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      Sheldon Harnick, ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Lyricist, Dies at 99

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      His collaborations with the composer Jerry Bock also included “Fiorello!” — which, like “Fiddler,” was a Tony winner — and “She Loves Me.”Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist who teamed up with the composer Jerry Bock to write some of Broadway’s most memorable musicals, including the Tony Award winners “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Fiorello!,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99. His death was announced by a spokesman, Sean Katz.Mr. Harnick’s lyrics could be broadly funny, slyly satirical, lushly romantic or poignantly moving. He gave voice to a broad range of characters, including starry-eyed young lovers, corrupt politicians, a quarreling Adam and Eve and, in “Fiddler on the Roof,” struggling Jews in early-20th-century Russia.When three unmarried sisters in “Fiddler” confront the village matchmaker, two of them hopeful and the third cynical, they all end up having second thoughts:Matchmaker, matchmaker, plan me no plansI’m in no rush, maybe I’ve learnedPlaying with matches a girl can get burned.So bring me no ring, groom me no groom,Find me no find, catch me no catch.Unless he’s a matchless match!When the leading man in “She Loves Me” is about to meet the woman with whom he’s been trading love letters for months, he practically sings himself into a nervous breakdown:I haven’t slept a wink, I only thinkOf our approaching tête-à-tête,Tonight at eight.I feel a combination of depression and elation;What a state!To waitTill eight.Maria Karnilova and Zero Mostel in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” for which Mr. Harnick and Jerry Bock wrote the score. The show, which opened in 1964, ran for more than 3,200 performances and became the longest-running musical in Broadway history.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMr. Harnick met Mr. Bock in the late 1950s, and the two quickly realized they could work together despite their different temperaments. “I tend to approach things skeptically and pessimistically,” Mr. Harnick told The New York Times in 1990. “Jerry Bock is a bubbling, ebullient personality.”The team would break up after a dozen years over a dispute involving their musical “The Rothschilds.” But the combination worked extremely well while it lasted.The late 1950s was a challenging time for newcomers to the musical stage. The decade’s hit Broadway musicals had included “Guys and Dolls,” “The King and I,” “Wonderful Town,” “My Fair Lady” and “Candide.” “In those days,” Mr. Harnick recalled in a 2004 interview, “lyricists were consciously trying to be more sophisticated and literate. Now we’re in the Andrew Lloyd Webber vein, trying to hit bigger, broader audiences.”Mr. Harnick and Mr. Bock got off to a weak start in 1958 with “The Body Beautiful,” set in the world of prizefighting; it closed after a brief run. But they bounced back decisively the next year with “Fiorello!,” a breezy portrait of one of New York City’s most colorful politicians.“Fiorello!,” which had a book by George Abbott and Jerome Weidman and was directed by Mr. Abbott, starred Tom Bosley as Fiorello H. La Guardia, the reformer who was mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945. Its score evoked a time when political corruption was rife.The song “Little Tin Box,” for example, suggests how a crooked party boss (Howard Da Silva) might have responded when a judge asked him how he has managed to buy a yacht, given his modest salary. The boss replies:I am positive Your Honor must be joking.Any working man can do what I have done.For a month or two I simply gave up smokingAnd I put my extra pennies one by oneInto a little tin boxA little tin boxThat a little tin key unlocks.There is nothing unorthodoxAbout a little tin box.“Fiorello!” ran for nearly 800 performances and won three Tony Awards, including the prize for best musical, which it shared with “The Sound of Music.” It was also one of the few musicals to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Jerry Bock, left, with Mr. Harnick in 1970. Their collaboration produced some of Broadway’s most memorable musicals.Barton Silverman/The New York TimesBut the Bock-Harnick team’s biggest success — and one of Broadway’s — was yet to come: “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened in 1964 and ran for more than 3,200 performances. It became the longest-running musical in Broadway history, a record that stood for a decade.Directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with a book by Joseph Stein based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, “Fiddler on the Roof” told the story of a Jewish community facing expulsion from a village in the czarist Russian empire, with a focus on Tevye (Zero Mostel), the village milkman, and his family.In addition to “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” the score included a number of songs that would soon be regarded as classics, including “Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset” and Tevye’s humorously wistful lament “If I Were a Rich Man” (“There would be one long staircase just going up/ And one even longer coming down/ And one more leading nowhere, just for show”).