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      Livestreaming ‘Made All the Difference’ for Some Disabled Art Lovers

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      When shuttered venues embraced streaming during the pandemic, the arts became more accessible. With live performance back, and streams dwindling, many feel forgotten.For Mollie Gathro, live theater was a once-a-year indulgence if the stars aligned perfectly.Gathro has degenerative disc disease and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, resulting in joint pain, weakness and loss of mobility. Because of her disabilities, going to a show meant having to secure accessible seating after hourslong phone calls with her “nemesis,” Ticketmaster; finding a friend to drive her or arranging other transportation; and hoping her body would cooperate enough for her to actually go out.But when live performance was brought to a halt three years ago by the coronavirus pandemic, and presenters turned to streaming in an effort to keep reaching audiences, the playing field was suddenly leveled for arts lovers like Gathro.From her home in West Springfield, Mass., Gathro suddenly had access to the same offerings as everyone else, watching streams of Gore Vidal’s drama “The Best Man” and of a Guster concert at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. For a while, it seemed, everything was online: performances by the Berlin State Opera or the Philadelphia Orchestra; dances by choreographers like Alonzo King and a New York City Ballet Spring Gala directed by Sofia Coppola; blockbuster movies that were released to streaming services at the same time they hit multiplexes; even the latest installment of Richard Nelson’s acclaimed cycle of plays about the Apple family for the Public Theater was streamed live.“I was overjoyed, but there was also this tentative feeling like waiting for the other shoe to drop because they could take the accessibility away just as easily as they gave it,” Gathro, 35, said, “which feels like is exactly what is happening.”It is happening. With live performance now back, and some theaters and concert halls still struggling to bring back audiences, presenters have cut back on their streamed offerings — leaving many people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, who have been calling for better virtual access for decades, excluded again.While many presenters have cut back on streaming, there is still more available than there used to be. In September the San Francisco Opera streamed a performance of John Adams’ “Antony and Cleopatra” starring Amina Edris. Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaLivestreaming “opened up the door and showed us what is possible,” said Celia Hughes, the executive director of Art Spark Texas, a nonprofit that aims to make the arts more inclusive and accessible. The door, she said, has begun to close again.Aimi Hamraie,​​ an associate professor of medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt University who studies disability access, said that the decisions to cut back on streaming options “were not made with disabled people in mind.”“We’ve all been shown that we already have the tools to create more accessible exhibitions and performances, so people can no longer say it’s not possible,” Hamraie said. “We all know that that’s not true.”One in four adults in the United States has some form of disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But more than three decades after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act made it illegal to discriminate based on disability, advocates say that it remains difficult for many disabled people to navigate arts venues: gilded old theaters often have narrow aisles, cramped rows and stairs, while sleek modern spaces can be off-the-beaten-path or feature temporary seating on risers.To be sure, there are far more streaming options available now than there used to be. The San Francisco Opera has been livestreaming all of its productions this season, and last month the Paris Opera announced new streaming options. Second Stage Theater simulcast the last two weeks of its Broadway run of “Between Riverside and Crazy” and “Circle Jerk,” a Zoom play that became a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for drama, returned for a hybrid run last summer for both live and streaming audiences. The Cleveland Orchestra has joined the growing number of classical ensembles streaming select performances. And this year’s Sundance Film Festival was held in person in Park City, Utah — but also online.Second Stage Theater simulcast the last two weeks of its Broadway run of “Between Riverside and Crazy.” From left to right: Stephen McKinley Henderson, Victor Almanzar, Common.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut venues and producers have cut back on streaming for a number of reasons: the costs associated with equipment and the work required to film performances; contracts that call for paying artists and rights holders more money for streams; and fears that streams could provide more incentive for people to stay home rather than attend in person.Arts lovers with disabilities are feeling the loss.“It made all the difference because I felt like during the pandemic, I was allowed to be part of the world again, and then I just lost it,” said Dom Evans, 42, a hard-of-hearing filmmaker with spinal muscular atrophy, among other disabilities, and a co-creator of FilmDis, a group that monitors disability representation in the media.The recent experiments with streaming have raised questions of what counts as “live.” Some events are heavily produced and edited before they are made available online.“It’s better than nothing, but it’s not the same,” Phoebe Boag, 43, a music fan with myalgic encephalomyelitis, who lives in Scotland, said in an email interview. “When you’re watching a live performance at the same time as everyone else, you have the same anticipation leading up to the event, and there’s a sense of community and inclusion, knowing that you’re watching the performance alongside however many other people.”More venues are providing programming specifically for people with disabilities and their families. Moments, at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, for example, is geared toward people with dementia and their caregivers. “Our main goal is that everyone has choice, everyone can get access to what they want in ways that work best for them,” Miranda Hoffner, the associate director of accessibility at Lincoln Center, said.Moments, at Lincoln Center, is geared toward people with dementia and their caregivers. Ayami Goto and Takumi Miyake, of American Ballet Theater’s Studio Company, danced.Lawrence SumulongThese types of programs have been welcomed. But others say that presenters must do more to make all of their programming accessible.“We need arts programs that are fully integrated,” Evans, the filmmaker, said.Even as presenters have cut back on streaming options, many have stopped requiring proof of vaccination and masks — placing new barriers to attendance for some of the estimated seven million American adults who have compromised immune systems that make them more likely to get severely ill from Covid-19.“It’s easy to feel just like you’re farther and farther behind and not only forgotten, but just completely disregarded,” said Han Olliver, a 26-year-old freelance artist and writer with multiple chronic illnesses who would like more access to the arts. “And that’s really lonely.”Still, new opportunities have led to more connections for and among disabled people.Theater Breaking Through Barriers, an Off Broadway company that promotes the inclusion of disabled actors onstage, has presented more than 75 short plays since 2020 that have been designed to be performed virtually. Last fall, it streamed a series of plays, including some that were created on Zoom and others that were performed in front of live audiences. Nicholas Viselli, the company’s artistic director, said the goal is to make streaming more regular.There is an idea that “‘doing virtual stuff is not really theater,’ and I don’t agree with that,” Viselli said.“It’s not the same as being in the room and feeling the energy from the audience and the actors,” he said, “but it is when you have artists creating something in front of your eyes.”Gathro continues to take advantage of streaming options when she can from her home in West Springfield. But she hopes that more presenters will stream their work in the future.“I wish I always had options for livestreaming, for really everything, because I would,” Gathro said. “For me, it’s worth paying as much as I would pay to see it in person. The accessibility is just that much more helpful.” More

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      Review: In a Sorkinized ‘Camelot,’ That’s How Conditions Are. Alas.

