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      Feature: Shaftesbury Theatre: Dramatic Transformation

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      How Shaftesbury Theatre’s exciting renovations are helping put heart into the art of the West End

      The Shaftesbury Theatre, currently home to & Juliet, this week revealed the latest stage of its £10 million ‘Dramatic Transformation’ programme, and Everything Theatre was invited along to see what they’ve been up to. It’s an impressive project; but the tour revealed that what’s unique about the theatre is more than just the building itself.

      The Shaftesbury is the largest independent theatre in the West End. A gloriously ornate Edwardian structure, built in 1911, it has withstood two world wars and a more recent global pandemic. Our host, Executive Director James Williams, explained not only how the Grade II listed building has been carefully future-proofed with a massive investment in its infrastructure, but spoke with passion of community connections, networks and wellbeing.

      In 2013 a series of building improvements began, including installation of offices and an impressive £5 million flytower, which are visible from the roof. The foundations and steel legs for this were installed during just two eight week dark periods back then, and the top section followed, in 2015. The theatre remained open throughout, with construction work during the day and performances of Memphis and The Illusionists each evening. In 2016 a lift was fitted down to stage level, where there is an accessible dressing room and toilet for performers with mobility issues.

      The seed for further improvements began when Camden Council announced its intention to develop Princes Circus, including pedestrianising areas around the site. Realising that the theatre owned the land beneath the road, they seized on the opportunity to extend their basement premises. This week sees the launch of the beautiful 1911 stalls bar, constructed 3.5 metres underground. The renovation process revealed layers of the past, such as the bare bricks of the bar, which have been kept. The white tiles of the former heating plant also remain, but the space is now innovatively reinvented as a cosy hospitality area: the new Taffner Suite, named in honour of the late Don Taffner Sr (former Chairman of the Shaftesbury’s Theatre of Comedy Company and father of the current Chairman, Donald Taffner Jnr).

      The theatre’s beautiful historic ceilings have now been renovated, allowing for working platforms in the technical void above the dome ceiling. Formerly technical staff would be unable to stand when working above stage.

      Further refurbished public spaces have also been unveiled, including over fifty new toilets, a state of the art air-conditioning system and reconfigured seating in the auditorium. Access needs have been enhanced with the fitting of a public lift from street level to the stalls, along with thirteen new wheelchair spaces and removeable seats, which will eventually be installed throughout.

      All of these improvements set the theatre up for a great future. But clearly there is more to it than bricks and mortar. James spoke of the Shaftesbury as above all a space for people; a place to “feed the soul”. Wellbeing is at the heart of many of the changes. A flat space set back from the steels of the flytower offers a peaceful rooftop recreation area for staff, whilst the stylish entertainment spaces open the building to new visitors by day, for meetings and creative events. And it’s good relationships in the industry, at the council and in the local community that forge the distinctive, independent personality of the Shaftesbury, making it unique.

      This is a fabulous West End theatre that truly has a beating heart beneath its art. Its new features will allow it to welcome customers new and old to fabulous shows for many years to come.

      & Juliet is booking at the Shaftesbury Theatre until Saturday 25 March 2023. Details are available at https://www.shaftesburytheatre.com/events/juliet/ More

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      Review: Praise the Lord for ‘Tammy Faye’

