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      Can ‘Miss Saigon’ Be Saved? Two British Shows Disagree.

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      A revival reimagines the polarizing musical for the 21st century while a new show offers a bawdy riposte.“Miss Saigon” is back and so, inevitably, is the surrounding discourse.Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical melodrama about an ill-fated romance between a Vietnamese sex worker and an American G.I. during the Vietnam War has polarized opinion ever since it was first staged in 1989. In that original West End run, Jonathan Pryce donned yellowface to play a mixed-race pimp, and the show’s critics have continued to raise concerns about its portrayal of East Asian people, particularly its tawdry sexualization of Vietnamese women.So not everyone was pleased when the Crucible Theater in Sheffield, England, announced it would stage a new production of “Miss Saigon” this summer. A British East and Southeast Asian theater troupe pulled their own show from the playhouse in protest, saying the musical peddled “damaging tropes, misogyny and racism.”The boycott may have been unwarranted, however, as this new production — directed by Robert Hastie and Anthony Lau under the auspices of the acclaimed producer Cameron Mackintosh, and running through Aug. 19 — sets out to address those longstanding criticisms, reimagining the musical in line with 21st-century liberal sensibilities.The outline of the story, heavily inspired by Puccini’s 1904 opera “Madama Butterfly,” is largely unchanged. Chris (a compellingly lugubrious Christian Maynard) meets Kim (Jessica Lee) in a brothel and they fall in love, but their affair ends abruptly when the Americans withdraw from Saigon. Three years later, Chris, now married to an American woman, learns that he has a young son by Kim. Kim tragically takes her own life in order to ensure her child will be raised by his father in the United States, and thus have a better life than she can provide for him.But the play’s look and feel have changed. For starters, there’s the casting: The hitherto male role of the Engineer, the scheming pimp whose machinations provide much of the story’s motive force, is here played with a suitably brash, pantomimic vitality by Joanna Ampil, who played Kim in two 1990s runs at London’s Theater Royal Drury Lane; Chris and his wife, Ellen (Shanay Holmes), are played by Black, rather than white, actors. While this neatly sidesteps some of the baggage associated with Chris being a “white savior,” it does feel a little gimmicky, since what really matters to the plot is his American passport.Shanay Holmes and Christian Maynard in “Miss Saigon.”Johan PerssonMore significantly, Ben Stones’s splendid set design eschews the hackneyed visual imagery associated with this show. The action plays out around an imposing industrial staircase set against a large, dark gray metal screen cut with a geometric pattern, a forbidding backdrop evoking a decidedly unsentimental urban landscape, which is a far cry from the idyllic visions of rural bamboo huts often seen in “Miss Saigon” productions.Lee excels as Kim, rendering her with a dignified stoicism that imbues her sorrowful ballads with pathos — despite the music being objectively corny. Neither she nor her supporting ensemble in the brothel are overtly sexualized: they are just people, doing what they must to survive.The directors Hastie and Lau have argued the case for “reshaping and transforming” problematic narratives rather than doing away with them entirely, and with some tweaks to the script, made with Schönberg’s blessing, they have succeeded in creating a relatively tasteful and humane version of this perennially contentious musical.Yet it’s hard to shake the suspicion that Orientalist kitsch was integral to the shows’s commercial appeal. Remove the defamiliarizing frisson of the exotic and you have, essentially, a love triangle with an immigration paperwork angle. It’s still a heart-rending tale, but is it as much of a spectacle?Forty miles down the road, audiences in Manchester have been enjoying “Untitled F*ck M*ss S**gon Play,” which runs at the the Royal Exchange Theater through July 22 as part of the Manchester International Festival before transferring to London’s Young Vic in September, and is every bit as irreverent as its title suggests.Written by the New York-based dramatist Kimber Lee and directed by Roy Alexander Weise, it features a succession of mordant sendups of the “Madama Butterfly” and “Miss Saigon” narrative arc, in which several iterations of the Kim character (Mei Mac) repeatedly endure the same ill-treatment at the hands of a would-be white savior (Tom Weston-Jones) while a narrator (Rochelle Rose) provides knowingly wry commentary.The series of sketches begin in 1906 (the year “Madama Butterfly” premiered in New York) and ends in mid-’70s Vietnam (the setting for “Miss Saigon”), with pop-cultural touchstones along the way including the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific” and the TV series “M*A*S*H.”It’s a bawdy and playful pastiche, with the Orientalist elements hammed up for comic effect, in Kim’s ludicrously doll-like passivity and the generic “hut-like dwelling” in which the romance unfolds: “The whole place looks like Pier 1 and Cost Plus had a three-way with Ikea and this hut is their bastard mixed-race child,” the narrator quips.Kim’s American lover speaks to her in a nonsensical language made up of assorted Asian words — bulgogi, sashimi, onigiri — which the narrator translates into English, a pointed callback to the use of gobbledygook in lieu of Vietnamese in productions of “Miss Saigon” from the 1990s.Things take an autofictional turn when the setting shifts to a dinner party in present-day New York. Kim is now a struggling playwright burdened by a sense of responsibility to push back against decades of racially offensive caricatures on stage and screen. At this point the fun fizzles out somewhat, giving way to essayistic soul-searching.Kim’s mother, Rosie (Lourdes Faberes), delivers an impassioned monologue on behalf of first-generation