In today’s newsletter, the musicalization of a lurid nineteen-twenties poem. Plus:

• “Project Hail Mary” aims to be a crowd-pleaser
• Why we cling to the Kennedy myth
• A rare play about a good dad

Dan Stahl
A New Yorker staffer who writes about theatre for Goings On.

A night of dancing, drinking, and crazed debauchery in N.Y.C.? No, not next Saturday at Knockdown Center—it’s “The Wild Party,” Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe’s musicalization of a 1928 poem by Joseph Moncure March, revived this month in New York City Center’s Encores! series (March 18-29). Set during the Roaring Twenties, the show takes place at the Manhattan apartment of Queenie (Jasmine Amy Rogers), a vaudeville bombshell, and her man of the moment, the comedian Burrs (Jordan Donica). Guests include a former prizefighter, a pair of piano-playing twins, an “ambisextrous” playboy, a stage diva past her prime, and someone’s kid sister from Poughkeepsie. Oh, there’s also Queenie’s frenemy Kate (Adrienne Warren), who brings along a hunky plus-one with a roving eye (Jelani Alladin). (Fidelity is so nineteen-tens.)

“The Wild Party” premièred on Broadway in 2000 and ran for an underwhelming two months, despite seven Tony nominations and a cast that included Toni Collette, Mandy Patinkin, and Eartha Kitt. It is not to be confused with Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party,” a musical adaptation of the same poem that also premièred in 2000 and also received an Encores! revival, a 2015 staging starring Sutton Foster. That March’s poem is the basis for not one but two musicals is perhaps unsurprising—it offers the seemingly endless allure of a Jazz Age milieu, rendered with a luridness that makes F. Scott Fitzgerald look like Mother Goose.

From the dissonance of the orchestra’s opening peal of brass, LaChiusa’s version signals its allegiance to his source’s snarling tone and, in fact, incorporates many of March’s lines directly into the songs, as in the number introducing its antiheroine: “She liked her lovers violent, and vicious: / Queenie was sexually ambitious.” These are unhappy hedonists, boozing and fornicating for lack of fulfillment. A century on, the party crowd’s arsenal of intoxicants has expanded, and sex has never been more accessible. But fulfillment remains as elusive as ever.

Off Broadway

Anna Ziegler’s “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)” reimagines Sophocles’ authority-defying heroine (Susannah Perkins) as a young woman seeking an abortion. The procedure has been outlawed by Antigone’s newly coronated uncle, Creon (Tony Shalhoub), who presides over a playfully anachronistic Thebes, in which the palace gate is a walk-through metal detector manned by a befuddled security officer (Dave Quay, a slapstick virtuoso). Ziegler’s humor and sympathy for her characters—including Creon, who desperately wants to do right by everyone—saves the conflict between individual and state from heavy-handedness. Arresting performances by Perkins, Shalhoub, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, as a one-woman chorus, are anchored by a set that, under Tyne Rafaeli’s slick direction, keeps surprising with its inventiveness.—Dan Stahl (Public Theatre; through April 5.)

Dance

The first “Motion/Matter: All-Styles Dance Battle,” at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, in 2024, was the culmination of a festival of street-dance productions. In the past two years, the festival has fallen away, leaving the essential core of battle-culture dance intact: the competition in which soloists define themselves ever more clearly as they rise to the challenge set by other contenders. This year’s panel of judges (including the Litefeet trailblazer Chrybaby Cozie) isn’t quite as starry as the inaugural jury, but the battle, hosted by the comically manic Cebo and the elegant Nubian Néné, should still serve as a concentrated sample of the state of the art.—Brian Seibert (PAC NYC; March 21.)

Electronic

The experimental singer-producer FKA twigs, for most of her career, has made cerebral electronic music intent on synchronizing the mind and body. A transformative discography—her intimacy-focussed début,“LP1” (2014); her operatic breakup record, “Magdalene” (2019); and her border-hopping pandemic mixtape, “Caprisongs” (2022)—made her a revolutionary figure in both pop and avant-garde spheres. But last year, across two LPs, twigs broke even her own paradigm. “Eusexua,” inspired by the techno scene in Prague, sought music for a euphoric out-of-body experience. Its continuation, “Eusexua Afterglow,” released ten months later, was the score for a blissful post-rave comedown. Together, the albums create a vision of the club as a sanctuary where one can completely detach from the self.—Sheldon Pearce (Madison Square Garden; March 21.)