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      A new musical about the life of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, composed by Elton John, makes spectacular entertainment from a righteous subject.LONDON — Praise the lord for “Tammy Faye,” the new musical that opened Wednesday at London’s Almeida Theater. Telling the unlikely story — for the English stage at least — of the American televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, the show has a heart as big as the title character’s bouffant hairdo, and runs through Dec. 3.Rupert Goold’s vigorous production is also an increasing London rarity: a musical with an original score at a time when most repackage existing hits. That the composer is Elton John has only intensified interest in a project that also includes the Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears as lyricist and the prolific playwright James Graham as book writer. John’s most recent musical, “The Devil Wears Prada,” ran aground in Chicago over the summer, so it’s a relief to report that “Tammy Faye” is, for the most part, spectacularly entertaining, even if it could do with some trims and the toning down of a few tasteless sections.And when the astonishing Katie Brayben in the title role seizes center stage to rock out at the close of both acts, you can feel the intimate Almeida transformed into the sort of pulsating arena that Tammy Faye would surely love. “Show me mercy, open your hand,” she sings, letting rip in one of several impassioned numbers, “Empty Hands,” that comes from the gut. I was right there with her, as I was in the comparable “If You Came to See Me Cry” near the end, in which Tammy Faye reflects on her legacy from heaven. (Where else?)We know she’s headed there right from the start. The show begins with the revelation that Tammy Faye has colon cancer, and a sexually explicit joke that comes after the diagnosis indicates that this won’t exactly be family fare.We then turn back the decades to chart her progression from her modest Minnesota origins to a wealthy televisual messiah with a hotline to God. “If I hadn’t lived it,” she says, “I wouldn’t believe it.”Bunny Christie’s deliberately antiseptic set consists of a back wall of TV screens that allows for a recreation of the Praise the Lord satellite network that Tammy Faye and her first husband, Jim Bakker (the Broadway star Andrew Rannells, making a firm-voiced London debut), founded in the 1970s. Her second husband, Roe Messner, is never mentioned.Brayben, left, and others in “Tammy Faye.” Brayben displays such fervor and commitment in the title role that you fall under her sway.Marc Brenner John’s score throughout is a savvy amalgam of country twang and rousing pop-rock ensemble numbers. The musical, as expected, has campy fun with its subject, but doesn’t condescend, and Graham’s canny script always places the Bakkers in the historical context of a larger conservative movement whose presence is felt to this day. We note the importance at the time of Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart, three men in the couple’s orbit who are presented as meanspirited foils of sorts to Tammy Faye’s worldview; Tammy Faye, by contrast, is all smiles and eyelashes, and Brayben communicates her generosity of spirit with ease.The show’s prevailing villain is Jerry Falwell (a sonorous Zubin Varla), who looks on in loathing at the Bakkers and is given more brooding solo numbers than the musical really needs: One would be enough. Falwell becomes the resident Iago of the piece, a rival consumed by envy who has no time for Tammy Faye’s tolerance of gay people.The second act dramatizes Tammy Faye’s famous 1985 interview with Steve Pieters (Ashley Campbell) the gay pastor and AIDS patient who finds in her a celebrity soul mate. (Love, Tammy Faye reports, gets many more mentions in the Bible than hate: 489 vs. 89, by her tally). It also charts the breakdown of the Bakkers’ blissful domestic life, when it was revealed that Jim had had a sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn, a church secretary, and was also sentenced to 45 years in prison for fraud.“Tammy Faye” is Goold’s third show this season on the stage of the Almeida, a theater he runs, after a coronavirus pandemic-delayed “Spring Awakening” and “Patriots,” a play about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Boris Berezovsky, an exiled Russian oligarch, that transfers to the West End next year. Goold and the choreographer Lynne Page have assembled a splendidly drilled ensemble that writhes and snakes across the stage in collective ecstasy. The show also hints at the fickle nature of that same crowd, who at one revealing moment turn on the couple in fury.Through it all, Brayben displays such fervor and commitment in the title role that you fall under the sway not just of Tammy Faye, but of a performer giving her career-enhancing all to a part that Brayben was born — Tammy Faye would surely say destined — to play.Tammy FayeThrough Dec. 3 at the Almeida Theater in London; almeida.co.uk. More

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      Avant-Garde Theater, or a Musical: Who Says You Need to Choose?

