Eliana Willis

Facing enormous financial strain because of the shutdown of the theater industry, the health insurance fund that covers thousands of stage actors is making it more difficult for them to qualify for coverage.Currently, professional actors and stage managers have to work 11 weeks to qualify for six months of coverage. But starting Jan. 1, they will have to work 16 weeks to qualify for a similar level of coverage.Nonprofit and commercial theater producers contribute to the health fund when they employ unionized actors and stage managers, but because theaters have been closed since March, those contributions — which make up 88 percent of the fund’s revenue — have largely ceased.“The fact that we have no contributed income is something no one could have foreseen,” said Christopher Brockmeyer, a Broadway League executive who co-chairs the fund’s board of trustees, which is evenly divided between representatives of the Actors’ Equity union and producers. “We really put together the only viable option to cover as many people as possible with meaningful benefits under these totally unprecedented circumstances.”Brockmeyer and his co-chair, Madeleine Fallon, said the fund, which currently provides insurance coverage for about 6,700 Equity members, is facing its biggest financial challenge since the height of the AIDS crisis. At that time, the challenge was high expenses for the fund; this time, it is low revenues.“Everybody is out of work, everybody is panicked, everybody has lost income and can’t make their art, and on top of that their health fund is in crisis,” said Fallon, who leads the union bloc on the board. “It’s been an emotionally difficult journey, but we hope our members will understand that we did find the plan that gives us our best chance to rebuild.”Under the new system, those who work at least 12 weeks can qualify for lower-tiered plans with higher co-payments and more restrictions.Actors’ Equity, which appoints half of the fund’s trustees, but is otherwise an independent organization, opposes the changes.“We all understand that there is no escaping the devastating loss of months of employer contributions nationwide, and no alternative aside from making adjustments to the plan,” the union’s president, Kate Shindle, said in a statement. “But I believe that the fund had both the obligation and the financial reserves to take the time to make better choices.”Shindle said the union had asked its members on the fund’s board of trustees not to support the changes until they conducted a study about the potential impact on union members of color, on pregnant union members, and on union members who live outside New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.A similar battle is unfolding in the film and television industry. Members of SAG-AFTRA, a union representing actors in those media, have loudly objected to changes in their health plan.Stage actors are accustomed to working to earn health care benefits — some take jobs for the express purpose of getting weeks that will help qualify them for insurance. But many actors are not working at all, and can’t qualify no matter how many weeks are required.As a result, some will be uninsured, while others can get coverage through Medicaid, COBRA or the Affordable Care Act. The Actors Fund is providing “health insurance counseling” to those facing a loss of coverage.The Equity-League Health Fund, which is available to unionized actors and stage managers who work in commercial and nonprofit productions on Broadway, Off Broadway, and at regional theaters around the country, informed its beneficiaries of the changes on Thursday.The fund began the pandemic with $120 million in reserves, and is now down to $91 million. Its administrators project that reserves will drop below $20 million by the middle of next year if its eligibility and benefits rules remain unchanged, and that it will be unable to pay benefits at all by the end of next year. More

White actors, writers and directors still dominate Broadway stages, according to an annual report released on Wednesday by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition in partnership with the American Theater Wing.About 20 percent of shows in the 2017-18 season on Broadway and Off Broadway stages were created by people of color, the report found. Nearly two-thirds of roles were filled by white actors on Broadway, and about 94 percent of directors were white.The study examined the city’s 18 largest nonprofit theaters, as well as all 41 Broadway stages. It is a snapshot of a single season, and varies each time it is done. In the seasons since 2017-18, several shows with casts that feature a high percentage of performers of color — including the musicals “Ain’t Too Proud,” “Tina,” “Hadestown” and “West Side Story,” as well as “Slave