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    Richard Belzer Had a Ball With the Relationship Between Comic and Crowd

    Unlike his TV characters, his live shows were marked by spontaneity and physicality. He could even keep up with Robin Williams line by line.When Richard Belzer did stand-up on “Late Night With David Letterman,” he always entered to the opening riffs of “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones, dancing his way onstage, looking like the life of the party in dark shades. Once he arrived at the microphone, he made a point of engaging with the studio audience in a way you rarely saw on television. More than once, he asked, “You in a good mood?” and waited for a cheer. Then his tone shifted: “Prove it.”With that opening pivot, he turned the relationship between comedian and crowd upside-down. The expectation was now on the people in the seats: Impress me.Belzer, who died Sunday, is best known for his performances as a detective on TV, but his acting career was built on a signature persona in comedy, as a master of seductive crowd work who set the template for the MC in the early days of the comedy club. Often in jackets and shirts buttoned low, he cut a stylish image, spiky and louche. He could charm with the best of them, but unlike many performers, he didn’t come off as desperate for your approval. He understood that one of the peculiar things about comedy is that the line between irritation and ingratiation could easily blur.Throughout the 1970s, he ran the show at the buzziest of the New York clubs: Catch a Rising Star, stand-up’s answer to Studio 54. He roasted the crowds while warming them up, quizzing them about where they were from and what they did, establishing rapport and dominance. Long before Dave Chappelle dropped the mic at the end of shows, Belzer regularly did so.If the crowd wasn’t laughing, he could lay on a guilt trip: “Could you be a little more quiet? Because I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.” And if someone heckled, look out. According to a story from the comic Jonathan Katz, one night someone in the crowd yelled, “Nice jacket!” and Belzer responded that he got it on sale in his mother’s vagina.Belzer didn’t get famous as quickly as many of his peers, but he was a cult figure with wide influence in comedy. You can hear his clipped cadences, not to mention his use of the word “babe” as a nickname, in the act of Dennis Miller, who once referred to him as “the dark prince” of Catch a Rising Star. Andy Kaufman’s alter ego Tony Clifton was partly inspired by Belzer (notice the glasses).Even as an MC, Belzer was his own star attraction. He became famous for taking an incredibly long time to introduce a comic. In an interview for a documentary on him that has yet to be released, Belzer recalled once taking an hour and forty-five minutes to bring up the next comic. The writer Bill Scheft, who is producing the movie, said Belzer ad-libbed many lines “that became stock MC lines for others.”Few of Belzer’s live shows were taped, but you can find traces online. An all-purpose showman who could sing and dance, he even did pratfalls while spoofing a hipster pose. One wonderfully goofy bit involved getting his hand stuck while running it through his hair, dragging his whole body down to the ground. He leaned hard on flamboyant impressions including those of Ronald Reagan, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and especially Mick Jagger. There’s a wonderful competitive moment from the 2011 show “Green Room” when, in the middle of a conversation, Belzer gets into a “Jagger-off” with the comic Rick Overton. He triumphs, doing an impression he always called “peacock on acid.”More than any joke, what stands out from a deep dive into Belzer’s online comedy was an attitude: impatient, sarcastic, friendly but quick to jab. There was a percussive sound to his running retorts to the crowd: “Yeah, right, sure.” These move-it-along interruptions had a rhythm and sound that was quintessentially New York. When he dove into a familiar premise, his voice could move from dry to wry in a blink, mocking himself. It’s no wonder that Letterman, another ironist whose attitude perpetually commented on and upstaged his own jokes, booked him so often.Today, crowd work is much easier to see, in specials but also all over social media, where it has become a critical part of marketing and selling tickets for young comics. But in the 1980s, unless you went to a club, you didn’t often find people turning “Where you from?” into spontaneous comedy, so it’s striking that in his 1986 HBO special, he included plenty of such basic interactions. “There’s a lot of parts of New Jersey that are very nice,” he said, responding to one guy from the state. “I can’t think of any right now.”As early as 1978, he opened sets with a touch of hostility, looking up and asking, “Could you make these lights brighter? I’d like to go blind.”Nothing on video displays his stature as much as a 90-minute show celebrating the 10th anniversary of Catch a Rising Star that aired on HBO in 1982. It’s a terrific portrait of New York comedy at the time, with a long bill including Andy Kaufman, Billy Crystal, Rita Rudner and David Brenner, along with the singer Pat Benatar, who was managed by the club’s owner, Rick Newman. Belzer introduces them all, keeping things just sarcastic enough to prevent anyone from taking themselves seriously. Once Joe Piscopo finished a Frank Sinatra