Eliana Willis

Sure, the rhymes can be tricky, the lyrics high-speed. There are 68 words delivered in 11 seconds of “Getting Married Today,” alone. But for the pack of fans Stephen Sondheim has amassed over the years, it’s often the emotion — in one song, one melody, one lyric — that got them hooked. We asked his admirers, some of them also his collaborators, to reflect on the songs — with music and/or lyrics by Sondheim — that have stayed in their hearts. Their answers have been edited for clarity.Audra McDonald, actor“Move On,” from “Sunday in the Park With George”George is quite stuck as an artist, and he feels like he’s having a hard time finding inspiration. And the character of Dot comes to him and sings, “Stop worrying where you’re going, move on/ If you can know where you’re going, you’ve gone /Just keep moving on.” It’s absolutely the truth. And the specific lyric that breaks me up every time is, “Anything you do/ Let it come from you/ Then it will be new/ Give us more to see.” That is an artist’s credo. That, to me, is like a Bible verse that I return to over and over.[embedded content]James Corden, actor“Not While I’m Around,” from “Sweeney Todd”“Nothing’s gonna harm you/ Not while I’m around” — it’s the purest lyric, I think, in any musical. I found it moving as a teenager when I first heard it; I find it even more moving now as a parent.Cameron Crowe, director“Barcelona,” from “Company”There was a PBS special on Sondheim, and I got steeped in “Company,” and “Barcelona” really stuck out. It was like the third character in that scene was Bobby’s emerging soul. Beneath this lilting back-and- forth, push-and-pull of the song was the strong current of what was pulling Bobby to “Being Alive.” It was as rich as any Paul Simon or Neil Young song that I was starting to fall in love with.Barbra Streisand, singer“Putting it Together,” from “Sunday in the Park With George”I wanted to return to my roots and sing songs from Broadway, and thought this would be a great opener to a new album. I was very timid as I called Steve and asked him if he would consider rewriting the song to be about the music world, rather than the art world. I was almost waiting for him to slam the phone down, but he thought for a moment and said, “Sure, I’ll try it.” Now that’s extraordinary — he was willing to make changes to his own masterpiece.Joe Iconis, composer“Who’s That Woman?,” from “Follies”I love that it starts in this very casual way, and then it gets more aggressive, more dissonant, more tense. And then to have the final line — “That woman is me” — that’s what we’re really getting to. You have both celebration and disdain in the same lyric.Julie Andrews, actor“Getting Married Today,” from “Company”Lyrically, this was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn. It had vocally high choral moments, and then rapid-fire dialogue. I used very small physical gestures to help trigger my memory: There’s a moment — “Thank you for the 27 dinner plates and 37 butter knives” — and I just literally, with the word “knife,” thought of something stabbing me in the stomach.Melissa Errico, actor“No More,” from “Into the Woods”I’m always looking for answers in my life. What makes him so fascinating is that his songs are made up of questions. These lines stand out to me: “Running away, go to it/ Where did you have in mind?/ Have to take care: Unless there’s a where/ You’ll only be wandering blind./Just more questions./Different kind.” What he’s saying is that it’s not black or white; it’s black and white simultaneously. You’re running one place, looking for an answer, and the answer is often the next question. And that’s hard, but that’s mature.Michael Chabon, author“Chrysanthemum Tea,” from “Pacific Overtures”It’s my favorite of his musicals, probably because it’s the one I encountered first. I was taken by my parents, and it was such an incredible spectacle. “Chrysanthemum Tea” has typically clever Sondheim lyrics, with twisty rhymes. And the fact that it’s the shogun’s mother, and she’s poisoning her own son — there is a thread of wickedness in his work, and that was maybe my first encounter with it. I remember laughing, and being shocked at the reveal of what’s going on.Raúl Esparza, actor“Every Day a Little Death,” from “A Little Night Music”I was a student at N.Y.U. in the ’90s. It was the first semester of a musical theater class, and one of the students got up and sang “Every Day a Little Death.” It was dark outside and snowing, and I remember hearing the song and thinking, “What is this?” It’s such a simple series of tiny moments that make up a day, that seem to be completely pragmatic descriptions of everyday life, played against the unbelievable torrent of sweeping emotion underneath in the