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      Inga Swenson, Who Went From Stage to ‘Benson,’ Dies at 90

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      She had success on Broadway in “110 in the Shade” and other shows, but a later generation knew her from a sitcom.Inga Swenson, whose acting talent, striking looks and versatile singing voice brought her success on the Broadway stage in the 1950s and ’60s, and who years later rode a phony German accent to sitcom stardom as the cook on the long-running sitcom “Benson,” died on July 23 at a care facility in Los Angeles. She was 90.The Television Academy posted news of her death. Ms. Swenson, who studied theater at Northwestern University, started out as a stage actress. In 1953 and 1954 she and her husband, Lowell Harris, whom she had met and married while at Northwestern, appeared in productions at the Playhouse, Eagles Mere, in north central Pennsylvania, including Clifford Odets’s “The Country Girl,” in which they played a husband and wife. In November 1954 Ms. Swenson made her New York debut with an Off Broadway troupe called the Shakespearewrights, playing Olivia in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”“I had these gorgeous gowns because I was fun to costume,” Ms. Swenson told the podcast “Behind the Curtain: Broadway’s Living Legends” in 2019. “They loved a 5-foot-10 skinny woman with narrow shoulders.”That performance landed her an agent, and in 1956 she made her Broadway debut in the musical revue “New Faces of 1956.” Also in the cast was Maggie Smith, who was just beginning her storied career.Ms. Swenson’s biggest Broadway success came in 1963 when she was cast in a leading role in “110 in the Shade,” which had music by Harvey Schmidt and lyrics by Tom Jones, the duo responsible for the long-running musical “The Fantasticks.” The book was by N. Richard Nash, based on his play “The Rainmaker.” Ms. Swenson was Lizzie Curry, a supposedly average-looking young woman who is beginning to think she will never find love.“The tears seem to fall interminably from the big blue eyes of Inga Swenson,” Howard Taubman wrote in his review in The New York Times, “who has to pretend that she is Lizzie, the plain Curry girl, too honest to use female wiles and too homely to attract a man. It’s quite a job of make-believe for Miss Swenson, who is attractive and talented.”Ms. Swenson in 1967 with Ivor Emmanuel, left, and Stephen Douglass, her castmates in the 1967 London production of “110 in the Shade.” She was nominated for a Tony for her performance in the show on Broadway.Getty ImagesThe show ran for 330 performances, then went on the road. It earned Ms. Swenson a Tony Award nomination for best actress in a musical. It also pitted her against the Broadway hitmaker David Merrick, who produced the show.“110 in the Shade” ended with an onstage rainstorm, and during the curtain call at a performance in April 1964 Ms. Swenson slipped on a puddle and seriously injured an ankle. The injury troubled her for months afterward, and she filed a million-dollar lawsuit against Mr. Merrick, contending that the puddle was a result of faulty set construction.Later that year, when the show traveled to San Francisco, she told The San Francisco Examiner that she and Mr. Merrick remained friends and that the suit was aimed not at him but at his insurance company. How the matter was resolved is lost in the mists of time.In any case, Ms. Swenson returned to Broadway in 1965 in “Baker Street,” a musical Sherlock Holmes yarn, earning another Tony nomination for best actress in a musical. By that point she had also begun working occasionally in the movies, including roles in “Advise & Consent” in 1962 and “The Miracle Worker,” in which she played the mother of Helen Keller, Patty Duke’s character, the same year.In 1978 she landed a recurring role in a season of the television comedy “Soap,” and when the same producing team was casting the sitcom “Benson,” a “Soap” spinoff whose title character (played by Robert Guillaume) ran a governor’s household, she auditioned, using a German accent.“I went in there, read with an accent and they fell off their chairs,” she said on the podcast. She won the role of Gretchen Kraus, a cook and perpetual thorn in Benson’s side. The show ran for eight seasons, and Ms. Swenson was nominated for the supporting-actress Emmy three times.Inga Swenson was born on Dec. 29, 1932, in Omaha to A.C.R. and Geneva Swenson. Her father was a prominent lawyer and an honorary Swedish consul, and her mother was prominent in social circles in Omaha.Her parents attended a Congregational church that had five choirs, and her performing life began when she tried out for one as a child, impressing church officials.“They learned that I had a pretty voice and I could make the parishioners weep,” she said on the podcast.Her father died in a car crash in 1948. Soon after, she landed the role of Maid Marian in her high school’s production of the operetta “Robin Hood,” which helped her through her grief.“Giving me that role saved my life,” she said. “I had something to do. I had something to think about. I had people telling me I was wonderful.”Fifteen years later, her singing was good enough to get her cast in “110 in the Shade,” despite some tough competition.“Everybody wanted to play Lizzie,” she said on “Behind the Curtain.” “When I went to audition, Barbra Streisand was there.”Ms. Swenson’s survivors include her husband and a son, Mark Harris.Ms. Swenson said she didn’t often get considered for comic roles because of her elegant looks.“People take one look and say: ‘You’re not funny,’” she said in a 1983 interview. “‘You don’t even have a funny face.’”She proved such assessments wrong on “Benson,” which was filmed in front of a live audience.“That was not phony laughter,” she said on “Behind the Curtain.” “There wasn’t a sign that went up and said ‘Laugh.’ People laughed because we were funny.” More

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      PlayStation and BTS Help Lea Salonga Clear Her Head

