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    Final ‘Jeopardy!’: Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik to Split Hosting Duties

    The popular game show, which has had trouble finding a new host since Alex Trebek died in 2020, will stick with the hosts who served temporarily this year.For more than a year, there was one question that fans of “Jeopardy!” could never seem to get a clear answer to: Who would succeed its popular longtime host Alex Trebek after his death, becoming the new face of the popular quiz show?First came a rotating cast of temporary hosts — including LeVar Burton, who had a legion of online fans boosting him as the permanent choice, and Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor who followed his hosting stint with a bid for U.S. Senate. Then, the show announced its succession plan — its executive producer, Mike Richards, would take over as host during the regular season, while Mayim Bialik would tape prime-time specials. That plan imploded after revelations that Richards had made offensive comments on a podcast.To fill the hosting vacuum, the program then turned to Bialik and to the former champion Ken Jennings, asking them to fill in temporarily and split hosting duties. It was a temporary arrangement that got extended, and on Wednesday, the show made it permanent, opting for the status quo rather than another major shake-up.“I write today with the exciting news that we have closed and signed deals with Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings to be the hosts of ‘Jeopardy!’ moving forward,” the show’s executive producer, Michael Davies, wrote in an announcement posted to the show’s website.The rationale for two hosts, he explained, was the show’s rapidly expanding brand, which includes a “Celebrity Jeopardy!” spinoff and a Second Chance tournament that invites standout contestants back to compete.Read More About ‘Jeopardy!’A New Legend: When Amy Schneider’s 40-game streak ended, she left as the highest-winning woman in the show’s history.Star Players: Schneider’s success is not a one-off. “Jeopardy!” has seen an unusual trend of big winners lately.A Signature Look: Mattea Roach, the show’s most high-profile Gen Zer, has a personal style that reflects her generation and helped make her a star.“The fact is, we have so much ‘Jeopardy!’ to make, and so many plans for the future, that we always knew we would need multiple hosts for the franchise,” Davies wrote.Jennings will be hosting the regular season shows through December, and Bialik will take over in January, according to the announcement.In a gesture to the show’s loyal but vocal fan base, Davies sought to give them some reassurances: “We know you value consistency, so we will not flip-flop the hosts constantly and will keep you informed about the hosting schedule.”The new arrangement makes official the stopgap solution the show hit upon after Richards departed the show last August. The program initially announced that Bialik and Jennings would share the job through the remainder of 2021. Then, in December, the show said the arrangement would continue into 2022.But while the show was struggling to find its footing behind the scenes, it continued to generate excitement — and ratings — with a series of star contestants. Within just one season, four new champions were added to the show’s all-time leaderboard, fueling plenty of theorizing among fans about what was behind the new streak of winning streaks. For a while, the growing celebrity of the winning contestants — including Amy Schneider, Matt Amodio and Mattea Roach — offered a welcome distraction from the lack of clarity around who would become the permanent face of the show.Jennings remains the champion with the highest number of consecutive wins (74) and the highest amount of money won in regular-season games ($2.5 million) in the show’s history. Bialik, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and is best known for her role as a scientist in the sitcom “The Big Bang Theory,” has made clear from the beginning that she is interested in getting the job permanently, though she has had to balance it with the demands of her sitcom “Call Me Kat,” and faced criticism for endorsing a “brain health supplement” for a company that settled a lawsuit accusing it of false advertising. Jennings has also received criticism for old social media posts, apologizing for tweeting “unartful and insensitive things” after he was initially revealed as a “Jeopardy!” guest host following Trebek’s death.After Richards’s departure, Davies, a veteran game-show producer who developed the original American version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” took over temporarily as executive producer — and that job, too, soon became permanent.Under Davies, the show has worked to expand beyond its traditional structure and to cater to its passionate fans, announcing daily statistics for each contestant and, on Wednesday, a new podcast.And there are more specials coming. Bialik will host “Celebrity Jeopardy!,” which debuts on ABC in September, while Jennings will host the first Second Chance Tournament, as well as the upcoming Tournament of Champions. In his announcement, Davies hinted that there could be more spinoffs ahead, noting that Bialik would also host a couple of new tournaments, in addition to the college championship. More

