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    Robert Morse, Impish Tony-Winning Comedy Star, Is Dead at 90

    He dazzled as a charming corporate schemer in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” His later triumphs included a memorable role on “Mad Men.”Robert Morse, whose impish, gaptoothed grin and expert comic timing made him a Tony-winning Broadway star as a charming corporate schemer in the 1961 musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” who later won another Tony for his eerily lifelike portrait of the writer Truman Capote in “Tru,” and who capped his long career with a triumphant return to the corporate world on the acclaimed television series “Mad Men,” has died. He was 90. His death was announced on Twitter by the writer and producer Larry Karaszewski, who worked with Mr. Morse on the television series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” He did not say where or when Mr. Morse died.Small in stature but larger than life as a performer, Mr. Morse was still a relative newcomer to the stage when he took Broadway by storm in “How to Succeed.” Directed (and partly written) by Abe Burrows, with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, and based on a book by Shepherd Mead, the show, a broad satire of the business world, was set in the headquarters of the World Wide Wicket Company, ruled by its peevish president, J.B. Biggley (Rudy Vallee). The plot revolved around the determined efforts of an ambitious young window washer named J. Pierrepont Finch, played with sly humor by Mr. Morse, to climb to the top of the corporate ladder. Among the show’s many high points was the washroom scene in which Mr. Morse delivered a heartfelt rendition of the song “I Believe in You” while gazing rapturously into a mirror.“How to Succeed” ran for more than 1,400 performances and won seven Tony Awards, including one for Mr. Morse as best actor in a musical, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The 1967 film adaptation, with Mr. Morse and Mr. Vallee repeating their roles, was a hit as well, and the show has been revived on Broadway twice. Mr. Morse always seemed more at home on the stage than on the screen. Five years before “How to Succeed” opened, he made an uncredited and virtually unseen Hollywood debut (his face was swathed in bandages) in the World War II drama “The Proud and Profane.” With no other screen roles in the offing, he returned to New York, where he had earlier studied acting with Lee Strasberg, and where he auditioned for the director Tyrone Guthrie and was given his first Broadway role in “The Matchmaker,” Thornton Wilder’s comedy about a widowed merchant’s search for a new wife. Ruth Gordon played the title role, and Mr. Morse and Arthur Hill played clerks in the merchant’s shop. Mr. Morse would reprise his role in the 1958 film adaptation. From left, John Slattery, Mr. Morse and Nathan Lane in the 2016 Broadway revival of “The Front Page.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Morse’s Broadway career continued with the comedy “Say, Darling” (1958), in which he played an eager young producer, and “Take Me Along” (1959), a musical based on Eugene O’Neill’s play “Ah, Wilderness!,” in which Mr. Morse was a doubt-ridden adolescent, Walter Pidgeon his sympathetic father and Jackie Gleason his hard-drinking uncle. Then came his star-making turn in “How to Succeed.”His success in that show led to movie offers, but not to movie stardom; he rarely had a screen vehicle that fit him comfortably. “The parts I could play,” he observed to The Sunday News of New York in 1965, “they give to Jack Lemmon.” When he co-starred with Robert Goulet in the 1964 sex farce “Honeymoon Hotel,” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, “It is hard to imagine good actors being given worse material with which to work.” He fared better, but only slightly, in “The Loved One” (1965), a freewheeling adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s scathing novel about America’s moneymaking funeral industry in which he was improbably cast as a British poet who finds work at an animal cemetery, and “A Guide for the Married Man” (1967), in which Mr. Morse gives a fellow husband (Walter Matthau) advice on how to cheat on his wife. Television proved more hospitable. In addition to guest appearances on various shows in the 1960s and ’70s, he co-starred with the actress E.J. Peaker in the 1968 series “That’s Life,” an unusual hybrid of sitcom and variety show that told the story of a young couple’s courtship and marriage through sketches, monologues, singing and dancing. Perhaps too ambitious for its own good — “We’re producing what amounts to a new musical each week,” Mr. Morse told an interviewer — it lasted only one season.Mr. Morse returned to Broadway in 1972 in “Sugar,” a musical based on the Billy Wilder film “Some Like It Hot” about two Chicago musicians — Tony Roberts in the part originally played by Tony Curtis and Mr. Morse, appropriately, in the Jack Lemmon role — who flee from local mobsters by dressing as women and