Hasan Minhaj's

THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Monday, November 2, 2015

FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh, Jennie Mamary Megan Ching, Julia Lewis

PAGES: 18, including this page.

October 31, 2015

‘Funny Girl’ Secures Transfer to West End, Before It Even Opens By David Belcher

LONDON — Just a few weeks into rehearsals, the Menier Chocolate Factory has announced that its revival of “Funny Girl,” which broke the theater’s box-office records by selling out in 90 minutes, will transfer to the Savoy Theater in London’s West End on April 9 for 12 weeks.

The production, starring the Olivier Award winner Sheridan Smith, is the first major London revival of the musical, which had its premiere on Broadway in 1964 but has not been produced there since. (A Broadway revival planned for 2011, which was to have starred Lauren Ambrose and be directed by Bartlett Sher, was scrapped after several producers pulled out.)

Whereas other classic Broadway musicals with major original stars — such as Ethel Merman in “Gypsy” or Gertrude Lawrence in “The King and I” — have enjoyed successful revivals in both London and on Broadway, “Funny Girl” has remained indelibly linked to Barbra Streisand, who originated the role of Fanny Brice on Broadway at age 21 and repeated it on the London stage in 1966 and in the 1968 film version, winning an Oscar for best actress.

The musical recounts the rise of an actress from working-class New York to film and Broadway stardom, and features such songs as “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” For the London production, the book by Isobel Lennart is being revised by the writer and actor Harvey Fierstein, though the producers are not releasing any details, or information on whether the original score (by Jule Styne, with lyrics by Bob Merrill) remains intact.

Ms. Smith won an Olivier Award for her role in “Flare Path” in London in 2011 and has also starred in the West End in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Hedda Gabler” and “Legally Blonde.” The new “Funny Girl” is directed by Michael Mayer, whose Broadway credits include “American Idiot’’ and “Spring Awakening”; and co-stars Darius Campbell as Brice’s ne’er-do-well husband, a role made famous by Omar Sharif in the film version.

The Menier has had several productions move to the West End, and its revivals of “Sunday in the Park With George,” “A Little Night Music” and “La Cage aux Folles” transferred to Broadway.

The sold-out production at the Menier Chocolate Factory will run Nov. 20 to March 5. The West End production will run April 9 to July 2, and tickets go on sale Nov. 16. C1

November 2, 2015 Review: In ‘King Charles III,’ Glimpsing the Near Future of Monarchy By Ben Brantley

To sign, or not to sign. That is the question that hangs so urgently over the wavering title character of “King Charles III,” Mike Bartlett’s flat-out brilliant portrait of a monarchy in crisis, which blazed open on Sunday night at the Music Box Theater.

Any echoes you may infer regarding a certain Danish prince are entirely appropriate to this dazzlingly presumptuous drama, set in and around Buckingham Palace in a highly foreseeable future. True, as a product of the 20th century, the newly anointed King Charles — whom you probably know better as the current Prince of Wales — would seem to have more in common with T S. Eliot’s muddling J. Alfred Prufrock, who sadly recognized he was not “Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.”

Yet as portrayed by Tim Pigott-Smith, in a fully fleshed performance that finds heroic dimensions in one man’s misguided bid for greatness, this unsteady monarch acquires a pathos that might indeed be called Shakespearean. Yes, it’s only a pen he holds, not a sword, as he stares at the unsigned documents before him. But in that pen lies the power to divide a nation and to erase a king’s identity.

Directed with fiery wit and rushing momentum by Rupert Goold, this London import, which won last year’s Olivier Award for best play, is a work that takes all manner of audacious license, poetic and otherwise. It’s one thing to portray the current members of the House of Windsor, on whom it is always open season for writers of every stripe, in a mainstream drama. (A fictional version of Queen Elizabeth II showed up on Broadway earlier this year — and picked up a Tony for the actress playing her, Helen Mirren — in the form of Peter Morgan’s “The Audience.” But that play was highly respectful to Her Majesty and, while necessarily speculative, rooted in known fact.)

But Mr. Bartlett has the hubris to venture not only into the future but also into the minds of public figures who are notorious for never revealing their thoughts. What’s more, he opens up these shuttered psyches by means of language, structure and theatrical devices that brazenly imitate those of one (gulp!) William Shakespeare. Much of the script is in blank verse, with a heady surfeit of expanding metaphors, lyrical soliloquies and discreetly rhymed couplets.