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      In Germany, a sonically daring Chekhov adaptation and a post-apocalyptic western “opera” are breaking down barriers between genres.FRANKFURT — Ever since Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill served up “The Threepenny Opera,” their “play with music,” in Berlin in 1928, the dividing line between spoken and musical theater in Germany has been remarkably porous.Music is everywhere in contemporary German theater, often used to heighten or subvert emotional effects. Some of the credit or blame goes to Frank Castorf, the influential East Berlin director, whose long, demanding productions at the Volksbühne owed much of their unique, frenetic energy to the eclectic soundtracks devised by the theater’s longtime music director, Sir Henry.The quota of live music on dramatic stages here also seems to be increasing. Recent memorable examples have included the furious drumming that provides a rhythmic backbone to the Trojan War segment of Christopher Rüping’s monumental “Dionysos Stadt” and the dronelike chanting in Ulrich Rasche’s takes on classic works.And two of last year’s most discussed shows — Bonn Park’s “Gymnasium” and Yael Ronen’s “Slippery Slope” — were bona fide musicals, with impressive scores and singing, although they were a far cry from your typical Broadway or West End fare. Watching both productions, I felt we might be on the cusp of a breakthrough, with serious theater makers here channeling the vulgar and gleeful tunefulness of “Avenue Q” or “The Book of Mormon.”Such thoughts swirled in my head as I sat down to watch “Burt Turrido. An Opera” in Frankfurt this month. A four-hour post-apocalyptic western, it will travel to Hamburg and Berlin in the coming weeks.Behind the show is Nature Theater of Oklahoma, an influential American avant-garde theater collective that was founded in New York in 2006 and has become increasingly prominent on European stages in the past decade. The troupe’s co-founders, Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, are serious artists whose shrewd approach and mischievous creative drive combine elements of European and American avant-gardes. Formally daring, energetic and unpredictable, their work is hard to pin down precisely because it encompasses so many genres and styles.From left, Bence Mezei, Robert M. Johanson, Anne Gridley and Gabel Eiben in “Burt Turrido.”Jessica SchäferSadly, the theatrical exuberance and innovation that characterize Copper and Liska’s best efforts are in short supply in “Burt Turrido,” a loopy mock-opera whose silliness would be bearable if the meandering libretto had anything to say, or if the canned score was not a succession of immediately forgettable folk and country tunes.The title character (a bewildered-looking Gabel Eiben) is a red-bearded castaway with amnesia who washes ashore on a barren island. He is rescued by Queen Karen (a scene-chewing Anne Gridley) and King Bob (Robert M. Johanson, who also wrote the music), petty despots who seized control of the island after it was swept by waves of environmental catastrophe, war and genocide. Burt is pursued by Karen, who wants his child, and a lovesick ghost named Emily (Kadence Neill, the cast’s best singer). Oh, and there’s Joseph (Bence Mezei), Emily’s ex-husband and Karen’s ex-lover, who has more than a little in common with his biblical predecessor. (For starters, he’s thrown into a pit.)The characters circle one another in an endless dance of romantic intrigue, suspicion and shifting power dynamics. Copper and Liska keep the tone light, with some silly sci-fi and horror effects (ghosts in sheets; a chintzy U.F.O.) and only a handful of genuinely moving scenes.This is a show with legs: It has already been performed in the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Norway and Greece. (So far, however, no U.S. dates have been announced.) And it does seem to have been devised and designed for maximum portability. Luka Curk’s set consists of little more than flat, hand-painted backdrops, cutout waves jerked back and forth by the performers, and a shimmering blue cloth to represent the sea.Of course, a certain level of flimsiness is precisely the point of this winking, knowing operatic sendup: It’s decidedly a bargain basement production, and Copper and Liska’s ability to create a convincing and clean theatrical aesthetic out of the bare-bones staging is their main achievement here. Yet at even half its current length, “Burt Turrido” would be excruciating. Its 14 scenes (and epilogue) feel like a goofy sketch that has metastasized to operatic proportions.I would have felt bad for the performers who needed to drawl, warble and dance their way through the overlong evening, except that they appeared to be having more fun than the audience, a large portion of which fled at intermission. Beyond the spirited performances, there’s little to recommend “Burt Turrido,” which mostly feels like a joke that goes on far too long. Perhaps the biggest disappointment is how little the music adds. Here, too, the constant singing registers mostly as a gimmick, and there is little flair to Johanson’s score. The result is an impoverished “opera” where neither the music nor the drama is enriched through their combination.The cast of “Waiting for Platonov,” directed by Thom Luz, at the Residenztheater.Sandra ThenFor a sly and haunting marriage of those two elements, turn to “Waiting for Platonov,” an arrestingly musical production by the Swiss director Thom Luz at the Residenztheater in Munich. The title character of Chekhov’s early play, a womanizing schoolteacher who broods on his life of failure, never materializes during the production’s two and a half hours. Instead, a troupe of 10 actors recite snippets of dialogue drawn from the Russian writer’s work and break out in song while performing an energetic choreography that is precisely timed to a witty, inventive sound design.The title, with its nod to Beckett, can be interpreted in several ways. First of all, it proposes the Russian dramatist as a sort of precursor to the Irish Nobel Prize winner in his examination of futility as an existential component of human life. Chekhov’s characters cavort in dachas, while Beckett’s take up residence in trash cans — but they all feel the stifling dread and purposelessness of existence. The title may also refer to the fact that it took over four decades for Chekhov’s 1878 work to be published. The actors’ excitement and increasing exasperation over Platonov’s impending arrival parallels the writer’s frustrations with the play, which was rejected by Maria Yermolova, the great Russian actress to whom he sent the manuscript.Luz, an in-house director at the Residenztheater, brings a compositional rigor to his work that is occasionally reminiscent of the style of Christoph Marthaler and Herbert Fritsch, two influential older directors with keen musical sensibilities and a penchant for absurdity, but his enigmatic and astringent style is entirely his own. The show’s soundscape, devised by Luz, is full of popping mics, uncanny reverberations, sustained clusters of discordant notes and an out-of-tune mechanical piano. As the actors ascend and descend two large onstage staircases (also designed by Luz), their footfalls describe musical scales.Luz balances between the production’s abstract, aural elements and Chekhov’s decontextualized dialogue, which takes on a musical function as well through chanting. Although it is as far from traditional musical theater as “Burt Turrido. An Opera” is from “La Traviata,” “Waiting for Platonov” is a fusion of music, sound and text that is hypnotic, compelling and utterly fresh.Burt Turrido. An Opera. Directed by Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska. Oct. 27-29 at Kampnagel, in Hamburg; Nov. 3-5 at HAU — Hebbel am Ufer, in Berlin; Nov. 11-13 at Espoo City Theater, in Espoo, Finland.Waiting for Platonov. Directed by Thom Luz. Through Dec. 7 at the Residenztheater, in Munich. More

