Category: Theater

Delivering a eulogy is never easy at the best of times, and it’s an especially tough slog for Milo, whose best friend, Roman, has recently died. The pair had been close since childhood, and Milo, who is in his early 20s, appears especially shaken. It quickly becomes obvious that he will need a supportive hand from those attending the service.

And that means us, the audience members at Peter Charney and Brendan George’s “A Eulogy for Roman,” a modest but sneakily affecting show that just opened at 59E59 Theaters.

It is not long before we are roped into helping the flustered Milo (played by George, a graduate student at New York University who also wrote the play). He asks a theatergoer to help him sort index cards on which he has scribbled some thoughts about Roman. Then he wonders if anyone can share tips for dealing with loss. “Dogs,” a woman volunteered at the performance I attended.

Of course, Milo’s gentle prompts serve to move around the show’s emotional building blocks, but he is such a charming presence that it feels as though he is including the theatergoers in a conversation rather than simply manipulating them to serve his storytelling needs.

There is a bit of unease, however, as Milo’s emotion is decidedly self-centered — he doesn’t tell us anything very revealing about Roman. Then again, isn’t part of the grieving process the act of figuring out how one continues to live?

To overcome his disarray, Milo decides to complete a project he had embarked on with Roman: getting through a “Life Points List,” a lengthy catalog of experiences “that would remind us that we are alive and make us feel alive.” A few of them still hadn’t been checked off when Roman died, and perhaps, Milo suggests, the memorial-goers might want to help him achieve closure. The remaining tasks include suggesting songs for a playlist (my fellow audience members spontaneously latched onto a candy theme) and teaming up with Milo to do 100 push-ups. As amusing as those scenes are, they can feel like activities at a children’s birthday party, even if the show tends to stay on the right side of that dangerous line.

The use of a list as a way to deal with death, combined with audience participation, brings to mind Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s hit play “Every Brilliant Thing,” though “A Eulogy for Roman” does not weave the more discomforting sides of our existence into its fabric as effectively as that show did.

Still, George has an endearing presence and Charney, who is credited with concept and direction, moves the action along at a steady pace. And there is something refreshing about the show’s commitment to earnestness. We have been so conditioned to expect a certain degree of cynicism that I spent a good portion of the evening wondering when we were going to discover that Roman or Milo or both were psychopaths. But no: The bravest thing about “A Eulogy for Roman” is its embrace of kindness, resilience and community.

A Eulogy for Roman
Through Sept. 3 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.

Forget the sunglasses, the baseball caps, the featherweight clothing. Heat or no heat, it’s time to choose a fantastical mask and a wild costume and head to the Lower East Side to join a Wednesday evening parade. Hades himself will welcome you.

The occasion? It’s Halloween in August, the theme of the third International Puppet Fringe Festival NYC, which officially begins with this open-to-all procession on Suffolk Street. This year’s festival, which arrives with more than 50 performances, as well as cabarets, craft workshops, panels, open mics and films, celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer and theater artist Ralph Lee.

Lee, who died in May, invented one of New York’s most popular puppet revels — the Village Halloween Parade — and Wednesday’s street stroll will feature not only his Greek god of the underworld but also his Fat Devil and Yama, the Chinese Lord of Death. Such creations underscore one of the festival’s core principles: that puppetry is more than child’s play.

“People have this misconception that it is just for, like, birthday parties or children’s television shows,” said Manuel Antonio Morán, the artistic director of the festival, which is produced by Teatro SEA, the Latino theater that he founded; his own agency, Grupo Morán; and the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, where Puppet Fringe performances will run through Sunday. “Yes, it is for that, too,” he said in an interview, but in many countries, it’s “part of the folklore, it’s part of the tradition.”

Folklore and mythology continually inspired Lee, who collaborated on this year’s festival despite his declining health. His work, including incarnations of the ghost of Henry Hudson, a mermaid and Coney Island sideshow characters, will appear in Brendan Schweda’s “Barnacle Bill the Husband,” one of a special group of brief, intimate works for small audiences. On Saturday, the festival will host a round-table discussion with Lee’s troupe, the Mettawee River Theater Company. But the greatest breadth of his creativity will be on display through Aug. 31 in two exhibitions: “Theater Unmasked: Photographic Glimpses of Ralph Lee’s Work” and “Myths, Legends and Spectacle: Masks and Puppets of Ralph Lee.” (The festival’s exhibitions and outdoor performances are free; indoor shows are $20 each, and day passes $75.)

“What I want people to experience while they’re here is that the world is whatever you decide to make it for yourself,” said Matthew Sorensen, who curated the shows of Lee’s work.

