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      Kevin Spacey Denies Sexual Assault Charges During U.K. Trial

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      Two weeks into a trial in London, the Oscar-winning actor gave his account of sexual encounters that the prosecution says were criminal acts.Kevin Spacey arriving at Southwark Crown Court in London on Thursday.Henry Nicholls/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKevin Spacey told a British jury on Thursday that he was “a big flirt” who had what he characterized as gentle, touching and romantic encounters with a man who accused him of sexual assault. He always respected the man’s boundaries, Mr. Spacey said, adding that he felt “crushed” when the man accused him of assault.Two weeks into a sexual assault trial in London against the Oscar- and Tony Award-winning actor, Mr. Spacey’s testimony on Thursday was the first time that the jury heard from him directly.Mr. Spacey, 63, has pleaded not guilty to 12 charges relating to incidents that the prosecution says involved four men and occurred from 2001 to 2013. For most of that time, Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London.Sitting at the front of a courtroom at Southwark Crown Court and facing the jury, Mr. Spacey — who was wearing a gray suit, and light blue tie — was calm and occasionally joked with his legal representative, Patrick Gibbs.Opening the trial last month, Christine Agnew, a British prosecutor, told the jury that Mr. Spacey was “a sexual bully” who “delights in making others feel powerless and uncomfortable.” He had repeatedly groped men, Ms. Agnew said. On one occasion, Ms. Agnew added, Mr. Spacey gave a man oral sex without that man’s consent.In the days after Ms. Agnew’s opening, the jury heard from the four anonymous complainants. Under British law, it is illegal for anyone to identify complainants in sexual assault cases, or to publish information that may cause them to be identified. The jury first watched recordings of interviews that each complainant gave to British police officers, then the accuser was cross-examined in the courthouse.The first complainant said in his police interview that, in the early 2000s, Mr. Spacey touched him multiple times. On one occasion, the complainant said, he was driving with Mr. Spacey to a ball organized by Elton John, and the actor grabbed his genitals so hard that he almost veered off the road.On Thursday, the day’s opening session focused on Mr. Spacey’s recollection of those encounters and the actor discussed his relationship with that complainant. Leaning back in his chair, and sounding wistful, he said the man was “friendly and charming and flirtatious.”The pair’s encounters gradually “became somewhat sexual,” Mr. Spacey said, adding that this most likely occurred at the actor’s own initiation. Mr. Spacey said the pair never had sex. The complainant “made it clear he didn’t want to go any further,” Mr. Spacey added. He said he had respected the complainant’s boundaries.Mr. Gibbs then asked Mr. Spacey to recall how he felt when he learned that the complainant accused him of assault. Mr. Spacey said he had been “crushed” and it felt like the complainant had stabbed him in the back. The court then adjourned for a break. More

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      The Shed Hires Boston Ballet’s Meredith Hodges as New C.E.O.

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      As the new arts space faces financial challenges, it tapped Meredith Hodges to take over its administrative leadership from Alex Poots, who will remain as artistic director.After a mixed beginning that was complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, the Shed in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards announced Wednesday that it had tapped Meredith Hodges, known as Max, the executive director of the Boston Ballet, to become its new chief executive officer.“She is the right combination to join the Shed at this moment,” said Jonathan M. Tisch, who in April succeeded the Shed’s founding chairman, Daniel L. Doctoroff, and who — with his wife, Lizzie — donated $27.5 million in 2019 toward the building’s construction. “She is a proven leader who understands the business side of culture, but also has an affinity for the culture side of culture.”The chief executive position was initially held by Alex Poots, who previously founded the Manchester International Festival and served as the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory. But he gave up the chief executive title in January, when the organization said he would solely focus on his role as artistic director.Having opened with great promise in 2019, the Shed saw some of its initial ambitious programming meet with mixed reviews. And it had little time to build momentum or an audience before it was hit, like so many other cultural institutions, by the pandemic: 28 of its 107 full-time workers were laid off in July 2020, and its annual operating budget was reduced to $26.5 million from $46 million.In a telephone interview, Hodges, who will start later this year, said she felt confident about the institution’s prospects. “The Shed opened on the eve of one of the worst crises the art world has ever had to weather,” she said. “There is a huge amount to be proud of in the Shed’s short existence.”The Shed’s founding chairman, Doctoroff, who had been a deputy mayor under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, stepped back from the role because of illness.As mayor, Bloomberg helped jump-start the project by securing a $75 million city grant for the Shed, and he has personally donated $130 million of his own fortune toward the architecturally ambitious $475 million arts center.