Eliana Willis

Sandra Marvin had just dropped her plants off with a friend in March, in anticipation of a three-month U.S. tour performing in the musical comedy “Romantics Anonymous.” She checked her phone and got a message that there might be what she called “a small hiccup” in the company’s travel plans owing to growing concerns over the coronavirus. Within days, the tour was called off.Almost six months later, “Romantics Anonymous” is on the road again. Sort of.But instead of the production traveling to its original tour destinations of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Charleston, S.C., audiences in those cities and others will take turns coming to the Bristol Old Vic in England — virtually — over five consecutive nights.The livestreamed performances, which begin Sept. 22, will feature the creator/director Emma Rice’s original 2017 staging in its entirety, complete with sets, choreography, a seven-member cast and even onstage kissing. The only modifications to the script, Rice said this week, will stem from the absence of an audience in the theater.“We are all nervous,” said Rice, who first presented “Romantics” (which features music by Michael Kooman and lyrics by Christopher Dimond) at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London during her time as its artistic director. (“Sweet-natured and giddy” was The New York Times verdict on the show, a Gallic romance centered on two timid chocolatiers and the titular support group.)“The thought that we might all get to be together again and make music together again and forget what’s happening for a few hours is intoxicating,” Rice added. “Let’s see what we can make happen safely and joyously.”In the latest of several attempts to replicate, or reimagine, the live experience when many countries have severely curtailed and even forbidden indoor theatrical productions, the “Romantics” cast, musicians and crew will spend the first 10 days sheltering in place at their respective homes.They will then be transported in private vehicles to an apartment block around the corner from the Old Vic for the last two weeks. Everyone involved will be tested for Covid-19 at the beginning and end of their first quarantine, then weekly while together in Bristol.“On the whole, we haven’t been looking at theater all that much for ideas because there aren’t that many examples,” said Poppy Keeling, executive producer of Wise Children, the Bristol-based company that Rice created after leaving the Globe. “We’ve really been looking at what TV and film have done in this country, with very clear, government-ratified guidance for getting that industry back up and running.”Simon Baker, the production’s technical director and Rice’s partner, performed in a similar capacity on the popular June livestreams of the Duncan Macmillan play “Lungs” at the Old Vic’s London theater. Its popularity may have had a lot to do with the starry two-person cast — “The Crown” co-stars Claire Foy and Matt Smith — but that modified production demonstrated the possibility of guerrilla filming.“We realized that the technology had really come down in price and we could do it ourselves,” said Baker, who plans to use a camera crew of just four.As with the virtual cinema model, where audiences choose which of several movie theaters to support with a home ticket purchase, “Romantics Anonymous” viewers in the United States can select one of six presenting organizations as their venue.Joining the original three U.S. destinations — the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, the Shakespeare Theater Company and Spoleto Festival USA — are St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, Berkeley Rep in California and Chicago Shakespeare Theater.In each case, the selected theater will split the proceeds with Wise Children. Tickets will cost 15 pounds (about $20) in advance and go up to 20 pounds (about $27) the week of the performances. Information can be found at wisechildrendigital.com or at the individual presenters’ websites.With no limit on tickets, it is hard to determine the financial prospects of the five-performance run. “We’re taking a huge risk,” Rice said. “We know how many tickets we have to sell to break even, but we have found underwriters in case it’s a disaster.”In keeping with the idea of a touring production, the first four performances are exclusive to specific regions of the United Kingdom, beginning with a Sept. 22 show sponsored by seven theaters in Scotland and the north of England. The sole U.S. performance will be the final one, at 4 p.m. E.D.T. on Saturday, Sept. 26. And the creative team hasn’t ruled out the possibility of additional performances, although that would require the entire cast and crew to quarantine longer.The series of livestreams will give everyone the chance to learn from the previous performance’s mistakes, according to Rice. “The experience will be like a typical theater show,” she said. “We’ll all meet at the end of the night and talk about what can be done better.”While Keeling lamented that those nightly talks won’t happen at a local pub, Marvin — who plays three characters in “Romantics” — is looking forward not just to being on the stage after almost half a year, but also to sharing that stage with so many colleagues.“I live by myself,” she said. “This will be the most people I’ve been around since March.” More