Play” and “A Soldier’s Play” — have been staged on Broadway.The study found that Off Broadway theaters invested as much as six times as much in white actors as they did in actors of color. It noted that a similar gap likely exists on Broadway stages, but it could not say for certain because Broadway theaters do not publish their negotiated salaries.Approximately 23 percent of roles over all at New York City theaters went to Black actors, 7 percent to Asian-American actors, 6 percent to Latino actors, 2 percent to Middle Eastern or North African actors and fewer than 1 percent to Indigenous actors, according to the report. Latino actors were also more than three times as likely to be cast in a chorus role than as a principal in a Broadway musical.Last year’s report, which analyzed the 2016-17 season, found that about 87 percent of shows on and Off Broadway had white authors, a proportion that is now roughly 80 percent.The report comes at a time when institutions are reckoning with how theater must change after the killings of Black men and women by police officers and years of white overrepresentation. Coalitions of theater artists like “We See You, White American Theater” have released demands for theaters to require that at least half of cast and creative teams be made up of people of color and for Tony Awards administrators to appoint a group of nominators in which at least half are people of color.“As we strive to create a more equitable American theater, it is critical to understand where we are now, in order to chart a path to where we need to go,” Heather Hitchens, the president and chief executive of the American Theater Wing, said in a statement. “It is my hope that my colleagues will use it to guide more intentional and exponential inclusivity and equity.” More

Black theaters across the country will receive a significant financial boost thanks to a multimillion-dollar program announced today by the Billie Holiday Theater, a Black-led artistic institution in Brooklyn.The initiative, known as The Black Seed, is described as the first national strategic plan to provide financial support for Black theaters across the country. It is backed by a $5 million lead gift from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which, according to a news release, is the largest-ever one-time investment in Black theater.“The Black Seed stands on the shoulders of Black theater leaders who came before and centered the work by us, for us, about us and near us,” Indira Etwaroo, the executive artistic director of the Billie Holiday Theater, who conceptualized and worked with others to create the initiative, said in a statement.The Billie Holiday Theater was founded in 1972 in response to the civil rights and Black Arts movements. The plan will be administered by that theater in collaboration with three other Black-led artistic institutions: the Craft Institute in Massachusetts, Plowshares Theater Company in Detroit, and WACO Theater Center in Los Angeles. The group will award up to 50 one- to three-year grants to Black theaters in the coming months, in amounts ranging from $30,000 to $300,000.According to American Theater magazine, there were 88 Black theaters in the United States in 2019. The initiative focuses on empowering them, rather than targeting diversity and inclusion at historically white institutions, Ms. Etwaroo said. Grants will aid in developing and leveraging national partnerships and supporting new artistic commissions.The group announced several other prongs of the plan: The Black Seed National Leadership Circle, which will invite donor investments in Black theaters; a cohort of six national networks and coalitions that will meet twice a year to collaborate on advancing the Black theater field; and a national marketing campaign to share the story of Black theater in America.“We are deeply moved to be a part of a field-wide endeavor that would bring institutions and coalitions together to link arms, to find strength in one another, and to dream out loud, as a collective,” said Kenny Leon, who co-founded True Colors Theater Company in 2002 and went on to win a 2014 Tony Award for directing “A Raisin in the Sun.”Strengthening the country’s Black theaters has been a priority as institutions consider how the art form must change after the killings of Black men and women by police officers, and in the wake of demands to diversify the American theater ecosystem from coalitions of theater artists like “We See You, White American Theater.”Sarah Bellamy, the artistic director of Penumbra Theater in St. Paul, Minn., told The New York Times in June that Black theater “is alive and well; it’s just not funded.”“I invite these Black artists who have been wounded by their efforts with the Great White Way to come back home,” she said.The Black Seed group hopes to raise $10 million for the three-year initiative, a spokeswoman said. A request for proposals from Black theater institutions will be announced in October, and the group hopes to announce grantees in December. More