“Obviously it’s a very difficult moment for all cultural institutions,” Tisch said. “The Shed is no different.”Despite its economic challenges, the Shed has had some noteworthy successes, namely sold-out performances for “Straight Line Crazy,” the recent play about Robert Moses featuring Ralph Fiennes, and an ambitious three-part exhibition by the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno.Poots will report to Hodges, who said she felt “lucky and excited” to work with him and “to get to free Alex to put all his energy and attention on his passion.”Poots said that he looked forward to working with her. “Having her expertise will enable me to entirely focus on our artistic direction,” he said in a statement, “to produce and present ambitious new productions, and to develop new artistic formats.”Hodges described herself as “strategic” and “data driven.” Asked whether she had any targets for building the Shed’s audience, revenue or the endowment, Hodges said: “I’m a quantitative person, so I’m sure that will come.”Hodges, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, was also a senior associate consultant with Bain & Company.At the Boston Ballet, which she has led since 2014, Hodges more than doubled the endowment, to $36 million from $14 million; helped lead the organization’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; and built attendance to 170,000 for the company’s 2022-23 season, its second highest ever.Before going to the Boston Ballet, she served as the executive director of Gallim Dance, a contemporary dance company in Brooklyn, and in various roles at the Museum of Modern Art, including project director leading strategic development, membership and technology initiatives. More

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      Award-Winning ‘Cabaret’ Revival Plans Spring Broadway Bow

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      The production opened in London with Eddie Redmayne in a starring role; the New York cast has not yet been announced but he is expected to join it.Willkommen, bienvenue, Broadway!“Cabaret,” the ever-popular (and portentous) musical set in a Berlin nightclub on the eve of the Nazis’ rise to power, will return to Broadway in the spring in a new production that has already won raves in London.The producing team on Tuesday morning announced a plan to transfer the show to Broadway, and said it would open at the August Wilson Theater, where a revival of “Funny Girl” is scheduled to close Sept. 3.The “Cabaret” producers did not announce any other details, but it is widely expected that Eddie Redmayne, the film star who played the nightclub’s Master of Ceremonies when this revival opened in London, will reprise the role on Broadway. The show’s other big role, Sally Bowles, the nightclub’s star singer, was initially played in London by Jessie Buckley; that role has not yet been cast in New York.“Cabaret,” with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and a book by Joe Masteroff, originally opened on Broadway in 1966, and that production, directed by Hal Prince and starring Joel Grey, won eight Tony Awards, including for best musical, and ran for three years. Grey went on to star in a 1972 film adaptation that won eight Academy Awards, including one for Grey and one for his co-star, Liza Minnelli.The musical was revived on Broadway in 1987, again with Prince directing and Grey as the Emcee. Then in 1998, a new production directed by Sam Mendes and starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson, came to Broadway via the Roundabout Theater Company; that production closed in 2004 and then returned in 2014 for another year, opening with Michelle Williams opposite Cumming.This latest revival, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, opened in London in 2021, and won seven Olivier Awards, including one for best musical revival. Its run is continuing. The critic Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, called the production “nerve-shredding,” and said, “Frecknall pulls us into a hedonistic milieu, only to send us out nearly three hours later reminded of life’s horrors.”The lead producers are Ambassador Theater Group, a British company that owns and operates theaters around Europe and the United States and has become increasingly active in producing on Broadway, and Underbelly, a British company closely associated with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.“Cabaret” will join multiple shows on Broadway this season that deal with antisemitism, among them “Just for Us,” a one-man show from the comedian Alex Edelman, which is now running, as well as “Harmony,” a musical by Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman that is opening in the fall and “Prayer for the French Republic,” a play by Joshua Harmon, which is to open in the winter. Last season’s Tony-winning best play, “Leopoldstadt,” which closed earlier this month, and the winner of the Tony for best musical revival, “Parade,” which runs until Aug. 6, are also about antisemitism. More

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      Jack Goldstein, a Savior of Broadway Theaters, Dies at 74