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    Review: In ‘Mr. Burns,’ Apocalypse Now, With ‘The Simpsons’ and Songs

    Anne Washburn’s 2012 play about a post-pandemic society reckoning with loss has not aged at all, our critic writes.Stories, like viruses, are transmissible. In the brain, in the blood, they mutate and change. Tragedies become comedies; dramas become myths. And in Anne Washburn’s visionary and wackadoo “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” revived by the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, an episode of “The Simpsons” becomes an opera and that opera becomes a way for a post-apocalyptic society to reckon with all it has lost.After a devastating contagion and concomitant nuclear meltdowns, the American population has shrunk to maybe a million, maybe half that. In the first act, set in the very near future, somewhere in the northeast, a few survivors have gathered around what should be a campfire (did the fire marshal not allow it?) to tell stories. Or as on this night, one particular story. Collectively, they piece together the events and jokes of “Cape Feare,” a Season 5 episode of “The Simpsons.”Recalling Sideshow Bob’s flourishes and Homer’s doofus behavior connects them to a lost world in a way that feels bearable. Real memories are too painful. Memories of a television show — in a time when televisions no longer work — are what they can manage. In the second act, these scattershot remembrances have been refashioned into a revue. The third act, set decades later and entirely sung through, with music from the composer Michael Friedman, transmutes them further.“Mr. Burns” debuted in May 2012 at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, and then moved to Playwrights Horizons. Sept. 11 was more vivid in the cultural memory a decade ago. One passage includes a haunting reference to twin towers of light. But with the pandemic, we have a new cataclysm to absorb, which makes “Mr. Burns,” directed by the festival’s artistic director, Davis McCallum, a timely selection. (Will there always be some new disaster? Will this play always seem of the moment? Yes. Probably. Ugh.) In its invention, its cool ruthlessness, its interrogation of why and how we use narrative, it has not aged at all.Sean McNall, Merritt Janson, Quintero, Karaman, Ota, and Zack Fine. With three-quarter seating, the director and his designers sometimes struggle to make the action visible to all.T. Charles EricksonIn some ways, the festival, with its sandy floor and jaunty tent, provides an ideal location. The opening at the back of the tent looks out into some old-growth trees. Even considering the mowed lawn — a concession to picnickers and the tick-averse — it suggests what the landscape might look like if nature made a comeback. (If the vista had shown the recently decommissioned Indian Point nuclear plant, located just down the Hudson, that might have been even more evocative.) But the play was built for a proscenium stage, not three-quarter seating, and McCallum and his designers sometimes struggle to make the action visible to all, particularly in the final act.The acting is uneven here, the rhythms sometimes off, though Sean McNall, a festival veteran, has a terrific turn as a newcomer in the first act, and Merritt Janson, a welcome Off-Broadway presence, does pointed and specific work as an actor-manager in the second. Zachary Fine, who operates on a very low-key in the first two acts, triumphs in the third. During that act, a chorus member banged a drum straight into my ear, which I could have done without.And yet, if you are in the area, and you can book a seat away from that drum, you should see “Mr. Burns.” Here’s why: It seems to me that no new work of art — theater, television, film, fiction — produced in these past few years has really represented the pandemic, at least as I’ve experienced it. Sometimes the more on the nose they were (“Station Eleven,” say) the further away they felt.“Mr. Burns” doesn’t exactly capture it either, but it captures something else. In these past two years, when I have had a moment of downtime, I have turned to comedies and procedurals, shows that made the world feel regular and knowable. “Mr. Burns” explores the ways that we use stories, even seemingly irrelevant stories, to make sense of our lives. “Mr. Burns” is a play about where we find comfort and it is also, more chillingly, about the limits of that comfort, about how reality can intrude even before the credits roll.Reality sometimes intruded, even here, out of the city, out of doors. The show’s opening had been delayed owing to coronavirus cases among the cast. The spectators closest to the actors were asked to wear masks; most did. Still, we could lose ourselves for a while, in imagining how a society much like ours might handle a disaster much worse than this one, how we might or might not come through it. To watch this feels pleasurable and painful and mysterious and weird. Or to put it another way: D’Oh.Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric PlayThrough Sept. 17 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    Ford and Mellon Foundations Announce 2022 Disability Futures Fellows

