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    The ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Creative Team on Assembling Their Quirky Puzzle

    The toilets wouldn’t stop flushing. The playwright David Lindsay-Abaire was trying to talk about his collaboration with the composer Jeanine Tesori and the director Jessica Stone on their musical, “Kimberly Akimbo,” and in the background, the janitorial staff members of the Booth Theater were cleaning the bathrooms.“I said to Jeanine,” he said, trying to keep a straight face as another toilet flushed, “I wish we could write a musical the way that I write a play, where there’s not a team of other people involved.”Another flush.Tesori stood up, muttering, “I have to close that door myself.” Which prompted Stone to bend over in laughter.“Thank you,” Stone said, as Tesori returned to her seat in the basement lounge of the Broadway theater.“It is on theme,” Lindsay-Abaire said. “Nothing better.”“Isn’t that enough?” Tesori responded. “Doesn’t that say everything?”For the creative team behind “Kimberly Akimbo,” the chaotic energy of this morning fit the musical itself, whose concept seems — on the page, at least — too off-kilter for a shiny Broadway marquee.Victoria Clark, center, as Kimberly with Alli Mauzey, foreground left, and Steven Boyer, foreground right, who play her parents.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical dramedy set in New Jersey, “Kimberly Akimbo” tells the story of a teenager named Kimberly (played by Victoria Clark) who has a disease akin to progeria, which causes her to age at a hyperspeed. At 16, she looks 72.It’s far from a tragedy, though, thanks in part to the quirky characters: Kimberly’s pregnant mother is a hypochondriac; her best friend, Seth, loves anagrams and plays the tuba; and her aunt is trying to persuade her to commit some white-collar crimes. Through it all, even though people with her condition have an average life expectancy of 16 years, Kimberly learns to be young and unafraid after years of taking on adult responsibilities.“I love stories that weave together pain, and hilarity and absurdity. And that, to me, is David and Jeanine, and their work and their sensibility,” said Stone, 52, who has been attached to the musical since 2019. “It’s exhilarating.”When the show premiered Off Broadway last winter at Atlantic Theater Company, Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called it a “funny and moving new musical.” Led by the producer David Stone (no relation to the director), the show sold out its run, and a Broadway transfer was quickly announced. (As the producer of musicals like “Next to Normal” and “If/Then,” Stone is no stranger to an out-of-the-box concept.) Now “Kimberly Akimbo” is in previews, and scheduled to open on Nov. 10.Tesori, 60, and Lindsay-Abaire, 52, first worked together on “Shrek the Musical” in 2008, and for the past seven years, transforming Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 play “Kimberly Akimbo” into a musical was their passion project. The focus and intimacy of that partnership, he said, made the musical “the easiest thing I’ve ever written.”He compares writing a musical to working on a puzzle. (He loves puzzles and word games; the show’s title is an anagram.) “It is like dumping a bunch of puzzle pieces onto the table,” he said. “It’s hard when you say, ‘Hey, 20 people, come on in and let’s do this puzzle together.’ But if it’s just the two of you — ‘I have this corner’; ‘I’m working on the edges; let’s get to the middle’ — then it comes into focus. And seldom does that happen with a musical.”Stone, Tesori and Lindsay-Abaire gathered to discuss their process on the first day of previews. These are edited excerpts from the discussion.Clark and Justin Cooley, who are reprising their roles on Broadway. “The two of them give each other really beautiful gifts,” the show’s director said of the actors.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDavid, what were the instincts that led you to write “Kimberly Akimbo” 20 years ago?DAVID LINDSAY-ABAIRE I was writing what I hoped would be a great part for an actress that I loved and adored: Marylouise Burke [who starred in the play Off Broadway in 2001]. I wrote a part for her because she and now Vicki [Victoria Clark] have such an amazing young spirit about them, even though they’re actresses of a certain age. And so I wanted to write an amazing part for a great actor. But I also wanted to explore mortality and what it means to truly live in the moment. What I probably didn’t know at the time was that I was also writing about my family in many ways, and things that I was afraid of and angry about.How do you mean?LINDSAY-ABAIRE Uh oh …JEANINE TESORI I don’t know if you can open that door.LINDSAY-ABAIRE Look, I love my family very much. And they messed me up just enough for this play to be what it is. [Tesori pats Lindsay-Abaire’s arm, remarking, “Wow.”] I don’t feel messed up by them. But I feel messed up just enough to be the writer and be the person that I am.TESORI That’s what makes you a storyteller. Healthy enough to write, damaged enough to want to write.The play didn’t have monologues for Kimberly, but it did have monologues for her parents. Was creating the musical a way to create more interiority for her?LINDSAY-ABAIRE During “Shrek,” I said to Jeanine, “I would love to write a musical the way that I write a play, where it would just be us figuring it out for as long as we needed to figure it out.” And then Jeanine said, “Well, how about one of your plays? I think ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ could be a musical. It has a really deep, complicated inner life. Those characters want to sing to me, their emotions are deep. And I like how funny it is.”By making it a musical, we had a way into the characters that the play did not have. We could crack open Kimberly’s heart, and let her express all of those feelings and emotions and fears and desires and longings, that are only subtext in the play.TESORI I feel it in my body when something sings, I can’t put it into words. And these characters, they reminded me of people I grew up with, they reminded me of people in my family — and not always people who are center stage, especially in a musical.Jessica, how did you direct Victoria Clark, who is 63, and Justin Cooley, who plays her boyfriend, Seth, who’s now 19? They