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      What to Know About Kevin Spacey’s UK Sexual Offenses Trial

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      The actor will appear in a London courtroom on Wednesday to face a four-week trial over allegations of sexual assault.The Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey is scheduled to go on trial in London on Wednesday, facing multiple allegations of sexual assault.Since the #MeToo movement came to prominence six years ago, a number of high-profile men have been accused of misconduct, yet Mr. Spacey’s case is one of only a few to reach a British courtroom.The actor, 63, has already pleaded not guilty to all charges. This month, in an interview with Zeit Magazin, a German magazine, he said he expected to be found innocent, after which he would resume acting.The trial at Southwark Crown Court is scheduled to last four weeks. During that time, the courthouse is likely to be filled with reporters and celebrity watchers following the case.Here’s what you need to know.Why is Kevin Spacey on trial in Britain?Mr. Spacey is accused of sexually assaulting four men in England between 2001 and 2013. For much of that period, Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater, one of London’s most acclaimed playhouses.Last June, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service charged Mr. Spacey with four counts of sexual assault against three men, as well as another of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without their consent.A few months later, in November, the prosecutors authorized seven further charges against Mr. Spacey related to another complainant. Those included three counts of sexual assault, three of indecent assault and one count of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent.Both sets of charges will be considered in this month’s trial.How will the trial work?Anna Bradshaw, a British criminal lawyer, said in a telephone interview that the case will look different from an American trial. In Britain, legal professionals called barristers argue cases in court while wearing the traditional garb of white wigs and black gowns.The trial will not be televised, Ms. Bradshaw added, because cameras are rarely allowed in British courts. (Instead, specialist artists sketch the scene.)The complainants will also not be publicly identified, Ms. Bradshaw said, adding that this rule was in place to protect accusers’ privacy and encourage victims of sexual assault to report incidents to the police. They will likely give evidence, and be cross-examined, “via a video-link, or, in court, possibly from behind a screen or curtain,” Ms. Bradshaw said.During the four-week trial, the prosecutors will first outline their case to the 12-person jury, then Mr. Spacey’s team will make its defense.What penalty does Mr. Spacey potentially face?One of the offenses carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Others also come with potential jail terms. Under British law, judges have some flexibility to alter sentences.If there is a guilty verdict, the judge would normally hold a separate hearing to announce the sentence at a later date, Ms. Bradshaw added.What has Mr. Spacey said about the accusations?In two hearings over the past year, Mr. Spacey pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. Last June, Patrick Gibbs, Mr. Spacey’s legal representative, told a courtroom that the actor was determined to establish his innocence.In Britain, where it is an offense to publish information that may bias a jury, defendants like Mr. Spacey face some restrictions in using the news media to make their case before a trial.To avoid breaking British law, Mr. Spacey did not discuss the case in the Zeit Magazin article, apart from stressing his innocence. But he said he knew of directors who wanted to work with him once the trial ended. “I know that there are people right now who are ready to hire me the moment I am cleared of these charges,” he said. More

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      Review: In ‘The Gospel According to Heather,’ the Messiah Has Homeroom

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      A lonely high school student discovers she may be a divine messenger in Paul Gordon’s half-baked new Off Broadway musical.“Do you like Kierkegaard?” As flirtatious chit-chat goes, this one sets 17-year-old Heather (Brittany Nicole Williams) apart. You can also see why the jock she’s asking (Carlos Alcala) just walks away. Sadly, this is par for the course for Heather, a pescatarian brainiac who is ostracized by classmates at her Ohio high school for being a “freak,” and quietly stifled at home by a loving but clueless widowed mother (Lauren Elder).How our heroine suddenly gains popularity is at the heart of “The Gospel According to Heather,” a musical by Paul Gordon (“Jane Eyre,” the Off Broadway success “Daddy Long Legs”) that recently opened at Theater 555 in an Amas Musical Theater production directed and choreographed by Rachel Klein (“Red Roses, Green Gold”).The title gives an inkling as to what suddenly improves Heather’s standing: She is revealed as