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    In ‘A League of Their Own,’ Abbi Jacobson Makes the Team

    Abbi Jacobson really can play baseball, she insisted. Just not when the cameras are rolling. “I fully get the yips when someone is watching me,” she told me.This was on a recent weekday morning, on a shady bench with a view of the ball fields in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Jacobson lives nearby, in an apartment she shares with her fiancée, the “For All Mankind” actress Jodi Balfour. This morning, she hadn’t come to the fields to play, which was good — the diamonds swarmed with little kids. (It was good, too, because while Jacobson can play, I can’t, though she did offer to teach me.) And honestly, she deserved to enjoy her off season.In “A League of Their Own,” arriving Aug. 12 on Amazon Prime Video, Jacobson stars as Carson Shaw, the catcher for the Rockford Peaches. Carson is an invented character, but the Peaches, a team from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which debuted in 1943, are delightfully real. For five rainy months, on location in Pittsburgh, Jacobson, 38, had to catch, throw, hit and slide into base. Is some of this computer-generated magic? Sure, but not all. Which means that Jacobson played while plenty of people were watching. And she played well.“She’s really good,” said Will Graham, who created the series with her. “Abbi is constantly self-effacing and self-deprecating but is actually a badass.”Carson, a talented, anxious woman, becomes the team’s de facto leader. As a creator and executive producer, as well as the series’s star, Jacobson led a team, too, onscreen and off. This is work that she has been doing since her mid 20s, when she and Ilana Glazer created and eventually oversaw the giddy, unladylike comedy “Broad City.” On that show, she became a leader more or less by accident. On “A League of Their Own,” which was inspired by Penny Marshall’s 1992 film, Jacobson led from the get-go and with purpose, infusing the script with her own ideas about what leadership can look like.Jacobson plays a talented, anxious catcher who becomes her team’s leader. Her character’s story is one among many in a series that celebrates a range of women’s experience.Amazon Studios“The stories that I want to tell are about how I’m a messy person, and I’m insecure all the time,” she said. “And then what if the most insecure, unsure person is the leader? What if the messy person gets to own herself?”So is Carson’s story her story?“Kind of,” she said, squinting against the sun.Jacobson, who has described herself as an introvert masquerading as an extrovert, is approachable but also watchful, an observer before she is a participant. Even in the midst of animated conversation, she has an attitude that suggests that if you were to leave her alone with a book, or a sketch pad, or maybe her dog, Desi, that would be fine, too.Her favorite pastime: “I like to go and sit in a very populated area with like a book. Alone,” she said.On that morning, she wore a white tank top and paint-stained pants, but the stains were pre-applied and deliberate, sloppiness turned into fashion. The bag she carried was Chanel. She didn’t look a lot like a baseball player, but she did look like a woman who had become comfortable in her own skin, who had cleaned up most of her private mess and put the rest of it to professional use.“She’s a boss,” said the writer and comedian Phoebe Robinson, a friend. “And she knows herself in her core.”Jacobson grew up in a Philadelphia suburb, the youngest of two children in a Reform Jewish family. She played sports throughout her childhood — softball, basketball, travel soccer — until she gave them up for jam bands and weed.“That team mentality was very much my childhood,” she said.After art school, she moved to New York to become a dramatic actress, then veered into comedy through improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade. She and Glazer wanted to join a house improv team, but team after team rejected them. So they created “Broad City” instead, which ran first as a web series and then for five seasons on Comedy Central. A “Girls” without the gloss, trailing pot smoke as it went, it followed its protagonists, Abbi and Ilana, as they blazed a zigzag trail through young adulthood. The New Yorker called the show, lovingly, a “bra-mance.”For Jacobson, the show was both a professional development seminar and a form of therapy. Through writing and playing a version of herself, she emerged more confident, less anxious.“Having this receipt of her anxiety in the character allowed her to look at it and grow in a different direction,” Glazer said.Jacobson began developing “A League of Their Own” with Will Graham as “Broad City” was wrapping up.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIn 2017, when “Broad City” had two seasons to go, Graham (“Mozart in the Jungle”) invited Jacobson to dinner. He had recently secured the rights to “A League of Their Own,” a movie he had loved as a child. He thought it could make a great series, with a few changes. The queerness of some characters — rendered in the movie through blink-and-you-miss-it subtext — ought to be more overt this time. In the film, in a scene that lasts just seconds, a Black woman returns a foul ball with force and accuracy, a nod to the league’s segregation. This, too, deserved more attention.Graham had pursued Jacobson, he said, for her integrity, her smarts, her flustered, nervy optimism. He wanted the experience of making the show to be joyful. And he wanted the stories it told — particularly the queer stories — to convey joy, too. He sensed that Jacobson, who came out in her mid 30s, could deliver.“She’s so funny, and also so emotionally honest — and so unafraid of being emotionally honest,” Graham said.As Jacobson finished the final seasons of “Broad City,” development began on the new series. She and Graham threw themselves into research, speaking to the some of the surviving women who had played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League or in the Negro leagues. They also spoke with Marshall, via phone, before her death in 2018. Marshall had focused primarily on the story of one woman: Geena Davis’s Dottie. Graham and Jacobson wanted to try to tell more stories, as many as an eight-episode season allowed.“The movie is a story about white women getting to play baseball,” Jacobson said. “That’s just not enough.”Gradually the show took form, morphing from a half-hour comedy to an hourlong dramedy. Then it found its co-stars: D’Arcy Carden as Greta, the team’s glamour girl; Roberta Colindrez as Lupe, the team’s pitcher; Chanté Adams as Max, a Black superstar in search of a team of her own. Rosie O’Donnell, a star of the original movie, signed on for an episode, playing the owner of a gay bar.Chanté Adams, left, was impressed by Jacobson’s leadership on set. “She always makes sure that everyone’s voice is heard and included,” she said.Amazon StudiosThe pilot was shot in Los Angeles, which doubled first for Chicago and then for Rockford, Ill. The coronavirus hit soon after, delaying production until last summer. Rising costs pushed the show to relocate to Pittsburgh, which is, as it happens, a rainy city, a problem for a show with so many game-day sequences. But the cast and crew handled it.“There was kind of a summer camp quality to it,” Graham said.And Jacobson, as Glazer reminded me, spent many years as a camp counselor. So a lot of that summer camp quality was owed to her. And to the incessant baseball practice she insisted on.“There was so much baseball practice, truly months of baseball practice,” Carden said. “We were a team more than we were a cast. That was Abbi. Abbi’s an ensemble person.”Adams first met Jacobson in the audition room. (As a longtime “Broad City” fan, she struggled to keep her cool.) On set, Jacobson immediately impressed her.“I don’t know how she does it,” Adams said. “But even as a leader and the star of the show, she always makes sure that everyone’s voice is heard and included.” After filming had ended, Adams said, Jacobson kept showing up for her, attending the opening night of her Broadway show.“It just melted my heart,” she said. “Abbi is the epitome of what it means to be a leader.”Jacobson doesn’t always feel that way, but she feels it more often than she used to. “Sometimes I can really own that,” she said. “And sometimes I go home, and I’m like, how am I the person? Or what’s happening here?” So she lent that same self-doubt to Carson, a leader who evolves when she acknowledges her vulnerability.“The movie is a story about white women getting to play baseball,” Jacobson said. “That’s just not enough.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesBut Carson’s narrative is only one among many in a series that celebrates a range of women’s experience: Black, white and Latina women; straight, queer and questioning women; femme women; butch women; and women in between. Many of the actors are beautiful in the ways that Hollywood prefers. Many aren’t.Yet the show insists that all of these women deserve love, friendship and fulfillment. In an email, O’Donnell observed that while the movie had focused on one woman’s story, this new version gives nearly every character a rich inner life “in a beautiful and accurate way that brings the characters’ humanity to the forefront.”Carden has known Jacobson for 15 years, since their early improv days. No one had ever seen her as a romantic lead until Jacobson dropped off a glove and a hand-drawn card (“Adorable and romantic,” Carden said) and invited her to join the team. Carden was proud to take the role and proud, too, to work with Jacobson again.“She’s changed none at all,” Carden said. “She’s always been Abbi, but the confidence is different.”Jacobson wears that confidence lightly. Glimmers of uncertainty remain. “I’m never the person that you’re like, She should lead the show,” she told me in Prospect Park.But clearly she is. When no team would have her, she made her own, and now she has made another one. After an hour and a half, she picked up her purse and her coffee cup and she walked back through the park. Like a boss. Like a coach. Like a leader. More

