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      Amid the Mountains, They Can Be ‘Open Without Being Judged’

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      In a cabin in the Rocky Mountains, a murmur began to build like the jungle cacophony it was intended to mimic. It was the final afternoon of the four-day Camp Realize Your Beauty, and the nine campers were repeating the social media and popular culture messages about perfection that they felt bombarded by in their daily lives.Their words would ring familiar to anyone who has ever felt the pinch of culturally lauded beauty standards: “Thigh gaps.” “Hourglass figure.” “No acne.” “Pores.” “No body hair.”A video helped explain the deceptive nature of photoshopping, which is widespread in images on social media.Starr Kirkland, an actor, teacher and longtime Realize Your Beauty facilitator, reminded the campers to keep repeating their phrase as the group’s chant of shoddy messaging crescendoed. The soundscape would be part of a devised video piece that was shared with their families after the weekend-long camp, which ran July 27-30. “We’re all going to say our themes at the same time,” another counselor told them. “Why? To create that overwhelming feeling.”The overload of images and muddy information that kids and adolescents receive about their bodies, particularly from social media, was among the reasons Stacey Lorin Merkl said she created Realize Your Beauty, a nonprofit based in New York City, in 2010. The goal: to blend theater, traditional camp offerings and empowerment workshops to help the children build self-esteem. In 2016, she started the theater-arts camp where “self-esteem takes center stage” (the organization’s tagline) at the Y.M.C.A. of the Rockies in Colorado, partly because that’s where she grew up, where she studied acting (at the University of Northern Colorado) and where her parents still reside. It’s also stunning.The campers were encouraged to “embrace the cringe” and to make new friends.Shelby Knowles for The New York TimesRealize Your Beauty isn’t packed with aspiring Audra McDonalds, Billy Porters and Sutton Fosters. At least not exclusively. “It’s not theater kids, necessarily,” Merkl said over coffee a few days before camp began. “Some of the kids love theater. Some of them are maybe mildly interested. Some of them are totally new to the theater, but their parents think that they could benefit from this. We are doing theater, but this is not a camp for them to come and learn Shakespeare.”Elise Arndt, a veteran theater camp counselor who flew in from Orange County, Calif., said: “Not all of them are going to be gung-ho theater people. But there’s something about it that intrigues them.” Arndt and Kirkland joined Realize Your Beauty early on, performing in the workshops and plays about body positivity and eating disorder awareness that the organization takes to schools in New York City, as well as to the Girl Scouts of America.Improvised games not only helped the campers and counselors warm up for activities but also reiterated that they are in a safe and playful space to be themselves.At the camp, the voice work, breathing exercises and improvisation games Arndt leads with — staples at many performing arts sleepaway camps — are tools for erecting safe and playful spaces for the campers to be themselves, even if they are still figuring out just who that person might be.On the first day, Kirkland, who proved to be something of a joy whisperer, advised them to “embrace the cringe,” to make new friends, to form “silly-ships.” Sitting in a circle, the campers, all from Colorado this year, shared their takeaways from the first acting exercises — which included an improvised bit in which a spoiling piece of sushi at a bus stop asked a woman to give up her seat.Time was set aside each day for them to write in their journals.“Even if it makes me feel a little silly, it makes other people laugh,” said Bella, 11.Emma, 10, one half of that maki roll, said, “I learned that we could pretend to be anything, even a piece of sushi.” And the shy Anna, 12, who had been encouraged by Riley, 14, and Bella, said in the quietest of voices: “I learned that it’s good to make new friends.”And even in a space where body positivity is the aim and self-kindness the mantra, hiccups can occur. For a breath-work exercise, Arndt asked the campers to lie down on their backs. “I feel fat laying down,” said Ava, 14, resting on the cabin’s carpeted floor.Not missing a beat, Arndt responded: “You do not look fat laying down. That is not Realize Your Beauty, right?”Warm-up drills included a series of games and skits. “We are doing theater, but this is not a camp for them to come and learn Shakespeare,” said Stacey Lorin Merkl, the camp’s founder and executive director.Shelby Knowles for The New York Times“You look like a person laying down,” a fellow camper added.“Take a big inhale through your stomach,” Arndt said, returning to the breathing. “All bodies are beautiful. Also, we literally made up fat. We made it up as a human race. Take a big inhale, take a big exhale.”Instead of putting on a show for the parents at the weekend’s conclusion, the campers and the staff worked on a video piece composed of journal entries, artwork and, of course, a song: This year’s was Miley Cyrus’s empowerment ballad “The Climb.” (“The struggles I’m facing/The chances I’m taking/Sometimes might knock me down, but/No, I’m not breaking,” the song goes.) They needed those big breaths.During a nature walk, the kids gathered materials for self-portraits.After dinner, the sisters Mia and Macie sat at a table, sharing impressions about the camp.“I always come back from camp just happy, unlike school,” said Mia, 14, who sometimes appeared to be hiding behind her long, straightened hair. This was her second year at Realize Your Beauty. “I just think that this camp is very fun — and I love meeting new people — but I think it’s also a camp where you could come, and you could be very open without being judged.”Teary goodbyes at the weekend’s end.Shelby Knowles for The New York TimesMacie, 10, boasting an Afro and talking in a high-pitched chirp, chimed in with an idea. “I think that there should be camp for the younger kids like this. Because when you have an open space like this when you’re younger,” she said, “you probably won’t be as mean as most people.”Over the span of the weekend, but even hour by hour, came hints of new self-awareness, arcs of subtle personal triumph. “I feel like the best part of the experience is definitely from the campers themselves,” said the first-time counselor June Dempsey, a 16-year-old theater kid and ballet dancer. “I’m loving watching their growth, and I’m already seeing it. People are building confidence.”The campers share cabins at the Y.M.C.A. of the Rockies in Estes Park, Colo.Among the teary goodbyes, one stood out. “Anna came up to me to say goodbye. And as soon as she came up, she just burst into tears,” Kirkland, tearing up, recalled during a video call after returning to her home in San Diego.“It just felt really beautiful,” she continued. “Not only that we were having that moment together, but that she had gotten to the place where she felt vulnerable enough that we could have that moment together, because that’s not anything she would have ever done when we started.” More