a Messenger, with the disciples and the powers that go with the role. As it turns out, understanding 19th-century Danish philosophers is not the only miracle Heather is capable of. She can also heal the severely injured and bring the occasional hamster back to life. The presence in the cast of Katey Sagal (“The Conners,” “Sons of Anarchy”), the veteran TV actress, almost qualifies as another of those unaccountable surprises.Sagal plays Agatha, a sarcastic woman who uses a wheelchair and whom Heather likes to visit at a senior center. Sagal makes the most of a handful of lines, and then becomes the center of a major 11th-hour twist.Heather’s elevated status leads to new headaches, and she can’t decide if she wants to be an anonymous normie or if the change might have rewarding aspects — the show uneasily tries to navigate satire (of conservative fearmongers), whimsy (those crazy teens!) and spirituality (there is more to the show than a Messenger).What is certain is that Heather is attracting attention from friends and foes alike. The populist podcast host Booker (Jeremy Kushnier) definitely belongs to the foes camp, but it’s unclear at first where the strapping Zach (Carson Stewart) lands.It was probably not a great idea for Gordon to name his main character in a way that triggers memories of the cult movie “Heathers” and its extremely fun musical adaptation from 2014 — especially since like this show, they center on a bright, alienated Ohio girl who falls for a mysterious boy who tends to enter her bedroom through the window. This is not a comparison this show should encourage.The book lacks coherence, but Gordon’s score is frustrating for a different reason: It actually has potential. The production kicks off brightly with “My Name Is Heather Krebs,” a jaunty tune with a couple of solid melodic hooks that suggests there might be more nuggets to come; alas, too many of the numbers sound tacked on or unfinished. If only a teenage Midwestern messiah could come to the rescue.The Gospel According to HeatherThrough July 16 at Theater 555, Manhattan; amasmusical.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Review: An All-Female ‘Richard III’ Makes for an Evening of Discontent

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      The New York Classical Theater adaptation, playing in New York’s city parks, feints toward novelty but offers little in the way of originality.The idea of an “all-female, gender-fluid, disability forward” staging of “Richard III” — as New York Classical Theater describes its new production of Shakespeare’s tragedy about the monstrously degenerate Plantagenet king — tantalizes. Will the protagonist, who loves to “descant on mine own deformity,” make us see anew the premium that society places on women’s appearances? Will the Duke of Gloucester be re-envisioned as a bloody-minded assassin like the bloody-minded Villanelle of “Killing Eve?” Will it force us to reckon with discrimination against the disabled in the royal court? As realized in this risk-shy adaptation directed by Stephen Burdman, the answer is none of the above.This “Richard III,” which plays in New York parks through July 9, feints toward novelty while offering little in the way of originality — the actors all inhabit the genders of their characters as originally conceived. The title role is played by Delaney Feener, a strong actor with a “limb difference,” as the press material takes care to note. But with her shortened right arm hidden beneath a cloak, Feener’s Richard does not immediately register as a “boar,” “bottled spider,” “foul-bunched toad” or any of the bestial lumps to which he is repeatedly compared by other characters. That can be a valid choice if explored thoughtfully, but even after Richard reveals that shortened arm to us and says he is “determined to prove a villain,” we gain little insight into his psychology; it’s unclear if this line is a boasting assertion of will or a victim’s lament.During the ambulatory adaptation, audience members pick up their own blankets or collapsible chairs and walk to different sections of the parks.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesWhile certain scenes are understandably curtailed or excised — a requirement in compressed versions even longer than this one’s two hours — the removal of Queen Margaret from a production starring women and gender-nonconforming actors is less forgivable. Though often seen as a peripheral character, she serves as a linchpin in the Wars of the Roses and appears in all of Shakespeare’s first series of history plays, her curses having the force of prophecy. Along with Queen Elizabeth (a regal Kristen Calgaro) and the Duchess of York (Pamela Sabaugh), Margaret traditionally forms a trinity of grieving women that usefully recalls the three Fates or Furies.This ambulatory adaptation, which requires audience members to pick up their own blankets or collapsible chairs and walk to different sections of the parks, also does not make for the most accessible production. A change of scenery sometimes proves dramatically fortuitous, as when a tree provides handy cover for one of many beheadings, but more often disrupts the momentum of proceedings. When Richard is finally unhorsed from power and swallowed into the night, we should feel relieved that his reign of terror has ended. But we don’t: The problem with this “Richard III” is that its villain is not a “boar” but a bore.Richard IIIThrough July 9 at various New York City parks; nyclassical.org. Running time: 2 hours.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      ‘Just for Us’ Review: A Jew and 16 ‘Nerf Nazis’ Meet Cute

