Ben Brantley

NEW YORK — Want to hang out at Kristin’s or Ian’s place? Come on, it’ll be fun. We’ll kick back, gossip about famous friends, join in singalongs and — if we’re lucky — take a gander at prized possessions from their collections of memorabilia: Glinda’s magic wand, perhaps, from the musical “Wicked,” or Gandalf’s mighty sword from the “Lord of the Rings” movies.

As they say, there’s no place like home — especially when it’s a big Broadway stage.

Last week, I had the chance to spend some personal time with two much adored, Tony-winning performers, Kristin Chenoweth and Ian McKellen. She’s appearing through Nov. 17 in “Kristin Chenoweth: For the Girls,” which opened on Friday at the Nederlander Theater. He touched down at the Hudson Theater on Tuesday for a one-night charity performance of “Ian McKellen on Stage: With Tolkien, Shakespeare, Others ... and You,” with which he’s been touring Britain.

These two wouldn’t seem to have much in common. For starters, they are separated by more than a foot in height and three decades in age. Chenoweth, 51, is best known as an ebulliently American musical comedy diva, while McKellen, 80, is one of the all-time great British classical stage actors, with a lucrative sideline in fantasy action movies.

Fame can be a great leveler, though. And seeing McKellen and Chenoweth in the same week, I was struck by how much their shows shared as acknowledgments of their respective, equally passionate fan bases. Note the implicit collective embrace in each of their productions’ names.

The “and You” of McKellen’s title puts the audience on equal footing with him, Tolkien and Shakespeare. (That Tolkien gets billed over Shakespeare isn’t a matter I’m going to parse.) “For the Girls,” which is also the title of Chenoweth’s new album, exudes the snuggly promise of a slumber party, in which boys can be honorary girls if they behave.

And while Chenoweth hails from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and McKellen from Lancashire, England, each appears to regard returning to Broadway as a homecoming. Both announced early in their shows, with roaring contentment, how happy they were to be back on the Great White Way.

They proceeded to treat their theater palaces as if they were outsize studio apartments where everyone gathers around the table to gab. Yes, each did what she or he does best — singing, with octave-stretching virtuosity (Chenoweth) and sonorously reciting immortal verse (McKellen).

But these performances were rendered with a disarming, self-interrupting casualness, suggesting a happy ham at home among friends. And they often directly involved the audience. “Do you want it? Do you want it?” Chenoweth shouted to the audience, before she hit a high D in concluding a song. McKellen, in his show’s second act, asked theatergoers to yell out names of plays by Shakespeare, to cue whatever he did next.

It goes without saying that narcissism is essential to such endeavors. Any show styled as “An Evening With….” could just as well have the title of Elton John’s juicy new memoir, “Me.” But both stars are well aware that there wouldn’t be a Me, at least the capitalized version, without You.

And more than, say, the sort of stadium stage ruled by rock stars or a Comic-Con forum that showcases actors from superhero flicks (that includes McKellen, by the way), a Broadway house fosters the illusion of palpable intimacy. One of the first things McKellen did in his show — directed by his former romantic partner and longtime collaborator Sean Mathias — was to invite a few audience members onstage to fondle the sword he used playing the wizard Gandalf.

The beginning of “For the Girls,” directed by record and concert producer (and celebrated diva handler) Richard Jay Alexander, found Chenoweth alone onstage, back to the audience in an oversized T-shirt, with a 7-11 Big Gulp soda on the grand piano. She turned around and feigned exaggerated embarrassment, as if we had caught her unaware in her scanties.

While it’s easy to make fun of stars playing gracious host to us little people out there in the dark, an aura of easygoing generosity and gratitude pervaded both works. Chenoweth repeatedly brought her two, highly individual backup vocalists, Crystal Monee Hall and Marissa Rosen, into the spotlight for solos, and asked them about their starts in showbiz.

On Friday night, there were also guest appearances from Brittney Johnson, these days the standby for Glinda (a role originated by Chenoweth) in “Wicked,” and the divine operatic mezzo Jamie Barton, who was allowed to pretty much run away with the show singing the novelty number “Alto’s Lament.” Chenoweth, whose freakishly wide-ranging voice can accommodate a multitude of styles, sang Judy Garland favorites, country and western numbers, a Carpenters hit and a gospel crowd rouser.

McKellen spent much of the first act talking about falling in love with theater, working with titans like Laurence Olivier and, above all, coming out as a gay man, which he did at 47. (He mingled with the audience during intermission and afterward personally swung the bucket for donations to the nonprofit theater organization Only Make Believe.)

Chenoweth, like McKellen, is an ardent activist for gay rights. Both pointedly reminded us of how to spell their names and spoke of their religious upbringings (McKellen is descended from a line of Protestant ministers) and current convictions about the existence of God, which, for the record, are not the same.

Sometimes they even got down to the business of doing what they do best. McKellen’s mesmerizingly idiosyncratic recitations from “Hamlet,” “Macbeth” and “The Tempest” — which located a brooding acknowledgment of existential nothingness in three very different works — had me shivering.

And when, as a finale, Chenoweth tossed aside the microphone to deliver a heartbroken rendition of “I Will Always Love You” (by Dolly Parton, one of the many female singers to whom tribute was paid), I found tears in my eyes for the first time that night.

These moments reminded us of why such colossally talented individuals are worthy of our attention in the first place. Me, I’m happiest when my theater gods stay on Olympus when they’re performing. But in this paradoxical age of egalitarian celebrity, when stars are our very best friends, I’m probably in the minority.

“Kristin Chenoweth: For the Girls” runs through Nov. 17 at Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; 877-250-2929; officialkristinchenoweth.com/events. Running time: 2 hours.

This article originally appeared in

(Critic's Notebook)

When Home Is a Big Broadway Stage

Presumably, most of those who have gathered to see “Cyrano,” as this New Group production is called, are there for the express purpose of setting eyes upon the possessor of that voice, Peter Dinklage. These are the fans who know and adore him as Tyrion Lannister, the witty, wily and dangerously underestimated warrior of the blockbuster series “Game of Thrones,” which ended its eight-season run earlier this year.

The man who won four Emmy Awards playing Tyrion, I hasten to announce, is by no means a disappointment as the witty, wily and dangerously underestimated title character of “Cyrano,” a musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s classic by Erica Schmidt, who is also the show’s director (and Dinklage’s wife). Before he became a combative representative of the kingdom of Westeros in “Thrones,” Dinklage had amply demonstrated that he had the chops to rule a New York stage, most notably in the title role of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” at the Public Theater in 2004.

