The Morning Line

THE MORNING LINE DATE: Monday, April 7, 2014 FROM: Emily Meagher, Michelle Farabaugh Connor Davis PAGES: 28, including this page April 4, 2014 ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ to Return for Arena Tour By Dave Itzkoff Hosanna hey or hosanna huh? “Jesus Christ Superstar,” Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical about the final days of Jesus, will soon rise again, this time as a arena show that will feature an eclectic roster of rock and pop artists and will tour North America starting in June. This new production of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which was announced Friday morning on “Good Morning America,” will feature Brandon Boyd of the rock band Incubus as Judas Iscariot; JC Chasez of *NSYNC as Pontius Pilate; Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child as Mary Magdalene; and John Lydon (a k a Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) as King Herod. The tour will also star Ben Forster, the winner of a British reality- TV casting competition, as Jesus. Performances will begin on June 9 at the Lakefront Arena in New Orleans, and the tour is expected to conclude on Aug. 17 at the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia. (Other area dates include an Aug. 5 performance at Madison Square Garden in New York.) “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which began as a concept album in 1970 and has spawned numerous stage productions, was last presented on Broadway in 2012, starring Paul Nolan as Jesus and Josh Young as Judas Iscariot. Total Daily Circulation–1,586,757 Sunday Circulation– 2,003,247 April 6, 2014 Powerhouse Theater Summer Season By Adam Kepler Among the highlights of the summer season for the Powerhouse Theater will be “In Your Arms,” a collection of wordless dance vignettes written by playwrights like Terrence McNally, Christopher Durang, Carrie Fisher, Douglas Carter Beane and Lynn Nottage, with music by Stephen Flaherty (“Ragtime”) and choreography by Christopher Gattelli (“Newsies”). Produced by New York Stage and Film and Vassar College, the season is also to include new plays by Richard Greenberg (“Take Me Out”) and John Patrick Shanley (“Doubt”) and is scheduled to begin on June 20 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Total Daily Circulation–1,586,757 Sunday Circulation– 2,003,247 April 6, 2014 Plugging Away at Living, Come What May ‘Realistic Joneses’ Stars Toni Collette and Michael C. Hall By Charles Isherwood Plays as funny and moving, as wonderful and weird as “The Realistic Joneses,” by Will Eno, do not appear often on Broadway. Or ever, really. You’re as likely to see a tumbleweed lolloping across 42nd Street as you are to see something as daring as Mr. Eno’s meditation on the confounding business of being alive (or not) sprouting where only repurposed movies, plays by dead people and blaring musicals tend to thrive. Broadway has long been a place inhospitable to the truly active currents of contemporary theater, so the opening of Mr. Eno’s play at the Lyceum Theater on Sunday night, in a production insured against instantaneous death (one hopes) by the presence of a few name stars — Toni Collette, Michael C. Hall and Marisa Tomei, alongside the less famous but no less gifted Tracy Letts — is an occasion worth celebrating. And I hope the word “weird” doesn’t scare you off: Mr. Eno’s voice may be the most singular of his generation, but it’s humane, literate and slyly hilarious. He makes the most mundane language caper and dance, revealing how absurd attempts at communication can be. He also burrows into the heart of his characters to reveal the core of their humanity: the fear and loneliness and unspoken love that mostly remains hidden beneath the surface as we plug away at life, come what may. An awful lot, or a lot of awful, may be in store for the characters in “The Realistic Joneses,” which is easily his most accessible play (others include the Pulitzer Prize-finalist “Thom Pain (based on nothing)” and “Middletown”). It has been ushered onto Broadway with a gentle hand by the director Sam Gold, who allows his terrific cast to find its own way into the twisting grooves of Mr. Eno’s writing. The play opens on a bucolic tableau that finds Bob and Jennifer Jones (Mr. Letts and Ms. Collette) idling through an evening at the picnic table in their backyard, exchanging nothing-much conversation that carries an undercurrent of unease. “It just seems like we don’t talk,” Jennifer says, after Bob has dodged her attempts to turn the conversation into serious channels. “What are we doing right now, math?” Bob replies, with an edge in his deadpan. “No, we’re — I don’t know — sort of throwing words at each other,” his wife says. A rustling in the garbage cans signals the arrival of the new neighbors, John (Mr. Hall) and Pony (Ms. Tomei), who bring a festive-looking bottle that, tellingly, remains unopened. They share the same last name and have come to this corner of the world because, as the bubbly Pony explains: “I always wanted to live in one of these little towns near the mountains. So one night, he comes home and literally just says, literally — I forget what you said exactly.” Total Daily Circulation–1,586,757 Sunday Circulation– 2,003,247 “Just, something about moving to one of these little towns near the mountains,” John helpfully replies. When Bob goes in search of glasses, Jennifer impulsively reveals the reason for their own move to the town: Bob has a degenerative disease, and a leading doctor in the field happens to live here. The treatments are experimental, and the prognosis isn’t rosy. Suddenly embarrassed at divulging so much to strangers, Jennifer says sheepishly, “I’m sorry, I just kind of blurted that all out.” John says: “That’s all right. That’s what separates us from the animal. You never hear animals blurting things out. Unless they’re being run over by a car or something.” The disjointed push and pull of Mr. Eno’s dialogue is not easy to master: He emphasizes the way in which we so often do throw words at one another, although most of us don’t have the arsenal of curveballs that, say, John does. You may come out of this play hearing a new strangeness — and perhaps a lunatic beauty — in the way a casual conversation can unfold, or at least wishing that your interactions held the entrancing oddity of Mr. Eno’s characters’. The actors slip into its herky-jerky tempos with no apparent effort. I saw the play at its premiere at Yale Repertory Theater, with a mostly different foursome (only Mr. Letts remains), and feared that the necessity of casting stars for a Broadway run would foul up the works. It has not, thanks in part to Mr. Gold, who has become a consummate director of adventurous new writing for the theater. Mr. Hall may be considered a first among equals, if only because his character, who harbors a secret from his wife that he reveals to Jennifer, has the most entertaining non sequiturs. Having appeared in the cable series “Six Feet Under” and “Dexter,” Mr. Hall certainly is at home riding the currents of anxiety in Mr. Eno’s play. But his performance is most rewarding for its buoyancy, the manner in which Mr. Hall imbues his character’s despair with an offhand lightness of touch, as if a festering sore were just a scratch. Mr. Letts, a Tony winner last year for his hair-raising performance in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” brings a laconic yearning to Bob, who has chosen to confront the fact of his illness by ignoring it. A scene in which Bob steals up to Pony and John’s house in the middle of the night, and the two men exchange moderately hostile chitchat as they contemplate the night sky (“No, I’m looking at this part,” John insists, “you look over there”), is among the evening’s finest and funniest. Ms. Collette exudes a touching, exasperated dignity as Jennifer, who finds herself in unexpected intimacy with John, even as she cannot seem to breach the bulwark that her own husband has marshaled as a defense against his fears. And Ms. Tomei radiates chipper energy as Pony, an air of desperate cheeriness that keeps faltering, like a sparkler sputtering in the dark. (I must, however, pause here to give a shout-out to the sublime Parker Posey, who memorably created this role in New Haven.) The evolving relationship between the two couples forms the plot, such as it is, of “The Realistic Joneses.” By Mr. Eno’s standards, there’s actually quite a bit of “drama”: There’s that ominous specter of death waiting in the wings, of course, but also the potential of both marriages fracturing as the characters reveal, obliquely, their frustrations and disappointments, with themselves and one another. NY Times Total Daily Circulation–876,638 Monthly Online Circulation–19,500,000 David Zinn’s rustic-suburban set looks great on the Lyceum’s stage, with its soaring black backdrop somehow suggesting the cosmic. the sound design of Leon Rothenberg, with a hooting owl and a night chorus of crickets, echoes that feeling, of the immensity of the natural world cradling the characters. But don’t come to the play expecting tidy resolutions, clearly drawn narrative arcs or familiarly typed characters. “The Realistic Joneses” progresses in a series of short scenes that have the shape and rhythms of sketches on “Saturday Night Live” rather than those of a traditional play. (Most are followed by quick blackouts.) And while the Joneses — all four of them — have all the aspects of normal folks, as their names would suggest, they also possess an uncanny otherness expressed through their stylized, disordered way of communicating.

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