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      Rattlestick Theater Names Will Davis as Its Next Artistic Director

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      Davis will be the rare transgender theater artist to lead an Off Broadway nonprofit.Rattlestick Theater, a well-regarded Off Broadway company in the West Village, has decided to name Will Davis, a freelance director and choreographer, as its next artistic director.Davis will succeed Daniella Topol, the artistic director since 2016, who has decided to leave theater administration to pursue a career as a nurse. Davis, 40, is transgender, a distinction that he views as noteworthy.“One of the most important things I can do, as a very intentionally, very visible trans person, is offer a mirror to other emerging artists in all disciplines who may not feel like there is a space for them,” he said. “I’m very excited to be part of the group of people who can push this door open and leave it open.”Davis, who is particularly interested in developing new plays, previously served as artistic director of the American Theater Company in Chicago. He programmed experimental work there and box office revenue declined; his tenure ended with the shuttering of the theater company.Jeff Thamkittikasem, the chairman of the Rattlestick board, said the nonprofit had considered Davis’s experience in Chicago and was confident that the situation in New York was different.In Chicago, Thamkittikasem said, Davis “did what he could and produced great art.” In New York, Thamkittikasem said, “We are in a safer and stronger position that will allow him to flourish.”“Will is just an amazing artist with a beautiful eye, and we’re so excited for that aesthetic to be used for developing the culture of Rattlestick,” Thamkittikasem said.Davis said he was proud of the work he did in Chicago, and looking forward to the opportunity to lead in New York. “Rattlestick has always been a home for experimentation, and that has definitely been a part of what my work has been about,” he said. “There’s every possibility for us to make work that is exciting, that pushes the form, and that also feeds and sustains the theater.”Rattlestick, founded in 1994, is a small company with a penchant for adventurous work by emerging writers. This past week, the Obie Awards said it would honor a show the theater staged in 2021, “Ni Mi Madre,” by giving a prize for performance to the show’s creator and star, Arturo Luís Soria.The company has an annual budget of about $1.5 million, with five full-time and five part-time staffers. The company operates out of a theater, rented from a church, with about 93 seats; a $4 million renovation project is scheduled to begin at the end of this summer, and the company plans to stage its next season at locations around the city.Davis will start working alongside Topol in the coming weeks, and will assume the artistic director position full-time on May 1. More

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      Review: In ‘With No Fanfare,’ Things Fall Apart

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      The play, a hit at the Avignon Festival, explores the twists and turns of a breakup through a whimsical mix of musical numbers and dreamlike vignettes.While romantic drama fuels much of the theatrical repertoire, what happens after a catastrophic breakup isn’t nearly as easy to translate onstage. In “With No Fanfare,” a French musical theater production directed by Samuel Achache, it takes a set that literally falls apart to establish the slow process of picking up the pieces.The metaphor is transparent, but it isn’t overblown. “With No Fanfare” (“Sans Tambour”) centers on a nameless couple, a man and a woman who have already reached their breaking point when the play starts. The man (Lionel Dray) frantically washes the dishes in a small sink; the woman (Sarah Le Picard) accuses him of caring only about clogged drains. As they trade barbs, they punch the kitchen walls, or whack household items at them. One by one, the walls collapse like a house of cards.And that’s just the first 15 minutes. What comes next — mourning and rebuilding — is told through a whimsical mix of musical numbers and dreamlike vignettes. One character lands at an imaginary clinic for broken hearts. Later, the cast re-enacts the medieval story of the star-crossed Tristan and Isolde. The process is unpredictable, tragicomic, slightly messy — and thoroughly touching.“With No Fanfare” first made a splash at the Avignon Festival last summer, and it has now reached the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, where it feels right at home. When the director Peter Brook brought this dilapidated music hall back to life in the 1970s, he didn’t hide the visible wear and tear on the walls. The set, a two-story house designed by Lisa Navarro, has a similarly ramshackle quality, with peeling paint and a hazardous stairwell.Lisa Navarro’s set suggests a ramshackle, two-story house.Christophe Raynaud de LageOver the past decade, Achache has developed a quirky brand of musical theater, often in tandem with a co-director, Jeanne Candel. The company he founded in 2021, La Sourde, employs both musicians and actors, and “With No Fanfare” takes advantage of that as it weaves compositions by cast members and the musical director, Florent Hubert, on top of a series of lieder by Schumann.The soprano Agathe Peyrat sings many of these numbers, and acts almost as a shadow for the actors, expressing their grief-stricken feelings. Along with her, five musicians are onstage nearly throughout, and they also take smaller acting parts.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The back-and-forth between drama and music lends “With No Fanfare” much of its power, because the show’s dreamlike logic can be hard to follow. The part in which characters play Tristan and Isolde doesn’t quite land, for instance: A relationship built on a mythical love potion isn’t an ideal point of comparison for a modern couple.