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      A revival of the 1960 musical with the famously great score and infamously bad book gets a gorgeous makeover that makes no difference.About 30 minutes into its 90-minute first act, the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “Camelot” finally wakes up, as if from a pleasant drowse. That’s when Jordan Donica, as Lancelot, who has arrived in England to join King Arthur’s Round Table, tears into the boastful “C’est Moi” like a lion ripping huge bites of dramatic flesh with his teeth.And then, apparently sated, the show, which opened Thursday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, goes back to sleep for another spell, as if this were “Brigadoon.”If only it were! But “Camelot,” the 1960 Lerner and Loewe musical based on T.H. White’s Arthurian tales, has what you might call a post-operetta problem. Neither content to be agreeable piffle nor ready to be Sondheimesque psychodrama, it aims for a middle path, welding Arthur’s romantic life with a free-spirited queen to his rethinking of governance with a recalcitrant gentry. Both fail, as does the show, in a way that “Brigadoon,” the team’s 1947 hit, aiming lower, does not.In “Camelot,” the clever, lightweight style of Lerner’s dialogue, and the show-off triple rhymes of his lyrics, clash with his ambition. They make Loewe’s profoundly polished music, in songs like “I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight?” and “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood,” which open the show, come off as charming tea party tunes. Only in flashes does the “serious” part recover, but by then it’s too late. After Lancelot finishes “C’est Moi,” the story goes back to bed for 40 minutes, at last reawakening to the clangs of a thrilling sword fight.Burnap, left, fighting Jordan Donica as Lancelot. Aaron Sorkin could not solve the riddle of the love triangle connecting Guenevere to the boyish Arthur on one side and the hunky Lancelot on the other, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s not a problem a rewrite could readily solve, or at any rate it’s not one that Aaron Sorkin did. His revisions for the director Bartlett Sher’s spare-no-expense production — visually and sonically gorgeous — do make some improvements. The silly supernatural subplots have been excised (along with a beautiful song, “Follow Me”) and Guenevere, Arthur’s involuntary queen, has been strengthened with snappy backtalk. She’s now a kind of medieval Katharine Hepburn.But Sorkin cannot solve the riddle of the love triangle connecting Guenevere (Phillipa Soo) to the boyish Arthur (Andrew Burnap) on one side and the hunky Lancelot on the other. The riddle is: When is a triangle a flat line? Because only by rigging up questions of fidelity that make everyone look silly does Lerner’s plot engine turn over at all. Is Arthur still in love with the sorceress Morgan Le Fey, a woman he hasn’t seen since he was 15? Does Guenevere desire Lancelot? Who doesn’t? And why, in any case, should we care?Sorkin tries to shore up Lerner’s droopy stories by rooting the personal conflict in the political and social experiments of the time — or of some time, anyway. The new book, which is set on “the eve of the Enlightenment,” even though that was about a millennium post-Arthur, is not fussy about period. Indeed, it winks at its muddled chronology: “The Middle Ages won’t end by itself,” Arthur says, as if he knew he were middling.The historical backfill is present in White’s and Lerner’s versions, too: The idea of changing a culture of violence to one of justice is at the heart of the story. (It’s the reason Arthur convenes his knights.) The problem is that the musical doesn’t musicalize that, which is why after an hour of brittleness you desperately need the sword fight. (The fight director, still full of surprises, is the great B.H. Barry.) Even the title number, which Sorkin has Guenevere call “that stupid song about the weather,” praises the Camelot revolution in purely sybaritic terms. “The rain may never fall till after sundown” sounds like a boast on Airbnb.Lacking songs to support them, Sorkin’s historical enhancements fall flat. Particularly unconvincing is his sidebar on the evolution of magic into science, with Merlyn (Dakin Matthews, excellent) now a sage, not a wizard, and Morgan (Marilee Talkington) some kind of chemist. (Let’s not even get into Mordred, the mortifying Plot Necessity played by Taylor Trensch.) Forced to maintain the Lerner framework, he can neither justify the romantic story on modern terms nor distract from it in ways that make musical sense.The romance at least gives the principals something to do besides spouting ideas, and gives the audience, especially with Lancelot, something to hear. (After “C’est Moi,” he sings the almost-too-rich “If Ever I Would Leave You” and “I Loved You Once in Silence.”) And though Guenevere mostly gets the tea party numbers, delivered creamily, and Arthur (perhaps in deference to the vocal talents of the role’s originator, Richard Burton) gets almost nothing, both are appealing and play the West Wing of the Castle banter beautifully.Not that there’s a castle. In this, his fifth Golden Age musical revival, and fourth for Lincoln Center Theater, Sher has changed his visual approach. Not so much the costumes, by Jennifer Moeller, which are just as stunning as ever; if you wear velvet gowns or quilted tabards, you’ll want to collect them all. But instead of scenic coups like the orchestra reveal in “South Pacific” and the 52-foot ship in “The King and I,” the set designer Michael Yeargan, the lighting designer Lap Chi Chu and the projection designers at 59 Productions have pared everything to a few basic elements: arches, screens, snow, branches, shadows and “Seventh Seal” silhouettes.From left, Danny Wolohan, Anthony Michael Lopez, Soo and Fergie Philippe. The costumes, by Jennifer Moeller, are just as stunning as ever.