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    Can ‘Miss Saigon’ Be Saved? Two British Shows Disagree.

    A revival reimagines the polarizing musical for the 21st century while a new show offers a bawdy riposte.“Miss Saigon” is back and so, inevitably, is the surrounding discourse.Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical melodrama about an ill-fated romance between a Vietnamese sex worker and an American G.I. during the Vietnam War has polarized opinion ever since it was first staged in 1989. In that original West End run, Jonathan Pryce donned yellowface to play a mixed-race pimp, and the show’s critics have continued to raise concerns about its portrayal of East Asian people, particularly its tawdry sexualization of Vietnamese women.So not everyone was pleased when the Crucible Theater in Sheffield, England, announced it would stage a new production of “Miss Saigon” this summer. A British East and Southeast Asian theater troupe pulled their own show from the playhouse in protest, saying the musical peddled “damaging tropes, misogyny and racism.”The boycott may have been unwarranted, however, as this new production — directed by Robert Hastie and Anthony Lau under the auspices of the acclaimed producer Cameron Mackintosh, and running through Aug. 19 — sets out to address those longstanding criticisms, reimagining the musical in line with 21st-century liberal sensibilities.The outline of the story, heavily inspired by Puccini’s 1904 opera “Madama Butterfly,” is largely unchanged. Chris (a compellingly lugubrious Christian Maynard) meets Kim (Jessica Lee) in a brothel and they fall in love, but their affair ends abruptly when the Americans withdraw from Saigon. Three years later, Chris, now married to an American woman, learns that he has a young son by Kim. Kim tragically takes her own life in order to ensure her child will be raised by his father in the United States, and thus have a better life than she can provide for him.But the play’s look and feel have changed. For starters, there’s the casting: The hitherto male role of the Engineer, the scheming pimp whose machinations provide much of the story’s motive force, is here played with a suitably brash, pantomimic vitality by Joanna Ampil, who played Kim in two 1990s runs at London’s Theater Royal Drury Lane; Chris and his wife, Ellen (Shanay Holmes), are played by Black, rather than white, actors. While this neatly sidesteps some of the baggage associated with Chris being a “white savior,” it does feel a little gimmicky, since what really matters to the plot is his American passport.Shanay Holmes and Christian Maynard in “Miss Saigon.”Johan PerssonMore significantly, Ben Stones’s splendid set design eschews the hackneyed visual imagery associated with this show. The action plays out around an imposing industrial staircase set against a large, dark gray metal screen cut with a geometric pattern, a forbidding backdrop evoking a decidedly unsentimental urban landscape, which is a far cry from the idyllic visions of rural bamboo huts often seen in “Miss Saigon” productions.Lee excels as Kim, rendering her with a dignified stoicism that imbues her sorrowful ballads with pathos — despite the music being objectively corny. Neither she nor her supporting ensemble in the brothel are overtly sexualized: they are just people, doing what they must to survive.The directors Hastie and Lau have argued the case for “reshaping and transforming” problematic narratives rather than doing away with them entirely, and with some tweaks to the script, made with Schönberg’s blessing, they have succeeded in creating a relatively tasteful and humane version of this perennially contentious musical.Yet it’s hard to shake the suspicion that Orientalist kitsch was integral to the shows’s commercial appeal. Remove the defamiliarizing frisson of the exotic and you have, essentially, a love triangle with an immigration paperwork angle. It’s still a heart-rending tale, but is it as much of a spectacle?Forty miles down the road, audiences in Manchester have been enjoying “Untitled F*ck M*ss S**gon Play,” which runs at the the Royal Exchange Theater through July 22 as part of the Manchester International Festival before transferring to London’s Young Vic in September, and is every bit as irreverent as its title suggests.Written by the New York-based dramatist Kimber Lee and directed by Roy Alexander Weise, it features a succession of mordant sendups of the “Madama Butterfly” and “Miss Saigon” narrative arc, in which several iterations of the Kim character (Mei Mac) repeatedly endure the same ill-treatment at the hands of a would-be white savior (Tom Weston-Jones) while a narrator (Rochelle Rose) provides knowingly wry commentary.The series of sketches begin in 1906 (the year “Madama Butterfly” premiered in New York) and ends in mid-’70s Vietnam (the setting for “Miss Saigon”), with pop-cultural touchstones along the way including the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific” and the TV series “M*A*S*H.”It’s a bawdy and playful pastiche, with the Orientalist elements hammed up for comic effect, in Kim’s ludicrously doll-like passivity and the generic “hut-like dwelling” in which the romance unfolds: “The whole place looks like Pier 1 and Cost Plus had a three-way with Ikea and this hut is their bastard mixed-race child,” the narrator quips.Kim’s American lover speaks to her in a nonsensical language made up of assorted Asian words — bulgogi, sashimi, onigiri — which the narrator translates into English, a pointed callback to the use of gobbledygook in lieu of Vietnamese in productions of “Miss Saigon” from the 1990s.Things take an autofictional turn when the setting shifts to a dinner party in present-day New York. Kim is now a struggling playwright burdened by a sense of responsibility to push back against decades of racially offensive caricatures on stage and screen. At this point the fun fizzles out somewhat, giving way to essayistic soul-searching.Kim’s mother, Rosie (Lourdes Faberes), delivers an impassioned monologue on behalf of first-generation immigrants, explaining that insensitive representations were something they had to take in their stride. She would like her daughter to be less zealous, and just live her life. A friend implores Kim to make peace with the past, reminding her that American society has come a long way: “We could stop here. We could stay here. It’s not so bad, is it?”It’s a vibrant, funny and intelligent show, but that loss of momentum in the latter stages exposes the limitations of activist theater in which the primary creative impulse is corrective: Once you’ve made your point, there is nowhere left to go.In this regard, “Untitled F*ck M*ss S**gon Play” shares similarities with the new “Miss Saigon,” a show whose moral and aesthetic merit derives primarily from what it omits — the offensive caricature, the crass fetishism — rather than what it contains.These productions function as valuable cultural palate cleansers. But the drive to sanitize problematic content is, ultimately, a matter of commercial self-preservation: Juggernaut brands like “Miss Saigon” are too lucrative to be allowed to die.Having outlived its relevance, the musical is doomed to an afterlife of well-meaning but slightly anodyne remakes as it slowly, inexorably fades into oblivion. More

