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      New York’s Public Theater Lays Off 19 Percent of Its Staff

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      The institution, a titan among nonprofit theaters, is suffering from the combined effects of falling revenue and rising costs plaguing the arts world.The Public Theater, one of the nation’s most prestigious and successful nonprofit theaters, laid off 19 percent of its staff on Thursday as a financial crisis sweeps across the field.The move, which cost about 50 people their jobs, followed a 13 percent layoff at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and a 10 percent layoff at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles.The Public, headquartered in Lower Manhattan and presenting work primarily Off Broadway, is by almost any measure a titan among nonprofit theaters — the birthplace of “A Chorus Line” and “Hamilton,” the originator and presenter of Free Shakespeare in the Park, and a creative anchor for some of the nation’s most influential dramatists.But the theater, like many others, is suffering from the combined effects of falling revenue and rising costs.“The economic headwinds that are attacking the American theater are attacking us, too,” Oskar Eustis, the theater’s artistic director, said in an interview. “Our audience is down by about 30 percent, we have expenses up anywhere from 30 to 45 percent, and we have kept our donor base, but it’s static. Put that all together, and you get budget shortfalls — big budget shortfalls.”Eustis said the Public would not shutter any programs beyond its previous decision to put its Under the Radar Festival, an annual program of experimental work, on indefinite hiatus.But Eustis said the Public would need to reduce the amount of theater it is staging in the short term — its next season, he said, will feature five shows at its Astor Place building, down from 11 in the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic. The traditional Shakespeare in the Park program will also not take place next year because its home, the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, will be undergoing a long-planned renovation, but Eustis said the company is seeking a way to present some Shakespeare at an alternate location (or locations) next summer.The theater’s executive director, Patrick Willingham, said the cuts would be spread across the company’s operations. “It’s a pullback in every department at every level,” he said.The Public currently has about 246 full-time positions, Willingham said. The company had a previous round of layoffs in 2021 as it tried to rebound following the pandemic closure of theaters, and it also had staff furloughs at the height of the pandemic. Willingham said this week’s layoffs were not a surprise to the staff because the need for spending cuts had been discussed internally for some time. “We’ve been really transparent with the employees over the course of this year,” he said. “We’ve been really clear that we were going to have to make reductions.”Willingham said the Public’s annual budget during the next fiscal year will be around $50 million, down from about $60 million before the coronavirus pandemic. He added that, thanks to federal pandemic relief funds and royalties from “Hamilton,” the theater is hoping it will not have a budget deficit during its current fiscal year, which ends next month, or the following fiscal year. “We’re making decisions that are actually trying to get ahead of what we’re seeing as this nationwide trend,” Willingham said, “so that we can get to a sustainable model we can rely on year after year.”Eustis, who is among the best-compensated artistic directors in the field, said he will cut his own pay by an unspecified amount — “I will be taking a significant reduction in salary,” he said — but that “nobody else would or should” have a salary reduction.He added that the Public remains committed to its Public Works program, in which amateur performers join professionals to put on musical pageants adapted from classic works, and its mobile unit, which presents Shakespeare in a variety of locations in and around the city, including at prisons and community centers.Eustis called the cuts “absolutely necessary to secure the Public’s security and future,” but also “tremendously sad and difficult.” However, at a time when some theaters are closing as a result of financial problems, Eustis said the Public is in no such danger.“This is not an existential crisis,” he said. “We are taking moves that mean that the Public’s existence and future will not be threatened. The Public will be here, and performing its mission, long past the time you and I are here.” More

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      A French Festival Focuses (Timidly) on English