immigrants, explaining that insensitive representations were something they had to take in their stride. She would like her daughter to be less zealous, and just live her life. A friend implores Kim to make peace with the past, reminding her that American society has come a long way: “We could stop here. We could stay here. It’s not so bad, is it?”It’s a vibrant, funny and intelligent show, but that loss of momentum in the latter stages exposes the limitations of activist theater in which the primary creative impulse is corrective: Once you’ve made your point, there is nowhere left to go.In this regard, “Untitled F*ck M*ss S**gon Play” shares similarities with the new “Miss Saigon,” a show whose moral and aesthetic merit derives primarily from what it omits — the offensive caricature, the crass fetishism — rather than what it contains.These productions function as valuable cultural palate cleansers. But the drive to sanitize problematic content is, ultimately, a matter of commercial self-preservation: Juggernaut brands like “Miss Saigon” are too lucrative to be allowed to die.Having outlived its relevance, the musical is doomed to an afterlife of well-meaning but slightly anodyne remakes as it slowly, inexorably fades into oblivion. More

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      Artistic Director of HERE to Depart After 30 Years

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      “I’m not retiring,” Kristin Marting said about her decision to leave the cross-genre avant-garde company next June.Kristin Marting, the founding artistic director of HERE, wanted to make something clear in announcing her departure from the avant-garde Off Off Broadway theater after 30 years.“I’m not retiring,” she said in an interview last week.“I’ve had my opportunity as a white woman leader to put my stamp and perspective on HERE and on the work that we do,” she said. “So it just feels like the right time for me to make space for what that new vision is.”Exactly what that new vision will be is unclear for now: a successor will be named at a later date and Marting, 56, will program one final season before stepping down next June.HERE, a genre-bending arts center that commissions, produces and presents the work of multidisciplinary artists, was founded in 1993 when Marting and three colleagues (Tim Maner, Barbara Busackino and Randy Rollison) sought a permanent home for their companies of young directors: the Tiny Mythic Theater Company and Home for Contemporary Theater and Art. So they found a 13,000-square-foot raw space, borrowed a bunch of money, recruited volunteers to help build it out and rented a Ferris wheel for their opening performance.“We were just crazy ambitious, naïve, and we were just like, we’re going for it,” she said.The hustle paid off. HERE has not only managed to survive economic downturns, but in 2005, after renting for more than a decade, HERE also bought its space — a former mattress store-turned storage facility south of Houston Street and west of Avenue of the Americas.The arts center, which operates as a company, producer and incubator in addition to being a rental house, has presented critically adored hits, including “The Vagina Monologues” by Eve Ensler, now known as V; Taylor Mac’s “The Lily’s Revenge”; Young Jean Lee’s “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven”; and Basil Twist’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” “Risk-taking is at the center of our curatorial process,” Marting said, “it has always been at the core of what we’re doing and hasn’t changed in any way.”During Marting’s tenure, HERE co-founded the experimental opera-focused Prototype Festival with Beth Morrison Projects, and Marting will remain a co-curator of that festival. She also started a residency program, which offers mentorship, financial backing and other support to theater, dance, music, puppetry, visual art and new media artists. In recent years, HERE has also created a self-care fund for workers whose disciplines are not covered by unions, instituted a five-day workweek (the theater industry standard is six), and implemented an eight-hour workday for technical rehearsals (referred to as “10 out of 12s” for traditionally 12-hour days with two hours off, contractually permitted by the Actors’ Equity Association).For Marting’s final season, HERE will present a lineup of women-led productions: Normandy Sherwood’s “Psychic Self Defense” (Sept. 12-30), a work of object-theater-puppetry in which a curtain is repeatedly lowered and raised; Heather Christian’s “Terce” (Jan. 10 to Feb. 4), a religious mass with a chorus of 36 women singing rock, gospel and a cappella harmonies; and Nia Witherspoon’s “Priestess of Twerk” (April 3-27), a performance work contemplating bodily autonomy.What’s next for Marting, a multidisciplinary artist herself? She plans to continue directing (including an interactive opera about a modern-day Joan of Arc), and to “say yes more than I’ve been able to,” she said.As for her legacy, Marting said she hopes to leave behind “a philosophy that is about artists at the center of the process.”“If artists are given what they think they need to make their best work, they’ll make their best work,” she said. “They can tell us best what their work needs to be magical.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Encounterism,’ by Andy Field