If even the mildest, most intimate play struggles to translate online, you’d think a comic interstellar adventure would be impossible to pull off. And yet.In the goofball epic “Elephant Room: Dust From the Stars,” three endearingly dorky magicians travel from their basement rec rooms to outer space, where they end up discovering a mysterious “gathering place.” It’s “Wayne’s World” crossbred with “Spinal Tap” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” simultaneously very funny and unexpectedly touching.The show, part of the Fringe Festival in Philadelphia, packs a lot in just over an hour and is the most resourceful, gleefully entertaining new theater piece I have seen during the pandemic. Yes, it all happens on Zoom. Yes, there are tricks, some of them involving the audience. And yes, it’s possible to laugh alone in front of your computer.New Yorkers might remember said magicians from their appearance at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2012. “Elephant Room” — the new show gets a grandiose subtitle, as sequels tend to do — introduced Dennis Diamond (played by Geoff Sobelle), Daryl Hannah (Trey Lyford) and Louie Magic (Steve Cuiffo) as dorky-cool suburbanites with a fixation on sleight-of-hand and 1980s male hair stunts.These foundational elements are still present eight years later, as the trio welcome us, their fellow illusionists, to our magic society’s monthly meeting. “I hope you have a ticket for both,” Dennis told one of the Zoom attendees, who was watching with her cat.We went through the agenda: minutes; dues; Louie, who appeared to be in a wood-paneled basement, executing a trick with five mugs and a billiard ball, followed by one with ESP cards like those used by Bill Murray in “Ghostbusters.” The feats of mentalism elicited all-cap messages like “WHOAH” and “STOP IT” in the chat window — the Zoom equivalents of gasps.It’s all great fun, but “Dust From the Stars” really takes off when it literally takes off.Directed, like the earlier one, by Paul Lazar, the show deftly mixes the lo-fi aesthetics of budget science fiction (Louie’s communication device looks suspiciously like a shower attachment) with dopey humor and experimental theater’s sensibility. The last does not come as a surprise: Sobelle is a regular on arty stages, both on his own (“The Object Lesson” and “Home”) and with Lyford (“All Wear Bowlers”); Cuiffo is an actual magician who has performed verbatim re-creations of Lenny Bruce’s acts. (The sets are by Julian Crouch, whose work has been seen on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera.)After Daryl recounts a nighttime encounter involving flashing lights and mysterious creatures, we switch to a galaxy where Louie “was volunteered to make first contact.” He disappears and his buddies set out “to find him in our land buggy that flies and stuff.” At this point, the show starts integrating the actors into elaborate backdrops and videos (the films are credited to Derrick Belcham and Lyford), peaking in an astonishing final scene in which the galactic travelers find themselves in a ghostly locale. It is, like what preceded, very funny, but this time the laughs may catch in your throat.Elephant Room: Dust From the StarsLive performances on Zoom through Sept. 26. More

“If you don’t do anything, nothing can go wrong.”So sings a pop-up character not otherwise involved in the story of “Romantics Anonymous,” the hyperglycemic 2017 musical streaming live through Sept. 26 from the gorgeous Theater Royale in Bristol, England.In the tradition of Act II opening numbers, the song reintroduces the plot — about two pathetically timid French chocolatiers who can’t break out of their shells — while also expanding it thematically to encompass this pandemic moment. Its warning about love and bonbons, both of which apparently demand great daring, turns into a warning about our recently comatose theater: “We can’t do nothing.”And to the extent “Romantics Anonymous,” directed by Emma Rice, offers a real live musical with a cast of nine, singing and dancing together on an actual stage to the accompaniment of a four-person band, it is doing something most welcome. When the chocolatiers kiss, with no Zoom grid or Plexiglas baffle anywhere in sight, you feel like applauding, and not just for them. Perhaps our Sleeping Beauty art form is finally awakening from its six-month blackout, at least in Bristol.But musicals should aim higher than mere industry boosterism. Yes, it is noble that the producers of the show — Wise Children, Bristol Old Vic and Plush Theatricals — reconfigured