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      The Avignon Festival’s new director wants to spotlight drama in a different language each year. This year’s first installment had some conventional choices.As soon as the Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues took over at the Avignon Festival, France’s biggest theater event, he announced a symbolic move: Under his direction, there would be a special focus on a different language every year, starting, this summer, with English.There was wincing from some quarters: To many in France, English is already far too culturally dominant. In the end, they needn’t have worried. Of several dozen productions in the official lineup of this year’s festival, which runs through July 25, only six plays are predominantly in English.As a result, Avignon, which has long welcomed shows from a wide range of cultures, hasn’t felt much different this year. If anything, Rodrigues’s Anglo-Saxon choices seem a tad timid. Focusing on a language, rather than a country, could have opened the door to Anglophone theater from underrepresented regions. Instead, five productions came from British directors, two of whom, Tim Etchells and Alexander Zeldin, are already well-established in France.A few novelties are still to come, including work from London’s Royal Court Theater, which is largely unknown across the Channel. So far, however, the most intriguing discovery has been the sole American entry, “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” from Elevator Repair Service. This verbatim recreation of a 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., about race in the United States, is spare and meticulous. From tables on opposite sides of the stage, Greig Sargeant (Baldwin) and Ben Williams (Buckley) spar with effective solemnity.The fact that Elevator Repair Service is widely described as “experimental” in its home country may amuse some French festivalgoers: “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” is fairly buttoned-up by local standards. Only the short final scene, which sees Sargeant and April Matthis, as the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, break character and touch on racial dynamics in the making of a previous Elevator Repair Service production, feels truly biting.Catherine Dagenais-Savard in “Marguerite: The Fire,” which pays tribute to Marguerite Duplessis, who, in 1740, was one of the first enslaved people to be heard by a Canadian court.Christophe Raynaud de LageAnother North American production at Avignon is performed in French: “Marguerite: The Fire,” by the Québec-based Indigenous writer and director Émilie Monnet. It, too, touched on the history of racism by way of a little-known historical figure, Marguerite Duplessis. In 1740, Duplessis was one of the first enslaved people to be heard by a Canadian court, after she claimed she had been born a free woman.Together with three other performers, Monnet pays tribute to Duplessis in a production that has high points — including evocative choral and dance numbers — but feels overly linear, its text well-meaning yet monotonous. Like “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” “Marguerite: The Fire” also unwittingly plays into a French national sport: deploring North American racism while struggling to recognize it closer to home.In the French portion of the lineup, meanwhile, some directors also got involved in the Anglo-Saxon focus by adapting the work of English-speaking authors. Pauline Bayle, a rising star who was appointed to lead the Montreuil Theater last year, boldly took on Virginia Woolf. Unfortunately, the result, “Writing Life,” is strangely shapeless.The cast awkwardly veer between peppy contemporary digressions and bits and pieces lifted from Woolf’s works. One minute, they mention the threat of an imminent, pandemic-style lockdown, and engage in slightly forced interactions with three rows of audience members. The next, they grapple with Woolf’s intricate style, which comes across as bombastic by contrast.“Writing Life” at least came with English surtitles for non-French speakers — a welcome development for the Avignon Festival. While select productions already came with an English translation under the previous director, Olivier Py, Rodrigues has made it the default to appeal to more international visitors.The cast of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is wheeled into the venue, a former quarry, by bus.Christophe Raynaud de LageThere were a handful of exceptions, not least Philippe Quesne’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” accessible only to French speakers. It’s a shame, because the production marked the reopening of a legendary Avignon venue: the Boulbon quarry, a majestic natural spot outside the city. It was last used in 2016, not least because of its eye-watering running costs: Fire safety precautions alone ended up costing 600,000 euros, or $670,000, this year.“The Garden of Earthly Delights” proved a loving reintroduction to Boulbon. In it, members of an eccentric, hippie-adjacent community are wheeled into the quarry by bus. They carefully lay a giant egg down in the middle of the vast space, and perform amusingly absurd rituals around it. Some recreate poses from paintings by Hieronymus Bosch; others deliver wacky poems or monologues. Even if you spoke the language, it didn’t fully make sense, but it felt at home against Boulbon’s arid, otherworldly backdrop.For English-speaking visitors, however, one major part of Avignon remains difficult to access: the Fringe, known as “le Off.” With nearly 1,500 shows on offer in small and big venues all around the city, it dwarves the official lineup, but very few productions offer English versions or surtitles.If you look closely enough, though, there are some opportunities to hang with the French crowds at “le Off.” A handful of venues offer surtitles on select days, like the Théâtre des Doms with “Méduse.s,” a well-crafted feminist reinterpretation of the mythical figure of Medusa by the Belgian company La Gang.Some performers find other ways to bridge the gap with English speakers. On Mondays during the festival, the French writer and performer Maïmouna Coulibaly, who currently lives in Berlin, performs her one-woman show “Maïmouna – HPS” in English at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint Michel. It’s a no-holds-barred exploration of her relationship to her body, including her traumatic circumcision as a child and her adult sex life. The back-and-forth between the two experiences induces a little whiplash, but Coulibaly brings galvanizing energy to the stage.Charlotte Avias and Camille Timmerman in “Punk.e.s,” which tells the story of the first all-female punk band, the Slits.Arnaud DufauAnd some French shows barely need translating. Justine Heynemann and Rachel Arditi’s “Punk.e.s,” at La Scala Provence, dives into the story of the first major all-female punk band, the Slits, with such chutzpah that, by the final musical number at a recent performance, quite a few audience members were on their feet.Charlotte Avias, especially, gives a manic pixie punk performance to remember as the Slits’ lead vocalist Ari Up, and Kim Verschueren, a powerful singer, finds shadowy nuance in the role of Tessa Pollitt. The set list — which cycles through the Beatles, the Clash and the Velvet Underground — could have used even more Slits songs, but “Punk.e.s” is a reminder that French artists have long taken inspiration from their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.There’s a way to go to before language differences don’t prove a barrier for theater. Still, the Avignon Festival is increasingly doing its part. More

