8 THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022
desperation, familial abuse, clan conflict—to
create a modern-day staging with uncom-
fortably acute resonances. Stone’s onstage
film crew and overly enthusiastic use of the
Met’s revolving platform immerse view-
ers in a forgotten, economically distressed
town in the Rust Belt, where Nadine Sierra’s
good-hearted Lucia is tricked by her slea-
zebag brother (Artur Ruciński’s elegantly
sung Enrico) into thinking that her beloved
(Javier Camerana’s tender Edgardo) has
abandoned her. When Lucia understands,
too late, what’s happened, she sings the most
famous mad scene in all of opera—a twen-
ty-minute virtuosic display often handled by
sparkly voices. Sierra’s rich soprano sounds
captivating in this music, imbuing it with a
warmth that makes Lucia’s pain all too real.
Riccardo Frizza conducts, with a light touch
that sometimes goes slack.—Oussama Zahr
(Metropolitan Opera House; May 14 and May
21 at 1 and May 17 at 7.)
PinkPantheress
DANCE PinkPantheress’s existence as a re-
cording artist manifested itself during the
pandemic. The pop phenomenon’s music
has thrived in the short form, on TikTok,
pairing U.K. underground dance sounds,
such as drum ’n’ bass and garage, with the
distilled lucidity of pop-punk. The effect,
on her début, “to hell with it,” from 2021,
is a beguiling display of dreams and night-
mares, delivered with such hyperreality
and restraint as to be uncanny. It was only
sixteen months ago, during her first year
of university, that she began to share these
diaristic but spare songs, the virality of
which led to a major-label record deal, and
a U.S. tour—including this headlining stop
at a banquet hall that has also served as a
dim-sum restaurant, under the Manhattan
Bridge.—J.P. (88 Palace; May 13.)
Samara Joy and
Pasquale Grasso Trio
JAZZ Samara Joy, the winner of the 2019
Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal
Competition, has all the goods to hold a
room spellbound, but so does Pasquale
Grasso, a master guitarist. Nonetheless,
Grasso does a superb job of selflessly sup-
porting the technically gifted and swinging
singer, without letting you forget what a
monster player he is. Joy and the trio leader
Grasso, neo-traditionalists who met at Pur-
chase College, approach standards, and also
instrumental pieces with recast lyrics—in-
cluding an adaptation of Fats Navarro’s
luminous 1947 “Nostalgia”—with the glee
of wide-eyed enthusiasts uncovering in-
spiration in a music older than the two of
them put together.—Steve Futterman (Bar
Bayeux; May 11.)
1
DANCE
New York City Ballet
The Stravinsky Festival continues for a sec-
ond week. The third program in the series
(on May 11 and on the evening of May 14)
offers a triptych of well-known Balanchine
ballets on ancient Greek themes, with
“Apollo,” “Orpheus,” and “Agon.” (Aaron
Sanz and Joseph Gordon début as Orpheus.)
Program IV (on May 12-13 and at the May
14 matinée) is more varied, and includes a
seldom seen work, “Divertimento from ‘Le
Baiser de la Fée.’” The original “Baiser de la
Fée,” created in 1928, was a story ballet in-
spired by a haunting Hans Christian Ander-
sen tale. Balanchine choreographed other
versions into the seventies, eliminating the
story but featuring a mysterious and diffi-
cult solo for the lead male dancer, who ap-
pears to struggle against an invisible force.
It is one of the most striking male solos in
the Balanchine repertory. “Divertimento”
shares a bill with Jerome Robbins’s highly
dramatic “The Cage” and the delicate pas
de deux “Duo Concertant.”—Marina Harss
(DavidH. Koch Theatre; through May 29.)“The Missing Element”
A Works & Process production, with cre-
ative direction by the beatbox virtuoso Chris
Celiz and the b-boy Anthony Vito Rodri-
guez, “The Missing Element” combines the
collective mouthing of the Beatbox House
with a crew of experts in krump, flex, and
breaking, including Brian (HollowDreamz)
Henry and King Havoc. The show, which
was created during the pandemic in bubble
residencies and has been presented in sev-
eral forms, live and online, now has its full
world première.—Brian Seibert (Guggenheim;
May 15-16.)“Nearly Stationary”
The visual artist Barbara Kilpatrick has a
long history with dance, designing exqui-
sitely eccentric costumes and sets for the
choreographer Vicky Shick, among others.
