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    The West End's Comeback: London Theater Reopens

    London’s theater scene re-emerged with “The Mousetrap,” Agatha Christie’s long-running murder mystery, which has changed little from its debut in 1952, let alone from before the coronavirus.LONDON — At 8:30 p.m. on Monday, two friends were huddling outside St. Martin’s Theater in London’s West End doing something no one has for 14 months: arguing during the intermission over who was the murderer in “The Mousetrap,” Agatha Christie’s long-running whodunit.“I’m convinced it’s the posh woman who runs the hotel,” said Lockie Chapman, 40, a singer, before immediately changing his mind.“Actually, it’s the major!” he said. “Or how about that shifty Italian dude?” he added.“The shifty Italian dude?” replied Rah Petherbridge, 37. “But he could be a red herring!”Such debates have rung out outside the “The Mousetrap” ever since it debuted in 1952, but those accompanying the show’s 28,200th performance on Monday were significant. They marked the reopening of the West End.Since March last year, when the coronavirus pandemic shut down Britain, the country’s theaters have been effectively dark. A few shows, including “The Mousetrap,” tried to come back last fall, only for a second lockdown to keep them from even making it to rehearsals.Pippa Griffin, a “Mousetrap” usher, during the show. Audience members on Monday said they felt that this time, theater’s comeback would last.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesSeveral tried again in December, including “Six,” the hit musical about the wives of Henry VIII, but they managed only a handful of performances before they were shut once more. Theaters had to perform to online audiences if they wanted to keep working.Monday’s comeback felt like it was actually permanent, 15 audience members said in interviews, many highlighting Britain’s speedy vaccination campaign as the reason for their optimism. (Over 55 percent of the British population has received at least one dose, a higher proportion than in the United States.) A small but worrying surge in coronavirus cases in Britain, linked to a variant first identified in India, did not dampen their mood.“I really think we’re back for good this time,” said Matthew Lumby, 48, a civil servant. “I wouldn’t be certain we’ll be without face masks for a while, but if wearing one’s the price of being back in a theater again, it’s a small one to pay.”The Royal Opera House has also reopened, with Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito.” Clive Barda, via Royal Opera HouseThe mood was similar at the nearby Royal Opera House, which also reopened on Monday, with Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito.” “I feel confident this time it’s for good,” said Katie Connor, 40, as several huge Rolls Royces pulled up with glamorous operagoers.“I’m just so happy to be back,” she added. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to ugly-cry for the whole two hours and 25 minutes of the show.”England’s theaters are not immediately allowed to return to their prepandemic state. For now, shows can open only at 50 percent capacity, and audience members must wear face masks throughout performances.Social-distancing rules are supposed to be removed June 21, allowing full capacity, but on Friday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned that the date might be pushed back because of the recent rise in cases.“I have to level with you that this new variant could pose a serious disruption to our progress,” Johnson said.Inside the Royal Opera House before the show on Monday. For now, venues can open only at 50 percent capacity.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesIt would be “financially bumpy” for “The Mousetrap” if distancing weren’t removed soon, said Adam Spiegel, the show’s producer, but he insisted that he would keep the show open no matter what, to give the actors and crew work. “It’s the right thing to do,” he said.Several other major West End shows are reopening this week, including “Six” and “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” a hit musical about a boy’s attempts to become a drag queen, with a host of others to come across England in coming months. But on Monday, the spotlight was left largely to “The Mousetrap,” which holds a Guinness world record for the longest-running play.It was “a bit bizarre” for “The Mousetrap” to be at the vanguard of theater’s return, Spiegel said. Critics have been calling it “an anachronism” since at least the 1970s, lacking the technical bells and whistles one would expect of a modern production. But Spiegel said that it was the best play to reopen the West End, as it had become a symbol of the city.