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      ‘A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela’ Review: A Performer Drugs Herself

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      In an ethically murky show at the Avignon Festival, the Brazilian performer Carolina Bianchi opens up about how she was drugged and abused, then knocks herself out with a spiked cocktail.A decade ago, the Brazilian performer and director Carolina Bianchi was drugged and assaulted. In “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” (“A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela”), her new stage production at the Avignon Festival in France, she doesn’t merely open up about that experience. She relives part of it, night after night.Bianchi slips a similar drug into a colorful cocktail and drinks it, with a sinister “Cheers.” She talks to the audience about art and trauma, waiting for the effects to kick in, then spends the rest of the show unconscious.This all-too-real performance single-handedly jolted Avignon alive over the first week of the festival, turning Bianchi — an unknown, Amsterdam-based artist — into a sensation at the event. On the night I attended, one woman broke down in sobs on the way out. I felt nauseated at several points, as if “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” had tapped into my own fight-or-flight instinct.The show starts innocuously enough. Bianchi enters in a stylish white ensemble, and proceeds to deliver a lecture from a heavy stack of notes. From a desk, she examines sexual violence against women through the lens of art history, weaving in contemporary cases — chief among them the 2008 rape and murder of Pippa Bacca, a performance artist, as she hitchhiked in Turkey in a wedding dress as part of an artistic project.“The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” may be a much safer form of performance art, but it doesn’t feel that way. Twenty minutes in, Bianchi starts drinking her cocktail. Before long, she is slurring her words and hunches over, then lies down on the table and loses consciousness.For a few minutes, time stands still. We know nothing unplanned is likely to happen: According to the French news agency Agence France-Presse, Bianchi takes a mix of tranquilizers, rather than an actual date rape drug (known in Portuguese as a “Goodnight Cinderella”), and medics are on hand. Yet her vulnerability is scarily palpable.After Bianchi is unconscious, the performance takes on a club-like atmosphere, with slinky choreography leading to sexual encounters that never look fully consensual.Christophe Raynaud de LageThen, for the next hour and a half, eight young members from Bianchi’s collective, Cara de Cavalo, take over. The backdrop rises to reveal another set, dotted with what appear to be bodies in various states of decomposition. The performers lie Bianchi down on a mattress next to them, and the atmosphere turns trippy, with loud distorted club music. Slinky choreography leads to sexual encounters that never look fully consensual.Throughout, on screens above them, Bianchi’s words continue to roll. Her narrative isn’t one of healing: She repeatedly compares her need to revisit the assault to Dante’s journey into hell. “How dare they say that surviving is revenge?” the text reads at one point. “No act of catharsis overcomes the damage.”The cast exercise real care toward the unconscious Bianchi. The group’s women are tasked with most of the physical manipulation, and their actions never mimic her assault. Yet one scene near the end would probably be too much to present in many countries. (In Avignon, viewers under 18 were “strongly discouraged” from attending.) Cast members spread Bianchi’s legs and insert a speculum and a small camera into her vagina, with a live video feed and in full view of the audience, as if to simulate a post-rape forensic examination.Is this ethical? Your mileage may vary: As a director, Bianchi is in charge, even as she relinquishes physical control. Yet it is deeply unnerving to experience this scene, knowing that the main protagonist will have little to no memory of it, even as it lives on in the heads of hundreds of audience members. Her inability to remember her own assault, Bianchi explains earlier, haunts her to this day.I hesitate to say “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” should tour widely, because that means Bianchi, who wakes up looking dazed in the final few minutes, will keep putting herself through this ordeal. Still, the production, billed as the first chapter of a trilogy, is already scheduled to visit Belgium, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. And love it or hate it, it doesn’t flinch from an uncomfortable truth: Sometimes there is no safe space to be found from trauma. More