That production used Dinklage’s height (he is 4-foot-5) to enhance the outsider status of Richard, who was born with a hunched back. And in “Cyrano,” whenever people refer to its hero’s famously large nose, that’s not really what they’re talking about.

“What you have heard is true,” this Cyrano announces with a weary matter-of-factness. “I am not a rumor. I am proof that God has a sick sense of humor.” (A Depeche Mode shout-out?)

This declaration is made early in the play, after the nasty nobleman De Guiche (Ritchie Coster) dares to describe Cyrano’s very presence as “offensive.” De Guiche proceeds to speak, awe-struck, of Cyrano’s “nose,” a word that is framed by punctuating pauses. Yet Dinklage, unadorned by any prosthesis, has a handsome but unexceptional nose. (In fact, the word “nose” occurs exactly twice in the script.)

It is clear that it is his dwarfism that’s at issue here. It is equally clear that Cyrano is more charismatic, intelligent and self-aware than anyone else on the stage, just as Dinklage’s Tyrion was the cleverest Westerosi of them all in “Thrones.”

In other words, using Dinklage as Cyrano was a natural idea. I only wish that this production had lived up to its inspired coup of star casting.

For the play’s first 15 minutes or so, it seems as if this might be the case, introducing new shades of romantic darkness into a theatrical chestnut. The show’s score has been composed by Aaron Dessner and Bryce Dessner, members of the rock band The National, with lyrics by that group’s frontman, Matt Berninger, and Carin Besser.

Certainly, it sounds nothing like your standard fancy-dress musical. (For the record, there have been previous musical versions of “Cyrano,” including at least two forgettable Broadway productions.) The National is celebrated for its air of literate melancholy, a mood that becomes this particular Cyrano.

His hopeless love for the beautiful Roxanne (Jasmine Cephas Jones) is expressed in grave and anguished ballads, sung as he composes passionate letters to her for his friend, the handsome Christian, played by Blake Jenner. (Christian is the inarticulate soldier whom Roxanne thinks she loves.)

With melodies that bring to mind the sort of Leonard Cohen numbers you listen to when you have a hangover, and really want to feel bad, these songs throb with compelling masochism. “Humiliation and pain,” sings Dinklage, who has the perfect as-deep-as-a-well voice for such subjects, as Cyrano deconstructs his love. “My hunger, my patience, my devastation.”

Jones, best known as the shady lady who led Alexander astray in the original cast of “Hamilton,” has a throaty mezzo that complements Dinklage’s saturnine bass. This Roxanne and Cyrano at first seem like a matched set of sharp, sardonic and eloquent fatalists, in the tradition of immortal literary couples like Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, or Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. (Christine Jones and Amy Rubin’s non-period-specific set, which is intermittently enlivened by falling glitter or leaves and is broodingly lighted by Jeff Croiter, is dominated by a black chalkboard scrawled with words.)

Unfortunately, everyone in the show sings this way, including the shallow Christian, the mean old De Guiche and even Roxanne’s prim chaperone, Marie (the talented performer and composer Grace McLean). And all this musical angst, rendered in what often feel like the same endless vamps, soon starts to flatline.

Even more dispiriting, this production deprives Cyrano of most opportunities to execute the singular, poeticizing performance art that has made the character immortal. Rostand’s fabulous catalog of all the literary forms by which a person might make fun of Cyrano’s nose? There’s not even a vestige of an equivalent here.

The big balcony scene, in which Cyrano pretends to be Christian? We aren’t even allowed to see Dinklage’s face when Christian climbs into the arms of the woman Cyrano worships.

Far too much time is devoted to rehashing, point by point, Rostand’s plot, which without the virtuosic set pieces is tedious stuff. The entire show feels woefully static, with performers (dressed in ahistorical costumes by Tom Broecker) lined up across the narrow stage like participants in a high-school pageant.

The choreography by Jeff and Rick Kuperman is mostly performed as a sort of incidental sideshow, with hackneyed slow-mo effects that presumably are meant to suggest how love transforms time.

Previously staged in a workshop production at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House, this “Cyrano” still feels like a good idea in search of a matching form. As it is, the show sinks into sluggish earnestness early, and you keep waiting for it to recapture the promising wit and daring with which it began.

It says much about what went wrong that Cyrano no longer identifies the trait that most defines him, the one he will die clutching, as his “panache.” Instead, it is his “dignity” that he most values.

That worthy substitution may make Cyrano more of an Everyman. Who doesn’t want to hold on to dignity? But it deprives a deathless romantic of the romance that has always been what really makes him stand out in the overcrowded field of lovelorn literary swains.

Tickets: Through Dec. 22 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; 800-745-3000, thenewgroup.org. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes.

Credits: Adapted and directed by Erica Schmidt; music and orchestrations by Aaron Dessner and Bryce Dessner; lyrics by Matt Berninger and Carin Besser; choreography by Jeff Kuperman and Rick Kuperman; sets by Christine Jones and Amy Rubin; costumes by Tom Broecker; lighting by Jeff Croiter; sound by Dan Moses Schreier; hair, wigs and makeup by Tommy Kurzman; music direction by Ted Arthur; music coordinator, Kristy Norter; music supervision and arrangements by Mary-Mitchell Campbell; production supervisor, Beacon Theatrical Services; production stage manager, Linda Marvel; associate artistic director, Ian Morgan; general manager, Teresa Gozzo. Presented by the New Group, Scott Elliott, artistic director, Adam Bernstein, executive director.

Cast: Ritchie Coster, Josh A. Dawson, Peter Dinklage, Hillary Fisher, Christopher Gurr, Blake Jenner, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Nehal Joshi, Grace McLean, Erika Olson and Scott Stangland.

'Cyrano': Again, an Underestimated Outsider

NEW YORK — Deep, imperious and thundering with an angry irony, the voice precedes the man. When it first tears through the darkness, amplified to eardrum-rattling volume, you sense a collective quickening of pulses at the Daryl Roth Theater, where a somber and monotonous new variation on “Cyrano de Bergerac” opened Thursday night.

But his gentle, truly moving “The Michaels” — which opened at the Public Theater on Sunday, the night on which the play is set — feels pitched in an even lower key than its predecessors: “The Apple Family Plays,” a tetralogy, or the three works that make up “The Gabriels.” In those pieces, middle-class, economically anxious people, of literary and artistic bents, were apt to become heated and at least a little loud as they navigated the overlap between the state of their country and the state of their homes.

