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Towleroad’s Top 10 Plays and Musicals of 2019

Towleroad’s Top 10 Plays and Musicals of 2019

Jordan E. Copper in ‘Aint No Mo’

The year in theatre was marked by daring artists who took big risks and stuck the landing.* For every jukebox recycling bin, there was a dark chamber musical set at the mouth of hell, or another gleefully circling the mind of its own maker. 

New York also welcomed back artists decades ahead of their time, from foremothers of the downtown avant garde who finally received landmark revivals to pop musicians whose distinct voices once dominated radio, back when radio was a thing. 

They made us laugh to keep from crying, and showed us worlds beyond and beneath our own. Here are Towleroad’s top 10 shows of 2019. 

[*If you’re looking for Slave Play, which moved to Broadway this fall, it was on this list last year.]

‘David Byrne’s American Utopia’

10. David Byrne’s American Utopia 
Despite his signature shock of grey hair, the Talking Heads singer doesn’t seem to have aged since the 1970s, when his voice became one of the 20th century’s most wildly original. Barefoot and clad in a sharp gray suit, he leads a journey through his music that’s part interior exploration, part political incitement, and wholly rapturous. He’s joined on stage by a dexterous 11-person band whose expert musicianship is transfixing. 

‘Jagged Little Pill’

9. Jagged Little Pill
Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album serves as inspiration and score for this new musical about darkness lurking behind the sheen of American suburbia. The too-muchness of Morissette’s songs perfectly suits the genre, and book writer Diablo Cody deftly weaves together a family drama that touches on a litany of current woes — opioid addiction and rape culture chief among them — while drawing distinct, believable characters. Don’t check emotional baggage at the door, rifling through it is strongly encouraged. 

8. A Strange Loop
Michael R. Jackson’s semi-autobiographical meta musical about a playwright struggling to write a “big, Black, and queer-ass American Broadway show” is as layered with pleasures as provocations. Larry Owens gave an exuberant, full-body performance as an artist trying to claim space for his vision while sorting out what’s going on in his head. Raw, revelatory and filled with personal and political insights set to irresistible song, A Strange Loop is everything its protagonist is trying to write and more.

7. Ain’t No Mo
Another thrilling new voice to emerge in 2019 — which also happened to be big, Black, and queer — was Jordan E. Cooper, who wrote and performed in Ain’t No Mo. Cooper took as his premise an African American exodus from the U.S. to craft a series of riotous scenes traversing questions of Black identity, racism, belonging, and most impressively, why living in a post-Obama America isn’t what some may have hoped or dared to imagine. Stevie Walker-Webb’s production for the Public was a vibrant testament to theatre’s ability to electrify.

‘Heroes of the Fourth Turning’

6. Heroes of the Fourth Turning
Will Arbery’s journey into the heart of darkness (i.e. the minds and souls of the Catholic far-right) approaches its subjects with a ruthless sensitivity. Director Danya Taymor’s production for Playwrights Horizons resembled a painting by Caravaggio in more than just the weight of its shadows. Casting harsh light on souls grappling in the dark with their best intentions is the stuff of visceral art. In the end, whose side you happen to be on is beside the point.

‘Hadestown’

5. Hadestown
There’s a reason myths are so often timeless. But this modern musical retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice speaks so directly to the present moment, it makes the hairs on your neck stand at attention. Birthed from a concept album by singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and ingeniously imagined for the stage by director Rachel Chavin, Hadestown is a story about greed and despair and lost love — and hope despite it all. The Best Musical winner also features two of the year’s most magnetic performances, from André De Shields (who won a Tony for his) and Amber Gray. 

4. Fleabag
In the midst of her ascent to Hollywood royalty (which now includes a jaw-dropping stop on the cover of Vogue), Phoebe Waller-Bridge reprised the one-woman show that became her hit Amazon series. We already knew she was a brilliant, dirty, and mordantly funny actor and writer, but performing the play in New York for the first time, Waller-Bridge also proved herself a master of intimacy and character. Assuming every role in the story that became season one of Fleabag, her elastic face became a canvas with which it seemed she could paint the whole world.  

‘Fefu and Her Friends’

3. Fefu and Her Friends
It’s hard to believe that this Theatre for a New Audience production was the first New York revival since the 1977 premiere María Irene Fornés’ astonishing masterwork. Its promenade format, in which the audience rotates through a series of scenes in different rooms, makes staging a challenge, but director Lileana Blain-Cruz pulled it off exquisitely. The women whose fears, desires, and undoings spin the plot were brought to life in vivid detail by one of the best ensembles of the season. Hopefully, Fefu won’t wait another 40 years to return.  

2. Marys Seacole
Reclaimed history, inherited trauma, and the phantom limb of imperialism combine and combust in this pressure cooker of a play from Pulitzer-winner Jackie Sibblies Drury. The fluid and beautifully executed production, also directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, bent and eventually broke conventions of time and space to reveal deeper truths that surpass both. A searing performance from Quincy Tyler Bernstine, playing both Mary Seacole the historical figure and a present-day incarnation of her legacy, was among the most memorable of the year. 

‘For Colored Girls’

1. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf 
Ntozake Shange’s enchanting paean to Black womanhood, which the late playwright classified a ‘choreopoem,’ made a triumphant return to the Public Theater, where it was first performed in 1976. A collection of evocations that crack open like precious stones, Shange’s play deals in luminous insights, both joyous and devastating. Direction by Leah C. Gardiner and choreography from Camille A. Brown combined to create a kind of seance for the beauty and pain of lived history. It was the best of anything one can hope to experience in a theatre. 

