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☆ ‘The Seven Year Disappear’ Review: Looking for Mom in All the Wrong Places
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-26 | by ( Naveen Kumar | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The problem with writing a play about absence: How to fill the void? When a performance artist known as Miriam (Cynthia Nixon) vanishes in “The Seven Year Disappear,” a two-hander by Jordan Seavey that opened Monday at the Signature Center, we know only that she is a narcissist who steals the air from any room she enters. “The Whitney is mine,” she exclaims in the opening scene, after her adult son and manager, Naphtali (Taylor Trensch), informs her that the museum has made some sort of offer to Marina Abramovic. After seven years off the map, when Miriam returns, she has the gall to ask Naphtali whether he will help turn his abandonment into her next piece. Scenes following Miriam’s reappearance, which occurs on the heels of the 2016 election, are intercut with a reverse chronology of Naphtali’s search for her, which is really a quest to find himself — in a change of careers, a series of sexual liaisons and a lot of hard drugs.

Persons: Miriam, Cynthia Nixon, Jordan Seavey, “, Whitney, Taylor Trensch, Marina Abramovic, — Organizations: Signature

☆ Reviving ‘The Wiz’ Through ‘the Blackest of Black Lenses’
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-24 | by ( Naveen Kumar | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Schele Williams first saw “The Wiz” when a tour of the original Broadway production came through Dayton, Ohio. She even used the show’s soaring finale, “Home,” as one of her audition songs. Now, after working on Broadway as an actor (“Aida”) and an associate director (“Motown”), she is directing the first Broadway revival of “The Wiz” in almost 40 years. It’s a chance, Williams said, to celebrate what “The Wiz” has meant to her and to pass the story along to her daughters. Since becoming a Broadway hit in 1975, “The Wiz,” a gospel, soul and R&B take on Dorothy’s adventures in Oz, largely composed by Charlie Smalls, with a book by William F. Brown, has been a vibrant cornerstone of Black culture.

Persons: Schele Williams, Dorothy, ”, Williams, It’s, Charlie Smalls, William F, Brown Organizations: Broadway Locations: Dayton , Ohio

Jesse Green’s Best Theater | Unforgettable ExperiencesJESSE GREENYear of the DramedyIf 2023 was a tragedy in the world, on New York stages it was a dramedy year, highlighted not only by serious plays with great jokes, but also by flat-out comedies with dark underpinnings. Its residents included an unemployed man in his 50s, his barely-holding-on mother, a pregnant woman, two refugees — and us. Seated adjacent to the facility’s dingy common room, we became, in the playwright’s own staging, fellow residents. But if the others eyed us like we might steal a precious sandwich, we could blithely leave when the play was over. The New York Theater Workshop audience, too, learned a great deal, as the questions bedeviling so many relationships — the complexity of consent and the meaning of control — played out before us in this perfectly timed hot-button play.

Persons: Jesse Green’s, Alexander Zeldin, ”, Henrik Ibsen, Jessica Chastain, Nora, Jamie Lloyd’s, Amy Herzog, Chastain, Liliana Padilla, —, gorgeously, Rachel Chavkin, Steph Paul Organizations: Armory, Zeldin, bros, New York Locations: New York, York City, Norway, New York City

☆ Full Exposure? Four Solo Shows Ponder the Art of True Nature.
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-21 | by ( Naveen Kumar | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Two years of post-shutdown theater has brought to New York stages a slew of solo performers wrestling with subjects like grief, death and the apocalypse — and those are just the comedies. Solo shows are inexpensive to produce and relatively low-lift endeavors for an industry still on shaky ground. There has been no shortage this fall, and now four solo shows running Off Broadway demonstrate a range of approaches to the form, proving, at least for this round, that baring your inner thoughts and fears pays off. “School Pictures” and “Amusements,” also at Playwrights Horizons, take the opposite tack, with performers who hold themselves at a distance to direct attention elsewhere, but with devices that can be distracting and evasive. Now she is nursing HPV and moving into a convent boardinghouse named for St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins and sexual abuse survivors.

