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      At Under the Radar, Stories Unfold via Sexts, Tweets and Puppeteers

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      The Public Theater’s experimental theater festival is back in person for the first time since 2020. Here, our critics review a handful of the works on display.‘Your Sexts Are ____: Older Better Letters’Through Sunday. Running time: 1 hour.The art of talking dirty has withered of late. Or so Rachel Mars sets out to demonstrate in “Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters,” her filthy, funny yet eventually cloying performance piece dressed in the incongruous drag of a lecture.As evidence of the downturn, Mars compares some cherry-picked examples of epistolary smut with actual sexts she has solicited online. But do electronic acquaintances really stand a chance against the likes of James Joyce in full flower? Especially when the acquaintances are present only in the form of screenshots and Joyce gets rapturously read aloud?Though occasionally non-gross (“If you were here rn in my car what would we be doing?”) and on several occasions eliciting clever responses (“Probably arguing”), the sexts aren’t very sexy. Instead, as Mars’s presentation makes plain, they are dully goal-oriented, like Slack messages setting up meetings. They take no interest in the process of arousal or the way exquisite, elaborate and even embarrassing language can be part of it.Joyce, on the other hand, writing in 1908 to his lover (and later wife) Nora Barnacle, spins arias of sexual and scatological rapture that go so far past pornography as to crash the gates of literature. The man seems to have been unblushable — and the woman, too, though her responses have been lost and can only be imagined (as the show in fact does) by implication.The recovery of women’s sexual voices, especially queer ones, is Mars’s deeper theme here, a theme to which she lends some autobiographical muscle. Yet in doing so, and in moving from Joyce to the fevered Frida Kahlo, the cosmic Georgia O’Keeffe, the grand Radclyffe Hall and the prim Eleanor Roosevelt, her original sexts-versus-letters argument begins to fray.For one thing, those women’s letters are too romantic to be dirty. Then too, they are not the writers that Joyce, or for that matter Gertrude Stein, were. When Stein, in a letter to Alice B. Toklas, says she wants to treat her “wifie” to “an entire cow,” you don’t know whether “cow” is a pet word for “orgasm” or an actual pet. Either way, it’s brilliant, and you may wish she’d written it to Roosevelt. JESSE GREEN‘Moby Dick’Through Saturday. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.A large-scale puppet adaptation of “Moby Dick” is brought to life by a French-Norwegian company that includes the musicians, from left, Guro Skumsnes Moe, Havard Skaset and Ane Marthe Sorlien Holen.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWeathered and wild-haired, Ahab is a grizzled sea captain on the hunt, dragging his crew across oceans in search of his particular prey: the whale who took half his leg.Now Ahab inhales deeply, scenting in the salt air the presence of his nemesis.“It is Moby Dick,” he says. “I am sure of it!”In swims the white leviathan — not the lithe, tormenting beast of Ahab’s vengeance-soaked fantasies but a tattered, battle-worn creature with moldering flesh and a lumbering strength that’s no less fearsome for its gracelessness. He takes Ahab’s whole ship in his dagger-toothed mouth and claims decisive victory.Apologies if that plot point is a spoiler, but it is impossible to ruin with mere description the experience of the French-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire’s exquisite “Moby Dick,” a large-scale puppet adaptation of the Herman Melville classic. From its first moment on the vast N.Y.U. Skirball stage, when glittering fish appear, their tails swishing in the darkness, the wondrousness of this show lies in its spectacle and ambience.Directed by Yngvild Aspeli, this is serious artistry, with 50 puppets (many life-size, others Lilliputian or gargantuan), seven actor-puppeteers and three musicians whose underscore modulates the mood as deftly as the intricate lighting (by Xavier Lescat and Vincent Loubière) and beguiling video (by David Lejard-Ruffet). Just one quibble: When the music’s volume rises, it can drown out the dialogue.The show’s narrator, of course, is the sailor Ishmael — sometimes a puppet, more often a human played by Julian Spooner. Ahab’s crew, Ishmael says, “seemed to be picked and packed specifically by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniacal revenge.”There is real-world resonance to the notion of unhinged leaders reckless with their followers’ lives, but this is not the production to explore that. On a set by Elisabeth Holager Lund, where the ribs of Ahab’s ship are made of whale bone, Aspeli’s “Moby Dick” is more interested in the specter of death that shadows the voyage. And it does not blink from violence: A scene involving a mother whale and her calf is first touching, then horrifying.But this production is also about the relish of life — including the pleasure of friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg — and the abundance of beauty all around. The breathtaking puppetry embodies that loveliness.If you missed Plexus Polaire’s arresting “Chambre Noire” at Under the Radar in 2019, don’t make the same mistake with “Moby Dick.” It’s running only through Saturday, then at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival Jan. 18-21. Hurry. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES‘Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner’Through Jan. 22. