Fabiola Caraballo Quijada and Joseph Torres in the North American Tour of & Juliet Credit: Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade
We all have those playlists from our past that haunt us: the guilty-pleasure songs from our youth that won’t stop repeating inside our heads, reminding us of our first dance and/or heartbreak. Blend that with the Shakespearean stories drilled into our souls since childhood, and you’ve got Broadway’s & Juliet (running now through Jan. 11 at the Dr. Phillips Center’s Walt Disney Theater) which brings all those memories together in a refreshing spectacle of humor and sentimentality.
David West Read’s Tony-nominated book is a revisionist reimagining of Romeo and Juliet where the heroine finds herself, instead of choosing to commit suicide over her short-lived boyfriend. Director Luke Sheppard serves up the story with a bit of an urban feel, adding an Olde English chaser. The real hero of the show is recent high school graduate Fabiola Caraballo Quijada as the title character; at such a young age, she embodies a strong woman who can make her own choices, even when things go horribly wrong. Revamped songs written by Max Martin — the hitmaker behind Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry and others — range from angsty rock to uplifting pop, bringing you right there with her as she struggles to become her own woman.
The buzz among the opening audience was all about Joey Fatone being in the show. The two-time second-place winner of Dancing With the Stars has proven that he’s never taken himself too seriously, and aging *NSYNC fans (myself included) were there to see him show his stuff; little did we know that he would only spend a total of about 25 minutes onstage. Many audience members left during intermission, unaware that if they had waited for the second act, they would have gotten more of the Fatone that they had come to see. In his role as “Lance,” a French man trying to get his son married, Fatone is charismatic even with a humorous cheesy French accent. The “DeBois Band” performance toward the end was the type of thing that makes the inner teenager in all of us scream with glee.
Despite sharing billing with someone famous, Crystal Kellogg steals the show as Anne, Shakespeare’s wife. As a “supporting” character, it’s a joy to see her take center stage, and Kellogg brought not only heart and strength but also playfulness to scenes that might have otherwise fallen flat. And Nico Ochoa’s gender-fluid performance as Juliet’s nonbinary friend May was intriguing, and left the audience longing for more.
Soutra Gilmour’s scenic design is joyfully over-the-top, featuring a few characters descending from the ceiling on chandeliers that made the audience cheer. The music is a reminder of the past, with the cast often performing a well-known song better than the original artists. And Paloma Young’s costumes are a mix of new and old, with corsets added to track suits, Elizabethan ruff collars, mini-backpacks and short skirts, all in bright sparkling colors. Add to all of that Howard Hudson’s flashing lights and confetti cannons, and it’s like a ’90s rave in 2026.
In the end, & Juliet empowers by showing us that life is made of choices. Do you choose who you are supposed to be or who you want to be? Either way, it’s a fun journey to get there … even if it only takes four days.
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The windows are down, the sun is a kaleidoscope through the reddening leaves, and I’m listening to Saves the Day’s Stay What You Are on the car CD-player, on the way to play Soul Caliber and hold hands with my boyfriend after school … It’s cold, and you can still hear the dull thud of the music from the goth club in the basement under the sushi bar, and I’m wearing a cheap polyester corset, and I think I’m about to be kissed in this parking lot under a full moon … It’s Homecoming, and I’m talking with the friend I’ve known since we were three, because we both came with guys who are in fact a couple, but one of them has parents who can’t find out he’s gay, so we’re their covers so they can meet up at the dance …
I don’t know what it is about adolescence—maybe it’s something to do with those underbaked prefrontal cortexes—but I doubt I’m alone in retaining memories from my teenage life that still feel as vivid, twenty-plus years on, as last week’s. It’s another world, in almost every sense another person, and at the same time its tiniest details, ecstatic or embarrassing, are still definitive, ephemeral and yet indelible.
It’s this sensation—a feeling of swimming through waters that long ago flowed on and out into the ocean—that the playwright Else Went captures so potently in Initiative. Developed over the last ten years with the collaboration of their wife, the director Emma Rosa Went, as well as many of the actors who are now on stage in its premiere at the Public, the show has both the patience and the pain of maturity. It feels slow-cooked, basted in rich juices and allowed to simmer. That the production is five hours long—three 90-minute acts unfolding over the course of the central characters’ four years in high school, plus intermissions—is certainly crucial to this quality, but it’s the pace and texture, rather than the length per se, that really distinguish Initiative. A play can run a marathon (see Gatz) or it can brew like tea, building a somatic experience that concentrates and darkens over time. This steeped and tannic quality is what keeps the Wents’ project—notwithstanding the Jimmy Eat World and Sugarcult blasting during the preshow, the dramatized AIM chats of its characters, and the Dungeons & Dragons sessions that become central to its story—distinct from nostalgia. Nostalgia is about consuming a version of the past as comfort food. Initiative is—to steal a “good 50-cent word” from one of its characters—elegiac. It’s about loss and survival and the way in which imagination can become as tangible and critical as a climbing rope on a cliff face.