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    Trevor Noah Rips Russia for Brittney Griner Sentence

    “We all know Russia doesn’t care about what Brittney Griner did,” Noah said, calling Russia “the same country that’s breaking every human rights law on the planet.”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.Most Valuable PlayerThe American basketball star Brittney Griner was found guilty of a drug-related offense and was sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony on Thursday.On “The Daily Show,” Trevor Noah said he hoped the sentence was a negotiation tactic and that President Biden could now trade a Russian war criminal for Griner.“Whoever America has in prison, send them to Russia. Yeah, it seems like they win, but don’t forget, that person now has to live in Russia. Yeah, yeah. They’ll get there and be like, [imitating a Russian criminal] ‘This whole country is prison. I miss food in Alcatraz, no!’” — TREVOR NOAH“We all know Russia doesn’t care about what Brittney Griner did. This is the same country that’s breaking every human rights law on the planet, but they’re like, ‘That woman has vape cartridge. She’s real criminal.” — TREVOR NOAH“Now, Biden will try to negotiate a deal to bring her home, and if that doesn’t work, he’s going to send Jon Stewart to get the job done for him.” — JIMMY FALLON“Now if we had more time, we could talk about how this could have been avoided if the W.N.B.A. paid their stars enough so they didn’t have to go and play in Russia in the off-season to make money.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Choco Taco Update Edition)“That’s right, President Biden is getting some things done.” — JIMMY FALLON“That’s right, the Choco Taco could return in the coming years. Apparently you cannot rush the artisanal process of folding an ice cream cone in half.” — JIMMY FALLON“What? This is amazing! Klondike ended the Choco Taco and the fans brought it back. This is the kind of passion you normally only see in, like, the Beyhive or BTS army. They should get their own name, like the Choco Taco flock’o.” — TREVOR NOAH“They had so much demand for their product line that to keep up, they had to eliminate the Choco Taco and all of its popular toppings, like tableside choco-mole.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Thursday’s “Tonight Show,” Brad Pitt gave Jimmy Fallon an idea of what to expect from his new film “Bullet Train.”Also, Check This OutLina Iris Viktor’s piece “Eleventh” from 2018 is on display as part of the exhibition. The mixed media work includes 24-karat gold.Lina Iris Viktor; via Hayward GalleryDescribed as “a feel-good show about death,” “In the Black Fantastic” looks beyond Afro-Futurism at London’s Hayward Gallery. More

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    Julie Benko Was the ‘Funny Girl’ No One Had Heard of, Until Now