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.Jasmine Lee-Jones’s play about cultural appropriation, colorism, sexuality and more features Tia Bannon, left, and Leanne Henlon. It reminded our critic of Adrienne Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn 2019, Forbes magazine named Kylie Jenner, a lip kit trendsetter, the youngest self-made billionaire. A year later, Forbes retracted that honor. Jenner, the magazine announced, was not in fact a billionaire. (And using a term like “self-made” to describe any Kardashian-adjacent adult had always been suspect.) This failure of journalism and accountancy did have one upside: It inspired Jasmine Lee-Jones’s vicious, playful, indignant work, a Royal Court Theater production being presented at the Public Theater.Offended by Forbes’s celebratory tweet promoting its initial article, Cleo (Leanne Henlon), a young Black British woman who uses the handle @Incognegro, composes a couple of posts of her own, which imagine Jenner poisoned and shot. The tweets go viral. And despite the warnings of Kara (Tia Bannon), her mixed-raced friend, she keeps tweeting, pained by Jenner’s insouciant appropriation of the full lips typically associated with Black women. (Cleo has been bullied for the plump lips that Jenner, a white woman, bought and built her brand upon.) The tweets are unnervingly violent: “Can you take a selfie whilst being lit? But like actually lit on fire?,” Cleo types. (That would be method No. 5: immolation.) A riff on Adrienne Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse,” retooled for digital natives, “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” is a meditation on Black womanhood and identity, online and off and in the murkier spaces in between.As directed by Milli Bhatia, Lee-Jones’s script shifts between the surrealism of the endless scroll — in which the two actresses voice memes, GIFs, emojis, tweets and retweets — and the relative naturalism of Cleo’s room. But even here — under a tangle of rope and lace, designed by Rajha Shakiry, that seems to literalize the World Wide Web — the argot of social media invades. Abbreviations like “idk” and “lmao” overrun ordinary speech. And virality seems to empower Cleo in adverse ways. Yet the play, ardently acted, is ultimately hopeful.The internet is a sewer. Yes, of course. But in real life, two friends, however divided by colorism and sexuality, might find their way back to each other. That this is achieved by the imagined murder of another woman, however entitled, is one of the show’s stickier points.On Wednesday, the second night of the run, technical difficulties plagued the show for nearly an hour. Then the difficulties stopped it cold. After a 15-minute pause, the play resumed, with the sound and light cues now appropriately synced to the script. Those miscues had been a distraction, particularly when it came to understanding the actresses, whose speech was warped by wonky microphone effects. Still, maybe there was a lesson somewhere in this technical mess. The technologies of social media can amplify individual voices. But it can distort them, too. ALEXIS SOLOSKI‘A Thousand Ways (Part Three): An Assembly’Through Jan. 22. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.“A Thousand Ways (Part Three): An Assembly” by 600 Highwaymen is a participatory, experimental piece about finding communion.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe final installment of 600 Highwaymen’s pandemic triptych takes place in an antiseptically corporate room on the top floor of the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.A participatory, experimental piece about finding communion in a disrupted but healing world, it requires little more than a stack of notecards, a rubber band to hold them and chairs for the audience members, who are also the actors. In theory, you could perform it anywhere.But it is tough to cast a dramatic spell in an unadorned event space, and hard to focus the attention of a group when floor-to-ceiling windows look out on a wraparound terrace where visitors come and go against a busy cityscape.If only this kind-spirited show by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone were being staged in a theater, a space designed to shut out distraction. How strange that the Under the Radar festival chose otherwise for the finish to a triptych structured like the industry’s shutdown and return: lonely isolation, cautious distance, disquieted reunion.On a recent afternoon, “An Assembly” had none of the quasi-sacramental feel of the previous parts of “A Thousand Ways.” It felt instead like doing a team-building exercise with a dozen amiable colleagues I’d never met. We spoke lines, answered questions (“Who here is worried?” “Do you have any tattoos?”) and moved about as the notecards instructed.A tall guy volunteered to take the first turn with the script. “This won’t be recorded,” he told us, reading from a card. “We won’t look back at it.”And I thought: We won’t? I’ve looked back with such affection on the earlier parts: the ways they asked me to imagine the humanity of people I did not know, and let them do the same with me — fostering empathy and connection in a time of antipathy and aloneness.The first part, “A Phone Call,” matched two strangers for a script-guided telephone conversation. I did that from my apartment in late 2020. The second, “An Encounter,” seated two strangers across a table, separated by glass and following a script. I did that at the Public Theater, in an empty auditorium, in mid-2021.Those works arrived when theater lovers unappeased by streaming were ravenous for any semblance of the live stuff, and craving human interaction. By now, we’re used to being with strangers again — if not to passing their keys and phones from hand-to-hand, as Part Three asks us to.Well over a year into the industry’s revival, “An Assembly” feels belated. It is calming, though. And if the people in your group give off a considerate and patient vibe, as those in mine did, it’s heartening, too. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES More