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      Lifted by Lea Michele, ‘Funny Girl’ Recoups on Broadway

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      The show, which opened in the spring of 2022, has had a remarkable box office turnaround after Michele replaced its original star.The Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” starring Lea Michele is now officially a hit: It has recouped its capitalization costs, completing a remarkable box office turnaround of the sort rarely seen in the commercial theater.The show’s lead producers, Sonia Friedman, Scott Landis and David Babani, announced on Monday that the production had made back the $16.5 million it cost to mount. That milestone not only gives the production bragging rights, but also means that “Funny Girl” can generate a profit during the last few weeks of its run, which ends on Sept. 3.Only a handful of Broadway productions have announced the recoupment of their capitalization costs since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, as higher expenses and smaller audiences have made the always challenging economics of Broadway even more difficult.“Funny Girl,” though, is an especially unusual case: The production — the first revival of a show that had long seemed impossible to revive because of the long shadow of its original star, Barbra Streisand — opened at the August Wilson Theater in April 2022 with Beanie Feldstein in the title role. Critics were underwhelmed; the show won no Tony Awards (it was only nominated for one); and by summer its sales had drooped.The producers replaced Feldstein with Michele, generating an avalanche of press coverage (Michele was a star of “Glee,” and her character had starred in a fictional revival of “Funny Girl”) and rapturous reviews (in The Los Angeles Times, Charles McNulty called Michele’s performance “one of the top five musical theater performances I’ve seen in my lifetime”). Ticket sales soared (as did ticket prices — the top price at the box office rose to $599 last Christmas), and over time the production made enough money to recover its development costs. Michele, whose reputation had been tarnished by allegations that she had behaved poorly to co-workers on “Glee,” worked tirelessly to transform the way people saw both her and “Funny Girl,” and became the toast of the town.Among the other Broadway shows that have opened since the pandemic shutdown and announced recoupment are “Six,” a pop musical about the wives of King Henry VIII; “MJ,” the Michael Jackson biomusical; and “Prima Facie,” a one-woman play about sexual assault that starred Jodie Comer. Also, a handful of shows that opened before the pandemic have recouped since theaters reopened, including “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “Moulin Rouge!” Not all shows announce recoupment, and it is likely that a few other shows have quietly done so in recent months.A “Funny Girl” tour is scheduled to start next month in Providence, R.I., starring Katerina McCrimmon. More

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      Book Review: ‘August Wilson: A Life,’ by Patti Hartigan

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      The first major biography of the playwright recounts his life and boundless vision.AUGUST WILSON: A Life, by Patti HartiganIn 1986, David Mamet published his best book, a slim and semi-hardboiled treatise on theater and life titled “Writing in Restaurants.” This was decades before he became “the Kanye West of American letters,” as The Forward put it last year. Alas, the book was only vaguely about restaurants.Mamet’s title came back to me while I was reading Patti Hartigan’s biography of another essential American playwright, August Wilson. Wilson, who died in 2005, spent so much time lingering in diners that “Writing in Restaurants” is a plausible alternative subtitle for Hartigan’s “August Wilson: A Life.”Wilson was a large, bearded man, often in tweeds and a pageboy cap. He’d sit in the back with a cup of coffee and an overflowing ashtray. (He smoked five packs a day and didn’t pause while in the shower.) He’d write on napkins or receipts, whatever was handy.He wrote one early play, “Jitney,” in an Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips. As his fame grew, he’d find a place in each city where his plays were staged. He’d call this joint “the Spot.” In New York City, he liked the seedy charm of the Hotel Edison’s coffee shop, known to regulars as the Polish Tea Room. In Boston, it was Ann’s Cafeteria. In Seattle, Caffe Ladro. He’d bring newspapers, and sometimes a friend. Over breakfast he’d hold court for four or five hours at a time. It was his daily slice of experimental theater.Wilson was a raconteur, with an autodidact’s darting curiosity. He was born in Pittsburgh in 1945, to a single Black mother who raised him and his siblings largely on welfare checks. He mined that city, especially its historically African American Hill District, as if it were coal; he was tapping a seam. The family’s first house had no hot water and an outhouse in the backyard. Wilson dropped out of high school and had a brief stint in the Army. He educated himself in Pittsburgh’s libraries the way Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that he did at Howard University: “three call slips at a time.”He thought he might be a poet. His early verse was ornate and indebted to Dylan Thomas; it made him a figure of gentle derision. He discovered Bessie