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      At 89, Still Making Art (and Bread) With a Message in Vermont

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      Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater is going strong and, at 89, so is he. But what will happen to his company when he is gone?Under an unforgiving sun during a heat wave in July, Peter Schumann, the 89-year-old artistic director of Bread and Puppet Theater, rang a hand bell on a rolling hillside in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Before him a post topped with a giant grasping papier-mâché hand towered high like a maypole. Two dozen performers encircled it.“Walk slower, get closer to each other,” shouted Schumann, a tawny bearded man. More giant hands on poles rose up, seemingly reaching to the clouds in prayer. Then the group sang a dirge-like song as birds called from a nearby pine forest that is home to handmade memorial huts for friends and family. In two days, this surreal ritual was to be recreated in the debut of “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant,” part of the 60-year-old company’s season of Sunday shows.In addition to directing, Peter Schumann plays musical instruments, sculpts, paints on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard, and creates posters and printed chapbooks.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn July and August, the theater’s events run on weekends and are either free or modestly priced: indoor avant-garde performances, an outdoor circus featuring playful political sketches with towering effigy-like figures and a rowdy band, and side shows created by company members on compact stages are among the offerings.Schumann, a German immigrant who has retained his accent, came to New York City in the 1960s and found a potent way to respond in the streets to the war in Vietnam and social injustice: towering papier-mâché and cardboard figures. Influenced by John Cage and Merce Cunningham and exposed to the happenings of Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, he conceives his experimental collaborative pieces from a cauldron of ideas about the joys and ills of a conflicted capitalist world. Often they are drawn from the news, sometimes from legends. Some are reviewed well, others not. Schumann, uninterested in praise or media attention, keeps making them.In addition to directing, he sculpts, paints (on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard), and creates posters, calendars and printed chapbooks. He also uses an outdoor oven to bake coarse sourdough rye bread to feed audiences that can grow to a thousand or more in August.A horse puppet taking the field in “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant.”Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said on that pre-opening Friday last month while baking for about 50 summer company members. He knows that like his work, his bread can be challenging to chew, but hopefully nourishing and worth the trouble.Lately, Bread and Puppet Theater, which performs all over the world, has been growing. Its domestic touring schedule — to colleges, theaters, city plazas and small towns via a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life (coffee cups, flowers, the occasional “Ah!”) — included 66 stops last fall with a company of 30, twice the size of previous years. Print sales are up, too. Renewed interest in live performance and the current political climate may explain it. But appreciation for the company’s sustainable, handmade tactility and poetic anti-authoritarianism is nothing new.“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said of his sourdough rye bread, which he feeds to audiences.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAfter baking the bread in outdoor ovens, he brings the loaves into his kitchen to cool.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesHoward Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” cited its “beauty, magic and power” in a blurb for “Rehearsing With Gods,” a 2004 book about the company. Grace Paley marched with the group starting in the 1960s, and wrote a poem inspired by its policy of speaking up and speaking out. Julie Taymor, who used natural materials, papier-mâché and puppets in the stage adaptation of “The Lion King,” referenced some of Schumann’s stock puppet figures in her 2007 Beatles movie, “Across the Universe.” Kiki Smith, the sculptor, in an interview on the Smithsonian’s archive website, talked about the company’s “epic and biblical qualities” and of seeing its performances often in her youth.Guided by Schumann’s uncompromising views about greed, racism and militarism, the collective has questioned the World Bank, the treatment of Indigenous people and, to some in-house and public consternation, the providing of arms to Ukraine instead of ways to negotiate.The troupe presents free or modestly priced circuses, pageants and other performance arts on summer weekends.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“To live in a war and be a refugee is a lifelong education,” Schumann said of a childhood in which he experienced bombings in Germany’s Silesia region, which is now part of Poland. “There’s no equivalent to it in the U.S.”The printing press posters, chapbooks and calendars he designs drive his messages home and come from an uncompromising faith in “Cheap Art.” His manifesto about it states the importance of its unimportance — cheap, lightweight, undermining the sanctity of affluence and in opposition to the money-hungry “business of art.” For decades, his wife, Elka Schumann, who died in 2021, on a Sunday in August, oversaw the printing press that turns out countless pieces, all drawn with his bold and expressionistic hand and celebrating life while questioning abuses of power. (One poster of an iris reads “Resistance to the Empire”; a chapbook on courage urges “Dig through the dirt.”)But for all the questions firing like flares at society, with Schumann’s humor and pathos, there is one — far more insular in focus — on the minds of those around him: What will happen to his company when he is gone?“It’s been an ongoing conversation for 15 years, and we’re still figuring it out,” said his son Max Schumann, 59, an artist and the departing executive director of Printed Matter, a nonprofit based in New York City that sells artists’ books.Guides help audience members navigate the woods.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesSome of the puppets during the circus performance.