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      Interview: Singing The Elephant Song

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      Jason Moore & Ian Nicholas on The Elephant Song

      OnBook Theatre are just about to bring Canadian playwright Nicolas Billon‘s The Elephant Song to Park Theatre for it’s UK premiere. The play follows the suddenly disappearance of a psychiatrist from a mental health unit and Michael, a young patient, is suspected to be involved.

      We are always excited to see new thrillers coming to the stage, so were delighted to be able to catch up with OnBook’s creative partnership of Jason Moore and Ian Nicholas to find out more.

      [embedded content]

      Great to meet you both, shall we do introductions first then?

      We’re Jason Moore and Ian Nicholas and we created OnBook Theatre in the summer of 2021. Jason is a director, Ian is a set and costume designer. Together we produce plays that we feel passionate about. We seem to be attracted to plays that deal with human relationships, with a dark, comedic undertone. The Elephant Song is no exception. It’s a psychological thriller, with a surprise ending. It’s the kind of play that will haunt you afterwards.

      Are we right in thinking that there is also a lot of humour in The Elephant Song? The press material talks about ‘verbal tugs-of-war’ – does this lend itself to black/dark comedy?

      The playwright, Nicolas Billon, has peppered the script with lots of witty, intelligent dialogue and in that respect, it feels like dark comedy at times. But at its core, it’s an emotional story of a young man who is fighting to be heard.

      How did you first come across the play and what piqued your interest about it?

      Ian saw the movie some years ago and loved the story. After researching its background, he went on the hunt for rights, which led him to playwright Nicolas Billon and his agent in Canada. Finding out it had never been produced in the UK made him even more determined. Several emails and phone calls later, we were in business.

      Have you spoken with Nicolas directly then, and has he been involved in the process so far?

      Absolutely. We reached out to Nicolas and were thrilled to hear from him. After a zoom meeting and several emails, we feel very lucky to have his blessing and involvement in the process. Even better, he’s flying to London to see our production, and he’s agreed to participate in a Q&A after the performance on 24 January. It’s a rare privilege when a theatre company gets to work closely with the writer so we are extremely lucky.

      You’ve brought together three very experienced actors, how was the casting process?

      The casting process was a little unusual. We both saw Gwithian Evans perform last year and were immediately impressed. He was the first person we cast. Louise Faulkner and Jason went to drama school together. Ian was talking to her about another production altogether. While he didn’t think she was right for that part, Ian instinctively felt she was perfect for Miss Peterson. He sent her the script and her marvelous audition proved she was perfect. We never auditioned anyone else. Similarly, in casting for Dr. Greenberg, we reached out to friends at CDM Talent Agency. They sent Jon Osbaldeston over and again, same story. Wonderful audition and never auditioned anyone else. So, all three actors were our first and only choices. How lucky can you get?

      How have rehearsals been going? Did you take a break for the festive period or has it been all go?

      Rehearsals have been going great. We had Christmas Day off but that was it. As producers, we work 24/7, always checking emails, always putting out fires. That’s what theatre producing is about. Managing everything. It’s not for the faint of heart.

      Park Theatre is a lovely venue and PARK90 can be configured in so many ways, can you give us an idea of what you have planned?

      We’re performing in the thrust, so we’ll have audience seating on three sides. It’s a modern, intimate space and just the right size for this play. The last two plays we produced were in the thrust too, it’s a ‘fly on the wall’ approach that we really enjoy. Firstly, there’s not a bad seat in the house. Secondly, there’s no distraction, you’re just a few feet from the stage, immersed in the action.

      What is next for you after The Elephant Song?

      We are producing Neil Simon’s classic comedy California Suite at OSO Arts Centre in Barnes. That opens February 21. And we are currently piloting OSO’s Youth Theatre project, working with young people interested in Theatre. After that, we’ll be working on two brand new plays, one’s a comedy, the other a courtroom drama based on true events. But we’re also passionate about musicals and produced two sell out cabarets in 2022, a format that we want to expand upon in 2023. We are blessed.

      Our thanks to OnBook Theatre for taking some time out of rehearsals to chat with us.

      The Elephant Song plays at Park Theatre from 18 January until 11 February. Further information and tickets can be found here. More

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      Paul Mescal in a Streetcar Named Desire