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      He helped secure landmark status for more than two dozen theaters in the 1980s, then initiated the design competition that led to a new TKTS booth.Jack Goldstein, a preservationist who in the 1980s reacted to the razing of several venerable Broadway theaters under a Times Square redevelopment plan by helping to organize a successful campaign to give landmark status to more than two dozen other theaters, died on June 16 in Cold Spring, N.Y., in Putnam County. He was 74.The cause was a heart attack, said Tom Miller, his executor.Over 30 years, Mr. Goldstein established himself as an effective behind-the-scenes player on Broadway.He was the executive director of the nonprofit Save the Theaters, which was formed to prevent the future destruction of playhouses. He was an executive at Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union, and with the Theater Development Fund, where he initiated the design competition that led to the creation of a new TKTS discount ticket booth in Duffy Square, topped with a dramatic cascade of 27 ruby-red structural glass steps that rises above West 47th Street.“Jack had a great artistic eye and a deep commitment to good government,” Gretchen Dykstra, the former president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, said in a phone interview.Mr. Goldstein arrived in Manhattan in the spring of 1982, during a difficult financial period for Broadway andaround the time of the wrenching demolition of the Helen Hayes and Morosco Theaters — the most distinctive of the five theaters between West 45th and 46th Streets on Broadway that were leveled to make way for the towering New York Marriott Marquis Hotel.The sites of the Hayes and Morosco Theaters had become the center of protests by actors, playwrights and others until the wrecking balls began swinging that March.The actor Jason Robards speaking at a rally in 1982 in an unsuccessful effort to preserve the Morosco Theater. Others on the platform included the actor Christopher Reeve, second from left. Mr. Goldstein joined the Broadway preservation effort that year. Marilyn K. Yee/The New York TimesMr. Goldstein told a conference at the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan in 2014, “The destruction in the center of Broadway of beloved, important and, from the actors’ point of view, irreplaceable instruments of their art form and communication, was an affront.”Mr. Goldstein, who had a background in historic preservation, was initially a volunteer with the Committee to Save the Theaters, which had been formed by Actors’ Equity. He soon shifted to join and then run its spinoff organization, Save the Theaters.“Since it was clear that the city no longer recognized the value of the Broadway theaters,” he told Metropolis, an architecture and design magazine, in 2004, “No. 1 on the agenda was to bring to bear whatever legal disincentives to demolition were available and apply them to the historic theaters.”For six years, Mr. Goldstein and other preservationists focused on getting protection for theaters from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.Part of the process was examining theaters’ interiors and exteriors to determine which might be designated landmarks. He brought actors to the commission’s hearings to impart their knowledge of the theaters. And he collaborated on a report with an architect, Hugh Hardy, that stressed the full geometry of the theaters — their shape, layout and acoustical properties — rather than just their decorative detail, as standards for landmark designation.Speaking to the Skyscraper conference, Mr. Goldstein cited, for example, the “spatial relationships and building techniques behind the walls” that allowed actors to speak without a microphone, or in a whisper, and be heard by 600 to 1,400 theatergoers.Workmen cutting away steel from the roof of the Helen Hayes Theater in 1982.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“He was well spoken and enormously energetic,” Kent Barwick, a former chairman of the landmarks commission, said in an interview. “He was doing what needed to be done at the time. Was he always right in his judgment? No. Was he always fair? No. Was he dramatic? Of course — he was coming out of Actors’ Equity.”In 1987, the commission designated 28 theaters as landmarks — some for their exteriors, some for their interiors, some for both. (The sale of the Mark Hellinger Theater to a church in 1991 brought the group to 27.) The city’s Board of Estimate, a powerful governing body at the time, approved the designations in March 1988.Theater owners objected to the landmarking “as a confiscation of the value of the building because it limited its use to live theater,” Rocco Landesman, a former president of Jujamcyn Theaters, said by phone. He said of the buildings: “You couldn’t tear them down, and it was difficult to build above them if you didn’t have the rights. Value was taken without compensation.”The owners sued to overturn the landmarking of 22 of the theaters, but in 1992 the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case after the State Supreme Court and the Appellate Division had upheld the designations.Mr. Goldstein in 1997. Looking back with satisfaction in 2014, he said he thought he had made an impact on Broadway. “I feel, ‘job done,’” he said.TDFJack Lewis Goldstein was born on March 5, 1949, in Jersey City, N.J. His father, Joseph, was an Army officer and a physician whose work took him and his family to Maryland, Germany and other postings. His mother, Thelma (Ginsberg) Goldstein, was a homemaker, potter and political activist. The couple eventually divorced.Jack’s maternal grandmother took him to his first Broadway show, Lionel Bart’s musical “Oliver!,” which opened at the Imperial Theater in 1963.“‘Oliver!’ was the first time I experienced that suspension of disbelief,” Mr. Goldstein told Crain’s New York Business in 1998. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Goldstein graduated from George Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1972. He worked in Manhattan at the National Design Center, which exhibited home furnishings, before moving to Washington, where he was an assistant to the director of programs at the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a small federal agency that would play a role in persuading him to go to Broadway.While he was in Washington, the Interior Department, responding to a petition from preservationists, determined that the Morosco was eligible to be included on the National Register of Historic Places, and that if the developer of the Marriott Marquis wanted to tear it down, the company would need a waiver from the advisory council. Mr. Goldstein contended in an affidavit that Lyn Nofziger, an aide to President Ronald Reagan, had told the council to grant the waiver or lose its government funding — an assertion Mr. Nofziger denied.Frustrated, Mr. Goldstein soon left Washington to join the Broadway preservationists, whose efforts to save the Morosco were by then doomed to fail.After leaving Save the Theaters in 1988, Mr. Goldstein was a special assistant for government affairs to Ron Silver, the actor and president of Actors’ Equity, and the project director of the Broadway Initiatives Working Group, which was formed to evaluate Broadway’s future. He was the executive director of the nonprofit Theater Development Fund, which makes theater more affordable and accessible, from 1998 to 2001.When he announced the competition to design a new TKTS booth in 1999, Mr. Goldstein recognized how beloved and important the slapdash, pipe-and-canvas structure had become to theatergoers over 26 years. But, as he told The New York Times, “time and weather have taken their toll.”The new TKTS booth was not completed until 2008, a year before Mr. Goldstein returned to Actors’ Equity as its national director of governance policy and support.In 2012, he became an antiques dealer in Cold Spring. He previously owned a seasonal antiques store in Rehoboth, Del.He is survived by a brother, Leonard.Mr. Goldstein acknowledged that he had made an impact on Broadway.“I think I’ve made a contribution when I walk through Times Square and see theaters filled — many would have been swept away,” he told The Highlands Current of Cold Spring in 2014. “I feel, ‘job done.’” More

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      Review: In ‘Malvolio,’ Hope (and a Title Role) for a Damaged Heart

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      The Classical Theater of Harlem follows up last year’s winning “Twelfth Night” with a sequel that feels like a sweet summer frolic.Poor old Malvolio. Amid the comic romance of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” he is the imperious steward who gets cruelly pranked for sport, duped by a band of smart alecks who forge a love letter seemingly addressed to him.Believing that the missive is from the countess he adores, and thinking he is following her wishes, he dresses garishly in yellow stockings with cross-garters and behaves as if he’s come unhinged. Then he is locked away in darkness, where his tormentors continue to mess with his mind.It’s a rancid kind of meanness, but the playwright Betty Shamieh has turned it into a hero’s origin story with her clever, winking new play “Malvolio.” And the Classical Theater of Harlem, whose “Twelfth Night” last July was an effervescent delight, has fashioned this sequel into a sweet summer frolic, with the sympathetic Allen Gilmore reprising what is now the title role.Twenty years after the end of “Twelfth Night,” Malvolio is long gone from the island of Illyria. A respected military general in a stubborn war, he is the leader of the Legion of the Cross-Gartered. (Fabulous name, that; fun uniforms, too, by Celeste Jennings.) But his past mistreatment festers in him.“My humiliation made me reckless,” he says. “Reckless men make great soldiers.”The fleet-footed production, featuring a very funny John-Andrew Morrison, center, as a bored king, is now at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park.Richard TermineIn Ian Belknap and Ty Jones’s fleet-footed production at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park, most of the old gang from “Twelfth Night” is still back on Illyria, living not so happily ever after. The marriage of Viola (Perri Gaffney) and Orsino (René Thornton Jr.) totters on despite his infidelity — and his preference for seeing her disguised as a boy, as she was when he fell in love with her.It’s Volina (Kineta Kunutu), their strong-minded daughter, who takes up the mantle of romance and adventure. Betrothed against her wishes to Prince Furtado (J.D. Mollison) — a misogynistic nitwit and sole heir to the uber-bored King Chadlio (John-Andrew Morrison, so funny that you will root for the king to survive various attempts on his life) — Volina slips out of Illyria and meets Malvolio by chance. She falls instantly, persuasively in love with him.Critical of war, skeptical of marriage and astute about the warping effect of defining oneself through trauma, “Malvolio” regards its characters from a distinctly female point of view. Paying close attention to the women, Shamieh has fun with callbacks to assorted Shakespeare plays; Volina’s nurse (Marjorie Johnson) was once Juliet’s.With a color palette that pops, and choreography (by Dell Howlett) that does, too, this is a visually and aurally enticing production. (The set is by Christopher and Justin Swader, lighting by Alan C. Edwards, video by Zavier Augustus Lee Taylor and music by Frederick Kennedy.) If the characters’ tangled relationships are a bit complex for the uninitiated, that’s also true in “Twelfth Night.” The big picture here is perfectly clear.Does Malvolio have enough hope in his damaged heart to risk loving Volina back? Will she even be free to choose him if he does? Well, it is a comedy — with last-minute reveals that are entirely in the spirit of Shakespeare, and utterly charming.It’s free, by the way. Treat yourself.MalvolioThrough July 29 at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park, Manhattan; cthnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Uncle Vanya’ Review: Candlelit With a High-Wattage Cast