Smith and the blues, and he fell sideways into theater. Amiri Baraka was a key influence; the poet, playwright and activist had come to Pittsburgh in 1968, at the height of the Black Power movement, and delivered a galvanizing speech. Wilson was 23 at the time.Baraka had founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School in Harlem in 1965. Wilson and his arts-world friends decided to start their own theater, which they called Black Horizons. No one volunteered to lead it, and Wilson was chosen by default. Material was needed, and Wilson began to write it. The words were simply there; the African American voices of an entire city came pouring out of him. His was a self-replenishing vision.This is the first major biography of Wilson, whose 10-play Century Cycle (also called the Pittsburgh Cycle) made him arguably the most important and successful playwright of the late 20th century. These plays, one for each decade of the 1900s, include “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson,” both of which won Pulitzer Prizes, as well as “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and what might be his most electric play, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”“Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” became films starring, respectively, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, and Davis and Chadwick Boseman. His plays provided career-boosting roles to Angela Bassett, Delroy Lindo and Samuel L. Jackson, among many others. They luxuriated in his language. He had a special gift for lowlife dialogue and camaraderie — the cries of characters craving to be understood.Hartigan is a former Boston Globe theater critic. Her book is an achievement: It’s solid and well reported. But it’s dutiful. It lacks ebullience and critical insight. The writing is slack and, by the second half, the clichés are falling so heavily you need a hat. A play is “a diamond in the rough” or “a well-oiled machine.” An event is, to grab just one example, “as likely as snow in July.”Yet Wilson’s story carries you along. Hartigan describes the then-novel system that Wilson and his most important director, Lloyd Richards, developed to nurture his plays. Before arriving in New York, they would open at a string of nonprofit regional theaters, in Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle and elsewhere, allowing Wilson to make cuts (his early drafts tended to be unwieldy) and hone his material.Frank Rich, then the theater critic for The New York Times, was an essential early champion. This biography’s best set piece might be the lead-up to a public debate in the winter of 1997 at Manhattan’s Town Hall, between Wilson and a less generous critic, Robert Brustein of The New Republic. (Standing outside the theater, Henry Louis Gates Jr. called it the “Thrilla in Manila.”) The evening was moderated by Anna Deavere Smith. Even before the event, Wilson and Brustein had tangled over, among other things, color-blind casting, which Wilson had declared “an insult to our intelligence.” He thought developing Black playwrights was more important. Patti HartiganMarisa IhWilson never got over certain childhood racial slights. In one Pittsburgh store, only white shoppers received their purchases in paper bags. For the rest of his life, Wilson asked for anything he bought to be placed in one. He had a temper. He hated it when a waiter would say something like, “What’ll you have, boys?” He was light-skinned. His absent father was a white man. He disliked having this fact mentioned.Wilson was married three times and had two daughters. He was not an attentive father or husband; his work came first. His second daughter grew up referring to him as “the slippery guy.” He was also, Hartigan writes, a lifelong womanizer, a sexual locavore.Critics have noted the relative lack of strong women’s roles in his work. Some other Black playwrights felt his overweening success left them in the shadows — that American culture had room for only one of them.This book couldn’t have been easy to write. Wilson tended to have three or four projects going at once: a play in New York, one in development somewhere, a third he was starting to write. Hartigan is adept at keeping the lines straight.Wilson argued with his directors, and often with his actors. He delivered rewrites up to the last minute. He procrastinated. Everyone was forced to live on what they called “August Wilson time.” He never learned to drive.Wilson mostly avoided Hollywood. He knew too many talents who disappeared there. He turned down an offer to write the film “Amistad” for Steven Spielberg. He was a complicated man and, even in an imperfect book, it’s a pleasure to make his company.AUGUST WILSON: A Life | By Patti Hartigan | Illustrated | 531 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $32.50 More

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      The Playwright Who Changed the Face of American Theater

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      Since 1965, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, tucked away in the bucolic seaside town of Waterford, Conn., has lured theater professionals every summer for the National Playwrights Conference. Named for the Nobel Prize-winning playwright who spent his childhood summers nearby, the O’Neill was initially informal and heady, but Lloyd Richards, who directed the 1959 Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” brought a sense of gravitas when he became artistic director in 1969.August Wilson first arrived at the O’Neill in 1982 with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” At 37, he was older than the others, but he presented himself as a neophyte who worked as a short-order cook. He had applied five times — and was rejected five times — but finally got his chance with “Ma Rainey.”During Richards’s era, the O’Neill became a haven for writers to test their work outside the commercial pressure of Broadway. Yet it was also a clubby place, with a regular company of actors and directors. Wilson didn’t immediately fit in, but by the end of the summer, he had developed an esprit de corps with his fellow playwrights.The O’Neill was a place, Wilson once said, where “you can fail and your life won’t disappear.” Writers mattered. They stuck up for one another in the way that playwrights today have supported the writers’ strike in Hollywood. It was at the