In other words, any sane theatergoer hearing of this latest effort from Mr. Bartlett, whose earlier work includes the excellent but small-scale “Cockfight Play,” might have predicted a Shakespearean fall from grace. Yet with “King Charles III,” Mr. Bartlett sails with bravado over every high hurdle he sets up. What could have been only a cleverly executed stunt is instead an intellectually and emotionally gripping study of the strangely enduring anachronism that is the British monarchy and of the contemporary, star-struck world that can still find room for its royals. And for Bardophiles, “King Charles III” provides the bonus of confirming the immortal topicality of Shakespeare.

Prototypes of plot, imagery and character from not only “Hamlet” but also “Richard II,” “Richard III,” “Henry IV” and “Macbeth” are invoked with droll yet illuminating precision as we follow the fortunes of Charles and his family. And, yes, aside from his mum, the gang’s all here: Charles’s wife, Camilla (Margot Leicester); his sons, William (Oliver Chris) and Harry (Richard Goulding); and his daughter-in-law, Kate (Lydia Wilson); as well as a long-dead family ghost (Sally Scott) who still shows up on the covers of celebrity magazines.

The plot is propelled by the quandaries, both constitutional and existential, of its title character, whose previous life has been, as he puts it, “a ling’ring for the throne.” Now that his mother has died, he is determined to fill dynamically what for centuries has been a passive, ornamental role.

This proactive attitude takes the specific form of his refusal to sign a bill, already passed by Parliament, that would limit the rights of the press in invading personal privacy. You would think that Charles — whose first wife, Diana, was killed while fleeing paparazzi — would be sympathetic to such measures.

But a principle is at stake, he insists, as is his very essence. As he says, in a lovely example of Mr. Bartlett’s neo-Shakespearean style,

For if my name is given through routine And not because it represents my view Then soon I’ll have no name, and nameless I Have not myself.

His stubbornness grows into monomania.

Such obduracy is met with horror by the reigning prime minister (Adam James), and strategically mixed emotions by the leader of the more conservative opposition party (Anthony Calf). When the conflict between Charles and his government is made public, chaos ensues that forces a nation as well as a king to wonder just who and what they are.

Paralleling Charles’s quest for selfhood is that of a bewildered Prince Harry, whose hedonistic lifestyle is not unlike that of Prince Hal in the “Henry IV” plays. But instead of being in thrall to a Falstaff, he falls in love with a socialist art student, Jess (Tafline Steen), and the wide-open world of commoners. In the meantime, Prince William and his sharp-witted, strong-willed wife, Kate, try their best to ensure the future of the throne that will eventually be theirs.

The attendant plots and counterplots are laid and hatched in a world in which a moss-covered past always coexists with a shiny present. This sensibility is richly yet efficiently conveyed by Tom Scutt’s ancient-looking, cathedral-like set and contemporary costumes; Jon Clark’s lighting, which shifts between phantasmal shadows and flashbulb brightness; and Jocelyn Pook’s ceremonial music.

The cast members — and they’re marvelous, to a one — deliver the script’s stately speech with such easy fluency that you forget they’re speaking in iambic pentameter. Playing people whose job is to maintain facades, these performers endow their characters with a canny self-awareness and a tellingly varied gift for balancing shell and substance.

Charles’s tragedy is that he’s a prisoner of an ivory-tower notion of royalty as much as Shakespeare’s medieval figurine of a king, Richard II, was. And like Richard, he finds himself pitted against a usurping Bolingbroke, who understands that for the monarchy to survive, it has to accommodate changing times and the juggernaut of realpolitik.

This role is assumed here by several characters, including one within the royal family. That’s the former Kate Middleton, born a commoner, astutely played by Ms. Wilson as a sane and even salutary Lady Macbeth type, who knows full well that it’s those who master the photo op who really rule the public in “a world of surfaces.”

Charles, alas, refuses to accept such reductionism. I’d say that anyone in this image-fixated era would do well to renounce such lofty ambitions as this king possesses. But that would include Mr. Bartlett, and had he thought smaller, he would never have made us the invaluable gift of this splendid, high-reaching and utterly unexpected play. C5

November 2, 2015

Review: ‘Full House! The Musical!’ Lampoons a Ripe Sitcom Target By Andy Webster

Suddenly the country has gone “Full House”-crazy. There’s “The Unauthorized Full House Story,” which aired in August on Lifetime; “Fuller House,” a coming Netflix series revisiting characters from ABC’s 1987-95 sitcom; “Grandfathered,” a new Fox comedy with John Stamos, a star in the original; and now “Full House! The Musical! A Tanner Family Parody!,” a frenetic satire at Theater 80 in the East Village, from the creators of “Bayside! The Musical! The Saved by the Bell Musical Parody!”