music. And that is such a classic skill of Steve’s, where lyric plays against music, and the two things together, in the ear of the listener, tell you the whole story.Steve Reich, composer“Finishing the Hat,” from “Sunday in the Park With George”Musically, it’s interesting because it’s six flats: G flat major. Now, that’s not your everyday key. Harmonically, it’s really very simple, in the best sense of that word. In terms of the lyrics, it’s just astounding — the rhymes, the half rhymes, the inner rhymes — all of which are making such a heartfelt impact.John Mulaney, comedian“Maria,” from “West Side Story” (1957)“I’ve just kissed a girl named Maria” is a perfect line. It is not trying to be clever, flowery, metaphoric. That’s what I would aspire to write in any joke or any written prose, television script, anything. It’s the clearest thing, and it’s what that character would say.Tituss Burgess, actor“First Midnight,” from “Into the Woods”“You may know what you need/ But to get what you want/ Better see that you keep what you have.” To me, that speaks to ambition. It speaks to having to make very tough decisions. It speaks to the heart of what sacrifice means, what compromise means, what negotiation means. It’s very smart advice.Trey Anastasio, lead singer (Phish)“Mr. Goldstone, I Love You,” from “Gypsy”My mother was a huge fan of Broadway’s golden age. She had all the original cast recordings, and she gave them to me when I was about 10 years old. “Gypsy” was the one that I played until it wore out the grooves. My childhood favorite was probably “Mr. Goldstone”: “Have a lychee, Mr. Goldstone/ Tell me any little thing that I can do/ Ginger peachy, Mr. Goldstone/ Have a kumquat, have two!” The show had a huge effect on my career, as crazy as that sounds. It was just a giant, giant part of my musical upbringing and landscape.Susan Choi, author“Send in the Clowns,” from “A Little Night Music”The memory is like a film clip: the camera points down at a small patch of dirt that is no longer farmland but isn’t yet lawn. It’s scrumbled full of gravel and other unsightly litter from the nearby building lots. And there’s a soundtrack: Judy Collins’s version of “Send in the Clowns.”I know the place: the undeveloped lot directly bordering my childhood home, making an unsightly seam with our new-seeded lawn. And I know the time: 1975, right after my parents and I moved into our first, and as it turned out last, suburban home. But why the song?Before that house was the ignominy of rented apartments, and after came the downslope of illness and divorce. But for the moment, we possessed the stage-set of a prosperous life. I couldn’t have known, at age six, that our show had a limited run — and yet, long before adulthood, my empty-lot explorations, in memory, became fused to Sondheim’s rueful music and words. It’s as if, despite those gaily-clad trapeze artists I imagined for “you in mid air,” I sensed the empty pageantry of our suburb, and how poorly-cast my parents were in their marital roles.Jason Robert Brown, composer“Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” from “Merrily We Roll Along”I played the part at summer camp when I was 16. It’s a song that tells you about a character’s intelligence, the action of the character and the effect of the character’s action. The song makes stuff happen in the show. And yet what I find most amazing — it’s a fairly unlikable thing that this person is doing — is just the real faith in show business. It’s a song that the audience can’t help but want to cheer on. More

A part-time usher who recently worked at two Broadway theaters has tested positive for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, prompting a scramble to inform the public and clean the buildings, according to the theater owners.The usher worked March 3 to March 6 at performances of a revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” now in previews at the 766-seat Booth Theater, starring Laurie Metcalf and Rupert Everett. Before that, the usher helped manage lines outside two performances of “Six,” a British musical about the wives of Henry VIII, on the evening of Feb. 25 and before the matinee of March 1. That show is now in previews at the 1,031-seat Brooks Atkinson Theater.The usher has been quarantined, and the person’s medical condition is not clear. Nor was it clear when the usher began showing symptoms, which can arise between 2 and 14 days of infection.A spokesman for the theater owners said that the usher — whom they did not identify — had been stationed in the mezzanine at the Booth for all but one of the performances concerned; the usher worked in the orchestra for the other performance. The spokesman said the usher did not show symptoms while working, and