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      In ‘A Simulacrum,’ Steve Cuiffo Has Nothing Up His Sleeves

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      The magician worked with the playwright Lucas Hnath to create “a more vulnerable version of magic performance,” Hnath said.Steve Cuiffo began performing magic the way that most kids do. His brother did tricks. So did an older cousin. A grandfather had a routine with a handkerchief and a dime that absolutely killed. While he was in elementary school, he started entertaining at birthday parties, first for $5 and then more. He kept up his routines even as he studied theater at New York University and began to work with avant-garde companies like the Wooster Group.“I always had a deck of cards in my hand,” he said recently. “I still kind of do.” (Technically, on the afternoon of our interview, they were in his shirt pocket.)For some years, he kept acting and illusionism separate. But gradually he combined them: first with “Major Bang,” a nuclear-terror comedy for the Foundry Theater, and then through work with Rainpan 43, which premiered the ecstatic magic lampoon, “Elephant Room.” He was also a magic consultant on other productions (television shows and movies, too), including Lucas Hnath’s 2013 play “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney.” (He and Hnath had overlapped at N.Y.U., but only became friendly later.)One day, during rehearsals for “Disney,” while watching Cuiffo teach the actor Larry Pine how to cough up bloody handkerchiefs, Hnath recalled telling that show’s director, Sarah Benson, “I could just watch that all day long.”Cuiffo performs both classic tricks and some new ones, including a few that fail.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd now he can. Cuiffo and Hnath have created “A Simulacrum,” which includes both classic tricks (the ambitious card, the torn and restored newspaper) and some new ones. Unusually for a magic show, it also incorporates several tricks that fail. Because “A Simulacrum,” running through July 9 at Atlantic Stage 2, is less a demonstration of magic than a deconstruction of how and why magic is made. To perform it, Cuiffo, 45, had to unlearn most of his habits, to strip away any vestige of showmanship.“This whole show is trying to answer that question of what is magic,” said Cuiffo, sunk into a couch in his dressing room, deep underground at the Atlantic Stage 2 space in Chelsea, and dressed in magician-appropriate all-black.His offstage persona is fairly close to the stage one he favors — rumpled, excitable, mildly sardonic, casually authoritative. Writing in The Times, Maya Phillips complimented his unflashy stage presence: “He’s low-key, grounded in both his gestures and his manner of speech.” If there is space between the man he is and the man he plays when he’s making cards appear and disappear, he can’t quite find it.“If I had a therapist, maybe I could answer that,” he said.Cuiffo, a familiar face Off Broadway, is unusual both in how he fuses magic and theater, which few performers do, and in how he appears to combine rigor with a seeming spontaneity.“He’s this great improvisational performer at his deepest core,” said Christine Jones, who was moved to create the one-on-one performance event Theater for One after Cuiffo performed close-up magic for her at a wedding. “But of course that’s balanced with hours and hours and hours of practice that is not improvisational at all.”Earlier work: Cuiffo, far right, with Trey Lyford, left, and Geoff Sobelle, center, as dorky-cool suburbanites with a fixation on sleight-of-hand in “Elephant Room: Dust From the Stars,” a play performed on Zoom in 2020.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGeoff Sobelle, who created “Elephant Room” and its sequel, “Elephant Room: Dust From the Stars,” with Cuiffo and the actor Trey Lyford, described a different balancing act, a reverence for and an impatience with magic as an art form.“As much as he loves this stuff,” Sobelle said, “he also totally wants to tear it down and just rip it apart.”After “Disney,” he created the mentalism routine for Hnath’s “The Thin Place,” a ghost story about a woman with supposed psychic powers, and the vanishing act in “Dana H.,” a first-person account of the kidnapping of Hnath’s mother. When “Dana H.” premiered at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, a member of the company’s artistic staff commissioned this new magic show by Hnath and Cuiffo.Their first of three workshops for what became “A Simulacrum” took place on East 15th Street in August 2021. The collaborators had set a few parameters. Hnath, who was raised as an evangelical Christian, had performed magic as a teenager, typically as a way to illustrate Gospel lessons. That experience has made him allergic to both audience participation and flimflam, so they had decided on a format that was closer to an interview.“I really wanted to find a way to make a magic show that I would want to watch,” Hnath said in a recent interview. “I wanted to make an honest magic show.”Hnath also decided they would record the workshops, which ultimately ran to 50 hours. Hnath then edited the recordings, with his voice appearing on tape and Cuiffo recreating, at each performance, his own side of the conversation.“We’ve set it up so I don’t have to act,” Cuiffo said.Cuiffo recalled his excitement for that first workshop. He had plenty of tricks to show Hnath, some old, some new. He figured they would choose the best ones and refine them. But as he moved from one to the next, Hnath remained unimpressed. The routines felt too polished, too slick. Hnath preferred messiness.