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      Angela Lansbury, TV’s Favorite Sleuth on ‘Murder She Wrote,’ Dies at 96

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      She was a Hollywood and Broadway sensation, but she captured the biggest audience of her career as the TV sleuth Jessica Fletcher.The New York Times sat down with Angela Lansbury in 2010 to discuss her life and accomplishments on the stage and screen. She spoke with us with the understanding the interview would be published only after her death.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAngela Lansbury, a formidable actress who captivated Hollywood in her youth, became a Broadway musical sensation in middle age and then drew millions of fans as a widowed mystery writer on the long-running television series “Murder, She Wrote,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.Her death was announced in a statement by her family.Ms. Lansbury was the winner of five competitive Tony Awards for her starring performances on the New York stage, from “Mame” in 1966 to “Blithe Spirit” in 2009, when she was 83, a testament to her extraordinary stamina. She also received a special Tony for lifetime achievement at this year’s ceremony. Yet she appeared on Broadway only from time to time over a seven-decade career in film, theater and television in which there were also years when nothing seemed to be coming up roses.Ms. Lansbury as Madame Arcati in the 2009 production of “Blithe Spirit” with, from left, Jayne Atkinson, Christine Ebersole and Rupert Everett. The role won Ms. Lansbury her fifth Tony.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe English-born daughter of an Irish actress, she was just 18 when she landed her first movie role, as Charles Boyer’s cheeky Cockney servant in the thriller “Gaslight” (1944), a precocious debut that brought her a contract with MGM and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. She received a second Oscar nomination in 1946, for her supporting performance as a dance-hall girl in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”It was a giddy start for a young woman who at 14 had fled wartime London with her mother and had only recently graduated from New York’s Feagin School of Dramatic Art. Ms. Lansbury imagined she might have a future as a leading lady, but, she said in a New York Times interview in 2009, she was not comfortable trying to climb that ladder.“I wasn’t very good at being a starlet,” she said. “I didn’t want to pose for cheesecake photos and that kind of thing.”It might also have been a matter of bones. Her full, round face was not well suited for the dramatic lighting of the time, which favored the more angular looks of stars like Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn. In any event, she appeared in many a forgettable film before breaking out as the glamorous, madcap aunt in “Mame” on Broadway.MGM regularly cast her as an older woman, or a nasty one. Of the 11 movies she made after “Dorian Gray,” perhaps her most notable role was in “State of the Union” (1948), with Ms. Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, in which she played a newspaper magnate trying to get her married lover elected president.With the expiration of her MGM contract in 1951, Ms. Lansbury joined the national touring productions of two stage plays, “Remains to Be Seen” and “Affairs of State.” But when she returned to the movies as a freelance actress, she again found herself cast as either of two types: as she put it, “bitches on wheels and people’s mothers.”Ms. Lansbury with Roddy McDowall in the Disney musical fantasy “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.” She played a witch.DisneyShe was Elvis Presley’s possessive mother in “Blue Hawaii” (1961). She was Laurence Harvey’s sinister mother in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), a role that won her a third supporting actress Oscar nomination. (Though she was only three years Mr. Harvey’s senior, her maternal authority was entirely convincing when she told him, “You are to shoot the presidential nominee through the head.”) She played a woman who kills her husband in “Please Murder Me” (1956) and an overbearing mother in “The Reluctant Debutante” (1958). And so it went.On to BroadwayMs. Lansbury made her Broadway debut in 1957 in “Hotel Paradiso,” a translation of a 19th-century French farce. Good reviews encouraged her to try more theater work. She returned to Broadway in 1960 as the alcoholic single mother of a pregnant teenager in “A Taste of Honey.”In 1964 she was cast as a corrupt mayor in the Arthur Laurents-Stephen Sondheim musical “Anyone Can Whistle.” A notorious failure, it closed after only 12 previews and nine performances, but it showed she could summon the right stuff for live musical performance. “I had a little, high soprano, and they wanted a belter,” she said in 2009. “So I learned how to belt.”Ms. Lansbury with Frankie Michaels in “Mame.” More than a dozen other actresses, including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn, were said to be under consideration for the role.via Angela LansburyMs. Lansbury was anything but a shoo-in for the coveted lead in “Mame,” the Jerry Herman musical adaptation of Patrick Dennis’s novel “Auntie Mame,” which had already been adapted into a stage play and a movie — both starring Rosalind Russell, and both great successes.Ms. Russell did not want to play Mame again. Mary Martin was cast but opted out. More than a dozen other actresses, including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Ms. Hepburn, were said to be under consideration. But Ms. Lansbury was one of the few willing to audition for the role in front of the show’s creative and financial principals.In a Life magazine cover article about the show and her part in it, she recalled that there had been many distracting interruptions by men in dark glasses, compelling her to sing the songs over again. “Then they said, ‘Goodbye, thank you.’ That was all,” she said.Back home in Malibu, Calif., with her husband, Peter Shaw, an MGM executive, and their teenage children, Anthony and Deirdre, she waited for months for a call from the East. Finally, she flew to New York and confronted the producers.“I am going back to California,” she recalled telling them, “and unless you tell me — let’s face it, I have prostrated myself — now, yes or no, that’s the end of it.” That afternoon, she got an official yes.Her performance made her a genuine star at last. The show opened in New York on May 24, 1966, and the columnist Rex Reed reported in The Times that on the night he attended, “when the people got tired of whistling and clapping like thunder, they stood up in the newly refurbished seats in the Winter Garden and screamed.” He likened Ms. Lansbury to “a happy caterpillar turning, after years of being thumb-nosed by Hollywood in endless roles as baggy-faced frumps, into a gilt-edged butterfly.”Ms. Lansbury in 1966. In 2013, she received an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for creating “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” and “inspiring generations of actors.”Sam Falk/The New York TimesTo Ms. Lansbury’s disappointment, though, Lucille Ball was chosen for the film version of “Mame,” which was not a success.Ms. Lansbury won her second Tony for best actress as the 75-year-old Countess Aurelia in “Dear World,” a 1969 musical adaptation of “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” The production itself was not well received and closed after 132 performances. For a while, though, it held the distinction of charging the highest ticket prices on Broadway: $12.50 for the best seats (the equivalent of about $105 today).She then returned to Hollywood, where she played an aging German aristocrat in “Something for Everyone” (1970), a