22 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
meant to hear what’s going on? What are
they doing there? Only Frank Wood, as the
father of the bride, manages to etch a fully
fleshed character, playing a lost soul who
looks befuddled by the proceedings.— E. V.
(Through March 29.)
The Unsinkable Molly Brown
Abrons Arts Center
The musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,”
which was adapted for the big screen in 1964
(starring the unmatched Debbie Reynolds),
is the unsinkably cute story of the real ac-
tivist and all-around do-gooder. Arriving
in a mining town, Molly helps revitalize
the community, makes a fortune, rallies for
unions, and climbs up the social ladder—all
before, famously, surviving the sinking of the
Titanic. The Transport Group’s production
updates the original with a new book and
some previously unheard songs by Meredith
Willson. Beth Malone, as Molly, is perfec-
tion—stunningly effervescent, plucky, and
honey-sweet, with a soaring voice. Whitney
Bashor and David Aron Damane, as Molly’s
best friend and her husband, respectively,
deliver crisp, operatic vocals, though the
latter lacks chemistry with Malone. The cho-
reography, by Kathleen Marshall, who also
directs, has the flair of old Broadway, with
lifts, leaps, and stomps. The second act, how-
ever, lacks momentum, and the production
feels rife with filler—extraneous songs and
scenes that accomplish the seemingly im-
possible task of slowing Molly down.—M.P.
(Through April 5.)
We’re Gonna Die
Second Stage
Young Jean Lee wrote the script and lyrics
of this hilarious, wrenching, and wise mono-
logue interspersed with fine, bright songs
about loneliness, sickness, aging, and death.
It’s a show in which a song with a chorus of
“When you get old / All your friends will
die / And you will be a burden to the world”
is a full-on banger and, weirdly, makes you
feel better. In its original production, in
2011, a lot of its charm emanated from its
indie spareness and from Lee’s own unstud-
ied performance as the lead. Here that role
goes to Janelle McDermoth, who’s a total
star, with endless charisma and a magnifi-
cent voice. As directed and choreographed
by Raja Feather Kelly, this version’s staging
is sleeker (Tuce Yasak designed the dazzling
lighting) and its arrangements poppier.
But it works just as well because McDer-
moth never plays it falsely.—R.R. (Through
March 22.)
West Side Story
Broadway Theatre
An infuriating example of what happens
when a powerful style calcifies into shtick.
For his fourth outing on Broadway, the Bel-
gian director Ivo van Hove has given himself
a gorgeous, youthful, diverse cast to work
with—Isaac Powell as a lithe and jittery
Tony and the spirited Shereen Pimentel as
Maria are highlights, as are Yesenia Ayala’s
Anita and Dharon E. Jones’s Riff—only to
1
MOVIES
The Burnt Orange Heresy
If modern art, purveyed or perused, strikes
you as a slippery trade, then Claes Bang is
your man. In “The Square” (2017), he played
the director of an art museum. In this new
film, directed by Giuseppe Capotondi and
based on a thriller by Charles Willeford, he
plays an art critic named James Figueras, who
has a keen eye on the market and a nose for
fraud. Together with a newfound lover, Ber-
enice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki), he is invited
to a villa on Lake Como, where a reclusive col-
lector, Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger), yearns
to get his hands on a painting—any paint-
ing—by the equally elusive Jerome Debney
(Donald Sutherland). Cassidy hires Figueras
to get whatever he can, though the mission
is complicated by Berenice, whose motives
are more opaque. Sadly, the movie steadily
loses steam and grace, but the early scenes
display a wicked suavity as the untrustworthy
characters toy with one another’s lusts and
fates.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of
3/9/20.) (In wide release.)Chronicle of Anna
Magdalena Bach
Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s
1968 bio-pic about the composer Johann
Sebastian Bach illuminates the artistic con-
flicts of their own time. The harpsichordist
and organist Gustav Leonhardt plays the
lead role, performing Bach’s music alongside
other luminaries of the period-instrument
movement (including Nikolaus Harnon-
court) in costume and on location in his-
toric churches and homes. The directors
emphasize Bach’s relentless practical battles
on behalf of his art—the indifference of
clerical authorities, the struggle for money,
the hostility of scholars, the quest for pa-
tronage—and depict such masterpieces as
the “St. Matthew Passion” as just another
day’s work. The performances are filmed in
long takes at incisive angles, placing Bach
squarely in the environment that his music
supremely transcends; the result suggests
the anti-romantic credo of a pair of free
spirits who show Bach subordinating his own
personality and personal circumstances in
the creation of an enduring, universal art.