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      Is it a stand-up act or a morality play? Either way, Alex Edelman’s look at race, religion and the limits of empathy is at home on Broadway.It may be too much to ask a human hummingbird like Alex Edelman to try to stick to the subject. In “Just for Us,” his three-jokes-per-minute one-man show, he zooms from punchline to punchline almost as fast as he caroms around the stage of the Hudson Theater. (At 34, he’s part of what he calls the overmedicated ADHD generation.) If you haven’t read about his act coming to Broadway, you might assume from his introduction — in which he describes his usual style as “benign silliness” and says this “isn’t Ibsen” — that you are in for a cheerful evening of laughs.And even though he’s telling a story about white supremacy, you are.That’s the glory and also the slight hitch of “Just for Us,” which opened on Monday after runs in London, Edinburgh, Washington and Off Broadway. No, it’s not Ibsen, a dramatist rarely noted for zingy one-liners. But it’s not silliness either. Despite its rabbi-on-Ritalin aesthetic, and its desperation to be liked at all costs, the show is so thoughtful and high-minded it comes with a mission statement. Edelman wants to open a conversation about the place of Jews on the “spectrum of whiteness,” he recently told my colleague Jason Zinoman, “without having a conversation about victimhood.”He’s well placed to draw the distinction. Growing up a “proudly and emphatically” Orthodox Jew in “this really racist part of Boston called Boston,” he clocked the wariness between races but also within them. And though he admits to experiencing “quite a bit of white privilege,” he was so alienated from mainstream culture that he didn’t know what Christmas was until his mother observed it one year when a gentile friend was in mourning.Oy, the tsouris it caused at his yeshiva!Hilarious as the ensuing story is, you have the feeling that “Just for Us” might have been little more than a millennial update on Jackie Mason-style Jewish humor were it not for that millennial accelerant, social media. “An avalanche of antisemitism” on Twitter, in response to some comments he’d posted, supercharged Edelman’s thinking about identity-based hatred and led him, one evening in 2017, to infiltrate a white supremacist get-together in Queens.“A Jew walks into a bar,” the joke might start, though it wasn’t a bar, as Edelman had expected, but a private apartment. There he took a chair among 16 strangers with predictably pan-bigoted opinions. By marrying Prince Harry, Meghan Markle would be “degrading” one of Europe’s oldest families. Diversity initiatives constitute “a plan to slowly genocide white people.” Jews, the root of the weed of that genocide, “are sneaky and everywhere.”The comedian is making his Broadway debut with “Just for Us.” The set at the Hudson Theater, by David Korins, consists of little more than a miniature proscenium to rescale expectations, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat we rarely feel the horror or even the unpleasantness of Edelman’s encounter is partly deliberate; he portions his spinach with plenty of candied yams. Defanging the “sneaky and everywhere” comment, he admits that he was in no position, sitting there incognito, to disprove the point. Then he wheels sharply into a seemingly unrelated 10-minute story about vaccine denialists. Likewise, the racist disparagement of Meghan Markle is immediately interrupted by a bit about Harry snorting cocaine through a rolled-up “picture of his grandmother.”The indirection is not purposeless; Edelman is building the service roads to his main argument. But that argument surfaces far less than the jokes do, taking up only about 35 minutes of the 85-minute show — a proportion that betrays its origins in stand-up. The set, by David Korins, betrays those origins too, consisting of little more than a miniature proscenium to rescale expectations and a black stool straight from your local Komedy Korner.The real giveaway, though, is the compulsive ingratiation. Though it produces much laughter, including too many giggles from the comic himself, the doggy overeagerness could stand to be toned down, and probably would have been if Edelman’s longtime director, Adam Brace, had been able to complete his work on the production. (He died in March, at 43, after a stroke.) Alex Timbers, credited as the creative consultant, helped guide the show to Broadway, handsomely.And yet, the ingratiation, however distracting, is also strategic. The show wouldn’t work without its contrast between storytelling and joke plugging. By going “dumb and small” about such a serious subject — Edelman describes the arrangement of chairs at the meeting as an “antisemicircle” — he lays the groundwork for a denouement in which he turns the critique on himself as he turns to the bigger issues at hand.For as he promised, “Just for Us” is not about Jewish victimhood, or anyone’s victimhood, except perhaps that of the aggrieved supremacists, who are too puny and whiny to constitute a real threat. He calls them Nerf Nazis. Nor is “Just for Us” (which is how the supremacists ultimately describe their territory) really about the spectrum of whiteness. What’s at stake instead is the idea of empathy, a central value in Edelman’s vision of Judaism. How far does it extend? Is it unconditional? Do even the hateful deserve it? And, especially relevant to Edelman in this case: Is it vitiated by bad motives?Because, check it out, there’s a cute woman at the meeting who seems to be into him. Could he be the guy who “fixes” her? Who fixes the whole group? They too have been ingratiated: “I came as an observer,” he says. “I might leave as, like, the youth outreach officer.”This is moral vanity, Edelman admits: a professional charmer’s eagerness to flatter other people’s self-regard as a way of buttressing his own. That’s what makes “Just for Us” more than a Catskills club act washed ashore on Broadway like Mason’s. For all the dumb jokes (but yes, I laughed at every one) it winds up as a critique of both dumbness and jokes.If that’s a highly indirect route to insight, it’s a highly effective one too, taking us through the process by which a Jew, or anyone, may learn once again that the cost of being liked at all costs is too high.Just for UsThrough Aug. 19 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; justforusshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      Brooklyn Academy of Music Lays Off 13 Percent of Its Staff

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      The organization, which made Brooklyn a destination for pathbreaking performances, is reducing programming next season as it seeks to rebound from the pandemic.The Brooklyn Academy of Music, one of the most important cultural organizations in New York, has laid off 13 percent of its staff members and reduced its programming as it seeks to plug a “sizable structural deficit” during a challenging time for the arts, officials confirmed on Monday.BAM moved last week to eliminate 26 positions, according to a letter sent to staff members by the organization’s president, Gina Duncan.In the letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times, Ms. Duncan said that the changes were necessary in part to help BAM to “weather the downturn in charitable giving for the arts, and address an outdated business model that heavily relies on a shrinking donor base.” She said that the organization faced a “sizable structural deficit” each year.“This is us putting on our oxygen mask so that we can continue to fulfill our promise to be a home for adventurous artists, audiences, and ideas,” she wrote in the email.Ms. Duncan noted that the academy had already pared down its Next Wave Festival scheduled for this fall and added that programming for next season as a whole would be reduced. (The festival, often a highlight of the city’s cultural year, will feature seven programs this year, down from 13 last year.)“These difficult decisions were made after a rigorous organizational review process,” Ms. Duncan wrote in the memo.“We cannot spend our way out of a deficit, and we cannot present programming beyond what we can afford,” she added.The year before the pandemic, in April 2019, BAM obtained a $2.8 million loan from Bank of America, according to its financial papers. The papers said that the balance, more than $2.4 million, would come due next June.Megan Grann, a union representative of Local 2110, which represents technical, office and professional workers, said that 17 of the people who lost jobs had been in the union. She said that at least three had been offered “possible new positions” within the arts institution.“We are really just not happy with this development, to say the least,” she said. “Our primary goal right now is to try to mitigate the damage as much as possible.”The layoffs come as BAM, which began presenting work in 1861, finds itself having to navigate the post-pandemic challenges that many arts organizations around the country are facing. Earlier this month the Center Theater Group, a flagship of the Los Angeles theater world, laid off 10 percent of its work force and halted productions at one of its three stages, the Mark Taper Forum.But BAM is facing those difficulties while also experiencing significant leadership turnover after many years of relative stability.David Binder, the institution’s artistic director, is expected to step down next month after roughly four years at the helm. His two predecessors, Joseph V. Melillo and Harvey Lichtenstein, each spent more than three decades at the institution.On the executive side, Ms. Duncan took over as president in 2022, after the departure of Katy Clark, who held the job for five years (and was permitted to keep an apartment that BAM helped her purchase). Clark