“I wanted to see how much I could stack on top of him and still watch him wriggle his way out,” Hnath said of Cuiffo. “He really is a magnificent problem solver.”Victor Llorente for The New York Times“I like the real mistakes, not the fake ones,” he said. “Too often magic and performance feels superhuman. I was interested in a more vulnerable version of magic performance.”In anticipation of the second workshop, to be held three months later, Hnath set up several impossible or nearly impossible tasks: Cuiffo had to create a trick that would realize some fantasy or desire, a trick that would fail, a trick in which the outcome would be a surprise and — this prompt was possibly the hardest — a trick that Cuiffo’s wife, the actress Eleanor Hutchins, would love. (As Hutchins confirmed in an email, most magic makes her “uncomfortable.”)“I wanted to see how much I could stack on top of him and still watch him wriggle his way out,” Hnath said. “Because he really is a magnificent problem solver.”That second workshop, as the show reveals, didn’t go very well. “Brutal” and “stressful” were the words that Cuiffo used to describe it. A perfectionist, Cuiffo struggled with the prompts. These were problems that he couldn’t solve, at least not in the way that Hnath required. Eventually, the workshop devolved into a two-hour fight, which erupted when Hnath critiqued the props that Cuiffo planned to use in the trick for Hutchins as “cheating.”“That got gnarly,” Cuiffo recalled. “Like, are you telling me how I need to make a piece for my wife?”There was one further workshop, which forms the show’s third act, although to say too much about it would be to blight the surprise. Cuiffo did eventually develop a trick and Hutchins confirmed that she did in fact love it.“It was unexpected, understated and personal,” she wrote in an email. “It was cute, funny and nice, just like Steve.”The show was designed to be about process, not product, however funny and nice. Despite the stress and the arguments, Cuiffo said that he enjoyed having Hnath as a collaborator and goad.“He strategically broke down all that [expletive] I usually do,” Cuiffo said.Making illusions without any of the patter, the showmanship, the razzle-dazzle? That, he has learned, is a kind of magic, too. More

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      ‘Dear England’ Review: When Soccer Success Becomes a Moral Victory

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      A new James Graham play about the soccer coach Gareth Southgate is a lively romp, but its core message about embracing male vulnerability feels soppy.What makes a good leader? When the unassuming and softly spoken Gareth Southgate was appointed head coach of the England men’s soccer team in 2016, many fans and commentators felt he lacked the kahunas for the role, that he was simply too nice. But in the past seven years he has overseen a remarkable transformation in the England team’s fortunes, making it stronger and more exciting to watch than at any time in recent history.The ups and downs of Southgate’s tenure are portrayed with a blend of playfulness and moral seriousness in “Dear England,” directed by Rupert Goold, which runs at the National Theater, in London, through Aug. 11. It’s a lively, feel-good romp with plenty of irreverent humor, though the narrative borders on hagiography, and its core message about embracing male vulnerability is labored to the point of soppiness.The play chronicles the team’s involvement in three recent major tournaments, starting with its surprise run to the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup in Russia; then comes an agonizing defeat by Italy in the Euro 2020 final, followed by an impressive showing, culminating in an unlucky quarterfinal exit, at last year’s World Cup in Qatar.The on-field action is evoked through dynamic set pieces choreographed by Ellen Kane and Hannes Langolf, in which the players enact key moments in elaborate simulations, complete with slow-motion sequences and freeze-framed goal celebrations. These are kitsch, but mercifully brief, as the bulk of the activity takes place off the pitch: in locker rooms, team meetings and news conferences whose settings are rendered with smart simplicity by the designer Es Devlin.Joseph Fiennes as Gareth Southgate, manager of the England men’s soccer team.Marc BrennerJoseph Fiennes is outstanding as Southgate, who is portrayed as self-effacing but assertive, an approachable father figure to his young charges. Will Close, as England’s captain and star player, Harry Kane, plays up the striker’s famously laconic manner, providing a bathetic counterpoint to the coach’s earnest rhetoric. Adam Hugill is similarly amusing as the defender Harry Maguire, who is portrayed as a lovable simpleton — not the sharpest tool in the box, but solid and dependable. Kel Matsena delivers a spirited performance as Raheem Sterling, who, along with Bukayo Saka (Ebenezer Gyau), speaks out defiantly against racism after England’s Black players are the targets of abuse.The principal female character in this necessarily male-dominated lineup is the sports psychologist Pippa Grange (Gina McKee), hired by Southgate to help the players open up about their feelings and overcome self-doubt. When one unreconstructed member of the coaching staff questions the need for her services, she reminds him that psychology has been at the root of England’s past failures: “This is men, dealing, or not dealing, with fear,” she says.The play’s author, James Graham, is known for political theater, with hits including “Ink” and “Best of Enemies,” and “Dear England” has distinctly activist overtones. Southgate’s mild-mannered disposition, emotional intelligence and leftish politics — he has been supportive of Black Lives Matter and outspoken on mental health issues — are kryptonite to a certain type of reactionary sports jock. So it’s tempting to view his story as a culture-war