BURNOUT PARADISE 

In the Burnout club, we all fam. Australian company Pony Cam’s batshit-wild and tremendously fun new show is, mostly, an excuse for wild and unhinged levels of silliness. But Burnout Paradise is also an oddly moving testament to genuine camaraderie—to the cathartic relief of simply having bro’s back, no matter what. 

Over a 65 minute running time, four tireless performers fulfill a series of escalating tasks while continuously running on treadmills. The tasks vary from submitting a grant application, to dying their hair, to cooking a three-course meal. From moment one, the audience is enlisted to run up on stage and help out. Participation is voluntary, but even the shyest among us will feel compelled to run up and lend a hand. We all have a duty to one another, don’t we?

A hit at Edinburgh Fringe, Burnout feels still in search of a grand finale—one last escalation of crazy that never quite arrives. But the piece is nonetheless a delight, a joyful burst of collective mania. 

WE ARE YOUR ROBOTS

What if HAL 9000 serenaded you with smooth, beguiling jazz? That’s the welcome question posed by Ethan Lipton’s thoughtful, acerbically funny new musical We Are Your Robots, created and performed by Lipton and his longtime “Orchestra” (Eben Levy, Vito Dieterle & Ian Riggs) and co-presented by Theatre for a New Audience & Rattlestick Theater at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center. 

Lipton’s smartest move is casting himself as a crooning android servant. “We are here to help,” Lipton assures us, insisting in wry patter between each catchy tune that robots are not looking to replace humanity—except, of course, in all the areas where they already have. Liptons wry, detached style is a perfect match for the assignment. 

The ambivalence of many recent theatrical works exploring AI (McNeal and Bioadapted among them) has proven uninteresting. At times, Robots has a similar uncertainty—and of course, no-one knows the future. But the form of the piece suggests a clear perspective. Each time Lipton poses a new question to the audience, he nods and repeats back our invented response, plucked out of total silence. Humanity’s presence is no longer, strictly speaking, required. 

STRATEGIC LOVE PLAY

There is a certain brand of play that I associate strongly with the “Royal Court crop”—multiple generations of darkly funny, fucked-up Brits who got their start at the London bastion of new writing. Take Simon Stephens’ Heisenberg, Mike Barlett’s Cock, Nick Payne’s Constellations, Dennis Kelly’s Boys and Girls. These plays tend to have small casts and a low-concept premise (love triangle, chance encounter) that conceals far grander thematic ambitions. 

Miriam Battye, another Royal Court alumnus, puts her own spin on this mini-genre with her quick-witted two-hander Strategic Love Play. First seen in the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and then on a UK tour, Love Play is simple on the surface: one man, one woman, sat across a table, opening up some wounds on a date gone horribly sideways. But through a simple setup, Battye tackles huge questions: love, loneliness, isolation, survival, seeking meaning in the vast unknown. 

The result is highly entertaining for a time, but winds up a muddle. Leads Michael Zegen and Heléne Yorke find a quick, witty repartee. The more this “Man” and “Woman” dislike each other, the more they like each other—a darkly horny little journey that’s fun to follow. The central questions are relatable: are they still talking out of openness, or desperation? Is that feeling that tells us “Not this one” a voice of reason, or one of fear?

And underneath all that relatability, an unsettling question—what are we really watching? Is all of this literally happening? Arnulfo Malonado empty, dreamlike Brooklyn bar set suggests otherwise. As the pair’s backstories fill in, the details don’t always seem to add up. It starts to feel like we’re not really watching one date, but rather every kind of date, all of them happening all at once.

But that suggestion of a larger canvas does not find any payoff. Battye redirects to the familiar questions: could these two find happiness together? Perhaps I’d simply misunderstood the play. I thought it was clear, pretty much from moment one, that this date was doomed; I thought everything that followed was a thought experiment, a gleeful dissection of the impossible aspirations and endless loops the dating gauntlet forces us through. 

In other words: I didn’t think Love Play was really about these two people at all. Evidently I thought wrong. If so, I confess to confusion at why Posner’s staging, with its surreal empty set and Jen Schriever’s ethereal lighting, would create such a non-literal world for an ultimately literal-minded play. 

I was also misdirected by Yorke’s performance, which leans broad (similar to her incredible work on Max’s The Other Two). “Woman” feels in Yorke’s hands more like chaos demon than character, needling “Man” past the point of reason. That broadness turns out to be cultural disconnect rather than a deliberate vision, a result of Yorke overplaying English humor that demanded subtler delivery. 