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      In London, the Irish actor stars as Stanley Kowalski in a deeply empathic version of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”Paul Mescal’s fast-ascending screen career has taken a detour to the London stage, where he is playing Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” This deeply empathic version of Tennessee Williams’s defining 1947 play is scheduled for a limited run at North London’s Almeida Theater through Feb. 4.That leaves audiences limited time to discover the sizable stage chops of Mescal, the heartthrob Irish actor who came to TV attention on Hulu’s “Normal People” in 2020 and has recently generated award-season buzz for the movie “Aftersun.” Barely a week has passed of late without his being mentioned for one or another major forthcoming film.The electricity he generates onscreen is fully evident in this latest “Streetcar” — a play frequently revived in London but rarely with the clarity and power brought to it here by Rebecca Frecknall, an associate director at the Almeida who won an Olivier Award last spring for an ongoing revival of the musical “Cabaret.”Mescal brings both swagger and sensitivity to the role, in the process stepping out of the long shadow cast over this part by its stage and screen originator, Marlon Brando. But he also exists amid a gifted company who lay bare the numerous contradictions of an infinitely rich play. Not intended as a mere star vehicle for its increasingly high-profile male lead, the visually stripped-back production is emotionally revelatory, too: Frecknall’s forensic skills allow us to look afresh at a motley gathering of people, Patsy Ferran’s tremulous Blanche DuBois chief among them, who seek understanding and compassion but just as frequently come to grief.Mescal, left, shares the stage with Anjana Vasan, who gives an outstanding performance as Stella.Marc BrennerStanley, of course, must fight his corner once he and his newly pregnant wife Stella (Anjana Vasan, outstanding) find their cramped New Orleans quarters taken over by Stella’s older sister, Blanche. Having lost the family ancestral home in Mississippi, Blanche shows up in Louisiana “hot, tired, and dirty” and on the run from a shaming and shameful past that she will clearly never escape.Purists may balk at Madeleine Girling’s raised platform set, which lacks the scenic divisions of the Kowalski household that the play repeatedly refers to. The impression instead is of an open, porous space where the actors not appearing at that particular moment often sit to one side, primed for action or for gladiatorial combat, even — something Mescal will soon be exploring onscreen.Visible well above the stage is a drummer, Tom Penn, who keeps ominous pulse with the roiling emotions of the play, as if to amplify yet further the damaged psyches on view. The rape scene ends with Blanche appearing abject in a pool of rain, as if the episode could somehow be washed away.The text’s paper lantern of legend is onstage, covering the naked light bulb that Blanche finds abhorrent. But the characters defy expectation, both in costume and physical type: Stella appears in various sweaters, incongruous with talk of the sweltering summer heat, while Ferran’s Blanche — dark-haired, large-eyed — is at some remove from the ethereal blondness often associated with this role. Nor does she make her entrance in the character’s signature white suit specified in the text. The result is a production, performed in the round, that adheres not so much to the letter of the play as to its bruised and bruising spirit. Much the same was true of Frecknall’s acclaimed 2018 revival for the Almeida, also starring Ferran, of Williams’s lesser-known “Summer and Smoke.” Frecknall takes her cue from the wounding lyricism of Williams’s writing, not his (copious) stage directions, though the inclusion of some slow-motion toward the end feels like a directorial intervention too far.I’ve rarely seen, for instance, the anger that coexists with Blanche’s fragility conveyed as clearly as it is here. She may speak in grandiose terms of her briefly beloved Mitch (an exceptionally touching Dwane Walcott) as her Rosenkavalier, but this Blanche, for all her delusions, seems to understand all too well the rum hand life has dealt her. (On that topic, the card game that ends the play has been cut.)Brought into the production late on when its original lead, Lydia Wilson, dropped out because of injury, the prismatic Ferran communicates the flighty neurotic in Blanche alongside someone nervy enough to tackle Stanley on his home turf.“I’ve got to keep hold of myself,” she says near the start, her equilibrium no less fragile than that of the brutish man-child Stanley, who cries like a baby for Stella well before his wife gives birth to their own. The bedroom is Blanche and Stanley’s battlefield, and both actors communicate the primal impulses that draw them together in a permanently disruptive date with destiny.Mescal, it seems, has his own dates pending with Hollywood, which may make such stage ventures harder for him to come by in the years ahead. (I smiled when Stanley dismisses Blanche’s “Hollywood glamour stuff,” something that the actor playing him surely knows about firsthand.)Whatever this fine actor’s future holds, his present is allied to an electrifying ensemble production of “Streetcar” that, by rights, won’t have its final stop here.A Streetcar Named DesireThrough Feb. 4 at the Almeida Theater in London; almeida.co.uk. More

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      5 Broadway Veterans on Race and Representation in Theater Design