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      ‘Straight Line Crazy’ Review: The Road Rage of Robert Moses

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      Off Broadway at the Shed, Ralph Fiennes is glorious in David Hare’s sputtering portrait of the man who paved New York.I doubt I’d have enjoyed meeting the real Robert Moses, New York’s paver of highways, evictor of minorities, eminent domain eminence and all-purpose boogeyman. But it’s a huge pleasure to meet him, in the form of Ralph Fiennes, in David Hare’s “Straight Line Crazy,” which opened on Wednesday at the Shed.Whether the creature Hare and Fiennes create has anything to do with the creature that created modern Gotham remains, for a while, an irrelevant question. Moses’ actual demeanor and utterance, as portrayed in the nearly 1,300 pages of Robert Caro’s biography “The Power Broker,” are little in evidence at the Hudson Yards theater.Fiennes is too gloriously entertaining for that. Melodramatic in the old-fashioned sense, a hero or villain from an operetta or Ayn Rand, he crows his lines like a rooster, albeit in an accent suspended somewhere between East Anglia and Texas. With his nose pointing straight up and his chest pointing straight out, he’s a figurehead on the prow of a ship that can slice through icebergs as easily as red tape.Also through consonants: When he says “boardwalk” — a thing he despises, with its “so-called amusements” and “lox and bagel merchants” — the word has three syllables: the board, the wal and the k.So what if Moses is racist, antisemitic (though Jewish by birth) and an unabashed elitist who aims to advance ordinary people’s fortunes “without having any respect for their opinions”? Here he is wit and pith personified — and why would he not be, with lines honed by Hare in high-gloss mode?Usually that high gloss means Hare is up to some undermining; in plays like “Plenty,” “The Judas Kiss” and “Skylight,” good badinage almost always means bad faith.But in “Straight Line Crazy,” the connection is unclear, forcing you to ask why such a progressive playwright would spend even half a play valorizing a man who, among many other practical atrocities, displaced 7,000 families to clear space for Lincoln Center and 40,000 residents to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway. A clue in the script: “Moses’ life is so prodigious and his reach so great,” Hare notes, “that I have chosen to concentrate on just two decisive moments in his extraordinary career.”From left: Danny Webb as Gov. Alfred E. Smith, Fiennes and Judith Roddy as Finnuala Connell in the play, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesApparently, one act will try to counteract the other, so it makes sense that the production, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage for the London Theater Company, should introduce us to Moses in 1926. At that time he is merely the chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission, and his antagonists are not yet sympathetic proles but out-of-touch gentry.These are the owners of Nassau County estates whose gorgeous seclusion, not to mention their orchards, are threatened by plans for the Northern and Southern State Parkways. The play’s first substantial scene is in fact with a (fictional) Vanderbilt, supplied with a big-eared butler named Fergus and an even bigger sneer.“Leave him at the end of the drive,” this Vanderbilt (Guy Paul) instructs the servant after dispensing with Moses.But of course it’s Moses who dispenses with Vanderbilt. In their scene together and in the long one that follows, at a headquarters that serves as a hive of urban planning, the power broker is shown breaking under- and overlings like twigs to get his way.I say he is “shown”; he is not dramatized except to the extent he is self-dramatized, with prompts from those underlings. (Their interruptions of “Why?” “What do they do?” and “What’s that?” amount to dramaturgy by laxative.) Perhaps because they too are fictional, and purpose-built, they have few characteristics except those that pertain to Moses: Ariel Porter (Adam Silver) is the meek one who backs off every argument, and Finnuala Connell (Judith Roddy) is the spunky one who stands up to him, at least on small points.It’s not until an official overling arrives that any actual drama occurs. He is Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York, a populist Democrat who is Moses’ patron and also, one begins to suspect, his patsy. That piquant combination, along with Danny Webb’s hilariously earthy take on the governor, gives the interaction between the men, needling each other among the maps and models of Bob Crowley’s set, the unlikely spin of a Mutt and Jeff comedy starring Laurence Olivier and Jimmy Durante.Helen Schlesinger as Jane Jacobs, the journalist and urban theorist, fails to emerge, as she did in life, as Moses’ greatest foil.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat’s going on beneath the comedy is less funny: On the theory that no one will tear up a road once it’s built, even if they’d have forbidden it beforehand, Moses orders construction to proceed on the parkways without having obtained the governor’s approval. That this is offered as an amusing example of flair and determination instead of a warning about subterfuge and megalomania means that Hare has either fallen under the Great Man’s spell or wants to make sure the audience has.Surely, you think during intermission, as you study the weird intrusion of the mall-like Hudson Yards into the city’s urban fabric, things will turn around in the second act, which the program tells you is set in 1956. That’s when Moses’ plan to extend Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park met with fierce resistance from a new kind of opponent: the “minstrels and artistic women with handbags” of Greenwich Village. Cue Jane Jacobs.Alas, that journalist and urban theorist, who has so far popped up merely to say hello, fails to emerge, as she did in life, as Moses’ greatest foil. It’s a strange choice to make Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger) a minor character. Perhaps because of the inconvenience of history — the two never met — we are denied a direct confrontation, and with it a satisfactory climax.Instead, Hare goes uncharacteristically soggy, hauling Moses’ alcoholic wife into the conversation for pathos and having Finnuala, after decades in service to the builder’s vision, finally repudiate it. Moses loses on minor, mostly made-up points, not the knockout that Jacobs, Caro and time actually delivered.But even as the directors’ invention fades along with Hare’s — the community meetings, full of serious nodding, are especially silly — Fiennes never falters. His Moses, like his performance, becomes a car in search of a road, gunning the engine with nowhere to go.That’s no tragedy. The play is still a pleasure, and Moses is still in the doghouse. The man who, in Hare’s formulation, thinks cars are the “can opener” to the tin that is America would not recognize a Manhattan that after decades of discussion is soon to institute congestion pricing.If the efficiency of the brute is often superior to the fecklessness of democracy in getting things done, it is not always as lasting — which is reason enough to see “Straight Line Crazy.” In the midst of what feels right now like the losing fight of progressivism, it’s worth peeking at the devil, with fear and envy and a little schadenfreude.Straight Line CrazyThrough Dec. 18 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Lucy Simon, Singer and Broadway Composer, Is Dead at 82