allegory, pitting touchy-feely liberalism against old-school machismo.From left: Will Close as Harry Kane, Ebenezer Gyau as Bukayo Saka and Kel Matsena as Raheem Sterling.Marc BrennerUnfortunately the play leans into this a little too heavily, with pantomimic cameos from several of Britain’s recent Conservative prime ministers — Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — pandering to the assumed prejudices of cosmopolitan London theatregoers in a way that comes off as ingratiating and smug. This is ramped up in the second half, which is considerably less funny, and feels rushed: The 2020 and 2022 tournaments are rattled through at speed, in contrast to the more leisurely pacing before the intermission.Southgate’s playing career is best remembered for a decisive miss in a penalty shootout against Germany in the semifinal of the 1996 European Championship, played in London, which resulted in England’s elimination from that tournament. A personal redemption narrative forms a compelling subplot the main story, and it’s a cruel irony that Southgate’s England side also lost the final of Euro 2020 in a penalty shootout on home soil. That Southgate has yet to bag a trophy — the England men’s team still hasn’t won a major tournament since 1966 — remains a powerful trump card for his doubters. And so the play’s celebratory tenor feels a little misplaced.Yet “Dear England” is not so much about sports as it is about culture. The technical and tactical foundations of the England team’s revival are conspicuously underplayed in this telling: The team’s on-field improvement is straightforwardly tethered to a shift in moral values, and we are given to understand that correlation equals causation. You can be fully on board with everything Southgate stands for and still find this cloyingly simplistic.Dear EnglandThrough Aug. 11 at the National Theater, in London; nationaltheatre.org.uk More

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      ‘Lizard Boy’ Review: Comic Book Adventures

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      Justin Huertas’s indie-rock musical, in which he also stars, follows a young misfit whose first date spirals into a comic book adventure.As “Lizard Boy,” a 2015 musical now making its New York debut at Theater Row, dragged some 20 minutes past its advertised 90, I began to wonder what the net positives of comic books have been on the culture. Presented in a Prospect Theater Company production, after a showing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year, this quirky indie-rock show, with book, music and lyrics by Justin Huertas, traffics in that medium’s clichés, down to a protagonist with a stunted understanding of grown-up matters. (And, no, I don’t think the show is meant for kids.)As we meet our hero, Trevor (Huertas), in Seattle, we learn of a horrific incident he had experienced 20 years ago: When a winged dragon was shot down by soldiers, its blood showered down on Trevor (and four other unlucky kids), causing them to mutate in some way, with him growing green scales. Now he only leaves the house during the annual Monster Fest, a Comic Con-like celebration of the dragon’s slaughter and apparently the only time he can go unnoticed. But when loneliness gets the better of him, he downloads Grindr and meets up with the dopey Cary (William A. Williams).Cary, who was only looking for sex, soon finds himself falling for the innocent Trevor, who tells him about a mysterious presence in his dreams. In a neat bit of timeline doubling that feels like flipping a comic’s pages back and forth, their meet cute is spliced with a visit to a grungy nightclub where that very figure from his dreams, the rough-edged Siren (Kiki deLohr), is performing. Their encounter fated, the three become embroiled in a routine battle for humanity, as the singer tries to enlist them in fending off what she and Trevor believe to be impending doom, but winds up becoming a threat herself.The cast members play their own instruments under the direction of Brandon Ivie, who has them hurtling road cases around Suzu Sakai’s cluttered-chic set. A brick back wall holds faded posters and houses Katherine Freer’s comic book projections, which do the fantastical heavy lifting when wings and superpowers enter the proceedings.Huertas’s music is agreeable, reminiscent of ’90s-era Duncan Sheik, with intuitive lyrics and some often lovely melodies. But if the idea is to build on comic books and their paralleling of heroes’ isolation to readers’ own disenfranchisement in order to fold in some sense of queer liberation, the proposition falls flat in a surprisingly close-minded show that is alarmingly puritanical in its view of sex.Trevor repeatedly berates Cary for his desires, and the show prioritizes Trevor’s virginal purity. With her tragic back story revealed, the bourbon-soaked, switchblade-wielding Siren is essentially a humorless take on Audrey from “Little Shop of Horrors” though, here, you get the sense that, in her stilettoed abjection, she is Someone Who Has Sex, and must therefore become a villain.Sex is everywhere and nowhere in “Lizard Boy,” a musical which I’m sure will continue to find its audience, just as comic books continue to infiltrate the idea of mature art.Lizard BoyThrough July 11 at Theater Row, Manhattan; prospecttheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Paxton Whitehead, Actor Who Found Humor in the Stodgy, Dies at 85

