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      Another Miranda at the Public Theater: Luis A. Miranda Jr., New Board Chair

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      Luis A. Miranda Jr., a political consultant and activist whose son, Lin-Manuel Miranda, composed one of the Public’s biggest hits, “Hamilton,” was named chair of the theater’s board.Long before he joined the board of the Public Theater, and before his son, Lin-Manuel Miranda, composed one of the biggest hits in the theater’s history, “Hamilton,” Luis A. Miranda Jr. recalled the first show he ever saw there: Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”“My first experience with the Public Theater, in 1976, was of a production that could not be more different than everything that was on Broadway,” Luis Miranda, 68, said, recalling “For Colored Girls” and its intimate stories of Black female agency told through spoken word and dance.Now Miranda, a political consultant and activist who has worked in city government and the nonprofit sector, will be taking on a new role at the institution: The theater announced Tuesday that he would be its next board chair.Miranda said that his priorities included the renovation of the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, the home of the theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park program, and support for the theater’s diversity and inclusion initiatives.While many theaters have begun to reckon with being “too white” in recent years, Miranda said, Public Theater had an early start on bridging the equity gap.“We’re not starting from scratch because the theater has a history of cultural transformation and putting onstage diverse actors, diverse writers,” said Miranda, who has been on the board since 2015. But he added that there was more to do and that he would work on initiatives that include antiracism training for board members and the hiring of a senior director of antiracism and equity.“Hamilton” started out at the Public Theater, before transferring to Broadway. “We never thought that Hamilton would be what it has become,” Miranda said.Miranda chairs the Latino Victory Fund, the Broadway League’s Viva Broadway initiative and the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance. At the Public he succeeds Arielle Tepper, who served as chair for nearly a decade. “I couldn’t be happier that he is taking over,” Tepper said.Oskar Eustis, the theater’s artistic director, praised Miranda in a statement for his commitment to the idea that “culture belongs to everyone.” More

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      ‘Chushingura — 47 Ronin’ Review: A Sprawling Tale of Loyalty

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      The palace intrigue behind a mythic battle from 18th-century Japan is the subject of this bilingual play in Manhattan.There is no getting around it: This show is far from perfect. Actually, it might be far from a conventional definition of good. The storytelling is erratic, and so is some of the acting; the production values are minimal.Yet during the vast majority of “Chushingura — 47 Ronin,” I was engrossed in the action, eager to see what was going to happen next. It did not even matter that I knew what was in store, having seen three film versions of the basic plot, including the Kenji Mizoguchi classic “The 47 Ronin,” from 1941. More celebrated plays have not exerted that kind of primal pull on me: Sometimes theater can be so elementally simple that it boils down to the basic enjoyment of a good yarn.And this one, about a band of warriors’ vengeful quest, is among the best of all time. The show, at A.R.T./New York Theaters, is a retelling of an event from 18th-century Japan that has spawned an impressively large number of movies (including one surreal misfire from 2013 starring Keanu Reeves) as well as TV series, artworks and comic books. (“Chushingura” is an umbrella term for the works inspired by the so-called Ako incident.)Now it’s the turn of the upstart New York company Amaterasu Za, which produces bilingual works rooted in Japanese sources and art forms. The show’s writer and director, Ako Dachs, also pops up at regular intervals as a narrator in English; the rest of the text is in Japanese, with simultaneous translation projected in supertitles whose synchronization can be haphazard. (The multitasking Dachs also did the period costumes and leads Amaterasu Za.)The tale is set in motion when, as so often happens, someone finally loses patience. Lord Kira (Hiroko Yonekura) is a scoundrel who, on a fateful day at Edo castle, taunts Lord Asano (Yasu Suzuki) one time too many. Asano attacks Kira and wounds him. Nobody dies in the skirmish, but Asano has broken the castle’s rules by “unreasonably” drawing his sword. Not only must he commit ritual suicide, but his estate will also be seized, and his samurai retinue and staff will be dismissed.Back at Asano’s home in Ako, his chancellor, Oishi (Tatsuo Ichikawa), rallies the samurai, now known as ronin because they are without a master, in a campaign to avenge Asano and restore his clan’s honor.While this suggests a lot of action, the vast majority of the show, which takes place on a fairly small stage, is dedicated to chatty palace intrigue, as if we were eavesdropping on conspirators. When there is a possibility that the unseen shogun might reinstate the fallen clan, some of Asano’s followers are bereft at the prospect of losing their excuse to kill Kira. Honor-bound duty has a messy way of turning into personal revenge.Yasu Suzuki, left, who plays Lord Asano, with Hiroko Yonekura.Melinda HallDespite writing that can be confusing — we are not told, for example, how Oishi’s group of 56 ronin ended up just 47, or maybe a supertitle zipped by too quickly — the story moves at a steady clip. And Dachs’s decision to have women play some of the male roles, most prominently Kira, is very effective.Gender-blind casting is, of course, not uncommon in Japanese theater, and Dachs herself is a former member of that country’s all-female Takarazuka Revue company (she is a familiar presence, under the single name Ako, on New York stages, most notably in Leah Nanako Winkler’s “Kentucky” and “God Said This”). That the actors portraying samurai wear headpieces in the traditional “chonmage” style, in which a ponytail is folded back over the top of the head, creates a sense of androgynous uniformity. (Mitsuteru Okuyama did the wigs.)So yes, “Chushingura — 47 Ronin” is far from the best show out there. But right now, this sprawling tale of loyalty to rigid codes certainly is unlike anything else on a New York stage.Chushingura — 47 RoninThrough Nov. 6 at A.R.T./New York, Manhattan; amaterasuza.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Danielle Deadwyler Is the Beating Heart of ‘Till’

