‘Purpose’ Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ Riotous Play, Directed by Phylicia Rashad
In Purpose, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ satiric family expose directed by Phylicia Rashad, we meet a patriarchal Black American civil rights icon, Solomon “Sonny Jasper (Harry Lennix), who is forced to confront his disappointments and foibles as his family gathers to celebrate the homecoming of his eldest son and namesake, Solomon “Junior” Jasper (Glenn Davis). Navigating the audience through treacherous familial waters with asides and intermittent, pointed narration, the youngest son Nazareth “Naz” Jasper (Jon Michael Hill), explores his family’s complicated legacy as he attempts to confront issues about his own identity and future.
Currently running at the Hayes Theater until July 6th, this ferocious, edgy and sardonic send up of Black American political and religious hypocrisy resonates with dramatic power. Its superlative performances and Rashad’s fine direction, make it a must-see. Importantly, in typical Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins style, the tour de force with jokes-a-plenty raises questions. It prompts us to reflect upon our own life intentions, as we examine the Jasper family’s dynamic through the acute perspective of the endearing, sensitive, vulnerable and authentic Naz. Hill is just terrific in a role which requires heavy lifting throughout.
As the play opens we note the subject matter and foundation upon which Jacobs-Jenkins’ moralistically satiric drama rests, namely the Jaspers (think along the lines of Jesse Jackson), whose heritage boasts of leaders in civil rights, congress and the protestant church. Todd Rosenthal’s lovely, well-appointed, Jasper family home represents prosperity, upward mobility and the success of the celebrated Black political elite. Solomon Jasper was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s heir apparent in the civil rights movement.
However, among other questions the play asks is, what happened to the substance and efficacy of the movement, considering the current “state of the union” under MAGA Party president Donald Trump, whose cabinet has no Black American member? What are the legacies of the Jasper’s faith? What is the heritage of their former Black radicalism, which Naz calls into question throughout the play, as the evening explodes into tragicomedy in front of unintended witness Aziza Houston (Kara Young)? As a result of the evening with the Jaspes, Aziza is horrified to see her civil rights icons, Solomon and Claudine, smashing her respect for them to smithereens during the family imbroglio in Act I.
Via an intriguing flashback/flashpresent device, Naz exposes and illustrates how the family’s shining history becomes obliterated by circumstances in the present “state of the family union,” which has not lived up to their patriarch’s illustrious expectations. Ultimately, Solomon Jasper, too, may be counted as not living up to his own personal expectations, a fact revealed by the conclusion of the second act, which further adds to his hypocrisy for giving Naz a hard time about his sexually, abstemious, personal choices..
With increasing intensity, the upheavals occur by the end of the first act and augment into further revelations and complications well into the second, until the wounds exposed are too great to ignore. Naz’s final synopsis and soulful, poignant comments solidify at the conclusion bringing this family retrospective together. His questioning wisdom leaves us as he is left, wondering what is the trajectory of this once august Jasper legacy, which Naz has chosen not to perpetuate. Not going into politics or the church, Naz selected a career in photography where he communes with nature’s beauty and peace.
Jacobs-Jenkins’ work is filled with contrasts: truth and lies, health and sickness, moral uprightness and moral turpitude. In fact the contrast of the outer image of the Jasper calm and sanctity versus the inner corruption and turmoil becomes evident with Jacobs-Jenkins’ character interactions throughout, heightened by Naz’s confidential asides.
Additionally, this contrast of superficial versus soul depth is superbly factored in by Rashad and Todd Rosenthal’s collaboration on set design. Initially, all is peaceful in their gorgeous home set up by matriarch Claudine Jasper (the excellent Latanya Richardson Jackson). The home’s beauty belies any roiling undercurrents beneath the family’s solid, upright probity. Perfection is their manufactured brand, which Aziza has bought hook, line and sinker as a Jasper fan.
To continue with the Jaspers’ “brand,” the inviting great room boasts a comfortable and lovely open layout-living room and dining room-backed by a curved staircase to the second level of bedrooms off the landing. The dark peach-colored walls are beautifully emphasized with white trim molding. The cherry wood furniture and cream colored sofa color-coordinate with the walls. The sofa is accented with appropriate pillows. Interspersed among furniture pieces are obvious antique heirlooms. Indeed, all is perfect with matching table runners and dining room tablecloth and napkins and dinnerware tastefully selected for its enhancing effect.
Prominently featured is the Jasper family heritage and legacy, a large portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. proudly displayed on the first level, and a lesser portrait of political/cultural heir apparent, Solomon “Sonny” Jasper on the second floor landing. Surrounding the Sonny Jasper portrait are framed photos chronicling the civil rights warriors and family, shining their historical significance. When Aziza first arrives and is welcomed desperately by Claudine who fears Naz’s not bringing any woman home means he is gay, Aziza is gobsmacked by the house. Seeing the portraits and Solomon Jasper, she realizes who Naz really is. She is over the moon slathering blandishments to Sonny. Thrilled, she can’t help but take selfies with the Jaspers to send to her mom, a mutual fan. Naz is beyond humiliated and surreptitiously pleads with her to leave.
What does Naz know about his family that he fears Aziza will discover? If Aziza doesn’t leave quickly, his mother’s hospitality to divine who Aziza is will make sure she stays. Indeed, Jackson’s Claudine never fails in her intentions.
Against the storied backdrop of their illustrious past that Aziza worships, the garish present unfolds at dinner. It is the celebration of Junior’s homecoming and reunion with the family since his thirty month prison stay for embezzling campaign funds. Junior’s behavior is one of the gravest disappointments that Sonny holds against his son. For him it is unforgivable that his namesake who was to take his place has tarnished the Jasper name with corruption.
Thus, when Junior presents a birthday gift to Claudine, of the letters she wrote to him in prison in a lovely book, Sonny scoffs, especially after reading a particularly mundane letter. (Lennix’s reading of a sample letter is hysterical). Then, Sonny questions Junior who wants to exploit their family name and go on tour with the book of Claudine’s letters, and Claudine, lifting up the hellishness of his imprisonment like a martyr.
Ironically, bitterly, humorously, Sonny airs his disgust that Junior would present himself as a Nelson Mandella, as if Junior’s prison experience was in any way equivalent to the horrors of imprisonment used as a tool of oppression and racism throughout US history. Sonny is especially livid because Junior’s crimes ripped off his father and Blacks who supported him. Additionally, the time Junior did was easy because Sonny used his influence to get Junior into “a minimum security playground.” Though it is revealed that Junior has bi-polar disorder, (the scene when Glenn Davis manifests this is superb), Sonny lacks empathy for Junior. He dismisses his illness and says he got caught where other politicians don’t get caught because Junior is stupid.
At dinner the dour Morgan (Alana Arenas), Junior’s wife, sits quietly at first. After Junior uplifts Claudine, Morgan claims neither he nor the Jaspers helped her through Junior’s mental breakdown. Nor does he acknowledge her visiting him through the prison experience with a present. Morgan rips into him and the family. They are “hucksters,” who don’t care about her and “have no sense of responsibility or remorse.” Listening to the Jasper’s accountants, Morgan signed their joint tax returns that implicated her in tax fraud with Junior. She has lost her career and will have to do time in prison for an error that she was ignorant about, trusting the family to not mislead her.
Thus, the artifice gradually peels away, shaped by the characters’ ever increasing digs at each other and Naz’s humorous perspective. To top it off, despite her promise to Naz that she will keep quiet, Aziza reveals how she trusts Naz to be the sperm donor for their child. This piece of information is a stick of dynamite for this religious family who chaffs at unmarried young people sleeping together. Then, when Claudine and Morgan go head to head and Morgan calls the family’s “honesty” into question and accuses Sonny of having “his fiftyleven other kids scattered all over this damn country,” Claudine loses it and gets violent.
Ironically, the act ends with the patriarch blaming Claudine, “I have let you build this house on a foundation of self-deceit.” Sonny loudly declares the time is now for “redemption” and a “new era in this family – a new era of truth! Truth!”
Act II indicates how that “truth” is to come about, as Naz and Aziza argue about why she broke her promise to him. Abashedly, Naz disavows the violence that spilled out between his mother and Morgan. Meanwhile, the verbal and emotional violence has always been an undercurrent in the family that has never confronted their issues. In other words, the dissembling, the lies and the deceit have augmented until “enough is enough.” Aziza, caught up in the fray rethinks what she has seen and no longer has any wish to have Naz’s child from their “illustrious” DNA. Additionally, she has learned not to lionize any other civil rights icon or celebrity easily, again. Celebrities, like the Jaspers, are not saviors or worthy to be made into icons. They have clay feet if you see them up close and personal.
Though the first act sails smoothly, the second act digresses in part with Naz’s extensive dialogue and explanations, which might have been slimmed down. Nevertheless, as we learn about each family member’s complications, the intensity shifts. Though there is less humor, there is incredible poignancy and each of the actors have their moments to shine. Not only do we note the profound aspects of character complexity, we understand the difficulty of attempting to maintain an oversized legacy of greatness when one is an imperfect human being. Indeed, the one who comes out best appears to be Naz, until the conclusion. It is then we understand how the family has impacted him and in response, he has sent himself spinning into his own chaos, which he will have to unravel for himself. So do we all as we deal with our own legacy, heritage and family dysfunction.
Purpose is brilliant, if a tad unwieldy. However, the ensemble cracks sharply like lightening. Rashad has a deep understanding of Jacobs-Jenkins’ themes, dynamic characters, prickly relationships and the sub rosa levels of meaning in the interactions. The pace is lively despite the playwright’s wordiness and keeps the audience engaged.