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    Artistic Director of HERE to Depart After 30 Years

    “I’m not retiring,” Kristin Marting said about her decision to leave the cross-genre avant-garde company next June.Kristin Marting, the founding artistic director of HERE, wanted to make something clear in announcing her departure from the avant-garde Off Off Broadway theater after 30 years.“I’m not retiring,” she said in an interview last week.“I’ve had my opportunity as a white woman leader to put my stamp and perspective on HERE and on the work that we do,” she said. “So it just feels like the right time for me to make space for what that new vision is.”Exactly what that new vision will be is unclear for now: a successor will be named at a later date and Marting, 56, will program one final season before stepping down next June.HERE, a genre-bending arts center that commissions, produces and presents the work of multidisciplinary artists, was founded in 1993 when Marting and three colleagues (Tim Maner, Barbara Busackino and Randy Rollison) sought a permanent home for their companies of young directors: the Tiny Mythic Theater Company and Home for Contemporary Theater and Art. So they found a 13,000-square-foot raw space, borrowed a bunch of money, recruited volunteers to help build it out and rented a Ferris wheel for their opening performance.“We were just crazy ambitious, naïve, and we were just like, we’re going for it,” she said.The hustle paid off. HERE has not only managed to survive economic downturns, but in 2005, after renting for more than a decade, HERE also bought its space — a former mattress store-turned storage facility south of Houston Street and west of Avenue of the Americas.The arts center, which operates as a company, producer and incubator in addition to being a rental house, has presented critically adored hits, including “The Vagina Monologues” by Eve Ensler, now known as V; Taylor Mac’s “The Lily’s Revenge”; Young Jean Lee’s “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven”; and Basil Twist’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” “Risk-taking is at the center of our curatorial process,” Marting said, “it has always been at the core of what we’re doing and hasn’t changed in any way.”During Marting’s tenure, HERE co-founded the experimental opera-focused Prototype Festival with Beth Morrison Projects, and Marting will remain a co-curator of that festival. She also started a residency program, which offers mentorship, financial backing and other support to theater, dance, music, puppetry, visual art and new media artists. In recent years, HERE has also created a self-care fund for workers whose disciplines are not covered by unions, instituted a five-day workweek (the theater industry standard is six), and implemented an eight-hour workday for technical rehearsals (referred to as “10 out of 12s” for traditionally 12-hour days with two hours off, contractually permitted by the Actors’ Equity Association).For Marting’s final season, HERE will present a lineup of women-led productions: Normandy Sherwood’s “Psychic Self Defense” (Sept. 12-30), a work of object-theater-puppetry in which a curtain is repeatedly lowered and raised; Heather Christian’s “Terce” (Jan. 10 to Feb. 4), a religious mass with a chorus of 36 women singing rock, gospel and a cappella harmonies; and Nia Witherspoon’s “Priestess of Twerk” (April 3-27), a performance work contemplating bodily autonomy.What’s next for Marting, a multidisciplinary artist herself? She plans to continue directing (including an interactive opera about a modern-day Joan of Arc), and to “say yes more than I’ve been able to,” she said.As for her legacy, Marting said she hopes to leave behind “a philosophy that is about artists at the center of the process.”“If artists are given what they think they need to make their best work, they’ll make their best work,” she said. “They can tell us best what their work needs to be magical.” More

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    Julie Halston on Playing Bitsy von Muffling in “And Just Like That”