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith so little furniture onstage, Sher, incapable of not making pretty pictures, keeps everyone moving busily; if the story refuses to make a triangle, he’ll compensate with dozens in his blocking. However fascinating that is to watch, the result feels abstract and analytical, of a piece with Byron Easley’s dainty choreography and, not to harp on them, Lerner’s lyrics. For “My Fair Lady” Lerner was able to find words that expressed character and period; in “Camelot” (with no underlying Shaw play to assist) he finds words that mostly express himself, on the bubble of the 1960s, sophisticated and dry.That is not, however, what you hear coming from the pit, where, under Kimberly Grigsby’s baton, 30 musicians play the original orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett and Philip J. Lang. Their superb characterization of the story in pure sound makes you feel what the show onstage doesn’t.It may also make you feel a bit sad. What’s to be done with such beautiful work, wedded to such intractable problems? How many more Golden Age musicals can Sher and Lincoln Center Theater lavish their love on before the project turns into Encores! with elephantiasis? Is Kelli O’Hara in “Flahooley” next?Well, to be honest, I’d be there for that. But “Camelot” is a show promoted above its station because of its music and Kennedy-era associations. Neither, it seems, is sufficient today. When Arthur reports, in “How to Handle a Woman,” that the answer is simply to “love her, love her, love her,” you can’t help thinking Lerner is not in his wheelhouse. (He married eight times.) Love, with both people and musicals, isn’t enough when the differences are irreconcilable.CamelotAt the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Hamnet,’ Shakespeare Becomes Soap Opera

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      The Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s hit 2020 novel is elegant and tasteful — but also formulaic and sentimental.Writers of historical fiction are allowed to take liberties — they are in the business of filling in blanks, after all. But how much is too much? At what point does something become so speculative, its connection to the factual record so tenuous, that it ceases to be historically credible?At the Royal Shakespeare Company, just a few hundred yards from the site of William Shakespeare’s family home, a new play is turning an imaginative spotlight on the Bard’s domestic life. “Hamnet,” an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling 2020 novel, portrays the vicissitudes of Shakespeare and his wife’s marriage, culminating in the death of the couple’s young son.Adapted for the stage by Lolita Chakrabarti — her recent adaptation of “The Life of Pi” is currently on Broadway — and directed by Erica Whyman, “Hamnet” runs at the Swan Theater, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, through June 17, before transferring to London’s West End in the fall. The production is essentially a high-end, 16th-century soap opera, a delicately wrought portrait of a couple — their coming together, their travails and their sorrow — that carries an uplifting message about the generative power of grief. It could be completely inaccurate, but no one can disprove it.Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway married in 1582; he was 18, she was 26 and pregnant with the first of their three children. Two years later, they had twins, Judith and Hamnet; at age 11, Hamnet died of unknown causes. Beyond these bare facts, almost everything is conjecture.In this telling, Shakespeare’s wife — called Agnes Hathaway, rather than Anne — is a healer and a clairvoyant, the subject of “rumors of witchery.” She takes a chance on Shakespeare when he is a lowly Latin tutor with few prospects, and encourages him in his endeavors. When Hamnet dies of bubonic plague, his father falls into a writing frenzy — “Work holds me straight … it’s the only thing that’s real” — that culminates in his most famous play, “Hamlet.” The pain of the couple’s bereavement is thus transmuted into a timeless work of art — the ultimate tribute.Madeleine Mantock plays Agnes with a serene and stoical grace, while Tom Varey’s young Shakespeare is a feckless dreamer with plucky charm. (Later, when Shakespeare moves to London and makes his name, he is an altogether different presence — mature, understatedly commanding.) Mantock and Varey have a playful, tender onstage chemistry, and Ajani Cabey performs the title role with such a wide-eyed, fey energy that you almost forget he is much older than 11.It is Peter Wright and Elizabeth Rider, as Shakespeare’s parents, John and Mary, who get the best lines. Wright is grimly compelling as a boorish and sometimes violent oaf, and Rider is very funny as a cynical, matronly naysayer, perpetually exasperated by Agnes’s oddness. Mary’s frantic interventions, along with the droll repartee among Shakespeare’s troupe during the London scenes — in which the excellent Wright features again, as the Shakespearean comic actor Will Kempe — provide much-needed light relief.Ajani Cabey performs the role of Hamnet with a wide-eyed, fey energy.Manuel HarlanThe Stratford scenes play out before a large, A-shaped wooden structure that represents Shakespeare’s childhood home. The impressive design, by Tom Piper, comprises two very tall ladders, and its stroke is an elevated platform high above the stage that the characters can scurry up to. It’s a deft use of space, and pleasing on the eye — and, of course, the “A” stands for Agnes. Prema Mehta, the lighting designer, deploys fine mist to generate a hazy ambience that is complemented by mournfully evocative melodies on viol and lute, played by Alice Brown and Phill Ward; these instruments, musical mainstays in Shakespeare’s time, lend some period realism to the proceedings.The pacing, however, is a little uneven. Whereas the first half, which recounts the story of the couple’s relationship up until the birth of their twins, is told at a leisurely pace, Hamnet’s death, its aftermath, and the gestation of “Hamlet” are all crammed into the second half. One wonders if those latter segments, with their hallucinations and flashbacks, might be better suited to film. We’ll soon find out, because a big-screen adaptation, directed by Chloé Zhao and with O’Farrell as a co-writer, is in the pipeline.In interviews, O’Farrell has said she wanted to rescue Agnes and Hamnet from obscurity and redress unkind assumptions about the Shakespeares’ marriage: that it was a loveless arrangement, thrust upon the playwright by circumstances and endured grudgingly; that he was indifferent to his son’s death. This elegant production does justice to those aims — albeit with considerable creative license — but whether it does much else is questionable. The literary-historical context is essentially window dressing for a story that leans heavily into a fairly formulaic, heartstring-tugging sentimentalism and the relatable banalities of everyday life: hostile in-laws; a father and son at loggerheads; the demands of work impinging on domestic life. It happens to be the Shakespeares, but it could be anyone, really. This is tastefully crafted melodrama — but melodrama, nonetheless. More