come across as being the same age.STONE: It actually is thrilling because you have two people on opposite ends of the spectrum. The skill that Vicki brings to the process of exploration can’t be created in Justin. I watch him being elevated by the discipline and skill, and her surgical approach to figuring out Kim and mapping out Kim’s world and behavior. He starts to sort of mimic that work ethic and he starts to explore and basically copy that approach.His complete honesty, tabula rasa, complete truthful, youthful, wide-eyed innocence and sweetness — it’s really hard to create that once you’ve lived, you know, 35 more years. So the fact that she’s in his orbit, this beautiful, innocent, youthful presence also washes over her. So the two of them give each other really beautiful gifts.Speaking of teenagers, there’s a duality to the show. It’s about youthfulness, but it’s also about mortality. As experienced artists, how do you keep that youthful tone intact?TESORI It’s part of being of a certain age, and what we have all experienced at this age. I’m older than these two. We share the same sensibility of humor. But there’s also this sense, like, we’ve been through some [expletive]. And our friends have been through some [expletive], and we’ve lost people. And if you’re lucky, you’re able to bring both of those things to an audience so they can recognize it. Because I think sometimes because musicals have artifice, they can seem artificial. And they’re not. They are the greatest art form.STONE We’re all parents. And we all have been close observers to adolescents. That adds a little bit to the glaze of authenticity, and a little understanding of the behavior, needs and pitfalls.LINDSAY-ABAIRE The first time in, I was really accessing my teenage years and stuff about my parents and my family, but really homing in on the Seth character who is very close to me in very many ways. I’m now the father of teenage boys, and I just had access to the parents in a way that I didn’t have when I wrote it. I understand much more acutely the fear of losing a child. The whole dynamics between parents and teenagers that I was sort of making up 20 years ago, now I know it deeply and personally. And I also got the chance to put all of my high school friends up onstage. Those four kids in the show choir were not in the play.“If you can have a gaggle of teenagers skipping out of the show, and then this grumpy old man with tears in his eyes — that’s victory,” said Lindsay-Abaire, right.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesDo you imagine this as the kind of show that parents can take their teens to?STONE ​​My kids, 13 and 15, were here, and they loved it. Because I’m so invested in the parent side of the story, and in the mortality side of the story, and in the how-do-you-choose-to-live-your-remaining-days-on-this-planet side of the story, I forget about the delight, the tremendous luxury of hope and time, that teens have. And that enables so much in terms of imagination and promise. [My sons] think it’s hilarious. They love Deborah [Kimberly’s aunt, played by Bonnie Milligan], because they love a rule breaker. They also thought it was really moving. They were really intrigued by the relationship between Kim and Seth, not because it’s a traditional love story. But they really responded to that deep friendship.LINDSAY-ABAIRE Nothing has made me happier than seeing gaggles of teenagers really love the show. But at the same time, at the end of the Atlantic run, a grumpy old man was walking up the aisle and he looked at me and I thought he’s going to criticize the piece. And he said, “I just want you to know that I’m going to go out and live life more fully tomorrow.” My eyes welled up and then he was gone into the night. If you can have a gaggle of teenagers skipping out of the show, and then this grumpy old man with tears in his eyes — that’s victory.In the musical, Kimberly’s aunt sings an upbeat number about how to commit mail fraud. Jeanine, how did you write a catchy song about white collar crime?TESORI [laughs] It’s exposition, which is generally not great for a song. But then I thought, “Oh, if we make it really sort of furtive, and it’s got a little bit of a muted guitar thing, and it’s sort of like Peggy Lee, but maybe on a very, very off day …” It’s having it be fun, so that she can convince the teens to be part of it.LINDSAY-ABAIRE It’s a teaching song. We were talking about “The Rain in Spain” [from “My Fair Lady”], but it’s about check washing. It’s just messed up enough. More

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    Jules Bass, Co-Producer of TV Holiday Staples, Is Dead at 87

    The animation company he ran with Arthur Rankin Jr. gave the world “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman” and much more.Jules Bass, who created an animation empire with his business partner, Arthur Rankin Jr., that produced perennial Christmastime television favorites like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman,” died on Tuesday in Rye, N.Y. He was 87.His death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by Jennifer Ruff, whose mother was Mr. Bass’s first wife.The Rankin/Bass studio was a major force in animated programming, mostly on television, from the early 1960s to the late ’80s. Some of its TV shows and movies used traditional hand-drawn cel animation, but it carved out a separate specialty in the stop-motion puppet animation familiar to viewers since “Gumby” in the 1950s.Rankin/Bass’s stop-motion specials included “Rudolph” (1964), featuring the voice of the folk singer Burl Ives as Sam the Snowman;“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” (1970), with Fred Astaire as the narrator and Mickey Rooney as the voice of Kris Kringle; and “Jack Frost” (1979), with Robert Morse voicing the title role.“Frosty” (1969), narrated by Jimmy Durante, used traditional animation.To create the stop-motion effect, animators in Japan painstakingly shot thousands of pictures of the tiniest movements and gestures of inches-tall puppets. When run at 24 frames a second, the images generated a whimsical sort of herky-jerky animation that became the Rankin/Bass signature.