THE MORNING LINE
DATE: Friday, August 7, 2015
FROM: Melissa Cohen, Jennie Mamary Zoe Edelman, Sarah Hodgson, Raychel Shipley
PAGES: 12, including this page.
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August 6, 2015 ‘Crucible’ Revival, With Whishaw and Okonedo, Sets Broadway Opening
By Lorne Manly
As the 100th anniversary of Arthur Miller’s birth approaches, Broadway is doubling down on two of his most produced plays this season.
Joining the previously announced “A View From the Bridge” is “The Crucible,” Miller’s searing political allegory about the McCarthy-era blacklist set during the Salem witch trials of the 1690s. The two productions will share more than just a Broadway season; both will be directed by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, and Scott Rudin is a producer of both.
The cast includes Ben Whishaw (“The Hour”) as John Proctor; Sophie Okonedo (a Tony winner for “A Raisin in the Sun”) as his wife, Elizabeth Proctor; Saoirse Ronan (“Atonement”) as Abigail Williams; and Ciaran Hinds (“Game of Thrones” and “The Seafarer” on Broadway) as Deputy Governor Danforth. Philip Glass will contribute an original score.
Since its Broadway premiere in 1953, “The Crucible” has been revived there four times, most recently in 2002 starring Liam Neeson and Laura Linney. The new production begins previews Feb. 29, with opening night set for April 7, at a theater yet to be named.
The Miller celebration will not be limited to Broadway. The Signature Theater Off Broadway will have a revival of “Incident at Vichy” later in its season, and New Yiddish Rep is reviving its “Death of a Salesman.” The Seattle Rep will have its own version of “A View From the Bridge” this September. And next February, the Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh will stage “The Crucible.”
August 6, 2015
Review: ‘Hamilton,’ Young Rebels Changing History and Theater By Ben Brantley
Yes, it really is that good.
At this point, it would be almost a relief to report that “Hamilton” — the musical that opened at the Richard Rodgers Theater on Thursday night — has shrunk beneath the bloat of its hype. Since it was first staged at the Public Theater this year, this brave new show about America’s founding fathers has been given the kind of worshipful press usually reserved for the appearances of once-in-a-lifetime comets or the births of little royal celebrities.
During the past several months, while it was being pumped up and trimmed down for its move from the East Village to Broadway, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rap-driven portrait of the rise and fall of Alexander Hamilton (this country’s first secretary of the Treasury) has been the stuff of encomiums in both fashion magazines and op-ed columns. A friend of mine recently said that there were three subjects she never wanted to see in a newspaper again: Caitlyn Jenner, the Harper Lee novel “Go Set a Watchman” and “Hamilton.”
Even I, one of the many critics who enthused about “Hamilton” in Februarylike a born-again convert in a revival tent, was beginning to think, “Enough already.” Then I saw the show at the Richard Rodgers.
I am loath to tell people to mortgage their houses and lease their children to acquire tickets to a hit Broadway show. But “Hamilton,” directed by Thomas Kail and starring Mr. Miranda, might just about be worth it — at least to anyone who wants proof that the American musical is not only surviving but also evolving in ways that should allow it to thrive and transmogrify in years to come.
A show about young rebels grabbing and shaping the future of an unformed country, “Hamilton” is making its own resonant history by changing the language of musicals. And it does so by insisting that the forms of song most frequently heard on pop radio stations in recent years — rap, hip-hop, R&B ballads — have both the narrative force and the emotional interiority to propel a hefty musical about long-dead white men whose solemn faces glower from the green bills in our wallets.
Washington, Jefferson, Madison — they’re all here, making war and writing constitutions and debating points of economic structure. So are Aaron Burr and the Marquis de Lafayette. They wear the clothes (by Paul Tazewell) you might expect them to wear in a traditional costume drama, and the big stage they inhabit has been done up (by David Korins) to suggest a period-appropriate tavern, where incendiary youth might gather to drink, brawl and plot revolution.
But these guys don’t exactly look like the marble statues of the men they’re portraying. For one thing, they’re black or Hispanic. And when they open their mouths, the words that tumble out are a fervid mix of contemporary street talk, wild and florid declarations of ambition and, oh yes, elegant phrases from momentous political documents you studied in school, like Washington’s Farewell Address.
And you never doubt for a second that these eclectic words don’t belong in proximity to one another. In mixing a broad range of references and rhythms in one percolating style, Mr. Miranda — who wrote the book, music and lyrics of “Hamilton,” which was inspired by Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography — does what rap artists have been doing for years. It’s the immoderate language of youth, ravenous and ambitious, wanting to claim and initial everything in reach as their own.
Which turns out to be the perfect voice for expressing the thoughts and drives of the diverse immigrants in the American colonies who came together to forge their own contentious, contradictory nation. To quote from an oft-repeated phrase in this almost entirely sung-through show: “Hey, yo, I’m just like my country, I’m young, scrappy and hungry, and I am not throwing away my shot.”