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      After critically acclaimed turns in “Station Eleven” and “The Harder They Fall,” her latest role hit close to home. That’s why she was hesitant to take it on.Danielle Deadwyler’s eyes are an instrument that she can play with precise control.In HBO Max’s postapocalyptic drama “Station Eleven,” they stare into your soul as Deadwyler’s graphic novelist character, Miranda, soaks in the world around her. In Netflix’s all-Black western “The Harder They Fall,” they’re the last thing a baddie sees before he’s killed by Deadwyler’s quippy gunslinger, Cuffee.And in her latest film, Chinonye Chukwu’s “Till,” about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 by white supremacists helped spark the civil rights movement, they often fill your entire screen, tortured and unblinking in shocked grief, eyelids fluttering in painful remembrance. Though the actress has been an outsize presence in smaller screen roles in recent years, “Till” is her first lead part in a feature film.“I’d been reared in the history, but I didn’t know the intimacy of it,” Deadwyler, 40, said of Mamie and Emmett’s relationship in a recent interview on a rainy evening at the Park Lane Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “So this was a chance to show what it meant to be Mamie both in public and in private, and how she was intentional about and navigating those two identities.”Deadwyler’s expressive eyes are only the beginning of her critically acclaimed performance as Emmett’s doting mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis praised Deadwyler’s range. “With fixed intensity and supple quicksilver emotional changes,” she wrote, “Deadwyler rises to the occasion as Mamie, delivering a quiet, centralizing performance that works contrapuntally with the story’s heaviness, its profundity and violence.”Deadwyler with Whoopi Goldberg in “Till.”Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion PicturesDEADWYLER GREW UP with three siblings in southwest Atlanta, the daughter of a legal secretary and a railroad supervisor. Her mother, she said, was intent on giving the children a diverse cultural life.“My mom was like, ‘You can’t go to U.G.A,’” she said, referring to the University of Georgia. “She had intentions for us to get out of a certain comfort zone.”As a youngster, Deadwyler dabbled in theater and dance, taking her first dance class when she was just 4 after her mother saw her shimmying to “Soul Train,” and falling in love with theater in high school.But she didn’t necessarily want to be an actor, she said, nor did she even fathom becoming one.“It was just a part of my life since I was a kid,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the couch in a loose white button-up over black slacks and black crew socks. “It was lifeblood.”She stayed close to home for college, majoring in history at Spelman while continuing to perform in plays. She earned a master’s degree in American Studies from Columbia in New York, writing her thesis on sex-positive representations of women in hip-hop. (In 2017 she earned a second master’s degree, in creative writing at Ashland University in Ohio.)Whoopi Goldberg, an Outspoken StarThe comedian and co-host of the ABC talk show “The View” is known for her provocative opinions — and controversies.‘The View’: Since 2007, Whoopi Goldberg has been the often-irascible moderator on the daytime talk show, helping it become one of the most important political TV shows in America.Holocaust Comments: Earlier this year, Goldberg was suspended for two weeks from “The View” after she said repeatedly that the Holocaust was not about race. She later apologized.On Living Alone: After three marriages, Goldberg told us in a 2016 interview that she knows she doesn’t “want somebody in my house.”A Decades-Long Career: In 2019, the Times podcast “Still Processing” discussed  Goldberg’s career, from her days as a boundary-pushing comedian to her role as professional curmudgeon on “The View.”When she was rejected for the women’s studies graduate program at Emory University in Atlanta — “I cried in the bathroom at the trust fund where I was interning,” she said — she turned to teaching at an elementary charter school for two years. But with her youthful looks and wiry frame, Deadwyler struggled to be taken seriously. “Quinta Brunson’s character on ‘Abbott Elementary’ looks young, but she has a teacherly presence,” Deadwyler said, clutching her knees to her chest. “I just looked young — I was fresh out of grad school. The kids were like, ‘What grade are you in?’”But then came her big break: a role as the Lady in Yellow in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” mounted by True Colors Theater in Atlanta in 2009.Screen work soon followed, including the lead in the 2012 TV drama “A Cross to Bear,” playing a homeless, alcoholic mother. She also began booking small television roles: the antagonist LaQuita Maxwell on Tyler Perry’s prime-time soap opera “The Haves and the Have Nots,” a recurring role as Yoli on the Starz drama “P-Valley,” and memorable parts in FX’s “Atlanta” and HBO’s “Watchmen.”The latter was the performance that came to mind when Patrick Somerville, creator of “Station Eleven,” was looking to cast his Miranda, the artist whose graphic novel drives the show’s narrative arc.