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      “Theater traffics in unconscious symbolism.” Set designers, lighting designers and a sound designer talk about skin tones, aesthetics and more.Design for live performance can cast a surreptitious spell, shaping an audience’s perceptions with stimuli we might not even notice consciously: a change of light, a snatch of sound, a detail of costume or décor. It’s encoded language, and we respond to it viscerally.To the lighting designer Jane Cox, the Broadway veteran who directs the theater program at Princeton University, that dynamic makes design ripe for interrogation in the context of antiracism. A course that she and the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins taught, about race and lighting design, was one of the seeds of a multidisciplinary symposium, “Sound & Color — The Future of Race in Design,” taking place Saturday and Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory. Organized by Cox and Tavia Nyong’o, a curator at the Armory, it will include commissioned installations by young designers of color.Cox and four other Broadway designers participating in the symposium spoke recently by phone about race and culture in design. These interviews have been edited and condensed.Mimi Lien, Set DesignerMimi Lien won a Tony Award in 2017 for the set design of “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.”Emma PratteDesigners for live performance create and curate an experience, right, by juxtaposing visual, sonic, tactile, spatial elements within a time-based structure. All of these chosen elements carry so much cultural meaning and emotion. The job of designers is to handpick those elements and create a design vocabulary that communicates narrative or a particular emotion. With that comes so much responsibility, because our landscape is constructed with the goal of telling a particular story or reaching a particular audience with really calibrated visual and sensory cues.There is a lot of talk about representation right now. But for me, the real interest of this symposium is the aesthetic question. Like, why do people have certain associations with certain colors, and with darkness versus light? That is a huge cultural, media, anthropological question. And I’m really interested in how the two things intersect: What is the intersection between representation and aesthetics?Jane Cox, Lighting DesignerJane Cox was a Tony Award nominee in 2022 for her work on “Macbeth.”Evan AlexanderBranden says, “Racism is a visual ism.” And he’s right. Racism is perpetrated or understood through how we see other people. How we hear other people. And that happens through the way people are dressed, through the spaces they inhabit, through the way they move, through sounds. When they’re depicted in an image or on a stage or in a movie, design impacts enormously how you see people and how you feel about them. Who’s the center of focus, who’s not the center of focus. Theater traffics in unconscious symbolism, and so does racism.My great hope is to investigate more deeply the ways in which our imaginations are colonized by our specific cultures. Designers are people who believe in our senses. How does sensory input impact these questions of racism? The point of the weekend is to try to start to find a language to talk about these things.Justin Ellington, Sound DesignerJustin Ellington was a Tony nominee in 2020 for “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” and his work can be seen on Broadway in “Topdog/Underdog” and “Ohio State Murders.”Justin Ellington“Race.” [sighs] That word. The angle I’ll be coming from is more cultural than race. A lot of the work that we do, especially with the contemporary work, is very specific about certain communities. There are people that live in those communities, and then there are people that need to do research to understand what’s going on. Living in a place and then hearing about that place that you live in is often drastically different.I was part of a workshop recently and some of the dialogue that was given to the Black characters, I was like, “I don’t know those people, never heard of those people.” Definitely imagined Blackness. As a designer, we need to read scripts and not just say, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” Because you’ll find yourself in Act II like, “What?” It’s like, “That is a terrible misrepresentation of a people.” I’m a sound designer by title but I’m a storyteller first. Sometimes I feel like a cultural watchdog.Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, Lighting DesignerJeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s work can be seen on Broadway in “Kimberly Akimbo.”Hunter CanningThere’s no such thing as racially correct lighting. So in some ways I’m free of that burden. What I have as a burden is a conversation that always comes up, about skin tone — how to be able to represent performers in the best light. Lighting white skin is just as complicated as lighting other, nonwhite skin because everybody’s skin tone reflects a different kind of way. You do have to train your eye.Many years ago, I saw a show that had an Asian cast. There’s a certain idea of lighting design that we should always have a warm and a cool tone onstage. This lighting designer’s particular warm tone was very amber; amber gel has a lot of green in it. Literally the Asian people just looked like they had liver disease, warm and yellow because of the skin tone having more green in it.Adam Rigg, Set DesignerAdam Rigg was a Tony nominee in 2022 for “The Skin of Our Teeth.”Ian MaddoxWe’re taught rules. Especially in theater and opera, there are systems that we follow straight down to the architecture of the space. Which were mostly designed by white men. The future, for me, it’s not about wiping away that history. It’s about truly finding a way to find equity in the vocabulary.I don’t want to get myself in trouble, but I’ll just say it. “Ain’t No Mo’” was originally designed by a team of BIPOC designers [Black, Indigenous and people of color]. The work was shocking and exciting. Then it moved to Broadway with still some designers of color, but some white cis male designers incorporated into the team. You could feel the cleverness draining from it. It felt safer. If we’re really trying to broaden Broadway — which is what the end goal for most of us is, to able to make a living — that representation goes down to design as well. Who was in the room not saying, “Hey, ‘Ain’t No Mo’,’ it’s a really Black play.” Who was just like, “Let some white people design it”? More

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      Shakespeare in the Park Will Stage ‘Hamlet’ This Summer

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      Ato Blankson-Wood will star as the aggrieved prince in a modern-dress production directed by Kenny Leon.Winter has just begun in New York, but already the Public Theater is looking toward summer: The nonprofit announced on Thursday that in June it would begin presenting an extended run of Shakespeare’s great tragedy “Hamlet” in Central Park.The production, which will be the fifth “Hamlet” in the 61 years of Free Shakespeare in the Park, will star Ato Blankson-Wood, a 38-year-old actor who was a member of the ensemble in a production of “Hair” in the park in 2008, and who has since starred there in musical adaptations of “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It.” In 2020, Blankson-Wood was nominated for a Tony Award for “Slave Play.”Kenny Leon, a much-in-demand director who this season directed revivals of “Topdog/Underdog” and “Ohio State Murders” on Broadway, will helm the production, returning to the park after winning plaudits for his direction of “Much Ado About Nothing” during the summer of 2019.“Hamlet” will be the only show in the park this summer — a reduction from the usual two-show schedule prompted by plans to renovate the Delacorte Theater, the open-air amphitheater where Free Shakespeare in the Park takes place. “Hamlet” will run for nine weeks, from June 8 to Aug. 6, after which the major renovation work is expected to begin; this winter, work in some ancillary areas is already underway.The Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said he had been so impressed by Leon’s work on “Much Ado” that he asked him to pick a play he wanted to do next, and they settled on “Hamlet.” “It’s the greatest play ever written,” Eustis said, “so let’s give him a crack at Everest.”Eustis also said he had high hopes for Blankson-Wood. “He’s a gorgeously charismatic performer, and the complexity of his inner life, and his ability to connect with an audience, is going to make him an extraordinary Hamlet,” he said. (Blankson-Wood has a background in musical theater, and the credits for this “Hamlet” include music composition by Jason Michael Webb. “I suspect his beautiful singing voice will not be completely wasted,” Eustis said of Blankson-Wood.)Eustis said that the production would “have a contemporary feel,” but that the exact time and place where it will be set have not yet been determined. He said the cast would be diverse, but that it was “absolutely meaningful to Kenny and to me that our Hamlet is a young Black man who is torn between ideals of revenge and violence and ideals of forgiveness and understanding and even rationality, and in the pairing between those things is finding himself paralyzed.”Eustis said his thinking about “Hamlet” had been influenced by “Fat Ham,” the most recent Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, which is a riff on the Shakespeare play set in the American South, and which will be running on Broadway this spring, produced in part by the Public. “I’m sure hoping that we’re going to be running ‘Fat Ham’ and ‘Hamlet’ at the same time,” Eustis said, “because those two plays talk to each other in a most beautiful way.”In prepandemic years, the Shakespeare in the Park season was followed by a short-run Public Works production, usually on or around Labor Day weekend, which was a musical adaptation of a classic story employing a mix of professional and amateur actors. The last new Public Works production there was “Hercules,” in 2019, but Eustis said there were three in development. He said he expected there would be a Public Works production staged this summer, although he did not yet know when or where it would take place. More

