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      With ‘Letters From Max’ Onstage, Sarah Ruhl Again Mourns a Poet’s Death

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      Through dialogue, poetry and ritual, the playwright revisits her correspondence with her former student, who died at the age of 25.About 10 minutes into “Letters From Max, a Ritual,” Sarah Ruhl’s new play about her epistolary friendship with the poet Max Ritvo, something akin to a sacred rite takes place: The lights dim, a spotlight illuminates center stage, and the actor portraying Ritvo walks toward a winged tattoo artist. For a few moments, they circle each other. Then the tattoo artist-angel removes the hospital gown that the poet is wearing and lifts him with grace. With a miming gesture, he offers a compact mirror to Ritvo so he might examine the birds newly adorning his back.“It’s dope,” Ritvo says of the tattoo, looking over his shoulder. “I really love it in this light.”But that quiet exchange was not dreamed up by Ruhl. It is actually a scene from a play that Ritvo wrote for Ruhl when he was a student at Yale in 2012, four years before he died of cancer at the age of 25. (After each surgery, he would acquire a new tattoo of a bird.) Before handing in the project, he told Ruhl, “I am adamant that something extravagant and silent happen.”With the Signature Theater production of “Letters From Max,” his desire for the work is now being realized in a way he might not have imagined.Ruhl’s play, adapted from a book she compiled of their correspondence during Ritvo’s chemotherapy, boils down to a single, yearslong conversation about poetry, love, mortality, the afterlife and soup. But this is not a traditional play. Poems and live music are interspersed between the dialogue, which comes from the letters, texts and voice mail messages they exchanged.Edelman, right, as a tattoo artist-angel, helping Pais remove his hospital gown in the play. The two actors alternate in the role of Max.Ye Fan for The New York Times“I don’t think of this play as ‘show business,’” Ruhl said in an interview, “but instead an encounter for the audience.” She hopes viewers will “bring their own grief or their own need for communal sadness,” she said, adding that the theater has been a place for catharsis dating back to the Greeks. “We’ve all been through so much in the last two years.”Though Ruhl feels her own grief in this production, which opens on Feb. 27, she has also found joy in sharing Ritvo’s work, and in seeing it move people the same way he did. “He was such a present, joyful person who made everyone around him laugh,” she said. There are other small tributes to Ritvo, too: A song he composed recurs throughout, and the titles of his poems are projected in his handwriting above the stage.There were no plans to adapt “Letters From Max” upon the book’s 2018 publication. But as Ruhl read sections at events — often with an actor reading Ritvo’s words — people asked, “Is this going to be a play?”Before distilling the 309-page book into a two-hour stage production, Ruhl consulted Ritvo’s literary executor, the poet Elizabeth Metzger.“She asked me long ago, ‘Do you think Max would want this?’” Metzger recalled, adding that she was “very, very certain that Max would.” For Ruhl, finding “the bones” within hundreds of pages of correspondence became a process of trial and error.She realized the first act is “about a teacher and a student getting to know each other and forming a friendship,” she said, “that would then reverse the teacher-student relationship” in the second act, which opens with a dialectic on the afterlife. “I was trying to offer Max a comforting view of the afterlife when he was afraid of death,” Ruhl said. “And he ultimately said, ‘Thank you. But no.’”Kate Whoriskey, who directed the New York production of Ruhl’s previous epistolary play, “Dear Elizabeth,” also about two poets exchanging letters, signed on to direct, and the actress Jessica Hecht was game to portray Ruhl, her longtime friend and collaborator. But casting Ritvo introduced a unique challenge. “I’m definitely sensitive to the fact that he had a huge reach and people are still in mourning,” Ruhl said.She said she was moved during auditions. “It was actually beautiful to see Max’s language inside a young person’s body again,” Ruhl said. Ruhl and Whoriskey liked the idea of a third body onstage — similar to the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” — who might “care-take the space” by delivering soup and poems to Ruhl and Ritvo. When the actors Ben Edelman and Zane Pais read for the role of Ritvo, Ruhl said, the team believed they “could do beautifully in both roles” by alternating nights. It turned out that Edelman plays the piano and Pais plays the guitar, so each composed music to perform while the other recites Ritvo’s poetry.“There’s some mystery, and it’s beyond words,” Ruhl said of the duality. “But it’s something about the spirit and the body, and the observer and the observed.” Not to mention, as Ruhl writes in the program note, the actors’ interchangeability demonstrates that Ritvo’s spirit and legacy is “bigger than any one actor.”“Max was many himself,” Metzger said. “Every time he read a poem, he read it differently, because he allowed the moment of the poem and the moment he was reading to merge.”When rehearsals began, Metzger texted Ruhl some guidance for the actors: “Reading the letters, the character is coming to face death,” she wrote, but “reading the poems, the character is not dying but being born, coming to life!” Metzger hoped the actors might “capture the shock of Max’s performance style, even the strange wild aliveness of the poems on the page.”Ritvo’s mother, Riva Ariella Ritvo, has been “an incredibly staunch supporter,” Edelman said, calling a video meeting she had with the cast members “one of the most intense experiences of my life.”He and Pais didn’t study Ritvo’s mannerisms. Instead, they aimed to embody his work. “Neither of us are trying to do an impersonation of Max at all,” Pais said.Hecht and Pais onstage during rehearsals at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Marsha Ginsberg’s spare set includes a white zoetrope that rotates to reveal scenes inside Max Ritvo’s childhood home, hospital rooms and a theater.Ye Fan for The New York TimesTo foreground the writing, the scenic designer Marsha Ginsberg kept the stage spare. The sole set piece is a white zoetrope that rotates to reveal scenes inside Ritvo’s childhood home, hospital rooms and the 13th Street Repertory Theater, where he accepted the 2014 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America while wearing a pink kimono. At one point, during a silent