    Few “And Just Like That” characters have evoked the delightful candor of Samantha Jones the way Bitsy von Muffling, played by Julie Halston, has.Julie Halston knows her socialites. The stage and screen actress ticked off names including Nan Kempner, Judith Peabody, Muffie Potter Aston and Beth Rudin DeWoody while discussing her reprisal of Bitsy von Muffling, a chirpy lady who lunches, in “And Just Like That,” the “Sex and The City” reboot.“Let’s face facts: There will always be the three-name socialite!” Ms. Halston, 68, said on a video call on July 12.Though Bitsy did not appear in “Sex and The City” until the show’s fifth season, she has intermittently been in “And Just Like That” from the very beginning. In the first episode of Season 1, Bitsy runs into Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), and asks them the question on countless minds: “Where’s Samantha?”She was referring, of course, to Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), whose absence has loomed large over the series’ first and second seasons. Last month, Max, the streaming service that airs “And Just Like That,” confirmed Ms. Cattrall will make a brief appearance before Season 2 ends on August 24.Though several new characters have effectively replaced Samantha in “And Just Like That,” few have lately channeled her delightful candor about sex, cosmetic surgery and aging fabulously the way Bitsy has.In Season 2, after running into Carrie at a salon, Bitsy tells her about the healing power a face-lift can offer a widow, explaining that few things felt as good as spending six figures on a procedure after the death of her husband, Bobby Fine (Nathan Lane), a lounge singer widely understood to be gay.Bitsy later tries to impress a potential suitor upon Carrie by sending her a picture of his penis.“When you think about it, yeah, that’s kind of there,” Ms. Halston said of the parallel between Bitsy and Samantha, which also extends to clothes. Like Samantha, Bitsy often appears in bright colors (a hot pink jacket by Thierry Mugler) and bold prints (a kaleidoscopic Pucci top) that add to her effervescence onscreen.In an interview from her home in Brooklyn, Ms. Halston spoke to The New York Times about that picture; her relationship with Michael Patrick King, the showrunner of “And Just Like That” and a “Sex and The City” executive producer; and how the 2018 death of her husband, the radio anchor Ralph Howard, influenced her reprisal of Bitsy.The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed.In Season 2 of “And Just Like That,” Bitsy, right, talks frankly with Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) about plastic surgery and sex.MaxHow did the role of Bitsy originate?Michael Patrick King had been a big fan of me and Charles Busch and our company Theatre-in-Limbo for many years. Then in 2001, he saw me in “The Women” on Broadway with Cynthia Nixon. Michael said, “I’m going to write something for you,” and I thought “Yeah, right, OK.” I auditioned for “Sex and The City” a few times and did not get it. One part was a therapist, one was like a Marianne Williamson type — a healer, “A Course in Miracles” kind of thing. Michael kept saying, “One of these days.”A couple years later, Bitsy was born, along with Nathan Lane’s character. People were really excited about this woman who was older, who married a gay man, knowing he was gay. That didn’t matter. He adored her; she adored him. I think that really resonated with a lot of people.Like Bitsy, you lost your husband, so the conversation with Carrie about grief at the salon presumably came from something of a real place.It will be five years this August. Michael knew a lot of what I had gone through, and he’s a smart fellow. He also wanted Bitsy to be a little more than just a funny lady wearing fun clothes, skipping in and out of the girls’ lives. What she said to Carrie — “The hole never fills, but new life will grow around it” — is totally true. It is awful. And you do have to fake it sometimes.Then, a few scenes later, Bitsy sends Carrie the penis picture while Gloria Steinem is speaking. What range!I would totally do that. Bitsy is not trying to be crass and horrible. She has slept with this guy, and now, she’s passing him on to Carrie. She’s doing a mitzvah for her. “Get out in the world. You need to get laid” is what she is saying. That’s very Julie and very Bitsy. Sexual health and sexual satisfaction are what I want more women to be about. I’m telling you, there would be a lot fewer wars in the world if people were more sexually satisfied.Do you also share Bitsy’s appreciation for plastic surgery?I do Botox, which I need right now. Dr. Douglas Steinbrech is how I prep for the role. It’s funny, but it’s the truth!As someone who appeared with the original cast in “Sex and the City,” how do you feel about the news that Samantha will make an appearance in “And Just Like That?”I’m sure there were so many people wanting to know something about her story line. I’m speculating, but maybe the creators thought, “Why don’t we just address this?” I’m not being coy. I honestly know nothing. I know what everyone else knows. Nothing. More

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    Book Review: ‘Encounterism,’ by Andy Field