“Nearly Stationary,” at Hudson Hall, in
Hudson, N.Y., is an installation of Kilpat-
rick’s photographs, sculptures, and cos-
tumes. Silas Riener and Rashaun Mitchell,
who are exquisite and eccentric themselves,
dance a new work in response to the exhibit1
THETHEATRE
Funny Girl
Watch Beanie Feldstein in the recent Ryan
Murphy historical soap “Impeachment:
American Crime Story,” where she plays a
naïve, troubled, and eventually embattled
Monica Lewinsky, and you’ll see a lot of
what makes her an appealing actor. She’s
vulnerable, with big quivering eyes, and she
knows how to use the fundamental fresh-
ness and innocence of her affect to create a
queasy sense of dramatic irony for viewers.
She’s a good performer with pathos to spare.
That’s why it’s strange to see her talents
so misjudged and misapplied in the new
Broadway production of the 1964 musical
“Funny Girl,” directed by Michael Mayer,
with a revised book by Harvey Fierstein.
Feldstein’s voice is sweet in the dead center
of her range, but it otherwise just can’t jus-
tify the casting. And the big, broad humor
in this uneven show is fatally devoid of the
lower-key, more soulful and emotionally
precise fare that might one day yield Feld-
stein a hit.—Vinson Cunningham (August
Wilson; open run.)How I Learned to Drive
Paula Vogel’s masterwork of scattered nar-
rative and dangerously controlled tone is
the kind of horror story that never sets its
humanism aside. It tells the fraught, al-
most physically painful story of a girl—soon
a woman—named Li’l Bit (Mary-Louise
Parker), who is sexually abused throughout
her adolescence by her uncle by marriage,
Peck (David Morse). The unthinkable and
sometimes brutal trick of Vogel’s play, which
skips through time like an artfully thrown
stone, is to make such bleak material in-
termittently funny and consistently wise.
The trick of this new production, directed
by Mark Brokaw for Manhattan Theatre
Club, is the casting of Parker and Morse,
two cerebral performers who, palpably, think
as they go. They reprise roles that they orig-
inated, in the play’s 1997 Off Broadway pre-
mière, and their canniness now, in middle
age—together with Vogel’s insouciant atti-
tude toward linear time—gives the harrow-
ing plot the texture of softly remembered
regret.—V.C. (SamuelJ. Friedman; through
May 29.)The Minutes
Tracy Letts’s play, directed by AnnaD. Sha-
piro, is a loopy bureaucratic comedy that’s
also a kind of textual mystery. Mr. Peel (Noah
Reid), a young councilman in a typical small
American town, returns to work after some
time off—his mother has recently died—and
comes back to odd changes. One of his col-
leagues is gone, and nobody will give him
a reason—or share, without a struggle, the
minutes of the meeting he’s missed. What
ensues is a sharp satire of democracy on the
smallest stage, and a much less sharp inter-
rogation of American history and myth. An
abrupt midstream change in genre comes
across as forced and needlessly didactic,
perhaps because, given the timing of this
production—originally slated for 2020, it
was postponed due to the pandemic—it feels
feebly matchy-matchy with the culture wars
encircling history and public schools.—V.C.
(Studio 54; through July 24.)Mr. Saturday Night
Sometimes entertainment is a mercifully
simple affair. Case in point: put Billy Crys-
tal on a stage, give him some jokes, and lethim interact with the crowd, and it’ll proba-
bly add up to a good time. The comedian and
longtime Oscar host hits his marks again in
“Mr. Saturday Night,” a musical based on a
1992 movie of the same name, with a book
by Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel, and Crys-
tal himself, music by Jason Robert Brown,
and lyrics by Amanda Green. The story is
fairly basic: when a faded star comedian is
declared dead on a televised “In Memo-
riam” roll call, he takes the fluky fifteen
minutes of fresh fame and tries to turn it
into a comeback. The songs are forgettable,
and forgettably sung. But the structure of
the musical is nicely roomy, giving Crystal
ample time to perform standup, sell jokes,
and serve up his shtick. It works!—V.C.
(Nederlander; open run.)