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    Sheldon Harnick, Musical Theater’s Great Marriage Broker

    In lyrics of rare humor, elegance and compassion, the man who put words to “Fiddler on the Roof” and “She Loves Me” explored the complex emotional architecture of love.The twilight golden years of the Golden Age of musical theater, which archaeologists date from about 1959 to 1981, produced three great lyricists. One, of course, was Stephen Sondheim, setting words to his own music with a neurotic complexity that defined that time and ours. Another was Fred Ebb, the longtime songwriting partner of John Kander, who if poppier in outlook was a genius at prosody, shooting off syllables (“one day it’s kicks, then it’s kicks in the shins”) that never failed to bruise.Sheldon Harnick, who died on Friday at 99, was the third, though only one of his musicals, “Fiddler on the Roof,” written with the composer Jerry Bock, was widely known outside the world of theater lovers. But within that world, his subtle craft and character insight were universally acknowledged. Sondheim called his lyrics “impeccable.”As models of humor, elegance and compassion, they could stand to be more widely studied and imitated. That they aren’t is partly the result of the strange bifurcation of Harnick’s career into Bock and post-Bock eras. Though Harnick kept writing well for four decades after the team broke up at the height of its powers in 1970, he never again met with the kind of success that greeted the earlier work. And Bock fell almost completely silent.What a loss! And yet what a success it had been. By the time of the split, Harnick had written the lyrics not just for the worldwide hit “Fiddler” (1964) but also for two smaller yet equally admired scores: “Fiorello!” (1959) and “She Loves Me” (1963). Another handful of his shows with Bock (“The Apple Tree,” “The Rothschilds,” “Tenderloin”) are just as pleasurable, if less profound.I use the word “profound” to describe those shows, and Harnick’s best lyrics, not because they offer earth-shattering insights but because they are perfect expressions of ordinary ones. A jaunty waltz like “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” from “Fiddler,” could not, after all, be more conventional in its framing: Two poor young sisters dream of being fixed up with perfect husbands.But notice how the agenda-like structuring of their wish list, along with the click-lock rhymes, captures in a few lines what “perfect” means to several people involved:For Papa, make him a scholarFor Mama, make him rich as a king.For me, well, I wouldn’t hollerIf he were as handsome as anything.By song’s end, though, alerted to the dangers of overreaching, the girls have turned the image inside out:Maybe I’ve learned:Playing with matchesA girl can get burned.What neither the sisters nor the audience yet know, but Harnick suggests, is how broadly the idea applies. While initiating the marriage plot so central to “Fiddler,” the lyric also introduces a warning about a world soon to go up in flames.Once heard, Harnick’s lyrics seem like the last word on their subjects. In part that’s because of their concision — he typically writes short lines and never too many — and in part because they build an almost impenetrably tight argument through structure and sound. The important words all land on the right beat; the grammar is never distorted to squeeze over a melody. With so little space, every syllable does at least double duty.Double duty is a nice way of looking as well at his main theme, marriage. (Harnick was briefly married to Elaine May; he wed Margery Gray, who survives him, in 1965.) Like most musicals, his and Bock’s keep circling the subject, but with a slyer view of the rage and redemption that go into it.That combo is brilliantly expressed in “Fiorello!” — the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical about Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City from 1934 through 1945. In “The Very Next Man,” the mayor’s long-suffering secretary, Marie, after years of frustrated love, vows to marry whoever shows up.Again, an ordinary setup, yet Harnick captures Marie’s compulsive preoccupation in a neat chain of repeated words, a few perfect rhymes (some of them hidden) and a heartbeat of recurring long o’s:I’m through with mopingMoping from all this pointless hopingHoping he’ll notice me and open his heartTime now to break away and make a new start.That stanza is actually a rewrite; apparently, in 1959, the original version (“And if he likes me/Who cares how frequently he strikes me?”) was considered acceptable and got a big laugh.There’s some justice in the rewrite being better crafted than the original; Harnick’s dramatic sweet spot was letting characters tie themselves in knots to convince themselves of ideas they know are not right. Also a Harnick sweet spot: forcefully untying the knots later. So even though Marie insists at the end of “The Very Next Man” that she’s finished with romance forever —New York papers, take note!Here’s a statement that you can quote:Waiting for ships that never come inA girl is likely to miss the boat.— she of course does marry La Guardia in the end.Harnick’s gift for expressing simply the complexity of emotional architecture finds perhaps its greatest expression in “She Loves Me,” a show essentially built on romantic delusion. In the song “I Don’t Know His Name,” Amalia concludes that her anonymous pen pal — even though he is, in fact, a co-worker she hates — must be an extremely kind and cultured man:When I undertook this correspondence,Little did I know I’d grow so fond;Little did I know our views would so correspond.But as that tight and high-minded stanza gives way to florid fantasizing —He writes his deepest thoughts to meOn Swift, Vermeer and Debussy.De Maupassant, Dumas, Dukas, Dufy, Dufay, Defoe.