Ms. Waller-Bridge — who went on to and — a name to reckon with in the entertainment industry. Much of “Fleabag” the play was recycled in the television show’s first season, which gave animate form to people described in the monologue by a cast that includes, if you please, Olivia Colman (and for the new season, Fiona Shaw and Kristin Scott Thomas). I would like to be able to tell you that if you’ve seen the series, you needn’t bother with the play, which is already sold out. I’m sorry. I can’t. Onstage, “Fleabag” throbs with a concentrated, combustible vitality that a camera is incapable of capturing, even with pore-probing close-ups. Sitting in a merciless spotlight, Ms. Waller-Bridge never leaves the long-legged chair, on a small red rug, that is the production’s set (designed by Holly Pigott, with lighting by Elliot Griggs). But, oh, the places she takes us, the hilarious heights and the despondent depths (or do I mean the opposite?). Fleabag is a restless and unhappy hedonist whose best friend and business partner (in a guinea pig-themed coffee shop) was recently killed in a traffic accident that was probably a semi-suicide attempt. The show begins with Fleabag being interviewed for a clerical job, and it establishes her contradictory approach to others, including the audience, equally ingratiating and antagonistic. The interviewer is a man, who it emerges has recently been accused of sexual harassment. “That won’t get you very far here anymore,” we hear his recorded voice saying to Fleabag, when she starts to remove her sweater, revealing she has only a bra on underneath. Fleabag swears this flashing of flesh was inadvertent. Then again, pretty much everything she does is an act of self-sabotage, even when it’s in the name of self-gratification. “I’m not obsessed with sex,” she says. “I just can’t stop thinking about it. The performance of it. The awkwardness of it. The drama of it.” She masturbates a lot, inspired by online images of everyone from Zac Efron to Barack Obama, “especially when I’m bored or angry or upset. Or happy.” And she registers all possible flickers of desire in the eyes of the men she sees, on the streets, in the subway, in her cafe. In most best-selling confessional memoirs, such hypersexuality would be traced to a primal woundedness — preferably caused by a single traumatic incident or abusive relationship — and (or) a misogynistic society. Ms. Waller-Bridge doesn’t traffic in clear-cut causes and effects. Yes, the script includes a late revelation about a life-wrenching act of betrayal. But Fleabag seems to have been behaving in much the same manner long before that act occurred. And yes, the show takes place against an internet-shaped landscape of vast and mutable carnality. (Listen to her listing the varied names of the porn sites she visits.) But while Fleabag is very much a woman of her time and place, a self-described “bad feminist” who exploits and is exploited by what surrounds her in the urban here and now, she can’t be entirely defined by them. Think of her as one of the great novelist Jean Rhys’s lost, promiscuous heroines transplanted to the 21st century, but with a devouring sense of humor that goes far beyond irony. Ms. Waller-Bridge understands that we are all laws unto ourselves, governed by our own special imps of the perverse. That universal distinctiveness is what’s meant by the saw “character is fate,” and it’s the source of both the deepest comedy and tragedy. Ms. Waller-Bridge deploys an ace stand-up’s sense of timing to plumb this most profound of paradoxes. Fleabag segues with canny purposefulness among earnest wistfulness and dismissive flippancy, scorching pain and echoing, hollow silence, giving equal weight to each. More than any current work of theater I can think of, “Fleabag” operates on the principle that no emotion is pure and simple. Society and sanity demand that we not acknowledge this in our daily interactions, and we do our best to adhere to a formula of true or false, thumbs up or thumbs down. In contrast, “Fleabag” keeps all contradictory shards and shades of feeling in play at the same time. That’s why it’s so gloriously disruptive. The show concludes with an abrupt insult, the commonest of angry epithets. Yet in Ms. Waller-Bridge’s rendering, an ugly, unprintable two-word exclamation somehow encompasses self-destructiveness, self-assertiveness, self-consciousness — and the unconditional thrill and muddle of simply being alive.

