THE MORNING LINE DATE: Wednesday, December 14, 2016 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh PAGES: 14, including this page

December 14, 2016

Jake Gyllenhaal to Star in Broadway Revival of ‘Sunday in the

Park’

By Michael Paulson

Jake Gyllenhaal will return to Broadway next year in a brief revival of “Sunday in the Park With George.”

The production, a more fully developed version of a four-performance City Center benefit concert that Mr.

Gyllenhaal anchored in October, will be the first show in 49 years at Hudson Theater, which is being

reconverted into a stage after decades of other uses.

Mr. Gyllenhaal’s concert performances wowed critics and sold out. “This is one of those shows that seems

destined to be forever spoken of with misty-eyed bragging rights by anyone who sees it,” Ben Brantley wrote in

The New York Times. Mr. Gyllenhaal’s City Center co-star, Annaleigh Ashford, will join him on Broadway.

The production will be shorter than the usual Broadway run, at 10 weeks, with previews beginning Feb. 11 and

the opening on Feb. 23; it will close on April 23.

The show will be produced by Ambassador Theater Group, the British company that is restoring the theater for

Broadway, along with New York City Center; Jeanine Tesori, who produced the City Center staging; and Riva

Marker, who runs Mr. Gyllenhaal’s company, Nine Stories Productions.

The short run in a 964-seat theater will make it difficult to recoup capitalization costs, but a spokeswoman said

that the company believed it could be done. The company has been eager to land a starry first production that

would bring attention to the theater, which is on West 44th Street and most recently has been used as a hotel

event space.

The spokeswoman said that the Broadway staging would be “fully memorized,” unlike the concert, and that the

show’s sets and costumes would be “deepened.”

“Sunday in the Park With George,” with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Lapine, is

one of the most beloved musicals in the canon, and in 1985 it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The show,

inspired by the painting “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” has a first act imagining the artwork’s creation by the

painter Georges Seurat, and a second act, set a century later, imagining the artistic struggles of the painter’s

great-grandson.

The revival will be directed by Sarna Lapine, who is Mr. Lapine’s niece, and who will be making her Broadway

debut as a director. She directed the City Center concert performance, and has been associate or assistant

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director on other Broadway shows. “Sunday in the Park” was first presented on Broadway in 1984; there was a

revival in 2008.

Mr. Gyllenhaal, whose only previous Broadway role was last year in the play “Constellations,” will play Seurat

and his great-grandson (Georges and George). Ms. Ashford, who won a Tony Award last year for her role

in “You Can’t Take It With You,” will play Seurat’s lover, Dot, as well as their daughter, Marie. The rest of the

cast has not been announced.

Mr. Gyllenhaal, a frequent film star, previously agreed to star in a play, “Burn This,” that was to have opened

the theater but postponed, citing unspecified scheduling conflicts. He was able to do “Sunday” instead because

it requires less of a time commitment.

December 13, 2016

Review: Jealousy and Lies in a No-Exit Theater of War in ‘Othello’

By Ben Brantley “I am your own forever.” When these words are uttered in the electrifying new production of “Othello,” which opened on Monday night at the New York Theater Workshop, you feel you’ve heard the most frightening vow ever spoken. It is delivered at the end of the first half of a performance that is drawn in lightning.

The speaker is a soldier, Iago by name, played by Daniel Craig; the object of his ardent declaration is his general, Othello, portrayed by David Oyelowo. Their faces are as close as clasped hands, foreheads pressed hard together as if in some ungodly mind meld.

By that moment, you have come to know these men intimately. You understand exactly how they’ve arrived at such a moment of communion and exactly where they’re headed. As presented by two actors at the top of their game, in a marriage made in both heaven and hell, the story of Othello and Iago could not possibly end otherwise than it does.

And, O the pity of it!

Character truly is fate in this breathless interpretation of Shakespeare’s taut portrait of lives razed by jealousy, in which Mr. Oyelowo and Mr. Craig, best known as movie stars, enter the ranks of first-rate classical stage actors. I’ve never seen an “Othello” as convincingly inexorable as this one.

Often when you watch a Shakespeare tragedy, you think hopefully of how things might end differently. If only Friar Laurence’s letter could get through to Romeo, or if Julius Caesar would listen to his wife and stay home on that day in mid-March.

But what’s so thrilling — and so terrifying — about this “Othello,” directed by Sam Gold, is that everything that occurs is so irrevocably inevitable. And not because of capricious gods, or cruel coincidences. No, the cause — to use a word Othello memorably repeats — lies in the precisely defined personalities of everyone who inhabits the play’s closed universe.