O’Neill, after all, that Wilson got his ticket to the world of professional theater. “Ma Rainey” opened on Broadway in 1984, and Wilson, who died in 2005 at 60, went on to write his series of 10 plays about the African American experience in the 20th century.In 1983, Wilson returned to the O’Neill with “Fences.” The story of that summer is recounted here in this excerpt from “August Wilson: A Life,” an upcoming biography by Patti Hartigan, a former theater critic for The Boston Globe.AUGUST WILSON WAS SETTLING IN to the life of an itinerant playwright. He had been invited back to the O’Neill for the 1983 National Playwrights Conference for a workshop of “Fences,” and this time, he knew what to expect at the preconference weekend. He had one goal before he got on the van to Waterford. He needed to stock up on scotch. When he arrived at the pickup location, he spotted someone he had never seen before. He seemed unfamiliar with the routine, with the same apprehension that Wilson had experienced the year before. He was James Yoshimura, a writer from Chicago who had attended the Yale School of Drama. After a brief introduction, Wilson told Yoshimura that they needed to get some liquid sustenance in order to make it through the long weekend. Yoshimura was up for the chase. They found a store, pooled their money, and bought a large bottle of scotch. By the time the van deposited them at the mansion, they were smashed. And they became fast friends.“Fences,” Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, arrived on Broadway in 1987 after premiering in 1985 at Yale Repertory Theater. Both productions starred, from left, Mary Alice, Ray Aranha and James Earl Jones.Ron ScherlLike Wilson, Yoshimura was raised Catholic and came from a large family. His parents converted when they were forced to live in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. “That does not work for birth control,” Yoshimura said. “I am the middle of 11 children.” His family was one of only three Asian families in a predominantly German American Catholic parish on the North Side of Chicago. “You are the other,” he said of his childhood. “August could empathize with that. He knew what the ‘other’ was. We shared this friendship. It wasn’t like we would discuss Catholicism. This was just how we grew up. We never felt part of the mainstream of the faith that we were baptized into.”During his first year at the O’Neill, Wilson was stunned to see all the theater people hugging one another, but now he was one of them. He took it upon himself to initiate his new friend to the summer camp experience. “The bottle of scotch made the preconference much better,” Yoshimura said. And they were willing to share. “We made a lot of friends.” Yoshimura needed liquid encouragement to get through the process of reading his play aloud before strangers. He was there with “Ohio Tip-Off,” a drama about seven athletes on a minor-league basketball team who are vying to make it to the N.B.A. The team has four Black players and three white players. Wilson did not question his new friend’s subject matter, but he did question the way he read his play for the group. “I read my play very badly, and he laughed aloud about how bad I was — while we were still sharing our scotch.” Wilson did not tell Yoshimura that he had been at the O’Neill the summer before (nor that he had become the controversial star after the Frank Rich [review disguised as a feature] ran in The New York Times, nor that he was in discussions about bringing “Ma Rainey” to Broadway). When Yoshimura found out, he asked Wilson about it. “He was humble. He didn’t want to talk about it.”Wilson, who later went on to make strong public statements about the need for a Black director to direct a film version of “Fences,” nurtured Yoshimura. He never suggested that Yoshimura should not be writing Black characters. His friend played basketball, and he was writing what he knew. “All of our discussions were about aesthetics,” Yoshimura said. “It was never a matter of color. He was like, ‘If you write it, you write it. If it doesn’t work, you gotta fix it.’” Wilson told other playwrights the same thing over the years. Laura Maria Censabella, who was also a jazz singer, came to the O’Neill with her play “Jazz Wives Jazz Lives.” The characters included Black jazz musicians that she based on her friends and colleagues in the jazz world. Some at the O’Neill questioned whether she, as a white woman, should write Black characters. Wilson defended her; she was writing from her own experience. Because of his support, the griping stopped.Wilson had different issues with “Fences.” It clocked in at more than four hours when Wilson read it at the preconference. “My impression was, this guy can write, but he hasn’t heard of the two-hour limit,” Yoshimura said. “It took two hours to get through the first act.”Yoshimura was the perfect partner for Wilson at the O’Neill, where, in addition to learning about playwriting, he enjoyed the college experience he had never had. The two bonded over sports. Wilson was still obsessed with the 1965 boxing showdown between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston. Ali unexpectedly knocked out Liston early in the first round, leading to suspicions that the fight was rigged. Wilson could dissect that match for hours, and Yoshimura was a willing audience.The Broadway revival of “Fences,” in 2010, featured Viola Davis, Denzel Washington and Stephen McKinley Henderson. They all went on to star in the 2016 film adaptation.