The more than 60 pieces in “Myths, Legends and Spectacle” cover six decades and range in tone from the fiercely haunting raffia-haired mask of a Japanese demon from the play “The Mask of Kitamura” (1983) to the 11-foot-tall, sweetly smiling Grandmother Earth puppet from “Nanabozho,” a staging of a Native American tale (1980). And everywhere, Lee gave castoffs new life: Piano keys serve as puppet teeth, and can lids as eyes. An open mailbox becomes the head and jaws of a dragon; the ribs of a baby carriage form its body.

This exhibition “opens up people’s ideas about materials,” said Casey Compton, Lee’s widow and frequent artistic collaborator, as she helped install the show. Many, she added, illustrate Lee’s method of taking “what’s just right there” and “exploring what it can do.”

Beyond Lee’s creations, an innovative approach to materials also distinguishes the other festival offerings, like “Sapientia,” a 10th-century play by Hroswitha of Gandersheim, sometimes called the West’s first female playwright. The title character, a Christian, opposes the pagan emperor Hadrian, who responds by torturing her young daughters. Scapegoat Carnivale, a Montreal-based theater company, stages the play as satirical object theater: Hadrian is portrayed by an espresso pot, Sapientia by a hand mirror and the children, who in the story are miraculously spared pain, by teacups. The torture devices include an iron and a George Foreman grill.

“The objects are able to kind of deconstruct and reveal almost the absurdity, but also support the miraculous nature” of the play, said Mia van Leeuwen, who worked on the adaptation and directed it.

Another humble substance stars throughout the Puppet Fringe: paper. “You can bind it together, you can rip it, you can make a pop-up of it, you can chew it up and spit it out,” said Yael Rasooly, an Israeli puppeteer who does all of those in her slightly macabre solo show “Paper Cut.” Rasooly, who will also teach a puppetry master class at the festival, portrays a secretary whose Hollywood fantasy world is made up of old movie magazine cutouts.

A more joyful exploration of paper’s possibilities unfolds in “The Paper Play,” which the Taiwanese company Puppet Beings Theater will present outdoors at the festival and indoors in a separate performance on Sunday at Flushing Town Hall in Queens. Consisting of two parts — one a gentle fable and the other a celebration of its medium’s transformative powers — this American premiere exemplifies the Puppet Fringe’s less spooky side.

The family-friendly fare also includes four productions from Teatro SEA. In “The Crazy Adventures of Don Quixote,” a musical Morán wrote with Radamés Gavé, don’t be surprised to see Cervantes’s 17th-century characters duel with “Star Wars”-style light sabers. They will also speak both English and Spanish, a bilingual approach adopted by all Teatro SEA puppetry shows. Another production, the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater’s urbanized “Little Red’s Hood,” will be performed once in Spanish and once in Mandarin.

“From the beginning, I’ve been wanting to be a very inclusive festival,” said Morán, who founded the biennial Puppet Fringe in 2018. (The second edition was held in 2021 because of the pandemic.) That has meant featuring shows in different languages, producers from minority groups and female puppeteers like Heather Henson, who has curated two festival short-film programs from Handmade Puppet Dreams, her company’s collection of works by independent artists: “Frights and Delights,” featuring fanciful ghosts and monsters, and “Kidscapes,” a series for children.

Puppetry “is very cross-disciplinary,” said Henson, who noted that her father, the renowned puppeteer Jim Henson, often produced art that “would have never worked on the stage.” Jump cuts, extreme close-ups and scene dissolves can make puppet films more exciting — or unsettling.

But however audiences experience puppetry, its power often derives from the extraordinary interplay between human agency and physical artworks.

“There’s lots of corny words for it, like magic,” said Compton. “But it is very special, when those elements come together, and there’s a life that can be shared.” Ralph Lee, she added, “was always going for that.”

Make way for shrubbery: “Spamalot” is returning to Broadway.

The show, a Monty Python-inspired spoof of Arthurian legend, first opened on Broadway in 2005, won the Tony Award for best musical, ran for four years, and has been widely staged since then.

This new production, which had a 10-day run in May at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, will be the musical’s first Broadway revival.

Previews are scheduled to begin Oct. 31, and the opening is set for Nov. 16 at the St. James Theater. The executive producer will be Jeffrey Finn, who is the Kennedy Center’s vice president of theater producing and programming.

“I have been a crazy fan of ‘Spamalot’ since I saw the opening in 2005,” Finn said. “I feel as though in 2023, audiences are really looking for a fun escape and an opportunity to laugh as much as possible, and I believe this show delivers all of that.”

The casting for Broadway has not yet been announced; at the Kennedy Center the cast included Alex Brightman, James Monroe Iglehart, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, Rob McClure, Matthew Saldivar, Jimmy Smagula, Michael Urie and Nik Walker.