“When I saw their cartoons, they left a great impression on me because they had dimensionality versus drawn animation,” said Tom Gasek, a professor in the school of film and animation at the Rochester Institute of Technology who was inspired by Rankin/Bass’s work to become a stop-motion animator. “They were not high quality by any means, but they were charming and their designs were very smart.”Mr. Bass and Mr. Rankin were often credited as the directors of their work and offered input on scripts and storyboards. But they played different roles at the company, said Rick Goldschmidt, the studio’s official historian.Mr. Bass composed much of the music. He hired and worked closely with the musical supervisor, Maury Laws, and ran the company’s business in Manhattan while Mr. Rankin was in Japan supervising the animation.“Where Jules is really the star of Rankin/Bass is as a songwriter and his partnership with Maury,” Mr. Goldschmidt said in a phone interview.Mr. Rankin, who was the studio’s chief executive, also sold the shows to TV networks and made sure they were delivered on time.“After a while, we were never seen together — I’d be doing production in Tokyo and he’d be recording a soundtrack in New York,” Mr. Rankin said in an interview in 2003 with the Museum of Television and Radio, now the Paley Center for Media. “If we were together, one of us wasn’t necessary.”Mr. Bass was rarely quoted publicly, and little is known about his private life. But the two partners spoke during a joint interview with The New York Times in 1982 when their animated theatrical feature, “The Last Unicorn,” was released.When they were asked who did most of the directing — the movie credits both of them — they initially said they did it together.“Anything he can do, I can do better,” Mr. Rankin said.Mr. Bass countered: “He never worked a day on the film. I did everything.”Peter S. Beagle, who wrote the screenplay for “The Last Unicorn” and the novel it was based on, recalled in a phone interview that his dealings with Mr. Bass “were very professional.” But, he added, “he was very private, and I never had a true sense of what was going on deepest in his head.”He added, “I’m grateful that the film came out pretty much as I wrote it.”Arthur Rankin Jr., left, and Mr. Bass in 1965. Both men were credited as producers and directors of their TV specials, but Mr. Bass was more involved with the music and Mr. Rankin with the animation.Miser Bros. Press/Rick Goldschmidt ArchivesJulius Bass was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 16, 1935. His father, Max, was a wholesale beer salesman, and his mother, Bernice (Palat) Bass, was a homemaker.He attended New York University, where he studied marketing from 1952 to 1954, but he did not graduate. He was hired by Gardner Advertising in Manhattan, where he met Mr. Rankin, who was making TV commercials under the banner of his company, Videocraft International.Mr. Bass joined Videocraft in the mid-1950s, and the two men produced commercials, occasionally using animation, for agencies that represented clients including General Electric and the A.&P. supermarket chain. They wearied of commercial production and shifted to animation in 1960 with a TV series, “The New Adventures of Pinocchio,” which used the stop-motion technique Mr. Bass had discovered in Japan.The company eventually changed its name to Rankin/Bass, and its work toggled between stop-motion and traditional cel animation.Although Rankin/Bass was best known for its Christmas programs, it also made TV movies like “The Ballad of Smokey the Bear” (1966), which was narrated by James Cagney,; “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” (1971); and “The Hobbit” (1977), which earned a Peabody Award. They also produced animated TV series like “King Kong” (1966), “The Reluctant Dragon & Mr. Toad Show” (1970), the “Jackson 5ive” (1971),“TigerSharks” (1985) and “Thundercats” (1987).Mr. Bass and Mr. Rankin ended their partnership in the late 1980s after their company was acquired by Lorimar-Telepictures, which was subsequently bought by Warner Communications, which is now Warner Bros. Discovery. Mr. Rankin died in 2014.Mr. Bass later wrote three children’s books. “Herb the Vegetarian Dragon” and “Cooking With Herb the Vegetarian Dragon,” illustrated by Debbie Harter, were both published in 1999. “The Mythomaniacs” (2013), with illustrations by Lawrence Christmas, is about a teenage magician who sends a group of readers of his father’s fairy tales into the books as characters.He also wrote an adult novel, “Headhunters” (2001), about four women from New Jersey who go to Monte Carlo and pretend to be among the world’s wealthiest women. It was adapted into a 2011 film, “Monte Carlo,” starring Selena Gomez.Mr. Bass leaves no immediate survivors. His daughter, Jean Nicole Bass, died this year. His marriages to Renee Fisherman and Sylvia Bass ended in divorce.The power of two of Rankin/Bass’s best-known productions has reverberated for decades since they were released: Both “Rudolph” and “Frosty” remain highly rated cornerstones of CBS’s pre-Christmas programming.In 2014, CBS promoted “Rudolph” on its 50th anniversary with ads that used stop motion to show the renowned reindeer and Sam the Snowman walking around the network’s backlot, meeting the stars of some of its other shows, including Mayim Bialik of “The Big Bang Theory” and Michael Weatherly of “NCIS.”“They’re the fabric of our Christmas hearth, the wood in the Christmas fire,” George Schweitzer, CBS’s former president of marketing, said in a phone interview. “You knew Christmas was coming when Rudolph and Frosty showed up on CBS.” More

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    ‘Hamlet’ Review: A Dirt-Eating Danish Prince, Born to Be Wild

    Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet,” presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival, unleashes more madness than what Shakespeare has already offered.“Hamlet” is a work of excesses: an endlessly philosophizing hero, a play within a play and enough casualties that by the end the stage looks like a horror film, scattered with corpses.And yet it is still possible to out-“Hamlet” “Hamlet,” to create a production with even more spilled blood, more graveyard dirt and more madness than what Shakespeare has already offered. For better or for worse, this is Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet” for the Schaubühne Berlin, presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival: the Danish prince unleashed, like a rabid dog, onto the stage.At the start of the production, running in BAM’s Harvey Theater through Nov. 5, a few figures gather, Last Supper-style, at a long table with a white tablecloth. Their expressions are unclear: They’re not only behind a curtain, but also sitting far from us, upstage. Downstage is a plot of dirt, where a coffin is being lowered into the earth. They’re at a wedding table for Hamlet’s mother Gertrude’s marriage to his uncle Claudius. Hamlet (an unpredictable Lars Eidinger), crouched in a corner, begins his “to be or not to be” speech (yes, a whole two acts early), speaking into a camera he holds close to his face, which is projected large onto the curtain for us to see. (The video design is by Sébastien Dupouey.) A gravedigger fights a coffin — the coffin of the late King Hamlet, who died under mysterious circumstances — into the ground in a long sequence of daffy physical comedy set to a swelling barrage of percussion, strings and guitar. Gertrude, in a white cropped shirt and white slacks, wears a long white veil and belly dances seductively for her brother-in-law-turned-husband.In other words, the performance has begun.Thomas Bading as Claudius and Jenny König as Gertrude kissing at their wedding table, with Eidinger’s Hamlet capturing the moment, which is projected onto a curtain.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis German-language production with supertitles (the German translation is by Marius von Mayenburg) was first staged in 2008 and has toured internationally since then. It takes a Brechtian approach, self-consciously nodding to the performance as a performance. In that way it’s not unlike, say, James Ijames’s thrilling “Fat Ham,” which ran at the Public Theater this spring — shows that push back against both the text and the fourth wall.This “Hamlet,” however, has neither the same poetry nor grace, which isn’t to say it’s unsuccessful. The production exhibits cleverness in its puckishly untamed and untidy circus act, but tips over into excess as it tries to make its spectacle of spit, dirt and trash into a masticated art piece with Shakespeare’s great work as its fodder.The cast of characters is condensed; a six-person ensemble plays 11 parts (everyone except Eidinger takes on two roles). The pairings are cleverly thought through: It makes sense that the actors who play Horatio (Damir Avdic), Hamlet’s closest confidante, and Laertes (Konrad Singer), Hamlet’s peer, also play the prince’s treacherous friends Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, offering opposing views of what Hamlet’s relationships look like. Claudius (Thomas Bading, on this evening) crumbles in a heap on his wedding table, in a drunken stupor, but then rises, as if from the sleep of death, as the late king’s ghost.Robert Beyer takes on two fools: Osric and Polonius. (He delivers an especially fine performance of the inane royal adviser Polonius, not as the clown productions often make him to be, but as a more realistic yet still comical daft uncle who isn’t as wise as he lets on.) Jenny König is left with the play’s troubled women — Queen Gertrude and the ill-fated Ophelia — though they are at least as ill-served in this production as in so many others. The fact that they are conflated here wisely calls to Hamlet’s psychosexual fixation on his mother’s eroticism and Ophelia’s innocence. But these female characters are also reduced to a seductress tongue-wrestling with her dead husband’s brother and a tragic nymphet whose arc is cut even shorter in this adaptation of the story; Ophelia is barely introduced before she is killed off.In the middle of a flurry of action, like a force of nature, is Eidinger, who retches, eats dirt, face-plants into the ground, tumbles, break-dances, twitches, hoots, spasms, shrieks, cross-dresses and wanders into the audience as he pleases. He throws empty drink cans, kicks around plates and flatware, sprays a hose of water across the stage (audience members in the first few rows, beware the splash zone), takes breaks to drop contemporary music references and pop culture jokes in English and to D.J. Though this production relentlessly trims down the text, it’s bloated back up with improv that steers the show to a nearly three-hour running time.König and Robert Beyer as Polonius in the play, which is presented in German and features a muddy graveyard increasingly littered with empty beer cans and other detritus.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd what we get is a show stripped of its pathos; Eidinger’s performance is as vibrant as it is off-putting and as aloof and performative as it is fascinating. This “Hamlet” is no longer a classical Greek-style tragedy of vengeance, mortality and fate but rather a tragedy of a man undone by his own solipsism.In “Hamlet” we see a production that sometimes succumbs to one of the frequent pitfalls of experimental takes on classic works: It feels more attuned to inherited ideas about and traditions of the play as opposed to being attuned to the material itself.Ostermeier’s direction is confrontational, from Eidinger’s interactions with the audience to the occasionally piercing, cinematic music (Nils Ostendorf). The lighting design, by Erich Schneider, takes us from horror to comedy, and occasionally targets the audience when Ostermeier starts to lean against the fourth wall. A nimbly choreographed fencing match (choreography by René Lay) so convincingly recalls the casually deadly jabs you’d see from two boxers in a street fight.One of my many favorite lines in the play is when Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he sees his country as a prison. Rosencrantz challenges him, suggesting that he is trapped in his own mind. Hamlet replies, “I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.” In Ostermeier and Eidinger’s “Hamlet,” the characters, setting and details become less important; the whole world we have is the chaotic space between Hamlet’s ears. Though being trapped in Prince Hamlet’s mind offers us a new perspective that some will find freeing, others will see only bedlam and madness.HamletThrough Nov. 5 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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    Seymour Press, a Behind-the-Scenes Fixture on Broadway, Dies at 98