“It’s been through all the ups and downs of British life of the last 70 years: terrorism, economic recessions, this,” he said. “There’s not a scientific answer to why it should be first. It just feels right.”Cassidy Janson and Danny Mac in “The Mousetrap.” Two casts were hired so that if one had to go into isolation, the other could step in.Tristram KentonThe play hadn’t needed much rewriting to lessen coronavirus risks, except the removal of one kiss, Spiegel said. Agatha Christie wrote the play just after World War II, he added, when British people “weren’t that kissy-wissy.”“So it fortunately lends itself quite well to social distancing,” he added.Backstage, though, there had been a few changes. Two casts were hired, so if one has to isolate, the other can step in. Cast and crew also had to stay distant, which meant the show’s wind machine could no longer be used, as the person operating it would have had to stand next to an actor backstage.Other shows are adopting similar measures. On Monday, the director Michael Longhurst started rehearsals for a revival of Nick Payne’s relationship drama “Constellations,” which is being staged at the Vaudeville Theater. He hired four two-person casts — including famous names like Zoë Wanamaker — to try to ensure that the show wouldn’t suffer any coronavirus-induced closures, he said. “It’s such a complicated balancing act for every production,” he added.Other theaters across England are similarly focused on small shows with lower coronavirus risks for now. The Theater Royal in Bath in southwestern England, for instance, is reopening May 25 not with a play, but with Ralph Fiennes performing T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” The performance will then travel around England.Temperature checks outside “The Mousetrap” on Monday. “Whatever is necessary to restart people’s ability to enjoy theater I’m OK with,” said Adam Spiegel, the producer.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesEngland’s theatrical reopening puts it ahead of Europe’s other major theater centers. In Paris, theaters may open from Wednesday, but they must finish by 9 p.m. and are allowed only 35 percent capacity. Some theaters have said that they can’t reopen under those conditions. Others have said that they can’t because they’re occupied by students protesting a lack of support for arts workers.In Berlin, theaters are also allowed to reopen on Wednesday, but only outdoors.In the West End, most theater owners and producers seem happy to accept restrictions, including the potential use of coronavirus passports to guarantee entry. “Whatever is necessary to restart people’s ability to enjoy theater I’m OK with,” Spiegel, of “The Mousetrap,” said.Many in the industry realize that it will be a long time before theaters are back to their old selves, employing thousands of freelancers. Some job losses are only just emerging. In April, The Stage, Britain’s theater newspaper, reported that “The Phantom of the Opera” would reopen July 27 but only with its touring orchestration, cutting the number of musicians almost in half, to 14, from 27.“It sets a bad precedent for the whole sector,” Dan West, a trombonist who played in the show before the pandemic, said in a telephone interview. “Every small producer will say, ‘If they don’t need brass, I don’t,’” he added.During “The Mousetrap” on Monday, any worries seemed far from people’s minds. Many audience members took off their masks to sip drinks during the show, then left them off as the tension ramped up onstage, with Detective Sergeant Trotter (Paul Hilliar) quizzing eight potential murderers.Eventually, the perpetrator was revealed, and several audience members gasped. “See, I told you!” one shouted, being shushed by those around him.“The Mousetrap” ended just had it had for every one of its previous 28,199 performances. “Thank you so much for your unbelievably warm reception this evening,” Hilliar said, after a standing ovation from the half-full theater.“Now, you are our partners in crime,” he added, “and we ask you to keep the secret of whodunit locked in your hearts.” More

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    A German Festival Takes Stock of Pandemic-Era Theater

    Online for a second year, Theatertreffen showcases the highs and lows of recent innovations in German-language digital dramaturgy.MUNICH — The most immediately striking aspect of this year’s Theatertreffen, the annual showcase of the best of German-language theater, is the numbers.To make their selection, the 2020 festival jury watched 285 productions in 60 cities across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The resulting program, which runs until Monday, is dauntingly full, with 80 hours of streaming events on a digital festival platform.When the seven jurors announced their selection in February, the festival hoped to hold in-person performances. But a third wave of the coronavirus, which has gripped Germany in recent months, meant that for the second year in a row, Theatertreffen was confined to this online presentation.Since the start of the pandemic, German playhouses have been uniquely proactive