THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Monday, January 9, 2017

FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh

PAGES: 23, including this page

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January 9, 2017

Hillary Clinton Receives Ovation at ‘The Color Purple’

By Michael Paulson and Michael Barbaro

Hillary Clinton, who has kept a relatively low public profile since losing the presidential election two months ago, on Sunday showed up at the final performance of the Broadway revival of “The Color Purple,” reveling in the story of a beleaguered woman who triumphs over the oppressive men in her life (and, along the way, discovers a love for colorful pants).

Mrs. Clinton, accompanied by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea, received several ovations from the sold-out audience as she arrived, and then another round of applause when she was acknowledged by the cast after the show.

“There’s a lot of really awesome famous and notable people here today,” the actress Patrice Covington, who gave the farewell speech on behalf of the cast after the show, said to the audience. “I’m not going to call all of them out — I know you already know them,” she said, before pausing, looking in Mrs. Clinton’s direction, and waving at her mischievously. At that, the audience erupted into a new, loud round of applause.

The reaction was substantially warmer than the scattered booing and clapping that greeted the arrival of Vice President-elect Mike Pence when he attended “Hamilton,” just one block north, on Nov. 18.

“We love you Hillary,” some audience members shouted. Several thanked Mrs. Clinton and told her, “God bless you.”

“God bless you,” Mrs. Clinton replied.

Mrs. Clinton was besieged by photo-seekers before the show, at intermission and as she was ushered out a side door after the musical ended (“Whoa!” said her husband as they left.)

Jordan Serpone, 33, an audience member from Boston, said that spotting Mrs. Clinton was a surprisingly moving experience for him.

“I was having every emotion I’ve tried to get rid of over the past few weeks,” he said during intermission. He shook her hand, but said he is still filled with frustration over her loss. “She shouldn’t be here. She should be planning her cabinet,” he said.

Because the Sunday matinee was the last performance for the acclaimed production, which won last year’s Tony award for best musical revival, the crowd was starry: Among those in the audience were Jonathan Groff,

Mariska Hargitay, Gayle King, Debra Messing, Leslie Odom Jr., Billy Porter, Phylicia Rashad and Anna Wintour.

Public sightings of Mrs. Clinton in the weeks since the election have been sufficiently rare that they create a stir on social media. Strangers have sought photographs with her at stores and in the woods near her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. But Mrs. Clinton has indicated that she and her husband plan to attend the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as president on Jan. 20.

“The Color Purple” tells the searing story of a young black woman abused by her stepfather and her husband in rural Georgia in the early 20th century. The musical is an adaptation of a best-selling 1982 novel, by Alice Walker, which was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Steven Spielberg adapted the novel into a film in 1985, and Oprah Winfrey, who was featured in the film, went on to become an important champion, and co-producer, of the musical.

The musical has been one of the most successful at attracting black audiences to Broadway. It first opened on Broadway in 2005, and features a book by Marsha Norman and music and lyrics by Stephen Bray, Brenda Russell and Allee Willis. The revival, which opened in 2015 and was directed by John Doyle, featured a star- making performance by the British actress Cynthia Erivo. She won a Tony award for best actress in a leading role in a musical. The last show took place on Ms. Erivo’s 30th birthday.

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January 6, 2017

Jimmy Buffett’s ‘Margaritaville’ Musical Is Broadway Bound

By Joshua Barone

Jimmy Buffett’s tropical paradise is coming to Broadway — but not before going on tour.

“Escape to Margaritaville,” Mr. Buffett’s musical featuring new songs and past hits, is scheduled to open on Broadway in spring 2018, its producers announced on Friday. The play will come to New York after its previously announced premiere in May at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, followed by engagements in New Orleans, Houston and Chicago.

“We’ll set sail from California on a pre-Broadway national tour stopping first in the city that gave me my start — New Orleans,” Mr. Buffett said in a statement. “Then to some of my other favorites,” he added, “before arriving at that port of all ports, Broadway and New York City.”

The musical — about a part-time bartender and singer named Tully who thinks he has life figured out until a tourist steals his heart — is being written by two veterans of the TV series “My Name Is Earl”: its creator, Greg Garcia, and the comic actor Mike O’Malley. Christopher Ashley, who is directing the new Broadway musical “Come From Away,” will direct. He was a Tony nominee for his direction of “Memphis” and “The Rocky Horror Show.”