I spent election night in 2016 with the fictional Gabriels, an extended, left-leaning family on the verge of having to sell their home, and I couldn’t have asked for more sympathetic and soulful company. Like me, they had cast their votes for president of the United States in upstate New York earlier that day. Like me, they were awaiting the results with the fearful sense that whatever happened, an increasingly unmoored and conflicted society was unlikely to be righted overnight.

Three years have now passed, and you don’t need me to tell you about what has happened in this country during that time. Yet at a moment when you might have expected the air of Rhinebeck to be rent with cries of lamentation worthy of Sophocles, Nelson has cannily turned down the volume. The word “Trump,” with a capital T, occurs exactly twice in “The Michaels,” and those references are more or less glossed over, as if someone had passed gas at the dinner table.

Please note, though, that the full title of this play is “The Michaels: Conversations During Difficult Times.” Nelson knows that his characters and his audience are all too aware of the rancorous clamor of the world outside. He also understands that there are moments when people grow tired of arguing, of fretting, of trying to make sense of an irrational universe.

This is especially true when there is a crisis at home that demands delicacy. Hence the almost hushed tone of this production, which is directed by Nelson, who makes expert use of his now standard arrangement of tiny suspended microphones, which allow performers to whisper and still be heard. (Scott Lehrer is the sound designer.)

I initially took this relative quiet to signify a state of depletion, perhaps even of surrender. Happily, I was wrong.

“The Michaels” is set in the house of a dying woman, Rose Michael (a perfectly cast Brenda Wehle), a modern dance choreographer with ovarian cancer. Rose has a new partner, Kate Harris (Maryann Plunkett), a retired history teacher.

Though Rose’s art is celebrated for its exaltation of women’s everyday chores (sweeping, mopping, washing), she herself might be described as domestically challenged. It thus falls to Kate to prepare the Sunday night meal for their visitors, who have connections both personal and professional to Rose.

These include two of Rose’s former dancers, now middle-aged: Sally Michael (Rita Wolf) and Irenie Walker (Haviland Morris). Sally is married to David Michael (Jay O. Sanders), an arts manager and producer who is also Rose’s former husband.

There are also two other, younger women there that night: Lucy (Charlotte Bydwell), the daughter of Rose and David, and her cousin, May Smith (Matilda Sakamoto). They are helping to prepare a tribute to Rose’s career, in which they will perform.

Before the evening is over, they will dance for Rose, a performance devised from some of her earlier work. (The resonant, spontaneous-seeming choreography is based on that of the modern dance veteran Dan Wagoner, whose translation to the stage here was overseen by Sara Rudner and Gwyneth Jones.) When they do, the odds are that they will make you cry.

There is little forward-moving plot in “The Michaels,” even by the uneventful standards of the other Rhinebeck plays. This latest addition shares with its predecessors an emphasis on the preparation of food, in what appears to be a fully functional kitchen.

And like other Rhinebeck plays, this one begins with the cast members bringing order to Jason Ardizzone-West’s set (lighted by the brilliant Jennifer Tipton). They arrange chairs and tables, unfold rugs, distribute the dishes and foodstuffs required to prepare and serve a meal. Nelson is once again asking us to draw the parallel between what goes into setting up a play and the daily business of setting up a life.

Though Nelson nearly always tips a reverential hat to the performing arts in his plays, the sense of art as both a mirror to and ordering force in life is paramount here. The first words spoken (by David) are about being backstage with the cast at a play he was working on, and the sense of its being a charged, almost mystical space — like that, presumably, from which the cast of “The Michaels” has just emerged.

The characters reminisce about working with Rose, and about the relationships that developed and transformed and ended during those collaborations. They go through boxes of old journals and photos, trying to summon what was before it fades from recollection altogether.

And while the others speak of Rose’s dogged silence on her illness, it appears she has already planned her own funeral. In the midst of life we are in death, and vice versa. Dance comes to seem like a tragically ephemeral form — and, paradoxically, one capable of endless regeneration.

Nelson lets such heady themes grow organically, by stealth, from an ensemble that never, ever seems to be acting. (The invaluable Plunkett, the show’s beating heart, and Sanders have appeared in all the previous Rhinebeck plays.) Even the dance here, performed in the cluttered kitchen, feels like a natural and necessary extension of the lives on display.

Though it takes place in real time, “The Michaels” is punctuated by brief blackouts, during which we hear what sounds like someone hungrily inhaling. Or is it exhaling? It is the breath of life, in any case, on the edge of extinction, and of renewal, too. “The Michaels” is as hopeful as it is heartbreaking.

Production Notes:

Through Nov. 24 at The Public Theater, Manhattan; 212-967-7555, publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours.

Written and directed by Richard Nelson; sets by Jason Ardizzone-West; costumes by Susan Hilferty and Mark Koss; lighting by Jennifer Tipton; sound by Scott Lehrer; dance coaching by Sara Rudner; dances based on original choreography by Dan Wagoner; choreography consulting by Gwyneth Jones; production stage manager, Theresa Flanagan; company manager, Rebecca Sherman; production manager, Jeff Harris. Presented by The Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director, Patrick Willingham, executive director.

Cast: Charlotte Bydwell, Haviland Morris, Maryann Plunkett, Matilda Sakamoto, Jay O. Sanders, Brenda Wehle, and Rita Wolf.

'The Michaels' Review: Life and Death Do a Delicate Dance

NEW YORK — They’re speaking more softly in Richard Nelson’s Rhinebeck these days, as if a raised voice might upset a tenuous balance. Not that any of the previous seven (and wonderful) family dramas written by Nelson during the past nine years, all set in the Hudson River town of Rhinebeck, New York, have ever involved much shouting.

But a storm that can’t be stopped is being discussed in grave and fatalistic tones by the East African women we meet in the first scene of this unresolved work, directed by Whitney White. They have assembled, they say, to tell a story that must be told when the sun comes up again, even as they wish that “we had only the moon to bury.”

The story is that of the occupant of the enclosed, transparent cubicle that looms, both dominant and out of place, from the center of Daniel Soule’s otherwise homespun, rug-strewn set. This cubicle is the office and inescapable prison of the beautiful, ambitious and desperately deracinated Jendyose Najju Nsugwa (Bisserat Tseggai).

