THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Tuesday, July 12, 2016

FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Emily Motill

PAGES: 10, including this page

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July 12, 2016 Review: A Byzantine Path to Middle East Peace in ‘Oslo’ By Ben Brantley

The Aaron Burr of the musical “Hamilton” — who stews over being shut out of pivotal closed-door conferences — isn’t the only person who wants to be in the room where it happens. It’s hard not to envy the witnesses to history in the making and to imagine attending conferences, Zelig-like, in Versailles, Vienna or Potsdam.

J. T. Rogers shares that instinct. Unlike most of you, he has acted on it. Having combined investigative zeal and theatrical imagination with insider access, Mr. Rogers now invites you into the chambers where the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization were forged during nine fraught months in 1993.

Even if you never thought about traveling to Norway, you’ll probably want to visit the inevitably titled “Oslo,” the absorbing drama by Mr. Rogers that opened on Monday night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center. At a very full three hours, with many international stops, this play is long and dense enough to make you wonder if you should have packed an overnight bag.

Yet what Mr. Rogers and the director, Bartlett Sher, have created is a streamlined time machine, comfortably appointed enough to forestall jet lag. Centering on one Norwegian couple who improbably initiated the diplomatic back channel that led to the epochal meeting of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the P.L.O leader Yasir Arafat at the White House, “Oslo” affectingly elicits the all-too-human factor in the weary machinations of state policy.

That couple is Mona Juul, then an official in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, and her husband, Terje Rod- Larsen, who was director of the Fafo Institute for Applied Social Sciences. They are friends, as it happens, of Mr. Sher, who in turn introduced them to Mr. Rogers, who interviewed them extensively before writing this play.

You might expect “Oslo” to have a self-servingly limited perspective. But as he demonstrated in his earlier plays about international politics, including “The Overwhelming” and “Blood and Gifts,” Mr. Rogers doesn’t traffic in superheroes.

His well-intentioned interventionists in foreign lands often turn out to be ambivalent fumblers in the manner of Graham Greene’s protagonists. “Oslo” doesn’t have the layers of complexity (and the respect for what we can’t know) of Michael Frayn’s great, similarly speculative you-are-there dramas “Copenhagen” and “Democracy.” But it’s a vivid, thoughtful and astonishingly lucid account of a byzantine chapter in international politics.

Mona and Terje are (spoiler) more successful in their endeavors than Mr. Rogers’s previous versions of such characters, at least in terms of immediate goals. But as embodied by (hooray!) Jennifer Ehle and Jefferson Mays, they are complicated beings in a less-than-perfect marriage with a sometimes faltering grasp of the international time bomb they have set ticking.

Well, perhaps not Mona, who always keeps her head and manages repeatedly to pluck victory from the jaws of disaster. But Mona has the advantages, as well as the disadvantages, of often being the only woman in the room; and she has the unqualified advantage of being played by the irresistible Ms. Ehle (the definitive BBC version of “Pride and Prejudice,” the 2000 Broadway revival of “The Real Thing”), who manages to be practically perfect without turning into Mary Poppins.

It is Mona who serves as our wryly neutral narrator, sliding briefly and fluidly out of the action to place us on timelines and annotate references. She and Terje have been ingeniously conceived as perpetual, generally gracious hosts to the play itself and to the social encounters within, pouring drinks, moving furniture and overseeing the seating arrangements on Michael Yeargan’s elegant, minimalist set.

Of course, the gatherings they preside over have astronomically higher stakes than those of an average cocktail party. When the play begins, a dinner at Mona and Terje’s home is interrupted by a phone call — two, actually, and simultaneous. It’s Israel on one line and the P.L.O. on the other. The couple’s guests, the Norwegian foreign minister Johan Jorgen Holst (T. Ryder Smith) and his wife, Marianne Heiberg (Henny Russell), are not pleased when Terje explains his goal of secretly bringing irreconcilable adversaries to the bargaining table.