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      Unrequited love swirls through this prestige-cast production of Anton Chekhov’s play, in a Manhattan loft.Leaning close in the flickering candlelight, Sonya and the man who makes her stomach flutter share a sneaky midnight snack. He is Astrov, her houseguest, and he is frankly a bit of a mess — drinks too much, is in fact drunk at the moment. He is also endearingly odd and smart and sweet, an eco-nerd physician who’s sending her some incredibly mixed signals.“We’re all alone here,” he says, sotto voce. “We can be honest with each other.”It is a scene so beguiling, so full of crushy hope on one side and obliviousness (or is it?) on the other, that it’s like watching Laura and the Gentleman Caller in “The Glass Menagerie.” But this is “Uncle Vanya,” and if Chekhov has never before made you want to match-make a couple of his characters on Tinder, this version — directed by Jack Serio in a loft in the Flatiron District of Manhattan — just might.“You’re a beautiful human being, more than anybody I know,” Sonya tells Astrov, and because she is portrayed by the magnificent Marin Ireland and he would obviously be ridiculously lucky to have her, your whole soul rises up in outrage: What is wrong with this likable doctor (beautifully played by Will Brill of sexy “Oklahoma!” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) that he’s obsessed with Yelena, her stepmother, instead?So is Sonya’s Uncle Vanya, whose play this is meant to be. A nose-to-the-grindstone worker, he looks up in middle age and realizes to his horror and humiliation that he has wasted his life fattening the bank account and elevating the status of an unworthy man: Sonya’s father, the over-entitled professor, Serebryakov (a dapper Bill Irwin). Doomed to receive nothing better from Yelena, the professor’s wife, than a pathetic kiss on the forehead, Vanya doesn’t even have a woman to love him.David Cromer’s performance in the title role, though, suggests none of that swallowed fire and swirling torment. His Vanya is a blank, and it’s not a matter of simplicity or restraint; there is nothing to the interpretation underneath the words, even when Vanya gets loud. Certainly there wasn’t on Saturday night, when I saw the play. But a live show is an evolving organism. Cromer may yet fill up that hollowness.Using a warm, seamless, contemporary translation by Paul Schmidt, and performed for an audience of no more than 40 seated along two sides of the loft, this is an intimate production that’s strange as well — because of the unbalancing emptiness of Cromer’s Vanya, and because of the maturity and intelligence of its Yelena, played by Julia Chan.Reading as older than the 27 years that Chekhov specifies, but still clearly decades younger than her husband, she is no incurious ingenue. There is a wisdom to this Yelena, and a savvy; Astrov and Vanya’s rivalrous infatuation with her, then, is no mere response to dewdrop youth. Chicly dressed for the city life she has left behind (costumes are by Ricky Reynoso), she is the picture of pristine elegance, sure of herself and too lively minded to find happiness in the cosseted quiet of this country house.Jack Serio’s production of “Uncle Vanya,” with, clockwise from lower left, Virginia Wing as Marina, Will Brill as Astrov and David Cromer as Vanya. It’s performed for an audience of no more than 40 seated along two sides of the room.Emilio MadridNo one else is finding happiness, either, of course; at best, perhaps placid resignation. Vanya, in his resentment, comes nowhere near that, but a bouquet-smashing eruption of his temper is the catalyst for a mesmerizingly pretty stage tableau: soft orange rose petals fallen just so on the weathered teal table and the blond wood floor. (The set is by Walt Spangler, the props by Carrie Mossman.)“It was a scene worthy of an old master,” Vanya and Sonya’s adorable, guitar-strumming neighbor, Telegin (the wonderfully funny Will Dagger), says a short time later, and while he may be thinking less of the flowers than of the gunplay that ensued, the sentiment is absolutely right.Stunning visuals — like those petals and that candlelit tête-à-tête — are a hallmark of Serio’s work. The lighting designer Stacey Derosier, who was instrumental to the look of his “On Set With Theda Bara” early this year and “This Beautiful Future” last year, also designed “Uncle Vanya.”But what glows most tantalizingly in this production is the pulsing electricity between the tender, resilient Sonya and the tree-planting Astrov, who is far too casual with her heart. If only he could love her the way he loves the forest.Uncle VanyaThrough July 16 at a loft in the Flatiron District, Manhattan; vanyanyc.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Here Lies Love’ Pairs Disco With a Dictator. It’s a Controversial Choice.

