Eliana Willis

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    The Wild History of the Real ‘Only Murders’ Building

    Viewers of the Hulu series know it as the Arconia, but the Upper West Side building has a name — and a dramatic story — of its own.Fans of the Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building,” which returns for its second season this week, know the building at the center of the drama as the Arconia, where Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez play an unlikely trio of residents who become amateur sleuths with a podcast. But the Renaissance-style apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is actually called the Belnord, and it has been making headlines for more than a century.The creators of “Only Murders in the Building” renamed the building the Arconia for the Hulu series, which stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, above, and Selena Gomez as an unlikely trio of residents who become amateur sleuths with a podcast.Craig Blankenhorn/HuluFrom the get-go, the Belnord was a newsmaker — an edifice of excess, a home for hyperbole. When it was finished in 1909, covering a full city block at West 86th Street and Broadway, the architect boasted that it was the largest apartment building in the country, and maybe the world. Newspapers, including this one, touted the interior courtyard as the biggest in Manhattan — a half acre of open space, with a garden and a lawn “for a score of children to romp on,” crowned with a bountiful, tiered marble fountain.They marveled at its capacious rental apartments, 175 of them, each 50 feet deep, stretching from street to courtyard, with interior decoration “in the style of Louis XVI” — pale, painted paneling and “harmoniously tinted silks” on the walls — and the most up-to-date modern conveniences. The refrigerators had ice machines, so no iceman would ever invade the Belnord, as one paper put it. On the roof, each apartment had a private laundry, a low-tech luxury that included a tub, ironing board and clothesline — for the convenience of one’s maid.It would be its own city, this paper noted, with a population of more than 1,500. Over the years, there were notable tenants: Lee Strasberg, the dictatorial father of Method acting, who was often visited by his shy protégée Marilyn Monroe; Walter Matthau, when he was an up-and-coming theater actor with a young family; the actor Zero Mostel, who played Tevye in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof”; and Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize-winning author, who liked to jog around the courtyard in a three-piece suit.When the Belnord was built in 1909, its architect, H. Hobart Weekes, of Hiss & Weekes, boasted that it was the largest apartment building in the country.via The New York Public LibraryBut by the 1970s, that city was in chaos. The ornate limestone-and-terra-cotta structure was crumbling, the roof was leaking and the plumbing cracked. Ceilings were collapsing. Stalactites, The New York Times reported in 1980, had formed in the basement. The fountain had been broken for years, and the garden was a fenced-in jungle, off limits to residents.The building’s owner, Lillian Seril, would earn the dubious distinction of being one of the city’s worst landlords: By all accounts, she was both litigious and recalcitrant, refusing to fix even the simplest issues, but energetic enough to sue not only her tenants but also the landlord association that threw her out for not paying her dues. (Tenants recalled buying their own refrigerators and sneaking them in with the help of sympathetic building staff, because Mrs. Seril would not allow their broken appliances to be repaired or replaced.)The Belnord’s residents, many of whom paid just a few hundred dollars a month for their enormous, house-like apartments, organized and revolted. In 1978, they began what would be the longest rent strike in the city’s history.For the 16 years that it went on, the Belnord battle was so contentious that one housing court judge declared that the two sides deserved each other, before washing his hands of the case when a settlement he had brokered collapsed. “I’m convinced the tenants and the owner are going to litigate the building to death,” he said. A city official likened the situation to the siege of Beirut.LEFT: When the building was constructed, The New York Times touted the courtyard’s lawn as a space for “a score of children to romp on.” RIGHT: Gary Barnett, the developer who bought the building in 1994, spent $100 million restoring it and also resuscitated the fountain at enormous expense.From left: via The Belnord; Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe battle ended in 1994, when the developer Gary Barnett, who was then only 38, bought the building with a group of investors for $15 million. (As part of the deal, Mrs. Seril insisted on retaining a 3,000-square-foot rent-controlled apartment for herself — at her death, in 2004, she was paying just $450 a month.) A decade later, Mr. Barnett and his company, Extell Development, would build One57, the funnel-shaped, blue-glass skyscraper on West 57th that was the city’s first supertall tower and, in so doing, incur the ire of preservationists, urban planners and civic groups. But in those years, he was a hero. The Belnord was his first Manhattan property, and he would spend $100 million shoring it up.He made various deals with individual tenants as he attempted to turn the place into a luxury rental building, with some apartments that leased for up to $45,000 a month. For a rabbi and his family who were paying $275 for a 4,000-square-foot apartment, Mr. Barnett bought a house in the New Jersey suburbs. Then there was the penthouse dweller who hankered for the desert: He flew her to Las Vegas to pick out a house with a pool, arranged for its purchase and paid her moving expenses. Other tenants opted to keep their low rents, but agreed to swap their vast, 11-room apartments for smaller ones.Mr. Barnett once joked that the fountain he had resuscitated at enormous expense — a project that involved disassembling and carting it away for repairs — was the fountain of youth, because nobody ever seemed to die at the Belnord.