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      The Shed Changes Leadership Structure

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      In the face of financial challenges, the arts institution is making adjustments: Alex Poots, its founding artistic director and chief executive, will now just focus on being artistic director.Having come into the world just a year before the coronavirus pandemic started, the Shed — an architecturally ambitious $475 million arts center in Hudson Yards — has weathered a bumpy beginning. In addition to sold-out performances (such as the recent play about Robert Moses starring Ralph Fiennes), the institution has had its share of financial struggles (28 of its 107 full-time workers were laid off in July 2020).Now, the Shed is making perhaps its biggest adjustment yet, announcing that Alex Poots, the founding artistic director and chief executive, will no longer be chief executive — but will continue to focus on the creative side of the institution as its artistic director.The change is effective immediately; Maryann Jordan, the Shed’s current president and chief operating officer, will handle day-to-day management in the interim.“It has become more and more clear to me that, to really take us on to the next chapter, I need to dedicate my entire time to the artistic direction of this organization,” Poots said in a telephone interview, adding that the change was his decision. “I see it as a positive step forward.”“I’m not going to say it’s not been a struggle, but we’ve gotten through it every time we’ve been confronted with challenges,” he added. “We’re very robust to have built the first arts center since Lincoln Center on an entirely new model with a completely new team.”More on the Coronavirus PandemicNew Subvariant: A new Omicron subvariant, known as XBB.1.5, is surging in the northeastern United States. Scientists say it remains rare in much of the world, but they expect it to spread quickly and globally.Travel: The European Union advised its 27 member nations to require negative Covid-19 tests for travelers boarding flights from China to the region, amid a surge in coronavirus cases in the country.Misinformation: As Covid cases and deaths rise in parts of the United States, misleading claims continue to spread, exasperating overburdened doctors and evading content moderators.Free at-Home Tests: With cases on the rise, the Biden administration restarted a program that has provided hundreds of millions of tests through the Postal Service.Jonathan M. Tisch, who in April succeeded the Shed’s founding chairman, Daniel L. Doctoroff, and who — with his wife, Lizzie — in 2019 donated $27.5 million toward the building’s construction, insisted this was not a demotion for Poots. “Alex has done a remarkable job over the past eight years of establishing the Shed as one of New York City’s — and probably the country’s — premiere cultural institutions,” Tisch said in an interview. “But it’s a tough job to be artistic director and C.E.O. at the same time. In conversations, Alex expressed interest in stepping back from being top executive to allowing his focus to center on ensuring our success.”Cultural institutions across the country have struggled mightily throughout the pandemic, primarily because of the lost revenue from closures and canceled performances. The Shed had the added hurdle of being just a year old, without the opportunity to build a loyal audience or donor base. In the wake of the pandemic, the Shed reduced its annual operating budget to $26.5 million from $46 million in 2020; its full-time staff is now 88.Last month, Poots sent an email to staff members saying that “in an uncertain economic environment,” the Shed would consolidate some of its artistic operations.“To align our program developments and resources, we are exploring ways of merging program areas into an interdisciplinary department that works within and between art forms in unified ways,” Poots said in the email, obtained by The New York Times. “After much deliberation, this new model includes the discontinuation of the visual arts Chief Curator position.”That curator position was held by Andria Hickey, who last February left Pace Gallery to join the Shed. She will be staying on, as curator at large.Having one chief curator “makes less sense now,” Poots said in the interview, “because we need expertise across a very wide range of disciplines.”The Shed has also had to adjust to the stepping back of Doctoroff, because of illness. Doctoroff led its successful fund-raising efforts and shepherded the institution into existence after he served as a deputy mayor under Michael R. Bloomberg, who himself supported the Shed.Other successes include the Fiennes play written by David Hare, “Straight Line Crazy”; the comedian Cecily Strong’s New York stage debut; and an ambitious three-part exhibition by the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno. In addition, the Shed was among the first arts institutions to reopen after New York’s pandemic shutdown. And the institution managed to raise the remainder of its building costs — $135 million — during the coronavirus crisis, Doctoroff said in an interview.“We’re still learning,” Doctoroff said. “We’ve started to understand the model. I’m encouraged, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t normal start-up bumps and bruises. I think we will be incredibly successful over time.” More

