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    Curtains Down, Bottoms Up: When the Show Ends, the Night’s Just Getting Started

    “Dead Letter No. 9,” “Cocktail Magique” and “Hypnotique” are offering theatergoers a taste of nightlife.A funny thing happened at Dead Letter No. 9, a new performance space in Brooklyn. It was just after 10 p.m. on a Saturday in late October. The evening’s show had finished, but the audience wouldn’t leave — crowding instead into the adjoining bar for cocktails, mocktails and flatbreads.Though New York City has its cabaret spaces and piano bars, theater and nightlife mostly occupy separate addresses. Blame temperament or real estate or the lingering effects of cabaret laws (finally repealed in 2017), which required a license to allow patrons to dance, but in general those who long for a drink and a show at the same time have had to settle for overpriced chardonnay in sippy cups. Ah, the glamour.New shows and new venues are blurring those lines. Though I am a lady with a hilariously low tolerance for alcohol who likes to be in bed just as the cable TV shows are getting good, I attended three of these performances over the last few weeks, trading a good night’s sleep for this superabundant approach (drinks, snacks, dance, card tricks, elaborate lingerie) to evening entertainment.Audience members sit facing the stage at “Cocktail Magique.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesStrong cocktails complement the dance routines at the show.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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    Peter S. Fischer, Who Helped Create ‘Murder, She Wrote,’ Dies at 88

    He spent many years as a writer and producer of the hit mystery series starring Angela Lansbury. He later wrote his own mystery novels, set in Hollywood.Peter S. Fischer, a creator, writer and producer of “Murder, She Wrote,” the long-running television series that starred Angela Lansbury as a mystery novelist and amateur sleuth, died on Oct. 30 in Pacific Grove, Calif. He was 88.His death, at a care facility, was confirmed by his grandson Jake McElrath, who said he did not know the cause.In 1983, Mr. Fischer and the prolific producers Richard Levinson and William Link pitched CBS on a new series. The three had worked together on “Columbo,” the hit show starring Peter Falk as a rumpled, underestimated police detective, and “Ellery Queen,” with Jim Hutton as a detective who was also an author. This time, their idea was “Blacke’s Magic,” about a magician who solves mysteries.At a meeting with a CBS executive in late 1983, they were told that the network was more interested in a murder mystery series with a female lead. Soon after, Mr. Fischer, he came up with an idea when he watched A Caribbean Mystery,” a CBS-TV movie starring Helen Hayes as Miss Jane Marple, the amateur detective created by Agatha Christie.“Why don’t we meld Miss Marple and Miss Christie into one character, a mystery writer who actually solved murder mysteries using logic, good sense, observations and a twinkly sense of humor that masks the sharp brain lurking beneath a very attractive hairdo?,” Mr. Fischer recalled thinking in his 2013 autobiography, “Me and ‘Murder, She Wrote.’”He came up with the names of both the character, Jessica Fletcher, and the fictional town where she solved murders — Cabot Cove, Maine.But they needed a star. Jean Stapleton, who had portrayed the saintly, ditsy Edith Bunker on “All in the Family,” turned them down. Then they heard that Ms. Lansbury, who was renowned for her work in Broadway shows like “Sweeney Todd” and films like “The Manchurian Candidate,” was willing to star in a TV series. She signed on.Ms. Lansbury with Erin Moran and Tom Bosley in a scene from a 1986 episode of “Murder, She Wrote.”Everett CollectionThe series was an immediate hit and lasted 12 seasons. Mr. Fischer wrote a few dozen episodes and was the executive producer from 1984 to 1991. He shared nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding dramatic series three times and won the Golden Globe Award for best drama series twice. In 1985, Mr. Fischer won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the “Murder, She Wrote” episode “Deadly Lady.”“Peter was a very good showrunner,” Ms. Lansbury, who died last year, told the Television Academy in 1998. “He was really quite brilliant at what he did.”But, she said, “I always wanted to make it appeal to more people and to enlarge our audience even more.”One of the changes she made after succeeding Mr. Fischer as executive producer in 1992, was to move Jessica part time to an apartment in Manhattan, where she taught criminology at a college and tracked down killers in a new location. He disagreed with that decision, but it was no longer his to make.