Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – THE BEST OF 2021: Theater, Music, and Dance

• By drediman
• January 1, 2022
• No Comments

With 2021 behind us, the time has come to look back and recognize the best of the year’s performing arts offerings. No matter how you look at it, assessing performance in 2021 was a difficult exercise, but also a worthwhile reminder of the fortitude and care with which presenters have ushered live performance back into our daily milieu. Here are my thematically bucketed picks for the cream of the year’s crop of in-person performances (see my “special mentions” for 2021’s streaming highlights).

1. Emerging from lockdown, ingeniously

Commencing in April, in-person shows slowly emerged from the deadening silence of lockdown, which for over a year emphatically shut down all performances in front of live audiences. Given the uncertainty of the times, performance presenters were understandably tentative to re-engage as they had prior to the lockdown, which fascinatingly resulted in some rather ingeniously conceived and executed productions that both ensured a safe experience for all involved and introduced new forms of theatrical expression.

• Actor-less productions were the first to arrive, most notably sound-and-light narratives like Simon Stephens’ Blindness and Whitney White’s Definition, elaborate art installations such as A Dozen Dreams, and an array of aural “sound-walks”.
• Then micro-scaled one-on-one experiences like BAM’s 1:1 Concerts, Modesto “Flako” Jimenez’s Taxilandia, Theatre for One’s Here Is Future, and 600 Highwaymen’s A Thousand Ways (Part 2): An Encounter found their way into the fold, disarming viewers with their intensity and heightened intimacy.
• Festival-like programming by major institutions most visibly led the way during the re-emergence. This included the respective pandemic spring/summer seasons of The Guggenheim’s path-forging Works in Process, The Shed’s Open Call, the Park Avenue Armory’s adventurously curated series, and Lincoln Center’s expansive and eclectic Restart Stages.
• Lastly, some semblance of normalcy came our way when The Public resumed its iconic Free Shakespeare in the Park with the extended summer-long run of Jocelyn Bioh’s spirited Merry Wives (after Shakespeare) at the Delacorte.

2. Important but under-appreciated works, revisited and re-minted

Some pieces take time to establish themselves as the works of art that they truly are. This was the case for two revivals that opened on the Great White Way last year, both courtesy of Roundabout Theatre Company.

• Alice Childress’s 1955 play Trouble in Mind finally made it to Broadway, potently confronting our country’s race problem with anger and dignity. The production featured a career-redefining performance by the luminous LaChanze.
• Jeanine Tesori and Tony Kushner’s masterpiece – the timely modern opera Caroline, or Change – blazed back onto Broadway even more powerfully than its artful original production. Sharon D. Clarke stunned in the complex and emotionally-conflicted title role.

3. Bill T. Jones makes big, striking statements at at the Park Avenue Armory

Partnering with the Park Avenue Armory, celebrated choreographer Bill T. Jones made a pair of striking, socially-driven statements earlier this year that spoke fiercely to the here and now.

• First up in May was Afterwardsness, Mr. Jones’s exquisitely candid and all-too-universal chronicle of life during lockdown.
• Then in September, the choreographer returned with the expansive Deep Blue Sea, a nearly unclassifiable piece that merged dance, theater, art installation, and community town hall in the interest of blowing up the country’s race problem to epic proportions so as to deem it unavoidable.

4. Notable new operas at the Met and BAM

This fall saw the arrival of some exciting and worthwhile operas on the stages of the Metropolitan Opera and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Opera has long been the playground of yesteryear, with much of the repertoire dominated by the works by dead white men. Refreshingly, this fall saw the arrival of several important new operas from diverse voices.

• The all-woman creative team of Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė brought their audacious, slyly prescient, and environmentally focused Sun and Sea to BAM, drawing sold out audiences to Brooklyn.
• Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bone – which boldly opened the Met season – was a bonafide hit, and the first opera in the mighty company’s history (!) to have been written by a Black composer.
• Composer Matthew Aucoin’s accomplished score wasn’t the only selling point of the new opera Eurydice at the Met. Two women – librettist Sarah Ruhl and director Mary Zimmerman – made sure that piece worked, first and foremost, as compelling theater.

5. Significant new plays about life on the fringes

The ability to allow audiences to empathize and step into others’ shoes has long been one of theater’s most important attributes. This past year, two significant new plays by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights (both women!) were wholly successful in catapulting audiences headlong into the lives of those barely managing to survive in society’s fringes.

• Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s saw the lauded playwright step outside her comfort zone by penning a raucous comedy that tickles, even as it takes a hard look at the difficult reality faced by ex-convicts after they’ve left the prison system.
• In the provocative Sanctuary City, playwright Martyna Majok continues her exploration of the lives of the underrepresented, namely young undocumented immigrants striving to make good for themselves.

6. Provocative experimentation on and off Broadway

Some of the plays that really got under my skin this past year were the ones that took the most risks aesthetically. Indeed, a few of these provocative, aggressively defiantly experimental shows stayed with me long after had blazed onstage.

• One of the highlights of BAM’s truncated re-opening season was the uniquely immersive By Heart, in which Tiago Rodrigues soulfully equated memory with humanism.
• Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey’s while you were partying at Soho Rep, meanwhile, seared itself into my brain with its boundary-defying play on truth and storytelling.
• The Vineyard Theatre’s captivating and decidedly avant-grade productions of  Tina Satter’ Is This a Room and Lucas Hnath’s Dana H. (starring an astonishing Deidre O’Connell) returned in repertoire at the Lyceum Theatre in an unlikely but welcome Broadway engagement.

7. Going out with a bang: The late (still can’t believe I just typed it) Stephen Sondheim had a big year

2021 was the year we lost Stephen Sondheim, musical theater’s indisputable giant. The day he passed away, New York was just about to open a pair of highly anticipated revivals of the composer/lyricist’s Company and Assassins, as well as finally unveil the new film version of West Side Story (a legendary early career effort to which he provided the lyrics). All three were exceptional, proving that Mr. Sondheim’s works – which scrutinize, in penetrating fashion, our underlying humanity – can adapt to and withstand the our rapidly changing times.

8. As did Jeanine Tesori, whose star continues to rise

It seems that Jeanine Tesori is the right person for any assignment. Aside from the excellent revival of Caroline, or Change (the musical theater composer also penned the music for Violet, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Shrek the Musical, Fun Home, among other works), 2021 also brought us, in the nick of time, Atlantic Theater Company’s musical adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s play Kimberly Akimbo, to which Ms. Tesori provided music. Her composition brought melody, additional depth, and great empathy to a work whose eccentricities already beguiled.

9. An uncommonly fine year for movie musicals

Movie musicals are tricky beasts, and they more often fizzle rather than capture the magic of their original stage incarnations. 2021, however, brought us not one, not two, but three fantastic movie musicals that managed to both transcend and evolve their respective underlying material.

• The film version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights improved upon the stage version by strengthening the narrative and injecting the material with intoxicating magic realism.
• Tick, Tick… Boom!, which featured an astounding central performance by Andrew Garfield, brought newfound specificity (particularly the direct references to Jonathan Larson’s life as a struggling artist) and poignancy to the musical.
• The aforementioned West Side Story, directed by Steven Spielberg, boldly uncovered the warhorse’s beating heart without losing the beloved musical’s essence.

10. Everywhere you look, there’s Justin Vivian Bond

No one in the cabaret world has worked more prolifically and in more eclectic environs since in-person performances began this year than the oh so distinctive and fabulous Justin Vivian Bond. In whatever venue Mx. Bond performs, v invariably casts a wicked spell with biting yet ultimately bruised (tender even?) performances. Here are some of the New York cabaret icon’s recent and upcoming gigs:

• Re-opening St. Ann’s Warehouse was Mx. Bond co-starring with the equally ubiquitous countertenor Anthony Roth Constanzo in Only an Octave Apart, a gloriously oversized vaudevillian cabaret act.
• Mx. Bond also re-opened Joe’s Pub with his cabaret show Storming the Glamparts, featuring v’s signature blend of sweet and sour flourishes, as well as v’s the usual suspects onstage collaborators.
• Then at BAM, v and Kenny Mellman reached back into the closet to resuscitate their legendary Kiki and Herb act – just in time to throw a wrench into the holidays.
• Note that Justin is also scheduled to perform with the New York Philharmonic later this month. What a run!

Special Mention: The Best in Streaming

2021 commenced very much still in the midst of the lockdown and therefore the proliferation of streamed performances. Some of the most successful of these streamings were those that whole-heartedly embraced the hybrid nature (e.g., simultaneously theater and cinema) of these endeavors:

• Kyle Abraham’s gorgeously austere When We Fell for New York City Ballet;
• MasterVoice’s imaginatively re-conceived Myths and Hymns by Adam Guettel;
• The Old Vic’s uncommonly theatrical “In Camera” series;
• Simon Godwin’s unabashedly hybrid production of Romeo and Juliet for the National Theatre; and
• Ma-Yi Theater Company’s emotionally unfiltered Vancouver, a puppet theater piece by Ralph B. Peña.