“You can just call me Joy,” she says. From the disgusted expression on her face, you can see that she is aware of the irony of her nickname.

It is abundantly clear that joy is the furthest emotion from this woman’s experience of urban life. And from what we’re told by that omnipresent, mythologizing female chorus, made up of relatives from the village that Joy left years ago, we know that the grimmest of destinies awaits her. So why aren’t we feeling the urgency and fear that usually accompany such knowledge?

“For all the women” teems with engaging ideas and arresting images, but they never assume a compelling and coherent form, or even a fluent language of their own. It feels like the work of a gifted and imaginative young playwright with so much to say that she chokes on it.

That turns out to be a fair diagnosis. This drama was written 11 years ago by multifarious Ashton, who as a 35-year-old actress is appearing to dazzling effect in the current revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” on Broadway.

She has described “for all the women” as a “fever dream” generated by the fears and anxieties of a younger self. And while you can understand a director’s impulse to interpret that dream with at least a modicum of clarity, the play might fare (marginally) better in a more phantasmagorical presentation.

I am not blaming inarguably talented White, who oversaw the vibrant off-Broadway sleeper hit “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” which is still running. “For all the women” made its belated debut earlier this month in London, staged by Jo McInnes, and the reviews from there suggest a production that was very different in its directorial approach — but also equally unsatisfying.

That version takes place in London; the Soho Rep incarnation would appear to be set in Manhattan. Either location serves to fuel the play’s central tension between the tradition-rooted, timeless world embodied by the play’s chorus and the harsh here and now of Joy’s professional life in the cosmopolitan West, in an unspecified, high-pressure job.

The attire of cast members underscores this divide. (Andrew Jean did the costumes.) Joy is the image of a Western career woman, with sleek hair and pale pink dress with matching high heels. The women who watch her from the sidelines are first seen in African tribal funeral garb.

Most of these supporting characters change their clothing at some point to step into Joy’s lonely cubicle. (They can get in, but she can’t get out.) In this setting, they are transformed into city people — a rival office worker, a cleaner, a babysitter — who often remind self-invented Joy of home, to her annoyance.

Or perhaps they truly are from Joy’s village in Africa, as Margaret (a very good Sharon Hope), the office cleaner, swears she is. Margaret offers the younger woman herbal remedies for what ails her and walks off with Joy’s pinching shoes and a bottle of prescription pills from her handbag.

Ashton has said that this play was in part inspired by the failures of the British health system in dealing with the problems of female émigrés of color. In performance, this theme takes a long time to register. (Toward the end, Joy consults that clueless white male doctor, played by Gibson Frazier, who is predictably patronizing and unhelpful.)

Both unsubtle and unclear, “for all the women” lacks the wholesale nightmare absurdism that paradoxically might make it easier to, if not follow, then accept. There are some fine brain-scrambling touches. These include a scene in which Joy and her smarmy boss (Frazier again) discuss both the weather and her clothing in slyly racist language, and a bravura segment in which she becomes instantly, visibly pregnant before our eyes.

Tseggai doesn’t provide enough of an emotional range to match Joy’s precipitous descent into unreality; she’s either terse and brittle or screaming and unglued. The show’s most persuasive performances come from the ensemble’s oldest members: Hope and Stephanie Berry, who plays Ruth, Joy’s understandably worried mother back home.

Ruth isn’t an unconditional source of comfort, by the way. The stories she tells of life in the village, where a young mother is drowned as a witch, imply that poisonous sexism isn’t exclusive to the urban West.

“For all the women,” in other words, is by no means a work of simplistic nostalgia. And there are striking elements throughout that you could imagine being reworked into a tighter, stronger play.

After more than a decade, though, Ashton may have had enough of trying to refocus this product of her youth. In any case, it seems unlikely that the bright, shardlike pieces of this inchoate work might ever be assembled to the complete satisfaction of anyone.

‘for all the women who thought they were Mad’Through Nov. 17 at Soho Rep., Manhattan; 866-811-4111, sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

By Zawe Ashton; directed by Whitney White; sets by Daniel Soule; costumes by Andrew Jean; lighting by Stacey Derosier; sound by Lee Kinney; props by Joshua Larrinaga-Yocom; video and projections by Johnny Moreno; hair and wigs by Nikiya Mathis; production stage manager, Chelsea Olivia Friday; technical director, Carl Whipple. Presented by Soho Rep.

Cast: Stephanie Berry, Gibson Frazier, Sharon Hope, Nicole Lewis, Blasina Olowe, Cherene Snow, Bisserat Tseggai, Shay Vawn and Kat Williams.

Review: In Zawe Ashton's 'for all the women,' the Price of Uprooting a Life

NEW YORK — It’s raining metaphors in “for all the women who thought they were Mad,” Zawe Ashton’s densely poetic play about racial alienation in the big city. As to whether it’s actually raining — or burning hot, with a sun that sears the skin — is a moot point in this production, which opened Sunday at Soho Rep.

By the end of the tautly sustained 70 minutes of “Is This a Room” — the extraordinary documentary theater work by Tina Satter that reopened this week after a brief run in January at the Kitchen — you’ll probably feel the need for a drink, or a yoga session, or a full-throated scream. Unlike more classic high-anxiety plays — say, “Oedipus Rex” or “Macbeth” — this production isn’t about to offer you the cleansing release of catharsis.

That will probably hold true even if you don’t know that what’s depicted here is only the opening chapter of a long nightmare for the young woman at the show’s center. That’s Reality Winner (portrayed by the wonderful Emily Davis), the former military linguist and intelligence contractor who is now serving a five-year, three-month prison sentence for the unauthorized release of government information to the media.

Satter, the founder and artistic director of the experimental Half Straddle company, conceived and staged this sharp, blindingly polished slice of theater vérité. She did not write its text, which is instead a transcript of a tape recording made by the FBI of its initial questioning of Winner from June 2017.

Interrogation scenes are a staple of crime shows, where wily, smooth-spoken police officers in closed rooms strategically grill their subjects into telling all. The session in “Room” takes place in the driveway, yard and interior of the Georgia house Winner was renting, and it is conducted with a clumsy casualness.

It is the sense of familiar territory made surreal, of easiness gradually becoming a chokehold, that gives “Room” its echoing power. I kept thinking of the opening chapter of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” in which a man wakes up “one fine morning” in his apartment to discover he is under arrest without knowing why.