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      Barry Grove to Depart Manhattan Theater Club After 48 Years

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      During his tenure, the nonprofit supported works that have gone on to earn seven Pulitzer Prizes and nearly 30 Tony Awards.Barry Grove was 23 years old when, in 1975, he started work as the managing director at Manhattan Theater Club, then a fledging nonprofit producing Off Off Broadway shows in space rented from a Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association on the Upper East Side.Over nearly half a century, as the organization, the art form and the industry have expanded and transformed, he has become a familiar figure both on Broadway, where M.T.C., which primarily presents new plays, now operates the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, and Off Broadway, where the company presents work at New York City Center in Midtown. The company’s annual budget has grown from $172,000 to about $27 million.Grove’s longtime partnership with the company’s artistic director, Lynne Meadow, who is celebrating her 50th anniversary at the nonprofit, has supported work that has won seven Pulitzer Prizes (for “Cost of Living,” “Crimes of the Heart,” “Doubt,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Proof,” “Rabbit Hole” and “Ruined”) and 28 Tony Awards. At the same time, he has taught (most recently at Columbia and Yale) and served on the industry’s most powerful boards (including for the Tony Awards, the Broadway League and the League of Resident Theaters).Now M.T.C.’s executive producer, Grove, 71, is ready to leave. He announced Wednesday that his last day will be June 30. His final shows include two plays on Broadway, “The Collaboration,” which opened in December and runs through Feb. 5, and “Summer, 1976,” which begins performances April 4, as well as two Off Broadway plays, “The Best We Could” and “King James.”“We’ve had an incredible run and an incredible relationship, and have done amazing things,” Meadow said. “I will miss him terribly, and we’re going to continue to try to be great.”As Grove prepares to depart the company, he reflected on his tenure, and the state of the industry. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why are you leaving?Very recently it became clear to me that it was time for me to do this and have some time while I’m still healthy with my wife and extended family, to maybe go back to teaching and some consulting work. I started in the professional theater when I was 19. I don’t know that I’m ready to get into a rocking chair, but I do want to be able to pursue small projects, a lifelong commitment to teaching, service to the community, that kind of stuff.Why did you stay for so long?If I had just landed in a finished theater — big and mature — I might well have gotten tired or burned out much earlier. But from the beginning, I was able to adopt a strategy of “learn it, do it, teach it, monitor it, and then get out of the way.” And so we were able to grow a staff and to grow the institution. With each new idea Lynne had, or new opportunity that the work demanded, there was a new challenge, and it kept me interested, it kept me motivated, and it kept me moved by the power of the work.What is your favorite show that you’ve worked on?This is a question over the years I’ve been asked a lot, and my answer is always the same: The next one.What is the future of the Manhattan Theater Club?I think it’s yet to be charted, but I hope that it will continue to be involved in important new work, and that it can remain a viable not-for-profit that will allow a next generation to do the work they feel needs to be and wants to be done. I’m not looking to tower over the future. I full well expect they’ll take the place beyond where we have and to places I haven’t even maybe dreamed of.What is the state of the play on Broadway?It’s now clear that we’re still not out of the woods on the pandemic aftereffects. The numbers are just down. In addition, there are for the first time in a while, a number of play revivals on Broadway, with very expensive capitalizations and stars, and between them they are seating a lot of people, but many of them are going to close at a loss. And in the meantime it makes for trying to keep the audience at the same size here hard, because the commercial world is spending a lot of money advertising. And beyond that, people are still slow to come back a lot — they’re buying single tickets to shows they want to see, but they’re not buying large subscription packages. We’re not out of the hole.How are nonprofit theaters doing?Everywhere, sales have been disrupted. I’d make a plea to the general public that cares about the theater: If ever there was a time to support your local theater, whichever one that is, now is the time to do that.Will you keep seeing theater?Of course. I need to see the final act of “Julius Caesar” to know how it comes out, because when my mom started taking me to theater in Stratford, Connecticut, she had an appendicitis attack in the fourth act so I never got to see how it ended. More

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      A Paris Cabaret Makes Way for ‘Cabaret’