Recent theatre features…
‘Jagged Little Pill’ Is a Raw and Explosive Portrait of Suburbia on the Brink: REVIEW
On Broadway, ‘The Inheritance’ Sprawls but Rarely Cracks the Surface: REVIEW
Male Mediocrity Goes to Seed in ‘Linda Vista’: REVIEW
Beyond the Breaking Point in ‘Slave Play’ and ‘Heroes of the Fourth Turning’: REVIEW

Broadway’s ‘Moulin Rouge!’ Is a Dystopian Glitter Bomb of Empty Excess: REVIEW
At First I Didn’t Think ‘Fairview’ Was for Me: REVIEW
Broadway’s Sensational ‘Hadestown’ Wrenches Myth into Modern Times: REVIEW
Temptations Musical ‘Ain’t Too Proud’ Makes a Play for Soul on Broadway: REVIEW

Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar

Photos by Matthew Murphy, Joan Marcus and Gerry Goodstein.

The post Towleroad’s Top 10 Plays and Musicals of 2019 appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.


Towleroad’s Top 10 Plays and Musicals of 2019

‘Jagged Little Pill’ Is a Raw and Explosive Portrait of Suburbia on the Brink: REVIEW

‘Jagged Little Pill’ Is a Raw and Explosive Portrait of Suburbia on the Brink: REVIEW

Some music is so emotionally raw, it’s almost embarrassing. The vulnerability of its rage and sorrow feels too messy and explicit, detailing dark recesses of feeling many of us would just as soon keep hidden. When Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill came out in 1995, it sounded like the id of a generation of disaffected young women unleashed in one guttural howl. To some it was delicious catharsis; others were reflexively turned off by its earnestness. I devoured it on repeat like the drama queen I was — and then suddenly, promptly pushed it away. 

Alanis was too much. She had no chill. And if I wanted to grow up, I needed to stop stamping my feet or staring off into the middle distance wallowing in a vague sense of the world’s injustices, and learn how to cope.

The same qualities that make Morissette’s music uncomfortable are what make it uniquely suited to musical theatre — which yes, some people also find embarrassing in its emotional displays. Jagged Little Pill, the new musical opening on Broadway tonight, ingeniously seizes on the dynamics that made the album divisive and wrests them into an explosive and shattering portrait of American suburbia. It’s a story about dirty and difficult open secrets, how much we’d rather ignore them, how painful it is to confront them head-on, and how absolutely necessary doing so has become. 

The Healy family has a surface sheen: Dad works long hours in the city, Mom whips up pancakes from scratch, their high-achieving son just nabbed early acceptance to Harvard, and their adopted daughter (who’s Black while her family is white) devotes herself to civil activism. Underneath all that, Dad (Sean Allan Krill) is lonely and self-soothing with porn and Pepto Bismol, Mom (Elizabeth Stanley) is sliding into addiction to pain meds, pressure to be perfect is crushing their son (Derek Klena), and their daughter (Celia Rose Gooding) is just trying to figure out who she is. (She happens to be bi, but her coming of age isn’t about coming out.) The rape of a classmate (Kathryn Gallagher) at a party has implications for each of them and turns the plot’s emotional gears.

Diablo Cody, best known as a screenwriter of wry, women-driven narratives like Juno (2007) and Jennifer’s Body (2009), achieves remarkable depth in a story that can sometimes seem to sprawl, both in order to incorporate as many Morissette songs as possible (two new tracks have been written for the show) and check off a laundry list of current social ills. Cody’s sharp humor certainly helps. But if the scope of what Jagged Little Pill aims to address feels precariously ambitious, the musical never short-changes its delicate, intertwined treatment of both sexual assault trauma and opioid abuse. To match Morissette’s music, beautifully orchestrated here by Tom Kitt, Cody’s script is honest and believable in a way that surpasses Tony-winner Dear Evan Hansen, its nearest Broadway kin.

The physical production from director Diane Paulus has the seamless flow of a waking dream turned terrible nightmare, with an efficient, paneled scenic design from Riccardo Hernández vividly lit by Justin Townsend. Paulus’ staging, and especially the work of movement director and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, are most extraordinary when the musical is at its most unflinching. How do you stage sexual assault? Slow its queasy momentum, capture its impact? Or demonstrate a long-buried trauma clawing its way to the surface? The results are among the most arresting moments of stagecraft on Broadway in recent memory.

The uniformly strong cast makes Morissette’s songs their own, even lending some a subtly the original recordings make up for in brashness. But there’s a reason that “You Oughta Know” — the album’s most furious anthem, incredibly sung here by Lauren Patten playing the spurned lover — gets the most riotous applause. The time for learning to cope, for pretending that everything is and will be fine, is over. Welcome back to the age of rage. 

Recent theatre features…
On Broadway, ‘The Inheritance’ Sprawls but Rarely Cracks the Surface: REVIEW
Male Mediocrity Goes to Seed in ‘Linda Vista’: REVIEW
Beyond the Breaking Point in ‘Slave Play’ and ‘Heroes of the Fourth Turning’: REVIEW

Broadway’s ‘Moulin Rouge!’ Is a Dystopian Glitter Bomb of Empty Excess: REVIEW
At First I Didn’t Think ‘Fairview’ Was for Me: REVIEW
Broadway’s Sensational ‘Hadestown’ Wrenches Myth into Modern Times: REVIEW
Temptations Musical ‘Ain’t Too Proud’ Makes a Play for Soul on Broadway: REVIEW

Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar

Photos by Matthew Murphy

The post ‘Jagged Little Pill’ Is a Raw and Explosive Portrait of Suburbia on the Brink: REVIEW appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.


‘Jagged Little Pill’ Is a Raw and Explosive Portrait of Suburbia on the Brink: REVIEW