“The world is cracking open,” says the blazing-eyed Terje, who has a habit of sounding like Tony Kushner in “Angels in America” when he is excited. (Mr. Mays, a Tony winner for “I Am My Own Wife,” expertly elicits the brazen but uneasy showboat in Terje.) Holst is skeptical and alarmed. That’s a response that Terje and Mona will continue to encounter in many forms. And the play’s rhythms are dictated by the couple’s repeated overcoming of resistance.

I leave it to historians to confirm or dispute the accuracy of Mr. Rogers’s portrayals. But he has done a fine job of mapping the lively, confusing intersection where private personalities cross with public roles. The supporting ensemble members, some of whom are double-cast, create credibly idiosyncratic portraits, right down to the two-man security detail (Christopher McHale and Jeb Kreager) that arrives in the show’s second half.

Only occasionally does the script resort to the telegraphic shorthand of cute, defining quirks. The relationships that emerge from within and between the opposing camps are steeped in a poignant multifacetedness, as sworn enemies find themselves tentatively speaking the language of friendship. This is most eloquently embodied by Uri Savir, an Israeli cabinet member portrayed juicily by Michael Aronov as an exuberant rock-star dignitary, and Ahmed Qurie , the P.L.O. finance minister played with a careful balance of wariness and warmth by Anthony Azizi.

The cast also memorably includes Daniel Oreskes and Daniel Jenkins as a pair of Rosencrantz-and- Guildenstern-ish academics from Haifa; Adam Dannheisser as an Israeli foreign minister with digestive problems; Joseph Siravo as a hard-line Jewish lawyer; and Dariush Kashani as a hard-line Marxist Palestinian. Mr. Oreskes also shows up as Shimon Peres. But the most famous power players in this drama, Rabin and Arafat, never appear, at least not in the flesh.

However, at various points, different characters do imitations of the more famous politicians who remain in the wings. The ways in which these impersonations evolve, and the responses they provoke, create some of the play’s tensest and funniest moments.

It’s no secret that politicians have to be actors, which the characters in “Oslo” well know. Their understanding and re-creation of the signature styles of allies and enemies make for unexpected moments of personal catharsis and illumination. They also happen to be the stuff of crackling theater.

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July 12, 2016 Review: A Harrowing Puppet Show, ‘Demolishing Everything With Amazing Speed’ By Ben Brantley

The timing could not have been worse — or more perfect. A series of short plays written nearly a century ago acquired an icy and unexpected urgency when they received their belated world premiere last week. And an audience was frozen into the kind of stillness that no one dares interrupt, not even with a startled gasp.

The cause of such extreme discomfort was a scene in, of all things, a puppet show, which runs through Sunday at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College here as part of its SummerScape festival. True, this work of cryptically stylized vignettes, written in 1917 by the Italian Futurist artist Fortunato Depero and midwifed into stage life by the American designer and director Dan Hurlin, bears the title of “Demolishing Everything With Amazing Speed.”

But that name could describe a comedy of anarchy starring the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges. Certainly, the first half of this 75-minute production — enacted by toddler-size Bunraku puppets manipulated by a visible team of performers — would seem to suggest a rarefied variation on such rowdy fare.

A chicly dressed drunken lady in red (albeit one with a single peacock-feather-like eye and a turnip-shaped head) struggles to find her footing on a shifting red staircase and falls; a husband and wife (green-skinned and bespectacled) progress from what looks like an everyday domestic argument into increasingly agitated warfare that peaks with their removing each other’s arms.

The gray-haired woman seated near me watched these activities with the audible delight of a chuckling child at a Punch and Judy show. But like everyone else, she fell silent when a dapper, portly puppet suddenly loomed over an upstage wall of screens. He was holding a red rifle, which he trained on an animated corps of hand puppets gathered below. One by one, they fell over, as a projected image tallied the body count.

In prefatory remarks to the audience on Friday night, the festival’s director of theater programs, Gideon Lester, warned that the fragmented stories of “Demolishing” would bring to mind the “terrible events of the last few days and weeks.” (The fatal shootings in Minnesota, Baton Rouge and, the night before, Dallas were still fresh to the point of rawness.)

But because this was taking place on the sort of college campus where syllabuses could be tagged with “trigger warnings,” I was skeptical. How upsetting could an esoteric puppet show be, even one from an Obie-winning artist like Mr. Hurlin, whose previous subjects have included the bombing of Hiroshima?