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen Yoshimura’s wife showed up to visit, Wilson made sure to teach their young son how to hit a baseball with a tree branch, a skill he had learned on the streets of Pittsburgh’s Hill District. They were improvising, onstage and off. This endearing friendship was formative for both men. Yoshimura had been told that he would succeed only if he wrote plays about Asian Americans, but Wilson assured him that was nonsense. Yoshimura tried to engage him on the subject of father-son relationships, since that is the foundation of “Fences.” Wilson, who was willing to talk about any subject for hours, shut down when asked about his father. Yoshimura intuited that his friend was “deeply wounded” and didn’t push the issue.Bill Partlan [the director of “Ma Rainey” the year before] was assigned to direct “Fences,” and Edith Oliver, the theater critic for The New Yorker, was the dramaturg. At the preconference, they both told Wilson that the play needed cuts. They made suggestions, but he said he wanted to see it first before excising any scenes or monologues. Wilson had never studied dramatic structure. He was learning fundamental rules such as the fact that an actor can’t be soaking wet in the rain at the end of one scene and then appear at the top of the next scene in fresh new clothing and dry hair.After the first performance, he stayed up all night and cut 45 minutes from the script. (Helen Hayes had been in the audience that night, and she left after the first act, reportedly saying, “I think I’ve had enough theater for one night.”) Wilson took out a long monologue about bones walking on water, a poetic piece of writing. Partlan told him to hold on to it. The monologue would be the foundation of a moving speech in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”“Fences” revolves around the tragic hero, Troy Maxson, a former slugger in the Negro Leagues who never got a chance to play in the Major Leagues because of the color of his skin. At its heart, the play is about the confrontation between Maxson and his son Cory, a theme that Wilson had explored in “Jitney!” as well. At the end of the play, Troy dies, and his brother, Gabriel, who was wounded in World War II and is mentally disabled with a metal plate in his head, wants to send his brother off to St. Peter in heaven. He blows his trumpet, but no sound comes out. The stage directions say it all. “He begins to howl in what is an attempt at song, or perhaps a song turning back into itself in an attempt at speech. He finishes his dance and the Gates of Heaven stand open as wide as God’s closet.” With that, Gabriel lightens up and says, “That’s the way that go.”On the second night of the performance at the O’Neill, the fog from the Atlantic Ocean rolled in at the end of the play. This was a common occurrence. Eugene O’Neill wrote about the fog in his masterpiece, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” “How thick the fog is,” he wrote. “I can’t see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know.”At the O’Neill, the natural setting was magical. The weather changed just as Gabriel, played by Howard E. Rollins Jr., went to play his trumpet. “The fog came in, and the lights pierced through the fog,” Partlan said. “I sent Howard up the ramp that leads to the door in the barn to usher Troy into heaven. It was magic. I can still see and feel it today.”The wallop of that final scene became a sort of touchstone at the O’Neill. Other playwrights aspired to achieve that emotional depth. At the end of the preconference when Wilson first read his play, he and the playwright John Patrick Shanley got drunk together one night [a story that is recounted in Jeffrey Sweet’s “The O’Neill”]. Shanley said, “You son-of-a-bitch. You wrote that stage direction at the end of that play,” referring to Gabriel blowing the trumpet. “You son-of-a-bitch. Nobody can touch that.”A revival of “Fences” is running at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Mass., through Aug. 27. Hartigan will be there at the Aug. 12 matinee for a discussion about her book, which will be published by Simon & Schuster on Aug. 15. More

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      Everybody Dance Now! ‘Here Lies Love’ Dictates Your Moves.

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      Engaging viewers’ bodies is central to this Broadway musical, a rare production that sets its audience in motion on the dance floor.Like many Broadway musicals, “Here Lies Love” involves a lot of dancing. Notably less common: how much moving is done by the audience.It isn’t unheard-of for a musical to tell the story of a dictator’s wife, but this one, with songs by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, is distinctly focused on its subject’s dancing habits. Imelda Marcos — wife of Ferdinand Marcos, the longtime president of the Philippines — was fond of discothèques. Accordingly, the Broadway Theater has been half-converted into a club on the model of Studio 54. There is a giant disco ball and a D.J., and the orchestra seats have been stripped out so that up to 300 members of the audience can experience the 90-minute show while crowded on a dance floor.As at a disco, those standing can dance as they like. But they are also herded by wranglers in magenta jumpsuits with light-up wands like the ones used to direct taxiing airplanes. Wheeled platforms and runways are regularly rearranged around the floor area, displacing audience members. One cruciform platform is aptly called the Blender. It churns the crowd like batter.The rest of the audience is seated, above the dance floor and back into the depths of the mezzanine. But these viewers move, too, encouraged by the D.J. to join the standing folks in a simple line dance, picking up the moves from cast members spread throughout the theater on more platforms and catwalks. A lot of the story action happens up there, too.“The engagement of the audience’s body is highly unusual,” Annie-B Parson, the show’s choreographer, said. “And when you engage the body, you also engage the mind and the heart.”The choreographer Annie-B Parson: “The engagement of the audience’s body is highly unusual. And when you engage the body, you also engage the mind and the heart.”Naima Green for The New York Times“Here Lies Love” has developed over more than a decade in various incarnations, but dance and audience motion have been at the center of the conception from the start, said Alex Timbers, the director: “We didn’t want it to be interactive, with people pulled up onstage and feeling embarrassed. We wanted the audience to be moving as a unit so no one feels singled out.”The idea is to cast the audience in the drama as extras, Timbers said. They aren’t just dancers at the club. They are guests at the Marcos’s wedding; the public at political rallies and election parties; witnesses to the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., the Marcos’s rival; participants in the People Power Revolution that overthrew the dictator in 1986.“Your journey changes, just like America’s relationship with the Philippines,” Timbers said. “After Aquino’s assassination, you feel a little complicit in having danced at Imelda’s wedding.”Similarly, the D.J. telling everyone what to do is somewhat dictatorial. When Marcos institutes martial law, no audience member “is getting tortured or anything,” Timbers said, “but there is a metaphor at play physically.”