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      The “Here Lies Love” actress finds inspiration in Alex Newell’s “Shucked” performance and a good night’s sleep in the sounds of “Forensic Files.”Lea Salonga was feeling under the weather earlier this month.“I had to miss shows, which is unfortunate,” she said before one of her final performances in the Broadway disco musical “Here Lies Love.” “But I was still able to stand over a stove and cook this soup that had a lot of garlic and a lot of ginger,” she recalled during a phone interview from her Manhattan home. “It’s called tinola, which is a Filipino chicken soup. It’s what would be cooked every time I was sick at home.”That connection to the Philippines — where Salonga was born and raised — is one she also feels with “Here Lies Love,” which recounts the rise and fall of the country’s ousted leader and first lady, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.“Normally, if I’m watching a theater piece, I could just feel whatever feelings there are, or that the show wants me to feel,” said Salonga, 52, who on Saturday finishes her guest run as Aurora Aquino, the mother of Benigno Aquino Jr., Ferdinand’s political rival. “But with something like this, where there is actual history of my country entwined in the story, my brain didn’t know what to do.”Though Salonga has had a long and distinguished Broadway career, winning a Tony Award in 1991 for her performance in “Miss Saigon” as the doomed Vietnamese mother Kim, “Here Lies Love” is the first time she has played a Filipino onstage and the first time she has served as a producer.Salonga, who next heads to London to begin rehearsals for the West End musical revue “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” discussed 10 of her cultural essentials, including her surprise love affair with BTS and how Alex Newell turned her world upside down in “Shucked.” These are edited excerpts.1PlayStation 5It’s a great way for me to escape after a show, to kind of cleanse my mind, especially if I’m doing a show that’s exhausting mentally and emotionally. Lately I’ve been playing Horizon Forbidden West; I still have to finish the downloadable content.2BTSAbout six months into the pandemic, I saw “Dynamite.” I can’t remember how I stumbled onto it, but I couldn’t move and I was like, “I have to finish this now.” The dancing and the synchronization and the charm — obviously, they’re beautiful people. It was a great way to find joy and something to look forward to when I woke up for the day in the midst of the world falling apart.3Leche FlanWhen I was growing up in the Philippines, my grandma would make leche flan, which was always so creamy and so delicious. So over the pandemic, when I was living in the Philippines, I learned how to make it. I would send samples of it over to my mother’s house to taste-test, and she would say, “No, that’s too sweet, can you bring down the sugar content?” When I finally got it right, I had to make sure I had written the recipe down!4Essential OilsThey help make me feel relaxed and grounded. You can choose different ones depending on what you feel you need — sometimes I need a little respiratory help, so there are certain oils I’ll either diffuse or massage or rub onto my body, which calm my mind. I gifted everyone in the company of “Here Lies Love” with a little vial of something to remind everyone to just breathe.5Cute PajamasSometimes I don’t really want to dress in a pair of jeans and a shirt to go down and pick something up from the communal pantry in a hotel. If I’m wearing cute pajamas, I can throw on a hoodie or a jacket, and I’ll still look presentable. My cousin gifted me “Family Guy” pajamas — a Stewie T-shirt and matching pants.6Portable PeripheralsI bring a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to use when I’m traveling, which make it much easier to type. Because I text bilingually sometimes, a voice memo is not able to grab everything.7Over-the-Ear HeadphonesAs much as I love the portability of my earbuds, my ears tend to get irritated after lengthy use. I have the Apple AirPods Max in light green, which are over-the-ear, Bluetooth-enabled and comfortable. I like that there’s a button you can just push so you can hear what’s going on around you.8‘Forensic Files’I find things like chromatography and DNA analysis fascinating. But also, Peter Thomas’s voice has lulled me to sleep more times than I can count.9‘Steven Universe’I just adore it for its themes of queer acceptance and girl power. Not to mention the number of musical theater folks that voice characters on it, including Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole.10Alex Newell in ‘Shucked’Dear God, Alex Newell is every single thing. That is a cultural reset to see what it’s like when this superstar stops the show and commands a standing ovation in the middle of the first half. But it’s Alex Newell — of course the show’s going to stop! More

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      An Arabic Adaptation of ‘Chicago’ Razzle Dazzles Lebanon