But “Demolishing” — the text of which was discovered by Mr. Hurlin during a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome — would be harrowing at any point during the past century. It was written during World War I, and that epochal conflict no doubt informed these plays’ vision of a world of mechanized death-dealing, a point that Mr. Hurlin underscores with video footage toward the production’s end.

For the Futurists, who glorified technological speed and force over all humanist virtues, war was good, notoriously described by one of the movement’s proponents as the “world’s only hygiene.” The tone of “Demolishing” is triumphantly macabre, unfolding as a bright catalog of carnage and vivisection, in which classic love and crime stories become automated Armageddons.

The destruction is realized with remarkable tidiness, even as bodies and landscapes come apart. A bowler-hatted narrator (a real person, Jennifer Kidwell) recites Depero’s stage directions (the plays were meant to be performed without words) with a resonant voice and unsmiling mien.

But the show’s strangely complacent detachment comes across most powerfully as you watch the puppeteers, who wear identical white boiler suits, guide effigies into action. None of the puppets are close to life-size (they are often captured in simulcast video, designed by Tom Lee), and they are visually dwarfed by the human bodies that make them move.

Yet as the show continues, the production’s elements (including expert lighting by Tyler Micoleau and music by Dan Moses Schreier) meld into an eerie unity. The expressionless puppeteers become one with their puppets, moving as if by mechanical reflex in what feels like a ghastly and inevitable historical march toward annihilation.

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July 12, 2016 Review: ‘Simon Says’ to Channel the Paranormal

By Anita Gates

I’ve never been to a channeling. I’ve only seen them on television and in documentaries — with men or women closing their eyes, shuddering and lapsing into oddly high voices and unfamiliar syntax as ancient spirits supposedly speak through them. But the one in Mat Schaffer’s “Simon Says,” at the Lynn Redgrave Theater, feels like the real thing, and it’s kind of thrilling.

The channeling takes place in the book-strewn living room of Professor Williston (the indomitable Broadway veteran Brian Murray), an academic of advanced years who charges for these sessions and needs the money. His protégé, James (Anthony J. Goes), is the medium, a young man who would like to get out of what he sees as show business and go to college. He isn’t in the mood to conjure Simon tonight. But something about their client, Annie (Vanessa Britting), an attractive young widow, changes his mind.

Annie shouldn’t even be there. She lives a fact-based, paranormal-free life as a high school science teacher, but her aunt, who scheduled the session, is ill, and Annie promised to fill in. Of course, as Simon says ominously more than once, “There are no accidents.”

At a recent performance, once Simon began to speak, the theater fell dead silent. The director, Myriam Cyr, and three solid performers make us part of the channeling, breathless and hopeful. There is also fine lighting work by John R. Malinowski, manipulating our reactions to the spookiness. Kevin Dunn gets credit for video; I’m not sure exactly what he did, but my eyes kept returning to eerie “reflections” in the windows.

Too bad this 90-minute play’s ending is such a letdown. Toward the end, it starts speeding toward a resolution that you can tell (whether it turns out to be about reincarnation or tricksters or vulnerability or revenge) is going to be all too pat. And there’s one moment when the magic fails, when James’s transformation seems like a cheap imitation of Whoopi Goldberg lending Patrick Swayze’s spirit her body in “Ghost.”

Off Script: 'Jane the Virgin' Actor Jaime Camil Makes Broadway History in 'Chicago' (Q&A) 2:19 PM PDT 7/11/2016 by Ashley Lee http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jaime-camil-chicago-script-jane-909777

The Latin star tells THR how Rogelio de la Vega would evaluate his onstage performance: "He'd think it's shit."

Eleven years ago, Jaime Camil nearly made his Broadway debut in The Mambo Kings — that is, until producers pulled the plug on the splashy musical adaptation just weeks before previews were to begin.

"I love the stage — the fact that you only have one take to get it right, the interaction with the audience, and how every show is different even though you're doing the same thing," the Jane the Virgin actor, who has led musicals in Mexico City including West Side Story, Hook and Aladdin, tells The Hollywood Reporter. "One of my dreams has always been to be in a Broadway musical."