impression in full costume and makeup, Belzer marveled: “What an honor. What a surprise. What a man. What a toupée.”At the end, Robin Williams heckled Belzer from the crowd, before going onstage and improvising a series of scenes to close out the night. Whereas Belzer was relatively unknown to the mainstream then, Williams was a giant television star and powerhouse live performer, frenetic and wildly unpredictable. Williams riffed punch lines effortlessly, but Belzer kept up and matched him, line by line. That some don’t land only adds gravitas to the feat, since it proves this was not an act polished for HBO but a real attempt to translate high-wire improv to television.This ephemeral work is not the part of comedy you tend to see in movies or specials, but when done well live, it can be thrilling. And part of the job of the MC is to be alert to the value of spontaneous moments. Belzer understood this as well as anyone.“The greatest thing for me is when I make the audience laugh in a moment that could only happen that night with that audience,” he said in a recent interview. “Sometimes I laugh with the audience because I’m hearing the joke the same time they are.” More

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    Barbara Bosson, 83, Dies; Brought Family Drama to ‘Hill Street Blues’

    She received five consecutive Emmy nominations for her role as Fay Furillo, the frenetic ex-wife of a police precinct captain.Barbara Bosson, who starred in a half-dozen TV crime dramas from the 1970s to the ’90s but who is best known for her five seasons on “Hill Street Blues,” for which she was nominated for five consecutive Emmy Awards, died on Saturday in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 83.Her son, Jesse Bochco, confirmed her death, in a hospital, but said the cause had not been determined.Ms. Bosson was a relatively unknown actress when she burst through the doors of a police station in the pilot episode of “Hill Street Blues,” the much-lauded police drama that ran from 1981 to 1987. She played Fay Furillo, the frenetic ex-wife of Capt. Frank Furillo (played by Daniel J. Travanti), and she had come to demand alimony, which he was chronically late in paying.Fay’s was supposed to be a one-off appearance, but producers, critics and audiences liked her so much that the writers — including her husband, Steven Bochco, the show’s producer and co-creator — quickly made her a part of the main cast.With its busy camera work and overlapping story lines, “Hill Street Blues” is widely considered a landmark in TV history. Set in a gritty (but unnamed) American city, the show offered a textured take on working-class life that struck a chord with a country in the midst of stagflation and deindustrialization. It was nominated for 97 Emmys, a record at the time for a one-hour drama (it has since been surpassed by “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “ER” and “Game of Thrones”), and won 25.Ms. Bosson’s performance as Fay was central to that success. Her character was difficult and self-pitying, but she was also a hardworking single mother struggling to make ends meet.“Fay is one of those transition women,” she told The Washington Post in 1987. “She grew up in one kind of set of values — she’s not unbright, but she never thought she’d have to support herself. And then she found herself divorced, poor, with a child and real angry.”Ms. Bosson faced accusations that she had won the role because she was married to Mr. Bochco. She brushed them off, but she also said they drove her add depth to the character as a way of showing her creative independence. It was her idea, for example, to make Fay a victims’-rights advocate.Mr. Bochco left the show over creative differences at the end of the fifth season. Ms. Bosson left soon after, claiming that the producers were trying to strip Fay of the endearing qualities she had worked so hard to add.Ms. Bosson went on to star in several more crime shows, including the Bochco creations “Hooperman,” “Cop Rock” and “Murder One,” Her performance as a deputy district attorney on “Murder One” earned her a sixth Emmy nomination.Ms. Bosson at a Screen Actors Guild event in 2005.Mark Sullivan/WireImage, via Getty ImagesBarbara Ann Bosson was born on Nov. 1, 1939, in Charleroi, Pa., about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. Her father, John, was an aspiring tennis coach who made ends meet as a milkman, and her mother, Doris, was a homemaker. When Barbara was a teenager, her family moved to Gulfport, Fla., where she graduated from high school in 1957.She gained admission to the drama department at Carnegie Tech (today part of Carnegie Mellon University), but it was too expensive for her parents. Instead she moved to New York, where she worked as a secretary and took acting classes at night. She also worked for a time as a hostess at the Playboy Club in Midtown Manhattan.“I put up with a lot of leering men to be able to study acting,” she told The St. Petersburg Times in 1990.She eventually saved enough money to enroll at Carnegie Tech in 1965, but left before graduating to pursue acting. Her classmates included several future “Hill Street Blues” colleagues, among them Mr. Bochco and the actors Bruce Weitz and Charles Haid.Mr. Bochco was married, but he had divorced by the time they met again, in Los Angeles, in 1969. They married at the end of the year.They divorced in 1997. Mr. Bochco died in 2018. Along with her son, Ms. Bosson is survived by a daughter, Melissa Bochco; two grandchildren; and her brother, Richard.Ms. Bosson’s first screen credit was in the 1968 crime thriller “Bullitt,” with Steve McQueen, and through the 1970s she was seen in a series of small TV and film roles. She was also a member of the Committee, an improv troupe.Though she continued to find work in the 12 years between leaving “Hill Street Blues” and her retirement in 1997, she found it increasingly frustrating, with good roles for women her age few and far between.“There’s this wonderful tradition in Hollywood where men as old as 60 or 70 play opposite women of 20,” she told The Washington Post. “The only time you’ll see an older woman with a younger man is if she’s so knock-them-down-dead gorgeous that anybody would go for her.” More