“With No Fanfare” is stronger when Achache and his cast (who all get a writing credit) let their imaginations roam freely. Once the central relationship has crumbled for good, the woman suddenly reappears at a treatment center where doctors offer remedies for heartbreak.There, the woman meets a third character, a writer named Spinel. Played by the actor and singer Léo-Antonin Lutinier, Spinel is a test patient for the clinic’s offbeat, metaphorical procedures. On doctors’ orders, he swims in his own tears. Later, he has surgery to remove the last remaining traces of love from his brain.“With No Fanfare” weaves a series of songs by Schumann into the narrative, as well as additional compositions by cast members.Christophe Raynaud de LageLutinier brings a dryly burlesque quality to the proceedings, and Spinel is in some ways the most affecting character, even though his relationship with the others isn’t fully fleshed out. Many scenes in “With No Fanfare” rely on plain physical comedy, as when Spinel tries to reach a piano that is hovering above the stage. He looks at it, and then brings a ladder that doesn’t reach; when he tries to climb it despite this, the steps give out under him, a Buster Keaton-style digression.Yet even the most absurd scenes have a melancholy quality to them. Achache somehow connects them to the long, frustrating process of rebuilding a life when the world you had imagined with someone collapses. As the nameless central man, Dray — an actor with over-the-top energy — spends much of the show standing precariously on a half-destroyed stool, a hammer in hand.It makes little sense on paper, yet onstage what you see is a man struggling to re-establish a sense of normalcy. Achache doesn’t aim for a tidy narrative. The characters don’t get a happy ending, or any real ending at all, but that lack of resolution rings true.At the end, Dray sits alone on the upper level of the set, dangling his legs over the edge, and surveys the ruins underneath. “And still, I coped with it,” he says, looking bemused. Mourning is a mental journey, and “With No Fanfare” makes a fitting visual and musical response to its twists and turns. More

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      Review: ‘black odyssey’ Sails Through Black Past and Present

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      This wine-dark sea threads through Harlem, and its Ulysses, buffeted by the gods, is a soldier fighting in Afghanistan who makes a fatal mistake.Imagine fitting the various arenas of Black history — protests, from the March on Washington to Black Lives Matter; deaths, from the enslaved lost on the Atlantic crossing to Trayvon Martin; music, from Negro spirituals to Biggie Smalls — into one of the foundational texts of civilization, so old that it predates the written word itself.Things are going to get a bit crowded.But that isn’t to say that what the poet-playwright Marcus Gardley has accomplished in his often stunning but also muddled “black odyssey,” which opened Sunday, is any less impressive for the sizable challenge it presents.Set in modern-day Harlem and beyond, “black odyssey” follows the journey of Ulysses Lincoln (Sean Boyce Johnson), a soldier in Afghanistan who unknowingly shot and killed the son of the sea god Paw Sidin (Jimonn Cole). The god’s vengeful machinations, along with Ulysses’ own guilt, have deterred him from getting back to his wife, Nella P. (D. Woods), and son, Malachai (Marcus Gladney, Jr.). The god-in-chief, Deus (James T. Alfred), and his daughter, Athena, or Aunt Tee (Harriett D. Foy), an ancestor of Ulysses who becomes human to support Nella and Malachai while the hero is away, try to help Ulysses despite Paw Sidin’s obstacles. Ultimately, though, Ulysses discovers that the only way he can absolve himself and return home is by finding his history.Presented by the Classic Stage Company, “black odyssey” opens with a chorus’s invocation: “Let’s begin at the beginning so we may end at the end.” This cheeky, faux-cryptic line introduces Gardley’s work, directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, as not just inspired by the plot and characters of the Odyssey but also by the formal structure of the epic poem, which begins with the same circularity and foreshadowing. The dialogue snaps with playful alliteration, repetition and puns, even rhymes that punch up lines rather than overpower them. (“God knows you could use a hot bath, hot comb, and a hot oil treatment,” Aunt Tee says indelicately to Nella, inviting herself into her home.)And the script demonstrates Gardley’s appreciation for and understanding of Homeric storytelling: As in the Odyssey, where so little of the main action takes place in real time but instead comes to life in hearsay and recollections, so too does “black odyssey” manipulate time and place, memory and fantasy, in the simple act of telling a story. (Gardley’s film adaptation of “The Color Purple” is forthcoming.)More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The cast is a delight, especially when Walker-Webb’s direction allows them to let loose with the comedy. Foy is uproarious as the wise and wisecracking Aunt Tee. Adrienne C. Moore, as the enchantress Circe, provocatively stalks across the stage, sticks out her bottom at Ulysses and stretches out horizontally in front of him, all the while describing a sensual menu of Southern comfort food (“Neck them neck bones … dump my dumplings,” she begs Ulysses in some culinary-themed foreplay). Cole’s Paw Sidin is wily and despicable, though as cool as his long, blue buttoned jacket.The heroes themselves are less interesting, though to be fair their roles give them less room for such play, given that they must carry the show’s drama. But Ulysses jittering around with desire as he’s seduced by Circe, Nella going angry-Black-mother on Malachai, and Malachai giving woke Gen Z-style speeches to his elders are all, in their comedy, more compelling than in their moments of sorrow and joy.From left in background, Tẹmídayọ Amay and Sean Boyce Johnson in boat. In foreground, James T. Alfred has the ship’s wheel chained to him.