“To throw this over to become a ‘big city woman’ violated everything I believed about her,” he said in interview with his son Christopher in 2012 after he started writing mystery novels.Mr. Fischer in 2018. He retired from television in the 1990s and later wrote murder mysteries set in postwar Hollywood.Nic Coury/Monterey County WeeklyPeter Stephen Fischer was born on Aug. 10, 1935, in Queens. His father, Paul, worked for Johnnie Walker, the Scotch whisky maker. His mother, Dorothy (Sullivan) Fischer, was a homemaker.Peter fell in love with reading at a young age and started writing short stories as a boy. He wrote plays in high school and at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied in a department devoted to writing, speech and drama, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1956.He married Lucille Warnock in 1957.Mr. Fischer did not become a full-time writer right away; instead he made a living in direct mail, as an insurance investigator and as a trade magazine editor. He also published a monthly magazine, Sports Car News, out of his house in Smithtown, N.Y., on Long Island.At 35, he got his screenwriting break. He had written a script about a dystopian future in which couples are permitted only one child and people over 65 are denied medical care. With help from his brother, Geoffrey, a casting director at Universal Television, the script found its way to the producer Aaron Spelling and was made into an ABC movie, “The Last Child” (1971), with Michael Cole and Janet Margolin as a couple who are willing to defy the law to have a second child after the death of their firstborn.He then wrote episodes of several Universal series, including “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law,” “Kojak,” “Baretta” and “Columbo,” for which he also worked as a story editor.Three shows Mr. Fischer created or co-created had short runs: “The Eddie Capra Mysteries” (1978), starring Vincent Baggetta as a lawyer; “The Law & Harry McGraw” (1987), a spinoff of “Murder, She Wrote” starring Jerry Orbach as a private investigator; and “Blacke’s Magic” (1986), starring Hal Linden — the collaboration with Mr. Link and Mr. Levinson that CBS did not want. (It ended up on NBC.)In addition to his grandson, Mr. Fischer is survived by his daughter, Megan McElrath; four other grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; his half sisters, Paula Shorts and Stephanie Donnelly; and his half brother, Stephen Fischer. His wife died in 2017. His sons also died before him — Stephen in 2014, Christopher in 2020.Mr. Fischer retired from television in the 1990s. He recast himself a decade ago as a murder mystery writer. He self-published more than 20 books set in postwar Hollywood, with a studio press agent as the sleuth and real movies as backdrops.“He loved old movies,” Ms. McElrath, his daughter, said by phone. “So he came up with this idea of a Jessica Fletcher-like character who’s not in law enforcement but finds himself tripping over all these murders.” More

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    Late Night on the GOP Debate

    “Oh, yeah, there was name-calling, wild rants and personal attacks. Even Trump was watching like, ‘Game recognize game,’” Jimmy Fallon said of the event.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘Game Recognize Game’The third Republican presidential debate took place on Wednesday, with five G.O.P. hopefuls taking the stage in Miami.On Thursday, late-night hosts weighed in on the debate, which Jimmy Fallon said was “being described as ‘unhinged.’”“Oh, yeah, there was name-calling, wild rants and personal attacks. Even Trump was watching like, ‘Game recognize game,’” Fallon joked.“Yeah, it was vicious. At one point, Lester Holt was like, ‘We interrupt this debate with a Real Housewives reunion already in progress.’” — JIMMY FALLON“During last night’s debate, Vivek Ramaswamy criticized Nikki Haley’s foreign policy views and said she was ‘Dick Cheney in three-inch heels.’ ‘Hey, I’m right here,’ said Ron DeSantis.” — SETH MEYERS“During the two-hour debate, Nikki Haley got the most questions, Tim Scott spoke the longest, and Ron DeSantis spoke the [cough] shortest.” — JIMMY FALLONOn “The Daily Show,” the guest host Sarah Silverman pointed to Vivek Ramaswamy’s disparaging comments about Nikki Haley’s daughter’s use of TikTok, calling him “really annoying.”“I mean, Nikki Haley was America’s top diplomat at the United Nations. She literally kept her cool with the worst dictators in the world, and eight minutes onstage with Vivek, and she’s like, ‘You are scum!’” — SARAH SILVERMAN“Ramaswamy elicited a reaction from me that I thought was impossible when he said, ‘You might want to take care of your family first.’ I actually thought, ‘Donald Trump would never!’ No, I’m kidding, of course he would.” — SETH MEYERS“He is so insufferable. He should just lean into it, you know? He should say, ‘Make me president so I can annoy our enemies for America.’ Like, he’ll have one meeting with Vladimir Putin, and 20 minutes later Putin will mysteriously kill himself.” — SARAH SILVERMAN“Then, the moderator tried to calm things down. He was like, ‘Nikki, Vivek, remember, none of you are going to be president.’” — JIMMY FALLONMerry Christmas, the Strike is OverSAG-AFTRA reached a tentative deal with studios on Wednesday, allowing Hollywood actors to return to work after 118 days. Jimmy Kimmel thanked viewers for “Take Your Actor Back to Work Day.”