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      Conceived before the pandemic, Andy Field’s ode to sharing space in person glosses over the ways our everyday habits seem to have changed for good.ENCOUNTERISM: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person, by Andy FieldIt has been shockingly easy, hasn’t it, to fall out of the habit of being with other humans. All it took was one world-stopping pandemic that demanded we keep our distance from one another, and taught us to use technology to maintain that separation for months on end.At home with our screens, we have yet to bounce back from that disruption, yet to readopt old habits like commuting to the office or watching movies at the multiplex. If recent trends in bad behavior are any indication, we may also have yet to relearn the skill set of coexistence — like how not to throw hard objects at musicians during their live shows, even if it makes for eye-grabbing video.Into this precarious state of affairs steps “Encounterism: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person,” an argument by the British artist Andy Field for venturing out among the populace. To him, our most ordinary sidewalk interactions can be imbued with “friction and possibility … anxiety and joy.” These are little pockets of opportunity where compassion might grow.“What do we lose when we stop inhabiting the streets of our towns and cities?” he asks. “What understanding of the world, and of each other, are we depriving ourselves of as we spend less and less time in proximity to all these strangers and their lives that are so very different from our own?” In an author’s note, Field says right up front that the idea for “Encounterism” came before the coronavirus pandemic, not in response to it, and that he wrote much of the book during “the caesura it created.” That goes some way toward explaining why its chapters — essays, essentially — so often feel trapped in amber, describing realities of another time, as if no paradigms had shifted. It might also explain why the book so frequently relies on research that a person could do from home, though its premise suggests what a limited portal to understanding that can be. (Granted, I am a journalist, and I cover theater. I believe in showing up.)Field’s most vivid, potent writing channels the sensations of physical immersion in activities he clearly cherishes — like dancing in clubs, which he believes nurtures empathy among strangers finding a collective rhythm in the dark, or sitting in a crowded movie theater, navigating a shared experience with a laughing, shushing, crying, shrieking audience: “We hold each other tightly until the moment the lights come up, and then we all go our separate ways.” But Field’s opening chapter — an intended homage to the tactile care that hairdressers provide, and a nod to its absence when salons were closed — reads like a performance of appreciation rather than the genuine article. And a chapter on shared meals strains to convey the significance of everyday dinners, unmindful of the sacred longing that those simple social rituals took on early in the pandemic, when people could not eat together.This is the dissonance that trails us through the book, nagging all the way. Field makes theater and performance art, and he tells some entertaining stories about his offbeat career. (One involves a stranger, whom he was attempting to feed as part of an experimental piece, biting him hard enough to leave a bruise.) But he barely mentions what it meant for his creative work — so dependent on up-close, in-person presence, and often involving travel — to go remote.It isn’t that the memories don’t belong; it’s that the changes do, too, as do the insights that they brought. The best part of Field’s chapter on city parks is about the community he has found in the London green space where he walks his dog, and how vital that place became to him in 2020 and 2021, when people were often forbidden to meet inside.Even so, Field never truly gets at the fundamental, tangible value of being present, bodily, with our fellow human beings. Not until the lovely final chapter, on the pleasure of hand-holding, does he very briefly mention one of the most excruciating privations of the early pandemic: the inability of people to be with their loved ones, holding hands at a deathbed.But the book doesn’t plumb the desperation so many felt for in-person contact: to hug and touch one another; to sniff a new baby’s head; to gauge someone’s well-being in 360 degrees and three dimensions, unconstricted by the frame of a video screen.We have those multisensory joys back — yet whole in-person art forms (hello, theater) are mired in financial crisis because the audiences that have returned are just too small. Such a fragile moment cries out for a ferociously persuasive argument for engaging with the world in person, not through our screens.The epigraph of “Encounterism,” a quotation from the French novelist and essayist Georges Perec, is about questioning “the habitual.” But our habits are not what they were only a handful of years ago. Far better to register what’s habitual now and examine that.Laura Collins-Hughes, a freelance journalist, writes about theater for The Times.ENCOUNTERISM: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person | By Andy Field | 288 pp. | W.W. Norton & Company | Paperback, $17.95 More

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      Movie Stars and Broadway Veterans Share Theater Camp Memories

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      In honor of “Theater Camp,” a new movie about a fictional sleepaway site, we asked Broadway veterans and movie stars for their favorite camp memories.Molly Gordon and Ben Platt met as children at the Adderley School, a theater studio in Los Angeles that runs after-school programs and summer day camps. There are photos and home videos of them starring opposite each other in some very grown-up shows like “Chicago” and “Damn Yankees.” Two decades later — with the help of the actor-writer Noah Galvin, Platt’s fiancé, and the writer-director Nick Lieberman — they have spun those memories of wonky vibrato, stumbling choreography and an ardent sense of belonging into the feature comedy “Theater Camp,” opening Friday.Set at the financially rickety establishment of the title, the film bounces among campers and counselors in upstate New York as they work on an ambitious slate of productions: “Cats,” “Damn Yankees,” “The Crucible Jr.” and “Joan Still,” an original musical inspired by the camp’s comatose founder (Amy Sedaris). The movie began as a 2017 short, and after a yearslong struggle for financing (“We wanted to make a mostly improvised movie with children; a lot of people were not down for that,” Gordon said), it was shot last summer in 19 frantic days at an abandoned camp in Warwick, N.Y.Full of in-jokes (campers barter for bags of Throat Coat tea like they are Schedule I