Eliana Willis

Online stages have the spotlight now that real ones are dark. The following companies enable children to watch, perform or learn about theater remotely.ArtsPower National Touring Theater: For $15, families can stream a show from the company for an unlimited time as part of its new on-demand service. All based on children’s books, the hourlong musicals include extras like author interviews and how-to-dance videos. The service’s first title, “Chicken Dance,” adapts Danny Schnitzlein’s comic barnyard tale.artspowerondemand.teachable.comBeat by Beat Press: This theater publisher has created two musicals for ages 7 to 14 that camps, schools and youth groups can rehearse and present virtually. After buying a license ($149.50 until Sept. 1, but organizations with low funds can pay less), the group downloads scripts, recorded accompaniment and other materials. Actors individually record and upload their numbers, which, when viewed successively, coalesce into a show. The choices: “The Show Must Go Online!” or “Super Happy Awesome News!”bbbpress.comChicago Children’s Theater: CCTv, this troupe’s YouTube channel, just made its debut with “Frederick, A Virtual Puppet Performance.” An adaptation of Leo Lionni’s picture book about field mice, it features a surprising narrator: the actor Michael Shannon. On Saturday the theater’s Boing! festival will include the premiere of “Doll Face Has a Party!,” based on the picture book written by Pam Conrad and illustrated by Brian Selznick.chicagochildrenstheatre.orgFunikijam World Music: Offering classes and shows that introduce children 9 and under to a variety of global cultures, the company has presented its menu in a virtual format. In its Totally Awesome Summer program, families can find music videos, online activities, excerpts from recorded performances and many free classes.funikijam.comThe New Victory Theater: Normally the home of international productions, the theater has devised New Victory Arts Break, a free weekly series of activities to do from Monday to Friday. Each package — they’re all on the website — has a theme, like songwriting or tap dance. This week’s edition honors Juneteenth with songs, readings, history and drama.newvictory.orgThe Paper Bag Players: The troupe that makes stories out of cardboard and paper teaches small children to do the same. Its webpage Activities for Kids at Home features weekly video installments with clips from past performances and projects like how to turn a box into a car.thepaperbagplayers.orgImageDIY: Family Musicals!, a fee-based class offered by TheaterWorksUSAcademy, helps families create a musical based on their favorite storybook.TheaterWorksUSA: This national company offers TheaterWorks Anywhere, a webpage with free activities, behind-the-scenes information and video clips of musical adaptations of books like “Charlotte’s Web” and “Dog Man: The Musical.” (Monthly subscriptions, starting at $5, provide access to more content.) It recently introduced TheaterWorksUSAcademy, a fee-based program of skill lessons and master classes, including a DIY: Family Musicals! course that begins on Saturday.twusa.orgTrusty Sidekick: Children can view free videos of nine of the troupe’s shows, a smorgasbord for different ages, on its website through June. But Sidekick Studio, its series of mini-classes, will remain online all summer. So will a video of the company’s latest experiment, “The Planetary Discovery Census,” an intergalactic adventure featuring cast members and the audience interacting on Zoom.trustysidekick.org More

With coronavirus cases sharply down in New York City, residents are preparing to return to dining outdoors and visiting hair salons as soon as next week. But as reopening continues this summer and fall, the city’s major classical music institutions will be silent.On Thursday, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center announced they would cancel their fall seasons. Coming on the heels of similar announcements from the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, the decisions make clear that there will be few, if any, large-scale performances before 2021 in one of the world’s musical centers.“This was a very difficult decision for us to make,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in a statement. “However, the safety of Carnegie Hall’s artists, audiences and staff is paramount.”Lincoln Center — which presents performances as well as acting as a landlord to the Met, the Philharmonic and other organizations — anticipates over $1.3 million in lost ticket revenue from the cancellation of fall events, Isabel Sinistore, a spokeswoman, said in an email.She added that the center had seen about $13 million in lost revenue, including ticket sales and rentals of its spaces, since the pandemic began. The center has furloughed or laid off approximately half its staff, and its leadership team has taken salary cuts.Synneve Carlino, a spokeswoman for Carnegie Hall, said the hall is projecting a deficit of approximately $8 million for the fiscal year ending June 30. It anticipates a larger deficit next year, including the impact of losing