in adapting to social distancing restrictions. Many have devised new theatrical formats, including immersive live productions for solo spectators or digital-only productions that have enlisted social media, video messaging apps, chat rooms and video gaming technology to create art that responds to our circumstances.Keeping up with this creative proliferation has been occasionally exhausting; more consistently, it has been inspiring to see how theater here — much of which receives robust state funding — has refused to lie down and die.A moment during the 12-hour production “Show Me a Good Time,” by the German-British theater collective Gob Squad.Eike Walkenhorst/Berlin FestivalI had hoped that this year’s Theatertreffen would take the full measure of this challenging year, so I was dismayed that the jury chose only one “corona show” among the 10 productions selected for the festival.But what a production it was!“Show Me a Good Time” by the German-British theater collective Gob Squad, was a wild noon-to-midnight performance that whizzed between the empty stage of the Berliner Festspiele and various participants in the outside world, discussing life during the pandemic, conducting man-on-the-street interviews about theater and soliciting artistic suggestions from callers. The performers at the theater, driving through Berlin and traipsing around England were connected via headsets and cameras in what often had the aspect of a theatrical telethon.Yet despite the marathon running time, it was accessible and down to earth. By design, it was a show that one could dip into and out of at will; over the 12 hours, more than 3,000 people popped their virtual heads in.While meditating on life, theater and the intersection of the two, the performers routinely injected their largely ad-libbed performances (in German and English) with generous doses of humor and silliness. One example: For two minutes each hour, they dropped everything and screeched with laughter.Rainald Goetz’s “Empire of Death” directed by Karin Beier, who leads the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. Arno DeclairWhile none of the other productions provided a similar degree of meaningful reflection on life during Covid-19, the reality of the pandemic clearly influenced the aesthetic choices behind several of the other streamed productions.Theaters had already reopened, at limited capacity, in Switzerland when a livestream of Schauspielhaus Zurich’s “It’s Only the End of the World” opened Theatertreffen last week. But the director, Christopher Rüping, a regular at the festival who has been a prominent proponent of new digital possibilities for theater during the pandemic, decided to keep the live audience out. Instead of performing for a handful of spectators, the actors addressed cameras. The result, watched online, was a hybrid theatrical experience reminiscent of cinéma vérité.Roving hand-held cameras captured Jean-Luc Lagarce’s 1990 play about a gay man who returns to his estranged family after a long absence. Most impressive was how effective the livestream’s filming style was at capturing the nuances of the production’s fine actors, including Ulrike Krumbiegel as the nervous, broken matriarch and Wiebke Mollenhauer and Nils Kahnwald as a pair of emotionally scarred siblings.This was also the second year that Theatertreffen’s jury voted to adopt a quota system to ensure that at least half the productions would be directed by women or majority-female collectives. (A recent study by the European Theater Convention that surveyed 22 countries found that there are six men for every four women working in theater).Last year’s Theatertreffen program looked quite similar to earlier installments despite the marked increase in female-led productions. This time around, though, an unofficial feminist theme seemed to reflect the festival’s focus on female theatermakers.“NAME HER. In Search of Women+,” a 7½-hour multimedia performance-lecture, directed by Marie Schleef, about overlooked women throughout history.Hendrik LietmannBy far the most didactic was “NAME HER. In Search of Women+,” a 7½-hour multimedia performance-lecture, directed by Marie Schleef, about overlooked women throughout history. Standing in front of a triptych of large iPhone-like displays of biographical information, charts and videos, the actress Anne Tismer gave an engaging performance that, however heroic, did suffer on video. Watching her rattle off this A to Z of brilliant and unjustly ignored woman, it was hard not to imagine it would have had an entirely different immediacy and energy if experienced live.One of the most prominent female theatermakers in Germany, and a frequent presence at Theatertreffen, is Karin Beier, who leads the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. This year, her production of Rainald Goetz’s “Empire of Death” served up a savage indictment of America’s post-9/11 military adventures abroad and democratic