New play "Daddy" opened at the Pershing Square Theater. No, it is not about the illustrious leader of this pack... OK, a little backstory, for me, on this production. I had a prime center orchestra seat for a Sunday evening performance a week ago. I got to the theater only to find the performance had been cancelled. No one from the production company could provide any assistance in regards to rebooking. "Call Ticket Central" was their response. I have to admit I was a little angry that no one notified me via email, text, or phone call that the performance was cancelled. Apparently the Saturday evening, Sunday matinee and Sunday evening performances had all been cancelled, too. No reason was given. Perhaps the pool sprung a leak! Anyway, the show is completely sold out. Producers did meet to discuss an extension to accommodate those affected by the cancellations and demand, however, it appears they were unable to do so. So, I am unable to provide my own opinion on this production but given the review I'd have to say that anytime a pool gets glowing notices, this isn't a very good show! Review: This ‘Daddy’ Has Issues. A Pool and Alan Cumming, Too. Even sharing a stage with a naked Alan Cumming, the swimming pool steals the show in “‘Daddy,’” the turgid new play by the seriously talented Jeremy O. Harris, which opened on Tuesday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center. This elegant, limpid rectangle runs across the front of Matt Saunders’s David Hockney-style evocation of a California pleasure palace. And though it never speaks a word, the appropriately named infinity pool — filled with water that sloshes into the front rows of the audience — ripples with eloquent promises of endless fluidity, hidden depths and boundary-crossing danger. It embodies, in other words, the same exciting traits that characterized Mr. Harris’s dazzling “Slave Play,” seen earlier this season at the New York Theater Workshop. Such elements are otherwise lacking in this portrait of a corrosive love affair between a young black artist (Ronald Peet) and an older, richer white man (Mr. Cumming, in Mephistophelean mode). This no doubt comes as surprising news to theatergoers rattled and roiled by “Slave Play,” which assessed the warping grasp of America’s slave-owning past on latter-day interracial sexual relationships. On paper, “‘Daddy’” — directed by Danya Taymor and featuring the formidable Charlayne Woodard as an avenging mother — seems like it could surpass the outrageousness of “Slave Play.” It features what may be the strangest karaoke performance in New York right now: A sopping wet Mr. Cumming, holding a hand mic and backed by a gospel trio, sways in the middle of the pool while delivering a smoky-voiced rendition of a George Michael pop hit. which here sounds a lot creepier than it did when it ruled the air waves three decades ago. Its lyrics are a declaration of love in which the singer vows to be “your preacher teacher / Anything you have in mind,” while adding that “sometimes love can be mistaken / For a crime.” Certainly, the words are a perfect fit for Andre, Mr. Cumming’s character, a Los Angeles art collector who wants to add the impressionable and beautiful Franklin (Mr. Peet) to his trove of expensive possessions. The lyrics also reflect the ruling compulsion of Franklin, who has been searching for someone to fill a void left by the father he never knew. By the time this musical moment arrives, toward the end of the first act (of three), it simply restates what we’ve been hearing since the play began. Even if you assume the number is a fantasy, taking place in Franklin’s fevered mind, it neither advances nor enhances the show’s story or its central relationship. It merely belabors the obvious. In an earlier version, “‘Daddy’” was the script that got Mr. Harris into the Yale School of Drama, and it feels like the work of an untested artist, especially compared with the flamboyantly assured “Slave Play.” Though confrontational from its beginning — in which a white man and a black woman enacted the rape of a plantation worker in what turned out to be a sex workshop — “Slave Play” also operated by stealth, concluding with an inspired and emotional sucker punch. In contrast, “‘Daddy,’” a coproduction of the New Group and the Vineyard Theater, wears its subtext like a sandwich board sign. In the first scene, an MDMA-drugged Franklin says to Andre, whom he’s just met at a wild party, “I can’t shut up — sometimes I just like say and say and say everything I’ve ever thought.” That’s a fair description of “‘Daddy,’” too. Mr. Harris appears to have been influenced by both Eugene O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude” — the 1928 Freud-steeped drama in which characters say what they’re really thinking to the audience — and the work of Thomas Bradshaw(“Burning,” “Intimacy”), a contemporary playwright for whom the id is always on the surface. But while Mr. Bradshaw’s writing pulses with a rushing sense of the primal, “‘Daddy’” always seems to be annotating rather than expressing its characters’ impulses. It could have been written by the exhaustingly self-conscious Franklin, who specializes in creating “these weird dolls of black boys,” as he describes them, “possibly me, all naked, deformed.” It is thus queasily appropriate that Franklin is co-opted by Andre, who seems to regard his new lover and protégé as the most collectible of human dolls. (He calls him “my little Naomi,” in reference to the fashion model Naomi Campbell.) Andre installs Franklin in his hillside mansion, where the young man learns to call his lover “Daddy,” while engaging in graphically rendered sex that includes infantile thumb-sucking and bare-bottomed spanking. Others soon invade this cozy ménage. They include Franklin’s chums Max (Tommy Dorfman) and Bellamy (Kahyun Kim) — pretty, young and vacuous materialists — and his gallerist, Alessia (Hari Nef, in the production’s sharpest satirical performance). Then there’s a less welcome visitor: Zora (Ms. Woodard), Franklin’s Bible-quoting mother, who is determined to save her son’s soul. Such conflicts are the stuff of old-fashioned potboilers. And Mr. Harris has subtitled his play “A Melodrama.” Yet even when the participants are wet, screaming and, in the cases of its male leads, nude, the confrontations feel academic. And while Ms. Taymor keeps the play moving briskly (against the odds), even the spanking sequences register as more cerebral than physical. As for the talk, it is endless and circular and repetitive. It includes famous-name-laden discussions of the intrinsic value of art, a monologue about the fatalism of mothers of black sons and