had succeeded Karen Brooks Hopkins, who spent 36 years at the institution, including 16 as president.Nora Ann Wallace took over as chair of BAM’s board in 2020, after the death of its previous board chair, Adam Max.Like other arts organizations, BAM has also had to contend with headwinds generated by the pandemic, which shuttered live performance for months. While many organizations survived the shutdown with the help of federal aid, once they reopened many found that it had become more difficult to attract audiences and donors alike.When Mr. Binder announced this year that he was leaving, the institution had 222 full-time staff positions, down from 256 before the pandemic. Most recently, the number of such positions had dwindled to around 200, and the latest round of cuts are expected to move the number below that threshold. More

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      ‘Invisible’ Review: Brown and British

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      As part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, Nikhil Parmar’s solo play is a drama-tinged satire that morphs into a grisly revenge parable.In the world of Nikhil Parmar’s funny, fantastical solo play “Invisible,” the mind-set of Britain has undergone a significant shift. One of the West’s favorite boogeymen — the Islamic fundamentalist — has vanished from the public imagination. Chinese terrorists are the designated bad guys now.For brown British actors like Zayan Prakash (Parmar), that is both good news and bad. On the one hand, strangers no longer look at him and assume that he’s a threat. On the other, that means the Muslim terrorist roles that were once so prolific have disappeared. So what’s left for him to play? Just “doctors, cabdrivers and corner shop owners.” He’s lucky if those characters get names.“Invisible,” at 59E59 Theaters as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, is a drama-tinged satire that morphs into a grisly revenge parable, before shape-shifting into something close to reality. But first this play, directed by Georgia Green for London’s Bush Theater, is a sharp and lively comedy in which the charismatic Zayan recalls answering his door to find his ex-girlfriend, Ella, the mother of his toddler daughter, standing there.“Hello. Why do you look weird?” Ella asks, and Zayan — who’s looking weird because he’s just heard on the news about the demise of “brown terrorism” — pivots to the audience with a cliché-killing aside that won my heart: “I was going to do her bit in a really high-pitched voice but, (a), it sounded pretty offensive and, (b), she actually has a properly deep voice, so.”Ella has come to tell Zayan that she has a live-in boyfriend, Terrence, an old classmate of theirs from drama school whose career is flourishing; he’s Korean and playing a terrorist in a prestige drama, now that “East Asian fundamentalism” is supposedly a menace. Zayan can’t stand Terrence, but their ensuing rivalry makes for laughs, even as it drives home a point about jostling for position inside a white-supremacist system.The magnetic Parmar slips in and out of Zayan and the crowd of characters around him, each distinct. Though the play’s narrative becomes somewhat tangled and unruly, there is method in its muchness.What torments Zayan is a creeping sense of his own invisibility: Now that he isn’t perceived as a terrorist, he fails to register at all. Yet over the show’s 60-minute running time, we see Zayan for the multitude that he is: underemployed actor, reluctant cater waiter, incompetent weed dealer, doting father, inattentive son. He is also a grieving brother haunted by the ghost of his dead little sister, the person who looked at him and saw someone central to her story.It is disorienting, and infuriating, to be hampered by a culture’s — and an industry’s — blinkered perception of what a whole group of people is capable of. “Invisible” is a thoughtfully provocative, witheringly knowing response to that noxiousness.InvisibleThrough July 2 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      Philip Schuyler Is Knocked Off His Pedestal in Albany

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      A statue of the Revolutionary War general, newly prominent thanks to the musical “Hamilton,” has been removed from its place outside Albany City Hall because he enslaved people.There was a time when one probably had to be a committed Revolutionary War buff or an aficionado of early Albany aristocracy to know the name Philip J. Schuyler.But that was before “Hamilton.”Indeed, as any devotee of the blockbuster musical can tell you, the Schuylers were Colonial-era movers and shakers, and the central figures in the show’s fraught love triangle between Hamilton and two of the Schuyler sisters.And while Philip Schuyler never speaks during the show, he is a presence even before he becomes Hamilton’s father-in-law: “Take Philip Schuyler, the man is loaded,” Aaron Burr intones, and Schuyler is mentioned frequently by his daughters, Angelica, Eliza and Peggy.In reality, Schuyler was much more prominent than a bit part: the patriarch of a wealthy Albany family — a patroon, as