    Conceived before the pandemic, Andy Field’s ode to sharing space in person glosses over the ways our everyday habits seem to have changed for good.ENCOUNTERISM: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person, by Andy FieldIt has been shockingly easy, hasn’t it, to fall out of the habit of being with other humans. All it took was one world-stopping pandemic that demanded we keep our distance from one another, and taught us to use technology to maintain that separation for months on end.At home with our screens, we have yet to bounce back from that disruption, yet to readopt old habits like commuting to the office or watching movies at the multiplex. If recent trends in bad behavior are any indication, we may also have yet to relearn the skill set of coexistence — like how not to throw hard objects at musicians during their live shows, even if it makes for eye-grabbing video.Into this precarious state of affairs steps “Encounterism: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person,” an argument by the British artist Andy Field for venturing out among the populace. To him, our most ordinary sidewalk interactions can be imbued with “friction and possibility … anxiety and joy.” These are little pockets of opportunity where compassion might grow.“What do we lose when we stop inhabiting the streets of our towns and cities?” he asks. “What understanding of the world, and of each other, are we depriving ourselves of as we spend less and less time in proximity to all these strangers and their lives that are so very different from our own?” In an author’s note, Field says right up front that the idea for “Encounterism” came before the coronavirus pandemic, not in response to it, and that he wrote much of the book during “the caesura it created.” That goes some way toward explaining why its chapters — essays, essentially — so often feel trapped in amber, describing realities of another time, as if no paradigms had shifted. It might also explain why the book so frequently relies on research that a person could do from home, though its premise suggests what a limited portal to understanding that can be. (Granted, I am a journalist, and I cover theater. I believe in showing up.)Field’s most vivid, potent writing channels the sensations of physical immersion in activities he clearly cherishes — like dancing in clubs, which he believes nurtures empathy among strangers finding a collective rhythm in the dark, or sitting in a crowded movie theater, navigating a shared experience with a laughing, shushing, crying, shrieking audience: “We hold each other tightly until the moment the lights come up, and then we all go our separate ways.” But Field’s opening chapter — an intended homage to the tactile care that hairdressers provide, and a nod to its absence when salons were closed — reads like a performance of appreciation rather than the genuine article. And a chapter on shared meals strains to convey the significance of everyday dinners, unmindful of the sacred longing that those simple social rituals took on early in the pandemic, when people could not eat together.This is the dissonance that trails us through the book, nagging all the way. Field makes theater and performance art, and he tells some entertaining stories about his offbeat career. (One involves a stranger, whom he was attempting to feed as part of an experimental piece, biting him hard enough to leave a bruise.) But he barely mentions what it meant for his creative work — so dependent on up-close, in-person presence, and often involving travel — to go remote.It isn’t that the memories don’t belong; it’s that the changes do, too, as do the insights that they brought. The best part of Field’s chapter on city parks is about the community he has found in the London green space where he walks his dog, and how vital that place became to him in 2020 and 2021, when people were often forbidden to meet inside.Even so, Field never truly gets at the fundamental, tangible value of being present, bodily, with our fellow human beings. Not until the lovely final chapter, on the pleasure of hand-holding, does he very briefly mention one of the most excruciating privations of the early pandemic: the inability of people to be with their loved ones, holding hands at a deathbed.But the book doesn’t plumb the desperation so many felt for in-person contact: to hug and touch one another; to sniff a new baby’s head; to gauge someone’s well-being in 360 degrees and three dimensions, unconstricted by the frame of a video screen.We have those multisensory joys back — yet whole in-person art forms (hello, theater) are mired in financial crisis because the audiences that have returned are just too small. Such a fragile moment cries out for a ferociously persuasive argument for engaging with the world in person, not through our screens.The epigraph of “Encounterism,” a quotation from the French novelist and essayist Georges Perec, is about questioning “the habitual.” But our habits are not what they were only a handful of years ago. Far better to register what’s habitual now and examine that.Laura Collins-Hughes, a freelance journalist, writes about theater for The Times.ENCOUNTERISM: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person | By Andy Field | 288 pp. | W.W. Norton & Company | Paperback, $17.95 More