    A Broadway actress, documentary filmmaker and DC comic artist are among this year’s recipients. They were selected by fellow disabled artists from a pool of about 60 nominees.Nasreen Alkhateeb, a filmmaker who has documented Kamala Harris on the campaign trail; Antoine Hunter, also known as Purple Fire Crow, a Deaf, Indigenous choreographer whose work has been performed around the world; and Tee Franklin, who is writing new Harley Quinn comics for DC, are among the second class of disability futures fellows, the Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations announced on Wednesday.The fellowship provides 20 disabled U.S. artists, filmmakers and journalists with unrestricted $50,000 grants administered by the arts funding group United States Artists. They are chosen by peer advisers who are themselves disabled artists. The fellowship supports people at all stages of their careers, and the class includes emerging and established artists.One grant recipient, Corbett Joan O’Toole, 70, an activist and historian who was featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Crip Camp,” said, “I’m really shocked.”“I do a lot of good work, but it’s not necessarily the prominent stuff,” she said. “It’s networking, providing resources for people, filling in the gaps.”This is the second class of fellows in the program, which was established in 2020 as part of an effort to increase the visibility and elevate the voices of disabled artists. Originally conceived as an 18-month initiative, the foundations announced last year that they would commit an additional $5 million to support the program through 2025.About one in four adults in the United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Dickie Hearts, a Deaf, gay and BIPOC actor and filmmaker known for his recurring role in Netflix’s San Francisco-set series “Tales of the City,” said he hoped to use the funding to produce a live version of an original concept musical in American Sign Language that he had directed remotely on Zoom during the pandemic.“I would love to see more deaf people behind the scenes, as well as onscreen,” he said in a video interview this week, which was conducted with the assistance of an ASL interpreter. “I want to see more creative executives, deaf directors,” executive producers and writers.The grants offer flexible compensation options. The money can be distributed in a lump sum, in payments or even be deferred, depending on what works best for the artist.Also among the recipients are Alexandria Wailes, a deaf actor who recently portrayed the Lady in Purple in the Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf”; JJJJJerome Ellis, a composer and poet who has a stutter (the reason for the repeated J’s in his name) and produces work about stuttering and Blackness; and Wendy Lu, a journalist and disability rights advocate who was recently hired as an editor by The New York Times.“I’m working on a book that’s coming out next year, playing concerts again, dancing more — it’s so exciting to be back working live,” said Ellis, 33, who about a year and a half ago moved back to Virginia, where he grew up, from New York.The inaugural class of fellows included the choreographer Alice Sheppard, the filmmaker Jim LeBrecht and the journalist Alice Wong.The Ford and Mellon Foundations are planning to invite people in the philanthropy and cultural sectors to learn from fellows and disability arts leaders at a symposium in New York in 2025, and fellows will be invited to a networking retreat in 2024. More

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    ‘Into the Woods’ and a Missing Giant’s Boot