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      Reimagining the Broadway musical for audiences near Beirut meant new character names, choreography and lyrics.As the orchestra began vamping for roughly a thousand festivalgoers at a 19th-century palace in a mountainous town in Lebanon, Selma Fehmi — the Velma Kelly character in a new Arabic version of the musical “Chicago” — started to croon lyrics to the tune of “All That Jazz.”But this reimagining of the show’s opening song quickly provided a Lebanese twist: “Hurry, pick me up and let’s take a drive/to a small place hidden in the center of Beirut.”The Arabic adaptation of “Chicago,” the longest-running show currently on Broadway, debuted at the Casino du Liban in May with a sold-out run that extended to five nights. The team returned with three performances in August at an art festival in Beiteddine, a town some 20 miles southeast of Beirut — where this adaptation takes place — and now hopes to take the show abroad, within the Middle East and beyond.Despite dealing with American cultural references and wildly different syntax, translating the musical into Arabic came pretty smoothly, said Roy ElKhouri, the writer, choreographer and director of the adaptation. The context particularly speaks to present-day Beirut, said Anthony Adonis, who adapted the lyrics.“It’s like it was written to be a commentary on the judicial system in Lebanon,” Adonis said, referring to the mismanagement and corruption that spurred the nation’s economic crisis and an investigation into the 2020 port explosion in the capital that has been muddied by obstruction and interference.In addition to an acting role, Roy ElKhouri wrote, choreographed and directed the adaptation.Chicago the MusicalThat ability for a show set in 1920s Chicago to speak to modern affairs in the Middle East was attractive to ElKhouri. “You can relate to it in every aspect,” he said, pointing to its universal themes of corruption, media manipulation and the power of showbiz.Barry Weissler, who produced the 1996 Broadway revival alongside his wife, Fran, was not surprised that artists in Lebanon were revisiting the story. “Everyone gets it,” Weissler said. “It doesn’t matter which language it’s in — the reaction’s still the same.”Yet even with the commonalities, reinterpreting the musical was a complicated process because of the strict guidelines that accompany licenses from Concord Theatricals. The Arabic version had to stay true to the original story line. Characters could not be added nor removed, and neither could songs. And the Lebanese team was required to give the adaptation entirely new choreography — originally by Bob Fosse — and direction.Once those parameters were laid out, ElKhouri’s team got to work.The first step was coming up with relevant Arabic names for characters, including Selma (Mirva Kadi), whose name rhymed with Velma. Roxie Hart, whose killing of her lover sets the story in motion, became Nancy Nar (Cynthya Karam), alluding to the Lebanese pop star Nancy Ajram.Other changes involved wordplay: The smooth-talking lawyer Billy Flynn, who frees murderers from prison, became Wael Horr (ElKhouri), his last name meaning “free.” Roxie’s loyal husband, Amos, became Amin (Fouad Yammine, who helped adapt the script), which means “faithful.” And the sympathetic journalist Mary Sunshine became Nour El Shams (Matteo El Khodr), whose full name translates to “the light of the sun.”Translating the songs was a bigger challenge. The legal and showbiz jargon of “Razzle Dazzle” — “Shubeik Lubeik” in Arabic (“Your Wish Is My Command”) — were especially tricky. Adonis wrote at least three versions until the team settled on the one that most aligned with the music. “It was like doing very, very complicated math,” he said.The team that adapted the musical did not shy away from its sensuality, whether it was the wide-open legs in the dance numbers or the revealing costumes.Chicago the MusicalThe Arabic version had to stay true to the original story line, but entirely new choreography — originally by Bob Fosse — was required.Chicago the MusicalLebanese references were trickled throughout the musical. In “Cell Block Tango,” or “Kan Yistahal” (“He Deserved It”), the prisoners’ dialects reflected the country’s diversity. The character of Hunyak, who is Hungarian in the original, became Armenian, a reference to Lebanon’s Armenian population.Though the country is considered one of the most liberal in the Arab world, many pockets of society lean conservative. But the team did not shy away from the musical’s sensuality, whether it was the wide-open legs in the dance numbers or the revealing costumes and suggestive squeals.ElKhouri did have other fears, though, primarily that “Chicago” would not find an audience in the country. The sold-out shows proved otherwise.“You rarely see this in Lebanon — this level of performance,” said Yahya Fares, a nurse who watched the first performance at the festival. His girlfriend, Maribelle Zouein, was also impressed.“They incorporated Lebanon’s culture,” she said. “They made it relatable.”Both Fares and Zouein lamented that Lebanese theater, and art in general, is growing more difficult to produce despite its cultural reputation in the region.In the mid-1800s, Maroun Naccache introduced Western-style theater to Lebanon by adapting European plays into Arabic musicals, said Aliya Khalidi, the founder of the Foundation for Arab Dramatic Arts. After the arrival of the Baalbeck International Festival in 1956, theater flourished. And even during Lebanon’s civil war, from 1975 to 1990, the composers and playwrights known as the Rahbani brothers, the singer Fairuz and her son Ziad produced musicals and plays that remain cultural mainstays.The past few years have delivered a setback because of the coronavirus pandemic, the financial meltdown and the port explosion, Khalidi said. “Usually, in times of crisis, the most affected medium is the theater,” she said.In the past year, more and more modest productions have begun to pop up in Lebanon, Khalidi and ElKhouri said. But the “Chicago” adaptation stood out for its scale, even though financial constraints meant the cast and crew had only two months to rehearse before the debut. Some actors and dancers had to keep their day jobs.“We’ve done this out of pocket,” Nayla El Khoury, the producer of the show, said. “Imagine what they can do if they had the proper resources and the proper support from the country.”Adonis said the adaptation was a statement in and of itself: No matter what the country endures, culturally, “Lebanon’s still on the map.” More