that “we have no knowledge of other individuals exhibiting symptoms as a result of contact with this individual.”Both shows went on as scheduled Wednesday night, but uneasy patrons were allowed to exchange their tickets. “Any ticketholder that prefers to attend a future performance of ‘Virginia Woolf’ or ‘Six’ will be provided the opportunity for an exchange at the point of purchase,” the theater owners said in a joint statement.The Shubert Organization, which operates the Booth, on Wednesday subjected that building to “a deep cleaning, following all current government standards,” according to the statement. The Brooks Atkinson, operated by the Nederlander Organization, will have a deep cleaning Wednesday night, in anticipation of the official opening of “Six” on Thursday night. More

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — The woman behind me was talking about her memories of McCarthyism, and I assumed she must be speaking of her childhood.But as I eavesdropped before the show at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, I heard her mention that she was 94. She had never liked the red-baiting Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, she said. She had been a fan, though, of his colleague and adversary Margaret Chase Smith.“Conscience,” Joe DiPietro’s new comic drama, displays a similar allegiance in recounting the fraught events of seven decades ago. A timely boxing match of a history play, it stars a deliciously piquant Harriet Harris as Smith, the principled, moderate, junior senator from Maine who in 1950 publicly stood up to McCarthy when most of their fellow Republicans were too cowed.In David Saint’s George Street Playhouse production, “Conscience” portrays Smith — the first woman elected to both houses of Congress and, at the time of the play, the only female senator — as a dry-witted hero with the rare courage to take on a lying bully who is sowing chaos, ruining reputations and threatening the very fabric of the nation.Assorted parallels to contemporary politics are there for the drawing, should you be so inclined.The fun of the play is partly in Smith’s withering contempt for the junior senator from Wisconsin — “the scoundrel Joe McCarthy,” she calls him. Also, given his incessant drinking: “an idiotic lush.”“He’s like the worst boy you went to high school with,” she marvels to her indispensable aide, William Lewis Jr. (Mark Junek).Smith and Lewis make a formidable, deeply sympathetic team. They are well matched by McCarthy — played by Lee Sellars as a sort of East-Coast-meets-Texas boor, without a whisper of Wisconsin to him — and his ruthlessly loyal young researcher, Jean Kerr (Cathryn Wake), who will become his wife.But DiPietro (“Memphis”), whose new musical “Diana” is in previews on Broadway, and Saint, George Street’s artistic director, haven’t figured out how to use Smith’s extraordinary “Declaration of Conscience” speech, which calls out McCarthy without ever naming him. Its delivery on the Senate floor is the climax of Act I.The address is fueled by righteous passion (“I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear,” Smith says), yet the abridged version here is a moment of witness, not drama. The tension and dread that are meant to rise do not.With Smith’s challenge thrown down, though, McCarthy in the second act is hellbent on her destruction, threatening to expose not only her secrets (her congressman husband was chronically unfaithful and died of syphilis) but also Lewis’s (he is gay and closeted). Frightened though Smith is, she is even more outraged that so many others knuckle under to McCarthy’s blatant thuggery.Smith went on to have a far longer career than McCarthy, and twice as long a life; for all the damage he wrought, he spent only a decade in the Senate and didn’t live to see 50. The play makes a point of the brevity of his terrorizing reign.It is acutely alert, too, to the egregious sexism that Smith and other women endured just to do their jobs. The exposition, though, is occasionally clumsy, as when Kerr expresses surprise at running into Smith in a regular women’s restroom at the Senate.“I just assumed you’d be in a senator’s washroom,” Kerr says, but would a whip-smart female staffer think that, really, when there wasn’t even a tiny one for female senators until the 1990s?Still, when Kerr mentions that Smith is being floated as a possible vice-presidential nominee, the senator speaks the stubborn Catch-22 out loud. Even if she were interested, Smith says, “it would be, well, unladylike for me to say so.”As programming for Women’s History Month, then, “Conscience” makes a lot of sense.Oddly, however, the deliberate male-female balance we see onstage is absent from the show’s creative team. Playwright, director, designers — all men. It’s as if the play’s lesson on gender equality weren’t applicable to the workplace that is professional theater.Yet it is. And when the creative team you’re assembling scores worse on female membership than the U.S. Senate in 1950, you might want to check your conscience.ConscienceThrough March 29 at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, New Brunswick, N.J.; 732-246-7717, georgestreetplayhouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. More