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      She and her sister Carly Simon were a folk duo in the 1960s. Years later, she wrote the Tony-nominated music for “The Secret Garden.”Lucy Simon, who with her sister Carly began performing and recording as the Simon Sisters during the folk revival of the 1960s, and who then almost three decades later became a Tony Award-nominated composer for the long-running musical “The Secret Garden,” died on Thursday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 82.Her family said the cause was metastatic breast cancer.Ms. Simon was the middle of three musical sisters. Her younger sister, Carly, became a best-selling pop star after their folk-duo days, and her older sister, Joanna, was an opera singer with an international career. Joanna Simon, at 85, died in Manhattan a day before Lucy Simon’s death.Lucy and Carly started singing together as teenagers. Their father, Richard, was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the publishing house, so a heady list of guests came through the household, including Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their mother was Andrea (Heinemann) Simon.“We would go to cocktail parties and bring our guitar and sing,” Lucy Simon told The New York Times in 2015. “And people loved it.”Eventually, she added, they said to each other, “Let’s see if we can pay our way by singing.”Carly was a student at Sarah Lawrence College and Lucy was studying at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing in New York in the early 1960s when, during summer break, they took a bus to Provincetown, Mass. (They had wanted to hitchhike, but their mother squashed that plan.) They quickly landed a gig at a bar called Moors, whose musical act had just been drafted. They arrived for their first show in carefully selected matching blouses.“Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay and lesbian bar,” Carly Simon wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Boys in the Trees.” “What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival.”They called themselves the Simon Sisters, even though, as Carly Simon wrote, “Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled — or dismissed — as just another novelty sister act.”In that book, Ms. Simon recalled the sisterly dynamic during that first foray into performing.“Anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister,” she wrote. “I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.”Soon they had a contract with a management company and were booked into the Bitter End, the Greenwich Village club that gave numerous future stars their start. An appearance on the musical variety television show “Hootenanny” in the spring of 1963 (along with the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Smothers Brothers) further boosted their profile. They appeared on the show again in early 1964.Some years earlier, Lucy Simon had composed a setting of the Eugene Field children’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and the song became a staple of the Simon Sisters’ performances. Released as a single in 1964, titled “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” it reached No. 73 on the Billboard chart. It also anchored one of the two albums they quickly recorded.The two sisters toured for a time, but after her marriage in 1967 to Dr. David Y. Levine, a psychiatrist, Lucy Simon pulled back from performing to focus on their two children. In 1975, she released a solo album, titled simply “Lucy Simon,” followed in 1977 by another, “Stolen Time.” But she found she had lost her zeal for performing.In the early 1980s, she and her husband produced two compilation albums featuring James Taylor, her sister Carly, Linda Ronstadt, Bette Midler and other stars singing children’s songs. The albums, “In Harmony: A Sesame Street Record” and “In Harmony 2,” both won Grammy Awards for best children’s album.In the 1980s, Ms. Simon took a stab at musical theater, working on an effort to make a musical out of the “Little House on the Prairie” stories. That project never bore fruit, but a connection provided by her sister Joanna led her to one that did.Joanna Simon was for a time the arts correspondent for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, and in 1988 she interviewed the playwright Marsha Norman. She asked Ms. Norman what she was working on, and the playwright mentioned an adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” the Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s novel, and said that she and the producer Heidi Landesman were looking for a composer.Lucy, left, and Carly Simon singing in Shubert Alley along Broadway in 1982. Lucy Simon was later nominated for a Tony Award for best original score, for the hit musical “The Secret Garden.”Nancy Kaye/Associated PressLucy Simon proved to be a good fit for Ms. Norman’s lyrics. The show opened on Broadway in April 1991. Reviews were mixed — Frank Rich, in The Times, said that Ms. Simon’s music was “fetching when limning the deep feelings locked within the story’s family constellations” but not always successful — yet the show was a hit, giving 709 performances over almost two years. Ms. Simon earned a Tony nomination for best original score. (The award went to Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for “The Will Rogers Follies.”)Ms. Simon reached Broadway again in 2015 as composer of the musical “Doctor Zhivago,” but the show lasted just 23 performances.Lucy Elizabeth Simon was born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan.“We all came out singing,” she once said of herself and her sisters. “And we kept on singing. At dinner we wouldn’t just say, ‘Please pass the salt, thank you.’ We’d sing it. Sometimes in the style of Gershwin. Sometimes as a lieder.”Carly Simon wrote in her book that the pass-the-salt singing started as a way to help her — Carly — with a vexing stammer. Their mother had suggested that instead of speaking the phrase, Carly try singing it. With Joanna and Lucy joining in to encourage their sister, it worked.Lucy and Carly Simon during an interview with The New York Times in 2015 at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.Ryan Conaty for The New York TimesLucy Simon’s greatest hit as a folk singer, the “Winkin’” song, had a self-help element to it. At 14, she was given a school assignment to memorize a poem, but dyslexia made it difficult. She found that she could memorize the Eugene Field poem by setting it to music. Her version was later recorded by numerous artists.Ms. Simon’s credits also included composing the music for a wild 1993 HBO movie, “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom,” which won Emmy Awards for Holly Hunter and Beau Bridges.Ms. Simon’s brother, Peter, a photographer, died in 2018. In addition to her husband and her sister Carly, she is survived by two children, Julie Simon and James Levine, and four grandchildren.In 1985, Ms. Simon was in the hospital for surgery. She told a reporter that her two sisters had turned up to give her support.“When the stretcher came to take me to the operating room, we sang three-part harmony,” she said. “It lifted me.” More