“One member of the actors’ negotiating committee said that there were ‘tears of exhilaration and joy’ in the room after the deal was approved, and it only took them a few takes. It was very realistic.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It is a big night: the S.A.G. strike is over. Which means Hollywood can finally get back to what they do best: turning your children gay.” — SARAH SILVERMAN“The strike is over! So, tune in tomorrow when my guests will be everyone.” — JIMMY FALLON“When the actors heard a deal had been reached, they gasped, screamed, laughed, cried, and then were like ‘I also do accents.’” — JIMMY FALLON“The Hallmark Channel immediately started shooting all 1,200 of its Christmas movies this morning.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Tim Scott’s Girlfriend Edition)“Politico published an article today after last night’s debate titled, ‘Tim Scott’s Girlfriend Is, in Fact, Real.’ However, jury’s still out on Tim Scott.” — SETH MEYERS“For a while now, Tim Scott has claimed to have a girlfriend, but no one has ever seen her, and donors have been worried it’s hurting him in the race so, after the debate he brought her up onstage. Yeah, when asked how they met, she was like, ‘I was his Uber driver on the way over.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Aw, that’s so sweet! Man, you look for love your whole life, and you finally find it with a respectable-looking woman just two months before the Iowa caucus. I mean, what are the odds?” — SARAH SILVERMAN“He really should have just proposed right there, got down on one knee, like, ‘Mindy, would you make my campaign manager the happiest man alive?’” — SARAH SILVERMAN“It’s just too bad for Tim that he had to get this nonunion actor to play his girlfriend. I mean, if he had waited one more day for the strike to end, he could have gotten a professional actor fake girlfriend.” — SARAH SILVERMAN“It’s a smart move by Tim Scott. He’s never going to be president, but at least people will know that he has a fake girlfriend, so that’s good: ‘She lives in Canada, you guys don’t know her.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe drag star Trixie Mattel read to a group of unimpressed children from Sen. Ted Cruz’s new book, “Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America,” on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutWritten and directed by the philosopher and activist Paul B. Preciado, the movie “Orlando, My Political Biography” draws inspiration from a Virginia Woolf novel.Sideshow and Janus FilmsIn Paul B. Preciado’s film, “Orlando, My Political Biography,” the Spanish-born philosopher and activist shared the title role with 20 trans and nonbinary performers to make a point about identity. More

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    Tales That Crackle With Vitality, With or Without a Puppeteer

    La MaMa Puppet Festival and other stage works this fall highlight the power of storytelling through puppetry.In a crisp white gallery space on Great Jones Street, in Manhattan’s East Village, a large wooden box contains a meticulous mise-en-scène: a midcentury roadside motel room constructed at puppet scale, which means it’s half of human scale. Standing on a step built into the outside of the box, spectators can gaze down into the installation, a time-capsule environment called “Motel,” by the master puppet artist Dan Hurlin.It has just one puppet inside — a motionless woman in an armchair in the corner, dressed with almost ostentatious modesty, one dark strand of hair hanging loose from her ponytail, a crucifix dangling from the chain around her neck. On the tabletop beside her, the key to Room 15 lies next to an envelope spilling $20 bills. On one of the double beds, the rust-orange spread is rumpled; outside the door to the bathroom, there is water in the sink. And on the desk, near the room phone and a stamped envelope, a letter is balled up.“Motel,” by the master puppet artist Dan Hurlin, freezes an anonymous American moment. It can be viewed at La MaMa Galleria through Nov. 18.Zach HymanOrdinarily, nothing seems more lifeless than a puppet without a puppeteer. But in freezing an anonymous American moment from a decade that might as easily be the 1970s as the 2020s, “Motel” absolutely crackles with an intriguing, unsettling vitality.The installation, on view through Nov. 12 at La MaMa Galleria, is a standout at this year’s La MaMa Puppet Festival — for the fastidious detail of Hurlin’s motel-room re-creation (wall-mounted bottle opener; wood-grain-patterned paneling; lampshade gone cockeyed; Bible, of course) but also because it poses a challenge beyond puppetry’s usual ask that we conspire in the illusion. Hurlin and his sound designer, the superb Dan Moses Schreier, are inviting us to take in their clues and envision a story as well.From the clock radio on the bedside stand, we hear intermittent voices giving and eliciting testimony, but they are from different nation-rocking scandals: Watergate and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. What decade is the puppet woman stuck in? Is she in danger or distress? Perhaps on the run? And why does her prim, princess-sleeved dress seem from a different wardrobe than the clothes hanging up?Dogs bark, crickets chirp, cars zoom past — all in Schreier’s subtle soundscape — and we peer ever more closely at the drab little room, imagining what trouble might have brought her here, and what all might be going on out there.