If, unlike the play’s characters, you weren’t experiencing your own high-school odyssey over a fistful of D20s, here’s a brief nerd primer: Most role-playing games are a mash-up of make-believe and chance. You play a character with “ability stats,” number scores that represent things like Charisma, Strength, and Intelligence, which in turn determine how successful you might be at performing certain actions during the game (like seducing an innkeeper or smashing a skull). But to generate those stats and perform those actions, you’ve always got to roll a die. “Initiative” is rolled for when your party of characters enters combat: In the face of a threat, who gets to make the first move? Who will attack and who will defend? Who’s got the agility to maneuver or the constitution to endure, and whose fate comes down to luck alone?
The whole endeavor—the danger, the thrill, the arcane rules and the fun of breaking them, the conscious, experimental creating of self—presents a meaty metaphor for coming of age, and, like all seasoned D&D players, the Wents and their actors take its stakes entirely seriously. Initiative is no parody, nor is it rarefied content meant solely for former Wizards of the Coast aficionados. Its characters don’t even begin “the game,” as they call it, until almost a third of the way through. Before, during, and after, they’re fighting the comparatively banal yet infinitely more harrowing battle of their own young lives, weathering high school while facing down the new millennium and, soon enough, a new war, from their home in “Coastal Podunk” California.
“Nothing happens here,” says the aspiring writer Riley (the fantastically malleable Greg Cuellar, reminiscent of a young Alan Rickman) to his English teacher, Mr. Stone (played in live voiceover by Brandon Burk; adults have no physical presence in this world). Riley dreams of escape, and, in their own ways, so do all the characters of Initiative — the driven, pure-hearted former homeschooler, Clara (Olivia Rose Barresi), who’s aiming for Yale by way of perfect SATs; the brothers Lo (Carson Higgins) and Em (a heartbreaking Christopher Dylan White), who take opposite tacks as they cope with an absent father and opioid-addicted mother; the free spirit Kendall (Andrea Lopez Alvarez) and the shy, sweet misfit transfer student Ty (Harrison Densmore). Even Em’s big lug of a buddy Tony (Jamie Sanders), who casually throws slurs around (like a true early-2000s gamer bro) and groans over how long it takes to download porn on dial-up, is desperately looking for a way out. Like the others, he needs a path toward a solid sense of self, a place where wounds aren’t simply being triaged but can begin to heal.
It’s this desire for some control over their own destinies—especially in what, says Clara, panicking in the face of post-9/11 American aggression, feels like its own “really horrible time to be alive in America”—that draws the wandering young souls of Initiative toward D&D. Getting to be a brilliant spell-caster or a divinely inspired paladin doesn’t hurt either. Confronted with a real world that hardly makes the case for the existence of love or kindness, let alone magic or God, who wouldn’t choose fantasy? (The show’s creative team, especially projection designer S. Katy Tucker, does rich conjuring work where this fantasy is concerned, and my only regret is that they and their director are confined to the LuEsther, a theater that clearly partitions action and audience in a way that saps some of the energetic potential of Initiative’s emotionally immersive story.)
As if in refutation of the puritanical outcry over D&D in its early days, Went’s characters use the game to attempt to construct a more just moral universe. In this sense, the play’s location in time is crucial, not simply for the facts of that moment—George W. Bush, Lil John and Avril Lavigne, shouting at your mom who wants to use the phone that you’ll be done with the internet in “LITERALLY ONE MINUTE”—but for its ethos. Millennials are, at least for now, the last generation of believers. We grew up wanting to “fix the world” and thinking it could be done. We didn’t know the word “problematic.” Clara and Riley—with their big hearts and weak armor, untempered by irony, vulnerable to the catastrophes of disillusionment—might as well be our patron saints.
These smart, soulful best friends are at the heart of Initiative, and their conversations, whether casual or charged with heartbreak, showcase some of Went’s most sensitive writing. (Though, the play is full of gems, like this one from Kendall to Em: “How come every time we hang out I feel sad? … Like… it’s comforting kinda. Like I can be myself with you, and myself is actually kinda sad, and that’s okay.”) Barresi and Cuellar hold each other up with palpable tenderness, each one crafting a long, poignant arc from innocence through the fogs and thorns of experience. A scene in which Riley (who naturally becomes the Dungeon Master in the game) narrates a solo campaign for the suffering Clara—literally taking her out of herself by leading her through an adventure as the paladin Andromeda—is profoundly moving in its generosity. Likewise the care that Lo, an increasingly aggressive jock and in plenty of outward ways a “bad kid,” shows as he shields his recessive younger brother from the brunt of their mother’s violent illness. Or the gentleness with which Kendall applies makeup to Ty’s face to hide a bruise. Initiative is stitched through with moments like these, like colorful patches on a heavy pall, little saving throws against the dark. Depending on when you were born and how much time you’ve spent rolling dice in basements, it might take you back, but its real achievement, bracing and compassionate, lies in its encouragement to keep walking forward.
Initiative is at the Public Theater through December 7.