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    Adrian Hall, Who Invigorated Regional Theater, Dies at 95

    As founding artistic director, he made Trinity Rep in Rhode Island a leader in theatrical innovation. He then made his mark in Dallas as well.Adrian Hall, who as founding artistic director built Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., into one of the premiere regional theaters in the country, and who did similarly important work in Dallas and elsewhere, died on Feb. 4 in Tyler, Texas. He was 95.Trinity announced his death in a statement. A neighbor, Ruth Barrett, said Mr. Hall, who lived in his native city, Van, Texas, east of Dallas, died in a hospital.Curt Columbus, Trinity’s current artistic director, called Mr. Hall “a visionary artist, not only in the way he challenged the aesthetic limits of the stage, but also in the challenging subject matter he produced.”Mr. Hall led Trinity from its founding in 1964 until 1989, presenting one inventive production after another. For the last six years of that tenure, he was also artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, another important regional house.In the 1960s and ’70s, with the establishment not only of Trinity but also of houses like American Repertory Theater in Massachusetts, the Guthrie in Minneapolis and Steppenwolf in Chicago, the regional theater movement that had begun a generation earlier under Margo Jones in Dallas and others solidified. Mr. Hall and his counterparts championed bold works innovatively staged.“His work was rooted in the work of the founders of the movement who came before him, especially Margo Jones, but then burst it wide open,” Kevin Moriarty, executive director of the Dallas Theater Center, said by email. “Like them, Adrian was deeply committed to creating a body of work with a company of actors who were resident in a community, rather than pick up actors for hire.“But,” he continued, “his unique approach to theatrical narrative and design was a significant aesthetic departure. Fusing the European influences of Brecht and Grotowski with a deep American sensibility (even more specifically, that of a gay Texan maverick), Adrian created theater in which actors confronted the audience directly.”In the early days of Trinity, that audience often consisted of high school students. In 1966, Mr. Hall received federal funding for a three-year program he called Project Discovery, which bused students from throughout Rhode Island to Providence to experience theater. In the first season, he mounted shows like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” thinking that the students would be interested in seeing plays they might be reading in class.They weren’t. They slashed seats, vandalized the bathrooms, threw things at the actors.“It was my moment of truth,” Mr. Hall told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “Even though I was frightened of them, I knew it was a battle unto the death with me. I had to make them listen.”“That,” he added, “is when I fired the cannons and sprayed them with water.”The reference was to the company’s adaptation of “Billy Budd,” the Herman Melville novella. Mr. Hall staged it in 1969, with the theater transformed into the H.M.S. Indomitable. The set was the work of Mr. Hall’s longtime collaborator Eugene Lee, who died on Feb. 6. (“Lee’s Indomitable is a masterpiece of stagecraft,” Kevin Kelly wrote in a review in The Boston Globe, “and it wouldn’t surprise me if she sailed.”)For that and other productions, Mr. Hall altered the theater seating in ways that made the students feel part of the action, an effort to shake them out of their indifference.“It seemed to me I had worked all my life to make theater possible, and the audience was saying, ‘We don’t want no part of it,’” he told The New York Times in 1975. “And so I began right then to move outside of the proscenium and to surprise those little devils, to throw things at them, to challenge them, to intimidate them.”That approach became a signature of Mr. Hall’s work. By 1972 The Times was calling him “probably the most interesting director now working in the American regional theater.” Fifteen years later, the newspaper described the Texas-born Mr. Hall as “regional theater’s most charismatic evangelist, preaching the gospel of the nonprofit theater and warning against that devil, Broadway, with a driven fervor that is as Southern as tent meetings and as brashly Texan as a fur coat at the Cotton Bowl.”For some directors, the text of a play guides the presentation. But for Mr. Hall, and others in the regional theaters of the day, the director’s vision was paramount.