Joe Turner's Come and Gone (c) Julieta Cervantes
Broadway: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
At the Barrymore Theatre
I consider August Wilson’s 1988 Joe Turner’s Come and Gone his best play in his series on the African American experience, set across each decade of the 20th century. It’s his best use of magical realism, perfectly integrated in the fabric of the post-slavery lives of these characters. The play is set in 1911 in a Pittsburgh boarding house run by Seth and Bertha Holly (Cedric “The Entertainer” and Taraji P. Henson), where people come and go paying $2 a week, and that includes meals. Currently, the tenants are a young, construction worker who wants to be a blues guitarist, Jeremy (Tripp Taylor); a jilted woman, Mattie (Nimene Sierra Wureh), lost without her boyfriend; Molly Cunningham (Maya Boyd), a more confident single woman who relishes her independence (and hysterically likes to talk about herself in the third person); and Bynum (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) who is more or less a full-time resident. Bynum is a conjuring man, who people go to when they have problems, but he also claims that when he was at his lowest he met someone he calls the Shining Man, who gave him back his spirit and song. Entering into their midst are Herald Loomis (Joshua Boone) and his young daughter Zonia (played in alternated performances by Savannah Commodore and Dominique Skye Turner), renting a room while Loomis searches for his missing wife. (Director Debbie Allen doesn’t want the audience to miss the huge symbolism that Wilson intends for a character named Herald instead of Harold by giving us ominous music as he enters the house.) Seth is suspicious of the stranger, but he agrees to let him stay as Loomis hires Selig (Bradley Stryker), a door-to-door salesman, who is known to find people.
Joe Turner's Come and Gone (c) Julieta Cervantes
Denzel Washington has made it his goal to film every one of these August Wilson plays, and one of the happy byproducts of that is that the film usually follows a Broadway revival like the recent Fences, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and The Piano Lesson. And while the big star power of Cedric “The Entertainer” and Henson is grabbing headlines, their roles are actually secondary. Cedric wrings out every last laugh as Seth (his delivery of the word “Tuesday” is the funniest line of the production). Henson brings a down-home warmth to Bertha, and while she makes a lovely Broadway debut, especially with her second act monologue, the Hidden Figures actress is mostly doing busy work like cooking and cleaning as the drama unfolds. And unfolds it does, in the capable and extraordinary hands of Santiago-Hudson, who is a world-class interpreter of Wilson’s brand of storytelling (he won a Tony Award for Seven Guitars). Here, he is just masterful, juggling both sides of Bynum’s possible charlatan/possible oracle with equal panache. His work with Boone as Herald, a man spiritually lost after being falsely imprisoned for seven years by the titular Joe Turner, is the heart of the play and it’s just electric. Allen, who directs the more naturalistic parts of the play nicely, relies too heavily on-stage tricks during the spiritually heavy climatic moments of each act. And while I love the play, Wilson does pad it with unnecessary asides from Zonia and a neighbor kid (played alternately by Christopher Woodley and Jackson Edward Davis) that, while no fault of the young actors, really add nothing to the theme of the harrowing and lasting effects of slavery on the soul of black communities. When a black woman in white (the excellent Abigail Onwunali) enters late in the play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone provides a path out of spiritual depletion so genuine and powerful that “Wow” is all you can say after the curtain call.
The Balusters (c) Jeremy Daniel
Broadway: The Balusters
Manhattan Theater Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater
I blame Bruce Norris. His 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Clybourne Park tells a parallel story to Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 “A Raisin in the Sun,” focusing the first act on the white community that the Younger family plans to move into. The second act is a meeting of black and white neighbors 50 years later in the now mostly black neighborhood, and it was essentially the woke vs. the unwoke (or using 2010s vernacular, pc vs. the politically incorrect), at one point having characters telling each other racist jokes. Since then, Broadway has had a series of plays (written by white men) in which members on different sides of the political aisle have to deal with each other in a public setting, like Tracy Lett’s The Minutes, about a local city council, and Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, about members of a school board. This year’s variation is David Lindsay-Abaire’s The Balusters that, with Kenny Leon’s smart direction, focuses on an HOA in a landmarked East Coast neighborhood. At the start of the play, with the usual Manhattan Theatre Club’s I-want-to-live-there sets (by Derek McLane), we’re in the home of newcomer Kyra (Anika Noni Rose), hosting her first board meeting with her housekeeper, Luz (Maria-Christina Oliveras) and her friend, Melissa (Jeena Yi), who is also on the board as her support. Through fun chatter (this is a Lindsay-Abaire play after all) we meet the nine members of the HOA, and it becomes obvious the most respected member is the current and long-reigning president, Elliot (Richard Thomas), who has lived in the neighborhood since he was a child. He is the biggest stickler to community and aesthetics standards, criticizing one homeowner for installing the wrong balusters on the staircase they converted into a wheelchair ramp, the concerns over Amazon packages being stolen from porches and fielding talk of a dangerous intersection with no stop signs.
