Oedipus (5*)

 

What if a birth certificate--or lack of one--WAS the smoking gun for a political candidate on the cusp of winning an election?

That's the question posed by writer/director Robert Icke in his absolutely absorbing update of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, a spoiler-proof tragedy even for those who never have read the Greek original.  The production begins with a video interview of the charismatic title character, played with chilling assurance by Mark Strong, projected across the entire stage. He smoothly promises to share his birth certificate immediately following his election to demonstrate that he is a man of the people, a product of the rural countryside despite his opponent's insinuations otherwise, and to investigate the death of a former strongman which has left years of political chaos in its wake.  When the curtain lifts, Creon, his adviser (John Carroll Lynch as you've never seen him before, credibly playing a Brit), and his wife Jocasta (the incomparable Lesley Manville) are aghast.  But Oedipus insists it must be done; truth is his brand.

Although Oedipus the King likely was likely the first reading on the syllabus for the Humanities course that defines Columbia's core curriculum, I've never seen it on stage and I couldn't imagine it having the believability and emotional impact that Icke, a young Turk from the West End (which seems to breed them) has given it with an almost unbearable injection of pedophilia and superb performances all around.  Am I actually sobbing in Studio 54, a place I remember with nothing but fondness?  Do I feel as invisible as the old woman Oedipus believes to be his mother (Anne Reid, 90 and still going strong), but for whom he has no time on election night despite her desperation to protect him from the political scandal that will surely follow his election?  How is it possible that I recalled the prophet's name, Teiresias, more than 50 years since being introduced to him when I can't remember the names of the characters in the novel I'm currently reading?  Did one of Antigone's siblings really just call her a see-you-next-Tuesday?

Icke's contemporary spin even manages to give the play a gay angle nearly 2500 years after it was first performed, at a time when same-sex relationships didn't require a label.  When his youngest son, Oedipus's favorite, tattles on an older brother's infidelity during a family celebration, the implicated brother retaliates by asking why he didn't bring his boyfriend. Despite his eventual support, the king isn't necessarily cool with his son's homosexuality but he lauds him for admitting the truth while simultaneously making the strongest and most succinct case I've ever heard for coming out to your parents.

Things don't go so well for Oedipus by the time the two-hour clock, which escalates the tension every passing minute, flashes to zero.  As the insanely clever sweatshirt I nearly bought on my way out blares:  "truth is a motherfu**er."  And I won't even mention the use to which he puts one of his birth mother's stiletto heels after a final coupling that elicits more audible gasps than the cunnilingus that precedes it.  YUCK!

Queens Field Trip

Corona, not screaming!

Thom and I toured the home of Louis Armstrong where he resided with his fourth wife, Lucille Wilson, from 1943 until his death in 1971.

No photos were allowed inside the very colorful interior, exactly as Lucille, a former Cotton Club singer, left it when she died more than a decade later.

Though the couple had no children of their own, they were beloved by the neighborhood kids.

The Louis Armstrong Center, across the street, opened only in 2023.  It's just the right size.

Other than glancing at magazine profiles, watching Armstrong co-star with Barbra Streisand in Hello, Dolly! and seeing him blow his trumpet on "The Ed Sullivan Show," everything I knew about Satchmo came from A Wonderful World, a musical based on his life.  "People here who saw it praised the music and the dancing but thought too much of the story was exaggerated," said our guide, a professional saxophonist with a deep love of jazz.  They should know:  Armstrong recorded his legacy on more than 900 reel-to-reel audio tapes, now digitized.  Visitors to the house are treated to excerpts of his voice speaking on a variety of subjects, and playing some music.

April 15, 1966

In spite of his love for his wife and home, America's Jazz Ambassador toured 300 days of the year, visiting a total of 65 countries during his lifetime.  He carried a suitcase engraved with his nickname, "Satchmo."  

This trumpet, which Lucille had bronzed for Armstrong's headstone, was so often an object of attempted theft that Lucille had it replaced with plaster in Flushing Cemetery.  I'll have to visit Louis there.

The second part of our field trip required walking half an hour to the Queens Museum, built as an ice skating rink (Thom remembered) for the 1964 World's Fair.  We went to see his nephew's contribution to "Umber Majeed J😊Y TECH," a not-easily-described (or understood) exhibit that explores the Pakistan pavilion at same World's Fair from the perspective of the contemporary diaspora.