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      ‘Television’ Review: Small-Screen Dreams

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      A new show at the Wild Project in Manhattan imagines how a small 1950s community weathers the arrival of the mass media age.In “Television,” which opened Wednesday in a Thirdwing production at the Wild Project, the playwright and director Cameron Darwin Bossert once again zeros in on America’s most sprawling form of soft power: its homegrown media. It’s an uneven production, but one that continues Bossert’s examination of the clash between the country’s cozy self-image and its greedier actions.Here, he imagines what happens to a small Colorado town in the late 1950s once its local TV station loses its CBS affiliation. As with his previous diptych, “A Venomous Color” — a pair of plays, “Burbank” and “The Fairest,” about the labor conditions during the early years of Disney’s animation studio — he is interested in the small, midcentury moments when mass media quietly lost its innocence.With “Television,” Bossert reaches for a more epic canvas: wider and wholly fictionalized, like the ongoing soap operas that populated the era’s airwaves. But, over a period of just over two hours, he slowly loses his focus, and the piece overflows with expanding motivations and plotlines.The action begins quickly, at least, with Wesley (Arash Mokhtar), the owner of the ailing station, meeting a neighboring family, the Fitzwaters, and taking an interest in their son, Billy (Cian Genaro). Soon headed off to study psychology in Denver, of which his veteran father, Arnold (Dikran Tulaine), disapproves, Billy has been passing the time writing conveniently episode-length plays whose nuanced mundanity Wesley thinks would make great counterprogramming to the overwrought offerings, like “Gunsmoke” and “Johnny Staccato,” currently crowding the broadcast schedule.Along with his colleague Barry (Bobby Underwood), Wesley begins producing the kid’s scripts, which, starring the dreadfully serious actress Sandra (Aprella Godfrey Barule), become a regional sensation. Soon enough, the independent network starts looking to fill up their programming schedule, and mother Fitzwater (Mary Monahan) gears up to host her own cooking show.Success, naturally, takes its toll on everyone. Taking on issues as macro as shell-shock, imperialism and media saturation, and as intimate as the particular sins of the Fitzwater father, Bossert struggles to maintain his usual precision. He rushes through and doesn’t sketch the piece’s many characters thoroughly enough for us to be really invested.But they are all compelling threads, drawn intelligently from modern American legends — there is more than a little of Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network” here, especially regarding Lionel (Wesli Spencer), an affable mailman who slowly begins to lose it after being plucked to host a talk show.Bossert’s acuity for matter-of-fact dialogue, and directing it tensely, is still incredibly engaging, initially coming across as jarring before revealing the lively emotion behind it; the air in his plays is not dead, but rather dense. It’s underscored by Deeba Montazeri’s sparsely deployed sound design, whose melancholy piano is immediately reminiscent of golden age melodrama, and nicely serves Bossert’s larger intentions of compounding the personal and historical.“Television” might not rise above the sensory overload it seeks to address, but still shows Bossert as a keen observer of the origins of our current media landscape.TelevisionThrough April 22 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thewildproject.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Review: Skewering Masculinity, in a Hot and Sizzling ‘Fat Ham’

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      A modern gloss on “Hamlet” set at a backyard barbecue remakes the tragedy as a comedy, and as a challenge for today.What might life be like if we chose pleasure over harm?So a young man wonders near the end of “Fat Ham,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by James Ijames that opened on Broadway on Wednesday, at the American Airlines Theater. Keep in mind that the young man, Tio, is stoned to the gills when he dreams this philosophy.Still, in his world as in our own, the question of harm, and self-harm, is a serious one. You might even say it’s a classic, having found its most famous expression four centuries ago in “Hamlet,” without benefit (as far as we know) of weed.If Tio is a gloss on that play’s Horatio — a loyal, hearty friend to the main character — he’s also a transformation of the template for today: laid-back and open to anything. In his dream, he says, he’s been pleasured by a gingerbread man, even though he usually prefers the “gingerbread ladies.”In the same way, “Fat Ham” is a gloss on “Hamlet” — and the best kind of challenge to it, asking the same questions but coming up with different answers. That it is a raucous domestic comedy instead of a palace blood bath (and in Saheem Ali’s production, a nonstop pleasure in itself) means that despite the enduring belligerence of mankind, and especially of men, it sees a way out.That way out is softness. The Hamlet figure, Juicy (Marcel Spears), is a “thicc” Black mama’s boy ambivalently mourning the murder of his father and suffering from what Tio (Chris Herbie Holland) diagnoses as inherited trauma. “Your Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail and what’s before that?” he asks. “Slavery.”But Juicy’s melancholy has a more immediate source. Within a week of the death of his father, called Pap, his mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), has remarried — and to no less a bully than Pap’s brother, Rev. On the day of the wedding, Pap’s ghost arrives, under a gingham tablecloth, to pin the crime on Rev and spur Juicy to revenge. (Both Pap and Rev are played by Billy Eugene Jones.) Yet whether considering murder or suicide, Juicy, like Hamlet, waffles.You don’t need to make any of those “Hamlet” connections to enjoy “Fat Ham,” because the parallels are not as telling as the divergences.