    When the Stephen Sondheim musical opened in 1987, a huge boot hung over the theater’s facade. The producers of the current revival would love to get it back.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Scroll down for a look at when a plane smashed into the Empire State Building — 77 years ago today. But first, a Broadway mystery.From 1987 to 1989, a giant boot dangled over the theater where “Into the Woods” was playing.Ann SlavitThe producers of the revival of “Into the Woods,” the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, have a wish. It is to locate a something you might call a prop from the original production. It is missing.It is a giant inflatable boot with a long vinyl leg attached.The boot was a fixture when “Into the Woods” opened in 1987. It was anchored to what was then the Martin Beck Theater (now the Al Hirschfeld). “The boot was like a beacon,” said Jordan Roth, the lead producer of the current revival at the St. James, which is extending its run to Oct. 16. “It was literally the beacon that called us all to the theater. I think why it captured our imagination was the way it really physicalized this impossible balance of the show between whimsy and weight.”Michael David, the executive producer for the original run, said there was a more practical concern. The theater, an “outlier” west of Eighth Avenue, had not had a long-running show in some time when “Into the Woods” arrived, he said. The boot gave the theater an identity “to help people find us, not where they’d think ‘what is the address’ but ‘the one with the boot above it.’”A 1987 sketch of the boot for “Into the Woods.” Ann SlavitWhen “Into the Woods” closed in 1989, the boot went into storage. It came out for a revival in 2002, this time at the Broadhurst Theater.The mystery is what happened to the boot when that production closed after 18 previews and 279 performances.“It’s in storage — I just don’t know where in storage,” David said, adding that there were two facilities in New Jersey still to be checked.The boot, which conjured up the giant who creates mayhem in the story, was the work of Ann Slavit, who had done a 30-foot-tall pair of red shoes that hung on the Brooklyn Academy of Music as a tribute to the celebrated ballet movie “The Red Shoes.”“I don’t think Michael David said to me, ‘Oh, can you do a boot?’” she said. “Maybe we were talking about the giant and I thought, ‘You never see him in the show so we could have this ominous presence.’” There was a second shoe that looked as if it was coming over the parapet of the theater.She said she suspected it had been discarded after it was taken off the Broadhurst on a day with particularly bad winter weather.But Chic Silber, a special effects designer who was involved in installing and removing it at the Broadhurst in 2002, said it was “neither destroyed nor thrown out” when it came down. But it had been cut into at least a couple of pieces. “What happened to either half after that, I don’t know,” he said.Roth, the lead producer of the revival, put out an all-points bulletin for the boot almost as soon as the arrangements to move “Into the Woods” into the St. James were completed in late spring. He recalled seeing the boot the first time he saw “Into the Woods,” as a 12-year-old in 1988, with Phylicia Rashad in the cast. If it were found and mounted on the St. James, he said, “the knee would bend right above my office window.”But Silber had advice for Roth: Call off the search.“Even if it could be found,” he said, “there is no way it would inflate again and work on the roof of any building.” And making a new boot would cost far less, he said.WeatherPrepare for a chance of showers on a mostly sunny day near the mid-80s. At night, expect a chance of showers and thunderstorms, with temperatures dropping to the mid-70s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption).The latest New York newsCathy Linh Che scrambled to find another apartment in the Two Bridges neighborhood in Manhattan after the rent on her pandemic-deal apartment increased by 65 percent.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesThe pandemicThe ‘Covid discount’: More than 40 percent of the available units in Manhattan currently come from tenants priced out of apartments they leased in 2020 and 2021, according to a new StreetEasy report.Your economic situation: The pandemic has drastically changed the global economy. We’re checking in with readers about their financial circumstances, and how they feel about the future.More local newsSchool budget cuts: More than $200 million in cuts to New York City public schools have been put on hold by a Manhattan judge, the latest move in an escalating fight over how to fund schools.Monkeypox vaccines: There were only 1,000 doses of the monkeypox vaccine available. Within two hours, the only clinic offering the shots began turning people away. At that same moment, some 300,000 doses of a ready-to-use vaccine owned by the United States sat in a facility in Denmark.Do you know the ice cream man? Owning an ice cream truck in New York City used to be a lucrative proposition, but for some, the expenses have become untenable.Honoring a baseball legend: Jackie Robinson accomplished a great deal on the field, but a museum celebrating his life — which will have a ribbon-cutting this week — puts as much focus on his civil rights work.LOOK BACKThe day a plane hit the Empire State BuildingErnie Sisto/ The New York TimesFor the city that had been defined by skyscrapers — and even for a skyscraper that had been defined by a monster movie — what