— we understand she is not yet ready to find love where it really exists. That will come later.In Sondheim’s lyrics, the double bind of attachment is often a source of agitation; in Ebb’s it is often a pummeling. But in Harnick’s word-world, attachment is a pleasant and relatively livable condition, once you get past the drama.Near the end of “Fiddler,” when in the song “Do You Love Me?” Tevye asks his wife that question, she replies, barely singing the words, “Do I what?” It’s a laugh line, defanging or absorbing what might otherwise seem sentimental. By the end of the gentle, forgiving and ruminative number, so typical of Harnick’s gentle, forgiving and ruminative art, you come willingly to the couple’s conclusion, sentimental or not:It doesn’t change a thingBut even soAfter twenty-five yearsIt’s nice to know. More

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    ‘One Woman Show’ Review: Unlikable for Laughs

    Liz Kingsman plays a messy attention-seeker grasping at relevance in a sharp satire of the trend of female comics playing chaotic train wrecks.Liz Kingsman’s stupendously silly spoof “One Woman Show” arrives in New York with enough buzz for an apiary. The rare solo comedy that moved from small theaters to the West End in London, it has received gushing reviews, topped year-end best-of lists and inspired more than one profile proclaiming its star the “queen of comedy.”That its jokes seem modest and a bit familiar shouldn’t discourage fans of sharply observed satire. The main target appears to be “Fleabag,” another solo launching pad, but more broadly it takes aim at the trend of female comics portraying sexually candid, flamboyantly chaotic train wrecks.Kingsman, whose alert, expressive eyes anchor an easy charisma, walks onstage before you realize she’s there. Cameras are on each side of her. She’s playing an anxiety-ridden actor putting a show together in the hopes of getting it on television. Shifting back and forth between off and onscreen, she stumbles through, technical mishaps piling up. When things break down, the tension between her and the unseen technical staff is delightfully passive aggressive.Her character is a mockery of the nakedly ingratiating artist who disguises herself as a boldly feminist risk-taker. The show she’s performing, called “Wildfowl,” takes you through an ordinary day, where she punches a busker, then yells at him that female characters don’t have to be likable anymore. In another moment, she says, calculatedly blasé: “I guess I’m just relatable.”Like Leo Reich in “Literally Who Cares?!,” another solo show from Britain that played Greenwich House Theater, Kingsman strings together knowing jargon (“Adulting,” “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff”) to poke fun at a sweaty attempt at relevance. Her ear for cliché can be hilarious, including a running joke about the overdone subject of discovering the downsides of the internet. “I know, I know,” she says, with comic conviction. “Everyone says social media is great.”The best parts of this show, staged by Adam Brace with the rhythm of a tight pop song, are the slyly underplayed moments of cultural criticism.The American tradition of the kind of woman she’s satirizing precedes “Fleabag” (see: Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer), and the next generation of comic performers have integrated spoofs into their work. In “Kate,” Kate Berlant also made fun of pretentious character work while leaning on a similar meta-theatrical framing device. And even a stand-up like Catherine Cohen builds self-awareness into her messy comic persona.These performers have a comic intensity that this show doesn’t aim for. In casual overalls, Kingsman is wry and off-handed even when buffoonish. Instead of pushing the desperation of her character, she plays it flatly. Some of this is its own sharp satire, since one of the jokes of the show is how one-dimensional supporting characters (the boss, the friend) only matter in service of the central star. But this is a light gibe. Kingsman’s instincts are affectionate and writerly. She isn’t out for blood so much as a witty delight.One Woman ShowThrough Aug. 11 at Greenwich House Theater; Manhattan. onewomanshownyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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    Sheldon Harnick, ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Lyricist, Dies at 99

    His collaborations with the composer Jerry Bock also included “Fiorello!” — which, like “Fiddler,” was a Tony winner — and “She Loves Me.”Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist who teamed up with the composer Jerry Bock to write some of Broadway’s most memorable musicals, including the Tony Award winners “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Fiorello!,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99. His death was announced by a spokesman, Sean Katz.Mr. Harnick’s lyrics could be broadly funny, slyly satirical, lushly romantic or poignantly moving. He gave voice to a broad range of characters, including starry-eyed young lovers, corrupt politicians, a quarreling Adam and Eve and, in “Fiddler on the Roof,” struggling Jews in early-20th-century Russia.When three unmarried sisters in “Fiddler” confront the village matchmaker, two of them hopeful and the third cynical, they all end up having second thoughts:Matchmaker, matchmaker, plan me no plansI’m in no rush, maybe I’ve learnedPlaying with matches a girl can get burned.So bring me no ring, groom me no groom,Find me no find, catch me no catch.Unless he’s a matchless match!When the leading man in “She Loves Me” is about to meet the woman with whom he’s been trading love letters for months, he practically sings himself into a nervous breakdown:I haven’t slept a wink, I only thinkOf our approaching tête-à-tête,Tonight at eight.I feel a combination of depression and elation;What a state!To waitTill eight.Maria Karnilova and Zero Mostel in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” for which Mr. Harnick and Jerry Bock wrote the score. The show, which opened in 1964, ran for more than 3,200 performances and became the longest-running musical in Broadway history.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMr. Harnick met Mr. Bock in the late 1950s, and the two quickly realized they could work together despite their different temperaments. “I tend to approach things skeptically and pessimistically,” Mr. Harnick told The New York Times in 1990. “Jerry Bock is a bubbling, ebullient personality.”The team would break up after a dozen years over a dispute involving their musical “The Rothschilds.” But the combination worked extremely well while it lasted.The late 1950s was a challenging time for newcomers to the musical stage. The decade’s hit Broadway musicals had included “Guys and Dolls,” “The King and I,” “Wonderful Town,” “My Fair Lady” and “Candide.” “In those days,” Mr. Harnick recalled in a 2004 interview, “lyricists were consciously trying to be more sophisticated and literate. Now we’re in the Andrew Lloyd Webber vein, trying to hit bigger, broader audiences.”Mr. Harnick and Mr. Bock got off to a weak start in 1958 with “The Body Beautiful,” set in the world of prizefighting; it closed after a brief run. But they bounced back decisively the next year with “Fiorello!,” a breezy portrait of one of New York City’s most colorful politicians.“Fiorello!,” which had a book by George Abbott and Jerome Weidman and was directed by Mr. Abbott, starred Tom Bosley as Fiorello H. La Guardia, the reformer who was mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945. Its score evoked a time when political corruption was rife.The song “Little Tin Box,” for example, suggests how a crooked party boss (Howard Da Silva) might have responded when a judge asked him how he has managed to buy a yacht, given his modest salary. The boss replies:I am positive Your Honor must be joking.Any working man can do what I have done.For a month or two I simply gave up smokingAnd I put my extra pennies one by oneInto a little tin boxA little tin boxThat a little tin key unlocks.There is nothing unorthodoxAbout a little tin box.“Fiorello!” ran for nearly 800 performances and won three Tony Awards, including the prize for best musical, which it shared with “The Sound of Music.” It was also one of the few musicals to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Jerry Bock, left, with Mr. Harnick in 1970. Their collaboration produced some of Broadway’s most memorable musicals.Barton Silverman/The New York TimesBut the Bock-Harnick team’s biggest success — and one of Broadway’s — was yet to come: “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened in 1964 and ran for more than 3,200 performances. It became the longest-running musical in Broadway history, a record that stood for a decade.Directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with a book by Joseph Stein based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, “Fiddler on the Roof” told the story of a Jewish community facing expulsion from a village in the czarist Russian empire, with a focus on Tevye (Zero Mostel), the village milkman, and his family.In addition to “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” the score included a number of songs that would soon be regarded as classics, including “Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset” and Tevye’s humorously wistful lament “If I Were a Rich Man” (“There would be one long staircase just going up/ And one even longer coming down/ And one more leading nowhere, just for show”).“Fiddler on the Roof” was more than a hit show; it was a phenomenon. It won nine Tony Awards, including one for its score. It was made into a hit movie in 1971, has been performed all over the world, and has had five Broadway revivals, most recently in 2015. (A Yiddish-language production was an Off Broadway hit in 2019 and played a return engagement in late 2022.)Mr. Harnick, left, and Hal Prince, the producer of “Fiddler on the Roof,” in 2015.Damon Winter/The New York TimesAmong the Bock-Harnick team’s other noteworthy efforts was “She Loves Me” (1963), based on the same Hungarian play that was the basis for the movies “The Shop Around the Corner,” “In the Good Old Summertime” and “You’ve Got Mail.” The story of two workers at a perfume shop in Budapest (Barbara Cook and Daniel Massey) who finally realize that they have been trading romantic letters and that they are meant for each other, “She Loves Me” had no showstopping songs and was not initially a big success, closing after 301 performances. But it has grown in popularity after a series of revivals — although Broadway productions in 1993 and 2016 were equally brief.Their other shows included “The Apple Tree” (1966), three musical playlets (including one about Adam and Eve) directed by Mike Nichols, and “The Rothschilds” (1970), based on Frederic Morton’s biography of the Jewish family that rose from the ghetto to become a financial powerhouse.It was a dispute over who would direct “The Rothschilds” that ended the Bock-Harnick partnership. The show’s original director, Derek Goldby, was replaced by Michael Kidd at the urging of Mr. Harnick and others who wanted someone with more musical-theater experience. Mr. Bock was irate.