Kudos to the creative team including those not already mentioned: Dede Ayite (costume design), Amith Chandrashaker (lighting design), Nikiya Mathis (hair & wig design), and Bob Milburn & Michael Bodeen (sound design). Purpose runs two hours fifty minutes with one intermission at the Helen Hayes Theater on 44th between 7th and 8th. https://purposeonbroadway.com/
‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ Starring Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr
Glengarry Glen Ross
Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s Pulitzer-prize winning treatise on rapacious, capitalist indecency is currently in its third revival at the spacious Palace Theatre on Broadway. Because of audience enthusiasm for a celebrity bro-fest, starring Kieran Culkin (Succession), Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul), comedian Bill Burr, who is making his Broadway debut, and clever ironist Michael McKean of the cult hit This is Spinal Tap, Glengarry Glenn Ross has been extended two weeks until June 28th. Judging by the jeers and raucous laughter at the characters’ non-stop, insulting, verbal sword play, the production directed by Patrick Marber (Closer) is a success.
With scenic design by Scott Pask, Mamet’s timeless, horrifically current, two-act drama divides between an unbusy Chinese restaurant in the first act, and in the second act, the robbery-devastated, real estate office where the characters attempt unsuccessfully to make “a living” and deliver their finalized sales contracts. The brief, first act is the set up for the second act where the emotional explosion occurs and the revelations stun because of Mamet’s clever misdirection throughout.
The Chinese restaurant represents the off-site, safe place where furtive deals might be made between the real estate salesmen and others. The three two-hander scenes, taking place one after the other, reveal the salesmen who succeed or fail under the oppression of a “dog-eat-dog” system that values money and material wealth as the only measure of human success, a pathetic blind they’ve fallen for.
Thus, thematically, as these individuals get ground up, drained of their identity and humanity in a process that de-masculinizes them, we note they become more aggressive, desperate and verbally explosive, as they confront failure by the play’s conclusion.
First, we meet Shelley Levene (Bob Odenkirk), who gaslights his office manager boss John Williamson (Donald Webber, Jr.), about his poor sales performance. Shelley hopes to mitigate the inevitable, being canned. So, he persuades John to give him the great leads that sell themselves. Despite Shelley’s oily patter and insistence to be “heard,” as he recalls his past glory days as ‘The Machine,” John directly tells Shelley that he hasn’t had a recent successful sale. He is at the bottom and ripe for firing because he is nowhere near being put on the board to compete to win the Cadillac offered as a gift to incentivize the men’s sales productivity.
Failing to convince John to “have a heart” about his losing streak that he claims is ending, Odenkirk’s Shelley suggests a quid pro quo. In exchange for a few premium leads, he will cut in John on a kickback of his sales. Not only does John “take the bait,” he calls Shelley’s bluff. He demands more money and payment up front which Shelley, of course, can’t afford. Interestingly, we note the sliminess of the exchanges and the abuse each man takes from the other in a devaluation of their humanity and decency in their struggle for the “all mighty dollar,” whose pursuit enslaves them and destroys their souls.
Webber, Jr. and Odenkirk are terrific in their focus, direction and pacing as they reveal these archetypes who are caught in a battle of wills where there is no ultimate winner.
The irony is that Williamson’s desk job is lower paying and requires little risk and a different skill set than Levene’s, who must sell worthless property to unsuspecting buyers. Both are on different levels entirely and they are blind to it. Without empathy for each other, they allow themselves to be overlorded by the unseen master entrepreneurs “Mitch and Murray,” who are the god-like downtown owners of the slime pit, real estate enterprise.
The overlords keep their charges in line through division, making sure all understand that performance is everything and competition against one another is the best way to shine. Those who can’t keep closing are fired, nothing personal. In spite of the vapid callousness his position requires, John makes sure the “operational daily grinding up of the men into mincemeat” continues smoothly. He is his owner’s loyal employee. Thus, he dead-ends Shelley’s kick-back offer and their conversation.
From this dead-end conversation between Levene and Williamson, Mamet moves to the next staccato dialogue between disgruntled, carping Dave Moss (Bill Burr), and laconic George Aaronow (Michael McKean). Both are terrific in humorous performances which reveal their mastery at their craft. Moss attempts to engage George to steal the premium leads that sell themselves which we’ve heard about in the previous scene. After their theft, Moss plans to sell them to a competitor of “Mitch and Murray” and give half the proceeds to George. Thus, on another level it’s “every man for himself” and the competition that Mitch and Murray stuff down their charges’ throats, Moss, who has had enough, plans to stuff down Mitch and Murray’s. Karma is a bitch in this world of anger, aggression and money.
Interestingly, with matter-of-fact irony, the “innocent” Moss anticipates that confiding in George about his gambit as a co-conspirator will be accepted by the laid back, stolid George. However, because the deal is a shady crime, Moss could be double crossing George about the amount of money he gets from the competitor. Not only would George not be able to countermand any cheating, he could end up “going up the river” if Moss decides to turn him over and disavow any participation in the theft. Moss’ proposition is a desperate one. Mamet indirectly suggests that the oppressive system, corrupt in itself, then provokes men to commit crimes to circumvent the inequitable set up rigged against them. If McKean’s George doesn’t pay attention to divine all the ramifications, he will trap himself, like Moss has been trapped.
When George realizes what Moss is after, none of the risk and half of the reward, which surely Moss will skim to his liking, McKean’s George avers. Moss, with dead seriousness that is also funny, implies that now, George is forced to steal the leads; he has no choice. By listening, he is an accomplice after the fact. Ironically, Moss uses his skills of persuasion to dupe a colleague in a contorted competitive strategem to get to the top.
With this sleight-of-hand, Mamet leaves the conversation “up in the air.” Will the exhausted, deadened George do what Moss wants him to, or will he assert his own will and avoid the trap, thus most probably losing his job, because he, too, hasn’t been on a winning streak and has no sales to stop the inevitable.
In the last exchange the dialogue shifts to the smooth, unadulterated, force and charm of the Ricky Roma (Kieran Culkin) sales pitch on his mark James Lingk (John Pirruccello). If the two previous scenes reveal desperate salesmen at the edge of the cliff of their humanity and identity, believing in the values of the system which cast them as suckers, failures and losers, Ricky Roma (Kiernan Culkin), proves to be the opposite.
In contrast Mamet shows why Roma succeeds as a salesman who the others resent. Additionally, he reveals why the premium leads that the others crave will only go to Roma as a closer and Cadillac winner. His approach with his mark is obvious. With Lingk he has identified a vulnerable, emasculated male who life has kicked around so furiously he wears as his cloak of apology and embarrassment as his outward demeanor. The real estate he sells, Roma cleverly converts to a concept, an experience of hope, a wonderful opportunity Lingk may have been waiting for his entire life. Roma presents the property as a salve that will soothe Lingk’s life humiliations.
However, to prep Lingk to receive this life turning experience, Roma frees Pirruccello’s Lingk from the obvious middle class morality that appears to have held him in. He absolves him of his deepest, darkest amoral longings only known to him.
Roma’s approach is gobsmacking. Here’s a winner to be reckoned with whose skills are exceptional and admirable. We would easily, willingly be duped by him. Yes, unlike the other whiners and weak-willed complainers, Roma is a closer who deserves the Cadillac. Along with Lingk, Mamet’s Roma has hooked us. We normalize the perverse values of this indecent unholy enterprise that is the backbone of the real estate industry as well as any industry that introduces a fabulous product but falls short of its promises.
Roma’s monologue is brilliantly written and I found it difficult to get Al Pacino’s portrayal in the titular 1992 film out of my mind. There’s an intimate intensity that must be conveyed, a confessional nature that engages Lingk so that he finds Roma’s sincerity and the hope he sells irresistible. The intensity, intimacy and sly seduction necessary for the sale was missing in Caulkin’s Roma. I do think that Caulkin might have been better served if the director positioned him seated in the same banquette as Pirruccello’s Lingk from the outset. Instead, Calkin’s Roma leans over the banquette and the intimacy that should exist between them falters.
In the first act Mamet sets up the stakes. The second act presents the payoff settling this masterpiece into a tragicomedy. The results of what the system has wrought in promoting the misery, torment and criminal behavior upturns the office. John’s “perfectly seamless environment” explodes. There is mess everywhere, and everyone loses, most of all Mitch and Murray. The power dynamic heightens between Caulkin’s Roma and Webber, Jr.’s John, as well as the dynamic between Shelley and John. In these scenes the actors are superlative.
Criminality has run amuck, starting from the top of the system on down, and all are its victims, even the detective (Howard W. Overshown), who must find the perpetrator to make himself relevant. As the gloves come off, Mamet ties in the humanity behind the desperation in the life of the one who stole the leads. The horror is that money has become the arbiter of life and death in this system where to get ahead, one must dupe, deceive, harm, then be inured to one’s own egregious actions, as if they are justified because you need money to live and a ton of money to prosper and live well. (Think of the CEO Brian Thompson of UnitedHealthcare.) Roma goes off to the restaurant after telling John that he and Shelley are teaming up and he is taking a part of Shelley’s commissions. Of course, John says nothing, allowing Roma’s greed to trap him as Roma is ignorant of Shelley’s circumstances.
Glengarry Glenn Ross works in this revival because its overarching themes are timeless. The acting and direction superbly emphasizes the authenticity of the characters’ desperation, exhaustion, and zombie-rat state, running in their own wheels, unable to stop themselves. Yes, even the shining Roma by the conclusion has been done in by the situation and his overconfidence in his skills.
Mamet emphasizes that in the system, whether you project that it is capitalism or economic totalitarianism, pity is a weakness and empathy is for chumps, not for closers. This is the perfect world that has birthed the current miasma that Donald Trump as a symbolic Mitch and Murray embraces and would foster, making all into his slavish subjects.
Of course, such a world doesn’t work seamlessly nor successfully, and if anything, nothing works in it much of the time. That the play concludes with all the players wiping dreck off their faces, including Mitch and Murray, who have lost their profits in a breach of security to their competitor, should be a lesson all the characters learn. But they don’t because they don’t reflect on their lives. They are too busy whining, being oppressed and making money to recognize they are going nowhere having been nowhere valuable or worthwhile when all is said and done.
Kudos to lighting designer Jen Schriever and the creative team already mentioned. Glengarry Glenn Ross is a must-see for the performances and to appreciate this early Mamet work. Apparently, he has since come to embrace the Mitch and Murrays of the world in what may only be intimated as Stockholm Syndrome.
