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      Review: Young Bros and Maidens Harmonize in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’

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      This peculiar early Shakespeare comedy gets updated with 10 songs for a youthful alfresco production.“Let’s rock!” is something I’m pretty sure no character in Shakespeare ever said. But on a sandy stage under a jaunty tent, with a green hillside as a welcoming backdrop, it seemed an apt way to begin “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”It is, after all, a young man’s play, both in its authorship (Shakespeare was about 30) and story (four callow bros fall madly in love with four sharp maidens). And this production, directed by Amanda Dehnert for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, intensifies the youth-crush factor with 10 emo songs. Neither fully true to the strange original nor completely remade as a viable musical, it swings between those poles in ways that are both tiresome and charming.Let’s start with the charming: The catchy songs, by Dehnert and the Chicago-based composer André Pluess, tap the sappy heart of summer and are danceable to boot. (You may be the audience member asked at one point to prove it.) Whether folky or funky, and despite lyrics that sound little like Shakespeare — “she’s a nice girl, always thinking twice girl” — they match the story emotionally, with titles like “The Infinite Ones” (as youth always sees itself) and “Change to Black” (as youth at some point must do).That the songs don’t match the story structurally is probably an insuperable problem. “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” with or without the British “u,” is a very youthful, disjointed text, its thin thread of plot repeatedly cut by clowns, dullards, puns, pomposities and noodling that goes nowhere. Misdelivered letters and absurd disguises contribute. By the time you get to the masque near the end, featuring impenetrable spoofs of the nine classical “worthies,” you may doubt young Shakespeare’s judgment of worthiness.And yet his ear for the painful paradoxes of love is already fully in evidence. The four young men of Navarre, who form a “Seinfeld”-like pact to abjure the company of women for three years, break it almost instantly when a delegation of four visiting gentlewomen arrives from France to resolve a diplomatic issue. (After many readings and viewings of the play, I still don’t know what that issue is.) In supple pentameter, Shakespeare explores the difference between the book learning the young men meant to engage in and the learning that emerges, despite their plans, from “the prompting eyes of beauty’s tutors.”From left, Mayadevi Ross, Emily Ota, Antoinette Robinson and Phoebe Lloyd in the play, with music and lyrics by Amanda Dehnert and André Pluess.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, theirs is a bumpy road to maturity. Spurred on by Berowne, “a man replete with mocks,” they double down on whimsy, dressing up for some reason as Russians to bamboozle their intendeds. (In Dehnert’s staging, the “Muscovites” are a rock group.) In response, the women, spurred on by Rosaline, whose eye “Jove’s lightning bears,” disguise themselves as one another to confuse and trump the men. But just as all of this gets sorted, with a quadruple marriage (or more) in sight, a last-minute death delays the nuptials and forestalls a normal resolution.“Our wooing doth not end like an old play,” Berowne says. “Jack hath not Jill” — which if true enough to life, is way too sudden for dramaturgy.The Hudson Valley Shakespeare production is not the first to struggle with such problems in musicalizing “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” But unlike the 1973 opera by Nicolas Nabokov, with a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, or the musical comedy presented by the Public Theater in 2013, with songs by Michael Friedman, Dehnert’s version does not use its songs to deepen character and propel the story.They are generally too short and atmospheric for that, most being sung between scenes instead of during them, and by members of the multitasking cast-slash-band (guitars, drums, accordion) who are observing the action, not experiencing it. The addition of songs, however beguiling, thus winds up emphasizing the play’s ungainliness by adding another unintegrated element and stretching the run time. A full-blown musical might have worked better, but at two hours and 40 minutes, it’s already too long for a summer romp.That’s a shame, because some of the singers — including Melissa Mahoney, who plays the “wench” Jaquenetta, and Luis Quintero, one of the dullards — have great voices. Others compare favorably only with the chorus of mosquitoes that always accompanies a Hudson Valley Shakespeare outing. But if discipline is not the top vocal note, rawness verging on excessiveness is a kind of authenticity in a show about raw, excessive youth.Authenticity is not sufficient when speaking the verse, though; it requires more finesse than some of the young actors yet possess. Getting your mouth around the overlapping and oddly shaped dialogue can be like eating an unpeeled pineapple.Luckily, Stephen Michael Spencer as Berowne and Antoinette Robinson as Rosaline are standouts, fully inhabiting the process of growing up and growing wise. At first almost adversaries — he impulsive and she haughty — they gradually move toward the middle as the invented trials of infatuation give way to the real ones of love. Both are also generally spared the over-emphatic jollity that Dehnert has evidently encouraged as a way of plowing through difficult passages of dialogue and forcing the weird jokes to bloom. It’s no fun when the people onstage are having more fun than you.Still, despite its lapses and longueurs, “Love’s Labor’s Lost” remains in this version a fascinating and feelingful taste of Shakespeare to come. And if in his later works he generally improved on many of the tricks pioneered here, that too is apt. Like those tricks, this musical, as it develops for future productions, may one day improve on its first, green outing.Love’s Labor’s LostThrough Aug. 27 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      At Two Summer Theater Festivals, Reassuring Signs of Life