    He started playing in Broadway orchestras in 1957, and eventually he began recruiting those orchestras as well.Seymour Press, who for more than 60 years served an important role — though one that went largely unnoticed by audiences — in dozens of Broadway and Off Broadway shows, first as a member of pit orchestras and later as the person who assembled those orchestras, died on Monday at an assisted living facility in Hackettstown, N.J. He was 98.His daughter, Gwynn Press Anidjar, said the cause was advanced myelofibrosis, a bone marrow cancer.Mr. Press, known as Red because he had red hair in his younger days, played multiple instruments, including saxophone; he first sat in a Broadway pit for the 1958 musical “The Body Beautiful,” one of the first shows to feature music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. In the mid-1970s he began taking on the demanding job of musical coordinator (also called music contractor), although he continued playing in orchestras well into the 2000s.His primary duty as coordinator was hiring orchestras for shows. But he also scheduled rehearsals, made sure musicians were paid, handled issues between their union and management, and ironed out all manner of problems.“The guy who waves his arm is the music,” he said in a 2018 episode of the podcast “Behind the Curtain: Broadway’s Living Legends,” referring to the conductor. “Everything else that has to do with the orchestra is me.”For 28 years, he filled that role for the Encores! revival series at New York City Center; he announced his retirement only this spring. He was also working on Broadway until just a few months ago, receiving the coordinator credit on the current productions of “The Music Man,” “Funny Girl” and “Into the Woods,” all of which opened this year.In 2007, he received a Tony Honor for Excellence in Theater, which recognizes outstanding achievement in theater by those who do not qualify in a traditional Tony Award category.Mr. Press in 2016. He was the music coordinator for the Encores! series at New York City Center for 28 years before announcing his retirement this year.Walter McBride/Getty ImagesSeymour Press was born on Feb. 26, 1924, in the Bronx. His mother, Rose (Guttman) Press, was a homemaker, and his father, Arthur, was a salesman and “a frustrated musician,” as Seymour Press put it in the podcast. His father’s cousin, he said, played the saxophone and introduced him to the instrument; Mr. Press later added flute, clarinet, piccolo and others to his arsenal.Mr. Press graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. In his second year at what is now the City University of New York, he enlisted in the Army. He had expected to be drafted, he said, so when he saw a poster recruiting for the Army band, he bit.He spent his service playing for troops as they shipped out of Newport News, Va. It was, he said, both a safe assignment and good music training.“I went in an amateur saxophone player,” he said on the podcast. “I came out a professional.”After mustering out in 1946, he toured with various bands, small-time ones at first and eventually those of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. But by the mid-1950s, big-band music was fading; “the musical style I thought would last my lifetime was gone,” he said. He married Nona Gwynn Holcomb in 1957 and began looking to trade life on the road for something at least somewhat more stable.“The Body Beautiful” didn’t last long, but in 1959, Mr. Press found himself in the pit for a show that did: the original production of “Gypsy.”“Not only was it the first hit show I had,” he said, but it was also “the first time I could look at myself and say, ‘I’m going to be working 52 weeks a year,’ which was a big thing.”Mr. Press’s wife died in 2021. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a stepson, Edward Finkenberg, and two grandchildren.In his decades as a pit player and musical coordinator, Mr. Press saw lots of change: orchestra sizes and instrumentation varied, the pits moved (often to create more seats), and sound engineering became more sophisticated. He also fielded his share of odd requests. On the podcast, he recalled being asked to recruit a trio for one production: cello, violin, piano. But, the director told him, not just any players would do.“He wanted one to be tall and thin, one to be overweight and one to be very short,” Mr. Press said. “That was a problem.”Mr. Press got an insider’s view of countless shows, but his tastes weren’t infallible. He remembered working on “Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge,” a sequel to the 1977 smash “Annie.” He first heard it at a backers’ audition.“I left that and I called my wife and said, ‘It’s going to be a giant hit,’” he said.Audiences at the pre-Broadway tryout in Washington in 1990 disagreed.“I watched them walk out — in throngs, not just four people, not just five people,” he recalled, adding, “We opened in Washington and closed in Washington.” More

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    Stephen Colbert Bans Kanye West From ‘The Late Show’

    Colbert said his jurisdiction extended into the northern half of Times Square, and that he was “banning Kanye from coming north of Bubba Gump Shrimp.”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.Ye Takes Another ‘L’Stephen Colbert made a big announcement on Thursday night.“After much thought and soul-searching, I, Stephen Colbert, am banning Kanye West from the Ed Sullivan Theater,” Colbert said. “In fact, as host of ‘The Late Show’ my jurisdiction extends into the northern half of Times Square, and I am banning Kanye from coming north of Bubba Gump Shrimp.”“And I just want to take a moment here and just point out that this — this next part is the courageous part — I’m ending all of our high-profile collabs, including, but not restricted to, our collection of spreadable jams, Strawbeezy Jelleezy. And I have decided not to release our duets album, ‘Ye and Phen Sing ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I know this has been too long in coming. I have no excuses for why I didn’t do this before, except that he has never been on the show, had no plans to be on the show, we have never asked him to be on the show, and I’m not sure he’s aware that I have a show.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But I had to do it now, because I was afraid he would just show up at any moment, because that’s what he did yesterday. The shoe company Skechers says it had to escort Kanye West from its offices after an unannounced visit. In five years, the idea of an unannounced visit from Kanye has gone from amazing to ‘Sir, you need to leave this Skechers.