an extended fantasy of patricide. And for every explicitly expressed concept, there is usually a big, fat external symbol. Franklin’s art advances from tiny dolls to life-size dummies that look like him, his mother and daddy Andre, to whom he fails to give a face. Though he spends a lot of time trembling, as if from the exposure of being wet and naked, Mr. Peet’s Franklin is too unfailingly poised and articulate to engage us emotionally. Ms. Woodard, a first-rate actress, sometimes seems worn out by the sheer weight of the words she must deliver. Mr. Cumming, who won a Tony Award as the satanic M.C. in the 1998 revival of “Cabaret,” here provides canny glimpses of the sad smallness of a man who believes he can buy love and respect with purchases from Tiffany and Hermes. And the gospel singers — Carrie Compere, Denise Manning and Onyie Nwachukwu — sound swell. It should also be noted that the performances noticeably improve whenever the ensemble members are in the pool, which has been lighted like a movie star by Isabella Byrd. Perhaps this is because it’s the only time they’re allowed contact with something truly elemental and beyond words. Were there an award for best supporting body of water in a play, this highly expressive pool would be a shoo-in. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/theater/review-jeremy-o-harris-daddy.html

‘Company’ and ‘Come From Away’ Lead Olivier Award Nominations LONDON — A gender-swapping version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” and the feel-good 9/11 musical “Come From Away” dominate the nominations for this year’s Olivier Awards — the British equivalent of the Tony Awards — which were announced on Tuesday. “Company,” which got nine nominations including best musical revival, was expected to lead the way. The production has been one of the most acclaimed in London in the last year. The Times’s theater critic Ben Brantley wrote that the “Company” revival, which replaces the musical’s male lead with a woman, “has emotional coherence and clout that it never possessed in my previous experiences of the show.” “Come From Away,” which opened at the Phoenix Theater in January, is about the residents of a Canadian town who accommodated 6,700 travelers whose planes were diverted there after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It also received nine nominations, including one for best new musical, despite receiving less positive reviews in London than it did when it opened on Broadway in 2017. “It is musically vigorous and excellently staged,” wrote Michael Billington, the theater critic for The Guardian. He added: “I found something bludgeoning about its relentless celebration of civic virtue.” In nonmusical categories, “The Inheritance,” a two-part, six-and-a-half hour play about the legacy of AIDS, received eight nominations. The play had rave reviews and is expected to transfer to Broadway. Dominic Cavendish, writing in The Daily Telegraph, called it “a theatrical marathon that instantly looks like a modern classic,” adding that it was “perhaps the most important American play of the century so far.” It will compete for best new play against “The Lehman Trilogy,” a family saga, directed by Sam Mendes, about founders of the financial firm bearing their name (It opens at the Park Avenue Armory on March 22); “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play set in working class Pennsylvania; and “Misty,” a one-man-show about a black artist trying to make it in a white world. Other notable nominees in the awards, organized by the Society of London Theater, include Gillian Anderson for best actress for her role in Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of “All About Eve,” at the Noël Coward Theater. Also nominated in that category is Sophie Okonedo, for her role as Cleopatra in the National Theater’s "Antony and Cleopatra.” Ian McKellen received a best actor nomination for “King Lear” at the Duke of York’s Theater. He is up against all three actors starring in “The Lehman Trilogy”: Adam Godley, Ben Miles and Simon Russell Beale. Full list of nominations at: http://www.playbill.com/article/2019-olivier-award-nominations-londons-company-and-come-from-away-lead-the-pack

Downtown Houston was my chosen location due to the proximity to the office. Escorts are generally not confined to any particular area and are more than willing to drive, or Uber, (and yes, over the years I'e had a few show up on their bicycle(!), to your location. Don't know how it's fared after all these years by my favorite hotel in downtown Houston was The Lancaster, a small elegant boutique hotel.

Adonis has changed NYC locations a number of times over the years, and it continues at Evolve, so the only drawback is whether or not you want to go to the westside of town or the eastside. Atlas is in the heart of the gay neighborhood of HK, Evolve in the more sedate Bloomingdale's country, but across the street from the ever popular Townhouse bar.

This just in from Tim. Adonis and Atlas have parted ways (for the time being). New nights scheduled at Evolve for Wednesday's and Saturday's. Best of luck to Tim and his crew on their new venues/adventures. Here is an edited version of Tim's email announcement saving you his tale of woe on the red eye back from LA and his encounter with a "support dog" in his seat. I can only offer Tim a suggestion to travel with a support go-go boy! LOL Adonis @ Evolve WEDNESDAYS & SATURDAYS Starting This Week! NO MORE ATLAS!! Oh yeah, the relevant stuff: I always do my best to approach these things, and there have been many over the years, with full transparency and honesty. This situation is a bit complicated and not what Atlas wanted or what I wanted, but such is life. It's quite possible we'll have a Part II there after some things get worked out, but for now we've locked in Evolve for WEDNESDAYSand SATURDAYS beginning this week. We're working on adding NEW nights and NEW venues too, so stay tuned and read the emails. You'll never hear me cry about these things or play victim, as it's just not my style. Everyone's life and work is complicated, not just mine. The Adonis network is strong, truly something unique and special, and I appreciate all the support and understanding Matt and I can always cunt, I mean count on, from coast to coast. It does make these trying situations a bit easier to deal with, so thank you. Lets have a BIG night Wednesday at Evolve this week to keep this ship afloat One last thing, special thanks to the owners at Atlas and my right-hand man Aaron at the door for a great ride and the opportunity to build what was a great event at a great venue. Onward and upward folks...