“It was a labor of love to restore that building,” he said recently. “But I didn’t really understand what I was getting into. It was quite a picture.”LEFT: A detail of an iron gate that Mr. Barnett restored in the 1990s. “It was a labor of love to restore that building,” he said recently. “But I didn’t really understand what I was getting into.” RIGHT: Through the gilded B, you can see the mosaic on a vaulted entrance.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesBy 2015, Mr. Barnett was out of the picture, in a deal worth a reported $575 million.Like everything else at the Belnord, the terms of Mr. Barnett’s mortgage had been problematic, and for a time, after he stopped making the loan payments, the city classified the property as “distressed.” (The calculus of the building’s debt and its rental revenue never quite added up.) And so a new group of investors swooped in — the cast of which kept changing, as various players dropped out because of insolvency, lawsuits and other calamities — to turn the place into a high-end condominium, converting the 100 or so available apartments into showplaces with Italian kitchens sheathed in marble.Robert A.M. Stern, the architect whose firm handled the conversion, described the process as “a very high-class Botox treatment.”Prices for the revamped units ranged from about $3.6 million to more than $11 million, although some tenants bought their own apartments at deep discounts. After a rocky start, the condos are now selling briskly, keeping pace with the high-end market in the city, said Jonathan Miller, the veteran property and market appraiser.And now the Belnord is once again in the limelight, thanks to the Hulu series. John Hoffman, who created the show with Mr. Martin, was delighted and stunned to have scored the place for his production, particularly in the middle of a pandemic. While the atmospheric apartments of Mr. Martin, Mr. Short and Ms. Gomez’s characters were built on a sound stage, the story needed a building like the Belnord, with its grand appointments and panopticon of a courtyard.“I was obsessed,” Mr. Hoffman said. “I knew we could make something as elevated as that amazing building. It’s a cliché to say that the building itself is a character, but I like the challenge of getting beyond that cliché a bit. What pulls us out of our apartments to meet people? How well do you know your neighbors? Do you only connect when it’s necessary? The ways in which we get pulled together when we live in these spaces is what’s really interesting.”Debbie Marx grew up in the classic seven where she now lives — a time capsule of 1959, the year her parents moved into the building. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOne Friday evening in early June, Debbie Marx, a Latin teacher and longtime Belnord resident, led a visitor through her unrenovated classic seven, its meandering, book-lined hallways a time capsule from 1959, the year her parents moved in. Her father, Josef Marx, was an oboist and musicologist who had his own music publishing company; her mother, Angelina, had been a ballerina. Ms. Marx moved back into her childhood apartment in the late 1980s, when she was pregnant with her first child and her mother was living there alone. Ms. Marx’s father had died in 1978, a victim, in a way, of the Belnord battle, having suffered a heart attack in the courthouse during a hearing with his fellow tenants.Ms. Marx recalled growing up in the building — playing handball in the courtyard, which was forbidden by Mrs. Seril, and slipping through the bars of the fence to the off-limits garden, by then a riot of shrubs and trees. She had her own courtyard gang, with Walter Matthau’s daughter Jenny and others, but their transgressions were mild: nicking the hat from a doorman, commandeering the service elevator, dropping the odd water bomb.“It’s like an archaeological site,” Richard Stengel said of the building. “The further you burrow down, you get a different culture and history.”Mr. Stengel, the author, journalist and former State Department official, has been a tenant since 1992, when he moved into an apartment that had been charred by a fire and left vacant for years. (If you see Mr. Stengel on MSNBC, where he is a contributor, with a deep red bookshelf behind him, he is broadcasting from his apartment at the Belnord.)John Scanlon, the wily public relations man who died in 2001, was also a ’90s-era tenant. In those days, Mr. Scanlon was embroiled in another long-running New York City real estate battle: the first Trump divorce. (He was Ivana Trump’s spokesman.)Like Mr. Stengel, Mr. Scanlon was a member of a Belnord demographic that you might call literary-and-publishing adjacent. He liked to tease Mr. Stengel, who was then the editor of Time magazine, when they collided in the courtyard: “How does it feel to be on the cutting edge of the passé?”LEFT: A Renaissance-style mosaic at the building’s entrance. The entire structure was landmarked in 1966. RIGHT: Debbie Marx and her son, Nicolas Held, in the courtyard.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesEarlier waves of tenants included Jewish European émigrés, unreconstructed Socialists and scores of psychoanalysts.“When we moved in, it had the feel of an Eastern European shtetl,” said Peter Krulewitch, a real estate investor who arrived 35 years ago with his wife, Deborah, a retired Estee Lauder executive, and soon formed what became known as the Belnord 18, one of the many splinter groups of building tenants who tried to negotiate with Mrs. Seril. “There were these wonderful aging lefties that had been there for years — and fought Mrs. Seril for years.”In many cases, those tenants had succession rights for their children. So despite the influx of condo buyers, Mr. Krulewitch said, the Belnord is a city that still — although just barely — has a population more culturally varied than the monolithic moneyed class that has taken over much of Manhattan.As Mr. Krulewitch put it, “It has been quite an adventure.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Endangered’ and ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’