sequence, the outside of the zoetrope becomes the window of an Amtrak quiet car. “We were trying to create a world where imaginative scapes could happen,” Whoriskey said. “So that a poem happens, and then suddenly, you’re seeing skeletons across a bridge, or a poem happens, and you’re seeing the shimmering of water.”Hecht didn’t work through the emotional arc of Ruhl’s character until the week before previews began. Though it’s easy to cry on command, she said, “I felt embarrassed to do that before we lived through the play for a while, and I really felt the weight of that story and that person coming into our lives.”For the past 30 years, Ruhl said, she has carried on an “intense” dialogue on life and art with Paula Vogel, her former professor. “When I met Max, it felt like he was one of those people that I would have that kind of dialogue with, had he lived that long,” she said. “It’s a comet-like thing. You might only meet those people once every … how often do comets circle?” Perhaps Ritvo made such an impact because he valued relationships. “He’s not a poet who just went inward and was exploring his own self and soul. It was always about talking to another person in a room,” Metzger said. “It was happening all the time, these little births and deaths of just being with a person in a room. I think that’s why he had so much intimacy with so many people. I’ve never met someone with as capacious of a soul.”When Ruhl attended the first preview performance of “Letters From Max, a Ritual” earlier this month, she could finally observe “how the humor landed,” how the emotional beats played out, and how Ritvo’s poetry “theatrically holds an audience.”But it wasn’t until intermission that the project came full circle. As part of the play’s “ritual,” she said, audience members sat at tables in the lobby to write letters to loved ones. A young woman approached Ruhl with an envelope addressed to her. The playwright opened it and drew out a note reading: “I have incurable brain cancer. And this production gave me hope.” More

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      Review: In ‘The Wanderers,’ Two Marriages and a Movie Star

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      Anna Ziegler’s play about an Orthodox couple in the 1970s and an unorthodox one in the 2010s explores the limits of longing.There’s no shortage of stories that explore the merits and pitfalls of arranged marriages. In the Jewish subcategory alone, we have “Shtisel,” “Unorthodox” and the perennial “Fiddler on the Roof.” But Anna Ziegler’s awkwardly hitched play “The Wanderers,” which opened Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, may be the first to consider the problem of forced matches while also exemplifying it.A shotgun seems to have been involved in forcing its two incompatible tales under one roof. The first begins in 1973 with the wedding of Esther and Schmuli, members of the Satmar Hasidic community who barely know each other. Even if Schmuli (Dave Klasko) is a bit meek, and Esther (Lucy Freyer) alarmingly headstrong, they seem at first like a traditional Orthodox couple, looking forward to making a family.Nevertheless, within five years, their marriage is in ruins. Schmuli has spirited away their daughters; Esther has fled Brooklyn with their infant son, Abraham.That’s not a spoiler but the foundation for the second story, which takes place decades later and proceeds in alternating “chapters” with the first. Abe (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is now an acclaimed 40-something novelist, having won, we are told, “a Pulitzer and two National Book Awards before turning 30.” The purple samples of his work provided suggest that the prizes were massively misjudged.Somewhat too conveniently for himself and the play, Abe is married to the daughter of another Satmar refugee. His mother and hers, best friends since childhood, raised Abe and Sophie (Sarah Cooper) to be each other’s “bashert”: their fate, their soul mates.Eddie Kaye Thomas and Sarah Cooper, on the table, portray a married couple with connections to an Orthodox couple played by Lucy Freyer, far left, and Dave Klasko, sitting at the two ends of the table.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhether they also chose that fate is an open question; for all their similarities, there are also crucial differences. For one thing, Sophie, who is biracial, grew up with a father — a Black professor of environmental science — but Abe rarely saw his after the separation. Precious about his loss, yet glib about other people’s, he has the charismatic narcissist’s ability to finagle subservience.That’s already a lot of plot for a 105-minute play, even before the lopsided interaction between the two stories, and the potential to explore generational harm through them, is overshadowed by an out-of-the-blue development. At a reading in a Brooklyn bookstore, Abe spots in the front row a well-known actress, a longtime crush who is apparently on his freebie list. Immediately afterward he receives an email that leads to a correspondence featuring thousands of others, many flirtatious to the point of virtual adultery.Unaccountably, the actress is given the name Julia Cheever, a herring so far past red it’s bleeding. As played by Katie Holmes, with whom the character shares certain biographical features, Julia is glamorous and wry but strangely underpowered. That’s in part a lack of stage authority; in this Off Broadway Roundabout Theater Company production, Holmes, though she appeared in the 2008 Broadway revival of “All My Sons” and in Theresa Rebeck’s “Dead Accounts” in 2012, is still feeling her way around a world that lacks a camera.But her indistinctness is also the result of the problem of representing virtual communication onstage. Sometimes the director Barry Edelstein has Julia sit face-to-face with Abe, or even touching, as if in the same room. Other times, she wanders about Marion Williams’s set, which consists almost entirely of books, while reciting her emails as if they were soliloquies.At least hers are down-to-earth. Abe’s are high-flown, pretentious — which is but one way this plot thread recalls the infamous electronic flirtation between the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and the actress Natalie Portman. Ziegler has said she found that correspondence, part of which was published in The New York Times, “pretty juicy,” but in repurposing it for the play, she seems to have spilled the juice everywhere. As written, and in Thomas’s crafty performance, Abe bears enough of a resemblance to Foer (who also has a mother named Esther) to make you wonder what the point is.In any case, the real governing spirit here