“Jerry felt that Derek had gotten a raw deal,” Mr. Harnick recalled in 1990. “For a while, the feelings between us were very bad.” He added that “things changed for the better” when “Fiorello!” was revived in 1985 at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut and he and Mr. Bock met there to work on it. (It was revived again off Broadway in 2016.)Nonetheless, they never wrote another show together. Mr. Bock died at 81 in 2010.From left, Mr. Prince, Mr. Bock, Mr. Harnick, Fred Ebb and John Kander in 2004, when the Bock-Harnick and Kander-Ebb songwriting teams announced that they were giving their archives to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.Yoni Brook/The New York TimesSheldon Mayer Harnick was born on April 30, 1924, in Chicago to Harry and Esther Harnick. His father was a dentist, his mother a homemaker. He took violin lessons as a child, attended music school as a teenager and earned money playing in amateur theatricals. After serving in the Army, he enrolled at the Northwestern University School of Music. He graduated in 1949.He began writing songs while in Carl Schurz High School in Chicago and became seriously interested in songwriting as a career after hearing a recording of Burton Lane and E.Y. Harburg’s hit 1947 musical, “Finian’s Rainbow.” At the urging of the actress Charlotte Rae, a fellow Northwestern student, he moved to New York in 1950.Mr. Harnick’s first song in a Broadway show was “The Boston Beguine,” which he wrote — music as well as lyrics — for the revue “Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952.” He wrote numbers for several other revues, including “Two’s Company” (1952), before teaming with Mr. Bock. (One of his compositions from those years, the darkly satirical and deceptively cheerful “The Merry Minuet,” was popularized by the folk music group the Kingston Trio.)Mr. Harnick’s first marriage, to Mary Boatner, was annulled. His second, to the comedian, writer and director Elaine May, ended in divorce. In 1965, he married Margery Gray, an actress whom he had met when she auditioned for his show “Tenderloin.” (She later became a photographer and an artist.) She survives him, as do a daughter, Beth Dorn; a son, Matthew Harnick; and four grandchildren.After his split with Mr. Bock, Mr. Harnick went on to collaborate with other composers. He worked with Mary Rodgers on a 1973 version of “Pinocchio” performed by the Bil Baird marionettes, and with her father, Richard Rodgers, on “Rex,” a musical about King Henry VIII of England that had a brief Broadway run in 1976, with Nicol Williamson in the title role. He also worked with Michel Legrand on two shows: an English-language stage version of the movie musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” produced off Broadway in 1979, and a new adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” staged in Stamford, Conn., in 1982. And he collaborated with Joe Raposo on “A Wonderful Life,” based on the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which has had a number of regional productions since 1986.Mr. Harnick in 2015. His lyrics could be broadly funny, slyly satirical, lushly romantic or poignantly moving. Chad Batka for The New York TimesMr. Harnick also became an accomplished opera translator, providing English librettos for classical works like Lehar’s “The Merry Widow,” Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” and Bizet’s “Carmen.”He wrote some original opera librettos as well, including “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines” (1975), with music by Jack Beeson, and “The Phantom Tollbooth” (1995), a collaboration with Norton Juster, the author of the children’s book on which it was based, and the composer Arnold Black. “Lady Bird: First Lady of the Land,” an opera about Lady Bird Johnson, for which he wrote the libretto and Henry Mollicone wrote the music, had its premiere in Texas in 2016 and has been performed in New York and elsewhere.In late 2015, shortly before the latest Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” opened, Mr. Harnick was in the studio making a demonstration record of songs from “Dragons,” an adaptation of a Russian play for which he wrote the book, music and lyrics, and which he had been working on for many years. In an interview with The Times, he said that he had no thoughts of retirement, and that he continued to attend every show on Broadway, as he had for many years. He added that he was working on a new show of his own.“I hope I live long enough to complete it,” he said. “I won’t tell you what idea I have, because you’ll steal it.”Robert Berkvist, a former New York Times arts editor, died in January. Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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    A Comic With Many Questions About Jews and Whiteness