“Fiddler on the Roof” was more than a hit show; it was a phenomenon. It won nine Tony Awards, including one for its score. It was made into a hit movie in 1971, has been performed all over the world, and has had five Broadway revivals, most recently in 2015. (A Yiddish-language production was an Off Broadway hit in 2019 and played a return engagement in late 2022.)Mr. Harnick, left, and Hal Prince, the producer of “Fiddler on the Roof,” in 2015.Damon Winter/The New York TimesAmong the Bock-Harnick team’s other noteworthy efforts was “She Loves Me” (1963), based on the same Hungarian play that was the basis for the movies “The Shop Around the Corner,” “In the Good Old Summertime” and “You’ve Got Mail.” The story of two workers at a perfume shop in Budapest (Barbara Cook and Daniel Massey) who finally realize that they have been trading romantic letters and that they are meant for each other, “She Loves Me” had no showstopping songs and was not initially a big success, closing after 301 performances. But it has grown in popularity after a series of revivals — although Broadway productions in 1993 and 2016 were equally brief.Their other shows included “The Apple Tree” (1966), three musical playlets (including one about Adam and Eve) directed by Mike Nichols, and “The Rothschilds” (1970), based on Frederic Morton’s biography of the Jewish family that rose from the ghetto to become a financial powerhouse.It was a dispute over who would direct “The Rothschilds” that ended the Bock-Harnick partnership. The show’s original director, Derek Goldby, was replaced by Michael Kidd at the urging of Mr. Harnick and others who wanted someone with more musical-theater experience. Mr. Bock was irate.“Jerry felt that Derek had gotten a raw deal,” Mr. Harnick recalled in 1990. “For a while, the feelings between us were very bad.” He added that “things changed for the better” when “Fiorello!” was revived in 1985 at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut and he and Mr. Bock met there to work on it. (It was revived again off Broadway in 2016.)Nonetheless, they never wrote another show together. Mr. Bock died at 81 in 2010.From left, Mr. Prince, Mr. Bock, Mr. Harnick, Fred Ebb and John Kander in 2004, when the Bock-Harnick and Kander-Ebb songwriting teams announced that they were giving their archives to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.Yoni Brook/The New York TimesSheldon Mayer Harnick was born on April 30, 1924, in Chicago to Harry and Esther Harnick. His father was a dentist, his mother a homemaker. He took violin lessons as a child, attended music school as a teenager and earned money playing in amateur theatricals. After serving in the Army, he enrolled at the Northwestern University School of Music. He graduated in 1949.He began writing songs while in Carl Schurz High School in Chicago and became seriously interested in songwriting as a career after hearing a recording of Burton Lane and E.Y. Harburg’s hit 1947 musical, “Finian’s Rainbow.” At the urging of the actress Charlotte Rae, a fellow Northwestern student, he moved to New York in 1950.Mr. Harnick’s first song in a Broadway show was “The Boston Beguine,” which he wrote — music as well as lyrics — for the revue “Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952.” He wrote numbers for several other revues, including “Two’s Company” (1952), before teaming with Mr. Bock. (One of his compositions from those years, the darkly satirical and deceptively cheerful “The Merry Minuet,” was popularized by the folk music group the Kingston Trio.)Mr. Harnick’s first marriage, to Mary Boatner, was annulled. His second, to the comedian, writer and director Elaine May, ended in divorce. In 1965, he married Margery Gray, an actress whom he had met when she auditioned for his show “Tenderloin.” (She later became a photographer and an artist.) She survives him, as do a daughter, Beth Dorn; a son, Matthew Harnick; and four grandchildren.After his split with Mr. Bock, Mr. Harnick went on to collaborate with other composers. He worked with Mary Rodgers on a 1973 version of “Pinocchio” performed by the Bil Baird marionettes, and with her father, Richard Rodgers, on “Rex,” a musical about King Henry VIII of England that had a brief Broadway run in 1976, with Nicol Williamson in the title role. He also worked with Michel Legrand on two shows: an English-language stage version of the movie musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” produced off Broadway in 1979, and a new adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” staged in Stamford, Conn., in 1982. And he collaborated with Joe Raposo on “A Wonderful Life,” based on the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which has had a number of regional productions since 1986.Mr. Harnick in 2015. His lyrics could be broadly funny, slyly satirical, lushly romantic or poignantly moving. Chad Batka for The New York TimesMr. Harnick also became an accomplished opera translator, providing English librettos for classical works like Lehar’s “The Merry Widow,” Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” and Bizet’s “Carmen.”He wrote some original opera librettos as well, including “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines” (1975), with music by Jack Beeson, and “The Phantom Tollbooth” (1995), a collaboration with Norton Juster, the author of the children’s book on which it was based, and the composer Arnold Black. “Lady Bird: First Lady of the Land,” an opera about Lady Bird Johnson, for which he wrote the libretto and Henry Mollicone wrote the music, had its premiere in Texas in 2016 and has been performed in New York and elsewhere.In late 2015, shortly before the latest Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” opened, Mr. Harnick was in the studio making a demonstration record of songs from “Dragons,” an adaptation of a Russian play for which he wrote the book, music and lyrics, and which he had been working on for many years. In an interview with The Times, he said that he had no thoughts of retirement, and that he continued to attend every show on Broadway, as he had for many years. He added that he was working on a new show of his own.“I hope I live long enough to complete it,” he said. “I won’t tell you what idea I have, because you’ll steal it.”Robert Berkvist, a former New York Times arts editor, died in January. Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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      A Comic With Many Questions About Jews and Whiteness