***Over at La MaMa proper, on nearby East Fourth Street, my favorite festival performance of last weekend was Tom Lee’s mesmerizing “Sounding the Resonant Path,” upstairs at the Ellen Stewart Theater. (Its brief run has ended, I regret to say.)The principal character is a puppet called the Woodcutter. Entering with an ax slung over one plaid-shirted shoulder, he walks slowly and deliberately along a curving wooden track, ostensibly alone. Never mind the puppeteer (Lee) seated just behind him, dressed in black and scooting along on a small, wheeled box. That is part of the Japanese kuruma ningyo style, a relative of bunraku.This charming, funny Woodcutter fells trees to carve and shape; in his studio, we see him transform blocks of wood into art. (Eventually, we also see him carrying an actual flaming torch, which is one way of getting us to worry about a puppet’s mortality, even if that is not the point.)Solitary and self-sufficient, the Woodcutter is possessed of the ineffable quality — a kind of projectability — that can make puppets profound and delicate vessels for embodying human vulnerability. His is the microcosmic life at the center of the show’s macrocosmic evocations.Because what “Sounding the Resonant Path” sets out to do is briefly, bountifully recap all of our planetary history. Its inspiration is the August 1977 launch of the Voyager 2 space probe, which carried the golden record of images, speech and music meant to explain Earth to any extraterrestrial life.Maria Camia’s ambitious musical, “The Healing Shipment,” features extraterrestrial puppets whose torsos frame the faces of the puppeteers inside. Richard TermineThis show’s version includes minimal speech but many intricate projections (by Chris Carcione) and shadow puppets (by Linda Wingerter), as well as live music (by Ralph Samuelson, Perry Yung, Julian Kytasty and Yukio Tsuji) whose bandura, drums and haunting shakuhachi flute reach in and grab you by the soul. To mimic exquisitely the deep, shivery sound of rushing water, the show uses the “Rain Making Machine,” a kinetic artwork by La MaMa’s longtime resident set designer Jun Maeda, who died of Covid in April 2020 and to whom the production is dedicated.The cavernous Ellen Stewart Theater is an excellent space for contemplating vastness — of space, of time — but Lee and his Woodcutter do it especially affectingly, under an impossibly huge, star-pricked sky. (Lighting is by Federico Restrepo.) There is, at show’s end, a clear and lingering consciousness of being minuscule in the universe, and terribly, beautifully human.***Puppet-wise, New York is having a strong fall. Up at City Center, in Manhattan Theater Club’s production of Qui Nguyen’s “Poor Yella Rednecks,” winsome child-size puppets (by David Valentine) play a principal character named Little Man — more than one being necessary to pull off a comic action sequence in particular.Later this month, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, the venerable Handspring Puppet Company — known for “War Horse” and Little Amal — is slated to return with a puppet adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Life & Times of Michael K.”And there is the rest of the La MaMa festival, part of the point of which is to nurture puppet artists at different stages of their careers.Last weekend I saw two other shows there whose runs have already ended. One was an ambitious puppet musical, Maria Camia’s “The Healing Shipment,” whose puppet design was a lot of fun: humans with Smurf-blue skin and shocking white hair; extraterrestrials whose bright yellow torsos framed the faces of the puppeteers inside. The plot, though — involving potato spaceships and intergenerational time travel — was overly complicated and insufficiently interesting. The other was Charlotte Lily Gaspard’s “Mia M.I.A.,” a work-in-progress shadow-puppet musical with some very clever 3-D puppets. Coincidentally, it also had a space-travel theme, making the shows three for three on that.Of all the elements for puppet pieces to have in common — outer space, really? Makes a person want to hunker down in some retro motel room and listen to the radio.La MaMa Puppet FestivalThrough Nov. 18 at La MaMa and La MaMa Galleria, Manhattan; lamama.org. More

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    ‘Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey’ Review: A Trilogy’s Bittersweet End