    Alex Edelman thrives on doubt in “Just for Us” on Broadway. It’s the result of years of revision and notes from Seinfeld, Birbiglia and the late Adam Brace.When Jerry Seinfeld talked to the comic Alex Edelman after seeing him perform “Just for Us,” his solo show that began previews on Broadway this week, he gave him one note: Don’t acknowledge the audience’s response to a joke onstage.Edelman, 34, took it, even though he has the kind of sensitive, hyperactive mind that can’t help but look past the fourth wall. In an interview recently at Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side, he kept peeking at my list of questions, inquiring why I was writing down “L’s” (I wasn’t) and periodically asking me how he was doing (very well). He seemed to answer questions while simultaneously imagining how they were playing, even in emotional moments like discussing his longtime friend, collaborator and director Adam Brace, who tragically died in April at 43 after a stroke.Brace had been critical at every stage of Edelman’s show from its inception in 2018 through hundreds of performances, and after almost all of them the British director gave him notes. “He looked after the flow of the show,” Edelman said, which is why the comic paused in our conversation as he considered a joke he had worked on at the Comedy Cellar the night before, his eyes watering as he said how much he missed having Brace as a sounding board. He then imagined how getting choked up would come off, writing the sentence out loud (“and his eyes fill up”) before quipping: “Don’t overdo it.”During the pandemic, “Just for Us,” a thoughtful, punchline-dense comedy, skipped past downtown hit into the rarefied air of cultural phenomenon. I knew it made the zeitgeist when friends not especially interested in comedy approached me wanting to talk about it. The autobiographical show benefits from a killer elevator pitch: Orthodox Jewish comic gets accidentally invited to a white supremacist meeting in Queens, attends and has a meet-cute flirtation with a racist.When “Just for Us” ran in Washington, D.C., it became the second-highest-grossing show in Woolly Mammoth Theater’s 43-year history. Asked about this success by phone, its artistic director, Maria Manuela Goyanes, recalled telling Jewish staff members: “Y’all show up.”But unlike current Broadway shows that explore antisemitism like “Parade” or “Leopoldstadt,” Edelman isn’t looking back at the past but toward the identity politics of the moment. One reason “Just for Us” has resonated with audiences is that it’s one of the few new shows to dig into the relationship between Jews and whiteness. “Growing up I always wanted to be white,” Edelman says in the show. This gets a laugh because he presents as white, but not all groups see him that way, which he called “almost a founding tension” of the show.After one performance, an audience member told Edelman he always thought Jews were white until he saw the show. Someone behind him responded that they always thought Jews weren’t white. Edelman looked pleased by this exchange. “It’s the induction of doubt,” he explained to me, adding that he told them: “You’re both right.”Edelman at the Comedy Cellar, where he continues to work out jokes.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesHis instinct is to question, not answer, to air strong opinions but not settle into them too securely. When Kanye West comes up in our conversation, Edelman described a Jewish friend who resented the expectation that he should be outraged by the rapper’s trafficking in Jewish stereotypes, describing it as “taking our turn on the victim wheel.” In our talk, Edelman articulated this position with passion but didn’t go so far as to agree. His point is that his show aims to “have the conversation about Jews in their place on that spectrum of whiteness without having a conversation about victimhood.”Growing up in Boston, the child of a professor of biomedical engineering and a real estate lawyer, Edelman, who has a slight build and floppy hair, has been doing stand-up since he was a teenager. (He has had long-term romantic relationships with the female comics Katherine Ryan and more recently, Hannah Einbinder, though they broke up a month ago.) He describes his early influences as “not great,” explaining that “if I’m being honest, I saw a lot of racist comedy, self-congratulatory and smug.” He described discovering his voice when he went to London during college, and recalled one key turning point when the British comic Josie Long took him aside and said, “What you’re doing is getting laughs but it’s not who you are.”Even more important, at 23, he met Brace at Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s birthday party. They talked comedy and Brace later asked him if he could give him notes. Brace was especially alert to the dramaturgy of a show, insisting on cutting jokes that worked if they weren’t worth the lost momentum. If Edelman riffed too much, Brace told him: You’re on the jazz tonight. Their running conversations continued over the next decade.In early June, I accompanied Edelman to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to watch old recordings of Broadway performances by artists like Billy Crystal (who also gave him a note after a show) and Eric Bogosian. When a man at the desk told him that he could see “The Producers” only with the approval of its director, Susan Stroman, and she was in London, Edelman looked down at his phone, shot off a text and within a minute had her approval. The man at the desk looked surprised, then added that he also needed the approval of Robin Wagner, the show’s set designer, and he had died the previous week. After a pregnant pause, Edelman deadpanned: “That’s beyond my ability.”When asked about how he seems to know everyone, Edelman said these were all people he approached because he was genuinely curious