Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – 2022 IN REVIEW: Theater, Music, and Dance

• By drediman
• January 9, 2023
• No Comments

2022 saw live performances continue to emerge from Covid’s comprehensive grasp. In no particular order, here are my thematically grouped picks for the most notable happenings in the performing arts that occurred during the calendar year newly behind us.

Sondheim-mania continues

Following last year’s lauded revivals of Company and Assassins, 2022 continued to see blockbuster revivals of the musicals of the late, great Stephen Sondheim.

• When it opened at New York City Center in May, Lear deBessonet’s acclaimed, sold out Encores! production of Into the Woods was the talk of the town. Thankfully, the revival subsequently transferred to Broadway, where a revolving door of musical theater stars were able to put their own distinct stamp on the work’s iconic fairy tale characters.
• Perhaps this past year’s hottest ticket was the hotly anticipated Off-Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along at New York Theatre Workshop (the production is planning to transfer to the Main Stem later this year). And rightfully so – Maria Friedman’s insightful, starry production (Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsey Mendez lead the cast) may have well unlocked the full potential of Sondheim’s notoriously problematic reverse-chronological musical. 
• Sondheim’s posthumous valedictory lap doesn’t end there. In February, a major new revival of his masterpiece Sweeney Todd – helmed by Hamilton’s Thomas Kail and starring Tony-winner Analeigh Ashford and recording superstar Josh Groban – is scheduled to open on the Great White Way.

Beguiling avant-garde music theater

2022 saw the arrival of a pair of avant-garde music theater pieces that utterly beguiled me with the audacity of their singular visions. Suffice to say, I’m still thinking about these adventurous Off-Broadway offerings to this day.

• First there’s Ars Nova’s production of the confounding but sonically overpowering Oratorio for Living Things, Heather Christian’s richly wrought meditation on the nature of time and humanity’s place in the cosmos. The experience – gorgeously and sensitively staged in an intimate cocoon-like arena custom-built within the Greenwich House Theatre – left me shaken with the way it contained and wielded/mastered sound.
• Then there’s Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s The Hang, which could barely be contained within the cozy confines of HERE’s main stage. Originally scheduled for the 2022 Prototype festival (which was ultimately canceled due to the rise of Omicron), the zany queer jazz opera recounts the last hours of the life of Greek philosopher Socrates, albeit in life-giving, romp-like fashion. Like Ms. Christian’s aforementioned piece, Mac and Ray’s work defies genre, straddling opera, musical theater, and experimentalism to intoxicating effect.

The American musical is alive and well

Those of you looking for less experimental fare need not look further than two new musicals that opened on and brightened up Broadway’s fall season.

• Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman’s hugely entertaining new musical Some Like It Hot (featuring a book by book by Tony winner Matthew López and Amber Ruffin and based on the classic film bearing the same title) – led sensationally by Christian Borle and R. Harrison Ghee – pulls off an unlikely hat trick. While harkening back to the golden days of musical theater, it also manages to be keenly attuned to the present moment, particularly as it relates to sexual and gender politics.
• Victoria Clark is both heartbreaking and inspiring in the Broadway transfer of Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire’s Kimberly Akimbo (the musical is based on Mr. Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 play of the same name). Thankfully, the Main Stem edition of the musical has retained the intimacy of its Off-Broadway incarnation at the Atlantic Theater Company, as well as Justin Cooley and Bonnie Milligan’s quirky, irresistible star turns.

Classical music at Lincoln Center: the Metropolitan Opera christens two new stars and the new Geffen Hall is unveiled

In 2022, the mighty Metropolitan Opera christened a pair of opera stars, both of whom captured the imagination of audiences with their blazing vocal and dramatic performances.

• Norwegian soprano Lise Davidson wowed opera fans with the lush quality and effortless power of her voice in recent revivals of two Richard Strauss operas – the rarely-performed Ariadne auf Naxos and the shattering one act Elektra (in which she co-starred with a smoldering Nina Stemme in the title role).
• British tenor Allan Clayton brought terrifying psychological depth and slicing vocal pyrotechnics to both the title roles of the Met’s productions of Brett Dean’s striking operatic take on Hamlet and Benjamin Britten’s 20th century masterpiece Peter Grimes. 
• Speaking of classical music on Lincoln Center’s campus, 2022 also saw the highly anticipated opening of the new David Geffen Hall. Happily, the acoustics of the hall are much improved – I’ve never heard Handel’s Messiah sound richer, warmer, and more immediate in the hall than this ast holiday season – even if some of the design decisions of the hall’s public spaces left me scratching my head.