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Unlike with Adidas, Kanye never had a deal with Skechers. Apparently, Kanye is so desperate, he’s just driving around and searching Google Maps for ‘shoes near me.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Sinking In Edition)“Speaking of ‘Stranger Things,’ Elon Musk is in the news. Elon Musk is close to buying Twitter, and, yesterday, he walked into their headquarters carrying a sink just so that he could tweet — this is real— ‘Entering Twitter HQ. Let that sink in.’ That pun cost him $44 billion.” — JIMMY FALLON“I know a lot of people think that was corny, but I think once you have 87 children, you are allowed to make dad jokes.” — TREVOR NOAH“Just when you thought Kanye made the most bizarre entrance, Elon was like, ‘Hold my sink.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Where did he get the sink? Is it just the one he ripped out of the wall when the judge told him that he had to buy Twitter?” — TREVOR NOAH“If anything, Elon is the right billionaire to make this joke, you know? Because if Jeff Bezos walked into Amazon with a sink, his employees would be like, ‘Oh wow, we’re finally getting a restroom?’” — TREVOR NOAH“I’m looking forward to Twitter on his first bad day as C.E.O.: ‘Our stock is in the toilet!’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingRonny Chieng makes the case that Halloween is awful in a new segment of “Prove Me Wrong” on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutGijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMusicians who worked with Stevie Wonder on his landmark 1972 album “Talking Book,” and others who just cherish it, reminisce about its magic, half a century after its release. More

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    ‘Walking With Ghosts’ Review: Gabriel Byrne Roams His Past

    The Irish actor’s one-man show on Broadway delves into painful and playful memories alike. He even imitates the oddballs of his Dublin boyhood.The Irish actor Gabriel Byrne has a genius for listening. On the HBO show “In Treatment,” playing a psychologist wrestling with his own internal conflicts, he spent minutes at a time in silence, as tides of concern and compassion flowed and ebbed across his handsome, craggy face. But “Walking With Ghosts,” his autobiographical one-man show at the Music Box Theater, directed by Lonny Price, finds him alone onstage, within a series of retreating golden frames. And so Byrne, with no one to listen to, kindles into speech.The show is drawn, often verbatim, from Byrne’s recent memoir of the same name. Slipping back and forth in time, the book traces the 72-year-old actor’s life from boyhood on the rural outskirts of Dublin to his eventual success. The wispy show, by contrast, follows a strict chronology, but even here Byrne favors association over causality, image over argument — offering a slide show of the mind, with little relation between and among the anecdotes. He claims to feel like “an intruder in my own past. Emigrant, immigrant, exile.” Yet his recollections are vivid and immediate. At times the form echoes Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” a catalog of experiences that will go on to shape the mature artist’s mind and soul.“Walking With Ghosts” has the texture of a vanity project. Nearly every autobiographical show does. And during a preview performance, the audience — “In Treatment” fans, perhaps, or devotees of Byrne’s 1995 film “The Usual Suspects” — rewarded that vanity, laughing at jokes before Byrne delivered the punch lines, sighing sympathetically at the sad parts. But Byrne is a serious writer, rendering memory and image in the energetic vernacular of his childhood: “slingeing along,” “stravaging,” “gobdaw.” And he is a serious actor, too, which eases the self-indulgence. The script, while often mournful, allows him to show a playful side and a gift, neglected in Hollywood, for physical comedy. In one sequence, he imitates the oddballs of his boyhood. In another, he shows how the various actors in the amateur theater troupe he joined take their bows. Who wouldn’t want to spend a clinical hour with this man? Or two, plus intermission.And yet, the transition from page to stage feels undermotivated, incomplete. The lively language shifts easily enough from prose to monologue, and Byrne — with his wide, serious face, his bright, worried eyes, his voice like the growl of a polite bear — is compulsively watchable. What the show lacks (and this is true of the memoir, as well) is a sense of why he’s examining his life now. In public. Why would a man lay himself bare like this, on Broadway? It’s hard to discern because the show all but ignores the latter part of his life and acting career.“Walking With Ghosts” never provides satisfying answers, even as it keeps the focus relentlessly on Byrne, with little to distract from his performance. He wears the same clothes throughout — blue shirt, blue vest, blue blazer, gray slacks — and he sketches characters sparingly, with accents and funny voices kept to a minimum. Byrne, who last visited Broadway in 2016 with “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” appears at ease on the stage, bestriding it as easily as another man might stroll his own patio.Minimal set and lighting design, by Sinéad McKenna, keeps the focus on Byrne’s performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor better or worse, Price’s direction is mostly unfelt. Price has him move backward, beyond another arch or two, as he reaches into the past and forward as he nears the present day, finally sitting at the lip of the stage as he discusses his alcoholism and the sobriety he ultimately achieved, twentysome years ago. Otherwise the interventions are few.The design can also feel less than intentional, slapdash almost. As imagined by Sinéad McKenna, the set’s back wall is a mirror, riven with cracks. Apt enough. But the way in which the lights (McKenna) play against it turns Byrne’s shadow upside down, so that it lurks behind him, like a vampire bat. The sound and music, by Sinéad Diskin, come and go, sometimes offering a sense of place, at other times leaving place ambiguous, universal.Byrne unearths embarrassing memories and painful