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“This company has always been an iffy little enterprise that depends way too much on me,” his father said of Bread and Puppet, which has a million-dollar annual budget raised through touring, print sales, tickets and donations, but no direct corporate or government funding. “Is it sustainable when I’m gone and will people recognize it as important?”Those questions remain unanswered as Schumann’s incessant creation of new work keeps the focus on the present.INSIDE A BARN last month, a couple of hours after the rehearsal for the “Heart of the Matter” pageant, several dozen performers from around the world — paid puppeteers, interns, community volunteers — presented their proposed circus acts. Schumann typically reviews and critiques the sketches.Most of the acts had a whimsical tone. A man imitating a bee (collapsing bee colonies the inspiration) did a frenetic waggle around a cardboard city that transformed itself into a tangle of dancing urbanites. An orca ambushed yachting billionaire puppets. When somber-looking tree figures appeared with a narrator reading facts about boreal forests versus the more flammable monoculture ones burning in nearby Canada, Schumann became agitated.One of the circus performances.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“It’s too cliché, something everyone already knows,” he shouted. “You have to stop using so many words and solve things puppetry-wise.” Then he jumped to his feet and started moving people and puppets around. He had puppeteers throw the trees and then dance with them, causing some confusion.“It’s what you do, not what you say,” he said. “It’s puppetry, not preaching.”He told them he would return in a half-hour to see a revision. Then, as dinnertime approached, he excused himself to help the kitchen staff make potato pancakes — a recipe from his war-torn childhood.With admirable control, the puppeteers discussed how to rework their savaged piece, each giving the others time to suggest solutions. It was a utopian vision of collaboration, agile and practical — and typical of how the company functions.“Peter has a strong directional voice,” said Ziggy Bird, 26, a company member who took notice of Schumann’s work in a theater history class at Temple University. “It’s never personal and some of the most beautiful moments come from frustration, which can be a kick in the pants.”Bread and Puppet Theater performs all over the world, and travels domestically on a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesArt inside the bus, which reiterates Schumann’s uncompromising faith in what he calls “Cheap Art.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesVisitors tour a makeshift gallery featuring Schumann’s bedsheet paintings.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“Schools of art are teaching solo enterprises, but what people do here is the opposite — they collaborate,” Schumann said while smoking a cigar, drinking a can of beer and stirring a vat of potato pancake batter to be fried on an outdoor stovetop. This collaborative process has birthed companies far beyond Vermont, including Papermoon Puppet Theater in Indonesia, Y No Había Luz in Puerto Rico and Great Small Works in New York City.“It’s a way of making art and living with a strong level of engagement and concern,” said Clare Dolan, a puppeteer and a Bread and Puppet Theater board member who assists Schumann. She was preparing a circus act about the sending of cluster bombs to Ukraine. “There are incredible ripples that come from Peter that show up in theaters, parades and art-making around the world.”John Bell, the board’s president and a professor who runs the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, has been with the company since 1973, around the time it relocated to Vermont from New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood, first to Goddard College and then to the land in Glover.“In a way Bread and Puppet is an art project of Peter’s and we are only here to help him realize it,” he said. “So we don’t know what will happen once he’s gone, especially because he believes in responding to the present.” While Schumann is “dealing with being an older person these days,” Bell added, the moment he starts working, his pace accelerates.That seems an understatement.At the dress rehearsal on Saturday for the circus (canceled the next day because of a rainstorm that flooded Vermont) Schumann aggressively finessed the burning forest act and others. Later he performed in an indoor show billed as a mass, “Idiots of the World Unite Against the Idiot System”; it was a good-natured critique of everything from “the empire’s false sense of freedom” to a highway system that kills wild animals. He fiddled a hybrid violin and trumpet while making an abstract speech and then led the cast of 30 in an exasperated “Aaaagh.”“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral,” Schumann said. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAfter that a quartet performed a Beethoven fugue.Done listening, he drove his Subaru wagon up a dirt road to a studio to finish one of his “Heart of the Matter” paintings.“He’s always had a manic creative energy and right now he’s been working with wild abandon, trying to squeeze it all in,” Max Schumann observed. “When our mother passed away, his grief was intense, but the work helped keep him alive.”In fact, when Elka Schumann died, the circus and pageant carried on the same weekend.Now Schumann lives without the life partner who helped make many things work at Bread and Puppet. He thinks about her often and visits the memorial he made to her in his pine forest — a sculptural relief of a couple embraced. At night he sometimes sits on his porch listening to the parties down on his farm, pleased about what he and his wife have inspired and sustained. Sometimes he joins in, dancing with abandon.“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral, and I’ve already had a stroke and a second is probably on the way,” he said as he painted with a steady hand. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”He put the last paint stroke on his recycled bedsheet and stepped away.“OK, this series is finished,” he said. “Now I can go on to what’s next.” More

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      ‘A Eulogy for Roman’ Review: Farewell to a Friend, With Help From the Audience