Well, Camil is currently getting all that jazz by starring in Chicago through July 31 at the Ambassador Theatre. But come Monday night, the Latin star will make history: for the first time, two Mexican-born actors will lead a Broadway musical, as he plays Billy Flynn opposite Bianca Marroquin as Roxie Hart.

Camil, 42, goes Off Script with THR about crossing over to the Great White Way, adding a Spanish line to the script, and guessing how Rogelio de la Vega would evaluate his onstage performance: "He'd think it's shit."

What do you admire most about Chicago and Billy Flynn?

Chicago is amazing because there's no special effects or explosions. It's just a group of talented human beings doing amazing things. Billy Flynn is a character who manipulates these people like puppets. Everything happens because of him; it's not a matter of if he's going to win a case, it's a matter of when. I love that he's the mastermind behind everything that happens. He's a fun character to play.

In "All I Care About," you throw in a line in Spanish.

That was the stage manager's idea! When Eddie George was in this, he did his signature touchdown dance in "Razzle Dazzle." So when the girls are fondling me behind their feathers, I say in Spanish, "Oh please, stop it — you know I like it!" It works nicely for the Spanish-speaking fans who come to the show."

What have you given up for this role?

Family. When I was here for the twenty-something days of rehearsal, I was here by myself; it was the first time I've been away from my kids for so many days. I was in the Hotel Americano in Chelsea, but now I'm in a three-bedroom apartment with my family, and they're staying with me throughout my run. Now I'm complete; now I can function.

What's a new habit you've adopted?

Thanks to my dance captain, David Bushman, I have to go to Bibble & Sip two blocks away from the theater before the show and get my iced matcha jasmine latte, and a chocolate chip cookie to get my energy up, especially when we have matinee and evening shows.

What time do you wake up on a show day?

My daughter, who is almost five, is going to summer school here in New York. The first two days, I woke up with my family to drop her off at school at 9 a.m., and my voice wasn't that strong during the shows. I told my wife I needed to sleep in a little longer, and that's been working. My wife Elena is a sweetheart. I wake up at 9:30 and it makes a difference. Then I go to the gym and pick up my daughter from school.

When do you have dinner?

It's more like a Mexican lunch: in Mexico, we have breakfast at 10 a.m., lunch at 3 p.m. and dinner at 8:30 or 9 p.m.. I try to sit down in a restaurant no later than 3 for a good and substantial meal, and then I have a light salad after the show.

What do you do on your day off?

Things with my family. We've been going to the Museum of Natural History, the Guggenheim, the Children's Museum, Bryant Park, Central Park. When you have kids, all your plans, everything that you do is for them to have fun.

Favorite backstage guest so far?

Emilio and Gloria Estefan are dear friends of mine, and they came to the show without telling me beforehand. That was a surprise. And Brock O'Hurn — that extremely good looking model who has the best man bun — we work out at the same gym in Los Angeles. He's a super cool dude, and everyone loved him backstage. You're welcome, guys!

Best stage door reaction so far?

One Mexican guy told me, "Have you noticed that at your stage door, it's 80 percent American and 20 percent Latinos?" Meaning, having both markets from my twenty year-career in Mexico and also Jane the Virgin. It's been the best of both worlds.

What's something special in your dressing room?

Cards from my fellow cast members, managers and agents and my Jane the Virgin showrunner, plus a drawing from my daughter.

What's your toughest number?

"We Both Reached for the Gun" is the most fun. The one I wasn't too sure about was "Razzle Dazzle." I had trouble remembering the lyrics, so I just made myself learn it and performed it like a robot. But I've started to really enjoy the attitude and the storytelling of that one because that's what Chicago really is about.

How would your Jane the Virgin character, Rogelio de la Vega, react to your performance of Billy Flynn?

Oh, he'd think it's shit. Yeah, I'm kind of doing a good job, but I would never do it like he would. I would never reach Rogelio's standards — ever — because he is the greatest actor in the world.

If you were to play Rogelio de la Vega playing Billy Flynn, what would do differently?

For starters, that flower and handkerchief and bowtie wouldn't be white, they'd all be lavender!