approximately $13 million to $14 million in ticket revenue and rental income from the cancellation of its fall season.Those losses will be partially offset by furloughs of approximately 50 of the hall’s 274 full-time employees who had still been working this spring. (Another 80 staff members, including ushers and stagehands, had already stopped working when the hall closed in March.) There will be pay cuts for all employees making over $75,000 a year.The hall tentatively plans to reopen its three theaters on Jan. 7, 2021, and Lincoln Center aims to follow on Feb. 6. Carnegie’s opening night gala, originally scheduled for Oct. 7, will become a virtual celebration on a date to be announced.New York’s theaters have been closed since the middle of March. The Met, which hopes to return with a New Year’s Eve gala, has projected that its empty stage will cost it close to $100 million in lost revenue. The Philharmonic plans to return early in 2021. On Thursday, New York City Ballet announced that it, too, would close for the fall, losing its lucrative “Nutcracker” run around Christmastime. Broadway theaters are shuttered at least through Labor Day, but many industry officials believe they will remain closed significantly longer than that.Closures continue outside New York, too: On Tuesday, both San Francisco Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the two largest American opera companies besides the Met, announced the cancellation of their fall seasons. While live musical performances look to be largely out for this fall, several of New York’s museums have announced tentative opening plans. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a national bellwether, is aiming for mid-August. More

The verdict is in: Zoom can, in fact, be an effective new stage for theater.The Boston-based Arlekin Players Theater’s digital production of “State vs. Natasha Banina” reimagines the utility of the medium beyond everyday office meetings and virtual happy hours, using graphics, animation and other interactive elements to create a captivating theatrical experience.The immersive production, directed by Igor Golyak and starring Darya Denisova, is based on “Natasha’s Dream,” by the Russian playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich. Before it starts, an announcement sounds: “By joining us today, you have self-selected to be part of our trial.”Eschewing the virtual equivalent of a theater’s typically silent, anonymous audience, this “live theater and art experiment” encourages viewers to introduce themselves to one another via the Zoom chat, and to take an interactive poll so they can be selected as jurors.But, clearly, this is no typical trial: At the performance I watched, more than a hundred participants peered into their computers from their homes across the U.S. to hear the testimony of Natasha Banina (Denisova), a Russian teenage orphan being tried for manslaughter. Natasha nonchalantly describes her time in the orphanage, among girls who bully one another and supervisors who seem not to care. But Natasha wants more; she had a dream, she tells us, repeatedly, with desperation.And here’s when things got bad, she tells us: When she met a journalist who took an interest in covering her hardships at the orphanage, she became infatuated with him, then obsessed, until she was driven to commit a crime of passion. At the end, the audience votes on her fate: guilty or not guilty?While many productions have been trying to figure out how to use Zoom to mask the fact that we’re seeing theater at a remove, “State vs. Natasha Banina” (presented by the Cherry Orchard Festival) leans into that sense of disconnection. Natasha herself is detached from the world, and as she moves around the white walls of her empty cell, fidgeting and throwing middle fingers up to the camera, we become drawn into her head space.ImageAnton Iakhontov’s animations include the depiction of Natasha’s lover as an astronaut.She draws on the walls, and the sketches come to life thanks to Anton Iakhontov’s brilliantly executed animations: a cigarette smokes; a two-dimensional drawing of a TV conjures a functional one that plays a news segment; a faucet drips hearts that drop to the bottom of the screen.We encounter her imagined lover, too, though never rendered as a three-dimensional human but rather piecemeal, as just a hovering pair of glasses or a drawing of legs and feet, or, most commonly, as an astronaut who strolls alongside her, as though her imagination has fully launched her into space.This mutable virtual tableau is satisfyingly disconcerting. We’re intimately acquainted with Natasha; her mind is open for us to see, with all of its dreams and diversions, and her imagination is suffocating, as she swings wildly between declarations of affection and vicious aspersions.Yet we are asked to judge her. The play’s conceit feeds from this tension, between empathy and dispassionate scrutiny. Zoom ironically makes the interaction even more personal; Natasha looks at the screen and calls out the names of audience members, pleading with them to see her side of the story.This is the second interactive trial