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      Book Review: ‘The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race,’ by Farah Karim-Cooper

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      In “The Great White Bard,” Farah Karim-Cooper maintains that close attention to race, and racism, will only deepen engagement with the playwright’s canon.THE GREAT WHITE BARD: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race, by Farah Karim-CooperWas my relationship to Shakespeare and race in need of a reality check?I asked myself that question as I did the 50-yard dash to catch the G train for a rehearsal of “Hamlet,” clutching in my hand a copy of “The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race,” by Farah Karim-Cooper. The book takes a necessary look under the hood of the plays, delving into the Elizabethan and Renaissance ideals of race and how Shakespeare helped shape and define them. “Instead of worshiping his words,” Karim-Cooper writes, interrogating them “allows us to confront crucial questions of our day.”As a Black actor who has had the chance to play many of the plum Shakespearean roles, had I been looking at his work through rose-colored glasses? Of course I knew there was racism in Shakespeare, but to what extent? This question is top of mind in drama schools and theaters of late, with Shakespeare’s relevance at stake. I know because I’ve been brought to campuses to discuss it.So this summer I made “The Great White Bard” my trusted, troubling and fascinating companion on train rides, during rehearsal breaks, in dressing rooms and backstage, while working on Shakespeare’s greatest play on arguably New York’s greatest stage, the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.Karim-Cooper, a director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe theater and a professor at King’s College London, is not merely analyzing from a distance; she’s an eyewitness on the front lines. Since 2018 she has helped put together festivals on “Shakespeare and Race” at the Globe — facing social-media blowback as a result. And she’s drawing on a growing body of important research by prominent scholars, including Ayanna Thompson, Kim F. Hall and Margo Hendricks.In a sweeping yet forensic 336 pages, “The Great White Bard” argues that “Shakespeare’s texts are a reservoir of what is known as race-making” — how language can define racial identity and establish hierarchy.The book details how racism plagues Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare scholarship. Both, Karim-Cooper contends, overtly and subtly elevate whiteness and denigrate Blackness, rendering true inclusion practically impossible. (Sexism and misogyny play a big part, too.)The result: Shakespeare for the few and not for the many.Yet Karim-Cooper is by no means offering up a luminary for cancellation. “To love Shakespeare means to know him,” she writes. “At some point love demands that we reconcile ourselves with flaws and limitations. Only then can there be a deeper understanding and affinity with another.”The book illuminates the numerous instances of racialized language in “Othello” (that “barbarous Moor”); “The Merchant of Venice” (Shylock described as “devil,” “wolf,” “dog” and “cur”); and “Titus Andronicus” (Aaron the Moor, also “barbarous”). Descriptions of interracial relationships in “Titus” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” Karim-Cooper argues, dehumanize Blackness and establish white supremacy.Her insights also reach into unexpected places, as when she finds sexual stereotyping of Black and dark women in the comedies “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Love’s Labour’s Lost” and “As You Like It.”The author’s analysis is both dizzying and impressive, yet at times overzealous. Some parsing of the texts feels narrow and binary, diminishing the scope and scale of their multiple meanings. Her carefully reasoned claim that words like “kindness” and “fair” are inherently connected only with whiteness runs the risk of hyperbole, in Shakespeare’s time or now. Surely the boogeyman can’t be everywhere.I have always found myself in Shakespeare, as if these works were written for me. I feel seen, heard and recreated by them. In playing many of his leading roles, I have found pure joy and pain, surrendering to the better and darker angels in myself. In some cosmic way, I believe these characters are as much drawn to me as I am to them.This is not to say that I haven’t had to come to terms with racism in the texts, from my first “Othello” in 1992 to my most recent turn as Shylock in 2022, with stints as Macbeth, Antony, Richard III and Prospero in between.Where I found racism, I also found complex characters who took my breath away with their great depth and astonishing humanity. Words, words, words: Shakespeare’s words contain multitudes of meaning, ideas and emotions that in my Black body become mutable and ancestral — shifting with time, intention, context, perception and culture.Every night after a “Hamlet” performance, as I headed home from the Delacorte, my grappling with “The Great White Bard” would resume. It has indeed exposed me to flaws and limitations, while also affirming Shakespeare’s power and abundance. Perhaps Karim-Cooper and I are after the same thing. I challenge some of her findings, but I respect her book and the alarm she sounds.“The Great White Bard” contributes to an essential discussion on Shakespeare and race, one that must include literary scholars, historians, etymologists, audiences and, yes, even actors. Let us all debate and think critically about the issues Karim-Cooper raises. At the end of the day, such tough love can guide us to truly love Shakespeare.John Douglas Thompson is a New York City actor who most recently played Claudius in “Hamlet” for Shakespeare in the Park.THE GREAT WHITE BARD: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race | By Farah Karim-Cooper | Illustrated | 336 pp. | Viking | $30 More