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      The musical, the brainchild of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, dramatizes — and, some say, sanitizes — the life of the former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos.The Broadway musical “Here Lies Love” is a rollicking karaoke dance party with an immersive staging and, for the first time in Broadway history, organizers say, an all-Filipino cast.It’s a good time — until it’s not.At its center is the brutal regime of Ferdinand (played by Jose Llana) and Imelda Marcos (Arielle Jacobs), the former president and first lady of the Philippines who committed countless human rights abuses and violent crimes during his 21-year reign from 1965 to 1986.David Byrne, who wrote the music and lyrics for the show with the electronic dance musician Fatboy Slim, has said the musical, which focuses on the life of Imelda Marcos, interpolates karaoke as a means of replicating for audiences how it felt for Filipinos who lived through the Marcos regime.But, some argue, telling the story of the corrupt Marcos regime through disco does not work when the audience lacks the necessary context. The production, opening July 20, has faced accusations that it trivializes the suffering of thousands of Filipinos.Here’s what to know about Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, the People Power Revolution of 1986 and the controversies the show has faced.Who was Ferdinand Marcos?Ferdinand Marcos, the longest-serving president of the Philippines, was a dictator who placed the country under martial law from 1972 until 1981. In 1983 the opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. (played by Conrad Ricamora) was assassinated at the airport as he was returning from exile; an investigatory panel concluded that a military plot was responsible. The assassination led to a series of events that culminated with Aquino’s widow, Corazon, becoming president in 1986.With the election of Aquino, Marcos fled the Philippines for Hawaii, where he died in 1989 without ever facing trial in the United States on criminal charges that he plundered the Philippine Treasury of more than $100 million. (However, the following decade a jury in Hawaii awarded damages of almost $2 billion against his estate for the killings and tortures of almost 10,000 Filipinos. Collecting on that judgment has been difficult though, and despite ongoing efforts, victims have seen only a fraction of that amount.)Who is Imelda Marcos?Imelda Marcos, who married Ferdinand in 1954, became the face of the regime’s enormous wealth. A former teenage beauty queen known for her love of nightlife and disco music, she and her family raided government coffers to finance a lavish lifestyle while millions of Filipinos lived in poverty.A Philippine court convicted her on corruption charges in 2018 for creating private foundations to hide her wealth, but she appealed the case and is unlikely to see jail time because of her age. She is now 94.What was the People Power Revolution?The Marcos era ended in February 1986 after a series of nonviolent street marches. The People Power Revolution, with more than two million Filipinos participating, condemned the regime’s human rights violations and electoral fraud. The demonstrations ended with Ferdinand Marcos’s departure.Why has the show been controversial?A number of Filipinos have objected to what they argue is the show’s trivialization of the Marcos’s crimes and sympathy toward Imelda Marcos. The actress Sara Porkalob, who recently appeared on Broadway in “1776,” wrote in 2017 that the musical, then playing at the Seattle Repertory Theater, one of the show’s several regional and Off Broadway engagements since its premiere at New York’s Public Theater in 2013, “paints a glossy veneer over the Philippines’ national trauma and America’s role in it.”Those objections have become particularly salient for many now; Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was elected president of the Philippines last year.“David Byrne’s attempt to humanize Imelda Marcos insults the impoverished people she and her family stole from,” Ruben Carranza, a former government lawyer who prosecuted Imelda Marcos’s hidden wealth cases, wrote in a recent email. “And because it is playing at a time when the Marcoses have lied their way back to power, ‘Here Lies Love’ will only reinforce those lies and serve, intentionally or not, the larger Marcos agenda of denying truth and revising the history of their dictatorship.”Others, however, have praised the show’s approach, contending that it “mirrors Filipino complicity and American blindness through its disco-controlled experiment on its audience,” as the Filipino novelist Gina Apostol wrote in 2014 after seeing the show Off Broadway at the Public Theater.How has the production responded?In a statement released earlier this year after criticism resurfaced following the announcement of the Broadway transfer, producers wrote that “Here Lies Love” is “an anti-Marcos show” intended to combat disinformation with “a creative way of re-information.” The show has also hired a Filipino American actress, Giselle Töngi, known as G, as a cultural and community liaison.Why did Broadway musicians object to the show?Though producers have argued that using recorded instrumental tracks instead of a live band is central to the storytelling, a labor union representing musicians objected in May, arguing that its contract for the theater requires musicians to be used for musicals. In June they reached a compromise: The musical would employ 12 live musicians.What has Imelda Marcos said about the show?In 2010, after listening to part of Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s original concept album for the show at a mall food court in the Philippines during her campaign for the country’s House of Representatives, she told The New York Times reporter Norimitsu Onishi, “I’m flattered; I can’t believe it!”The show takes its title from the three-word phrase she has said she would like inscribed on her tombstone. More