It’s hard to beat a sitcom as a satirical target, and the bland, bathetic “House” is wide open, with its cloying “Three Men and a Three-Daughter Family” premise. You might recall that Bob Saget played Danny Tanner, a widower raising the teenage D.J., the tween Stephanie and the moppet Michelle in San Francisco. Danny was aided by his live-in pals Jesse (Mr. Stamos), an aspiring rock star, and Joey (Dave Coulier), an aspiring comedian.

The musical, with a book, music and lyrics by Bob and Tobly McSmith, wastes no time extolling the paternal platitudes of Danny (here played by the Internet semi-celebrity Perez Hilton) in an early number before pillorying other characters.

D.J. (Marie Eife) is a budding, anorexic floozy in Debbie Gibson drag. (“Do you guys have an ice cube? Because I am starving!”) Stephanie (Marguerite Halcovage), the Jan Brady of the bunch, is ignored by her family. (“I don’t have any friends,” she wails. “You’re not that interesting!” she is told.) Seth Blum (of “Bayside!”), the resident quick-change artist, plays Joey; the neighbor Kimmy; and the family dog, Comet. He also operates a sex-crazed puppet.

John Duff (another “Bayside!” alum), as the beefcake Jesse, courts the prim professional Rebecca (Bridget Russell Kennedy). (“You’re so independent it makes me want to domesticate you,” he says.)

Despite occasional musical wit (a funny riff on Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” is called “Erotic”), this lightning- fast blast of prime-time catchphrases and graphic ribaldry is directed with scant concern for breathing space by Jason Wise. And Mr. Hilton, ostensibly the big star here, is eclipsed by his co-stars.

Only Marshall Louise, as Michelle, is allowed to savor a moment, in a delicious second-act sendup of the grown Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (who both played Michelle on the series). Ms. Louise’s impersonation might be one-note, but it is certainly something to treasure. C1

October 31, 2015

Review: In ‘Dear Elizabeth,’ Two Solitary Poets Commune

By Charles Isherwood

As both poets and personalities, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell could hardly have been more different.

She: intensely shy and self-doubting, producing gemlike, allusive poems so infrequently that her collected verse fits easily into an inch-thick volume. He: extroverted and convivial, if afflicted, like her, with a fundamentally solitary nature, and a prolific writer who came to exemplify the confessional poetry of the 1950s and 1960s.

And yet, as their long correspondence movingly attests, each considered the other a cherished friend — “best friend,” as they told third parties — as well as a sympathetic and understanding reader (and, at times, critic).

Sarah Ruhl’s play “Dear Elizabeth,” which is having its New York premiere at the McGinn/Cazale Theater in a production from Women’s Project Theater, draws on their decades of correspondence (collected in the volume “Words in Air”) to dramatize, after a fashion, the complicated contours of their friendship, but perhaps just as much to memorialize their rare gift for putting words together, even in casual letters and the stray postcard.

I say after a fashion because the production, directed by Kate Whoriskey, involves minimal staging or even movement. The two actors portraying Bishop and Lowell — for the first week, Kathleen Chalfant and Harris Yulin — sit at worn wooden desks a few feet apart and spend most of the play seated, reading from the letters and an occasional poem.

On rare occasions, they rise and meet, exchanging looks and slightly touching, signifying the relatively infrequent meetings that took place across the course of their decades-long friendship. (As with last season’s sadly short Broadway revival of A. R. Gurney’s fictional epistolary play, “Love Letters,” a rotating roster of actors will take over the roles after Ms. Chalfant and Mr. Yulin; the list is on the Women’s Project Theater website.)

The exchanges begin with a formal 1947 letter from Bishop, congratulating Lowell on winning a trifecta of poetry prizes, including the Pulitzer. “Maybe if you’re still in town, you could come see me sometime,” she writes hesitantly. Soon she is thanking him for an enthusiastic if not entirely uncritical review: “I suppose for pride’s sake I should take some sort of stand about the adverse criticisms, but I agreed with some of them only too well.”

Ms. Chalfant, with her air of Yankee fortitude, might at first seem an unusual choice for the intermittently unstable Bishop, who struggled with alcoholism throughout her life. (We see her sipping from a whiskey bottle and, at one appalling point, a bottle of rubbing alcohol.) But her lovely, husky voice brings mellow nuances of emotion to the letters, without ever stepping into any histrionic puddles. And she can be amusingly wry when Bishop reveals her gin-dry sense of humor.

In one of my favorite letters, Bishop tells of a visit to a hairdresser in New England who told her “1, that my hair ‘don’t feel like hair at all.’ 2, I was turning gray practically ‘under her eyes.’ And when I’d said, yes, I was an orphan, she said, ‘Kind of awful, ain’t it, ploughing through life alone.’ ”

To which Lowell replied in a postscript: “There’s something haunting and nihilistic about your hairdresser.”