about them. “The thing everyone says but maybe doesn’t internalize is: You just have to show up,” he explained, before adding that there is privilege in knowing you are able to do so.The previous month, when in Boston, he knocked on the door of the 94-year-old comedy legend Tom Lehrer, whom he did not know, just to talk. “I told him I was a comedian,” Edelman reported. “And he said, ‘What problem do you need solving?’”In a more critical example of showing up, Edelman approached Mike Birbiglia in 2019. “We had an older brother, younger brother relationship,” Birbiglia said by phone. “He’d ask to pick my brain and I’d say I’m very busy.”This time, however, when Edelman described “Just for Us,” Birbiglia heard a surprising, relatable story that had more potential. He told Edelman to keep working on it. After producing one performance, Birbiglia, who is not Jewish, encouraged him to strengthen its spine. With a chuckle, he recalled that one note was to make it more Jewish.Edelman returned to London and he and Brace rebuilt the show as controversy raged in the Labour Party there over its leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attitudes toward Jews, which Edelman said informed the writing. After opening Off Broadway in 2021 to rave reviews, “Just for Us” became a hit.With Brace gone, Edelman said he had leaned on Birbiglia more, both for notes and emotional support. When I asked Birbiglia what Edelman was good at besides comedy, he said with a small snort: “Newspaper interviews.” Later that night, he texted me that “one of Alex’s remarkable talents is he’s willing to continue to rewrite and experiment on a show that had already reviewed well” at festivals like the Edinburgh Fringe. “That’s a very rare quality,” the text continued, “and I think it bodes well for whatever he chooses to do next.”That has been on Edelman’s mind. He had planned to make his follow-up about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject he has been fascinated by since he was a kid, but doing so without Brace seemed daunting.And yet, there was something about the cantankerous impossibility of this dispute that clearly appeals to him. One of the first things Edelman told me in our interview was: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”He thought it was from the playwright George Bernard Shaw, but reconsidered, brow furrowed, then looked it up on his phone and realized it was from the poet William Butler Yeats. “I have so much doubt,” he said, “which is why I have so much patience for both sides of the argument.” More

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    ‘The Light in the Piazza’ Review: When It Comes to Love, They’re Outsiders

    A meet-cute on an Italian excursion sends a mother and daughter on parallel journeys of self-discovery in an Encores! staging of the 2005 musical.Encountering a great piece of art can lead to a moment of transcendence. That’s the idea behind the mother-daughter tour of Florence in “The Light in the Piazza,” the 2005 musical romance composed by Adam Guettel and written by Craig Lucas. And for audiences at New York City Center, where an exquisite Encores! revival directed by Chay Yew opened on Wednesday, a sensational performance by Ruthie Ann Miles delivers a feeling close to the sublime.Miles, who was nominated for a Tony Award this year for her role as the beggar woman in the Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd,” embodies a vivid and elegant portrait of maternal empathy and restraint as Margaret, a veteran’s wife from the South. She honeymooned in Italy; now it’s the summer of 1953, and her marital flame is dimming just as her daughter, Clara (Anna Zavelson), first discovers desire. It’s a bittersweet reflection that Miles imbues with grace, fortitude and the circumspect wit of middle age.That Margaret and Clara are Asian American adds a further layer of shading to their outsiderness abroad. (“I’m as different here as different can be,” Clara sings.) But Clara’s sense of otherness is rooted in a less visible aspect of her identity. As Margaret tells the audience in a brief aside, Clara is “very young for her age,” her cognitive and emotional abilities stunted by an incident in her childhood.But it’s not Italian art that broadens Clara’s consciousness on their trip; soon after a local dreamboat named Fabrizio (James D. Gish) retrieves Clara’s hat from the wind, Margaret assumes the unenviable task of trying to steer her daughter away from love at first sight.Miles’s rich and precise vocals illuminate Guettel’s lush, poetic score, which is nimbly and gorgeously orchestrated ‌by Guettel, Ted Sperling‌‌ and Bruce Coughlin. (Listen for the lone clarinet that accompanies Margaret’s most intimate moments of introspection.) Miles also radiates wry intelligence, as an ‌astute mother hoping to rein in her daughter’s increasingly unbridled impulses, another aspect of the story heightened by casting the characters as Asian American.The young lovers flirt over fumbling to understand one another (Fabrizio speaks little English, though Gish’s Italian is also unconvincing). And while the actors’ connection lacks animal magnetism, their characters are united in their reveries about how love is supposed to feel. Clara has the more compelling awakening in this regard, and Zavelson, making her professional New York debut, lends an effervescent innocence to her portrayal of self-discovery. Both actors sing with appealing earnestness, but Gish’s Fabrizio is painted in broader strokes, as though smitten Florentine hunks had been loitering around every