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      The industry is facing challenges, but in western Massachusetts the quality of the works is as rich as ever, our critic writes.Suddenly, out of the darkness, came one of the most thrilling sounds an audience can make: a collective gasp. This is how you know that the crowd is rapt, that the storytelling has taken hold. And so it had the other night during a performance of “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at Barrington Stage Company, where a different plot twist elicited another welcome noise: a mid-scene eruption of delighted applause. Humans can be a lot of fun to see a show with.That’s something to keep in mind at this crisis moment in the theater, whose prepandemic audiences have yet to return in their former numbers, and whose programming has shrunk accordingly. But that doesn’t mean the work itself has withered. Over a couple of days in Western Massachusetts last week, I saw two plays, one play reading and one cabaret, and if you looked at the quality of what was there — rather than the quantity of what was not — you’d hardly know that anything was amiss. And Barrington Stage, anyway, has not scaled back this year.“Blues for an Alabama Sky,” directed by Candis C. Jones on the Boyd-Quinson Stage in Pittsfield, Mass., is a tone-perfect production of Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play, set in the summer of 1930, that has plenty of resonance in the summer of 2023. It also shimmers with the charisma of a terrific cast playing funny, likable, fully dimensional friends.Angel (Tsilala Brock), a role originated by Phylicia Rashad, is a Harlem nightclub singer with a voice to fit her name. Guy (Brandon Alvión) is a chicly fabulous costume designer with exquisite taste. In the middle of the Great Depression, they are both freshly out of work — since the night Angel told off her gangster ex from the stage, and Guy defended her. Now they’re roommates, sharing his apartment.Angel hopes that Leland (DeLeon Dallas), a conventionally religious Southern stranger, will swoop in and save her, even though they are a catastrophic mismatch. Guy plans to be rescued by Josephine Baker, whose portrait hangs from his wall like a deity. He sends his designs to her in Paris, fantasizing that she will whisk him there.Across the hall, Angel and Guy’s earnest, impassioned social worker friend, Delia (Jasminn Johnson), is helping to open a family planning clinic — and maybe falling for their nightlife-loving doctor friend, Sam (Ryan George), who delivers babies all over the neighborhood.“I’m not trying to make a revolution,” Delia says, and if her drably sensible suits are any indication, she means it. “I’m just trying to give women in Harlem the chance to plan their families.”But self-determination — control over one’s own body in particular — has always been revolutionary, and freedom from straitjacketing social mores is what Angel and Guy have been chasing ever since they left Savannah for Harlem. As a Black woman and a gay Black man, they’ve each encountered violence aimed at them for that.“Blues for an Alabama Sky” is about the tenacity of hope, the limits of forgiveness and the romance of defiance. It’s a glittering spoken blues, layered with yearning.Bill Irwin in master-clown mode at the Williamstown Theater Festival, which is hosting a series of cabaret performances this summer.Emilio MadridAbout 20 miles north of Pittsfield, Williamstown Theater Festival is producing a drastically cropped season, none of whose offerings are open to review — because, a publicist said, they “are all in active development.” Fair enough. But the festival — which landed in trouble in 2021 when workers accused it of exploiting them, and in response produced a streamlined 2022 season — hasn’t lost its stardust, even without its customary fully staged productions.In the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance at Williams College, the festival’s longtime home, the WTF Cabaret set (by Se Hyun Oh) is stark, the lighting (by Emily Schmit) glamorous. Both audience and performers are onstage, with the auditorium’s rows of empty seats forming the backdrop for the show. A sculptural array of illuminated bulbs hangs in the air, like a constellation of ghost lights. Simplicity, this summer, is the festival’s friend.So, last weekend, was the actor Jeff Hiller. Lately risen on the cultural radar thanks to HBO’s heart-stirring friendship dramedy “Somebody Somewhere,” he hosted the cabaret, trying out comic material for an August show at Joe’s Pub. Bill Irwin performed in master-clown mode, and Jacob Ming-Trent knocked his songs so far out of the park that he could not have been a better advertisement for seeing him down the road in Lenox, Mass., playing Bottom in Shakespeare & Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Aug. 1-Sept. 10).The cabaret hosts and guests change each weekend, but the band and the core performers (Eden Espinosa, Asmeret Ghebremichael and Jon-Michael Reese) are constants. Reese’s fresh, textured interpretation of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” given a soulful flourish by the music director, Joel Waggoner, ought to be a constant, too.Nearby at the Clark, I saw a Williamstown Theater Festival reading of Cindy Lou Johnson’s “Plunder and Lightning,” directed by Portia Krieger. It would be unfair to evaluate the play, about a family of schemers teetering on the edge of ruin, but it was a genuine joy to watch Annie Golden rip into a substantial comic part, with the brilliant Johanna Day alongside her. Not a bad lineup for a Friday afternoon, or for a $15 ticket. And the legroom? Miles of it.Barrington Stage Company presented the world premiere of Mike Lew’s “tiny father,” a comedy set in a neonatal intensive care unit, featuring Andy Lucien as the father of a premature baby.Daniel RaderBack in Pittsfield, Barrington Stage Company was also engaged in new work: the world premiere of Mike Lew’s “tiny father” — a comedy set in a neonatal intensive care unit, where Daniel (Andy Lucien) has become the father of a daughter born 14 weeks premature, and is soon a solo parent. Caroline (Jennifer Ikeda), a nurse on the unit, is his guide through this alien landscape — and sometimes, Daniel thinks, his opponent there.Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, it’s a smart play about parenthood, and the ways race and gender play into expectations and outcomes in health care and elsewhere. (Daniel is Black, his baby’s mother is Asian, and Caroline is written to be played by an Asian or Latina actress.) But the script demands an exceptionally tricky balance of comedy and emotional complexity in the portrayal of Daniel, which this production has yet to find. Talking to the baby, Sophia, though, Lucien is lovely always.Good news, then, from a theatrical landscape lately festooned with co-productions. Though this “tiny father” has ended its Barrington Stage run, it will get a chance to go deeper when it moves to Chautauqua Theater Company in Chautauqua, N.Y., next week. Butts in seats, please.Blues for an Alabama SkyThrough Aug. 5 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org.tiny fatherAug. 4-17 in the Bratton Theater at the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, N.Y.; chq.org. More