“Her eyes can do anything,” he said. “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”He put her through a lot of last-minute rewrites, but “she was never concerned with change,” he said. “She was always her own center. I was always impressed by her unbelievable confidence.”Deadwyler in “Station Eleven.” The show’s creator, Patrick Somerville, said, “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”HBO MaxHER BIGGEST LEAP to date, “Till,” is one she almost didn’t take.Mamie Till-Mobley is best known for insisting on an open-casket viewing for her son’s corpse, to show the world what a mob of white men did to him, but the film focuses on her transformation from shellshocked parent to fervent activist. “My reps sent me the script, and I was like, ‘Do I want to do this?’” said Deadwyler, who is the single mother of a 12-year-old son, “because it’s a joyous endeavor, but it’s a painful one, too.”In the end, the role of Mamie resonated in her bones.For her audition, she submitted a self-tape that included the scene in which she knots a tie around Emmett’s neck — using her son, Ezra, as a stand-in — as he prepares to go down to Mississippi, telling him to “be small.” Then, in a video call with Chukwu, she re-enacted the moment when Mamie sees Emmett’s corpse for the first time. (“I warned my son, ‘Hey, man, you might hear some weird noises,’” she said.)Chukwu, the director, said she knew immediately that she was watching something special.“When I’m casting, I look at whether actors can communicate a story with their eyes,” she said. “Are they able to get underneath the words in a nonverbal way? Are they willing and able to dive into the work in a way that demands a vulnerability and focusedness? I saw all of that in her audition tape.”Deadwyler’s wordless ability to act with her whole body informed how she shot the film, Chukwu said.“I knew that I wanted the audience to see this Black woman’s humanity and that faces would be important,” she said. “But when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Mamie’s testimony scene in the courtroom, for instance — a seven-page powder keg of grief, frustration and rage — is shot in one long take. Chukwu said she originally planned on eight or nine other setups, but when Deadwyler received a standing ovation from the cast and crew on the first take — a close-up on her face — Chukwu decided: She didn’t need any more.Deadwyler said the weight of Mamie’s suffering, her choice to fight battles for future generations even when she knows she cannot win in the present, settled into every part of her body on set. But the minute they wrapped for the day, a waiting car would take her home, Mahalia Jackson gospel songs on the stereo.“It’s a sonic shift,” she said. “It’s the same thing with Mamie: There’s a private self and a public self.”The director Chinonye Chukwu planned to focus on faces all along. But “when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesYet there were lighthearted moments on set that reflected Deadwyler’s sense of humor. “At first I thought she was very serious, and that she’d get very annoyed with me, because I’m not,” said Whoopi Goldberg, who plays Mamie’s mother and served as a producer of the film. “But she is also very silly.”Despite the film’s enthusiastic reception among both critics and audiences — it currently has a 99 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes — it was a project that took more than two decades to reach the big screen, Goldberg said.“People would say, ‘You know, nobody wants to see that story,’” she said. “You’d say, ‘No, people do want to see it.’ I guess it was the reckoning that happened that finally got people interested in telling these stories.” (“Till” is the second project focused on Mamie and Emmett’s story to be released this year, after the ABC mini-series “Women of the Movement.”)“It has modern-day resonance,” Deadwyler said, adding that she has discussed the story with her son because “it would be neglectful for me to not talk to him about the possibilities.”AFTER THE PUBLICITY TOUR for “Till,” Deadwyler plans to take a moment — just a moment — to soak it all in. She can also be seen starring alongside Zoe Saldaña in the new Netflix limited series “From Scratch,” based on Tembi Locke’s memoir about an American student who falls in love with an Italian chef. And she has a few film projects in the works, among them Kourosh Ahari’s sci-fi thriller “Parallel” and Netflix’s star-studded airport Christmas thriller “Carry On.”“I want to collaborate with people,” she said. “And I’m looking forward to being approached for more projects, vs. doing 80, 100 auditions per year.”In the meantime, after being told that her face can be seen in ads atop New York taxis, she marveled at her change in fortune, though she hadn’t seen one yet. “I would like to go quietly into the dark,” she said, laughing.Deadwyler’s laugh is a curious thing, a sound you haven’t heard much onscreen: It’s a deep, rumbling, full-bodied “HA HA HA” that you can hear echoing down the hall long after the door closes. “Me, a serious person?” she says, eyes twinkling. “No.”I ask what else people get wrong about her.There’s that laugh again.“Everything.” More

