Theater

Developed by a team of Broadway and Hollywood all-stars, the new Hulu series sets a chorus of inner critics to song.The rats were not on the call sheet. They turned up anyway.For the members of the brain trust behind the new Hulu musical series “Up Here,” this balmy September night last year was to be a precious occasion: After more than two years of cross-country video calls, the writer and executive producer Danielle Sanchez-Witzel had flown in from Los Angeles during the last full week of production, finally giving her a chance to hang out on set with her collaborators — a gang of Broadway powerhouses that included the highly decorated songwriting couple behind “Frozen,” Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez.“She was one of our best friends in the pandemic,” Anderson-Lopez said at the time, at an outdoor shoot in the Manhattan neighborhood of Hudson Heights. “We spent six to eight hours together a day during 2021. And we just hugged in person for the first time 10 minutes ago.”And then Sanchez-Witzel got a dose of New York City realness. As they gathered around the monitors, with the cameras rolling just a few yards away, a few enterprising rodents decided to join the fun. Snacks were stashed. Sanchez-Witzel nervously pulled up her feet. Someone joked about creating a viral video to promote the show.It was just the latest twist in the bigger challenge faced by the illustrious team behind “Up Here,” which dropped all eight episodes of its first season on Friday: how to merge that most classically New York of art forms, the stage musical, with a much younger Hollywood one — the bingeable half-hour streaming sitcom.Stage musicals have been adapted into movies for decades; live television adaptations have made a comeback in recent years, too. But turning one into serialized television is new. This alone would make “Up Here,” developed from an original musical by the Lopezes, stand out.The developers of “Up Here” on a location shoot in Manhattan, from left: Danielle Sanchez-Witzel, Robert Lopez, Steven Levenson, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Thomas Kail.Sarah Shatz/HuluThe Lopezes created “Up Here” as a stage musical that debuted in San Diego in 2015, but soon shelved it. They made significant changes for the TV adaptation. Sarah Shatz/HuluAdd to that the Tony-winning creative powers of the writer Steven Levenson (“Dear Evan Hansen”) and the director Thomas Kail (“Hamilton”), and the series also comes courtesy of Broadway’s equivalent to a Marvel superteam.“I think they wanted to make sure someone hadn’t won a Tony in this group,” Sanchez-Witzel said. (She, Levenson and the Lopezes are all credited as developers.) She joked that over the years she had spent “thousands of dollars on StubHub” to watch her new collaborators’ shows.Given the surrealistic premise of “Up Here,” it was perhaps always well suited for the screen — think “Herman’s Head” with music, or “Inside Out” with nagging parents, mean ex-crushes and former friends instead of lovable little gremlins. Set at the turn of the millennium, it centers on Lindsay and Miguel (played in the series by Mae Whitman and Carlos Valdes), a young couple who meet outside a bar bathroom where Lindsay’s roommate is having sex with a stranger.If a show about the lurid dating lives of 20-something New Yorkers feels a little familiar, the twist is that the characters’ thoughts, as personified by people from their lives, constantly speak up — or, rather, sing up — to interfere.“I got there, and with the accompanist and the music, I was like, ‘Oh, this is like a theater audition,’” said Valdes about trying out for his role. He had ample show-tune experience.Patrick Harbron/HuluThe original musical premiered in San Diego in 2015, then was shelved while the Lopezes worked on other things. It didn’t stay on the shelf for long. Early in 2020, Kail, who since directing “Hamilton” had begun to develop a solid reputation in television (he was an executive producer and director of the acclaimed FX series “Fosse/Verdon”), was looking for a new project he could sink his teeth into. He knew the Lopezes from the theater world — in addition to their songs for the “Frozen” movies and “Coco,” Lopez had co-written “Avenue Q” and “The Book of Mormon” — and he asked if they had anything lying around.They were keen to take another crack at “Up Here.” Kail saw potential. He soon pulled in Levenson, his fellow developer of “Fosse/Verdon.” All agreed that “Up Here” would work best as a comedy series. There was just one problem.