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      A Guide to Summer Theater Festivals in New York and the Berkshires

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      In summertime, a lot of stage talent heads for the Hudson River Valley and western Massachusetts, where curious audiences follow. Here is some of what theaters there have on tap this year.Hudson Valley Shakespeare FestivalAmong this summer’s offerings at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival is a production of “Henry V,” directed by Davis McCallum, the company’s artistic director.T. Charles EricksonThis company has a knack for magnificent vistas. Its new home is high above the Hudson River in Garrison, N.Y., with breathtaking views. Picnicking, should you care to, is very much part of the preshow experience, and performances are alfresco, under a sturdy, festive, big white tent. But productions here often use the landscape just outside for striking tableaus, with the tent’s wide, arced entrance framing bits of action on the sloping lawn.This season’s shows are Shakespeare’s “Henry V” (through Aug. 21), directed by Davis McCallum, the company’s artistic director; a musical spin on Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labor’s Lost” (through Aug. 27), adapted and directed by Amanda Dehnert, who wrote the pop-rock score with André Pluess; and “Penelope” (Sept. 2-17), a solo musical re-envisioning of “The Odyssey,” directed by Eva Steinmetz, with music and lyrics by Alex Bechtel, who wrote the book with Grace McLean and Steinmetz. (hvshakespeare.org)New York Stage and FilmThe dance musical “Paradise Ballroom,” featuring choreography by Princess Lockerooo, above, will close out New York Stage and Film’s season next weekend.Kenny RodriguezThere is a particular excitement to seeing theater by daring artists while it is still taking shape. Such is the allure of New York Stage and Film’s readings and workshops, on the campus of Marist College in Poughkeepsie. Last weekend, people filing in to see Lauren Yee and Heather Christian’s new musical adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” were handed a slip of paper advising that many lyrics would be spoken, not sung. “There is much music still to be written,” it said. Disappointing? Not if you approach these shows knowing that they are incubating. Also, Katrina Lenk was playing Mrs. Whatsit, fabulously.The company’s new-play readings this weekend are “The Good Name” (July 29), written by Sopan Deb, a New York Times reporter, and directed by Trip Cullman; and “Downstairs Neighbor” (July 29), by Beth Henley, directed by Jaki Bradley. The season closes with the dance musical “Paradise Ballroom” (Aug. 4-6), directed by Colette Robert, with book, lyrics and choreography by Princess Lockerooo, and music by Harold O’Neal; and a workshop presentation of “Like They Do in the Movies” (Aug. 5-6), a solo show written and performed by Laurence Fishburne, directed by Leonard Foglia. (newyorkstageandfilm.org)Williamstown Theater FestivalFrom left, Jon-Michael Reese, Natalie Joy Johnson and Eden Espinosa at a recent WTF Cabaret performance. The loose and lively weekend concert series has a rotating roster of performers.Emilio MadridWestern Massachusetts’s most powerful magnet for boldface-name stage artists is taking a sparer approach this year — minimal physical production, a focus on works in progress, blink-and-you-miss-them runs. But even as the company looks for a less costly, more sustainable way forward, it has not left glamour behind.At the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance at Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass., the play reading on the main stage this weekend is Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (July 29-30), with Meryl Streep’s daughters, Louisa Jacobson, Mamie Gummer and Grace Gummer, in the title roles, and her son, Henry Wolfe Gummer, as the sisters’ brother. Next weekend, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Michael Chernus and Alison Pill star in a reading of Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman” (Aug. 5-6).The loose and lively WTF Cabaret, on the same intimate stage, is hosted this week by the comedian Lewis Black (July 27-29) and next week by the comedian Jaye McBride (Aug. 3-5). The band is terrific.The festival’s Fridays@3 reading series takes place close by, at the Clark Art Institute, where you might want to leave time to see the exhibition “Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth” or dip your toes in the three-tiered reflecting pool outside. (It’s allowed.) With Diana Oh in the cast, Clarence Coo’s “Chapters of a Floating Life” (July 28) is about two couples from China in postwar New York City. The series finishes with Aurora Real de Asua’s “Wipeout” (Aug. 4), a septuagenarian surfing comedy with Emily Kuroda, Becky Ann Baker and Candy Buckley. (wtfestival.org)Barrington Stage CompanyA revival of Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” with Tsilala Brock, left, and Ryan George, is at Barrington Stage Company through Aug. 5.Daniel RaderIn downtown Pittsfield, Mass., this theater has a slate of full productions this summer. A beautifully acted, vibrantly designed revival of Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky” is on the Boyd-Quinson Stage (through Aug. 5), followed by a revival of William Finn and James Lapine’s musical “A New Brain” (Aug. 16-Sept. 10). With a cast that includes Adam Chanler-Berat, Andy Grotelueschen and Mary Testa, it’s produced in association with Williamstown Theater Festival.A few blocks away, on the St. Germain Stage at the Sydelle and Lee Blatt Performing Arts Center, Julianne Boyd directs Brian Friel’s classic “Faith Healer” (Aug. 1-27), a drama told in monologues. Downstairs, Mr. Finn’s Cabaret presents a lineup of Broadway veterans: Lillias White (Aug. 13-14), currently playing Hermes in “Hadestown”; Hugh Panaro (Aug. 21), a former Phantom in “The Phantom of the Opera”; the composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown (Aug. 31-Sept. 1), whose musical “Parade” just won the Tony Award for best revival; and Alan H. Green (Sept. 2-3), a company favorite. (barringtonstageco.org)Berkshire Theater GroupChristine Lahti in Berkshire Theater Group’s production of the actress’s autobiographical solo show “The Smile of Her.”Emma K. Rothenberg-WareThis is the final weekend to catch