Carmen:

The Glass Marquee wants to be three things at once — a memory play, a spectacle musical, and an argument about who gets to tell the stories of immigrant neighborhoods — and for long stretches it succeeds at all three simultaneously. That’s not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.

Let me set the scene: the Aldine Theatre, a Sunday matinee, a house that was more than half tourists who had no idea what they were walking into. By the second act, they were holding their breath. I know because I spent about forty-five seconds watching them instead of the stage, which is something I do when I want to take the temperature of a room. The temperature was: very warm, leaning toward fever.

Director Soledad Fuentes has staged Miriam Ochsner’s book with a confidence that occasionally tips into imposition — there are moments when you sense the production trusting its concept more than its characters, which is always a warning sign. But then Celestine Okafor opens her mouth for “The Name I Kept,” the Act One closer, and every reservation I had walked right out the door. Her voice has that quality that great musical theater voices have, where the technique disappears and what’s left is just a human being telling you the truth. The house didn’t applaud when she finished. They came in about four seconds late, like they’d forgotten to. That’s the good kind of stunned.

Do I think this show is perfect? No. Do I think you should buy a ticket before this run ends? Yes. Pero — and this is important — I think Priya and Imani are both wrong about why.

Priya:

Carmen’s right that “The Name I Kept” earns its applause, and I have no interest in being contrarian about Celestine Okafor’s instrument, which is formidable. But Carmen is locating the show’s value in its performances, and that’s where I get off the train.

Here is the structural problem. Miriam Ochsner is trying to do something genuinely difficult — she’s braiding a memory-play architecture with the expansive temporality of the spectacle musical, which are formally incompatible modes in ways that are not incidental. Memory plays collapse time inward. Spectacle musicals explode it outward. Sondheim and Furth solved this in Company by making the protagonist’s interiority the organizing principle of both. Ochsner hasn’t found that organizing principle yet. What she has found is a very good production to paper over the gap.

Soledad Fuentes is doing real work here, and I mean that as a partial criticism. The staging is confident enough that you don’t notice, on a second viewing, how many of the transitions are directorial solutions to book problems — moments where the choreography and the lighting are making the argument the script hasn’t made yet. That’s craft. It’s also a tell.

The immigrant-neighborhood argument Carmen mentions lands strongest in Act One because Ochsner’s formal ambition and her thematic ambition are briefly aligned. Act Two spends that alignment and doesn’t earn it back. The ending is not a reckoning. It’s a resolution. Those are not the same thing, and in a play about who controls narrative, the difference is the whole point.

Go if you haven’t. But go for the production. The book still has work to do.

Imani:

Okay, I love both of these women and I need to correct them.

Carmen is right that the room went fever-warm, and she is right that you should buy a ticket. Priya is right that the book has structural tension. Where Priya loses me is in calling Soledad Fuentes’s staging a cover job. A cover job implies something broken underneath. What I saw — what my dancer’s body sitting in row G actually registered — was choreographer Ezra Lindqvist doing structural work ON PURPOSE.

Watch the ensemble in Act Two, the sequence the program calls “The Return.” Lindqvist is doing something formal with unison breaks that addresses the exact memory-play problem Priya names. Eight counts of precise ensemble movement, then two counts where three bodies split off and hold. Then fold back in. It happens four times in that sequence, and by the fourth time you feel the way memory actually works: mostly coherent, interrupted by the thing that won’t integrate. That is not papering over a gap. THAT IS THE ARGUMENT. The choreography is writing the thesis the book hasn’t finished.

Celestine Okafor knows exactly what she’s in. Her Act Two entrance is the tell — she takes the stage about four seconds before she needs to, holding still while the ensemble finishes their last formation. She’s giving you the diva who is also the memory, the fixed point the whole structure orbits. It’s not showy. It’s architectural.

Do I think the ending lands? No. Carmen and Priya are both being diplomatic. The ending is genuinely soft.

But the production is not soft, and the production is worth your Sunday.

Get to the Aldine before this closes.