THE MORNING LINE DATE: Monday, April 25, 2016 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Claire Manning, Amanda Price PAGES: 18, including this page

April 23, 2016

C3

April 23, 2016

Review: ‘A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’ Is a Ghostly Play By Ben Brantley

The body is barely there, more phantasm than person, and at first you might mistake it for a shadow. When the astonishing Irish actress Aoife Duffin makes her entrance in “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,” drifting through a corridor of gray light, her features are indistinguishable. And though she soon starts to speak, the words that she says also seem curiously inchoate.

“For you,” she says, falteringly, in a voice pitched between a quack and a chirp. “You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say.”

Come again? Who’s “you,” anyway?

Keep listening, and keep looking. Little by little, the speaker and her speech assume concrete and coherent form. Suddenly, you’re thinking in the language of someone else’s mind, that of a rebellious Irish girl scrambling for a sense of her drifting self. And by the end of a timeless 80 minutes, you’ll have grasped the dimensions of an entire individual life, in all its confused clarity.

This uncanny act of materialization, which runs through April 30 at the Jerome Robbins Theater of the Baryshnikov Arts Center, is the more remarkable in that it is also an improbable act of translation, from what would seem to be uncompromisingly literary material. Adapted for the stage by Annie Ryan (also its director), “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing” is based on the much-laureled first novel of Eimear McBride, a book that was rejected repeatedly by publishers and consigned to a desk drawer for a decade before seeing the light of print.

You can understand a publisher’s hesitation. That first sentence I quoted, which (like everything else in this play) comes directly from the novel, is typical of what follows, fragmented locutions unadorned by commas or proper names. I began reading the book in a state of irritation, ready to dismiss it as a wayward, show-off descendant of James Joyce.

Yet Ms. McBride’s stream of consciousness appears to flow so naturally from a single organic source that it soon wears down your resistance. And though its text includes many words that would seem unpronounceable by the human tongue, “Girl” turns out to hold the stage quite comfortably, at least with Ms. Duffin and Ms. Ryan as our guides.

O.K., perhaps “comfortably” isn’t a word to apply to the telling of a tale as jagged with pain as this one. Its unnamed narrator grows up feisty and fatherless in rural Ireland, with a fanatically pious mother and a learning-challenged older brother, who nearly died from cancer of the brain as a toddler.

C1

At 13, our heroine is introduced to sex by her uncle, her mother’s brother-in-law. She spends the rest of her adolescence in a state of aggressive promiscuity, trying both to numb and to heighten the hurt of that original encounter. She goes to college in Dublin, where she lives large, but is pulled back to the small, insular world of her family, a place she will always be a prisoner.

The stage version, which originated at the Corn Exchange in Dublin, uses only a fraction of the book’s original text, though there’s never a feeling of abridgment here. Ms. Ryan hasn’t made the mistake of opening up the narrative to include externalized characters. The only voice we hear is that of the girl, whose artfully paced ruminations are subliminally echoed by Mel Mercier’s music and sound design, and Sinead Wallace’s lighting, which seems to hold Ms. Duffin in midair above Lian Bell’s abstract country field of a set.

Of course, our narrator takes on the personas of others, but as they are seen and heard by her. “Girl” is no gallery of quick-sketch impersonations. Ms. Duffin gives distinctive identities to the heroine’s family members, lovers and fellow travelers through rowdy Dublin nights. But they are also always defined by her character’s sense of them, and we see her more clearly through the way she sees them.

Ms. Duffin is so tireless, passionate and exact in her performance, you only hope she has a reliable means of escaping her onstage alter ego between shows. You never feel her switching onto automatic pilot, coasting on the music of the words, even in such exquisitely cadenced set pieces as the one in which she describes an endless parade of interchangeable lovers, each phrase beginning with the words “I met a man.”

Every image has emotional heft and specificity. Speaking of the visiting Christian charismatics who descend upon her family in times of crisis, she says slowly and grimly, “They come with fruitcakes,” and you know everything you need to know about these god botherers. When she describes her grandfather’s funeral, you feel the whiskey-scented breath of closely gathered multitudes of chattering mourners.

But there is little satirical distance when she evokes those who have been so integral to what she has become: the harried, disapproving mother; the smiling, incestuous uncle, both doting and terrifying; and the damaged brother — the “you” to whom much of her monologue is addressed — the idea of whom she clutches as if it were the only anchor in a raging sea.

Some audience members, especially those who haven’t read Ms. McBride’s book, may feel at sea themselves. My advice is to go with the flow — or rather the fierce current — of Ms. Duffin’s performance. You’ll get your bearings sooner than you think.