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      An Englishman with a deep, cultured voice, he played uptight snobs in films like “Back to School” and on shows like “Friends” and “Mad About You.”Paxton Whitehead, a comic actor who earned a Tony nomination for his role in a revival of “Camelot” and played the starchiest of stuffed shirts in films like the Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School” and on hit 1990s sitcoms like “Friends” and “Mad About You,” died on Friday in Arlington, Va. He was 85.His daughter, Alex Whitehead-Gordon, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of a fall.Mr. Whitehead, an Englishman with a modulated baritone voice, often coaxed humor from his sharp features and dignified bearing. His comic characters typically displayed subtly exaggerated versions of his own traits, which he executed with seeming ease.“He couldn’t help but be funny,” the critic Terry Doran wrote in The Buffalo News in 1997 of Mr. Whitehead’s time at the George Bernard Shaw Festival in Ontario, adding: “He didn’t sweat buckets striving to make us laugh. He just was amusing. It came naturally.”For Mr. Whitehead, finding the comedy was the key that unlocked a role.“You always have to find the core of humor in a character — at least I like to, the same way some people will say, ‘I like to find the good in him, even though he is a villain,’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1997.One such character was Philip Barbay, the uptight dean of a business school and the nemesis of Thornton Melon, Mr. Dangerfield’s character, in “Back to School” (1986). Melon, a crass but successful businessman, comes to Grand Lakes University to visit his struggling son and winds up enrolling at the school after making a sizable donation.Barbay hates Melon on sight and does his best to get him expelled, to little effect. Early in the movie he and his girlfriend, Diane, a literature professor played by Sally Kellerman, see Melon buying books for students at the university bookstore, and Barbay describes him as “the world’s oldest living freshman, and the walking epitome of the decline in modern education.”Melon goes on to disrupt Barbay’s class and date Diane. Mr. Whitehead infused Barbay with some pathos — the character seemed unable to keep himself from being a killjoy — which added another layer to the humor. While out with the free-spirited, poetry-loving Diane, Barbay proposes that they take their relationship to the next level through “a merger,” adding that they would become “incorporated, if you will.”From left, Rodney Dangerfield, Mr. Whitehead and Ned Beatty in the 1986 movie “Back to School.”Orion, via ShutterstockMr. Whitehead’s stodgy figure in “Back to School” was the archetype for many of his later sitcom roles. He played a stuffy neighbor on “Mad About You,” a stuffy boss on “Friends” and the stuffy headmaster of a prestigious school on “Frasier.”He was also a prolific theater actor. He appeared in more than a dozen Broadway productions, including the revue “Beyond the Fringe” (1962-64) and the 1980 revival of “Camelot,” in which his portrayal of King Pellinore earned him a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical. He played Sherlock Holmes opposite Glenn Close in “The Crucifer of Blood,” which ran for 236 performances at the Helen Hayes Theater in 1978 and 1979.Mr. Whitehead’s roles, especially onstage, were not always comic. One departure was his portrayal of the ambition-crazed lead in a well-reviewed production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” at the Old Globe in San Diego in 1985.“Comedy, tragedy, pathos, spectacle — everything is swept along before the raging kinetic power of this Richard,” the theater critic Welton Jones wrote in The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1985.Francis Edward Paxton Whitehead was born in Kent, England, on Oct. 17, 1937. His father, Charles, was a lawyer, and his mother, Louise (Hunt) Whitehead, was a homemaker. His daughter said that his family and friends had called him Paxton since he was a child.He graduated from the Rugby School in Warwickshire before studying acting at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. His early work was with touring companies, sometimes performing a new play every week. In the late 1950s he earned a stint with the New Shakespeare Memorial Theater, which is now called the Royal Shakespeare Theater and is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company.“But I was the lowest of lows,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, and after playing Shakespearean extras for a while, he decided to move to New York City. (His mother was American, so he was allowed to work in the States.)His Broadway career soon took off, and it continued into recent decades. He appeared in the original productions of the comedies “Noises Off” (1983-85) and “Lettice and Lovage” (1990) and in revivals of “My Fair Lady” (1993), as Colonel Pickering and later Henry Higgins, and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (2011), as the Rev. Canon Chasuble.In 1967, Mr. Whitehead became the artistic director of the Shaw Festival. He produced, acted in or directed most of Shaw’s plays, attracting actors like Jessica Tandy to the festival’s productions, before deciding to return to acting in 1977.His other films include “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1986), which starred Whoopi Goldberg; “Baby Boom” (1987) which starred Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard; and “The Adventures of Huck Finn” (1993), which starred Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance. His other television appearances include “Murder, She Wrote,” “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “The West Wing,” “Hart to Hart” and “Caroline in the City.”His marriage to the actress Patricia Gage ended in divorce in 1986. The next year he married Katherine Robertson, who died in 2009.In addition to his daughter, with whom he lived in Arlington, he is survived by a son, Charles; a stepdaughter from his first marriage, Heather Whitehead; and four grandchildren.Mr. Whitehead told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1986 that he usually preferred to act in comedy, because “it interests me more, and actually I take it a great deal more seriously than I do tragedy.”“The last time I did a tragic role,” he added, “they laughed.” More