Holding the whole thing together is Zegen, an often undersung stage performer who here delivers the finest performance of his career. Zegen hits his punchlines with restraint, finding a natural nerdiness without overdoing the awkwardness. He embodies what Battye’s play and Posner’s production never quite find—the specific and the universal, sitting happily alongside each other in one character. He is somehow both a specific guy, and also every poor soul at every awful date that ever occurred.

A group of half-sisters return to their family home on a small island off the coast of Georgia in Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt, which had its New York premiere tonight at Lincoln Center’s Newhouse Theatre. Though they’re there to mourn their recently deceased mother, and the play follows the classic dramatic reunion template (with unique voice and great added nuance), the production is mostly an entertaining look at four sisters, and one of their daughters, figuring out what their dynamics will look like moving forward. With its relentlessly watchable performances, The Blood Quilt is a well-crafted addition to the fruitful genre of the homecoming play.

The eldest, auntie-like Clementine (Crystal Dickinson) and the beer-loving Gio (Adrienne C. Moore), a cop who hits her weed pen to “aid her glaucoma,” are already at Jernigans’ ancestral house when along come Cassan (Susan Kelechi Watson) and her identity-hopping teen daughter, Zambia (Mirirai), who this week is in a hijab; last week was a vampire. Their mother hosted them each year for a quilting bee, a tradition they intend to continue in her memory. Amber (Lauren E. Banks), a California-living lawyer and the least in-touch with the family, is the last to arrive, and the fastest to set off tensions among the women: who’s more successful than the other; who needs to stay out of the other’s business; to whom is mom leaving the best inheritance?

That last question becomes the most salient when it is revealed that their mother’s back taxes might outweigh her top two possessions: her house, and her large, historic collection of family quilts. This sets off a series of escalating arguments between the sisters which Hall interweaves with poignant cultural weight. Amber and Zambia, the youngest and most modern, are quick to adopt a joking African accent when poking fun at the others’ observance of ritual and Black tradition which they see as corny – what Amber calls “pseudo-Black Nationalist” bullshit, like the “fake-ass Yoruba village” just over on the mainland. But they’re the first to offer a solution that would take care of all three bequests, even if the other women are in staunch opposition.

The play probably doesn’t need to last two hours and forty minutes, but Hall, whose television series P-Valley will soon debut its third season, knows how to draw out long threads and keep them engaging: she is alternately soothingly poetic and fiercely funny, and her characters are people we’re more than willing to spend time with. This cast is uniformly terrific, with Banks and Watson particular standouts. They’re also remarkably comfortable with each other, their relationships joyously lived-in under the familial direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, who brings aboard her delightful usual design suspects, Adam Rigg (scenic) and Montana Levi Blanco (costumes). Blanco’s work deftly displays each woman’s personality and Rigg evokes the harmonious chaos of a quilt in their set, which features mismatched fabrics and wooden tiles on the house’s attractive bones, several gorgeous quilts, and a water feature downstage which, though initially almost an afterthought, hosts the play’s stunningly staged catharsis. (Jiyoun Chang’s light, Palmer Hefferan’s sound, and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s projections helpfully assist.)

That final purifying rainfall washes away what becomes almost an overloading of trauma, as the sisters cut deeper into each other, from the affecting family drama at this play’s core. Hall has a commanding ability to knit themes of history and legacy with a calibrated, comic touch that’s tight enough to endure the thoroughly introspective, and breathable enough to remain deeply enjoyable.

The Blood Quilt is in performance through December 29, 2024 at Lincoln Center’s Newhouse Theatre on West 65th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

Elf: The Musical please save me. Save me Elf: The Musical! 

Okay—perhaps too much to expect from an eight-week run of a holiday musical. But I do have my own personal history with this treacly yet charming Christmas staple, which returns to Broadway at the Marquis Theatre through January 4 following two previous outings on the main stem. My very first job in New York City was on the 2012 encore run of Elf at the beautiful Al Hirschfeld Theatre (where the show also debuted two years prior). I worked mostly as a “hawker,” roving the theater with a bucket of candy strapped to my chest and a Santa hat atop my head. (Yes, I did look cute.)

New to Broadway and not yet totally jaded, I would sneak into the back of the house each night to watch my favorite numbers over and over. The show highlight, in my opinion, was “There Is A Santa Claus,” a sprightly number belted to the heavens each night by the ever-reliable Beth Leavel. 