Toward the show’s end, the girl we have to come know with such uneasy intimacy asks: “What’s left? What’s left behind?” This haunting work honors the hopelessness implicit in those questions. But, make no mistake, it leaves an indelible mark on the memory.

April 24, 2016

7

April 24, 2016

4

April 24, 2016

Review: Broadway's 'Waitress' has the recipe for success

By Mark Kennedy

NEW YORK (AP) — The unmistakable smell of baking pies pervades the Brooks Atkinson Theatre at performances of the sweet and savory new musical "Waitress." It's not a trick — there really is a pie baking in the lobby.

Such a move might seem mawkish or desperate at any other theater, but here it shows off the quirky genuineness of "Waitress." For a show about a baker, it feels like we are sitting inside a theater-sized pie.

It might not have worked if the creators hadn't used a great recipe: Take terrific songs by Sara Bareilles, mix them to a story by Jessie Nelson that isn't too sugary, bake that with intimate, understated direction by Diane Paulus and top it off with a powerhouse performance by Jessie Mueller.

The musical that opened Sunday is adapted from a 2007 film starring Keri Russell about a waitress and pie-maker trapped in a small-town diner and a loveless marriage. It offers unusual ingredients for musical theater, like infidelity, spousal abuse and lack of maternal instincts.

But this is a rollicking show with dream sequences, flour tossed around like pixie dust and brave staging. The song "The Negative" has three women waving pregnancy testing sticks as they pray for them to reveal two lines. There's also a funny make-out

session on a gynecologists' examination chair, complete with stirrups.

Bareilles proves adept at writing for different characters and styles, earning ribbons for the rocking "I Didn't Plan It" — with the great lines "Look around you/There ain't saints here, baby/We're all just looking for a

This image released by Boneau/Bryan-Brown shows Drew Gehling, left, and Jessie Mueller during a performance of "Waitress," at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in New York.

(Joan Marcus/Boneau/Bryan-Brown via AP)

little less crazy" — the jokey "Never Ever Getting Rid of Me" and the rockabilly duet "Bad Idea." Nelson's script sometimes drifts toward icky sweetness but always seems to quickly cut it with a dash of vinegar.

But the best part of this show is Mueller as piemaker Jenna, who won a Tony Award for playing Carole King in the musical "Beautiful." She combines earthiness, sexiness, timidity and dreaminess and her voice overflows with emotion. Listening to her sing the heartbreaking "She Used to Be Mine" is surely one of the very best things on Broadway this season.

The cast also includes a very menacing Nick Cordero as Jenna's husband and a terrific scene-stealing Christopher Fitzgerald as an unlikely love interest. Drew Gehling as Jenna's ob-gyn is masterful in a comic and moving performance, getting a laugh once just for primping his hair.

The rest of the cast of characters leans a little too hard on the quirky, like the lonely, odd waitress who is a secret knockout (Kimiko Glenn, from "Orange Is the New Black"). The use of a sour black nurse gets old quick, too.

Paulus, lately with big musicals like "Finding Neverland" and "Pippin," paints with a more delicate brush this time but it's no less powerful. A smaller story has brought out a heartfelt ingenuity and low-tech fireworks that are naturally beautiful.

She and choreographer Lorin Latarro offer little jewels of movement — a group of soon-to-be-delivering moms moving to the heartbeats of their babies, and three waitresses singing as they add real ingredients to a pie mixture. It's all so well thought out that in one sequence, when the recipe calls for gingersnaps, everyone snaps their fingers.

However this isn't the best show to catch if you've skipped a meal, particularly since scenic designer Scott Pask has put some four dozen pies stacked and rotating in tall cylinders on either side of the stage. But if you're hungry for a heartfelt gooey musical with a molten star in the middle, order up a slice of "Waitress."

___

Online: http://www.waitressthemusical.com

Jessie Mueller, right, and Drew Gehling play a small-town waitress and a

doctor in the new Broadway musical 'Waitress.' (Photo: Joan Marcus)

April 25, 2016

'Waitress' serves sweetness on Broadway

NEW YORK — "Sugar," "butter" and "flour" are the first words we hear in the new Broadway musical Waitress (* * * ½ out of four) — simple ingredients that can produce scrumptious, and healing, results.

That's certainly the case with this delightful adaptation of Adrienne Shelly's 2007 film, which followed a small-town gal trapped in an unhappy marriage but blessed with a prodigious talent for making pies. Arriving in a season that has brought Hamilton and now the majestically unsettling American Psycho, the new musical may initially strike you as — pardon the inescapable

food metaphors — a modest confection.