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKilling is not news to this crowd: Pap was in jail for shanking a cook at the family’s barbecue restaurant. And Rev struts his dominance during a backyard party at which the play’s action takes place by stoking the smoker with fresh hunks of pig. He doesn’t treat his nephew, now stepson, much better. “You pansy,” he calls Juicy, who thinks of himself as an empath. “Girly ass puddle of spit.” He then makes Tedra explain how they’ve spent his online-college tuition on a bathroom makeover.“Fat Ham” is certainly clever in its parallels with “Hamlet”: The barbecue is a neat translation of the “funeral baked meats” with which Gertrude and her new husband “did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” The melancholy prince’s ploy to prove Rev’s guilt is no longer a play wherein to “catch the conscience of the king” but a game of charades. Sententious Polonius is now a church lady, Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas); her children are Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) and Larry (Calvin Leon Smith) instead of Ophelia and Laertes.But you don’t need to make any of those “Hamlet” connections to enjoy “Fat Ham,” because the parallels are not as telling as the divergences. It is in the relationship between Larry and Juicy that Ijames most directly and movingly addresses the cycles of male violence, seeing in the damage done to individuals the disasters of the world.In that sense, it’s telling that Larry is a Marine, living at attention, possibly suffering from post-traumatic stress. His dialogue is mostly obedient monosyllables until it flowers with feeling when talking to Juicy. Though their scenes of aching tenderness do lead to a physical confrontation — “Fat Ham” is based on a tragedy, after all — it is no fatal sword fight; they both discover that confrontation can be a means of breaking open, not just breaking.And so it goes with Juicy and Tedra, Opal and Rabby, Tio and the gingerbread man. All must learn to accept love as offered, not as imagined, and to reject love, like Rev’s, that is not really love.That “Fat Ham” achieves its happy, even joyful, ending honestly, without denying the weight of forces that make “Hamlet” feel just as honest, is a sign of how capacious and original the writing is, growing the skin of its own necessity instead of merely burrowing into Shakespeare’s. It’s also a sign of how beautifully the cast brings the writing to life.It is in the relationship between Larry and Juicy that Ijames most directly addresses the cycles of male violence, seeing in the damage done to individuals the disasters of the world, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEveryone is excellent, and Thomas’s loud-lady-in-the-pew-behind-you routine is flat-out hilarious. But Spears, with his minute calibrations of feyness and fierceness, holds the whole thing together. In his scenes with Crawford, especially one in which Tedra pleads with Juicy to hold it together — “you don’t get to go crazy” — he lets us see how a character creates and re-creates himself in real time.Despite its wit and speed, Ali’s beautifully contoured staging leaves plenty of room for such quiet, profound moments. It’s a wider-spectrum account and bigger, too, than the film version produced by the Wilma Theater in 2021 and the stage premiere at the Public Theater last year.By bigger I don’t just mean Maruti Evans’s Broadway-size set, with its Broadway-size surprises, or the — really, must we? — confetti cannon at the end. (At least what it shoots is the opposite of artillery.) The performances, too, are bigger, their frank acknowledgment of the audience more sustained and more integral.For we are also part of this story. Not just when Juicy soliloquizes across the proscenium or Tedra casts us some side-eye. It takes more than seven fictional characters to choose pleasure over harm in a way that’s meaningful beyond a play — though it helps that no one in “Fat Ham” dies an unnatural death. (In “Hamlet,” almost everyone does.) If we’re to rethink masculinity after centuries of experiencing it as a call to arms, we need to witness what that might look like.For me, seeing “Fat Ham,” even multiple times, thus remains a revelation and a balm. It does one of the most important things we ask of theater: to rehearse, as many times as necessary, better ways to be — instead of choosing not to.Fat HamThrough Aug. 6 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; fathambroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      In Her New Show, Rita Indiana Confronts All Kinds of Ghosts

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      “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”), which debuts Friday in New York, is a spiritual multimedia performance from the 45-year-old novelist and musician.“In the time you dropped a chorus, I wrote five novels.”It’s the kind of shot that only Rita Indiana could fire off in a song. The lyrics — which appear in “Como un dragón,” the lead single from the musician and writer’s last album, “Mandinga Times” in 2020 — encapsulate the interdisciplinary abundance she has cultivated over the last 20 years. They also show off a slick-talking, Caribbean kind of realness, which lives in the characters that populate her world.On a recent Friday afternoon, Indiana was running around at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, posing for photos and working on set decorations with an assistant. She and her wife, the Puerto Rican filmmaker Noelia Quintero Herencia, were putting the final touches on a multimedia performance called “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”), which debuts on Friday at the Clemente’s Flamboyán Theater.Indiana, who sports a huge tattoo of an American buffalo on her right hand, sighed as she paused to rest on a bench. Tufts of gray sprouted from her shaggy pixie cut. “I’m a punk abuela,” she said, laughing. Not quite your average grandma.Over the last two decades, the 45-year-old Dominican artist has transformed into one of the Caribbean’s foremost cultural agitators. Indiana’s repertoire unsettles deeply entrenched cultural norms — she’s not afraid to write queer sex scenes in her award-winning books, or condemn corrupt politicians in her genre-shattering songs. In 2010, she and her band Los Misterios released the blistering “El juidero,” a record about diasporic longing and Dominican identity that shredded up merengue, rock and Afro-Dominican folk styles.Indiana’s early works were almost documentarian, exploring the everyday joys and contradictions of Caribbean life. In recent years, she has journeyed into freakier, more fantastical universes. For “Mandinga Times,” which was nominated for a Latin Grammy, she developed a demonic nonbinary alter ego, meant to symbolize all kinds of marginalized bodies.Her 2015 novel “La mucama de Ominculé,” a dystopian tale set in Santo Domingo, follows a transgender protagonist who travels back in time via a divine sea anemone to save the world from nuclear catastrophe. Scholars praise Indiana’s constellatory style, particularly the way she integrates tropical futurism, queer poetics and the buoyancy of Dominican speech to imagine the liberatory possibilities of the present. The acclaim has made her a literary superstar; she is currently serving as the acting director of New York University’s Creative Writing in Spanish M.F.A.At the Clemente, Quintero Herencia, who designed the sets for “Tu nombre verdadero,” whittled disembodied clay fingers while Indiana traced the creative process behind the show. It features her first new music since “Mandinga Times,” the LP that ended a 10-year hiatus during which she focused on writing. It’s also Indiana’s first piece as a New York resident. (The couple spent 14 years in Puerto Rico.)The show’s nonlinear story immerses the audience in experiences of death and illness, particularly as they relate to artists. Indiana said it explores the weight that an artist’s name has when they die. She cited the photographer, painter and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz; the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca as some of the figures that shaped the spirit of the performance. Indiana herself goes by a shortened version of her birth name (Rita Indiana Hernández Sánchez), and said she chose it not to Anglicize her identity, but because she felt Indiana was more interesting.The theatricality of “Tu nombre verdadero” draws on Indiana’s teenage years in the independent Dominican theater group Teatro Guloya, where she studied alongside the visionary actors Claudio Rivera and Viena González. Quintero Herencia has worked as a director, prop designer and set builder in most of Indiana’s films and music videos, and said the piece will feature dreamlike visual projections. “Tu nombre verdadero” is the “inevitable fate of our practices,” Indiana added.While conceptualizing the show, commissioned by the Americas Society, the couple navigated a wave of death, both personal and collective. They mourned the millions lost in the pandemic, as well as close friends, relatives and beloved musicians, like Quintero Herencia’s mother, the Dominican painter Jorge Pineda and the merengue icon Johnny Ventura. In part, the performance is a way to guide “our ghosts” to a better place and process our memories of them, Indiana said.The couple’s longstanding fascination with death and ancestral energies has surfaced in their previous work. “I never separate my art from my spiritual world and the world of my ancestors,” Quintero Herencia said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie, a documentary or a drawing. There’s always a channel that I open, that I know is connected to the ancestral world.” Indiana, whose father died violently when she was around 12, explained that death has intrigued her for as long as she can remember. She often wonders how a body “that we love with, fight with, work with, understand with, cry with” suddenly becomes nothing.It’s a subject that has also emerged from Caribbean colonial wounds. The island of Hispaniola, home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was the first New World colony settled by Spain in 1493. Indiana said the region is still confronting its sordid past — the massacre of native Taínos, the cruel violence of the Atlantic slave trade — and all the cultural knowledge and traditions that were annihilated in the process. “Colonialism is a machine of death,” she said. “We are a part of that — of all that pain and that whole factory of bones.”Indiana tapped a small crew of musicians for the show, including the composer and frequent collaborator Luis Amed Irizarry, who arranged the songbook for piano and drums. Efraín Martínez, a drummer who has toured with the merengue idol Olga Tañón and recorded with the reggae group Cultura Profética, also joined the lineup.The theatricality of “Tu nombre verdadero” draws on Indiana’s teenage years in the independent Dominican theater group Teatro Guloya.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesIndiana described the compositions as “bare bones,” far removed from the conventional structures of popular music. “It’s a more poetic language, more absurd,” she said. “The references are from my childhood, the music I heard when I was very small.” She recalled the influence of her great-aunt Ivonne Haza, a decorated soprano, who was a vocal coach for some of the Dominican Republic’s most renowned singers, including Fernandito Villalona and Sonia Silvestre. Haza would give lessons at Indiana’s grandparents’ house, where Indiana lived until she was 7.“That was like the soundtrack to my homework — four hours, five hours of that,” she explained, chuckling.The songbook is impressionistic, sculpting Dominican gagá, Spanish copla, Cuban son and other genres into abstract shapes. There is even an experimental merengue, inspired by Danny Elfman’s Tim Burton scores, and an English-language satirical country number that addresses the brutality of Latin American dictatorships. Indiana burst into the chorus of the song, adopting a Southern twang: “He’s our strong man, he’s our puppet, he’s our pawn/You should see how he trips/Over our banana splits/When we choose his killers from among his own.”Indiana’s fearlessness helped inspire the Dominican artist La Marimba to fuse and tinker with disparate genres — to not be afraid to “have your own identity and show it.” She called Indiana a key figure in a movement of Dominican musicians who adapted the country’s folk traditions for the contemporary moment.A generation of young Dominican writers also identifies Indiana as a lodestar. Johan Mijail, who appeared in a 2018 anthology of contemporary Dominican literature that Indiana edited, said that Indiana’s novels permitted Mijail’s own writing to “offer a view of Santo Domingo and its outskirts where music, popular culture and the urban could be taken as possible horizons for sexual diversity to bloom.”With “Tu nombre verdadero” almost behind her, Indiana is working on her own books, too. “I wrote a novel last year that’s in a drawer right now,” she said, describing it as a “gender horror novel” she will revisit later. Another book, set in Puerto Rico and related to the Vietnam War, is coming later this year.No matter the medium, Indiana’s work is nourished by endless interrogation. She noted that the commitment to scrutiny — both of self and community — is grounded in her lived reality. “As a queer person, I’m questioning my identity until I’m dead,” she said. “In this perpetual transitional state,” she added, “what is my real name?” More