Tom Hanks in This World of Tomorrow at the Shed. Photo: Marc J. Franklin/Courtesy The Shed
Whatever is happening at the Shed right now, it’s not really a play. It’s play-shaped, and actors put on costumes and wander around onstage for a couple of hours, repeating words they’ve memorized. But I’d be more comfortable calling the staging of This World of Tomorrow — starring Tom Hanks, written by Hanks and his collaborator James Glossman, directed by Kenny Leon, and based off elements of Hanks’s short-story collection, Uncommon Type — something more along the lines of “a flight of fancy,” “a doodle on a napkin,” or “a college-drama-club project with the express purpose of making one person happy.” There are plenty of talented folks around Hanks who have been roped into making this, and plenty of people in the audience who might be paying a lot to see him, but they don’t factor into the equation. This thing is entirely about admiring its star. Hey, at least there are some fun hats.
This World of Tomorrow is not malicious in its intent. Tom Hanks, the moral nice-guy mayor of Hollywood, is the closest thing the film industry has to a Jimmy Stewart, and I’m happy to believe that his forays into writing have developed out of genuine artistic interest in good-hearted Americana. (Inevitably, a character speaks admiringly about a typewriter.) Whether a theater company should spend its time and resources developing and staging what he has written is another question. (No.) This World of Tomorrow, largely based on the Hanks story “The Past Is Important to Us,” has him playing Bert Allenberry, a rich tech titan from around the year 2100 who keeps taking expensive daylong trips to the 1939 New York World’s Fair via a company called Chronometric Adventures. He justifies the cost by telling his colleagues that he’s enthralled by the way the past imagined a better future than the one we got, but it becomes clear very quickly that he’s really doing it because he’s infatuated with a winsome divorcée named Carmen Perry (Kelli O’Hara, at home in any role where she wears gloves). Carmen is visiting the fair with her spunky niece, Virginia (Kayli Carter, fumbling for any texture to play and landing on “loud”), and Hanks runs into her by accident, then comes back again and again. In each time loop, Carmen doesn’t remember Bert, he so keeps reseducing her, using a little more information each time, an unsettling dynamic that’s a blend between Groundhog Day, Midnight in Paris, and maybe even the deranged sci-fi drama Passengers, all films that aren’t known for their sensitivity toward women’s agency.
There’s where you might expect a play to develop some dramatic friction, perhaps as a commentary on the dangers of nostalgia or on one extremely rich man’s sense of entitlement. Any such turn might be a current, if obvious, direction for a play like this. But one thing you can say about This World of Tomorrow is that it doesn’t do much of what you might expect. There’s little tension anywhere or really any significant attempt to undercut Bert’s rosy gaze on the past. Hanks and Glossman have written a few throwaway lines that acknowledge the racism of the 1930s — Black members of the ensemble are often called upon to roll their eyes at Bert’s cheeriness about 1939 — and in the play’s announcement, Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, told the New York Times that “there is reference to the rise in authoritarianism,” which I can translate as “there is a line about how Bert should have used time travel to kill Hitler.”
I wouldn’t say that This World of Tomorrow embraces Bert’s nostalgia, either, so much as it just lets his quest for Carmen happen. The script is too rudderless to navigate toward any specific theme, and Leon, who has become the go-to director for soggy celebrity-drivendrama, hasn’t pushed his cast toward any specific idea. (According to a conversation in your program, Leon said the play is about “time and love”; one is a concept an actor can’t play, and the other is something no one is convincingly playing.) Somehow, despite what must have been a substantial budget, the set looks cheap. Derek McLane’s design resembles a cybernetic wilderness, a spare set of moving columns that indicate new locations and settings through screens and projections. If Bert’s so enamored with the innovations of the World’s Fair, couldn’t we see re-creations of a few of them onstage? Why not show us the famous robot or the celebrity cow?
Instead, in the space of where it could allow for wonder and enthusiasm, This World of Tomorrow tends toward overexplanation. The script is remarkably heavy on the technobabble and the scenes in which Hanks’s colleagues from the future throw nonsense time-travel-related nouns around while wearing Star Trek outfits. I couldn’t care less about the acids that supposedly accumulate when you go back and forth in time. The script’s most engaging indulgence is a series of scenes that occur in the second act as Bert and Carmen meet in the 1950s at a Greek diner, which is run by a grumbly Jay O. Sanders. Sanders almost convinces you that you’re watching a real play about a real man, commanding the stage with a gruff bark and mining humor from his character’s insistence on teaching everyone Greek vocabulary as he picks up some English. I’m not sure how his presence is supposed to relate to the rest of the story or why Hanks felt it was necessary to include it — perhaps his wife, the Greek American actress and producer Rita Wilson, had his ear — but at least it’s an interestingly idiosyncratic gesture.