Glengarry Glenn Ross runs 1 hour 45 minutes with a 15-minute intermission at the Palace Theatre on 47th Street. https://www.glengarryonbroadway.com/?gclsrc=aw.ds&gad_source=1
‘The Orchid Show: Mexican Modernism’ at New York Botanical Garden
ORCHID SHOW: MEXICAN MODERNISM-FEBRUARY 15TH THROUGH APRIL 27TH
The New York Botanical Garden Orchid Show: Mexican Modernism has exploded onto the New York City scene in eye-popping color.
The NYBG exhibit is so welcome at this time of year. Many New Yorkers and Garden members having been waiting with high anticipation for the annual orchid show to brighten up this period of winter’s doldrums.
The show is superlative. In displays of orchids, one showier than the next, the exhibition, inspired by the vibrant, multi-hued designs of Mexican architect Luis Barragán (1902-1988), leaves one with a treasured emotional uplift.
It is just great knowing one may now walk through the galleries of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory’s beauties taking in the breathtaking orchids in fabulous displays while the winter cold and potential snowfalls remain outside.
There’s no place better to be than in the comforting warmth of orchid pageantry, as one saunters through the conservatory’s splendid galleries.
This is NYBG 22nd Orchid Show
Moving through the various galleries beginning with the Palms of the World gallery, visitors will note the myriad orchid species from the family Orchidaceae. According to Marc Hachadourian, Director of Glasshouse Horticulture & Senior Curator of Orchids at NYBG, orchids grow in every continent on the planet except Antarctica.
The orchid exhibit features rare orchids in the glass case just before you go into the rain forest gallery. Importantly, in color and variety, NYBG staff arranged thousands of orchids. Many from Mexico are featured on the Luis Barragán inspired yellow lattice fence designs that are perfect for growing the particular displays.
The exhibit is so utterly beautiful because it brings Luis Barragán’s renown, minimalist, architectural style to NYBG. According to those who elected to have Barragán as this year’s featured artist of the orchid show, Barragán was highly influential in defining Mexican modernist architecture. He adapted international trends using what was at hand in Mexico, suffusing Mexican culture and style with international ideas. His achitecture employed organic textures, vibrant cultural hues and native Mexican plants like cactus, agave and other succulents.
Look for the accompanying signage to understand how Luis Barragán’s designs meld with the unique orchids chosen for the yellow lattice fences (Carole Di Tosti)
In the rotunda, magic and contrast
Barragán was able to master balancing contrasting elements: splashes of color pop against neutrals. Geometric shapes cast dramatic shadows across starkly hued vibrant walls. Clean lines emerge and strike against the circular shapes of lava rocks and prickly desert plants.
Check out the succulents which provide a curious and striking contrast to the exotic, luxuriant orchids attached to various walled structures, and lattice fences. The effect of the plantings encourages otherworldly, mesmerizing visuals.
It is vital to remember that Mexico has a wide range of ecosystems that contain 10-12 percent of the world’s botanical species and their accompanying animal species. Mexico is one of the largest biodiversity hotspots on Earth. Additionally, it includes more than 1,300 orchid species, about 40 percent of which are endemic. In other words, they are not found anywhere else on the planet.
Walking through the galleries, note these native plants from Mexico and the surrounding plantings that feature the stunning orchids that are companion pieces to the walls and the fantasy blue tree in the rotunda. It is a multi-faceted display which is non pareil. Also, check out the water features which are reminiscent of the cooling fountains throughout Mexico City and smaller cities in Barragán’s beloved homeland.
Numerous designs include a predominance of Moth orchids (phalaenopsis) in the large Barragán inspired structures. These are present especially in the Palms of the World Gallery, the rotunda and the walkway gallery, whose distance perspective is absolutely stunning.
The walkway gallery with stunning perspectives
On your visit, make sure to stand with your back to the exit door of the Palms of the World Gallery and look toward the rotunda. As you look through the vistas of the diminishing rectangular walls of orchids, the combined effect will take your breath away.
One reason why you will see phalaenopsis in the large, spectacular displays is because they are hardier and last longer, looking vital and robust. Phalaenopsis maintain their blooms with proper care for more than a few weeks until they get dreary and droopy. NYBG staff continually replace orchids that have moved past their prime. Indeed, when I visited during the press preview, Marc Hachadourin was speaking with staff to insure that orchids and their plantings looked fresh and vibrant. He suggested that staff check places here and there which needed some attention.
The 22nd orchid show, as previous shows have done, showcases diverse ecosystems where orchids make their home. Even in the desert gallery with the cacti and succulents featured in this show because of their relationship to Mexican environs, you will see that NYBG has an orchid that lives in the dry terrain of the desert. However, that orchid may not be blooming for you to see during this time in the season.
In one of the galleries where there were benches, I noted that visitors on Members Day crowded to sit and take in the glorious sights. They so enjoyed the serene and peaceful setting of the dazzling orchids, hanging vines, fountain splashing water and tropical beauty that created a magical world. They were loathe to leave and move on to the other galleries. As happens with the annual orchid show, members made sure to take their time to appreciate the exotic, ethereal orchid wonders.
ORCHID NIGHTS
This magic can be experienced all throughout the exhibition various days and night and in different venues in a marvelous celebration of Mexico’s extensive botanical history. For example, on select evenings, Orchid Nights bring the happy beats of cumbia music, with cumbia sonidea dance parties led by a DJ and professional dancers.
Come to experience the party atmosphere of traditional tracks and modern influences that create an immersive dance experience. DJ hellotones, “El Hijo de PueblaYork,”is Bronx-born and at the forefront of a cultural renaissance that uplifts the Mexican diaspora in New York City.
Uplifted is the cumbia genre. Mark Saldana, a.k.a. Coolmarx, born and raised in Queens and based in Brooklyn, embraces variations of cumbia in his community-based dance lessons. These include cumbia colombiana, ecuatoriana, peruana, and mexicana.
Orchid Nights feature music and dancing, cash bars and food (lite bites) for purchase for adults 21 and over. Experience the energy and exuberance carried from the exhibit to the appreciation of all things Mexican. Select evenings are February 22; March 8, 25, 22 and 29; April 5, 12, 18, 19, 25, 26.
Photography Exhibit by Mexican-American Visual Artist Martirene Alcantara.
Check out the LuEsther T. Mertz Library to see how the artist captures the essence of Luis Barragán’s vibrantly colorful and geometrical works.
For additional programming go to https://www.nybg.org/event/the-orchid-show-mexican-modernism/
‘Babe,’ Theater Review: Marisa Tomei, Rocking Through to the Next Phase
Babe
Can people change? Or do they just flip their perspectives and deceive themselves to believe they’re “evolving?” In the New Group presentation of Babe, written by Jessica Goldberg, directed by Scott Elliott, Abigail (Marisa Tomei), is Gus’ (Arliss Howard), invaluable collaborator in the music industry. The comedy/drama focuses on a number of current issues using Abby and Gus’ relationship as a focal point to explore the landscape of shifting political correctness, power dynamics, generational conflicts, delayed self-actualization, and more. With original music by the trio BETTY, Babe runs approximately 85 minutes with no intermission at the Signature Center until December 22nd.
Treading lightly on Gus’ rocky ground, Abby has been instrumental in maintaining their successful, collegial relationship for thirty-two years, though at a steep, personal price. She hasn’t acknowledged the sacrifice to herself or been inspired to make a change until the confident, twenty-nine year old, Katherine, interviews with Gus, while Abby monitors their conversation and tries to give him clues when to end his political incorrectness. Katherine’s poise and forward attitude develops during the play as the catalyst which ignites a fire that turns into a conflagration between Gus, Abby and Katherine by the conclusion.
Tomei’s astute Abby is sensitive and insightful
Tomei’s astute Abby provides the sensitivity and insight into the zeitgeist that electrifies fans and brings in the gold records, a number of which hang on the walls of Gus’s chic office (sleek, versatile set design by Derek McLane). The producing legend now in his 60s, but fronting his hip, “with-it” ethos in his tight, black pants, chains, stylized beret, and black leather jacket (Jeff Mahshie, costume design), is at “the top of his game,”and on a down-hill slide, indicated by the sensitivity-training Abby references he has had to withstand. We learn it has been ordered by patriarchal, music company head Bob, who also needs to correct himself, but is powerful enough not to. The hope is with Abby’s continual guidance, and the training, Gus’ boorish, self-absorbed, toxic maleness and unrestrained egotism, encouraged at the company by the other men in the past, will refine. Not a chance, as old dogs refuse to learn new tricks.
As groundbreaking, protective and vital as Abby has been to Gus, the two A & R reps, who have discovered and fashioned some of the most successful solo artists in the business, are not equal in stature, success or monetary rewards. Abby’s discovery of Kat Wonder epitomizes these disparities between her boss Gus, and her, as his second. The only woman in the company for years, Abby suffered through the vulgar and abusive patriarchy, a fact she admits late in the play. To her credit, she managed to gain Gus and the others’ respect and esteem. They keep her around because, as Gus suggests, they think she is like them. We learn by degrees that this is because she is silent and as apparently sedate as her bland, grey pants, white top and black jacket. She is unobtrusive and remains professional, the perfect “Girl Friday,” who allows them to “let it all hang out,” without judging their behavior or making them feel like pigs.
Abby is shut out of receiving credit for her sterling efforts
For her pains to participate, Abby didn’t receive credit on any of the Kat Wonder albums, an “invisible” co-producer. Nor did she share in the spoils as Gus did with global residences and a townhouse he forces the staff to meet in at his convenience, instead of the conference room.
However, ignoring Gus as “all that,” Katherine conflicts with his philosophy, his pronouncements, his ideas. If opposites attract, these two are an exception. Gus sees Katherine’s cultural approaches as pretentious and immaterial (vegan he is not). Katherine is gently oppositional as she pitches herself, her education and background. Interestingly, Katherine sees Abby as a hero to admire. In the initial meet-up, Katherine recognizes Abby from a photo Abby appears in with phenom of the time, “Kat Wonder” at CBGB.Admiring Abby and fawning over her after the interview, Katherine tells Abby that she has been her inspiration to get into the business and wanted to be her.