joining an all-girl band en route to Miami. It brought Mr. Morse another Tony nomination and was a modest hit, running for more than a year.But his next show, the 1976 musical “So Long, 174th Street,” based on the play “Enter Laughing” — with Mr. Morse, still boyish-looking at just shy of 45, as an aspiring actor roughly half his age — received harsh reviews and closed in a matter of weeks. It was Mr. Morse’s last appearance on Broadway for more than a decade.He kept busy in the ensuing years, but choice roles were scarce, and he battled depression. He also had problems with drugs and alcohol, although he maintained that those problems did not interfere with his work; looking back in 1989, he told The Times, “It was the other 22 hours I had a problem with.”He starred in a number of out-of-town revivals, including a production of “How to Succeed” in Los Angeles. He was a familiar face on television in series like “Love, American Style” and “Murder, She Wrote” — and a familiar voice as well, on cartoon shows like “Pound Puppies.” But he longed to escape a casting pigeonhole that he knew he had helped create.“I’m the short, funny guy,” he said ruefully in a 1972 Times interview. “It’s very difficult to get out of that.” Eight years earlier he had told another interviewer: “I think of myself as an actor. I happen to have a comic flair, but that doesn’t mean I plan to spend my life as a comedian.”It took him a while to find the perfect dramatic showcase, but he found it in 1989 in “Tru,” Jay Presson Allen’s one-man show about Truman Capote. Almost unrecognizable in heavy makeup and utterly convincing in voice and mannerisms, he was Capote incarnate, alone in his apartment in 1975 and brooding over the friendships he had lost after the publication of excerpts from his gossipy novel in progress, “Answered Prayers.” Mr. Morse’s performance brought him his second Tony Award. A television adaptation of “Tru” for the PBS series “American Playhouse” in 1992 also won him an Emmy.Robert Alan Morse was born on May 18, 1931, in Newton, Mass. His father, Charles, managed a chain of movie theaters. His mother, May (Silver) Morse, was a pianist.In high school, Mr. Morse earned a reputation as the class clown; a sympathetic music teacher helped him transfer his energy from the classroom to the theater. He spent a summer with the Peterborough Players in New Hampshire, came to New York and, after trying and failing to get an acting job, joined the Navy in 1950. After his discharge four years later, he moved back to New York and enrolled at the American Theater Wing.Mr. Morse in an episode of “Mad Men.” “I said I’d be happy to be Bertram Cooper, chairman of the board, and sit behind a desk,” he said of being offered the role, which earned him five Emmy nominations. “It looked like the road company of ‘How to Succeed.’”Jaimie Trueblood/AMCMr. Morse’s first marriage, to Carole Ann D’Andrea, a dancer, ended in divorce. They had three daughters, Robin, Andrea and Hilary. He and his second wife, Elizabeth Roberts, an advertising executive, had a daughter, Allyn, and a son, Charles.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Morse’s success in “Tru” guaranteed that he would no longer be thought of as, in his words, “an aging leprechaun.” A wider variety of roles followed, including, in 2016, a return to Broadway in a star-studded revival of “The Front Page.”“In the small but crucial role of a messenger from the governor’s office,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times, “Mr. Morse, who made his Broadway debut more than 60 years ago, proves he can still steal a scene without breaking a sweat.”But for the last three decades of his life, he was mostly seen on television. He appeared in more than a dozen episodes of the 2000 CBS series “City of Angels” as the unpredictable chairman of an urban hospital. And in 2007 he came full circle when he was cast as the eccentric head of an advertising agency in the acclaimed AMC series “Mad Men,” set in the same era as “How to Succeed.” The role brought him five Emmy nominations. “I was quite elated when Matt called me and said, ‘We’d love you to do this show,’” Mr. Morse told The Times in 2014, referring to the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner. “I said I’d be happy to be Bertram Cooper, chairman of the board, and sit behind a desk. It looked like the road company of ‘How to Succeed.’”Although Bertram Cooper was a straight dramatic role, Mr. Morse got to return to his musical-comedy roots in his last episode, aired in the spring of 2014, when the character died — and then reappeared, in a fantasy song-and-dance sequence, to croon the old standard “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”“What a send-off!” Mr. Morse said. “The opportunity to shine in the spotlight that Matt Weiner gave me — it was an absolute love letter. Christmas and New Year’s, all rolled into one.”Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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    A Broadway Choreographer Who Gets Ideas on the Subway Platform