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      Check your cynicism at the door: Brendan George is earnest and endearing as he mourns Roman in this one-man show.Delivering a eulogy is never easy at the best of times, and it’s an especially tough slog for Milo, whose best friend, Roman, has recently died. The pair had been close since childhood, and Milo, who is in his early 20s, appears especially shaken. It quickly becomes obvious that he will need a supportive hand from those attending the service.And that means us, the audience members at Peter Charney and Brendan George’s “A Eulogy for Roman,” a modest but sneakily affecting show that just opened at 59E59 Theaters.It is not long before we are roped into helping the flustered Milo (played by George, a graduate student at New York University who also wrote the play). He asks a theatergoer to help him sort index cards on which he has scribbled some thoughts about Roman. Then he wonders if anyone can share tips for dealing with loss. “Dogs,” a woman volunteered at the performance I attended.Of course, Milo’s gentle prompts serve to move around the show’s emotional building blocks, but he is such a charming presence that it feels as though he is including the theatergoers in a conversation rather than simply manipulating them to serve his storytelling needs.There is a bit of unease, however, as Milo’s emotion is decidedly self-centered — he doesn’t tell us anything very revealing about Roman. Then again, isn’t part of the grieving process the act of figuring out how one continues to live?To overcome his disarray, Milo decides to complete a project he had embarked on with Roman: getting through a “Life Points List,” a lengthy catalog of experiences “that would remind us that we are alive and make us feel alive.” A few of them still hadn’t been checked off when Roman died, and perhaps, Milo suggests, the memorial-goers might want to help him achieve closure. The remaining tasks include suggesting songs for a playlist (my fellow audience members spontaneously latched onto a candy theme) and teaming up with Milo to do 100 push-ups. As amusing as those scenes are, they can feel like activities at a children’s birthday party, even if the show tends to stay on the right side of that dangerous line.The use of a list as a way to deal with death, combined with audience participation, brings to mind Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s hit play “Every Brilliant Thing,” though “A Eulogy for Roman” does not weave the more discomforting sides of our existence into its fabric as effectively as that show did.Still, George has an endearing presence and Charney, who is credited with concept and direction, moves the action along at a steady pace. And there is something refreshing about the show’s commitment to earnestness. We have been so conditioned to expect a certain degree of cynicism that I spent a good portion of the evening wondering when we were going to discover that Roman or Milo or both were psychopaths. But no: The bravest thing about “A Eulogy for Roman” is its embrace of kindness, resilience and community.A Eulogy for RomanThrough Sept. 3 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Name These Books That Became Broadway Musicals

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s monthly quiz about books that have been made into television shows, movies, theatrical productions and more. This month’s challenge is about books that were adapted into Broadway musicals; coincidentally, all of the correct answers were adapted into films before they made it to the stage. Tap or click your answers to the five questions below.New literary quizzes appear on the Book Review page every week and you can find previous installments in the Book Review Quiz Bowl archive online. More

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      Edinburgh Festival Review: ‘Food’ Is an Acquired Taste

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      At the Edinburgh Festival, Geoff Sobelle presents a dinner party as a theatrical spectacle, in which silliness is the end in itself.In an auditorium in Scotland, the American theater artist Geoff Sobelle is hosting a dinner party. The stage is taken up by an enormous square table, laid out with plates and cutlery. Around three of its sides sit twenty-four audience members. At the center of the fourth is the waistcoated figure of Sobelle, who brings wine, hands out menus and takes orders. When one lady requests a baked potato, he produces a bucket full of earth and empties it out onto the table; he plants a seed in the mound, waters it and waits a while before reaching in to pull out a large spud.After several skits in this vein, Sobelle withdraws into himself and proceeds to binge silently: He eats one apple, then another, and then another and another, followed by a bowl of cherry tomatoes, a few radishes and carrots, a concerning quantity of ranch, a number of raw eggs, an entire onion and some bank notes.Sobelle’s one-man show “Food,” which runs at The Studio through Aug. 27 as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, is billed as “a meditation on how and why we eat.” But, aside from a short preamble about the primordial nature of our relationship with grub, there is little attempt to intellectualize. Audiences primed to look for meaning will find none here: Silliness is the end in itself; the enjoyment is in the buildup of nervous energy in the room as Sobelle carries out his buffoonery with the focused determination of a doctor performing lifesaving surgery.Sobelle trained as a magician, and then as a clown, before turning his hand to absurdist theater. In an artistic mission statement on his website, he declares that he sees his body of work as “a colossal practical joke.” This checks out.Midway through the show, Sobelle carefully gathers up the guests’ wine glasses, then returns to his seat and violently pulls away the tablecloth, amid much clattering of plates. Underneath, it turns out, is not a table, but a field of dirt: The set is transformed into one big muddy landscape. A remote control tractor trundles across this terrain, and sheafs of wheat sprout upward in its wake. The trappings of modern civilization materialize; toy trucks are handed to the diners and passed around the perimeter of the dining table-turned-landscape. Sobelle clambers onto the scenery, sticks his hand in it and strikes oil; tall buildings start popping up here and there. We begin to suspect there may be someone underneath the table.The audience was bewildered, but charmed, and for 90 minutes reduced to a state of childlike wonder, reveling in the frisson of anticipation, awkwardness and unease. The immersive setup produced some amusing unscripted moments, like when a theatergoer’s cellphone got swept away as Sobelle removed the tablecloth; his demeanor as he handed it back was a picture of dumb officiousness, both apologetic and vaguely affronted.Sobelle’s comedy of affable idiocy may be witless, but it is also timeless — every bit as primal, one suspects, as our love of eating. (There’s a reason “Mr. Bean” is still so popular around the world.) In drawing much of its mirth from sheer ridiculousness or grotesquerie, “Food” channels a comic sensibility from less exalted sectors of the entertainment world — think provincial circus troupes, or competitive eating championships.In the comparatively rarefied environs of the Edinburgh International Festival, the show’s sensibility feels like an ironic curio. I was reminded of Freddie Mercury’s line about wanting to bring opera to the masses: Sobelle, it seems, is doing the inverse, bringing low culture to the cosmopolitan elite. A perverse kind of altruism, perhaps.FoodThrough Aug. 27 at The Studio, in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk. More