    A documentary about the dangers that journalists face airs on HBO. And the Showtime series starring Chiwetel Ejiofor wraps up its first season.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, June 27 to July 3. Details and times are subject to change.MondayHIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: YOUTH MENTAL ILLNESS 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In Ken Burns’s latest documentary, 20 people ranging in age from 11 to 27 share their first-person accounts of mental illness and how it has affected their lives. This two-part series also includes the perspectives of the parents, teachers and friends of those affected as well as input from mental health professionals. The film was also screened at the White House last week, with Jill Biden, the first lady, thanking Burns for creating a documentary that reminds young people that this does not have to be an isolating experience.TuesdayA scene from “Endangered.”HBOENDANGERED (2022) 9 p.m. on HBO. In this HBO original documentary, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady and executive produced by Ronan Farrow, journalists (Patrícia Campos Mello, Oliver Laughland, Carl Juste and Sáshenka Gutiérrez) discuss how they navigate the growing backlash and relatively new risks they face in their work. They also share their firsthand experiences with dangerous situations, like having threats made against them. The documentary — including one-on-one interviews and archival footage — goes in-depth to analyze the factors that have led to increasing distrust of the news media, and shows the relationship journalism has with elected officials, the public and law enforcement.WednesdayTHE FLASH 8 p.m. on the CW. “The Flash” is wrapping up its eighth season this week with a two-part finale, carrying on a tradition from its seventh season. Part 1 of the finale, which aired last week, featured the brutal death of a main character (at the hands of another main character) and the even more brutal resurrection of another character — so the finale has a lot of loose ends to tie up. The show has already been renewed for Season 9, but with Jesse L. Martin, a series regular, leaving to lead an NBC pilot, its fate past next season is unknown.ThursdayJude Law and Cameron Diaz in “The Holiday.”Columbia PicturesTHE HOLIDAY (2006) 10 p.m. on HBO. Though we have officially entered summer and temperatures are rising, you can escape to the chilly English countryside with Jude Law and Cameron Diaz in “The Holiday.” Written and directed by Nancy Meyers, the movie follows two women (Diaz and Kate Winslet) who decide to swap houses — and lives — after they experience heartbreak. Though it takes place around Christmas (and also stars Jack Black and Eli Wallach), it is ultimately a story about love: “The men and women in a Nancy Meyers film don’t just fall in love,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times, “they talk about falling in love, about falling out of love, about needing, fearing and surrendering to love.”ME OR THE MENU 10 p.m. on Food Network. Though the old saying goes that you should never mix business with pleasure, Food Network’s newest show does exactly that. The show follows four couples as they work toward the dream of opening a restaurant — without putting a strain on their relationships. The first episode will introduce the couples and then follow their journeys from there.FridayMarilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, center, and Tony Curtis in “Some Like It Hot.”United ArtistsSOME LIKE IT HOT (1959) 8 p.m. on TCM. This comedy directed by Billy Wilder revolves around Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), who transform themselves into Josephine and Daphne in an attempt to avoid the gangsters that are following them. They join a female jazz band, where they meet Sugar (Marilyn Monroe). Shenanigans ensue. If you can’t get enough of the 1959 film, which was written by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, a Broadway adaptation of the movie is coming to the stage this fall.SaturdayFUNNY FACE (1957) 8 p.m. on TCM. This classic is packed with star power: Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire star as Jo Stockton and Dick Avery, and the film features a score with music by George and Ira Gershwin. It’s also a romantic comedy that starts with a meet cute: Dick is a fashion photographer and Jo works at the Greenwich Village bookstore where the two meet. Dick is struck by Jo’s beauty and whisks her off to Paris, where they eventually fall in love. “Miss Hepburn has the meek charm of a wallflower turned into a rueful butterfly,” the Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “and Mr. Astaire plays her lens-hound suitor softly, as if afraid to turn on too much steam.”SundayTHE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH 10 p.m. on Showtime. This series, which was inspired by the 1976 Nicolas Roeg film and the 1963 novel by Walter Tevis, is wrapping up its first season after a 10-episode arc. The show begins when Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character, Faraday, crashes in the oil fields of New Mexico and sets off to find Justin Falls (Naomie Harris), who is the only woman who can save his species. It has yet to be renewed by Showtime. More