Mr. Gold’s production puts us smack in the claustrophobic center of that universe. The theater has been reconfigured (by the designer Andrew Lieberman) as a raw wooden barracks, with bleachers-style seating on three sides of the playing area. There are mattresses on the floor, and laptops, radios, barbells and cellphones. When the soldiers party, they sing Drake’s “Hotline Bling.”

The 21st century has become the default era for “Othello” since the American invasion of Iraq — sometimes brilliantly (Nicholas Hytner’s 2013 London version), sometimes misguidedly (Peter Sellars’s 2009 New York production). But this “Othello” isn’t striving for contemporary relevance or high-concept surprise.

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The colorblind casting of other roles (Iago’s wife, Emilia, is played by a fine Marsha Stephanie Blake, an African-American actress) makes Othello’s blackness less of a cultural issue than it often is. What interests Mr. Gold is the intimate spectacle of two disastrously different, equally great minds in collision.

The sealed military environment brings us into touching distance with people who can never escape one another’s company. (Jane Cox’s lighting, which often plunges us into pitch darkness, emphasizes smothering insularity.) Though the script’s location moves from Venice to Cyprus, the set remains the same. It’s a no-exit theater of war, invisibly stage-managed by a military underling with an instinct for human frailties.

That’s Iago, whose resentment of Othello, the Moorish commander who passed him over for promotion, sets the play on its destructive course. As incarnated in recent decades by the likes of Simon Russell Beale and Liev Schreiber, this vicious manipulator has stolen the show, leaving us with the impression that it’s Iago’s world — Othello and everybody else just live (and die) in it.

But in Mr. Gold’s production, the charismatic weight is more evenly balanced. Yes, Iago — embodied with gritty brilliance by Mr. Craig — is still the smartest guy in the room. But Mr. Oyelowo’s Othello has a daunting authority. And passion, and a paradoxically worldly innocence, and an enviable ability to love (his bride, Desdemona, played with piquant freshness by Rachel Brosnahan) that Iago will never know or entirely understand.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know how to turn Othello’s forceful feelings inside out. Throughout the production, you watch Mr. Craig’s Iago sizing up the psychology of everyone around him and then acting on the assessment.

Though he retains a hearty bluffness, he is also unusually chameleonic, subtly altering his speech and affect to be what other people expect him (and think they need him) to be. Mr. Craig, whom international moviegoers know as the infinitely suave James Bond, lends Iago a disarming, virile charm, through which only we can glimpse the contempt and the calculation.

That seductiveness is exerted on characters as diverse as his earthy wife; his Desdemona-besotted stooge, the wealthy Venetian, Roderigo (a perfectly fatuous Matthew Maher); and the young soldier Cassio (a radiantly open-faced Finn Wittrock), the central pawn in Iago’s scheme to convince Othello of his wife’s infidelity.

That these characters don’t catch on to Iago’s duplicity isn’t because they’re stupid. (Well, except Roderigo.) Ms. Brosnahan’s Desdemona comes across as a cleareyed, sharp-witted woman who, until the play’s end, can stand up for herself.

But like everyone else, she can’t conceive even the possibility of the self-sustaining malice that fuels Iago. (Isn’t that what’s scariest about psychopaths, that we can’t fit them into our frame of reference?) Nor can she believe that Othello would doubt her; she is confident in his affection.

As she should be. Mr. Oyelowo, who was a magnetic Martin Luther King Jr, in the movie “Selma,” gives Othello’s love for Desdemona a solar heat. Speaking with an African accent that underscores his mythic presence as a war hero, Othello exudes the titanic certainty of someone who thinks in absolutes.

That means he knows no middle ground of feeling. As he says, “To be once in doubt is to be once resolved.” And when suspicion becomes resolution here, Mr. Oyelowo is Olympian in his anguish. His Othello is the real thing — a bona fide tragic hero, whose capacity for emotion is way beyond our everyday depths.

The play’s stark final scene finds our leading men stripped to their essences. “When you these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am,” says Mr. Oyelowo, looking directly into the audience with scorched eyes. This

incandescent production makes it possible for us to speak with rare understanding of this Othello — and this Iago — as they are.

December 14, 2016

Review: The Devil Went Down to Chelsea to See ‘Prudencia Hart’

By Ben Brantley In search of merry and bright drinking companions in this dark and sullen winter? You could do a lot worse than raise a shot glass (or two or three) with the rousing band of Scots who’ve encamped in a pub at the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea. They sing, dance on tables, discuss post-post-structuralist theory, talk in rhyme. And they tell one hell of a tale.

Which happens to be about going straight to hell.

O.K., maybe “straight” isn’t quite the word for a narrative as twisty as a back road in the hills of the Scottish Borders region, where “The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart” is set. But this gleeful import from the National Theater of Scotland, which opened on Tuesday night, does transport you into infernal eternity. It turns out to be a swell place for a hibernal vacation.