drugs), the movie is also a hymn to all of the outcasts and square pegs who finally find acceptance in a kick line. Theater camp is, as a closing ballad explains, “where every kid picked last in gym finally makes the team.”Over the years, theater camps around the country have yielded a rich crop of Broadway stars, composers and directors. The movie’s creators and a handful of Broadway veterans who credit camp with shaping their careers spoke with me about community, stage kisses and the transformative effects of “Free to Be You and Me.” These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Gordon and Platt in the movie. “I was just a crazy wild child and so excited to be in that environment,” Gordon said about her childhood camp experience.Searchlight PicturesMolly GordonActress (“Booksmart,” “The Bear”)Camps: The Adderley School, French Woods, Stagedoor ManorMemories: At sleepaway camp, I was never a lead. I was always in the chorus — “Zombie Prom,” “West Side Story,” “Chicago.” But I absolutely adored it. I had the classic experience. I could eat all the sugar I wanted. I got to be in completely age-inappropriate shows. I kissed two guys who told me that they were gay the next day. I was just a crazy wild child and so excited to be in that environment.Ben PlattActor (“Parade,” “Dear Evan Hansen”)Camp: The Adderley SchoolMemories: There’s an independence. You’re forced away from your parents, and you are having to risk embarrassing yourself; you throw yourself into things and fall on your face. It’s healthy failure. For queer kids, like me, it was where I was the most completely embraced, not having to fit a box or semi-pretend to be enjoying certain things. At day camp at Adderley, Molly and I were Adelaide and Sky in “Guys and Dolls.” We were Lola and Joe in “Damn Yankees.” We were Roxie and Billy Flynn in “Chicago.” We were Tracy and Link in “Hairspray.” I was pretty much the queerest Link Larkin. Molly, one of her first kisses was our kiss in that.Noah GalvinActor (“The Good Doctor,” “Dear Evan Hansen”)Camps: Northern Westchester Center for the ArtsMemories: My first play was “Charlotte’s Web.” My mom tells this really disturbing story of me coming onstage as the gander with my script in my hand, because I was so nervous about forgetting my lines. My mom was like, “I’m not certain that he’s cut out for this.” But it teaches you agency as a young person; it gives you real independence, emotionally and physically. There were kids of all shapes and sizes and gender expressions. I walked into a space and there were 120 like-minded individuals who all want to do “Anything Goes.”Jason Robert BrownComposer (“Parade,” “13”)Camp: French WoodsMemories: I went in thinking I was an actor, but I was also in the rock bands and jazz bands. Fortunately for everyone, actor guy has gone away. I was Pirelli in “Sweeney Todd” and Charley in “Merrily We Roll Along.” In a role I truly should never have been doing, I sang “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in “Cabaret.” I was able to see this whole world of work. I’m not a happy-ending guy. And if all you see are the most popular shows, you might feel like that’s all there is. Because I got to do all this material that was darker than that, that was stranger than that, I got to say, “Oh, there is a place for the thing I want to do.”From left, Andréa Burns, Karen Olivo, Janet Dacal and Mandy Gonzalez, seated, in “In the Heights” on Broadway. Burns grew up going to the French Woods theater camp.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAndréa BurnsActress (“In the Heights”)Camp: French WoodsMemories: It was a miracle. In my own school, I was the only person who really liked theater. Going to this wonderland, where I met other kids who loved this as much as I did gave me a true sense of belonging. I played Sally Bowles in “Cabaret” and Aldonza in “Man of La Mancha” the same summer. I was 14, singing “Aldonza the Whore” and talking about sleeping around. The way we would root for one another, it was such a joyful experience. Being inspired by the gifts of my peers drove me to work harder. I discovered true happiness in that atmosphere of collaboration and growth. Quite honestly, I’ve been chasing that feeling my entire professional life.Celia Keenan-BolgerActress (“To Kill a Mockingbird”)Camp: Interlochen Arts CampMemories: I felt like I had landed in some sort of magical world. We were all talking about what our favorite Sondheim musical was instead of what was playing on the radio. The thing that has kept me in the theater for so long is that sense of belonging. I felt the most like myself when I was at camp. This feeling of wanting to do musicals was something that always felt singular and a little bit lonely, growing up, and then to be with all of these people who were so talented and loved it as much as I did, something clicked into place. Camp made me feel like, “Oh, this could be my profession.”Rachel Chavkin winning the Tony for best direction for “Hadestown.” She went to Stagedoor Manor as a child.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRachel ChavkinDirector (“The Thanksgiving Play,” “Hadestown”)Camp: Stagedoor ManorMemories: I did “The Cell,” where I played a nun who murders a bird or a child or both. I did Arthur Miller’s “Playing for Time.” I played the lead in “Ruthless!” and the evil mother in “Blood Brothers.” We did “Our Town,” and I played the stage manager. A huge profound thing about Stagedoor was it was filled with people who were alienated in their home schools. For queerness of all kinds, it was a haven. And as ambivalent as I am about the strange status games at Stagedoor, I don’t think I would be in theater without it. It nurtured my curiosity. And it began to teach me about taste. I showed up to college a year after leaving Stagedoor and saw my first Wooster Group show, and I was like, “I never want to see another musical again.”Jeanine TesoriComposer (“Kimberly Akimbo,” “Fun Home”)Camp: Stagedoor ManorMemories: I didn’t even know what theater was until I was 18. But it all started at Stagedoor for me. I was a music director and a counselor. I music-directed “Free to Be You and Me.” My friend was directing it, and she wanted new material and that was the first song I ever wrote. I immediately thought, “Oh, this is the missing piece for me.” At that point, I was still a pre-med major at Barnard. After that summer, I did the music major at Columbia. I did that because of Stagedoor. It was just a ticket to a whole different world. More

