17. MORNING’S AT SEVEN (seen November 11, 2021)

 

For my review of Morning’s at Seven please click on THE BROADWAY BLOG.

16. THE VISITOR (seen November 14, 2021)

 

For my review of The Visitor please click on THEATER LIFE.

THEATREGOING IN THE TIME OF COVID: A CAUTIONARY TALE

Sunday, November 14:

Theatre has returned to New York, of course, but only under certain restrictions necessitated by the Covid pandemic. Over the past two months it’s been encouraging to see the number of people in the Times Square district increase exponentially, although still not to the level of pre-Covid days, when you could barely walk down Eighth Avenue without being forced into the gutter.

I’ve seen seventeen shows, on and Off Broadway, since September. For a reviewer, that’s not as many as it might seem. I’ve actually been more selective this season, given some of the discomforts necessitated by the theatregoing process and the wish to expose myself to the virus as little as possible, both in theatres and on public transportation (I subway in from South Queens).

Since most—not all—shows provide critics with two seats, many of us have plus-one lists of people we invite to accompany us. Mine includes over twenty people; however, over half of those have decided not to accept my invitations until they feel safer about going to the theatre. Mind you, these are all sophisticated theatregoers who ordinarily would be reluctant to turn down offers to see theatre for free, and to simultaneously enjoy my iridescent presence.

And even offers made to my reduced list have rarely gotten more than one bite; several people who asked to remain on the list still have not responded to my invitations. Clearly, there’s a great deal of hesitancy about returning under the present circumstances, not least the need to show vaccination proof and wear a mask. And while more and more people, tourists and locals, have been filling theatre seats, notable gaps can be seen in the auditoriums of shows that aren’t hit musicals.

Many people ask me, and, I’m sure, my fellow reviewers, what’s it like to go to the theatre these days? Well, speaking only for myself, I can say it ain’t thrilling. I am, after all, in my early 80s and, though still spry, am faced by the usual geriatric obstacles. This means one must get to the theatre early so as to have time for passing through the gauntlet of safety and personal needs obstacles.

On Broadway (and, in some cases, Off) you must line up outside and wait for the processing of theatregoers to begin. This means you must show some proof of your having had two shots (on a card or phone app) along with a photo ID to prove it’s actually you who’s been jabbed. Oldsters, of course, especially those unprepared for the experience, may struggle as they manipulate their phones, purses, and wallets, causing delays for others on the line. The weather has been mostly mild so far, but when it’s not, doing this outdoors can make the experience that much more uncomfortable. I foresee this being something the coming months hold in store.

Next, you must pass through a metal detector or have a security person poke through your bag with a long flashlight wand. Naturally, everyone’s wearing a mask, which can muffle spoken instructions from the staff. If you’re flustered on a muggy day, expect the sweat to flow and your glasses to fog up.

Once inside, if you’re like me, you may wish to visit the restroom before taking your seat. Social distancing, I assure you, is paid no more than lip service at the facilities, with so many people needing to take care of business. And, since many theatres have insufficient stalls for women, some men’s rooms are seeing women using them when their own lines are too long. Modesty be damned. Off Broadway, by the way, has seen a proliferation of gender-neutral bathrooms over the last few years, so the person washing their hands next to you will likely not share your particular gender.

Senior citizens, like me, will often want to use the free assistive listening devices available at many theatres. In the past, most users simply handed over their driver’s license as surety for the safe return of the devices. Now, a number of Broadway theatres (not all) have the person providing the devices enter your contact info on an IPad, making it unnecessary to leave your license or photo ID. While this makes it easier to depart by simply dropping off your device, it can seriously clog up the pre-curtain time available as you wait on line for others to complete the process.

Finally, you take your seat, remove your outer wear, wipe the steam off your glasses, mop the sweat off your brow, and get ready for the show to start. When the show ends you race for the exits (try racing out of a crowded Broadway theatre) so you can get to the street and rip the mask off your face for the few minutes of fresh air before you descend into the subway.