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    ‘Bodies They Ritual’ Review: Plush Robes and Cults

    Angela Hanks’s new comedy is set in Santa Fe, N.M., where five women of color have traveled for some fancy R&R laced with New Age spirituality.The tapas party had not gone over well: “The food was so tiny,” the guest of honor, Faye, recalled. “And I was so hungry.”So for Faye’s 65th birthday, her daughter, Marie, has invited her mother and three friends for a relaxing stay at a fancy sweat lodge. The cantankerous Faye is not crazy about that, either. And that’s even before the cult members turn up.Angela Hanks’s bittersweet new comedy, “Bodies They Ritual,” is set in Santa Fe, N.M., where the five women (four are African American and one is Bengali American) have traveled from Dallas for some fancy R&R laced with New Age spirituality. There are hot stones and plush white robes, chats by the fire pit and periods of zoning out. There are also the uncomfortable revelations and colorful encounters that pop up whenever Americans’ fictional characters go on retreats (see: Bess Wohl’s play “Small Mouth Sounds,” which takes place at a silent retreat, or the book and series “Nine Perfect Strangers”).“Bodies They Ritual” — the third and final play in this year’s edition of the Clubbed Thumb company’s Summerworks series — revolves around a series of meetings between the visitors and assorted locals. Naturally, the locals help excavate a few truths, but somehow there don’t seem to be any earth-shattering changes for anybody. Whatever metaphorical splinter was lodged under a character’s skin at the start is pretty much still there at the end, a constant reminder of past choices and roads taken, or not.Marie (Ebony Marshall-Oliver), for example, prefers to keep her relationships free from romantic entanglements. Faye (Lizan Mitchell), a retired hairdresser, picks at what she sees as her daughter’s idiosyncrasies, like her taste in music as a kid, or Marie’s decision to focus on her career as the manager for a professional sports team and forgo children. While the relationship between the two women feels commonplace, Hanks adorns it with offbeat details that often materialize almost out of the blue, like Faye’s spur-of-the-moment rendition of the Sublime song “Santeria.”Similarly, when Faye’s friend Toni (Denise Burse) fantasizes about seeing her late husband again just so she can tell him how much she still loathes him, Hanks seeds her angry monologue with surreal specificity — “I want to hit him in the head with a candelabra.”Turquoise Sunshine (Keilly McQuail) and Dawn (Kai Heath) are acolytes in “Bodies They Ritual.”Marcus MiddletonThis technique applies to the locals, like a teenage barista (Bianca Norwood) who tells Toni that she was named for her mother’s “third favorite thrash metal band,” Sepultura. “I consider myself lucky my name isn’t Anthrax,” she tells Toni.Best, or at least strangest of all are Queen Harvest (Emily Cass McDonnell), the Galadriel of New Mexico, and her acolytes Dawn (Kai Heath) and Turquoise Sunshine (Keilly McQuail, coming up with some strikingly kooky line readings).Hanks, whose “Wilder Gone” was in the 2018 edition of Summerworks, has a dry, tart tone that is well served by the director Knud Adams. He wrings finely tuned performances from the excellent cast and never oversells the comedy, letting a raised eyebrow, a side glance or a throwaway line do a lot of work. This is especially effective since Hanks, to her credit, refrains from open conflicts and cathartic resolutions — Santa Fe may peddle enlightenment, but this playwright does not take the bait. Admittedly, “Bodies They Ritual” does not quite cohere into a whole, but its parts are wonderful. They may be tiny, but they add up to a full meal.Bodies They RitualThrough July 2 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. More

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    On Broadway, One Show Decides to Keep Masks. No, It’s Not ‘Phantom.’

    Three days after the Broadway League announced that all 41 theaters would make masks optional starting July 1, one of those theaters has decided to stick with mandatory face coverings.The producers of a starry revival of “American Buffalo,” which is a 1975 drama by David Mamet about three schemers in a junk shop, announced Friday that they would continue to require masks through the scheduled end of the show’s run at Circle in the Square Theater on July 10.That’s only 10 days beyond when Broadway plans to drop its industrywide masking requirement, and it’s just one show, but it suggests that the unanimity among producers and theater owners may not be rock solid.There are several factors that make the “American Buffalo” situation unusual.The play, starring Sam Rockwell, Laurence Fishburne and Darren Criss, is being staged at Broadway’s only theater-in-the-round (it’s actually almost-in-the-round, because the seating doesn’t entirely encircle the stage), which means there are more patrons seated within spitting distance of actors than at other theaters.Also, Circle in the Square, with 751 seats as it is currently configured, is the only remaining Broadway theater that is not operated by a large company or a nonprofit organization, so its decisions are not tied to those of a bigger entity.Rockwell expressed concerns about the end of the masking policy in an interview this week with the New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante.The show announced the change in policy in a news release, saying that it was “due to the close proximity of the audience to the actors as a result of the intimate size of the theater and the staging in the round.” The production and theater owner did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, said of the “American Buffalo” decision, “As the optional mask policy takes effect in July, there may be unique situations which would require the audience, or some of the audience, to be masked.”It is not clear whether the decision will affect other Broadway shows. The vast majority take place in theaters operated by a handful of big landlords who endorsed the mask-optional decision. Broadway’s four nonprofit theater operators, who have been more Covid-cautious, do not have any shows this summer. And summer fare on Broadway is dominated by big musicals, where the audience tends to skew toward tourists, many of whom come from places where masks are long gone; older New York playgoers are scarcer at this time of year (and the volume of shows is lower, too: there are only 27 shows now running on Broadway).After “American Buffalo” closes next month, Circle in the Square is scheduled to be vacant until October, when a new musical called “KPOP” begins previews.Actors’ Equity, the union representing performers and stage managers, has declined to comment on the audience safety protocols, but this week sent an email to its members, previously reported by Deadline, saying, “This decision was made unilaterally, without input from your union or any other, and the unions were only given advance notice a couple of hours before the announcement.”Although the decision was announced by the Broadway League, it was made by theater owners and operators, and they plan to reconsider the protocols monthly. More

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    Immersed in ‘Stranger Things,’ Then Strolling to Beckett