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    In ‘Secret Invasion,’ Ben Mendelsohn Faces a Turning Point

    In an interview, the Australian actor discusses his character’s big moment in the most recent episode and his role as ally to Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury.This article includes spoilers for the fourth episode of “Secret Invasion.”At one point while on set for the latest Marvel TV show “Secret Invasion,” Ben Mendelsohn and Samuel L. Jackson broke into song.They had both taken a break from filming to listen to some tunes, and when “Poison Ivy” by the Coasters came on they began belting out the lyrics.“I’ll get the occasional word wrong, but Sam’s all over it,” Ben Mendelsohn, 54, said in an interview last week.It’s Mendelsohn’s interactions with Jackson onscreen — their two characters squabble like decades-long lovers as they attempt to stave off World War III — that energize this latest installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.Jackson’s character, the grizzled superspy Nick Fury, has been around since before Tony Stark was Iron Man. In “Secret Invasion,” he’s back to his old pastime of saving planet Earth — this time from an invasion of shape-shifting aliens called Skrulls — but after a hiatus in space, he seems slightly off kilter, slower and less formidable.And so it is Mendelsohn’s character Talos, a Skrull general, who steps in to help — just as he’s been doing for decades, as he reminds Fury: “Your life got a hell of a lot more charmed once I came into it.” It thus feels fitting, though no less upsetting for fans, that Episode 4 ends with Talos sacrificing his life to help Fury complete one more mission.This is Mendelsohn’s third appearance in a Marvel production, after his character’s introduction in “Captain Marvel” and a brief cameo in “Spider-Man: Far From Home.” Now, the Australian actor is relishing the chance to be part of a show full of what he calls “old-fashioned Cold War thriller stuff.”Mendelsohn gained recognition in the United States for his role in the Australian crime drama film “Animal Kingdom,” and he later starred in the Netflix show “Bloodline,” which premiered in 2015. Born in Melbourne, he first got into acting by starring in school plays and memorizing every line from the movie, “Taxi Driver.”“Once I got bitten by that bug, I didn’t look back,” he said.Not long after the premiere of last week’s pivotal episode, Mendelsohn spoke about his role, his character’s relationship with Nick Fury and whether Talos is truly dead. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Mendelsohn’s character, Talos, seemingly sacrificed himself to help Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury complete one more mission.Des Willie/MarvelSo far Marvel’s TV series have taken different forms and explored a variety of issues. What are some of the key themes of this one?I think there is a lot to do with trust and secrecy. I think there’s a certain theme of mutability. You could take that on the obvious level with the whole Skrull-y thing, but I also think it’s about the mutability of where someone is in their life. When I think about the show I think about it through the Nick Fury lens. I’ve always looked at it very much as Sam’s piece. One of the real delights for me is that this relationship morphed between these two characters, which was not there from Day Zero. What I really love is how different Fury is, how different the world is post Infinity Gauntlet and what that does to loyalty. Because loyalty without stress or duress doesn’t mean anything.How has the relationship between Talos and Fury evolved, starting from “Captain Marvel”? At one point, Talos was impersonating Fury, right?Yeah that was such a genius flip from Marvel to have Fury [in “Spider-Man: Far From Home”] be Talos the entire time. Ostensibly the two characters start out as enemies. And what we come to learn is how incredibly loyal Talos is to Fury. What we learn is that Fury owes his entire je ne sais quoi to these creatures. And if you want to think about how deeply Marvel can flip stuff on its head, they’ve taken what were the surf Nazi punks of the Marvel world and turned them into the incredibly effective ally of the humans.Do you think Talos is too optimistic about the humans and the Skrull coexisting?If you keep boiling the argument down, Talos’s argument is really the only one that stands. Because if you take the Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) kind of perspective and you go for domination, there is one thing that Talos correctly surmises: You will not beat them. It’s their spot, and they have already shown that they can be incredibly effective at wiping out enormous numbers of beings. And so while you can look at what G’iah (Emilia Clarke) is going through and understand Gravik’s frustration, it’s similar to the frustrations that we’ve seen play out locally elsewhere. And you might well say, “OK, yeah that’s right. Go for it and go for it now.” But it’s reckless, destructive. And it’s immature both ideologically and in a realpolitik sense. So as idealistic as Talos may appear to be, he is really the only one with the genuine experience and genuine ability to call it. This is not a zero-sum game for humans and Skrull.Given how this episode started, with the big reveal about G’iah’s still being alive, is Talos really dead? Should we expect some kind of regeneration later on?Well to answer that would be to be an enemy of what I do. My greatest loyalty is always to the audience, and I try not to undermine that in any way, shape, or form. But I can definitely tell you Talos’s death is a turning point.Mendelsohn with Emilia Clarke in “Secret Invasion.” “The great strength of the studio is that they play what-if for real,” he said of Marvel.Des Willie/MarvelWhat has it been like to interact with Jackson both on-set and off?The best things that were brought to this relationship onscreen were brought by Sam. Sam’s the reason for the Skrull kiss at the very first time we see them together. It’s Sam who really brings the template in the train scene that allows me to react off and against them. Sam and I have been able to work together because we don’t take it too seriously. But we also try not to half-step. And the reason I look through the lens of Sam a.k.a. Nick Fury is because I come at it as a guy who watched “Jungle Fever” and just went crazy.I think a lot of fans are wondering: What’s the significance of the Skrull in the overarching narrative arc of the MCU?Ever since they’ve been introduced and utilized well, they do present an ever-present threat. Because how do you know? That’s one of the great things about “Secret Invasion.” “Civil War” also has that flavor. It’s just like, Who is who here?The great strength of the studio is that they play what-if for real; they don’t play what-if as an entertaining byline. They play it for real and keep integrating it. Once they have an event for “Secret Invasion,” you can’t un-have it.While I was watching the show there was a point where I wondered if Fury was going to change into a Skrull halfway through?Well, keep watching. Fury is more connected to the Skrull than any other human is. More

