![]() ![]() The musical also benefits from the direction of John Doyle, who stepped down as artistic director of Classic Stage in June, and leaves the company with this wonderful parting gift. Moody makes a powerful case that Alfie's perception of the world isn't wrong, just that the world is incredibly cruel to those who really see it - who wouldn't follow that come-hither smile into the darkness? And as a mysterious man in a beret, newcomer Da'Von T. William Youmans is touchingly gruff as the widower Baldy O'Shea. Shively is irresistibly charming as Robbie, delivering a powerfully understated rendition of "The Streets of Dublin." Ahmed is shimmeringly furtive as the new girl in town with a secret. When Lily mentions that her brother likes puppets, he responds, "Hand puppets or marionettes?" The latter word drips with suspicious disdain, lubricating the runway from the song "Books" (easily a throwaway, but masterful here). She has great chemistry with Thom Sesma, who plays the butcher and amateur thespian Mr. The supporting performances are just as thoughtful: Winningham is sweet, kooky, and just a little bit intense as the nosy sister. Carney in A Man of No Importance at Classic Stage Company. Mare Winningham plays Lily Byrne, and Thom Sesma plays Mr. But he remains willfully unaware of himself, and in that way, he stands in for an entire generation of Internet lurkers - brimming with information, but incapable of translating that into a better life. He observes the world intently, seeing things that most people ignore in their daily hustle: While Alfie is often made to stand onstage and watch as someone else sings, Parsons turns these moments into revelations we know that he's listening and absorbing everything. Parsons, who played a very different kind of tortured homosexual in The Boys in the Band, gives Alfie a presence that is both authoritative and incredibly vulnerable. And even after accounting for the Bush administration's cynical homophobia, gay men could be confident that Alfie's loneliness was something we could leave behind in the 20th century, which certainly must have made this story seem like a treacly cliché. A new frontier of community and connection seemed to stretch out before us. The reviews for that original run were lukewarm, perhaps because we were still in the early years of the Internet and had not yet reached the outer limits of liberal atomization (that would arrive with the 2020 pandemic). This is the first time A Man of No Importance has been revived in New York since its 2002 debut at Lincoln Center. Shereen Ahmed (left) plays Adele Rice in A Man of No Importance, directed by John Doyle, at Classic Stage Company. It's hard not to admire his perseverance, even if we can see how this is all going to fall apart before it even comes together. And he tries to convince Father Kenny (Nathaniel Stampley) that the play is art, not blasphemy (it helps that the priest never bothers to read the script).ĭeeply closeted and pristinely celibate, Alfie indulges his obsessions as much to distract himself from his sexual urges as to escape the parochial society that is Ireland in the early 1960s. He tries to persuade the fresh-faced Adele Rice (Shereen Ahmed) to play the title role in his forthcoming production of Salomé. But Alfie tries with Lily, just as he tries to coax his handsome bus driver, Robbie (A.J. After that, he returns to the home he shares with his sister, Lily (Mare Winningham), to make her a dinner of spaghetti Bolognese, which is far too exotic for her Irish tastebuds. That's Alfie Byrne (Jim Parsons), a Dublin bus conductor who reads poems by Oscar Wilde to his passengers by day and directs Wilde's plays in a church basement by night. Based on the 1994 film and written by the team behind Ragtime (composer Stephen Flaherty, lyricist Lynn Ahrens, book writer Terrence McNally), A Man of No Importance is a heartfelt love letter to community theater and an intimate look at the private desperation of one man. So the Classic Stage Company revival of A Man of No Importance serves as a timely reminder that there are still offline alternatives, just as there have always been tiny sanctuaries from the dominant culture. In 2022, people mostly turn to the Internet in search of a tribe and the thing they create, if anything, is memes. The theater is just the pretext for a group of likeminded souls to come together and create something precious and ephemeral. This attitude ignores the real benefit community theater offers. Community theater is too often a punchline - shorthand for bad theater and a way for those working on the professional stage to distance themselves from the lives they might have led without a bit of good fortune.
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