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      In a Musical About Penicillin, Superbugs Take Center Stage

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      “The Mold That Changed the World” focuses on the physician who discovered penicillin. And it offers a message: Don’t take antibiotics unless you really need them.WASHINGTON — Robin Hiley’s eyes rolled when he recounted the night in 2016 that a friend, an infectious disease doctor, asked him what seemed like a crazy question: “Wouldn’t it be a great thing to have a musical about antibiotics?”Hiley, a composer and songwriter who is the artistic director of the Charades Theater Company in Edinburgh, was skeptical. Though the troupe calls itself “theatre with a social conscience,” antibiotics — or more precisely the threat of antimicrobial resistance, which can lead to death when common germs evade treatment — seemed a bridge too far.But the friend, Dr. Meghan Perry, was persistent, passionate about what she conceded was “this wacky idea.” And so it is that “The Mold That Changed the World,” a musical about Alexander Fleming, the Scottish physician and microbiologist who received a Nobel Prize in 1945 for discovering penicillin, is playing this week (through Sunday) in Washington.The show traces the life of Fleming, from his days as a young private in Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps who later became a medical doctor, through two world wars and his famous discovery. It also offers a glimpse into a dark future — one predicted by Fleming himself — where antibiotics no longer work because deadly “superbugs” have learned to evade them.It also has a neat twist: a chorus of real-life health care professionals and scientists, who play soldiers, lab technicians, reporters — singing and dancing with the rest of the cast. They include people like Mario Sengco, a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency who also sings in the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington.Emily Bull, as Rose, comforts a wounded soldier played by Scott Armstrong in “The Mold That Changed the World.”Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times“How often can a musical deliver a lifesaving message to society?” he asked.The danger Fleming foresaw is, in fact, already here. Experts estimate that antimicrobial resistance leads to 1.2 million deaths around the world each year.And the problem — known by its initials, A.M.R. — is getting worse, because the drugs were overused during the coronavirus pandemic, said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The show opens on Nov. 1 in Atlanta, home of the C.D.C.; Dr. Walensky will participate in a panel discussion before the performance.)At a discussion before Thursday night’s performance at the Atlas Performing Arts Center here in the nation’s capital, Dr. Rick Bright, former director of the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, made the story personal: After a cut he sustained while gardening led to an antibiotic-resistant infection, he spent a week in the hospital, and almost lost a thumb. It took seven antibiotics to cure him. Another panelist, the writer Diane Shader Smith, lost her 25-year-old daughter, who had cystic fibrosis, to a superbug infection.In Edinburgh, that is precisely what Dr. Perry was worried about when she pitched her idea to Hiley, who said he gravitates “toward historical stories that have a social impact.” He began reading about Fleming, he said, and “saw this potential of a story and started to begin to understand the global impact of A.M.R. And the seed was sown, so to speak.”The musical features a chorus of real-life health care professionals and scientists, who play soldiers, lab technicians, reporters — singing and dancing with the rest of the cast.