isn’t Foer but the frequently name-dropped Philip Roth; Abe seems to aspire not just to his stature but also to his characters’ unapologetic selfishness. That Sophie tolerates this while also taking nearly sole responsibility for their two children, who could not possibly be as whiny as her husband, is something of a mystery, at least for a half-hour. But pretty soon, and with growing irritation thereafter, the explanatory twist becomes obvious, leaving the big revelation at the end of the play a letdown.Is it too much of a hint to mention that catfish is not kosher?Helpfully, Cooper, known for her comic lip-syncing of Donald Trump, has a fresh and natural energy onstage. Even so, the plot mechanics ensure that Sophie isn’t given enough playable material to make us want to stay in her story. And Abe, who thinks he is deep, is unbearable.The social strictures facing Freyer’s Esther and Klasko’s Schmuli seem impossible to alter and are thus political, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf only by contrast, Schmuli and Esther are more engaging. The forces aligned against their happiness are not merely theoretical as with Abe and Sophie; they emerge from social strictures that seem impossible to alter and are thus political. This gives the emotions of their scenes more complexity, and though Freyer can’t do much else with her troubled character, Klasko is at times heartbreaking in his portrait of conflicted and hopelessly unenlightened love.The comparison between the two marriages, each undone by the search for something outside the characters’ ken, nevertheless feels specious. The dialogue in both sections, sprinkled like parsley with pidgin Yiddish and Hebrew prayer, has a secondhand aura that is also unconvincing. More authentic are the wigs by Tommy Kurzman and costumes by David Israel Reynoso; you certainly never question which world you’re in as the fur hats and wigs — the shtreimels and sheitels — give way to sweatpants.Still, “The Wanderers” feels, like its vague title, unmoored. That has not been a problem with Ziegler’s previous plays, which include “Photograph 51” (about the molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin) and “Actually” (about a campus sexual assault trial). Both feature stories in which a strong argument is developed single-mindedly through specific conflicts that point toward a crisis.It’s an irony that in trying to weld two such stories together, “The Wanderers” doesn’t enhance those elements but compromises them. Arranged or chosen, not all marriages are bashert.The WanderersThrough April 2 at Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      ‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ and ‘Sylvia’ Energize British Musicals

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      The art form needs to make room for lesser-known names, to refresh and enlarge the talent pool, our critic writes.Where are the new British musicals? The question bears asking as Britain’s defining musical theater composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, starts previews on Broadway of his latest show, “Bad Cinderella.” In April, Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” will close on Broadway after a record-‌breaking 35-year run in a city where he has often seemed to be the only English practitioner of musicals around.Who else might carry forward an art form in which Lloyd Webber, 75 next month, surely can’t be expected to go it alone? There have, of course, been the occasional offerings from George Stiles and Anthony Drewe (“Betty Blue Eyes,” “Honk”), or from Elton John, whose “Billy Elliot” ran for years on both sides of the Atlantic. John’s recent “Tammy Faye” premiered Off West End last year at the buzzy Almeida Theater‌, and has life in it still.But musicals need to make room for lesser-known names as well, to refresh and enlarge the talent pool. How gratifying, then, to encounter two recent London openings from comparative newcomers, both in large playhouses, both enthusiastically received. And each show knows how to energize an audience — no small achievement in itself.That’s not to say that either “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” at the National Theater, through March 25‌, or “Sylvia,” at the Old Vic, through April 8‌‌, is ready for the Broadway spotlight‌, ‌if that is even ‌their goal: Both are determinedly British in their subject matter, and “Sylvia,” in particular, has further work to do.It was nonetheless cheering to note the visceral response of playgoers swept up in the sheer passion of stories vigorously told; on this evidence, there seems to be an appetite for shows that expand the scope of what an English musical can be.‌“Standing at the Sky’s Edge” arrives in London after two‌ runs in Sheffield, the northern English city where it is set, and where both its composer-lyricist, Richard Hawley, and book writer, Chris Bush, are from.Cast members of “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” which is set in the Park Hill housing complex, a Brutalist architectural landmark in Sheffield, England.Johan PerssonAnd yet you don’t need to be familiar with the city’s Park Hill housing complex, a Brutalist architectural landmark, to be drawn into the musical’s skillful weave of three story lines set in the same apartment there. Ben Stones’s imposing concrete set includes the signature graffito, “I love you, will u marry me,” that was painted on a concrete bridge of the housing project in 2001 and became an unlikely Sheffield icon.Love in its various forms turns out to be the topic connecting the show’s three plot strands, each set in different eras. We see Rose (Rachael Wooding) and Harry (Robert Lonsdale) starting a family in the early 1960s: Harry, a steelworker, takes pride in being the youngest foreman in his company’s history, but slides into depression as the once-mighty steel industry in the region goes into decline.That same flat some 30 years later becomes home to a teenager fleeing war-torn Liberia. Played by a radiant Faith Omole, that character, Joy, isn’t sure whether Park Hill, her supposed place of refuge, is a castle or a prison. And when she embarks on a mixed-race relationship with a sweet local boy, Jimmy (Samuel Jordan, in a knockout performance), Joy confronts the realities of racism head on: You wince when someone asks her family if they know how to use a refrigerator.Bringing the story line forward to 2016 is the transplanted Londoner Poppy (a clarion-voiced Alex Young), whose anxious parents need reassurance that their daughter has moved to “South Yorkshire, not Siberia.” Attempting a fresh start in a property that has been newly refurbished and a neighborhood that has