In German.—Richard Brody (Metrograph,
March 12, and streaming.)Joan of Arc
For the second installment in Bruno Du-
mont’s diptych, the director follows the vi-
sionary confidence of his 2017 rock opera,
“Jeannette”—where the child Joan prepares
to fight France’s English occupiers—with
the sombre and ironic balladry of a defeated
young warrior facing execution at the hands
of her enemies. The ten-year-old Lise Leplat
Prudhomme plays Joan, who defies the super-
cilious King Charles VII (Fabrice Luchini)
and leads her troops into disastrous battle,
first at the gates of Paris and then at Amiens,
where she is captured. Half of the movie is
set in and around a cathedral, where she’s
interrogated by church officials under English
command. Adapting a play by Charles Péguy,
Dumont transforms the tale into a dialec-
tical spectacle: he stages military musters
like Busby Berkeley productions, seethes at
the torturers’ rationalizations, delights in
hearing his actors (especially Fabien Fenet)
declaim the scholars’ sophistries, and thrills
in the pugnacious simplicity of Joan’s defiant
responses, which reduce her captors’ pride
and privilege to ridicule. With music by the
singer-songwriter Christophe.—R.B. (Film at
Lincoln Center, March 11 and March 13.)Never Rarely Sometimes Always
Eliza Hittman’s third feature tells a spare
story in compelling detail: Autumn Calla-
han (Sidney Flanigan), a seventeen-year-old
high-school student in a small Pennsylvania
town, learns that she’s pregnant. Unable to
get an abortion in that state without parental
consent, she travels to New York, with her
cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder), for the proce-
dure. Hittman, who also wrote the script,
stays intimately close to Autumn, with at-
tention to her cramped life at home and in
school, her independent-minded ferocity, and
her physical sufferings (including attempts at
ending the pregnancy herself). But, above all,
this is a drama of social fabric—of the impact
of policy and prejudice on the daily thicketdwarf them with video footage streamed
on billboard-size screens above their heads.
As a metaphor—for the insignificance of
these characters’ lives in a hostile world, per-
haps?—the technique is banal; as a theatrical
device, it is a ludicrous waste. As is his wont,
van Hove has amplified the play’s darker
elements and snuffed out any lightness that
might temper its tragedy. (Farewell, “I Feel
Pretty.”) This is all the more disappointing
considering all that is promising here, includ-
ing Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreog-
raphy, which closes the gap between modern-
ist constructivism and TikTok preening, and
the exquisite rumble scene, which offers a
startling glimpse of what van Hove could do
were he to return to eye level and reground
himself in the idiom of the stage.—Alexandra
Schwartz (Reviewed in our issue of 3/2/20.)
(Open run.)The Woman in Black
McKittrick Hotel
You can’t go wrong with an old-fashioned
ghost story filled with jump scares—which
may be why “The Woman in Black” has been
running in London for thirty years. Now
Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of Susan
Hill’s 1983 novel has come to New York,
to the same building as “Sleep No More.”
The premise is simple: a London solicitor
named Arthur Kipps (David Acton) travels
to an isolated coastal house to sort out a
newly deceased woman’s papers; things go
bump in the night. Mallatratt added an un-
necessarily complicated storytelling device
involving a play within the play (an actor
portrayed by Ben Porter helps Kipps narrate
his tale). The show is at its best when the
director Robin Herford unleashes such sim-
ple theatrical devices as sudden loud noises,
moody lighting, and periods of pitch-black
darkness to create an atmosphere of dread.
If only the running time—which, at two
hours, feels padded—were as spartan as the
staging.—E.V. (Through April 19.)