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesThey received funding from the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, which in turn led to backing from a powerful figure: Dame Sally Davies, who was then Britain’s chief medical officer. She was so concerned about antimicrobial resistance, she said, that it is now on Britain’s “risk register,” along with pandemics and bioterrorism, as a security threat.The show has had sold-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe festival and has also played in London and Glasgow — with mold spelled “mould.” It opens with Fleming, played by Jeremy Rose, at the end of his life, encountering an otherworldly, barefoot Mother Earth figure named Rose, played by Emily Bull.Rose, the Mother Earth character, hovers over the story as a kind of narrator, bringing Fleming back and forward in time. Two ethereal-looking circus performers, dressed in flowing psychedelic colors, appear throughout the musical, spinning on an acrobat’s wheel. Hiley envisioned them as the “Gram twins,” representing two different types of bacteria: Gram-positive and Gram-negative. (Penicillin treats Gram-positive infections.)The audience sees the young Army private bidding farewell to the London Scottish Regiment, where he has served for 14 years. (“Private 6392, this mess hall honors you!” the cast sings.) Soon it is 1914, and Fleming is in Bologne, France, tending to soldiers — some from his old unit — facing death from exposure to poison and shrapnel wounds that turn into deadly infections.He cries at the uselessness of it all: “These men came to war prepared to die to protect their homeland, their families, their friends — not to be poisoned by gas, gangrene, harmless cuts; infected by horse manure on the fields on which they fought!”Fleming, later seen in his bacteriology lab at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, is a rumpled, earnest figure. He was apparently not the neatest of scientists, and the show riffs on other scientists who frown on his untidy habits. (“It’s clean and tidy we adore,” the chorus, dressed in lab coats, sings. “So sterilize those beakers! Disinfect that glass pipette!”) But that very untidiness led to his world-changing discovery.In 1928, while experimenting with common staphylococcal bacteria, Fleming spotted a ring of mold in a petri dish he had left by an open window while he was off on vacation. He was astonished to see that the mold had killed the germs. But that is not the end of the story.More than a decade passed before his discovery could actually be put to use. It took a couple of polished Oxford University scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, to purify the mold called penicillium notatum so that it could be tested on mice, and then people, and manufactured in mass quantities. They shared the Nobel with Fleming.A panel discussion at the Atlas Performing Arts Center included, from left: the composer and songwriter Robin Hiley; Sarah Despres of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Bethany Brookshire, a science writer in Washington; Dr. Rick Bright; and the writer Diane Shader Smith.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesOne of the biggest challenges in modern medicine is that drug companies don’t want to invest in developing new antibiotics; it is not that lucrative, and if germs keep evolving to evade new drugs, the market potential is limited. In bringing the show to Washington, Dame Sally said, she hopes to persuade Congress to pass a bill, the PASTEUR Act, that would offer incentives for companies to innovate. (The name, a play on the famous scientist Louis Pasteur, stands for Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Up surging Resistance.)“We have a market failure,” Dame Sally said.Looking ahead, Dr. Walensky said, “addressing antimicrobial resistance is going to be the next chapter because it was the thing everybody was worried about before the pandemic.”As “The Mold That Changed The World” winds down, Fleming finds himself in the future, aghast at what humankind has wrought. With so many people taking antibiotics unnecessarily, and farmers using them to prevent and treat disease in livestock and increase productivity, modern medicine is no more equipped to handle bacterial infections than the young Fleming was on the battlefield.The message, Dr. Perry said, is clear: “Don’t take an antibiotic unless you really need it.” She harked back to when she and Hiley were brainstorming at the cafe in Edinburgh, and to the message she had written in block letters atop their storyboard: “Antibiotics are precious.” More