Those words are declaimed by Mr. Miranda as Hamilton, an impoverished orphan newly arrived in New York from St. Croix, but they might be tattooed on the consciousness of most of the characters in the play. These include Burr (the suavely brooding Leslie Odom Jr.), Hamilton’s friend, rival and nemesis, who functions as a wondering, embittered narrator to his confrere’s meteoric rise; Washington (Christopher Jackson); Jefferson (a delightfully dandyish Daveed Diggs, who doubles as Lafayette) and Madison (Okieriete Onaodowan).
They are each fully rendered individuals, as are the three women in Hamilton’s life, blissfully embodied by Phillipa Soo (as his wife, Eliza); Renée Elise Goldsberry (as her sister, Angelica Schuyler); and Jasmine Cephas Jones (as Maria Reynolds, the adulterous lover who brings about Hamilton’s fall from grace). The ballads that define the triangular relationship among Hamilton, Eliza and Angelica have a romantic urgency and ambivalence that had me in happy tears.
There’s a breathless rush to those numbers. And nearly all of the score — directed and orchestrated with precise and infinite variety by Alex Lacamoire — is infused with the same sense of momentum, of a wave that you ride or drown in. And the gymnastic corps de ballet, choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler, gives further, infectious life to that feeling of perpetual motion, of a speeding, unceasing course of human events. (The use of a revolving stage in a set has seldom seemed more apt; this world never stops spinning.)
Mr. Miranda’s Hamilton, a propulsive mix of hubris and insecurity, may be the center of the show. But he is not its star. That would be history itself, that collision of time and character that molds the fates of nations and their inhabitants. You might even call history the evening’s D.J., making sure there’s always something to dance to.
Mr. Kail beautifully sustains this sense of collective lives in motion throughout. It feels right that while the numbers here have been scaled up and shined up for a big Broadway house (Mr. Odom’s jivey “The Room Where It Happens,” a wicked meditation on being a political outsider, is now a full-fledged showstopper), you never feel that any single performer is pushing for a breakout moment. Well, with one exception.
That’s King George III (a delicious Jonathan Groff, who replaced Brian d’Arcy James during the run at the Public). He sings an entirely different tune as he observes, from across the Atlantic, that his colonial subjects are revolting, in all senses of the word. His is the voice of vintage Britpop, rendered in a leisurely, ironic, condescending vein to a distant population he regards as savages.
George is funny, fun company. But ultimately, it’s not his story. “Hamilton” is, among other things, about who owns history, who gets to be in charge of the narrative. One of its greatest accomplishments is that it leaves no doubt that these scrappy, adrenaline-charged young folks, with their fast way with rhyme that gives order to chaos, have every right to be in charge of the story here.
In temperament, they’re probably a lot closer to the real men who inspired this show than the stately figures of high school history books. Before they were founding fathers, these guys were rebellious sons, moving to a new, fierce, liberating beat that never seemed to let up. “Hamilton” makes us feel the unstoppable, urgent rhythm of a nation being born.
Hamilton Music, lyrics and book by Lin-Manuel Miranda, inspired by the book “Alexander Hamilton” by Ron Chernow; directed by Thomas Kail; choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler; music direction and orchestrations by Alex Lacamoire; sets by David Korins; costumes by Paul Tazewell; lighting by Howell Binkley; sound by Nevin Steinberg; hair and wig design by Charles G. LaPointe; music coordinators, Michael Keller and Michael Aarons; technical supervisor, Hudson Theatrical Associates; production stage manager, J. Philip Bassett; company manager, Brig Berney; arrangements by Mr. Lacamoire and Mr. Miranda; general manager, Baseline Theatrical/Andy Jones. Presented by Jeffrey Seller, Sander Jacobs, Jill Furman and the Public Theater. At the Richard Rodgers Theater, 877-250-2929, hamiltonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.
WITH: Daveed Diggs (Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson), Renée Elise Goldsberry (Angelica Schuyler), Jonathan Groff (King George), Christopher Jackson (George Washington), Jasmine Cephas Jones (Peggy Schuyler/Maria Reynolds), Lin-Manuel Miranda (Alexander Hamilton), Javier Muñoz (alternate Alexander Hamilton), Leslie Odom Jr. (Aaron Burr), Okieriete Onaodowan (Hercules Mulligan/James Madison), Anthony Ramos (John Laurens/Philip Hamilton) and Phillipa Soo (Eliza Hamilton).
August 6, 2015
Review: ‘Holden’ Explores the Distance That Killing Requires
By Claudia La Rocco
“Holden,” a new play written and directed by Anisa George, occupies a claustrophobic realm: a one-room cabin into which four intense men are crammed, bounded by slowly growing walls of chopped firewood.
But watching the play on Wednesday at the New Ohio Theater, during its premiere at the Ice Factory Festival, I was thinking about space. Specifically about the space conjured in these lines, written by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his powerful and upsetting essay in The New Yorker in May, about the 2011 massacre of 77 people in his country:
“Killing another person requires a tremendous amount of distance, and the space that makes such distance possible has appeared in the midst of our culture. It has appeared among us, and it exists here, now.”