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      ‘Hound Dog’ Review: A Soul-Searching Journey Strays Off Course

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      Melis Aker’s new play with music, presented by Ars Nova and PlayCo., follows a musical prodigy without drive or passion.The young woman nicknamed Hound Dog might have studied musicology at Harvard, but all the panel members at her Royal Academy of Music audition seem to care about is that she’s from Turkey.“It’s like if Joni Mitchell had a bit of an orgy with a few Turkish folk musicians, and then had a very confused baby,” one of the panelists says of Hound Dog’s song. Another detects an “Americana” influence, “which is … surprising.” The first one wishes that she’d use “the traditional Turkish instrument,” though it’s unclear what that would be.What’s jarring about this scene is not so much that educators at the Royal Academy of Music would have such clichéd assumptions, but that their phrasing would be so clunky and vague — they’re deciding on admission to a prestigious institution, not a neighborhood after-school program. Unfortunately, this lack of focus and attendant lack of bite are fairly representative of Melis Aker’s new play with music, “Hound Dog,” which is being jointly presented by Ars Nova and PlayCo.When we meet her, Hound Dog (Ellena Eshraghi) is back in her hometown, Ankara, pondering whether to attend the conservatory (yes, she ended up being admitted), though the reasons for her hesitation are unclear. Complicating matters is her fraught relationship with her widowed father (Laith Nakli), with whom she is staying.Intertwined with his frustration and impatience with Turkey as a whole, Baba is a big rock ’n’ roll fan, with a particular fixation on Elvis Presley. Hound Dog sniffs at his taste with the dismissiveness of the newly enlightened. “I took a class called ‘Sound in the Uncanny Valley’ with this crazy professor,” she informs her childhood bestie, Ayse (the crackerjack Olivia AbiAssi, making the most of an underwritten role), before deriding “the appropriation and commercial simplicity” of her dad’s favorite bands.The dogmatism is amusing and on point. It is also contradicted by what we hear from Hound Dog’s own music. Her folk-rock audition number, “Only in Time” (performed, like the others in the show, by a live band headed by the coolly composed singer Sahar Milani), does sound like a Joni Mitchell pastiche, complete with vocal mannerisms, so who’s appropriating what now?But it’s hard to tell why Hound Dog writes in any particular style or even what animates her in general: This supposed prodigy is portrayed as lacking drive and passion. Mostly Hound Dog gabs with Ayse over some joints, argues with Baba, visits her dopey high school music teacher, Mr. Callahan (Matt Magnusson), and mopes as she attempts to deal with her unresolved grief over her mother’s death a year earlier.Aker had a promising subject in a woman who is deeply ambivalent about her life’s calling, and, by extension, herself. Hound Dog tries to navigate notions of authenticity and identity as she looks for her place in her family and in the world. The last is evoked by brief references to the ways social, political and cultural forces have long hurled against one another in Turkey, including an encounter with a cop who asks Baba, “Your folks never tell you about playing foreign music outside ’round here?”Because Hound Dog’s soul-searching remains blurry, Aker and the director, Machel Ross, can never quite make her equivocations compelling to watch — an ambiguous situation since the character is partly autobiographical, with stage directions that use the first-person singular whenever Hound Dog (referred to as “Me” in the script) is involved.Yet more unfulfilled promise comes from the musical numbers, written by Aker and the brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour, who are credited as the Lazours. One wonders, for example, whose feelings the band’s frontwoman is meant to voice. She could be Hound Dog’s siren-like alter ego, or perhaps she is a half-fantasized vision of her late mother. Or a mix of both. No matter: It’s hard not to feel that Hound Dog is stuck on the outside of her own story, listening in.Hound DogThrough Nov. 5 at Greenwich House, Manhattan; arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘New York, New York,’ a Film-Inspired Homage, Plans Broadway Bow