The artist, a thirty-something woman, hired Jimmy to produce the three-dimensional animation, including these "pink pearls," although I think it's probably not cool to identify them that way any longer.

Another exhibit with allusions to the '64 Worlds Fair resonated more with this baby boomer. In fact, I had just mentioned the work that inspired it to our guide earlier when he mentioned the event had celebrated "Louis Armstrong Day" on June 30 after the trumpeter finally dislodged the Beatles' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" from the top of the charts with "Hello, Dolly" his most popular recording ever.  A seminal moment in pop culture, it signaled the squares (i.e. the fair organizers) weren't entirely done for, not yet.  They also rejected 13 Most Wanted Men, the mural Andy Warhol had been commissioned to create.  Governor Nelson Rockefeller feared it would offend one of his his important constituencies because so many of the criminals' last names were Italian!

"America's Most Help Wanted (After Warhol)" by Abang-guard (2025)

The Filipino artistic collective is getting a lot of contemporary mileage spoofing the work of old white male artists.

"Corazon Amurao In Window (After Lichtenstein)"
by Abang-guard (2025)

What I mistook to be whale bone scrimshaw turned out to be buffalo bone, carved by a contemporary indigenous artists whose name I regretfully forgot to capture.  Such incredible detail.

Speaking of incredible detail, we also checked out "The Panorama of the City of New York On Long-Term View," billed as a "helicopter ride over New York's five boroughs" when it was constructed for the '64 World's Fair, and updated (with more than 60,000 buildings replaced!) for the opening of the Queens Museum in 1994.  It's the only exhibit in the place that makes adequate use of the building's cavernous space which definitely could use a re-imagining.

While some more recent landmarks have been added to the scale 3D map on a piecemeal basis (including Citi Field and Yankee Stadium), other extraordinary historical changes are not reflected. Oddly, 27 buildings in Battery Park City were replaced without elaboration in the descriptive text while the Twin Towers remain standing.  No doubt that's a lose/lose situation for museum's administration.  Better not to have adopted the piecemeal strategy IMHO.

More than 15 years ago, the museum launched an "Adopt-the Building" campaign to raise funds for another city-wide renovation.  After celebrating my 47th year in 47 Pianos (circled in red below on the left) this month, I can buy a year-long lease on the property for $100, about 12 times less than I'm currently paying in monthly rent!!!!!

Florenzer (4*)

When I picked up Phil Melanson's queer historical novel about Leonardo da Vinci, I figured the title referred to a native of Florence, where I'd just spent four days.  Wrong!

Go to the Hapsburg court up in the Alps and ask someone how to say sodomite. Florenzer, they’ll tell you. 

Such actions aren’t confined within the walls of Florence, of course. Sodomy exists anywhere there are men with cocks and men with holes. Which is everywhere, really, except for the convents—and there the nuns have their own methods. But does anyone condone it? Certainly not. These are Christian lands. 

Apparently some critics have complained about the liberties Melanson has taken in imagining the specifics of da Vinci's sexual orientation, but they rang so true that I immediately searched the internet for an incomplete portrait of Saint Sebastian (one of my photographic obsessions) to 1) find out if it existed and 2) to see what Leonardo's boyfriend, the model, looked like (in fact, the real da Vinci drew an incomplete sketch).

Iac may never have lived, but Melanson employs him less a real person than a symbol of forbidden first love, the kind that cuts deepest.  The reader sees the character only through Leonardo's eyes, as a young prostitute who aspires to gold smithing when the city they inhabit is known throughout the world for the beauty that it produces. 

Melanson makes the Saint Sebastian metaphor work overtime.  Near the novel's end, Leonardo's father reveals his heretofore unexpressed disgust with his illegitimate son's homosexuality, cataloging all the signs that have been evident since childhood.

He [Leonardo] is Sebastian, struck with arrows, one by one. 

The rupture affords Leonardo a Renaissance way of "coming out."  With nothing left to lose (he previously has been arrested for sodomy and briefly imprisoned, an experience so traumatic that it induces both celibacy and artistic inertia), he can refuse a commission from Lorenzo Medici, the ruler of the Republic of Florence, whose story, told in parallel, provides Melanson with a fruitful opportunity to explore the competing power centers of the era, and free Leonardo to become arguably the world's most famous painter.