happened on a densely foggy morning 77 years ago today was unthinkable. An airplane crashed into the Empire State Building.Fourteen people were killed: The pilot, Lt. Col. William Smith Jr., and the two others aboard his Army B-25, and 11 in what was then the world’s tallest building. Burning fuel rained down an elevator shaft after the fuel tanks exploded. An engine and part of the landing gear tumbled into a subbasement.Smith had been scheduled to fly to La Guardia Airport, but as he approached, he said he wanted to land at Newark. The change sent Smith’s unarmed training plane over Manhattan and into the 78th and 79th floors of the Empire State Building. A government investigation later concluded that he had “erred in judgment” and should not have been cleared to proceed.Up in the Empire State Building, where clouds sometimes drifted into the not-yet air-conditioned offices, the roar of the two propeller-driven engines became louder as the B-25 cruised along. And then it hit.Soon office workers were rushing down the stairways to safety, and firefighters were rushing in. So were photographers lugging bulky 4-by-5 Speed Graphic cameras.One of them was Ernie Sisto of The New York Times, who talked his way past the police officers on the street and rode to the 67th floor in an elevator that was still in operation. He then took the stairs, finding a vantage point above the 79th floor.There, he dangled over the parapet after asking two competing photographers to hold his legs. He repaid the favor by snapping shots for them, along with the photograph above.Therese Fortier Willig, a secretary in the Catholic War Relief office on the 79th floor, huddled with co-workers. She recalled in 1995 that she was so upset that she yanked off the rings she was wearing and hurled them out the window. One was her high-school graduation ring, the other a friendship ring from her boyfriend, whom she never expected to see again.She eventually escaped, and firefighters not only discovered the rings in the debris on the street, they tracked her down and gave them back. She married the man who had given her the friendship ring and had a son — George Willig, who climbed the World Trade Center in the 1970s.“She hardly ever talked about it, kind of like I hardly ever talk about climbing the World Trade Center,” he said this week. “After a while your life goes on, it’s part of your history.”But sometimes he thinks about his mother’s association with one tall New York building and his association with another. “I have a hard time putting that all together and making sense of it,” he said.METROPOLITAN diaryPhones offDear Diary:As an original subscriber to City Center’s Encores! series, I was thrilled to attend the eagerly anticipated reopening after a two-year hiatus.Subscribers generally know all the audience members who sit near them, so there’s a bit of a buzz when someone new appears. And at a February performance of “The Tap Dance Kid,” everyone in my row noticed a new face in the row in front of us.As the standard announcement was made about the rules against taking photographs and videos and using phones, this woman took out her phone and appeared to start texting.The orchestra began to play, and the audience applauded. The light from the phone was still visible. I was about to tap her on her shoulder and ask her to turn off the phone, when the person beside her turned to her.“Please turn that phone off,” he said.“And by the way,” he added. “You’re way off track. The Wordle is ‘pleat.’”— Dennis BuonaguraIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Melissa Guerrero More

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    Trevor Noah Is a Fan of Pope Francis

    “He’s reached out to other faiths, he said gay people can get into heaven, and don’t forget he added a pop and lock to the sign of the cross,” Noah joked on Tuesday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Catholic Guilt Takes CanadaPope Francis issued an apology to Indigenous Canadians on Monday, saying he was “deeply sorry” for the ways in which “many Christians supported the colonizing mentality of the powers that oppressed the Indigenous peoples.”“I’m glad he is doing that,” Trevor Noah said on Tuesday. “It also must have been a shock to Canadians, you know? Someone coming and apologizing to them?”