“He brought his own unique aesthetic to a play,” Mr. Moriarty said, “focusing on the violence of a visceral experience in a shared, rough space, rather than creating illustrations that attempted to represent reality.”In 1981 Trinity won the Tony Award for regional theaters.Mr. Hall on the set of “The Tempest” at the Dallas Theater Center in 1987. For the last six years of his tenure at Trinity, he was also artistic director there.Mark Perlstein for The New York TimesMr. Hall was born in Van on Dec. 3, 1927, to Lennie and Mattie Hall. His father thought he should follow in his footsteps and become a rancher; his mother envisioned him as a preacher. Instead he read a lot, acted in school plays and, after graduating from high school at 16, enrolled at East State Texas Teachers College in Commerce.In 1947, he took a fateful trip to Dallas, where he met Ms. Jones, who was attracting attention with the repertory theater she had started there.She suggested that he apply to the Pasadena Playhouse’s theater arts school in California. He was accepted, and studied for six months there before returning to the teachers college. He graduated in 1949 and, from 1951 to 1953, served in the Army, where he started the Seventh Army Repertory Company, “doing grim little plays like ‘Darkness at Noon’” all over Europe, he told The Boston Globe in 1986.In the 1950s and early ’60s, Mr. Hall directed in New York City, the Catskills and elsewhere before getting the call from a group of Providence business people who were trying to turn an amateur theatrical group, Trinity Square, into a professional one.He leaves no immediate survivors.Mr. Hall had a big personality and sometimes clashed with theater boards; his reluctance to set his full season in advance was one source of friction, since that made it hard to market subscriptions. A split with the Trinity board led him to leave Providence in 1989 and devote his full attention to the Dallas job, only to have that end when he clashed with the board there the same year, after which he became a freelance director.“Every once in a while,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989, “an Adrian Hall will meet an unmovable object such as the Dallas Theater Center board.”If his personality set him apart, so, to some, did being openly gay. It also influenced his work.“Being gay, well, it’s an outsider status, no matter what anyone else says, and part of me really likes that,” he told The Globe in 1986. “It keeps me on edge, keeps me aware of what it’s like not being fully accepted, what it’s like being scored and thought less of because you’re different.“I identify with society’s rejects. Always have. That’s what my work’s about.” More

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    Review: In ‘Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?!,’ He’s Too Hot to Live

    Reich, a comedian and writer, transforms into the avatar of Gen Z disaffection in his taut, biting solo show at Greenwich House Theater.The British writer and comedian Leo Reich styles himself as a walking caricature, his cropped mop of slick curls and high cheekbones framing his frequently half-rolled eyes. Roving the compact stage of the Greenwich House Theater, where his darkly hilarious solo show “Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?!” opened on Sunday, Reich is frenetic and restless, a self-consciously exaggerated cliché.You know the type. Raised with smartphones in hand and prone to hyperbole, they are experts of self-presentation who use words like “literally” and “iconic” as filler. Onstage, Reich, 23, fashions himself as a hyperkinetic Gen Z avatar, playing off prevailing assumptions associated with those perennially known as “kids today.” He identifies as queer and hot, he says, preening with ironic self-regard. (A faux memoir he reads from onstage is titled, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Ripped Slut.”)But Reich’s over-the-top vanity and arch detachment are another form of misdirection, his favored comedic strategy. The flippancy implied by the title of his 60-minute show, a taut and often mordant stand-up set punctuated with musical numbers (by the “Six” co-composer Toby Marlow), masks the profundity of the question it really asks: of how to look forward to life when the future seems, by all accounts, pretty bleak.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Every generation finds its reasons for disaffection, and those facing young people today are undeniably harsh. Of course, few among us are inured from the consequences of extreme digitization, climate change, war and a yearslong pandemic. But Reich points to the particular, twisted flavor of experiencing all of that at an age when the promise of innocence has disappeared from the menu. He says he first saw hard-core pornography online at age 9, spent his early 20s typing “death toll” into Google rather than casually dating and imagines that homeownership is so out of reach he’ll still be living with his parents in 2042.None of this feels remotely like hand-wringing, though, and Reich is drolly circumspect (it’s not like 70-year-olds in the audience actually lived through the Holocaust, he tells us). But his show offers a keen and incisive distillation of how much has changed since the turn of the century, and how dizzying and absurd it can seem to people of any age. Musings about how to cope with the crises of modern life are interspersed with pivotal moments from his queer coming-of-age, lending the show a cohesive