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      At 20, an Upstate Arts Haven Keeps Breaking New Ground

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      On a recent Saturday night, a group of young people were gathered in this bucolic hamlet in the Hudson Valley, building a campfire of sorts. There were no matches or flames, but there were lanterns, chirping crickets, fir trees swirled with haze and, at one point, a zombie attack.The ersatz campfire was onstage, at the final evening performance of “Illinois,” a dance-theater piece based on Sufjan Stevens’s beloved 2005 indie-pop concept album. Directed by the star choreographer Justin Peck, the show drew a sold-out crowd of arts-minded weekenders and curious Stevens fans to commune inside the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.Since opening 20 years ago, the center’s Frank Gehry building has emerged as a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary and sometimes hard to describe hits.It’s here that Daniel Fish’s radically reimagined “Oklahoma!” took shape before its unlikely run to Broadway (and a Tony Award for best musical revival), and here that the choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s “Four Quartets” (praised in The New York Times as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century”) was sparked by a random breakfast conversation.Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive. “Just approaching an artist and saying, ‘Let’s do something together,’ is the thing that excites me most in the world,” he said.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesGiven the personnel involved, “Illinois,” which will move to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater in January, would seem to have the makings of a popular hit. But for Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive, it furthers the same exploratory mission as everything else the center does.“All of these projects are research, which is why they belong in a college,” he said. “What these artists are doing is investigating something, experimenting, creating something in a new way.”These are tenuous times for the performing arts, including in the Hudson Valley, where several independent institutions have curtailed programming or shuttered entirely. But the Fisher Center, nestled in a college long known as a bastion of the humanities, is making big plans.In October, it will break ground on a $42 million studio building designed by Maya Lin. And it just received a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the work of Tania El Khoury, an artist in residence and director of the school’s recently founded Center for Human Rights and the Arts.Gehry’s building, with its explosion of stainless steel whorls, is something of a symbol of the center’s discipline-scrambling programming. Each year, the center is home to full-scale productions of rarely performed operas (like Saint-Saëns’s “Henry VIII,” which opens on July 21) and theatrical world premieres (like Elevator Repair Service’s “Ulysses,” coming in September).The center has also hosted a live-art biennial, development workshops for Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo’s “Only an Octave Apart” and, during the pandemic shutdown, a streaming serial production of “Chapter & Verse,” Meshell Ndegeocello’s musical performance inspired by James Baldwin.Justin Peck, left, in rehearsal with Ahmad Simmons, a dancer in “Illinois.” Peck’s dance-theater piece is based on the 2005 indie-pop album by Sufjan Stevens.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesFrom left, Simmons, Tilly Evans-Krueger and Jonathan Fahoury. “I wanted to build a spaceship for all these dance artists to blast off in,” Peck said of “Illinois.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesAs for “Illinois,” presented as part of the annual SummerScape festival, even those closest to it are hard-pressed to categorize it. Aaron Mattocks, the Fisher Center’s chief operating officer, called it a “genre blur.”For Peck, who came to the center with the idea about two years ago, it’s “a spaceship for all these dance astronauts to blast off in.”“I was looking for a place to go that felt somewhat quiet but also exciting, and a place that had felt willing to take risks on something like this,” Peck said.The Fisher Center opened in 2003 as a multifunctional performing arts center that would be home to the college’s teaching programs as well as the Bard Music Festival, allowing it to mount full-scale operas.The center has always presented theater and dance, too. But with Lester’s arrival in 2012, it has expanded its commissioning of original, contemporary-minded work.“What Gideon has done is brought to it a fantastic originality and an eye and ear for things that need doing, and then inspiring artists to do it,” Leon Botstein, Bard’s president, said.Jenny Gersten, a producer and the interim artistic director at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, credited the Fisher Center with fare that is “distinctively downtown-on-the-Hudson.”“Lots of theaters outside of New York City can develop work,” she said, “but Bard is one of the few who chooses to dig into experimentation of form and bold artistic dares.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesErik Tanner for The New York TimesLester, 50, grew up in London, in the period when the director Sam Mendes and the theater company Complicité were emerging. (He also admits to memorizing all the lyrics of “The Phantom of the Opera.”)But his own brief directorial career had a shaky start. At Oxford, he and another student persuaded the playwright Peter Shaffer to let them mount a production of Shaffer’s “Yonadab,” which hadn’t been performed since its disastrously reviewed 1985 premiere at the National Theater.About 15 minutes into the Oxford opening, there was a general power cut, and the play stopped. But the assembled London critics reviewed it anyway, noting, Lester recalled, that the play “hadn’t improved much.”