it as a virtual “tour” to support theaters around the world, including many it planned to visit in person before the pandemic intervened. And “Romantics Anonymous” gets bonus civics points for making closed-caption and audio-described recordings of the livestream available to everyone on Sept. 28.ImageBawden, left, and Marc Antolin shyly approach romance in the show, adapted from a 2010 film.If only good intentions were enough to make it good! But unless you already love this kind of material — French whimsy in the manner of “Amélie,” with a soupçon of “Waitress” and its relentless food imagery tossed in — you are not going to find that musicalizing the 2010 French-Belgian film “Les Émotifs Anonymes,” already an acquired taste, has made it any more satisfying.That it follows every rule in the musical theater handbook is actually a problem. The songs (lyrics by Christopher Dimond, music by Michael Kooman) are as sweet and unobtrusive as the main characters — which sounds like a good match of form and content except that with passive, inexpressive types like Angèlique (Carly Bawden) and Jean-René (Marc Antolin) you want contrast and gumption. Without them, and despite the glugs of style Rice slathers on everything, the story has no bite.Please excuse the confectionary metaphors; the thematic discipline imposed on the show is insistent enough to gratify a masochist. The opening number immediately points out that “chocolate makes the darkness somehow bright” and “bitterness is what it takes to make the taste complete.” Elsewhere we hear about the need to follow recipes for success in business and, in a supposedly sexier vein, how “the thing about chocolate is that its flavors take time to penetrate.”This sophomoric cleverness (the book is by Rice, based on the screenplay by Jean-Pierre Améris and Philippe Blasband) feels incongruous in a story supposedly about growing past pain. Angèlique is one of the best chocolate makers in France yet hides her pralines under a bushel — apparently because her mother, according to one scene and song, is a louche loudmouth. Jean-René has parent problems too: His disapproving late father’s insistence on traditional methods and flavors is driving the family business into the ground.Naturally, the two must face their demons and conquer them; Angèlique with the help of a 12-step-like program called Romantics Anonymous, and Jean-René with the encouragement of his jolly employees. (All these and more — mustachioed waiters, neckerchiefed sailors, wisdom-spouting bellboys and assorted oddballs — are played by the chorus of seven, changing costumes and flipping wigs from one stereotype to another.) If you don’t know right from the start that the plot will end with marriage, and also with Angèlique turning Jean-René’s moribund business into a success, you haven’t seen a musical ever.That obvious wrap-up would have been fine — as it is in many great musical comedies — if what happened along the way ever caused a ripple of genuine complication; it doesn’t. (Even the surprises are predictable.) The dialogue and lyrics are too ceaselessly winky to dignify actual growth or suffering, and the attempts at humor also fail; faint to begin with, they suffer further from the lack of a live audience. And though the sets and choreography are nicely shot for the livestream, which went off without a glitch on Tuesday, there isn’t much to distract you from characters so stylized that they have just about nothing left in common with humans.Stylization has long been Rice’s long suit; in “Brief Encounter,” “The Red Shoes,” “Tristan & Yseult” and other productions for Kneehigh, the theater where she made her name, she dialed character reality down to nearly zero in order to wow with sensation. Often, she succeeded, especially when the material was already bursting with archetypal significance and musical bombast.But despite a charmingly serious performance by Bawden — she alone never winks — the characters in “Romantics Anonymous” are too fey to support the kind of aesthetic superstructure Rice insists on building. Angèlique and Jean-René are no Laura Jesson and Alex Harvey, the would-be adulterers in “Brief Encounter,” whose intimate story is made large and grave by the possibility of real tragedy and the proximity of imminent war. Of course, their soundtrack is Rachmaninoff.Here, though, neither the pleasant score nor the fate of Angèlique’s apricot-infused truffles is enough to justify two hours of tedious twee. So though I agree with “Romantics Anonymous” that doing nothing is insupportable, I have to add that with vaporous stories like this one, it can be just as unsatisfying to do too much.Romantics AnonymousPerformances streaming live through Sept. 26, with closed captioning and audio described recordings available on Sept. 28. More