Christine Lahti in “The Smile of Her” (through July 29), an autobiographical solo show about her suburban family in the patriarchal 1950s, at the Unicorn Theater in Stockbridge, Mass. Next up, also at the Unicorn, is the world premiere of the musical “On Cedar Street” (Aug. 12-Sept. 2), about two widowed small-town neighbors who start sleeping side by side to alleviate their loneliness. Adapted from Kent Haruf’s final novel, “Our Souls at Night,” it has a book by Emily Mann, music by Lucy Simon and Carmel Dean and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead. (berkshiretheatregroup.org)Shakespeare & CompanyBrian D. Coats and Ella Joyce in a production of August Wilson’s “Fences,” through Aug. 27, at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass.Eran ZelixonNot a lot of Shakespeare is among the theater happening this summer in green and gorgeous Lenox, Mass., but “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Aug. 1-Sept. 10) is coming right up in an open-air production, with the excellent Jacob Ming-Trent as Bottom. Ken Ludwig’s two-hander “Dear Jack, Dear Louise” (through July 30) is wrapping up its run in another of the company’s outdoor spaces.Indoors are August Wilson’s “Fences” (through Aug. 27), William Gibson’s “Golda’s Balcony” (Aug. 5-20) and Donald Margulies’s “Lunar Eclipse” (Sept. 15-Oct. 22), making its world premiere with Karen Allen and Reed Birney at the tail end of summer. Also inside: a staged reading of “Hamlet” (Sept. 1-3), with Finn Wittrock in the title role and Christopher Lloyd, who played the mad monarch in Shakespeare & Company’s “King Lear” two summers ago, as Polonius. (shakespeare.org) More

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      Book Review: ‘Tom Lake,’ by Ann Patchett

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      This time the celebrated novelist spins the cozy tale of a former actress, her three daughters and their rueful memories. There’s a cherry orchard, too.Are you in possession of a hammock? A creaky old porch swing? A bay window with built-in seating? If not, Ann Patchett’s new novel, “Tom Lake,” will situate you there mentally. I wouldn’t be surprised if it put your fitness tracker on the fritz, even if you amble around listening to Meryl Streep read the audio version.This author is such a decorated and beloved figure in American letters — spinning out novels, memoirs and essays like so many multicolored silks; opening an independent bookstore in Nashville to fight the Amazon anaconda; even helping care for Tom Hanks’s cancer-stricken personal assistant — that I sometimes think of her as Aunt Patchett.Patchett’s actual family of origin was complicated, as she made explicit after the 2016 publication of the semi-autobiographical “Commonwealth.” “The Dutch House” (2019), which had a wicked stepmother, did not stray far from the idea that living with relatives can be messy and hellish.With “Tom Lake,” she treats us — and perhaps herself — to a vision of a family beautifully, bucolically simple: nuclear, in its pre-bomb meaning.Like some guardian angel in the sky, Anton Chekhov hovers over this story, which features three sisters in their 20s and is set on their parents’ cherry orchard(albeit in northern Michigan during the recent pandemic, not the tuberculosis-torn Russian provinces). But Thornton Wilder is driving the tractor.Sequestered not unhappily in lockdown, the sisters’ mother, Lara (she dropped a “u” after reading “Doctor Zhivago”), is telling them, after tiring days in the field, about her long-ago, short-lived career as an actress, whose highlight was starring as Emily Gibbs, the tragic heroine of Wilder’s enduringly popular piece of Americana, “Our Town.”In flashbacks we learn she played Emily in both high school and college in New Hampshire, also home to the play’s fictional Grover’s Corners. Then, after a brief and disorienting detour to Hollywood, she returns to the role in summer stock at a theater company, the titular Tom Lake, that happened to be nearish the orchard.“Even hawking Diet Dr Pepper I was Emily, because she was the only thing I knew how to do,” Lara realized after starting rehearsals to play Mae in Sam Shepard’s rather less innocent “Fool for Love.” “I had the range of a box turtle. I was excellent, as long as no one moved me.” Emily is as important to her as Barbie, apparently, was to so many others: a character so formative, she provides the name for Lara’s firstborn.Lara’s Emily doesn’t aspire to be an actress — that particular affliction has befallen the youngest daughter, Nell, named for Lara’s seamstress grandmother — but she is powerfully fixated on her mother’s former co-star and ex-boyfriend: one Peter Duke, who played Emily Webb’s father at Tom Lake.“Duke,” as everyone calls him, goes on to become a huge celebrity, enchanting the kiddies in a movie musical called “The Popcorn King,” singing and dancing on a floor covered with kernels, then becoming a Serious Actor, winning an Oscar and inevitably descending into addiction. As a teen, Lara’s Emily grows convinced he, not Lara’s hardworking fruit-farmer husband, was her father, and Patchett drops in enough subtle commonalities — their hair, a certain physical rubberiness (“whoever installed her interior compass put the magnet in upside down”) — that the reader is left in genuine suspense about whether it’s true.But the larger theme is that it may not matter: Our children inherit the full range of our experience, as much as genetic traits.“Tom Lake” isn’t a prudish novel — the flashbacks are to the 1980s, when parents hovered a lot less — but it is a resolutely folksy, cozy one, a thing of pies and quilts and nettlesome goats and a middle child named Maisie after the other grandmother. (Lara, in her late 50s up there in rural Michigan, is a demographic anomaly, leaving so many of her old friends in the deep fog of memory without trying to hunt them down on Facebook.) Nell senior had a sewing business and countrified sayings appear here like dropped stitches. You could have knocked me over with a feather!Idle hands? We all know whose workshop they are. You “can’t swing a cat” without hitting a castle, in Scotland.Two performances of Wilder’s Stage Manager are “as different as chalk and cheese.”But Patchett is also, as always, slyly needlepointing her own pillowcase mottos. “There is no explaining this simple truth about life: You will forget much of it.” “Sweet cherries must be picked today and every day until they’re gone.” “Swimming is the reset button.” This last spoken by a lithe and beautiful Black character named Pallace — whose integration into the theatrical utopia seems just a tad too easy.“Tom Lake” is a quiet and reassuring book, not a rabble-rouser. It’s highly conscious of Emily Gibbs’s speech about human failure to appreciate the little things, the Stage Manager’s line about the earth “straining away all the time to make something of itself,” and of the ravages to that earth. Domestic contentment is its North Star, generational continuity its reliable moon. Only a cynic could resist lying down on a nice soft blanket to marvel at Patchett’s twinkling planetarium.TOM LAKE | By Ann Patchett | 320 pp. | HarperCollins | $30 More