Yet the audience isn’t at the Shed for idiosyncrasies. Hanks is the be-all and end-all of This World of Tomorrow, and, sure, when you’re sitting in the audience a few dozen yards away from him, it’s hard to deny his loping movie-star magnetism. He has something of the energy of a beloved and aging family dog, padding up to you to lay his paws on your lap. It’s hard to judge Hanks’s strengths as a stage actor given that this script gives him so few challenges, but when he delivers several jokes about Bert’s discovery that they have real milk at the World’s Fair — presumably, an unspoken environmental collapse has eliminated dairy — he is deeply charming. In those moments, the audience lets out a sigh of relief, as if to say, Ah, yes, the celebrity we’re here to see is giving us the performance we wanted. It’s his own persona he’s performing, not a character. We come to see plenty of stage actors for a taste of their familiar forms, from Kristin Chenoweth to Laurie Metcalf, but perhaps putting a movie star onstage and asking them to actually perform in a play is an extra hurdle we needn’t ask them to clear. Why not just revert to something more direct, more medieval and churchy? Do away with the scripts, with the directors, with the rest of the ensemble, with the pretense. Have them stand there, in pristine and golden-lit silence for two hours at the center of the stage, and bask in the awe and admiration. Audiences could think of it as a pilgrimage to visit a holy relic — or its own act of sacramental theater. He’s not performing, after all. You are.
This World of Tomorrow is at the Shed through December 21.
How do you spell joy? For New York theatergoers this fall, it’s “S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G B-E-E.”
You could make a credible case that “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” was the best-written musical of the 21st century until “Hamilton”—and watching its buoyant 20th-anniversary Off-Broadway revival, you might find yourself believing it. Few musicals from the era are as airtight, inventive, or downright lovable. William Finn’s vibrant, emotionally tuned score and Rachel Sheinkin’s Tony-winning, slyly compassionate book remain a model of musical-theater integration.
For the uninitiated, “Spelling Bee” unfolds as an actual elementary school spelling bee—complete with an onstage word pronouncer, escalating vocabulary, and a handful of audience volunteers who join the competition. As six quirky young contestants spell their way toward the trophy, the musical gradually opens up their anxieties, home lives, rivalries, and aspirations. It’s both a satire of academic pressure and a tender coming-of-age story, structured as one continuous, intermission-less event in real time. Much like “A Chorus Line,” once the bee starts, it never stops—and the emotional stakes deepen even as the jokes fly faster.
The revival, which arrives in the wake of Finn’s recent passing, feels like an unexpected but deeply welcome reunion with an old friend. In my experience—having seen the musical Off-Broadway, on Broadway, in regional theaters, and at schools—“Spelling Bee” tends to hold up under almost any conditions. But the show thrives when performed in a compact proscenium space like New World Stages. The intimacy sharpens the jokes, heightens the pathos, and restores the electricity that sometimes dissipated in the wider, in-the-round staging at Circle in the Square during its Broadway run.
Back in 2005, the kids of “Spelling Bee” lamented that “life is random and unfair” and “life is pandemonium.” Two decades later, the lyric hits with startling new weight. Today’s adolescents navigate the lagging shadows of a pandemic, the omnipresence of social media, the existential fog of AI, impending climate doom, and a political climate that would rattle even William Barfée’s magic foot. The show always understood that childhood isn’t cute—it’s treacherous. This production simply meets the moment more directly while preserving the joyfulness, heart, and full-throttle silliness that made the original so irresistible.
Director-choreographer Danny Mefford doesn’t attempt a radical reinterpretation, nor does he need to. The material is bulletproof. But he infuses the evening with a welcome sense of kinetic play, giving each scene and musical number a brisk, physical charge. “Magic Foot” remains a guaranteed showstopper, and the decision to run without an intermission—keeping the show at a tight 1 hour and 45 minutes—maintains the breathless pacing that makes the bee feel like a single, unbroken event.
The ensemble approaches the characters with fresh instincts rather than nostalgic mimicry. Kevin McHale (Artie on “Glee”) gives William Barfée a moody, snooty confidence and a diva-sized belt. Justin Cooley (so memorable in “Kimberly Akimbo”) offers a blissfully chilled-out Leaf Coneybear, so relaxed he seems permanently mid-microdose.
Jasmine Amy Rogers, who recently stole the spotlight as the title character in “Boop! The Musical,” makes a near-total 180 as Olive Ostrovsky. Her Olive is tremulous, frightened, and heartbreakingly open—a performance so vulnerable it nearly re-centers the musical around her. Autumn Best’s Logainne is bright and manic, frayed from political and parental pressure, while Leana Rae Concepcion’s Marcy also arrives in crisis mode, a model student cracking under the weight of expectation.
Philippe Arroyo brings a puffed-up swagger to Chip Tolentino, whose downfall remains one of the show’s most reliable comic detonations. Jason Kravits, as the sardonic Vice Principal Panch, proves that a perfectly delivered definition can be as funny as any punchline.
And then there’s Lilli Cooper, delivering one of her most assured performances as Rona Lisa Peretti. Cooper gives Rona the poise of a pageant host, the warmth of a beloved teacher, and the gravitas of a narrator who understands she’s shepherding us through a formative ritual. She grounds the evening with confidence and a touch of glamour. Vocally, the cast is uniformly sharp, and the sound design allows Finn’s harmonies—and his jokes—to land with crisp clarity.