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      Lily Allen’s Second Act

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      Lily Allen didn’t know why she agreed to be interviewed for this article.On a recent morning, sitting outside a London cafe, the British singer said she had paused earlier for a moment of reflection. “I was like, ‘Why am I doing this?’” she said. “I sort of wonder why I put myself in these situations, and open myself up to criticism.”Allen, 38, hypothesized that the answer might be narcissism, or her resignation to the requirements of being in the public eye. “It’s been my life since I was like 18 years old,” she said.Since Allen burst onto the pop music scene in the mid-00s with lilting reggae-infused tracks like “Smile,” her relationship with the press has been fraught. She has always been outspoken — in her lyrics, in interviews and on social media — and for many years, she was a fixture in Britain’s tabloid newspapers. In 2009, she obtained a court order to stop paparazzi following her around London.“It’s not a very nice feeling,” she said of that kind of attention. “Especially when you’re in your early 20s, and you’re still trying to figure out who you are in the world.”Now, Allen lives in New York, where she largely goes unrecognized. She was back in London because she has also left music behind — at least for now — and turned her attention to acting, instead.Allen is currently playing a lead role in a West End revival of “The Pillowman,” the 2003 play by the “Banshees of Inisherin” writer and director Martin McDonagh, which runs at The Duke of York’s Theater through Sept. 2.“I still get to play with the human experience,” she said of this career transition, “but I don’t have to put my heart on my sleeve as much” as in her — often very personal — songs.Paul Kaye and Lily Allen in “The Pillowman,” at Duke of York’s Theater in London.Johan PerssonAllen’s mother is a film producer and her father an actor, but as a teenager she was drawn to music. When she was 19, in 2005, she signed to the Regal/Parlaphone label and built a following on the then-nascent social media site MySpace. According to Michael Cragg, who recently wrote a book on British pop music, the music scene at the time “was kind of mired in ‘The X Factor’ and TV talent shows.” The consensus, he added, “was that pop needed a bit of a kick up the bum.”Clad in prom-style dresses, chunky gold jewelry and sneakers, Allen was a new kind of British pop star. With a London accent, she sang her own funny and provocative lyrics about messy relationships, sex and self-loathing. “A young woman singing and presenting themselves in that way felt very exciting,” Cragg said.Her first two albums — “Alright, Still” and “It’s Not Me, It’s You” — were commercial and critical successes, but the making and marketing of a third, “Sheezus,” in 2014, was more fraught: In interviews, she has described having an “identity crisis” at the time, as she tried to be both a pop star and a new mom.In 2018, Allen’s next release, “No Shame” — a low-key record that addressed her divorce and feelings of isolation — was nominated for the Mercury Prize, but Allen has since become disillusioned with the music industry, she said. “It’s so competitive, it’s so rooted in money and success and digital figures,” she added. “I’m just not interested in doing any of that.”Allen performing in London in 2007. Her prom-style dresses and strong London accent made her stand out among the pop stars at the time.Suzan Moore/Press Association, via ReutersAt around the same time, she also changed her relationship to alcohol and drugs. “From 18 to about four or five years ago just feels like a bit of a haze, because I was literally just off my face the whole time,” Allen said. “I was using fame as well — that was an addiction in itself: the attention and the paparazzi and the chaos.”Allen’s “four year sober birthday” fell on the date of this interview, she said, and it seemed that chaos had abated. Three years ago, she married the “Stranger Things” actor David Harbour, 48. Her life in New York with him and her two daughters from her previous marriage was “pretty leisurely,” she said.So when she was approached about an acting role in the West End show “2:22 A Ghost Story,” she “was like, ‘No, I don’t act and I live in New York, so no thanks,’” she said. But Harbour convinced her to take the gig, and it earned her a nomination in the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent to the Tony’s.In “The Pillowman,” Allen plays Katurian, a writer living in a totalitarian state, who is questioned about a string of child murders that remind the authorities of her fictional stories. Like much of McDonagh’s work, it’s as dark as it is comic.Allen said she saw a through line between McDonagh’s “dark and sick humor” and the lyrics of the songs she used to write. In rehearsals, she added, “I would say things that people might ordinarily be shocked by, and you look at Martin, and he’d be smiling.”“I still get to play with the human experience,” Allen said of her career transition to acting, “but I don’t have to put my heart on my sleeve as much.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesAllen’s turn as Katurian is the first time the role has been played by a woman, and her casting gives Katurian’s interrogation scenes, in which she is verbally and physically abused by two detectives, a different weight.“The play really is about patriarchal brutality,” said Matthew Dunster, the production’s director. “I said to Martin, ‘This is going to be really difficult for audiences to take, this slight woman being treated to brutally so early on in the piece,’ and Martin said, ‘Isn’t that the point?’”Dunster also directed Allen in “2:22 A Ghost Story,” and he said he had seen her grow as an actor. “What was thrilling to me was to see her taking ownership of her own process,” he said.When “The Pillowman” ends, Allen intends to return to New York. Her priority would be settling her two daughters into middle school, she said, but she had also applied for acting courses.One day, she said, she hoped to land lead roles in films and television. But, for now, she added, she was leaving herself open “to any opportunities that come my way.” More