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      Pamela Blair, an Original ‘Chorus Line’ Cast Member, Dies at 73

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      As Val, one of the dancers in the hit Broadway musical, she sang a memorable song explaining how she got work by enhancing her body through cosmetic surgery.Pamela Blair, who as the sassy and profane dancer Val in the original production of “A Chorus Line” delivered a showstopping song about enhancing her breasts and butt with silicone to get work as an actress, died on Sunday at her home in Mesa, Ariz. She was 73.Her former husband, the director Don Scardino, said the cause was complications of colon surgery, including pneumonia and sepsis. She also had Clippers disease, a chronic inflammation of the central nervous system.Ms. Blair was one of the performers who were invited to the workshops where “A Chorus Line” was developed, and who told the creative team — led by Michael Bennett, who conceived, directed and choreographed the show — deeply personal stories, which were used as material to build its characters.“The core of Val came from the anarchic character that was Pam,” Mr. Scardino said in a phone interview.Ms. Blair’s brassy solo, “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three” (a reference to the grades Val got at an audition before undergoing cosmetic surgery), was a paean to the benefits of silicone, among them the national tours Val was hired for. (Ms. Blair herself said she didn’t have her breasts enhanced.)In a number written, like the rest of the show’s score, by Marvin Hamlisch (music) and Edward Kliban (lyrics), Val sings, in part: “It’s a gas, just a dash of silicone/Shake your new maracas and you’re fine.”And:Where the cupboard once was bareNow you knock and someone’s thereYou have got ‘em, hey, top to bottom, hey.In reviewing “A Chorus Line” in its pre-Broadway run at the Public Theater in the East Village, Allan Wallach of Newsday called Ms. Blair “a marvelously defiant blonde” and Douglas Watt of The Daily News of New York described her as “blonde and saucy.” After moving to Broadway in 1975, the show ran for 6,137 performances. Ms. Blair stayed with it for about a year before joining the national tour.In 1980, Ms. Blair recalled the experience of singing “Dance Ten; Looks Three.”“When I sang that song, I really was like that girl,” she told The Hartford Courant. “I was blond. I was dumb. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I thought, ‘Damn it, I’m an actress too.’”She returned to Broadway in 1978, first in the musical “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” in which she played a prostitute, and later that year in another musical, “King of Hearts,” in which she played the youngest inmate in a mental hospital.She made her final Broadway appearance in 1990 when she replaced Megan Gallagher as Lt. Cmdr. Joanne Galloway, the only female character in Aaron Sorkin’s military drama “A Few Good Men.”“It was great at first, being the only girl with all those guys,” she told The Daily News in 1990. “But it didn’t last. Now they treat me like one of them. I get no respect. They go around backstage in their holey underwear — and even less!”Ms. Blair was also seen on soap operas like “Loving” and “Another World”; on prime-time series like “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”; and in films like John Huston’s version of the musical “Annie” (1982) and Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995).Ms. Blair in 1983 on the soap opera “Loving,” one of her several television appearances.BC Photo Archives/Disney, via Getty ImagesPamela Blair was born on Dec. 5, 1949, in Bennington, Vt. Her father, Edgar, worked at a company that made plastic molds. Her mother, Geraldine (Cummings) Blair, was a homemaker who worked part time in a local Christmas shop and as a library volunteer.When Ms. Blair was 16, she entered the National Ballet Academy New York. She met Mr. Bennett during a class there, which led to her being cast in her first Broadway role, in the 1968 musical “Promises, Promises,” which he choreographed.In 1972 and 1973, Ms. Blair played several roles in “Sugar,” a musical adaptation of the Billy Wilder comedy “Some Like It Hot” (unrelated to the current Broadway adaptation). She was the understudy for the title role, Sugar Kane, which Marilyn Monroe had played in the 1959 film, and replaced Elaine Joyce when she went on vacation.When asked how it felt to star in “Sugar,” she told the syndicated columnist Leonard Lyons: “I wasn’t that nervous. The butterflies hadn’t developed — they were still caterpillars.”In 1973, she played another small role in the musical “Seesaw,” for which Mr. Bennett was the director and one of two choreographers. A year later, she was cast as the seductive character known only as “Curley’s wife” in John Steinbeck’s stage adaptation of his novel “Of Mice and Men,” which starred James Earl Jones and Kevin Conway.“I can’t tell you how affected I was by acting with James Earl Jones,” she told Newsday. “To do a scene with him was so exciting. I would lose myself in him. I want that again.”She continued to work on TV and in films through 2009. By then, she had moved to Arizona and become a physical and massage therapist, although she return to the stage to play Miss Mona, who runs the Chicken Ranch brothel, in a 2006 Phoenix production of “Best Little Whorehouse.”Ms. Blair is survived by a sister, Cheryl Hard. Her marriages to Alfred Feola and Mr. Scardino ended in divorce.In 1980, Ms. Blair recalled the tension she felt while she was in “A Chorus Line,” mainly because of Mr. Bennett.“He made you live the show,” she told The Courant. “I mean, he’d make you think you were gonna be fired at any moment.”Near the end of her time in the show, she watched it from a seat in the audience.“I thought we were all so unhappy and yet we were giving people such joy,” she said. “I cried during the finale, and I remember thinking: This show was a miracle. Why couldn’t I have enjoyed it while it was happening?” More

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      Despite Acquittal, Kevin Spacey Faces Uphill Battle for Hollywood Roles