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      Kevin Spacey Denies Sexual Assault Charges During U.K. Trial

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      Two weeks into a trial in London, the Oscar-winning actor gave his account of sexual encounters that the prosecution says were criminal acts.Kevin Spacey arriving at Southwark Crown Court in London on Thursday.Henry Nicholls/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKevin Spacey told a British jury on Thursday that he was “a big flirt” who had what he characterized as gentle, touching and romantic encounters with a man who accused him of sexual assault. He always respected the man’s boundaries, Mr. Spacey said, adding that he felt “crushed” when the man accused him of assault.Two weeks into a sexual assault trial in London against the Oscar- and Tony Award-winning actor, Mr. Spacey’s testimony on Thursday was the first time that the jury heard from him directly.Mr. Spacey, 63, has pleaded not guilty to 12 charges relating to incidents that the prosecution says involved four men and occurred from 2001 to 2013. For most of that time, Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London.Sitting at the front of a courtroom at Southwark Crown Court and facing the jury, Mr. Spacey — who was wearing a gray suit, and light blue tie — was calm and occasionally joked with his legal representative, Patrick Gibbs.Opening the trial last month, Christine Agnew, a British prosecutor, told the jury that Mr. Spacey was “a sexual bully” who “delights in making others feel powerless and uncomfortable.” He had repeatedly groped men, Ms. Agnew said. On one occasion, Ms. Agnew added, Mr. Spacey gave a man oral sex without that man’s consent.In the days after Ms. Agnew’s opening, the jury heard from the four anonymous complainants. Under British law, it is illegal for anyone to identify complainants in sexual assault cases, or to publish information that may cause them to be identified. The jury first watched recordings of interviews that each complainant gave to British police officers, then the accuser was cross-examined in the courthouse.The first complainant said in his police interview that, in the early 2000s, Mr. Spacey touched him multiple times. On one occasion, the complainant said, he was driving with Mr. Spacey to a ball organized by Elton John, and the actor grabbed his genitals so hard that he almost veered off the road.On Thursday, the day’s opening session focused on Mr. Spacey’s recollection of those encounters and the actor discussed his relationship with that complainant. Leaning back in his chair, and sounding wistful, he said the man was “friendly and charming and flirtatious.”The pair’s encounters gradually “became somewhat sexual,” Mr. Spacey said, adding that this most likely occurred at the actor’s own initiation. Mr. Spacey said the pair never had sex. The complainant “made it clear he didn’t want to go any further,” Mr. Spacey added. He said he had respected the complainant’s boundaries.Mr. Gibbs then asked Mr. Spacey to recall how he felt when he learned that the complainant accused him of assault. Mr. Spacey said he had been “crushed” and it felt like the complainant had stabbed him in the back. The court then adjourned for a break. More

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      The Shed Hires Boston Ballet’s Meredith Hodges as New C.E.O.