The one character who has been consciously reconceived is Mitch Mahoney, traditionally a “comfort counselor” doing court-ordered community service. In a smart, culturally sensitive update, Matt Manuel plays him not as a former convict but as a personal trainer whose gym went under—still brusque, still deadpan, but without the baggage of stereotype.
Because audience participation remains core to “Spelling Bee,” the performers lean liberally into spontaneous riffs, calling out everything from the government shutdown to Mayor Mandami, Pelosi’s retirement, AOC, microdosing, pronoun debates, and even the fact that the spelling bee is happening next door to a production of “Heathers.” My audience was particularly game—screaming support for the volunteer contestants and erupting into mid-scene ovations that turned the evening into a communal pep rally. When a crowd is this alive and responsive, the show’s humor and heart land twice as effectively.
This revival premiered last year at the Kennedy Center, before the Trump Administration’s takeover of that institution shuttered the very musical theater series from which this production originated. With “Schmigadoon” (also produced by the Kennedy Center) now Broadway-bound, one can’t help wondering what else might have emerged from that program in a different political landscape.
New World Stages, 340 W 50th Street, spellingbeenyc.com. Through April 12.
In 1991, Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial debut novel, American Psycho, was published. It’s a look into the mind of Patrick Bateman, your average 1980s name-dropping, brand-whoring Wall Street greedhead. Raw, scary and often gross, it follows the downward spiral of a yuppie who is a pretentious, misogynistic businessman by day, and a “give me a weapon and I will use it” serial killer by night. As you read it, you feel his descent into madness, and it has become a Gen X cult classic (inspiring a film version in 2000 starring Christian Bale). The original printing still has a special place on my bookshelf, so imagine my excitement to be sitting in the audience at Theater West End for playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s musical adaptation of a story I’ve known for decades.
Director-designer Derek Critzer’s set is impressive, especially for a smaller theater. The array of old televisions playing videos of songs from the time was almost overwhelming, and a vivid reminder of how nightclubs in that era looked. Most surprising were the four sunken tables in the middle of the stage, with platforms built around them like a catwalk. Then I noticed audience members being escorted to those tables. I enjoy immersive theater, but were they there to make the party scenes look more crowded? Would they get spattered with blood? It’s a bold choice.
Halfway through the first song I realized this play’s tone has little in common with the book. Yes, it’ was based on it’s the source material, but this is not the gritty, scary novel I remembered; instead, it was more campy, almost upbeat. Familiar pop songs — including Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” — keep the audience mouthing along to the sounds of sweet nostalgia. However, while some of the original songs by Duncan Sheik are catchy and crammed with pop-culture references, others are obviously just “Killing Time” (a song that was on the original London cast album, but isn’t always included in productions). It felt light and fluffy, like an after-school special where everything’s OK at the end, no matter what happens on the way there.
At first, Chris Monell’s portrayal of Patrick Bateman was off-putting; he initially seemed flat and dull for such a complex character (though he certainly had the body for it). About 30 minutes in, Monell found his footing and became the Bateman that I had always imagined. During the second half, when things took a much darker turn, Monell really brought it home, bravely spending most of the final act onstage wearing nothing but tighty-whities and fake blood.
The supporting cast is a valuable asset, many playing multiple roles. Will Sippel (as Luis) and Noah Howard (playing three different roles) both do a great job of making smaller lines hit the mark. Woodrow Helms’ portrayal of Tim Price is a standout, with charm and humor bringing layers of personality to the drab beginning. As Paul Owen, Harvey Evens is captivating until his end. The female cast is also compelling. Laurel Hatfield, as spoiled, ditzy socialite Evelyn Williams, is perfectly cringy in the role. Jordan Grant, as Jean, the shy, quiet secretary in love with her boss, is delightful while giving the show a hint of humanity. Unfortunately, the women were overshadowed — which makes sense, as Bateman only sees women as accessories or future victims. Or both.
Despite a few sound mishaps, music director Justin Adams and sound engineer Lance Lebonte do a good job bringing the show to life. Chris Payen’s choreography is strong, with distinctive robotic movements, though it sometimes distracted from the action on the slim front stage, pulling focus from the actors to the people dancing around them. The costumes by Maria and Ana Tew were also on point. It had to be challenging to find the proper 1980s attire for such a large cast, especially with all the designer name-dropping that runs throughout the show. I particularly enjoyed a few very subtle details, like when Bateman’s pockets were coming out of his sweatpants or his shirt was untucked in the back, showing he wasn’t as put together as he liked to pretend.
All in all, American Psycho at Theater West End is a fun experience. Once I realized that I was in for an over-the-top version of the original, I strapped in and enjoyed the ride. Critzer’s direction, with assistant director Hunter Rogers, is edgy and confident, just like the material; the use of a knife as Bateman’s phone was inspired, and holding the business cards at genital level showed the desperate need for all these men to have the biggest … ego.
This show embodies the gluttony and greed of the ’80s, featuring a wicked twist and some comments about the “great” Donald Trump. Full of people who want to be the same as their peers, but just a little bit superior. It holds up because nothing has actually changed. It’s a kill-or-be-killed world. But the show is suitable for a laugh as we decide which choice we’re making.