    Our writer checked out two very different experiences in New York. In Netflix’s TV re-creation, you fight Demogorgons. In “Cascando,” you walk off your existential angst.Before the pizza parlor, before the arcade games, before the ice cream shop and the merch kiosks (so many merch kiosks!) and the photo op with a fiberglass-and-silicone Demogorgon, “Stranger Things: The Experience,” at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, puts on a show.Netflix, which has created other immersive entertainments based on its “Bridgerton” and “Money Heist” properties, co-produced this 45-minute experience with Fever. Based on the teen-horror pastiche “Stranger Things,” it plunks participants, many of them dressed in 1980s finery, into tens of thousands of square feet of Hawkins, Ind. Some rooms have an unfinished feel (did the budget not include ceilings?); others suggest a theme-park-quality buildout. The most fully realized ones are nestled inside Hawkins’s cheery state-of-the-art lab. Ostensibly, ticket holders have signed up for a sleep study. An interdimensional rift soon complicates study protocols. Will these test subjects survive? Of course. They have tote bags to buy afterward.“Stranger Things: The Experience” is a piece of fan service that adopts the vocabulary of immersive theater. While legible, barely, for those unfamiliar with the series, this story has been built for devotees, allowing them to enter into the fictional world. Enterprises like this used to be lower-budget affairs of the do-it-yourself variety, the province of live-action role-players and tabletop gamers. Now for about $58 — less for gutsy under-17s, more if you book on a weekend — Netflix and its partners will do the doing for you.“We look at live experiences as providing fans another way to see themselves more in the stories they love,” Greg Lombardo, the head of live experiences at Netflix, told me in an interview a couple of days after my visit.This show, which runs for about 45 minutes, chugs along like a reasonably well-oiled machine. What eldritch fluids comprise that oil? Best not ask. The cast members who circulate are trained improvisers, skilled at eliciting responses, practiced at batting those responses back. At one point I was harangued by a journalist character — sweaty, anxious, overconfident. Ow.The Upside-Down World of ‘Stranger Things’After a three-year wait, Netflix’s sci-fi series returns with a fourth season.Season 4 Guide: As in seasons past, this go-round is full of nods and Easter eggs to 1970s and ’80s pop culture. Here are the major highlights.Review: “Stranger Things” has gone from lovingly echoing 1980s touchstones to industriously copying itself, our critic writes of the show’s fourth installment.The Duffer Brothers: The “Stranger Things” creators seem to share a brain. But they could never lock themselves in a writing cabin together.David Harbour: While “Stranger Things” was on hiatus, the actor tackled a string of strangely compelling deadbeat characters.While immersive, “The Experience” doesn’t really depend on you. The Demogorgons will eventually explode, whether or not you deploy your extrasensory powers. Which is a letdown. Because there is a fantasy that many of us entertain about the art we love — that we might matter to the art as much as it matters to us. Still, the teenagers and young adults in the room gasped and screamed and unleashed their psychic abilities with apparent delight.“We’re trying to give fans a chance to be the hero of their stories,” Lombardo said. This is pushing it. Eleven, the psychokinetic phenom played by Millie Bobby Brown, who appears via hologram, is the real hero here. The motivating factors of “The Experience” owe less to art than to marketing, and its ultimate goal suggests a branding ouroboros: devotion to the show encourages consumption of the experience, consumption of the experience urges re-engagement with the show.After “The Experience,” with the rift safely sealed, you can consume without the distractions of a plot — which is when “Stranger Things: The Experience” achieves its final and ideal form. There is pizza to be eaten and ice cream to be licked and cocktails to be drunk. Bertolt Brecht used to rail against the culinary theater, a theater that delivered only emotion and sensation, rather than intellectual engagement. Brecht probably never had a drink with a stroopwafel as garnish. I didn’t buy a tote bag, but I did play through the “Stranger Things”-branded pinball game. I think I did pretty well.“Cascando,” an adaptation of a Beckett radio play, comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theater. Upon arrival each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTo wander the streets of Manhattan dressed as a high-fashion druid, a goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNo amusement genius has yet made a Samuel Beckett pinball machine — I imagine a gloomy palette, defective flippers and a high-score list that reads GODOT GODOT GODOT. But those eager for a Beckett brand extension can instead arrive at New York University’s Skirball Center for “Cascando,” an adaptation of a Beckett radio play from the early 1960s. It comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theater, an Irish company with an insouciant approach to the classics.Originally created in conjunction with the composer Marcel Mihalovici, “Cascando” is intended as a passive audio experience. But this “Cascando,” directed by Gavin Quinn and designed by Aedin Cosgrove, adds a participatory element.Upon arrival each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones. Loosed onto La Guardia Place, a quiet street adjacent to Washington Square Park in Manhattan, participants begin a single-file walk around and through the neighboring blocks. As they stroll, they listen to the text, prerecorded here by Andrew Bennett and Daniel Reardon.To wander the Village dressed as a high-fashion druid, a goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind. But there are no stops along the way, no interactions, no activations. The choreography — a sharp turn here and there — is minimal. At one point, I wondered, with almost breathless excitement, if we would sit. We did not sit.While it makes sense to encounter Beckett’s text via headphones — there are references throughout to a story existing only in someone’s head — the alone-together walk doesn’t illuminate or galvanize the text, which is, like so much of Beckett’s work, heavy on repetition and ellipses. On the rainy sidewalk, meaning slid away.In another city, at another moment, a show like “Cascando” might at least have ornamented the street life. But New York’s typical street life is already a variety of theater, druids or no. As we re-entered the park, I saw a clump of skateboarders look us up and down. We had become part of their story, I thought for a moment, part of their experience. Then they shrugged and returned to their conversation. Just another Wednesday in the Village, bro.Stranger Things: The ExperienceThrough Aug. 21 at Duggal Greenhouse, Brooklyn; strangerthings-experience.com. Running time: 45 minutes for the show, then mingling.CascandoThrough July 3 at N.Y.U. Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 30 minutes. More