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      As the new arts space faces financial challenges, it tapped Meredith Hodges to take over its administrative leadership from Alex Poots, who will remain as artistic director.After a mixed beginning that was complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, the Shed in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards announced Wednesday that it had tapped Meredith Hodges, known as Max, the executive director of the Boston Ballet, to become its new chief executive officer.“She is the right combination to join the Shed at this moment,” said Jonathan M. Tisch, who in April succeeded the Shed’s founding chairman, Daniel L. Doctoroff, and who — with his wife, Lizzie — donated $27.5 million in 2019 toward the building’s construction. “She is a proven leader who understands the business side of culture, but also has an affinity for the culture side of culture.”The chief executive position was initially held by Alex Poots, who previously founded the Manchester International Festival and served as the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory. But he gave up the chief executive title in January, when the organization said he would solely focus on his role as artistic director.Having opened with great promise in 2019, the Shed saw some of its initial ambitious programming meet with mixed reviews. And it had little time to build momentum or an audience before it was hit, like so many other cultural institutions, by the pandemic: 28 of its 107 full-time workers were laid off in July 2020, and its annual operating budget was reduced to $26.5 million from $46 million.In a telephone interview, Hodges, who will start later this year, said she felt confident about the institution’s prospects. “The Shed opened on the eve of one of the worst crises the art world has ever had to weather,” she said. “There is a huge amount to be proud of in the Shed’s short existence.”The Shed’s founding chairman, Doctoroff, who had been a deputy mayor under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, stepped back from the role because of illness.As mayor, Bloomberg helped jump-start the project by securing a $75 million city grant for the Shed, and he has personally donated $130 million of his own fortune toward the architecturally ambitious $475 million arts center.“Obviously it’s a very difficult moment for all cultural institutions,” Tisch said. “The Shed is no different.”Despite its economic challenges, the Shed has had some noteworthy successes, namely sold-out performances for “Straight Line Crazy,” the recent play about Robert Moses featuring Ralph Fiennes, and an ambitious three-part exhibition by the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno.Poots will report to Hodges, who said she felt “lucky and excited” to work with him and “to get to free Alex to put all his energy and attention on his passion.”Poots said that he looked forward to working with her. “Having her expertise will enable me to entirely focus on our artistic direction,” he said in a statement, “to produce and present ambitious new productions, and to develop new artistic formats.”Hodges described herself as “strategic” and “data driven.” Asked whether she had any targets for building the Shed’s audience, revenue or the endowment, Hodges said: “I’m a quantitative person, so I’m sure that will come.”Hodges, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, was also a senior associate consultant with Bain & Company.At the Boston Ballet, which she has led since 2014, Hodges more than doubled the endowment, to $36 million from $14 million; helped lead the organization’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; and built attendance to 170,000 for the company’s 2022-23 season, its second highest ever.Before going to the Boston Ballet, she served as the executive director of Gallim Dance, a contemporary dance company in Brooklyn, and in various roles at the Museum of Modern Art, including project director leading strategic development, membership and technology initiatives. More

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      Award-Winning ‘Cabaret’ Revival Plans Spring Broadway Bow