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      Why Basketball Is So Popular Off Broadway

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      Basketball is central to the plot in new shows, including “Flex” and “The Half-God of Rainfall.”In Inua Ellams’s new play, “The Half-God of Rainfall,” the gods play thunderous games of basketball in the heavens. For Candrice Jones’s “Flex,” high schoolers practice their defensive stances while scraping by in rural Arkansas. Near the end of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” the two main characters play a one-on-one game of basketball using a crumpled up piece of paper after waxing poetic about the greatness of the N.B.A. star LeBron James.Basketball hasn’t just been on the playgrounds of New York City this summer. Hoop dreams are also playing out onstage, highlighting a theater, ahem, crossover that has become more pronounced in recent years.While basketball is not as popular as, say, American football, its cultural reach surpasses that of other American team sports because its players are among the most publicly recognizable. (Three of the 10 highest-paid athletes in the world, when including endorsements and other off-field endeavors, according to Forbes, are N.B.A. players.)“Watching a basketball game is the same excitement I get from watching great theater,” said Taibi Magar, the director of “The Half-God of Rainfall.” “It’s like embodied conflict. It’s executed by highly skilled performers. When you’re watching Broadway, you feel just like you’re watching N.B.A. performers.”For Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, basketball is the most culturally important sport partly because so many international stars play in the N.B.A., like the Denver Nuggets’s Nikola Jokic, who is Serbian, and the Milwaukee Bucks’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, who’s from Greece.“It’s drawing from every place on the planet, which means that the sport has become a really important athletic pursuit globally,” said Joseph, whose play “King James” just ended its run at New York City Center.In Inua Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” at New York Theater Workshop, Demi (played by Mister Fitzgerald) is a half-Greek god who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd basketball’s prevalence in pop culture — including in the worlds of hip-hop and fashion and more recently in film and television — has also penetrated the theater space. Dwyane Wade, who retired from the N.B.A. in 2019, was among the producers of the Broadway shows “American Son” and “Ain’t No Mo’.”“Even if one hasn’t played on a team or hasn’t played organized ball, we all have access to basketball,” Jones, who wrote “Flex,” said in a recent interview. “You go in any hood or any small town, someone has created a basketball goal.”In casting “Flex,” which is in previews at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, prospective actors recorded themselves playing basketball as part of the audition process. Jones and the show’s director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, who both played basketball in high school, said they wanted the basketball being played onstage to look authentic.“People have different styles, different ways of shooting, different personalities, different kinds of swagger,” Blain-Cruz said. “We care about the individual in the role that they play and how they’re playing it. And I think that aligns itself to theater.”Jones’s play, set in rural Arkansas, tells the story of a girl’s high school basketball team in 1998, which aligned with the second year of the W.N.B.A. So as the audition process advanced, the actors were asked to dribble, shoot and do layups for the creative team. Once the cast was set, some rehearsals weren’t about staging at all: The cast had basketball practice at nearby John Jay College.“There’s a kind of ensemble quality to it,” Blain-Cruz said about the sport. “Like an ensemble of actors playing together, a team of basketball players performing together. Together, they create the event.”Minutes later, as Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” blared, Blain-Cruz led a warm-up with the cast that included hip openers and upward arm stretches. It could have doubled as pregame preparation. The set itself had a basketball hoop hanging in the rear, and a basketball court painted on the floor. “Flex” refers to a type of play basketball teams run, and the staged work features several instances of game play.“There’s a real rigor. It is real,” Blain-Cruz said. “That’s what’s so satisfying, I think, about sports onstage. There’s an honesty to it, right? Dribbling the ball is actually dribbling the ball. We’re not performing the idea of dribbling the ball.”After a recent outing to a New York Liberty game, the actress Erica Matthews, whose character, Starra Jones, is the 17-year-old point guard of the fictional team, said watching the players reminded her of watching live theater.“Basketball is very intimate. You can play a one-on-one game in a small amount of space,” Matthews said. “They’re actually performing on a stage and with the way the audience is surrounding them, the way they’re cheering, it’s basically storytelling.”Downtown at the New York Theater Workshop, Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” a Dante-inspired “contemporary epic” about a half-Greek god named Demi who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A., is in previews and is scheduled to open July 31. While “Flex” deals with down-to-earth issues, such as teen pregnancy, “The Half-God of Rainfall” transports basketball to a mythical world for immortals to deal with.At a recent rehearsal, cast members pantomimed slow motion basketball movements at the direction of the choreographer, Orlando Pabotoy. The actors Jason Bowen and Patrice Johnson Chevannes worked on setting up a proper screen, and Bowen later practiced a Michael Jordan impersonation — complete with the tongue wagging. (Jordan is referenced in the play.)As Ellams and Magar, the show’s director, looked on from desks cluttered with tiny inflatable basketballs, they worked on reallocating lines as the choreography required. Though this version of Ellams’s poem has a cast of seven, he said it can be staged with as many or as few performers as the production desires. (A 2019 production at the Birmingham Repertory Theater in England had only two actors.)Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, who has played basketball since he was a teenager, said he created the character Demi to “do all the things that I never could” on the court. He mused that basketball has a greater draw to the stage because it is “a far more beautiful sport.”In Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” which just ended its run at New York City Center, Chris Perfetti and Glenn Davis play two men who bond over their love of LeBron James.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“There’s something humbling and mortal about basketball in the sense that there’s a simple equation,” Ellams said. “The ball bounces; it comes back up to your palm. You can break that down. This is solitariness, which invites the blues and what it means to play the blues. There’s a longing.”“There’s a natural melancholy about it,” he added, which makes it “easier to pair with the human spirit.”Of course there have been other basketball-related plays. In 2012, “Magic/Bird” explored the friendship and rivalry between the 1980s basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird on Broadway. The 2011 Broadway musical “Lysistrata Jones,” inspired by Aristophanes’s “Lysistrata,” followed a group of cheerleaders who withhold sex from their boyfriends on the basketball team because they keep losing games. Lauren Yee’s 2018 Off Broadway play, “The Great Leap,” also directed by Magar, tells the story of a teenage basketball prodigy who travels to China in 1989 to play in an exhibition game between college teams from Beijing and San Francisco.Daryl Morey, now an executive with the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers, commissioned a musical comedy called “Small Ball” that played in Houston in 2018. It depicts a fictional character named Michael Jordan — not the Jordan — as he finds himself playing in an international league with teammates who are six inches tall.“I think basketball is just the most important of all of the sports among the up-and-coming directors and playwrights, at least the ones I’ve spoken to,” Morey said.Not that basketball has a lock on the theater. Baseball has long been an object of fascination for playwrights, including classic shows like “Damn Yankees.” Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning 2003 play, “Take Me Out,” about a baseball player who comes out as gay, had a Tony-winning revival on Broadway last year. In 2019, “Toni Stone,” written by Lydia R. Diamond, depicted the life of Marcenia Lyle Stone, who became the first woman to play in a men’s baseball league when she took the field for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues.Football and boxing, too: “Lombardi,” a biographical play based on the life of the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, ran on Broadway in 2010, and 2014 brought a stage adaptation of “Rocky,” the famous 1976 underdog boxing film, to Broadway.But for the moment, it is basketball that is having a renaissance in theater. Or to put it in basketball terms, playwrights who take on the sport currently have the hot hand. More

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      A Reporter’s Unexpected Love Affair With ‘Notre Dame de Paris’

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      One reporter is hooked on the French spectacle that mixes acrobatics with a rock opera score.It seemed as if nothing would ever displace “The Phantom of the Opera” as my most-viewed musical.And then, “Notre Dame de Paris” happened.The 1998 French musical, which is based on Victor Hugo’s epic 19th-century novel (as is the 1996 Disney animated adaptation), made its New York premiere last summer at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.I saw it twice then and, when it returned this summer, two more times; a fifth viewing is planned for Sunday’s closing performance in New York. And I’m not done: While in Paris this fall, I’ll see it twice at its original theater, the Palais des Congrès, for its 25th anniversary.As an avid theatergoer, I rarely go to the same production twice. (A recent exception was the Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House,” starring Jessica Chastain in a bewitching, minimalist march to self-discovery.)And after initially seeing “Notre Dame de Paris,” a second viewing didn’t seem essential. The musical, which is sung in French with English supertitles, follows the beautiful Esmeralda and the three men who vie to win her love: the kind hunchback Quasimodo; the twisted archdeacon Frollo; and the egotistic soldier Phoebus.The production has a plentiful serving of ear candy-esque power ballads sprinkled among its more than 50 (!) songs, but parts of it were also cheesy. A song debating the merits of the printing press at the top of Act II after a cliffhanger Act I ending? (I guess they had to leave at least one trademark Hugo tangent in there!) Frollo falling to one knee because he’s so overwhelmed by his desire for Esmeralda? The poet-narrator Gringoire’s Donny Osmond “Joseph” hair and psychedelic pants?Of course, those elements were meant to be campy. And now, they’re only part of my affection for the show.But it’s the show’s particular brand of rock opera sorcery that wormed its way into my heart and took hold.Blame “Belle.”Let me explain: About two-thirds of the way through the first act, there comes a song for the three men in love with Esmeralda that is the earworm equivalent of “The Music of the Night” in “The Phantom of the Opera.” “Belle” (the