New(?) revival from the Roundabout company starring the great Kelli O'Hara and Will Chase. I had some familiarity from the film version in which a young Bob Fosse has a dancing role as Hortensio. A young Bobby Van also appears in the film. I never got to see the 1999 revival with Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie. The original was the winner of the first-ever Tony Award for Best Musical,. The show is alive with onstage romance, backstage passion, comedy high and low, a dash of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, and a stylish songbook by the great Cole Porter that includes “Too Darn Hot,” “So In Love” and “Always True To You In My Fashion.” I caught a preview last night, and aside from a very annoying woman with her young son sitting directly in front of me (I swear she had ADHD or was very high on drugs) it was a good show. Something is missing. Kelli is great but, for me, she lacks the fieriness needed for the role of Kate. Perhaps she'll grow into the role. Opening night is March 14, so there are a few weeks left to fine tune. Two nice guys sat next to the ADHD mess and were taking notes throughout, no doubt for fine tuning the production. BTW, Ms. ADHD left with the kid before the end of the first act, so we all sat back had really enjoyed the second act, especially the act two opening number Too Darn Hot. We'll see what the critics have to say in a few weeks..... 2 hours 30 minutes with one 15-minute intermission.

I gave this revival several considerations and finally decided to pass. I've seen my fair share of productions of this flawed Sondheim show. The "best" I ever saw was a London revival a few years ago. It came closest to having a cohesive book. Still, the score is fabulous. Perhaps I'll go if it crops up on a deeply discounted seat. Alas, this latest revival from the Roundabout Theater Co suffers from the same flaws . Review: ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ the Way It Never, Ever Was There are few moments in musical theater as heartbreaking as the one near the end of “Merrily We Roll Along,” when the reverse chronology of the storytelling lands us on a Manhattan tenement rooftop in 1957. We have already lived backward through 23 years of disillusion, as three friends, Frank, Charley and Mary, first seen as hardened adults in 1980, gradually grow younger, shedding their cynicism. Now singing “Our Time” — that sounds like what dew on a cobweb looks like — they appear in all their unpolluted promise, anticipating important lives and unbreakable bonds. The only thing sadder than this moment in “Merrily” is “Merrily” itself. A show with one of the richest scores of the 1980s, by Stephen Sondheim — but one of the most problematic books, by George Furth — it has spent the 38 years since its flop Broadway opening on its own backward trajectory to find its best self. On the evidence of its umpteenth unsatisfactory revisal, which opened on Tuesday at the Laura Pels Theater, I’m sorry to say that it’s still not “Merrily”’s time. Maybe it never will be — and I speak as someone who’d gladly patronize a dedicated “Merrily” repertory theater, perhaps on that rooftop, running nothing but reworked versions in perpetuity. E ven if all the productions I’ve seen since 1981 have fallen short in some way, each one has added to my understanding of the show, and human nature. Until now. The current production, a six-actor, eight-musician, one-act reduction by Fiasco Theater, in residence at the Roundabout Theater Company, seems not so much stripped-down as emaciated. All of the contrasts of idealism and greed, gloss and substance so central to the story’s effectiveness are flattened under the pressure of forcing it to stand without enough legs. Purists may focus on the prickly new orchestrations (by Alexander Gemignani) and iffy singing (by almost everyone). And yes, these are problematic, even though you can sense how they reflect the production’s priorities. Fiasco, known for imaginative, fat-free stagings, does not aim for fancy or swell. That minimalist aesthetic has worked just fine in recent takes on “Cymbeline” and “Measure for Measure” — and, for that matter, “Into the Woods,” also by Mr. Sondheim, with a book by James Lapine. Fiasco’s story-theater format was marvelously effective in conveying the complex morality of that tale, regardless of how well any one song came off. But “Merrily” was written when Mr. Sondheim was still mining the rich seam of his peak Broadway style. By the time he wrote “Into the Woods,” six years later, having reconsidered his threat to leave the theater entirely, he had adjusted his palette in response to cerebral new collaborators and stories. “Merrily” can’t really reach its potential by superimposing that later approach. As indicated by Derek McLane’s warehouse of a set, stuffed with the detritus of decades of showbiz, it is a story about theatrical artists, vivid and nostalgic. Frank (Ben Steinfeld) is a Broadway composer who sells out to Hollywood; Charley (Manu Narayan) is his word man, who loudly doesn’t; and Mary (Jessie Austrian) is a writer trying to figure out where she fits in, which we learn right from the drunken start is nowhere. Especially as run in reverse, their conflicts over love and work and what it means to stay friends must be dense enough to support the score, which in its original orchestration by Jonathan Tunick had . Here, something has flipped. The songs, with all their polish removed, no longer reflect the coherent Broadway world of the story but instead try to excavate its various interior workings. Often radically reconceived, harshly truncated or left to dribble away, they no longer ennoble the characters or provide much pleasure for the audience. So “ ,” Mary’s deliciously brassy effort to buck up Frank and bring down the curtain at what used to be the end of Act I, is rendered here as a mid-show dirge, exposing subtext that was better off sub. Or take the bitter torch song “Not a Day Goes By,” sung by Frank in the original production. Reassigned to his betrayed wife, Beth (Brittany Bradford), on the eve of their brutal divorce, it makes better sense, in theory; but because of the reverse chronology, it’s pretty much the first thing out of her mouth and thus seems to come from nowhere. “Why is that lady singing?” you may wonder — just as the conceptual set often leaves you asking, “Where are we?” and the use of three actors to cover the entire ensemble (the original cast numbered 27) has you trying to sort out who’s who. I’ll let completists detail the many other changes: more cuts than additions, it seemed to me, except for a new scene, near the end, adapted from one in the 1934 Kaufman and Hart play on which the show is distantly based. (Utterly unmusicalized, the scene lays an egg.) The director Noah Brody has also interpolated a lot of business during the inter-scene rewinds; some is succinct and clever (at one point even the lyrics are sung backward), but some just seems like doodling. Say what you will about the original production, with its just-turned-professional cast and bizarre costume concept, but I found that “Merrily” more coherent and moving than any I’ve seen since. Of course, I was just out of college then, the age of the characters when they sing “Our Time.” So perhaps I’m guilty of the same sin Mary nails in the song “Like It Was”: blaming “the way it is / on the way it was. / On the way it never ever was.” Even so, one has to stand in awe of Mr. Sondheim for his willingness to allow intelligent younger artists to futz with his classic work. the gender-switched “Company,”now in London,One day someone may even get “Merrily” right In the meantime I find myself nodding in agreement when Frank says of Mary, “We go way back,” and she instantly zings: “But seldom forward.”

