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The Broadway company of Illinoise. Photo credit: Matthew Murphy

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

NEW YORK – On a sultry Saturday afternoon 10 days ago under Manhattan Bridge, in an amiable queue for a cone at Brooklyn Ice Cream, an elegant French woman from Basel explains to me, en français, that she maintains an apartment in New York to “keep her words.”

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They can get away from you, to be sure, in the course of Big Apple sensory overload. But New York is a city of words. Written. Neon. Graffiti. Spoken (at a volume that always takes some getting used to) — in the subway, in Central Park, in exchanges with taxi drivers or hot dog vendors or invisible people at the other end of AirPods.

Jenny Holzer: Light Line, at the Guggenheim Museum, NYC. Photo by yours truly.

At the Guggenheim Museum words, a dizzying six-storey moving LED ticker tape of them, spiral upwards through the ramps of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum’s rotunda to the very top. In in Jenny Holzer: Light Line, catchphrases, clichés, idioms, invented slogans… they never stop moving. “Words tend to be inadequate.” “Abuse of power comes as no surprise.” “You are guileless in your dreams.” And in intermittent alcoves en route up, on what seem to be burnt scraps of paper, a selection of idiotic Tweets from the man who became U.S. president in 2016. Or engraved on burnished sheets of metal, heavily redacted documents from protocols about the treatment of prisoners

Illinoise on Broadway. Photo by Matthew Murphy

Curiously, the other extreme in word count happens in a theatre, where words tend to rule. Illinoise, at the St. James on West 44th is a stunning dance-theatre production with none at all. Based on a 2005 concept album by Sufjan Stevens, the text-less production directed by Justin Peck, resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet, reveals its episodic coming-of-age narrative (devised with the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury), through movement, and music.

Illinoise on Broadway. Photo credit: Matthew Murphy.

It’s called “a new Broadway musical” but Illinoise doesn’t work like one. A cast of 16 actor/dancers do not dance to illustrate or even amplify the songs or their lyrics. And the songs (delivered by three singers wearing butterfly wings on assorted platforms, along with an 11-piece orchestra) don’t advance the “story,” at least not in the usual musical theatre way. But you understand with such clarity, in performances led by Ricky Ubeda, the complex feelings of a small-town kid and his best friend who move first to Chicago and have a road trip to New York, as friendship moves to romance, and then, fatally stops there but can’t go back. It’s a beautiful, moving piece of storytelling set forth onstage with real originality: characters gather round a sort of campfire, and as Illinoise progresses, they emerge from a subterranean garden. I loved it.

Stereophonic, at the Golden Theater. Photo by Alan Kellogg

David Adjmi’s Stereophonic, the season’s Tony Award winning play (and biggest nomination magnet in history, with 13) is full of music too. And the dreams and frustrations, the creative tensions and broken relationships that go into making it, and then making it better. It’s set almost exclusively in a recording studio c. 1976, where a five-person rock band and a couple of sound engineers, on a health diet of booze, weed, and cocaine, are working on what they’re starting to dare to hope will be a break-out runaway hit album.

Loosely based on the famously fractious history of Fleetwood Mac, with original songs by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, Stereophonic lives on the high-stress frontier between the small- and the big-time, where backstage life and personal life duke it out, and egos grow along with confidence.

The performances by actors who, like the fictional musicians they portray, have had to  work to become a band, are absolutely convincing in Daniel Aukin’s production. And so are the set and sound design by David Zinn and Ryan Rumery (respectively).

Three fascinating, absorbing hours of a play that really needs its length.

Hell’s Kitchen, at the Shubert Theater..

Hell’s Kitchen is the story of an artist, too, finding her own way, discovering mentors as she discovers her own burgeoning talent. The musical is inspired, in a loose way, by the coming-of-age story of Alicia Keyes, whose own r&b-flavoured songbook is tapped (and supplemented by new Keyes originals). This isn’t a narrative with the age-old built-in drama of an artist struggling out of privation and poverty to be a star. Keyes and the protagonist here, played by the sensational newcomer Maleah Joe Moon, grew up in the artist-friendly Manhattan Plaza in the title part of town. Dramatic conflict is limited to domestic frictions:  constant tension with a protective mother (Shoshana Bean) — OK, that is an old story — and occasional encounters with a musician father (Brandon Victor Dixon) who’s a charmer when he’s around and then disappears for indeterminate periods.

The fierce mentorship of a pianist who lives in the building (Kecia Lewis) is vivid. But to me the storytelling felt a little inert. Keyes’ fans will be delighted by the musical expertise onstage, but the songs aren’t exactly propulsive, in a way that would move the musical through the narrative.

Having said that, though, I must add that the stagecraft in Michael Greig’s production is a knock-out: Camille A. Brown’s jagged, startlingly original choreography, Robert Brill’s utterly beautiful scenic design, a love affair with New York City in itself, aided and abetted by Natasha Katz’s stunning lighting and Peter Nigrini’s projections. All breathtaking. In a final flourish, it ends with Empire State of Mind, Keyes’ homage to her birthplace city. When you walk out at the end, there’s a ’stereophonic’ immersive experience in that, and you get to put it in your pocket and take it with you.