corner for Clara to find.Fabrizio’s family tends to be broader as well, though knowingly. His brother, Giuseppe (Rodd Cyrus), is a slick womanizer whose wife, Franca (Shereen Ahmed), seethes with jealousy and warns Clara about the fickleness of infatuation. His mother, Signora Naccarelli (Andréa Burns), pauses the family’s rowdy display of collective passion during the Italian-language number “Aiutami” to assure the audience that she’s aware the Naccarellis are drama queens. It’s a self-conscious nod, from Guettel and Lucas, to their uncommon fusion of operatic melodrama with the psychological realism of contemporary musical theater. (The duo’s “Days of Wine and Roses,” now running at the Linda Gross Theater, builds on that formula.)The set designed by Clint Ramos and Miguel emphasizes depth of field, with the 16-member orchestra elevated on a colonnade platform as its centerpiece.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn Yew’s concert staging, which runs through Sunday, those elements cohere seamlessly. (Though Miles and the ensemble carry leather-bound scripts that resemble guidebooks, the production is fully and beautifully staged.) The 16-member orchestra is the magnificent centerpiece, elevated on a colonnade platform that runs the length of the stage. The set design by Clint Ramos and Miguel Urbino emphasizes depth of field, its white framework a receptive canvas for Linda Cho’s refined midcentury costumes and the warm ambers of David Weiner’s lighting.That sense of dimension and perspective also comes through in Margaret, as well as in Fabrizio’s father, Signor Naccarelli (Ivan Hernandez), who eventually grow simpatico as their children are drawn to each other. Margaret may be ambivalent about love herself, recognizing its inevitable fallibility (her husband, played by Michael Hayden, appears in strained long-distance phone calls), but she invests in its possibilities for Clara, a generosity of spirit that gives “The Light in the Piazza” its shimmer.Margaret’s instinct to protect her daughter, and her ultimate reconciliation of sorrow with hope, are the musical’s emotional center. And there will be yet a deeper level of resonance for audiences familiar with Miles’s own personal history, of losing her 5-year-old daughter, Abigail, when they were struck by a car in 2018, and, two months later, the baby Miles was pregnant with at the time.Miles reflected in a recent interview that the conclusion of Margaret’s story might allow her to “finally take a breath.” Whether that turns out to be the case, Miles’s performance is certain, at least, to leave audiences breathless.The Light in the PiazzaThrough June 25 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    New Jason Robert Brown Musical Highlights MCC Theater Season

    A honky-tonk lesbian romance and a new musical by Gavin Creel are also slated for the Off Broadway theater’s 2023-24 lineup.A new musical about an aspiring writer by Jason Robert Brown, a honky-tonk lesbian romance and a musical inspired by the singer and songwriter Gavin Creel’s first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art are on the roster for MCC Theater’s 2023-24 season.“Each of their shows asks a provocative question. What does art do for us? What is our responsibility to the truth? And what does family mean?” Bernie Telsey and Will Cantler, co-artistic directors at the theater, wrote in a statement announcing the season on Thursday.The season will begin in November with the new musical “Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice,” a program of 17 original songs that Creel wrote after his first visit to the Met in 2019. (The title, he told The New York Times in 2021, stemmed from his discovery that if a work of art is lacking color, light, sex or story, “I usually just kind of walk on by.”) Creel, who won a Tony Award for his performance as Cornelius Hackl in “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway and is currently playing Cinderella’s Prince in the national tour of “Into the Woods,” will also star in “Walk on Through,” which is his theatrical songwriting debut. Linda Goodrich will direct.It will be followed in January by the world premiere of “The Connector,” a musical that tells the story of an up-and-coming writer who gets his first article published in a prestigious magazine — and soon faces a test of his integrity. The music and lyrics are by Brown, the three-time Tony Award-winning composer and lyricist for “Parade” and “The Bridges of Madison County,” with a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman. The show will be directed by Daisy Prince, who also helped conceive it, with casting to be announced.Finally, in April, comes the New York premiere of “The Lonely Few,” a rock concert-style show about two musicians who navigate being an interracial gay couple in the South. It was first produced at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles earlier this year in a production starring Lauren Patten, who won a Tony Award in 2021 for “Jagged Little Pill,” and Ciara Renée (“Waitress,” “Frozen”). The show, with music and lyrics by Zoe Sarnak and a book by Rachel Bonds, received mixed reviews, with Charles McNulty, the theater critic for The Los Angeles Times, calling the performances universally “terrific” while noting that the production suffered from “choppy” storytelling and a “relationship between the drama and the music that’s off-kilter.” It will be directed by Trip Cullman and Ellenore Scott, both of whom also helmed it at the Geffen, with casting to be announced.The season will also include the world premiere of “Mary Gets Hers,” a drama-comedy by Emma Horwitz set during a 10th-century plague in Germany and inspired by “Abraham, or the Rise and Repentance of Mary,” by Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, an early European female poet and playwright (Sept. 11-Oct. 7). The production will be directed by Josiah Davis and produced by MCC Theater’s fall company-in-residence, The Playwrights Realm. More