Currently playing in the West End, I had hoped for a better reaction than Ben's tepid review of this classic tale. Review: ‘All About Eve’ Gets the Vampire Treatment from Ivo van Hove LONDON — Has a vampire had its way with “All About Eve”? The anemic spectacle now sleepwalking across the stage of the Noël Coward Theater here shares a title, characters and much of its dialogue with Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Oscar-winning 1950 film about the glamorous narcissists who inhabit the dark and glittering world of Broadway. Yet as adapted and directed by the international auteur Ivo van Hove,what was originally a crackling, high-gloss satire now feels like a horror movie without a pulse. The shades of lurid red that saturate the sets and costumes for this production, which opened on Tuesday night with Gillian Anderson as its enervated star, suggest nothing so much as the fast-drying lifeblood of an exsanguinated masterpiece. The Belgian-born Mr. van Hove, perhaps the most unlikely artist ever to become a hot Broadway director, is famed for his onstage vivisections of classic films. The results have embraced the very good (“Opening Night”), the bad (“Obsession”) and the mesmerizingly ugly (“The Damned”). (His current New York hit, “Network,” falls somewhere in between.) But they could usually be relied upon to throb with unsettling and exciting energy. Yet his “Eve” is always on the edge of slipping into a coma, taking its audience with it. The most entertaining backstage drama to come out of Hollywood — starring Bette Davis as the volcanic stage star Margo Channing — is dear to theater-loving moviegoers, who commit to memory its poisoned bon mots. The best-known: “ ” As spoken by Davis’s Margo, as a warning to guests foolish enough to attend a party she’s giving, those words had the exhilarating crack of bullwhip. Uttered by Ms. Anderson in the same role, the lines slide off her tongue like clotted, bilious spittle. It seems fitting that shortly thereafter we see her (via a stalking video camera, which takes us backstage and into bathrooms) vomiting into a toilet bowl, with a subsequent close-up of its contents. Mr. van Hove is once again daring to tell it like it is, right? After all, this is how real people behave when they’ve drunk to excess. And Margo, who is about 50 (not 40, as in the film), probably can’t hold her liquor as she once did. But the glory of the Mankiewicz movie is its immaculate artifice. A savvy celebration of a mythic urban sophistication, it is basically the sum of its epigrams and perfectly groomed star turns. It has about as much of a bona fide heart as its title character, Eve Harrington (Lily James, of “Downton Abbey,” in the Anne Baxter role), a fox in lamb’s clothing who schemes to take Margo’s place in the bedroom and on the marquee. The movie’s enameled veneer is what holds it together, and once you strip that away, the whole sparkly edifice crumbles, leaving … well, all Mr. van Hove seems to have found is a vacuum. The big tragic emotions that he elicited so brilliantly in his Broadway revivals of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” and “The Crucible” simply aren’t here to be mined. So Mr. van Hove has grabbed hard at the film’s most melancholy element, Margo’s vanity about getting older, which becomes an all-out terror of mortality. When Ms. Anderson stares into her makeup mirror — the solar center of Jan Versweyveld’s mutable set — her face, as replicated on a giant screen, ages into crumbly decrepitude. Margo responds, understandably, by doing an impression of Munch’s “The Scream.” This isn’t funny, nor is it meant to be. The music heard throughout, by the gifted PJ Harvey, is ever so somber, inspired by Liszt’s “Liebestraume.” And while most of the film’s wittier lines are retained, they land with the thud of frivolous jokes at a funeral. Ms. James’s Eve is so fiendishly feverish and tremulous from the get-go, you can’t believe everyone doesn’t run for cover. Playing Margo’s best friend, Karen (the Celeste Holm part), Monica Dolan gives a raw emotional performance more suitable to Mr. van Hove’s intense stage production of “Scenes From a Marriage.” As the viperish, all-powerful theater critic Addison DeWitt (embodied to acidic perfection in the film by George Sanders), Stanley Townsend is so melodramatically satanic he might as well be carrying a pitchfork. The other cast members just seem to saying their lines and hoping for the best. Ms. Anderson, a perennially witty and adventurous actress, was a smashing Blanche in Benedict Andrews’ deconstructed “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Her Margo, with her languid speech and wilting posture, suggests Blanche in that play’s final scenes, already defeated and depleted. At her ill-fated party, Margo asks the hired pianist (Philip Voyzey) to keep playing a lugubrious lullaby she calls “Sandman.” All she wants, it would seem, is to sleep. Can you blame her?