The musical, based on the screenplay for “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” features a book and lyrics by Eric Idle, who was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. The music is by Idle and John Du Prez. Reviewing the original production, The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “resplendently silly” and a “fitful, eager celebration of inanity.”

The revival is directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, who will be making his Broadway directing debut; he has worked on Broadway as a performer and choreographer. (Rhodes’s husband, Lee Wilkins, was a replacement swing in the original “Spamalot” company.)

Rhodes described “Spamalot” as “a beautiful satire of Broadway, and of the class system,” and said he is excited to introduce Monty Python to a generation of theatergoers who may be unfamiliar with the group’s history and work. “In D.C., there was some sort of incredible energy from the audience that made us realize people were so hungry for this material,” he said. “There was a rowdiness that maybe wasn’t there before, and made it feel very special.”

The “Spamalot” revival will be the first production developed by the Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage program to transfer to Broadway; Finn created the program in 2018, and it has evolved from presenting semi-staged concert versions of existing musicals to presenting fully staged, but short-run, productions. The Kennedy Center had a previous history of nurturing work that transferred to Broadway; the last Kennedy Center-produced transfer was a 2014 revival of “Side Show.”

A few years ago a movie version of the musical was in the works, but Paramount Pictures, which held the rights to produce it, is no longer pursuing the project, and Idle suggested on Twitter earlier this year that that the film adaptation had been killed.

At this point we have been burned by many musical adaptations of beloved movies, and reactions have ranged from “Why did they even bother?” to “Dear God, please make it stop.” So it was with some trepidation that I traveled to the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut to check out its take on Charles Walters’s “Summer Stock,” from 1950.

The movie’s plot in shorthand: Gene Kelly and Judy Garland put on a show in a barn, and then she sings “Get Happy” at the end. Naturally, that last exhortation pops up in the world-premiere stage version (twice, even) currently running in East Haddam, but it is easy to take to heart: The show may not be perfect, but its craftsmanship, zest and good humor — which are deceivingly hard to achieve without falling into bland cheerleading and forced joy — are perfectly dosed and on target.

The book writer Cheri Steinkellner stuck to the movie’s spirit rather than its letter, though she wisely did not mess with the central conceit: A group of theater kids led by the director Joe Ross (Corbin Bleu, last seen on Broadway in the 2019 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate”) find themselves rehearsing a musical on the struggling farm of one Jane Falbury (Danielle Wade).

A notable change is that in the director-choreographer Donna Feore’s production, the local businessman and Jane’s sort-of antagonist, Jasper Wingate, has become the stern Mrs. Wingate (Veanne Cox, in supreme form), who wants to take over our heroine’s land to create “the largest commercial farming operation in the Connecticut River Valley.” The Wingate heir is still an oaf named Orville (Will Roland, from “Be More Chill”), but this time around he has a secret — no, not that one. When Jane must find money to save her farm, Joe suggests using his show for a benefit.

In the movie, Jane’s barn looks to be of an average New England size from the outside, but magically turns out to be capacious enough to accommodate big numbers. In contrast, the Goodspeed building is impressively large when you walk up to it, but the theater nestled within only has about 400 seats and a fairly small stage, lending “Summer Stock” a welcome intimacy and suggesting the gee-whiz enthusiasm the story requires.

Steinkellner and Feore know when to update, when to leave well enough alone, and when to have it both ways. In the reprise of “Get Happy,” for example, the ensemble wears the same black suits and coral shirts as in the movie, though now we also get amusing explanations for how Jane ended up in a fedora and a tuxedo jacket, and how the painted background acquired its pink hue. Hint: The beefed-up character of Jane’s sister (Arianna Rosario) has a hand, or foot, in both.

But what really makes this “Summer Stock” pop is its cast, which appears to be having a blast — another element that is too often missing. Bleu, who got his start portraying a young basketball star in the “High School Musical” franchise, has become a terrific interpreter of golden-age fare. His athleticism and deceptively casual nonchalance allow him to effortlessly lead energetic dance numbers like “Dig for Your Dinner,” and his voice has matured into a warm baritone that works wonders on “It Had to Be You” (one of the too many songs added to the show). As Jane, Wade can’t quite summon up the same firepower, but they still make a fine couple.

Chewing up the barn with great gusto, Cox, Roland and J. Anthony Crane (playing the hammy, vain thespian Montgomery Leach) leave behind contrails of laughter every time they exit the stage. As Garland sang in another classic “let’s put on a show!” movie, “Babes in Arms”: Who could ask for anything more?

Summer Stock
Through Aug. 27 at the Goodspeed Opera House, East Haddam, Conn.; goodspeed.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.