“We quickly decided none of us had any experience in half-hour television,” Levenson said. So Kail contacted Sanchez-Witzel, whose credits included “The Carmichael Show” and “New Girl.” She signed on but continued to work from Los Angeles. (Kail, the Lopezes and Levenson are also executive producers.)The team’s central task was figuring out how to translate the stage version to episodic television. The idea, as Levenson explained it, was to create a musical that spanned eight episodes but where each was also its own mini-musical. And the tunes had to be more than an accessory.“The show needed to function like a musical, where the songs actually were necessary to the storytelling, so that if you removed them, the show wouldn’t work,” Levenson said.The learning curve was steep for both sides.“Danielle told us about certain structures of a 30-minute comedy,” Anderson-Lopez said. “And we talked a lot about how when we’re looking for songs in theater or animated musicals, we’re always looking for a moment when a character is having a feeling so big, they can’t speak anymore. It was really fun figuring out those spaces in a half-hour comedy.”Eventually, the set list from the San Diego production was almost entirely put aside. The male lead’s name was also changed from Dan to Miguel.Valdes as Miguel in a scene from the series. The male lead was called Dan in the stage version. Sarah Shatz/Hulu“I felt strongly that this time around he should be not white,” said Lopez, the youngest person ever to win an EGOT — an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony — and also the only person to have won each award more than once. He and Sanchez-Witzel share “a similar experience being nonwhite and feeling disconnected from both the white mainstream and from our immigrant histories,” he added. (Lopez is of Philippine descent; Sanchez-Witzel is Mexican American.) “We thought that’d be interesting to put into this character.”To find their lead actors, the New York-based creators followed a procedure they were all familiar with. This was an advantage for Valdes.“I got there, and with the accompanist and the music, I was like, ‘Oh, this is like a theater audition,’” said Valdes, who is best known for playing Cisco/Vibe on the CW’s “The Flash” but has extensive show-tune experience, including appearing in the Broadway hit “Once” a decade ago.“It had been a long time since I’d been in that kind of musical theater space, but it felt so familiar,” he said, “like a homecoming.”Landing the part was more fraught for Whitman, whose extensive television résumé (“Parenthood,” “Arrested Development”) had not prepared her for an old-school tryout. “I had to fly to New York and stand in front of a table full of people next to a piano player and have to sing,” Whitman said in a joint video call with Valdes. “It was terrifying. I can sing, but I’d never done anything like that.”As for the actors handling Lindsay and Miguel’s inner voices, they tend to straddle both worlds. Portraying Lindsay’s parents are the writer, humorist and actor John Hodgman and the Broadway and “Brockmire” veteran Katie Finneran. Team Miguel includes Scott Porter, an original cast member of the Off Broadway hit musical “Altar Boyz” who went on to star in “Friday Night Lights.” That evening in Hudson Heights, he was rocking a goatee and suspenders that made him look like a cocky late-90s corporate bro, which is exactly what he plays.Lindsay leaves her partner (George Hampe, far right) for New York City in the pilot. The voices in her head (played by, center left, Sophia Hammons; Katie Finneran; and John Hodgman) follow her.Craig Blankenhorn/HuluFrom his experience in theater and on “Fosse/Verdon,” Kail had learned that things went smoother if you had everyone in the same building; aside from the portions shot on location, the entire production was concentrated at a compound in Long Island City, Queens, from the writing to the choreography to the costume making.“The thing with theater is, there is a moment when you move into the theater and everybody’s under the same tent,” he said. “We wanted to try to do that here and bring everybody in.”Except, of course, for Sanchez-Witzel, who until the final full week had to make do from Los Angeles. It was great that technology had allowed her to observe the set from 3,000 miles away, she said, but she couldn’t deny the thrill of finally watching it all in person: the strips of ratty off-white carpet evoking dirty Manhattan snow, the whispers between takes, the in-person chemistry between Whitman and Valdes.Then there was the massive boulder in the middle of a block in Hudson Heights, where Lindsay and Miguel share an important kiss.“To see the rock in person — it’s probably hard for you to imagine how exciting it is,” Sanchez-Witzel said, laughing. “But to me, it’s extremely exciting!” More