    The actress, who covered for Beanie Feldstein, gets the part to herself for the next month, and Broadway fans are thrilled for her.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Early on in the musical “Funny Girl,” a young and determined Fanny Brice sings a line that anyone even slightly acquainted with the show will be familiar with: “I’m … (deedle-dee deedle-dee) the greatest star … (deedle-dee deedle-dee).”“I am by far,” she goes on, with endearing chutzpah. “But no one knows it.”Those five words — “but no one knows it” — have been a source of comfort to Julie Benko, who covered for Beanie Feldstein’s Brice in the Broadway revival of the show. Benko is well aware of the disappointment some audience members may have felt when they opened their Playbills and saw that white slip of paper fall out: “The role of Fanny Brice will be played by …”But by the second scene, in which Brice, an ungainly interloper with dreams of a stage career, tries to land a job alongside a bunch of leggy chorus girls, Benko said she has felt a sense of relief.The song gives Benko, the actress, a chance to level with the audience: Sure, perhaps you’ve never heard of Julie Benko, but no one had heard of Brice in the beginning, either, so why not give her a shot?“You feel them start to root for you, you feel them on your team,” Benko said in a recent interview near the August Wilson Theater, where the Broadway revival is currently running. “And then by the end of ‘I’m the Greatest Star,’ they’re so excited to be there because they feel like they’re part of the journey, part of the story.”At least for now, Benko, 33, can relinquish the anxiety that comes with that white slip of paper.For a monthlong run that started Tuesday night, she will be the Fanny Brice that audiences will expect. After Feldstein announced that she would be departing the role on July 31, nearly two months earlier than scheduled, the production tapped Benko to take over until Sept. 4, after which the former “Glee” star Lea Michele will step in. The events have put Benko near the center of a media obsession that she said she has tried to mostly ignore, instead choosing to focus on the opportunity for the role of a lifetime.In the fall, Benko will be guaranteed top billing once a week, on Thursdays — a promotion that seems, at least in part, a nod to the fact that she has proved herself to be much more than a placeholder over the past several months. Benko has filled in for Feldstein at 26 performances since “Funny Girl” opened in April. Along the way, she has established herself in theater-loving circles as a performer worth seeing.Benko as Fanny Brice, with Jared Grimes as Eddie Ryan, in “Funny Girl.”Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMadeIt started with a few adoring comments on Broadway message boards. Then her TikToks gave the public a window into the harried process of being called to do a show on short notice, multiplying the public’s awareness of her existence. These days, she said, she gets recognized by a stranger almost every day in the city.Among the Broadway fans at the first show of her run on Tuesday, Benko was a known entity. Younger ticketholders tended to know her from her viral TikToks, while older ones had heard about her through their theatergoing grapevines.At a time when it seems as if Broadway producers are hyper-focused on hiring big-name celebrities who they hope will rake in ticket sales, a segment of the industry’s cognoscenti is excited to celebrate the success of a relatively unknown actress who has worked as an understudy for Broadway-level productions since she was 19.“She must be on top of the world — I’m psyched for her,” Tucker Christon, 48, a lifelong Broadway fan, said during intermission at Tuesday’s performance. “Could it run through the fall without a big name? I don’t think so. But give her four weeks and, hello! She could do anything she wants after this.”The Great ReadMore fascinating tales you can’t help reading all the way to the end.Elsie Eiler is the sole resident of Monowi, Neb., where she operates a tavern that serves as one of the last gathering places for the remaining residents of the county. What will happen once she’s gone?TikTok is flooded with health misinformation. Meet the medical experts fighting bogus science, one “stitch” at a time.Viewers of the Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building” know the Upper West Side apartment building as the Arconia. But it has a name — and a dramatic story — all its own.It also happens to be a time when Broadway has been more vocal about its appreciation for understudies and swings — performers who, during the pandemic, have been more crucial than ever. In an email praising Benko, Michele called her commitment to the production “a savior” to the show amid Covid and the casting transition.“People have been celebrating the fact that understudies keep the shows running in a way that I don’t think they did before,” Benko said.Growing up in Fairfield, Conn., Benko began imagining a career in musical theater after a production of “Fiddler on the Roof” at a local J.C.C., in which her father played the innkeeper and her mother played a villager. She was 14, and the show was directed by Tobi Beth Silver, a professional acting coach known for instructing young performers on Broadway, including cubs in “The Lion King.”“It was clear to me that day: This girl’s going to make it,” Silver said, recalling when she saw Benko audition.Cast as Hodel, the second-oldest daughter in “Fiddler,” Benko had her first kiss during the J.C.C. production. The performance also secured her the opportunity to study with Silver, who helped prepare her to audition for New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and introduced her to her first talent manager.Benko’s time as an undergraduate studying musical theater was punctuated by stints on tour. After her freshman year at Tisch, she understudied five roles in the national “Spring Awakening” tour in 2008, and later joined the “Les Misérables” tour, where she worked her way up from roles like understudy, “whore” and “innkeeper’s wife” to become Cosette.Her career came full circle in 2015 when she worked as a swing in the Broadway revival of “Fiddler,” which meant she had to be prepared to step in as any of four of Tevye’s daughters, as well as four ensemble roles, on a given night.But not even that could prepare her for all that it would take to play Fanny Brice.“I’ve covered eight roles in ‘Fiddler,’ and I feel like Fanny is more than all that put together,” Benko said, adding, with Brice-like playfulness: “Plus Tevye maybe.”Unlike Feldstein and Michele, who both have said they had long dreamed of playing Brice, Benko had no such fantasies. It was a bug that she had somehow avoided catching, despite being a Jewish girl obsessed with musical theater. When she got a callback to be Feldstein’s standby last year, she decided it was time to watch the original 1968 film, which Barbra Streisand shot after her success in the original Broadway production turned her into a star.“I’ve covered eight roles in ‘Fiddler,’ and I feel like Fanny is more than all that put together,” Benko said in an interview.Alexandra Genova for The New York TimesBut Benko was careful not to pay too much attention to the Hollywood version. Streisand’s iconic, Oscar-winning performance had played no small part in the difficulty Broadway producers had had over the decades in reviving the musical. Benko wanted to be careful not to attempt an impersonation, a sentiment that Feldstein shared.Once she landed the job, Benko was more intent on learning the quirks and mannerisms of the real Fanny Brice on which the musical is based: a comic actress who rose to stardom in the Ziegfeld Follies and fell in love with the slippery gambler and con man Nick Arnstein (played by Ramin Karimloo). Before rehearsals began in February, Benko read biographies of Brice and excerpts from her diaries. She worked with an archivist at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to watch old footage of Brice doing goofy dances and contorting her face into silly expressions.“She has an insatiable appetite for the world of the play, for the world of the story,” Brandon Dirden, who taught Benko when she returned to N.Y.U. for graduate school, said of his former student. “She doesn’t leave any stone unturned.”As Feldstein rehearsed, Benko sat on the sidelines taking notes, recording details about pacing and the intent behind lines of dialogue. After rehearsals ended, Benko would run lines with her husband and musical collaborator, Jason Yeager, in their living room. She sang through the entire score nearly every day to build stamina, and would practice the tap sequences of “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat” in a full-length mirror, Yeager recalled.The rehearsals were primarily focused on the main cast, so it wasn’t until the day of her first performance, on April 29, that Benko got to run through a stage rehearsal with costumes, lights and microphones.When she walked onstage that night, Benko was shocked to be greeted by entrance applause — entrance applause! “It was probably the most thrilling moment of my life,” she said.She was comfortable with the choreography onstage, but it was the offstage choreography — in particular, the show’s many costume changes — that had been more difficult to practice. The show, which follows Brice from her late teens to her early 30s, packs in four wigs and 21 costumes, 19 of which are quick changes that need to happen in as short as a minute.Benko, center, with Kurt Csolak, left, and Justin Prescott in the show.Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMadeOnstage, Benko’s research into Brice is evident. She expands her large, expressive eyes into saucers of shock or disbelief, and, while dancing, she rolls them around, exaggeratedly, as if to say, “Aren’t I such a lady?” In the old footage, some of which she found on YouTube, Benko drew inspiration from a zany little dance in which Brice wiggles her arms and shuffles her feet like a wannabe ballerina.“You saw the vulnerability, you saw the intelligence,” said Bartlett Sher, the Tony-winning director who worked with Benko on “Fiddler” and was at one point the creative force behind a “Funny Girl” revival that did not ultimately come to fruition. (In 2011, he told The Times that Brice was the hardest part he had ever had to cast.)“I think everything that I love about ‘Funny Girl’ came through in seeing her play the part,” Sher said of watching Benko. “When you do one of these parts, you hook the whole company up to your back and you pull and pull everyone ahead — and she really did that.”Benko recognizes that the pressure that comes with that responsibility could become all-consuming if she let it. But instead of projecting perfection, she has opted to be open about her mistakes. She sometimes even draws attention to them, like when she posted a TikTok about a performance in which she bungled a lyric in “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” singing “get ready for me love, ’cause I’m a hummer,” instead of “’cause I’m a comer.”Earlier in her career, she said, she would have tortured herself over such a mistake. But after more than a decade in the industry, she has learned to laugh it off and accept it as part of the process.“I finally hit a point where I decided that if I wanted to make myself miserable, I should pick something that makes me rich,” she said.As Michele prepares to inherit the role, Benko will soon be tasked with learning any changes that the actress might adopt: tweaks to dialogue, blocking or key changes. When Michele arrives, Benko’s title will switch from “standby” to “alternate,” to reflect her regularly scheduled appearances. But for the next month, she will have the opportunity to fully settle into her portrayal of Fanny Brice and relax enough to let some natural playfulness emerge.“When you get the chance to play such an amazing role, there’s no need to take it too seriously,” she said. “You just have to enjoy it.”Audio produced by More

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    In the Theater, Workers Are Demanding Better Conditions