“You watch the audience applaud,” Parson said, “and you watch them wonder why they’re applauding. It’s pretty Brechtian.”Development of the show has been a trial-and-error experiment in how to get audiences to move as the creative team wants. “You don’t have the same audience every night,” Timbers said, “so you’re looking at trends, at human nature.”Elaborate charts delineate how the wranglers can redistribute the crowd effectively and safely without being distracting. And since the people in the mezzanine face in one direction while those on the floor face in several, directing everyone to “step to the right” in a line dance isn’t a simple matter. (Well-placed performers and video screens help.)Parson, who has worked with Byrne on concerts tours and on his recent Broadway show, “American Utopia,” comes from the world of postmodern dance. She said that while Timbers “has a beautiful sense of the body and space,” he and she had opposing, if complementary, attitudes about the fact that no audience member of “Here Lies Love” could see everything.The director of “Here Lies Love,” Alex Timbers, said the idea was to cast the audience in the drama as extras.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Alex worked really hard to share all the story material with everyone in the theater,” she said, whereas she was thinking about the composer John Cage’s philosophical idea that every seat in the house is perfect. “It becomes about perception. I love the experience of watching someone watch things that I might not be seeing. You feel things in your body that you may not see.”It’s a question of perspective, and not the only one. Many reviews of “Here Lies Love” and public objections to the show have focused on how the glamour and play of the club atmosphere rub against the show’s critique of the Marcoses.Parson said the context of disco — “an ecstatic dance form that tips quickly into despair” — is intentionally ambiguous. “Dancing is relative. You can use it for ill or for the greater good.”Imelda’s use of dance, what became known as her handbag diplomacy, “was embodied statesmanship,” Parson said. “She didn’t put a table between her and Nixon or Castro. She asked them to dance. She wasn’t a great dancer but that gave her a lot of power.”At one point, cast members act this out, wearing masks of famous political leaders. At other points, the choreography borrows a few of Imelda’s signature moves: circling her eye with two fingers, tapping the tops of her butterfly sleeves.The line dance, Parson said, was designed to be “fun and easy, something you could do in a chair if space was tight.” (“The Philippines have a really muscular tradition of line dancing,” she added, noting that the line dancing performed by the all-Filipino cast at parties is much more intricate.)Much of the choreography for the cast is more complicated, but mostly in tone, Parson said. In the title song, for example, Imelda tells the audience to remember her for love. “But let’s talk about the families she destroyed,” Parson said. “It’s a beautiful song, but it is ironic, so that’s how I choreographed it, with swinging umbrellas and sternum to the ceiling. You can’t take it straight.”Timothy Matthew Flores, who plays Aquino’s son along with other ensemble roles, said the detail of Parson’s choreography — “every single movement has a meaning” — made it more difficult than flashier and harder-hitting dance he’s done before. And running all around the large theater is “90 minutes of cardio.”But getting the audience out of their seats and dancing? That’s just fun, Flores said. “They start off shy and then they end up having a really good time. You can see them thinking, ‘Wow, this is not like any other Broadway show.’” More

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      ‘Back to the Future’ Review: The DeLorean Crash Lands on Broadway

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      The addition of 17 songs turns the 1985 sci-fi classic into a big “why?” musical with a big wow factor.The brand-extension musical is a tough genre to game, demanding something new for newcomers yet fidelity for fans. (“Hairspray” succeeded; “Frozen” did not.) “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based on the first of the time-travel films in the billion-dollar franchise, faces an additional hurdle: It hinges on a star performance that would seem to be irreproducible onstage.And by star, I of course mean the car.So, good news: In the Broadway adaptation, which opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater, the famously souped-up DeLorean DMC, or a life-size replica thereof, is terrific — in some ways more exciting than the one in the movies because it does its tricks live.Well, partly live. The time-warping, plutonium-powered joy rides that shuttle young Marty McFly (Casey Likes) between 1985 and 1955 in the vehicle retrofitted by the eccentric Doc Brown (Roger Bart) are crafty illusions combining mechanical action, busy projections and a lot of distraction with fog, lights and sound.Alas, that also describes the rest of the show, directed by John Rando with Doc-like frenzy: mechanical, busy, distracting, foggy. Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.Certainly the musical’s book, by Bob Gale, sticks as close to his 1985 screenplay (written with Robert Zemeckis, the movie’s director) as stagecraft and current-day taste permit. The Libyans who threaten Doc Brown are gone, swapped for radiation poisoning, which as yet has no defenders.But Marty is still the same frustrated would-be rock ’n’ roller, stuck in cookie-cutter, Reagan-era Hill Valley, Calif. — and, worse, in a family of beaten-down losers. When Doc’s DeLorean accidentally transports the teenager to 1955, during the exact week in which George McFly (his patsy father) and Lorraine (his boozing mother) fell in love at a high school dance, his presence threatens to create a causal paradox, interfering with their courtship and erasing his own existence.Roger Bart, left, as Doc Brown and Casey Likes as Marty McFly with a life-size replica of the souped-up DeLorean DMC from the film.