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      The actor, who was cleared of sexual assault charges in Britain this week, has parts in two small upcoming films. Yet his tarnished public perception makes starry roles unlikely.The two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey said last month that he was ready to return to acting after years in the wilderness following sexual assault allegations.“I know that there are people right now who are ready to hire me the moment I am cleared of these charges in London,” Mr. Spacey told a German magazine, referring to accusations that he had assaulted four men. “The second that happens, they’re ready to move forward.”Mr. Spacey was right in several ways: A British jury found him not guilty of nine counts of sexual assault this week, nearly a year after a federal jury in Manhattan cleared him of battery in a civil case filed by the actor Anthony Rapp. And he has two small projects awaiting release, with directors who could not be more publicly supportive.But the starry Hollywood roles, like Mr. Spacey’s conniving politician in “House of Cards” and droll advertising executive in “American Beauty,” may not come back anytime soon, if at all.Despite Mr. Spacey’s legal successes, his public perception is tarnished and a turnoff to studios and streaming services desperate to avoid controversy, said Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.“He’s in real trouble,” said Mr. Galloway, who previously served as executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter. “On the 0-to-10 scale, this is like a minus one.”During Mr. Spacey’s trial in Britain, he testified about the damage to his career after the public accusations began to emerge in 2017. “There was a rush to judgment and before the first question was asked or answered, I lost my job, I lost my reputation, I lost everything,” he said.Within months of the initial allegation, Mr. Spacey’s character was killed off in the final season of “House of Cards,” his scenes as J. Paul Getty in “All the Money in the World” were reshot with a different actor, and Netflix scrapped the film “Gore,” in which he played the writer Gore Vidal.Beyond two recently filmed parts listed on IMDb, a movie database, it is unclear whether Mr. Spacey is attached to any new projects. His team did not respond to a request for comment, and Mr. Spacey did not provide career insight after being acquitted this week. “I imagine that many of you can understand that there’s a lot for me to process,” he said from the courthouse steps.Mike Paul, a public relations expert who specializes in reputation and crisis management, said that considering the nature of the accusations Mr. Spacey faced, he must avoid “pouring gasoline back on issues that you don’t want gasoline on.” Hollywood, he said, wants to see a time of reflection and quiet analysis.The best bet, Mr. Galloway said, is for Mr. Spacey to develop projects for his production company, Trigger Street, or to pursue indie projects that value his acting prowess or consider the publicity a boon.Mr. Spacey’s two known upcoming roles are in minor movies: “Control,” a British film in which he plays a hacker who takes over a politician’s smart car (his part is voice only), and “Peter Five Eight,” a comedic thriller in which he plays a shadowy stranger who arrives in a small mountainside community.Spacey plays a shadowy stranger in the upcoming comedic thriller “Peter Five Eight.”Ascent Films Forever Safe ProductionsMichael Zaiko Hall, the writer and director of “Peter Five Eight,” said in an email that the film, which does not have an official release date, represented a return to the smaller independent films with which Mr. Spacey started his career.“We have here a double Oscar winner with legendary screen presence whose name has just been cleared,” Mr. Hall said. “I imagine there will be a thaw period, followed by a re-emergence into the culture.”Gene Fallaize, the writer and director of “Control,” said that he approached Mr. Spacey for the voice role last fall, and that the recent verdict showed “our gamble had paid off.” Before the jury’s decision, his movie had distribution deals in Germany, Russia and the Middle East. Now, Mr. Fallaize said, it was negotiating with American and British distributors.Mr. Fallaize added that Mr. Spacey might need to do independent movies for a year or two, showing he could generate commercial returns, before major studios would be prepared to work with him. Those movies might have to be in countries that have a more “lenient” view to allegations made against stars, Mr. Fallaize added.“It’s more likely for Europe to be receptive,” agreed Dominik Sedlar, a Croatian-born director and friend of Mr. Spacey’s whose father made a movie this year in which the actor played the country’s first president.Mr. Sedlar said that although Mr. Spacey had twice been vindicated by juries, Hollywood studios might keep shunning the actor “rather than admit they were wrong.”In recent years, both the Venice and Cannes film festivals have been happy to showcase work by directors and actors whose reputation has been stained in the United States, including Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Johnny Depp. On Thursday, spokeswomen for both festivals said their artistic directors were unavailable to comment on Mr. Spacey.Comebacks have always been hard in Hollywood, which may be politically liberal but is artistically and financially conservative.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockThere was similar reluctance from members of the London theater world, where Mr. Spacey was a regular star in the 1990s and 2000s and served as the artistic director of the Old Vic theater from 2004 to 2015. Representatives for 15 producers, West End theater owners and artistic directors either turned down or did not respond to interview requests to discuss Mr. Spacey’s future.Alistair Smith, editor of The Stage, Britain’s major theater newspaper, said in an email that Mr. Spacey’s return was “highly unlikely.” In 2017 the Old Vic published the findings of an independent investigation into Mr. Spacey’s tenure that revealed that 20 unnamed people accused him of unstated inappropriate behavior.“Those allegations have never been satisfactorily addressed by Spacey,” Mr. Smith said. “Unless they are, I can’t see him working in London theater again.”Comebacks have always been hard in Hollywood, which may be politically liberal but is artistically and financially conservative. For those who have succeeded, such as Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr., the road was long.“You need to completely reset your reputation,” Mr. Galloway said. In “fortress Hollywood, the drawbridge is pulled up, and it’s a dangerous moat to swim across.” More