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      Ariana DeBose to Return as Tony Awards Host This Year

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      The annual ceremony, honoring Broadway plays and musicals, is to take place June 11 at the United Palace in Washington Heights.Ariana DeBose, whose exuberant embrace of song and dance enlivened last year’s Tony Awards, will return to host the annual ceremony this spring.DeBose, who in 2022 won an Academy Award for her performance in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” remake, appeared in six Broadway shows between 2012 and 2018, and was nominated for a Tony Award as one of three actresses playing Donna Summer in the jukebox musical “Summer.” She is currently featured in “Schmigadoon!,” a streaming musical comedy series on Apple TV+, and she has several upcoming films.Earlier this year, she sang the opening number at the BAFTA Awards, and a rapped section paying tribute to female movie stars was mocked and memed for a hot second. DeBose, who is 32, seems to have taken it in stride — in London earlier this month, she turned the kerfuffle into merch that raised money for charity, and last weekend she performed at Lincoln Center.This year’s awards ceremony will for the first time take place at the United Palace, a large theater in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. The ceremony, which is presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, honors plays and musicals staged on Broadway; it is scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, June 11, and to be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.This season’s Tony nominees are to be announced on May 2. More

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      In ‘Prima Facie,’ Jodie Comer Finds Her Light

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      The one-woman show, coming to Broadway, is the “Killing Eve” star’s first stage role. She dared herself to do it.Until last year, the actress Jodie Comer had never performed onstage. Comer, 30, a native of Liverpool, England, who began her career as a teenager, hadn’t gone to drama school. She hadn’t studied voice or movement. Her comfort was in the close-up, the medium shot. She knew how to make her face still and her voice quiet, and to let the camera do the rest. The theater directors she auditioned for didn’t trust that she could fill a stage.“It kind of felt unattainable,” she said.But she is filling one now. On Broadway, at the John Golden Theater on West 45th Street, her face is emblazoned above the marquee, twice. The art for the Olivier Award-winning “Prima Facie” — an intimate and harrowing monodrama about a woman contending with the fallout of a sexual assault — shows Comer bathed in pink tones, serene, in a barrister’s wig, her eyes closed; it also shows her washed in blue, screaming. Opening on April 23, the play, which Comer first performed in London last year, runs 100 minutes. She is alone onstage for all of them. It’s the theatrical equivalent of being shoved down a mountain the first time you put on skis, or off a high dive before you have even learned to swim.Comer put it a little differently. “I pushed myself,” she said.This was on a Sunday morning in late March, at an out-of-the way table at a West Village cafe. Comer, buoyed by the London-to-New York time change, had arrived early, chipper and casual in jeans and a fisherman’s sweater. (Casual, but not entirely anonymous: The reservation was in my name, yet a waiter had already brought a plate of complimentary pastries.) A plastic clip held her hair away from her face.About that face: Comer has wide-set eyes, full lips and an impossible milk-and-roses complexion. She looks like a Botticelli goddess who has stepped out of the canvas and into some cute ankle boots. And yet, if you have seen her previous work — the action comedy “Free Guy,” the action drama “The Last Duel,” the crusading BBC film “Help” and, most significantly, the queer assassin fever dream “Killing Eve” — you will know that her beauty is usually the least interesting thing about her. That prettiness is a mask she can remove at will, exposing something weirder, spikier, wilder beneath.A theatrical debut and an endurance test: Comer is alone onstage for the full 100-minute run of “Prima Facie.”Helen Murray“It’s like Jodie didn’t get the memo that she is staggeringly beautiful,” Shawn Levy, who directed “Free Guy,” told me. “Jodie is uninterested in relying on her physical appearance.”Unlike many beautiful actresses, Comer has mostly avoided wife, girlfriend and love-interest parts — and their inherent limitations. “From early on, my characters were quite nuanced or multifaceted,” she said. “I was probably very lucky that that’s where I started. Once people see you in that light, they latch on to that.”At the cafe, the morning sun showed her as friendly, unassuming almost, until she began to speak about her work. Then, behind those wide eyes, something like lightning flashed.“Jodie is extraordinarily powerful,” Shannon Murphy, a director who worked closely with her on “Killing Eve,” told me. “People aren’t just going to cast her as the girl next door. Because it’s a waste.”And yet, the role that Comer plays in “Prima Facie” is very much a girl next door, which lends the show much of its heartbreak and force. Written by Suzie Miller, an Australian attorney turned playwright, and directed by Justin Martin (“The Jungle”), also Australian, “Prima Facie” centers on Tessa Ensler, a promising barrister who has transcended her working-class origins and accent. When she finds herself the victim of a sexual assault, a crime whose accused perpetrators she had often defended, Tessa’s poise and selfhood collapse. In this play, the reality and violence of the assault is never in doubt. That it should happen to a woman like Comer’s Tessa — so pretty, so assertive, so canny — means that it could happen to anyone.