gentrified since Joy’s time there, Poppy can’t escape her former lover, Nikki (Maimuna Memon), who shows up hoping to rekindle their romance.A roving narrator (Bobbie Little) appears now and then to connect the thematic dots. Home, she tells us, may “simply be a series of boxes that stops the rain,” but, in the director Robert Hastie’s production, there is also a profound sense of connection to the city. (Hastie runs the Crucible, the Sheffield theater where the show began.)Hawley’s full-bodied score, meanwhile, folds this singer-songwriter’s back catalog together with new songs, yearning and hopeful, that catch at the heart. The title song, taken from a 2012 album, is a rousing company number that gets the second act off to a propulsive start, and whose elation is characteristic of the show as a whole.The cast of “Sylvia,” which tells the story of the English suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst, at the Old Vic.Manuel Harlan“Sylvia” also looks toward England’s past, this time to tell the real-life story of the celebrated suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst, an activist who fought over many years to secure the right of British women to vote. She is at the impassioned center of this well-meaning, if dramatically sketchy, musical from the director-choreographer Kate Prince. The impressive designer here, as with the Sheffield-set musical, is Ben Stones.An earlier version of the show had a brief run at the Old Vic in 2018 as a dance-led work-in-progress. It has since been reworked as a largely sung-through musical that casts a strong glance ‌toward‌‌ “Hamilton.” Like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s trailblazer, “Sylvia” refracts history through an ethnically and musically diverse lens: The music by Josh Cohen and D.J. Walde draws from funk, soul, R&B and hip-hop. Sharon Rose, in the title role, recently appeared as Eliza in “Hamilton” in London.But “Sylvia” has a superficial feel that “Hamilton” never had: It makes caricatures of the historical figures it presents, including Winston Churchill, and skimps on the family drama at its fractured heart, though the soul singer Beverley Knight is in tremendous voice as Sylvia’s mother, Emmeline.It’s left to the giddy, near-perpetual motion of the staging to carry us through, even when the writing doesn’t. And Prince, a notable figure on the British dance scene, is canny enough to know how to end proceedings on a high. The show ends with a pair of anthems, “Stand Up” and “Rise Up,” celebrating women’s progress and exhorting the audience to get to their feet. And, swept along, they do. More

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      ‘Cornelia Street’ Review: A Musical With Local Ambitions

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      An affectionate elegy to a Greenwich Village restaurant, Neil Pepe’s production at Atlantic Theater orders everything on the menu.The midcentury novelist Dawn Powell, Greenwich Village’s great chronicler, wrote that there are three stages a person goes through when negotiating its twisty streets — first enthusiasm (“Bohemia — oh thrills!”), then cynicism (“Bah! Village theatricals!”), then resigned acceptance (“After all the Village is the Village when all’s said and done”).“Cornelia Street,” a fidgety, aimless new musical, is set on one of the Village’s quainter lanes. It goes through every stage, all at once. Written by Simon Stephens with music and lyrics by Mark Eitzel and directed by Neil Pepe for the Atlantic Theater’s subterranean space, the show is simultaneously celebration, deflation and a neighborhood elegy in a minor key. It plays out amid and atop the rickety tables and sturdier bar of Marty’s Café, a struggling Village restaurant. The show has deep affection for this (mostly) invented place and for the majority of its habitués. But like a lot of tourists who have walked these winding streets, it loses its way.At the play’s diffuse center is Jacob (Norbert Leo Butz), a onetime punk who has spent 28 years as the cafe’s chef. Jacob lives above the storefront with his teenage daughter, Patti (Lena Pepe, the director’s own daughter), and has recently developed higher culinary ambitions, trying to sneak orders for Iberico ham and venison under the crotchety nose of the cafe’s owner, Marty (Kevyn Morrow). How the empty restaurant has remained solvent long enough for Jacob to turn gourmet is one of the play’s many mysteries. Scott Pask’s set and Stacey Derosier’s lighting suggest a snug, homey, stay-all-day space of tin ceilings and mismatched wood. But no one frequents it, save for Mary Beth Peil’s former opera singer, Ben Rosenfield’s puppyish tech bro and George Abud’s preening cabdriver.The first act finds Marty’s suddenly threatened: The landlord wants to sell. Meanwhile, Patti has trouble at school. Philip (Esteban Andres Cruz), the sole waiter, has an audition. Misty (Gizel Jiménez), a woman from Jacob’s past, fleeing her own demons, turns up, too. Jacob embroils himself in a drug-dealing scheme that also demands embezzlement. If landlord disputes, lost souls and white-collar crime seem like too much story to stir into a chamber musical, well, yes. This is before the complications of the second act: a death, a disappearance, a musical number devoted to the glory days of Studio 54. (For some of us, this will conjure unhappy memories of the Atlantic’s last musical flop, “This Ain’t No Disco.”)Stephens doesn’t seem to believe in all this action, often stopping it cold so that characters can offer some blue-plate philosophizing.Here is Jacob’s: “You ever get one of those days when you really thought you knew where you were and what you were doing with your life and then you realize you had no [expletive] idea?”And here is Misty’s: “Life, huh?”This is the third collaboration between Stephens and the singer-songwriter Eitzel, the founder of the mordant alternative rock band American Music Club, following 2010’s “Marine Parade” and 2015’s “Song From Far Away.” Neither show has played New York, but reviews suggest that these previous partnerships have been successful ones. Which makes sense. Stephens’s enduring concern, in plays from “Punk Rock” to last year’s “Morning Sun,” is with people who don’t feel at home in the world or who must learn that any home they thought they had was made of straw and sticks. And the characters in Eitzel’s songs are very rarely anything like satisfied or secure.Scott Pask’s set and Stacey Derosier’s lighting suggest a snug, homey, stay-all-day space, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut here, under Pepe’s makeshift direction, the songs and the book scenes feel at odds. (Pepe is another frequent collaborator