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn general, when the play leans to parody, offering sirens styled as Dream Girls and the blind prophet Tiresias as a funky, supa-dupa-fly afro-wearing bus driver (Alfred, clowning around wholesomely), it becomes a whole different production — entertaining, though from left field.Because otherwise, the work’s copious name-dropping, and its conflation of characters and events from Black history, transforms it into a game of Black bingo: Check references to the Scottsboro Boys, the Birmingham church bombing, the Middle Passage, Hurricane Katrina and the spirituals (though beautifully performed, particularly by Woods and Gladney) for the winning card.And “black odyssey” has a lot of fun with naming, in the same spirit as its source text (in the Odyssey, Odysseus says he is “Nobody” or “No one”) — but between Malachai Malcolm Little Lincoln and Circe Tubman Sojourner Rosa Ida B. Nzinga, among others, even that touch of humor becomes little more than an overdone declaration of the play’s Blackness.Formal and informal classicists who’ve attended the College of Homer and the University of Bulfinch and Edith Hamilton may also have some follow-up questions about this Harlem odyssey’s modus operandi. For example, the play represents the gods exercising their power in the human world as Deus and Paw Sidin playing a chess game. But the metaphor is overused and raises more questions: Do these gods have laws and limitations to follow? Deus says they’ve been playing since 1619, so does that mean they are to blame for the state of Black Americans? Are they only gods of Black people; are they the same gods from Homer?More generally “black odyssey” sometimes struggles to strike the right balance of working from the original text and departing from it; the tension is most apparent when the play blatantly explains itself, by, for example, naming a character Benevolence Nausicca Calypso Sabine (a transformative Tẹmídayo Amay) to make clear that she’s an amalgamation of several young female characters Odysseus encountered in his travels.David Goldstein’s set beautifully transforms the thrust stage at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater with an elevated platform that appears to ripple and reflect like the actual sea. Two ends of a sailboat, painted with a city skyline and used to represent a home, a rooftop or, of course, a sailing vessel, go a long way, but the production could use a few other pieces or props to make its different settings clear. Adam Honoré’s lighting is appropriately august, when Deus stands with a trail of warm yellow light behind him, opposite the chilly dark blue of Paw Sidin’s lighting, and aquamarine blues and greens reflect off the sea-stage, submerging the whole theater in an oceanic underworld. Similarly on point is Kindall Houston Almond’s costume design, which showcases such a variety of fashions from different periods and aesthetics: bright, flowing robes, a black baseball cap with a Basquiat-style crown, huaraches, a.k.a., the unofficial shoes of every Caribbean man of a certain age.This classic-meets-modern, Greek-meets-Black production traverses a lot of ground in its two-and-a-half-hour running time, making the journey feel tiresome by the end. Still, “black odyssey” offers a set of heroes — and villains — and a grand spectacle of Blackness to make the trip worthwhile.Black OdysseyThrough March 26 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Mama, I Want to Sing!’ Returns for 40th Anniversary

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      Gospel soul returns to the stage as the long-running musical is revived for Black History Month at El Museo’s El Teatro.Ahmaya Knoelle Higginson first appeared onstage before she was even born. Her mother, Vy Higginsen, a co-writer of the gospel musical “Mama, I Want to Sing!,” was pregnant with Higginson in 1983 as she performed in the show about a preacher’s daughter who becomes a pop sensation. When Higginson was a toddler, she waddled backstage during the musical’s international tours, and at the age of 10 she joined its choir for performances at Madison Square Garden. Then as a teenager, she stepped into the lead role of Doris Winter.“I ended up being a product of my environment,” Higginson said. “Whether I heard the music from the womb or not.”Now, Higginson, 39, is directing a revival of “Mama, I Want to Sing!,” which is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a nearly three-week run. The performances, also coinciding with Black History Month, will run through March 12 at El Museo’s El Teatro, formerly the Heckscher Theater, where the 1983 musical ran for years in the ’80s.Higginsen, who created the production with her husband, Ken Wydro, said she could not have predicted that her daughter, as director, would carry on the show’s legacy. But it’s no surprise she did: Her daughter, “saw every iteration, saw every singer, every star,” Higginsen said, adding, “Who’s more capable to direct the show at this stage than she is?”Higginson, left, overseeing a rehearsal, as Elise Silva, at rear, who shares the lead role in the musical, awaits instruction. Scott Rossi for The New York TimesHigginson leaned into her mother as they spoke about the show’s evolution during a recent interview at the Mama Foundation for the Arts in Harlem, an organization created by Higginsen to preserve and promote Black music through free educational programming.