    Getting to play Cinderella in a Broadway revival of “Into the Woods” sounds like a young musical theater performer’s dream, until you break your neck doing the pratfalls built into the role.That’s what Laura Benanti says happened to her in 2002. “I was a 22-year-old girl who didn’t know how to say ‘this doesn’t feel safe to me,’” she wrote on her Instagram page nearly two decades later, after suffering “intense pain every single day for seven years,” two surgeries and much heartbreak.At the time, people bad-mouthed her for missing performances.Disastrous tumbles and physical danger are so much a part of theater history that they’ve become treasured backstage lore instead of causes for concern. I am ashamed to admit to laughing when I read about the dancer who fell into the “Anyone Can Whistle” orchestra pit in 1964, landing on a saxophone player, who promptly died. In 1991 we all gossiped merrily when the tempestuous Nicol Williamson ignored his fight choreography in “I Hate Hamlet” and struck his co-star Evan Handler with a sword. (Handler quit; Williamson got applause.) For much of the early 2010s, the mayhem of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” was an endless source of schadenfreude.Laura Benanti as Cinderella in the 2002 Broadway revival of “Into the Woods.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut concussions, broken ribs, a fractured skull, a crushed leg and an amputated foot — those are just the “Spider-Man” injuries — aren’t actually funny. And they are only the most visible part of the story of harm endured by theater workers onstage and off. In return for the privilege of scraping by in a field they love, they are commonly expected to endanger themselves physically and emotionally.They dance till they drop. They work punishing hours. They strip themselves, often literally, and enact trauma over and over. If they are parents and nevertheless insist on sleeping more than five hours a night, they may see their children — as Amber Gray, a star in the original cast of “Hadestown,” told me — barely more than 50 minutes a day.The pandemic put a temporary end to all that, reuniting families and helping injuries heal. The pause also gave theater workers, perhaps for the first time ever, plenty of time to consider the lives their profession requires them to lead. It’s no surprise that, as theaters reopened, calls for change therefore emerged with greater urgency. This summer I’ve been grappling with those demands, and in earlier parts of this series I’ve looked at ridding the art form of the “great man” inheritance that built cruelty into its DNA and the movement for fair pay.But getting back to business has also reminded show people of the specific weirdness of their work. In sync with the resurgence of labor activism nationwide, actors, dancers, stage managers, technicians and others have been questioning the nuts and bolts of their contracts — both the documents that detail their jobs and the wider assumptions about what they owe an audience. Can the theater, they ask, find a way to uphold them more holistically as humans, even as they continue to gut themselves every night?Some people will not even agree that it should. The idea that theater is a calling, not a job, and that the two categories are mutually exclusive, is so ingrained in the industry’s ethos — not to mention its business model — that demands for shorter working days, more understudies, intimacy coordinators, mental health stipends, child care reimbursements and other accommodations are often met with doubt or derision. Caring for actors, some say, is coddling. Suffering is a badge of honor, and the theater is properly a purple-heart club.Amber Gray received a Tony Award nomination in 2019 for playing Persephone in “Hadestown.” She said her schedule began to make her feel like “a deadbeat mom.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat indoctrination goes deep. Stanislavski saw his students as votaries in an ascetic cult. The men who created the dominant forms of American theater assembled their power by extorting it from others. Musicals have often romanticized the idea that a good artist is a starving one. And Broadway dancers, many trained in a system even more repressive than the theater’s, have traditionally been expected to perform like robots, retire early and shut up in between.Perhaps the most pervasive and pernicious maxim is the one that says the show must go on — no matter what. Work rules that would seem ludicrous in any other business are, in the theater, built into the contracts. Performers represented by Actors’ Equity Association, the national labor union for actors and stage managers, are typically engaged for eight-show weeks, but productions can increase that number under certain circumstances. During holiday seasons, many offer 10-show schedules, and nonunion gigs can exceed even that.Another rule, governing the number of hours a company can work during technical rehearsals, is so reviled it has been the subject of a 2015 backstage comedy. In Anne Washburn’s “10 out of 12” — named for the clause in Equity contracts that permits 12-hour days if there are two hours off — the under-slept and daylight-deprived company of an absurd plantation melodrama undergoes a kind of mass psychosis while the tech teams adjust lights and scenery.The ReformationThe world is changing, and so is the theater. Our chief critic looks at how.Sacred Monsters: Is it time to cut loose the “great men” who helped America create its classics and its institutions?Paying Dues: Poverty is part of the identity, even the glamour, of the theater. It’s not sustainable.The Hard-Knock Life: The physical risks of the theater have many demanding their basic needs as humans.It’s not fiction. Kate Shindle, the president of Equity, has lived it herself. As a working actor she spent part of 2018 at a regional theater having “an awesome creative experience,” she told me in an email. (She declined to name the theater.) “But the schedule was no joke. On the longest days, I left my apartment at 9 a.m. and didn’t return home until after 1 a.m. And to be clear, the employer wasn’t bending or breaking work rules. This is the intensity that the American theater has been relying on for generations. The workers have helped sustain a model that simply needs to be rewritten.”At its annual convention last year, Equity delegates endorsed the elimination of 10 out of 12s — along with five-show weekend-performance schedules and six-day workweeks. But while these were just recommendations for future contract negotiations, some theaters have already begun to experiment with the ideas.For Donya K. Washington, the festival producer at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the experiment has its roots in 2016. It was then, while working at a different theater, that a production department head told her how the 12-hour tech calls for actors were nothing compared to what he experienced. To manage his crew, implement changes and debrief later, he arrived at the theater well before the cast and stayed well after. As a result, he was working 16-hour days for days at a time.“That’s not sustainable,” Washington said in a recent Zoom conversation. “I didn’t know what to do about it, but it stuck in my head.”After arriving in Oregon in 2019, where she was drafted onto the team creating the intensely complicated schedule that allows a repertory company to function, she started looking for ways to eliminate the 10 out of 12s. It was then that a worker “began proselytizing” for another quality-of-life improvement: the five-day workweek. “We had just finished building the calendar for the 2021 season, and my brain broke,” Washington said.But the pandemic — which closed the festival’s theaters for 14 months — gave her time to think. Over the course of 50 calendar drafts, she played with the parameters. What if the company produced five shows instead of the usual 11? What if they mounted one show at a time instead of several in rep? In one of those passes, since the exercise “wasn’t real anyway,” she decided to see if “you could do a five-day, 40-hour week and still get a production up. And lo and behold you could.”On a spreadsheet, anyway. In reality, when the festival fully reopened this April, the five-day week was not quite attainable. (They got as low as five-and-a-half.) But Washington feels it will be possible in the future, by adding about two additional weeks of rehearsals per show to make up for the lost time. The cost, she said, “would not be ginormous.” Already 10 out of 12s have been eliminated without trouble, reduced to 8 out of 10s — a step in the right direction. “And even if just from a business perspective it makes sense,” Washington added, because happier, healthier, better-rested companies produce a better product.