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      New Jason Robert Brown Musical Highlights MCC Theater Season

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      A honky-tonk lesbian romance and a new musical by Gavin Creel are also slated for the Off Broadway theater’s 2023-24 lineup.A new musical about an aspiring writer by Jason Robert Brown, a honky-tonk lesbian romance and a musical inspired by the singer and songwriter Gavin Creel’s first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art are on the roster for MCC Theater’s 2023-24 season.“Each of their shows asks a provocative question. What does art do for us? What is our responsibility to the truth? And what does family mean?” Bernie Telsey and Will Cantler, co-artistic directors at the theater, wrote in a statement announcing the season on Thursday.The season will begin in November with the new musical “Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice,” a program of 17 original songs that Creel wrote after his first visit to the Met in 2019. (The title, he told The New York Times in 2021, stemmed from his discovery that if a work of art is lacking color, light, sex or story, “I usually just kind of walk on by.”) Creel, who won a Tony Award for his performance as Cornelius Hackl in “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway and is currently playing Cinderella’s Prince in the national tour of “Into the Woods,” will also star in “Walk on Through,” which is his theatrical songwriting debut. Linda Goodrich will direct.It will be followed in January by the world premiere of “The Connector,” a musical that tells the story of an up-and-coming writer who gets his first article published in a prestigious magazine — and soon faces a test of his integrity. The music and lyrics are by Brown, the three-time Tony Award-winning composer and lyricist for “Parade” and “The Bridges of Madison County,” with a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman. The show will be directed by Daisy Prince, who also helped conceive it, with casting to be announced.Finally, in April, comes the New York premiere of “The Lonely Few,” a rock concert-style show about two musicians who navigate being an interracial gay couple in the South. It was first produced at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles earlier this year in a production starring Lauren Patten, who won a Tony Award in 2021 for “Jagged Little Pill,” and Ciara Renée (“Waitress,” “Frozen”). The show, with music and lyrics by Zoe Sarnak and a book by Rachel Bonds, received mixed reviews, with Charles McNulty, the theater critic for The Los Angeles Times, calling the performances universally “terrific” while noting that the production suffered from “choppy” storytelling and a “relationship between the drama and the music that’s off-kilter.” It will be directed by Trip Cullman and Ellenore Scott, both of whom also helmed it at the Geffen, with casting to be announced.The season will also include the world premiere of “Mary Gets Hers,” a drama-comedy by Emma Horwitz set during a 10th-century plague in Germany and inspired by “Abraham, or the Rise and Repentance of Mary,” by Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, an early European female poet and playwright (Sept. 11-Oct. 7). The production will be directed by Josiah Davis and produced by MCC Theater’s fall company-in-residence, The Playwrights Realm. More

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      Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells to Reunite in ‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’