Returning to the world of Elf last week, I did wonder if I was making a mistake. After all, my fondness for the show stemmed from a very specific moment in my life. Elf is now at the cold, faceless Marquis Theatre, a venue that does not exactly scream festive cheer. And we are living in a moment of existential despair, a grim moment for a country hurtling towards near-certain doom. Was I putting too much pressure on the healing powers of a return visit to Christmastown? 

Early signs were discouraging. I visited the bar, hoping the old favorites would still be on offer. But the world of Elf-themed cocktails was not as I had left it. 

“You know, when I worked concessions at Elf” I informed the bartender, “The drinks were called the “Naughty” and the “Nice!”” He appeared fascinated by this information. 

Prospects grew more worrisome as the show began. Santa’s North Pole living room trundled onstage to muted audience response—perhaps because the set piece resembled a high school scene shop creation. By the time four non-descript tables and a sad backdrop had floated on to vaguely indicate Santa’s Workshop, I became deeply concerned. Exactly how much scenic heavy lifting would be left to Ian William Galloway crude video designs, blown up on a giant screen looming over the sad, bare Marquis stage? 

This iteration of Elf, presumably designed for touring (set and costumes are by Tim Goodchild), is a far cry from David Rockwell’s colorful and sumptuous work at the Hirschfeld. I also felt disappointment with Buddy’s journey to New York City, a cheerful segment which director/choreographer Casey Nicholaw brought to easy, breezy life back in 2010. Under new choreographer Liam Steel’s more serviceable hand, hurtling from the North Pool to Times Square made for a less jubilant trip. 

Had I made a horrible error? Did Elf now reflect rather than distract from a moment of horrible American decline, its cheapened and diminished form a reminder of the corporate soullessness rapidly sucking what little joy remained in our increasingly artless world?  

In dark times, though, hope remains. And there are still good people out there, putting in the work. 

As my Buddy’s Maple Old Fashioned began to settle in, I started to find the joy. The joy in Grey Henson’s delightfully sassy take on Buddy himself, an expert mix of warmth and dry deadpan. Or in Henson’s enjoyably cutting repartee with Kayla Davion’s Jovie—somehow, probably for the first time in this show’s history, the pair’s romance feels almost plausible. Or in Sean Astin’s surprise double-duty as both Santa and heartless executive Mr. Greenaway, the latter role forcing an admirably game Astin to attempt a few dance moves. The man cannot dance to save his life, but what an endearing delight to watch him try. 

The adults-only throwaway gags also started to hit for me. Like the embittered Jovie announcing that her favorite Billy Crystal movie is Throw Momma From the Train, or an exasperated Emily Hobbs (Ashley Brown) quieting her precocious son Michael (Kai Edgar) with, “Settle down, Brené Brown.” Also, Buddy greeting Jovie with the romantic opener. “I’d like to stick you on top of the Christmas tree,” one of several filthy come-ons which Henson goes out of his way to deliver with an inappropriate degree of sexual confidence. 

A couple seated behind me were also wasted by this point, which only added to my own enjoyment. “YAAAAS SEAN ASTIN,” they screamed as Samwise pulled out his unfortunate dance moves. Later, the two rightly lost their shit for show highlight “Nobody Cares About Santa,” a sharp ensemble number that sends a dozen out-of-work Santas twirling miserably as they bemoan our cynical times.

And then, finally, we came to my own personal favorite: “There Is A Santa Claus.” After witnessing certain evidence of the big man’s existence, Emily and Michael belted to the heavens of their renewed faith in all things Christmas: “There is…aaaaaa...Saaanta..Claaaaus!!!” Brown and Edgar hit that note, gloriously. I was transported back to a happier time. (“GIVE THAT BOY A TONY!” the drunk couple screamed.) 

Look. Times are tough. Our world is not, at this moment, all that “Sparkle-jolly-twinkle-jingley” (to reference another low-key banger of a number). Is this low-budget Elf actually good? I’m not sure. But in the end, it gave me exactly what I wanted: a fleeting flashback to more hopeful times, giddily channeled through overqualified Broadway talent going full-out on a dose of sugary schmaltz. For one brief shining moment, there was a Santa Claus.

Elf: The Musical is now in performance at the Marriott Marquis Theatre through January 4, 2025. For tickets and more information, visit here.