On the other hand, as happened to me at Saturday's matinee, you may never get this far.

As I said, I’ve seen my fair share of shows since September, and got through the gauntlet with flying colors each time—until this past weekend. I was booked to pick up a pair of ducats to a major Broadway show and, as on multiple recent occasions, brought along a plus-one regular. Naturally, she had a card proving that she had her second shot. However, while the CVS pharmacy clearly recorded it as her second shot, they didn’t list her first. That’s because she’d lost her first card and, when she got the second shot, they listed only that one. You’d think that since it says “second shot” or something similar that would be sufficient.

But this theatre’s Covid supervisor, sympathetic but firm, said his bosses were very strict. So my plus-one searched and searched her emails for the CVS confirmation of her two-shot status. She didn’t have an Excelsior pass because she’d had technical problems downloading one and hadn’t bothered calling their help line for assistance. Besides, none of the other theatres we’d been to had made a fuss. But now it was beginning to rain, curtain time was approaching, and we were getting nervous.

Seeing no alternative, I approached the box office, canceled the seats, and left on the subway with my plus-one for Queens. She kept rifling through her old emails on the train. Several stops away, there it was: bingo! In the best of all subway systems, we might have turned around and made it back in time, but New York isn’t Tokyo.

The lesson, of course, is that, if you're in a situation like my plus-one's, you shouldn't assume your vaccination card will get you in, even if it says you've had both shots. 

Later on Sunday she visited CVS and got a proper statement of her vaccination status. For some technical reason, however, the Excelsior pass remains a hill she's still trying to climb.

15. LACKAWANNA BLUES (seen November 7, 2021)

Ruben Santiago-Hudson. (Photos: Mark J. Franklin.)

I come late to the Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Lackawanna Blues, which I was originally scheduled to see on October 2. But it’s not for lack of wanting to see it. Its extraordinary star, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, suffered a back injury that forced not only the cancellation of my first booking, but also a second, when his injury flared up again. At this point, with numerous mostly highly positive reviews of the show having been filed, all I can do is to simply add the following cherry to the sundae.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

Because there’s only one actor speaking all the lines and playing all the characters, Lackawanna Blues belongs to the category of one-person shows. It would, however, lose a huge chunk of its theatrical punch without the awesome presence of Junior Mack, the onstage guitarist who accompanies Mr. Santiago-Hudson, playing low-key, bluesy background music by the late Bill Sims, Jr., during almost every one the show’s ninety minutes.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

Mr. Santiago-Hudson, a multitalented New York theatre powerhouse, who also serves as MTC’s “artistic advisor,” is no stranger to the solo format, having done just fine eight years ago starring at the Signature in August Wilson’s How I Learned What I Learned, a memorable performance strangely missing from his Playbill bio. (Mr. Santiago-Hudson, of course, is one of our leading Wilson exponents, both as an actor and director.)

I didn’t see Lackawanna Blues, based on Mr. Santiago-Hudson’s childhood experiences, when it was first produced back in 2001 at the Public Theatre, where George C. Wolfe directed its award-winning production. This was followed in 2005 by a multiple award-winning HBO movie version, starring S. Epatha Merkeson as Rachel “Nanny” Crosby, and a cornucopia of first-line actors in support, among them Jimmy Smits (as Ruben’s father), Terrence Howard, Mos Def, Rosie Perez, Delroy Lindo, Jeffrey Wright, and many others.

These actors played the many colorful characters Mr. Santiago-Hudson recalled from his boyhood growing up during the 1950s in Lackawanna, an upstate New York working-class city, where circumstances saw him being raised by the remarkable Nanny. She was a saintly Black woman who was both entrepreneur and nonjudgmental overseer of those who, in one way or the other, came to fall within her purview as a local boardinghouse proprietor. As lovingly embodied by her onetime ward, she comes off as a pious woman of enormous strength, courage, determination, wisdom, and gentleness, anchored by inordinate depths of kindness.