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      The pair, who were the original co-stars of “The Book of Mormon,” will return to Broadway this fall in a two-man musical comedy.Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, whose careers were transformed when they co-starred as hapless missionaries in “The Book of Mormon,” will reunite this fall in a comedic two-hander, “Gutenberg! The Musical!,” that has been staged around the world but will now arrive on Broadway for the first time.“There is no bigger passion as an actor than being on a stage,” Gad, who has been working in film and television for the last decade, said in a joint telephone interview with Rannells. “It’s how I got my start, and I’ve missed it.”“Gutenberg” is a musical that satirizes musicals; it is about two aspiring musical theater writers who decide to write a musical about Johannes Gutenberg without knowing all that much either about him (he was a Renaissance inventor, best known for his contributions to the history of printing presses) or about musical theater. The show is set at a backers’ audition — a run-through staged for potential investors — but in this case, the artists have so little money they have to perform every role themselves.“‘Gutenberg’ is very much a love letter to musical theater,” Rannells said. “We’re playing these two characters who have very passionately written a show without a ton of historical information and without a lot of skill, but a lot of passion and a lot of heart and one shot to find some Broadway producers to help them put this show on.”The musical, written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, began its life in the comedy world, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, where King was the artistic director, and then was further developed at the New York Musical Festival. It had runs in London and Off Broadway starting in 2006, and has since been produced in Australia, France, Korea, Spain, and around the U.S.; Brown and King, who have been friends since childhood, went on to write the book for the musical adaptation of “Beetlejuice.”The Broadway run is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 15, to open Oct. 12, and to close Jan. 28 at the James Earl Jones Theater. The director will be Alex Timbers, who also directed the 2006 Off Broadway production; Timbers later won a Tony Award for directing “Moulin Rouge!,” and he has also worked in comedy, including as the director of “Oh, Hello” on Broadway.“I love this show, and it gets seen and performed all over the world, but isn’t really known in New York,” Timbers said. “It straddles the play and comedy worlds, and I feel like there’s an audience for that.”Timbers and Gad had been talking for some time about finding a way to collaborate; Gad said they had discussed the possibility of doing a production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” In 2020, Timbers suggested “Gutenberg,” and Gad loved the script, which he in turn shared with Rannells; the three did a first reading together in March of 2020, days before theaters were shut down for the coronavirus pandemic, and are now returning to the project.“Broadway is rebounding, and it is due for an even bigger rebound,” Gad said. “I was watching the Tony Awards, and I was blown away by how many productions I was so excited to go see on my next trip to New York, and to be a part of that — this incredible comeback that Broadway is long overdue post-pandemic — is a really exciting opportunity. And more than anything, I think that people miss laughing.”The lead producer of “Gutenberg” is the Ambassador Theater Group, a British company that has become increasingly active on Broadway; among the other producers is Bad Robot Live, which is a new division of a company co-founded by the filmmaker J.J. Abrams, and which has a partnership with the Ambassador Theater Group. More

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      36 Hours in Paris: Things to Do and See

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      4:30 p.m.
      Go from a royal garden to the mosque
      Cross to the city’s left bank via Sully Bridge, taking in views from the small triangular garden at the tip of the Île Saint-Louis, the quieter of the two islands on the Seine. From Oberkampf, this half-hour walk will take you to the Jardin des Plantes, a vast botanical park that started as a royal medicinal garden in the 17th century. Stroll through, with the National Museum of Natural History in the background, and visit the gardens’ four oversize greenhouses (€7). Exit via the west gates to find the Grand Mosque of Paris. Inaugurated in the wake of World War I, in part to commemorate the sacrifices of colonized Muslims who fought for France, it features a patio with a hand-sculpted cedar wood door adorned with Quran verses in calligraphy, built by highly skilled North African craftsmen (visit, €3). Pause for a glass of mint tea (€2) in the courtyard or get a good scrubbing or massage at the ornate, sizeable hammam (from €30, women only). More

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      ‘Good Vibrations’ Review: The Saving Power of Punk

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      In a big-hearted musical about a 1970s Belfast record store owner and the punk movement he nurtured, music is the real hero.On a nighttime street in 1970s Belfast, Northern Ireland, a D.J. named Terri Hooley runs into a pair of local toughs — young men who’ve found their purpose in the gunfire and explosions of a sectarian conflict pitting Protestants against Catholics.That strife defines everything around Terri, but his life’s meaning comes from music: the Hank Williams songs of his childhood; the rock and reggae that became his soundtrack later on.“Do your feet a favor,” he tells the toughs. “Take them dancing, like you used to.”Is it bad to call a punk rock musical charming? I hope not, because “Good Vibrations” — a biomusical about the real Terri Hooley, who became the idealistic, stalwart champion of Belfast’s nascent punk scene — absolutely is. Directed by Des Kennedy for the Lyric Theater, Belfast, it portrays music as a defiantly joyous refuge from ugliness and danger. Far from romanticizing mayhem, it presents Northern Irish punk as a youthful life force in opposition to it.Adapted by Colin Carberry and Glenn Patterson from their 2012 film of the same name, “Good Vibrations” (not to be confused with the Broadway jukebox musical also of the same name, set to Beach Boys tunes) transports the movie’s righteous sense of pleasure and freedom to the stage at Irish Arts Center, in Manhattan.Glen Wallace stars as Terri, a stubborn dreamer with zero business sense who opens a record shop, Good Vibrations, in Belfast’s city center — and makes a deal with fighters on both sides that they will leave him alone. Soon he’s putting out records by local punk bands, because no one else will, and promoting them to the world. His marriage to the lovely Ruth Carr (Jayne Wisener) suffers for it; his passion is consumed by the shop and the punks.Terri’s bands — Rudi, the Outcasts, the Undertones — don’t snarl in their rebellion, though. They’re sunnier than that, and so is this show. It’s also a little chaotic, as befits Terri’s life, and not always as clear as it needs to be. It could be that its creators are inhibited by the ethical obligations of telling a story inspired by real people. Still, this is a tonic of a musical.Grace Smart’s set makes clever use of instrument cases, Gillian Lennox’s period costumes are impeccable and the use of music as underscore can be hauntingly gorgeous. (The musical director is Katie Richardson.) In a cast that does a lot of doubling, Marty Maguire is a protean standout as Terri’s socialist dad and several other characters.As much as “Good Vibrations” is about Terri, its ultimate hero might be music itself, in whose saving, salving power he believes unwaveringly.“This is missionary work,” Terri says, in his D.J. days.So it is. Preach.Good VibrationsThrough July 16 at Irish Art Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      In ‘A Simulacrum,’ Steve Cuiffo Has Nothing Up His Sleeves