ones, like the death of a boyhood friend and an incident of predation by a priest at the seminary he attended for a few years. Later, he finds that the priest doesn’t remember him. Byrne, though he has blacked out some of what occurred, can’t forget it. But in general, he seems to have had that rare thing for an artist — a happy childhood, loved by parents who loved each other. He is elegiac in recalling a celebration at the Guinness brewery, his grandmother’s love of the movies.Whether discussing good memories or bad ones, the show rarely draws connections — the kinds a clinician might encourage — between the boy Byrne was and the actor he became. In fairness, neither does “The Prelude.” At times, Byrne suggests some internal restlessness and malleability, an inability to settle himself to any particular practice or trade, which may have fitted him for acting. (With the priesthood barred, he rapidly cycled through stints as a plumber, a dishwasher and a toilet attendant.) But aside from one comic story about scenery chewing — and scenery breaking — on an early television play, he never discusses his practice or art. The boy and the professional man seem to exist separately, not continuously.The show seems to conclude with a kind of resignation and acceptance, that if the people of his past are dead now, they persist within him. How those ghosts have made him and shape him and haunt his work still? That remains unspoken.Walking With GhostsThrough Dec. 30 at the Music Box Theater, Manhattan; gabrielbyrneonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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    In a Marathon of One-Act Plays, Boundaries Are Pushed and Pulled

    Ensemble Studio Theater’s 38th Marathon of One-Act Plays showcases what can be accomplished in short-form productions, and how, in some cases, they hem ideas in.In Harron Atkins’s multigenerational saga “Still…,” artistic ambitions rub up against personal relationships. Careers wax and wane. A couple forms, bickers, ends — and may or may not be reborn on different terms. We even hear exquisite renditions of “Doo Wop (That Thing)” and “Valerie.”All of this in only 40 minutes.The scope and length of “Still…” make it an outlier not just in Ensemble Studio Theater’s 38th Marathon of One-Act Plays, but in short-form theater in general, which tends to focus on economical vignettes and snapshots. Not here: Atkins follows Noah and Jeremy, starting with their meet-cute as tweens, then tracking them as young adults uploading songs on social media before they eventually make moves in the music industry, and going all the way to their reminiscing — but also looking ahead — when they are in their 60s. Much of the time is spent with the young-adult versions of Jeremy (Eric R. Williams) and Noah (Deandre Sevon) as their friendship morphs into love, which in turn becomes strained when Noah’s career takes off while Jeremy’s stalls.At times it feels as if we are watching a live pitch for a movie or television series, a connection Atkins does not shy away from with a joke about the TV show “Empire.” (Referring to a character played by Taraji P. Henson, Jeremy asks Noah, “Did you think I was about to roll in there causing a scene like Cookie Lyon?”) But “Still…,” directed by Cameron Knight, also functions on its own terms and has a genuine breadth that works within the boundaries of its current format.Atkins’s piece closes Series A, part one of this year’s two-part marathon, which is resuming for the first time since 2019. The theater marathon features a lineup of 11 plays — 10 in person and an extra one, presented with Perseverance Theater out of Juneau, Alaska, available via streaming — by artists who are Black, Indigenous or people of color. The playwright Mike Lew (“Teenage Dick”) and the writer-director Colette Robert (“Behind the Sheet”) curated the project, and their efforts pay off most in Series A, which is not only superior to Series B but also to the other Ensemble Studio Theater marathons I have attended in the past. (This year’s marathon runs through Nov. 13.)At their best, the works in the first series introduce distinctive writers who make me crave more. One of them is Dominic Colón, whose “Prospect Ave or the Miseducation of Juni Rodriguez” had already been performed, beginning in 2020, as part of “The M.T.A. Radio Plays,” an audio anthology from Rattlestick Theater. It’s a pleasure to revisit the lovely chance meeting of Juni (Justin Rodriguez) and Macho (Ed Ventura) on a 2 train, when an overheard phone conversation leads to something more direct and, maybe, more real. Bonus points for an excellent Foot Locker joke and the apropos use of McDonald’s takeout.From left, Brenda Crawley, Cristina Pitter and Denise Manning in Vivian J.O. Barnes’s “Intro To.” Carol Rosegg“Intro To,” by Vivian J.O. Barnes (“Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!”), also boasts a superb use of language — florid, funny, and suggestive in every sense of the word — which is especially fitting for a piece set during a class where erotic writing is being taught. With the instructor delayed, Kara (the Off Off Broadway darling Cristina Pitter) takes charge and leads the participants in readings of their stories. The shy Shanice (Denise Manning), a biology student, has come up with a surprisingly evocative tale, but it’s when the older Mary (Brenda Crawley) steps up that the play takes a turn for the weird — halfway between heavy-breathing sensuality and body horror.Another pleasure to be found in “Intro To,” which is directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant, is Manning’s terrific comic performance, driven by precision timing and constant inventiveness. She makes the most of the material, then fills the silences with a hilariously fidgety presence. Other superlative turns can be found in the Series B closer, “blooms,” by a.k. payne. This evocative slice of life about a pair of lovers, played with rare warmth by Alisha Espinosa and Kai Heath, takes place in the 10 minutes before the grocery store that employs them opens. Decisions must be made, and payne sketches the situation with tenderness and sympathetic humor.Fernando Gonzalez, left, and Will Dagger in Keiko Green’s “Prepared.”Carol RoseggAnother fine performance lurks in Series B’s “Prepared,” by Keiko Green, in which Will Dagger portrays a Boy Scout trying to survive