Lackawanna Blues is more a series of anecdotes built around the sturdy frame of Nanny than it is a conventionally structured play. No matter. Mr. Santiago, dressed by Karen Perry simply in slacks and a casual, rust-colored, cabana-type shirt, with beige stripes, like the kind bowlers used to wear, ably presents the panoply of characters, men and women, he recalls. Merely by shifts in voice, accent, body, and facial expression, he makes you see them parading across the stage. 

Keep your eyes and ears peeled for Ol’ Po’ Carl, Mr. Lemuel Taylor, Numb Finger Pete, Sweet Tooth Sam, Mr. Luscious, and on and on and on, including the wide-eyed, innocent Mr. Santiago-Hudson once was. We see each with their limps, their coughs, their stuttering and muttering, their smoking, their boasting, their sweetness, their threats, their coolness, their neediness, their pride, and their suffering.  And each is incarnated with grace, humor, affection, and sufficient accuracy to provide lifelike thumbnail portraits. 

With Mr. Mack seated at right center, in and out of the shadows as lit by Jen Schriever with expressive sensitivity, Mr. Santiago freely roams Michael Carnahan’s set of a dark, crumbling, brick background. Into it is set no more than an an ornate, old-fashioned doorway, with a window of frosted, colored-glass panes high above. Hovering overhead down front is a rotating ceiling fan. In this memory-laden space, Mr, Santiago shows that he can not only act but sing (albeit minimally); even more impressive are those moments when he plays a really mean harmonica. 

Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

Each season brings an assortment of solo shows, most of them revealing the striking talents of their performers. Just the day before seeing Lackawanna Blues I visited another outstanding, albeit radically different, work in this category, Off Broadway’s Kristina Wong: Sweatshop Overlord. Both shows are autobiographical, the first an affectionate memorial to a long-gone slice of postwar African-Americana, the latter a farcically inclined docudrama with a ripped-from-the headlines political agenda. And both are among the best things I’ve seen during this still young season.

14. KRISTINA WONG: SWEATSHOP OVERLORD (seen November 6, 2021)

 

Kristina Wong. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

For my review of Kristina Wong: Sweatshop Overlord please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

13. MORNING SUN (seen November 5, 2021)

 

Edie Falco. (Photos: Matthew Murphy)

Casual talk of ghosts arises several times in Morning Sun, British playwright's Simon Stephens’s (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime) murky new play, at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s City Center basement venue (where no kind of sun ever shines). Those references underline the play's premise as a ghost play, of sorts. Even the homely set, a wide, blandly beige, and barely furnished room, designed by a collective called dots, can be seen as serving the purpose. If you added folding chairs, it could easily serve as a funeral parlor, with a spinet located where an organ would be. Further adding to the mildly off-kilter aura is the spectral sound design of Lee Kinney and Daniel Kluger, the latter also contributing effectively moody music.

Edie Falco, Marin Ireland.

While not itself funereal, thanks to the spirited presence of three top New York actresses—Blair Brown, Edie Falco, and Marin Ireland—representing three generations of women in the same family (like Albee’s Three Tall Women), the production is simultaneously real and unreal, linear and non-linear, and set in both the present, the past, and (it would seem) the future. For all its specificity of dates, one might call it timeless. It does, however, take a bit of time before you realize that what first appears to be a straightforward domestic dramedy is something else entirely, a world of free-floating memories affecting three women, or souls, if you will.

Marin Ireland.

Those recollections are mostly related to Charlotte (who prefers “Charley”) McBride (designated as “1” in the script), in her mid-fifties. What action there is encapsulates her passage through life, beginning with childhood. Charley’s experiences, of course, are tied to the lives of her mother, Claudette (“2”; Ms. Brown), seen in her seventies, and Charley’s daughter, Tessa (“3”; Ms. Ireland), thirty, as they help Charley navigate issues from her past.

Edie Falco, Marin Ireland, Blair Brown.