Despite the warmth that flows through their letters, there is indeed something haunting (and maybe just a little nihilistic) about their rocky paths through life. Bishop was terminally restless and often alone, finding a lasting relationship fairly late in life when she moved to Brazil and lived with her partner, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. But even that relationship came to a desperately unhappy end, referred to here simply with the announcement of Soares’s suicide by the Stage Manager (Polly Noonan), who sits in a remote corner of the stage and provides occasional logistical or biographical detail.

Ms. Ruhl, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “In the Next Room, or the vibrator play” and one of the most adventurous playwrights working today, has excerpted their long correspondence (“Words in Air” runs more than 800 pages) with a fine ear for emotional detail and the glistening phrase, but the personal evolutions in both poets’ lives are sometimes hard to discern from oblique references. Lowell, known as Cal, suffered from violent manic episodes — today he would probably be given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder — and had a turbulent marriage to the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, which is only glancingly touched upon.

Mr. Yulin, like Ms. Chalfant, has a gruff, weathered stage voice that hints at the rough knocks of Lowell’s life — self-induced although many of them were. The only real conflict in their long friendship arrives when Lowell publishes a long poem, “The Dolphin,” that includes letters from Hardwick that he has taken the liberty of editing. Mr. Yulin deftly combines the poet’s fierce defense of his work with a sense of contrition and sensitivity to his friend’s criticism.

I also like the small selection of poems Ms. Ruhl has chosen to have the actors read, including Bishop’s “The Fish” and “The Armadillo,” and perhaps her most celebrated and self-revealing work, “One Art,” a villanelle with the recurring refrain “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” — sad and tartly funny at the same time.

Both writers could be viewed as superficially successful, becoming celebrated poets, if on different scales. But their lives — like so many others’ — also come across here as chronicles of inevitable loss: of wives and lovers, of emotional equilibrium, of poems (in Bishop’s case) that never came to fruition.

What’s most affecting about “Dear Elizabeth,” and “Words in Air,” for that matter, is that despite lapses in their correspondence, when one or the other was going through a particularly rough patch, somehow these two great writers never lost each other, until, inevitably, death put a final caesura in their friendship. C6

October 31, 2015

Review: Hasan Minhaj’s ‘Homecoming,’ a Tale of Multiple Worlds By Neil Genzlinger

Hasan Minhaj, hired into the ranks of correspondents for “The Daily Show” just before Jon Stewart left, has a moderate-size, presumably fairly young fan base and a few amusing personal stories. That’s what comedy clubs are for. Theaters are for more polished, more substantive work that touches or amuses a broader audience. “Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King,” Mr. Minhaj’s rambling one-man show at the Cherry Lane Theater, has enjoyable moments but lacks the arc and insight that turn stories told among friends into theater.

Mr. Minhaj is Indian-American and Muslim, two demographics not heard from nearly often enough in American theater, and he has a genial stage presence that makes you glad to be in his company and eager to hear what he has to say. He starts out with tidbits about his recent wedding — “a huge Indian wedding,” he explains — mostly to rib the white guests who were there.

It’s a teaser to set up a recurrent, brown-man-in-a-white-world theme, but Mr. Minhaj has only relatively mild outsider tales to tell, and he takes too long to tell them. There’s a story about a school friend, an outsider of a different sort, whom Mr. Minhaj didn’t support at a crucial moment. The centerpiece involves a prom date with a white girl that was derailed by racism and builds to a sour slice of payback that Mr. Minhaj was able to extract later.

That Mr. Minhaj, who is 30, is still brooding about high school is a bit worrisome, but mostly these set pieces are just anticlimactic. Either could be an episode in one of those interchangeable Nickelodeon and Disney Channel sitcoms about high schoolers, which are full of mild messages quickly forgotten. And maybe that’s what Mr. Minhaj is angling for with this show. There has been a mini-trend lately of sitcoms featuring stand-up comics and stories inspired by their pre-stand-up days: Craig Robinson’s “Mr. Robinson,” Jerrod Carmichael’s “Carmichael Show,” Ken Jeong’s “Dr. Ken.” Perhaps “Minhaj Meets World” is on someone’s drawing board.

As theater, though, “Homecoming King” seems unsurprising and premature. It’s also worth noting that Mr. Minhaj injects his tales with language, rhythms and hand gestures popularized by black rappers. Appropriating from one world while trying to secure a place in another makes you wonder if he’s really found his identity at all. 5

November 1, 2015

C11

November 1, 2015