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    Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells to Reunite in ‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’

    The pair, who were the original co-stars of “The Book of Mormon,” will return to Broadway this fall in a two-man musical comedy.Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, whose careers were transformed when they co-starred as hapless missionaries in “The Book of Mormon,” will reunite this fall in a comedic two-hander, “Gutenberg! The Musical!,” that has been staged around the world but will now arrive on Broadway for the first time.“There is no bigger passion as an actor than being on a stage,” Gad, who has been working in film and television for the last decade, said in a joint telephone interview with Rannells. “It’s how I got my start, and I’ve missed it.”“Gutenberg” is a musical that satirizes musicals; it is about two aspiring musical theater writers who decide to write a musical about Johannes Gutenberg without knowing all that much either about him (he was a Renaissance inventor, best known for his contributions to the history of printing presses) or about musical theater. The show is set at a backers’ audition — a run-through staged for potential investors — but in this case, the artists have so little money they have to perform every role themselves.“‘Gutenberg’ is very much a love letter to musical theater,” Rannells said. “We’re playing these two characters who have very passionately written a show without a ton of historical information and without a lot of skill, but a lot of passion and a lot of heart and one shot to find some Broadway producers to help them put this show on.”The musical, written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, began its life in the comedy world, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, where King was the artistic director, and then was further developed at the New York Musical Festival. It had runs in London and Off Broadway starting in 2006, and has since been produced in Australia, France, Korea, Spain, and around the U.S.; Brown and King, who have been friends since childhood, went on to write the book for the musical adaptation of “Beetlejuice.”The Broadway run is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 15, to open Oct. 12, and to close Jan. 28 at the James Earl Jones Theater. The director will be Alex Timbers, who also directed the 2006 Off Broadway production; Timbers later won a Tony Award for directing “Moulin Rouge!,” and he has also worked in comedy, including as the director of “Oh, Hello” on Broadway.“I love this show, and it gets seen and performed all over the world, but isn’t really known in New York,” Timbers said. “It straddles the play and comedy worlds, and I feel like there’s an audience for that.”Timbers and Gad had been talking for some time about finding a way to collaborate; Gad said they had discussed the possibility of doing a production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” In 2020, Timbers suggested “Gutenberg,” and Gad loved the script, which he in turn shared with Rannells; the three did a first reading together in March of 2020, days before theaters were shut down for the coronavirus pandemic, and are now returning to the project.“Broadway is rebounding, and it is due for an even bigger rebound,” Gad said. “I was watching the Tony Awards, and I was blown away by how many productions I was so excited to go see on my next trip to New York, and to be a part of that — this incredible comeback that Broadway is long overdue post-pandemic — is a really exciting opportunity. And more than anything, I think that people miss laughing.”The lead producer of “Gutenberg” is the Ambassador Theater Group, a British company that has become increasingly active on Broadway; among the other producers is Bad Robot Live, which is a new division of a company co-founded by the filmmaker J.J. Abrams, and which has a partnership with the Ambassador Theater Group. More

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    36 Hours in Paris: Things to Do and See

    4:30 p.m.
    Go from a royal garden to the mosque
    Cross to the city’s left bank via Sully Bridge, taking in views from the small triangular garden at the tip of the Île Saint-Louis, the quieter of the two islands on the Seine. From Oberkampf, this half-hour walk will take you to the Jardin des Plantes, a vast botanical park that started as a royal medicinal garden in the 17th century. Stroll through, with the National Museum of Natural History in the background, and visit the gardens’ four oversize greenhouses (€7). Exit via the west gates to find the Grand Mosque of Paris. Inaugurated in the wake of World War I, in part to commemorate the sacrifices of colonized Muslims who fought for France, it features a patio with a hand-sculpted cedar wood door adorned with Quran verses in calligraphy, built by highly skilled North African craftsmen (visit, €3). Pause for a glass of mint tea (€2) in the courtyard or get a good scrubbing or massage at the ornate, sizeable hammam (from €30, women only). More