Although the easily-consumed Florenzer bears a strong resemblance to a screenplay, particularly in a tripartite narrative structure that relies on cross cutting--Melanson worked in film marketing before writing this, his first novel--there's much that sticks, including deft portraits of Lucrezia, Lorenzo Medici's wise but conniving mother, and Francesco Salviati, an embittered priest in service to a corrupt pope who favors his "nephews" when assigning plum bishoprics.

If Melanson is less convincing in his depiction of Lorenzo Medic that may reflect an unfamiliarity--or lack of sympathy--with a heterosexual point of view if not the historical record which he claims to have followed accurately.  Miserable and unattractive, especially in contrast to his handsome, happy-go-lucky brother who recognizes da Vinci's talent and yearns to marry outside his class, Lorenzo both relies on and resents his mother to the exclusion of nearly all other relationships.  This dynamic seems improbable in a society as patriarchal as Italy's was at the time and remained until the end of the last century.  Unlike the man who relied only on his skill and imagination for his life's work, Lorenzo, who died at 43 (the same year that Columbus didn't discover America) had a lot on his plate.

"Portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici" by Giorgio Vasari (1534)

In the appealing but anachronistic world of Florenzer, only one of them gets a happy ending. 

Liberation (5*)

I couldn't help it, thoughts of Taylor Swift kept intruding while I absorbed a kinda heartbreaking critique of feminism in Liberation, a self-described memory play that examines the lives of five women, all members of a women's consciousness-raising group that meets in an Ohio recreation center with a basketball court.  "19:70" appears on the scoreboard.

Lizzie (Susannah Flood, flakey but sincere) welcomes the audience as well as the women with a mission statement:  in a double role, she's going to interrogate how her mother, the kind of woman she never has wanted to become, could have organized the group and what happened to its members over the last 50 years. Playwright (and Gen Xer) Bess Wohl uses the first act of Liberation to introduce the era's archetypes including Margie (Betsy Aidem, who transcends cliche oh-so-movingly), a semi-embittered housewife; Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd, fierce), an Angela Davis lookalike with her short Afro and hexagonal glasses, convinced of her acute intelligence but hiding a secret; Susan (Adina Verson, fiercer) a radical Marxist lesbian, who believes only artificial wombs will save humankind; and Dora (Audrey Corsa, FANTAStic), a Barbie whose brainpower, if not her sexual pleasure, is on par with her good fortune and determination.  Only Isidora (Irene Sofia Lucio, galvanizing) as an Italian immigrant with peculiar politics, seemed unfamiliar to this regular reader of popular feminist fiction back in the day (The Bluest Eye, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, Fear of Flying, Rubyfruit Jungle & The Women's Room, off the top of my head, in chronological order).  The women's interactions are fairly predictable, too, as their "community" and politics evolve but watching the winning cast establish their characters is thoroughly enjoyable. 

To feminize a male metaphor, director Whitney White (Saturday Church) takes off the gloves in the second act, after the brief but critical appearance of Bill (Charlie Thurston, persuasively anodyne) the chivalrous, ambitious hunk who competes with Lizze to clear the meeting chairs before shooting some hoops.  Sparks fly and Lizzie turns her mother's role over to Susan (Kayla Davion, fiercest) because "it would be creepy" for a daughter to be sexually interested in her father, and begins watching the action instead of participating in it, an effective sleight of theatrical hand.  Susan, as a woman with four kids who, like Bill, hasn't been given much to do in the first act, dominates the second playing both Black and white and poor and privileged characters, a performance that serves as a powerful metaphor for what appears to be Wohl's theme:  as much as women's age, bodies, class, race and sexual orientation differ they all face the same challenges when fighting for equality, challenges that have diminished over time but remain formidable particularly in the face of love, the chemical reaction that fuels human reproduction for the majority of people.

Which brings me back to Taylor Swift, who from this fangirl's perspective seems to have it all.  The megastar's track record prior to her engagement and the release of her latest album surely more than qualifies her as a contemporary feminist icon.  To cite just three examples:  as a young woman, she successfully sued a radio promoter who grabbed her ass; her lyrics for "The Man" offered the most tuneful, transgressive and amusing distillation of sexism to ever appear on a pop album; and she re-mastered much of her back catalog when a male recording executive refused to sell them back to her, a seemingly impossible feat.

Now, in The Life of a Showgirl, Swift admits that she lied when she said "I don't believe in marriage" ("Eldest Daughter"); she's queerbaiting in a public catfight with another pop star ("Actually Romantic"); and she's rhapsodizing about her fiancé's endowment ("Wood").  I can't say that I'm looking forward to her songs about motherhood.