And by the way, Sartre got it wrong. Hell isn’t just other people. It’s a tacky bed-and-breakfast, albeit one with a really extensive library, next to a Costco parking lot.

A collaboration between the playwright David Greig (“The Events”) and the director Wils Wilson, “The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart” is the ultimate shaggy Satan story. The script takes its cues from the border ballads so beloved of Sir Walter Scott, which sang of valiant knights and damsels errant, of dashing outlaws and tenacious ghosts, and had titles like “The Daemon Lover.”

Such fantastical realms are the specialty of our Prudencia, an uptight academic from Edinburgh who comes to a conference in Kelso, a Scottish border town, one snowy night. There she is ridiculed by her fellow pedants, who have little use for her sentimental take on the genre; wooed by a fatuous professor who studies the folkways of football chants; and attacked by a group of drunken karaoke singers in a bar.

She is finally driven by these varied assaults into a winter wonderland from which she may never return. And that’s just in the satirical lark that is the first act. In the show’s second half, Prudencia discovers the hypnotic, perversely sensual landscape of life after life and the respective powers of poetry and prose.

She also has the chance to dance — among other things — with the Devil, who (being a slippery character) is embodied by two actors and has a fabulous wardrobe of red jackets. Shakespeare’s assertion that the “devil hath power t’assume a pleasing shape” is confirmed many times over.

“Prudencia Hart” is performed by a multifarious ensemble of five, which includes the show’s musical director, Alasdair Macrae. The others are Annie Grace, Peter Hannah, Paul McCole and, as Prudencia, the euphoniously named Melody Grove, whose latter-day fairy-tale attire is worth noting. (The show’s designer is Georgia McGuinness.)

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All the performers are dab hands with an assortment of instruments, musical styles and instant impersonations. They are also most companionable hosts in the specially outfitted pub through which they wander. You are encouraged to drink (preferably whisky), eat, assist in the creation of a snowstorm and help clear your table when somebody needs it to simulate falling through a gap in time.

The prevailing style might be called populist highbrow or perhaps raised lowbrow (you might want to bone up on Kylie Minogue songs), except that “Prudencia Hart” sends up and explodes such categories. It shifts seamlessly from robust silliness to sensual dreaminess, as the mind tends to through the course of successive whiskies. (Note to teetotalers: You don’t need to drink to become inebriated here.)

Before the show began, one of the actors who visited my table explained that “Prudencia Hart” is set in 2010, a “time when there was still hope.” For anyone who needs to turn back the clock for a few hours, this happy mindbender offers the best deal going on time travel.

December 13, 2016

Review: A ‘Rudolph’ for Inclusion (at Least if You’re a Guy) By Laurel Graeber According to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Musical,” there’s something even more unheard-of than letting a funny-looking buck play in any reindeer games: allowing a doe to join in.

The show, at the Theater at Madison Square Garden, begins in Santa’s homeland, which appears to be not only frozen in atmosphere but also frozen in time. Based on the 1964 animated television special and a subsequent theatrical staging directed and conceived by Jeff Frank and First Stage, this “Rudolph” features elf boys in blue, elf girls in pink. The lyrics about Christmas toys specify “a scooter for Jimmy, a dolly for Sue.” And when an adolescent Rudolph arrives at the Reindeer Games, the coach, Comet (same dude from “A Visit From St. Nicholas”), growls, “My job is to make bucks out of you.” As for does, they apparently can’t compete.

The script, adapted by Bob Penola, presents the games as a flying audition for pulling Santa’s sleigh. Clarice, a watchful doe, takes a shine to the too-shiny Rudolph, even after his fake nose falls off to reveal his scarlet schnoz of shame. When Rudolph runs away, he acquires male sidekicks — Hermey (Wesley Edwards), a tormented elf (he wants to be a dentist instead of a toymaker) and Yukon Cornelius (Fred Inkley), a gruff prospector. Although Clarice (Becca Andrews) helps search for her hero, she stays an ego-stroking damsel.

The production, directed and choreographed by Dana Solimando, has a game cast, led by the spunky Sarah Errington (yes, a woman) as Rudolph. Hardrive Productions has created marvelous reindeer costumes and an adorable puppet menagerie. Some will also enjoy the peppy holiday hits in Johnny Marks’s score, like “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and the title tune, a couple of which welcome audience participation.

The story’s themes — that bullying is cruel, and that those who are born different can make vital contributions — certainly remain timeless lessons for children. But you can’t help being disappointed that this show championing equality still denies it to half the population.

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December 14-20, 2016

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