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      Tony Awards Give a Box Office Boost to Prize-Winning Shows

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      “Leopoldstadt,” which was named best play, and “Kimberly Akimbo,” which won best musical, saw considerable increases in ticket sales.“Leopoldstadt” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” the two shows that took home top Tony Awards last week, saw big bumps at the box office in the days following that ceremony.The increases for the award-winning shows, which far outpaced a slight rise in the box office overall, seemed to support the industry’s argument to Hollywood’s striking screenwriters that a Tony Awards telecast can play an important role in sustaining struggling shows. “Kimberly Akimbo,” in particular, needed the boost; despite strong reviews, it had been soft at the box office.“Leopoldstadt,” a heart-wrenching drama by Tom Stoppard about the effect of the Holocaust on a Jewish family in Vienna, had the biggest assist: The show won the Tony Award for best new play on June 11, and its grosses for the week that ended June 18 were up 42 percent over the prior week. The grosses were most likely boosted by the fast-approaching end of the show’s run on July 2.“Kimberly Akimbo,” a quirky show about a high school student with a life-threatening genetic condition and a comically dysfunctional home life, got a 32 percent boost at the box office after winning the prize for best new musical. The show, written by David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori, played to full houses through the week, which had not been the case previously.“After this won, I’m like, ‘I want to see this before I leave, just because it won a Tony,’” said Brad Steinmeyer, 30, who was visiting from Colorado and bought tickets to see the Tony Award winning-actors in “Kimberly Akimbo” on Saturday.Rhys Williams, 27, a theater actor from New York City, also said that watching the Tony Awards cemented his decision to buy a ticket for the show.“It made it something I didn’t want to miss,” he said.Overall, Broadway grosses were up 6 percent last week, reflecting some combination of recovery from the effects of the previous week’s wildfire smoke, the slow build of the summer tourism season, and heightened awareness of Broadway shows because of the awards ceremony and attendant media coverage.The other Tony-nominated musicals also saw improvement after their performances on the telecast, including “Shucked,” a corn-themed country-music show, which was up 23 percent; “& Juliet,” a revisionist take on “Romeo and Juliet” set to pop hits, which was up 18 percent; “New York, New York,” about two musicians making their way in the post-World War II city, which was up 17 percent; and “Some Like It Hot,” which was up 10 percent.“Parade,” which won the Tony Award for best musical revival, was also up 10 percent. The show is about the lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia in the early 20th century.Among plays, “Prima Facie” was up 17 percent after its lead actress, Jodie Comer, won a Tony; on Tuesday, the producers announced that the play had achieved the rare feat of recouping its capitalization cost, which was $4.1 million and means it will now begin generating profits in the days before it closes on July 2. But “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” a madcap comedy that had no presence on the Tony Awards, was up even more — 22 percent — serving as a reminder of the capriciousness of grosses.Simply performing on the Tony Awards did not pay off for “A Beautiful Noise,” the Neil Diamond musical, which was not nominated for any prizes, and suffered an 11 percent box office drop after its cast performed a singalong version of “Sweet Caroline” on the telecast.Meanwhile, “Life of Pi,” adapted from the best-selling novel that had also been developed into a film, announced Tuesday that it would end its run on July 23. The play arrived from London after winning the Olivier Award there for best new play, and it received generally positive reviews upon opening on March 30 in New York, but never caught on with audiences. It picked up three Tony Awards for design, but was not nominated in the best play category; a North American tour is planned. More

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      Review: A Genderqueer ‘Cabaret,’ at War With Itself

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      A revival of the 1998 revisal of the 1966 musical highlights the stories of trans and nonbinary performers.The revival of “Cabaret” that opened on Sunday at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., has a bad case of the Underwear Problem.It’s not the only time the affliction has struck the 1966 musical set in a skeevy Berlin nightclub; indeed, it’s a chronic condition. “Cabaret” first caught the sniffles in 1972, when the Bob Fosse movie amped up the eroticism and rolled down the stockings. And it fully succumbed in 1993, when it was nearly stripped naked for a London production that came to Broadway five years later.In that revival, Sally Bowles, the minimally talented chorine at the center of the action, still wore the “lacy pants” mentioned in “Don’t Tell Mama,” one of the many great songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb — but now she and the other Kit Kat Girls wore little else. The club’s Emcee was no longer the weird, tuxedo-clad marionette that Joel Grey created in the original production; instead, as played by Alan Cumming, he was a denizen of an S&M