THEATER
TUESDAY - SUNDAY, MAY 14 - 19, 2019
7:30 PM TUESDAY - SATURDAY
3:00 PM SUNDAY

Anne Carson: Norma Jeane Baker of Troy
The Shed
545 West 30th Street, Hudson Yards, Manhattan

$99-$179
https://theshed.org/program/4-norma-jeane-baker-of-troy

Even aside from The Shed's multitude of fundamental contradictions, this production brings to a light a basic problem with at least one part of The Shed's mission:  the problem of bringing Downtown Uptown.  If you saw this show at, say, the Underground Theater at Abrons Arts Center, you and the rest of the undoubtedly packed audience would think it was fine:  stimulating, provoking, unexpected.  You wouldn't care whether or not it was the greatest night of theater you've ever experienced; you wouldn't care whether everything hung together perfectly; you certainly wouldn't care that the piece required a certain body of knowledge on your part about both Classics and pop culture, and that it required you to think hard about what was being presented on stage.  You'd only care whether you had a good, thought-provoking night.  Move it Uptown, however, put it into a slick much-hyped venue, cast two superduperstar performers, charge Uptown prices, and you get what you got here:  tepid reviews; a leap of 20 or 30 years in the average audience age; empty seats; a continuing stream of disgruntled walk-outs.  Well, I'm here to tell you that Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a perfectly good piece, well worth an hour-and-a-half of your time (whether it's worth $99-$179 of your money is probably undeterminable -- but let's recall that you usually get this kind of theater [minus the superduperstars] for a fraction of these prices Downtown and in Brooklyn).  It's good not despite, but because of, all of its difficulties and ambiguities.  People who need to have theater put on a plate for them can go see To Kill a Mockingbird.  Also, it must be said, the two superduperstars really deliver.  Ben Whishaw I expected to be great.  ButRenée Fleming -- whom I adored as an opera singer -- does such an unexpectedly good job both with her distinctly non-operatic singing and her speaking part that I'm newly optimistic about her pending post-operatic career.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT:   Kāwi, the most forthrightly Korean (which is not to say it's straight Korean) of the Momofukus, is finally open for dinner as well as lunch, so they have you covered all day.  (Its adjacent sandwich/snack bar closes at 5 PM.