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      Nonprofit Theaters Are in Crisis. A Times Reporter Spoke With 72 of Them

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      Michael Paulson spoke with producers and artistic directors at nonprofit theaters across the country about the crisis their industry is facing.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Michael Paulson, who has covered theater for The New York Times for eight years, knew the situation was bad at the country’s nonprofit regional theaters, which had yet to regain their prepandemic audiences.But in recent months, the shock waves have gotten bigger: One of the nation’s largest companies, Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, said it would pause production on one of its three stages and lay off 10 percent of its staff. The Lookingglass, an anchor of Chicago’s theater scene, halted production for the rest of the year. Then this month, New York’s prestigious Public Theater cut nearly one in five of its jobs.“We’ve seen an increase in the number of closings, and it felt like this is real and serious and important for readers to know about,” Mr. Paulson said in an interview.That observation formed the basis for an article by Mr. Paulson that appeared on the front page of Monday’s newspaper. To document the crisis at America’s regional theaters, he spoke with the leaders of 72 top-tier companies across the country.Here, Mr. Paulson reflects on the reasons for the upheaval, on the most promising solutions being proposed and on the balancing act he juggles between the demands of daily news reporting and investigative projects. This conversation has been edited.How many of the issues that challenge nonprofit theaters stem from the pandemic?The pandemic was an accelerant. But the issues at the heart of this crisis — the aging of the audience, the growing role of streaming media in people’s entertainment diets, the decline in subscriptions as the way consumers plan their theatergoing — were underway before it. The economic situation combined with this inflationary moment proved unsurvivable for a number of theaters and damaging for many more.Are these challenges unique to theaters, or are they true of the nonprofit arts sector in general?Theater has some particular vulnerabilities — it’s a niche art form, and a lot of nonprofits pride themselves on developing new work, which means a show sometimes has a title or is by an artist that audiences don’t yet know. A bunch of people told me audiences want to be sure they’re going to have a good time before they set aside the time and the money, and that often means going to something that’s already established, versus something that is just being introduced to the world.Seventy-two interviews is a lot for one article. Do you envision this piece being the first in a series?I do have a tendency to be an overreporter, but I wanted to be confident that what we were reporting reflected a national pattern and wasn’t just an extrapolation from a handful of worst-case scenarios. I expect that a lot of my time this year is going to be spent thinking and writing about the economic challenges facing theaters in America.How do you balance the demands of daily news reporting with bigger-picture projects?I’m probably going to be doing fewer features about individual shows, while I focus on more of these stories about the health of the field, but I still want to write occasional pieces about artists and works of art. I think a mix of stories is what keeps a reporter sane.Do you anticipate doing a lot of that reporting in person?I hope so. A couple of days ago, I went to see “Evita” at American Repertory Theater outside of Boston, and over the weekend I went to see a play called “tiny father” at Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires. On Thursday, I saw a production of “Fun Home” at the Studio Theater in Washington, D.C. I’m trying, to the extent I can, to see things outside New York. We need to pay more attention to nonprofit theaters and theaters outside New York — because there are real challenges in those places we need to be telling our readers about.What was the most surprising thing you learned while reporting this article?I was struck by how many theaters are now doing coproductions. It’s pretty dramatic: The Shakespeare Theater Company in D.C. had one coproduction out of six shows before the pandemic, and now at least five out of six will be coproductions this coming season. There’s also a lot of experimentation with collaboration, which is heartening. Theaters that once saw themselves either as competitors or just strangers are much more interested in finding ways to help one another.Your article touches on a number of potential solutions. Which seem most promising?There’s a coalition forming of theaters in Connecticut that is talking about whether the theaters might be able to share set-building functions. Those kinds of approaches might have promise. A lot of theaters are talking about the possibility of either more government assistance or for more foundations to take seriously the challenges facing this field. There’s a shared sense that box-office revenue, which has never been enough to sustain these organizations, is not going to be a primary part of the solution.How will we see an effect on Broadway, which depends on nonprofit theaters to develop material and support artists?The situation means less work for artists, actors, writers, directors and designers. Fewer shows are being staged, and those shows are often smaller and have shorter runs, which is a challenge both for the people who are already established in the field and the people who are seeking to enter it. There’s just less work to go around. More

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      Julian Barry, Who Made Lenny Bruce Into ‘Lenny,’ Dies at 92