But Waitress, which opened Sunday at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, rises and nourishes, thanks largely to the complementary contributions of a number of women artists. They begin with Shelly herself, who in a horrific twist was murdered shortly before the film's premiere.

Jessie Nelson's libretto retains the warm, gutsy spirit and earthy wit that marked the original screenplay, while pop singer/songwriter Sara Bareilles provides a folk-based score that shimmers and charms, never straining too hard for theatricality. Director Diane Paulus, currently represented on Broadway by the lush crowd-pleaser Finding Neverland — and earlier by exuberant, haunting revivals of Pippin and Hair — adapts to a smaller scale with compassion and insight. The struggles and yearnings of Waitress's working-class characters are represented without sentimentality or condescension.

Paulus is also fortunate in having Jessie Mueller for her leading lady. A Tony Award winner for her uncanny portrait of the title character in 2014's Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Mueller is a gifted actress with a singing voice that can stretch to a crystalline soprano, but also accommodated an uncanny simulation of King's quirky, nasal style. As Waitress's Jenna (who was introduced on screen by a wry, luminous Keri Russell),

Left to right, Keala Settle, Jessie Mueller and Kimiko Glenn in the Broadway musical 'Waitress.' (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Mueller gets to reveal the textured beauty of her own lower register, and her emotional intuition and discretion as a singer.

Jenna is also another showcase for the gentle pluck and vulnerability Mueller has brought to various roles. The undervalued durability of female friendship is very much in focus in Waitress, and Mueller has supple support in the women who play her co-workers. Keala Settle serves up a juicy comedic performance as the feisty, seen-it-all Becky, while Kimiko Glenn is adorable and affecting as the blooming wallflower Dawn.

The men deliver as well, particularly Drew Gehling, masterfully goofy and deeply endearing as Dr. Pomatter, the obstetrician who enters Jenna's life when she discovers that her louse of a husband has gotten her pregnant. As Jenna's relationship with her doctor grows deeper and more complicated, and funnier, Dawn lands her own romantic interest: Ogie, a tax accountant (played by a hilarious Christopher Fitzgerald) with poetic aspirations and an early American history fetish.

These characters have learned, certainly, that life isn't as easy as pie. But as they remind us, we need to find the sweetness and savor it.

April 25, 2016

Women songwriters like Sara Bareilles are owning Broadway By Elisabeth Vincentelli

Jessie Mueller stars in "Waitress" on Broadway. Photo: Joan Marcus

First came Cyndi Lauper and “Kinky Boots.” Now Sara Bareilles and “Waitress” look ready to double down.

Women dismissed for writing fluffy pop hits — “Love Song” in Bareilles’ case — have succeeded where the “serious” likes of U2, Paul Simon, Randy Newman and Sting failed: They’re rocking Broadway.

Excuse us while we savor the irony, which is as sweet as the freshly baked pies on sale in the “Waitress” lobby.

In a rare case of an adaptation besting its source material, the new musical is an improvement on the 2007 movie it’s based on. From score to casting, book to staging, everything comes together with a deceiving ease.

Jessie Mueller is the heart and soul of the show as Jenna, a pregnant diner waitress whose gift for baking amazing pies help her cope with her low-rent bully of a husband and ease her affair with her gynecologist.

No wonder she takes so easily to Bareilles’ score: The songwriter’s piano-driven style combines storytelling and catchy melodies the way ’70s pop used to — and Mueller won a Tony for portraying Carole King in “Beautiful.”

The show is also better than the movie — which looks awkwardly dated now — in how it creates a tightknit, affectionate community onstage, echoing the one you’d find at a real small-town diner. Most of the action even takes place in the restaurant, with the six-piece band visible in the back.

And while cartoonishly amped up for the stage, the men here are more appealing than their screen models, particularly Drew Gehling as the married gyno and Christopher Fitzgerald as an adorkable Paul Revere re-enactor.

Bareilles, director Diane Paulus and the rest of their team are all women, a first for a Broadway musical, and you can tell. The jokes about spotting and Pap smears are both funny and jolting. You just never hear about that stuff on Broadway, even though it’s pretty familiar to at least 50 percent of audiences.

“I’m leaving before I die from estrogen asphyxiation,” moans the gruff diner manager. But he also gets a lot of the best lines and turns out to be a cool dude. That’s the “Waitress” spirit — generous as a slice of homemade pie.

Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47th St.; 150 minutes, one intermission

April 24, 2016

C10

April 24, 2016

A2

April 24, 2016

C5

April 25, 2016

B5

April 25, 2016

B5