“Mama, I Want to Sing!” is a family affair. The story was inspired by Doris Troy, Higginsen’s older sister, who was a choir girl in her father’s Harlem church and later became a soul singer, known for her 1960s chart hit “Just One Look.” (Troy played the role of her mother in the musical from 1984 to 1998, before her death from emphysema in 2004.) The musical also has deep roots in Harlem, with a fictional Doris finding her voice at Mount Calvary Church and auditioning at the Apollo Theater.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.From 1983 to 1991, the musical had more than 2,800 performances at the Heckscher Theater, and Higginsen said she still remembered lifting the chains from the theater, which had previously been shuttered, scrubbing dirt and dust from the seats. “At first we didn’t know whether it was going to work, but then the word of mouth spread like wildfire.” The success of “Mama, I Want to Sing!” led to national and international tours, with stops in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Japan and London. Then came the 1990 sequel, about Doris Winter’s marriage and first child, and the 1996 production of “Born to Sing: Mama III,” which followed Doris’s international tour and her teenage daughter’s singing aspirations.All along, Higginsen said, she was thinking of the show’s legacy. She wanted the next generation to become ambassadors of gospel, jazz and R&B music, starting with her daughter, who has gone from performing onstage to sitting in the director’s chair.Faith Cochrane, 16,  is one of three teenagers alternating in the role of the young starlet, Doris Winter.Scott Rossi for The New York Times“This story begs to be told in an authentic way,” Higginsen said, “to really pay tribute to the music, to pay tribute to the artists that came before us, and to make sure that people recognize the contribution that African American music has made to the American musical landscape.”The Rev. Richard Hartley, who plays Rev. Winter in the current production, first joined the show in 1987 as a member of the musical’s church choir, and later took on other roles, including the narrator and the boisterous choir director. “This is an American institution,” Hartley said, “and to be a part of it — and it’s Black History Month — it’s just so fulfilling.”Higginson and her mother could feel the spirit of Doris Troy in the room, Higginson said, adding that she was grateful to breathe life into the gospel musical once again.Scott Rossi for The New York TimesTo cast the next Doris for the show’s latest iteration, Higginson began a nationwide search last year but it was unsuccessful. The people who came to audition were overrehearsed, she said, and she craved the vulnerability and authenticity that earlier productions had. (The last version of the show to be performed onstage was a 2013 production of “Mama, I Want to Sing: The Next Generation,” in Japan.)Then in November, after consulting a colleague who teaches at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, she visited the school on a Tuesday and auditioned 20 students in the hallway.“People say expect the unexpected,” Higginson said. “I could see that on their face, but that’s exactly what we wanted.”Faith Cochrane, a 16-year-old junior and vocal major, said she was eating lunch when Higginson arrived. She was nervous, she said, and didn’t hit all of the notes in her audition song, “Amazing Grace.” But Higginson was impressed by her potential, and Cochrane was asked to join the production. She is now one of three teenage performers — including Elise Silva and Asa Sulton — alternating in the role of the young starlet.“Something that I had to work on was really stepping outside of my comfort zone,” Cochrane said. “But when I did, the response from everyone else was really good and it made me feel better.”During rehearsals in Harlem last week, Higginson led the Sing Harlem choir, instructing them to stand tall, jive to the rhythm, and hit sharp staccato notes. In between scenes, the three teenagers playing Doris giggled and danced, bouncing their shoulders and stomping their feet. And as different performers sang solos, choir members clapped and fanned in approval. Higginson and her mother could feel the spirit of Troy in the room, Higginson said, and she was grateful to breathe life into the gospel musical once again.“I’ve been in the spotlight for so long,” she added. “The awesome part is to see the flower grow.” More

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      Alexander Zeldin Brings ‘Love’ to the Park Avenue Armory

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      Because his shows are based on research and interviews, and are grounded in pressing social issues, the British writer and director Alexander Zeldin is often said to practice docu-theater.The first part of his “Inequalities” trilogy, “Beyond Caring” (2014), is about zero-hour contracts (a British term for when an employer does not have to offer a minimum number of hours), while “Faith, Hope and Charity” (2019) is set at a community center for the poor and the homeless. Zeldin’s “Love,” which starts previews at the Park Avenue Armory on Saturday, and opened in 2016 at the National Theater in London, takes place in a temporary-housing facility. “The whole project is to write the tragic knot of our time,” Zeldin said.Yet he grimaced when that docu-theater label came up in a video conversation from London, where he was rehearsing “Love” — so popular across the Atlantic that it has traveled to eight European countries since its premiere, including France, Austria and Serbia, and was filmed by the BBC in 2018 — before its American debut.