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      The magician worked with the playwright Lucas Hnath to create “a more vulnerable version of magic performance,” Hnath said.Steve Cuiffo began performing magic the way that most kids do. His brother did tricks. So did an older cousin. A grandfather had a routine with a handkerchief and a dime that absolutely killed. While he was in elementary school, he started entertaining at birthday parties, first for $5 and then more. He kept up his routines even as he studied theater at New York University and began to work with avant-garde companies like the Wooster Group.“I always had a deck of cards in my hand,” he said recently. “I still kind of do.” (Technically, on the afternoon of our interview, they were in his shirt pocket.)For some years, he kept acting and illusionism separate. But gradually he combined them: first with “Major Bang,” a nuclear-terror comedy for the Foundry Theater, and then through work with Rainpan 43, which premiered the ecstatic magic lampoon, “Elephant Room.” He was also a magic consultant on other productions (television shows and movies, too), including Lucas Hnath’s 2013 play “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney.” (He and Hnath had overlapped at N.Y.U., but only became friendly later.)One day, during rehearsals for “Disney,” while watching Cuiffo teach the actor Larry Pine how to cough up bloody handkerchiefs, Hnath recalled telling that show’s director, Sarah Benson, “I could just watch that all day long.”Cuiffo performs both classic tricks and some new ones, including a few that fail.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd now he can. Cuiffo and Hnath have created “A Simulacrum,” which includes both classic tricks (the ambitious card, the torn and restored newspaper) and some new ones. Unusually for a magic show, it also incorporates several tricks that fail. Because “A Simulacrum,” running through July 9 at Atlantic Stage 2, is less a demonstration of magic than a deconstruction of how and why magic is made. To perform it, Cuiffo, 45, had to unlearn most of his habits, to strip away any vestige of showmanship.“This whole show is trying to answer that question of what is magic,” said Cuiffo, sunk into a couch in his dressing room, deep underground at the Atlantic Stage 2 space in Chelsea, and dressed in magician-appropriate all-black.His offstage persona is fairly close to the stage one he favors — rumpled, excitable, mildly sardonic, casually authoritative. Writing in The Times, Maya Phillips complimented his unflashy stage presence: “He’s low-key, grounded in both his gestures and his manner of speech.” If there is space between the man he is and the man he plays when he’s making cards appear and disappear, he can’t quite find it.“If I had a therapist, maybe I could answer that,” he said.Cuiffo, a familiar face Off Broadway, is unusual both in how he fuses magic and theater, which few performers do, and in how he appears to combine rigor with a seeming spontaneity.“He’s this great improvisational performer at his deepest core,” said Christine Jones, who was moved to create the one-on-one performance event Theater for One after Cuiffo performed close-up magic for her at a wedding. “But of course that’s balanced with hours and hours and hours of practice that is not improvisational at all.”Earlier work: Cuiffo, far right, with Trey Lyford, left, and Geoff Sobelle, center, as dorky-cool suburbanites with a fixation on sleight-of-hand in “Elephant Room: Dust From the Stars,” a play performed on Zoom in 2020.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGeoff Sobelle, who created “Elephant Room” and its sequel, “Elephant Room: Dust From the Stars,” with Cuiffo and the actor Trey Lyford, described a different balancing act, a reverence for and an impatience with magic as an art form.