The work of translation that is theater — scripted dialogue and scored music transcribed via performance, design and direction — is tricky. That’s even more so when the original material is already a work in translation. Case in point: the Culture Project’s unsteady production of “About Love,” which awkwardly wrestles “First Love,” a novella by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, to the stage of the Sheen Center.Peter (Jeffrey Kringer), a 16-year-old vacationing with his parents in the Russian countryside, encounters the mesmerizing 21-year-old Zina (Silvia Bond). Trailed by a herd of male admirers, she is staying with her mother, a snuff-sniffing princess beleaguered by debts, in the shabby cottage next door. Peter spends the summer vying with other suitors for Zina’s attention, but soon discovers that her affections lie elsewhere. When he learns the truth, he reflects on the emotional hurly-burly of love and the injury of his first heartbreak.In his script, Will Pomerantz, who also directs, sticks to the plot but struggles to capture the most intriguing aspects of the novella.Taken alone, Turgenev’s story isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. But his similes and syntax — sentences that build tension through accumulation, creating a messy sense of overflow — conjure the tempestuousness of a teenage love.“My blood was in a ferment within me, my heart was full of longing, sweetly and foolishly; I was all expectancy and wonder; I was tremulous and waiting; my fancy fluttered and circled about the same images like martins round a bell-tower at dawn; I dreamed and was sad and sometimes cried,” reads one passage in the translation by Isaiah Berlin.In “About Love,” such sentiments are dimmed and ironed out: “I remember feeling the blood rushing through my veins, and I was often in a strange melancholy, which felt both delightful and absurd,” Peter announces.In a self-conscious touch that ultimately proves scattered, his and many other pieces of narration hot-potato from actor to actor as they crisscross the stage. Pomerantz may be attempting to shake up the written work, but the gesture is more gimmicky than complex. (At least Brian C. Staton’s stage design, a wooden-planked platform with a smattering of old furniture and trunks of dead birches littered around the space, doesn’t overstate itself.)Billed as “a play with songs and music” rather than a full-fledged musical, the production, with a cast of six plus four musicians, seems to want to have its Russian tea cake and eat it too. The six numbers, with music by Nancy Harrow, are short, more appetizers than entrees. A somber, trilling violin speaks to the Russian setting, but Harrow mashes up the Motherland with the Big Easy, abruptly inserting jazz-inspired numbers as well.[embedded content]Kringer’s Peter, adorable if a bit hokey in his youthfulness, has a fittingly romantic voice. Jazz may suit her character’s temperament, but Bond’s tidy rendition of “A Little Blue” lacks swing and swell.Otherwise, she is magnetic in the role: persuasive, mercurial and occasionally cruel. Dan Domingues, who appears both as a gruff Lurch-like butler and a wise doctor also courting Zina, is another standout.“What an exciting girl that Zinochka is!” Gustav Flaubert wrote in a letter to Turgenev, responding to the love object in the novella. “About Love,” by contrast, is mostly earnest. Something has been lost in translation.About LoveThrough March 22 at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture, Manhattan; 212-925-2812, sheencenter.org. Running time: 1 hours 35 minutes. More