degeneracy at home, and it was easily the grimmest thing at the festival. I couldn’t wait for the four-hour theatrical scream to end.After so many lengthy shows, I was also grateful for those that clocked in at little more than an hour. They provided a sense of intimacy that was missing from the more sprawling productions.One was Leonie Böhm’s internal monologue version of “Medea*,” Schauspielhaus Zurich’s second production at the festival, which worked best as a finely tuned psychological examination of one of world literature’s most famous villainesses. In it, the actress Maja Beckmann’s Medea struggles with how Euripides’ tragedy fates her to be a child murderer, and how history will forever judge her a monster.Staged in a large white tent, “Medea*” created an atmosphere of privacy that it shared with the festival’s most unusual entry, the fragile dance performance “Scores That Shaped Our Friendship,” a physically tender exploration of the friendship between Lucy Wilke, a performer with spinal muscular atrophy, and Pawel Dudus, a queer Polish artist and dancer.Maja Beckmann in Leonie Böhm’s internal monologue version of “Medea*” from Schauspielhaus Zurich.Gina FollyDespite the quota system, this year’s Theatertreffen featured only one conventional play by a female playwright that was also directed by a woman: Anna Gmeyner’s “Automatenbüfett.”We have the Burgtheater in Vienna and the director Barbara Frey to thank for the rediscovery of this 1932 play by the Austrian-Jewish Gmeyner. In it, she combines folk realism with symbolic elements for a parable-like tale of the common good undermined by avarice and sexual dependency, set largely in a vending-machine restaurant. The automat dominates the drab set of Frey’s dramatically incisive and impeccably acted production.It is far and away the most traditional production in this Theatertreffen, as well as one of the best. Starting late this month, it will again be seen onstage in Vienna, where theaters have just reopened after half a year of hibernation. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Rakes Republicans for Downplaying the Capitol Attack

    “You know, when a violent mob attacked our embassy in Benghazi, Republicans in Congress investigated it eight times,” Kimmel said. “A violent mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, they’re like: ‘Tourists! What are you gonna do?’”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. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. More

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    Paul Mooney, Trailblazing Comedian, Dies at 79

    A comic writer and performer, he was known for his boundary-pushing routines about racism and social justice and for his work with Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle.Paul Mooney, the boundary-pushing comedian and comedy writer who made his views on race, racism and social justice abundantly clear as Richard Pryor’s longtime behind-the-scenes partner, a contributor to “In Living Color” and a performer and writer on “Chappelle’s Show,” died on Wednesday at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 79.The cause was a heart attack, said Cassandra Williams, his publicist. Mr. Mooney was found to have prostate cancer in 2014.If you knew Mr. Pryor’s work, you probably knew Mr. Mooney’s words. The two worked together on the short-lived 1977 variety series “The Richard Pryor Show”; “Pryor’s Place” (1984), Mr. Pryor’s unlikely attempt at a children’s show; television specials; the album and film “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip” (1982); the autobiographical film “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling” (1986), which Mr. Pryor starred in and directed; and Mr. Pryor’s 1975 appearance as host on “Saturday Night Live.” That episode included a now-famous escalating-racial-insults job-interview sketch with Chevy Chase, written by Mr. Mooney.In an interview with The New York Times after Mr. Pryor’s death in 2005 at 65, Mr. Mooney described himself as Mr. Pryor’s “Black writer.”As a writer on “In Living Color,” Keenen Ivory Wayans’s hit sketch comedy show that had its premiere on Fox in 1990 with a predominantly Black cast, Mr. Mooney was the inspiration for and co-creator of Homey D. Clown, a less than jovial circus-costumed character who was forced to interact with children (part of his parole agreement) and usually ended up frightening them.As a writer and performer on “Chappelle’s Show” in the early 2000s, Mr. Mooney played Negrodamus, a turbaned mystic who foretold the future (Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political prospects, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver’s marriage), appeared as the expert in “Ask a Black Dude” and reviewed movies alongside white female critics. Discussing “Gone With the Wind,” he revealed that Hattie McDaniel, who played the enslaved character known as Mammy, had been reincarnated as Oprah Winfrey — for the money.Mr. Mooney’s film roles included the singer Sam Cooke in “The Buddy Holly Story” (1978) and Junebug, an old-school stand-up comedian with equal amounts of dignity, integrity and genius, in “Bamboozled” (2000), Spike Lee’s dark farce about a television network bringing back the minstrel-show genre.On “Chappelle’s Show” in the early 2000s, Mr. Mooney played Negrodamus, a turbaned mystic who foretold the future.Comedy CentralPaul Mooney was born Paul Gladney on Aug. 4, 1941, in Shreveport, La., to George Gladney and LaVoya Ealy, who were both teenagers. When Paul was 7, he moved with his mother and her parents to Oakland, where he was largely raised by his grandmother, Aimay Ealy.Although some reports said he had taken his stage surname from the Hollywood actor Paul Muni, he corrected that in his 2007 memoir, “White Is the New Black.” His family loved nicknames, he wrote, and his grandmother just started calling him Mooney when he was a child.Paul was 14 when he and his mother moved to nearby Berkeley. There, at a local movie theater, he won his first “hambone” contest, performing an African-American stomping dance that involves slapping and patting the body like a drum. It was then that he realized that he loved applause — and prize money.He had his first taste of fame when he became a teenage regular on a local dance-party television show. After the Army (he was drafted and served in Germany), he came home to all kinds of sales jobs and, even more, to a future in entertainment. He did his first stand-up comedy (alongside friends who were folk singers), created a Black improvisational group called the Yankee Doodle Bedbugs, and joined the noted improv group the Second City. He also took a job for a while as ringmaster of the traveling Gatti-Charles Circus, which, he said, just called for looking good and telling jokes.Mr. Mooney and Richard Pryor (seated) attended the premiere of Spike Lee’s concert film “The Original Kings of Comedy” in Los Angeles in 2000. With them were, from left, Walter Latham, one of the film’s producers, along with Cedric the Entertainer, Steve Harvey, Mr. Lee and D.L. Hughley.Fred Prouser/ReutersHe met Mr. Pryor in the late 1960s at a party, and they soon discovered that their personal lives were antithetical. “Pryor was a self-loathing, drug-addicted genius, Mooney an industrious teetotaler, but they bonded over laughs and a distrust of the white Hollywood power structure,” The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2010.Mr. Mooney continued his comedy career after Mr. Pryor’s death, preserving his routines in documentaries and DVDs like “The Godfather of Comedy” (2012) and “Jesus Is Black — So Was Cleopatra — Know Your History” (2007).In “Jesus Is Black,” his three sons — Shane (whose mother was Yvonne Carothers, whom Mr. Pryor married in 1973) and Daryl and Dwayne (twin sons from an earlier relationship) — appeared as themselves. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Mooney had strong opinions, even about himself.“Whatever that thing is that white people like in Blacks, I don’t have it,” he wrote in his memoir. “Maybe it’s my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don’t have it.”Marie Fazio contributed reporting. More

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    Their Fascination With ‘Real Housewives’ Is Anything but Fake

    A cadre of Yale drama graduates have followed up a first streaming hit with “This American Wife,” a reality-blurring look at the long-running reality TV franchise.Last fall, the theater company known as Fake Friends had one of the most attention-getting shows of the season, and not just because of its title. The troupe’s livestreamed production “Circle Jerk” was a viral hit, amassing Twitter love from Sarah Paulson, Roxane Gay and Hari Nef, and extending its run before briefly returning on demand in January.Its dynamic use of a real theater space mapped a live experience against a landscape of (literally) inside-the-box Zoom plays, while also tackling those restrictions head-on, thanks to self-aware, meme-ready campiness and sharp commentary on lives lived increasingly online.With a production co-sign from the playwright Jeremy O. Harris and his very digital following, the show propelled two of its members, Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, into internet fame. They were tapped to adapt “Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical” for the virtual stage, and secured funding to turn their first-ever collaboration into another work of live internet theater.Along with the company’s dramaturges, Catherine María Rodríguez and Ariel Sibert, the two have reworked “This American Wife,” a half-confessional, half-delusional treatise on gay men’s worship of TV’s “Real Housewives” franchise, which they first staged at Yale Cabaret in 2017.Though the company is a four-person operation, they have enlisted a group of “friends of Fake Friends” (as