“You know, say what you want, I love this pope. I really do. Yeah, because ever since he has come into office, or into power, or ever since he has gotten the gig, what do they even say? Whatever it is, he has done a really good job of trying to right the Catholic Church’s wrongs, you know? He’s reached out to other faiths, he said gay people can get into heaven, and don’t forget he added a pop and lock to the sign of the cross.” — TREVOR NOAH“And you know beyond the pope, the pope is great in all of this but you know who the heroes of the story are? The Indigenous people, yeah. For not just speaking to the pope but for forgiving him, even letting him wear their traditional headdress. That was amazing. It was gracious, you know? Unless they were just setting him up for a trap, you know? Like, ‘We let bygones be bygones, please accept this headdress,’ snap photo, ‘And you’re canceled, mother [bleep]! We got you — cultural appropriation.’” — TREVOR NOAH“Now, apparently in addition to the apology the church has also agreed to pay a settlement for what they did, which I think is fantastic, especially on the tribe for actually insisting on it. Yeah, because so many people’s lives have been destroyed and a generation was thrust into poverty. So sorry is nice, but money goes a long way, yeah. In fact, you know what, they should put ‘I’m sorry’ in the caption of the Venmo payments, that is what they should do.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (R.I.P. Choco Taco Edition)“I’m going to shoot you straight: Things are looking a little rough right now. The climate is on fire, democracy is hanging on by a pube, and just when we thought we couldn’t take another punch to the national gut, we’ve learned that Klondike’s Choco Taco has been discontinued after almost 40 years. No, not the Choco Taco! It was the only dessert with as much real beef as Taco Bell!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Well, I guess the answer to ‘What would you do for a Klondike bar?’ is ‘ruin childhood.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The Choco Taco is the perfect American fusion of cultures. right? It’s Mexican and sugar.” — TREVOR NOAH“[Singing in the vein of Elton John] ’Cause it seems to me you lived your life like a taco in the fridge. You’re an ice cream waffle taco covered in chocolate, and I sure did love to eat you when I was just a kid. Your choco melted long before your taco ever did.” — JIMMY FALLON“And may I point out, we learned this shocking news on a Taco Tuesday. That’s just salted caramel in the wound.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingMaggie Rogers performed her song “Want Want” on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutPaul Sorvino as the mob underboss who gave orders with just a nod of his head in “Goodfellas.”Warner Bros.The late Paul Sorvino is perhaps known for playing the underboss Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas,” but he almost walked away from the role. More

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    Editors’ Note

    An obituary of the actor Tony Dow was published in error. The Times based the confirmation of his death on a Facebook post by his representatives, which proved erroneous and has since been deleted. More

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    ‘Seagull’ Review: Blurring the Lines of Fiction

    Elevator Repair Service’s Chekhov revival has promising ideas about art, experimentation and truth, but the production inevitably falls flat, our critic writes.If only I could find someone who loves me enough to gift me a dead bird in a brown paper bag.I jest, of course. The wounded young protagonist who delivers this confounding gift in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” communicates his thoughts and feelings through wild symbols — “new forms” of art, he says — like this particular one of the avian variety. The theater troupe Elevator Repair Service — known for its ambitious, innovative takes on classics like “The Great Gatsby” (“Gatz”) — attempts to meet that challenge in its latest work, “Seagull.”But this highly stylized contemporary production, which recently opened at NYU Skirball in a nearly three-hour production, feels like a series of ideas that never quite cohere. The beginnings of those ideas are promising, though: the toppling of the fourth wall, the meta references to the original text, the vivid tonal changes and the comic recasting of the play’s characters, each of them living through their own sad, ironic farce of a life.Let’s begin with those clowns. Konstantin (a wooden Gavin Price) wants to be a great writer but is too busy producing incomprehensible symbolist plays, at least that’s what his mother, Irina (Kate Benson, a bluster of affected melodrama), thinks. A vain actress with a vicious streak toward her son, Irina has come to stay with her sick brother at his country estate, and she’s taken along her boy toy, the famous writer Boris Trigorin (a compellingly aloof Robert M. Johanson). From the other side of the property comes Nina (Maggie Hoffman, magnetic), a young woman who wants to escape her circumstances and become an actress.One may need a map for the various romantic entanglements: Semyon (Pete Simpson) loves the depressed, coke-snorting Masha (Susie Sokol), who loves Konstantin, who loves Nina, who is enamored with Trigorin, who is attached to Irina. And Masha’s mother, Paulina (Lindsay Hockaday), is married to Ilya (Julian Fleisher) but is having an affair with the former playboy doctor Gene (a delightfully quippy Vin Knight).