This unfathomable space, which has become a horrifying constant in American life, lies at the heart of “Holden,” a 95-minute work that — spoilers ensue — stays for a while in a comic, absurdist vein before throwing itself, and its audience, down the rabbit hole of male violence.
Chapman (Jaime Maseda), Hinckley (Scott Sheppard) and Zev (Matteo Scammell) share a woodshed of the mind with J. D. Salinger (Bill George, Ms. George’s father). The first two character names refer to Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, and John Hinckley Jr., who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. When he killed Lennon, Mr.Chapman had a copy of Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” and that book was also found among Mr. Hinckley’s possessions.
Zev’s presence is ambiguous at first, until we learn that he is a more modern-day creature, obsessed not with the killing of one person, but of many. The promise of indiscriminate violence roils just below Mr. Scammell’s physical portrayal of a lost, rage-filled boy, who is a bridge between Salinger’s post-traumatic stress after World War II and the phenomenon of the gun-carrying murderer. (At one point, Zev offers a critique of the subject of Mr. Knausgaard’s essay: “Even though the island was isolated, it was still way too open, way too many places to run and hide.”)
Mr. Scammell is not alone in his compelling and charismatic performance. (The male cast is offset only by Adele Goldader, who plays Salinger’s adolescent daughter, Peggy; Ms. George may have drawn from Ms. Salinger’s memoir in creating a portrait of this reclusive writer.) The entire production is sturdily wrought, and if the many threads Ms. George ambitiously tries to weave don’t always come together, they nonetheless hold you in a disturbing grip. The impossible conceit of her play is ultimately easier to swallow than the impossible actions with which she, and we, try to grapple.
“Holden” continues through Saturday at the New Ohio Theater, Manhattan; 888-596-1027, newohiotheatre.org.
August 4, 2015
Review: In This ‘Comedy of Errors,’ Shakespeare Gets a Jersey Accent By Laura Collins-Hughes
LENOX, Mass. — She is a magnificent specimen: the hair big and honey blond, the clothes snug and revealing, the jewelry copious and gold. Meticulously manicured, stalking around in screaming-orange sandals with wedge heels that would maim a weaker woman, the aggrieved Adriana is pure Jersey girl — the stereotypical variety.
She is also a hilariously high-strung delight to behold in Taibi Magar’s effervescent staging of “The Comedy of Errors” here at Shakespeare & Company, where Kelley Curran unapologetically steals the show with an Adriana who is all defiant posing and tangy Garden State vowels.
Yes, yes, Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” is the mistaken-identity farce about the two almost indistinguishably named sets of long-lost identical twins, and Adriana isn’t among them. Her straying husband, Antipholus of Ephesus (Ian Lassiter), is, though, and can she help it if she loves the creep and just wants him to come home?
Operatic in both anger and misery, Adriana thinks nothing of swatting their servant, Dromio of Ephesus (Aaron Bartz), with the foil reflector she uses for sunbathing, and she weeps extravagantly when her steadfast sister, Luciana (Cloteal L. Horne), reports that Antipholus came on to her. But when Luciana confesses that her smitten brother-in-law also praised her beauty — it was actually her brother-in-law’s twin, but she doesn’t know that — Adriana flies into a wounded rage.
“Didst speak him fair?” she yowls. The furious list of insults with which she proceeds to indict him is comical, ridiculous, as self-dramatizing as anything on reality TV — and sympathetic, too. Beneath all the Jersey girl trappings is a human being, not a Real Housewife, and that lends heft to a production so fizzy that it might otherwise float off into the ether.
Punctuated with bursts of pop music (Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” makes a triumphant appearance) and jubilant dance (choreographed by Jesse Perez), the show moves at an almost manic pace, and the frivolity sometimes seems forced. With Mr. Lassiter doubling as Antipholus of Syracuse, and Mr. Bartz doubling as his servant, Dromio of Syracuse, these upscale boys glide into Ephesus on a yellow tandem bike and forever after reach for their hand sanitizer, repelled by their proximity to the gaudy locals with their Jersey tones.
Clad in leather clogs and earthy-chic cotton (the costumes are by Tilly Grimes), Luciana stands apart. When she and Antipholus of Syracuse touch for the first time, the connection between them is electric — a cause for horror in Luciana, who believes this is her brother-in-law. Happily for us, Ms. Horne does a very funny freakout.
Ms. Magar created a problem for herself in single-casting each pair of twins, who must meet in the climactic scene. Her solution is in keeping with the playful spirit of this 90-minute production. But she goes the hoary
route in having a man, Douglas Seldin, play Luce, Adriana’s maid, an aggressively amorous woman so unattractive that she looks like a large, hairy guy. That’s the whole joke, and it’s awfully stale.
Yet much of the rest, on John McDermott’s grassy set, has the loose and friendly feel of a barbecue in the park — picnic table, busy boombox and all.
“The Comedy of Errors” continues through Aug. 23 in the Tina Packer Playhouse at Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, Mass.; 413- 637-3353, shakespeare.org.
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