French word for “beautiful”) became the biggest-selling single of 1998 in France.A YouTube video of the song from the original production — featuring Daniel Lavoie as Frollo (Lavoie, now 74, is reprising the role in New York), along with Garou as Quasimodo and Patrick Fiori as Phoebus — played on a loop for a week in my apartment.Seeing the show for a second time last summer was a revelation: Already familiar with the plot, I didn’t need to read the supertitles as much and could actually watch the actors, especially the mesmerizing acrobats. (What does the guy who spins on his head for 20 seconds have to do to get a chance with Esmeralda?)The show, I have since learned, has a cadre of superfans who have seen it six, 10, even 20 times. And they travel. (One treat for New York audiences: an orchestra. “Notre Dame” is usually performed with recorded music.)So what is its hold on people?The Canadian director Gilles Maheu, who oversaw the original Paris run and several tours since, including the current one, credits the show’s timeless themes and music with its longevity.“I wanted to do the show outside of current fashion,” Maheu said of the musical, which maintains its original staging, in a recent video interview from his home in Frelighsburg, Quebec.“The traditional story line of three different people loving the same woman is one I think people recognize easily,” he added. “The songs are beautiful, and not only ‘Belle.’”Holly Thomas, 26, a guest service representative for a Broadway ticketing company and a stage manager, first saw the show in New York last summer — and is on track to have seen it 11 times here by the time it closes Sunday.“It deals with issues that we’re constantly dealing with as a general society — racism, misogyny, the corruption of power,” she said.Michael Lewis, 52, an I.T. consultant based in Boston, attended one of the original performances in Paris 25 years ago, and has also seen the musical in London and New York. In addition to its timelessness, he said, “the theme of migrants seeking asylum has resonance today,” he said, “especially given what just happened with the Pakistani immigrants on the way to Greece.”Here in New York, which is experiencing its own migrant crisis, the show’s overtures for shelter and asylum have had similar poignancy.My boss at The New York Times recently saw the show with his daughters — and the next day I received a message from him: “I must have watched this video of ‘Belle’ on YouTube at least a dozen times today,” he wrote.“Is this how it starts?” More

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      Review: In ‘The Saviour,’ Past Trauma Is Very Much Present

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      The gravitational pull of the hurts of yesteryear is on vivid display in Deirdre Kinahan’s drama at Irish Repertory Theater.Back stories can be dangerous things. A character besotted with them — especially reductive trauma-filled ones — colludes in her own miniaturization.That’s the case with Máire Sullivan, the central character of Deirdre Kinahan’s “The Saviour,” a two-character drama that is receiving its world stage premiere at Irish Repertory Theater. Propped up in bed on her 67th birthday, a languorous Máire (the lauded Marie Mullen, who originated the role in an online production of the play in 2021) enjoys a postcoital smoke as she waits for her lover to bring her a cup of coffee.Ciarán Bagnall’s set, with its chalky walls and dusty windows, suggests a room that hasn’t been aired out in years. It’s a fitting milieu for a woman who cultivates mental cobwebs. Even the “volcanic” sex she’s just had sends her mind hurtling to the past; addressing her confidences to Jesus, Máire, a devout Catholic, describes how sex was previously “foisted on me when I didn’t want it or offered for a bit of peace.”From there, clues pointing to a traumatic episode pile up. After her mother died when she was a young girl, Máire was sent to a Magdalene laundry, a “reformatory for whores and hussies,” as she describes it. These laundries, operated by Catholic religious orders and propped up with state funding, incarcerated thousands of Irish girls and women as late as 1996. Máire recounts the monotony of the work, the suffocating silence imposed on the “forgotten girls,” and the unmourned death of a friend who dropped “dead in the steam.” Such reminiscences, though chilling, seem both overly contrived and overly familiar when spatchcocked together, departing little from abused-children narratives handed down by Dickens and Charlotte Brontë.Even working with a script that leans too much on exposition, the galvanic Mullen shows impressive range, channeling Molly Bloom in a fist-pumping soliloquy about having sex as a sexagenarian one minute, chiding herself for “acting ridiculous” the next. When her son Mel (a guarded Jamie O’Neill) shows up to deliver some disturbing news about her lover, she unleashes a biblical wave of fury on him.Alas, for both these characters, the past is like a heavy fog that never lifts. (Mel hints darkly that Máire was an emotionally absent mother, frequently subject to dark moods, and even hit one of her children.) The gift that Mel brings for Máire’s birthday — a doll wearing a yellow dress with pink roses — is a throwback to a toy that the nuns at the Stanhope Street laundry snatched from her as a young girl. But even a seemingly heartfelt gift meant to restore something of the life that was taken from Máire is ultimately used as a weapon against Mel.As the play ends, Máire and her son, whose homosexuality she can’t bring herself to reconcile with her faith, are at an impasse. Under Louise Lowe’s direction, mother and son stand on opposite sides of a wall facing the audience, underscoring their estrangement, as Mel offers a moving reflection of a rare moment in his childhood when “Jesus left us a bit of room.” For all of Máire’s religious fervor, the continual resurfacing of trauma is the bigger issue. It exerts the gravitational pull of a black hole that sucks everything in and gives nothing back.The SaviourThrough Aug. 13 at Irish Rep, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      At the Salzburg Festival, Bertolt Brecht Pushes Boundaries