As obnoxious as Katherine’s forward presumptuousness is, her confidence and appearance remind Abby of Kat Wonder, whose wild grace and energy haunts her throughout the play. Kat appears in her imagination in flashbacks at varying, crucial turning points, with Gracie McGraw doubling for Kat Wonder. These memories of their time together direct Abby toward self-realization and an eventual confrontation with Gus about his unjust treatment of her. This is obviously a painful realization which Abby eventually allows, despite acknowledging Gus’ platonic love, and respect. His concern for her is apparent when he sits with her during a very uncomfortable chemo treatment for her breast cancer.
Katherine visits Abby in an unusual get-together
After Katherine again attempts to rise in the company in another interaction with Gus, she visits Abby at her apartment (McLane’s set design again shines in the transition from Gus’ office to Abby’s apartment and back). They listen to music and Katherine asks Abby probing questions. Then they rock out to music and she dances with Abby, at which point Katherine pushes herself on Abby. Abby is forced to rebuff her because any relationship between them is inappropriate. Nevertheless, this trigger, Goldberg implies, impacts Abby. Abby’s remembrance of her relationship with Kat brings her into a deepening realization of herself because of her experiences, including feeling responsible for Kat Wonder’s death, and being shut out of the glory of notoriety as producer who discovered grunge-rocker Kat.
Abby’s realizations about what she has allowed emotionally, which may have contributed to her physical illness and stress, coupled with a twist that Katherine generates, bring about a surprising conclusion. However, Abby’s response to the final events is the most crucial and important. Maybe it is possible in one’s middle age to forge a new path and become one’s own self-proclaimed star.
The ensemble melds with authenticity and flair
The actors convey their characters with spot-on authenticity, aptly shepherded by Elliot’s direction. Arliss Howard manages to break through Gus’ character with a winning charm and matter-of-factness, which throws dust in the audience’s eyes, even after Katherine corrects his back-handed compliment of her as a “smart girl.” Marisa Tomei as Abby is imminently watchable and versatile as she moves from quiet restraint, to the throes of physical and emotional suffering. The development and culmination of her rage and satisfying expression of it in rocking-out with Kat Wonder is powerful especially at the conclusion. As always Tomei gives it the fullness of her talent, rounding out the Abby’s humanity despite Goldberg’s thin characterization.
Gracie McGraw’s portrayal of Kat Wonder, the 1990s grunge rocker who embodied “centuries of female rage,” before she self-destructed is too brief, perhaps. Much is suggested in Kat’s and Abby’s relationship, but remains opaque. However, we do get to see McGraw’s Kat cut loose. And the memory is so alive and vibrant, it encourages Tomei’s Abby to be her own rock-star, wailing out her repressed rage by the conclusion of Babe. And the women in the audience wail with her, especially now, after the election.
Babe covers many interesting points. To what extent has music been egregiously shaped by the current technologies? What damage has been done as the music and entertainment industry, hypocritically shaped by cultural politics, only creates artificial boundaries on the surface that don’t penetrate the noxious back room parties and behaviors which have given rise to worse abuses? Another issue defines the difficulties of compromise and corruption which spans every institution, every industry. To be a part, one has to be complicit, and then be satisfied with less of a reward because others hold the power and money and make up the rules. Babe scratches the surface and leaves food for thought. The performances are noteworthy and should be seen.
Kudos to the creatives not mentioned before which include Cha See (lighting design), Jessica Paz (sound design), Matthew Armentrout (hair and wig design), and not enough of BETTY’S original music.
Babe runs 85 minutes with no intermission at the Signature Center.
‘The Blood Quilt,’ Threading an Ancestral Masterpiece of Hope
The Blood Quilt
In her ambitious layering of the story of four half-sisters who gather to finally lay to rest their recently deceased mother, Katori Hall, with astute direction by Lileana Blain-Cruz, focuses on complex family dynamics, jealousies, misunderstandings and secrets. The confluence of emotions roil the souls of each sister and a teenage niece, paralleling the stormy seas which crash waves onto the setting, Kwemera Island, Georgia. The culmination of fiery anger, pain and sadness releases in the rituals of quilting and the soul healing of family connections in mysticism, dance and song.
By the conclusion of the two-act drama, currently at LCT’s Mitzie E. Newhouse until December 29, we know the fabric of each of the sister’s lives. As a result we thrill with them when they are able to reconcile their inner wounds and cast them into the sea. It is in the waters fronting the small country cabin they call home, where ancestors have been buried in a symbolic tradition that the eldest sister Clementine speaks of with power, “We all came from the water and we all must return.”
The characters are the patchworks that make up the family masterpiece
Much of the beauty of Hall’s drama, laced with comedic elements, comes from her precise characterizations of the disparate sisters who share the same mother but have different fathers. They are the patchworks that make up the last quilted masterpiece that their mother designed and they gather to finish.
Clementine, Gio, Amber
Clementine (Crystal Dickinson), is the eldest, who lives in the incredible ancestral home. Adam Rigg’s set design hums with authenticity, warmth and life. The cabin is decorated with generational family quilts that cover walls and the balcony railing, each colorful, individual, symbolic. Family ownership of the “chic” cabin with the sea in its front yard is in jeopardy because of unpaid taxes which their mother ignored, while keeping her delinquency a secret from her children.
Clementine, who lives there and became caretaker of their dying mother, best knows the rituals of their Jernigan ancestors. A root worker of potions and spells, she speaks Geechee (from their Gullah Geechee heritage), and emotionally archives their legacy, back to the first slave ancestors that lived and worked on the plantations in the area. She is a master of the rituals and celebration of their heritage through quilting which they practice yearly under her direction. This summer when the play opens, the sisters and their niece Zambia (Mirirai), gather together to complete the last quilt their dying mother/grandmother designed, as they symbolically release her to another plane of existence.
Gio (Adrienne C. Moore), is the second oldest, a roughly hewn, hard drinking, Mississippi cop, who is resentful and jealous of her youngest sister Amber (Lauren E. Banks). Gio’s rancor runs deep because of a traumatic, covert incident unbeknownst to Amber but related to Amber’s father that happened when Gio was a teenager. Sensitive to her own misery, burying hurts from her divisive relationship with their mother who abused her, Gio’s moods, aided by alcohol, swing widely as she peppers them with spicey swearing and insults directed mostly at youngest sister Amber.
Amber is the beauty and reputed favorite of their mother because of her accomplishments. She went to an Ivy league college and eventually becomes an entertainment lawyer of means. Because she missed the last three summers of their quilting ritual, and their mother’s funeral service, her estrangement from her sisters and the difference between her lifestyle and theirs is apparent.
Despite Gio and Clementine’s “guilting” her for not coming to the funeral, we discover Amber was emotionally the closest to her mother. She paid for her cancer treatments, phoned her often and even assisted the family after she left the homestead for California. In spite of their geographical and emotional separation, she paid for her sisters’ needs when they asked her, and especially pays for niece Zambia’s tuition in a private school.
Zambia and Cassan
It is Zambia who is the linchpin of the wayward, patchwork family that hangs together by a slender thread as each sister expels her angst and self-recrimination to each other. However, Hall uses Zambia and her mother, the quiet nurse Cassan (Susan Kelechi Watson), who is the closest to Amber, to round out the backstory with Zambia’s questions. Zambia and peacemaker Clementine move along the arc of development which settles upon two issues. How will they pay off the tax liens against the house, and who inherits the quilts, (pricey relics which are cultural artifacts of a rich historical past), the property and the cabin contents?
These questions are answered as Hall unspools each sister’s interior wounds via their relationships, revealing their individual portrait of their complicated, intriguing mother. All clarifies and we are brought to the edge of unresolved personal traumas that threaten to further destroy their lives emotionally, physically, spiritually. However, it is the act of quilting together that we view the whole with the sisters contributing to the corners of the ancestral masterpiece that unifies them with a familial love and redemption from past harm effected by their mother, each other and most importantly themselves.
Mystical elements
Hall’s first act languishes in exposition until the conflicts among the sisters erupt. The details of the quilting process fascinate and are well integrated into the dialogue. The symbolism and metaphor of the stormy souls aligned with the threatening hurricane’s thunder and lightening effected by Jiyoun Chang (lighting design), Palmer Hefferan (sound design), and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew (projections), mirror how the natural world, material world and spiritual world often collide until there is a movement toward establishing peace and reconciliation.
Blain-Cruz does a smashing job referencing the impact the spiritual plane of existence has upon the material life of the sisters which is sensationally wrought in Act 2 toward the conclusion when they attempt to place the finished quilt on their mother’s bed and a mystical experience occurs. It is then when Zambia becomes the channel between the past spiritual legacy and the present and the pathway toward healing is realized.
The costumes by Montana Lvi Blanco pointedly imbue each of the sisters and Zambia’s changing “trends,” enhancing Hall and Blain-Cruz’s vision of this family to precisely tie in their characters culturally and psychically. Importantly, the ensemble works together to create a family drama with which we can identify and empathize. Their acting is superb. Perhaps the Geechee deserves a translation either in the program or elsewhere. I was benefited by a copy of the script. Vitally, the different language serves to remind the audience of the African diaspora that beleaguered the Jernigan ancestors-slaves, and unified them as they prospered in a hostile, alien world.
The Blood Quilt
See The Blood Quilt, which runs two hours forty-five minutes with one intermission at LCT, the Mitzi E. Newhouse, until December 29th.
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Ashland Independent FF, ‘The Long Long Night,’and Panel with Bruce Campbell on Indie Films
Revisiting The Long Long Night at Ashland Independent FF
I reviewed The Long Long Night when it premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2023, which you can read at this link, Tribeca Film Festival Review: ‘The Long Long Night’ With Mark Duplass and Barret O’Brien. I thought the indie series slated for TV, was superbly acted by New Orleans’ natives, the inimitable, Emmy award-winning Mark Duplass, and writer/director Barret O’Brien, who wrote and directed the clever, humorous episodic.