rare cinematic effort from the Broadway producer and director Harold Prince, and a witch in the Disney movie “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” (1971).But this was a tumultuous time for her and her family. Their Malibu house was destroyed in a brush fire. Her son and daughter were using hard drugs. She and Mr. Shaw decided to leave California for the coast of County Cork, Ireland, where they built a home based on traditional farmhouse design.It was the sanctuary they had hoped for: Ms. Lansbury became a serious gardener, and her children overcame their drug problems. Anthony became an actor and then a television director, with credits including numerous episodes of “Murder, She Wrote”; Deirdre eventually married Enzo Battarra, a restaurateur, and became his business partner.With Len Cariou in “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lansbury won a Tony Award for her performance as the baker Mrs. Lovett.Martha SwopeOver the next decade Ms. Lansbury worked mostly on the stage, in London and New York. She starred as Mama Rose in a revival of “Gypsy,” which opened in London and won her a third Tony when it reached Broadway in 1974. She won yet another for her performance as Mrs. Lovett, the baker with a grisly source of meat for her pies, in Mr. Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “Sweeney Todd,” with Len Cariou in the title role, which opened in March 1979 and ran for 557 performances.Success on the London stage closed a circle for Ms. Lansbury.Angela Brigid Lansbury was born in London on Oct. 16, 1925, and grew up there in upper-middle-class comfort, the daughter of Moyna MacGill, an Irish actress, and Edgar Lansbury, a timber merchant and politician who was the son of a Labour Party leader, George Lansbury. Her father died of stomach cancer when she was 9; her grandfather died five years later, and that loss, together with the Blitz, prompted her mother to move to the United States with Angela, her half sister and her twin younger brothers.“We left everything behind,” Ms. Lansbury recalled. “Suddenly, we just weren’t there anymore.”Ms. Lansbury as the mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the hugely successful CBS series “Murder, She Wrote.”CBSA Surprise HitFor all her stage success, Ms. Lansbury would capture the biggest audience of her career in 1984, when she was cast as the mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the CBS series “Murder, She Wrote.”It was widely believed that the series, whose protagonist was a bicycle-riding widow living in a small town in Maine, had little chance against sexier competition like the action crime drama “Knight Rider” on NBC. The conventional wisdom was that advertisers would not go after the older audience the show was likely to attract.“We were getting condolences even before we went on the air,” Richard Levinson, one of the show’s creators, recalled. “At best, we hoped that it would be a marginal success.” Instead, the show became a huge hit. In its second season it outdrew Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated anthology series, “Amazing Stories,” by more than two million viewers a week, and it went on to run until 1996.“What appealed to me about Jessica Fletcher,” Ms. Lansbury said in an interview with The Times early in the show’s second season, “is that I could do what I do best and have little chance to play — a sincere, down-to-earth woman.”She received 12 successive Emmy nominations for her portrayal of Jessica Fletcher, but she never won.Ms. Lansbury remained active on television (she returned to her signature role in four made-for-television “Murder, She Wrote” films) and in movies, notably the Disney animated hit “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), in which she was the voice of the talking teapot Mrs. Potts. And there were more Broadway performances to come. Neither arthritis nor hip and knee replacements could keep her off the stage for very long.She starred with Marian Seldes in the Terrence McNally comedy “Deuce” in 2007 and played the eccentric medium Madame Arcati in the 2009 revival of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” earning Tony No. 5. Her lifetime achievement award brought the total to six — a total matched only by Audra McDonald and Julie Harris (including Ms. Harris’s own lifetime achievement award). Ms. Lansbury received another nomination for her performance later that year as Madame Armfeldt in a revival of the Sondheim musical “A Little Night Music.”Though she never won an Oscar or an Emmy, Ms. Lansbury received an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2013 for creating “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” and “inspiring generations of actors.” A year later, she was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II.Ms. Lansbury and the MGM executive Peter Shaw. They married in 1949.via Angela LansburyMr. Shaw, her husband, died in 2003. An earlier marriage to Richard Cromwell, an American actor, ended in divorce after less than a year. Ms. Lansbury is survived by her sons, Anthony and David; her daughter, Deirdre; a brother, Edgar; three grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.While many older actresses complained about a shortage of roles, Ms. Lansbury never lacked for work and seldom turned it down.She did opt out of a big chance to return to Broadway for the 2017-18 season, in a revival of “The Chalk Garden,” saying she had decided to spend more time with her family rather than face a long, lonely stretch of living in New York. But other good roles continued to catch her fancy, including the rich, imperious Aunt March in the BBC mini-series “Little Women” and the nice lady who sells magical balloons in the film “Mary Poppins Returns.” Both were released in 2018.“I really don’t know how to relax to the degree that I could just stop,” she told Katie Couric of CBS in 2009. “So when something comes along and is presented to me, and I think ‘Gee, I could have some fun doing that,’ or ‘I think I could bring something to that,’ I’ll do it.”Ms. Lansbury in 2009. “I really don’t know how to relax to the degree that I could just stop,” she said that year.Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesBut, she added, there was one thing she was still missing after all those years: “I’d like to do one great movie before I pass along the way. I don’t know what it’ll be, but I think there’s one out there somewhere.” More

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      ‘A Strange Loop,’ Which Won Best Musical, Will End Broadway Run

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      The meta-musical, which won the Tony Award this year and the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, announced it would close on Jan. 15.“A Strange Loop,” the winner of this year’s Tony Award for best musical, will close on Broadway on Jan. 15, after a short run that reflects the industry’s ongoing pandemic-related struggles and the challenges of marketing an unconventional musical that wrestles with complex themes.The musical, a meta-theatrical story about an aspiring musical theater writer who is writing a musical about his struggles to find his way professionally and personally, has been a triumph in many ways — a first show by a previously unknown writer, Michael R. Jackson, it was hailed by critics as soon as it opened Off Broadway in 2019, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in drama, and then, after opening on Broadway in April, picked up Tony Awards in June for best musical and best book of a musical.But its run will be unusually short for a best musical winner in recent years, when the prize has often had more box office impact.At the time of its closing, “A Strange Loop” will have had 314 total performances, including 13 previews. That is significantly fewer than for other recent winners with modest runs, including “Fun Home,” which won the award in 2015 and closed after 609 total performances; “The Band’s Visit,” which won in 2018 and closed after 624 total performances; and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,” which won in 2014 and closed after 935 total performances.All three of those shows recouped their capitalization costs. A spokesman said it is not yet clear whether “A Strange Loop” would recoup its capitalization costs, which a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said were $9.5 million.