Mr. Buffett’s previous foray into musical theater, a collaboration in the 1990s with the writer Herman Wouk called “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” was critically and commercially unsuccessful and never arrived on Broadway.

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January 9, 2017

Review: ‘Gardens Speak,’ a Graveside Encounter With Lives Lost in Syria

By Charles Isherwood

It’s a sad truism, or maybe a sad truth, that even the most appalling statistics about the victims of war can over time have a numbing effect. The conflict ripping apart Syria has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, but it has been making headlines for so long that even the most empathetic among us may be growing inured to the horror. “Gardens Speak,” a stark, moving theater piece by Tania El Khoury, brings us into painful intimacy with the human cost of the war by acquainting us with the life — and the death — of just one of those victims.

Presented as part of the Under the Radar festival, this work is as much an art installation as it is theater. Just 10 people participate at a time, and the work lasts about 40 minutes. After being led into a dark antechamber and asked to remove shoes and socks (I pitied the woman wearing long laceup boots), we don raincoats and then move into another room, in the middle of which is a simulacrum of a cemetery.

Each audience member chooses a card on which a name is written in Arabic. We then match the name to one of the names written on the tombstones, and, as instructed on the card, dig into the dirt to reveal the English name of the person being memorialized (they were all opposing the Assad government), and then lie down on top of the “grave” to hear the man or woman’s story, which seemed to be whispered from under the earth.

I heard the story of Ahmad, a university student who participated in the protests in Aleppo against government forces and was shot dead during one of them. In lightly accented English, he told of his youthful aspirations, his studies and his death and burial in the garden of a stranger. (There are, apparently, thousands of Syrians laid to rest in the gardens of sympathetic strangers, and in communal parks.)

The story was a simple one, simply told, but the experience was nonetheless extraordinary, and emotionally wrenching. After the voice is stilled we return to benches upon which small notebooks have been placed, and we have the option of writing a letter to the “martyr” whose story we have heard, and burying it in the earth above the grave for other participants to read if they choose.

I was too shaken to think of anything to put down. I’m a writer by profession, obviously, but in the moment the words just wouldn’t come.

Gardens Speak Through Monday. New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Abe Burrows Theater, Manhattan, 212-967- 7555, undertheradarfestival.com. Running time: 40 minutes.

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January 7, 2017

‘Lula del Ray,’ a Spectral Parade of Fantastical Images

By Ben Brantley

So if you add up the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional to create a new spatial entity, does that mean you’re in the fifth dimension? Whatever you choose to call it, such a perspective-melting world is the realm in which the enchanting “Lula del Ray” takes place.

This latest offering from the Chicago-based arts collective Manual Cinema, which runs through next Saturday in the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, is dreamy in all senses of the word. It tells its story — in many ways, a familiar one of a restless girl’s small rebellion against her lonely provincial life — in the twilight zone between shadow and substance.

As you sink into the spectral parade of images of the 1950s American Southwest, you may wonder at times if you haven’t, in fact, fallen asleep. Should you require a reality check, you can always shift your focus from what’s happening on the large upper screen — where a polished narrative unfolds in a series of animated silhouettes — to the industrious group of sorcerers gathered directly below it.

They’re the show’s own Wizards of Oz, the illusion-makers who ply transparencies, shadow puppets, video, scrims and their own shadows to create an alternate universe. You are in no way discouraged from watching the magicians at work behind the scenes. When the show is over, the audience will be invited to tour the stage to examine the tools of these artisans’ sui generis trade.

But somehow, as you’re watching “Lula del Ray,” conceived by Julia Miller and based on an original text by Brendan Hill, the visible presence of its creators tends to enhance, rather than erase, the sense of an ineffable magic. (The show is designed and directed by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace and Ms. Miller.) The effect summons memories of childhood games of make-believe, wherein the lines between fact and fiction blur in ways that made the ground beneath your feet feel scarily, excitingly, less solid.

That’s an appropriate sensation for a work in which the title character usually has her head in the stars, the kinds that populate both the cosmos and the pages of fan magazines. Lula (whose corporeal, shadow-casting form is embodied by a masked and bewigged Charlotte Long) lives in a trailer in the desert with her look-alike mother (Sara Sawicki), the supervisor of a nearby satellite field. It’s an isolated existence, and Lula spends lots of time staring into the night skies.