The six episodes of The Long Long Night coalesce around issues of our time in a send up of “white bros” attempting to negotiate a fine balance between screaming into the void of “political correctness,” living an “intentioned” life, and hammering macho male toxicity that uplifts Joe Rogan’s “all that” ethos. In a brilliant and sardonic twist to the “shining white maleness,” Emmy-nominated actor, Karen Pittman, guest stars in a hilarious episode. Her contribution is a counterpoint of “female, Black intention” that is not to be missed.
“Future of Indie Filmmaking” (Rory O’Neill Schmitt)
After the 2023 Tribeca premiere, the Duplass Brothers Productions series screened in 2024 at Ashland Independent Film Festival October 2024. Before the screening a panel discussion on the
“Future of Indie Filmmaking” was held. Present at the discussion were actor and writer Barret O’Brien and Rory O’Neill Schmitt, producer of The Long Long Night. Joining her were director, Gary Lundgren, as well as Oregon-based producer Annie Lundgren (Above the Trees).
Bruce Campbell
Adding his knowledge, experience and expertise was special guest actor, producer, screenwriter and director Bruce Campbell. Bruce is most widely recognized for originating the role of protagonist Ash Williams in the cult classic, supernatural horror film The Evil Dead (1981). The film has been cited as among the greatest horror films of all time, and Ash Williams has become a cultural icon. From its success, subsequent films blossomed into a media franchise including a TV series, video games and comic books. Campbell, appeared in the films and is also noted for other work including USA Network series, Burn Notice (2007–2013). For the gift that keeps on giving, Campbell reprised his role as Ash for the Starz series Ash vs. Evil Dead (2015-2018). Campbell is currently finalizing his latest film, Ernie and Emma, which was filmed in Oregon.
During the panel filmmakers discussed how to create a successful indie film project, making vital creative choices despite limited resources. Panelists also discussed the importance of using maverick approaches to independent film production and distribution.
Follow-up interview between Rory Schmitt and Bruce Campbell
In a follow-up discussion Rory O’Neill Schmitt honed in on specific questions for Bruce Campbell about the future of independent film. His advice for up-and-coming filmmakers was based on his experiences, including those working with Evil Dead writer/director Sam Rami. Campbell was with Rami at the outset in 1978 working on Within the Woods, the short film which became the Evil Dead. Campbell contributed his creativity and efforts in subsequent films and the TV series in the franchise.
Rory Schmitt (RS): What do you think is the future of indie film?
Bruce Campbell (BC): The future is bright, as long as filmmakers are willing to work outside the studio box and often finance their own work. Independent movies have never been easier because of technology and the amount of platforms to exhibit the finished product.
Rory Schmitt (RS): What continues to draw you to making independent films? What do you feel audiences like about independent films?
Bruce Campbell (BC): I am drawn to independent films because they are the closest to being a single view, a single vision, whereas studio flicks are often driven by popularity. Stories can be more daring and original with indies because studio films feel the need to appeal to a wider audience, so the stories have to be more bland and “appealing.” Indie films can be way more daring.
Rory Schmitt (RS): Can you tell us about your upcoming feature film, Ernie and Emma (shot in Oregon)?
Bruce Campbell (BC): Ernie and Emma is a bittersweet tale of pear salesman Ernie Tyler who is entrusted with his wife’s ashes after she passes. As an executive secretary of a sawmill for 25 years, she has very specific ideas of what to do with her remains – not all of it warm and fuzzy nostalgia. I describe it as “Hallmark with swearing,” a sunrise story where ultimately Ernie learns to move on – with a little help from his wife.
Rory Schmitt (RS): Do you have any advice for emerging filmmakers?
Bruce Campbell (BC): If you avoid the following three systems, you will come out ahead in life: the legal system, the medical system, and the studio system. As a filmmaker, the only freedom you’ll have is owning/controlling your negative. Also, don’t be ignorant about business – learn the ins and outs of contracts, partnerships and financing, domestic and international. Educate yourself!
Look for The Long Long Night, Ernie and Emma and Hysteria (another project with Bruce Campbell on Peacock).
‘Shit. Meet. Fan.’ Neil Patrick Harris, Debra Messing, Jane Krakowski in a Scatalogical Romp Through Coupledom
Shit. Meet. Fan.
It’s an intriguing title. Stepping into the audience seating area of the MCC Theater, what’s not to like? Clint Ramos’ scenic design sparkles as the audience gazes upon Eve (Jane Krakowski), and Rodger’s (Neil Patrick Harris), upscale condo in Dumbo, NYC, a shimmering spectacle of Manhattan lights twinkling in the distance, visible through windows on the second floor which includes a “must-have” telescope on an “elegant” terrace.
From the title Shit. Meet. Fan. to the conclusion, the production screams with sardonic hilarity. Thematically, playwright Robert O’Hara presents characters who exude the allure of security, prosperity, white privilege and “happiness,” conditions to be envied. Perhaps. However, as the evening unspools on this party night when three couples and odd-Black-man-out, Logan, (Tramell Tillman), gather and have their vicious fun, we note that prosperity without contentment, truth or happiness is anything but “all that.”
The shoe drops at the outset
The shoe drops immediately, as promised in the title, and we are startled into recognition that in the opening scene, “it” is hitting the fan, as mother Eve (Jane Krakowski), confronts daughter, Sam (Genevieve Hannelius), about a box of condoms she found that Sam glibly professes isn’t hers. Though the scene concludes with Mom’s peaceful concession and return of the box to her daughter, the screaming match which paves the daughter’s way to success, is revelatory. In their heated interaction, O’Hara, who also directs, discloses a “hip,” ribald mother and daughter, whose frank rants about having sex are “no big deal,” though mom appears to protest too much for 17 year-old-Sam’s liking.
From then on as the guests arrive, “it” grows more plentiful. The characters fan the room, drink, do cocaine and spray their increasingly toxic, chaotic, mind games and patter to the back row of the audience. By the conclusion the audience is “covered.” It is funny, but not necessarily what we’ve wished for during the 105 minute romp through a tragic waste of humanity. However, O’Hara wishes us to laugh at ourselves as much as at the characters. Their hypocrisy, toxic masculinity, feminine one-up-woman-ship, and misery may be ironically recognizable to those able to afford a ticket to this Off Broadway production.
O’Hara based Shit. Meet. Fan. on the popular 2016 Italian film Perfect Strangers
Based on the 2016 Italian film Perfect Strangers, by Paolo Genovese, in the similar development, Rodger and Eve have invited their couple friends to celebrate the eclipse. The bonds of friendship were formed in college when the four men were in the same fraternity and consider themselves “bros.” They are a hotbed of toxic masculinity, fitting all the stereotypes one loves to despise when they are “under the influence” of drugs and alcohol. The men are TV celebrity heavyweights. Besides Neil Patrick Harris, who is always spot-on in whatever role he acts, the superb actors include Brett (Garret Dillahunt), Frank (Michael Oberholtzer), and the aforementioned Tramell Tillman as Logan.
On the other hand the women are close, but ancillary to the key relationships in this comedy that has a number of thematic twists, especially in O’Hara’s version. Joining Jane Krakowski’s Eve and Genevieve Hannelius as Sam, there are Brett’s wife, Claire (Debra Messing) and Frank’s wife, Hannah (Constance Wu). All reveal comedic perfection. The women circle the wagons when attacked, questioned or prodded by their spouses whose vulgar, women-demeaning, objectifying tales and shared secrets, divide the party among gender lines.
As the eclipse presumably occurs the characters get wild and wooly
As the party progresses and the eclipse occurs, which is more symbolic than visualized since no one really watches, the teeth and nails sharpened for this occasion extend for the vicious “fun,” prompted by Eve. She suggests that they play a “game of phones,” and willfully violate each other’s privacy for each other’s amusement, by publicly reading or putting on speaker every phone text, email or call received for an hour during the evening. For one hour there are no secrets; all the dirty laundry is aired. As each unwillingly gives up their phones because no one protests, they put the “black boxes” that record their lives on a centrally located table ready for exposure and humiliation. After that, the drama and comedy intensifies.
The first to suffer the slings and arrows of shame in front of his “bros” is Frank when Rodger calls him from their unknown landline and breathes heavily into the phone. Hannah, newly married to Frank in the heat of their first year together, is ready to knife out his eye. But Rodger comes down the steps heavily breathing into the phone in a classically delivered, brilliantly funny, Neil Patrick Harris, dead pan moment. It is priceless and one of the biggest laughs in the first half of the production.
The “free-for-all” occurs after Logan receives a call
After that it becomes a free-for-all. Logan receives a phone call from his sister who insists humorously that he take her off speaker so those “white b%$ches” don’t hear “her business.” Censorship and political correctness cloaks are off; it’s expose time. Since there is no spoiler, you’ll just have to see the production to witness how each “bro” is delivered a blow and each spouse is found out to be doing numerous things other than being the sweet, loyal “wifey.”
Here are some clues. There are folks on the down low, alternate sexual preferences, affairs referenced by jewelry purchases, a proposal to throw mama in a nursing home behind sonny-boy’s back and more. O’Hara has pegged the jabbing one liners and jokes trippingly to the rapid-fire comedic rhythms which begin casually at an even pace, then pick up and race into the territory of high farce. Then, when the eclipse ends, all settles into normalcy as if nothing untoward, raw and menacing happened. Such is upscale life among the white privileged and two token persons of color. Oblivion after emergences of poisonous, festering wounds.
Meanwhile, we have the opportunity to peek into the illusions, lies and self-gaslighting of these peculiar and infantile minds that may not evolve beyond what we note as entertained watchers.
O’Hara portrays boorish, unlikable characters
Clearly, O’Hara finds these individuals boorish and craven, especially the white, toxic stereotypical males who make everywhere their preferred locker room, especially out of their wives earshot. The women are the fairer but not gentler sex. Together, we allow that this night of frolicking fun doesn’t happen often. If it did, there would be three divorces on the horizon except for one, perhaps, though Rodger loves his wife Eve, even if he dislikes who she is as they both contemplate divorce. Thematically, O’Hara proves that individuals choose the friends they deserve as they periodically are tortured and tormented by them under the guise of “fun and games” which are anything but.
