Things to do in New York this Saturday

Theater review by Raven Snook  Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but in Fat Ham redemption is what's on the menu. The outlines of James Ijames's delicious riff on Hamlet are Shakespearean, but the point and the punch lines—and most of the poetry—are the playwright’s own. Morose online college student Juicy (an endearing Marcel Spears) is upset that his newly widowed mom Tedra (Nikki Crawford) has already remarried his scheming uncle Rev (Billy Eugene Jones). His father was an abusive killer who got shanked in prison, but when Pap returns as a ghost (also played by Jones) to reveal that Rev was to blame for his death—and to demand that his son avenge his murder—the queer and clever Juicy is torn over whether to continue the family traditions of toxic masculinity and violence. But can he choose pleasure over pain?  Juicy’s spiritual journey takes place at a boisterous Southern backyard barbecue that is funny and fabulous, terrifying and touching, as seven souls—each as messy as the meat they're devouring—clash, connect and push against their expected roles. In addition to the kin that's less than kind, there are Juicy's motor-mouthed cousin Tio (Chris Herbie Holland, hilarious), whose porn obsession inspires a dreamy philosophy; church lady Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas, perfect); and Rabby’s unhappy kids, Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) and U.S. Marine Larry (Calvin Leon Smith, heartbreaking), all of whom have secrets. Fat Ham | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus Over ribs and ribbing

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  There are eight million stories in the naked city, and the new musical New York, New York seems to include about half of them. Set in the 1940s in what the iconographic title tune calls “the city that never sleeps,” this hustling, bustling show doesn’t rest for a minute. There are more than 20 songs—mostly by the legendary team of John Kander and Fred Ebb—and director-choreographer Susan Stroman fills the spaces between them with diverting vignettes of character dance, performed by a large ensemble that gives us Grand Central Terminal by way of Central Casting: pin-striped gangsters, nuns in full habit, artists, tourists, a sailor, a bride, an opera singer who moonlights cleaning floors at the museum.  These lively doodles brighten the margins of what amounts to a slender book in big type. The musical is nominally inspired by the 1977 Martin Scorsese movie New York, New York, but the show retains almost nothing from the film except three Kander and Ebb songs: the eponymous one, of course, as well as “Happy Endings” and the terrific torch anthem “But the World Goes ’Round.” The rest of the score is a quilt of selections from other old Kander and Ebb works—from Flora the Red Menace’s lovely “A Quiet Thing” to a ditty from Funny Lady and numbers that were cut from The Rink and The Act—augmented by pieces that Kander has written himself or with Lin-Manuel Miranda since Ebb’s death in 2004.  While they don’t deliver the big hits of Kander and Ebb’s

It's been nearly 20 years since Adam Guettel's gorgeous score for The Light in the Piazza solidified his status as one of modern musical theater's most important composers. But we haven't gotten a full new show from him since—until now. This original musical, adapted from JP Miller's 1958 TV movie and 1962 film about a hard-drinking couple in the 1950s, reunites Guettel with two key Piazza collaborators: book writer Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss) and leading lady Kelli O'Hara, who stars opposite fellow Broadway luminary Brian d'Arcy James. Michael Greif (Rent) directs the hotly antipated world premiere at the Atlantic.

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served. Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1979 Sweeney Todd may well be the greatest of all Broadway musicals: an epic combination of disparate ingredients—horror and humor, cynicism and sentiment, melodrama and sophisticated wit—with a central core of grounded, meaty humanity. But while the show’s quality is baked into the writing, portion sizes in recent years have varied. Sweeney Todd’s scope makes it expensive to stage; its 1989 and 2005 Broadway revivals (and the immersive 2017 Off Broadway incarnation) presented the show with greatly reduced casts and orchestrations. Not so for the thrilling version now playing at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, directed by Hamilton’s Thomas Kail: This production features a 26-piece orchestra and a cast of 25 led by Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. It’s a feast for the ears.  Groban plays the title role: a Victorian barber, né Benjamin Barker, who returns to London after serving 15 years of hard labor for a crime he didn’t commit, hoping to reunite with his beloved wife, Lucy, and their young daughter, Johanna. But as he learns from his practical neighbor Mrs. Lovett (Ashford)—who operates the squalid meat-pie shop below his old tonsorial parlor—Lucy poisoned herself after being assaulted by the same lecherous judge (Jamie Jackson) who sent him away, who is now the guardian of the teenage Johanna (Maria Bilbao). With help from Mrs. Lovett and his friend Anthony (Jordan Fish