“A Strange Loop” was a passion project for Jackson, who labored on the musical for more than a decade. Inspired by his own experiences, the musical tells the story of Usher, who is working as an usher while writing about his own life, while also struggling with his family’s homophobia and with the racism and sizeism he encounters in the gay community.The show — which markets itself as “the big, Black and queer-ass Great American Musical” — is more sexually and emotionally frank than most Broadway musicals.The musical saw a bump at the box office after winning the Tony Award, playing to sold-out houses for two weeks with grosses peaking at $860,496 during the week that ended June 26. But grosses have been sliding since; during the week that ended Oct. 2, it grossed $579,354 and played to houses that were 79 percent full.Its creator, Jackson, said in a statement that he felt “blessed to have had the opportunity to share this raw, vulnerable and personal story with the world and to have connected with so many enthusiastic, loving audiences.”Broadway had been enjoying a yearslong sustained boom before the coronavirus pandemic, but like many other performing arts forms it has been struggling to rebound following the lengthy shutdown of theaters. The industry has been challenged not only by concerns about public health, but also by diminished tourism in New York City, the slow return of office workers to Midtown, a worrisome economy and, possibly, changing entertainment habits.During the 2021-22 Broadway season — a short season because most theaters remained closed during the summer of 2021 — 6,729,143 people attended Broadway shows, down from 14,768,254 during the 2018-19 season, which was the last full season before the pandemic. Annual Broadway grosses dropped from $1.8 billion to $845 million over that time period.The industry’s softness appears to be ongoing. During the week that ended Oct. 2, there were 25 shows running on Broadway, attended by 209,668 people and grossing $25,208,583. During the comparable week in 2019 — the last comparable week before the pandemic shutdown — there were 33 shows running, attended by 261,793 people and grossing $30,098,714.The struggles have contributed to a number of closings. Most significantly, “The Phantom of the Opera” has announced that it plans to close Feb. 18, concluding a record-breaking 35-year run on Broadway. Two more modest hits, “Come From Away” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” also closed recently, and a strong-selling revival of “The Music Man” plans to close on New Year’s Day.New Yorkers will have another chance to see Jackson’s work next year. His new musical, “White Girl in Danger,” is scheduled to have an Off Broadway run next spring at Second Stage Theater, which is producing it jointly with Vineyard Theater. More

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      Lawsuit Says Charity Leader Hired His Former Personal Trainer for Key Role

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      Spending by a charity intended to honor a radio pioneer is being challenged by his granddaughter, who says he was tricked into leaving his fortune to it. The charity denies the charge and says the producer did not trust his family to protect his legacy.Over the course of a decade, Matthew Forman emerged as a public face of the Himan Brown Charitable Trust, a charity with $100 million in assets and a stated purpose of furthering the legacy of Mr. Brown, who had created treasured radio dramas like “Dick Tracy” during that medium’s golden age.As a director and, more recently, a consultant to the trust, Mr. Forman, 41, earned as much as $250,000 annually as he helped distribute millions of dollars in funds to deserving causes, often around Miami, where he was recognized with a community service award and spoke on expert panels.“He was great to work with,” said Isabelle Pike, senior vice president of development at Branches, an organization that works with poor families. “He supported great programming here in South Florida.”But a foundation run by a granddaughter of Mr. Brown’s has challenged Mr. Forman’s qualifications for those roles in court papers that say he apparently had no prior experience in the field when he was hired by the charity’s sole trustee, for whom he had worked as a personal trainer.The challenge is the latest chapter in a long-running lawsuit by the foundation, the Radio Drama Network, against the sole trustee, Richard L. Kay, who helped design the trust as Mr. Brown’s lawyer.Mr. Kay has argued that Mr. Brown created the trust to shield his money from a family from whom he had become estranged. But the suit contends Mr. Kay tricked Mr. Brown, at age 94 in 2004, into signing over his fortune to the charitable trust, whose spending Mr. Kay now controls. Mr. Brown died six years later.Under a new estate plan, the suit argues, most of the fortune that had been designated to go to the Radio Drama Network was instead diverted to the new Himan Brown Charitable Trust.The lawsuit argues that, under Mr. Kay, the trust has paid $1.5 million to Mr. Forman and donated millions more to causes tied to Mr. Kay, like his alma maters, Cornell University and Michigan Law School; his grandchild’s Montessori school; and the 92nd Street Y, New York, where he is on the board. That money, the suit asserts, should have instead been directed to the radio foundation, which Mr. Brown separately created to foster respect for the spoken word.“I really want to let people know who he was and show the kind of work he did,” Melina Brown, the granddaughter, said in an interview. “But it’s not happening.”Himan Brown, right, directing Betty Winkler and Frank Lovejoy at a radio studio in New York in 1943.Associated PressMr. Forman declined to be interviewed but his lawyer defended his qualifications, describing him as a former sales professional who had done well in college and while briefly attending law school at the University of Miami. In 2014, the Miami-Dade County public school system recognized him with a Community Partners Recognition Award for help the trust provided for children in Miami’s poorer neighborhoods. Several other grant recipients in Florida praised him and the charity for their work.