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      The International Puppet Fringe Festival Draws the World of Puppetry to New York

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      This year’s International Puppet Fringe Festival surveys puppetry traditions from around the globe, and celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer Ralph Lee.Forget the sunglasses, the baseball caps, the featherweight clothing. Heat or no heat, it’s time to choose a fantastical mask and a wild costume and head to the Lower East Side to join a Wednesday evening parade. Hades himself will welcome you.The occasion? It’s Halloween in August, the theme of the third International Puppet Fringe Festival NYC, which officially begins with this open-to-all procession on Suffolk Street. This year’s festival, which arrives with more than 50 performances, as well as cabarets, craft workshops, panels, open mics and films, celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer and theater artist Ralph Lee.Lee, who died in May, invented one of New York’s most popular puppet revels — the Village Halloween Parade — and Wednesday’s street stroll will feature not only his Greek god of the underworld but also his Fat Devil and Yama, the Chinese Lord of Death. Such creations underscore one of the festival’s core principles: that puppetry is more than child’s play.“People have this misconception that it is just for, like, birthday parties or children’s television shows,” said Manuel Antonio Morán, the artistic director of the festival, which is produced by Teatro SEA, the Latino theater that he founded; his own agency, Grupo Morán; and the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, where Puppet Fringe performances will run through Sunday. “Yes, it is for that, too,” he said in an interview, but in many countries, it’s “part of the folklore, it’s part of the tradition.”A donkey puppet is another part of the musical “The Crazy Adventures of Don Quixote.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesFolklore and mythology continually inspired Lee, who collaborated on this year’s festival despite his declining health. His work, including incarnations of the ghost of Henry Hudson, a mermaid and Coney Island sideshow characters, will appear in Brendan Schweda’s “Barnacle Bill the Husband,” one of a special group of brief, intimate works for small audiences. On Saturday, the festival will host a round-table discussion with Lee’s troupe, the Mettawee River Theater Company. But the greatest breadth of his creativity will be on display in two exhibitions: “Theater Unmasked: Photographic Glimpses of Ralph Lee’s Work,” on view through Sunday, and “Myths, Legends and Spectacle: Masks and Puppets of Ralph Lee,” which is on display through Aug. 31. (The festival’s exhibitions and outdoor performances are free; indoor shows are $20 each, and day passes $75.)“What I want people to experience while they’re here is that the world is whatever you decide to make it for yourself,” said Matthew Sorensen, who curated the shows of Lee’s work.The more than 60 pieces in “Myths, Legends and Spectacle” cover six decades and range in tone from the fiercely haunting raffia-haired mask of a Japanese demon from the play “The Mask of Kitamura” (1983) to the 11-foot-tall, sweetly smiling Grandmother Earth puppet from “Nanabozho,” a staging of a Native American tale (1980). And everywhere, Lee gave castoffs new life: Piano keys serve as puppet teeth, and can lids as eyes. An open mailbox becomes the head and jaws of a dragon; the ribs of a baby carriage form its body.This exhibition “opens up people’s ideas about materials,” said Casey Compton, Lee’s widow and frequent artistic collaborator, as she helped install the show. Many, she added, illustrate Lee’s method of taking “what’s just right there” and “exploring what it can do.”This year’s International Puppet Fringe Festival celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer and theater artist Ralph Lee, pictured here in 1998 alongside some of his creations.Sara KrulwichBeyond Lee’s creations, an innovative approach to materials also distinguishes the other festival offerings, like “Sapientia,” a 10th-century play by Hroswitha of Gandersheim, sometimes called the West’s first female playwright. The title character, a Christian, opposes the pagan emperor Hadrian, who responds by torturing her young daughters. Scapegoat Carnivale, a Montreal-based theater company, stages the play as satirical object theater: Hadrian is portrayed by an espresso pot, Sapientia by a hand mirror and the children, who in the story are miraculously spared pain, by teacups. The torture devices include an iron and a George Foreman grill.“The objects are able to kind of deconstruct and reveal almost the absurdity, but also support the miraculous nature” of the play, said Mia van Leeuwen, who worked on the adaptation and directed it.Another humble substance stars throughout the Puppet Fringe: paper. “You can bind it together, you can rip it, you can make a pop-up of it, you can chew it up and spit it out,” said Yael Rasooly, an Israeli puppeteer who does all of those in her slightly macabre solo show “Paper Cut.” Rasooly, who will also teach a puppetry master class at the festival, portrays a secretary whose Hollywood fantasy world is made up of old movie magazine cutouts.A more joyful exploration of paper’s possibilities unfolds in “The Paper Play,” which the Taiwanese company Puppet Beings Theater will present outdoors at the festival and indoors in a separate performance on Sunday at Flushing Town Hall in Queens. Consisting of two parts — one a gentle fable and the other a celebration of its medium’s transformative powers — this American premiere exemplifies the Puppet Fringe’s less spooky side.Behind the scenes at the International Puppet Fringe Festival.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe family-friendly fare also includes four productions from Teatro SEA. In “The Crazy Adventures of Don Quixote,” a musical Morán wrote with Radamés Gavé, don’t be surprised to see Cervantes’s 17th-century characters duel with “Star Wars”-style light sabers. They will also speak both English and Spanish, a bilingual approach adopted by all Teatro SEA puppetry shows. Another production, the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater’s urbanized “Little Red’s Hood,” will be performed once in Spanish and once in Mandarin.