Dutch-era landowners were known — he served as a New York lawmaker, a United States senator, and a major general in the war with the British, and was a close friend of George Washington.Those accomplishments had resulted in a seven-foot-tall statue of Schuyler being placed, nearly a century ago, on a pedestal in front of Albany’s grandly Romanesque City Hall, just across from the State Capitol. In recent years it sometimes drew “Hamilton” fans to snap selfies.The Schuyler statue — in bronze, by J. Massey Rhind, a Scottish-born sculptor — had stood outside City Hall since 1925. iStock/Getty ImagesBut Schuyler also enslaved people, by some accounts among the most in the Albany area at the time. That fact has led to a reconsideration of his legacy, and ultimately to his statue’s removal — a slow-motion retreat on a flatbed trailer — after years of delays and amid a backlash by some who argue that such actions do little to remedy past sins and may even miss an opportunity for education.The removal is part of a wider reckoning with the racist actions of historical figures, a movement that gained steam during the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, who died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a white police officer in Minneapolis. That re-evaluation has included the removal or dismantling of scores of monuments devoted to Confederate figures, and has even touched on Hamilton himself, who some scholars say is likely to have enslaved people despite his reputation as an abolitionist.In Schuyler’s case, the statue’s detachment — from a pedestal hiding a 1920s time capsule, complete with a letter from a Schuyler descendant — was authorized by Albany’s mayor, Kathy Sheehan, via executive order in June 2020.In an interview, Ms. Sheehan said that her decision had come, in part, after concerns were raised by Black members of her staff. “You couldn’t get into City Hall without walking past the statue,” said Sheehan, a Democrat, who said budget problems and the pandemic had stymied earlier efforts to move the statue.Mayor Kathy Sheehan of Albany held a news conference after a time capsule was discovered in the base of the statue.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesMs. Sheehan noted that Schuyler’s slaveholding was well-known. Nearly two decades ago, the remains of enslaved people were discovered buried on property once owned by the Schuyler family.Alice Green, the executive director of the Center for Law and Justice, a civil rights organization in Albany, said that the statue’s removal was “a relief.”“It didn’t seem right that we should have a statue on public property, glorifying and paying tribute to someone who had done what he did to African American people,” said Dr. Green, adding that her group had worked for years to have Schuyler sent packing, and that the publicity around “Hamilton” may have given the effort momentum.“Some people, I think, became more angry after learning more about who Schuyler was,” Dr. Green said. “And they only were able to do that because people started talking about Schuyler as a result of ‘Hamilton.’”The removal was met with opposition from some prominent local lawmakers: Representative Elise Stefanik, the third-highest ranking Republican in the House majority, who represents a district in Northern New York, accused Ms. Sheehan of trying to “erase history” with the statue’s removal.Jeff Perlee, a Republican member of the Albany County Legislature, echoed that.“I just think it reflects poorly on Albany, and its awareness of its own history,” said Mr. Perlee, adding that — unlike Confederate figures — Schuyler was “someone who sacrificed everything he had to create this country.”“Can you imagine Boston turning its back on Sam Adams or Virginia denying Thomas Jefferson?” Mr. Perlee continued. “The leaders in those places, I think, are sophisticated enough to understand the historical context and the whole measure of attributes and negative features of historical figures. And unfortunately, the leaders in Albany don’t.”Workers with the time capsule, and its contents, found in the base of the statue.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesThere is no question that Schuyler — and Hamilton — had a major presence in Albany. Hamilton, who famously died in a duel with Burr, his political rival, in 1804, was married to Eliza Schuyler at the family’s mansion on Albany’s south side in 1780, where Hamilton also worked on the U.S. Constitution, according to “Oh Albany!,” a history of the city by William Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Both Hamilton and Burr also had law practices in the capital, not far from City Hall.The Schuyler Mansion, overlooking the Hudson River, was a seat of power in old Albany, an impressive estate with formal gardens and a working farm manned by dozens of enslaved people and other servants, according to the state’s parks department. Mr. Kennedy said that Schuyler — who married Catherine Van Rensselaer, from another prominent Dutch family — was host to some of America’s most famous figures at its most formative moments.