“He is a humble, bright, diligent and caring person who is one of the most professional people I’ve worked with in philanthropy,” said Melissa White, the executive director of the Key Biscayne Community Foundation, which has received grants from the trust.The judge presiding over the case, filed in Surrogate’s Court in Manhattan in 2015, has ruled that the administration of the trust and its spending are beyond the scope of the lawsuit, which is focused on allegations that Mr. Kay deceived Mr. Brown into setting it up.But the drama network has challenged that ruling and argues that Mr. Kay’s spending choices, including the hiring of Mr. Forman, are indicative of his self-interest at the time the trust was drawn up in 2004. It did not begin functioning until after Mr. Brown’s death.Mr. Brown had created the radio network, a separate foundation, in 1984, and in a 1999 interview he spoke of it as being part of his effort to revive the lost “art of listening” in an era of reduced attention spans and competing media.The communal experience of radio, where families gathered in living rooms for a broadcast, had its heyday from the 1930s to the 1950s, before the expansion of television. During that time, Mr. Brown directed and produced shows like “The Adventures of the Thin Man,” “Flash Gordon,” “Grand Central Station” and “Inner Sanctum Mysteries,” working alongside actors like Orson Welles and Helen Hayes. In 1990, he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame.Several years before he died, Mr. Brown was sued unsuccessfully by his son, Barry, who said, among other things, that his father had molested him as a child, a charge that his father denied. Barry Brown sued again after his father died, challenging his father’s will in a case in which he accused Mr. Kay of manipulating his father into diverting money into the new charitable trust.But in 2015, Judge Nora S. Anderson of Surrogate’s Court rejected his claim and cited witnesses who said Mr. Brown had “remained clearheaded and firm-minded even through advanced age.”The drama network filed its suit later that year. Mr. Kay’s lawyers argued that the claims of fraud had already been adjudicated. But Judge Anderson decided that the new lawsuit could move forward.In the current suit, Mr. Kay’s lawyers have accused Ms. Brown of trying to claim a larger share of the estate so as to draw larger administration fees. Mr. Kay said in a deposition earlier this year that Mr. Brown had expressly created the new trust to keep the bulk of his money away from Barry Brown and Barry’s two children, including Melina.Melina Brown, left, and Himan Brown in an undated family photograph.via Melina Brown“I cannot be more dramatic about the venom displayed by Himan Brown with respect to his son, and it extended to his granddaughters, as well,” Mr. Kay said.Melina Brown has denied seeking larger fees or that the breach between her grandfather and father ever extended to her. She said in an interview that her grandfather, whom she cared for in his last years, had loved her and wanted her to push forward with his mission to build interest in the spoken word. Before he died, he appointed her as a director of the Radio Drama Network and in his estate left her $3 million and his home in Connecticut.Today, the radio foundation has about $20 million in assets. In the year ending June 2021, it gave $307,500 in grants, including to organizations that support Hispanic theater and storytelling in public schools. Pursuing the lawsuit against the trust has been expensive, with more than $2 million going to legal fees in the past two years, according to tax records.The charitable trust controlled by Mr. Kay holds about $107 million in assets. It distributed nearly $4.5 million in grants in the year ending in March 2021, according to tax filings.Mr. Kay receives yearly compensation as a trustee — $300,000 last year — which he shares with his law firm, Pryor Cashman, which has drawn fees of as much as $400,000 to represent the trust in recent years.Lawyers for Mr. Kay say Mr. Brown’s name is fully associated with gifts made by his trust, like a 60+ Program named for him at the 92nd Street Y, New York. They say that when Mr. Brown was alive, his radio foundation financially supported many varied causes, of which only a few were affiliated with the spoken word. They also point out that the trust has supported multiple speaking engagements, such as appearances by Dick Cavett and Bill Clinton. Mr. Brown, they say, viewed Mr. Kay as a friend whose judgment he fully trusted in making grants, and they point to personal messages from Mr. Brown to Mr. Kay to illustrate their close relationship.Mr. Forman said in a deposition last month that he had worked as a personal trainer for Mr. Kay and his family in New York, before moving to Florida. He had been working in sales, he said, when Mr. Kay hired him for the trust in 2011, and he acknowledged that he did not have prior experience in philanthropic giving beyond making gifts himself. In court papers earlier this year, he said he had also served at one point as a co-trustee of the trust.New York State does not set specific professional qualifications for employees or consultants of a charity. But experts said charities, especially those with substantial funds, often seek to hire individuals with an understanding of charitable work, topical expertise and experience in fund-raising or grant giving.Matthew Forman representing the Himan Brown Charitable Trust at an event at the University of Miami School of Medicine in 2011.via Key Biscayne Community FoundationLawyers from Carter Ledyard & Milburn, who represent the drama network, were precluded from asking detailed questions about Mr. Forman’s work for the charity during his deposition last month, after Judge Anderson ruled that the suit did not directly concern Mr. Kay’s administration of the trust.But in limited questioning, Mr. Forman said he had worked as an employee of the trust until sometime in late 2017 or early 2018. Tax records show from that point forward a company registered to Mr. Forman, Miami Philanthropic Consulting Inc., began to serve as an adviser to the trust. For the year that ended in March 2021, the consulting company was paid $250,000 by the trust, according to the tax records.Mr. Forman said in his deposition that he had not spoken to Mr. Kay in years, but said he could not give an exact date.He was also asked what he knew about the man whose legacy he had promoted. He said he knew that Mr. Brown had risen from a humble background to become a successful businessman who owned production studios and had stayed vibrant into old age.“He produced radio shows,” Mr. Forman said. “I believe ‘The Thin Man.’ Maybe ‘Dick Tracy.’” More

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      Robert Kalfin, Founder of an Adventurous Theater, Dies at 89

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      For two decades, his Chelsea Theater Center was on the cutting edge with productions that could be challenging, baffling or, sometimes, Broadway bound.Robert Kalfin, the driving force behind the Chelsea Theater Center, which for two decades beginning in 1965 presented adventurous plays that were sometimes too innovative for the theatergoing public and sometimes successful enough that they transferred to Broadway, died on Sept. 20 at a hospice center in Quiogue, a hamlet in Southampton, N.Y. He was 89.Philip Himberg, a longtime friend, said the cause was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Kalfin directed countless plays in a career that began in his mid-20s and continued into his 80s. In 1965, he started the nonprofit Chelsea Theater Center and became its founding artistic director, with David Long as managing director and George Bari as production manager.They set up shop in St. Peter’s Church in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, though a strip dance in one of its early offerings got the group tossed out of that church and forced it to move to another. Those were two of several locations it would use over the years, only some of which were in Chelsea.Mr. Kalfin thought the commercial theaters of the day were limited and unimaginative, and he strove to broaden the theatrical landscape.“The mission statement, which I came up with, which was very useful, was ‘We will do whatever nobody else is doing and what we think people ought to see,’” he said in an interview in 2014 for the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project. “That gave me great leeway.”The Chelsea achieved particular prominence once it moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1968. Its productions there were attention-getting, to say the least. A 1969 staging of “Slave Ship,” written by Amiri Baraka (who was then known as LeRoi Jones) and directed by Gilbert Moses, took on racism, leaving Clive Barnes of The New York Times rattled.