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      At Edinburgh Fringe, Small Shows With Big Ambitions

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      This year, the stronger productions in the open-to-all event were on a par with many in the more prestigious, curated Edinburgh International Festival.Shortly after I arrived in Edinburgh for this year’s festival, I had lunch with a Scottish friend and her young son. The boy was enthralled by the colorful posters plastered all over the city advertising upcoming shows in the Fringe, the scrappy sidebar to the highbrow Edinburgh International Festival. This year, the Fringe — which runs through Aug. 28 — comprises over 3,000 shows, and many posters featured eye-catchingly silly titles. My friend’s son was particularly amused by “Sex Job,” “My Sleepybum” and “A Shark Ate My Penis.” His delighted guffaws were a fitting prelude to my stint in Edinburgh.There was plenty of laughter at “Hello Kitty Must Die,” a musical inspired by Angela Choi’s cult novel of the same title. In this zippy farce, Sami Ma plays Fiona Yu, a Chinese American lawyer fed up with being fetishized by white people and shouldering the unrealistic expectations of her out-of-touch parents. She reconnects with a mercurial childhood friend, Sean (Lennox T. Duong), and they embark on a ludicrous killing spree reminiscent of the movie “Heathers,” with musical numbers including a hymn to a silicone dildo.The all-female cast is hugely talented, and their portrayals of obnoxious men were particularly striking for their impressively rendered physicality, whether the swaggering gait of a self-styled Lothario, the slumped posture of a feckless gamer, or the pompously militaristic bearing of the protagonist’s father.“Hello Kitty Must Die,” is another adaptation of a novel, with musical numbers and a standout all-female cast.Justine BarbinElsewhere, two dance productions explored somber subject matter with impressive subtlety. “Woodhill,” by the activist theater company LUNG, examines the failings of a real British prison where a conspicuously high number of inmates have died by suicide. The story is told in a series of fragmentary voice-overs — interviews with lawyers, prison staff and bereaved relatives — while performers act out the relatives’ grief through dance, set to thumping electronic beats and strobe lighting. It’s a powerful spectacle, and the message — that Britain’s prisons need urgent reform — hits home.“Party Scene,” by the Dublin troupe, THISISPOPBABY, has a similar aesthetic. It depicts four gay Irishmen who are active in the “chemsex” scene, in which people hook up for sex under the influence of methamphetamines. The men’s choreographed dancing is pointedly joyless in its zombified roboticism; for all their synchronicity, they seem lonely and abstracted. The show evokes the existential bleakness of a comedown, of morning-after remorse and shame. And yet it doesn’t lapse into preachiness: The nightclub atmospherics are sufficiently appealing, in themselves, to suggest good times. (On the way out I overheard a theatregoer say to his friend: “I felt like it made me want to do chemsex …”)From left: Liam Bixby, Anderson de Souza, Carl Harrison and Matthew Morris in “Party Scene.”Olga KuzmenkoFor budgetary and logistical reasons, many Fringe shows are relatively small productions, and there are always many for solo performers. One of these is “The Insider,” by the Danish company Teater Katapult, in which Christoffer Hvidberg Ronje plays a lawyer implicated in a huge tax fraud. We find him in a transparent interrogation cell, weighing up whether to spill the beans in return for a reduced sentence. He does lots of sweating, writhing and shaking while oscillating between hubris and remorse. The protagonist’s back story provides some intriguing psychodrama — an obsession with transcending his modest provincial origins led him to embrace a ruthless social Darwinism — his uncomplicated moral abjectness makes for a one-dimensional portrait. It’s an open-and-shut case, in every sense.In another one-man-show, “The Ballad of Truman Capote,” Patrick Moys plays the renowned American author as he prepares to host a masked ball in 1966. Written by the Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, the play is a maudlin monologue in which Capote muses gnomically on his childhood and career. (“Being published is not like being loved”; “My creative life is an unmade bed.”) The problem is not the lack of action per se, but the monotonous timbre of the reminiscences: Capote’s elliptical inwardness makes for dull company.Holding the audience’s attention is a perennial challenge with a single actor onstage. In a smart revival of Cyriel Buysse’s Flemish classic, “The Van Paemel Family” by the Antwerp troupe SKaGeN, the actor Valentijn Dhaenens sidesteps this difficulty by playing all the play’s roles. He takes three of the 13 characters in the flesh, and the rest appear in the form of prerecorded scenes digitally projected onto a screen.The story revolves around a farmer who falls out with his two sons after they side with striking farmworkers during a period of social unrest. Mr. van Paemel is slavishly loyal to the landowner for whom they all work, and believes organized labor is a scourge. Even when he and his family are driven off their farm by rent hikes, and his daughter is cruelly taken advantage of by the landowner’s son, he prefers to maintain his beef with his sons, rather than focus on those responsible for his plight.There was something uncanny about seeing the real-life Dhaenens interact with his vaguely spectral digitized selves. This eerie visual texture, neatly complemented by the doleful tones of an accordion, made for a memorably unique aesthetic. The play dates from 1903, but the story’s central character is a timeless archetype: The embattled patriarch who clings stubbornly to every reactionary shibboleth even as he gets shafted from all directions.The standout Fringe show was Lara Foot’s stylish adaptation of “The Life and Times of Michael K.,” J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning 1983 novel about the struggles of a poor man during a fictional civil war in South Africa. The play is a collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, best known for its work on “War Horse”, and Michael K. and his elderly mother are represented by puppets that are manipulated and voiced by onstage performers.The interplay between puppets and actors made “J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K.” a Fringe standout.Fiona MacPhersonMichael K. is a borderline simpleton, kindhearted and determined, but naïve; something about the puppet’s plaintive expression and scrawny frame evokes a pathos that fits the story perfectly. Yet this somewhat desolate tale is mitigated by moments of humor, such as when the famished Michael comes unstuck trying to eat a sandwich. Being a puppet, he can’t actually do it, so the three men controlling him hungrily take a bite each, on his behalf.People think of the Fringe, which is open to anyone who can pay the accreditation fee, as defined more by quantity than quality. Yet the stronger Fringe shows were pretty much on a par — in intelligence, aesthetic ambition and technical execution — with several of the productions I saw at the more prestigious, curated International Festival. The difference was mainly a question of scale.For all its bustling, chaotic energy and anything-goes philosophy, the Fringe’s organization was impressively slick, although there was, inevitably, the occasional blip. My heart went out to the cast of “Exile for Two Violins,” whose performance at the French Institute was marred by noise pollution from a street party next to the venue, complete with a P.A. system blasting pop music. This delicate meditation on the life and work of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok could probably have done without the accompaniment of loud rhythmic clapping, periodic cheers and whistles, and the booming strains of the White Stripes’ garage rock anthem, “Seven Nation Army.” The performers plowed on — heroes, one and all.Edinburgh Festival FringeThrough Aug. 28 at various venues in Edinburgh; edfringe.com. More