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    ‘Justified: City Primeval’ Review: Raylan Is Back

    Timothy Olyphant returns in a sequel to the Kentucky crime drama “Justified,” and he’s still the coolest lawman in town, even if the town is now Detroit.Eight years after he walked — gingerly, warily, every joint bent at some odd angle — into the sunset on “Justified,” Timothy Olyphant returns on Tuesday in “Justified: City Primeval,” FX’s one-off, eight-episode sequel to its hit hillbilly noir. “Justified” was one of the most entertaining television shows of the last few decades largely because of Olyphant’s cagey, obliquely sexy portrayal of Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, a fantasy of a frontier lawman, simmering but sensitive, equally quick with a gun or a pithy comeback.Olyphant does not miss a single syncopated beat in “City Primeval,” which is based on the novel of the same name by Elmore Leonard, who created Givens and traced his career in a handful of books and stories. The character has left the page and become completely Olyphant’s. It’s a wonderfully economic performance, all slouch and sloe eyes, offering a moral thermometer of the fallen world through which Raylan moves via Olyphant’s sly repertoire of expressions: grin, smirk, smile, hard stare, blank bemusement.Onscreen, Raylan has aged more than eight years — he now has a teenage daughter, Willa (played by Olyphant’s daughter Vivian Olyphant), who was a baby when “Justified” ended. Caustic, character-defining references are made to his advanced years: Chasing bad guys at his age means he’s been passed over or he loves it too much; a retired cop tells him, “You remind me of me, man, when I started out. Except you’re old.” These comments create some cognitive dissonance, because Olyphant, despite some gray hair, doesn’t come off as a day older. That could be seen as a lapse in his performance, but come on. We all know what we’re here for.And it’s a good thing original Raylan is still there. Because despite the work of a number of the old “Justified” crew, including the writer-producers Dave Andron and Michael Dinner, and an accomplished new cast, “City Primeval” — though handsomely filmed, well acted and ample in its emotions and its violent action — feels, ultimately, like a simulacrum. The body looks good, but a large part of the soul is missing.In considering why, it’s hard to avoid the fact that Raylan Givens does not appear in the novel on which the mini-series is based — he’s been shoehorned into another cop’s story. (The original protagonist, played by Paul Calderón, gets a short, awkward walk-on.) He’s also been taken out of the Kentucky landscape that was essential to “Justified” and sent on a road trip to Detroit, where he’s now an unwanted outsider rather than a prodigal son.The change of scenery is fine in theory, but it doesn’t produce much. There are artful backdrops of urban decay, congruent with the rural poverty in “Justified,” and the largely Black cast of characters deals with injustices that parallel the hardships of the original show’s poor whites. But those elements feel obligatory — they come to life only here and there, usually in scenes involving Aunjanue Ellis as a lawyer whose life becomes entwined with Raylan’s.And while the plotting of “Justified” was always complicated — a slow build of coincidences, missed connections, bad decisions and murderous eruptions that provided a broad canvas for human weakness and duplicity — in “City Primeval,” the complications feel forced, and there isn’t the same satisfaction when the pieces click into place.Olyphant’s daughter Vivian plays Raylan’s daughter in the new series.Chuck Hodes/FXThe mechanisms by which Raylan and Willa end up in Detroit, and by which Raylan is pulled into the investigation of the killing of a judge, are murky and arbitrary. There’s no good reason for Raylan to be in this story beyond the demand for a sequel, and you can feel the writers straining with the effort of putting him there. Characters drift in and out, or disappear altogether (while still alive). A crew of Albanian gangsters, on hand for local color, conveniently drop out of the action just when you’re thinking, “They could wrap this all up in another 20 minutes.”All along, though, there are reasons to watch. Some simply have to do with the preservation of moods and motifs from the original series, but some are new. One of those is the father-daughter relationship: Willa feels abandoned because of Raylan’s devotion to his job, and the Olyphants nicely render the crossroads of brazen but sorrowful teenage manipulation and agonizing parental guilt. (This section of the story is oddly truncated, though, another instance of haphazard storytelling.)There are also excellent performers everywhere you look: Ellis; Vondie Curtis-Hall as a bar owner who used to be a musician; Norbert Leo Butz, Marin Ireland and Victor Williams as Detroit cops; Adelaide Clemens as the designated seductress. Boyd Holbrook of “Narcos” is smoothly menacing as the big bad: a talkative sociopath in the mold of Boyd Crowder from “Justified,” though you can’t help comparing him unfavorably with Walton Goggins, the man who played Boyd. David Cross turns in an amusing cameo as a wealthy mark. Terry Kinney is likable, as always, but not entirely convincing as an Albanian mob boss.“City Primeval” gets off to an entertaining but confusing start — the first episode is better on a second viewing — and generates enough of the “Justified” brew of eccentricity, off-kilter humor and underplayed suspense to hold interest through a few episodes, before the plot runs out of gas and the malaise sets in. Then a funny thing happens: After the Detroit story is resolved, there’s an epilogue that takes place in a world where we, and presumably the show’s creators, would much rather be. At that point, revealed as the place holder it was all along, “City Primeval” drops right out of your memory. More