Rodríguez put it) for this production, which begins streaming May 20: the director Rory Pelsue, the performer Jakeem Dante Powell, and Harris as a co-producer — all graduates of the Yale School of Drama.Foley, left, and Breslin say the show will examine the tensions that come with living one’s life significantly on camera.Michael George for The New York Times“We’re all huge theater nerds who can break out deep conversations about ‘Fefu and Her Friends’ in the same breath that we’re talking about Lady Gaga’s last tweet,” Harris, Breslin’s former New Haven roommate, said on a recent FaceTime call. “It’s a real love of high and low, and a rigorous relationship to both.”Breslin and Foley met backstage at a Yale production of Harris’s “water sports; or insignificant white boys” in 2017, where they discovered a mutual love of both experimental theater and the popular Bravo franchise.“Spoiler alert: They’re the same form,” Foley quipped on a recent Zoom call.“We’re really fascinated with what a camera does to a performer,” Breslin added. “What does the presence of a camera change about your behavior, about how you present yourself?”Unlike “Circle Jerk,” a satirical takedown of white gay culture laden with musical theater references, this project takes formal cues from lensed images. It’s styled as an episode of “Real Housewives” run amok, and the team cites French surrealist film, the photography of Man Ray, and the melodramas of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk as major inspirations.Foley and Powell being filmed for segments that will be part of the livestream.Michael George for The New York Times“This American Wife” follows autofictional versions of Breslin, Foley and Powell as they arrive at a glamorous McMansion and recount their relationships to reality television and the impulse to humiliate oneself for attention.Fused with a litany of the Housewives’ actual phrases, the three performers detail personal, often traumatic, facts about themselves, echoing the franchise’s televised oversharing.And as their competing narratives become increasingly revealing and damaging, the show becomes a semi-improvised, high-concept dialectic on identity and “realness.”“The show directly confronts this visual internet world of the Housewives and how they’re endlessly used as GIFs, decontextualized from possible tragedies in their lives,” Breslin said.The addition of Powell to the cast allows the creators to surface prickly questions about race that have dogged the “Real Housewives” franchise.Michael George for The New York TimesWhile the “Housewives” shows draw steady social-media chatter, the intensity of attention seemed to reach a fever pitch during lockdown. “Because we’ve had this year off, a lot of people were watching the ‘Real Housewives’ on both a surface and an intellectual level,” Powell said.Queer viewers have a particular interest in debates over how real reality TV really is. “I think queer people have a real stake in this division of reality and fakery — what gets deemed real and what gets deemed fake,” Breslin said.“Within the gay community there’s a big tendency to look at the pre-coming-out period as a dark age — to foster this narrative of being a fake self, or playing a character and telling narratives that weren’t true, while still living a life,” said Foley.“That experience of a lie that is lived-in is integral to me,” he added.Early rehearsals at a West Village townhouse previously owned by Sarah Jessica Parker saw the team spend hours reviewing “Real Housewives” footage, determining which eye-rolls and gestures would best evoke the essence of the conspicuous rich, and which could be included as pre-existing GIFs.There and at the Long Island mansion where the company completed tech rehearsals — and from which it will livestream — flowed a heady combination of after-hours grad school discourse and pure farce. Wigged performers yelled Kandi Burruss quotes at refrigerators and other domestic essentials, which would later be fitted with livestreaming GoPro cameras.The character played by Powell, a Black actor, is new to this iteration — the fourth, following two at Yale and one for Next Door at New York Theater Workshop. It brings race into the former two-man show, responding to a crucial element Breslin and Foley felt missing from their original script.Breslin and Foley said that incorporating Powell — an understudy in Harris’s Tony Award-nominated “Slave Play” on Broadway — was an obvious choice, given his “encyclopedic knowledge” of the franchise, and what his addition would do for the piece’s dramaturgy.Ariel Sibert, left, a dramaturg and Rory Pelsue, to her left, is the director of “This American Wife.” Michael George for The New York Times“I remember talking to them about the Housewives that they gave voice to in the show,” Powell said. “For obvious reasons, there were voices that were not there, but who were alluded to in the text.”