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      Mr. Barry’s scripts for a hit Broadway play and later a Hollywood movie about that rule-breaking comic helped give Mr. Bruce a lasting place in pop culture lore.Julian Barry, whose scripts for a Broadway play and a Hollywood movie about Lenny Bruce, both titled “Lenny,” became definitive portraits of the comedian as a truth teller who drove himself mad in a righteous struggle against American hypocrisy, was found dead on Tuesday morning at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 92.His daughter Julia Barry said he had died overnight in his sleep. He had been receiving medical treatment for congestive heart failure and, in recent weeks, for late-stage kidney disease.Like Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon, Mr. Bruce died young (he was 40) and became a figure of continually renewed pop-culture lore. His comedy career and his criminal prosecutions on drug and obscenity charges inspired museum exhibitions, one-man theatrical performances and biographies. From 2017 until this year, a fictionalized version of Mr. Bruce was a recurring character on the Amazon Prime television show “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Mr. Barry’s play, which opened on Broadway in 1971, five years after Mr. Bruce’s death, proved that Mr. Bruce could draw an audience posthumously. The 1974 movie version, which starred Dustin Hoffman in the title role, has endured as a classic of the Lenny Bruce mini-genre. It earned six Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, best actor and best adapted screenplay. (Mr. Barry lost to Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo for “The Godfather Part II.”)Cliff Gorman in the title role and Jane House as his wife in the original Broadway production of “Lenny” in 1971.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsIn both scripts, Mr. Barry paid homage to Mr. Bruce by including lengthy passages of his stand-up comedic material. His Lenny Bruce is crude but winningly so — more forgiving human frailty than mocking it, and skillful in using earthy common sense to attack the prejudices of his day.Clive Barnes of The New York Times called the play a “dynamite shtick” of theater, and reflected on the irony that Mr. Bruce had been arrested after using language in nightclubs that by 1971 seemed unexceptional when declaimed from a Broadway stage. “The last laugh,” he concluded, “is with Mr. Bruce.”The Broadway star of “Lenny,” Cliff Gorman, won the 1972 Tony Award for lead actor in a play. As Mr. Gorman told The Times in an interview after the play opened, his performance roused Mr. Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr, to visit his dressing room and address him as a “genius.”Mr. Barry’s script compared Mr. Bruce to Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift. Some people rolled their eyes.“The story Julian Barry has extracted from Bruce’s life tends to sanctify and, in the end, even to solemnize Bruce rather than to explore his obsessions,” another Times theater critic, Mel Gussow, wrote in a 1972 review, when Sandy Baron replaced Mr. Gorman.But Mr. Barry found a powerful fan in Bob Fosse. After directing the movie version of the Broadway musical “Cabaret” (1972), for which he won the Academy Award for best director, Mr. Fosse decided that he wanted “Lenny” to be his next film project. He hired Mr. Barry to write the script.“In the play, I mythologized Lenny Bruce,” Mr. Barry told Rolling Stone in 1974. In contrast, he said, the movie offered “a cold, objective approach.”Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce and Valerie Perrine as his wife, Honey, in the 1974 film “Lenny,” directed by Bob Fosse and written by Mr. Barry.United ArtistsMr. Barry was perhaps referring to the film’s depiction of Mr. Bruce’s decline — ranting onstage about his arrests, shooting heroin, speechifying pathetically in court and finally dying of a morphine overdose naked on his bathroom floor in Los Angeles.Yet in “Lenny,” filmed in arty black and white, Mr. Bruce’s flaws are redeemed. He cheats on his wife, but he shows himself to be faithful to her when she needs him most. His idealism about racial slurs — that by using them people can sap them of their malign power — goes unquestioned. His enemies in the legal system do not explain their defense of conservative social mores.Mr. Barry saw Mr. Bruce as a tragic hero.“The whole beauty of Lenny,” he told Rolling Stone, “is his message: We’re all the same schmuck.”Julian Barry Mendelsohn Jr. was born on Dec. 24, 1930, in the Bronx and grew up in the Riverdale neighborhood. His father struggled as a salesman during the Depression but eventually rose to become an executive at the Hudson Pulp and Paper Company. His mother, Grace (Fein) Mendelsohn, donated time and money to Jewish causes and the theater.Julian began acting as a teenager while attending Horace Mann, a day school in Riverdale, where, he wrote in his memoir, “My Night With Orson” (2011), he was a “townie” — not as privileged as wealthier fellow students who lived in uptown Manhattan. Believing it would aid a future career in show business — and following the advice of Philip Burton, a British director who taught at a summer acting camp that Julian attended — he modified his name to sound less Jewish while still just a teenager.He was briefly an undergraduate at Syracuse University and Emerson College in Massachusetts. After serving in the Army and fighting in Korea in his early 20s, he established a career as a Broadway stage manager. He then took a risk at the age of 35, turning down steady work to focus on writing.Mr. Barry’s first screenplay to be filmed was “Rhinoceros” (1974), an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s play starring Gene Wilder, left, and Zero Mostel.Kino InternationalMr. Barry found success in television writing scripts in the 1960s for popular shows like “Mission: Impossible.” His first screenplay to be filmed was “Rhinoceros” (1974), an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s play, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder.Mr. Barry’s four marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Julia, from his third marriage, to the film producer Laura Ziskin, he is survived by his longtime partner, Samantha Harper Macy; two daughters, Sally and Jennifer Barry, from his second marriage, to Patricia Foley; a son, Michael, also from that marriage; five grandchildren; and one great-grandson.In his autobiography, Mr. Barry described years of meeting stars and starlets. He and Frank Sinatra spent hours telling old stories and imagining a movie they might make together.Summing up his life in the mid-1980s, he wrote, “I was still bumming a ride on my Academy nomination.”Yet project after project of his did not get made, lost in the Hollywood purgatory known as “development.”To some extent, Mr. Barry wrote, it was his own fault for becoming too hip for his own good. He grew his hair long, and he name-dropped in the offhand style of a “Hollywood Phony,” he wrote. Discussing a script of his with Robert Redford and the director Sydney Pollack in Mr. Redford’s hotel room, he suddenly lit up a joint. He was later told that the two men did not like him.“I had to live up to my reputation,” Mr. Barry recalled, “as the man who wrote about Lenny Bruce.” More