Her thoughts are mostly of rocket ships until she hears, through distorted radio waves, the siren call of the Baden Brothers, a rockabilly duo whose hit record is a phantasmal riff on the children’s song “Lord, Blow the Moon Out Please.” (The show’s beguiling original score, which suggests an astral Roy Orbison, is by Kyle Vegter and Ben Kauffman, with Maren Celest, Michael Hilger and Jacob Winchester.)

Lured by their music, Lula runs away to the big city, in hopes of seeing her new idols in the flesh. What she finds there requires an adjustment in her perspective that wittily echoes the ways that Manual Cinema, whose

similarly fantastical “Ada/Ava” was seen in New York in 2015, has been playing with its audience’s point of view all along.

The production features all sorts of ingenious handmade equivalents for cinematic effects: close-ups, long shots, pans. (Ms. Long, Ms. Sawicki, Lizi Breit and Sam Deutsch are the puppeteers.) Rural and urban environments are conjured with a specificity that evokes the very different, equally daunting vastness of each. Above both, there is always the infinite sky, rendered in a palette of bleeding pastels.

Lula herself, who has the bouncy carriage and perky topknot of a young Sandra Dee, is seen both as a tiny figure amid immense landscapes and as a silhouette mask in ravishing close-up. Sometimes it is Ms. Long’s body that gives Lula life; on other occasions, it is an effigy.

After a point, you won’t be able to distinguish between the two. It is a crucial part of this production’s magic that the tellers and their tale blur into a single spellbound self.

Lula del Ray Through next Saturday at the Public Theater, Manhattan; 212-967-7555, undertheradarfestival.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. AR6

January 8, 2017

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January 8, 2017

Broadway Review: Cate Blanchett in ‘The Present’

By Marilyn Stasio

Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh lead the Sydney Theater Company in a sparkling production of “The Present,” Andrew Upton’s free-form treatment of Anton Chekhov’s “Platonov.” The original play, an early effort written when the playwright was 21, is quite the shaggy dog — rambling, unfocused and stuffed with gratuitous characters. But the spirit of Chekhovian farce shines bright, and the ensemble work of this Aussie company is just grand.

Blanchett is a glorious example of profound Chekhovian ennui (“I am so bored!”) as Anna, a widowed landowner intent on celebrating her 40th birthday with great quantities of food, drink, and good friends. Her throaty laugh suggests a cynical intellect and her long, loose limbs and bare feet convey a sense of wanton abandon that can drive men wild.

The friends gathered in her honor include Platonov (Mikhail, as he’s called here), an irresistibly charming rascal played by the irresistibly attractive Roxburgh. No fewer than four women (including his wife) moon over Mikhail during the course of this party weekend, but it seems perfectly clear that, if they can resist murdering one another, Anna and Mikhail are the only true and perfect mates.

In fact, the most Chekhovian (as we know it) moment in the play is a scene between Anna and Mikhail, alone at last and getting progressively drunker and more passionate. “I can never have you or be with you because you consume me. You are me,” Mikhail tells Anna. “Just take me. Shake me. Smoke me. Reduce me to ashes,” Anna dares him. “Come on!” Blanchett turns out to be a consummate comic actress, and Roxburgh her perfect foil, allowing the scene to swing from passion to painfully funny pathos without taking a breath.

But in the cursed spirit of romantic farce, these ideal lovers are kept apart by all the other lovelorn characters yearning for one or the other of them. Protestations of undying love are made in the lovely summer house designed by Alice Babidge, until it is dramatically blown up at the height of the celebratory birthday fireworks. And even when the set lies in tatters, the fools are still roaming the landscape, waving guns and looking for love.

John Crowley (“Brooklyn,” Broadway’s “The Pillowman”) handles the directing chores with an impressively light touch, keeping this army of characters circling one another like moths obsessively courting their flames without letting them get burned. (Or not terribly burned, anyway — maybe just a bit scorched.)

Blanchett and Roxburgh give off so much heat that it’s hard to focus on all these secondary moths. Susan Prior, Jacqueline McKenzie and Anna Bamford are pathetically funny as Mikhail’s playthings; Toby Schmitz and Chris Ryan are just as amusing asserting their bruised masculinity. Martin Jacobs and Marshall Napier make sure that, no matter how annoying, the older generation is heard from. Crowley keeps the entire ensemble in orbit, although one suspects that not even Chekhov could stop them from careening into one another from time to time.