“Sometimes we have a mind-set of doing something for the sake of doing it, because that’s how it’s always been done,” she said. “But step by step we have to retrain ourselves. And not just actors. Even I have to remind myself I’m not supposed to work seven days a week!”When I pointed out that we were having this conversation on a Sunday afternoon, Washington smiled and shrugged.The theater is unlikely to become a model workplace anytime soon. It’s always going to be a very tough life choice for most people. But who gets to make that choice is one of the things at stake in the calls for bettering a work-life balance that more often presents itself as a work-nonwork nightmare. Those who can’t afford to be penniless must generally opt out of theatrical careers, and if they do get a job they can’t afford to complain.Among that group, traditionally, have been parents of young children. Even if you have a stay-at-home partner or the means to hire full-time care, the mismatched hours of a baby’s schedule and an actor’s can be unbearable. Gray, the “Hadestown” star, was horrified to find that her older son, now 6, at some point started to cry whenever she sang, having learned to associate the sound with her going away. “It’s brutal,” she said, “when your child hates what you do. I felt like a deadbeat mom.”From left, Satomi Blair, Tina Chilip and Maechi Aharanwa in Playwrights Realm’s 2019 production of “Mothers.” The company created a pilot program during the 2019-20 season to accommodate parents.Richard Termine for The New York TimesNot that working while pregnant was less worrisome. “We sign contracts that say we must always be able to fit the costume,” she told me, adding that she hid her second pregnancy “because there are so many stigmas.”But general acclaim for her performance in “Hadestown” — and a 2019 Tony Award nomination to cap it — emboldened her when her contract was up for renewal. “I asked for an alternate for the Sunday matinee and Tuesday night, so that I could be home at least one day when my kids are too.” Previously, like most actors, her only day off was a Monday.When the producers, to her surprise, said yes, Gray found that the block of three days off, Sunday through Tuesday, made a huge difference. Finally getting enough sleep, she could “bang out” her two-show Wednesday “like nothing.” Her partner felt supported, she could play with her children, she could see other people’s work and attend the galas where connections are made. And even though the pandemic soon shut down that arrangement, it remains a model. Elizabeth Stanley, the star of “Jagged Little Pill,” made a similar deal when she returned to that show from maternity leave, splitting the role of Mary Jane with her friend Heidi Blickenstaff.These are, so far, one-off solutions, available to women considered important to the commercial success of a show. To test whether the idea of supporting parents could work in the nonprofit sector, the Playwrights Realm, an Off Broadway company devoted to early-career playwrights, created a pilot program called the Radical Parent-Inclusion Project. Roberta Pereira, the Realm’s executive director, explained that during the 2019-20 season, which included a production of Anna Moench’s “Mothers,” the company basically tried every possible accommodation to make parents welcome not only onstage and backstage but also in the audience.Among those accommodations was a caretaker reimbursement of up to $750, available to anyone working on the theater’s programming that season. (The credit was good for any kind of caretaking, including eldercare.) Rehearsals were cut back to 30 hours over the course of five days from 36 hours in six, necessitating an extra week to make up the difference. Broadway Babysitters, an arts-focused child care company, was hired to mind children during open auditions and callbacks, and a 4 p.m. matinee was added to the schedule. “For children who are younger and take naps,” Pereira said, “that was a much better time than 2 p.m.”The free child care was not just for performers, by the way; audience members brought a total of 22 children, half of them less than a year old, to the matinee — which perhaps as a result sold out.“Not that every theater should try this at the level we did,” Pereira said, “but you could see which things work for you. Some cost nothing, some cost a lot.” In all, the season’s caretaking enhancements added about $38,000 to the company’s $1.3 million budget, most of it covered by increased grants from its usual funders. That’s in line with what PAAL, the Parent Artist Advocacy League for Performing Arts and Media, has found at other theaters experimenting with child care programs. For Elevator Repair Service, a New York-based company, the cost of those programs amounted to less than 2 percent of the budget, PAAL reported.As a result, Pereira said, actors who effectively used to pay to be in a show — or just to audition for it — may no longer have to make the choice between plays and parenting.For the 2019 Broadway production of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon worked with an intimacy director, who helped stage the nude scenes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAchieving a better work-life balance is something you might expect to read about in emails from the human relations departments of companies promoting Yoga Thursdays. And though by no means common in American business, child care stipends are at least a familiar concept. But some of the other changes happening in the theater are intensely specific to the needs of the stage.One is the growing presence of intimacy directors, who help shape moments of physical contact in ways that feel safe to the people performing them. Intimacy Directors & Coordinators, one of several organizations created to further the field, defines its aim as the creation of “a culture of consent” in storytelling. Though that culture was traditionally the responsibility of a show’s director, the history of abuse in rehearsal and production has led many actors to advocate for the hiring of dedicated professionals on every show where the subject may come up — which is to say, virtually all of them.“To not have someone in that position is asking for trouble,” Audra McDonald told me in a recent phone interview. She first worked with an intimacy director in 2019, when Claire Warden helped stage the nude scenes and other physical interactions between her and her co-star, Michael Shannon, in “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” Having been in previous situations where she felt she “didn’t have the right to speak up about what was happening,” McDonald found Warden’s presence “revelatory.”“Knowing what the boundaries and parameters were for what Michael and I had to go through on that stage, we could push up against them as hard as we possibly could while knowing what lines not to cross,” she said. “It’s about knowing where the bottom of the pool is, so you feel safer about diving all the way down and then swimming as fearlessly and fiercely as you want.”“Pass Over,” Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s harrowing play about the precarious lives of two young Black men, also had an intimacy coordinator, Ann James. But its producers offered the cast another protection against the potential trauma of the story: a mental health allowance.From left, Jon Michael Hill, Gabriel Ebert and Namir Smallwood in “Pass Over.” They had access to a “health and wellness” allowance during the play’s Broadway run last year.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe allowance permitted actors to seek reimbursements of up to $250 a week for expenses deemed beneficial to their “health and wellness as it relates to performing this show eight times a week,” the policy stated. Matt Ross, the lead producer, added that the definition of “health and wellness” was deliberately broad; it could mean, for instance, a therapist or a voice lesson or a massage.Cody Renard Richard, the production stage manager, said it was only fitting to offer that support. “From their first class, actors have been asked to bring their traumas into a certain space, been nagged to call up personal stuff so they can cry in a scene. To ask them to open their wounds like that and not give them the help to deal with the result is incredibly unfair.”The additional cost of the mental health stipend, along with the production’s intimacy coordinator and the equity, diversity and inclusion consultant, Nicole Johnson, was “minuscule,” Ross said. “Probably less than 1 percent of the overall weekly costs.”But low cost is not the main selling point for advocates of such changes; undoing the harm built into the system is. And one of the reasons there is so much resistance to what seem like obviously worthy goals is that the harm has never been evenly distributed. When I spoke to Wayne Cilento, who originated the song “I Can Do That” in the 1975 musical “A Chorus Line,” he seemed proud of his ability to work on that show despite what he described as constant back and knee injuries. Later, in Bob Fosse’s “Dancin’,” which earned Cilento a Tony Award nomination in 1978, he missed only two performances in one-and-a-half years “while other people who didn’t have my urgency were dropping all around,” he said. “Stepping out was not my way.”From left, Jovan Dansberrry, Khori Michelle Petinaud, Manuel Herrera, Dylis Croman, Ron Todorowski and Jacob Guzman in a revival of “Dancin’” at San Diego’s Old Globe this spring.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesStill, in preparing to direct and choreograph a revival of “Dancin’” for Broadway, he said he was more conscious of looking out for his dancers than Fosse was. (Fosse “never had a conversation about how’s your back or how’s your hamstring.”) For the tryout at San Diego’s Old Globe this spring, he cut the material from three acts to two and divvied up “his” track — the sequence of dances he’d done in the original production — among several men because it now seemed too much to ask of just one. For the planned 2023 Broadway production, he is rethinking the number of swings and covers to step into any role at any time so that injured dancers will feel less pressure to perform. And he is much more collaborative with the ensemble than Fosse was with him.“But it’s a fine line,” he said. “Incorporating the ensemble in the conversation makes them feel trusted and cared for, and it’s good for the show. But — this sounds awful — even though I want to hear your problems, at some point I don’t want to. The bottom line is: What you have to do for the show is what you have to do for the show. And the director, the choreographer, is the one who decides what that is.”Cilento is touching on a problem that underlies the uneasiness some people feel about the changes advocates are seeking. So much of what we are used to in the theater, so much of it thrilling, is ultimately the result of individual virtuosity being inspired by individual vision, even if the individual with the vision is a tyrant. When everyone is equally empowered what happens to it? If the theater ever does become a worker’s paradise, will it still produce heavenly art?Another source of unease is that those of us — I include myself — who grew up in the harsh, sometimes inhumane ways of thinking about the theater may have developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome. About the harshness we are blasé or even sentimental. When, in “A Chorus Line,” Cilento sang, with the rest of the ensemble, “What I Did for Love,” we understood the response to be: Everything. Anything. The gift was ours to borrow.Now I’m pretty sure that’s not the right answer. More