of Stephens, though only his straight plays.) Whatever its contrivances, “Cornelia Street” is ultimately a work of naturalism, whereas the dreamy, gloomy musical interludes suggest something more abstract and symbolic. Instead of swelling during the musical numbers, the show seems to shrink, embarrassed. The arrangements and orchestrations are expansive and surprising, but the staging feels apologetic. Butz, with his rocker voice and dad vibes, and Jiménez, an ingénue with edge, are supple performers, singing as casually as they might speak. They manage these tonal shifts with ease. The rest of the cast, moving to Hope Boykin’s swishing, slashing choreography, seem to struggle. That their characters feel less like people and more like types can’t help.The Atlantic has a productive history of investing in small, off-center musicals — “The Bedwetter,” “Kimberly Akimbo,” “The Secret Life of Bees,” and most significantly “The Band’s Visit” and “Spring Awakening.” This wants to be one more. (In its more creditable moments, it also gestures toward another intimate, single-set musical, “Once.”) Here, the approach feels tentative. Sometimes offstage voices are used, sometimes not. Lighting transforms the space during a song or remains constant. Pepe seems like a man who is not enjoying what he has ordered, but can’t bring himself to send it back.“Cornelia Street” owes an obvious debt to the Cornelia Street Cafe, a Village institution that shuttered in 2019 because of rent hikes. (This homage had apparently upset Robin Hirsch, one of the cafe’s founders. But Hirsch, invited to lead a storytelling event alongside Stephens and Eitzel on one of the show’s dark nights, has since been brought into the fold.) Friendly and unpretentious, the place made you feel like a local, even if you could never afford an apartment nearby. If only “Cornelia Street” could offer some of that same welcome and sense of purpose. If ever a musical needed to stop and ask for directions, it is this one.Cornelia StreetThrough March 5 at Atlantic Theater Company Stage 2, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Broadway and West End Theater Owners Agree to Join Forces

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      A major British theater company, Ambassador Theater Group, says it is “combining operations” with Jujamcyn, the smallest of Broadway’s three big landlords.Jujamcyn Theaters, the smallest of the three big Broadway landlords, is combining its operations with a large British company, the Ambassador Theater Group, or A.T.G.The transaction, confirmed Tuesday by Jujamcyn and International Entertainment Holdings Limited, which is A.T.G.’s parent company, would give A.T.G., which already operates two of the 41 Broadway houses, a more sizable foothold in the heart of America’s theater industry, and would give Jordan Roth, the Jujamcyn president, more resources for showcasing his creative ambitions. Jujamcyn operates five Broadway houses; A.T.G. has 58 venues in Britain, Germany, and the United States.The companies said that the transaction is subject to regulatory approval, but did not say by what entity and in which country. No financial terms were specified.Roth, one of the most colorful characters on Broadway’s business side, will become the creative director of the combined company and its largest individual shareholder, with a seat on the board. There are also significant institutional shareholders: A large Rhode Island-based private equity firm, Providence Equity Partners, has for the last decade been A.T.G.’s majority shareholder, and at the height of the pandemic, when theaters were being financially squeezed by a lengthy shutdown, an Australian company, T.E.G., acquired a minority share of the company.Roth, the 47-year-old son of the real estate titan Steven Roth and the Broadway producer Daryl Roth, has been a singular force in a staid industry, with a disruptive emphasis on customer service in his theaters, a fondness for couture, an exuberant presence on social media, and left-leaning politics sharply at odds with those of his Trump-supporting father.The transaction portends a potential shift from the quirky to the corporate: A.T.G. is a large company, run by a former wine industry executive, Mark Cornell, who will remain as chief executive of the combined company. A.T.G. is fundamentally British, which could be a cause for concern on Broadway, where there is occasional worry about too many London shows — often developed with British government support — swamping work by American theater artists. (After Second Stage Theater, a nonprofit that focuses on work by living American writers, finally acquired a Broadway house in 2015, its artistic director, Carole Rothman, proudly proclaimed that her organization’s Broadway programming would feature “No Brits.”)The companies, which would not make anyone available for comment, did not describe the transaction as either an acquisition or a merger, and it is not immediately clear what “combining operations” will mean for the employees or operations at the five Jujamcyn houses or the two A.T.G. Broadway houses.The Jujamcyn theaters include the Eugene O’Neill, which is the long-term home of “The Book of Mormon,” as well as the Al Hirschfeld (“Moulin Rouge!”), the Walter Kerr (“Hadestown”), the August Wilson (“Funny Girl”) and the St. James (awaiting a new musical called “New York, New York”). Roth is expected to continue to decide what shows run in those five theaters, and he has previously shown a strong interest in work by American writers: Four of the five current Jujamcyn musicals have American origins; “Moulin Rouge!” has Australian roots, but the stage musical was developed in the United States.A.T.G. has an ambitious Broadway track record thus far. The company has for a decade operated one of the biggest Broadway houses, the Lyric, which, lavishly reconfigured for 1,622 seats, has for the last five years been home to “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” A.T.G. has since 2017 also operated one of Broadway’s smaller houses, the Hudson, which with just under 1,000 seats often presents plays; the latest, a revival of “A Doll’s House” starring Jessica Chastain, began previews Monday night. Among the hallmarks of the company’s Broadway presence: fancier food and drink than at most of the American-operated houses.Notably, both “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “A Doll’s House” are produced by companies financed by A.T.G. A lead producer of “Cursed Child” is Sonia Friedman, a prolific and powerful London-based producer whose production company is an A.T.G. affiliate; the director of “A Doll’s House” is Jamie Lloyd, a British director whose production