“The play is set in the hold of a ship and the conscience of a nation,” Mr. Barnes wrote in his review.“The play ends with the symbolic destruction of white America,” he added. “Whitey is got — Black Panther banners are unfurled. This scared and horrified me. I am whitey.”In 1971, The Times wrote an article about Mr. Kalfin’s troupe that carried the headline “America’s Most Exciting New Theater?” Its productions for the rest of that decade cemented its stature as one of the scene’s leading innovators.In 1973, the Chelsea revived the Leonard Bernstein operetta “Candide,” which had failed on Broadway in the 1950s, and gave it a new book, by Hugh Wheeler. Harold Prince directed, and the result was a smash in Brooklyn that became the group’s first transfer to Broadway, where it ran for almost two years.Another great success was “Strider,” Mark Rozovsky’s play with music based on a Tolstoy story about a piebald horse that is tormented because of its appearance. Mr. Kalfin first saw it in Leningrad, and in 1979 he staged an English-language version at the Westside Theater on West 43rd Street. It drew a strong review from Mel Gussow in The Times.“We are transported by the ingenuousness and the originality of the show,” he wrote. “Looking closely, we even notice a grittiness that might have been appreciated by Brecht and Weill. The play works on two levels, as a kind of Tolstoyan ‘Black Beauty’ — downbeat but finally inspirational — and as a valid commentary on the injustices of civilization.”That show, directed by Mr. Kalfin and Lynne Gannaway, transferred to Broadway and ran there for six months.By then Mr. Kalfin was seeing a change in theater audiences, one that his company had helped bring about.“There’s a whole new generation of theatergoers, and they have become elitist in a very positive way,” he told The Times that November as “Strider” was beginning its Broadway run. “I think they’re bored to death with television, and they’re more demanding of theater now because they’re so hungry for nourishment.”A scene from the Chelsea Theater Center’s production of Amiri Baraka’s “Slave Ship” in 1969. The play’s ending, the Times critic Clive Barnes wrote, “scared and horrified me.”Deidi von Schaewen, via BAM Hamm ArchivesRobert Zangwill Kalfin was born on April 22, 1933, in the Bronx. His father, Alfred, was a real estate developer, and his mother, Hilda Shulman Kalfin, was a teacher.His childhood memories were of being taken not to the theater but to the Metropolitan Opera, where he and his parents generally ended up in the cheap seats, high up and off to the side.“My father would hold onto the back of my pants while I leaned over trying to see center stage,” he said in the oral history.He studied music at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and Performing Arts). As a theater major at Alfred University in central New York, he became part of an ambitious department that was staging Bertolt Brecht and other European writers and experimenting with unusual settings — he was in a production of “Androcles and the Lion” that was staged in a gymnasium transformed to look like a Roman arena.He earned his master’s degree in 1957 at the Yale School of Drama and settled into odd jobs in New York, working for a time in the shipping department at WOR-TV and as a production assistant on a children’s television show in Newark, N.J., that starred a chimpanzee.He directed his first Off Broadway production, “The Golem,” in 1959, at St. Mark’s Playhouse. His other early efforts included “The Good Soldier Schweik” in 1963, which didn’t go well — a producer interfered so intrusively that Mr. Kalfin withdrew before opening night and sought unsuccessfully to stop the production from opening. When it did, William Glover of The Associated Press called it “one of the season’s worst plays.”Mr. Kalfin, right, with Michael David, left, the executive director of the Chelsea Theater Center, and Burl Hash, the production director, in 1973.Manuel Guevaza Jr.At the Chelsea, Mr. Kalfin sometimes left audiences and critics scratching their heads. That was the case with a 1970 musical called “Tarot,” which he staged in Brooklyn. As the credits read, it was conceived by The Rubber Duck and directed jointly by “Mr. Duck” (as The Times called him, tongue in cheek) and Mr. Kalfin.Mr. Barnes hated it. “Pretentiousness is rioting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,” his review began. Yet the Chelsea was respected enough by then that even in that pan, Mr. Barnes felt compelled to note that the group was facing one of its frequent financial crises at the time, and that “it simply must not be allowed to die.”The group did peter out in the mid-1980s, swamped with debt. Before it did, its other notable successes included “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer story of a Jewish girl who passes as a boy; Mr. Kalfin had it adapted for the stage by Leah Napolin and directed it. It opened in Brooklyn in December 1974.It was a tough road to opening night. Mr. Kalfin clashed with Tovah Feldshuh, who played the title character, and withstood complaints from Orthodox Jewish leaders; he also had to strike a deal with Barbra Streisand, who owned the rights to the Singer story, which she would turn into a film in 1983. But the play moved to Broadway, where it ran for 223 performances.Mr. Bari, Mr. Kalfin’s life partner, died in 2013. Mr. Kalfin, who had lived in East Hampton, N.Y., leaves no immediate survivors.After the Chelsea gave up the ghost, Mr. Kalfin continued to direct in New York and in regional houses; he was still working until recently. One of his post-Chelsea projects in New York was directing a Yiddish version of “Yentl” produced by the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater in 2002. Eleanor Reissa played the title role.“Even though he’d directed maybe a hundred shows, every time was like the first,” Ms. Reissa, who had worked with Mr. Kalfin on other shows as well, said by email. “Wide eyed and wide hearted always, infectious joyfulness.” More

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      Review: ‘Death of a Salesman’ on Broadway Makes the Lomans New Again

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      Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke star in a powerful revival of Arthur Miller’s drama, led by a Black cast.A deeply original work that is also deeply influential may yet in time be trite. What once opened eyes comes to seem preloaded behind them, as if part of the general human inheritance.Such has been the ironic trajectory of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” When it premiered on Broadway in 1949, with its depiction of the false hopes of capitalism and the family dysfunction left in its wake, there were fathers for whom “the doctor had to be called because they couldn’t stop crying,” the director Mike Nichols, who saw it then, said. “It was like an explosion.”As “Salesman” spread into the culture with astonishing speed, it helped introduce the seismic re-evaluations of the ensuing decades. But now that we take those shocks to be self-evident, the job of making the play feel as new as it once did is a difficult one for those who would revive it. “Willy Loman” has long since become shorthand for the “low man” in the pecking order. And everyone for whom it was required high school reading already knows the story: how a washed-up salesman’s delusions about American success destroy not just his own life but also those of his wife, Linda, and their sons, Happy and Biff.Short of stunt casting or radical resetting, directors must therefore dig either deeper or wider. Nichols’s 2012 Broadway production, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Linda Emond as Willy and Linda, went deeper, examining the work with microscopic precision and even replicating Jo Mielziner’s original set design and Alex North’s music. The result was a very powerful mounting, and I use the word advisedly: It sometimes seemed like an exhibit.From left, Khris Davis as Biff Loman, McKinley Belcher III as Happy Loman and Sharon D Clarke as Linda Loman.