“There is something easily identifiable for me with how femininity lives within the body of a Black woman that didn’t resonate with me in the white women,” he added, describing that exploration as “really enticing.”The show, which to him now “feels like a brand-new piece,” aims to critique the role of race, not just within queer fandoms, but within the franchise itself, whose lack of diversity has been called out in major publications, from The New York Times to a Hollywood Reporter essay by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.“We have the first Black woman on ‘The Real Housewives of New York’ in 2021,” Breslin pointed out. “What does that say about what these shows are instructing people on what New York is?”In 2020, the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” star NeNe Leakes called its creator Andy Cohen racist on Twitter, shortly after exiting the show.“The conversation around what’s going on behind the scenes with NeNe and Bravo is fascinating to me,” Powell said. “It’s the same conversation that’s happening around the country — how the tenets of white supremacist culture exist everywhere.”Harris, who has used his recent financial success to fund several, mostly Black-led, theater initiatives, said he finds Fake Friends’ mission “really exciting.”“If you are a person of color, you are generally demanded to write something that puts your entire identity on the line,” he added. “I get very annoyed that it’s very easy for a white person to write something mundane that risks nothing, to get acclaim. Having friends who are so willing to ask hard questions about what their personhood in this country means is exhilarating.”FourthWall Theatrical, a two-woman production company composed of Jana Bezdek and Jen Hoguet, is producing the work with Harris. “This American Wife” will be their inaugural production.According to Breslin, Bezdek introduced herself as a lover of “three things: feminist theater, Brecht, and musicals.”“I used to work in reality TV so I can’t watch it for relaxation,” she said. “But this is such a complex, intelligent piece, that is not just reflecting our obsession with ‘The Real Housewives’ back on us, but reflecting ourselves back on us.”This American WifeThrough June 6; thisamericanwife.live More

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    Billy Porter Reveals He Has Been H.I.V. Positive for 14 Years

    The actor told The Hollywood Reporter that he had feared disclosing it would give “another way for people to discriminate against me in an already discriminatory profession.”The Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor Billy Porter disclosed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published on Wednesday that he learned he had H.I.V. in 2007 and hid the information from colleagues for over a decade, fearing discrimination in the entertainment industry.“I was trying to have a life and a career, and I wasn’t certain I could if the wrong people knew,” Porter, 51, said in the interview. “It would just be another way for people to discriminate against me in an already discriminatory profession.”He also described the shame he felt, having grown up in a Pentecostal church and in a very religious family, and how he had been afraid to tell his mother for 14 years. “It’s time to grow up and move on because shame is destructive — and if not dealt with, it can destroy everything in its path,” he said of his decision to talk about the diagnosis now.Porter said that he was able to “work through the shame” through his role on the FX series “Pose,” which centers on the ballroom scene during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s in New York City. Porter’s character, a ballroom M.C. and elder of the community, received a diagnosis of H.I.V. in the first season and struggles to share the information with the group.“I was able to say everything that I wanted to say through a surrogate,” Porter said.Porter’s acting career took off after his star turn in the Broadway musical “Kinky Boots,” which earned him a 2013 Tony Award for best actor in a musical for his performance as the drag performer Lola.Porter’s acting career took off after he won a Tony Award for his performance in “Kinky Boots.” He is shown here on the red carpet of the Academy Awards in 2019.Josh Haner/The New York TimesFor years, Porter said, he had resolved to keep his health status a secret until his mother’s death. He changed his mind more recently, and made a plan to tell his mother about the diagnosis with his sister. But one day — which happened to be the last day filming the final season of “Pose” — on a phone call with his mother, she noticed that he sounded off, and he told her.“She said, ‘You’ve been carrying this around for 14 years?’” Porter said. “‘Don’t ever do this again. I’m your mother, I love you no matter what.’” More

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    Next Up at the Home of ‘Beach Blanket Babylon’? A Circus, of Course.