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      The new musical, based on the 1977 Martin Scorsese film, features songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb and is directed by Susan Stroman.“New York, New York,” a new musical inspired by the 1977 Martin Scorsese film of the same name, will open on Broadway next spring.The musical, set in the years just after World War II, is nominally about the lives of a diverse array of New Yorkers, including a musician who falls in love with a singer, as in the film. But, also like the movie, it is a tribute to New York City as a city of seekers and strivers.The musical will feature songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb, a songwriting pair best known for “Chicago” and “Cabaret.” The two wrote songs for the film, which was also a musical, including, most famously, the title song, which enjoyed renewed popularity in the city at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.The stage adaptation will include nine existing songs and 13 new ones. Ebb died in 2004; Kander, who is 95, has been actively working on the show, and the composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (“Hamilton”) co-wrote two songs with him and will be credited for contributing additional lyrics to the show.“The hero or heroine of the piece is New York City itself,” Kander said in an interview. “In the years of 1946 and 1947, the city was flooded with new young people, many of whom had been in the Service — I was one of them — looking to have a life you couldn’t have where you came from.”Kander said the show will track five story lines, but also will feature “a kaleidoscopic set of interludes where we see other characters.”The show features a book by David Thompson and Sharon Washington, and will be directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman. The cast has not yet been announced.The musical is scheduled to begin performances on March 24 and to open on April 26 at the St. James Theater. The lead producers are Sonia Friedman and Tom Kirdahy; the show will be capitalized for $25 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The show will be large — Stroman said she expects an onstage cast of 27 and an orchestra of 19. Stroman and Kander began talking about the show before the pandemic, but now see it a tribute to the city’s resilience. “We knew the city would at some point come back, and that fueled us to write about it even more,” Stroman said. More

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      Review: This Time, ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ Really Does Explode