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      Alex Edelman thrives on doubt in “Just for Us” on Broadway. It’s the result of years of revision and notes from Seinfeld, Birbiglia and the late Adam Brace.When Jerry Seinfeld talked to the comic Alex Edelman after seeing him perform “Just for Us,” his solo show that began previews on Broadway this week, he gave him one note: Don’t acknowledge the audience’s response to a joke onstage.Edelman, 34, took it, even though he has the kind of sensitive, hyperactive mind that can’t help but look past the fourth wall. In an interview recently at Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side, he kept peeking at my list of questions, inquiring why I was writing down “L’s” (I wasn’t) and periodically asking me how he was doing (very well). He seemed to answer questions while simultaneously imagining how they were playing, even in emotional moments like discussing his longtime friend, collaborator and director Adam Brace, who tragically died in April at 43 after a stroke.Brace had been critical at every stage of Edelman’s show from its inception in 2018 through hundreds of performances, and after almost all of them the British director gave him notes. “He looked after the flow of the show,” Edelman said, which is why the comic paused in our conversation as he considered a joke he had worked on at the Comedy Cellar the night before, his eyes watering as he said how much he missed having Brace as a sounding board. He then imagined how getting choked up would come off, writing the sentence out loud (“and his eyes fill up”) before quipping: “Don’t overdo it.”During the pandemic, “Just for Us,” a thoughtful, punchline-dense comedy, skipped past downtown hit into the rarefied air of cultural phenomenon. I knew it made the zeitgeist when friends not especially interested in comedy approached me wanting to talk about it. The autobiographical show benefits from a killer elevator pitch: Orthodox Jewish comic gets accidentally invited to a white supremacist meeting in Queens, attends and has a meet-cute flirtation with a racist.When “Just for Us” ran in Washington, D.C., it became the second-highest-grossing show in Woolly Mammoth Theater’s 43-year history. Asked about this success by phone, its artistic director, Maria Manuela Goyanes, recalled telling Jewish staff members: “Y’all show up.”But unlike current Broadway shows that explore antisemitism like “Parade” or “Leopoldstadt,” Edelman isn’t looking back at the past but toward the identity politics of the moment. One reason “Just for Us” has resonated with audiences is that it’s one of the few new shows to dig into the relationship between Jews and whiteness. “Growing up I always wanted to be white,” Edelman says in the show. This gets a laugh because he presents as white, but not all groups see him that way, which he called “almost a founding tension” of the show.After one performance, an audience member told Edelman he always thought Jews were white until he saw the show. Someone behind him responded that they always thought Jews weren’t white. Edelman looked pleased by this exchange. “It’s the induction of doubt,” he explained to me, adding that he told them: “You’re both right.”Edelman at the Comedy Cellar, where he continues to work out jokes.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesHis instinct is to question, not answer, to air strong opinions but not settle into them too securely. When Kanye West comes up in our conversation, Edelman described a Jewish friend who resented the expectation that he should be outraged by the rapper’s trafficking in Jewish stereotypes, describing it as “taking our turn on the victim wheel.” In our talk, Edelman articulated this position with passion but didn’t go so far as to agree. His point is that his show aims to “have the conversation about Jews in their place on that spectrum of whiteness without having a conversation about victimhood.”Growing up in Boston, the child of a professor of biomedical engineering and a real estate lawyer, Edelman, who has a slight build and floppy hair, has been doing stand-up since he was a teenager. (He has had long-term romantic relationships with the female comics Katherine Ryan and more recently, Hannah