“As much as he loves this stuff,” Sobelle said, “he also totally wants to tear it down and just rip it apart.”After “Disney,” he created the mentalism routine for Hnath’s “The Thin Place,” a ghost story about a woman with supposed psychic powers, and the vanishing act in “Dana H.,” a first-person account of the kidnapping of Hnath’s mother. When “Dana H.” premiered at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, a member of the company’s artistic staff commissioned this new magic show by Hnath and Cuiffo.Their first of three workshops for what became “A Simulacrum” took place on East 15th Street in August 2021. The collaborators had set a few parameters. Hnath, who was raised as an evangelical Christian, had performed magic as a teenager, typically as a way to illustrate Gospel lessons. That experience has made him allergic to both audience participation and flimflam, so they had decided on a format that was closer to an interview.“I really wanted to find a way to make a magic show that I would want to watch,” Hnath said in a recent interview. “I wanted to make an honest magic show.”Hnath also decided they would record the workshops, which ultimately ran to 50 hours. Hnath then edited the recordings, with his voice appearing on tape and Cuiffo recreating, at each performance, his own side of the conversation.“We’ve set it up so I don’t have to act,” Cuiffo said.Cuiffo recalled his excitement for that first workshop. He had plenty of tricks to show Hnath, some old, some new. He figured they would choose the best ones and refine them. But as he moved from one to the next, Hnath remained unimpressed. The routines felt too polished, too slick. Hnath preferred messiness.“I wanted to see how much I could stack on top of him and still watch him wriggle his way out,” Hnath said of Cuiffo. “He really is a magnificent problem solver.”Victor Llorente for The New York Times“I like the real mistakes, not the fake ones,” he said. “Too often magic and performance feels superhuman. I was interested in a more vulnerable version of magic performance.”In anticipation of the second workshop, to be held three months later, Hnath set up several impossible or nearly impossible tasks: Cuiffo had to create a trick that would realize some fantasy or desire, a trick that would fail, a trick in which the outcome would be a surprise and — this prompt was possibly the hardest — a trick that Cuiffo’s wife, the actress Eleanor Hutchins, would love. (As Hutchins confirmed in an email, most magic makes her “uncomfortable.”)“I wanted to see how much I could stack on top of him and still watch him wriggle his way out,” Hnath said. “Because he really is a magnificent problem solver.”That second workshop, as the show reveals, didn’t go very well. “Brutal” and “stressful” were the words that Cuiffo used to describe it. A perfectionist, Cuiffo struggled with the prompts. These were problems that he couldn’t solve, at least not in the way that Hnath required. Eventually, the workshop devolved into a two-hour fight, which erupted when Hnath critiqued the props that Cuiffo planned to use in the trick for Hutchins as “cheating.”“That got gnarly,” Cuiffo recalled. “Like, are you telling me how I need to make a piece for my wife?”There was one further workshop, which forms the show’s third act, although to say too much about it would be to blight the surprise. Cuiffo did eventually develop a trick and Hutchins confirmed that she did in fact love it.“It was unexpected, understated and personal,” she wrote in an email. “It was cute, funny and nice, just like Steve.”The show was designed to be about process, not product, however funny and nice. Despite the stress and the arguments, Cuiffo said that he enjoyed having Hnath as a collaborator and goad.“He strategically broke down all that [expletive] I usually do,” Cuiffo said.Making illusions without any of the patter, the showmanship, the razzle-dazzle? That, he has learned, is a kind of magic, too. More