One bright pleasure amid the grimness of the pandemic has been the serendipity of hearing from people you’ve lost touch with and had forgotten how much you liked. You get to learn where they’ve been sheltering in place, and how they might have been changed by this age of upheaval and displacement.I was pleased, for instance, to receive an email about Abigail and Shaun Bengson, who have come up with a show of exultant ambivalence for the Actors Theater of Louisville. It’s called “The Keep Going Song,” and it streams through Oct. 8 on a pay-what-you-can basis.I had taken a shine to this eccentrically wholesome couple when I met them at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival a few years ago. Not that I actually spoke to them or shook their hands (which was a socially sanctioned activity then). But performing their musical memoir “Hundred Days,” about the dramatic genesis of their relationship, the Bengsons emanated the confiding coziness of late-night gab sessions over beers at a kitchen table.That mostly all-sung show, delivered in a gutsy pop-folk style spliced with gospel laments and hallelujahs, was about how — or if — love can survive in the shadow of our awareness of death. So I was curious about the states of their hearts and minds in a year when the imminence of mortal disease is as pervasive as fog.It turns out that the Bengsons have been spending their quarantine in Dayton, Ohio, with their 3-year-old son, in Shaun’s parents’ house. That’s the setting for “The Keep Going Song,” and you can glimpse the accouterments of their improvised life there — a futon, an afghan for an indoor picnic, a tot-size trampoline in the backyard.As Abigail sings, in that wide-open balladeer’s voice of hers, “We have to make it up as we go.” That’s the general credo of this 50-minute piece, which is about nothing more nor less than continuing to exist when everything feels both static and in endless flux.The subjects covered as they address this concern, while playing keyboards and guitars (acoustic and electric), are both homey and cosmic, from financial shortages to the testing nature of God. For the Bengsons, it seems, everyday life is both a religious celebration and a passion play.They begin the show, which was “mixed and mastered” by Ian Kagey, with a ritualistic sharing of challah bread and grape juice, proffered to us through the camera lens. They then shift into what feels like one sustained, shape-shifting song, of varied component parts, which seems to have no beginning or end.Abigail offers a benediction. She hopes we have lots of good television, adequate food and “enough good memories to last you a long time.” The numbers that follow embrace an account about Shaun’s distrust of churchgoing, an anatomy of lacerating grief and Abigail’s description of the sacred hallucinations that come with labor pains. All of them deal with coming to terms with “the dark and the light of the world as it is.”“Keep Going” deals more directly with questions of faith than any made-for-streaming show I’ve encountered during the past five months. The whole work is steeped in a kind of everyperson pantheism, with elements of Judeo-Christian and Eastern religions.The usual prayers, Abigail sings, “just ain’t cuttin’ it,” before she and Shaun segue into a funky, propulsive chant: “I want money comin’ in and good things to happen.” Responses to such requests are not immediately forthcoming, of course.Early on, Abigail sings that she hopes if “your heart is breaking, it’s breaking open.” In other words, be receptive to everything, the pain and the joy, because it’s all part of the same indivisible package. That’s what music is, the Bengsons say, a blending of those opposed feelings into an ineffable, all-transcending whole.On the basis of “Keep Going,” you might almost believe that the Bengsons communicate in song all the time. Surely that’s not actually true, or Shaun’s parents might have run away or strangled them by now.But there is a sense that the melody, heard or unheard, never really stops. The Bengsons use synthesizers and keyboards to layer sounds and rhythms that keep repeating, which extend to an epilogue that’s as infectious as a kindergarten ditty, a list song about things that grow.That includes trees, leaves, people and thoughts, not to mention the music to which this roster is set. I guarantee it will keep expanding in your mind later in ways that should drive you mad. But for me, it felt like some much needed reassurance.The Keep Going SongAvailable through Oct. 8; actorstheatre.org. More