O’Hara’s creative team in addition to Clint Ramos’ scenic design, includes Sarafina Bush’s costume design, Alex Jainchill’s lighting design, Palmer Hefferan’s sound design, and Cookie Jordan’s hair design. Each of these creatives assists O’Hara’s sardonic vision of these upper brow professionals in their one night of infantilism and terrorism of each other which is perhaps more well deserved than we know.
Shit. Meet. Fan. runs 1 hour forty-five minutes with no intermission at MCC Theater (511 West 52nd Street between 11th and 10th Avenue), until December 15th. See it for the celebrities who are glorious, as O’Hara intentionally tries the audience’s patience with their characters’ crass and vapid immaturity.
‘Tammy Faye,’ Starring Olivier-winner Katie Brayben in a Thematically Charged Musical
Tammy Faye
Tammy Faye, with music by Elton John, lyrics by Jake Shears and book by James Graham stars theater heavyweights Katie Brayben, Christian Borle and Michael Cerveris. All of them are letter perfect in the roles of Tammy Faye Bakker, Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell. Considering that the show is about the rise and fall of the hugely successful PTL Christian network headed up by televangelists Tammy Faye Bakker and Jim Bakker, the production’s chronicle of a complex period in America’s sociopolitical and religious history is ambitious. Currently at the newly renovated Palace Theatre, Tammy Faye runs until December 8th.
For some, the production is hard to swallow. This is unfortunate because its themes are vitally connected to our country. Also, it is a satiric, entertaining new musical whose theatricality coheres in director Rupert Goold’s vision shepherding a fine ensemble and creative technical team. Because I have a familiarity with the Christian evangelical church and, in fact, went to the same church that Jessica Hahn went to during the PTL scandal, and knew and spoke to her, I have a different perspective. Arguably, I may be biased in favor of the musical. That must be considered when reading this review.
With choreography by Lynne Page and Tom Deering’s music supervision, arrangements and additional music, Tammy Faye presents a fascinating picture of individuals who currently are not held in high esteem. Only one comes out on top as James Graham’s book characterizes her and as the phenomenal voice and acting chops of Katie Brayben performs her. Singing from a core of emotion and heart, illustrating Tammy Faye’s trials of faith, Brayben belts out numbers that overshadow the real Tammy Faye’s voice. These high-points in Tammy Faye’s emotional journey include “Empty Hands,” “In My Prime Time,” and “If You Came to See Me Cry.”
Katie Brayben gives a bravura performance
During these dynamic and compelling songs, Brayben’s Tammy Faye reveals the depth and impact of her betrayal by husband Jim Bakker, as she attempts to find a way forward for and by herself. Not to be underestimated, Tammy Faye is a maverick among the Christian women of the church, a portrayal that we see time and again as she speaks out, despite Christian pastors trying to shut her up. Sharing her opinion at a conference with Billy Graham (Mark Evans), in a beginning flashback of “how it all began,” we note her courage at a time when women took a back seat to any form of leadership. Billy Graham encourages her as the new generation of spiritual warriors in front of a patriarchal, oppressive, conservative group of pastors.
From then on we see her emerge despite being dismissed by the pastors who become the hypocritical villains of Tammy Faye and who sadly lead the way for the massive hypocrisy present in the white supremacist leaning evangelical church today. The Falwell types and white supremacist pastors turn a blind eye to the bullying hatreds and criminality of the MAGA movement they undergird in supporting Donald Trump. Trump’s controversial presidency is in his violating the tenets of Christianity and patriotism. Indeed, he is an alleged pedophile consorting with friend Jeffrey Epstein. He is Putin’s asset who has undermined our election processes twice, and most probably cheated and defrauded the American voter to elicit a “win,” in 2024 (see the Mark Thompson Show on YouTube). He adheres to Putin’s guidance regarding NATO, and on a personal note to emphasize his “godliness,” he’s a lying adulterer and admitted sexual predator (the Hollywood access tape), many times over, in cover ups much worse than Jim Bakker ever committed.
Tammy Faye reveals how we got to the current politics of evangelism
Importantly, for those who would understand how the US “got here” with the rise of evangelism and a brand of political Christianity that belies the true tenets of Jesus Christ’s sermon on the mount, and “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Tammy Faye gives a crash course in hypocritical Christianity that is right out of St. Paul’s letters to the hypocritical church in Corinthians I and II. It’s interesting to note that over two thousand years later, nothing changes much. Judgment, criticism and condemnation are alive in the human heart and in venues that are supposed to be uplifting the opposite and preaching Christ’s message of love.
Goold stages the production with scenic designer Bunny Christie’s “Hollywood Square” back screen and other projections (video design by Finn Ross), to emphasize the importance of TV to the rise of global evangelism in the 1970s to the present. When the PTL live program is not being taped with dancers and singers, other scenes reflect the importance of satellite TV in the square/screen motif in which appear the various players. Always present as a backdrop are the TV screens reflected in the grid of boxes strikingly lit by Neil Austin that represent what obsesses the actions of the preachers, the Bakkers and their employees (“Satellite of God”). The electric church was televised globally via satellite and its reach was and is expansive, though the screens became smaller on phones after streaming WiFi.
In its symbolism and its wayward themes of church leaders and politicians making damaging and unconstitutional bedfellows, Tammy Faye does its job perfectly, thanks to its creatives. And for that it has received its due misplaced disgust at a time in our nation when Americans have no more patience for hypocrites, scammers and thieves, especially those who profess “Christianity” and lie, cheat, steal, condemn, oppress, restrict, torment and insult as their brand of fun and sanctimony. Hello, Speaker Mike Johnson, Jim Jordan and JD Vance. Nevertheless, Tammy Faye is a vital musical of the time and should be seen for Elton John’s striking music, its irony in how the hypocrites dance around their own lies, and its themes which are more current than ever.
Graham’s book elucidates a version of PTL worthy of note
Book writer James Graham elucidates a version of what happened with PTL that is worthy of note. Laying the blame on the inability of the Christian Church to be united under the first two commandments that Christ preached (love God, love your neighbor as yourself), Graham reveals how Tammy Faye tried to bring disparate groups together with love, but failed. Additionally, to that point, if Tammy Faye had been part of the back room financial arrangements, the fraudulent situation with Heritage Village might not have gotten completely out of hand (“God’s House/Heritage USA”). Indeed, Heritage Village was Jim Bakker’s idea, and clearly, its idea development was mishandled and mismanaged.
Finally, we note that Jim Bakker, whose feckless leadership causes their collapse when he relinquishes PTL and the TV network to Jerry Falwell. With smiling duplicity and treachery, Falwell promises to help the Bakkers get on their feet again and pay their expenses. Tammy Faye warns Jim not to listen to Falwell whom she has always distrusted and deemed a self-serving, condemnatory, hypocritical preacher of hate. Tammy Faye’s unheeded warning proves correct. With his lies, misinformation and mischaracterizations, Falwell upends any goodness the Bakkers accomplish, defames them publicly, and kicks them out of the Christian fellowship for the “good” of the conservative church and himself.
The difference between preachers and preachers
The book underscores the difference between Tammy Faye and Jim, and the other preachers from conservative churches. Falwell (a dynamic Cerveris), Jimmy Swaggart (Ian Lassiter), Pat Robertson (Andy Taylor) and Marvin Gorman (Max Gordon Moore), demean Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker’s way of bringing people to the Gospel. They tolerate them, believing they will fail and are surprised and shocked at their success. Falwell’s massive ego can’t bear to see another preacher in his sphere of influence doing better than he. Not only does Falwell compete for viewership, he goes on their program and insults them attempting to send a message to church goers that they are not of God.
The turning point comes at the prodding of Ted Turner (Andy Taylor), who is concerned about PTL’s finances plummeting because of overspending. Part of the reason Turner suggests the program needs an uplift is because the love and charisma in Tammy and Jim’s relationship has cooled and viewers sense something is wrong. Even friends Paul Crouch (Nick Bailey) and Jan Crouch (Allison Guinn) warn them. At this point in time Tammy has learned of Jim’s infidelity with Jessica Hahn (Alana Pollard), and though he repeatedly asks for forgiveness, Tammy finds it difficult. Increasingly, she relies on prescription pain medicine to anesthetize herself which staff preacher, John Fletcher (Raymond J. Lee), sometimes gives her.
When Tammy strikes out on her own without Jim to carry a show, she draws greater audience viewership which Ted Turner praises. In a heartfelt satellite interview, she speaks with gay pastor Steve Pieters (Charl Brown), about having AIDS. Her public action is courageous. She hugs Steve and accepts him with love into Christ’s fellowship, an anathema to conservative Christianity which condemns gays and believes AIDS is God’s punishment for their sinful homosexuality.
A meeting sealing the fate of PTL
Falwell and the other ministers have a confidential meeting and Falwell even phones President Ronald Reagan (Ian Lassiter), who never acknowledged or worked to stem the AIDS crisis, despite having a gay son and working with gays when he was an actor. Of course, Reagan’s hypocrisy and need for the evangelical church to endorse him is why he speaks to Falwell. In another inflection point, we see the division between church and state morph into an unholy matrimony of religious politicos washing each other’s hands despite the historically traditional separation between church and state.
Thus, Reagan’s public uplifting of the evangelical community via Falwell and others provokes a sea change in the sociopolitical and cultural direction of the nation. The growing intrusion of religion into politics becomes the foundation of constitutional human rights’ reversals seen today, which are particularly uplifted in MAGA states.
Reagan and conservative evangelism, for the voting block-merging church and state
With Reagan in their corner, conservative religious leadership agrees that PTL is moving in an unGodly direction. Falwell and the other preachers see the Bakkers are headed for disaster and they give them a push when the opportunity arises. For example, they get prominent PTL member John Fletcher to turn on Bakker. He sets up Bakker with Hahn, then leaks information when Falwell threatens to expose him of his “infidelities” with gay men if he doesn’t play ball. Falwell also tips off the Charlotte Observer whose reporter Charles Shepard (Mark Evans), investigates the financial arrangements of PTL and finds them to be indebted and insolvent. The situation boils over in “Don’t Let There Be Light.” Tammy, Jim and Jerry recognize their shameful actions and pray that they will not be exposed.