Christopher Bannow and Anthony Roth Costanzo in The Marriage of Figaro. Photo: Nina Westervelt
The night breeze was delicious in that late summer way, the lights of Jersey twinkled across the Hudson, and the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo’s vocal cords were projected live on two giant screens, pink and weird and undulating like some beast from the Aliens franchise, as he sang Countess Rosina’s Act Three aria, “Dove sono i bei momenti.” The image made my jaw drop, though perhaps not as much as Costanzo’s — there it loomed, a kind of weird, fleshy synecdoche for all of the frenetically ingenious reimagining of The Marriage of Figaro that’s currently bursting the seams of the outdoor amphitheater at Little Island. Like the production as a whole—which (full disclosure) I saw in a preview rather than at the opening night for critics, and (even fuller disclosure) whose creative team includes several people I know—the moment is both exposed and audacious, at once totally naked and flamboyantly theatrical. It’s a “watch this” flourish in a show that’s full of them. Indeed, this Figaro’s sleeves are so stuffed with tricks it sometimes feels like it’s in an arms race with itself — and, at the same time, the physical truth of the gesture is a wonder. Here on display is the paradox of opera: As a form, it could hardly be more absurd, more flagrantly artificial, and yet the whole precarious, glittering edifice rests atop a real miracle of the human body. If we are sad for the countess, it’s because we stand in awe of the larynx.
Now, take that awe—however much of it you’d spend on nine or so major characters—and stuff it into one body. Costanzo, who recently took over Opera Philadelphia and who seems to pop up almost any time something rad is happening in the opera world, sings every role in this Figaro himself. The show is his baby, gestated with the dramaturg Jacob Mallinson Bird and delivered with mad-scientist zeal by the inexhaustible director Dustin Wills. Rounding out the brain trust is musical director Dan Schlosberg, who helps to bring the whole thing in under 90 minutes by brilliantly slimming down the arrangement for an eight-piece orchestra, which he conducts with ferocity and precision from behind the keyboard. Virtuosity abounds — and extends into the ensemble. For Costanzo isn’t alone onstage; he’s surrounded by a company of actors, all first-rate clowns, who begin the play as his harried, breathless stagehands and gradually morph into full expressions of Mozart and Da Ponte’s characters. Costanzo may be the Kathy Seldon to their Lina Lamonts, but they’re nobody’s puppets. Their bodies—and, ultimately, their own voices—are just as crucial to the project as his. This breadth and depth of creative vitality is what keeps the core concept from feeling like a party trick. We’re not just here for a showcase by Costanzo, but to witness something more like a circus — the wild, symbiotic, you-catch-me I’ll-catch-you frisson of a trapeze act.
That kind of high-stakes, all-hands agility is really what farce requires. Figaro’s careering upstairs-downstairs shenanigans—derived from the deceptively fizzy 1778 play by Pierre Beaumarchais—are also well suited to Wills as a high priest of the church of More Is More. You might think at first that all there is to the show’s set (co-designed by Wills and Lisa Laratta) is its elegant wooden deck and its view of the Hudson, but it’s practically a pop-up book. Trap doors and rollaway sections of floor reveal lights, curtains, furniture, instruments, and people. Ryan Shinji Murray, embodying the drunken gardener Antonio, lip-syncs the majority of his part while doing flips on a previously hidden trampoline. Every climax one-ups itself; every metatheatrical break breaks again. Though I sometimes wished for a more rigorous edit—especially after Costanzo single-voicedly pulls off the opera’s insane Act Two finale and a break has to be built into the show for him—it would be simple petulance to resent a director with 50 ideas to spare when plenty struggle to have just one. This Figaro’s muchness is, more than anything else, ecstatically playful.
Such a breakneck, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach requires a confident handshake, and Wills, Costanzo, and company immediately define the terms: Here comes the countertenor—slight and muscular, with a face somehow both chiseled and elastic—wrestling a rolling costume rack up a ramp and onto the stage with the help of actor Emma Ramos, who wears a stage manager’s headset and a Buster Keaton–ish expression of deadpan haplessness. A spotlight catches Costanzo like a burglar in an old movie. Ramos shoves a yardstick in his hand and a tricorn on his head. Poof, he’s the affable, wily manservant Figaro, busy measuring out the space for his wedding bed. But all it takes for him to become his own fiancée, the clever maid Susanna, is for a rolling door to rotate and for him to sing through a window in its center, while a dress rigged up below the window (and a gazelle’s leap into the treble clef) alert us to his new identity. Then, poof again — a clownish red onesie with a lace collar conjures Cherubino, the adorably sex-crazed serving boy who’s usually played by a female mezzo. (This is where Costanzo’s voice and persona most naturally sit, and indeed, the seeds were planted for this Figaro long ago, when he first played Cherubino at 17.) Fleet, irreverent subtitles by Nicholas Betson and witty, rehearsal-style costume pieces by Emily Bode—a hat and waistcoat here, an open-back dress, a flower crown and ribbon there—keep us up to speed and entertained on multiple levels: Costanzo’s body-hopping experiment, after all, is layered on top of a play that already revels in disguise, swapped outfits, and mistaken identity. But in all the chaos, there’s no confusion. Wills is the kind of man behind the curtain who wants you to pay attention to the strings and levers. We follow, and we take delight, because the magician reveals the trick and trusts the revelation to generate the real magic.