structure. But it’s Reich’s brashness and wry, reflexive panache that give “Literally Who Cares?!” its embodied dynamism.Partly, this is thanks to how he builds momentum. Under the direction of Adam Brace, Reich flits seamlessly between bits, with punch lines cleverly enjambed at the ends of his sentences. (Rapid shifts in tone are greatly aided by the wit of Daniel Carter-Brennan’s lighting design.) The show traverses an impressive range of subjects as a result, while staying anchored in Reich’s own experience of being gay (a boon for branding, but still a psychological nightmare, he says), Jewish (doesn’t God seem like another controlling boyfriend?) and perpetually online, where signifiers of identity have become salable commodities.There was a moment during childhood, Reich recalls, when he did a somersault, not realizing it would be his last one. He plays this realization with mock sentimentality, but the metaphor is a poignant one. Life is an accumulation of losses, and their pace is accelerating — privacy, innocence and the illusion of invincibility have all grown tougher to hold onto for long. If you’re wondering where all of this could be headed next, ask a young person who’s weathering the chaos with a wicked sense of humor.Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?!Through March 11 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan; leoreich.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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    Chase Stokes Turned Down ‘Outer Banks.’ He’s Glad He Reconsidered.

    The actor plays John B. in the hit Netflix drama, which returns for its third season on Thursday.Before Chase Stokes started playing John B., the teenage treasure hunter at the center of “Outer Banks,” on Netflix, he played a fictional Hollywood manager, mass emailing talent agencies to tout an up-and-coming young actor named Chase Stokes.He also worked as a bartender and a food photographer to make ends meet, and he spent months couch-surfing and occasionally sleeping in his 2009 BMW in the parking lot of the Ovation Hollywood (formerly Hollywood and Highland) mall as he took acting classes.Despite his circumstances, Stokes said he initially turned down offers to audition for “Outer Banks” — it felt like a “Goonies” remake, and he didn’t want to besmirch a classic, he said. But eventually an apartment eviction notice and his car’s overheating engine and expired tags convinced him to give it a shot. He considers himself lucky that he did.“But I think luck is when consistency and determination and hard work meet,” Stokes said.“Outer Banks” is a teen drama about a group of attractive young adventurers (known as “pogues”) battling their island community’s rich kids (“kooks”) and chasing treasure linked to the disappearance of John B.’s father. It debuted in 2020 but broke out when its second season premiered in July 2021, becoming Netflix’s most watched English-language series globally for four weeks. A fan event to promote the third season drew more than 4,000 attendees to Huntington Beach, Calif., on Saturday, to watch performances by acts like Khalid and Lil Baby. The cast also took the stage to announce that the show had already been renewed for a fourth season.Season 3 of “Outer Banks” begins on Thursday, following John B. and the other pogues as they take on new territory in another quest for gold after the first two seasons saw them successfully scavenge and subsequently lose treasures in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The crew was last seen on a deserted island they had named Poguelandia, and the unexpected discovery of John B.’s presumed-dead father, Big John (played by Charles Halford), sparks a new itch to uncover yet another bounty.In a video call from a West Hollywood hotel, Stokes talked about how he initially declined the role that has made him famous and what “Outer Banks” says about friendship and the class divide. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You initially turned down the “Outer Banks” audition. What convinced you to reconsider?I really wasn’t making money as an actor up until the job that I did right before “Outer Banks,” which was a show on Amazon called “Tell Me Your Secrets.” But the money had kind of run dry from that show — I had an eviction notice on my door, the registration on my car had expired, my engine was steaming everywhere I went. I’m not a mechanic, so I didn’t know how to fix it, nor did I have the money to do so.After declining the “Outer Banks” audition a couple of times I got a call from Lisa Fincannon, a wonderful casting director, and she said, “You need to read for this.” That was a Wednesday. Sunday came around, and I get a call and [my agent] said: “You’re getting on a plane tonight. Here’s 14 pages of dialogue. Here’s the first four episodes. You’re going to be on the very last row of a plane in the middle seat on a red eye, and you’re going to land in Charleston. The audition is right when you get off the plane.” And I did it, and the rest is history.How would you describe “Outer Banks” to someone who hasn’t seen it?If “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Scooby-Doo” had a baby, and that baby became best friends with “The Goonies.”Was there anything about John B. that you particularly related to?I feel like on the exterior, there are a lot of similarities. I grew up on the water; I grew up in Florida, about 30 minutes away from Cocoa Beach, so [I