Of course, they are all exposed and vilified by the press and other church leaders. One humorous scene involves Pope John Paul II (Andy Taylor), Mormon leader (Thomas S. Monson), and Archbishop of Canterbury (Ian Lassiter), staged in window squares raised to a higher level above the stage ironically. From their lofty positions, they comment on the troubles of the “electric church” and the Bakkers. Meanwhile, elements of the same unloving hypocrisy are present in their congregations. The pederasty, pedophilia and horrific abuse of the Catholic church is yet to be revealed by the Boston Globe and is still being revealed in the Irish Madeline Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. Certainly, the church memberships fall off in the Mormon Church and the Church of England. Congregants loathe the leaderships’ hypocrisy.
Acting hate not love
Falwell, Robertson, et. al., end up backbiting each other with hate and jealously. A desperate Bakker, beyond Tammy’s counsel, gives the PTL reigns to Falwell after Tammy learns Jim paid hush money to Jessica Hahn. The scandal widens the more the Bakkers give interviews to defend their positions. In Falwell’s hands, PTL goes bankrupt and is closed down. Tammy divorces Jim and other pastors’ infidelities are exposed as Bakker ends up in jail (“Look How Far We’ve Fallen”). The biased judge ridiculously throws the book at Bakker when murderers are even given lighter sentences.
Eventually, the conservative hypocritical Falwell and Pat Robertson follow in Reagan’s footsteps and run for the presidency. Indeed, their great piety is a sham as they attempt to vault their notoriety to the White House and reap untold rewards, but fail. Unlike Donald Trump who has defrauded his way there again with the treasonous help of various conservative think tanks, True the Vote’s voter challenges in Georgia, voter suppression in swing states, Elon Musk and Putin, Falwell and Robertson’s reputations preceded them and they were rejected as candidates.
Nevertheless, the evangelical Christian movement had an established foothold in politics. The country then wasn’t ready for a conservative, religious president. Now, the MAGAS, building on white supremacists and overturning Reagan’s legacy, have evolved to the point that with Putin’s foreign interference paying influencers to promote misinformation, Trump has become their acceptable, religious MAGA god/autocrat. Despite what Trump/MAGAS/Putin and a complicit press would have voters and the world believe that Trump received “great” voting support, over half the voting public of both parties doesn’t agree with MAGA/Trump’s religious, conservative, oppressive and autocratically unconstitutional mandates. Most probably, if there had been a recount, the results would have revealed otherwise. Better to let sleeping MAGAS, Trump, Putin and others lie.
Favorable reviews in London, bad timing in Manhattan
The show, which originated two years ago at the Almeida Theater in London, received favorable reviews. Opening here at the time it did proved unfortunate because of its subject, a conservative evangelical church, now associated with Donald Trump: a twice impeached, three times indicted, one time convicted criminal, who attempted to overthrow the 2020 election with some of their help via militias and the support of Clarence Thomas’ wife Ginni Thomas.
From Reagan and Falwell and PTL televangelism to the racist, xenophobic, misogynist, MAGA Christianity of today, the conservative brand of evangelicalism has blossomed into “acceptable” white supremacy, oppression, hellfire condemnation and tyranny toward other religions and people of color. Is there any wonder that Tammy Faye, opening around the 2024 election, is a brutal and noisome reminder of what lies, misinformation and money do for those in power, who stir up hate, work unconstitutionally and divide even their own believers from patriotism and the love of God?
Important takeaways
Positive takeaways are the show’s performances which are sterling, especially the leads. The technical team under Goold’s guidance manifests his vision for the production. The book glosses over a complicated series of events (one of which never shows the other side of Jessica Hahn’s professed “virginal innocence,” nor the role her Long Island pastor played in strong-arming the PTL board to pay her hush money).
However, the production does manage to portray one individual, regardless of her psychic flaws, who preached love instead of messages of hate and condemnation (“See you in Heaven”). Tammy Faye did this at a time when standing up for individuals with AIDS was anathema to the general public, let alone Christians. Hers was a courageous, heartfelt stance as an independent Christian church woman. who, alone, went out on a limb to mirror God’s love and show how Christians were supposed to support and help one another.
I heartily recommend this production, especially for those who are interested to understand how evangelism became involved with our politics, despite the supposed separation of church and state. Tammy Faye runs at the Palace Theatre with one intermission until December 8th. https://tammyfayebway.com/?gad_source=1 It’s a shame it is closing so soon.
The Marvelous New York Botanical Garden ‘Holiday Train Show®’
All Aboard!
Now in it’s 33rd year, the magical NYBG Holiday Train Show® has arrived. This most thrilling and fun experience for families and friends runs from Saturday, November 16, 2024 through Monday, January 20, 2025.
Enid A. Haupt Conservatory exhibits
NYC favorite the Holiday Train Show® boasts G-scaele model trains zipping, racing and rollicking through galleries of the Enid Haupt Conservatory amidst gorgeous, rainbow hued plantings set to complement New York landmarks in miniature from NYC’s five boroughs to historic places in the beautiful Hudson Valley.
These replicas (i.e. Poe Cottage, the Park Avenue Armory, LuEsther T. Mertz Library, Cooper Union) are wonders in themselves because Applied Imagination’s creative team constructs them entirely of plant parts.
Practically every train type is represented from1880s American steam engines to modern freight and passenger trains with diesel engines, to trolleys and whimsical cars.
Woodland outdoor display
The woodland outdoor display created last year is an enchantment for all.
Trains chug around whimsical mountain structures on the ground and high above on trestles so that high visitors may walk under the bridges. The landscape is filled with forest animals and creatures, winter-interest plants and marvelous fungi.
All these and more enchantments unfold on the conservatory Lawn begging to be seen, like the owl perched above looking down on laughing children and smiling adults.
Events
NYBG and Tea Around Town
This year NYBG has partnered with Tea Around Town, a sightseeing tour bus that serves afternoon tea and brings the excitement and delight of the season from Manhattan to NYBG. First, join Tea Around Town’s festive journey to NYBG’s Holiday Train Show®. On the bus you will enjoy special teas, delicious treats and merriment served by elves aboard a beautifully decorated bus that celebrates the season. Disembarking from the bus, you will walk through the Holiday Train Show exhibits appreciating the craftsmanship and skill of Applied Imagination’s ingenious team and the clever botanical designs of the NYBG staff.
The Tea Around Town bus will run Tuesdays in November and December, and Thursdays and Sundays from November 19th through January 20th. The bus departs from Central Park South at 11 a.m. and leaves NYBG at 3 p.m. to return to Manhattan. Also, in November and December, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1-2:30 p.m., Santa and an elf will be on-site in NYBG’s Leon Levy Visitor Center for photo opportunities with visitors.
Holiday Train Nights
Everyone enjoys another favorite event of the NYBG Holiday Train Show® at Holiday Train Nights. There is nothing more mysterious and beautiful as the glowing colored lights in the evenings where another atmosphere takes over the Garden landscape and inside the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. Viewing the replicas twinkling with lighting from within and without. Enjoy listening or bopping along with holiday classics and Christmas pop favorites sung by performers in the Locomotive Lounge of the Visitor Center. Enjoy sweet and savory bites, spiked cider cocktails and mocktails, and hands-on gingerbread decorating your own for purchase.
Holiday Train Nights take place on 16 select evenings. Ten of them are for adults only from 7 to 10 p.m. Six of the evenings are for all ages from 6 to 9 p.m. Holiday Train Nights are ticketed through NYBG’s presenting partner Fever.
For adults
During adult Holiday Train Nights adults age 21 and older will be able to view the Train Show under an entirely different evening aura. There is also festive food and curated cocktails available for purchase. The dates are as follows: Saturday, Novembr 21; Friday, November 29; Saturday, November 30; Saturday, December 7; Friday, December 13; Saturday, December 14; Saturday, Decembr 28; Saturday, January 4; Saturday, January 11; and Saturday, January 18.
For families
All ages can enjoy Holiday Train Nights with hands-on activities on the following dates: Friday, December 20; Saturday, December 21′ Sunday, December 22; Monday, December 23; Thursday, December 26; and Friday, December 27.
More coverage will appear on this blog about NYBG Holiday Train Show. For additional information visit https://www.nybg.org/
‘Sunset Blvd.’ A Thrilling, Edgy, Mega Spectacle, Starring Nicole Scherzinger
If you have seen A Doll’s House with Jessica Chastain, Cyrano de Bergerac with James McAvoy or Betrayal with Tom Hiddleston, you know that director Jamie Lloyd’s dramatic approach reimagining the classics is to present an unencumbered stage and few or no props. The reason is paramount. He focuses his vision on the actors’ characters, and their steely, maverick interpretation of the playwright’s dialogue. The actors and dialogue are the theatricality of the drama. Why include extraneous distractions? Using this elusively spare almost spiritual approach which is archetypal and happens in what appears to be pure, electrified consciousness, Lloyd is a throwback to ancient Greek theater, which used few if any sets. As such Lloyd’s reimagining of the magnificently performed, uncluttered, cinematically live spectacle, Sunset Blvd., currently at the St. James Theatre in its second Broadway revival, is a marvel to behold.
The original production, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and book and lyrics by Don Black and Christoper Hampton, opened in 1993. Lloyd’s reimagining configures the musical on a predominately black “box” stage that appears cavernous. Soutra Gilmour’s black costumes (with white accessories, belts, Joe’s T-shirt), are carried through to the black backdrop whose projection, at times, is white light against which the actors/dancers gyrate and dance as shadow figures. The white mists and clouds of fog ethereally appear white in contrast to the background. There is one stark exception of blinding color (no spoiler, sorry), toward the last scene of the musical.