Lizzie, look no further than basic biology for the answer to your question.  Maybe Susan is right about those artificial wombs, after all.

*  *  *  *

Liberation, because of its second-act shocker, has a better reason than inconsiderate people to insist that audience members secure their phones in Yondr pouches upon arrival at the theater.  For me it's a worthwhile inconvenience because use of phones during live performances and movies DRIVES ME NUTS.  So when I sat down in my orchestra seat and immediately spotted a masked woman about my age in front of me removing her phone from her purse, I confronted her. 

"You know, you're supposed to check your phone upon entering the theater," I admonished. 

"You don't understand, sir" her companion, also masked, replied.  "She's got diabetes."

"Oh yeah?  What did she do before she had a phone?" I snapped.

"It's none of your business," replied the diabetic who continued to scroll her phone in a manner that suggested she wasn't monitoring her blood sugar.

Furious at the insensitivity of an individual who would use her phone in a theater where everyone else had been denied access to theirs, I got up from my seat to look for an usher. "If she's wearing a white band around her wrist, it's OK now, but not during the show," the usher explained.  Somewhat chastened, I returned to my seat where the woman's scrolling continued on and off with nervous looks over her shoulder until Liberation began.  I couldn't see if she was wearing a white band or not.

As soon as the curtain dropped for intermission, out came her phone.  She briefly checked her mail, but returned it to her purse as soon as she heard me scoff in disgust.  Fifteen minutes without my phone gave me even more time to stew.

Am I the asshole?  Would I have confronted a man in the same situation?

Little Bear Ridge Road (3*)

 

Call me shallow, but enduring 90 minutes of mostly misery isn't how I want to spend a night on Broadway, even at reduced prices.  Based on "Little Bear Ridge Road," and "The Whale," the film adaptation of his 2012 drama, playwright Samuel D. Hunter seems to specialize in gay men in flyover country whose sense of victimhood gets in the way of their lives.  

Ethan (Micah Stock), a sad sack, shows up at the rural Idaho home of his aunt Sarah (Laurie Metcalfe), bearing a grudge he has nursed since the age of ten, to settle the estate of his estranged father, a meth addict.  He's masked and within the first few minutes, the audience understands this is a Pandemic play with a capital "P," although covid isn't primarily responsible for the mismatched pair's isolation.  Sarah vacuums, Ethan mopes and they watch a series that may or may not feature aliens from a double Barcalounger, the only piece of furniture on stage.  It hints at a long-gone lover or husband.  

The "action" jumps forward quickly; along the way, Ethan hooks up with a budding astrophysicist whose metaphor about star watching forecasts the play's teachable moment (duh!), and Sarah, a nurse, is forced to disclose her treatment for cancer.  Before you know it, the pandemic is over and Ethan has begun to mirror his aunt's spirit but when given an opportunity to change his life, he scrolls his phone instead.  Director Joe Mantello more subtly indicts the role technology has had in stunting our emotional lives with "content" always distantly audible in the background.

Much of the audience found the characters' mostly tentative interactions funny, guffawing as if they were watching an episode of Roseanne, and may have come to see Metcalfe personify irascibility which she does, faultlessly.  The bond she develops with James (John Drea, pitch perfect in his kind befuddlement) suggests she wasn't always the fighter she is now, no thanks to Hunter, who provides so little backstory for either character that the audience is left to project their own motivations.

There's redemption, of a kind, narrated by a competent health care professional who can't pronounce "infinitesimal."  I didn't believe it for a moment.  People don't really change. Somewhere in Portland, Ethan is still feeling sorry for himself while James enjoys the kind of life available to most self-respecting gay men who get their asses to a big city.

Saturday Church (5*)

 I bought a ticket for a show celebrating queens before I knew the matinee at the New York Theater Workshop would be taking place on a day of nationwide "No Kings" protests.  I probably should feel guilty for enjoying myself as much as I did, but at least Saturday Night Church, based on a little-seen 2018 movie, offered a mostly Black universe where love finally trumps hate.