company is also affiliated with the group. (Friedman is also a lead producer of “Funny Girl” and “New York, New York,” both running at Jujamcyn theaters.)The combination of A.T.G. and Jujamcyn — it is not clear what the amalgamated venture will be called — will still be the smallest of the three big Broadway landlords, but now with seven of the 41 theaters. The Shubert Organization has 17 theaters and the Nederlander Organization has nine. Six theaters are operated by nonprofits, one by Disney, and one (Circle in the Square) is independently owned.Jujamcyn, founded in the late 1950s, was named for Judy, James and Cynthia Binger, the grandchildren of the company’s founder. The Binger family sold the company to Rocco Landesman in 2005; Jordan Roth bought a stake in the company in 2009.Roth has been an activist theater owner. In the buildings, he has overseen everything from a redesign of the ice cubes (to reduce the clinking noise) to bringing in a new ticket seller, SeatGeek, to manage ticket sales.He has presented multiple hit shows, among the biggest of which has been “The Book of Mormon,” which has been running since 2011. He also landed “Springsteen on Broadway,” an enormously successful Bruce Springsteen concert show that had runs both before and after the pandemic shutdown.Roth has also been active as a producer, most recently transferring a concert-style production of “Into the Woods” from City Center to the St. James; he was also a producer of the Tony-winning 2018 revival of “Angels in America.”A.T.G. has been expanding its presence in the United States, where it now owns, operates or manages 16 theaters, including not only the two Broadway houses, but also the King’s Theater in Brooklyn, the Colonial Theater in Boston, and theaters in Detroit, New Orleans, San Antonio, San Francisco and Sugar Land, Texas. More

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      New Ohio Theater Announces It Will Close After Three Decades

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      Robert Lyons, the founding artistic director, said it was time for a new generation to take over the West Village stage.At a time when theaters are struggling to reach prepandemic audience levels, the New Ohio Theater, a staple for artists and independent theater companies for 30 years, announced it would present its final Manhattan performance in August.The shifting theater landscape and increased financial pressures led to the decision, said the founding artistic director, Robert Lyons, who is also a playwright and director. “It’s just a good time to step aside and pass the baton,” he added, explaining that he envisioned a new generation taking on the space.The closing will end programs like the Ice Factory, Now in Process, Theater for Young Minds, New Ohio Presents and New Ohio Hosts. The Archive Residency program will conclude in the spring of 2024.The theater, originally known as the Ohio Theater and located off Wooster Street in SoHo, was founded as a nonprofit in 1993, and before that provided a shared space for independent companies and artists to brainstorm and perform. In 2011, the company moved to 154 Christopher Street in the West Village as the New Ohio Theater, and continued to operate as a hub for independent theater. Over time, New Ohio oversaw a renovation project at the theater that included the installation of a new sprung stage, new risers, an HVAC system and a bathroom in the dressing room.For 16 years, Edward Einhorn, the artistic director of the Untitled Theater Company No. 61, has collaborated with the theater; he plans to present his absurdist dark comedy “The Shylock and the Shakespeareans” there in June. Einhorn said theaters like the New Ohio have been essential to the development of indie performance works since the late ’90s.“I’m slowly losing my homes,” Einhorn said. “There are a few left, but it’s a hard time still, hard to get audiences, hard to know what to do next.”The “Moulin Rouge!” director Alex Timbers and the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin are among those who worked at the theater early in their careers.Kristin Marting, the founding artistic director of HERE Arts Center, who was part of a company that booked a season at the theater when she was 21, said it was the first theater she worked in. Marting said it greenlighted less conventional works, like an immersive “Alice in Wonderland” she directed in the late ’80s, and served as a sanctuary for generations of emerging theater makers.The plan is to reserve the 74-seat space for use by nonprofit companies. The building’s landlord, Rockrose Development, will accept proposals from theater companies looking for a home beginning Wednesday.Marting said the New Ohio would be sorely missed.“I hope that the new entity that comes in embraces the same level of experimentation and inclusion and invites a broad spectrum of the community to make work,” she said. More

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      Book Review: ‘Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?” by Craig Seligman

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      WHO DOES THAT BITCH THINK SHE IS? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag, by Craig SeligmanFrom wee-hours cabaret to prime-time reality TV to fiercely contended children’s story hour at the local library, the American drag queen’s journey has been a long and bumpy one.For Doris Fish, alter ego of Philip Clargo Mills, it began not in America but Manly Vale, an apt-sounding suburb of Sydney, Australia,and ended in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco, 1991 — with resurrection, one source maintains, as a ghost composed variously of golden sparks and Evian water.I had not known of Fish before reading the journalist Craig Seligman’s minutely observed new biography of him (though some friends used the female pronoun, “he never wanted to be a woman — he never even wanted to seem like a woman,” the author writes). I finished it persuaded this was a life well worth examining, if only because his peers are so often celebrated, or excoriated, in aggregate.Most of Fish’s performances are unrecoverable, but those that can be scratched up are indelible. Best known, in a limited way, is probably “Vegas in Space,” a posthumously released and deeply weird 1991 sci-fi comedy about male earthlings who undergo sex-change operations so they can travel to a female-only planet (something about recovering stolen jewels…).Promoting the movie during its production period on a Pittsburgh morning show in 1986, Fish gamely endures being treated like a talking zoo animal by the gawking hosts and awkwardly grinning housewives. There’s also a choppy video