“I was completely freaked out and thought, ‘This is too much pressure, I don’t think I can direct,’” he said.Instead, he enrolled in the dramaturgy program at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., even if — like many in theater — he was a bit hazy on what exactly dramaturgy was.A rendering of a planned new studio building designed by Maya Lin.Maya Lin Studio with Bialosky + Partners“Basically, I just learned what dramaturgy was by sitting in the room with directors,” he said, by “making mistakes and giving notes and being told to shut up.”Lester became the theater’s resident dramaturg under Robert Brustein and later, under Robert Woodruff, its associate artistic director. Asked about highlights, he mentioned working with artists like the Dutch-Syrian director Ola Mafaalani (“Wings of Desire”) and the Polish director Krystian Lupa, whom he approached after seeing his 11-hour production of “Sleepwalkers” at the Edinburgh Festival.Lupa’s “Three Sisters” at the A.R.T. was “amazing,” if not “particularly liked,” Lester recalled with a wry laugh. “But I got to be in rehearsal with him and see how he worked.”At Bard, Lester has shepherded an impressive series of audience pleasers. But when talking about him — and Caleb Hammons, the director of artistic planning and producing — collaborators use words like “artist centered” and “artist forward.”“They’re unusually good at being adaptive to what different artists need,” said Daniel Fish, whose “Most Happy in Concert” also originated at Bard.Tanowitz, the choreographer, first met Lester in 2015, when he invited her to do a repertory show. Afterward, over breakfast, he asked about the title of one dance, which included a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”Damon Daunno and Amber Gray in Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!” in 2015. The production went to Broadway, where it won a Tony Award for best revival.Cory WeaverDancers in the 2018 premiere of Pam Tanowitz’s “Four Quartets,” which grew out of a conversation Tanowitz and Lester had over breakfast.Maria BaranovaThey talked about the poem for a while, and then she went to the bathroom. When she got back, he asked, “Why don’t you make a dance of ‘Four Quartets’?”“That’s classic Gideon,” Tanowitz said. “He thinks big. He has chutzpah. Part of it was a dare, so I said yes, thinking in my mind, ‘This will never happen.’”He introduced her to collaborators including the actor Kathleen Chalfant, who narrated the piece; the painter Brice Marden, whose paintings inspired the scenic design; and the composer Kaija Saariaho. (The Fisher Center has also taken over the administration of Tanowitz’s company.)But for all Lester’s skills as a connector, Tanowitz said, mostly he “dares you to be yourself.”El Khoury, who is Lebanese, first met Lester in 2017, at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, where he invited her to breakfast. “In classic Gideon fashion, he proposed all these things,” she recalled.She wasn’t sure how seriously to take any of them. But then he popped up again a few months later, at the CounterCurrent Festival in Houston.She came to Bard in 2019, as guest curator of the third Fisher Center biennial. During a long drive to New Hampshire, she and Lester had a rambling conversation that led to the creation a year later of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, which is part of the Open Society University Network.“It’s a huge responsibility to bring in an artist from a totally different environment and give her a lot of space and funding and trust,” El Khoury said.The most recent biennial addressed the politics of land and food. It culminated in May with a four-day festival that included El Khoury’s “Memory of Birds,” an interactive sound installation that invited visitors to lie in cocoon-like structures at the base of a row of maple trees.“I love it that the last piece we commissioned was Tania’s, which could be experienced by seven people at a time,” Lester said. “And now we’re doing ‘Illinois’ for almost 900.”The Fisher Center, nestled in a college known for the humanities, is expanding at a time when many performing arts institutions are struggling.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesPeck, the resident choreographer at New York City Ballet, said he had been thinking for almost a decade about creating something based on Stevens’s album, which he fell in love with as a teenager.“It’s a real full-circle moment, getting to engage with this album of a generation,” he said.“Illinois,” which came to the Fisher Center with commercial producers attached, is the most expensive non-opera production it has done, with a budget of about $1.2 million. (“Oklahoma!,” Lester said, cost about $450,000.)The show, whose narrative was developed by Peck and the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview”), has no dialogue, just the lyrics of the songs, which are orchestrated by Timo Andres and performed and sung by a 13-piece band.The 12 dancers include some who Peck worked with on the 2018 Broadway revival of “Carousel” and Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.”“I wanted to create a vehicle for today’s generation of dance artists who are working in theater and storytelling,” he said, “to tell a story using their language, which is their movement.”Critics were not invited — they will be at the show’s Chicago run — but at the final evening performance, the audience whooped and applauded after most songs. After the tap-inflected “Jacksonville,” featuring a rapturously received turn by Jennifer Florentino, Lester and Drury fist-bumped.The show, Lester said, is “full of joy.” And part of that feeling, for him, is the white-knuckle uncertainty that comes with every project.“The joy of it,” he said, “is not knowing whether something’s going to work.” More