Dark Noon 4, fit+foxy at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Photo by Teddy Wolff.

It’s a moment in history, it need hardly be said, when the world is wondering what on earth is going on with America. At St. Ann’s Warehouse, a marvellously adaptable old brick warehouse in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges) where the programming is consistently gutsy, you get an outsider’s perspective, scathing and funny, on the great American mythology attached to … America’s own history. In Dark Noon, by the Danish artist Tue Beiring who co-directed it with South African director/choreographer Nhlanhla Mahlangu, seven agile South African actors, six Black and one white, “perform,” with Hollywood gusto, the storied history of the Wild West.

Dark Noon, fit+foxy at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Photo by Teddy Wolff

It is, in a word, riotous — a high-speed shoot ‘em up all the way in this 2023 Edinburgh Fringe hit which has been touring Europe. And the muse is slapstick comedy with a cutting edge (and a live video feed), as the Indigenous populations get gunned down, Africans get enslaved, Chinese railway workers get popped. The history of America is a story of violence. Guns and gunslingers are everywhere. And they’re the response to every crisis, from the moment to Black actors in whiteface, stand opposite each other, in a face-off that re-purposes the film High Noon. The railroad and an entire Western town get built before our very eyes on the red-clay stage.

This is satire at its most blistering. And movingly it ends with the actors shedding costumes and wigs to tell us their personal experience with American Westerns as entertainment, and the effects they believe have ensued in their own very violent gun-happy South Africa.

Conrad Ricamora and Cole Escola in Oh, Mary. Photo by Emilio Madrid

If Dark Noon is the outsider’s view, the insider perspective is the irreverent, very silly, very amusing comedy burlesque Oh, Mary. A transfer from Off-Broadway it’s arrived at the Lyceum trailing rapturous reviews (“not just funny, dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny!” in Time Out New York, for example). It’s the talk of the town.

The star of the show, and its creator, is a particularly gifted cabaret soloist Cole Escola, whose appetite for zany and high camp knows no bounds. They play Mary Todd Lincoln, the uncontrollably vicious booze-soaked wife of Abraham Lincoln. Escola has been on the late-night talk shows explaining breezily that he did no research, “zero!”, for his play.

Mary has had to give up her true love, cabaret, and deprive the world of A Star. And her resentment knows no bounds, as she bustles around the stage tossing her ringlets, on the hunt for hidden bottles. Since Abe (Conrad Ricamora), who’s a dour shouter, has got a lot on his plate what with the Civil War (“the South of what?” asks Mary), and his pesky under-the-desk attraction to his aide, he tries to distract his wife. He offers acting lessons with a handsome instructor; the chosen text is The Tempest, with Mary as the dewy Miranda, in an inexplicable Scottish accent.

Cole Escola, star of Oh, Mary at the Lyceum. Photo by Emilio Madrid.

Oh, Mary has been touted widely as satire, but I don’t really think that’s its strength. It’s a giddy, amiable entertainment, scripted but with the feel of improv in its constant anachronistic asides. It has everything to do with Escola, an amazingly gifted comic performer. Ever pause, every grimace, every double-take is judged for maximum impact. The audience roared their approval after every scene.

The only dud of the holiday was a show reviewed everywhere with irresistible enthusiasm (a cautionary tale for career reviewers, to be sure). Water For Elephants, adapted for the stage by Rick Elice (of Peter and the Starcatcher fame) from the Sara Gruen novel, is set in a travelling one-ring circus during the Depression. The circus consultants were the Montreal troupe the 7 Fingers. But both the aerial acts and, especially, the music by the PigPen Theatre Collective seemed generic. When a show where a young man runs away from family tragedy to join a circus fails to generate a sense of wonder, it’s in trouble. In this country we know a lot about the marriage of circus and wonder.

Joey Alexander Trio at the Blue Note. Photo by Liz

One of the great delights of summer in New York is the way theatre, music, and visual art tag-team for your especial benefit. So you can see The Harlem Renaissance, a wonderful Metropolitan Museum exhibition starring paintings by Archibald Motley, a key artist in the flourishing of Black American art in the ‘20s and 30s. You can savour his vigorous, energized images of Black jazz clubs, their musicians, their excited dancing audiences. And then, of course, you can experience live jazz at the Blue Note and Birdland.

Abetare by Petrit Halilaj, the rooftop commission at the Metropolitan Museum, NYC. Photo by Alan Kellogg

Up on the rooftop garden at the top of the Met, you can see the park and the gleaming towers of Manhattan through the eyes of a child. It’s a dreamy urban vision through the loops, curly-queues and wonky angles of Abetare, airy outsized sculptures in bronze and steel piping by Kosovo artist Petrit Halilaj. They’re kids’ drawings writ large: a giant spider, tilted houses, stars, birds. a flower, an upside down Batman.  And there’s theatrical magic in that.