    The San Francisco theater where the musical revue ran for decades will get a new show in the fall by the 7 Fingers, a Montreal circus collective.Gypsy Snider was just 4 when she began performing alongside the red-nosed clowns and unflappable jugglers of the Pickle Family Circus, a San Francisco troupe that her parents helped found. She went on to join the Cirque du Soleil before becoming a co-founder of the 7 Fingers, a Montreal circus collective, and creating dazzling acrobatic and trapeze numbers for the Tony-award-winning 2013 revival of “Pippin” on Broadway.Now, Snider, 51, is returning to San Francisco as one of the artistic directors of a new 7 Fingers circus production celebrating the city’s colorful history that will open in the fall at Club Fugazi, the venerable North Beach theater that was home to the long-running musical revue “Beach Blanket Babylon.”While the show has not yet been named, it is described as a love letter to San Francisco and will include scenes about the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake and the Summer of Love.The production, which was announced Wednesday by one of the show’s producers, David Dower, will also be a homecoming for its other artistic director, Shana Carroll, a Berkeley native who started her career as a trapeze artist with the Pickle Family Circus. Like Snider, Carroll helped found the 7 Fingers (or “Les 7 Doigts de la Main,” in French), a pathbreaking troupe that started in 2002.From her childhood, Snider said, she was enchanted by the concept of contemporary circus that began to take hold in the 1970s, a human spectacle driven by emotion, artistry and narrative instead of the elephants and tigers of the Ringling Brothers.“I wanted to create a circus I had never seen before,” Snider said. “I was more interested in what you could do to elevate circus through storytelling.”Now she and Carroll are returning home to the Bay Area, with a circus that they hope will bring new life to Club Fugazi, where “Beach Blanket Babylon,” a zany spoof, ended its remarkable 45-year run in 2019. “The idea was that we were going to be more connected to the community that raised us,” Snider said.The pandemic delayed their plans by more than a year, but now that the performing arts are making a comeback across the country, the project has the green light: The trapeze is being installed, and tickets will soon go on sale.The century-old Club Fugazi building is much smaller than the spacious arenas that many circus audiences are used to, but to Snider, that is very much the point. Getting closer to the action makes it a visceral, intimate experience, she says.The theater will remove balcony seating that “Beach Blanket Babylon” had added and rebuild the stage so it protrudes into the audience, cabaret style. The idea is that after many people spent months confined to their couches, passively watching television and movies, this show will make audience members feel as though the circus performers might just end up on their laps (which they won’t, assuming all goes well).The cast and production team, who have all been vaccinated, plan to start their initial workshops for the show in the next couple of weeks. It is unclear how many audience members the city will allow inside the theater come fall, but no matter the capacity level, the creative team hopes that the show will propel San Francisco back into vibrancy after an extended live performance drought.“Circus is so death defying that it’s life affirming,” Snider said. “That’s what we want cabaret to do in San Francisco in a post-pandemic society.” More

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    Drama Book Shop, Backed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, to Open in June

    The quirky bookstore, which sells scripts and other theater-related work, was acquired by a team of “Hamilton” alumni after years of struggle.The Drama Book Shop, a quirky 104-year-old Manhattan specialty store that has long been a haven for aspiring artists as well as a purveyor of scripts, will reopen next month with a new location, a new look, and a new team of starry owners.Those new owners — the “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as the show’s director, Thomas Kail, lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, and the theater owner James L. Nederlander — said Wednesday that the store will have its long-delayed reopening on June 10.The opening, at 266 West 39th Street, is a sign of the team’s confidence in Times Square, which has been largely theater-free since March 12, 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic forced Broadway to close. Broadway shows are not planning to resume performances until September, but the new store owners say they are ready for business.The “Hamilton” team bought the Drama Book Shop, most recently located on West 40th Street, in early 2019 after years in which the store had struggled to survive the challenges of Manhattan real estate, e-commerce, and even a damaging flood. Kail had a particular passion for the bookstore, where he had run a small theater company in his early years as a professional; Miranda joined him there to work on “In the Heights,” a musical Kail directed. “In the Heights” has now been adapted into a film which is being released on June 11, the day after the bookstore opens.The new owners had initially hoped to reopen the store in late 2019, and then in early 2020, but the project was delayed, first by the vicissitudes of construction, and then by the pandemic. The new shop has been designed by David Korins, the “Hamilton” scenic designer, and includes a cafe.The store is encouraging visitors to make reservations online; capacity will be limited. More