“From the beginning, I’ve been wanting to be a very inclusive festival,” said Morán, who founded the biennial Puppet Fringe in 2018. (The second edition was held in 2021 because of the pandemic.) That has meant featuring shows in different languages, producers from minority groups and female puppeteers like Heather Henson, who has curated two festival short-film programs from Handmade Puppet Dreams, her company’s collection of works by independent artists: “Frights and Delights,” featuring fanciful ghosts and monsters, and “Kidscapes,” a series for children.Puppetry “is very cross-disciplinary,” said Henson, who noted that her father, the renowned puppeteer Jim Henson, often produced art that “would have never worked on the stage.” Jump cuts, extreme close-ups and scene dissolves can make puppet films more exciting — or unsettling.But however audiences experience puppetry, its power often derives from the extraordinary interplay between human agency and physical artworks.“There’s lots of corny words for it, like magic,” said Compton. “But it is very special, when those elements come together, and there’s a life that can be shared.” Ralph Lee, she added, “was always going for that.” More

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      Tom Jones, Half of Record-Setting ‘Fantasticks’ Team, Dies at 95

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      He wrote the book and lyrics to a little show that opened in 1960 in Greenwich Village and became “the longest-running musical in the universe.”Tom Jones, who wrote the book and lyrics for a modest musical called “The Fantasticks” that opened in 1960 in Greenwich Village and ran for an astonishing 42 years, propelled in part by its wistful opening song, “Try to Remember,” died on Friday at his home in Sharon, Conn. He was 95.His son Michael said the cause was cancer.Mr. Jones and his frequent collaborator, Harvey Schmidt, first worked together when they were students at the University of Texas, Mr. Jones in the drama department’s directing program, Mr. Schmidt studying art but indulging his musical inclinations on the side.They kept in touch after graduating, writing songs together by mail after they were drafted during the Korean War. Mr. Jones got out first and tried his luck in New York, failing to find work as a director but writing for the revues being staged by the impresario Julius Monk and fiddling with a musical with another composer, John Donald Robb.Mr. Jones and Mr. Robb called that show, which was loosely based on a comedy by the French playwright Edmond Rostand, “Joy Comes to Deadhorse,” and in 1956 they staged it at the University of New Mexico, where Mr. Robb was a dean. It was a big-cast production that included a small squadron of dancers.The two men had different reactions to their production. “I felt it was basically wrong,” Mr. Jones wrote in an unpublished memoir. “He felt it was basically right. So we split.”Mr. Jones, left, with his frequent collaborator, Harvey Schmidt, and the British actress Stephanie Voss, promoting “The Fantasticks” in London in 1961.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones kept working on the piece, now with Mr. Schmidt, who had arrived in New York after leaving the military and was having some success as a commercial artist. They were still envisioning it as a big Broadway musical, but in 1959, when a friend was looking for a one-act musical for a summer festival at Barnard College, they did a radical revision. Instead of trying to imitate Rodgers and Hammerstein, Mr. Jones wrote, “we decided to break all the rules.”“We didn’t understand them anyway,” he added.Their pared-down musical, about two young lovers and their seemingly feuding fathers, used a narrator, minimalist staging and other touches that bucked the formula of a big Broadway musical.Among those who saw it at Barnard was the producer Lore Noto, who brought it to the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, where it opened in May 1960. The cast included Jerry Orbach, early in his storied career, as El Gallo, the narrator, who delivers “Try to Remember.”It also included, in a smaller role, one Thomas Bruce — who was actually Mr. Jones. He said he didn’t use his own name because he wanted to head off accusations that “The Fantasticks” was a vanity production.Mr. Jones wrote that the opening night performance, attended by critics, was rocky, and at the after-party all involved awaited the reviews with trepidation. They came in around midnight; Word Baker, the director, related them to the assembled group, beginning with the mixed review from Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times.“All we could hear, any of us, were the bad parts,” Mr. Jones wrote.Walter Kerr in The New York Herald Tribune also said both positive and negative things, while some of the other New York papers raved.In any case, the show had a resilience that no one back then could have predicted. It continued to run at Sullivan Street for more than 17,000 performances, finally closing in 2002 as the longest-running musical in history. (“The Mousetrap,” the Agatha Christie play, has been running longer in London, but not continuously in the same theater.)Mr. Jones, right, with Mr. Schmidt in 1999. They worked together on several musicals, including “I Do! I Do!” and “110 in the Shade.”Ray Fisher/Getty ImagesMr. Jones and Mr. Schmidt, who died in 2018, went on to collaborate on other shows. Mr. Jones wrote the lyrics for Mr. Schmidt’s music for “110 in the Shade,” which opened on Broadway in 1963 and ran for 330 performances, and he wrote the book and lyrics for “I Do! I Do!,” another collaboration with Mr. Schmidt, which ran for a year and a half on Broadway in the mid-1960s.Each of those shows earned the men Tony Award nominations. Ed Ames’s version of “My Cup Runneth Over,” a song from “I Do! I Do!,” peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967 and received Grammy Award nominations.But “The Fantasticks” overshadowed everything else. After its initial long run, a revival that opened in 2006 in Midtown Manhattan ran for more than 4,300 performances, with Mr. Jones again in the opening night cast in the same secondary role. As in the original production, actors cycled through the various roles in the revival, which continued for more than a decade. In 2010, Mr. Jones, then 82, returned to the cast briefly to mark the 50th anniversary of the original show’s opening.In 2006, an interviewer for American Theater Wing, introducing Mr. Jones, described “The Fantasticks” as “the longest-running musical in the universe.”