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      Brecht’s 1944 play “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” is set to challenge its performers and audiences, just as a once-banned Brecht would have liked.As a playwright and director, Bertolt Brecht revolutionized theater, dragging 20th-century politics into the room and swapping escapism for urgent and timely themes played out almost in the laps of audience members.He also provoked many theatrical companies — notably the Salzburg Festival. In 1950, Brecht was given Austrian citizenship after agreeing to adapt the 15th-century play “Jedermann” (“Everyman”), a staple of the festival since 1920. But he never did, instead embracing Marxist ideologies and moving to East Berlin, which prompted an official boycott of his work in Austria that lasted 10 years. His works have rarely been performed at the Salzburg Festival since.But now, “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” his 1944 play written during his years in America, will be staged there on Aug. 12-22 (in German with English supertitles). In a theatrical choice that would have no doubt thrilled the ever-inventive Brecht, this “Chalk Circle” will be presented with the Swiss company Theater Hora, made up of actors with learning disabilities, underscoring the power of Brecht’s works to push the boundaries of both performers and audiences. This “Chalk Circle” feels more urgent and well-timed for those involved.“The play takes place during a civil war and is all about empathy,” Bettina Hering, the drama director of the Salzburg Festival, said in a video interview, “but it also shows that society is multilayered.”Like Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” “Chalk Circle” weaves motherhood into politics and the brutality of war. The play is based on a 13th-century Chinese parable, in which two women fight over the custody of a child. During wartime, a governor’s wife has abandoned her child, who is then saved by a servant girl. A judge determines that custody will be granted to the mother who can pull the child safely from a circle of chalk drawn around the child. Brecht used this as a metaphor for a misguided society.Rehearsal for “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” whose cast includes, from left, Remo Beuggert, Simone Gisler and Tiziana Pagliaro.Rimini ProtokollBrecht’s own family story and life in the theater reads like a drama. Born in Bavaria in 1898 and raised in a strict Christian household, he became interested in politics, theater and writing at a young age (he was a fierce critic of the carnage of his generation of young men in World War I and avoided combat as a medic). In Berlin, along with the German director Erwin Piscator, Brecht created what became known as “epic theater,” or “dialectical theater,” which asked audiences to confront sociopolitical issues rather than suspend disbelief and be swept away.This revolution in German theater flourished during the Weimar Republic, but Brecht left Germany when the Nazis gained power, fearing persecution, fleeing to Scandinavia and then America, where he lived in the Los Angeles area and co-wrote the story for one movie (“Hangmen Also Die!”) and many of his most famous plays, including “Chalk Circle.” After World War II, he returned to Europe, and though never officially a member of the Communist Party, his Marxist leanings prompted that boycott of his work in Austria from 1953 to 1963.“One critic wrote that it was an atomic bomb scandal,” Ms. Hering said. “It was the equivalent of cancel culture today.”His works are often heavy on politics and religion, from fascism (“The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”) to the clash between theology and science (“Life of Galileo”). He also wrote “The Threepenny Opera,” which the Salzburg Festival staged in 2015, with the composer Kurt Weill.Brecht died in East Berlin in 1956 at 58, leaving behind an enormous theatrical legacy.“One of his poems refers to the future when he won’t be needed, but we still live in a world he would recognize,” Tom Kuhn, a professor of German literature at Oxford University and one of the translators of Brecht’s “Collected Poems,” said in a video interview. “But we have populists strutting the stage. We have fascism. We have war in Europe. Brecht could comment on those in urgent and insistent ways.”That sense of relevancy is what drew Ms. Hering to “Chalk Circle” and to choose Theater Hora as the company to bring it to life. Brecht’s experimental theatrical style, as both a writer and director, felt perfectly suited to Hora, as did the mother-and-child plot of “Chalk Circle.”“People with disabilities are dependent on others,” Ms. Hering said. “They are like an eternal child in a way.”She invited Helgard Haug, a celebrated German director more associated with interactive theater who had never directed the Hora troupe, nor a Brecht piece, to lead this “Chalk Circle.” For Ms. Haug, it was both a daunting and exciting proposition.“I’m really interested when people really bring their own conditions to the stage where they are open enough to tell their own stories,” Ms. Haug said in a video interview. “It’s more than a discussion between two mothers. Can systems change? Can it be different? It feels special to stage Brecht with a group of performers who have their own approach and their own way to translate text into their own understanding.”The evolving relevance of Brecht’s works speaks to those still devoted to preserving his legacy and acknowledging that he created new possibilities for theater to educate and provoke audiences. And they inspire performers, playwrights and directors who come after him.“‘Chalk’ is a play for the moment, and I see it as a way to observe the difficulty of the world and how it is possible to find a right and honest way through chaos,” said Erdmut Wizisla, head of the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin. “It is an invitation to think. He’s a poet. He’s a political author but not a politician. And that is why Brecht will always have a future.” More