These memories—bitter, recriminatory, happy, or sad, as the case may be—concern mainly romantic relationships (positive and otherwise) and mother-daughter conflicts, mostly negative. Most are set against the landscape of New York as experienced from the perspective of the fifth-floor walkup on 11th Street in Greenwich Village, where the family long resided. 

Blair Brown, Edie Falco.

About that walkup. Stephens’s script calls for “a liminal space” defined more by light and shadows than objects. Lighting designer Lap Chi Chu has deftly used his skills to realize this goal, but the setting itself is more literal than liminal. With small, high windows running across the top of its walls it reads as a basement, but without relevance to anything mentioned in the script, like the apartment the family once owned. Further, its extreme width in contrast to its low height (like a kabuki stage) serves only to dissipate the impact of director Lila Neugebauer’s staging on the spacious, relatively bare expanse.

Edie Falco, Marin Ireland.

In this space, the characters drop shared references to familiar places and events, most New York-related, across the past half-century. We hear of the White Horse Tavern, Peter McManus, Washington Square, and the Cherry Lane Playhouse (for some reason called, inaccurately, the theatre on Cherry Lane). Then there are the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, and Leonard Bernstein, a couple of great moments in New York baseball, the demolition of Penn Station, the Weathermen explosion, the AIDS crisis, the Dakota and John Lennon, the Circle Line, Brighton Beach, Macy’s, Murray’s Bagels, 9/11, the New School, and so on and so forth. Charley’s longest-held job, as a receptionist at the now vanished St. Vincent’s Hospital, recalls an iconic New York landmark.

Blair Brown, Marin Ireland.

Stephens seems intent on evoking the drama of even the most ordinary of lives, although the dialogue is rich enough to provide the stars with many histrionic possibilities. I suspect most people will enjoy the performances more than they do the play, which lasts 100 uninterrupted, but not always interesting, minutes. Although there are emotional disruptions, the principal tension comes from the efforts the audience must make to absorb the stream of memories and their significance; otherwise, since these characters drift along across half-a-dozen or so decades, the few dramatic stakes are fleeting.

Each actor portrays both her own principal character, as well as several others (men included), while also now and then serving as a narrator. We meet friends, husbands, lovers, grandfathers, uncles, and the like, some briefly, some at greater length, like the pilot who knocked up Charley on a one-night stand, producing Tessa as a result.

Maybe I was confused but, in one scene, all three women seemed to be sharing lines meant for two people, Claudette even speaking Charley’s words. Whatever’s going on, it’s indicative of the fuzziness created by the writing’s goal of subtle transitions, requiring nuances of attitude as opposed to appearance to distinguish one person from another. It's far easier to distinguish among the dozens of characters invoked by Ruben Santiago-Hudson's solo performance in Lackawanna Blues than it is to figure out this play's dramatis personae.

Late in the play, Charley, on life support, delivers a touching monologue of things she longs for, bits of which made me think of Emily’s farewell to clocks ticking in Our Town. It comes off as something like the eleven o’clock song in a musical, just in time to retrieve Morning Sun from lapsing into total boredom. Ms. Falco, presently icing TV screens with wifely sangfroid as the betrayed Hillary Clinton in “Impeachment,” delivers the goods, as she always does. And the distinguished reputations of both Ms. Brown (looking, sounding, and acting like Lois Smith's doppelganger) and Ms. Ireland are further enhanced by their sterling work.

Whether Morning Sun drowses or arouses you, I wouldn't be surprised if, as a play for three actresses of different generations, it doesn't have a significant afterlife. If all it does, however, is remind you of its inspiration, the Edward Hopper painting of the same name, showing a young woman sitting on a bed staring vacantly out a window into the morning sun, that too is a takeaway of sorts.

Morning Sun

Manhattan Theatre Club

City Center Stage 1

131 W. 55^th Street, NYC

Through December 19

 

 

 

12. CAROLINE, OR CHANGE (seen November 3, 2021)

For my review of Caroline, or Change please click on THE BROADWAY BLOG.