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      The 1966 American musical has opened at a venue that for decades hosted one of the city’s most famous revue troupes.For decades, the Lido was one of the glitziest cabarets in Paris, home to extravagant, acrobatic numbers and the Bluebell Girls, a renowned chorus line. Last July, the curtain came down on their feathered headpieces for the final time, and the ensemble was disbanded. Their replacement at the theater this winter? “Cabaret” — the 1966 American musical.On a recent evening, with bejeweled Bluebell outfits still shimmering in window displays by the venue’s entrance, the Lido’s patrons seemed ready for a show. When the Emcee from “Cabaret,” directed by Robert Carsen, introduced the musical’s own ensemble, the Kit Kat Girls and Kit Kat Boys, there were eager cheers, but the lack of topless dancing, not to mention the somber Nazi-era plot, may have come as a surprise to some audience members.Yet the Lido’s move from cabaret to “Cabaret” is no coincidence. It speaks to a larger shift in Paris, where American-style musicals have been on the rise just as historic revues have struggled to maintain relevance.The pandemic only accelerated the decline of mainstream French cabaret, long a tourist attraction at venues like the Lido and the Moulin Rouge: Without out-of-towners, there simply weren’t enough Parisians interested in nostalgic cancan dances to prop up expensive revues. Add to that the genre’s increasingly outdated objectification of women’s near-naked bodies, and cabaret appeared to have fallen out of step with the times.The Lido’s reinvention as a musical theater venue — under a new owner, the hotel conglomerate Accor, and a somewhat silly new name, Lido2Paris — is clearly an attempt to lure back local crowds. To mastermind the transition, Accor hired Jean-Luc Choplin, whose tenure at the Théâtre du Châtelet from 2006 to 2017 saw a string of successes with English-language musicals, including “My Fair Lady” and “42nd Street.”This winter, the Châtelet has again been filled to the rafters, this time for a revival of Stephen Mear’s 2016 production of “42nd Street.” And other venues have been listening to the “lullaby of Broadway,” as one “42nd Street” number puts it. At the Théâtre de Paris, a French-language adaptation of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers” by the director Alexis Michalik has turned into a runaway hit since its late 2021 premiere, and is currently scheduled to run through April.The storytelling in Théâtre du Châtelet’s “42nd Street” is bright, and Broadway in style. Thomas AmourouxWhile performed in different languages — “42nd Street” is in English — “42nd Street” and “The Producers” don’t depart from Broadway habits. “42nd Street” opens with the curtain raising a couple of feet, so all we see are is the ensemble’s legs, tapping away and garnering enthusiastic applause. The storytelling in both productions is bright, with an almost uncanny rendition into French, in “The Producers,” of the upbeat pace of American-style dialogue.“The Producers” didn’t please every critic — the French newspaper Libération blasted its “discriminatory” stereotypes — but as theaters in France struggle to return to prepandemic ticket sales and the cost of living rises, musicals have seemed immune. That includes the French rock opera “Starmania,” recently revived for the first time in decades, but France simply doesn’t have a wide repertoire of musicals to draw on: The genre was long considered minor, and too entertainment-oriented, by French theater makers.That leaves Broadway favorites, and specifically the classics — what’s missing on Paris stages, inexplicably, is more recent musicals, like “Hamilton” and “The Book of Mormon.” Carsen’s “Cabaret” isn’t actually the first version of this musical, with its book by Joe Masteroff, music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, to be seen in Paris this century. A French translation, staged by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall, was presented at another historical cabaret venue, the Folies Bergère, in 2006. But the Lido2Paris’s production, in English with subtitles, is a dry, ominous showstopper.Carsen, a renowned Canadian director, takes full advantage of the venue’s layout: The Lido was designed as a cabaret-restaurant, with tables laid out on three sides of a thrust stage, and the Kit Kat Klub, the Weimar-era Berlin venue around which “Cabaret” revolves, is right at home in this atmosphere.Before its revue closed, the Lido offered a high-end dinner service each night. (Over 150 people were laid off as part of Accor’s takeover, from restaurant staff to the permanent ensemble.) Now audience members have to trek to one of two small bars to buy a glass of champagne and nibbles, which left the auditorium feeling a little deserted.The production captures the nihilism of 1929 Berlin and the steady rise of Nazism, which some characters see as little more than a distraction, starting with cabaret performer Sally Bowles (a role made famous by Liza Minnelli, here given restless intensity by Lizzy Connolly). Clifford Bradshaw, a bisexual American writer who has come to Berlin seeking freedom and inspiration, comes to see the growing political threat — yet fails to convince Sally, despite the love between them.As the sardonic Emcee who presides over both the Kit Kat Klub and the show itself, Sam Buttery is an arresting sight from the opening “Willkommen” — bald with heavy, dark makeup, at once charismatic and blasé.Sam Buttery plays the Emcee in Lido2Paris’s “Cabaret,” and gives the production momentum.Julien BenhamouAll the soloists acquit themselves well, but Buttery and the 15-strong Kit Kat Girls and Boys lend Carsen’s production much of its momentum. The choreography, credited to Fabian Aloise, is brilliantly dynamic, its exaggerated sexual innuendo rendered grotesque by the dancers’ distorted, over-it facial expressions. The choreographed opening of the second act, in which the dancers slowly don shorts, boots and swastika armbands, transforming into a high-kicking Nazi line, is especially chilling.Near the end, in video projections, Carsen ties the rise of fascism in “Cabaret” to contemporary events, with images of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as well as protests in Western countries like France. It’s a somewhat vague conclusion for an otherwise biting production, given that, by this point, the audience has likely drawn their own parallels.“Cabaret” is worth seeing both for its merits and to say goodbye to the Lido as it existed for decades. In early February, it will close for extensive renovation, with a view to reopening next December. A spokesman for the venue said that it would retain some of its hallmarks, like the tables around the stage, and upgrade its technical equipment.The long-term plan, under Choplin, is simple: more musicals. Tourists may not take to this change of programming, since the genre is hardly associated with Paris, but French audiences seem to approve, and the applause at “Cabaret” was warm.Blow to Parisian history or not, for now, American entertainment is winning the argument. More