“Room” begins just after Reality has pulled into her driveway, bearing groceries, and finds unknown men waiting for her. They are Agent Garrick (Pete Simpson), Agent Taylor (TL Thompson) and a colleague who is listed in the program only as Unknown Male (Becca Blackwell).

These men do not sound hostile or menacing or even particularly official. “Hey, how are you?” they say. “How’s your day going?” They explain that they have a search warrant for Reality’s house and car. “This is about a possible mishandling of classified information,” Garrick says.

Many minutes will pass before that “possible mishandling” is specifically defined, and many more before Reality admits that she did indeed print out a document about possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and mailed it to political news website The Intercept. During that time, she will never have been read her rights.

There has been no attempt here to replicate physically the real setting for this encounter — Parker Lutz’s set is an anonymous, neutral-colored platform — and yet I felt I could see Reality’s house as clearly as if I were watching a film. Thomas Dunn’s lighting, Enver Chakartash’s costumes, and Lee Kinney and Sanae Yamada’s subliminal, gut-clutching sound design summon an acute sense of place and time.

But these elements also conjure the feelings of displacement and of time unhinged that arrive when a space you had thought was yours is occupied and transformed by others. “Is this a room? Is that a room?” the Unknown Man asks, in the line that gives the play its title, as he takes in the layout of the house.

A lot of what is said concerns what is and isn’t in Reality’s house and car. What is in the home includes three licensed guns (one of them pink) and two rescue animals, a dog and a cat, whose well-being is much on Reality’s mind.

There is affable talk of pets, gym regimens and work reassignments, all grounded in tedious, quotidian detail. Little by little, the focus narrows to the nature of Reality’s work as a translator and what she may or may not have done with a certain document a month earlier.

The transcript is rendered not just word for word. It’s also um for um, cough for cough. (Garrick has sinus problems.) Simpson, in particular, is a virtuoso in capturing precisely the imprecision of everyday speech.

The staging is less literal. Every so often, the three male characters will group themselves closely around Reality. Usually, she appears utterly alone, an impression occasionally underscored by an isolating spotlight. There is one brief, judiciously placed sequence enacted in slow motion.

In a portrait of almost forensic detail, Davis delivers one of the most trenchantly observed performances of the year. You feel viscerally how Reality is always struggling to convey and to hold onto an illusion of normalcy, as if nothing were really wrong with this picture.

But her body betrays her. Her eyes brim; her nose drips; her hands twist into knots; her mouth speaks words at odds with her intentions.

Even more remarkably, without anything like a motive-revealing monologue, we sense we understand why she committed the crime of which she was accused. Or as much as Reality herself does. “I wasn’t trying to be Snowden or anything,” she says, referring to Edward Snowden, a more famous whistleblower and a man with a far more conscious plan to divulge information.

“I — I just — I guess I didn’t care about, like, myself at that point,” she says, “and just ... Yeah. I guess. Yeah, I screwed up royally.”

All specific references to the document in question, its source and the website to which it was sent are redacted in the transcript. This production provides the sensory equivalent of such redactions.

Whenever they occur, the theater is plunged abruptly into darkness. In these moments, you may feel that, like Reality, you are falling down an endless hole, wherein the reliable laws of gravity have been suspended until further notice.

Production Notes:

‘Is This A Room’: Through Nov. 10 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; 212-353-0303, vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.

'Is This a Room' Review: Echoes of Kafka in a Whistle-Blower's Interrogation

NEW YORK — A lot of what’s being said on the stage of the Vineyard Theater these days is maddeningly ordinary — the kind of friendly, vapid conversation you might exchange with a stranger in a grocery store line. Yet every word spoken, no matter how banal, seems to stretch your nerves closer to snapping.

But it’s nothing as palpable as a hurricane that keeps knocking them off balance and making them flail like sandpipers in a heavy wind. To understand what’s sweeping through this production, which opened at the American Airlines Theater on Tuesday with a cast led by a valiant Marisa Tomei, listen to the words of Assunta, a wise old Sicilian signora.

“There is something wild in the air,” says Assunta (Carolyn Mignini), in the play’s opening moments, to Serafina (Tomei), the ecstatically married wife of a virile truck driver. “No wind but everything is moving.” She adds that she can hear the noises of the stars.

A skeptical Serafina, who says she sees “nothing moving,” ascribes the noise to termites. But Trip Cullman, the imaginative but erratic director here, appears to have taken Assunta’s emotional weather report to heart.

Just look at Mark Wendland’s wide-open set (lushly lighted by Ben Stanton), which conjures a world without walls. Pieces of furniture, door frames, a sewing machine and a candle-laden shrine to the Virgin Mary seem to float against a video backdrop of waves lapping against a shore. (Lucy Mackinnon did the projection design). And huddled beneath the power lines that stretch above the stage is a thick congregation of pink flamingos.

The flamingos, which are artificial, remain immobile. But all the human performers do indeed seem to have been destabilized by a shelter-free environment in which the usual demarcations between inside and outside do not exist.

This approach makes a certain poetic sense in a play about the serendipitous and cataclysmic force of carnal love. First produced in 1951, when it (astonishingly) became the winner of Williams’ only Tony Award for best play, “The Rose Tattoo” is perhaps the most hopeful and lighthearted work in its author’s suffering-packed canon.

Dedicated to Williams’ longtime partner, Frank Merlo, a former sailor of Sicilian ancestry, “Tattoo” is a paean to the anarchic but restorative power of sexual attraction. It makes good on Blanche DuBois’ assertion in “A Streetcar Named Desire” that “sometimes there’s God, so quickly,” especially if that god is Eros.

The fable-like plot is built around the unlikely destruction and resurrection of Serafina the seamstress, a proper, corset-wearing wife and mother whose life is unhinged when the husband whom she worships — body and soul, but particularly body — dies in a truck crash. When she later learns that he had been unfaithful to her, she begins to question her very faith.

But fate has a wonderful surprise for Serafina: Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Scottish-born actor Emun Elliott, in a likable Broadway debut), a lovely buffoon of man, who has her husband’s body and the head of a clown.

Williams wrote “Tattoo” with the great Italian actress Anna Magnani in mind, although he had to wait for the 1955 film version for her to play it. She was a volcanic presence, whose Vesuvian eruptions in the part had the transcendent conviction of Italian opera.