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      This Evil Stepmother Has Perfect Comedic Timing

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      In “Once Upon a One More Time,” Jennifer Simard finds value in seeing “how small you can make something and achieve a big result.”You don’t need to visit a faraway kingdom to see that, in “Once Upon a One More Time,” Jennifer Simard is demonstrating what her devoted following of fans have long known: Her comedic performances sear themselves into the brain, often becoming a show’s selling point.Take, for example, her choice in the first act of this jukebox musical with a fairy tale flavor set to Britney Spears’s songs: Playing Cinderella’s Stepmother, the actress, who has been sitting on the floor in a gargantuan gown, is dressing down her less-than-chic adoptee. Then, midsentence, she back rolls into a standing position — in heels.The move brings the house down, but doesn’t stop the show. Rather, it keeps it all going. As natural as it is indescribably comical, the action makes plain that Simard, 53, is more invested in continuing the larger story.“I had to get up, and it occurred to me that it’s a great juxtaposition between a dress that makes me look like a human feather duster, and ‘Why not?’” she said. “I’m of the school that says you have to take a bunch of spaghetti and throw it at the wall and see what sticks.”The performance is full of Simardisms: big moments of physical comedy and high-flying vocal acrobatics sprinkled shrewdly with a deadpan, almost Mid-Atlantic affect. “She sounds like she’s been drinking cocktails and smoking cigarettes for centuries,” said Mari Madrid, who directed and choreographed the show with her husband, Keone.“The way she developed that moment and turned it into physical comedy was all Jenn,” Madrid said. “When you have someone like that, you have to lean into their ideas.”But the actor also finds value in seeing “how small you can make something and achieve a big result.” During a recent interview at the Moxy hotel in Times Square (selected by Simard because her character “has moxie”), she mentioned a line in which, frustrated with her daughters, her character drolly threatens to boil them.“As written, it’s all in capital letters with a big exclamation point, and that makes sense when you’re typing to convey that she’s angry,” she said. “However, the way to successfully play it is to undercut it as much as possible, because the containment of the rage is funnier than the feeling itself. In the best comedy, it’s what the character is not getting — what they are frustrated about — that’s funniest.”Simard, center, is a star of “Once Upon a One More Time,” with Tess Soltau and Amy Hillner Larsen, at the Marquis Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe same could be said of Simard’s career. She has amassed a loyal following as a sort of “if you know, you know” insider legend. And, as she tells it, she realized her talents while growing up in Litchfield, N.H.Before a visit to a theater in Manchester, N.H., drew her to the stage, she said she idolized “funny, funny women” on TV. These included Madeline Kahn, Anne Bancroft, Bernadette Peters and Barbara Barrie, whose performance in a recording of “Barefoot in the Park” from the early 1980s she called “a lesson in comedic timing.” Simard eventually appeared onstage with Peters in “Hello, Dolly!,” after Peters replaced Bette Midler during that musical’s 2016 revival, and, as Barrie had years before, played Sarah in the recent revival of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical “Company.”“I wasn’t the class clown — I was quite a good girl — but I knew from a very early age that I had that inside of me,” she said. “It’s like Jeanine Tesori said about ‘Fun Home’” in her acceptance speech at the Tony Awards. “Little girls need to see things to believe it’s possible. Having that exposure was so important to why I’m here.”A stint studying musical theater at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee ended after one semester, when Simard booked a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in New Hampshire and, later, a role in “Nunsense” — which began her recurring habit of onstage habits.Armed with improv training in Boston, she moved to New York in 1992, after she was cast in “Forbidden Broadway ’93.” She soon met Seth Rudetsky, who became her vocal coach and later cast her in “Disaster!,” his 2013 Off Broadway musical.In the intervening 20 years, Simard opened in the long-running “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” which earned her the first of four Drama Desk Award nominations, and she made her Broadway debut as a replacement in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” followed by small roles in “Shrek the Musical” and “Sister Act.”“She hit it out of the ballpark when she moved here,” Rudetsky said during a phone call, “and everyone was obsessed with her, but then she was just sort of taking jobs so she could keep working, not showing people what she could do. There are very few roles where someone like her can show everything she can do, and it becomes almost a hindrance.”Rudetsky’s spoof of 1970s disaster films got her closer to that kind of role. As Sister Mary Downy, a gambling-addicted nun, Simard “brought down the house,” he said.She shared the stage with Christopher Sieber and Katrina Lenk in the recent Broadway revival of “Company.” ”She is a scientist,” Sieber said of working with Simard. “There wasn’t a syllable we didn’t discuss.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen “Disaster!” briefly transferred to Broadway in 2016, her performance — especially her first-act rendition of “Never Can Say Goodbye” — earned the production’s sole Tony nomination and inspired an (ultimately unsuccessful) grass-roots social media campaign, #PutSimardOn, to feature her in that year’s ceremony.“Vocally she got to do the thing she does now during ‘Toxic,’ which is underplay first, then shock the audience at the end,” Rudetsky said. (In her review for The New York Times, Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote that it’s “as if Moira Rose from ‘Schitt’s Creek’ and Norma Desmond had spawned a villainess crooning a slowed-down ‘Toxic.’”)Simard gets only two songs from Spears’s catalog in “Once Upon a One More Time”: her campy entrance to “Work Bitch” and “Toxic,” an 11 o’clock number she twists into a seat-clenching wail she calls her “Robert Plant-Steven Tyler moment.”“The music is quite mercurial,” she said, “and we’ve come up with a homage that conveys what that section of the show needs. I do what I can to make it vocally exciting.”She flexed a similar shrieking melodic ability as Ernestina in “Hello, Dolly!” — hers is the earsplitting high C on that cast album’s “Put on Your Sunday Clothes.”Shortly after “Dolly!,” Tina Fey, who saw her in “Disaster!,” cast her as a replacement in “Mean Girls,” playing, among others, the teacher role that Fey played in the film.Then came the gender-swapped revival of “Company,” in which Simard played the fitness addict Sarah. Previews began in March 2020, but the industry shutdown delayed its opening until December 2021 and Covid outbreaks among the cast plagued its run.“Whew, I thought we’d all come back and there’d be a ribbon-cutting ceremony,” she joked, “but it seemed like we never really got out of the red alert of it all, and that’s a very intense place.”At one point, Patti LuPone, who played the cynical, hard-drinking Joanne, came down with Covid and, with 45 minutes notice, Simard was tapped to fill in for what would be 11 performances.“I didn’t see any of it, but I had tears rolling down my eyes because she sounded amazing,” Christopher Sieber, her scene partner in the production, recalled during a video call. “It’s Jennifer, so she’d prepared like crazy, but taking that — subbing for Patti LuPone and singing “The Ladies Who Lunch” — is a daunting task.”Being partnered with Sieber, her longtime friend, helped. The two played a couple struggling to adhere to their diets, and one bit had her doing tricep dips.“It’s an interesting scene because there are no jokes,” Sieber said. “It’s all behavioral, observational kind of humor, and Jennifer found the funny in things like that. She knows where a laugh should be, and breaks down every little thing, finding the trail that will get you to that moment.“She is a scientist,” he added. “There wasn’t a syllable we didn’t discuss.”LuPone would win that season’s best featured actress Tony, with Simard earning her second Tony nomination in that same category. But, Stepmother scene-stealing aside, Simard has her sights on another possible star turn. Shortly before being cast in “Once Upon a One More Time,” she and Sieber participated in an industry reading of “Death Becomes Her,” a musical adaptation of the 1992 film. She read the part played by Goldie Hawn.“You know when it’s a winner, and it’s a winner,” she said, hinting at a future life for the prospective show.Citing her “always correct” intuition, calling back to her now flourishing career, and unintentionally echoing her own comedic technique, she added: “You know, there’s no substitute for time.” More