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      Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic ends on a note of cautious optimism. Its latest incarnation, at the Public Theater, does not.Leaving his recent “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” aside, Robert O’Hara doesn’t typically direct revivals; nor, leaving Shakespeare aside, does the Public Theater typically produce them. Yet on Tuesday the Public opened O’Hara’s take on Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun”: not merely a revival but a further “exploration” of an earlier production of a 1959 classic that is arguably as well known today as it was epochal when it debuted.How, then, to make it new? Apparently, on the evidence of this staging, by furiously underlining its subtleties and downplaying its conventional strengths, a reversal of standard procedure that produces a sometimes stunning, sometimes stunted result.It’s not as if the play needed help to feel relevant; like all great works it has proved itself incessantly timely. In telling the story of the Youngers, a Black family aiming to move from a “rat trap” tenement on Chicago’s South Side to a house in a working-class white neighborhood, it both reports on and anticipates the racist backlash to upward mobility that has been a blight on American life since Reconstruction. And in dramatizing the effects of that backlash on Walter Lee, the feckless dreamer of the family, it offers a piercing psychological portrait of Black manhood in distress.As was customary in her time, Hansberry prioritizes the real estate plot, wrapping Walter Lee’s personal drama (and that of his mother, wife, sister and son) in its ultimately hopeful arms. Beginning with the indignities of “ghetto-itus” — there are just two bedrooms for the three generations and a bathroom shared with neighbors down the hall — the play ends with them all moving out. Even the feeble houseplant, symbolically undernourished in the light-deprived apartment, is promised a new life.O’Hara signals from the start (and reiterates throughout) that he will flip the focus, at the same time broadening and darkening it. His production begins not, as written, with Ruth Younger (Mandi Masden) making breakfast, but with Walter Lee (Francois Battiste) carrying their sleeping son, Travis, from the dim recesses of the apartment to his bed on the living room sofa. It’s a haunting image that suggests the way the father’s hopes, and perhaps his failures, may be borne into the future — a future O’Hara and the scenic designer, Clint Ramos, literalize in a devastating coup de théâtre at the end.Francois Battiste as Walter Lee, right, with his son Toussaint Battiste as Travis, has no difficulty filling the additional space created by O’Hara’s interpretation of the role, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn between, no matter how judiciously Hansberry has distributed the play’s attention among the main characters — including the matriarch, Lena (Tonya Pinkins), and her daughter, Beneatha (Paige Gilbert) — O’Hara concentrates his prodigious theatrical imagination on Walter Lee.Battiste, among the most compelling stage actors today, has no difficulty filling the additional space created by that interpretation, making the character more alarming than usual but no less believable. Even when O’Hara has him step completely out of the frame of the play, turning what is already a horrifying speech (“O, yassuh boss! Yassssuh, Great white Father!”) into a brutal moment of minstrelsy, Battiste manages not to rip the skin of the role.But some of O’Hara’s other attempts to muscle in on Hansberry’s naturalism are less successful. Reaching not just forward but also backward along the family’s male line, he transfers some of the dialogue normally assigned to Lena to the ghost of her husband, who wanders atmospherically in and out of the action, looking unmoored. (The spectral lighting is by Alex Jainchill.) Also unmoored: a passage of postcoital pillow talk for Walter Lee and Ruth, created by turning dialogue that’s usually spoken live into a recorded voice-over. We hear the moans of their lovemaking too.Rather than creating the impression of buried fondness in their marriage, as it evidently means to do, the interpolation pushes the affection offstage. That’s a problem throughout. O’Hara directs most of the family scenes as overlapping free-for-alls, creating a generalized impression of dysfunction and very little of attachment. (Most of the funny and trenchant detail is lost in the noise.) At times I had the feeling that O’Hara, impatient with Hansberry’s occasionally laborious dramaturgy, had spun all the dials to the extreme right: volume, contrast, hue.Yet that was not the case in the earlier version of this revival seen at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2019. Led more equally by Battiste’s Walter Lee and S. Epatha Merkerson’s Lena, that “Raisin” was just as daring but less cartoonish. And though the current cast is very good generally, it’s noticeable that the comic material is handled most deftly, with standout performances from the piquant Gilbert and, as a nosy neighbor, Perri Gaffney.Gilbert as Beneatha and John Clay III as one of Beneatha’s suitors, the Nigerian idealist Joseph Asagai.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRather, the problem seems to be that O’Hara’s continued exploration has escaped Hansberry’s orbit, leaving some of the graver characters stranded in the thin air between her style and his. As Lena, Pinkins, ordinarily capable of astonishing depth and power, is largely hampered by too much directorial business, including the sudden onset of a ferocious palsy no one onstage seems to notice. And where the script famously has her slap her daughter for blasphemy, O’Hara has her go much further, leaving Beneatha flat on the floor.Despite his similar approach to the play overall, it never stays down for long. It can’t; it has too much internal energy and direction for any single misstep, including Hansberry’s, to throw the whole thing off track. Beneatha’s choice between two suitors — a preppy conformist (Mister Fitzgerald) and a Nigerian idealist (John Clay III) — is fully engaging no matter how creaky the setup is. And though the scene in which a representative of the Youngers’s new neighborhood (Jesse Pennington) comes to “welcome” them with veiled threats is very nearly twirling-mustache melodrama, it’s nevertheless one of the highlights of American theater.In that sense, O’Hara — who aside from his brilliant direction of contemporary works like “Slave Play” and “BLKS” is a mordant comic playwright himself — is right to reimagine the genre expectations of “Raisin.” It’s what we do with all classics, not because they require it but because they can handle it. And if his pessimism about American racism is somewhat at odds with Hansberry’s cautious optimism, well, he’s had 60 more years of history to support his point. That the play is so prescient does not mean that its story is over. It means that, sadly, it never is.A Raisin in the SunThrough Nov. 20 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 3 hours. More