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    3 Theaters, 3 Plays, One Cast, All at Once

    The Crucible Theater in Sheffield, England, is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a mind-boggling logistical challenge that also honors a declining industry in the city.SHEFFIELD, England — Visitors to Tudor Square in the center of this northern English city might spot some unusual figures there this week: a woman sprinting through in a neon boilersuit, or a tutu, or a man running with a box of scissors. And if they look like they’re in a hurry to get somewhere, that’s because they are. These are actors, and they have an entrance to make — on a different stage from the one they just left.“Rock/Paper/Scissors,” running through July 2, is a triptych of plays designed to be performed by one cast, at the same time, in three different theaters. Programmed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sheffield’s Crucible Theater, the trilogy unfolds on that playhouse’s 980-seater main stage, a smaller studio below and across the square at the Victorian-era Lyceum.The project’s logistics are mind-boggling. The 14 cast members appear as the same characters across all three shows, and most of them are on one of the stages, most of time — hence those hurried journeys between theaters. Each play has its own director and technical team, while nine stage managers ensure smooth running backstage.The three plays, which offer varying perspectives on a family saga, are designed to work as stand-alone stories, but watching all three in succession reveals densely interwoven plotlines and character arcs. “Rock,” “Paper” and “Scissors” are all set at the same time, on the same day, in almost the same place: across three different spaces in a run-down Sheffield scissor factory. The crumbling location has resonance in a city that once had a rich industrial tradition of producing steel and manufacturing world-class cutlery, including scissors.From left, Guy Rhys, Lucie Shorthouse and Samatha Power rehearsing “Rock/Paper/Scissors” at the Lyceum theater in Sheffield, England.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe plays open after the death of the factory owner, whose will is missing. Each narrative centers on characters with competing claims on the building, and conflicting visions for its future.Chris Bush, who wrote the three plays to celebrate the Crucible Theater’s anniversary, said they were about offering a “perspective shift” across the three generations. “The same world is shared by three different stories, where heroes become villains and villains become heroes,” she said.To make sure the scripts worked for simultaneous performance, Bush planned them out with a series of spreadsheets, timing the entrances and exits by the word count of each scene, she said.Robert Hastie, Sheffield Theaters’ artistic leader and the director for “Paper,” said, “The precision tuning is more complicated than anything I’ve ever done.” Even scheduling rehearsals proved a headache, he added, requiring careful planning with his fellow directors Anthony Lau and Elin Schofield to divide the 14 actors’ time.Backstage during a recent preview performance, an atmosphere of quiet concentration prevailed. If any play were to start running fast, or slow, or to stop for any reason, it would throw all three out of sync. The team of stage managers were all focused on marked-up scripts and color-coded spreadsheets detailing the more than 80 entrances and exits.A large screen in each of the theater’s backstage areas shows all three stages as well as a giant synchronized clock, so any deviations from the plan can be quickly spotted. The stage managers communicate via radios and WhatsApp, and are ready, in the worst-case scenario, to stop all three shows if they have to. (So far, this only happened once in previews, because of a technical fault rather than a timing issue.)The stage manager Andrew Wilcox, center, conferring with colleagues backstage.Mary Turner for The New York TimesNonetheless, the swift entrances and exits — and the knowledge that the cast are having to run across a busy public square to get between the theaters — adds a frisson for both audiences and the actors.One of the cast members, Samantha Power, said she had some entrances “where I am absolutely sprinting across Tudor Square.” She added that this was more of a challenge on a Saturday night, “negotiating all the inebriated people.”Andrew Macbean, another actor in the show, said that during the same journey, “Somebody asked me if I had any spare change.” But mostly, he added, the cast was unfazed. “For us, it’s just one play,” he said. “Three different venues is no different, really, to doing it on three different sets.”Responses to “Rock/Paper/Scissors” have been positive so far, with the shows earning standing ovations and strong reviews. Watching all three plays back-to-back on press day on Wednesday, the performances became a cumulative experience: each new part deepened the audience’s understanding of the characters.The triptych also offers three different answers to a question that is freshly topical after two years of the coronavirus pandemic: What do we do with our empty city center spaces?In “Rock,” presented on the Crucible’s thrust stage, the character of Susie — an aging rocker and the sister of the scissor factory’s deceased owner — puts forward idealistic plans to turn the gritty space into a vibrant new music venue. In “Paper,” at the Lyceum, the owner’s daughter Faye and her wife argue for the most financially lucrative option: selling the building to a developer to turn it into apartments. “Scissors,” in the Studio, is set in a workshop where four young apprentices put the case for maintaining the building as a workshop for hand-making scissors, preserving a local tradition.These arguments will sound familiar to Sheffield residents. Like many British town centers, Sheffield contains many shuttered buildings, including a prominent former department store that city authorities are currently debating how to repurpose. (Options include a soccer museum, bars and restaurants, and housing). The decline of Sheffield’s steel industry since the 1970s has meant that many buildings once used in manufacturing also fell into disuse, although several have been repurposed as street food markets, nightclubs, vintage stores and housing developments.Fifty years ago there were dozens of scissor factories in Sheffield; now, there are just two. One of those that remains, Ernest Wright, lent working machinery to the production, so actors could sharpen real blades during “Scissors.”Hastie said it was “impossible to overestimate how central cutlery is to Sheffield’s sense of self and its sense of pride.” Examining this legacy, as well as considering the future of former industrial spaces, seemed an appropriate subject for a 50th anniversary show at a theater at the city’s heart, he said.“We were very much looking for an idea for our 50th anniversary that had a spirit of adventure and daring,” he said, adding that using the three theater spaces simultaneously fit that bill. “We wanted to see if we’d bitten off more than we could chew.”And have they? “We’re still chewing very hard,” Hastie said.Rock/Paper/ScissorsThrough July 2 at the Crucible, Studio and Lyceum theaters in Sheffield, England; sheffieldtheatres.co.uk.Jabez Sykes and Maia Tamrakar, actors in the production, embracing backstage after an exhausting performance.Mary Turner for The New York Times More