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      At 89, Still Making Art (and Bread) With a Message in Vermont

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      Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater is going strong and, at 89, so is he. But what will happen to his company when he is gone?Under an unforgiving sun during a heat wave in July, Peter Schumann, the 89-year-old artistic director of Bread and Puppet Theater, rang a hand bell on a rolling hillside in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Before him a post topped with a giant grasping papier-mâché hand towered high like a maypole. Two dozen performers encircled it.“Walk slower, get closer to each other,” shouted Schumann, a tawny bearded man. More giant hands on poles rose up, seemingly reaching to the clouds in prayer. Then the group sang a dirge-like song as birds called from a nearby pine forest that is home to handmade memorial huts for friends and family. In two days, this surreal ritual was to be recreated in the debut of “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant,” part of the 60-year-old company’s season of Sunday shows.In addition to directing, Peter Schumann plays musical instruments, sculpts, paints on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard, and creates posters and printed chapbooks.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn July and August, the theater’s events run on weekends and are either free or modestly priced: indoor avant-garde performances, an outdoor circus featuring playful political sketches with towering effigy-like figures and a rowdy band, and side shows created by company members on compact stages are among the offerings.Schumann, a German immigrant who has retained his accent, came to New York City in the 1960s and found a potent way to respond in the streets to the war in Vietnam and social injustice: towering papier-mâché and cardboard figures. Influenced by John Cage and Merce Cunningham and exposed to the happenings of Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, he conceives his experimental collaborative pieces from a cauldron of ideas about the joys and ills of a conflicted capitalist world. Often they are drawn from the news, sometimes from legends. Some are reviewed well, others not. Schumann, uninterested in praise or media attention, keeps making them.In addition to directing, he sculpts, paints (on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard), and creates posters, calendars and printed chapbooks. He also uses an outdoor oven to bake coarse sourdough rye bread to feed audiences that can grow to a thousand or more in August.A horse puppet taking the field in “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant.”Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said on that pre-opening Friday last month while baking for about 50 summer company members. He knows that like his work, his bread can be challenging to chew, but hopefully nourishing and worth the trouble.Lately, Bread and Puppet Theater, which performs all over the world, has been growing. Its domestic touring schedule — to colleges, theaters, city plazas and small towns via a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life (coffee cups, flowers, the occasional “Ah!”) — included 66 stops last fall with a company of 30, twice the size of previous years. Print sales are up, too. Renewed interest in live performance and the current political climate may explain it. But appreciation for the company’s sustainable, handmade tactility and poetic anti-authoritarianism is nothing new.“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said of his sourdough rye bread, which he feeds to audiences.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAfter baking the bread in outdoor ovens, he brings the loaves into his kitchen to cool.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesHoward Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” cited its “beauty, magic and power” in a blurb for “Rehearsing With Gods,” a 2004 book about the company. Grace Paley marched with the group starting in the 1960s, and wrote a poem inspired by its policy of speaking up and speaking out. Julie Taymor, who used natural materials, papier-mâché and puppets in the stage adaptation of “The Lion King,” referenced some of Schumann’s stock puppet figures in her 2007 Beatles movie, “Across the Universe.” Kiki Smith, the sculptor, in an interview on the Smithsonian’s archive website, talked about the company’s “epic and biblical qualities” and of seeing its performances often in her youth.Guided by Schumann’s uncompromising views about greed, racism and militarism, the collective has questioned the World Bank, the treatment of Indigenous people and, to some in-house and public consternation, the providing of arms to Ukraine instead of ways to negotiate.The troupe presents free or modestly priced circuses, pageants and other performance arts on summer weekends.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“To live in a war and be a refugee is a lifelong education,” Schumann said of a childhood in which he experienced bombings in Germany’s Silesia region, which is now part of Poland. “There’s no equivalent to it in the U.S.”The printing press posters, chapbooks and calendars he designs drive his messages home and come from an uncompromising faith in “Cheap Art.” His manifesto about it states the importance of its unimportance — cheap, lightweight, undermining the sanctity of affluence and in opposition to the money-hungry “business of art.” For decades, his wife, Elka Schumann, who died in 2021, on a Sunday in August, oversaw the printing press that turns out countless pieces, all drawn with his bold and expressionistic hand and celebrating life while questioning abuses of power. (One poster of an iris reads “Resistance to the Empire”; a chapbook on courage urges “Dig through the dirt.”)But for all the questions firing like flares at society, with Schumann’s humor and pathos, there is one — far more insular in focus — on the minds of those around him: What will happen to his company when he is gone?“It’s been an ongoing conversation for 15 years, and we’re still figuring it out,” said his son Max Schumann, 59, an artist and the departing executive director of Printed Matter, a nonprofit based in New York City that sells artists’ books.Guides help audience members navigate the woods.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesSome of the puppets during the circus performance.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“This company has always been an iffy little enterprise that depends way too much on me,” his father said of Bread and Puppet, which has a million-dollar annual budget raised through touring, print sales, tickets and donations, but no direct corporate or government funding. “Is it sustainable when I’m gone and will people recognize it as important?”Those questions remain unanswered as Schumann’s incessant creation of new work keeps the focus on the present.INSIDE A BARN last month, a couple of hours after the rehearsal for the “Heart of the Matter” pageant, several dozen performers from around the world — paid puppeteers, interns, community volunteers — presented their proposed circus acts. Schumann typically reviews and critiques the sketches.Most of the acts had a whimsical tone. A man imitating a bee (collapsing bee colonies the inspiration) did a frenetic waggle around a cardboard city that transformed itself into a tangle of dancing urbanites. An orca ambushed yachting billionaire puppets. When somber-looking tree figures appeared with a narrator reading facts about boreal forests versus the more flammable monoculture ones burning in nearby Canada, Schumann became agitated.One of the circus performances.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“It’s too cliché, something everyone already knows,” he shouted. “You have to stop using so many words and solve things puppetry-wise.” Then he jumped to his feet and started moving people and puppets around. He had puppeteers throw the trees and then dance with them, causing some confusion.“It’s what you do, not what you say,” he said. “It’s puppetry, not preaching.”He told them he would return in a half-hour to see a revision. Then, as dinnertime approached, he excused himself to help the kitchen staff make potato pancakes — a recipe from his war-torn childhood.With admirable control, the puppeteers discussed how to rework their savaged piece, each giving the others time to suggest solutions. It was a utopian vision of collaboration, agile and practical — and typical of how the company functions.“Peter has a strong directional voice,” said Ziggy Bird, 26, a company member who took notice of Schumann’s work in a theater history class at Temple University. “It’s never personal and some of the most beautiful moments come from frustration, which can be a kick in the pants.”Bread and Puppet Theater performs all over the world, and travels domestically on a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesArt inside the bus, which reiterates Schumann’s uncompromising faith in what he calls “Cheap Art.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesVisitors tour a makeshift gallery featuring Schumann’s bedsheet paintings.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“Schools of art are teaching solo enterprises, but what people do here is the opposite — they collaborate,” Schumann said while smoking a cigar, drinking a can of beer and stirring a vat of potato pancake batter to be fried on an outdoor stovetop. This collaborative process has birthed companies far beyond Vermont, including Papermoon Puppet Theater in Indonesia, Y No Había Luz in Puerto Rico and Great Small Works in New York City.“It’s a way of making art and living with a strong level of engagement and concern,” said Clare Dolan, a puppeteer and a Bread and Puppet Theater board member who assists Schumann. She was preparing a circus act about the sending of cluster bombs to Ukraine. “There are incredible ripples that come from Peter that show up in theaters, parades and art-making around the world.”John Bell, the board’s president and a professor who runs the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, has been with the company since 1973, around the time it relocated to Vermont from New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood, first to Goddard College and then to the land in Glover.“In a way Bread and Puppet is an art project of Peter’s and we are only here to help him realize it,” he said. “So we don’t know what will happen once he’s gone, especially because he believes in responding to the present.” While Schumann is “dealing with being an older person these days,” Bell added, the moment he starts working, his pace accelerates.That seems an understatement.At the dress rehearsal on Saturday for the circus (canceled the next day because of a rainstorm that flooded Vermont) Schumann aggressively finessed the burning forest act and others. Later he performed in an indoor show billed as a mass, “Idiots of the World Unite Against the Idiot System”; it was a good-natured critique of everything from “the empire’s false sense of freedom” to a highway system that kills wild animals. He fiddled a hybrid violin and trumpet while making an abstract speech and then led the cast of 30 in an exasperated “Aaaagh.”“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral,” Schumann said. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAfter that a quartet performed a Beethoven fugue.Done listening, he drove his Subaru wagon up a dirt road to a studio to finish one of his “Heart of the Matter” paintings.“He’s always had a manic creative energy and right now he’s been working with wild abandon, trying to squeeze it all in,” Max Schumann observed. “When our mother passed away, his grief was intense, but the work helped keep him alive.”In fact, when Elka Schumann died, the circus and pageant carried on the same weekend.Now Schumann lives without the life partner who helped make many things work at Bread and Puppet. He thinks about her often and visits the memorial he made to her in his pine forest — a sculptural relief of a couple embraced. At night he sometimes sits on his porch listening to the parties down on his farm, pleased about what he and his wife have inspired and sustained. Sometimes he joins in, dancing with abandon.“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral, and I’ve already had a stroke and a second is probably on the way,” he said as he painted with a steady hand. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”He put the last paint stroke on his recycled bedsheet and stepped away.“OK, this series is finished,” he said. “Now I can go on to what’s next.” More