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Some plays offer a slice of life; Life of Pi is a wedge of fantasy. Adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti from Yann Martel’s bestselling 2001 novel, which also inspired a 2012 film by Ang Lee, this British import has been mounted to spectacular effect. Its sea-tossed story—about a shipwrecked Indian teenager named Pi (Hiran Abeysekera) who spends hundreds of days afloat in the Pacific in the company of a Bengal tiger—demands imagination, and director Max Webster provides it in abundance. Animal puppetry, lights, action, music and sound flood the theater, especially in the show’s second half; stage magic crashes out then gently recedes, tugging us into its currents.  The glory of this creation is the tiger, of course, whose comical name, Richard Parker—the result of a bureaucratic mix-up with its hunter—represents one of Life of Pi’s running themes: the thinness of the line between man from beast, especially when survival is at stake. It takes a team of eight human puppeteers, alternating duties, to bring Richard Parker to theatrical life as the great cat prowls, shudders, leaps and purrs. But Finn Caldwell and Nick Barnes’s sensitively articulated puppet designs do not end there: The production’s menagerie also includes a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a turtle; for larger groups of animals, swarms of actors wave butterfly poles and fish sticks.  Life of Pi | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman The result is something like childr

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  In the opening minutes of Prima Facie, a modern young woman dresses herself up as an old man from centuries ago. Tessa, the defense barrister played by the riveting Jodie Comer in Suzie Miller’s solo play, seems comfortable in her traditional English legal costume: a dark suit, a gray wig, a black gown, a crisp white shirt with a jabot in front. She’s playing in a court whose rules were not invented for her, and she knows how to win—including when she is defending men on trial for sex crimes. “It’s not emotional for me,” she says. “It’s the game. The game of law.”   Later in the play, the working-class Tessa tells us that she has been driven all her life by her desire to serve justice, and by her faith in the law to provide it. That’s the truth, but not the whole truth. She gets an ego rush playing cat to the witnesses’ mice, and she enjoys the rewards that come from victory. (“Respect. Power.”) And her success within a patriarchal system makes her feel sexy: At a bar, when she tipsily holds forth about the rights of the accused—”‘We believe in innocent until proven guilty. It’s not just a catchphrase, it’s the bedrock of how you keep a society civilized”—it’s partly to impress a male colleague whom she knows to be watching her. (The image that greets the audience at the start of the play is a neon illustration of blind justice that evokes the signage for a strip club.)  Prima Facie | Photograph: Courtesy Bronwen Sharp Miller’s tale has a str

Hundreds of items have been pulled from the New York Public Library's expansive and centuries-spanning archive to be put on display—many of them for the first time—in a permanent exhibition called "The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures." Inside the NYPL's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building and its beautiful Gottesman Hall, are more than 250 unique and rare items culled from its research centers: the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the Library for the Performing Arts and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The exhibit, which opens to the public on Friday, September 24, spans 4,000 years of history and includes a wide range of history-making pieces, including the only surviving letter from Christoper Columbus announcing his "discovery" of the Americas to King Ferdinand’s court and the first Gutenberg Bible brought over to the Americas. We visited the stunning collection this week to find the top 10 must-see items at the NYPL Treasures exhibit so when you go, you can make sure to see them for yourself: 1. Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence Photograph: Max Touhey / NYPL Only six manuscript versions of the Declaration of Independence are known to survive in the hand of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson made this copy for a friend shortly after the July 4th, 1776, ratification of the Declaration, which announced to the world the American colonies’ political separation from Great Britain. He underlined words t