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    The ‘Most Real Richard III There’s Ever Been’

    The Royal Shakespeare Company has cast a disabled actor to play the “deformed, unfinish’d” king for the first time. The choice has been hailed as a landmark moment.STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England — A raucous party was underway in one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s rehearsal rooms this month as the cast of “Richard III” ran through the play’s opening, dancing in a conga line while music blared and balloons bounced off the floor.Off to one side, the future Richard III sneered at the scene. Shakespeare depicted the king as a scheming hunchback who murdered his way to the British throne, and in this imagining of the play, he is personified by the 30-year-old actor Arthur Hughes. In role, Hughes stepped into the middle of the party, veering through the revelers to deliver the play’s famed opening speech: “Now is the winter of our discontent,” he began.As the speech continues, Richard lists the insults he has faced. He is “curtail’d of this fair proportion”; he is “cheated of feature”; he is “deformed, unfinish’d.” As Hughes declaimed each barb, he angrily squeezed a white balloon. Eventually the pressure became too much. The balloon popped.The moment of tension was made even more powerful by Hughes’s own appearance. He has radial dysplasia, meaning he was born with a shorter right arm, his wrist bending into the body and his hand missing a thumb.The first casting by the Royal Shakespeare Company of a disabled actor to play Richard III has been hailed as an advance in British theater. The play opened in Stratford-upon-Avon on Thursday and runs through Oct. 8.“You can see a despot and tyrant,” Hughes said of Richard III, “but also a little boy who hasn’t been loved and someone who’s shunned.”Ellie Kurttz, via Royal Shakespeare CompanyShakespeare used and amplified Richard III’s real-life condition — the king is thought to have had scoliosis or curvature of the spine — to highlight the character’s unsavory nature. (He is described at one point as a “pois’nous bunch-back’d toad.”) According to Gregory Doran, the director of the current adaptation, the casting of Hughes in the role “sends out a big message, just as not casting a disabled actor would have sent out a different message.”Hughes’s casting comes as the frequency of disabled actors earning major roles appears to be growing in British theater. In July, the National Theater will present “All of Us” by Francesca Martinez, an actor and playwright who has cerebral palsy (Martinez said in a telephone interview that the play would feature three disabled actors, including herself). And Liz Carr, who uses a wheelchair, this year won an Olivier Award, Britain’s equivalent of a Tony, for her performance in Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” at the National.In her Olivier acceptance speech, Carr highlighted some persistent problems. “There’s so many fears of risk of employing disabled actors,” she said, but added the award “proves we can do it, we can project, we can fill a stage.”Jack Thorne, the playwright behind “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and an activist for disabled people, said in a telephone interview that there was “definitely a willingness” to expand disabled casting in Britain. The National Theater was a leader, he said, as were six regional theaters behind an initiative called Ramps on the Moon that stages productions led by deaf and disabled actors.Yet there was still a dearth of lead roles in London’s commercial heartland, he said. “There aren’t West End shows with disabled leads,” he added. In discussions about diversity, the issue was routinely forgotten, he said. Theaters should bring in targets to increase participation, he said.The National Theater, for instance, has experimented with aspirational quotas for women and people of color, but not for disabled people. Alastair Coomer, the theater’s head of casting, said in a telephone interview that new targets were being discussed and that he “would not be surprised” if that discrepancy was addressed.Hughes in a Royal Shakespeare Company costume storeroom. “Richard III” plays in the company’s repertoire through Oct. 8.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesHughes, eating potato chips in a break from rehearsal, said he hoped his casting as Richard III “sets the mold for how the industry can change.”Growing up in Aylesbury, a town about 40 miles northwest of London, Hughes said that he had experienced few barriers to pursuing acting. As a child, he said, he was so enthusiastic in drama classes that he was given prime roles, such as Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”Hughes said that he had read “Richard III” for the first time while looking for speeches to use when auditioning for drama schools. He instantly identified with the role, he added, since the play’s characters view the future king as “not cut out for big parts” because of his looks. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me,’” Hughes said.After drama school, Hughes did not immediately secure an agent — unlike many of his colleagues. “Voices in my head were going, ‘Are you a risk?’” he said, but those doubts lifted after he secured a role in a production by Graeae, a British theater company that casts deaf and disabled actors. Before then, Hughes said, he felt his appearance “was going to hold me back,” but after being surrounded by other disabled actors, he felt empowered. He even started wearing short sleeves to highlight his limb difference, he added.The Royal Shakespeare Company show is Hughes’s most high-profile casting to date. In May, Doran gave an interview to The Times of London that was headlined: “Able-Bodied Actors Cannot Be Richard III.” In a letter of complaint to that newspaper, Doran said that the headline was misleading. His point, he wrote, was that, although anybody could play the role, a disabled actor could “enhance the performance and impact of the production.”Richard III is often portrayed as an almost comedic bad guy, Hughes said, often with a fake “hump and limp.” While not trying to hide the character’s villainy, he hoped to draw attention to his motivations: “You can see a despot and tyrant,” he said, “but also a little boy who hasn’t been loved and someone who’s shunned and outcast and is underestimated.”Mat Fraser, another disabled actor, who played Richard III in a production in Hull in northern England in 2017, said that the king was often played by older performers who could make the king seem a “withered little twig.” But Hughes is young and muscular — better suited to portraying a monarch who died at age 32 on a battlefield, Fraser said. “We’re going to see the most real Richard III there’s ever been,” he added.Hughes said he was already looking beyond his turn as Richard to other Shakespeare roles, and would love to play Hamlet, and Iago from “Othello.”“I’d like to play a role that’s not specified as disabled,” he said. “Obviously, whichever role I play will be disabled by the very nature of me playing it,” he added. “But that’s not the point.”Richard IIIThrough Oct. 8 at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England; rsc.org.uk. More