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      ‘Dear England’ Review: When Soccer Success Becomes a Moral Victory

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      A new James Graham play about the soccer coach Gareth Southgate is a lively romp, but its core message about embracing male vulnerability feels soppy.What makes a good leader? When the unassuming and softly spoken Gareth Southgate was appointed head coach of the England men’s soccer team in 2016, many fans and commentators felt he lacked the kahunas for the role, that he was simply too nice. But in the past seven years he has overseen a remarkable transformation in the England team’s fortunes, making it stronger and more exciting to watch than at any time in recent history.The ups and downs of Southgate’s tenure are portrayed with a blend of playfulness and moral seriousness in “Dear England,” directed by Rupert Goold, which runs at the National Theater, in London, through Aug. 11. It’s a lively, feel-good romp with plenty of irreverent humor, though the narrative borders on hagiography, and its core message about embracing male vulnerability is labored to the point of soppiness.The play chronicles the team’s involvement in three recent major tournaments, starting with its surprise run to the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup in Russia; then comes an agonizing defeat by Italy in the Euro 2020 final, followed by an impressive showing, culminating in an unlucky quarterfinal exit, at last year’s World Cup in Qatar.The on-field action is evoked through dynamic set pieces choreographed by Ellen Kane and Hannes Langolf, in which the players enact key moments in elaborate simulations, complete with slow-motion sequences and freeze-framed goal celebrations. These are kitsch, but mercifully brief, as the bulk of the activity takes place off the pitch: in locker rooms, team meetings and news conferences whose settings are rendered with smart simplicity by the designer Es Devlin.Joseph Fiennes as Gareth Southgate, manager of the England men’s soccer team.Marc BrennerJoseph Fiennes is outstanding as Southgate, who is portrayed as self-effacing but assertive, an approachable father figure to his young charges. Will Close, as England’s captain and star player, Harry Kane, plays up the striker’s famously laconic manner, providing a bathetic counterpoint to the coach’s earnest rhetoric. Adam Hugill is similarly amusing as the defender Harry Maguire, who is portrayed as a lovable simpleton — not the sharpest tool in the box, but solid and dependable. Kel Matsena delivers a spirited performance as Raheem Sterling, who, along with Bukayo Saka (Ebenezer Gyau), speaks out defiantly against racism after England’s Black players are the targets of abuse.The principal female character in this necessarily male-dominated lineup is the sports psychologist Pippa Grange (Gina McKee), hired by Southgate to help the players open up about their feelings and overcome self-doubt. When one unreconstructed member of the coaching staff questions the need for her services, she reminds him that psychology has been at the root of England’s past failures: “This is men, dealing, or not dealing, with fear,” she says.The play’s author, James Graham, is known for political theater, with hits including “Ink” and “Best of Enemies,” and “Dear England” has distinctly activist overtones. Southgate’s mild-mannered disposition, emotional intelligence and leftish politics — he has been supportive of Black Lives Matter and outspoken on mental health issues — are kryptonite to a certain type of reactionary sports jock. So it’s tempting to view his story as a culture-war allegory, pitting touchy-feely liberalism against old-school machismo.From left: Will Close as Harry Kane, Ebenezer Gyau as Bukayo Saka and Kel Matsena as Raheem Sterling.Marc BrennerUnfortunately the play leans into this a little too heavily, with pantomimic cameos from several of Britain’s recent Conservative prime ministers — Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — pandering to the assumed prejudices of cosmopolitan London theatregoers in a way that comes off as ingratiating and smug. This is ramped up in the second half, which is considerably less funny, and feels rushed: The 2020 and 2022 tournaments are rattled through at speed, in contrast to the more leisurely pacing before the intermission.Southgate’s playing career is best remembered for a decisive miss in a penalty shootout against Germany in the semifinal of the 1996 European Championship, played in London, which resulted in England’s elimination from that tournament. A personal redemption narrative forms a compelling subplot the main story, and it’s a cruel irony that Southgate’s England side also lost the final of Euro 2020 in a penalty shootout on home soil. That Southgate has yet to bag a trophy — the England men’s team still hasn’t won a major tournament since 1966 — remains a powerful trump card for his doubters. And so the play’s celebratory tenor feels a little misplaced.Yet “Dear England” is not so much about sports as it is about culture. The technical and tactical foundations of the England team’s revival are conspicuously underplayed in this telling: The team’s on-field improvement is straightforwardly tethered to a shift in moral values, and we are given to understand that correlation equals causation. You can be fully on board with everything Southgate stands for and still find this cloyingly simplistic.Dear EnglandThrough Aug. 11 at the National Theater, in London; nationaltheatre.org.uk More