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      ‘Life of Pi’ Will Come to Broadway

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      Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s award-winning novel will begin preview performances on March 9.The theatrical adaptation of “Life of Pi,” about the tales of a teenage boy stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger, is coming to New York this spring.Following an energetic run in London, where “Life of Pi” won five Olivier Awards, including best new play, the show will come to Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theater with preview performances starting March 9 and an opening night slated for March 30. Casting has not yet been announced.The show, written by Lolita Chakrabarti and directed by Max Webster, is an adaptation of Yann Martel’s acclaimed 2001 novel, which won the Man Booker Prize and inspired a 2012 film. It uses intricate puppetry to bring the story’s animal characters to life, with the seven performers who play the tiger collectively awarded best actor in a supporting role at the Olivier Awards.In The New York Times, the critic Matt Wolf wrote that the appeal of the production in London’s West End “lies not so much in blunt pronouncements as in the visual wonder of a bare stage yielding to richly imagined life.”In a statement, Chakrabarti called the show “a story of survival which all of us can fundamentally relate to after the effects of the pandemic.” She added that “to be able to tell this story the way I imagined it, to create the world using my references and viewpoint, has been an extraordinary gift.”Before coming to Broadway, “Life of Pi” will make its North American premiere at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University. More

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      Review: Retracing the Path From Middle School Nerd to Rock Goddess

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      Best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” the enchanting singer-songwriter Jill Sobule is the star of a winsome and defiant autobiographical musical.It is an established fact of human development that most of the people who grew up to be cool and original were nerds for a while, way back when.Case in point: the enchanting Jill Sobule, best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” and currently starring in the winsome and defiant autobiographical musical “F*ck7thGrade.” Seventh grade being, as she tells it, the year when it all fell apart — when she no longer fit in with the other girls at her school in Colorado, and they weren’t shy about telling her so.“They thought I was weird because I had a Batman utility belt and a camera that turned into a 007 gun,” she says, and your heart kind of breaks even as you smile, because she must have been darling, right? Then, with an air of baffled wonder: “I was the only one who wanted to be a spy.”She also dreamed of being a rock star, and longed for the girl she had a secret crush on to reciprocate. But it was the early 1970s, and Sobule didn’t fit the template of sugar and spice and everything nice. The girls who had been her friends rejected her. One of them lobbed a homophobic slur her way.“She didn’t even know what that meant,” says Sobule, who is now 61. “But I did.”Directed by Lisa Peterson, the show — at the Wild Project in the East Village — is described in promotional materials as a “rock concert musical,” a slightly awkward term that is nonetheless exactly right. With a book by Liza Birkenmeier, it truly is a musical, backing Sobule with a three-piece band whose musicians — Nini Camps, Kristen Ellis-Henderson and Julie Wolf (also the music director) — play assorted characters throughout the 90-minute show.Still, the performance on this small stage does feel like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley. The name of Sobule’s three-piece band is Secrets of the Vatican — made up of all girls when it existed only in her childhood imagination, and of all women now, which even in 2022 is rare enough to make a statement.On a set by Rachel Hauck whose principal feature is a wall of lockers, Sobule speaks and sings a slender story of her life, starting with the exultant freedom of pre-adolescence and her rocking ode to the bike she cherished then, “Raleigh Blue Chopper.”“When I was 12, I was a fierce little rocker who wanted to be Jimi Hendrix,” she says with the same sly, sunny, quietly confiding air that the video for “I Kissed a Girl” captured 27 years ago. “I didn’t have to tell anyone what I was,” she adds. “I just was.”The performance on this small East Village stage feels like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley.Eric McNattBut the wider world of the late 20th century was not much more hospitable to ambitious female musicians — let alone lesbians — than seventh grade had been. Sobule remembers a conversation she overheard at her record label in the ’90s, about Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge and how glad the label was that Sobule was straight. Which she wasn’t, as they might have guessed from “I Kissed a Girl,” but she also wasn’t about to clue them in.“I wish I would have said to all of them: it’s a big ol’ gay gay song,” she says. “But I didn’t. I was too scared. I wanted to do the smart thing. I wanted to be arty and transgressive, but I wanted to sell records. The compromising got me nowhere. And then I couldn’t stand my own song.”Shorter, sharper and more theatrical than Etheridge’s current Off Broadway show, “My Window,” Sobule’s is much more intimate in scale — although each pays brief tribute to “Day by Day,” from “Godspell,” with which both musicians’ teen years coincided.“Strawberry Gloss,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Sold My Soul” and “Underdog Victorious” are among the songs Sobule sings from her own catalog. Eventually, so is “I Kissed a Girl.”This is a show for Sobule fans, and for a queer audience, but it’s also for the many nerds who grew up to be the cool people. It will give you flashbacks to middle school, no matter how popular you were; that’s pretty much guaranteed. But it will also give you the cheering company of Sobule and her extremely non-imaginary, rocking-out band.F*ck7thGradeThrough Nov. 8 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thewildproject.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Feature: Singing Along at Musical Con