Einbinder, though they broke up a month ago.) He describes his early influences as “not great,” explaining that “if I’m being honest, I saw a lot of racist comedy, self-congratulatory and smug.” He described discovering his voice when he went to London during college, and recalled one key turning point when the British comic Josie Long took him aside and said, “What you’re doing is getting laughs but it’s not who you are.”Even more important, at 23, he met Brace at Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s birthday party. They talked comedy and Brace later asked him if he could give him notes. Brace was especially alert to the dramaturgy of a show, insisting on cutting jokes that worked if they weren’t worth the lost momentum. If Edelman riffed too much, Brace told him: You’re on the jazz tonight. Their running conversations continued over the next decade.In early June, I accompanied Edelman to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to watch old recordings of Broadway performances by artists like Billy Crystal (who also gave him a note after a show) and Eric Bogosian. When a man at the desk told him that he could see “The Producers” only with the approval of its director, Susan Stroman, and she was in London, Edelman looked down at his phone, shot off a text and within a minute had her approval. The man at the desk looked surprised, then added that he also needed the approval of Robin Wagner, the show’s set designer, and he had died the previous week. After a pregnant pause, Edelman deadpanned: “That’s beyond my ability.”When asked about how he seems to know everyone, Edelman said these were all people he approached because he was genuinely curious about them. “The thing everyone says but maybe doesn’t internalize is: You just have to show up,” he explained, before adding that there is privilege in knowing you are able to do so.The previous month, when in Boston, he knocked on the door of the 94-year-old comedy legend Tom Lehrer, whom he did not know, just to talk. “I told him I was a comedian,” Edelman reported. “And he said, ‘What problem do you need solving?’”In a more critical example of showing up, Edelman approached Mike Birbiglia in 2019. “We had an older brother, younger brother relationship,” Birbiglia said by phone. “He’d ask to pick my brain and I’d say I’m very busy.”This time, however, when Edelman described “Just for Us,” Birbiglia heard a surprising, relatable story that had more potential. He told Edelman to keep working on it. After producing one performance, Birbiglia, who is not Jewish, encouraged him to strengthen its spine. With a chuckle, he recalled that one note was to make it more Jewish.Edelman returned to London and he and Brace rebuilt the show as controversy raged in the Labour Party there over its leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attitudes toward Jews, which Edelman said informed the writing. After opening Off Broadway in 2021 to rave reviews, “Just for Us” became a hit.With Brace gone, Edelman said he had leaned on Birbiglia more, both for notes and emotional support. When I asked Birbiglia what Edelman was good at besides comedy, he said with a small snort: “Newspaper interviews.” Later that night, he texted me that “one of Alex’s remarkable talents is he’s willing to continue to rewrite and experiment on a show that had already reviewed well” at festivals like the Edinburgh Fringe. “That’s a very rare quality,” the text continued, “and I think it bodes well for whatever he chooses to do next.”That has been on Edelman’s mind. He had planned to make his follow-up about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject he has been fascinated by since he was a kid, but doing so without Brace seemed daunting.And yet, there was something about the cantankerous impossibility of this dispute that clearly appeals to him. One of the first things Edelman told me in our interview was: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”He thought it was from the playwright George Bernard Shaw, but reconsidered, brow furrowed, then looked it up on his phone and realized it was from the poet William Butler Yeats. “I have so much doubt,” he said, “which is why I have so much patience for both sides of the argument.” More