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe latest Broadway revival, which opened on Sunday at the Hudson Theater, goes wider, a notably rich and mostly successful approach. For the first time in a major New York production, the Lomans are played by Black actors. Wendell Pierce, as Willy, is wrenching as he flails and fails to avoid his fate instead of slumping into it from the start. And Sharon D Clarke, as Linda, is so paradoxically shattering in her stoicism that she turns what is usually portrayed as unshakable loyalty into a kind of heedless comorbidity.Miranda Cromwell’s revival, based on one she directed in London with Marianne Elliott in 2019, does more than give us Black Lomans — including Khris Davis as Biff and McKinley Belcher III as Happy. It also, crucially, puts them in a largely white world. Willy’s employer (Blake DeLong), his neighbor (Delaney Williams) and his mistress (Lynn Hawley) are thus more than foils in the usual sense; like Willy, you can never untangle the personal, economic and now racial threads of their behavior. And even if they aren’t bigots, they electrify moments — a card game with the neighbor, a negotiation with the “boss” — in which Willy’s paranoia seems at the same time both fantastical and well founded.It’s even more astonishing that the production achieves this effect with only a few minor alterations to the dialogue. (The college that Biff, a would-be football star, hopes to attend is now U.C.L.A., instead of the University of Virginia, where the first Black student was not admitted until 1950 — and even then, only after a lawsuit.) Likewise, though the play’s web of urban imagery, much written about in A.P. English essays, is duly honored in Anna Fleischle’s skeletal set design, it gets new life when seen in the light of the redistricting and gentrification that squeezed many people like the Lomans out of their homes.It’s therefore central to the effectiveness of the casting that it’s not colorblind. Neither the Black nor the white actors ignore race; they mine it, bringing their characters to fully specific and vivid life. Willy’s mistress has an ear-bending working-class white Boston accent. The oddly formal patois (“Nobody dast blame this man”) of the good-hearted neighbor Charley marks him as a clear outsider. (Williams is excellent in the part.) And Biff and Happy’s take on trash-talking, no less than Linda’s maternal don’t-cross-me commandments — “Attention must be finally paid!” — awakens lines you’ve heard innumerable times, asserting their implacable realness.André De Shields, in a terrifying performance, plays the ghost of Willy’s older brother, Ben.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat awakening reaches a theatrical climax in André De Shields’s terrifying performance as the ghost of Willy’s older brother, Ben. Though dressed like Liberace in a white suit and crystal-studded shoes — the costumes are by Fleischle and Sarita Fellows — he makes every utterance sound like an elaborate curse. When he warns Biff not to “fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way,” he puts such a troubling spin on the words “boy” and “jungle” that you feel you should duck.But what works to ground and intensify the performances does not always work for the production overall. Cromwell’s use of expressionistic devices like silhouettes and frozen poses to suggest Willy’s fragmenting consciousness seems obvious and unmoored, an intrusion of acquired Polaroid memories. And though the wistful music by Femi Temowo — including a beautiful spiritual-like setting of “When the Trumpets Sound” — sets the mood for the impending tragedy, it confuses the tone when used for comic effect, or worse, solace. There is no solace in “Salesman.”In general, the balance of light and dark in this very dark play does not yet feel natural. Biff and Happy, in Willy’s memory, are not just boyish, but clichés of boyishness; aiming to solve this textual problem by underlining it, Cromwell’s direction makes it worse. On the other hand, Willy himself is often so unrelievedly monstrous that you sometimes can’t see past it to the monstrosity of American business that Miller means to indict.Yet nothing can stop the engine of the final scenes, sparking and huffing and pushing the play into great drama. As the lies that bind at last come undone, we see each of the trapped family members liberated to choose life or death or a combination thereof. (The play’s last words, after all, are “We’re free.”) They have nothing left to sell. If you believe, as Nichols said in 2012, that “now everyone in America is a salesman,” you may even feel a shiver of recognition. Made new and unfamiliar once again in this production, the Lomans look like all of us.Death of a SalesmanThrough Jan. 15 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; salesmanonbroadway.com. Running time: 3 hours 10 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Hamilton’ in German? It’s a Thrill.

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      The hit musical arrived in Hamburg with its verve, ingenuity and idealism intact. And it gains unexpected depth from being staged in Germany.HAMBURG, Germany — Early on in “Hamilton,” Aaron Burr offers the founding father of the title some “free advice”: “Talk less. Smile more.”In the German-language premiere of the blockbuster musical that opened here on Thursday, that line is one of the few retained in English — and a flummoxed Hamilton immediately asks what those words mean.There’s a slinking, mischievous irony to Burr’s advice. This is one of the wordiest musicals in the history of theater, a show so drunk on the exuberance of its language that it almost never stops to catch its breath. As much as it is a musical tour de force, “Hamilton” is a love letter to the English language’s tonal richness and malleability. So, when Hamilton prompts Burr for a translation in this early exchange, it teasingly registers as a meta-commentary on the artistic challenges facing the production — and as both a taunt and a dare.The “Hamilton” cast in Hamburg comes from 13 countries, including Brazil, the Philippines and the United States.Johan PerssonEver since a German-language version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Pulitzer and Tony-winning “Hamilton” was announced, a number of urgent questions have swirled about. How, in God’s name, could this, of all musicals, convince in German, a language with a vastly different syntax and repertoire of sounds? In a theater landscape that lacks diversity, where would producers find the mammoth multiracial cast the show requires? And why should German audiences even care about the story of an American founding father whose likeness on the $10 bill most here would not even recognize?A lot could have gone wrong. So I’m pleased to report that “Hamilton” has transferred to Hamburg with its verve, ingenuity, idealism and courage intact. The show here is every bit as electrifying as the one currently running on Broadway, and it gains unexpected depth from being performed in Germany, and auf Deutsch.Perhaps most fundamentally, this “Hamilton” is a masterpiece of translation. The translating team of Kevin Schroeder and Sera Finale spent four years working on the German version of Miranda’s densely wordy and rhythmically propulsive lyrics. (In the end, Miranda vetted the final version of each line himself). The result is some of the most