the apocalypse with what’s left of his troop. Unfortunately, unlike the aforementioned cast members, Dagger must make the most of a rickety piece that tries way too hard for whimsy and is burdened by the tiresome monologues that the Scoutmaster (Fernando Gonzalez) delivers on a radio. As short as it is, the play feels padded, a problem that also afflicts Bleu Beckford-Burrell’s “Tr@k Grls (pt1),” which runs in circles. Since the play is about two teenagers training for the track team, this might be pushing form and function a little too far.Goldie E. Patrick’s “Breath of Life: a Choreoplay of Black Love,” directed by Jonathan McCrory and also featured in Series B, is trickier to appraise. It begins with a suspenseful urgency suffused by pervasive, realistic dread. It’s 2020 and the asthmatic Drew (Biko Eisen-Martin) finds himself in the middle of a Black Lives Matter demonstration; his partner, Toni (Ashley Bufkin), is becoming increasingly panicky because she can’t reach him. Patrick skillfully builds tension as Drew, fearing both police violence and catching Covid, works his way through the throngs. About two-thirds of the way through, the piece’s four actors start switching roles: for example, Margaret Odette portrays Drew after having played his friend Ayo — meaning that Toni and Drew are now both women. As the story continues, more permutations follow that might suggest that love is love is love. As for the “Choreoplay” subtitle, that remains confounding since there is no dancing.Dance does, however, play a big role in Vera Starbard’s streaming piece “Yan Tután,” set during a rehearsal by an Indigenous group in Alaska. The piece moves in a fairly herky-jerky manner until Ernestine Hayes enters and takes command as the elder Auntie Dolly, who recounts a harrowing story of cultural erasure with a happy epilogue. In a flash, we see all that was lost but also all that might be gained, and Starbard builds to an emotional finish that feels entirely earned. More

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    ‘Chekhov’s First Play’ Review: A Play-by-Play of the Play Within the Play

    At Irish Arts Center, a wry, experimental iteration doesn’t do much to untangle the playwright’s unwieldy early work.If Anton Chekhov gave a name to the early play that surfaced years after his death, we don’t know what it was. This is part of the lore around that script, a relished detail in the story of its discovery: The title page was missing.The text is a mammoth, unwieldy beast, as playwrights’ juvenilia often is. Written when Chekhov was 18, or 19, or 20 — that fact is uncertain, too — it’s a stylistic mishmash that would run five or six hours, staged whole. But dramatists are drawn to it, in part because its elements are recognizable from his later work: the grand old estate, the money woes, the crowd of characters living restless, listless lives. And, of course, the gun.So adapters dive in, gather what they like and leave the rest. Michael Frayn called his rendition “Wild Honey.” David Hare’s is “Platonov,” which is the usual title for the play in English. And if you remember the amusing spectacle of Cate Blanchett, on Broadway nearly six years ago, removing her bra without taking off her dress — well, then you’ve seen the version known as “The Present,” by Andrew Upton.“Chekhov’s First Play,” at the Irish Arts Center in Hell’s Kitchen, is Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd’s wry, experimental iteration. Directed by the pair for Dead Centre — their Dublin company, familiar to New York audiences for the shows “Lippy” and “Hamnet” — it whittles Chekhov’s script down to a bare 70 minutes. That includes time for the location to shift from the late 19th-century Russian countryside to early 21st-century Dublin, and for a wrecking ball and a pneumatic drill to do some damage to Andrew Clancy’s scenery.Languor escalates into havoc for the characters — among them Anna (Ali White), the financially indebted owner of a house she can’t afford; her friend Triletsky (Paul Reid), who, like Chekhov, is a doctor with tuberculosis that he fails to diagnose; and Platonov, who arrives quite late, played by an audience member. Not that you are likely to care much about the characters, let alone the plot, as story is not exactly at the forefront here. The performance we watch is, in a sense, the play within the play.The whole experience is framed by Moukarzel’s running commentary, spoken into audience members’ ears via the headphones we wear throughout. (Sound design is by Jimmy Eadie and Kevin Gleeson.) It’s funny and often snarky; in one slightly crude line, Moukarzel sounds like a sports broadcaster giving a play-by-play of a rare Chekhov move. But Moukarzel also expounds on the themes of the play — like private property and the ravenousness of the rich — and laments that he cut so many characters from Chekhov’s script.“It was hard to decide what matters,” he says, “and who you can just throw away.”This, really, is the nub of “Chekhov’s First Play,” which had its premiere in 2015. That’s also when Irish artists were sifting through the human wreckage of the Celtic Tiger, an economic boom that collapsed into painful recession and left Ireland littered with abandoned housing developments.When these characters talk of cancer, it’s a metaphor for harmful, unchecked growth; their scorn for banks is rooted in reckless lending that ruined lives. Even Moukarzel and Kidd’s decision not to give the Chekhov play a proper title is significant — because of that other meaning of title: legal ownership. Historically, one name for the found Chekhov text has been “Play Without a Title.”Trouble is, the Celtic Tiger is so many crises removed from the present that it’s a little obscure, even at the Irish Arts Center, which co-commissioned the play.Similarly, the headphones would have been novel in 2015 — the year that downtown theatergoers experienced Anne Washburn’s “10 out of 12” that way, and the year before Simon McBurney’s “The Encounter” gobsmacked headphone-wearing Broadway audiences with its binaural sound design. Now, as a tool, they’re underwhelming.“Chekhov’s First Play” surely felt much bolder and fresher when it was new. But if you ask the question “Why this show now?” the answer seems to be that it was in the wings.Chekhov’s First PlayThrough Nov. 6 at the Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More