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      Excel Centre 22 – 23 October

      We sent Lily Middleton along to the first ever Musical Con to find out just what it is all about, and whether it could become an annual event for the legions of musical theatre fans.

      I think we’ve found the place where we belong

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      Strolling from Custom House station up to the ExCel Centre and it’s easy to spot my fellow musical theatre fans. Whilst I’m sporting a “The show must go on” charity t-shirt, there are also a plethora of Queens from Six, residents of Oz, students of Westerberg High and much more. We’re all heading to the first ever Musical Con – a convention for fans of musical theatre.

      The convention is a mix of performances, panel discussions and opportunities to meet the stars as well as workshops for budding performers. There is a small selection of stalls with musical theatre themed gifts, temptingly charming embroidery kits and the newly launched Musicals magazine. If you’re looking to train in the industry, there are plenty of theatre schools on hand to offer advice and guidance. I met Sam Rowe, a musical theatre student at Trinity Laban with dreams of being Javert in Les Mis, who is there to inspire prospective students. He stresses how everyone in the industry must be a fan to start with, and there’s no shortage of them in this hall today.

      There’s a lot going on at Musical Con. And sadly, this is slightly to the detriment of the event. It’s very loud. Very, very loud. When watching the incredible Jenna Russell, she caveats her performance of one of Sondheim’s most exquisite songs, by saying “This is gonna be hilarious. It’s such a quiet little song.”, and she comically wonders what her friend, Sondheim himself, would have made of the situation.

      The whole event is in just one hall at ExCel, so the music and shouting from the workshops easily carries across to the main stage. It’s distracting at best, but at worst it completely spoils the performances on stage. In the ‘Backstage’ area, home to many fascinating talks, there are headphones on each chair (the type you’d have at a silent disco) but again it’s quite hard to focus. You can’t help but feel sorry for the stars on stage, battling with the general volume of the event. We had to keep leaving the event space every now and then to give our ears a break.

      Musical Con has also received some criticism online around accessibility issues, from not being clear in advance of the event for fans who were trying to work out if it would be possible and safe for them to attend, to issues on the day for those that did go. There is very little seating around the main stage; as a result you either have to stand for long periods of time, hope you can find a chair or just sit on the floor – not an option for all attendees.

      Having said that, when this event is good, it’s fantastic. The opening performance on the main stage featured six West End icons performing a real mix of classic show tunes and more recent hits. Highlights were Ben Forster with his goosebump-inducing performance of ‘The Music of the Night’, Alice Fearn charming us with ‘Into the Unknown’ and Trevor Dion Nicholas thrilling the crowd with ’Friend Like Me’. And it was an absolute treat to hear the crowd erupt when Layton Williams burst onto the stage in his icon-making role from Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.