vivid, fresh-faced and dynamic German I’ve heard in the theater in a long time. Schroeder and Finale approached their herculean assignment with unstinting resourcefulness and shrewd musical instinct.The punning, exuberant text results in a genuinely German version, a “Hamilton” eminently, entirely at home in the language. Nearly every word in translation rings true.This makes it possible for the large cast to convincingly inhabit both show’s musical landscape — with its mix of hip hop, R&B, pop and show tunes — as well as its inner world. Although David Korins’s brick-and-wood set is identical to the one used in the six English-language productions, directed by Thomas Kail and currently running worldwide, the performers succeed in making it their own. Indeed, the German cast seems to rejuvenate the 7-year-old show, whose haunting lighting by Howell Binkley, frequently stage rotations and energetic, near-constant dancing (Andy Blankenbuehler’s Tony Award-winning choreography) mirror the torrid flow of language.Gino Emnes, center, as Aaron Burr.Johan PerssonCasting “Hamilton” in German was nearly as difficult as translating it, and the talent scouts at Stage Entertainment, the show’s producer in Hamburg, have assembled an impressive cast whose members hail from 13 countries. The Broadway-caliber performers bring the requisite bluster, lyricism and wit to their assignments. And they all get that, fundamentally, “Hamilton” is a show about collective energy and cooperation — the hard work of democracy — rather than showboating.Benet Monteiro, who is from Brazil, plays Hamilton with wiry, coiled-up energy. He’s a man constantly overheated, which is what makes him tick, and is his tragic flaw. Gino Emnes, who is Dutch, is charismatic and elegant as Burr. Daniel Dodd-Ellis, an American, does double duty as Lafayette (with an outrageous French accent) and Jefferson. Another American, Charles Simmons, cut a striking figure as Washington.The late 18th-century America of “Hamilton” is very much a guy’s world, but the show has a trio of finely drawn female characters, sung here by the lyrically accomplished Berlin-born Ivy Quainoo (as Eliza Hamilton), the American-born Chasity Crisp (Angelica Schuyler) and the Filipino-Swiss actress Mae Ann Jorolan (as Peggy Schuyler/Maria Reynolds).If the translation is a rare artistic accomplishment, this casting feels like a milestone in this country. Theaters throughout the German-speaking world — both commercial theaters and the publicly funded playhouses common throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland — have not made the push for onstage diversity that companies in the United States and Britain have. And these countries are as not as ethnically homogeneous as they are often taken for; indeed, they are all becoming less white and more diverse. Even so, the theater scene here has been slow to adapt to reflect this emerging demographic reality. With few exceptions, the huge theater scene here remains overwhelmingly white and native-born.Charles Simmons, center, in the role of Washington.Johan Persson“Hamilton” in Germany takes on a different charge than it does in today’s America. To see the Broadway show is to be transported to a prelapsarian time before the wreckage of the Trump years, the murder of George Floyd and the Capitol Hill insurrection. In a painfully divided country, “Hamilton” can feel like a quaint artifact from a simpler time, an encapsulation of the hope, however naïve, for a colorblind society that celebrated individuality, difference and the contribution of immigrants.Sitting through the show in Hamburg, my impressions were different. Although the history in “Hamilton” is not Germany’s own, it leaped off the stage with force, immediacy and clarity. Who cares if local audiences only have a passing knowledge of the Federalist Papers or can’t tell James Madison from John Adams? “Hamilton’s” ability to transcend the specific cultural context of its inception is the ultimate proof that it is a great work of art with universal significance.Hearing Miranda’s work lent a new vitality through a new language — acted, sung and danced by a multiethnic, multinational cast, the like of which has never been assembled in Germany before — was edifying, riveting and inspiring. I hope that Hamburgers thrill to this German “Hamilton” as much as I did. They would be crazy not to.HamiltonAt the Operettenhaus in Hamburg, Germany, for an open-ended run; stage-entertainment.de. More

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      ‘Complicity’ Review: A Muddled #MeToo Drama

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      A new play by Diane Davis at the New Ohio Theater addresses the topic head-on, but clumsily, our critic writes.It has been about five years since the rise of the #MeToo movement. Debate remains on the cultural shifts it has wrought and whether these shifts will last.More laws are on the books now, more men have been jailed or fined. Others have been swiftly canceled. And then uncanceled almost as quickly. But what of the people who enabled these men?This is the subject of “Complicity,” a new play by Diane Davis at the New Ohio Theater in Greenwich Village, which addresses the topic head-on, but very clumsily, as in mismatched heels. The drama concerns, though never shows, Harry Wickstone, a legendary producer, and the hold he maintains over the women and men unlucky enough to orbit him. Two of them are Tig (Katie Broad), a naïve ingénue, and Lilia (Christian Paxton), her more seasoned co-star. Five terrible minutes in a luxury hotel room send these two women on radically different paths before the play forces them back together and then tragically apart.This brief description renders “Complicity” as a more coherent work than it truly is. Its story arcs need smoothing, its characters clarifying, even in their basic details. Tig has a sister, Sima (Nadia Sepsenwol), equally inexperienced, who somehow acts as her agent. What official role does Nigel (Zach Wegner), Harry’s fixer, play at the studio and what does he want of Lilia? (Tonia E. Anderson plays a television host: Christian Prins Coen and Ben Faigus appear in several small roles.) Davis struggles to illustrate how Hollywood works, how people work. But it’s less of a struggle than a slap fight, without clear winners.Katie Broad, left, and Nadia Sepsenwol, as sisters. The play is less of a struggle than a slap fight, without clear winners.Ashley Garrett PhotographyUnder Illana Stein’s direction, little gels. Some scenes, like a talk show sequence, are played for realism. Some, like the women’s various breakdowns, are played with an embarrassing expressionist bent. Rarely do these scenes convince. Overacting is rampant, presumably with Stein’s encouragement. Even when the actors aren’t speaking, they cycle through various expressions. At times the actors seem to be in entirely different productions — one playing a scene sincerely, one archly.It is an unhappy irony that in a play about collusion they could not collude on a house style. The design is more coherent, but only in the slapdash sense that the producers seem to have skimped on budget and time. Scenes are underlit, projections of time and place appear and disappear before they can be read. The cheap costumes are a puzzle with few satisfying solutions, the sets wincingly flimsy.Here is one more irony. Five years on, amid the noisy and bad-faith hand-wringing of whether the movement has gone too far or not far enough, the producer Harvey Weinstein’s case stands firm. So many women came forward and their stories were presented with such lucidity and compassion by journalists — New York Times journalists among them — that his guilt was substantiated, despite his great power.Women, finally, were believed. Punishment was meted out. As stories like these go, this stands as the surest, plainest, least ambiguous story imaginable. And even so, “Complicity” blunders so much in its telling.ComplicityThrough Oct. 15 at the New Ohio Theater, Manhattan; newohiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘1776,’ When All Men, and Only Men, Were Created Equal