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou wouldn’t expect the adapters to change that; the working out of the paradox is the best thing about the screenplay. Nor would you expect them to drop Doc’s unaccountably beloved catchphrase, “Great Scott,” though invoking it 13 times is perhaps a dozen times too many.Still, you might hope that something in the musical, for instance music, would change the way the material lands. It doesn’t. The numbers carried over from the movie and performed by Marty at that high school dance — including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Huey Lewis and the News’s “The Power of Love” — are of course effective as ensemble opportunities. But neither they nor most of the 17 new songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, though tuneful and in a few cases rousing, do anything different from what the movie did anyway. Like Silvestri’s John Williams-y main title music, repurposed here as a brief overture, they are too generic for that.The exceptions underline the problem. One is “Gotta Start Somewhere,” a song for Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955 who we already know will run for mayor 30 years later. That nice but underfed idea from the screenplay becomes a can’t-help-but-smile barnburner here, with a classic musical theater theme (underdog dreams big) sparking a classic musical theater performance (by Jelani Remy). Similarly, “My Myopia,” the appealingly peculiar song that introduces George in 1955, creates the illusion of depth (“My myopia is my utopia”) from a plot hole.Rando’s staging of that number is not ideal; though George (Hugh Coles) is supposedly peeping at Lorraine from a tree, it looks more like he’s in a rowboat made of leaves. And Lorraine (Liana Hunt) apparently misunderstands the physics of reflection because she’s using her open bedroom window as a mirror.It’s a rare visual misstep for Tim Hatley, the show’s set and costume designer, who has generally provided astonishingly satisfying theatrical versions of the movie’s settings and — with the sound designer Gareth Owen, the lighting designers Tim Lutkin and Hugh Vanstone, the video designer Finn Ross and the illusion designer Chris Fisher — those surprisingly old-fashioned newfangled effects.The inventiveness and surprise of the climactic sequence — we see Doc climbing the crucial clock tower in a hilariously fake layering of live action behind a scrim and animation projected onto it — makes the show’s obsessive concern with faithfulness elsewhere feel like a cheap compromise.And yet it’s not really faithful. The movie is carefully balanced in tone; the musical is dialed up uniformly to 88 m.p.h. Coles, a carry-over from the 2021 London production, which won the 2022 Olivier award for best new musical, essentially duplicates and then vastly exaggerates Crispin Glover’s already exaggerated George. Bart, too idiosyncratic merely to copy the idiosyncrasies of the movie’s Christopher Lloyd, instead adds a descant of commentary atop them, sometimes seeming to extemporize a different show entirely. And Likes, though not at all reminiscent of the expert Michael J. Fox in the movie — in tribute to whom there’s a nice Easter egg — is given nothing new to do except sing, which he does very well.Jelani Remy, center, as Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955, performing “Gotta Start Somewhere.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat the problems of musical adaptation, even when solved, come to define the production — good workarounds are not the same as good work — suggests the “Why?” problem at its heart. Why, other than the opportunity to rake in a gazillion more dollars, make a musical out of a movie that clearly does not want you to?I say that because, like most pop science fiction, “Back to the Future” resists (and barely benefits from) deepening. Its plot is necessarily complex and its characters compensatorily flat — instead of, preferably for a musical, the other way around. The movie’s two hours were barely enough to tell the story; to tell it in about two-and-a-half, while leaving room for those 17 new songs, everything else has been cut to the bone, with no room for subtlety, let alone expressivity. Why then bother with the songs in the first place?Making material shallower, even if cleverly, is not a great argument for adaptation. It can be defended if some other value is countervailing. For me, the show’s stagecraft and general high spirits come closest to providing that value, but they are too often undone by 1955-ish ideas of Broadway style (cartwheeling cheerleaders, backflipping jocks) and 1985-ish plot points held over from the movie. The Libyans may be gone, but the story still valorizes a peeping Tom and suggests that a white boy introduced “Johnny B. Goode” three years before a Black man actually wrote it. That’s what we call a caucausal paradox.Though much praised at the time of its release and more recently beatified as one of the all-time greats, the movie, with its implicit consumerism and win-at-all-costs ethos, has always struck some people — including Glover — as morally hollow. One of the sour notes in the musical is the way it sings the same tune. Still, in this first post-“Phantom of the Opera” season, I have to admit that the car alone might be worth a ticket. It fills a deep Broadway longing for large objects performing audience flyovers — and, like the dear departed arthritic chandelier, may be doing so for the foreseeable future.Back to the Future: The MusicalAt the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; backtothefuturemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Cat Kid Comic Club’ Review: Tiny, Big Imaginations