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    Canada’s Stratford and Shaw Festivals Revive Four Classic Works

    At the Stratford and the Shaw theater festivals, four heated classics get cool new productions for summer.STRATFORD, Ontario — “All’s Well That Ends Well” is one of Shakespeare’s least-loved comedies. “Gaslight” is a hopeless old melodrama purveying woman-as-victim tropes. And “Chicago” is so covered with Bob Fosse’s fingerprints — or are they footprints? — that the musical can hardly be imagined without him.Yet on a recent trip to Canada — six days here at the home of the Stratford Festival and another day in Niagara-on-the-Lake, where the Shaw Festival performs — I saw all three of those shows successfully remade. I also saw one classic, “Richard III,” successfully left alone.Is there something healthful to revivals in the air up here? The productions run through the end of October, so you have time to find out for yourself.Stratford’s “All’s Well,” at the brand-new Tom Patterson Theater, was perhaps the biggest surprise. As usually performed, it is the distasteful tale of a callow playboy named Bertram who treats the friend who loves him — Helen, a young “gentlewoman” of his mother’s household — as a discardable childhood toy. And though Helen eventually gets her revenge, employing a textbook “bed trick” to snare him, that too feels icky.Indeed, “All’s Well” often comes off as a Shakespearean supercut. Bertram’s mother, a recently widowed countess, retails Polonius-like pearls of wisdom; a fop soldier gets a Malvolio-like comeuppance; and the dying King of France is magically rescued from apparent death like 32 other characters in the canon.But with vibrantly detailed performances under the direction of Scott Wentworth, the Stratford production turns the problems into assets. Bertram (Jordin Hall) isn’t frivolous; on the brink of manhood, he’s terrified of being trapped by his past. Likewise, Helen (Jessica B. Hill) draws on the anguish, verging on rage, that is the other side of a crush. That you want the best for both of them — and even for the poor fop (Rylan Wilkie) — makes the conflicts more compelling.A subtler transformation has turned the countess (Seana McKenna, superb) and the king (Ben Carlson, likewise) from stock dotards into complex characters. This is achieved less by rethinking motivations than by burrowing into the language, far richer than I imagined. The updating of the period — which from Michelle Bohn’s Edwardian costumes appears to be World War I — is just enough to provide the actors with recognizable social situations (a funeral, a farewell) that make the verse feel purposeful instead of just pretty. For pretty, there are restless Satie-like piano études by Paul Shilton.“All’s Well” is thus revealed as less of a knockabout romp than a moving look at the stages of maturity: how it is at first avoided at all costs, then pursued uncertainly and, eventually, for the lucky, achieved with dignity if not a little rue.Jennifer Rider-Shaw as Velma Kelly in a revival of “Chicago,” directed by Donna Feore, who replaced Fosse’s choreography with her own.Cylla von TiedemannWalking a few blocks along the Avon River — yes, that’s its real name — brings you from the Tom Patterson to the Festival Theater, where “Chicago,” directed and choreographed by Donna Feore, is playing. Feore is the first person permitted by the show’s rights holders to replace Fosse’s choreography in a major production; as she has shown in previous Stratford musical revivals, including “Guys and Dolls” and “The Music Man,” she makes every new step count.But actually, she’s not very interested in steps, as Fosse so distinctively was. (His style is much the same no matter the material.) Rather, she builds on social dance of the period, the late 1920s, to tell the story she’s chosen to highlight. That story is less about the cynicism of the American justice system — how two “merry murderesses” (Jennifer Rider-Shaw and Chelsea Preston) get off the hook by turning their crimes into showbiz — than about women negotiating the tricky new landscape of independence and prohibition.So when six incarcerated women perform the “Cell Block Tango,” we see their men getting bumped off — and they look as if they deserved it. And when Hunyak, the immigrant who maintains her innocence to the end, is nevertheless executed, Feore stages the scene as an aerial act, having the doomed woman (Bonnie Jordan) descend from the top of the theater on a satiny ribbon that becomes her noose. I won’t reveal how Billy Flynn, the self-serving lawyer played by Dan Chameroy, departs.Still, this “Chicago” is a mostly joyful take, as is nearly inevitable with full sets and costumes instead of the bleak aesthetic of the long-running Broadway revival. (With everyone wearing black in that production, it can sometimes seem like a super-chic sorority wake.) Feore has apparently drawn inspiration instead from the great Kander and Ebb song “All That Jazz,” which starts the show on a note of liberation: “Oh, I’m no one’s wife/but, oh, I love my life.”That sentiment is nothing you’d expect to find in “Gaslight,” the 1938 Patrick Hamilton thriller about a woman driven nearly insane by her husband. In earlier versions of the story, including the 1944 George Cukor film, the wife, Bella, is a bewildered victim of psychological torture and a mostly passive participant in the escape from her husband, Jack. She’s rescued by a police detective, whom we understand she may marry next.André Morin as Jack and Julie Lumsden as Bella in a revamp of the classic thriller “Gaslight” at the Shaw Festival.David CooperBut in Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson’s complete revamp along feminist lines for the Shaw Festival, there’s little left of the original but the gaslit Victorian setting and the general theme of mind control. Even that is now a two-way street. Bella (Julie Lumsden) soon understands what Jack (André Morin) is doing, and fashions a plan to turn the tables. With no police detective in sight, she must rescue herself, with just a doughty maid (Kate Hennig) to help.Normally when producers find material broadly objectionable, I think they should simply not produce it. (There are plenty of new plays that need to be staged.) This “Gaslight,” though, makes a convincing case for the renovation, not because it is palatable to our tastes but because it is so satisfying as genre drama. It doesn’t hurt that the production, directed by Kelli Fox, is taut and luscious — the set and costumes are by Judith Bowden — with Lumsden particularly compelling as a woman waking up to her powers.Whether the revision can become a new classic is yet to be seen. It could certainly take a shot at Broadway, where the original, under the title “Angel Street,” ran for three years in the 1940s.But which works manage to last, and why, remains a great mystery. Though it certainly helps to have Shakespeare on the title page, even he is buckling under pressures of representation and fairness. “The Merchant of Venice” is antisemitic, “The Taming of the Shrew” is sexist, “Othello” is arguably both sexist and racist.This year seems to find “Richard III” on the block. When it opened the first Stratford festival in 1953, no one blinked at having Alec Guinness, who was not disabled, play a king who famously was. But when the play, in a nice touch of symmetry, opened the new Tom Patterson this summer, in a production starring Colm Feore — he’s Donna Feore’s husband — I felt torn. I had just seen the Public Theater’s garbled take in Central Park, in which Danai Gurira played the title role without any acknowledgment of Richard’s disability.Colm Feore in “Richard III” at Stratford. His performance, our critic writes, is “superb in a very cool and traditional reading.”David HouFeore more than acknowledges Richard’s body. In some ways that’s what this production, directed by Antoni Cimolino, Stratford’s artistic director, is about. Cimolino frames the action with the discovery of what is most likely the king’s skeleton in 2013. Feore walks with one leg turned at almost a 90-degree angle, causing him to lurch wildly and, at some performances, fall over. If that weren’t enough to make plain the importance of disability in this production’s conception of the character, the scoliotic curvature of Richard’s spine is sewn into his costumes, designed by Francesca Callow.One ought not like it. Even if you believe, as I do, that someday everyone should be able to play anyone, there are too many disabled actors who rarely get work to give a plum role like Richard to somebody else.And yet, what can I say? Feore is superb in a very cool and traditional reading of the role. (He barely raises his voice, or needs to, thanks to the Patterson’s phenomenal acoustics.) His internalization of Richard’s disability seems complete, accurate and uncondescending. The supporting cast, most of whom appear in “All’s Well” at alternate performances, is unusually fine, especially the quartet of women whom Richard widows, taunts, haunts, marries or murders. Actually, in this production, it’s a quintet of women: The assassin he hires to do his worst deed — the killing of the boy princes who stand in his way — is no longer James Tyrell but Jane. Chillingly, she is the only person onstage you believe Richard actually loves.Despite that alteration, and the contemporary framing device, this remains a conventional revival in the best sense: It restores the power of the story by keeping faith with its words. That’s what makes all the Canadian revivals I saw so powerful. (Well, OK, there was a middling “Hamlet.”) If there’s something in the air here promoting that quality, it’s the repertory system: Stratford, still returning to full strength after the pandemic shutdown, has 10 productions running this season; Shaw has 11. Talk about maturity! Most things get better the more you do them.Stratford Festival“All’s Well That Ends Well,” “Chicago” and “Richard III” are in repertory through Oct. 30. Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca.Shaw Festival“Gaslight” is in repertory through Oct. 8. Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario; shawfest.com. More