This is a Broadway debut for both leads and for the Sydney Theater Company itself. Is it too soon to ask them back?

Broadway Review: Cate Blanchett in 'The Present' Ethel Barrymore Theater; 1,059 seats; $149 top. Opened Jan. 8, 2017. Reviewed Jan. 5. Running time: THREE HOURS.

Production A presentation by Stuart Thompson and the Sydney Theater Company, with Jon B. Platt, Scott M. Delman, Ruth Hendel, The Shubert Organization, Robert G. Bartner, John Gore, and Jimter Productions, LLC, of the Sydney Theater Company production of a play in two acts by Andrew Lipton, after Anton Chekhov's "Platonov."

Creative Directed by John Crowley. Sets & costumes, Alice Babidge; lighting, Nick Schlieper; original music & sound design, Stefan Gregory; production stage manager, Kristen Harris.

Cast Cate Blanchett , Richard Roxburgh, Andrew Buchanan, Anna Bamford, David Downer, Eamon Farren, Martin Jacobs, Bandon McClelland, Jacqueline McKenzie, Marshall Napier, Susan Prior, Chris Ryan, Toby Schmitz.

January 8, 2017

'The Present': Theater Review

By David Rooney

Richard Roxburgh plays a philandering schoolteacher and Cate Blanchett the love that slipped through his fingers in Andrew Upton's post-perestroika update of Chekhov's first play, which comes to Broadway from Sydney Theatre Company.

What better way to clear both the physical debris and the festering rancor of a messy birthday party than with a detonator and a stash of Semtex to cap off the more traditional fireworks? Yet despite the many explosive crescendos, gunshots, volatile meltdowns and farcical entanglements that punctuate The Present, it’s the melancholy aroma of regret — over bad choices, blind complacency and irreversible consequences — that perfumes the air in Andrew Upton's vigorous reworking of Chekhov's baggy first play, Platonov.

The headline draw is the incandescent chemistry between Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh, both superb, playing characters whose dissatisfaction spreads like contagion among the guests. But this Sydney Theatre Company import is also a compelling ensemble portrait of people "trapped in loveless lives," suspended

between a past of illusory splendor and a compromised future in which the new order will leave many of them in the dust.

What's most surprising about John Crowley's expertly calibrated production is how funny it is, while remaining true to themes of disillusionment, class breakdown and unfulfilled love that would find more articulate expression in Chekhov's later, better plays. It also exemplifies the "Chekhov's gun" principle to the letter, starting with a sly wink in the play's opening moments.

Upton has traded pre-revolutionary Russia for the post-perestroika nation of the mid-1990s, with the rise of the oligarchs finding effective echoes in the shift to the right and the concentration of wealth and power in our contemporary world. The play is written and performed in a relaxed Australian vernacular that adds immeasurably to its ease and immediacy, even if the first of the three-hour production's four acts is tough sledding, requiring close attention to keep straight the identities and connections of everyone onstage. But the unhurried approach pays off as wine and vodka are consumed, truths aired and polite formalities dropped.

The occasion is the 40th birthday of Anna Petrovna, played by the extraordinary Blanchett as a coltish beauty whose effortless command doesn't exclude the odd invigorating note of blasé vulgarity. The once-wealthy widow of a formidable man referred to only as the General, she is now forced to contemplate an opportunistic match with one of her late husband's crusty contemporaries — either the benign retired lawyer Alexei (Martin Jacobs) or the more chilly businessman Yegor (David Downer), the latter flanked by his circumspect son (Brandon McClelland) and his thuggish muscle (Andrew Buchanan).

The suitors' government connections will enable Anna to reap income from natural gas mines on her property. Except that while playing the two men off against one another, Anna grows distracted, extending her manipulative games to her guests. That group includes the General's son from his first marriage, the desperately ingratiating Sergei (Chris Ryan), justifiably concerned about the affections of his wife Sophia (Jacqueline McKenzie); and Nikolai (Toby Schmitz), a cocky young doctor ambivalent about marrying his student girlfriend Maria (Anna Bamford), a lightweight who goes to great lengths to point out her extreme seriousness. (Watching Anna wrap Maria around her finger is a delicious high point.) Sergei and Nikolai are close in age to Anna, who both encourages and disdains their quasi-filial regard for her.