“I don’t see what I do as docu-theater at all,” he said, adding, “My script is about music. It’s about rhythm. Very modestly, that’s the ambition.”For Zeldin, 37, subject and form are inextricably linked. In “Love,” for example, the house lights remain on and the actors portraying the people at the shelter often sit amid‌ or walk around audience members, as if to say they are us and we are them, separated only by circumstance. Meanwhile, the narrative is carefully built in a tragic arc.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.“The structure is very classical and that’s very, very deliberate,” Zeldin said. “It’s rooted in life with an ambition to be judged or experienced as theater, not as testimony.”Amelda Brown during rehearsals. Her character in “Love” is losing control over her mind and body.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesZeldin grew up in Britain as the son of an Australian mother and a Jewish refugee father who was born in Haifa, Israel. His death when Zeldin was 15 created instant turmoil.“I was in trouble at school and all sorts of things that made me find theater, a place where I could have a real concentration of life,” Zeldin said. “I was very drawn to how it was making me feel life with the intensity that I felt in the most intense moments in my own life, which were quite a few at that time.”He started exploring theater at 17; his first play was an adaptation of the Marguerite Duras novel “Moderato Cantabile.” After studying at Oxford, Zeldin roamed the world, soaking up theater cultures and making works in countries like Georgia, Egypt, South Korea and Russia. In 2012 he became an assistant to the revered director Peter Brook and his longtime collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, and started teaching at the London acting school East 15, where he began developing the hyper-real style of the “Inequalities” trilogy.“My script is about music,” Alexander Zeldin said. “It’s about rhythm. Very modestly, that’s the ambition.”Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesA big preoccupation was the austerity programs implemented by Prime Minister David Cameron, so Zeldin hit the pavement and conducted extensive research. For “Love,” he went to shelters and reached out to organizations like the housing and homelessness charity Shelter. He was put in touch with Louise Walker, now 47, who inspired the characters of Emma and Dean, a young couple marooned at the shelter with Dean’s children.After Walker lost her home, Zeldin learned, she and her children ended up in housing that was meant to be temporary but lasted for months. She faced Kafka-esque bureaucratic labyrinths and had to juggle contradictory administrative demands, which we discover with horror in the play. “I do think that the whole system is designed to make you feel extremely uncomfortable and unworthy and just to stay in the squalor that this society put you in,” Walker said in a video chat.“In every part of the process, Alex was like, ‘You’ll be involved and tell me if I’m relaying correctly the things that you’re saying to me,’” she said. “He allowed us to very much tell our story.” (She and her daughter Renée are in the BBC film.)Zeldin wrote sketches of scenes, which he refined into an outline through a series of workshops. “We bring in 30 or 40 people, we pay them to be involved, and then we go out into the world working with families in their homes, understanding their situation,” he said. “Because I was doing so much work with community groups anyway, it felt natural to me that that should be part of the artistic process, that there should be a room, a great radical mix of people in the room.”This is represented onstage as well. While some people in the cast have theater experience — like Amelda Brown, who joined the cast in 2021 and whose character, Barbara, is losing control over her mind and body — some don’t. It’s an important semantic distinction that Zeldin prefers to “professional” versus “amateur.”Hind Swareldahab and Naby Dakhli during a break from rehearsals.Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times“Hind’s a big professional,” he said, referring to Hind Swareldahab, who plays Tharwa, a Sudanese refugee like herself. “She’s performed at the Odéon twice, she’s performed at the Vienna festival, Geneva, the National Theater. She’s got a great C.V. and she’s a brilliant actor, but she’d never been in a theater before she worked with me. She didn’t know there was a front of house, she didn’t know there was a stage. And so that brings you face to face with the question of, What is the theater for? And unless we ask this question, if we rely on habit, we will die.”Swareldahab, 46, who works as a pharmacist, heard about one of the “Love” workshops in an email from the Refugee Council, a charity and advocacy group. She has done the play many times now, and still marvels at its emotional toll. “Every second, every line, we feel it,” she said. “It’s not easy to watch. Every country, people cry. Everything is real. It’s hard to watch.”At the same time, it should be clear that the show is not a huge downer but is about resilience and our shared humanity — and it pulses with the power of a good yarn.“I want theater to be useful to the world, and I passionately don’t think that that is against poetics, against great storytelling, against entertainment, against accessibility,” Zeldin said. “I’m very lucky that ‘Love’ sells out. It’s a show that people want to see, and that’s very important to me.” More

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      Obie Awards Honor ‘English’ as Best New Play