Off Broadway

A shakedown opens Lauren Yee’s “Mother Russia,” directed by Teddy Bergman. Evgeny (Adam Chanler-Berat), deputized by his fixer father, arrives at a St. Petersburg shop to extract money from its proprietor, Dmitri Petrovich (Steven Boyer). A gun is raised, then lowered; boyhood recognition floods in. Soon, the childhood acquaintances are embarking on a surveillance caper, eavesdropping on a dissident pop star (Rebecca Naomi Jones). Yee stretches the comedy in each scene like taffy, but she keeps a scalpel up her sleeve: Mother Russia (David Turner), who embodies the weary soul of her country, hilariously relates the saga of a nation forever ricocheting between tsars and strongmen, purges and pageants.—Rhoda Feng (Pershing Square Signature Center; through March 22.)

Art

“Four Seasons in One Head” (c. 1590). Art work by Giuseppe Arcimboldo / Courtesy National Gallery of Art

Like many of the outstanding shows that the Morgan puts on, this exhibition, centered on the early Caravaggio masterpiece “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” (c. 1595), is given a fantastic context, the better for the viewer to understand the artist, his methods, and why the work continues to resonate. Caravaggio, born and trained in Lombardy, had a creative boldness based on confronting reality. Also included here are brilliant examples of how other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters provided samples from the natural world—among them Giuseppe Arcimboldo, in his still scary “Four Seasons in One Head” (c. 1590). It’s a treasure trove of a show, with a lot of emphasis on pleasure.—Hilton Als (Morgan Library & Museum; through April 19.)

Classical

The philosopher Adam Smith, in his 1776 text, “The Wealth of Nations,” wrote that musicians have “some of the most frivolous professions.” He would perhaps shudder to learn that, two hundred and fifty years later, his classical-economics opus would be rendered into frivolity by the Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang. Lang’s oratorio of the same name draws lines from Smith’s treatise, and also from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Edith Wharton—all synthesized to ask, What does it mean to value something? The piece, performed by the Singaporean-British mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and the New York Philharmonic Chorus, has its world première under the baton of the orchestra’s soon-to-be director Gustavo Dudamel. Frivolous? I think not.—Jane Bua (David Geffen Hall; March 19-22.)

Illustration by JAE

In 2019, a teeny sliver of a store, specializing in Japanese stationery, opened on Tenth Street in the East Village. The button-size shop, called niconeco zakkaya (fashioned, purposefully, in all lower case), was founded by a paper-goods obsessive named Siming Vautin, who had spent about a decade living in Japan; it had grown out of a successful Etsy store that trafficked in all things kawaii (the Japanese term for cute, or, more specifically, heart-squeezingly adorable). Niconeco zakkaya sells a neatly curated selection of precious little items, including washi tape printed with cats and ladybugs, pastel pencil pouches, diminutive watercolor palettes, rubber stamps of teapots and paper cranes, green-tea-infused writing paper, handmade scented candles, and many more irresistible, if self-consciously twee, impulse purchases. But the shop, which I started visiting regularly a few years ago as a surefire Sunday comfort activity, can quickly become so crowded with human traffic jams that one can barely move through it. Fortunately, last summer, Vautin opened a brand-new outpost in Williamsburg, Loaf on Paper by niconeco zakkaya (64 Grand St.), which is four times the size of the original location. The front half of Loaf on Paper serves as an all-day café, where customers can sip black-sesame lattes, post up reading a novel, and purchase a variety of upscale foods (artisanal berry jams, Brightland olive oil, dark-chocolate-covered medjool dates). The back half of the store, however, is where the fun really begins. Vautin has created a true stationery smorgasbord, stuffed with creamy notebooks, wax seals, fountain pens and inks, wee porcelain bowls, mini-colored-pencil sets, gift wrap, highlighter pens, Hobonichi planners, a bounty of illustrated stickers, and washi-tape rolls by the dozen. I find it impossible to leave empty-handed.