“I don’t know about Saturn,” Mr. Jones replied.Thomas Collins Jones was born on Feb. 17, 1928, in Littlefield, Texas. His father, William, was a turkey farmer, and his mother, Jessie (Bellomy) Jones, was a homemaker.He grew up in Coleman, Texas, where he got a job as an usher at a movie theater, which morphed into a role as master of ceremonies for a weekly talent show held on Wednesday nights between features.As Mr. Jones put it in his memoir, “sometime during my sophomore year at Coleman High School, I became a ‘character’” — wearing bow ties and a straw hat to school, smoking a pipe, signing his articles for the school newspaper “T. Collins Jones, Esquire.”“Even now, nearly 70 years later, I can’t help but stop and wonder what the hell I thought I was doing,” he wrote. “Even more, I wonder at the fact that the other kids — farmers mostly, and ranchers and 4-H girls — took it all in their stride.”In 1945, when he enrolled in the drama department at the University of Texas, “for the first time, there were other people actually like me.”“Here, marvel of marvels,” he wrote, “everybody was T. Collins Jones, Esquire.”He earned a bachelor’s degree and, in 1951, a master’s degree at the university, and soon after was drafted. By happenstance — and passing a typing test — he managed to avoid being sent to fight in Korea; instead he was assigned to administrative work in a counterintelligence unit.There, he proposed that he write a manual on how to conduct covert operations. (“The Army loves manuals,” he wrote in the memoir. “More than machine guns. More than medals.”) Superiors liked the idea, and he worked on that until he was discharged after the war ended in 1953.In the American Theater Wing interview, Mr. Jones recounted the story of “Try to Remember,” the signature song from “The Fantasticks.” Mr. Schmidt had come up with the music in just a few minutes during an idle moment in a rehearsal hall. Mr. Jones heard an opportunity.“I thought, well, it would be fun to take this simple, long-line song and then play with lots of assonance and near sounds and near rhymes and inner rhymes and sort of encrust it verbally on top of this flowing, basically folklike, simple melody,” he said. “That took me weeks to do. It took him 20 seconds and me three weeks.”His lyrics still echo across the decades:Try to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen life was slow and oh, so mellow.Try to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen grass was green and grain was yellow.Try to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen you were a tender and callow fellow.Try to remember and if you rememberThen follow, follow.Mr. Jones’s first marriage, to Eleanor Wright, ended in divorce. His second marriage was to the choreographer Janet Watson, who died in 2016. Michael Jones and another son from that marriage, Sam, survive him.Mr. Jones and Mr. Schmidt seemed to have a knack for long runs. “I Do! I Do!” has had countless other productions since it was on Broadway, including one in Minneapolis that ran from 1971 to 1993, with the same two actors, David Anders and Susan Goeppinger, in the same roles the whole time.Among the other shows on which Mr. Jones and Mr. Schmidt collaborated was “Celebration,” which ran for three months on Broadway in 1969 and which Mr. Jones also directed. They created a musical version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” but when Mary Martin, who had originated the female role in “I Do! I Do!” on Broadway and was to star, became ill, the project was derailed.In a 2002 interview with The Times, Mr. Jones said that though he wasn’t displeased that “The Fantasticks” had dominated his career, he regretted that it overshadowed some of the other work he and Mr. Schmidt had done.“It’s nice to be remembered for anything,” he said. “I do hope and believe that there is going to come a time, probably after we’re dead, when someone will say, ‘What are these other weirdo titles?’ and they’ll say, ‘This is strange; this is interesting stuff.’” More

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      At the Edinburgh Festival, Wrestling With Identity

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      In plays from Scotland, Korea and Switzerland, theater companies explored questions of belonging, with varying degrees of success.Questions of nationhood, identity and belonging loom large in three politically themed productions at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. The tagline for this year’s edition is “community over chaos,” and there was plenty of both in “Thrown,” a National Theater of Scotland production running at the Traverse Theater through Aug. 27.Written by Nat McCleary and directed by Johnny McKnight, it’s a sentimental comedy about five women from Glasgow who travel to the Scottish countryside to compete in a backhold wrestling tournament. In this folk sport, indigenous to Scotland, competitors are initially locked into a clamp-like hug, before trying to wrestle each other to the ground. It dates back more than a thousand years, and the escapade is a kind of pilgrimage for the characters as they seek to connect with their national heritage. Along the way they playfully dissect what it means to be Scottish, reeling off some serviceable — if not terribly original — gags about haggis, kilts and “Braveheart.”Personality clashes emerge. Jo (Adiza Shardow), who is mixed race, and Chantelle (Chloe-Ann Taylor), who is white, are both working class and have been best pals since their school days, whereas Imogen (Efé Agwele), who is Black, was expensively educated and is new on the scene. When Imogen encourages Jo to take a greater interest in racial politics, this puts a strain on Jo and Chantelle’s friendship. Chantelle resents Imogen for boiling everything down to race and vents her frustration at being seen as privileged, simply because she is white. Imogen, in turn, points out that her affluent upbringing has not protected her from racism. They are both right, of course, and their circular squabbling brings home the absurdity of pitting different types of oppression against each other.Lesley Hart is boisterously engaging as the group’s intense coach, Pam, but the star of the show is Maureen Carr, who plays Helen, the most unlikely of the five wrestlers. Diminutive in stature and older than the rest of the gang, she is a fish out of water who Carr plays with winning geniality. Helen provides moral support to Pam when she reveals her struggles with her gender identity and delivers the play’s defining monologue: a positive message of unity through celebrating difference.Pam explains that the play’s title denotes the feeling helplessness in the split second when you realize you’re about to lose a wrestling match. The sport is a metaphor for personal struggle, and the team, of course, is a metaphor for the Scottish nation. It’s heartwarming stuff, but heavy-handedly allegorical.Maureen Carter, right, who plays Helen, is the standout actor of