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      In a musical based on works by the creator of Captain Underpants, an anthropomorphic feline urges young swamp dwellers (and the polliwogs in the audience) to let their creativity run wild.“Oppenheimer” isn’t the summer’s only work of popular culture in which atomic bombs detonate. The other such production, however, draws laughter and aims for an audience that probably worries more about long division than about nuclear fission.That show is TheaterWorksUSA’s “Cat Kid Comic Club: The Musical,” which opened on Sunday at the Lucille Lortel Theater. This family-oriented romp, set in a swamp “right this minute,” features obstreperous tadpoles, a bionic butterflyfish and a sweet-natured feline hero — all characters that spring from the imagination of Dav Pilkey, the delightfully subversive author of such best-selling children’s graphic-novel series as Captain Underpants and Dog Man. Now the writer and lyricist Kevin Del Aguila, who’s also an actor in “Some Like It Hot,” and the composer Brad Alexander, who in 2019 winningly adapted the Dog Man books for TheaterWorksUSA, have returned to bring Pilkey’s Cat Kid Comic Club series to the stage.The new production begins as the tadpoles, who have been endowed with telekinetic powers, are destroying civilization, but soon morphs into a humorous tale of redemption. Cat Kid (Sonia Roman), a feline friend to all the swamp’s residents, has an antidote to the evil force controlling the polliwogs, and Flippy the fish (Jamie LaVerdiere) adopts them. But when they still prove to be disciplinary challenges, Cat Kid starts the club in the musical’s title, hoping that teaching the tiny frogs to create comics will help tame their behavior.Drawing comics certainly helped Pilkey, who has written about his early attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But just as his irreverent novels dismay some adults, the tadpoles produce comics — all acted out hilariously onstage — that horrify their adoptive father.Curly (Brian Owen) delivers one in which a failed baby superhero inadvertently causes nukes to explode, ending the world. And Poppy (L.R. Davidson) draws “The Cute, Little, Fluffy Cloud of Death,” whose lonely, lisping title character finds friendship with a ghost girl and her skeleton dog. (Emmarose Campbell created the dog; AchesonWalsh Studios did the other ingenious puppets that augment the nimble human cast, and Cameron Anderson designed the inventive set.)Now, parents who think gallows humor is inappropriate for the young may not buy tickets to “Cat Kid.” But they would be depriving their children of not only the wit of the musical’s book and the inventiveness of its numbers — they range from Bon Jovi-esque power ballads to bluegrass to rap — but also of its serious import.In addition to urging its audience to be fearlessly imaginative, the show promotes equity for girls in a subplot involving the combative tadpole Naomi (Markia Nicole Smith) and her smug brother, Melvin (Dan Rosales). The action reveals that Naomi’s prickliness derives partly from having to work harder for the rewards that boys like Melvin take for granted.But the musical, deftly directed and choreographed by Marlo Hunter, also endorses a more global inclusiveness. At one point, Cat Kid announces a lesson on perspective, which led a little boy at the performance I attended to whisper, “What’s perspective?”The show answers by demonstrating how the concept plays a role in society as well as in art. At a time when some communities are banning certain children’s books — Pilkey’s included — “Cat Kid” emphasizes the value of learning about diverse points of view and encouraging creativity in young people. And if what they create makes their parents uncomfortable? It’s not the end of the world.Cat Kid Comic ClubThrough Aug. 27 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; twusa.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      ‘Spamalot’ Revival to Open on Broadway This Fall

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      The new production, directed by Josh Rhodes, had a brief run at the Kennedy Center in Washington in May. Casting has not yet been announced.Make way for shrubbery: “Spamalot” is returning to Broadway.The show, a Monty Python-inspired spoof of Arthurian legend, first opened on Broadway in 2005, won the Tony Award for best musical, ran for four years, and has been widely staged since then.This new production, which had a 10-day run in May at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, will be the musical’s first Broadway revival.Previews are scheduled to begin Oct. 31, and the opening is set for Nov. 16 at the St. James Theater. The executive producer will be Jeffrey Finn, who is the Kennedy Center’s vice president of theater producing and programming.“I have been a crazy fan of ‘Spamalot’ since I saw the opening in 2005,” Finn said. “I feel as though in 2023, audiences are really looking for a fun escape and an opportunity to laugh as much as possible, and I believe this show delivers all of that.”The casting for Broadway has not yet been announced; at the Kennedy Center the cast included Alex Brightman, James Monroe Iglehart, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, Rob McClure, Matthew Saldivar, Jimmy Smagula, Michael Urie and Nik Walker.The musical, based on the screenplay for “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” features a book and lyrics by Eric Idle, who was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. The music is by Idle and John Du Prez. Reviewing the original production, The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “resplendently silly” and a “fitful, eager celebration of inanity.”The revival is directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, who will be making his Broadway directing debut; he has worked on Broadway as a performer and choreographer. (Rhodes’s husband, Lee Wilkins, was a replacement swing in the original “Spamalot” company.)Rhodes described “Spamalot” as “a beautiful satire of Broadway, and of the class system,” and said he is excited to introduce Monty Python to a generation of theatergoers who may be unfamiliar with the group’s history and work. “In D.C., there was some sort of incredible energy from the audience that made us realize people were so hungry for this material,” he said. “There was a rowdiness that maybe wasn’t there before, and made it feel very special.”The “Spamalot” revival will be the first production developed by the Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage program to transfer to Broadway; Finn created the program in 2018, and it has evolved from presenting semi-staged concert versions of existing musicals to presenting fully staged, but short-run, productions. The Kennedy Center had a previous history of nurturing work that transferred to Broadway; the last Kennedy Center-produced transfer was a 2014 revival of “Side Show.”A few years ago a movie version of the musical was in the works, but Paramount Pictures, which held the rights to produce it, is no longer pursuing the project, and Idle suggested on Twitter earlier this year that that the film adaptation had been killed. More