Tomei knows from Italian-flavored portraiture. (She won an Oscar playing a character named Mona Lisa Vito in “My Cousin Vinny.”) If, in the closefitting 1950s slips and dresses costume designer Clint Ramos has provided, her affect is more cuddly pixie than temperamental colossus, she is nonetheless a bold and inventive comic performer.

Unfortunately, she is in hard-fought competition with her environment. It’s not that she’s operating in a vacuum, which might be easier. Cullman has populated the stage with an ever-present chorus of singing Italian women and frantic children.

These are not, to be fair, interpolations. Neither is the use of the mood-setting Italian ballads, although they have been omitted from other productions I’ve seen. (Fitz Patton and Jason Michael Webb did the original music.) Cullman is acting on suggestions from Williams’ original script.

I’m also assuming that the intention has been to conjure a small town in which nobody’s business is their own, and the lines between private and public are hazy. Still, the lack of defined interiors can lead to unwarranted confusion.

From the beginning of this production, which originated at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2016, Tomei must pitch her performance at an exaggerated level to be seen. Fluttery and anxious from the get-go, she doesn’t establish a whole lot of difference between Serafina before and after her husband’s death, which is mostly signaled by a change in hair style.

Worse, once the studly but hapless Mangiacavallo (the name means “eat a horse”) makes his entrance, he and Serafina seem to be communicating across an abyss on that big, borderless stage. They are both given to frantic, pantomime-style gesticulation and shticky molto Italiano accents.

When, at one point, she responds to him as if they were playing charades, it feels uneasily like a commentary on the acting. Both Tomei and Elliott have some genuinely funny moments. But it’s a vaudevillian notion of sex they’re presenting, and the poignancy and poetry within their characters’ coming together are mostly absent.

The large cast also includes the formidable Tina Benko as a husband-stealing casino worker and Paige Gilbert and Portia as man-crazy, gossipy clients of Serafina. Ella Rubin is Serafina’s defiant (and stridently Southern) daughter, and Burke Swanson is the young, wooden sailor she loves.

Although the original film version was advertised with words like “frank” and “violent,” “Tattoo” can indeed be interpreted as a romantic comedy. But as in all of this dramatist’s works, there are delicate feelings at its center, and they need to be handled with care.

Feeling betrayed by her beloved Virgin, Serafina exclaims to the effigy in her living room (or I think that’s where it is), “You hold in the cup of your hand this little house and you smash it.” Allowing for Serafina’s tendency to hyperbole, she might be talking about the production in which she appears.

Tickets: Through Dec. 8 at American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

Credits: By Tennessee Williams; directed by Trip Cullman; music, arrangements and music direction by Jason Michael Webb; sets by Mark Wendland; costumes by Clint Ramos; lighting by Ben Stanton; music and sound by Fitz Patton; projections by Lucy Mackinnon; hair and wigs by Tom Watson; makeup by Joe Dulude II; fight choreography by Thomas Schall; dialect coach, Tom Watson; dramaturg, Marco Calvani; production stage manager, Arabella Powell; production management, Aurora Productions; general manager, Denise Cooper; associate artistic director, Jill Rafson; deputy artistic director, Scott Ellis; Presented by Roundabout Theater Company, Todd Haimes, artistic director/chief executive, Julia C. Levy, executive director, Sydney Beers, general manager, Steve Dow, chief administrative officer.

Cast: Cassie Beck, Alexander Bello, Tina Benko, Andréa Burns, Susan Cella, Emun Elliott, Paige Gilbert, Greg Hildreth, Isabella Iannelli, Jacob Michael Laval, Ellyn Marie Marsh, Carolyn Mignini, Portia, Ella Rubin, Jennifer Sánchez, Constance Shulman, Burke Swanson and Marisa Tomei.

Review: Marisa Tomei Braves a Typhoon in 'The Rose Tattoo'

NEW YORK — You thought tropical storms were disruptive? The Italian Americans living along the Gulf Coast in the Roundabout Theater Company’s untethered revival of Tennessee Williams’ “The Rose Tattoo” are really up against the elements, and so are the actors playing them.

Played with immense, shaggy charm — and anger to match — by Ian Barford in a performance that reminds you of how brilliantly bruising Steppenwolf acting can be, this charismatic loser is named Wheeler. Actually, it’s Dick Wheeler, but he prefers to dispense with the first name, perhaps on the theory that it’s better not to provide too many clues to your essential nature.

When we first see Wheeler, he’s moving into new digs in San Diego, with the help of his best friend, Paul (Jim True-Frost), schlepping boxes and overstuffed bags with the sloppy casualness of college boys returning to campus. Never mind that Wheeler is 50.

Their conversation, too, has a sophomoric ring, as they debate the right word for big breasts, like the pair on one of Wheeler’s co-workers. And there’s a hilarious riff on their teenage crush on Ali MacGraw, who, Paul says, confessed to being a sex addict in her memoir.

Is this talk too sexist for comfort? Wheeler might argue that he and Paul are just goofing (sort of), that they’re also enlightened 21st-century men who understand that some kinds of behavior regarding the opposite sex are no longer cool. You can sense that kind of self-consciousness at work when he’s talking to women.

Anyway, Wheeler — a word snob who has a gift for stating home truths that nobody else dares utter — soon has the audience in the palm of his 11 1/2-sized hand. And when discussing a group of possible Trump voters, he declaims, “you cannot be friends with these people,” the theater bursts into applause.

Now cut to a scene early in the second act when Wheeler, on a date in a restaurant, ends a promising relationship with a brusque, simple sentence that lands like a lethal karate chop. This time, the audience gasps in something like horror. It won’t be the last time it does so.

This gasp-inducing moment was exactly when I decided that Letts’ latest play, directed with astutely varied pacing and room for rage by Dexter Bullard, was going to be a lot more interesting than I had thought. Up to that point, I had worried that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “August: Osage County” was simply reanimating a tired literary formula.

By that, I mean the tale of the clever, existentially challenged womanizer staring down the second half of his life. Traditionally, he’s a man we can’t help enjoying no matter how badly he behaves because he wallows so eloquently in his own pain. And as he keeps racking up the sexual conquests, a part of us is meant to cheer him on.

My dad had shelves of novels about such men — written by Kingsley Amis, John Updike and Philip Roth. Similar types regularly stalked Broadway and the West End, in plays by dramatists as different as Simon Gray (“Butley,” “Otherwise Engaged”), Alan Ayckbourn (“The Norman Conquests”) and Neil Simon (“Jake’s Women”).