dungeon, with rouged nipples peeking out from a strappy leather harness.This was a purely contemporary idea of loucheness, employed to shock and titillate audiences who might no longer respond to period sleaze. Shock is a losing game, of course. “This same production in 10 years would probably look very tired if we remounted it,” Kander himself predicted.And because the plot still hinged on the rise of Nazism around 1930, the more modern outlook also ate away at the show’s period concept, which depended on a clear alternation between commentative cabaret numbers like “Two Ladies” and naturalistic “book” scenes dramatizing the lives of the characters. Blurring those realms — which the original director, Harold Prince, had taken pains to keep separate — turned Sally, a Weimar party girl in Joe Masteroff’s book, into a neither-world negligee zombie.That’s the Underwear Problem: the perspective confusion that sometimes results from surfacing the subtext and emphasizing interpretation over story. You may, of course, gain something in return; not for nothing did the 1998 revival win four Tonys, run six years and itself get revived in 2014. But when you strip away the social conventions from which a show’s crisis develops — prudery, repression, outerwear, what have you — you leave the action unmotivated and unmoored. It shivers in the conceptual cold.The Barrington revival embraces that denuding and deracination, which is nice for the eyes if not for the drama. That’s not to say it isn’t occasionally gripping and novel at its extremes, as when Sally (Krysta Rodriguez) sings the title song in tatters and with cataclysmic abandon. (The inventively sordid costumes are by Rodrigo Muñoz.) And the book scenes between the widower Herr Schultz (Richard Kline) and the widow Fraulein Schneider (Candy Buckley) — a Jew and a gentile who must eventually face facts — have a graceful dignity when not pushed too hard.Krysta Rodriguez, center, as Sally Bowles performing the song “Maybe This Time.”Daniel RaderBut more often this “Cabaret” oversells itself, laboring to exemplify values that, however naturally they match the “live and let live” ethos enunciated by the Emcee (Nik Alexander, channeling Eartha Kitt) are not a natural part of its storytelling. No matter how much you may respect a production that “celebrates queerness, centers the stories of trans and nonbinary performers and acknowledges that many people of color were also harmed by the Nazis” (as the director, Alan Paul, writes in a program note), that respect cannot hold the musical together.To be clear, I support the nontraditional casting. That three of the Kit Kat Ensemble (as it is now called) are played by trans or nonbinary performers (Charles Mayhew Miller, James Rose and Ryland Marbutt) helps push the 1998 revision’s flirtation with gender diversity in a more serious direction. That Alexander is Black adds an eye-opening racial dimension. And Paul, who is Barrington’s new artistic director, uses the casting expressively instead of merely paying it lip service.That, however, is part of the problem. The original script, and especially the songs, despite the now standard interpolations and deletions, are so strong they continue to tell the story their way even as the director tries to tell it his.At first the tension is useful. When Miller, Rose and Marbutt sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in tender harmony while removing their Kit Kat costumes or combing their wigs, we are willing to accept it as a song of hope for a genderqueer future instead of the sinister Nazi anthem Kander and Ebb actually wrote. Yet later, when the song recurs, we are asked to take it as a mortal threat to the same characters. You can argue about multiplicities of meanings, but the ear won’t have it both ways.From left: James Rose, Ryland Marbutt and Charles Mayhew Miller as three members of the Kit Kat Ensemble, singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”Daniel RaderThe same fight between the authors’ and the director’s intentions undermines many of the book scenes as well. Sally’s relationship with Clifford Bradshaw (Dan Amboyer), an American writer visiting Berlin for inspiration, has become less and less credible as his sexuality, altered repeatedly in different versions of the story, has become more and more obvious. Now even Nazis rub up against him, advancing the inadvertent but no less troubling idea that National Socialism was in part a queer phenomenon.I suppose you could explore that idea, but to do so you’d need a much larger conceptual intervention than even this production offers. With just one word of the text altered — a character formerly introduced as “he” is now introduced as “they” — there’s only so much a little nontraditional casting can do. Maybe a lot more would work better.Because “Cabaret” as written is not about personal identity at all. It’s about mass complacency: a society’s failure to awaken in time to injustice and disaster. In 1966, when the Holocaust was still recent history, Prince didn’t need a contemporary lens to portray that danger or make it relevant; the period lens did just fine. So did Boris Aronson’s set, which featured an enormous mirror tipping ominously toward the audience to reflect and implicate it in the story.A mirror features in Wilson Chin’s handsome set for the Barrington production, too, but instead of reflecting the audience, it reflects the stage. After seeing so many versions of “Cabaret” that strip the original bare and rebuild it inside out, I’m beginning to think that’s the real problem. It is no longer a comment on our history but its own.CabaretThrough July 8 at the Barrington Stage Company, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘The Light in the Piazza’ Through an Asian American Lens at Encores!