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      The production opened in London with Eddie Redmayne in a starring role; the New York cast has not yet been announced but he is expected to join it.Willkommen, bienvenue, Broadway!“Cabaret,” the ever-popular (and portentous) musical set in a Berlin nightclub on the eve of the Nazis’ rise to power, will return to Broadway in the spring in a new production that has already won raves in London.The producing team on Tuesday morning announced a plan to transfer the show to Broadway, and said it would open at the August Wilson Theater, where a revival of “Funny Girl” is scheduled to close Sept. 3.The “Cabaret” producers did not announce any other details, but it is widely expected that Eddie Redmayne, the film star who played the nightclub’s Master of Ceremonies when this revival opened in London, will reprise the role on Broadway. The show’s other big role, Sally Bowles, the nightclub’s star singer, was initially played in London by Jessie Buckley; that role has not yet been cast in New York.“Cabaret,” with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and a book by Joe Masteroff, originally opened on Broadway in 1966, and that production, directed by Hal Prince and starring Joel Grey, won eight Tony Awards, including for best musical, and ran for three years. Grey went on to star in a 1972 film adaptation that won eight Academy Awards, including one for Grey and one for his co-star, Liza Minnelli.The musical was revived on Broadway in 1987, again with Prince directing and Grey as the Emcee. Then in 1998, a new production directed by Sam Mendes and starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson, came to Broadway via the Roundabout Theater Company; that production closed in 2004 and then returned in 2014 for another year, opening with Michelle Williams opposite Cumming.This latest revival, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, opened in London in 2021, and won seven Olivier Awards, including one for best musical revival. Its run is continuing. The critic Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, called the production “nerve-shredding,” and said, “Frecknall pulls us into a hedonistic milieu, only to send us out nearly three hours later reminded of life’s horrors.”The lead producers are Ambassador Theater Group, a British company that owns and operates theaters around Europe and the United States and has become increasingly active in producing on Broadway, and Underbelly, a British company closely associated with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.“Cabaret” will join multiple shows on Broadway this season that deal with antisemitism, among them “Just for Us,” a one-man show from the comedian Alex Edelman, which is now running, as well as “Harmony,” a musical by Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman that is opening in the fall and “Prayer for the French Republic,” a play by Joshua Harmon, which is to open in the winter. Last season’s Tony-winning best play, “Leopoldstadt,” which closed earlier this month, and the winner of the Tony for best musical revival, “Parade,” which runs until Aug. 6, are also about antisemitism. More

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      Jack Goldstein, a Savior of Broadway Theaters, Dies at 74