Attention to culinary detail is the best part of this heavily seasoned family drama by Christin Eve Cato at the WP Theater.“Sancocho,” a new play by Christin Eve Cato, begins long before the lights come up. As ticket holders file into the WP Theater, a large pot simmers on the stove (the hyperrealistic kitchen set is by Raul Abrego), releasing the savory scents of the stew of the title. A little later, when one of the play’s sisters describes her mother’s cooking — sofrito made from scratch, pastelillos, arroz con gandules, tender pernil, “the way she made oxtail slide off the bone” — I heard a woman in the audience audibly moan.This attention to culinary detail — the smells, the sights, the hand towels with a weave you can practically feel — is the best, most succulent part of this heavily seasoned domestic drama, produced by the Latinx Playwrights Circle, WP Theater and the Sol Project. Though it occupies a single set, a roomy kitchen somewhere in East Harlem, and introduces just two characters, sisters born to Puerto Rican parents a generation apart, the play stirs together two lifetimes of trauma and catastrophe into only 90 minutes. “Sancocho,” with the stew as its central metaphor, is a meditation on inheritance and family, how its members might eat and celebrate together, but suffer apart.Renata (Shirley Rumierk), a successful lawyer, heavily pregnant, has stopped by the apartment of her older sister, Caridad (Zuleyma Guevara), a cleaner. This is a brief visit, Renata insists: she has to leave for New Jersey before the traffic kicks off. But it is also a fraught one. Their father is dying. Renata needs Caridad to review his will. Caridad has a few items for Renata to review as well.A lesser playwright might have emphasized what separates the sisters. There are obvious differences between these women — in age; class; education; and as Caridad, who inherited their father’s complexion, points out, even skin color. But there are just as many similarities. Prickly and volatile, both are quick to take offense and just as quick to offer absolution. Caridad is clearly more at home in the kitchen. It is her kitchen, after all. And Renata doesn’t know how to peel a plantain. Yet this is a dish they cook together.The specificity of this cooking — as when Caridad shows Renata how to score the plantain’s skin and strip the peel away — gives the show its particular flavor. But the heated discussion the sisters have over and around the ingredients strains the play’s naturalism, as does the more presentational performances that the director, Rebecca Martínez, encourages. Would all of these revelations really emerge in this same moment? Why have they never had any of these conversations before? And crucially, will the stew have time to cook before the other guests arrive?In the program, Cato includes a sancocho recipe borrowed from her grandmother. Carnivorous members of the audience can make it at home. But even the vegetarians might try out a few of the play’s other recipes: for forgiveness, for love.SancochoThrough April 9 at WP Theater, Manhattan; wptheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

Andrew Lloyd Webber hopes to extend an unbroken 43-year streak on Broadway. But his 13th new musical may not be the charm.First: Bring earplugs.Not just because the songs in “Bad Cinderella,” the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that opened on Thursday at the Imperial Theater, are so crushingly loud. The dialogue, too, would benefit from inaudibility.For that matter, bring eye plugs: The sets and costumes are as loud as the songs. If there were such a thing as soul plugs, I’d recommend them as well.That’s because “Bad Cinderella” is not the clever, high-spirited revamp you might have expected, casting contemporary fairy dust on the classic story of love and slippers. It has none of the grit of the Grimm tale, the sweetness of the Disney movie or the grace (let alone the melodic delight) of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Instead, it’s surprisingly vulgar, sexed-up and dumbed-down: a parade of hustling women in bustiers and shirtless pec-rippling hunks.Finally, a Cinderella for streetwalkers and gym rats!That this is the supposedly improved version of the musical that opened in London in August 2021 beggars the imagination. Then simply called “Cinderella,” and welcomed with indulgent warmth by critics who were perhaps rusty after more than a year of lockdown, it has here acquired the adjective “Bad,” as if to dare headline writers with an easy mark. A more accurate adjective might have been “Unnecessary” — except perhaps for Lloyd Webber himself, whose unbroken 43-year streak of shows on Broadway, beginning with “Evita” in 1979, would otherwise end with the closing of “The Phantom of the Opera” in April.Yet if there was no good reason for “Bad Cinderella,” that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been good. Quite a few recent and incoming musicals — “& Juliet,” “Once Upon a One More Time” and “Six” among them — have more or less reasonably applied a feminist spin to pre-feminist tales and history.Grace McLean as the Queen with a bevy of shirtless pec-rippling hunks.