Letts, for the record, has already explored this much-tilled territory in his Pulitzer-shortlisted “Man From Nebraska,” seen here in 2017 (and, like “Linda Vista,” a Second Stage presentation.) That, though, was a lyrical and oblique work that heard the abyss of nonexistence roaring within long silences. “Linda Vista” is as packed with nasty zingers as an HBO sitcom. And in the production’s first half I worried that Letts might be hoping to fill the vacuum left by the death of Simon, the lucrative master of the breezy comedy of anxiety.

Before Letts swam into the mainstream with “August,” he was a master of pitch-dark comedies that measured the grisliest depths of human behavior (“Killer Joe,” “Bug”). I am happy to report that this side of him is alive and squirming in “Linda Vista.”

Here are the bare bones of its familiar-sounding plot: Wheeler, in the midst of a protracted divorce and estranged from (and seemingly uninterested in) his 13-year-old son, moves into his own place, an apartment complex (as squalidly sterile as such environments can be, in Todd Rosenthal’s set, lighted without mercy by Marcus Doshi).

Wheeler was once a photographer for a Chicago newspaper, but now repairs cameras in a storefront shop. He presents himself picturesquely as a born loser and is delighted when a young woman in a bar offers this quick-sketch character portrait: “Let me guess. You’re a deadbeat, work a dead-end job, married — no wait, divorced — hate your wife and kids, hate everybody, depressed, can’t get laid, your body’s breaking down, the only thing that still runs is your mouth.”

Pretty accurate. Except it turns out Wheeler can get laid. There are four female characters in “Linda Vista,” and you suspect that he has either bedded, or will bed, every one of them. And that despite his failing hip and fatuous flippancy during emotional crises, he’ll always find women who want him. And oh, the pity of it.

The women we meet in “Linda Vista” (and though that’s what Wheeler’s neighborhood is called, doesn’t it sound like the ultimate girlfriend?) are a diverse lot. And they are blessed with a self-preserving intelligence that always keeps them this side of social caricature.

They are beautifully portrayed by Sally Murphy (as Margaret, Paul’s wife); Cora Vander Broek (Jules, a professional life coach and Margaret’s good friend); Caroline Neff (Anita, who works in the shop with Wheeler); and Chantal Thuy (Minnie, a 20-something American-Vietnamese rockabilly chick). Two of them, I should warn you, appear with Barford in stark-naked, tragicomic sex scenes that elicit the awkwardness and loneliness of human erotic congress.

It feels fitting that the women outnumber the men here, who are rounded out by Wheeler’s boss, Michael (Troy West), who is so creepily sexist he makes Wheeler look saintly. And each female character, in her own way, has learned how to navigate an environment that has been polluted by misogyny.

Such an attitude is atmospheric in “Linda Vista,” and it manifests in an assortment of casual cultural references: to a true crime television show (about a sex slave in a basement); comic book superhero movies; humiliation porn; and that monumental work of navel gazing, “My Struggle” by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Wheeler, it must be said, has plenty of acidic comments to make about such phenomena. Sure, he’s a perpetually randy man, but he gives great lip service to the more reasonable forms of political correctness. And though he can be lacerating to others, he’s hardest of all on himself.

How could you not fall for this self-flagellating, frustrated artist, who looks, as one woman puts, it “like a turtle who doesn’t know he’s lost his shell”? But don’t make the mistake of equating vulnerability with harmlessness.

The play, you see, memorably includes several gut-wrenching occasions when Barford’s Wheeler flips his appealingly grouchy persona to reveal a black hole of ugly, flailing, desperate narcissism. As it ends, he is making a passive-aggressive pitch to yet another woman, to whom he has acted as a sort of white knight. And even with us knowing what we know, he remains as charming as ever.

I asked the woman with whom I saw the play if she thought Wheeler would make a conquest of this last character. “Oh, absolutely,” she responded. She sounded angry.

‘Linda Vista’: Through Nov. 10 at the Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 212-246-4422, 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.

'Linda Vista' Review: A Womanizer Who Devastates as He Charms

NEW YORK — The everyday poison known as toxic masculinity becomes dangerously easy to swallow in “Linda Vista,” Tracy Letts’s inspired, ruthless take on the classic midlife-crisis comedy. In the sunny opening scenes of this very funny, equally unsettling Steppenwolf Theater production — which opened on Thursday at the Hayes Theater — you’ll probably feel like cozying up to that sheepish, disheveled big guy who rules the stage with his outspoken wit.

Then there’s the title itself, a blunt summing up of the universal nightmare of being accused unjustly of a crime, a topic that has recently become an obsessively popular subject for podcasts and streaming fare. “The Wrong Man” is also the name of a 1956 Alfred Hitchcock movie about such a miscarriage of justice, and whenever I try to watch it, I find myself having to look away as poor, decent Henry Fonda is railroaded once again.

So I was fully prepared to spend the 90 minutes of Golan’s variation on this theme — staged by Thomas Kail, no less, the director of the almighty “Hamilton” — with my fingernails buried into my palms. It was also encouraging to know that the title character, a love-seeking loser in Reno, Nevada, would be played by Joshua Henry, a Tony nominee as Billy Bigelow in the 2018 revival of “Carousel” and a performer of searing emotional focus.

For better or worse, though, my fists soon unclenched themselves. It’s not that “The Wrong Man” strays from the spine-tingling elements it establishes at its beginning. On the contrary, it hews to them with an unchanging insistence that ultimately drains them of their power. The show keeps reiterating its central premise, without grounding a dark conceit with the details that would give it gooseflesh-and-blood existence.

Golan is a successful pop composer who has delivered hits for the likes of Ariana Grande, Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber, as well as a preeminent podcaster on the art of songwriting. “The Wrong Man” was developed as a concept album, which Golan began working on in 2005 but was released only this summer.

Stage adaptations of concept albums are hardly without precedent. Think of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita” or, more recently, “Hadestown,” the current Broadway blockbuster by Anais Mitchell.

Yet unlike those shows, “The Wrong Man” feels like a repetitive internal monologue, one that never leaves its protagonist’s aching head to freely roam the world. And there’s little originality or variety in our hero’s thought patterns.

Duran, the show’s title character, is first presented to us as a sort of Everyscapegoat, close kin to that ultimate persecuted figure, Joseph K., of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” (No race is specified for the role of Duran, but the fact that Henry is black inevitably brings to mind recent cases of wrongful convictions of people of color.)