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    Trevor Noah Has Gun Law Ideas for New York

    Noah says the state should propose new restrictions where “anyone can buy a gun if they want, but the gun stores are only open on the nights that the Knicks win.”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.And You Get a Gun! And You Get a Gun!The U.S. Supreme Court issued a major ruling on Thursday, striking down a New York State gun law that allowed residents a conceal and carry permit only if they demonstrated a special need.Trevor Noah said the ruling “makes complete sense — because that would be making the militia well regulated, and I mean, you can’t do that, you know? It’s not like it’s written anywhere.”“You can see where this is going. This Supreme Court is feeling themselves, huh? Because you realize they finally have all the justices they need to do anything they want. It’s like Amy Coney Barrett was the last infinity stone that they needed. Yeah, they put it in, and now they’re just snapping away at all the laws. It’s like voting rights, gun control, Miranda rights, abortion. I love this song, yeah!” — TREVOR NOAH“Yeah, I don’t know about you guys, whenever I’ve been sitting in rush-hour traffic in New York with drivers screaming at each other and bikers cussing out the drivers and pedestrians wailing at the bikers and the drivers, the one thing I always think is, ‘Man, one thing that would calm this down is if everyone had a gun right now. Just a Glock or two would really chill the situation out.’” — TREVOR NOAH“So this is obviously a big setback for gun safety. But if you ask me, New York just needs to get creative. Yeah, they need to think outside of the box, the same way that Texas did, right? Look at what Texas did with banning abortion — they weren’t allowed to ban it, so they just made a crazy new law that basically banned it anyway. That’s what New York needs to do with guns. Like, yeah, they should say, ‘OK, anyone can buy a gun if they want, but the gun stores are only open on the nights that the Knicks win.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Gun Show Edition)“The Supreme Court today issued several rulings, including one that overturns a New York State gun law restricting concealed weapons. So move over, tourists! Seriously, move over, ’cuz you’re gonna get shot.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right, the Supreme Court overturned a New York law — a New York State gun law restricting concealed weapons. ’Cuz you know how sometimes you’ll be on the F train in August and there’s no A.C. and then it stops in the middle of the tunnel and the conductor doesn’t announce anything and you think to yourself, ‘Man, I wish we all had guns.’” — SETH MEYERS“Basically, New York had a law for the past 100 years that said if you want to just carry a gun around with you wherever you go, you need to prove that you have a specific reason you need that gun, you know, for your protection. You have to go to the police, you have to tell them, explain the whole thing. Maybe someone is making threats against you, or maybe you’re Liam Neeson’s daughter and people keep trying to kidnap you, even though it seems like it would be way easier to kidnap someone else’s daughter at this point.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingSamantha Bee shot this week’s “Full Frontal” while she had Covid, saying the news of a potential abortion ban was important enough to power through.Also, Check This OutAustin Butler as Elvis Presley in “Elvis,” directed by Baz Luhrmann. The soundtrack shakes up the expected playlist, and offers the strongest argument for Presley’s relevance.Warner Bros.Austin Butler plays Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s operatic, chaotic anti-biopic, “Elvis.” More