On his annual pilgrimage over the pond, NYTimes columnist Ben Brantley writes about 3 new plays currently in production. The first, When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, starring Cate Blanchett at the National received a lot of buzz and was considered to be a sure Broadway transfer. Alas, it flopped and prospective producers have backed out. The other, Lucy Barton, starring the delightful and talented Laura Linney will probably have a Broadway run. BRANTLEY IN BRITAIN How She Survives: Strategies for Women on London Stages LONDON — “I have power and you have none.” So says Man to Woman in the opening lines of “When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other,” Martin Crimp’s sold-out, much maligned play at the National Theater here. But does this deluded guy know who he’s talking to? Woman (and, yes, that is her character’s name) is portrayed by Cate Blanchett in this laboriously wordy production, which has theatergoers both queuing up for returned tickets and walking out mid-play. And woe unto any Man, even one with a capital M, who thinks he can outpower Ms. Blanchett. Pinned and spread-eagled in a wedding dress against an Audi’s shiny black hood by Stephen Dillane as Man, it’s clear that Ms. Blanchett’s Woman still has the upper hand or even, as things turn out, the upper phallus. For one thing, she’s Cate Blanchett, the two-time-Oscar winner and fearless stage star on whom I’d put my money in any Olympics of acting. But her character’s ascendancy here is also a matter of her simply being Woman. That means she’s capable of out-imagining, out-empathizing and ultimately outwitting anyone with a Y chromosome. Having been subjected to years of assumptions about her gender’s weakness and subservience, she’s acquired a mental and emotional agility that no patriarch could possibly rival. I caught Ms. Blanchett at the National on Friday, and her performance turned out to be the perfect curtain raiser for a weekend of watching gifted actresses in plays that explored the feminine capacity for survival. On Saturday afternoon, there was Laura Wade’s “Home, I’m Darling,” at the Duke of York’s Theater, in which Katherine Parkinson plays a 21st-century woman who has elected to live like a doting, house-proud housewife of the 1950s. And that night, across the Thames at the Bridge Theater, I found Laura Linney radiating shadow-streaked sunlight as the title character and sole performer in “My Name Is Lucy Barton.” That’s Rona Munro’s crystalline adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s best-selling novelabout a writer’s escape from a grim middle-American childhood. Of the three, “Lucy Barton” is the least overtly political and, on its own terms, the most artistically satisfying. But seeing these productions back-to-back had me thinking about acting not only as a delicate and commanding art but also as an existential condition, in which gender is always partly a matter of performance. That’s most obviously and immediately true for Man and Woman in (to use its full title) “When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other: 12 Variations on Samuel Richardson’s ‘Pamela,’” which has been staged as a meticulously ordered mess by the formidable Katie Mitchell. It takes its cues from — and then riffs like mad on — “Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded,” published in 1740 and sometimes described, debatably, as the first English novel. In it, the title character, a comely 15-year-old serving girl, is pursued by her rich roué of a master, who lays siege to her maidenhood. Mr. Crimp transposes the novel’s archetypes of unworldly, vulnerable woman and controlling, predatory man into a shifting, contemporary, aged-up key. Be warned: If you like to do full homework before seeing a play, you should look into not only Richardson’s novel but such theorists of sexuality as Freud and Foucault and the latter-day feminist philosophers Amia Srinivasan, Ellen Willis and Jacqueline Rose. They’re all quoted in the program. If you choose to read none of the above, you will not be entirely lost watching “Tortured.” You may, however, be bored, despite the simulated sex and violence that abound on stage. These acts occur in what appears to be a suburban garage (Vicki Mortimer is the set designer), wherein Man and Woman woo, imprison and abuse each other, while taking turns being on top, literally and otherwise. They are assisted in these activities by four other performers who embody different erotic fantasies (rough trade, schoolgirl-on-schoolgirl action, etc.). They also help Ms. Blanchett and Mr. Dillane in and out of Sussie Juhlin-Wallen’s costumes, which include classic maid’s uniforms and men’s business suits, worn by both actors, with identical black lingerie underneath. Their assorted poses are matched and mismatched by dialogue that encompasses what feels like far more than a dozen variations on archetypal gender-baiting and -switching. Mr. Dillane, an excellent actor who won a Tony for the 2000 Broadway revival of “The Real Thing,” is the less mutable of the two and by the end seems understandably depleted. But what a piece of work is Ms. Blanchett. Her Woman — and her Man, too — are evoked via a head-spinning range of vocal ranges and personae, picked up and discarded as effortlessly as if they were Kleenexes. She’s so convincing in each fleeting identity that you do indeed start to realize how much of what has traditionally been regarded as manly or womanly is, well, just acting. (Blanchett fans might recall her working in a similar vein as Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There.”) The insights afforded by her virtuosity meant that I was never tortured by “Tortured,” as many reviewers here seem to have been.But the production exhausts its ideas midway through