Or magicians, I should say. Along with Murray and Ramos, actors Christopher Bannow, Ariana Venturi, and Daniel Liu, all gifted comedians, also become conjurers as the play goes along. In a parallel to Figaro’s own smiling subversiveness (the original play “caused the French Revolution,” Liu quips at one point, “because the servants had opinions or something”), the production’s corps of non-singers eventually ditch their headsets for costumes and opinions of their own. No longer will they run behind Costanzo, moving furniture and catching discarded props — now they’ll go toe to toe with him, even as he ventriloquizes for them. The results can be hilarious, as when Costanzo’s lower register pours out of Venturi, who swaggers and stamps her way across the stage as the lascivious Count Almaviva, a femme form joyously channeling ridiculous machismo. They can also be astonishingly poignant: Sad-eyed and tender in a golden gown, Liu’s Countess twice prompts a gorgeous ritardando in the production’s madcap tempo simply by sitting still and embodying the heartache of Costanzo’s mezzo. Both “Porgi amor” and “Dove sono” become fully hers, the Countess’s, and his, Liu’s, even as we stare down Costanzo’s trachea during the latter. There’s a delicate act of transference happening, a gift being given, and given doubly. If Liu is a conduit, so too, in some ineffable sense, is Costanzo. The fact that the music travels through an extra body on its way to us heightens our awareness of the miracle of its emergence in the first place.
The Marriage of Figaro is at Little Island through September 22.
From Invasive Species, at the Vineyard Theatre. Photo: Julieta Cervantes
Two imperious blondes haunt Maia Novi throughout her play Invasive Species: Gwyneth Paltrow and Eva Perón. At drama school, Novi is told that she needs to shear off her Argentinian accent and try to imitate Paltrow’s crisp-as-a-summer-blouse American one. (Specifically, Novi keeps listening to Paltrow’s narration of her Goop morning routine, played over the theater speakers so many times that you’ll pick up the inflection yourself.) Then, after Novi buckles under the pressure of school, seeks treatment for insomnia, and is abruptly sent to a New Haven psych ward, Evita enters the picture. Alternating — and sometimes overlapping — with scenes in the hospital, there are scenes of Novi as a star on the rise, cast in some splashy studio production of Evita with a British director who keeps telling her, “No, don’t use that Gwyneth voice or even your normal accent; give us something ‘authentic.’”
The pressure to assimilate (Paltrow) while seeming authentic (Perón) — specifically, to give people the performance of what they think of as authentic (that version of Perón, after all, was written by a couple of Brits) — form the interlocking teeth of Invasive Species, a sprightly romp through the destruction of the self. Novi, who based the play on her own experience at Yale Drama, and her director Michael Breslin (of Circle Jerk) keep the pace quick as the play flits between several realities and temporalities, cross-cutting between surreal postcolonial satire and grim reality, as her supporting cast — a fine-tuned crew of Raffi Donatich, Sam Gonzalez, Alexandra Maurice, and Julian Sanchez — cover multiple roles.
Novi gets stung by the acting bug (embodied by a slithering Sanchez in a literal insect mask; he gives a similar sliminess to Evita’s British director later on) while watching The Amazing Spider-Man as a kid, which makes her disdain Latin American movies and dream of a career in the U.S. She tries out clown school in France and then lands in New Haven among vapid and cutthroat Americans, their eyes gleaming with dreams of landing agents and turning red from all the coke they do. The Americans alternatively fetishize Novi for her foreignness — on a date over tacos, she convinces a hapless American bro that her family is tight with the narcos — and tell her to tamp it down, cut the accent, and conform. Then, when Novi is hospitalized and initially doesn’t know what is happening, the satire falls away: She’s stuck in a ward with a trio of teenagers and a dictatorial nurse (Donatich, also domineering as Novi’s agent, a nice resonance), struggling to understand how she’s gotten there and how she can get out. She can’t remember any phone numbers other than her parents’ (Gonzalez plays both mother and father, in a giant hat and a golf outfit; they’re both grandly useless). She keeps trying to explain to the staff that her behavior isn’t a sign of mental illness, it’s just what it’s like being an actor.
Given that, in character, Novi is obsessed with a forthcoming acting showcase, it’s fitting that Invasive Species, now running Off Broadway after a stop at the Tank last summer, acts as a meta showcase for herself as an actor and writer. In white pants and a tank top, she struts around with confidence, whether as a newbie drama student not realizing she’s landed in a big and threatening pond or as a parodical Evita, a performance enhanced by Breslin’s clever Dior-shaped shadow projections on the wall behind her. But while Novi is comfortable and charming in bombastic absurdity, she can also scale down in scenes where she’s trying to connect with the teenagers around her in the ward, or when delivering a monologue about the origins of her invasive thoughts.