The scene is a staple of Broadway: After a show ends, its most ardent fans gather at the stage door, hoping for an autograph, an Instagrammable photo, or even a conversation with their favorite star.But this week, facing a widening coronavirus outbreak that threatens public health in New York and around the world, the theater industry’s leaders said they wanted to put a stop to the practice.“We are highly recommending that all stage door activities be eliminated for the time being,” the Broadway League, a trade organization representing producers and theater owners, said on Tuesday.The step is the latest in a series of actions the theater business has taken to keep its plays and musicals running while also protecting public health.Broadway, a hallmark New York industry that drew 14.8 million patrons and grossed $1.8 billion last season, is vulnerable to economic damage from the outbreak for multiple reasons: Its audience skews older, and older people seem especially vulnerable to this virus; its audience is heavily made up of tourists, and travel is drying up; and its events involve large numbers of people packed into tight spaces — a situation risky enough that it is being banned in some countries. On Wednesday, the owners of two theaters said that a part-time usher who worked for them had tested positive for the virus. No other worker had fallen ill, but the owners asked audience members and employees who were present at the same performances to monitor their health.Broadway’s leaders say they are determined to keep their theaters open if at all possible, and anticipate that they would collectively close only if ordered to do so by a government agency. That is not unthinkable: Some performance venues have been closed in Austria, Germany and Italy, among other places.On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was trying to avoid closing theaters, but also said they might need to cut down on audience size if they wanted to stay open.“What we’re trying to figure out is if there a way to reduce the capacity, reduce the number of people?” the mayor said on CNN. “If we cannot strike that balance, of course we can go to closure.”The scene at stage doors Tuesday night showed just how hard even small changes can be. At some shows — Disney’s “Frozen” and “The Lion King,” for example — theater employees made clear there would be no more stage dooring. But at other theaters, some actors obliged waiting fans.Outside the Shubert Theater, where “To Kill a Mockingbird” is playing, Ed Harris, the star who plays Atticus Finch, made a hasty exit with a wave to the crowd. But Nick Robinson, who plays Jem Finch, stayed to accept hugs, and stood in close, arms around shoulders, for pictures with a last handful of well-wishers. More

SHAKESPEARE IN A DIVIDED AMERICAWhat His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and FutureBy James ShapiroAmerica is massive. Shakespeare is massive. When two such cultural hyper-objects meet, they’re bound to create a black hole strong enough to suck in and warp just about anything around them. James Shapiro analyzes the effects of their collision in his terrific new book, “Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future.” If Jill Lepore and the late Tony Judt had collaborated, this taut, swift and insightful tract might have been the offspring. Yet Shapiro’s subtitle is misleading: His subject is us, the U.S., not Shakespeare plays. If you’re worried about the current state of the Republic, this is a book that will stoke your fears — while educating you on why you might justifiably be having them.Shapiro is already a master of creating Shakespeare treats for the literate common reader. His “1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare” and “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” are as entertaining as any nonfiction of recent years. Now he’s outdone himself — no surprise, given his qualifications for this new volume. He not only teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia, he serves on the board of directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and is the Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater in New York. He also edited the comprehensive “Shakespeare in America” anthology. Here, his combined scholarship and theatrical experience help him examine — brilliantly — the notorious 2017 “Julius Caesar” in Central Park, in which a Donald Trump look-alike as Caesar was assassinated nightly to fierce outrage from the political right.Did you know there was an epidemic of men spanking women in movies in the decade after 1938? That young, pre-bearded Ulysses S. Grant was cast as Desdemona in an Army production of “Othello” and rehearsed but never went on because of what amounted to homosexual panic among the producing officers in a national manliness crisis? Did you know that Steve Bannon wrote a screenplay for a sci-fi “Titus Andronicus” as well as an alt-right “Coriolanus”? (Neither was produced.) That Abraham Lincoln’s favorite play was “Macbeth,” one that helped secure the reputation of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s own Macbeth-to-be? It’s all here and much more.Each of the book’s eight chapters centers on a year with a different thematic focus. “1833: Miscegenation” examines contemporaneous reactions to “Othello,” almost all racist, some wildly screwy, like a female Shakespeare scholar’s attempt to prove that Othello was, as she effused, “a white man!” “1849: Class Warfare” provides a blistering account of New York’s deadly Astor Place riots, demonstrations against the English actor William Macready that were fueled by rising economic inequality and nationalistic fervor. When police forces fired into a massed crowd, more than 20 people died and dozens were wounded.