The Balusters (c) Jeremy Daniel
That last point is brought up by Kyra as the intersection is right outside her house, but Elliot believes any remedy will ruin the sightlines of the scenic neighborhood. However, he does allow Kyra to research alternative solutions. This sets up a showdown between Kyra and Elliot, a younger black woman and an older white man, while other agenda items bring up issues of sexual identities, race and tension at a store with a Muslim owner. Like the other plays I mentioned, this is done with humor, sometimes cruelly, as we who are living in this, the year of Trump 2026, many will be able to relate to people who say they understand all sides of an issue but rarely compromise. Lindsay-Abaire populates his play with enough antagonistic polar-opposite members to have some lively discussion, including more members from the LGBTQ-a-sphere than would be expected. He also ramps up the farcical quotients as it inches towards its finale. This is all played deliciously by its cast, which includes NYC stalwarts like Margaret Colin, Michael Esper and the always reliable Marylouise Burke. The playwright gives the juiciest head-butting moments to Rose and Thomas, who both handle it with an insincere civility, but it’s Oliveras as the Filipina maid who receives the most important element from the audience: empathy. The Balusters does seem to go to unbelievable lengths for the sake of comedy, such as a silly sub-plot about dog poop. Just know that the social commentary ultimately takes a backseat to the jokes.
Fallen Angels (c) Joan Marcus
Broadway: Fallen Angels
Roundabout Theatre Company at the Todd Haimes Theatre
It is always nice to see a play from an oft-produced playwright that is the not from their usual Broadway repertoire. For the prolific Noël Coward, we usually get the umpteenth revival of Private Lives, Design for Living, Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter (although my prayers to bring over the excellent Andrew Scott-led National Theatre production of the latter play from a few years ago keep going unanswered), so it was refreshing to see the Roundabout producing an early, mostly unknown Coward comedy, 1925’s Fallen Angels for its first Broadway revival since the 1956 production with Nancy Waker. With deft direction by Scott Ellis and two of the funniest performances of the season by Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne (the recent Oscar nominee for If I Had Legs I'd Kick You), this excellent Fallen Angels still can’t hide the fact that the plot is as light as champagne bubbles. Julia Sterroll (O’Hara) and Jane Banbury (Byrne) are old friends living on different floors of the same, posh London flat. They are both married, if not happily then contently. While their husbands—Julia’s Fred (Aasif Mandvi) and Jane’s Willy (Christopher Fitzgerald) —are away on a golf trip, the two gets a postcard from Maurice (Mark Consuelos), a Frenchman both ladies had dalliances with before they were married, who says he's coming to London that very evening. With the help of Julia’s new maid Saunders (the invaluable Tracee Chimo), the friends try to figure out how to avoid seeing Maurice while also scheming to see their old paramour without the other. This leads to the centerpiece and best scene in Fallen Angels, in which the two frenemies get more and more drunk anticipating Maurice’s arrival. They have a grand time outdoing each other with physical comedy that gets broader and funnier as the night continues. Byrne has a ball with a feathered fan while O’Hara delivers drunken pratfalls that seem to last for days. Not to slight the three men of the cast, but the three women get the best of the Coward’s ear for wit and director Ellis’ eye for farce. That the play will be forgotten the minute the audience hits 42nd Street is offset by the lasting memory of the delicious pairing of the leads.
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