“Seagull,” directed by the group’s founder, John Collins, opens with a meandering curtain speech, charismatically delivered by Simpson as his real-life self, and ends in the world of Chekhov, where Simpson is now Semyon, a poor lovesick teacher. Simpson cracks jokes and rattles off (real and fictional) information about the Skirball stage, letting the audience know that the line between reality and fiction is needlepoint thin, though to what end is unclear.Elevator Repair Service’s “Seagull,” directed by John Collins, not only breaks the fourth wall but also has its characters break into dance.Ian DouglasThe breaking of the fourth wall happens mostly in the first several minutes, though this play is being marketed as interactive, part “chat with the audience,” as if the entirety of the show will be meta. The production seems to want to reach toward some message about art — particularly experimental art, especially experimental theater — as when the group cheekily pokes fun at itself in Simpson’s opening speech. “If ERS is known for anything,” Simpson says, “we’re known for our livestock, wallpaper and violent dance.”I’m sorry to report that there’s no livestock or wallpaper but there is a bit of dancing (whether you’d deem it violent depends on your particular disposition). And besides a few references to the actors — not as their characters, but the real actors themselves — the production’s self-aware spoofing unfortunately falls to the wayside.The attempts to deconstruct Chekhov’s work extends to the set by Dots, the design collective. Lined up folding chairs, sat on by the cast, and a table with tech equipment are juxtaposed with a piano, where Konstantin broods, and a fraction of an old Russian dining room, just two perpendicular walls, decorated with framed paintings, a table and chairs in the center, where the characters sit to eat and play cards.And then there’s that dead bird.Dead feathered fowl! Suicide! Ruination! Unhappy marriages! Unrequited love! Festering resentment! “The Seagull” doesn’t seem like the kind of play that would tickle your funny bone, and yet Chekhov himself considered it a comedy. Most productions cast it as a tragedy (especially after the seminal Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski reinterpreted it as such in one of its first productions).Collins opts for both, going all in on comedy in the first half and making a daring turn to tragedy in the second. So Masha isn’t the cool goth pining after the dejected artist but a mopey dork in knee-high compression socks who drags herself across the stage while the sad-sack Semyon shuffles along after her. Konstantin isn’t a misunderstood virtuoso but a solipsistic hipster of an artist with serious mommy issues. In the final scene of the first act, Gene, having comforted two distraught characters in a row, comically declares, “You’re so upset! You’re all so upset!”And yet, despite its playful humor and antics, the show often falls into lulls where it’s mostly just performing a rote version of Chekhov’s piece.It’s not until partway through the second act that the show’s unforgettable shift occurs. The actors freeze, posing in an almost suffocating silence for several minutes. The set darkens and fog unfurls across the top of the stage. None of the actors speak, but we hear them reading their lines in voice-over. We see Nina slumped in a chair in the corner, Irina sitting in a commanding pose front and center, arms spread out on either side to rest on the chair backs, her legs brazenly crossed in front of her, and Ilya leaning against a pillar, head drooped to the side. The effect is haunting when paired with the disembodied voices. Instead of trying to seamlessly incorporate both the dark humor and the woe, the production calls attention to each individually.Chekhov’s play lends itself to dismantling and comic scrutiny. Take Aaron Posner’s postmodern remix, “Stupid _______ Bird,” which actually manages to pull off the balancing act that the Elevator Repair Service’s “Seagull” struggles with, splitting the difference between a dutiful replication of the text (or at least parts of it) and an irreverent sendup of prevailing ideas, themes and executions of the beloved work. Posner’s ambitious, if pretentious, play manages it a bit better through an almost Spartan-level commitment to its conceit, from script to stage.“Seagull” is milder in its execution of its ideas, though it would benefit from committing more to its experimental aspirations and making its insights about art clearer. And it could further blur the line between performance and reality as it does in the opening scene, allowing the actors to speak more freely, to improvise, to share parts of themselves even as they inhabit their characters.This production may get its audience thinking about art, experimentation and truth but can’t quite see those thoughts through. In the play Konstantin declares that we need new forms. This production may have inadvertently provided the answer: Only if the artist is up to it.SeagullThrough July 31 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 2 hour 50 minutes. More