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    Movie Stars and Broadway Veterans Share Theater Camp Memories

    In honor of “Theater Camp,” a new movie about a fictional sleepaway site, we asked Broadway veterans and movie stars for their favorite camp memories.Molly Gordon and Ben Platt met as children at the Adderley School, a theater studio in Los Angeles that runs after-school programs and summer day camps. There are photos and home videos of them starring opposite each other in some very grown-up shows like “Chicago” and “Damn Yankees.” Two decades later — with the help of the actor-writer Noah Galvin, Platt’s fiancé, and the writer-director Nick Lieberman — they have spun those memories of wonky vibrato, stumbling choreography and an ardent sense of belonging into the feature comedy “Theater Camp,” opening Friday.Set at the financially rickety establishment of the title, the film bounces among campers and counselors in upstate New York as they work on an ambitious slate of productions: “Cats,” “Damn Yankees,” “The Crucible Jr.” and “Joan Still,” an original musical inspired by the camp’s comatose founder (Amy Sedaris). The movie began as a 2017 short, and after a yearslong struggle for financing (“We wanted to make a mostly improvised movie with children; a lot of people were not down for that,” Gordon said), it was shot last summer in 19 frantic days at an abandoned camp in Warwick, N.Y.Full of in-jokes (campers barter for bags of Throat Coat tea like they are Schedule I drugs), the movie is also a hymn to all of the outcasts and square pegs who finally find acceptance in a kick line. Theater camp is, as a closing ballad explains, “where every kid picked last in gym finally makes the team.”Over the years, theater camps around the country have yielded a rich crop of Broadway stars, composers and directors. The movie’s creators and a handful of Broadway veterans who credit camp with shaping their careers spoke with me about community, stage kisses and the transformative effects of “Free to Be You and Me.” These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Gordon and Platt in the movie. “I was just a crazy wild child and so excited to be in that environment,” Gordon said about her childhood camp experience.Searchlight PicturesMolly GordonActress (“Booksmart,” “The Bear”)Camps: The Adderley School, French Woods, Stagedoor ManorMemories: At sleepaway camp, I was never a lead. I was always in the chorus — “Zombie Prom,” “West Side Story,” “Chicago.” But I absolutely adored it. I had the classic experience. I could eat all the sugar I wanted. I got to be in completely age-inappropriate shows. I kissed two guys who told me that they were gay the next day. I was just a crazy wild child and so excited to be in that environment.Ben PlattActor (“Parade,” “Dear Evan Hansen”)Camp: The Adderley SchoolMemories: There’s an independence. You’re forced away from your parents, and you are having to risk embarrassing yourself; you throw yourself into things and fall on your face. It’s healthy failure. For queer kids, like me, it was where I was the most completely embraced, not having to fit a box or semi-pretend to be enjoying certain things. At day camp at Adderley, Molly and I were Adelaide and Sky in “Guys and Dolls.” We were Lola and Joe in “Damn Yankees.” We were Roxie and Billy Flynn in “Chicago.” We were Tracy and Link in “Hairspray.” I was pretty much the queerest Link Larkin. Molly, one of her first kisses was our kiss in that.Noah GalvinActor (“The Good Doctor,” “Dear Evan Hansen”)Camps: Northern Westchester Center for the ArtsMemories: My first play was “Charlotte’s Web.” My mom tells this really disturbing story of me coming onstage as the gander with my script in my hand, because I was so nervous about forgetting my lines. My mom was like, “I’m not certain that he’s cut out for this.” But it teaches you agency as a young person; it gives you real independence, emotionally and physically. There were kids of all shapes and sizes and gender expressions. I walked into a space and there were 120 like-minded individuals who all want to do “Anything Goes.”Jason Robert BrownComposer (“Parade,” “13”)Camp: French WoodsMemories: I went in thinking I was an actor, but I was also in the rock bands and jazz bands. Fortunately for everyone, actor guy has gone away. I was Pirelli in “Sweeney Todd” and Charley in “Merrily We Roll Along.” In a role I truly should never have been doing, I sang “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in “Cabaret.” I was able to see this whole world of work. I’m not a happy-ending guy. And if all you see are the most popular shows, you might feel like that’s all there is. Because I got to do all this material that was darker than that, that was stranger than that, I got to say, “Oh, there is a place for the thing I want to do.”From left, Andréa Burns, Karen Olivo, Janet Dacal and Mandy Gonzalez, seated, in “In the Heights” on Broadway. Burns grew up going to the French Woods theater camp.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAndréa BurnsActress (“In the Heights”)Camp: French WoodsMemories: It was a miracle. In my own school, I was the only person who really liked theater. Going to this wonderland, where I met other kids who loved this as much as I did gave me a true sense of belonging. I played Sally Bowles in “Cabaret” and Aldonza in “Man of La Mancha” the same summer. I was 14, singing “Aldonza the Whore” and talking about sleeping around. The way we would root for one another, it was such a joyful experience. Being inspired by the gifts of my peers drove me to work harder. I discovered true happiness in that atmosphere of collaboration and growth. Quite honestly, I’ve been chasing that feeling my entire professional life.Celia Keenan-BolgerActress (“To Kill a Mockingbird”)Camp: Interlochen Arts CampMemories: I felt like I had landed in some sort of magical world. We were all talking about what our favorite Sondheim musical was instead of what was playing on the radio. The thing that has kept me in the theater for so long is that sense of belonging. I felt the most like myself when I was at camp. This feeling of wanting to do musicals was something that always felt singular and a little bit lonely, growing up, and then to be with all of these people who were so talented and loved it as much as I did, something clicked into place. Camp made me feel like, “Oh, this could be my profession.”Rachel Chavkin winning the Tony for best direction for “Hadestown.” She went to Stagedoor Manor as a child.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRachel ChavkinDirector (“The Thanksgiving Play,” “Hadestown”)Camp: Stagedoor ManorMemories: I did “The Cell,” where I played a nun who murders a bird or a child or both. I did Arthur Miller’s “Playing for Time.” I played the lead in “Ruthless!” and the evil mother in “Blood Brothers.” We did “Our Town,” and I played the stage manager. A huge profound thing about Stagedoor was it was filled with people who were alienated in their home schools. For queerness of all kinds, it was a haven. And as ambivalent as I am about the strange status games at Stagedoor, I don’t think I would be in theater without it. It nurtured my curiosity. And it began to teach me about taste. I showed up to college a year after leaving Stagedoor and saw my first Wooster Group show, and I was like, “I never want to see another musical again.”Jeanine TesoriComposer (“Kimberly Akimbo,” “Fun Home”)Camp: Stagedoor ManorMemories: I didn’t even know what theater was until I was 18. But it all started at Stagedoor for me. I was a music director and a counselor. I music-directed “Free to Be You and Me.” My friend was directing it, and she wanted new material and that was the first song I ever wrote. I immediately thought, “Oh, this is the missing piece for me.” At that point, I was still a pre-med major at Barnard. After that summer, I did the music major at Columbia. I did that because of Stagedoor. It was just a ticket to a whole different world. More

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    Why Basketball Is So Popular Off Broadway

