Gramercy and Flatiron events: The best shows and happenings

Review by Adam Feldman  The low-key dazzling Speakeasy Magick has been nestled in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel for more than a year, and now it has moved up to the Lodge: a small wood-framed room at Gallow Green, which functions as a rooftop bar in the summer. The show’s dark and noisy new digs suit it well. Hosted by Todd Robbins (Play Dead), who specializes in mild carnival-sideshow shocks, Speakeasy Magick is a moveable feast of legerdemain; audience members, seated at seven tables, are visited by a series of performers in turn. Robbins describes this as “magic speed dating.” One might also think of it as tricking: an illusion of intimacy, a satisfying climax, and off they go into the night. The evening is punctuated with brief performances on a makeshift stage. When I attended, the hearty Matthew Holtzclaw kicked things off with sleight of hand involving cigarettes and booze; later, the delicate-featured Alex Boyce pulled doves from thin air. But it’s the highly skilled close-up magic that really leaves you gasping with wonder. Holtzclaw’s table act comes to fruition with a highly effective variation on the classic cups-and-balls routine; the elegant, Singapore-born Prakash and the dauntingly tattooed Mark Calabrese—a razor of a card sharp—both find clever ways to integrate cell phones into their acts. Each performer has a tight 10-minute act, and most of them are excellent, but that’s the nice thing about the way the show is structured: If one of them happens to...

In the manner of A.R. Gurney's Love Letters, rotating pairs of veteran actors co-star in Michael Griffo's epistolary two-hander, which traces the long-distance friendship between two women (one American, the other British) over the course of five decades, starting in the 1950s. After a successful winter run, director SuzAnne Barabas's production returns for an encore with some of the same performers. Randy Graff and Beth Leavel share the stage through February 1; after that come Brooke Adams and Marilu Henner (Feb 4–15), Carmen Cusack and Gina Torres (Feb 18–Mar 1) and Jodi Benson and Marcia Mitzman Gaven (Mar 4–15). 

John Kelly, whose career as a performance artist stretches back more than 40 years, plays the outsider artist and graphomaniac Henry Darger—a Chicago menial worker whose enormous trove of strange and sometimes disturbing paintings, illustrations and literary efforts came to light mostly after his 1973 death—in the word premiere of a work conceived and directed by the dance-theater eminence Martha Clarke (The Garden of Earthly Delights). The show's script has been adapted from Darger's copious writings by the veteran playwright Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart).

As controversy continues to rage about immigration from the U.S.'s southern border, this ambitious two-handed musical revisits a time when the pipeline ran in the other direction, and thousands of Black Americans fled slavery for the safety of Mexico. Writer-actors Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson have performed the show across the country and, last fall, at Audible Theater's Minetta Lane Theatre; now they bring it back for a longer Off Broadway run. David Mendizábal directs.