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    Goodman Theater Names Susan V. Booth as Artistic Director

    Booth, who currently leads the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, will succeed Robert Falls, who is retiring after 35 years leading the Chicago mainstay.Susan V. Booth, the artistic director of the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, has been named the next artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, a dominant force in that city’s vibrant theater scene and one of the most influential regional nonprofits in the country.Booth, 59, who will assume the position in October, will be the first woman to lead the Goodman, which was founded in 1922. She succeeds Robert Falls, who announced last September that he would be stepping down after 35 years at the helm.The Goodman, which has an annual budget of $22 million and a staff of roughly 200, won the 1992 Tony Award for excellence in regional theater. Under Falls, it staged more than 150 world or American premieres, while also helping to transform Chicago from a theater scene known primarily for actors to one recognized as a seedbed for directors with artistic visions “too massive to be contained in a storefront theater,” as Chris Jones, the theater critic for The Chicago Tribune, wrote last year.The move will be something of a homecoming for Booth, who went to graduate school at Northwestern University, directed at theaters across the city and served as the Goodman’s director of new play development from 1993 to 2001. Her husband even proposed to her on the catwalk over the Goodman’s main stage on her last day on the job.In a telephone interview, Booth said she looked forward to diving back into Chicago’s rich theater scene, which she described as marked by a muscular, democratic and “radically diverse aesthetic.”“It was always a really fluid ecosystem, where artists would bounce between punky first-year start-ups in the backs of bars to the Goodman stage,” she said. “That fluidity meant that if there was a hierarchy, it had to do with your chops. It was glorious.”Her arrival at the Goodman comes at a time of widespread turnover in leadership in Chicago theater, because of retirement and upheavals around diversity and inclusion. She said one of her first tasks would be to figure out “where Chicago is now,” both artistically and civically, to determine how best to reach the widest audiences possible.She said she also wanted to work with the theater’s artistic collective to continue the Goodman’s tradition of “treating classics as if they were new plays” and giving prominent placement to challenging new works.“I love me a classic, and I have no interest in relegating that work to other theaters,” she said. “But I love the level playing field that’s created when you produce new work.”Booth led the Alliance in Atlanta for 21 years, where she doubled the operating budget (currently $20 million) and endowment, and led it to a 2007 Tony Award for regional excellence. The theater presented more than 85 world premieres, including six musicals that later went to Broadway, including “The Prom” and “The Color Purple.”It also worked to develop relationships with young playwrights, while cultivating new voices through programs like the Spelman Leadership Fellowship, a partnership with Spelman College in Atlanta aimed at addressing the lack of diversity in theater leadership.Asked about a signature project, she cited a staging of “Native Guard,” the former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey’s poem cycle exploring both her family history and the history of Black Civil War troops, which was staged originally at the Alliance and then later at the Atlanta History Center, amid its Civil War collections.“The theatricalization of it was as much about how the audience engaged with the work as about the source narrative,” she said. “It was a community event.”It was “theater designed to catalyze dialogue, to evoke action,” she added. “That mattered to me a lot.”The Goodman’s 2022-23 season, programmed by Falls, includes the world premieres of Rebecca Gilman’s play “Swing State,” about a Wisconsin community split by political polarization (one of two productions to be directed by Falls), and Christina Anderson’s “the ripple, the wave that carried me home,” about a family fighting for the integration of a swimming pool in Kansas in the 1960s. There will also be a 30th-anniversary production of “The Who’s Tommy,” directed by Des McAnuff.As for her own programming, Booth said she wanted the Goodman to be part of the ripe political and social debates of the moment, without losing sight of the pure pleasure of theater.“I don’t know a theater community in the country that isn’t creating the odd joy-bomb,” she said. More