“Tokio Confidential’s” unlikely combination of styles

You see all kinds of theatre in New York, but you don’t see that much Noh, the classical Japanese form that uses ritualized music, movement, and costumes to depict warriors, ghosts, and other epic folk. Playwrights like Brecht and O’Neill have been intoxicated by Noh and incorporated elements of it into their own work, and beginning on Sunday, audiences will have a chance to see how Noh blends with a traditional musical.

Presented at Atlantic Stage 2, Tokio Confidential might seem familiar and strange all at once. On one hand, it tells the relatable story of Isabella Archer (Jill Paice), a Civil War widow who tries to overcome her grief by traveling to Japan. Thanks to a surprising relationship with a tattoo artist and a personal decision to turn her body into art, she undergoes a physical and spiritual transformation that releases her from the past. Give or take a tattooing scene, this story should resonate with fans of everything from Gypsy to Hairspray to Grease.

But then again, there are no warrior ghosts haunting the kids at Rydell High, and the songs in Hairspray don’t suggest the lush, contemplative style of Japanese music.  That’s what makes Tokio Confidential so striking.

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Director Lynne Meadow juggles laughter and tears in a play about cancer, life, and death

In retrospect, it’s a very strange place for a laugh.

Near the end of Margaret Edson’s Wit, the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play now making its Broadway debut with Manhattan Theater Club, Vivian Bearing is just a few heartbeats from death. We’ve known this was coming from the very first scene, when she strolls on in a hospital gown, bald from chemotherapy, and tell us she has terminal cancer. But somehow, even as she takes us through her arduous hospital routine, it’s easy to overlook that Vivian’s dying. She’s just so forceful, wryly commenting on the silliness of medical bureaucracy and reflecting on her passion for the poetry of John Donne. Yes, her reveries are interrupted by tests and examinations, but still, she seems bigger than that. (This is partly due to the gusto of Cynthia Nixon’s performance.)

Eventually, though, just like Vivian promised, death slides into the room. The walls of her intellect and humor crack open, and her pain is laid bare. But just when she’s at her weakest, she’s visited by another character. For a few moments, they have a tender scene that’s dotted with intellectual curiosity. There’s even a clever observation about a children’s book that pulls a giant laugh from the audience.

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Reimagining Adam Guettel’s beloved song cycle

Myths and Hymns is practically begging to be interpreted and reinterpreted on stage.

Written by composer-lyricist Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza, Floyd Collins), it’s a song cycle that uses mythology, religious allusions, and the lyrics to classic hymns to explore massive themes like ambition, love, and death. Yet for all their all grandeur, the songs are easily accessible, influenced not only by European art songs and show tunes, but also by gospel, R&B, and Latin music.

As of today, however, there have only been sixteen official performances of Myths and Hymns in New York City, and those were in 1998, when the show was called Saturn Returns and got a brief concert staging at the Public Theater. Since then, a celebrated recording featuring Kristen Chenoweth, Audra McDonald, and Billy Porter has carried on the music’s legacy, but that’s just not the same as a living, breathing production.

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Sam Gold challenges expectations of the classic play

It’s tempting to dismiss Look Back In Anger, to say, “I get it. Realism. Kitchen sink. Angry young man.” But with his current revival at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, director Sam Gold wants to blow those assumptions apart.

That’s only fitting, since John Osborne’s play has always been about subverting the familiar. When it premiered in London in 1956, British theatre was lousy with boulevard comedies and polite drawing room dramas. Look Back in Anger, however, delivered Jimmy Porter, an intelligent but frustrated working class sweet seller who lives in a squalid apartment with his friend Cliff and his upper-middle-class wife, Alison. The British class system oppresses these people, and in turn, they oppress themselves with an endless cycle of insults, apologies, kisses, and arguments.

It’s hard to overstate how shocking this was. According to legend, audiences gasped when they saw Alison’s ironing board, since the tools of the working class were never part of the theatre. Many people hated the play for being uncouth and furious, but critic Kenneth Tynan called it a “minor miracle” for just these reasons. Soon enough, it inspired a wave of “angry young man” dramas.

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The actress fights her impulses in The New Group’s latest play

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles
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She’s a character you want to shake some sense into. As she moves through Russian Transport, Erika Sheffer’s world premiere play at the New Group, Diana behaves like someone who’s in control of her life and her family. A Russian immigrant who helps her husband run a car service, she’s gruffly charming as she barrels over everything, insisting that it’s Chinese food for dinner and threatening to kill her children if they don’t sit down right now.

Still, Diana can’t see that her family’s imploding. Her brother Boris, fresh off the boat from Russia, arrives with dark plans for his time in America. He changes everyone’s lives, and even though Diana’s partially aware of what he’s doing, she misses the most important details.

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