was familiar with] the surfing elements. I got my boater’s license before I got my driver’s license. I think one thing John B. goes through, especially in the third season, that I really related to was the anxiety of the world around him and the fear of failure. That’s something that I’ve kind of always felt, so we definitely share that.Among the pogues: from left, Stokes, Madelyn Cline and Carlacia Grant in the new season of “Outer Banks.”Jackson Lee Davis/NetflixWhen did you know the show was a hit?I think it was six months after the show came out when they finally told us we were going back for the second season. During Covid, seeing hundreds and hundreds of people show up to watch us film — that was when I think we started to put two and two together.They would follow our base camp. All of our trailers would set up in different areas of Charleston, and it would be like an alarm or a mass text would be sent out: You’d see people start to trickle in, and sometimes it’d be 20 people, sometimes it would be 2,000.Stokes describes “Outer Banks” as “if ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ and ‘Scooby-Doo’ had a baby, and that baby became best friends with ‘The Goonies.’”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesWhat have been some of your more interesting fan interactions?I’ve had people who’ve fainted in front of me, and we’ve had people who have cried. I’ve had people telling me that I saved their lives, which is always interesting, to know the show has helped people through a troubling time in human history. So the range of emotions is super vast, but all equally heartwarming.And now it’s really cool because the whole Charleston community has really accepted us, and you walk down the street or you go to a restaurant and people kind of give you a wink or a thumbs up.Are you going to the Poguelandia event?Of course.Where did the concert concept come from?We haven’t had a premiere; the show never had a red carpet. We’ve worked incredibly hard to create something the world has consumed at a really crazy rate, and obviously the platform sees it, and they wanted to congratulate us. I think it’s an ode to the show: The show is kind of a party; it’s kind of a riot. So why not throw a music festival?“Outer Banks” revolves largely around the class divide between the working-class pogues and the wealthy kooks. Is there a message in there about class discrimination?I think it’s a testament to how there has consistently been a class divide not just in this country, but in the world. And the lower class is going to fight tooth and nail to find a way to make an extra buck, and the upper class is going to find a way to save an extra couple thousand bucks. There’s a frustration that’s inevitably going to be there, and I think that’s the driving factor for the pogues. They’re right there, you know? They can see it. It’s so close to them, but they just can’t comprehend how to get there.The popularity of the show has led to many different kinds of fan interactions. “The range of emotions is super vast, but all equally heartwarming,” Stokes said.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesWhat does the show say about friendship?It’s every kid’s dream to have a group of friends who are going to ride or die and just go the distance with you, and these kids have grown up in an environment where they don’t have a lot. So they learn to do a lot with a little, and it’s a beautiful thing to see. I’m very proud and thankful to be part of a project that gives a true interpretation of friendship — not just the highs of it but also the lows and showing just as much love as when the wins come around.Has this friendship onscreen translated into one among the actors when the cameras are off?All of us came into the show with slim-pickings resumes. So to get into this and to feel like we need to create this truth and transparency through these characters, you sort of fall in love with one another and build this crazy camaraderie and chemistry.Do you think this friendship will carry beyond the show itself? How long do you think it will last?I hope forever. It’s been almost four years now, and I hope we do another 40. More

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    Review: In Eulalie Spence’s Harlem, the 1920s Come to Life

    “She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind,” three of Spence’s one-acts, packaged together at the Metropolitan Playhouse, are filled with gender and class politics.W.E.B. Du Bois and the playwright Eulalie Spence had their differences, foremost among them that Du Bois advocated evangelically political Black theater “by us, for us, about us, and near,” which she publicly disagreed with in a 1928 essay, insisting on the importance of theater as entertainment.