play I’ve seen recently (“Where We Stand” had its audience rule on its protagonist’s rise and fall from grace thanks to a magical interloper). Both are quiet calls for accountability that reach beyond the stage. We are asked for awareness, a vigilant wokeness in regards to a society’s disadvantaged, who are so often born into circumstances that make them figuratively dead on arrival.This conceit could come across as gimmicky or melodramatic if it weren’t for Golyak’s crafty direction and video design, and especially Denisova’s charismatically off-kilter performance. Her ever-grinning Natasha is abjectly alluring: unhinged and almost bestial, as she fidgets, paces and compulsively picks her nose. Natasha’s vehement insistence on her strength and indifference (“I don’t care” is a common refrain) reveals just the opposite, which makes moments of vulnerability, as when she curls up in a ball in the corner of the room and speaks of her mother, that much more riveting.ImageDenisova’s Natasha insists on her indifference, though her actions show otherwise.One can pick up on the play’s political notes: a timely criticism of a system that punishes people who have been marginalized by broken institutions, including orphanages. But the unequal social scaffolding built around Natasha is overshadowed by the grotesque peculiarities of the character herself, and Denisova’s mesmeric rendering. Though the story holds, it’s a missed opportunity, in this current moment of protest.As we each sit in our separate rooms, considering our own inconvenient detentions, “State vs. Natasha Banina” delivers an alternative: not freedom, but a view into another’s imprisonment. The sight is unsettling — the Cheshire grin of a girl trapped in a room with only her fantasies.“State vs. Natasha Banina” is streamable on June 21 and June 28 at the website of the Cherry Orchard Festival. More

An all-star team of black theater artists has formed a new coalition vowing to combat racism in the theater community.Black Theater United counts among its founding members the Tony Award winners Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, Phylicia Rashad, LaChanze, Kenny Leon, Adriane Lenox and Lillias White.The group, whose founders also include the actors Wendell Pierce, Vanessa Williams, Norm Lewis and Brandon Victor Dixon, said it had formed a nonprofit that would seek “to influence widespread reform and combat systemic racism within the theater industry and throughout the nation.”Among its plans: working for social change by pressing for greater participation by hard-to-count communities in the census, and reviewing theater industry practices and assisting black theater artists.The effort is one of several prompted by a wave of national unrest over racial injustice that has followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month.Another group of prominent black theater artists last week issued a “Dear White American Theater” letter decrying racism in the industry.The groups differ in their approach.The “Dear White American Theater” collective introduced itself with a blistering critique of the theater industry, which it called “this house of cards built on white fragility and supremacy,” and then said it plans to turn to next steps.“We are currently collecting data, testimonials and statistics, which will be incorporated into a comprehensive list of demands calling upon white institutions to examine, change and dismantle their harmful and racist practices,” the collective said in a press statement.Black Theater United began by specifying actions it intends to take, including supporting existing efforts to bolster census participation and developing new mentorship programs for aspiring young black theater artists. The group said it will next “constitute an inquiry committee to accurately assess past practices and policies within the theater.”There are several other efforts underway to call out and challenge racism in theater, and to champion black artists. Because the nation is still in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, many of the efforts are online.The Broadway Advocacy Coalition, formed in 2016, last week held three online sessions to discuss racism, and then invited nonblack members of the theater community to sign a “public accountability pledge.”The organization Broadway Black has created a new awards ceremony, the Antonyo Awards, to honor black artists working on Broadway and Off Broadway; the ceremony is to be held on Friday, which is Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the day the Emancipation Proclamation was read in Texas.The intensifying national focus on race and racism have also prompted online panels discussing race in theater, and streaming productions of plays that deal with race.Much of the conversation is taking place on social media. Black artists are sharing personal experiences of racism in theater (some under the hashtag #TheaterInColor); some white women theater artists with large followings invited black women theater artists to take over their social media accounts for a day (mirroring a similar campaign in other sectors of society). More