While Novi tends to be affecting and real in those moments — in a way that’s appropriately charged, given her play’s skepticism of the “authentic” — they’re also scenes where Invasive Species tends to retract its claws. When she explores the lives of the teenagers around her in the psych ward, there are stretches of observation that are honed but not thorough, and we don’t escape the feeling that the teens are always seen at a distance. Of the several parts she plays, Alexandra Maurice is most significant as Akila, a queen bee of the ward (she has some sort of Jell-O monopoly) who befriends Novi and provides a dark, funny speech about an attempted overdose. But Akila’s presence fades amid the play’s building mania — she becomes, at the point where Novi needs to arrive at her thesis, primarily a conduit to that crucial realization.
Novi has certainly thought carefully about re-creating those scenes in the ward. Her script cites Spalding Gray’s landmark Rumstick Road, a performance about his mother’s suicide, and notes that “situations in this play that are based on real events and real people should be treated with respect, dignity, and compassion.” That respectfulness, inarguably right as intention, sits awkwardly with the mania of the Hollywood and drama-school satires. Novi aims to use humor to tame the trauma, but the flow sometimes reverses, and the trauma makes the elements of the satire that aren’t well grounded seem all the more weightless. I kept wanting to know more about Akila and the other kids, more about the weird power dynamics of the ward, and less about how annoying your classmates can be. There is a limit on how interesting it can be to hear Yale people tell you how toxic Yale is (and this production is solidly Yale/Geffen-forward, from cast to directors to producer Jeremy O. Harris), and let alone to hear an actor describe their frustrations with a scatterbrained agent. Invasive Species moves fast and intends to please. By the end of the play, Novi wraps up her many threads quickly and neatly. It sent me out on a high, but it left me with the feeling there was so much more to be said — not just about those scenes in the ward but also when Novi approaches and then backs away from further discussing her mother’s mental illness. It put me in the position of a drama-school teacher giving that annoying post-performance note: Strong start, but you could dig even deeper?
Invasive Species is at the Vineyard’s Dimson Theatre.
‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ runs through May 19 at Theater West End in Sanford.
I was initially hesitant about attending Theater West End’s current production of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Perhaps it was the lingering memories of high school assignments, or the nature of the book that has led to it being restricted in some Florida school districts. However, I stepped into the theater with an open mind and curiosity, as I couldn’t help but admire the producers’ courage in staging a show still facing so much resistance.
As we entered the theater, we were greeted by the friendly staff and an almost sold-out house. My guest and I were ushered to our seats at a table in the back row, where we could see every inch of the theater. The meticulously designed set (by Derek Critzer and Tara Kromer, with dressing and paint by Ben Gaetanos and Bonnie Sprung) includes three living spaces and a tree, instantly transporting the audience to Alabama in 1935, setting the stage for a journey into the past.
Christopher Sergel’s adaptation of this American classic — which predates Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway version by decades — is narrated by the adult Jean Louise “Scout” Finch (Cynthia Beckert), and focuses on a group of children who are attempting to make sense of the world around them in the small town of Maycomb, Alabama. The story revolves around the 10-year-old Scout (Alice Dehaen), her brother, Jem (Owen Brown), and their friend Dill (Parker Ross Williams). The first act is a nostalgic trip down memory lane, evoking a time when mischief was innocent and curiosity was your only concern — so long as you were white.
The direction by Tara Kromer and Michael Morman creates an immersive experience, making the audience feel like they are living the story together with the strong, committed ensemble. You can see that this cast is a team, which mirrors the personal connections portrayed in the story. When they all gathered in the audience for the courtroom scene as the jury and “colored section,” it brought pain to this Southern girl’s heart. However, I must admit that as the second act’s trial arrived, I was captivated by Brian Brightman as attorney Atticus Finch, who defends the unjustly accused Black man Tom Robinson (Brent Jordan). His commanding presence on stage and unwavering pursuit of justice resonates deeply; I felt as if I were in one of my favorite crime shows.
Besides a few minor missteps like loud set changes, this production offers a fresh perspective on an iconic story. I came home with the thought that we were still in the old times, and I felt the story much more deeply than I did when having to read it for school. It’s all about a good person just trying to do something to help his fellow neighbor — which made me think hard about why this story is so hated by some in today’s world, where people are more comfortable doing what is expected instead of what is right.
If you’re seeking a unique and raw perspective on an American cultural classic, Theater West End in downtown Sanford is the place to be. The show, running through May 19, offers a glimpse into the old-school South, a world that is both distant and frighteningly familiar, brought to life by a charming cast that makes you feel like part of the community.
Sat., May 11, 8 p.m., Sun., May 12, 2 p.m., Mon., May 13, 8 p.m., Thu., May 16, 8 p.m., Fri., May 17, 8 p.m., Sat., May 18, 8 p.m. and Sun., May 19, 2 p.m.
