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.

Lazarus Man (4*)

I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the novels of Richard Price, which I've been reading for as long as I've lived in New York.  That's due at least in part to his gifts as a prolific writer for both film (his Oscar-nominated gig as author of The Color of Money screenplay) and television which left less time for publishing books.  No doubt his nitty gritty contributions to both The Wire and The Deuce helped make those HBO productions among my favorite series of all time with their realistic depictions of the way that ordinary people talk and behave.

In Lazarus Man he's back to the south Bronx, his home turf, where a building has collapsed. Price is less interested in what caused the disaster--although he does nod cursorily to the callous corruption that generally accompanies real estate development in New York City--than its impact on people in the neighborhood.  His characters include a biracial recovering addict who survives the collapse and whose journey gives the book its title; a separated cop on the community relations beat who obsesses over a missing person while semi-neglecting her two children; a Black undertaker who fears he may lose his parking area to a community garden; and a young photographer from upstate New York whose work provides an essential clue to Price's theme.  All, including the woman and half a dozen secondary characters, are what Mr. LaGrone, my enriched English teacher in high school, would have described as "well-rounded" and Price orchestrates their interactions with the kind of naturalism familiar to anyone who has walked the borough's mean streets. 

While there are no big revelations or epiphanies in the somewhat meandering Lazarus Man, it is the kind of sympathetic book only a man who has lived a long life could write.  In the larger scheme of things, faith is more important to Price--who survived his own struggles with cocaine-- and can be more life-changing than knowing the truth.

“I’m not one to talk about religion [says Anthony, the recovering addict] but it’s like God buried me under that earth, wiped my slate clean, then brought me back up to be who I never thought I could be before … And all I want, all I want now, is to be worthy of that gift and … and to be…”

If only I could believe that . . .