Imagine Pose, Ryan Murphy's indelible FX series about ballroom culture, scored by Sia and you'll get the idea.  It's true that we've seen this story many times before, although perhaps not presided over by a Black Jesus in drag.  Silly me, I didn't even realize that J. Harrison Ghee, Tony Award winner for Some Like It Hot, was performing that role as well as that of the butch Pastor Lewis until I glanced at the program during intermission.  He believably (and sympathetically) embodies both characters while towering over the rest of the cast not because he's more talented but because he's sooooo damn BIG, especially in platform boots.

But the real draw here is the vibe conjured by a fairly large and always exuberant cast with no weak links, the kind of pipes I always thought I might hear if I went to Sunday services in Harlem and the footwork of the Globetrotters.  As Ulysses, 2025 Voice contestant Bryson Battle sings like an angel and convincingly behaves like one, too.  Young Jackson Kanawha Perry, as the tender teen hustler who introduces him to his true self, has charisma to spare, and B Noel Thomas, the house mother nursing other ambitions, exudes a maternal warmth that runs as deep as her décolletage. 

Director Whitney White keeps things moving as fluidly as Michael Bennett did in Dreamgirls, no easy feat on an off-Broadway budget.  Saturday Church begins and ends with the kind of ferocious energy I've rarely seen sustained for more than two hours, although Hell's Kitchen did come close.  During the finale, everybody--including the too-busy blood mother (Christina Sajous) and frightened aunt (Joaquina Kalukango) whose resistance you know will eventually be overcome--gets to compete on the runway.  Aside from the WOW factor of Kalukango's Easter-appropriate costume, designed by the surely fabulous Qween Jean, it comes as no surprise but the house goes nuts anyway.

Broadway is about to have its own ballroom culture moment when Cats: The Jellicle Ball opens in March.    Producers should make room for Saturday Night Church, too!

Hell's Kitchen (4*)

For some reason, Alicia Keys had never been on a Chiffon playlist; as I scanned the musical numbers in the Playbill for Hell's Kitchen, I recognized only one, "Empire State of Mind," a song I associated more with Jay Z.  Definitely a blind spot and my loss for the past two decades.  

Set for the most part in Manhattan Plaza, where Keyes grew up, Hell's Kitchen resonated for a personal reason, too.  Barnet, one of the buildings earliest tenants, lived there with a spectacular view of the George Washington Bridge when we met, four years before the musical prodigy was born in 1981. The one-room apartment where Ali and her mother resided was the same size as Barnet's, and I recall listening with excitement to his stories of riding the elevator with Angela Lansbury.  And early in our relationship my encounters with the doormen, typically Black men like the ever-reliable Ray (Oscar Whitney, Jr.), were frequent.

From "Gospel," the super kinetic opening number, bolstered by vivid projections of the 'hood and multi-purpose scaffolding that emphasizes the high rise of Manhattan, Hell's Kitchen felt true to me in ways that other juke box musicals haven't, perhaps because it focuses strictly on the most relatable years before its adolescent subject became famous, while she banked the experience she eventually communicated through song. Has the Hudson ever served as a more relevant metaphor than it does in "River," plaintively sung by Amanda Reid, a fellow Texan making her Broadway debut? 

The production reminded me for the umpteenth time how much talent there is on Broadway.  Although I wasn't familiar with the 2024 Tony winners for Best Actress and Best Featured Actress in a Musical, the energetic and diverse cast, and first-rate band had the joint stompin' and shoutin', particularly during "Kaleidoscope," a new song Keys wrote for the show, when I almost felt young and hopeful enough to be dancing in the aisles along with them.  Jessica Vosk, as a strict mom, and Angela Birchett, an understudy who played Miss Liza Jane, Keyes's beloved mentor, both deliver powerhouse vocal performances that bring down the house.  Though Philip Johnson Richardson and Benjamin H. Moore don't have as much to do in what is essentially a thin but still resolutely feminist book, they sing well and deliver performances that add social justice nuance to stereotypes of sensitive, sexy men.  Speaking of sexy men, I have a weakness for chorus boys, but few have commanded the stage the way that Eliazar Jimenez does, tirelessly.

As for "Empire State of Mind," the closing number: let me just say I fell in love with my adopted city all over again, with the now besieged Statue of Liberty still capable of bringing tears to my cynical eyes.

Chiffon went to sleep listening to Alicia Keys "Essentials" on Apple Music and put the original cast recording of Hell's Kitchen on repeat the next morning.  Congratulations, Ms. Keyes, director Michael Greif and choreographer Camille A. Brown for raising the juke-box-musical bar as high as Barnet's apartment on the 37th floor.