“He was constantly talking with people like Benjamin Franklin when they were planning the Declaration of Independence,” said Kennedy, who is 95 and the éminence grise of Albany’s literary scene. “And his house was a place of common traffic with the leadership of this nation.”The Schuyler statue — in bronze, by J. Massey Rhind, a Scottish-born sculptor — was a gift of George C. Hawley, a local beer baron, and treated as front-page news in the Knickerbocker Press, which recounted a parade and thousands of onlookers at its unveiling, including military units and Boy Scouts, in June 1925.“The attention of millions of persons from all parts of the world will be arrested by General Schuyler’s figure, eloquent reminder of duties of manhood and obligations of citizenship,” the Press quoted Charles H. Johnson, the keynote speaker, as saying.Mr. Johnson’s prediction may have been hyperbolic, but the smash success of “Hamilton” — which opened at the Public Theater in 2015 and transferred to Broadway — has had a spillover effect to related Albany attractions. Attendance at the Schuyler mansion — now a state historic site — doubled between 2015 to 2019, as officials there and others began offering special Alexander Hamilton tours at the mansion and around Albany.The Schuyler sisters have also had their close-up, with specialized tours at the mansion, and a 2019 exhibition at the Albany Institute of History and Art.The Schuyler sisters: Phillipa Soo as Eliza, Renee Elise Goldsberry as Angelica and Jasmine Cephas Jones as Peggy in “Hamilton” on Broadway in 2015.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the same time, however, historians here do not try to whitewash Schuyler’s personal connection with slaveholding, including at the mansion, said Heidi L. Hill, the site’s manager. The mansion’s exhibits highlight the stories of an enslaved butler and valet of Philip Schuyler, as well the story of an enslaved woman who fled the mansion. The mansion also was the publisher of a 2020 paper linking Hamilton to slavery.Schuyler died in 1804, just months after Hamilton was killed in the duel. Schuyler’s fame ebbed, but his name has continued to be affixed to villages, schools and bakeries around the Albany area (though some of those have also decided to change their names).“He’s one of those figures that’s like hugely significant in his own lifetime, but he doesn’t have quite as prominent a role post-Revolution,” said Maeve Kane, an associate professor of history at the University at Albany. “So he has this role during the Revolution and then he kind of fades away.”Dr. Kane added that while the musical hadn’t necessarily changed the perception of Philip Schuyler, it had “acted as a catalyst for these broader conversations about early America.”“And as a historian, I think that’s valuable,” Dr. Kane said.As for the sculpture itself, the bronze was taken to an undisclosed location as the city considers where it put it; a 2022 study, “What to Do With Phil?,” authored by a local youth group — the Young Abolitionist Leadership Institute — considered several options, including moving the statue to a location near the Capitol.In the meantime, Mayor Sheehan says that she hopes that a new city commission — likely to be approved by Albany’s Common Council this summer — will find a good spot where the fullness of Schuyler’s life can be told, saying the removal is “not about scrubbing” the past.“It’s not about cancel culture and not about canceling him, but about moving him to a place where the entire story is contextualized,” she said, adding, “You cannot contextualize the history of anyone on a traffic circle.” More

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      Sheldon Harnick, Musical Theater’s Great Marriage Broker

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      In lyrics of rare humor, elegance and compassion, the man who put words to “Fiddler on the Roof” and “She Loves Me” explored the complex emotional architecture of love.The twilight golden years of the Golden Age of musical theater, which archaeologists date from about 1959 to 1981, produced three great lyricists. One, of course, was Stephen Sondheim, setting words to his own music with a neurotic complexity that defined that time and ours. Another was Fred Ebb, the longtime songwriting partner of John Kander, who if poppier in outlook was a genius at prosody, shooting off syllables (“one day it’s kicks, then it’s kicks in the shins”) that never failed to bruise.Sheldon Harnick, who died on Friday at 99, was the third, though only one of his musicals, “Fiddler on the Roof,” written with the composer Jerry Bock, was widely known outside the world of theater lovers. But within that world, his subtle craft and character insight were universally acknowledged. Sondheim called his lyrics “impeccable.”As models of humor, elegance and compassion, they could stand to be more widely studied and imitated. That they aren’t is partly the result of the strange bifurcation of Harnick’s career into Bock and post-Bock eras. Though Harnick kept writing well for four decades after the team broke up at the height of its powers in 1970, he never again met with the kind of success that greeted the earlier