“Prima Facie” debuted in Sydney in 2019, starring the Australian actress Sheridan Harbridge. When Miller and Martin knew that they wanted to take it to London, they began throwing around the names of English actresses. Martin suggested Comer. Miller said no. She had seen Comer on “Killing Eve,” as the mercurial assassin Villanelle, who is Russian-born and Russian-accented. Comer’s Emmy Award-winning command of the role was so absolute that Miller assumed that Comer was actually Russian. Once Martin gently corrected her, a script was sent.It reached Comer early in Britain’s lockdown, in Liverpool, where she was living with her parents. It spoke to her directly, and at volume. She had several friends who had undergone versions of Tessa’s experience. And the professional challenge was as serious as it was undeniable.“I was so fearful of it. I knew if I said no to it, it would be purely because of that,” Comer said. “But there was a part of myself deep down that believed I could do it, and I was interested in how I was going to get to that point.”That fear powered her initial approach to the role. “She gets scared,” Martin said. “But her way of dealing with it is to throw herself into it.”Comer as the assassin Villanelle with Sandra Oh in BBC’s “Killing Eve.” “People aren’t just going to cast her as the girl next door,” said Shannon Murphy, a director who worked closely with Comer on the show.BBC AmericaComer discovered theater in her teens. “I got into it because I enjoyed it. It made me happy. I don’t think that’s ever changed,” she said. A teacher put her forward for a radio drama, which led to an agent and to occasional television appearances. After graduation, she worked at a supermarket checkout and at a bar to make ends meet. Her idea of luxury was being able to make a living from acting only. Her first major break came seven years ago, when she was cast as the lead in “Thirteen,” a BBC drama about a woman who escapes from long captivity. Even then, Comer couldn’t land a stage role.But the recognition that “Killing Eve” brought changed all that. For Martin and for James Bierman, lead producer on “Prima Facie,” her lack of theater experience was never a problem. They offered her the resources — voice lessons, movement sessions — and the rehearsal time that she would need.Comer has always been an intuitive actor. The challenge, she found, was to take that intuition and extend it outward so that it reached the last row of the balcony. “Like, how do I emote from the top of my head to the tip of my toes?” she said.Rehearsals, which began early in 2022, were rigorous, as was Comer’s research. She spoke to barristers, to police officers, to a high-court judge. She visited a police station and attended a hearing. She had herself fitted for a wig. What would a woman like Tessa wear, she wanted to know. What would she eat? How would she sit, stand and speak? In watching some of the women barristers at work, Comer felt an immediate connection.“There were elements of it that felt like theater: the costumes, the cues, the rehearsal of the lines,” she said.The challenge in translating her instincts for TV acting, Comer found, was to extend them outward so that they reached the last row of the balcony. “Like, how do I emote from the top of my head to the tip of my toes?” she said.Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesTelevision and film sets provide elaborate, realistic environments. Especially if the projects are shot on location. Theater is a more symbolic space, a conjuration of lights and plywood, which offered Comer a kind of freedom. In that glow, she could experiment, she could play. “What theater really sparked in me was that curiosity and sense of imagination,” she said with all the eagerness of a recent convert. Onstage there was no armor, no safety, no ability to stop and take it again, particularly in the scene in which Comer, alone on the floor of the stage, depicts the assault.Miller was convinced, even during rehearsals. “She is magnificent onstage; she’s a theater animal,” she said of Comer on a recent video call. “She’s the character. She’s there.”But after years of performing on television and film, Comer hadn’t known how a live audience would respond. Her anxiety remained up until the first curtain and perhaps even after. “I was actually quite consumed by fear,” she said. “I didn’t really come up for air.”She recalled that, toward the end of the first preview in London, she heard a woman in the orchestra crying. “It was the most guttural cry,” Comer said. “It spread around the theater. It was like the audience were giving each other this unspoken permission to feel whatever was coming up for them.”Stephen Graham, an actor who worked with a teenage Comer on “Good Cop” and then again on “Help,” saw “Prima Facie” in London and wept through it, admiring “the beauty and the subtlety and the nuance and the craftsmanship that went into that performance,” he said.I didn’t see it in London, but I watched it a few weeks ago, on video, via a National Theater Live performance capture. Her craftsmanship was apparent from the first few minutes. Look at Comer in a robe, I thought to myself. Look how good she is. Then the character seemed to take her over. Absorbed in the story, I forgot about Comer, forgot about her beauty, and thought only of Tessa.Miller had noticed this, too. “You don’t look at her and go, ‘There’s a beautiful woman crying.’ You go, ‘There’s a devastated woman crying,’” she said.Over breakfast, Comer had said that despite her leading lady facade, she understands herself as a character actress, someone who wants to disappear into a part, even though or especially because she can’t even disappear into a Village cafe. “I’d love to get to a point where I play a role where I don’t recognize myself,” she said.“Prima Facie” began as a personal challenge, a dare almost. Could she manage alone onstage for all that time? Could she pull off the scene changes and the radical shifts in emotion? But it has become about something more.Women waited for her at the stage door every night in London, telling her that their experiences mirrored Tessa’s or that they were considering careers in law to support women like her. By vanishing into Tessa, she has given these women a way to recognize themselves. That image near the marquee? It’s her face, doubly exposed, but it’s also a mosaic composed of photos of women who submitted their pictures and stories. That’s what Comer wants: to feel part of something bigger than herself, to feel some greater purpose is working through her.“It’s those moments where you step out of your way when you feel the most fulfilled,” she said. More