the show. She delivers the play’s defining monologue: a positive message of unity through celebrating difference.Julie Howden“Dusk,” a show that the Brazilian theater maker Christiane Jatahy developed with the Swiss company Comédie de Genève, is more intellectually ambitious, but similarly flawed. Its protagonist, a young undocumented migrant called Graça (Julia Bernat), takes a job with a French-speaking theater troupe that is working on a stage adaptation of the Lars Von Trier movie “Dogville.”Graça claims to have fled Brazil as a political refugee, and the troupe’s members believe they are doing a good turn by hiring her, but relations sour when troubling stories emerge about her history. The women in the group become nasty as they suspect Graça has designs on their partners, and one male colleague, a naturalized citizen, takes against her because she reminds him of his own past experience as a hated outsider. The dynamic tips into exploitation and abuse, both psychological and sexual.Jatahy is known for work that blends the conventions of theater and cinema. Here, the onstage action is recorded by a camcorder synced up to a large screen displaying close-up footage in real time. This is occasionally interspersed with prerecorded footage that differs jarringly from what’s happening on the stage. The intention is to discombobulate the audience, and it does. The trouble, however, is that the big screen ultimately overshadows the actors’ in-the-flesh presence, as the eye is continually drawn upward. One might as well be at the movies.In “Dusk,” directed by Christiane Jatahy, close-up footage of the actors is displayed in real time on a screen at the back of the stage.Magali DougadosRunning at the Royal Lyceum Theater through Aug. 27, “Dusk” is a provocative and pointedly bleak allegory of liberal hypocrisy. The central concept is strong, but the play is let down by overkill, especially in not one, but two, graphic depictions of sexual violence. When, after the second, the fictional troupe’s director (played by Matthieu Sampeur) earnestly agonizes over the ethics of storytelling, we detect a none-too-subtle attempt to pre-empt criticisms that “Dusk” trades too heavily on shock value. (Reader, it does.)The final 30 minutes of this 90-minute production are spent laboring the message of the first hour, culminating in a catastrophically unnecessary audience-facing lecture from Graça on xenophobia, gendered violence and the rise of the far right. The applause at the end of the show was damningly restrained.A refreshing antidote to that production’s audiovisual clutter came in an exquisite production of Euripides’ “Trojan Women,” by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea. (The final performance of its three-show run is Aug. 11.) Set in the immediate aftermath of the decade-long Trojan War, it portrays the women of Troy as they await their imminent subjugation by the Greeks, who, having killed the Trojan menfolk, intend to take the women as wives or slaves.The National Changgeuk Company of Korea production of “Trojan Women” directed by Ong Keng Sen.Jess ShurteThe director, Ong King Sen, and the playwright Bae Sam-sik, have done a fine job of reimagining this tale, which is mostly told through the medium of Pansori, a Korean genre of musical storytelling in which singing is accompanied by drumming. The propulsive pounding of the drum lends the songs a certain martial quality, which combines with the mournful tones of a zither and the singers’ plaintive laments to produce a powerful blend of sorrow and defiance. Kim Kum-mi delivers a vocal performance of remarkable intensity as the Trojan queen Hecuba, and Yi So-yeon is arresting as the fey clairvoyant Cassandra.The splendid set, by Cho Myung-hee is all the more imposing for its elegant simplicity. The Trojan women emerge, clad in white, from a strange, otherworldly tunnel flanked by two golden staircases; at various points, the structure is brought to life with elaborate lighting effects to evoke fire and sea.Euripides’s play dates from 415 B.C., but its enduring resonance is all too obvious as we look around the world today and reflect, for example, on the anniversary of the genocide by ISIS of the Yazidi people of Syria and Iraq — and the subsequent sexual enslavement of hundreds of Yazidi women — which began nine years ago this month; or the mounting evidence of sexual violence by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.Hecuba’s howl of anguish — “Destiny is drunk, the gods are blind!” — is a lament for the ages, a visceral and succinct protest against the abject cruelty of war.Edinburgh International FestivalThrough Aug. 28 at various venues in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk. More

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      Can ’Candide,’ ‘Rent’ and ‘Spamalot’ Ever Be Truly Revived?

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      “Candide” in an opera house. “Spamalot” and “Rent” cheek by jowl with Shakespeare. But treating them as classics may not be doing them justice.There comes a moment in the afterlife of even the most successful musical when it threatens to become a museum piece. One day, it’s the hot new thing, perhaps even defining its era; next, it’s “The Merry Widow.”On a theater trip through New York State and Ontario last month, I saw three musical revivals in various stages of that transformation: one — “Candide” — fully evolved into an opera house staple that’s rarely performed anywhere else; the other two — “Rent” and “Spamalot” — on uncertain trajectories toward classic status or the dustbin.The “Candide,” at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., opened with what seemed to be an acknowledgment of the situation. From a stageful of shadows at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, Glimmerglass’s home on sparkling Otsego Lake, dim forms awakened as if from a long slumber, emerging from tarps and storage trunks. Eventually a sort of ghostly maitre d’ cued the orchestra, which sprang to life with the undying joy of Leonard Bernstein’s overture.It was an indication that the somewhat zombified story of “Candide” would always need resuscitating by the music. Rejiggered every which way since it was first produced on Broadway in 1956, the book has so many problems and variations that the options for reviving it resemble a game of 3-D chess. And the list of musical numbers Bernstein wrote to accommodate the changes — then discarded, rewrote, re-discarded, recombined and otherwise cycled into and out of the score — comes to nearly 100 titles.Glimmerglass’s version, originally produced there in 2015, is itself a revival, no more dramaturgically coherent in Francesca Zambello’s staging than any other. Though adapted from a Voltaire novella generally