its intermission-free two hours. And when, in the show’s final moments, Woman straps on a dildo to penetrate Man, it feels less a shock than a weary of reiteration of what’s come before. Judy, the heroine of the ingeniously titled “Home, I’m Darling,” would no doubt be appalled by such shenanigans. Though this former business executive turned industrious housewife (Ms. Parkinson, looking like a cross between Lucille Ball and Maya Rudolph) is a resident of 21st-century Britain, she and her husband, Johnny (Richard Harrington), pretend they’re living in the supposedly brighter and simpler world of the 1950s. Anna Fleischle’s set and costumes are a retro-stylist’s delight. And much of the fun of the show, snappily directed by Tamara Harvey, comes from seeing how Judy and Johnny are liberated and, ultimately, imprisoned by these period accouterments. Ms. Wade, best known for the boy’s club-eviscerating play “Posh,” knows her craft. She turns her “Home” inside out with a plot borrowed from Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” refracted through the gaze of a woman who actually wants to be a doll. This reworked story is ultimately stretched too thin to sustain much tension. But Ms. Parkinson (of AMC’s “Humans” and a fabulous Masha in the Royal Court “Seagull” in 2007) inflects Judy’s willful domestic blissfulness with a subconscious note of squeaky dissonance. The way Judy walks (and dances and cleans house) with heavy tread in high heels is one of the best arguments ever made for the absurdity of such footwear. “Lucy Barton,” a 100-minute monologue directed with penetrating calm by Richard Eyre, is about a different kind of search for selfhood. Lucy, a fiction writer, remembers being bed-bound in a hospital in New York City, where she is visited by her mother, whom she hadn’t seen in many years. (Tellingly, her husband, with whom she has two young daughters, is afraid of hospitals, and is seldom there.) The encounter inspires recollections of a dirt-poor, love-starved childhood in rural Illinois, where Lucy experienced abuse that almost resists description. One of the most unaffected and transparent of contemporary actresses, Ms. Linney is the perfect conduit for Ms. Strout’s lucid, direct prose. As she assumes both parts in Lucy’s dialogue with her austere, judgmental mother, you may at first feel like you’re eavesdropping on a rather mundane conversation. But an ever-deepening complexity emerges from such seeming simplicity. This is writing — and acting — that grows in power without your being aware of it, and the tears it elicits feel both surprising and natural. More than any of the struggling, often confused women I encountered during these three productions, Lucy becomes aware of who and what she is. Such knowledge hasn’t been acquired easily, and it comes at the price of great loneliness. But when Ms. Linney finally speaks the words of the title, just before the play ends, it is a triumph of self-assertion — gentle but glorious, and unconditionally earned.

Yes, not everyone liked the Merm, and that includes me. Not sure why you thought you needed to tell me about the cast recording. Puzzling...Hope you enjoy your memories and played the recording for old times sake.

I have no idea what show Jesse Green from the NYTimes saw! I totally disagree with his critique. Great cast, great music, great costumes and just a classic fun Broadway show. I loved it.

Seeing it tomorrow night. I'll chime in afterwards.... In the meantime, the full NYTimes review, which mentions a first-rate revival it did of this show in "95 with Tyne Daly. Without Ethel Merman, a Limp ‘Call Me Madam’ at Encores! “Neither the character of Mrs. Sally Adams, nor Miss Ethel Merman, resembles any other person alive or dead.” So theatergoers who saw “Call Me Madam” when it opened on Broadway in 1950 were warned in the Playbill. With the first half of that warning, the show’s producers might have been angling to forestall legal action from Perle Mesta, the Washington “hostess” whom President Truman appointed ambassador to Luxembourg in 1949. In “Call Me Madam,” Sally Adams, introduced in song as “ ,” is named ambassador to a country called Lichtenburg — and proceeds to make a mess of it. The other half of the alert, though, was simply a statement of fact. Merman’s clarion voice, brusque style and ha-cha-cha exuberance made her musical theater’s indispensable star for decades. But it also made most of the vehicles tailored to her gifts difficult fits for anyone else. That at any rate is the impression left by the pulse-lowering Encores! production of “Call Me Madam” that opened on Wednesday at City Center, directed by Casey Hushion and starring Carmen Cusack in the Merman role. Ms. Cusack, a strong performer in other circumstances — she emerged gleaming from the wreckage of “Bright Star” in 2016 — is overpowered here by material that, if it can work at all today, can do so only when rough-handled by a mauler. That seems to have been the happier case when Encores! first revived the show in 1995, with Tyne Daly as the ambassador. I didn’t see it then, but from that production delivers the thrill of a performance that knocks down everything in its path. And the flimsy story, not just the role of Sally Adams, requires that. When Adams, who liberally buys Washington influence with her oil millions, gets the D-list patronage job in Lichtenburg, where “babies and cheese are our main industries,” she thinks that because it is a duchy its citizens must be Dutch. (The musical’s book is by Howard Lindsay Despite the ministrations of her eager young assistant, Kenneth Gibson (Jason Gotay), and of the embassy’s imperious chargé d’affaires, Pemberton Maxwell (Michael Benjamin Washington), she makes gauche mistakes in both protocol and policy. The authors’ intention is clearly to satirize the underinformed internationalism of postwar America: Adams’s faith in capital and capitalism leads her to attempt to solve cash-strapped Lichtenburg’s problems by poulticing them with dollar bills. “Can you use any money today?” she sings. In a preshow welcome on Wednesday, the Encores! artistic director Jack Viertel said that one reason for revisiting “Call Me Madam” was to see how a political satire from 1950 differed from satire today. Fair enough — and a few lines, whether original or interpolated, elicited rueful laughter from an audience asked to recall a period of American history when a top marginal tax rate of almost 85 percent left the treasury overflowing with the potential to do good in the world. But “Call Me Madam” can’t support much political reflection, or any reflection, really, because its focus on know-nothing ambassadors and reflexive largess quickly becomes subservient to its dispiritingly dated romantic plot. It’s not enough that young Gibson should fall in forbidden love with Lichtenburg’s Princess Maria, wittily played by Lauren Worsham as a demented Dresden doll; Adams herself must also fall at first glance for Cosmo Constantine, the handsome foreign minister. Out of excess pride and nobility, he rejects her offer of $100 million to solve the duchy’s problems: “We are waiting for your country to offer the world something more than money.” But he does not reject her affection. This leads to some lovely singing, as Ms. Cusack and her Cosmo, Ben Davis, dig into pleasantly second-drawer Berlin numbers like “Something to Dance About,” “Marrying for Love” and “The Best Thing for You.” Ms. Cusack, who seemed as if she might be under the weather on Wednesday, could not quite pull off the necessary big notes but was lovely to listen to everywhere else; Mr. Davis is a dream. Still, the songs mostly backfire dramatically by forcing us to sympathize with characters, especially Adams, whom the book otherwise wishes us to treat as objects of surprisingly coarse satire. The form and the content are hopelessly uncoupled. It is telling, regarding both Berlin in 1950 and the production today, that the secondary characters, basically free from any hope of serving the plot, come off best. Between them, Mr. Gotay and Ms. Worsham get the evergreen duet “It’s a Lovely Day Today” as well as a charming rarity (“Once Upon a Time, Today”) and a hilariously bizarre “local color” ensemble, “The Ocarina.” The choreographer, Denis Jones, has staged this bit of period nonsense as if from the inside of a cuckoo clock. But the only time the score really breaks through the fog of mildness is when Mr. Gotay and Ms. Cusack sing the contrapuntal duet Berlin wrote quickly during the show’s out-of-town tryout: “You’re Just in Love.” For a wonderful moment as the melodies intertwine, you feel in Ms. Hushion’s otherwise laborious production what it must have been like when big, peculiar, unsanded personalities elevated stories instead of merely serving them. You also feel, with some emotion, that Berlin understood the difference. He wasn’t a musical dramatist but a songwriter, and by 1950 he saw which way the wind was blowing. At a few key moments in “Call Me Madam,” he interpolates the melody of “God Bless America,” which he’d written more than 30 years earlier. It comes off as both a winking self-tribute and an eyes-wide-open eulogy to a world and a style he would long outlive.

Yes, me too. Off I go, out-of-town! The Polonsky Shakepeare Center is located in downtown Brooklyn a block or so from BAM. A quick train from Manhattan or a short Uber drive. WARNING: Right now they are not selling single tickets and you MUST become a subscriber (in advance) to assure a seat. It's a two show requirement. Fairview AND Julius Caesar. But at $60 bucks a pop, it's still a worthwhile deal. Tickets available to subscribers on Feb 19. Sure to go fast...a very, very limited run.

Finally announced a new venue...but BROOKLYN? off-off-off-off-off Broadway for sure. Looks like I'll have to do a road trip! ‘Fairview’ Will Return to the New York Stage After a successful run at the 73-seat Soho Rep theater last summer, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s acclaimed play “Fairview” will return to challenge audiences in a bigger space this June. The play, which both chief theater critics for The New York Times named among the year’s top 10 productions, will be remounted at Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, in Brooklyn, from June 2 to June 30. The return engagement marks the second time that the Polonsky’s 299-seat main stage has hosted a play that originated at Soho Rep, following “An Octoroon,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s formally inventive comedy about race and American history, which ran at the Polonsky in 2015. On its face, “Fairview” is about an extended black family preparing for an important dinner. The tone starts off light and the plot stays within the confines of a family comedy. But as the play progresses, the mood shifts and the assumptions it invites are turned on their heads. “You begin watching by feeling mildly amused, then uneasy, then annoyed, then unsettled,” Ben Brantley wrote in his review for the Times. “And then abruptly you’re free-falling down a rabbit hole, and there’s no safe landing in sight.” “Fairview,” which was directed by Sarah Benson, Soho Rep’s artistic director, was extended three times there. The play moved to Berkeley Repertory Theater, which co-commissioned it, in October. Casting for the new production has not been announced. But the play’s much-discussed staging will be retained and adapted for the Polonsky, according to a publicist for the show. Ms. Drury’s new play, “Marys Seacole,” begins previews at Lincoln Center Theater on Feb. 9.