“She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind,” an evening of three of Spence’s one-acts, directed by Timothy Johnson and presented by the Metropolitan Playhouse, serves as another rebuttal to Du Bois. Each roughly 30-minute work, a slice of Black life packed with gender and class politics, is either a minute comedy punctuated with a tragic denouement, or a tragic mini-drama that resolves with breezy humor.In the first, “The Starter,” a young Black couple try to figure out their future on a park bench only to find themselves at odds when the topics of money and marital duty enter the conversation. In “Hot Stuff,” a woman running a numbers operation is forced to pay up for her shady behavior. And in “The Hunch,” a naïve young woman finds out how much she’s gambling with her love life on the night before her wedding day.A cast of eight performs the plays — all set in 1920s Harlem, and snazzily costumed by Jevyn Nelms in tiered fringe skirts and raining pearls — on the Metropolitan’s tiny thrust stage. A framed painting of Harlem, as seen from overhead, with the view of the buildings overtaken by the treetops, is the stage backdrop (set design by Vincent Gunn). And later, a few antique pieces stand in for the sparse furnishings of a rented room in a boarding-house in one play and a gambler’s home in another. Which is to say there’s nothing showy about this production, which neatly ties the plays together thematically, each one spotlighting a Black woman forced to face her economic prospects (or lack thereof) while juggling the societal expectations that she be a well-kept, well-behaved married woman.Déja Denise Green, Raven Jeannette and Jazmyn D. Boone shine as the three featured women, Jeannette in particular bringing both a stiff-backed brazenness and pathos to her cheating and conniving Fanny King in “Hot Stuff” and a spurned wife named Lucinda in “The Hunch.”Johnson smartly double- or triple-casts most of the actors to show off their versatility, so Dontonio Demarco follows a brief appearance as an abusive husband with one as a gallant suitor, and Terrell Wheeler plays a man who is cheated, then a man who’s a cheat. SJ Hannah, on the other hand, serves two believable shades of sleaze, a mischievous joker’s grin stretched across his face the whole while. Not everyone gets top billing; Spence’s plays each have side characters that could be condensed, combined or cut.When it comes to Spence’s set-up and gradual build to her protagonists’ eventful though abbreviated arcs and final emotional turns — usually as understated as a glance and a sigh — the director often seems to be at a loss. The production misses some beats of slowness, stillness and silence, the steady escalation of tension and humor from one line to the next. And though the three plays are already in perfect conversation, Johnson makes an unnecessary show of connecting and introducing them with the cast humming, clapping and stomping to original a cappella music when a simple instrumental interlude would do.Du Bois may have wanted propaganda from his contemporaries on the stage, but Spence’s plays have a different — though still Black, still political — agenda in mind: the extraordinary, bittersweet every day of the people north of 110th Street.She’s Got Harlem on Her MindThrough March 12 at the Metropolitan Playhouse in Manhattan; metropolitanplayhouse.org. More

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    When ‘A Little Touch of Star Quality’ Is a Little Too Much

    In upcoming musical revivals, world leaders both real (Imelda Marcos, Eva Perón) and folkloric (King Arthur) get an image makeover they may not deserve.Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes?I don’t mean mere antiheroes like Billy Bigelow, the “Carousel” carnival barker who sings gloriously about love yet hits his wife. Or Joey Evans, that lowlife “pal,” whose bed-hopping grift is set to a sparkling Rodgers and Hart score. Or even Evan Hansen, lying his way to love as he catches your heart with the catch in his throat.They’re all pikers, their damage largely domestic.Sweeney Todd, the liberally neck-slashing barber, is more like it. Though most of Fleet Street has been minced by the time the curtain falls on the musical named for him, he gets some of Stephen Sondheim’s most gorgeous arias, including the sinuous “My Friends” (crooned to his razors) and the erotic “Pretty Women” (whispered in the ear of the judge he’s about to dispatch). That a penny dreadful character originally meant just to shock and sicken becomes instead a pitiable victim is a testament to the power of music to make bad guys, if not good, compelling.Still, in “Sweeney Todd,” which opens next month in a Broadway revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, the terror remains local because the barber has no leverage. In three other upcoming musical revivals — “Evita,” “Camelot” and “Here Lies Love” — the damage is done by people with real power. Their harm is political, epochal, even as the songs they sing, encouraging empathy that may not otherwise be earned, invite us to give them a pass.Michael Cerveris, center, as the demon barber of Fleet Street, and Patti LuPone as Mrs. Lovett, second from left, in a 2005 production of “Sweeney Todd” at the Eugene O’Neill Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesExploring the humanity in flawed characters was the premise of many Golden Age musicals, which leaves them open to challenge today. “Evita” is an extreme case. Tim Rice’s book and lyrics try to keep the sins of Eva Perón, the second wife of the Argentine strongman Juan, at an ironic remove, lest the show seem to endorse her fascist tendencies and demagogic élan. The words make plain, just shy of celebrating, her manipulative genius.But Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music works at cross purposes to that distancing effort. Though famously difficult to sing, the difficulty is exciting; it’s impossible not to be thrilled when a performer nails the treacherous downward arpeggios of “Buenos Aires” or the stratospheric belt of “A New Argentina.” And to the extent new productions mimic the chic of the 1979 Broadway premiere, “Evita” always seems to bank on the same “little touch of star quality” that the real Perón did.Whether that contradiction can be addressed within the confines of the musical as written remains to be seen. Sammi Cannold, whose staging for New York City Center’s 2019 gala provided more context for Perón’s ambition, seems poised to go even further in a production scheduled to run from May 14 through July 16 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. It’s promising that in a TED Talk about “Evita,” Cannold reflects on “the responsibility of the storyteller.