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      A ceremony for the awards, celebrating work Off and Off Off Broadway, will be held Monday, but organizers decided to announce the winners in advance.The Obie Awards, back on track after a lengthy pandemic hiatus, are naming “English,” an acclaimed comedic drama set in an Iranian test-prep classroom, the best new American play staged Off Broadway over a two-year period.The play, written by the Iranian American playwright Sanaz Toossi, depicts four students, each at different stages of life and with different motivations, struggling to master English well enough to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language. The play was staged in New York early last year as a coproduction of the Atlantic and Roundabout theater companies. In The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green wrote, “Both contemplative and comic, it nails every opportunity for big laughs as its English-learning characters struggle with accents and idioms. But the laughter provides cover for the deeper idea that their struggle is not just linguistic.”Strong reviews have led to subsequent productions that are currently running in Washington and Toronto; another production is scheduled to begin performances next month in Berkeley, Calif.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The Obie Awards, founded by the Village Voice and now presented by the American Theater Wing, honor theater staged Off and Off Off Broadway. This year’s ceremony will be held Monday night at Terminal 5 and will recognize work presented in person or online between July 1, 2020, and Aug. 31, 2022. The Wing decided to announce the award recipients in advance to allow the evening to focus on a celebration of theater’s resilience. Acceptance speeches are being posted on the Wing’s YouTube channel.The Obies, by tradition, do not have established categories; instead, the judges each year give out awards as they see fit. This year the judging panel, headed by the director David Mendizábal and the critic Melissa Rose Bernardo, is giving 37 awards.Among the winners: Martyna Majok, already a Pulitzer winner for “Cost of Living,” is being granted an Obie for playwriting in recognition of “Sanctuary City,” an immigration drama. Presented by New York Theater Workshop, the show got through a week of previews before being forced to close by the pandemic and then resumed performances 18 months later.Performance awards will go to Stephanie Berry and Lizan Mitchell for “On Sugarland” at New York Theater Workshop; Brittany Bradford for “Wedding Band” at Theater for a New Audience; Kara Young for “Twelfth Night” at the Classical Theater of Harlem; and Arturo Luís Soria for “Ni Mi Madre” at Rattlestick Theater. Also, sustained achievement in performance awards will be given to Billy Eugene Jones for “Fat Ham” at the Public Theater and “On Sugarland”; and to Andrea Patterson for “Cullud Wattah” at the Public, “Confederates” at Signature Theater and “Seize the King” at the Classical Theater of Harlem.The Obies are bestowing multiple special citations, including for members of the teams that created “English” and “Fat Ham” as well as “Oratorio for Living Things” at Ars Nova; a musical adaptation of “As You Like It” for Free Shakespeare in the Park; “The Nosebleed” at Lincoln Center Theater and the Japan Society; and a trio of digital, virtual or hybrid productions: “Circle Jerk,” “Russian Troll Farm” and “Taxilandia.” Also getting citations: the comedian Alex Edelman, for “Just for Us”; the playwright Richard Nelson, for his series of 12 plays set in Rhinebeck; and the costume designer Qween Jean, for work on seven shows.A full list of winners is here. More

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      They Invited Shakespeare to the Cookout. They Got ‘Fat Ham.’

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      The playwright James Ijames and the director Saheem Ali built a “Hamlet”-inspired play, opening in April on Broadway, around their artistic friendship.When James Ijames and Saheem Ali, the playwright and director of the Broadway-bound Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fat Ham,” talk about their projects, they do so in the kind of shorthand of longtime friends: incomplete sentences, phrases punctuated with laughs and a whole vocabulary of glances.It’s a frigid February day, and they have settled into a booth at the Library restaurant at the Public Theater. Ijames is a bit guarded — speaking carefully, his posture showing a certain reserve. Ali radiates energy — beaming as he listens to Ijames, occasionally tapping him on the arm in excitement.“We’re always, always, always ideating, always brainstorming,” Ali said. “It’s kind of wonderful.”Ijames gently contradicts Ali: “Yeah, I am not thinking about anything else.”“You just sent me a new draft —” Ali starts.“That was a while ago!” Ijames protests.“It was like two weeks ago!” Ali insists. Both of them crack up.The back-and-forth is a hallmark of the creative partnership that now finds them preparing to make their Broadway debuts with “Fat Ham,” a co-production of the National Black Theater and the Public Theater. When the show opens at the American Airlines Theater on April 12, it will be the first National Black Theater production to appear on Broadway and the only work by a Black playwright on Broadway this spring.“I remember we announced that we’re coming and then the climate really kind of shifted after that,” said Ali, 44, acutely aware of the commercial pressures that have left new stories by Black playwrights struggling to find staying power on Broadway. “What are we walking into?”A riff on “Hamlet” in the form of a Black family gathering in North Carolina, the story follows a college student named Juicy, who is stuck at a barbecue that doubles as a wedding celebration for his mother, Tedra, and her new husband, Rev, a pit master and the brother of Tedra’s recently deceased ex-husband. Juicy’s the sullen outcast; he’s gay, emotionally aware, intellectual and not the embodiment of Black manhood that Rev expects him to be. When the ghost of Juicy’s father appears, demanding Juicy avenge his wrongful killing at his brother’s hand, the “Hamlet” story commences.