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      ‘Lizard Boy’ Review: Comic Book Adventures

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      Justin Huertas’s indie-rock musical, in which he also stars, follows a young misfit whose first date spirals into a comic book adventure.As “Lizard Boy,” a 2015 musical now making its New York debut at Theater Row, dragged some 20 minutes past its advertised 90, I began to wonder what the net positives of comic books have been on the culture. Presented in a Prospect Theater Company production, after a showing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year, this quirky indie-rock show, with book, music and lyrics by Justin Huertas, traffics in that medium’s clichés, down to a protagonist with a stunted understanding of grown-up matters. (And, no, I don’t think the show is meant for kids.)As we meet our hero, Trevor (Huertas), in Seattle, we learn of a horrific incident he had experienced 20 years ago: When a winged dragon was shot down by soldiers, its blood showered down on Trevor (and four other unlucky kids), causing them to mutate in some way, with him growing green scales. Now he only leaves the house during the annual Monster Fest, a Comic Con-like celebration of the dragon’s slaughter and apparently the only time he can go unnoticed. But when loneliness gets the better of him, he downloads Grindr and meets up with the dopey Cary (William A. Williams).Cary, who was only looking for sex, soon finds himself falling for the innocent Trevor, who tells him about a mysterious presence in his dreams. In a neat bit of timeline doubling that feels like flipping a comic’s pages back and forth, their meet cute is spliced with a visit to a grungy nightclub where that very figure from his dreams, the rough-edged Siren (Kiki deLohr), is performing. Their encounter fated, the three become embroiled in a routine battle for humanity, as the singer tries to enlist them in fending off what she and Trevor believe to be impending doom, but winds up becoming a threat herself.The cast members play their own instruments under the direction of Brandon Ivie, who has them hurtling road cases around Suzu Sakai’s cluttered-chic set. A brick back wall holds faded posters and houses Katherine Freer’s comic book projections, which do the fantastical heavy lifting when wings and superpowers enter the proceedings.Huertas’s music is agreeable, reminiscent of ’90s-era Duncan Sheik, with intuitive lyrics and some often lovely melodies. But if the idea is to build on comic books and their paralleling of heroes’ isolation to readers’ own disenfranchisement in order to fold in some sense of queer liberation, the proposition falls flat in a surprisingly close-minded show that is alarmingly puritanical in its view of sex.Trevor repeatedly berates Cary for his desires, and the show prioritizes Trevor’s virginal purity. With her tragic back story revealed, the bourbon-soaked, switchblade-wielding Siren is essentially a humorless take on Audrey from “Little Shop of Horrors” though, here, you get the sense that, in her stilettoed abjection, she is Someone Who Has Sex, and must therefore become a villain.Sex is everywhere and nowhere in “Lizard Boy,” a musical which I’m sure will continue to find its audience, just as comic books continue to infiltrate the idea of mature art.Lizard BoyThrough July 11 at Theater Row, Manhattan; prospecttheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Paxton Whitehead, Actor Who Found Humor in the Stodgy, Dies at 85