Persons: baring, “, ”, Waterwell, Lameece Issaq, Agnes, Peiyi Wong Organizations: Connelly, “, Playwrights, Playwrights Horizons, Yorker, St Locations: New York, East, Harpy, Midtown Manhattan

☆ ‘Let’s Call Her Patty’ Review: Unseen Depths of an Uptown Matriarch
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-01 | by ( Naveen Kumar | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Patty’s maternal relationships with Cecile and Sammy are the play’s sources of conflict (Patty’s offstage husband, Hal, we’re told, is “fine”). The matriarch is little more than an amalgam of stereotypes; that there is truth to them is hardly a revelation. But the play does little to question or disrupt the preconceived notions it assumes New York audiences will have about “an Upper West Side lady” like Patty. If this is a character study, Patty’s pungent, messy center is largely withheld from view. Unfortunately, Cecile is kept at arm’s length from a story in which she seems to have the most compelling inner life.

Persons: Cecile, Sammy, Hal, we’re, Patty, she’s, “, Perlman, Margot Bordelon, Goldman’s Cecile Locations: York

☆ ‘The Light in the Piazza’ Review: Outside, Looking In at Love
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-22 | by ( Naveen Kumar | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

That’s the idea behind the mother-daughter tour of Florence in “The Light in the Piazza,” the 2005 musical romance composed by Adam Guettel and written by Craig Lucas. revival directed by Chay Yew opened on Wednesday, a sensational performance by Ruthie Ann Miles delivers a feeling close to the sublime. She honeymooned in Italy; now it’s the summer of 1953, and her marital flame is dimming just as her daughter, Clara (Anna Zavelson), first discovers desire. That Margaret and Clara are Asian American adds a further layer of shading to their outsiderness abroad. (“I’m as different here as different can be,” Clara sings.)

Persons: Adam Guettel, Craig Lucas, Chay Yew, Ruthie Ann Miles, Miles, “ Sweeney Todd, ”, Margaret, Clara, Anna Zavelson, Miles imbues, ” Clara, it’s, Fabrizio, James D, Gish Organizations: New York City Center, Broadway Locations: Florence, “, Italy, American

☆ For Her New Play, Tori Sampson Revisited Her ‘Black Power Household’
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-02 | by ( Naveen Kumar | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

After a year of moving between foster homes, the twins petitioned to attend an all-Black boarding school in Mississippi, where their independence was contingent on high achievement. “I was always yearning to understand what it would look like to have a family,” Sampson said. “I wanted to write a story where Huey P. Newton walks into a bar and changes the lives of the people there forever,” Sampson said of the Black Panther Party co-founder. She got the idea for the play, a blend of historical fiction and sitcom conventions, when she learned that Newton’s rise to prominence began with an unsolved mystery. Rallies ‌to “Free Huey” helped set off the Black Power movement.

Persons: orphanhood, Sampson, ”, “ I’m, “, ” Sampson, Huey, Newton, ‌ Newton, Huey ” Organizations: “, Black Panther Party Locations: Mississippi, Los Angeles, “, Oakland, Calif

☆ ‘Primary Trust’ Review: Sipping Mai Tais, Until Bitter Reality Knocks
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-25 | by ( Naveen Kumar | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

(“Primary Trust” doubles as the name of Kenneth’s new employer, and an abbreviated metaphor for what was lost when his mother died.) As in her superstore dark comedy “Paris,” presented by Atlantic Theater Company in 2020, Booth again probes the half-dread of working-class Black characters in a one-freeway-exit corner of the Northeast. And though Kenneth’s Blackness is an underlying aspect of his experience, it is not the acute source of his alienation. Booth’s one-man study is wonderfully vivid, but there’s only so much emotional engagement that the unburdening of feelings, rather than their enactment or discovery, can inspire. Her other characters are far more loosely sketched: Sanders and Matthis turn small roles, rich with concise, sideways detail, into four-course meals, paradoxically making them feel underused.

The rupee finished last week 1.2% lower at 82.27 per dollar, tumbling swiftly from trading in the 81-handle initially. Considering that, the rupee is still expected to be "stuck" in a range, they added. Meanwhile, India's benchmark government bond yield ended last week at 7.2982%, with the 8 bps gain its biggest weekly rise since late-September. Yields are expected to move in a narrow range of 7.26%-7.36%, with high chances of the upper end being tested, said a fixed income trader. After the Fed meeting, traders will also watch out for the central bank's dot plot to see where terminal rates could go.

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