Duran’s opening number, sung with bravura intensity that Henry sustains throughout, asks knotty musical questions of identity like, “What if I’m based on an untrue story?” and promises “an existential dive into my soul.”

The music, performed by an onstage band and tautly orchestrated by Alex Lacamoire (“Hamilton,” “Dear Evan Hansen”), strikes resonant chords of anxiety here. And Travis Wall’s choreography, which shuffles the nine-member cast as if it were a deck of cards, emphasizes the notion of randomness, the sense that what happens here might happen to anyone.

Perversely enough, it’s when the plot takes over that the show’s grip slackens. Duran, the son of an abusive casino worker, is working in (unspecified) “middle management” in Reno and recovering from heartbreak.

In the fine tradition of film-noir saps, he hits the bars and runs smack into a femme fatale. That’s Mariana (the slinky-voiced Ciara Renée), who “looks for men in designer threads like they’re the Nevada lotto.” She and Duran adjourn posthaste to her place for great sex.

Alas, Mariana turns out to have an estranged homicidal husband (a nastily smiling Ryan Vasquez, identified as Man in Black), who is none too happy to learn that his ex is pregnant by Duran. Soon enough, Duran finds himself with blood on his hands, from not one but two corpses, and not long after that, on death row.

I am really not committing spoilers by telling you this. Golan’s libretto has no room for mystery or ambiguity, which perhaps suits a story about the arbitrariness of cruel fate. But for us to care in more than an abstract way, we need to feel that Duran, Mariana and that mean old Man in Black are more than archetypes.

When Duran, while waiting for Mariana to slip into something more comfortable on their first night together, notes that she “still had DVDs and they were alphabetized,” I felt like cheering. At last, here was a specific rather than generic bit of characterization.

Very few similar details followed. Mostly, the lyrics are of a one-size-fits-all nature: “Some good people do bad things,” or “I have a history of deleting my past and then repeating it back.” Duran, vainly asserting his innocence, sings: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, sure/But I’m not the one lying, I only told the truth, sir.”

Acts of sex and violence are rendered in standard-issue hall-of-mirrors ballets, usually performed by several sets of couples. An appropriate midnight-of-the-soul atmosphere for these pas de deux is summoned by Rachel Hauck’s stark set and Betsy Adams’ claustrophobic lighting.

Golan’s score is easy to listen to, spiced with hooks that dig into the memory. (I can still hear Renée wailing, “Some good people, good people do bad things.”) And there is one terrific number, “Stay Positive,” in which Duran on the lam feels “someone else’s heart” in his chest “beating, beating, beating.”

My own pulse rate accelerated during that song. It soon slowed again, though, as I went back to pondering the unfortunate fitness of one of the show’s repeated lyrics: “They say all kinds of clichés here/Like what happens here stays here.”

Through Nov. 17 at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, Manhattan; 646-506-9393, mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Book, music and lyrics by Ross Golan; directed by Thomas Kail; music supervision, vocal arrangements and orchestrations, Alex Lacamoire; choreography by Travis Wall; sets by Rachel Hauck; costumes by Jennifer Moeller and Kristin Isola; lighting by Betsy Adams; sound by Nevin Steinberg; hair and makeup by Tommy Kurzman; music direction by Taylor Peckham; music coordinator, Michael Aarons; production stage manager, Jason Pacella; production manager, Steve Rosenberg; general manager, Beth Dembrow; artistic producer, Jessica Chase. Presented by MCC Theater, Bob LuPone, Bernie Telsey, Will Cantler, artistic directors, Blake West, executive director.

Cast: Anoop Desai, Tilly Evans-Krueger, Joshua Henry, Malik Kitchen, Libby Lloyd, Ciara Renée, Kyle Robinson, Debbie Christine Tjong and Ryan Vasquez.

'The Wrong Man': A Universal Nightmare Set to Song

NEW YORK — A promising buzz of suspense stirs the opening moments of “The Wrong Man,” Ross Golan’s solemn new chamber musical, which opened Wednesday at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space in Manhattan. A lone, ominous whistle; a searchlight raking the darkness; a throng of tense-bodied men and women looking furtive — such gratifyingly classic notes of noir are sounded before a single word is sung.

NEW YORK — And just as you were thinking that life has no rhyme nor reason these days, along comes “Freestyle Love Supreme” to pump you full of hope.

This exultant master class in the fine art of hip-hop, which opened Wednesday night at the Booth Theater, suggests that there’s no feeling, thought or experience so anxious or so random that it can’t be translated into infectious, neon-bright rhythms. Confusion, frustration, depression — such emotions are banished by the team assembled on the stage to find the great, sick beat in your past and present woes.

If you’re asking who gives a rap on Broadway, you clearly haven’t been in that neighborhood since a show called “Hamilton” opened there four years ago. That trophy-laden hip-hop portrait of America’s Founding Fathers redefined what a Broadway musical could be, finding an authenticity and vitality in the lives of those long dead through a defiantly contemporary sound.

The team behind that work included Lin-Manuel Miranda — its writer, composer and original star — and Thomas Kail, its director. They are also the creators of “Freestyle Love Supreme,” along with Anthony Veneziale, who conceived the idea for it 15 years ago.

On the night I saw the show, directed by Kail, the amiable emcee-in-chief was Veneziale. The rest of the cast (which isn’t fixed) included two fellow rappers (Utkarsh Ambudkar and Aneesa Folds), two human beat makers (Chris Sullivan and Kaila Mullady) and two keyboard players (Arthur Lewis, who also sings sweetly, and Ian Weinberger).

There is also a guest star at each performance. Mine was Miranda, whom the crowd greeted with the kind of cheers that follow clock-beating touchdowns at home-team stadiums. Finally, it was possible to make out that Miranda was saying, like a Dolly Levi in denim, that it was so nice to be back on Broadway, where he belongs.

Indeed he does. And so does “Freestyle,” seen off-Broadway at the Greenwich House Theater earlier this year. This production may lack a script, a song list and a chorus line. Yet it is, in its way, the distilled essence of that venerable national institution, the musical comedy.

The enduring appeal of that form lies in its ability to exalt the everyday by endowing it with the pattern of rhythmic song. This is also what the spontaneous, self-created musicians of the 1970s were doing in the Bronx, when rap began its unstoppable spread through this country’s culture.

Ben Brantley

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