    At Irish Arts Center, the actor delivers the final installment of his solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved.Falling in love came as a surprise to Pat Farnon — a late-life development he hadn’t been looking for any more than he’d been looking for the marriage proposal that set that romance in motion. When a whirlwind of a woman named Kitsy Rainey asked him to marry her even though they’d never so much as dated, he acquiesced.“The most beautiful woman that ever water washed,” Pat called her, and Kitsy cherished him right back. But how well did she allow her husband to know her?In “The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey,” the bittersweet final installment of Mikel Murfi’s trilogy of solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved, it is 1987 and Kitsy has been dead two years. Holed up at home in their small Irish town, avoiding company, Pat gathers his courage to open a suitcase that Kitsy had forbidden him to look inside while she was alive.What he finds changes his understanding of her, and not just from the newspaper clipping suggesting her involvement in a long-ago crime, in the place where she was born and came of age. Or as their good friend Huby says, comically, after he reads the article: “It might be best, Pat, if we don’t try to put two and two together here.”Pat, though, has always had a quick and busy mind. The narrator of this play and its boisterously funny predecessors, “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes” and “I Hear You and Rejoice” (all currently running at Irish Arts Center, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan), Pat can speak to us, the audience, inside his head, but he cannot speak in life, nor can he read.He is, however, an accomplished listener, and Murfi, the plays’ author, director and shape-shifting star, is a marvel of characterization and vocalization, his repertoire including uncanny instrumentals and animal sounds. This is what allows him to populate Pat’s world so richly.It is risky, then, for “The Mysterious Case” to spend as much time as it does with Pat in solitude, contemplating his own deterioration and intermittently listening to a cassette tape that Kitsy made for him and left in that suitcase.And as emotionally honest as it is to let us feel Kitsy’s absence, dramatically it is far less interesting to hear her recorded voice than to watch Murfi become her. When he embodies Kitsy in a memory, even fleetingly, the show zings with life.Irish Arts Center advises that each play works as a stand-alone, but that isn’t true of “The Mysterious Case,” which seems to know that, opening with a verbal montage of standout lines from the first two shows: a kind of “Previously on ‘Kitsy Rainey’” nudge to our recollection.It would be a mistake to come to this play without an existing affection for and curiosity about Kitsy. But if you have those, Murfi has answers to sate you — even as you watch Pat, in his anger and pain, try to reconcile her love with her tenacious secrecy.The Mysterious Case of Kitsy RaineyThrough Nov. 18 at Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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    Late Night Mocks the GOP Debate

    Kimmel called the five candidates in the latest G.O.P. face-off “a Who’s Who of who has no chance to beat Donald Trump.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Not-So-Heated DebateThe third Republican debate aired on Wednesday night without the participation of the front-runner, former President Donald Trump.Jimmy Kimmel predicted that no one would tune in, saying, “The GOP ‘dopefuls’ were just happy to be on television.”“Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott — it’s a Who’s Who of who has no chance to beat Donald Trump.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It was quite a night. There were five candidates onstage, three moderators asking questions, and two people watching at home.” — JIMMY FALLON“Putting the Republican debate on opposite the C.M.A. awards — it makes no sense. It’s like putting lasagna up against a Swedish meatball.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But for these five Republicans, the stakes were higher than the lifts in a pair of Ron DeSantis’s boots.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Whatever you think about Trump, Republican debates are kind of meaningless without him. It’s like a football game without Taylor Swift.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Surprising Election Results Edition)“Well, guys, yesterday was Election Day, and despite some recent polls that show former President Trump leading President Biden, Democrats had a surprisingly strong night. Yep, Republicans were like, ‘How is that possible?’ and Democrats were like, ‘No, seriously, how is that possible?’