“1916: Immigration” shows how Caliban got used as a token in arguments about assimilation at a moment when racism was intensified by support from fake “science” and the United States was closing its borders. The chapter details, among other things, wacky efforts to make Shakespeare into an American. Why not? Wasn’t he an “Anglo-Saxon,” like all true Americans? One Charles Mills Gayley of Berkeley published a popular book in 1917 arguing that Shakespeare should “be considered one of the founders of liberty in America” because of his connection to a “liberal faction” of Elizabethan capitalists. In an earlier poem, Gayley had saluted Shakespeare as “Born of the Mayflower, born of Virginia.” Such buffoons litter the book.In “1948: Marriage,” “Kiss Me, Kate” goes under Shapiro’s lens. The story of how Bella Spewack, the main book writer, wrestled the oft-reviled “Taming of the Shrew” into a musical, how the show shadowed gender-role preoccupations of the time, and how the change from the ’40s to the ’50s caused the politically bold Broadway show to be tamed for the Hollywood movie provides cultural history at its most diverting.The 1998 chapter is worth the price of the book alone. Examining American anxieties about adultery and same-sex love, it chronicles how “Shakespeare in Love,” originally a progressive script written by Marc Norman, got rewritten by Tom Stoppard so that elements of Shakespearean homosexuality, bisexuality and marital infidelity were fudged. Ironically, Stoppard had been hired to soften such areas by the producer Harvey Weinstein, the moral paragon with decades of alleged sexual assault and now a rape conviction behind him. We watch Weinstein trying to massage the film into a template of his own relationships with women by leaving its heroine as now-successful Will’s piece on the side. (Instead, she goes to America, of course.) As a bonus we’re privy to a “cringe-inducing” Stoppard skit at Miramax’s pre-Oscar party. Juicy? But to the point? Hell, yes.We meet a character of truly Shakespearean contradictions in John Quincy Adams, who plays the lead in the 1833 chapter on racial mixing. “Recognized as one of the leading abolitionists in the land” and a victim of death threats for his views, Adams nonetheless went into print twice to express at length his horror at the mere idea that a white woman, Desdemona, might fall for a black man. Indeed, he thought she got her just deserts by being murdered for it.It’s in the final chapter, “2017: Left | Right,” on the Public Theater’s Trump-as-Julius-Caesar production, where Shapiro really soars, analyzing the pitfalls of applying contemporary politics to a famously double-edged play. With “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare strewed ambiguities like tacks on a highway, creating a play designed to multiply and complicate our responses. How are we to take Caesar? Or Brutus, or Cassius? If you don’t like Trump and Caesar is Trump, do you actually approve of seeing him butchered?When right-wing media screamed about the production (and why wouldn’t they? or shouldn’t they?), the Public realized it had set off a firestorm for which it was unprepared. A Shakespeare play is not a political statement, it’s a mosh pit of subjectivities, and here the audience was expected to sit back and rationally parse a theatrical Rorschach blot. This “Left | Right” chapter will feed annals of the Trump era a hundred years from now — if after the wildfires and the rising oceans anyone’s still here to write them.Shapiro’s book is history, but not past history. It’s ongoing and all too painfully still-relevant history. As he bounces back and forth between 1833 or 1916 and today, the similarities between Then and Now overwhelm the differences and Shapiro’s title resonates anew, reminding us how divided we’ve been since our very beginnings, with historical-tragical constantly muscling out pastoral-comical. Ultimately there rises the familiar suspicion that, for a country in love with the future, it’s always yesterday in America.Among all the fine words currently being spilled examining the American mess, James Shapiro has outshone many of our best political pundits with this superb contribution to the discourse. He upped the wattage simply by bouncing his spotlight off a playwright 400 years dead who yet again turns out to be, somehow, us. More