out there of his swan song, “This Is My Life,” fervidly performed in a caftan and satin gloves at the benefit from which the book takes its name. He was months from death.Born in 1952, Philip was the middle child of six in a tolerant Catholic family that permitted a marijuana plant on the premises. He played a high-kicking chorus girl under a priest’s tutelage at his all-boy school’s year-end musical with more enthusiasm than most of his classmates. Remarkably indifferent to the prospect of arrest or social censure, he joined a local troupe called Sylvia and the Synthetics whose outré antics had me scrawling exclamation points in the margins.One female impersonator’s considerable male member was tucked through his legs to simulate a tail. Another pinned back her hair with swastikas. Another bit into a dripping sheep’s heart to punctuate a lovelorn ballad, blood dripping onto her ball gown like one of the less tasteful Valentine’s Day bitmojis. There were flash mobs of Marilyn Monroe impersonators and teetering pyramids of performers on quaaludes. “Everything was permitted,” Seligman writes dryly, “including ineptitude.”After working for the Florence Broadhurst wallpaper factory, from which he filched metallic powders for his cosmetics, Philip/Doris moved to San Francisco, money sewn into his pockets by his loving mother, Mildred, and found his true calling. Mostly this was what was then called prostitution, though in Fish’s hands it seems more like a kind of sexual nursing. He specialized in relations with those society often rejected, the obese or infirm. (There was a green-card marriage to a lesbian, one of the few survivors of his circle who declined to be interviewed here.)He acted as “comedy model” for a greeting-card company called West Graphic, portraits that Seligman compares to the work of Cindy Sherman. He wrote a popular column for The San Francisco Sentinel, then an essential gay weekly. And he performed in a group called Sluts a-Go-Go, emulating faded stars of the ’30s and ’40s while occasionally brushing up against rising ones of the period (Robin Williams, Lynda Carter). The Sluts and their associates were equal-opportunity offenders, doing racial as well as gender impressions, spewing double entendre and sometimes seeming to positively assault their audiences with sensory overload, exaggerated glamour and flagrant disregard for safety codes.Though revolutionary in his in-your-faceness, Fish was not particularly political; the sincerity such activity requires was anathema. One of the more intriguing aspects of his foreshortened life was an attitude described here as Romantic Cruelism: a pose of complete indifference or dark humor even in the face of tragedy.Fish displays it when his parents divorce; when a younger sister dies after a mysterious illness; and when one Synthetic, who had been a childhood friend, perishes in a fire: “Burnt to a cinder in a room full of exotic drag. All they found was a tooth,” as Spurt!, a local punk zine, callously memorialized. “The young don’t know what to do with endings,” Seligman writes, and there were so many more to come.“Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?” revisits and draws from a 1986 profile of Fish that Seligman wrote for skittish editors at Image magazine, a weekend section of The San Francisco Examiner. Aside from overuse of the words “notoriety” and “notorious,” it is confidently written, wistful and quite personal; Seligman’s now-husband, Silvana Nova, was part of Fish’s scene.The author of a previous book comparing Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag, Seligman diverts here and there to Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp,’” but spends most of his time simply retracing Fish’s footsteps. At times these seem akin to the old Hans Christian Andersen version of “The Little Mermaid,” whose heroine is granted the power to walk out of the water, but only with the pain of swords going through her. (In one parade, Fish’s elaborate costume included fiberglass “legs” that drew blood from his own, covering the stains with black tights.)Seligman’s own stance is mostly one of wary wonderment, that drag queens have gone from “totally beyond the pale” to mainstream acknowledgment, “from feared freak into object of fascination,” from the shaky spotlight to — however contentiously — the kindergarten rug. He piles a lot of historical weight on Fish’s shoulders, but his subject carries it like Joan Crawford in a padded Adrian frock.WHO DOES THAT BITCH THINK SHE IS? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag | By Craig Seligman | Illustrated | 352 pp. | PublicAffairs | $29 More

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      Jürgen Flimm, Director of Festivals and Opera Houses, Dies at 81

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      He left his mark in Hamburg, Berlin, Salzburg and elsewhere. He also directed a memorable “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth.Jürgen Flimm, who led some of Europe’s most important theaters, opera houses and performing arts festivals over the last 40 years, died on Feb. 4 at his home in Wischhafen, Germany, northeast of Hamburg. He was 81.His death was announced by the Berlin State Opera, where he had been general manager from 2010 to 2018. His wife, the film producer Susanne Ottersbach Flimm, said the cause was heart failure following pneumonia.Mr. Flimm’s Berlin appointment was his last in a long career that also included directorships at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Ruhrtriennale festival in northwestern Germany and the Salzburg Festival in Austria. He also staged Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 2000.He directed acclaimed productions outside the German-speaking world as well, including at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.A dress rehearsal for Mr. Flimm’s 2000 production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” one critic wrote of the production, “but the shock was considerable.”Jürgen Flimm was born in Giessen, Germany, on July 17, 1941, to Werner and Ellen Flimm, who were both doctors. His family had fled there after bombs began falling on Cologne, where they had been living, and where they resettled after the war.In a 2011 interview with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mr. Flimm recalled his childhood. His father was a surgeon who, Mr. Flimm said, used the family’s apartment to see patients: “Every morning I put up my bed and our living room became a waiting room: patients everywhere.” His mother was a general practitioner, but like so many German women in the immediate postwar period, a time of general deprivation, she scrounged to bring