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      An Englishman with a deep, cultured voice, he played uptight snobs in films like “Back to School” and on shows like “Friends” and “Mad About You.”Paxton Whitehead, a comic actor who earned a Tony nomination for his role in a revival of “Camelot” and played the starchiest of stuffed shirts in films like the Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School” and on hit 1990s sitcoms like “Friends” and “Mad About You,” died on Friday in Arlington, Va. He was 85.His daughter, Alex Whitehead-Gordon, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of a fall.Mr. Whitehead, an Englishman with a modulated baritone voice, often coaxed humor from his sharp features and dignified bearing. His comic characters typically displayed subtly exaggerated versions of his own traits, which he executed with seeming ease.“He couldn’t help but be funny,” the critic Terry Doran wrote in The Buffalo News in 1997 of Mr. Whitehead’s time at the George Bernard Shaw Festival in Ontario, adding: “He didn’t sweat buckets striving to make us laugh. He just was amusing. It came naturally.”For Mr. Whitehead, finding the comedy was the key that unlocked a role.“You always have to find the core of humor in a character — at least I like to, the same way some people will say, ‘I like to find the good in him, even though he is a villain,’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1997.One such character was Philip Barbay, the uptight dean of a business school and the nemesis of Thornton Melon, Mr. Dangerfield’s character, in “Back to School” (1986). Melon, a crass but successful businessman, comes to Grand Lakes University to visit his struggling son and winds up enrolling at the school after making a sizable donation.Barbay hates Melon on sight and does his best to get him expelled, to little effect. Early in the movie he and his girlfriend, Diane, a literature professor played by Sally Kellerman, see Melon buying books for students at the university bookstore, and Barbay describes him as “the world’s oldest living freshman, and the walking epitome of the decline in modern education.”Melon goes on to disrupt Barbay’s class and date Diane. Mr. Whitehead infused Barbay with some pathos — the character seemed unable to keep himself from being a killjoy — which added another layer to the humor. While out with the free-spirited, poetry-loving Diane, Barbay proposes that they take their relationship to the next level through “a merger,” adding that they would become “incorporated, if you will.”From left, Rodney Dangerfield, Mr. Whitehead and Ned Beatty in the 1986 movie “Back to School.”Orion, via ShutterstockMr. Whitehead’s stodgy figure in “Back to School” was the archetype for many of his later sitcom roles. He played a stuffy neighbor on “Mad About You,” a stuffy boss on “Friends” and the stuffy headmaster of a prestigious school on “Frasier.”He was also a prolific theater actor. He appeared in more than a dozen Broadway productions, including the revue “Beyond the Fringe” (1962-64) and the 1980 revival of “Camelot,” in which his portrayal of King Pellinore earned him a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical. He played Sherlock Holmes opposite Glenn Close in “The Crucifer of Blood,” which ran for 236 performances at the Helen Hayes Theater in 1978 and 1979.Mr. Whitehead’s roles, especially onstage, were not always comic. One departure was his portrayal of the ambition-crazed lead in a well-reviewed production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” at the Old Globe in San Diego in 1985.“Comedy, tragedy, pathos, spectacle — everything is swept along before the raging kinetic power of this Richard,” the theater critic Welton Jones wrote in The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1985.Francis Edward Paxton Whitehead was born in Kent, England, on Oct. 17, 1937. His father, Charles, was a lawyer, and his mother, Louise (Hunt) Whitehead, was a homemaker. His daughter said that his family and friends had called him Paxton since he was a child.He graduated from the Rugby School in Warwickshire before studying acting at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. His early work was with touring companies, sometimes performing a new play every week. In the late 1950s he earned a stint with the New Shakespeare Memorial Theater, which is now called the Royal Shakespeare Theater and is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company.“But I was the lowest of lows,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, and after playing Shakespearean extras for a while, he decided to move to New York City. (His mother was American, so he was allowed to work in the States.)His Broadway career soon took off, and it continued into recent decades. He appeared in the original productions of the comedies “Noises Off” (1983-85) and “Lettice and Lovage” (1990) and in revivals of “My Fair Lady” (1993), as Colonel Pickering and later Henry Higgins, and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (2011), as the Rev. Canon Chasuble.In 1967, Mr. Whitehead became the artistic director of the Shaw Festival. He produced, acted in or directed most of Shaw’s plays, attracting actors like Jessica Tandy to the festival’s productions, before deciding to return to acting in 1977.His other films include “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1986), which starred Whoopi Goldberg; “Baby Boom” (1987) which starred Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard; and “The Adventures of Huck Finn” (1993), which starred Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance. His other television appearances include “Murder, She Wrote,” “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “The West Wing,” “Hart to Hart” and “Caroline in the City.”His marriage to the actress Patricia Gage ended in divorce in 1986. The next year he married Katherine Robertson, who died in 2009.In addition to his daughter, with whom he lived in Arlington, he is survived by a son, Charles; a stepdaughter from his first marriage, Heather Whitehead; and four grandchildren.Mr. Whitehead told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1986 that he usually preferred to act in comedy, because “it interests me more, and actually I take it a great deal more seriously than I do tragedy.”“The last time I did a tragic role,” he added, “they laughed.” More