Upton (Blanchett's husband, and until recently, artistic director of STC) shifts the play's center of gravity to favor Anna, but the traditional lead character, Mikhail Platonov (Roxburgh), firmly occupies that space alongside her. The former tutor of Sergei and Nikolai, back when he was an impassioned aspiring writer, he's now a disappointed idealist, tempering his sourness by juggling four women. In addition to his wife Sasha (Susan Prior), an endearing lump whose silly, flouncy frock does nothing to hide her post-pregnancy weight, Mikhail also has a history with the still-smitten Sophia and a strong mutual attraction to Maria. He claims, with the world-weary self-delusion of an unapologetic womanizer, to love them all, but Anna is clearly the torch that burns brightest, a feeling that cuts both ways.

The production's thrilling centerpiece is the tail end of the birthday meal in a summer pavilion on the estate, which is winding down as the second act begins. As Mikhail blathers on, indirectly venting his disgust at the world and himself, Anna becomes dangerously bored. Blanchett channels that impatience into a marvelous physical display of fidgety energy, her restlessness primed to erupt, which it does, in a debauched bacchanal set to the cheesy '90s dance hit "What Is Love." Anna's abandon gets misread as nihilism by Alexei's son Kirill (Eamon Farren), a DJ just back from Paris who's the epitome of Euro-trash entitlement. But her disillusionment runs deeper and darker, fueled by the retreat of her youth.

"It's so hard to do what you really, really desperately want in life," muses Anna. "It's so much easier to do shit you don't care either way about.” Upton laces the play with similarly flip-sounding reflections that go beyond merely putting a modern gloss on Chekhov, honoring the playwright's intentions with more bite than this unwieldy work might otherwise provide.

While Anna veers wildly between recklessness and careful control, Mikhail sinks further into inescapable emptiness in an otherworldly third act, staged by designer Alice Babidge as if in a smoke-drenched purgatory where he marinates in vodka and self-loathing. A fiercely charismatic stage actor who offsets Mikhail's bitterness with a louche air of mischief, Roxburgh is riveting in this long series of exchanges with the other characters, still toying with them even as he embraces his own sense of hopeless defeat.

His performance is a scintillating match for Blanchett's, with her willowy grace, her playfulness and bursts of febrile intensity, not to mention the supple modulations of that seductive voice. The two actors have worked together frequently over the years, dating back to a celebrated 1994 Hamlet, and watching them together is mesmeric, whether they're skirting around unspoken sorrows or plastering a sardonic veneer over their unhappiness.

The entire company of 13 has been with the production since it debuted in Sydney in 2015, and that commitment shows both in the depth of the individual characterizations and the sparks of their interactions. While there's not a weak link in the ensemble, I particularly enjoyed McKenzie's increasingly single-minded Sophia; Prior, bringing puppy-dog devotion to Sasha; Jacobs' wistful Alexei; Marshall Napier, amusing as the boozehound father of Sasha and Nikolai; and Ryan as Sergei, a meek, uninteresting man painfully aware of his own dullness. Weaving together these characters and their hollow lives in a context that connects them both to Chekhov's Russia and to our own uncertain world, Upton, Crowley and this accomplished company have elevated a problematic play into something unexpectedly satisfying.

Venue: Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York Cast: Cate Blanchett, Richard Roxburgh, Anna Bamford, Andrew Buchanan, David Downer, Eamon Farren, Martin Jacobs, Brandon McClelland, Jacqueline McKenzie, Marshall Napier, Susan Prior, Chris Ryan, Toby Schmitz Director: John Crowley Playwright: Andrew Upton, after Anton Chekhov's Platonov Set & costume designer: Alice Babidge

Lighting designer: Nick Schlieper Music & sound designer: Stefan Gregory Fight director: Thomas Schall Executive producers: Rachael Azzopardi, Patrick McIntyre Production: Sydney Theatre Company Presented by Stuart Thompson, Sydney Theatre Company, Jon B. Platt, Scott M. Delman, Ruth Hendel, The Shubert Organization, Robert G. Bartner, John Gore, Jimter Productions C13

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