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      He helped secure landmark status for more than two dozen theaters in the 1980s, then initiated the design competition that led to a new TKTS booth.Jack Goldstein, a preservationist who in the 1980s reacted to the razing of several venerable Broadway theaters under a Times Square redevelopment plan by helping to organize a successful campaign to give landmark status to more than two dozen other theaters, died on June 16 in Cold Spring, N.Y., in Putnam County. He was 74.The cause was a heart attack, said Tom Miller, his executor.Over 30 years, Mr. Goldstein established himself as an effective behind-the-scenes player on Broadway.He was the executive director of the nonprofit Save the Theaters, which was formed to prevent the future destruction of playhouses. He was an executive at Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union, and with the Theater Development Fund, where he initiated the design competition that led to the creation of a new TKTS discount ticket booth in Duffy Square, topped with a dramatic cascade of 27 ruby-red structural glass steps that rises above West 47th Street.“Jack had a great artistic eye and a deep commitment to good government,” Gretchen Dykstra, the former president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, said in a phone interview.Mr. Goldstein arrived in Manhattan in the spring of 1982, during a difficult financial period for Broadway andaround the time of the wrenching demolition of the Helen Hayes and Morosco Theaters — the most distinctive of the five theaters between West 45th and 46th Streets on Broadway that were leveled to make way for the towering New York Marriott Marquis Hotel.The sites of the Hayes and Morosco Theaters had become the center of protests by actors, playwrights and others until the wrecking balls began swinging that March.The actor Jason Robards speaking at a rally in 1982 in an unsuccessful effort to preserve the Morosco Theater. Others on the platform included the actor Christopher Reeve, second from left. Mr. Goldstein joined the Broadway preservation effort that year. Marilyn K. Yee/The New York TimesMr. Goldstein told a conference at the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan in 2014, “The destruction in the center of Broadway of beloved, important and, from the actors’ point of view, irreplaceable instruments of their art form and communication, was an affront.”Mr. Goldstein, who had a background in historic preservation, was initially a volunteer with the Committee to Save the Theaters, which had been formed by Actors’ Equity. He soon shifted to join and then run its spinoff organization, Save the Theaters.“Since it was clear that the city no longer recognized the value of the Broadway theaters,” he told Metropolis, an architecture and design magazine, in 2004, “No. 1 on the agenda was to bring to bear whatever legal disincentives to demolition were available and apply them to the historic theaters.”For six years, Mr. Goldstein and other preservationists focused on getting protection for theaters from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.Part of the process was examining theaters’ interiors and exteriors to determine which might be designated landmarks. He brought actors to the commission’s hearings to impart their knowledge of the theaters. And he collaborated on a report with an architect, Hugh Hardy, that stressed the full geometry of the theaters — their shape, layout and acoustical properties — rather than just their decorative detail, as standards for landmark designation.Speaking to the Skyscraper conference, Mr. Goldstein cited, for example, the “spatial relationships and building techniques behind the walls” that allowed actors to speak without a microphone, or in a whisper, and be heard by 600 to 1,400 theatergoers.Workmen cutting away steel from the roof of the Helen Hayes Theater in 1982.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“He was well spoken and enormously energetic,” Kent Barwick, a former chairman of the landmarks commission, said in an interview. “He was doing what needed to be done at the time. Was he always right in his judgment? No. Was he always fair? No. Was he dramatic? Of course — he was coming out of Actors’ Equity.”In 1987, the commission designated 28 theaters as landmarks — some for their exteriors, some for their interiors, some for both. (The sale of the Mark Hellinger Theater to a church in 1991 brought the group to 27.) The city’s Board of Estimate, a powerful governing body at the time, approved the designations in March 1988.Theater owners objected to the landmarking “as a confiscation of the value of the building because it limited its use to live theater,” Rocco Landesman, a former president of Jujamcyn Theaters, said by phone. He said of the buildings: “You couldn’t tear them down, and it was difficult to build above them if you didn’t have the rights. Value was taken without compensation.”The owners sued to overturn the landmarking of 22 of the theaters, but in 1992 the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case after the State Supreme Court and the Appellate Division had upheld the designations.Mr. Goldstein in 1997. Looking back with satisfaction in 2014, he said he thought he had made an impact on Broadway. “I feel, ‘job done,’” he said.TDFJack Lewis Goldstein was born on March 5, 1949, in Jersey City, N.J. His father, Joseph, was an Army officer and a physician whose work took him and his family to Maryland, Germany and other postings. His mother, Thelma (Ginsberg) Goldstein, was a homemaker, potter and political activist. The couple eventually divorced.Jack’s maternal grandmother took him to his first Broadway show, Lionel Bart’s musical “Oliver!,” which opened at the Imperial Theater in 1963.“‘Oliver!’ was the first time I experienced that suspension of disbelief,” Mr. Goldstein told Crain’s New York Business in 1998. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Goldstein graduated from George Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1972. He worked in Manhattan at the National Design Center, which exhibited home furnishings, before moving to Washington, where he was an assistant to the director of programs at the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a small federal agency that would play a role in persuading him to go to Broadway.While he was in Washington, the Interior Department, responding to a petition from preservationists, determined that the Morosco was eligible to be included on the National Register of Historic Places, and that if the developer of the Marriott Marquis wanted to tear it down, the company would need a waiver from the advisory council. Mr. Goldstein contended in an affidavit that Lyn Nofziger, an aide to President Ronald Reagan, had told the council to grant the waiver or lose its government funding — an assertion Mr. Nofziger denied.Frustrated, Mr. Goldstein soon left Washington to join the Broadway preservationists, whose efforts to save the Morosco were by then doomed to fail.After leaving Save the Theaters in 1988, Mr. Goldstein was a special assistant for government affairs to Ron Silver, the actor and president of Actors’ Equity, and the project director of the Broadway Initiatives Working Group, which was formed to evaluate Broadway’s future. He was the executive director of the nonprofit Theater Development Fund, which makes theater more affordable and accessible, from 1998 to 2001.When he announced the competition to design a new TKTS booth in 1999, Mr. Goldstein recognized how beloved and important the slapdash, pipe-and-canvas structure had become to theatergoers over 26 years. But, as he told The New York Times, “time and weather have taken their toll.”The new TKTS booth was not completed until 2008, a year before Mr. Goldstein returned to Actors’ Equity as its national director of governance policy and support.In 2012, he became an antiques dealer in Cold Spring. He previously owned a seasonal antiques store in Rehoboth, Del.He is survived by a brother, Leonard.Mr. Goldstein acknowledged that he had made an impact on Broadway.“I think I’ve made a contribution when I walk through Times Square and see theaters filled — many would have been swept away,” he told The Highlands Current of Cold Spring in 2014. “I feel, ‘job done.’” More