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The show’s world premiere, a filmed production for the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, was streamed digitally in 2021, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The play then had a critically acclaimed Off Broadway run in 2022 at the Public Theater. Just weeks before opening, it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Ijames, 42, who grew up in North Carolina and lives in Philadelphia, where he is the co-artistic director of the Wilma, is known for his examinations of Blackness and how it has been shaped by our nation’s prejudices. He strikes right at the foundations, often drawing on what are now viewed as the hypocrisies of the heroes of U.S. history like Thomas Jefferson (in “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever”) and George and Martha Washington (in “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington”).Ijames’s first play for the National Black Theater, 2017’s “Kill Move Paradise,” imagines a waiting room in the afterlife where four young Black men are trying to understand their deaths.“He’s helping create a visible space for us to bear witness to the trauma, the pain, the amount of lost bodies, but also the amount of hope,” said Jonathan McCrory, the National Black Theater’s executive artistic director. “We needed that. We needed someone to help us rethink and re-articulate the space in which our grief was amalgamating.”It was also the show that brought Ijames and Ali together. Ali, who has since directed Jocelyn Bioh’s “Merry Wives” and a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s classic “Fires in the Mirror,” had attended a table read in 2016. Ijames remembers being drawn to how Ali spoke about the text and interacted with the actors.They didn’t have much face time beyond that first meeting, though Ijames and Ali texted and called each other. (“This was before Zoom” became popular, Ijames noted.) Opening night was the first time Ijames saw Ali’s staging of his work. He loved it, but decided that in the future he didn’t want to miss the chemistry that occurs when the playwright is actually in the room for the rehearsal process.When they decided to collaborate again, Ali and Ijames gravitated toward Shakespeare. Both had developed an interest in the flexibility of the text at an early age; each cited “Romeo and Juliet” as the play that un-ruffed and de-frilled Shakespeare for them, allowing them to see the different language, lives and cultural experiences that could be welcomed into the text. For Ali, it started with performing Shakespeare with his peers in Kenya, where he was born and raised. “It was malleable. It was playable. It was completely adaptable,” he said. “Coming to the States, Shakespeare is this other thing: mostly white people, very few people of color, and they speak a certain way.”He began inviting playwrights to work on Shakespeare adaptations with him. “I was like, ‘I want someone whose profession it is to work on the language. And I can talk about the world and the concept.’”Ijames had already been drafting something along those lines, working on what would become “Fat Ham” in 2017. He had picked his favorite Shakespeare play, “Hamlet,” forming the idea from King Claudius and Queen Gertrude’s wedding celebration in the second scene of the first act.Set at a North Carolina backyard barbecue, “Fat Ham” unpacks themes of homophobia and toxic masculinity in a blend of colloquial language and Shakespearean English.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I was like, ‘What if you could spill all of ‘Hamlet’ into that party, that celebration, and tell the whole story there? What would change? What ultimately would these people find out and explore about each other in that pressure cooker of time?’” Ijames said.The tragedy of “Fat Ham” is multifaceted, rooted not in murder and intrigue but in themes of homophobia, self-hatred and toxic masculinity. Ijames unpacks it all in a chili-and-cornbread combo of colloquial language and Shakespearean English, with characters that reflect an authentic Black experience.“Black people of the diaspora, in America, on the continent, anywhere else in the world — we speak with music, we speak with meter,” Ijames said. IN SPEAKING ABOUT building the show, Ali and Ijames described how they complemented and trusted each other. Ijames mentioned Ali’s transformation of the karaoke scene in “Fat Ham,” staging it with an otherworldly theatricality. The lights shift, the characters’ movements slow down and Ali infuses the scene with what Ijames calls a “physical vocabulary” — an unexpected choreographed sequence that includes metal-style headbanging. Ali noted his admiration for the spaces Ijames provides in the script for the director to extend his imagination. He cited the stage directions at the end, which begin, “The play cracks open.” What the audience sees is what the story evoked in Ali’s mind — and it’s a joyous, glamorous break from what audiences may have come to expect. In other words, a party.