work. And Bock fell almost completely silent.What a loss! And yet what a success it had been. By the time of the split, Harnick had written the lyrics not just for the worldwide hit “Fiddler” (1964) but also for two smaller yet equally admired scores: “Fiorello!” (1959) and “She Loves Me” (1963). Another handful of his shows with Bock (“The Apple Tree,” “The Rothschilds,” “Tenderloin”) are just as pleasurable, if less profound.I use the word “profound” to describe those shows, and Harnick’s best lyrics, not because they offer earth-shattering insights but because they are perfect expressions of ordinary ones. A jaunty waltz like “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” from “Fiddler,” could not, after all, be more conventional in its framing: Two poor young sisters dream of being fixed up with perfect husbands.But notice how the agenda-like structuring of their wish list, along with the click-lock rhymes, captures in a few lines what “perfect” means to several people involved:For Papa, make him a scholarFor Mama, make him rich as a king.For me, well, I wouldn’t hollerIf he were as handsome as anything.By song’s end, though, alerted to the dangers of overreaching, the girls have turned the image inside out:Maybe I’ve learned:Playing with matchesA girl can get burned.What neither the sisters nor the audience yet know, but Harnick suggests, is how broadly the idea applies. While initiating the marriage plot so central to “Fiddler,” the lyric also introduces a warning about a world soon to go up in flames.Once heard, Harnick’s lyrics seem like the last word on their subjects. In part that’s because of their concision — he typically writes short lines and never too many — and in part because they build an almost impenetrably tight argument through structure and sound. The important words all land on the right beat; the grammar is never distorted to squeeze over a melody. With so little space, every syllable does at least double duty.Double duty is a nice way of looking as well at his main theme, marriage. (Harnick was briefly married to Elaine May; he wed Margery Gray, who survives him, in 1965.) Like most musicals, his and Bock’s keep circling the subject, but with a slyer view of the rage and redemption that go into it.That combo is brilliantly expressed in “Fiorello!” — the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical about Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City from 1934 through 1945. In “The Very Next Man,” the mayor’s long-suffering secretary, Marie, after years of frustrated love, vows to marry whoever shows up.Again, an ordinary setup, yet Harnick captures Marie’s compulsive preoccupation in a neat chain of repeated words, a few perfect rhymes (some of them hidden) and a heartbeat of recurring long o’s:I’m through with mopingMoping from all this pointless hopingHoping he’ll notice me and open his heartTime now to break away and make a new start.That stanza is actually a rewrite; apparently, in 1959, the original version (“And if he likes me/Who cares how frequently he strikes me?”) was considered acceptable and got a big laugh.There’s some justice in the rewrite being better crafted than the original; Harnick’s dramatic sweet spot was letting characters tie themselves in knots to convince themselves of ideas they know are not right. Also a Harnick sweet spot: forcefully untying the knots later. So even though Marie insists at the end of “The Very Next Man” that she’s finished with romance forever —New York papers, take note!Here’s a statement that you can quote:Waiting for ships that never come inA girl is likely to miss the boat.— she of course does marry La Guardia in the end.Harnick’s gift for expressing simply the complexity of emotional architecture finds perhaps its greatest expression in “She Loves Me,” a show essentially built on romantic delusion. In the song “I Don’t Know His Name,” Amalia concludes that her anonymous pen pal — even though he is, in fact, a co-worker she hates — must be an extremely kind and cultured man:When I undertook this correspondence,Little did I know I’d grow so fond;Little did I know our views would so correspond.But as that tight and high-minded stanza gives way to florid fantasizing —He writes his deepest thoughts to meOn Swift, Vermeer and Debussy.De Maupassant, Dumas, Dukas, Dufy, Dufay, Defoe.— we understand she is not yet ready to find love where it really exists. That will come later.In Sondheim’s lyrics, the double bind of attachment is often a source of agitation; in Ebb’s it is often a pummeling. But in Harnick’s word-world, attachment is a pleasant and relatively livable condition, once you get past the drama.Near the end of “Fiddler,” when in the song “Do You Love Me?” Tevye asks his wife that question, she replies, barely singing the words, “Do I what?” It’s a laugh line, defanging or absorbing what might otherwise seem sentimental. By the end of the gentle, forgiving and ruminative number, so typical of Harnick’s gentle, forgiving and ruminative art, you come willingly to the couple’s conclusion, sentimental or not:It doesn’t change a thingBut even soAfter twenty-five yearsIt’s nice to know. More