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      A revival of the musical about the Declaration of Independence underlines the gender imbalance among the Founding Fathers — and everything else.A transformation that’s either wondrous or scandalous, depending on your taste, occurs less than a minute into the Roundabout Theater Company’s otherwise disappointing Broadway revival of “1776.”Barely a line has been uttered or a note sung when the performers, who identify as female, transgender and nonbinary, and are wearing more-or-less contemporary streetwear, hike up their black tights and white socks to simulate breeches, don buckle shoes in place of clunky boots, step into frock coats of various colonial cuts and become (thanks to Emilio Sosa’s outstanding costume design) our Founding Fathers. That includes Elizabeth A. Davis, who makes a very visibly pregnant Thomas Jefferson.Though some will see the casting — which is diverse not just in gender but also in race and ethnicity — as a stunt and a travesty, I’m in the wondrous camp. Neither the 1969 musical nor (as “Hamilton” has proved) history itself is so frail as to crumple under new ways of looking at our theatrical and national past. Anyway, if you prefer, you can simply ignore the fact that these fathers aren’t men, and focus — or try to — on the plot, which encompasses nothing less than the months of negotiations and maneuverings that led, just barely, to the Declaration of Independence.But if you are willing to allow yourself a double vision, as the directors Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus clearly hope, you can take independence a step further. The white maleness of the characters becomes a semi-translucent screen through which we see the many other people, including people like the cast, whom the Declaration never even considered.Sara Porkalob, center, as the pro-slavery Edward Rutledge, who dissects John Adams’s hypocrisy in the song “Molasses to Rum.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor me, that double vision is the best thing about the production, which opened on Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. In theory, it deepens the ideas being batted about in the hot, fetid, fly-infested Philadelphia summer. So the “obnoxious and disliked” John Adams, as played by Crystal Lucas-Perry, who is Black, is not just an abolitionist on principle but in essence. And when Sara Porkalob, as the pro-slavery Edward Rutledge, dissects Adams’s hypocrisy in the song “Molasses to Rum” — showing how the North benefits from the slave trade as well as the South — the fact that she is Filipino American both intensifies and complicates the argument.If that sort of complication were itself great theater and not just a promising premise, this “1776” might be amazing. That the production is instead so overpumped and overplayed as to be hardly comprehensible is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the musical, which is plenty complicated as written — if not so much in its few and often trite songs, by Sherman Edwards, then at least in Peter Stone’s book, a masterpiece of condensation without diminishment.At first dismissed as Bicentennial-era pageantry, “1776” has survived all the ensuing upheavals of American history precisely because it is, within the confines of the genre, remarkably sophisticated about the forces at play in forging a nation from colonies harboring antithetical philosophies — and in forging a musical from similarly unlikely and conflicting raw materials. An Encores! production in 2016, which featured a racially diverse cast but the usual gender assignments, showed it could be modern and yet thoughtful and moving.But the current revival seems interested in the cast’s experience at the expense of the audience’s. I can understand that impulse, especially when creating space on a major stage for actors who rarely get it.Still, the best interpretations are those that, regardless of the performer’s professional history, find feeling in the specific actions of the text rather than in their personal feelings of exclusion from it. The Broadway veteran Carolee Carmello thus creates the character of the Pennsylvania holdout John Dickinson mostly by holding back on the outrage and offering smiles and politesse in its place. And as Abigail Adams, the Broadway newcomer Allyson Kaye Daniel is gently firm and dryly touching, achieving a lovely, modest balance in those contradictions.Carolee Carmello, center, as the Pennsylvania holdout John Dickinson. She’s joined by, from left: Oneika Phillips, Gisella Adisa, Porkalob, Sushma Saha, Nancy Anderson and Eryn LeCroy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore often, though, the performances are so vastly histrionic and unchecked by the social situation (this is Congress, after all) that they seem inside-out. Adams jumps on tables to make points. Patrena Murray so emphasizes Benjamin Franklin’s winky sententiousness that he seems like a joke, not a brilliant tactician. Eryn LeCroy makes of “He Plays the Violin” — a dainty minuet in which Martha Jefferson sings of her love for Thomas — a full-on psychodrama.It does not help that the new arrangements and orchestrations, aiming to refresh the songs’ profiles in the way the casting is meant to refresh the story, merely make them muddy — and make many of the lyrics unintelligible.If that’s not always a great loss, it certainly detracts from the show’s most powerful number, “Momma, Look Sharp.” A simple minor-key air sung from the point of view of a dead young soldier, it is performed here (by Salome B. Smith) as a belty anthem, complete with a moaning and heaving ensemble and a figure apparently representing Momma. (She’s looking! She’s crying!) When performers mime the emotions we should be having, the storytelling contract has been broken.Nor do Page (who is also the show’s choreographer) and Paulus (who has directed Broadway revivals of “Pippin” and “Porgy and Bess”) show much interest in the show’s humor. As some of it is ribald and sexist — probably accurately so — they prefer to defuse it by winking as if to say: Don’t worry, we don’t mean any harm. What a wasted opportunity! In dealing with such material, a nonmale cast might mean harm in the best way, forcing us to think about the character of men in their time and ours, and providing the kind of added value a regendered revival seemed to promise.Instead we get subtracted value. I don’t mean for the cast, who deserve the opportunity, or even for the theater as an industry and an ecosystem. As the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar said in a New York Times round-table discussion about putting history onstage, there is merit in “moving people into the center of narratives who have never been there for the public to see.” I agree. And if those narratives sometimes fail, well, so do most others; we might as well be open to everything.But underlining one’s progressiveness a thousand times, as this “1776” does, will not actually convey it better; rather it turns characters into cutouts and distracts from the ideas it means to promote. The musical even shows us that. It’s only when Adams stops yelling and starts plotting that he begins to turn the tide toward ratification. Just so, theater makers should have enough faith in the principles of equity and diversity to let them speak for themselves. Are they not, as someone once put it, self-evident?1776Through Jan. 8 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More