      But my personal highlight was witnessing four past Elphabas, Alice Fearn, Louise Dearman, Laura Pick and Nikki Bentley, discuss their experiences of playing this iconic role in Wicked and performing some of Elphaba’s showstopping songs. Watching them perform ‘Defying Gravity’ together was an overwhelming experience, a real treat for the fans in the room.

      A new event will always have issues, but Musical Con has some work to do for next year to make the event more accessible and find a way of controlling the noise levels. It’s also an expensive day, at £45 for the most basic day ticket and up to £195 for a weekend VIP ticket. At first, I questioned whether the event felt worth the money, and when you can’t get a seat at the Backstage talks stage to hear the panel discussions, or need to leave the event space just to avoid a headache, it feels hard to justify.

      However, most of the visitors I spoke to were flying high on the buzz of the day. A sibling pair had travelled from Glasgow and said they hope it happens every year whilst friends who’d travelled for 2½ hours to be there loved the variety of things to see. A group of Phantom cosplayers told me about their “stand-off with Les Mis” with glee, before explaining how they felt the event was a safe space, where they can be whoever they want to be without judgement. It’s a place for musical theatre fans to come together and freely share their passion.

      Hopefully Musical Con will iron out its teething problems and address the communication and accessibility issues to make this event a safe and welcoming staple in the musical theatre calendar, for all its audiences.

      Musical Con took place on 22 and 23 October 2022. Check the website here for future announcements for 2023. More

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      ‘Back to the Future’ Musical to Open on Broadway Next Summer

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      The show, now in London, has a creative team that combines veterans of the film with some Broadway stalwarts. Performances will begin on June 30.Filmdom’s most famous DeLorean is getting ready to park itself on Broadway.A musical adaptation of the hit 1985 film “Back to the Future” is planning to open on Broadway next summer, its producers announced Friday. (Look at your calendar: Friday is Oct. 21, which is when devoted fans celebrate “Back to the Future Day.”)The musical, with a creative team that combines veterans of the film with some Broadway stalwarts, has already had a life in Britain.It had an ill-timed opening at the Manchester Opera House on March 11, 2020; that production closed a few days later because of the coronavirus pandemic. The show then transferred to London last fall, where it has had much better luck: It won this year’s Olivier Award for best new musical, and it is still running at the Adelphi Theater.The beloved science-fiction film, about a teenager who travels back in time in a DeLorean and disrupts the lives of his future parents, spawned sequels and a variety of spinoff ventures, and also contributed to the fame of its star, Michael J. Fox.“Back to the Future: The Musical” features a book by Bob Gale, the screenwriter who co-wrote and co-produced all three films, and songs by Alan Silvestri, who composed the film’s score, as well as Glen Ballard, a record producer and songwriter. The musical also includes pop songs featured in the film, including “The Power of Love.”The director is John Rando, who in 2002 won a Tony Award for “Urinetown.”Two members of the London cast have signed on to reprise their roles on Broadway: Roger Bart as the inventor Doc Brown, and Hugh Coles as George McFly, the protagonist’s father. Casting for the main role, of the teenager Marty McFly, has not yet been announced.The musical is scheduled to begin performances June 30 and to open Aug. 3 at the Winter Garden Theater, which is now home to a starry revival of “The Music Man” that is planning to close Jan. 1.The musical, with Colin Ingram as its lead producer, is being capitalized for $23.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Gale, who has been working on projects related to “Back to the Future” for more than four decades and is the de facto guardian of the franchise, said he is delighted to finally be working on Broadway, more than 15 years after Leslie Zemeckis, the wife of the film’s director Robert Zemeckis, saw “The Producers” and suggested “Back to the Future” could also be musicalized. “Broadway is the gold standard — musical theater was really invented there — and I’m delighted that we are finally going to get our shot on the Great White Way,” Gale said.Gale said the creative team has been making tweaks to the script and the set as it prepares for a Broadway run, incorporating lessons from the productions in England. They are small changes, he said, “but little things add up.”“One thing people appreciate about the movie: the more they watch, the more details they see,” he said. More