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    ‘Days of Our Lives,’ NBC Mainstay Since 1965, Moves to Peacock

    The soap opera will be shown exclusively on the network’s streaming service, ending its 57-year run on broadcast TV.After more than 57 years and 14,000 episodes, NBC is moving “Days of Our Lives,” one of the last remaining soap operas, from its afternoon TV perch onto Peacock, the network’s streaming service.It will be replaced in the time slot by a news program, adding to the demise of the soap opera genre that, for most of television’s existence, was a steady presence on the major American networks each afternoon. “Days of Our Lives” will make its Peacock debut on Sept. 12, when the hourlong “NBC News Daily” will also premiere in its place on network TV.“With a large percentage of the ‘Days of Our Lives’ audience already watching digitally, this move enables us to build the show’s loyal fanbase on streaming while simultaneously bolstering the network daytime offering with an urgent, live programming opportunity for partners and consumers,” Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, said in a statement.The move left just three soap operas remaining on network TV: ABC’s “General Hospital,” and CBS’s “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.”Soap operas — named for the soap companies that advertised on them in the early days — began as radio programs in the 1930s, and moved to television in the ’50s in a 15-minute format. “Days of Our Lives” debuted on Nov. 8, 1965, as a half-hour program and expanded to an hour in 1975.The formula has in some ways changed little since the beginning: Plots feature heavy doses of love, lust, infidelity, heartbreak, murder and all manners of other intrigue, including occasional resurrections from the dead and brushes with the supernatural.For more than a decade, cancellation rumors have dogged “Days of Our Lives,” which follows a collection of characters in the fictional Midwestern town of Salem. In 2007, Jeff Zucker, then the president of NBC Universal Television, said the show was unlikely to continue past 2009. Soap opera ratings were sinking across the board; in 2009, CBS canceled “Guiding Light” after 72 years, and also canceled “As the World Turns” after 54 years.In 2011, ABC canceled “All My Children” and “One Life to Live.”But “Days of Our Lives” powered on, even as it attracted fewer than two million viewers per episode in recent years, far below the nearly 10 million who watched in the 1970s when it took over as daytime’s top-rated serial. It had the lowest ratings of the four remaining soap operas in the 2021-2022 season.In 2021, NBC renewed the program for two years, taking it into 2023. More

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    In Salzburg, New Lives for Two Scandalous Plays