    5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

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    ‘Bridgerton’s’ Jonathan Bailey Takes the Plunge

    5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

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    Ivo van Hove on His Famously Short Rehearsal Times

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    Playwright Aleshea Harris and Director Whitney White Bond at a Taqueria

    5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

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    When Their Show Was Postponed, a Playwright and Cast Turned to Poetry

    5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

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    Beanie Feldstein Warms Up for ‘Funny Girl’

    5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

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    Younger Than It Looks, but No More Diverse: France’s Top Theater Prize

    At the Molières, France’s equivalent of the Tony Awards, commercial and publicly funded productions seem to inhabit different worlds.PARIS — Four hundred years after his birth, the playwright Molière is being feted in France this year, and the theater awards that bear his name couldn’t pass up the chance to participate. The Molières, France’s equivalent of the Tony Awards, have jokingly renamed their yearly bash — set for May 30 — the 400th ceremony.Yet in truth, the Molières are a spring chicken compared with similar theater awards around the world. They were founded only in 1987, four decades after the Tonys; their initiator was the producer Georges Cravenne, who had already created the Césars, the French film awards, in 1976.And their history has been anything but smooth. The Molières were designed to bridge the gap between two opposing production models: publicly funded stagings on the one hand and private ventures on the other. The distinction has long structured French theater and shaped its aesthetics. “Public theater,” which is largely funded by the culture ministry and local authorities, prides itself on presenting more experimental, cerebral fare than privately owned venues.Ahead of the 2012 ceremony, however, representatives of over two dozen commercial venues walked out of the Molières, arguing that the ceremony favored the publicly funded sector and didn’t sufficiently account for their popularity with audiences. It returned only in 2014, under new leadership.This year’s nominations suggest the balance remains precarious. There are separate prizes for public and privately funded productions in several of the top categories, including best production and the acting awards, with different criteria. To be eligible, private-sector shows must have been performed at least 60 times between January 2020 and March 2022, whereas half that number of performances is enough for public-sector nominees. The winners are then voted on by members of the Molières’ Academy, whose names aren’t public.The outcome of this process can be puzzling. It rarely reflects critical consensus, perhaps because many well-reviewed productions don’t even qualify for consideration, and it favors star-led shows. The acting categories, especially, are dominated by acting veterans and celebrities like the singer Vanessa Paradis, who this year earned a best private-sector actress nomination for her stage debut, in “Maman” by Samuel Benchetrit.The Molières also appear utterly unconcerned about their lack of diversity. As early as 2016, the French collective “Decolonizing the Arts” pointed out that there wasn’t a single person of color among the acting nominees. Two years later, the Black author and director Gerty Dambury publicly called for a “non-racist Molières ceremony.” The message has fallen on deaf ears: This year, the acting and directing categories are almost uniformly white again, with the exception of one performer of Algerian descent, Kamel Isker.Jordi Le Bolloc’h as Jack Mancini and Anne-Sophie Picard as Élisa in “The Race of Giants” at the Théâtre des Béliers Parisiens.Alejandro GuerreroIf you are in the market for a white-savior narrative, on the other hand, the Molières have some options. One of the top shows in the private-sector categories this year is “Lawrence of Arabia,” playing at the Théâtre du Gymnase Marie-Bell through May 22. Like the 1962 film of the same name, it was inspired by the life of the British archaeologist and colonial administrator T.E. Lawrence, who played a role in the Arab Revolt throughout the Ottoman Empire during World War I. (The film isn’t mentioned in the show’s credits, despite obvious parallels.)Eric Bouvron and Benjamin Penamaria have crafted a zippy, low-tech stage biography, whose central highlight is live music, with two musicians and a singer onstage throughout. The artistic team clearly came to this story with good intentions. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret 1916 treaty that outlined how the Ottoman lands would be divided between France and the United Kingdom, is explained and denounced. As in the film, Lawrence is made aware of the plan late, and disagrees with it.Yet this “Lawrence of Arabia” doesn’t engage with the problems involved in representing Arab history and culture through the eyes of a British colonial-era hero. While the show includes some dialogue in Arabic, the frequent use of “Allahu akbar” as a war cry plays into Muslim caricatures, and a faux-“Oriental” dance is a low point.As the central character, Lawrence is depicted as a master strategist, without whom Arab leaders wouldn’t have accomplished much. Lawrence’s close Arab friend, Daoum, speaks in cringeworthy pidgin French that highlights his lack of education and manners, and follows Lawrence like an over-excited puppy.It is difficult to understand why anyone would want to reaffirm these dated perspectives today, but “Lawrence of Arabia” is in many ways typical of the production style favored in France’s private sector. Its storytelling is relentlessly upbeat and fast-paced, with regular visual jokes and puns; the characters are brightly captured, yet often one-dimensional.The main goal, clearly, is entertainment, and two of the other nominees for best private-sector production are made of the same cloth: “The Race of Giants,” written and directed by Mélody Mourey, and Léna Bréban’s production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”At the Théâtre des Béliers Parisiens, “The Race of Giants” (through May 29) dives into the 20th-century space race, efficiently weaving together history and fiction. Mourey invents a brilliant yet troubled astronaut, Jack Mancini, who makes it to NASA in the 1960s — only to be betrayed by a secret Soviet agent. The production makes inventive use of video and very few props, which allows for fast transitions and jumps back and forth in time.Jordi Le Bolloc’h makes for an energetic loose cannon as Mancini, but as in “Lawrence of Arabia,” the female characters — ditsy wives and flirty, drunken bar visitors, mainly — take a back seat to the lives of men, with the exception of Jack’s headstrong wife, Élisa.Barbara Schultz, left, as Rosalind and Ariane Mourier as Celia in “As You Like It” at the Théâtre de la Pépinière.François FontyFor feel-good comedy, “As You Like It,” at the Théâtre de la Pépinière through April 30, remains the best ticket in town. Bréban, who staged the first post-lockdown show in France — at a retirement home — in 2020, has been going from strength to strength recently. This winter, she briskly led members of the Comédie-Française in an adaptation of Hector Malot’s 1878 novel, “Sans Famille.”“As You Like It” is rarely performed in France, in part because its brand of pastoral fantasy isn’t easy to transpose, but the translator Pierre-Alain Leleu has provided this production with a brilliantly witty French rendition. Bréban, for her part, has a gift for instilling an exhilarating sense of collective rhythm in her actors. There isn’t a dull moment in her Forest of Arden; the relationship between the cousins Rosalind (Barbara Schulz) and Celia (Ariane Mourier) is especially loving and zany.“As You Like It” is nominated in several private-sector categories, but Bréban’s career shows that the distinction between private and publicly funded theater isn’t as clear-cut as it was in the past. Her ability to go from the Comédie-Française, a prestigious public institution, to the smaller Théâtre de la Pépinière with the same level of success suggests that the audiences for each are not so different. The Molières may not have found a happy medium yet, but some of its nominees are leading the way.Lawrence d’Arabie. Directed by Éric Bouvron. Théâtre du Gymnase Marie-Bell, through May 22.La Course Des Géants. Directed by Mélody Mourey. Théâtre des Béliers Parisiens, through May 29.Comme Il Vous Plaira. Directed by Léna Bréban. Théâtre de la Pépinière, through April 30. More