    Basketball is central to the plot in new shows, including “Flex” and “The Half-God of Rainfall.”In Inua Ellams’s new play, “The Half-God of Rainfall,” the gods play thunderous games of basketball in the heavens. For Candrice Jones’s “Flex,” high schoolers practice their defensive stances while scraping by in rural Arkansas. Near the end of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” the two main characters play a one-on-one game of basketball using a crumpled up piece of paper after waxing poetic about the greatness of the N.B.A. star LeBron James.Basketball hasn’t just been on the playgrounds of New York City this summer. Hoop dreams are also playing out onstage, highlighting a theater, ahem, crossover that has become more pronounced in recent years.While basketball is not as popular as, say, American football, its cultural reach surpasses that of other American team sports because its players are among the most publicly recognizable. (Three of the 10 highest-paid athletes in the world, when including endorsements and other off-field endeavors, according to Forbes, are N.B.A. players.)“Watching a basketball game is the same excitement I get from watching great theater,” said Taibi Magar, the director of “The Half-God of Rainfall.” “It’s like embodied conflict. It’s executed by highly skilled performers. When you’re watching Broadway, you feel just like you’re watching N.B.A. performers.”For Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, basketball is the most culturally important sport partly because so many international stars play in the N.B.A., like the Denver Nuggets’s Nikola Jokic, who is Serbian, and the Milwaukee Bucks’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, who’s from Greece.“It’s drawing from every place on the planet, which means that the sport has become a really important athletic pursuit globally,” said Joseph, whose play “King James” just ended its run at New York City Center.In Inua Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” at New York Theater Workshop, Demi (played by Mister Fitzgerald) is a half-Greek god who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd basketball’s prevalence in pop culture — including in the worlds of hip-hop and fashion and more recently in film and television — has also penetrated the theater space. Dwyane Wade, who retired from the N.B.A. in 2019, was among the producers of the Broadway shows “American Son” and “Ain’t No Mo’.”“Even if one hasn’t played on a team or hasn’t played organized ball, we all have access to basketball,” Jones, who wrote “Flex,” said in a recent interview. “You go in any hood or any small town, someone has created a basketball goal.”In casting “Flex,” which is in previews at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, prospective actors recorded themselves playing basketball as part of the audition process. Jones and the show’s director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, who both played basketball in high school, said they wanted the basketball being played onstage to look authentic.“People have different styles, different ways of shooting, different personalities, different kinds of swagger,” Blain-Cruz said. “We care about the individual in the role that they play and how they’re playing it. And I think that aligns itself to theater.”Jones’s play, set in rural Arkansas, tells the story of a girl’s high school basketball team in 1998, which aligned with the second year of the W.N.B.A. So as the audition process advanced, the actors were asked to dribble, shoot and do layups for the creative team. Once the cast was set, some rehearsals weren’t about staging at all: The cast had basketball practice at nearby John Jay College.“There’s a kind of ensemble quality to it,” Blain-Cruz said about the sport. “Like an ensemble of actors playing together, a team of basketball players performing together. Together, they create the event.”Minutes later, as Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” blared, Blain-Cruz led a warm-up with the cast that included hip openers and upward arm stretches. It could have doubled as pregame preparation. The set itself had a basketball hoop hanging in the rear, and a basketball court painted on the floor. “Flex” refers to a type of play basketball teams run, and the staged work features several instances of game play.“There’s a real rigor. It is real,” Blain-Cruz said. “That’s what’s so satisfying, I think, about sports onstage. There’s an honesty to it, right? Dribbling the ball is actually dribbling the ball. We’re not performing the idea of dribbling the ball.”After a recent outing to a New York Liberty game, the actress Erica Matthews, whose character, Starra Jones, is the 17-year-old point guard of the fictional team, said watching the players reminded her of watching live theater.“Basketball is very intimate. You can play a one-on-one game in a small amount of space,” Matthews said. “They’re actually performing on a stage and with the way the audience is surrounding them, the way they’re cheering, it’s basically storytelling.”Downtown at the New York Theater Workshop, Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” a Dante-inspired “contemporary epic” about a half-Greek god named Demi who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A., is in previews and is scheduled to open July 31. While “Flex” deals with down-to-earth issues, such as teen pregnancy, “The Half-God of Rainfall” transports basketball to a mythical world for immortals to deal with.At a recent rehearsal, cast members pantomimed slow motion basketball movements at the direction of the choreographer, Orlando Pabotoy. The actors Jason Bowen and Patrice Johnson Chevannes worked on setting up a proper screen, and Bowen later practiced a Michael Jordan impersonation — complete with the tongue wagging. (Jordan is referenced in the play.)As Ellams and Magar, the show’s director, looked on from desks cluttered with tiny inflatable basketballs, they worked on reallocating lines as the choreography required. Though this version of Ellams’s poem has a cast of seven, he said it can be staged with as many or as few performers as the production desires. (A 2019 production at the Birmingham Repertory Theater in England had only two actors.)Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, who has played basketball since he was a teenager, said he created the character Demi to “do all the things that I never could” on the court. He mused that basketball has a greater draw to the stage because it is “a far more beautiful sport.”In Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” which just ended its run at New York City Center, Chris Perfetti and Glenn Davis play two men who bond over their love of LeBron James.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“There’s something humbling and mortal about basketball in the sense that there’s a simple equation,” Ellams said. “The ball bounces; it comes back up to your palm. You can break that down. This is solitariness, which invites the blues and what it means to play the blues. There’s a longing.”“There’s a natural melancholy about it,” he added, which makes it “easier to pair with the human spirit.”Of course there have been other basketball-related plays. In 2012, “Magic/Bird” explored the friendship and rivalry between the 1980s basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird on Broadway. The 2011 Broadway musical “Lysistrata Jones,” inspired by Aristophanes’s “Lysistrata,” followed a group of cheerleaders who withhold sex from their boyfriends on the basketball team because they keep losing games. Lauren Yee’s 2018 Off Broadway play, “The Great Leap,” also directed by Magar, tells the story of a teenage basketball prodigy who travels to China in 1989 to play in an exhibition game between college teams from Beijing and San Francisco.Daryl Morey, now an executive with the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers, commissioned a musical comedy called “Small Ball” that played in Houston in 2018. It depicts a fictional character named Michael Jordan — not the Jordan — as he finds himself playing in an international league with teammates who are six inches tall.“I think basketball is just the most important of all of the sports among the up-and-coming directors and playwrights, at least the ones I’ve spoken to,” Morey said.Not that basketball has a lock on the theater. Baseball has long been an object of fascination for playwrights, including classic shows like “Damn Yankees.” Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning 2003 play, “Take Me Out,” about a baseball player who comes out as gay, had a Tony-winning revival on Broadway last year. In 2019, “Toni Stone,” written by Lydia R. Diamond, depicted the life of Marcenia Lyle Stone, who became the first woman to play in a men’s baseball league when she took the field for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues.Football and boxing, too: “Lombardi,” a biographical play based on the life of the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, ran on Broadway in 2010, and 2014 brought a stage adaptation of “Rocky,” the famous 1976 underdog boxing film, to Broadway.But for the moment, it is basketball that is having a renaissance in theater. Or to put it in basketball terms, playwrights who take on the sport currently have the hot hand. More