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      Review: In ‘Malvolio,’ Hope (and a Title Role) for a Damaged Heart

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      The Classical Theater of Harlem follows up last year’s winning “Twelfth Night” with a sequel that feels like a sweet summer frolic.Poor old Malvolio. Amid the comic romance of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” he is the imperious steward who gets cruelly pranked for sport, duped by a band of smart alecks who forge a love letter seemingly addressed to him.Believing that the missive is from the countess he adores, and thinking he is following her wishes, he dresses garishly in yellow stockings with cross-garters and behaves as if he’s come unhinged. Then he is locked away in darkness, where his tormentors continue to mess with his mind.It’s a rancid kind of meanness, but the playwright Betty Shamieh has turned it into a hero’s origin story with her clever, winking new play “Malvolio.” And the Classical Theater of Harlem, whose “Twelfth Night” last July was an effervescent delight, has fashioned this sequel into a sweet summer frolic, with the sympathetic Allen Gilmore reprising what is now the title role.Twenty years after the end of “Twelfth Night,” Malvolio is long gone from the island of Illyria. A respected military general in a stubborn war, he is the leader of the Legion of the Cross-Gartered. (Fabulous name, that; fun uniforms, too, by Celeste Jennings.) But his past mistreatment festers in him.“My humiliation made me reckless,” he says. “Reckless men make great soldiers.”The fleet-footed production, featuring a very funny John-Andrew Morrison, center, as a bored king, is now at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park.Richard TermineIn Ian Belknap and Ty Jones’s fleet-footed production at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park, most of the old gang from “Twelfth Night” is still back on Illyria, living not so happily ever after. The marriage of Viola (Perri Gaffney) and Orsino (René Thornton Jr.) totters on despite his infidelity — and his preference for seeing her disguised as a boy, as she was when he fell in love with her.It’s Volina (Kineta Kunutu), their strong-minded daughter, who takes up the mantle of romance and adventure. Betrothed against her wishes to Prince Furtado (J.D. Mollison) — a misogynistic nitwit and sole heir to the uber-bored King Chadlio (John-Andrew Morrison, so funny that you will root for the king to survive various attempts on his life) — Volina slips out of Illyria and meets Malvolio by chance. She falls instantly, persuasively in love with him.Critical of war, skeptical of marriage and astute about the warping effect of defining oneself through trauma, “Malvolio” regards its characters from a distinctly female point of view. Paying close attention to the women, Shamieh has fun with callbacks to assorted Shakespeare plays; Volina’s nurse (Marjorie Johnson) was once Juliet’s.With a color palette that pops, and choreography (by Dell Howlett) that does, too, this is a visually and aurally enticing production. (The set is by Christopher and Justin Swader, lighting by Alan C. Edwards, video by Zavier Augustus Lee Taylor and music by Frederick Kennedy.) If the characters’ tangled relationships are a bit complex for the uninitiated, that’s also true in “Twelfth Night.” The big picture here is perfectly clear.Does Malvolio have enough hope in his damaged heart to risk loving Volina back? Will she even be free to choose him if he does? Well, it is a comedy — with last-minute reveals that are entirely in the spirit of Shakespeare, and utterly charming.It’s free, by the way. Treat yourself.MalvolioThrough July 29 at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park, Manhattan; cthnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More