home butter and meat. As a child, Jürgen sold old newspapers to fishmongers. While his older brother, Dieter, played drums in jazz bands around the city, Jürgen invented dialogue for his puppets in the attic. Dieter Flimm eventually founded an architecture studio and worked as a set designer and a musician. He died in 2002.Their father, who loved theater, would attend performances as a doctor on duty, and Jürgen often accompanied him. “I secretly hoped that an actor would get sick, so I’d be able to go backstage and see what went on there,” he said, although his father disapproved of his sons’ artistic proclivities and would have preferred for them to study medicine.Jürgen enrolled at the University of Cologne, where he studied theater, German literature and sociology. He abandoned his studies to become an assistant director at the Münchner Kammerspiele theater in Munich, where he worked from 1968 to 1972. He received an acting degree from the Theater der Keller in Cologne.In 1969 Mr. Flimm married the actress Inge Jansen, a colleague at the Kammerspiele. The marriage ended in divorce, but Mr. Flimm remained close to Ms. Jansen’s five children from her previous marriage, four of whom are still living. Ms. Jansen died in 2017.Mr. Flimm married Susanne Ottersbach. The couple lived in a two-story thatched house built in 1648. She is his only immediate survivor.He directed his first production at a theater in Wuppertal in 1971 and held positions at theaters in Mannheim and Hamburg in the 1970s, while also building up his résumé as director in Zurich, Munich and Berlin.He directed his first opera in 1978, the German premiere of Luigi Nono’s 1975 “Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore” in Frankfurt. The work remained dear to Mr. Flimm’s heart: Decades later, he programmed it, in an acclaimed production by the British director Katie Mitchell, in both Salzburg and Berlin.In 1979, Mr. Flimm returned to Cologne to lead the city’s main theater, the Schauspiel Köln. During his six years as artistic director there, he programmed works by the influential choreographer Pina Bausch and the fanciful French-Argentine director Jérôme Savary.He moved to Hamburg in 1985 to lead the Thalia Theater, which he is widely credited with putting in the international spotlight by inviting avant-garde artists like the American director Robert Wilson.From left, the director Robert Wilson, the author William S. Burroughs and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits at the premiere of their work “The Black Rider” at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. It was the most lauded production during Mr. Flimm’s tenure there.Frederika Hoffmann/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1990, Mr. Wilson’s “The Black Rider,” a collaboration with the singer and songwriter Tom Waits and the author William Burroughs, became the most lauded production of Mr. Flimm’s tenure in Hamburg. Despite some famously sour reviews (the German magazine Der Spiegel likened it to “a version of ‘Cats’ for intellectuals and snobs”), it was a hit and toured worldwide.Mr. Flimm left the Thalia in 2000. That summer, his “Ring” cycle had its premiere at Bayreuth.“It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker, “but the shock was considerable.” While praising some aspects of the cycle, Mr. Ross concluded that it ultimately left a very mixed impression.“The production felt unfinished,” he wrote, “and the flurry of painted curtains during the ‘Götterdämmerung’ apocalypse suggested that in the end it had simply run out of money.”Mr. Flimm made his Metropolitan Opera debut with Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” that October. This time Mr. Ross raved, concluding his review by saying that “Flimm is a smart director, and the Met should give him anything he wants.” The production was revived three times between 2002 and 2017.Mr. Flimm’s follow-up at the Met, a 2004 production of “Salome” that was a vehicle for the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, was more polarizing. In his review for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini noted that Mr. Flimm received some loud boos on opening night. But, he noted, “the bravos won out, and rightly so.”In 2005, Mr. Flimm became artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a multidisciplinary arts festival in the rust belt of Germany. He stayed an extra summer past his three-year contract after his designated successor, the German theater director Marie Zimmermann, took her life in April 2007.His time there dovetailed with the start of his artistic directorship at the Salzburg Festival, where he had previously served as head of drama from 2002 to 2004. During his first summer, he commissioned a new staging of “Jedermann,” the morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition, from the young Bavarian director Christian Stückl. The production was a hit and remained a festival mainstay for a dozen years.Mr. Flimm ascended to the festival’s leadership in 2007. It was a tumultuous time: Gerard Mortier had taken the festival in a radically new direction throughout the 1990s, and after his departure in 2001, it had struggled to hold on to an artistic director.The four seasons Mr. Flimm spent as Salzburg’s leader were regarded as successful artistically, but he made clear that he was not interested in staying for the long run. In 2008, he announced that he would step down at the end of his term to head the Berlin State Opera.In September 2010, shortly after Mr. Flimm arrived in Berlin, four steamers sailed down the river Spree, conveying 500 members of the opera company westward to the Schiller Theater, where it planned to spend three seasons during renovations to its historic home. Instead, the construction dragged on for seven years.Mr. Flimm imported a number of acclaimed productions to Berlin that had first been seen at Salzburg. One of his original productions in Berlin was a 2016 staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which featured an abstract set designed by Frank Gehry that reportedly cost 100,000 euros.In addition to his work in theater, Mr. Flimm taught at the University of Hamburg and was a guest lecturer at Harvard and New York University. Among his many honors was the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the German government’s highest, which he received in 2002. In a 2011 interview with the Bavarian radio station BR, Mr. Flimm was asked what accomplishments he was particularly proud of. Among those he mentioned was his 2000 “Fidelio.”“After the premiere,” he said, “I stood on the balcony of the Met, looked out into Manhattan and thought to myself, ‘Not bad, Jürgen!’” More