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      A new Encores! staging of the 2005 musical, starring Ruthie Ann Miles, considers what it is like to feel like an outsider, at home and abroad.Inside a New York City Center studio, at a rehearsal for the Encores! revival of “The Light in the Piazza,” two young lovers in 1950s Italy were meeting for the first time.“This is my mother, Margaret Johnson,” Clara, a suddenly smitten American tourist, said to Fabrizio, a local Italian.“Johnson,” Fabrizio repeated, connecting the name to a then-popular Hollywood star. “Van Johnson?!”“Yes!” Clara enthused.“You are — relative?” Fabrizio asked.“No, no,” the mother, Margaret, cut in.And then, so too, did the director, Chay Yew. He turned to Ruthie Ann Miles, the Tony-winning actress playing Margaret, with a note.“Van Johnson is white,” Yew said, gesturing at his own Asian face.The group nodded. They started the scene again, and when Miles got to her line, she drew out the “noooo” while encircling her own Asian face with her finger to make the contrast exceedingly clear to the lovestruck Fabrizio.The move sent onlookers into a fit of laughter.“In the great works of art, there are ways to find more life between sentences and scenes,” said Chay Yew, who is directing the Encores! production.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNothing in the book, music or lyrics of this Tony Award-winning 2005 Broadway musical has been changed in the revival, which opens on Wednesday for a short run. But the casting of Asian American actresses in two of the main roles has reframed the musical to emphasize its exploration of the otherness — an otherness that some Asian Americans often feel in the United States and elsewhere. Without revisions, that point of view will have to come through in Yew’s direction and the actors’ interpretations.When Miles (“The King and I”) agreed to play Margaret, Yew began thinking about homing in on her background as a Korean American to further explore the experience of feeling like an outsider. The spike in anti-Asian violence during the pandemic, Yew said, was still very much front of mind.“No matter how Asian American you are, you’re always going to be the perpetual foreigner. The face that we wear,” Yew said, “always makes you feel that you do not belong in this country.“So I was interested in, well, what does it really mean to explore the outsider status in this particular musical?” Yew, a playwright and director of shows like “Cambodian Rock Band,” added. “It actually helps open up the music a little bit more. I think in the great works of art, there are ways to find more life between sentences and scenes.”“The Light in the Piazza,” which originally starred Victoria Clark as Margaret and Kelli O’Hara as Clara, tracks a woman and her daughter on vacation in Italy. Love is at its heart: Clara (Anna Zavelson) falls for Fabrizio (James D. Gish); Margaret wants to disrupt the romance to protect her daughter, who suffered a brain injury as a child that renders her childlike even as an adult; and Margaret herself is stuck in a seemingly loveless marriage to a husband who stayed at home in North Carolina.It is the Johnsons’ status as tourists — outsiders in a foreign land — that allows preoccupations with Clara’s disability to fade, her love to blossom and Margaret’s perspective to shift such that she can begin to let her daughter go. In leaving home, both women, in a sense, find themselves.Nothing in the book, music or lyrics of “The Light in the Piazza” has been changed in the revival, which opens on Wednesday at City Center.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFor Asian Americans, determining exactly what and where feels like home can be tricky. Clint Ramos, who designed the set with Miguel Urbino and is part of the Encores! leadership team, recalled having seen the show 10 times during its original run. He had moved to New York from the Philippines, and the idea of becoming totally immersed in a new place — and loving it — resonated. “Every time was ugly crying,” he said of seeing the musical.Miles was at the top of the Encores! list for the role of Margaret. (In his 2005 review of the show, Ben Brantley wrote that the character “qualifies as a blessing for those in search of signs of intelligent life in the American musical.”) They felt Miles “was virtuosic enough to actually handle the score, but also such an excellent actor,” Ramos said.With the role cast, Yew and Miles studied the history of Korean immigration and determined, for subtext, that Miles’s Margaret could have come to the United States in the early 1900s to study art and learn English, then met her white husband, settled in the South and eventually had a child.Miles, who has been juggling this show with her Tony-nominated role as the beggar woman in the Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd,” was born in the United States, then spent a few years as a young child in South Korea before returning to the U.S. with her mother. She recalled learning English while growing up in Hawaii as her Korean language skills diminished and becoming frustrated with her mother’s stubborn accent and lack of concern, unlike her friends’ parents, about things like having nice clothes. Over time, she said she even developed a sort of bitterness toward her mother.“And so I carry all of these stories and these ideas with me when we’re building Margaret,” she said.Zavelson, who graduated from high school last year and is making her professional New York debut in the musical, has always wanted to sing the score, but said she had never seen someone who looked like her play the role of Clara. Zavelson said she is Japanese American and Jewish.Anna Zavelson, as Clara, above with Gish, who plays Fabrizio, said she never “pictured myself being able to sing that role” because it’s usually filled by a white actress. Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“I don’t think that I had pictured myself being able to sing that role,” Zavelson said, because Clara has usually been played by a white actress. “Growing up, I think every kid is like, ‘Wouldn’t that be fun if I did this?’ But once you get to middle school, high school, and start to realize that you’re perceived differently by certain people, I think a lot of me was kind of like, ‘Oh, well, I’ll let that role die.’”