    Works that once horrified European audiences are now centerpieces of the drama offerings at the tony Austrian festival.SALZBURG, Austria — The 1920 premiere of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Reigen” provoked a riot in a Berlin theater. A year later, in Vienna, the work was shut down by the police. Shortly afterward, the playwright, who was prosecuted for indecency, banned further performances in Germany and Austria. The play, a merry-go-round of love affairs with a cast of characters drawn from all echelons of society, was not performed again in German until 1982, over half a century after Schnitzler’s death. Instead, its fame spread in translation, including French film adaptations by Max Ophüls and Roger Vadim.Last week, a new play inspired by Schnitzler’s succès de scandale premiered at the Salzburg Festival, where it was one of two reworked classics during the event’s opening days. The Salzburg Festival is, of course, better known for its musical offerings, including the high-profile opera premieres it rolls out each summer, but drama is Salzburg’s oldest tradition, dating back to the production of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Jedermann” that opened the first festival, in 1920. Nowadays, the plays at the festival draw a more diverse crowd than the exorbitantly priced operas, but Salzburg remains a blue-chip event, and the audience is swankier (and generally older) than your typical theatergoers in Berlin or Hamburg.For her Salzburg debut, the Latvian American director Yana Ross asked European writers under 50 to devise new scenes using “Reigen,” a cycle of 10 pre- and postcoital dialogues, as a rough guide. The result is a 21st-century homage that bears little resemblance to the original. As an anthology of short dramatic texts by a diverse group of established and emerging writers, it is both varied and, perhaps inevitably, uneven.Ross strings them together in a handsome production set in an upscale restaurant. Throughout the evening, the constantly reshuffling couples meet to share the quiet intimacy of a meal, with the tables and their occupants reflected in a large tilted mirror. The seven main actors dance their way from scene to scene to the strains of Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse,” or electronic and pop music.It feels like a misstep to start the production with a difficult, experimental retelling of the original play’s opening scene: a rendezvous between an eager prostitute and a reluctant soldier. The poetic rewrite, by the Austrian Lydia Haider, mixing heightened and vulgar speech, is a confusing way into the piece. And the Swiss playwright Lukas Barfüss’s unsettling and surreal version of the closing scene, where the erotic carousel comes full circle, is similarly disorienting and cryptic.Foreground from left, Urs Peter Halter, Sibylle Canonica and Matthias Neukirch in “Reigen.” Lucie JanschIn between, however, the production is on more solid footing, starting with the Finnish author Sofi Oksanen’s thoroughly contemporary reworking of the play’s second dialogue, between a soldier and a chambermaid.In Oksanen’s version, a man flirts over the intercom with his food delivery courier and then panics when she accepts his invitation to come up and share his dinner. Face to face with her, he is painfully awkward. Eventually, she discovers that her customer is a far-right internet troll, a revelation that sours any attraction she might have felt. Tabita Johannes lends the courier a shy curiosity before lashing out at the creep who’s lured her into his living room. It is one of several dazzling turns by Johannes, who like much of the cast belongs to the acting ensemble of the Schauspielhaus Zurich, where the production will transfer in September. (The majority of “Reigen’s” authors are women, and the female characters are generally better written and more interesting than the men.)Johannes also appears as a woman who accuses her boss of forcing himself on her, in a #MeToo-era twist on Schnitzler’s dialogue between a young man and a chambermaid. In the scene, by the French Moroccan author Leïla Slimani, the woman takes her employer to court, where she recounts his serial abuse in painful detail. Elsewhere Johannes gets to show her seductive, manipulative side as the clandestine lover of an older female author, in a scene by the Berlin writer Hengameh Yaghoobifarah that is the only one approaching the sexiness of the original play.Several other episodes are awkward fits, including one by the Hungarian author Kata Weber, about an actress nearing 40 who is terrified that her career will evaporate in her middle age. Lena Schwarz’s flamboyant, scenery-chewing performance notwithstanding, the episode comes across as clichéd and seems off topic.The production’s biggest gamble is a Skype conversation between a mother and son, written by the Russian author Mikhail Durnenkov. (The split-screen video is projected onstage.)Durnenkov, who now lives in Finland, rewrote the segment after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. The opening dispute, about a family friend arrested for kissing a man at a protest, works better than the son’s subsequent revelation that he is going into exile. “As long as we live here, they’re making war in our names. I won’t give them that right,” he says, struggling to convince his conservative mother. I can understand Durnenkov’s desire to make an antiwar statement, but his ideas are poorly dramatized and it is unclear how his scene relates to the others.Dagna Litzenberger Vinet, standing, as Alma, with Lilith Hässle as Berta and the ensemble in “Ingolstadt,” directed by Ivo van Hove.Matthias HornSeveral years after the “Reigen” premiere, Berlin kicked up another legendary Weimar Republic theater scandal with a 1929 production of Marieluise Fleisser’s “Pioneers in Ingolstadt.” Set in Fleisser’s Bavarian hometown, the play follows the fortunes of a young woman, Berta, who falls in love with Korl, a callous soldier stationed in town to repair a broken bridge. Audiences were shocked by the play’s depiction of small-town sexism and military cruelty, embellished for the premiere by Bertolt Brecht, who co-directed the production and staged the scene where Berta loses her virginity to Korl in an onstage shed that shook during their lovemaking.In Ivo van Hove’s new Salzburg Festival production, that scene is far more explicit than anything Brecht could have gotten away with. The Belgian director stages it unambiguously as a rape scene, with Korl pinning Berta down as she screams and flails in the shallow water that covers most of the large stage. It is one of many violent acts — stoning, torture, drowning, you name it — enacted with much squirming and splashing during the unrelentingly grim production.Van Hove, making his festival debut with this coproduction with Vienna’s Burgtheater, where it will transfer in September, fused “Pioneers in Ingolstadt” with an earlier play by Fleisser, “Purgatory in Ingolstadt,” about a pregnant schoolgirl and a former classmate with a savior complex. A new script, by Koen Tachelet, weaves the two plays together in a seamless, but not entirely convincing, way. The actors bring Fleisser’s hard, cold dialogue to life in emotionally raw performances, but they are miserable company to spend two and a half hours with. All that water onstage can’t wash away the humiliation and suffering. Nor did all the staging’s violence and cruelty produce a tremor of outrage. In lieu of a riot, the festival audience responded with polite, generous applause.Reigen. Directed by Yana Ross. Salzburg Festival through Aug. 11.Ingolstadt. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Salzburg Festival through Aug. 7. More

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    Trevor Noah Celebrates a Shocking Victory for Abortion Rights in Kansas

    “Congratulations, Kansas. It’s moments like these I wish I knew which one of these states you were,” Noah joked on Wednesday.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.Not in Kansas AnymoreKansas voters rejected a constitutional amendment on Tuesday that would restrict and limit access to abortion rights in the state.“Congratulations, Kansas. It’s moments like these I wish I knew which one of these states you were,” Trevor Noah joked on Wednesday.“And may I remind you, Kansas is a state so bright red, it looks like me after 30 seconds on the beach.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yeah, no one expected this. This was a bigger shock than when Batgirl found out her real nemesis was the C.E.O. of Warner Brothers.” — TREVOR NOAH, referring to a decision to kill a $90 million “Batgirl” movie“Wow, somewhere right now Brett Kavanaugh is angrily chugging a Coors Light tallboy with PJ and Squee.” — SETH MEYERS“And this is where you realize as well the anti-abortion views of right-wing lawmakers and some people on the Supreme Court — they don’t mirror what actual Americans want, right? It’s not accurate. And that’s a huge problem in this country. It’s like letting the craziest dude in your friend group plan your bachelor party. And you’re going to be like ‘I just wanted to play beer pong — how did we end up in a Bangkok prison? Not cool, Samuel.’” — TREVOR NOAH“They also changed their state bird from the western meadowlark to flipping off Sam Alito.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Bad Votes Edition)“So last night was a very good night for Donald ‘Jigglypuff’ Trump. In Michigan, his candidate defeated a Republican who voted to impeach him. In Arizona, his candidates won the primaries for senate and secretary of state, and in Missouri, the Eric he endorsed beat the other Eric that he endorsed. Yeah, it was the best night Trump has had that didn’t end with somebody signing an NDA.” — TREVOR NOAH“Most alarming about the elections is that many of the big winners include several election deniers backed by the former president. Apparently, the majority of Republican voters don’t trust voting, so after they cast their ballots, they got multiple stickers: ‘I voted.’ ‘Or did I?’ ‘Stop the sticker!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And these could have national implications because these Republicans, the ones winning now, they all believe in crazy conspiracy theories about Biden stealing the election in 2020. So if they win the final races, they could end up in charge of counting the votes in 2024. I don’t know about you, but I know for certain I do not trust them with their job.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingThe stand-up comic Katherine Blanford made her television debut on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightLL Cool J will stop by Thursday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”Also, Check This OutJennette McCurdy’s relationship with her mother is the narrative force at the center of her memoir.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesJennette McCurdy reflects on her time as a child actor and on her troubled relationship with her mother in her new memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died.” More