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, Democrats had a strong night in Republican-leaning states like Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia. It’s odd — it’s like hearing BTS swept every category at tonight’s Country Music Awards.” — JIMMY FALLON“You’re telling me Trump, the guy who stocked the Supreme Court with ’80s movie villains with the explicit goal of overturning Roe v. Wade, is leading the polls in Ohio, where voters just overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to protect abortion rights? This makes so little sense, even Steve Kornacki’s big board last night said ‘I give up.’” — SETH MEYERS“Yep, yesterday Americans went to the polls, and today we’re learning a lot about the new ballot measures each state approved. They’re pretty interesting. For instance, Ohio voted to legalize marijuana. Meanwhile, Indiana voted to enjoy the contact high from Ohio.” — JIMMY FALLON“The fact is, abortion limits have become such a losing issue that some conservatives have purportedly decided the problem isn’t pro-life policies but the phrase ‘pro-life.’ They’re looking to rebrand it but, personally, I think they should be forced to carry this phrase to term.” — SARAH SILVERMAN, guest host of “The Daily Show”The Bits Worth WatchingThe Grammy-winning Americana artist Margo Price, on Wednesday’s “Daily Show,” talked about writing her album “Strays” while on mushrooms.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightHilary Duff will chat with Seth Meyers about her new children’s book, “My Little Sweet Boy,” on Thursday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutMs. Hill, center, with members of the Rollettes, at a dance rehearsal in North Hollywood.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe champion dancer and choreographer Chelsie Hill has changed lives and shaped careers with the Rollettes, a Los Angeles-based dance team for women who use wheelchairs. More

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    ‘Watch Night’ Review: For Spacious Skies, for Rancorous Waves of Hate

    Conceived in part by Bill T. Jones, this multigenre work at the Perelman Performing Arts Center is interested in homegrown prejudice, but lacks dramatic focus.Entering the Perelman Performing Arts Center’s auditorium, you quickly notice detritus that looks as if it has been blown in from a bewildering protest: A few small American flags here, color copies of a Greetings From Hollywood postcard there, wrinkled fliers everywhere. Some of them are imprinted with the text of the Second Amendment, others a rallying cry: “We fight fascists.” Among the most eye-catching is an ad for N.R.A. memberships, with its promise of “$5,000 Accidental Death and Dismemberment insurance.”But what about intentional deaths? “Watch Night,” a new multigenre hybrid show, is interested in those, specifically the ones fueled by homegrown prejudice.Inspired, or maybe wrenched into existence, by the massacres at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, this Perelman center commission was conceived by the choreographer and director Bill T. Jones and the poet and librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, with a score by Tamar-kali.Joseph often draws directly from the news in his art: His collaboration with the composer Carlos Simon, “brea(d)th,” which the Minnesota Orchestra premiered in May, was informed by the life and death of George Floyd. He wrote the libretto for “We Shall Not Be Moved” (2017), an opera inspired by the police bombing in 1985 of a Philadelphia house occupied by Black activists, with an artistic team that included Jones and Lauren Whitehead, the “Watch Night” dramaturg. Unfortunately, those experiences have not helped focus this new production.The central figure in “Watch Night” is an ambitious Black journalist, Josh (Brandon Michael Nase). “American rage is my beat,” he says early on, “and man, business is boomin.’” Josh, who sounds almost grimly excited by the professional opportunities this anger could create, dreams of finding a story “ready-made for Hollywood.”Kevin Csolak as the Wolf, who orchestrates a shooting in a Black church.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHe maintains that stance of studied disaffection in the face of a pair of shootings: one in a Black church, orchestrated by a man nicknamed the Wolf (Kevin Csolak), the other a copycat rampage in a synagogue. Josh, whose mother is Jewish, finds himself involved in conversations about the issues roiling American society at large, and confronts people including his brother, Saul (Arri Lawton Simon).Much of the show consists of characters debating — sometimes amicably, often less so — contrasting philosophies of life and belief: Saul and Josh, who straddle two heritages; the church’s pastor (the excellent baritone Sola Fadiran) and the synagogue’s rabbi (Brian Golub). But the creative team struggles to musicalize and dramatize arguments about, say, forgiveness and repentance.Despite its weighty themes, “Watch Night” is strangely bereft of affecting tension. It would seem impossible that a plot point involving a congregant from the church, Shayla (Danyel Fulton), serving as a guard in the prison holding the Wolf could be unaffecting, but it is.What is most surprising about the production, besides its overreliance on perfunctory ensemble dance, is the awkwardness of Jones’s staging. The Perelman’s adaptable space has been configured so that the audience is split in two, with the halves facing each other. Whenever the music is in an operatic mode, the text is projected along the sides of the stage at an angle that makes it difficult to read while watching the actors. Select sentences and words are also projected to maximize their impact, but the two screens’ visual potential still feels underused. (Adam Rigg did the scenic design; Lucy Mackinnon handled the projections.)A scene from “Watch Night,” with choreography by its director, Bill T. Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe performers often walk up and down the aisles amid the audience, an immersive move that makes them hard to see if they are in your section — a sizable portion of viewers will have a tough time catching a crucial scene toward the end. How can we expect focus from a piece that struggles to exert control over our gaze?Then again, it often feels as if this indecision is embedded in the very fabric of “Watch Night.” In his program note, Joseph says that the new show “doesn’t code ‘switch,’ it code ‘surfs’” among disciplines and styles. There again it comes up short, including musically.The bassist Corey Schutzer and his often jazzy lines drive the eight-piece orchestra led by Adam Rothenberg. But Tamar-kali — whose “Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo” premiered this summer at Lincoln Center — mostly sticks to a limited palette. (One of the few times your ears may prick up is when she nods to Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much.”) The score feels as if it were paddling in place, never catching, let alone boldly surfing a wave that might transport us.Watch NightThrough Nov. 18 at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, Manhattan; pacnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Sleep No More’ to Close in January

    The Off Broadway production opened at the McKittrick Hotel in 2011, and helped to alter and expand the landscape of immersive theater.After more than a decade of performances, “Sleep No More” — the immersive, Hitchcockian riff on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” — will close the doors of its cargo elevator for good when it plays its final performance on Jan. 28.Rising production costs drove the decision to close, said Jonathan Hochwald, a producer, who also cited an unwillingness to raise ticket prices commensurately. “It’s an enormous undertaking with hundreds of employees,” he said.Created by the English theater company Punchdrunk, “Sleep No More” had a short run in London in 2003 and a longer one in Brookline, Mass., in 2009, in partnership with the American Repertory Theater. The success of that outing encouraged the newly formed commercial production company Emursive to bring it to New York. Emursive found an ideal space: adjoining warehouses in Chelsea that had previously housed nightclubs such as Twilo, Home and Bed. Its 100,000 square feet were reimagined as the McKittrick Hotel. “Sleep No More” began performances there in March 2011, pausing for the pandemic, then reopening two years later, its sold-out performances driven by word of mouth.Reviewing the show in 2011 for The New York Times, Ben Brantley described it as a “movable orgy” and “a voyeur’s delight, with all the creepy, shameful pleasures that entails.”“None of us ever imagined we’d be here talking about the show in 2023 — it was only on sale for six weeks at first,” Felix Barrett, artistic director of Punchdrunk and a co-creator of “Sleep No More,” said on Wednesday. “Above all it was the audiences in New York who embraced our show and made it such a success.”Though it is hardly New York’s longest-running immersive theater event (that honor most likely belongs to “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding”), “Sleep No More” helped to alter and expand the landscape of immersive theater in New York, encouraging new possibilities for design, environment and participation.Moody, dark and decadent, the wordless show attracted a legion of super fans, some of whom saw it dozens of times. Not all of those masked fans behaved appropriately. In 2018 Buzzfeed published an exposé in which performers and staffers detailed multiple instances of sexual misconduct. The postpandemic iteration addressed this, advising attendees to “please give your fellow patrons and the residents a bit of breathing room and keep a respectful distance.”When it closes in January, the show will have played 5,000 performances in its New York City incarnation, serving two million audience members, Hochwald and his producing partner, Arthur Karpati, estimated. For now, the producers plan to continue the McKittrick’s other late-night shows and its bars will remain open, but they are uncertain if they will host another major show. “We want more than anything to finish up strong and to leave a great legacy,” Hochwald said. More