“But seeing that Ruthie was attached to it just kind of lit something inside of me,” she continued. “I’m from Texas and Margaret and Clara are from North Carolina. So it’s not the same geographically, but having a Southern Asian American with a last name like Johnson isn’t actually that far from me.”And despite the effects of Clara’s injury, she is a generally upbeat, optimistic young woman who is warmly embraced by Fabrizio’s family, Zavelson said.So although the actors were still exploring their characters during rehearsals last week, Zavelson said she suspected many of the race-conscious nuances layered into the performance would manifest through Margaret, and the mother-daughter interactions between Clara and Margaret. To what extent does Margaret have an internalized fear of racism that makes her more hesitant to embrace Fabrizio and his family? How have her experiences as an immigrant toughened her? And how does that toughness play out in Margaret’s interactions with Clara?Exactly how to integrate the feeling of racial otherness into the show was also an ongoing challenge for the cast.“Maybe it’s slight racism from other people in Italy, whether it’s a gesture or a look,” Miles said.Miles also saw “The Light in the Piazza” on Broadway, and said she immediately noticed the “sweeping orchestration and beautiful vocals and this really human story of love and grief and regret.”But as she has played back the music in the years since, it speaks to her differently.It is no secret, she said, that she and her husband, Jonathan Blumenstein, have endured tragedy. In 2018, their daughter, Abigail, 5, was killed, and Miles herself critically injured when they were struck by a car while walking in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Miles was pregnant at the time, and two months later, near her due date, lost the baby.“I really feel the ways that Margaret tries to be strong and wants to let everybody know that she is in control and everything is OK,” Miles said. “But then what happens when the doors are closed?”When Margaret finally allows herself to be vulnerable for the audience, she continued, it could become a way for her personally “to finally take a breath and show perhaps a little bit more of the true me.”“Hopefully it’s not until the end of the show,” she added. “Because I won’t recover.” More

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      L.A.’s Center Theater Group Lays Off Staff and Halts Work on One Stage

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      With box office revenues, subscriptions and donations all down since the pandemic, the theater said it would pause production on one of its three stages, the Mark Taper Forum.In the face of what is described as a “crisis unlike any other in our 56-year history,” the Center Theater Group, a flagship of the Los Angeles theater world, announced a series of sharp cutbacks Thursday to deal with drops in revenue and attendance and said that it would suspend productions at one of its three stages, the Mark Taper Forum.The theater said it would lay off 10 percent of its 200-person work force.In a note to patrons, the theater said it “continues to feel the aftereffects of the pandemic and has been struggling to balance ever-increasing production costs with significantly reduced ticket revenue and donations that remain behind 2019 levels.” Theater officials said the organization posted an $8 million shortfall for the 2022-23 fiscal year and a $7 million shortfall the year before, much of which had been covered by federal pandemic assistance that is now ending.The 736-seat Taper, a semicircular amphitheater that has been a showpiece for innovative productions — “Slave Play” recently enjoyed a mostly sold-out run here — will suspend productions beginning this July and at least through the 2023-2024 season.And the theater is postponing a world premiere that had been set to open there this August, “Fake It Until You Make It” by Larissa FastHorse. As a result, the final production at the Taper for this season will be “A Transparent Musical,” a world premiere based on the television show “Transparent,” about the patriarch of a Los Angeles family coming out as transgender.The Los Angeles organization becomes the latest arts organization in the country — from regional theaters to symphony orchestras to opera houses — to grapple with a drop-off in attendance in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.The center, which has a long record of championing new and innovative work, has been struggling to redefine its mission and regain its financial footing since reopening after the pandemic. The group is made up of three theaters: the Taper, the Ahmanson, and the Kirk Douglas Theater. The Ahmanson and the Taper are part of the Music Center complex in downtown Los Angeles; the Kirk Douglas is in Culver City.Season subscriptions at the Taper are 35 percent below what they were before the pandemic shutdown began; subscriptions at the group’s main theater, the Ahmanson, are down 42 percent. Its longtime artistic director, Michael Ritchie, stepped down in December 2021, six months before the expiration of his contract. He was replaced by Snehal Desai, the producing artistic director of East West Players, who will step into his new role this summer. He will take the helm at a reduced institution.“We didn’t think that it would happen this fast or this dramatically — before he got in the door,” said Brett Webster, a spokesman for the center. “He did go in knowing this was a possibility.”The Taper is particularly admired here because of its relatively intimate feel and its willingness to take on new productions, sometimes to acclaim, and sometimes not.“Pausing season programming at the Taper is a difficult but necessary decision that will impact artists and audiences; and is particularly painful for the talented and committed CTG staff who have dedicated so much to bringing great theater to L.A.,” the theater said.The Center Theater Group has a long and distinguished history here, the site of such pathbreaking productions as “Angels in America” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” the Anna Deavere Smith play. More