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.More honored in the breach, that notion is part of what renders many Golden Age musicals so tricky today. Some of their unexamined assumptions — about race and gender and even the primacy of pleasurable song over political impact — have been revised or shot down in the intervening decades.One musical compromised in the process is “Camelot,” a romantic retelling of Arthurian legend that opened on Broadway in 1960. Its book, by Alan Jay Lerner, has always been considered clumsy and overlong; for Bartlett Sher’s Lincoln Center Theater revival, which begins performances on March 9, Aaron Sorkin has rewritten it.Though dialogue in “Camelot” explains why Arthur (Richard Burton in the original 1960 production) orders the execution of Guenevere (Julie Andrews), song makes him sympathetic, our critic writes.Pictorial Press Ltd./AlamyBut the score, with Lerner’s lyrics and Frederick Loewe’s music, was always able to compensate for the book’s shortcomings. Arthur’s utopian dreams were so perfectly captured in the title song that it became an emblem of the Kennedy era. The hauteur of his wife, Guenevere, and the egotism of her lover, Lancelot, were exposed and then exploded in torrents of rapturous balladry that swept away their faults.More recent concerns about the story may be more difficult to dismiss with mere melody. Indeed, melody can aggravate the problem. Though dialogue explains why Arthur behaves as he does — ordering his wife’s execution and destroying his country’s peace — song makes him sympathetic. Especially with a beloved score, the identification between audience and the characters is difficult to sever: We sing the songs in our heads as they sing them aloud.If it took six decades to see why that might be problematic for “Camelot,” just one has sufficed to raise similar questions about “Here Lies Love,” which sets the story of Imelda Marcos to a disco score by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. A success at the Public Theater in 2013, it is only now transferring to Broadway, where performances are scheduled to begin on June 17.The intervening years have altered the way we look at historical characters onstage, from Alexander Hamilton to Princess Diana. Marcos presents a particular problem, because she’s not yet historical: The country’s first lady from 1965 to 1986, she’s now, at 93, its first mother. (Her son, Ferdinand Jr., known as Bongbong, became president last June.) Whether merely supporting her husband’s dictatorship or more directly influencing and maintaining it, she was part of a regime accused of looting billions from the country’s treasury and eliminating its opponents.In telling the story of Imelda Marcos, a former first lady of the Philippines whose husband’s regime was accused of corruption, “Here Lies Love” takes lyrics from her own speeches and interviews.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNo wonder some Filipinos and Filipino Americans have objected to the way “Here Lies Love,” at least in the version seen at the Public, seems to sympathize with its main character. Sara Porkalob, who recently appeared on Broadway in “1776,” described the musical as painting “a glossy veneer over the Philippines’ national trauma and America’s role in it.”The show’s producers countered that “Here Lies Love” is “an Anti-Marcos show” that aims to fight disinformation with “a creative way of re-information.”But creative to what end? Though most of the show’s lyrics are taken from Marcos’s own speeches and interviews, phrases like “Why don’t you love me?” and “Is it a sin to care?” have a very different effect when merely spoken than when set to singalong melodies and danceable beats. Staging the production in what amounts to a discothèque further complicates the point of view. When song and dance bring so much pleasure, you may miss the atrocities as you’re doing the hustle.Perhaps that’s the point. As the musical has matured, artists have naturally sought to write about people who are more complicated than randy teenagers and frivolous socialites. Yet by applying the powerful tools of the form to darker and more dangerous figures, those figures are literally given greater voice, forcing us to consider the ways in which they are humans even if they may also be monsters.Does that mean whitewashing them? Obviously not; to describe domestic violence, as “Carousel” does, is not to endorse it. And yet seducing us into a kind of emotional complicity with powerful figures, especially real ones like Perón and Marcos, does have its dangers — dangers enhanced by the fundamental amorality of song, no matter what the words say.So when Evita, thrilling her public with diamonds and Dior, sings, “They must have excitement, and so must I,” it’s not that we risk forgiving her. It’s that we risk enjoying too much what we can’t forgive. More