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      ‘The Light in the Piazza’ Review: When It Comes to Love, They’re Outsiders

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      A meet-cute on an Italian excursion sends a mother and daughter on parallel journeys of self-discovery in an Encores! staging of the 2005 musical.Encountering a great piece of art can lead to a moment of transcendence. That’s the idea behind the mother-daughter tour of Florence in “The Light in the Piazza,” the 2005 musical romance composed by Adam Guettel and written by Craig Lucas. And for audiences at New York City Center, where an exquisite Encores! revival directed by Chay Yew opened on Wednesday, a sensational performance by Ruthie Ann Miles delivers a feeling close to the sublime.Miles, who was nominated for a Tony Award this year for her role as the beggar woman in the Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd,” embodies a vivid and elegant portrait of maternal empathy and restraint as Margaret, a veteran’s wife from the South. She honeymooned in Italy; now it’s the summer of 1953, and her marital flame is dimming just as her daughter, Clara (Anna Zavelson), first discovers desire. It’s a bittersweet reflection that Miles imbues with grace, fortitude and the circumspect wit of middle age.That Margaret and Clara are Asian American adds a further layer of shading to their outsiderness abroad. (“I’m as different here as different can be,” Clara sings.) But Clara’s sense of otherness is rooted in a less visible aspect of her identity. As Margaret tells the audience in a brief aside, Clara is “very young for her age,” her cognitive and emotional abilities stunted by an incident in her childhood.But it’s not Italian art that broadens Clara’s consciousness on their trip; soon after a local dreamboat named Fabrizio (James D. Gish) retrieves Clara’s hat from the wind, Margaret assumes the unenviable task of trying to steer her daughter away from love at first sight.Miles’s rich and precise vocals illuminate Guettel’s lush, poetic score, which is nimbly and gorgeously orchestrated ‌by Guettel, Ted Sperling‌‌ and Bruce Coughlin. (Listen for the lone clarinet that accompanies Margaret’s most intimate moments of introspection.) Miles also radiates wry intelligence, as an ‌astute mother hoping to rein in her daughter’s increasingly unbridled impulses, another aspect of the story heightened by casting the characters as Asian American.The young lovers flirt over fumbling to understand one another (Fabrizio speaks little English, though Gish’s Italian is also unconvincing). And while the actors’ connection lacks animal magnetism, their characters are united in their reveries about how love is supposed to feel. Clara has the more compelling awakening in this regard, and Zavelson, making her professional New York debut, lends an effervescent innocence to her portrayal of self-discovery. Both actors sing with appealing earnestness, but Gish’s Fabrizio is painted in broader strokes, as though smitten Florentine hunks had been loitering around every corner for Clara to find.Fabrizio’s family tends to be broader as well, though knowingly. His brother, Giuseppe (Rodd Cyrus), is a slick womanizer whose wife, Franca (Shereen Ahmed), seethes with jealousy and warns Clara about the fickleness of infatuation. His mother, Signora Naccarelli (Andréa Burns), pauses the family’s rowdy display of collective passion during the Italian-language number “Aiutami” to assure the audience that she’s aware the Naccarellis are drama queens. It’s a self-conscious nod, from Guettel and Lucas, to their uncommon fusion of operatic melodrama with the psychological realism of contemporary musical theater. (The duo’s “Days of Wine and Roses,” now running at the Linda Gross Theater, builds on that formula.)The set designed by Clint Ramos and Miguel emphasizes depth of field, with the 16-member orchestra elevated on a colonnade platform as its centerpiece.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn Yew’s concert staging, which runs through Sunday, those elements cohere seamlessly. (Though Miles and the ensemble carry leather-bound scripts that resemble guidebooks, the production is fully and beautifully staged.) The 16-member orchestra is the magnificent centerpiece, elevated on a colonnade platform that runs the length of the stage. The set design by Clint Ramos and Miguel Urbino emphasizes depth of field, its white framework a receptive canvas for Linda Cho’s refined midcentury costumes and the warm ambers of David Weiner’s lighting.That sense of dimension and perspective also comes through in Margaret, as well as in Fabrizio’s father, Signor Naccarelli (Ivan Hernandez), who eventually grow simpatico as their children are drawn to each other. Margaret may be ambivalent about love herself, recognizing its inevitable fallibility (her husband, played by Michael Hayden, appears in strained long-distance phone calls), but she invests in its possibilities for Clara, a generosity of spirit that gives “The Light in the Piazza” its shimmer.Margaret’s instinct to protect her daughter, and her ultimate reconciliation of sorrow with hope, are the musical’s emotional center. And there will be yet a deeper level of resonance for audiences familiar with Miles’s own personal history, of losing her 5-year-old daughter, Abigail, when they were struck by a car in 2018, and, two months later, the baby Miles was pregnant with at the time.Miles reflected in a recent interview that the conclusion of Margaret’s story might allow her to “finally take a breath.” Whether that turns out to be the case, Miles’s performance is certain, at least, to leave audiences breathless.The Light in the PiazzaThrough June 25 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      New Jason Robert Brown Musical Highlights MCC Theater Season

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

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

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

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      36 Hours in Paris: Things to Do and See

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

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      ‘Good Vibrations’ Review: The Saving Power of Punk

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

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      in Theater

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

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