considered a masterpiece, its story — an innocent boy’s education in optimism is undone by the ever more absurd horrors of the actual world — becomes a case of diminishing returns when staged. Nora Ephron, noting that you get tired of the characters’ misadventures long before they do, called it a musical that always seems to be great “on the night you’re not seeing it.”True, yet it is at the same time glorious. Young singers with clarion voices — and a 42-piece opera orchestra, conducted with incisive good humor by Joseph Colaneri — bear you swiftly through the longueurs. In the process, a flop that tried too hard to be au courant, satirizing America’s postwar euphoria, is transformed into a timeless piece that, having found its niche, lives on and on. When Candide and his lover, separated by various disasters, sing the lovely and witty “You Were Dead, You Know,” they might be singing about the show itself.Brian Vu, center, as the title character in “Candide,” whose optimism is unraveled over the course of the musical by the horrors of the real world.Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass FestivalThere’s a similar moment in “Spamalot,” the deliberately ludicrous musical by Eric Idle and the composer John Du Prez. If you’re familiar with “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the 1975 movie on which it’s closely based, you’ll probably be laughing even before a chorus of medieval plague victims, being carted off in tumbrels, sing pathetically that they’re “not dead yet.” One of them insists he’s in fact feeling much better.I don’t know whether “Spamalot,” playing this year at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, can expect a similar recovery. A Broadway hit in 2005, it offered silly distraction and precision direction (by no less than Mike Nichols) in the ongoing dark after the Sept. 11 attacks. Not that it was designed to speak to its time, let alone all time; it was content just to fill time. Its ambitions seemed limited to rhyming “Lancelot” with “dance a lot” and trotting out a Python dream team including the French taunter, the knights who say “Ni” and a chorus line of self-flagellating monks bonking themselves on the upbeat.Like the movie, it was a blast, even if its satire, coming from all directions, seemed to have no target. (Much of what it pokes fun at are the conventions of musicals themselves.) Seeing it at Stratford, as part of a 12-show repertory that includes four Shakespeare productions as well as new plays and modern classics, is a disorienting experience. As comedies go, it’s no “Much Ado About Nothing.” The festival’s dignity and its ethos of highbrow good work do something weird to material so deliberately lowbrow and anti-establishment.In 2018 at Stratford, “The Rocky Horror Show” suffered from a similar problem — but recent Stratford productions of “Chicago,” “The Music Man” and “Guys and Dolls” (all directed and choreographed by Donna Feore) did not. The festival does sincerity, even the gimlet-eyed kind, very well. But as directed by Lezlie Wade and choreographed by Jesse Robb, “Spamalot” feels hasty and mechanical, relying on the prefab jokes to do most of the work. They don’t.Yet it’s not clear to me that even a fresher and more idiomatic take would solve much. (We’ll have a chance to find out with the arrival of a completely different “Spamalot” revival on Broadway this fall.) For many of us, the punchlines are so ingrained that they have become golden oldies, suitable for a kind of karaoke pleasure but unlikely to produce helpless guffaws. Maybe comedy needs to skip a few generations until minds that know nothing of migratory coconuts can test its enduring worth.But what about tragedy? For the sake of argument, let’s call “Rent” a tragedy even though it does everything in its considerable power to turn the nightmare of AIDS in the late 1980s, recalling parallel plagues in its 19th-century sources, into musical theater uplift. And time has further distorted it. In the manner of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in their time, the show’s big anthem, “Seasons of Love,” has now delaminated from its story entirely. Instead of a plea to treasure brief lives, it has become an all-purpose good-times chorale; my sons (today in their late 20s) sang it at their elementary school graduations.Nestor Lozano Jr., center, as the drag queen Angel in the 2023 Stratford Festival production of “Rent.”David HouAn author should be so lucky as to have that problem, but it nevertheless is a problem. So is the meta-tragedy surrounding “Rent,” whose author, Jonathan Larson, died at 35 in the hours just before the show’s scheduled premiere. The work has essentially been frozen as he left it that day in 1996. Thom Allison, who directed Stratford’s production, told me that permission for even the tiniest change in the script, to correct an acknowledged inconsistency, was denied by the estate’s representatives.That leaves new generations little wiggle room in which to experiment with refreshing “Rent” and finessing its headaches. As always, it struck me in the Stratford production that the work of the downtown artists the show means to valorize is actually terrible; that the central male character is utterly passive; that its credibility as history is all but shattered by the last-minute resurrection of a character we’ve just watched succumb to AIDS. Having seen “Spamalot” the night before, I was surprised she didn’t sing “I’m Not Dead Yet” as she awoke.Yet Allison’s staging at Stratford’s flagship Festival Theater, also home this season to “Much Ado About Nothing” and “King Lear,” made a pretty good case that, in its scale at least, “Rent” can hold its own in such company. Certainly the story of the drag queen Angel and her lover Tom Collins (traced in the songs “Today 4 U,” “I’ll Cover You” and “Santa Fe”) has a full arc and tragic grandeur, enhanced here by frankness. The sight of Angel, beneath her drag, covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions from neck to ankle (thanks to a cleverly made body suit) sent me reeling back to 1989.The question is whether “Rent” can be meaningful even for those unable to be reeled back that way. The Stratford production makes the case that it can, but however much the appearance of a new section of the AIDS quilt during the finale moved me, I wondered how many people under 40 even knew what it was. Some shows are so of their moment that they cannot be wholly of ours.CandideThrough Aug. 20 at the Glimmerglass Festival, Cooperstown, N.Y.; glimmerglass.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.SpamalotThrough Oct. 28 at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.RentThrough Oct. 28 at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca. Running time: 2 hours 41 minutes. More