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The jokes pop like corn on a cast-iron stove in the musical Shucked. They pour out in a ceaseless succession of happy little bursts, one after another—pop! pop!—to be buttered and salted by a game and endearing cast. Are those cobs in the actors’ pockets, or are they happy to see you? Both. And if a few kernels fail to inflate, they’re forgotten amid the bounty: Before you know it, you’re gorged to satisfaction on a big, tasty bag of Broadway puff.   Shucked was originally conceived as an adaptation of the long-running TV variety show Hee Haw, and although it is no longer connected to that property, it embraces its roots in tele-vaudeville. Set mostly in the ultra-rural enclave of Cob County—whose cheerfully inbred residents, fenced off from the rest of America by a wall of corn stalks, have not left its confines in generations—the show tells a “farm to fable” tale that pits the slickness of the city against the hickery of the sticks. A pair of narrators, played by Grey Henson and Ashley D. Kelley, help guide us through the maize maze of the story. But the plot is essentially a framework, as sturdy but hole-ridden as Scott Pask’s tumbledown set, for Shucked’s primary selling point: laughs, and plenty of 'em. The country-fried score, by the accomplished Nashville songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, includes rollicking comedic numbers and a sprinkling of sincere character songs. The latter fall to the central romantic couple, Maizy (Car

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Sixteen is not sweet for the heroine of the bruisingly joyful new musical Kimberly Akimbo. Adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire from his own 2001 play, with music by Jeanine Tesori (Caroline, or Change), the show has a central conceit that verges on magical realism: Kimberly Levaco suffers from an unnamed, “incredibly rare” genetic disorder that makes her age at a superfast rate. Played by the 63-year-old Victoria Clark, she is physically and psychically out of place among her high school peers, who have more conventional adolescent problems like unrequited crushes. “Getting older is my affliction,” the usually mild-mannered Kimberly sings in a rare burst of confrontation. “Getting older is your cure.”   Life at home in New Jersey with her boozy, incompetently protective father (Steven Boyer) and her pregnant, hypochondriacal and self-absorbed mother (Alli Mauzey) is even less appealing. But as Kimberly stares into a cruelly foreshortened future—the life expectancy for people with her illness is, yes, 16—two agents of disruption reframe her perspective. The first is her aunt Debra (the unstoppable Bonnie Milligan), a hilarious gale force of chaos who blows into town and quickly recruits her niece into an elaborate check-fraud scheme. The other is Seth (the winsome and natural Justin Cooley), a gentle, tuba-playing classmate with an affinity for anagrams that suggests, to Kimberly, that maybe he could shake her up and rearrange her too. Kimberly Aki

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Minimalism, as an approach to theater, serves a double duty. On one hand, it is part of an honorable artistic tradition, championed by directorial giants like Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook, that aims to prioritize the actors and the text, and to avoid straining for a surface realism that film and television more readily provide. But it has another, more practical advantage as well: a production without lavish sets and costumes (and often with fewer actors) costs a lot less money to mount. The convergence of these two functions helps account for the recent trend toward a less-is-more aesthetic on even the biggest stages. Let’s call it radical cheap. When this strategy doesn’t work, it can leave you unsatisfied, without even the material comforts of an old-fashioned production to enjoy. But in the new Broadway revival of A Doll’s House, it slices clean through you. The superb Jessica Chastain plays Nora Helmer—the seemingly happy young wife and mother of Henrik Ibsen’s protofeminist 1879 social drama, who must learn to stop knitting the wool that gets pulled over her eyes—and Jamie Lloyd’s staging zeroes in on her with relentless focus. Chastain is seated onstage before the play begins, and she spends most of the next two hours, without intermission, facing forward in a plain wooden chair. The stage is completely bare, with no set unless you count a ceiling of lights that descends as Nora’s world closes in on her. The actors wear simple, moder