As a result, David Cullen and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s orchestrations under Alan Williams’ music supervision/direction sonorously played by the 19 piece orchestra are a standout. The gorgeous, memorable music is a character in itself, one of the points of Lloyd’s stunning production. From the overture to the heightened conclusion, the music carries tragedy lushly, operatically in a fascinating accompaniment/contrast to Lloyd’s spare, highly stylized rendering. On stage there are just the actors, their figures, voices and looming faces, which shine or spook shadows, sinister in the dim light. The immense faces of the main four characters in black and white, like the silent film stars, gleam or horrify. The surreal, hallucinatory effect even abides when the actors/dancers stand in the spotlights, or the towers of LED lights, or huddle in a dance circle as the cinematographer films close-ups thanks to Nathan Amzi & Joe Ransom.
The symbolism of the staging and selection of colors is open to many interpretations, including a ghostly haunting of the of the Hollywood era, which still impacts us today, persisting with some of the most duplicitous values, memes, behaviors and abuses. These are connected to the billion dollar weight loss industry, the medical (surgery and big pharma) industry, the fashion and cosmetics industry, and more. The noxious values referenced include ageism, appearance fascism (unreal concepts of beauty and fashion for women that promote pain, chemical dependence and prejudice), voracious, self-annihilating ambitions, sexual youth exploitation, sexual predation and much more. Lloyd’s stark and austere iteration of Sunset Blvd. promotes such themes that the dazzling full bore set design, etc., drains of meaning via distraction and misdirection.
The narrative is the same. Down and out studio writer Joe Gillis (the exceptional, winsome, authentic Tom Francis), to avoid goons sent to repossess his car, escapes onto the grounds of a dilapidated mansion on the famed Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. In the driveway, manservant Max (an incredible David Thaxton), mistakes him for someone else and invites him inside. There, Joe meets Norma Desmond (the divine hellion Nicole Scherzinger), a faded icon of the silent screen era in the throes of mania. Norma is “lovingly,” stoked by Max into the delusion that thousands of fans want her to return to her glory days in a new film.
When Norma hears Joe is a screenwriter, like a spider with a fly, she traps him to finish her “come-back” film (she wrote the screenplay). Thus, for champagne, caviar and the thrill of it, he stays, lured by the promise of money, the glamour of old Hollywood and the avoidance of debt collectors. As Norma grows dependent on Joe as her gigolo, he ends up falling for the lovely, unadulterated Betty (the fine, sweet, Grace Hodgett Young). Behind Norma’s back, Joe and Betty collaborate on a script and fall in love. The lies and romance end with the tragic truth.
The seemingly empty stage, tower of lights, spotlights for Norma and live streaming camera closeups projected on the back wall screen, Lloyd is the antithesis of the average director, whose vision focuses on lustrous set design and elaborate costumes and props. In Lloyd’s consciousness-raising universe such gaudy commercialism gaslights away from revealing anything novel or intriguing in the meat of this play’s themes or characterizations, which ultimately excoriate the culture with social commentary.
Soutra Gilmour’s set design and related costumes unmistakenly lay bare the narcissism and twisted values the entertainment industry promotes so that we see the destructive results in the interplay between Max, the indulged Norma and the hapless victim Joe, who tries a scam of his own which fails. Ultimately, all is psychosis, illusions and broken dreams turned into black hallucinations. For a parallel, current example, think of an indulged politician who wears bad make-up that under hot lights makes his face melt like Silly Putty. Again, hallucinations, psychosis, narcissism, egotism that is dangerous and ravenous and never satisfied. Such is the stuff insufferable divas are made of.
In the portrayal of the former Hollywood icon who has faded from the public spotlight and become a recluse, in scene three, when Lloyd presents Gillis meeting Desmond, she is the schizoid goddess and Gorgon radiating her own sunlight via Jack Knowles’ powerful, gleaming spotlights and shimmering lighting design, the only “being” worth looking at against the black background. Throughout, Norma possesses the cavernous space of the stage in surround-view black with white mists jetting out from stage left or right, forming symbolic clouds and fog representing her imagined “divinity” and her confused, fogged-over, abject psychotic hallucinations.
Whenever she “brings forth” from her consciousness “on high,” and empowers her fantasies in song, Lloyd has Knowles bathe her lovingly in a vibrant spotlight. When she emerges from the depths of her bleak mansion of sorrows to sing, “Surrender,” “With One Look,” and later, “As if We Never Said Goodbye,” she brings down the house with a standing ovation. Indeed, Norma Desmond is an immortal. She worships her imagined self at her alter of tribute. Her mammoth consciousness and ethos which Max (Thaxton’s incredible, equally magnificent, hollow-eyed, ghoulish, former husband and current director/keeper of her flaming divinity), perpetuates is key in the tragedy that is her life.
Importantly, Lloyd’s maverick, spare, stripped down approach gives the actors free reign to dig out the core of their characters and materialize their truth. In this musical, the black “empty” stage allows Scherzinger’s Norma to be the primal, raging diva who “will not surrender” to oblivion and death. She is a a god. Like the Gorgon Medusa, she will kill you as soon as look at you. And don’t anyone tell her the truth that she is a “has been.”
Of course, Joe does this out of a kindness that she refuses to accept. Without the black and white design, and cinematic streaming, a nod to the silent screen, which allows us to focus on faces, performances, magnified gestures and looks, the meanings become unremarkable. The theme-those who speak the truth must die/be killed because the deluded psychotic can’t hear truth-gains preeminence and Lloyd’s archetypal production gives witness to its timelessness. In her most unnuanced form, Norma is a dictator who must be obeyed and worshiped. Such narcissistic sociopaths must be pampered with lies.
Thus, in the last scene, Scherzinger’s Norma stands in bloody regalia as the spiritual devourer who has just annihilated reality and punished Joe. She is permissively allowed to do so by Max, who like a director, encourages her to star in her own tragedy, as he destroys her and himself. As Joe narrates in the flashback from beyond the grave, he expiates his soul’s mistakes with his cleansing confession, as he emphasizes a timeless object lesson.
From a theatrical perspective, the dramatic tension and forward momentum lies with Lloyd’s astute, profound shepherding of the actors in an illusory space. This becomes a fluid field which can shift flexibly each night, revealed when Joe, et. al run in circles and criss-cross the stage wildly. Expressionistic haunting, the foggy mists, the surrounding black stage walls, black costumes, the barefoot diva-hungrily filling up the spotlight-the shadowy figures, all suggest floating cultural nightmares. These the brainwashing “entertainment” industry for decades forces upon its fans to consume their waking moments with fear, the fear of aging, fear of failure, fear of destitution, fear of not being loved, fear of being alone. Many of these fears are conveyed in the songs, and dance numbers in Fabian Aloise’s choreography.
And yet, when the protagonist takes control of the black space of the stage around her, we understand how this happens. She is mesmerizing, hypnotic. Seduced by what we perceive is gorgeousness, we don’t see the terror, panic and mania beneath the shining surface. Instead, we are drawn as if she indomitably, courageously stands at the edge of the universe and asserts her being. In all of her growing insanity, we admire her persistence in driving toward her desire to be remembered and worshiped. Though it may not be in the medium she wishes, her provocations and Max’s love and loyalty help her achieve this dream, albeit, an infamous one, by the conclusion, as gory and macabre as Lloyd ironically makes it. Indeed, by the end her hallucination devours her.
Sunset Blvd is a sardonic send up of old Hollywood’s pernicious cruelty and savagery in how it ground up its employees (“Let’s Have Lunch,” Aloise’s brilliant factory town, conveyor belt choreography, referencing the cynical deadening of Joe’s dreams), and how it made its movie star icons into caricatures that bound their souls in cages of time and youth. Also, it is a drop down into tropes of cinema today in its penchant for horror, psychosis and the macabre, represented by Lloyd’s phenomenal creative team which elucidates this in the color scheme, mists, and starkly hyper-drive, electric atmosphere and movement.
Finally, in one of the most engaging, and exuberantly ironic segments filmed live, right before Act II, when Joe sings Sunset Blvd. with wry, humorous majesty, Tom Francis merges the character with himself as a Broadway/entertainment industry actor. During a live-recorded journey unveiling backstage “reality,” Francis/Joe moves downstairs, inside the bowels of the theater and in the actors’ spaces, so we see the actors’ view, from the stairwell to dressing rooms. Then Francis moves out onto 44th Street, joined by the chorus to eventually move back inside the theater and on stage where they finish singing “Sunset Blvd,” in a thematic parallel of Broadway and Hollywood. Broadway with its wicked inclination to sacrifice art for dollars, truth for commercialism with insane ticket prices, is the same if not worse than Hollywood, until now with AI fueling Amazon, Apple, Google, etc.
However, Broadway came first and spawned the movie industry, which poached actors from “the great white way.” Lloyd clearly makes the connection that the self-destructive dangers of the entertainment industry are the same, whether stage, screen, TV or Tik Tok. The competing themes are fascinating and the lightening strike into the “reality of backstage theater,” refreshes with funny split-second vignettes. For example, Francis peeks into Thaxton’s dressing room. Humorously merging with his character Max, Thaxton ogles a photo of the Pussycat Dolls taped to his mirror. Scherzinger was a former member of the global, best-selling music group (The Pussycat Dolls).
As Lloyd’s most expressionistic pared down, superbly technical extravaganza to date, every thrilling moment holds dynamic feeling, sharply illustrated for maximum impact. As an apotheosis of rage when her gigolo lover speaks the truth that dare not be spoken, Scherzinger’s Desmond becomes primal, a banshee, a Gorgon, a Medea who “refuses to surrender” to the idea that Hollywood, a treasured lover, like Jason, abandoned her for new goddesses.
With cosmic rage Scherzinger releases every, living, fiery nerve of vengeance to destroy the who and what that she can never believe. Meanwhile, Max, her evil twin, with clever prestidigitation, in one final act of loyalty to protect her febrile, mad, entangled imagination, has her get ready for the cameras and close-up, despite Joe’s tell-tale gore on her “black slip,” face and hands, which the media can feed off of like flies. No matter, she sucks up all the spotlight hungrily, clueless she will share a solitary room in a padded sell with no one in a prison for the mentally insane. Perhaps.
This revival should not be missed. Sunset Blvd. with one intermission, two hours 35 minutes is at the St. James Theatre until March 22, 2025 https://sunsetblvdbroadway.com/?gad_source=1
CAROLE DI TOSTI 