Sexy global theater at BAM

This past year, some of the hippest, sexiest specimens of global theater came our way by way of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

• The spring saw the U.S. premiere of Jamie Lloyd’s radical, visually sparse reconsideration of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. In the title role, film star James McAvoy gave a muscular, all-consuming performance that would have chewed up the scenery if there was any. 
• Then in the fall (as part of BAM’s revitalized Next Wave Festival), we got Ivo van Hove’s hotly anticipated four-hour stage adaptation – performed in Dutch with English titles – of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life. Thankfully, Yanagihara’s deeply unsettling tale benefits from the director’s emotionally maximalist aesthetic, which hasn’t always been the case for the projects undertaken by the renowned Belgian auteur.

Park Avenue Armory’s potent one-two summer punch

During the slower summer months, the Park Avenue Armory scored a coup by presenting – in repertory – a pair of re-calibrated staples of Western drama. Originally staged at London’s small-ish Almeida Theatre, both productions were helmed by Robert Icke, a director who has a knack for reinvigorating classics for contemporary audiences without sacrificing their original essence. And in an act akin to a magic trick, he somehow successfully expanded his stagings to fill the epic dimensions of the Armory’s drill hall.  

• Icke’s fascinating surveillance-heavy version of Hamlet was gripping from beginning to end. As the troubled Danish prince, Alex Lawther brought disarming self-knowledge to the role that brought new layers of nuance to Shakespeare’s ubiquitous tragedy.
• Playing in repertory with Icke’s Hamlet was his equally effective production of Oresteia, which reiterated the director’s ability to build in contemporary perspectives into works you thought you knew. As Klytemnestra, Anastasia Hille was a force of nature, embodying a deeply wronged woman with both terrifying rage with arresting humanity.

Off-Broadway was where to find the best new American plays

Off-Broadway continues to be a hotbed for the development of some of the most exciting playwriting. Indeed, two of the best new American plays of the year were to be found far from the bright lights of the Great White Way.

• At Playwrights Horizons (via Chicago’s excellent Steppenwolf Theatre Company), Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Norris’s Downstate controversially dug into the knotted psyches of a houseful of sex offenders, resulting in one of the most disturbing yet probing plays of the year, daring audiences to sympathize with or even forgive the unforgivable.
• Over at Atlantic Theater Company was the acutely-acted I’m Revolting, Gracie Gardner’s clear-eyed cross-sectional meditation on the disconcerting relationship between beauty and society. Under Knud Adams’ astute direction and as conveyed by the ensemble cast’s fearless acting, Ms. Gardner’s underrated play boldly confronted realities that have largely gone unexamined.

The rise of New York City Ballet’s latest crop of dancers 

This past year saw the retirement of some City Ballet’s veteran principals (e.g., Maria Kowroski, Sterling Hyltin, Amar Ramasar, etc.). Luckily, the company’s next generation of dancers look eager and more than ready to fill the void left behind by their venerated predecessors. 

• Of the men, Chun Wai Chan and Jovani Furlan – both of whom were promoted to principal dancers in 2022 – proved to be leading men of the highest order, bringing much needed style and artistic flair to the company’s technically proficient crop of male dancers.
• By far, the standout among the women this past year was Indiana Woodward, who was raised to principal in 2021. Over the course of the year, she lifted her dancing to new heights, performing with proactive musicality and unmatched technical bravado. Also elevating their games were Mira Nadon, Emily Kikta, and Miriam Miller, a trio of up-and-comers who are dancing with increasing distinctiveness and virtuosity (all three were promoted to soloists in 2022).

The continued ascendancy of Camille A. Brown 

2022 saw the further ascendancy of the career of choreographer Camille A. Brown, who continues to blossom in the most uncanny ways.

• Most conspicuously, Ms. Brown took on both directing and choreographing duties for the recent Broadway revival of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, Ntozake Shange’s seminal 1976 theatrical “choreopoem”. The results were electric, both profoundly moving and provoking.
• Ms. Brown also bid farewell to performance with a pair of fierce performances at The Joyce (BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play and Mr. TOL E. RAncE), which were prelude to the premiere of ink, the final installment of the choreographer’s trilogy of works exploring Black identity in our evolving world.

Dance programming at BAM

Theater isn’t the only thing that BAM got right this year. Additionally, at its opera house, the Academy presented the New York premieres of two of the most exciting full-length works of the year.

• First up was Akram Khan’s radical and riveting re-interpretation of Giselle, perhaps the most beloved classical ballet of the Romantic era. Relentless and visceral, Khan’s unapologetically contemporary, apocalyptic take brought urgency and moody atmosphere to the tragic love story that dance fans thought they knew.
• The city also finally played host to Pam Tanowitz’s widely-acclaimed Four Quartets (the piece premiered in 2018 at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College). Set to the poetry of T.S. Eliot (recited live by the incomparable stage actress Kathleen Chalfant) and accompanied by a delicate new score by acclaimed Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, the work is a mesmerizing, uncannily articulate choreographic investigation of time, memory, and human existence.