“Any time I get to collaborate with him I’m happy, because I don’t have to explain things to him,” Ijames said. “He just understands.”The word “trust” surfaces frequently among the show’s producers and cast members. “Lord knows Black folks endure a lot of contorting to fit in spaces that were not made for ourselves,” said Sade Lythcott, chief executive of the National Black Theater. “So trust becomes almost like the alchemy or the catalyst for how we can communicate to each other and build something as beautiful as ‘Fat Ham.’”Marcel Spears, who portrayed Juicy Off Broadway and is returning to the role, describes an almost psychic “synchronicity” between Ijames and Ali in the rehearsal room. “It’s like mom and dad,” he said.This will also be Spears’s first time on Broadway, and four other cast members are making their Broadway debuts as well. “Everybody’s walking into it with a sense of urgency and pride and joy,” he said.Still, “Fat Ham” faces a commercial environment that is challenging for new productions — especially plays by and about people of color. In the 2021-22 season, Broadway made history with the premiere of seven plays by Black playwrights. Yet many suffered financial losses (though not unusual for Broadway plays, particularly damning for work by already underrepresented artists) and a couple closed early, exacerbated by the surge in Omicron cases.“I’m shaking in my boots! Your boy is nervous,” Spears said with an anxious laugh. He mentioned a good friend, Jordan E. Cooper, the playwright and star of “Ain’t No Mo’,” and the early closing last fall of that show, which had a mostly Black creative team. “I was disheartened because as a Black theater artist, I want our work to be seen as just as valuable and as important and as immediate to Broadway audiences as anything else.”Lythcott, reflecting on those closures, said: “I think the way commercial theaters look at diversifying their audiences and appealing to culturally specific demographics, it still sometimes feels like Black folks are an idea and not living, breathing people. That’s the magic of James’s piece that he wrote: People can identify Tedra and Juicy; those are people that we know.”For his part, Ijames said he hopes that “Fat Ham” will attract a diverse, “game” New York audience who will enjoy what’s happening onstage. His expectations are those of an artist shaped by a scrappier regional theater scene: “We make the thing and then hopefully people come and hopefully it enlivens the community in which we’re making the thing. And so I hope that it’s going to do that. I hope that little stretch of 42nd Street is a little more Southern, a little more country.” More

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      ‘Parade’ Producers Condemn Neo-Nazi Protest at Show About Antisemitism

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      The show’s star, Ben Platt, said the “ugly and scary” display was a reminder of why they are retelling the story of the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman in Georgia.The producers and star of “Parade,” a Broadway musical about an antisemitic lynching in Georgia a century ago, condemned a small neo-Nazi demonstration that took place outside the show’s first preview performance on Tuesday night.The show centers on the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta who was convicted in 1913 of raping and murdering a 13-year-old girl. Responding to an outcry about whether Frank had been wrongfully convicted in a trial tainted by antisemitism, the Georgia governor commuted his death sentence. Months later, Frank was lynched by a mob.Ben Platt, the Tony-winning actor who plays Frank, had already described the musical revival as a timely story to tell at a moment when antisemitic incidents and hate speech have been a part of political and cultural conversations in America.But the appearance of about a dozen demonstrators outside the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, some holding a sign linking them to the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi organization, further underlined the current cultural relevance, the show’s producers said in a statement on Wednesday morning.“If there is any remaining doubt out there about the urgency of telling this story in this moment in history, the vileness on display last night should put it to rest,” the statement said. “We stand by the valiant Broadway cast that brings this vital story to life each night.”Platt, who won a Tony for “Dear Evan Hansen” and also appeared in last year’s brief run of “Parade” at New York City Center, learned about the demonstration on social media after he stepped offstage on Tuesday, he said in an Instagram video after the show.“It was definitely very ugly and scary, but a wonderful reminder of why we’re telling this particular story,” Platt said.The demonstration was also condemned by Actors’ Equity Association, the union representing Broadway actors and stage managers.In a video recorded by a bystander that was posted to Twitter, the demonstrators are seen and heard targeting Frank and the Anti-Defamation League, a group fighting antisemitism that was founded in the aftermath of Frank’s conviction. Some of them stood by a banner advertising the National Socialist Movement. One masked protester handed out fliers that promoted a separate group with neo-Nazi symbols and told people outside the theater that they were about to “worship a pedophile.”Burt Colucci, the leader of the National Socialist Movement, confirmed on Wednesday that local members of his organization had been involved in the demonstration.Frank’s conviction has been the subject of renewed scrutiny: In the 1980s, he received a posthumous pardon in Georgia, and in 2019, the district attorney in Fulton County created a panel to reinvestigate the case.“Parade” had a brief initial run on Broadway in 1998 that was not a commercial success, but the musical won Tony Awards for its book (by Alfred Uhry) and score (by Jason Robert Brown). Its run last year received positive reviews, including from Juan A. Ramírez, who said in The New York Times that it was “the best-sung musical in many a New York season.”The revival, directed by Michael Arden, is scheduled to run through early August.“Now is really the moment for this particular piece,” Platt said on his Instagram video, noting that he hoped the performance on Tuesday would make a more lasting impression than “the really ugly actions of a few people who were spreading evil.” More