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Bad Cinderella” seems as if it could have been in the same league. Emerald Fennell (original story and book) and Alexis Scheer (book adaptation) have rejiggered the traditional plot to give Cinderella (Linedy Genao) a better motive for marrying Prince Sebastian (Jordan Dobson) than mere infatuation; he’s already her friend instead of a stranger she meets at a ball. Her transformation from a “gutter rose” and a “rebel” to a silver-leafed stunner, with the help of a godmother (Christina Acosta Robinson) who’s more of a mad aesthetician than a fairy, is not for him, we are told, but herself.Despite that, and a series of effortful numbers Genao sings bravely, her story, which is almost entirely internal, recedes. Sebastian’s is more interesting. An unassuming, enlightened type, he has been dragooned into choosing a bride only because his brawnier and better-loved brother, Prince Charming, is presumed dead after disappearing at war. With both his mother (Grace McLean) and Cinderella’s stepmother (Carolee Carmello) devising other plans for him — the dreaded stepsisters, here hideous Valley Girls — Sebastian’s problem isn’t figuring out whom to marry (he wants Cinderella) but how.Those changes are hardly groundbreaking, especially coming from Fennell, who won an Oscar for writing the feminist revenge thriller “Promising Young Woman,” and Scheer, whose play “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” took a cudgel to stereotypes of innocent girlhood. Still, they ought to have been sufficient to make “Bad Cinderella” at least a winky hoot.One reason it isn’t is the unrelievedly pompous direction by Laurence Connor. Aside from those strident sets and costumes (by Gabriela Tylesova) and that aggressive sound (by Gareth Owen), there is a fundamental mismatch between the flippant fairy tale tone of the book, which wants the lightest possible treatment, and the exhaustingly one-note insistence of the staging. (The choreography is by JoAnn M. Hunter.) As in his work on the Broadway revivals of “Les Misèrables” in 2014 and “Miss Saigon” in 2017, Connor seems to favor busy, murky, late-Reagan-era oversell, not necessarily inappropriate to those late-Reagan-era shows but lacking the delicacy necessary for much that came after.Carolee Carmello, center, as Cinderella’s stepmother, with the dreaded stepsisters, played by Morgan Higgins, far left, and Sami Gayle. Genao is at right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlso lacking delicacy: the songs, with workmanlike lyrics by David Zippel, and music by Lloyd Webber that often sounds like it escaped from “Phantom.” The prettiest, if most bombastic, is “Only You, Lonely You” for Sebastian, which has the engine-in-overdrive feeling of “The Music of the Night,” complete with triple-crème melody and sludgy orchestrations (also by Lloyd Webber).But “Phantom” was a show about obsession, so its richness and hysteria made sense. If anything, “Bad Cinderella” is about plotting how to “marry for love” (the title of a song in the second act) and thus requires a much lighter touch. In only one number, “I Know You,” which McLean and especially Carmello turn into the show’s comic highlight, do Lloyd Webber and Zippel hit the mark.Whether the mark is worth hitting is another matter; a comic duet that pits aging, carping viragos against each other in the manner of “Bosom Buddies” from “Mame” is not perhaps a feminist anthem. At least there are jokes to land: “I must admit I never quite forget a face/Though every feature’s in a slightly different place.” But mostly when aiming for drollery, the songwriters overshoot and wind up at operetta.Well, “Phantom” was at bottom an operetta too, yet even in an obsolete genre has run on Broadway for 35 years. If “Bad Cinderella” does not seem likely to match that success, its virtues, however invisible to me, may yet be measurable by other means.Keep in mind that Lloyd Webber’s 12 previous Broadway musicals, starting with “Jesus Christ Superstar” in 1971, have run up a total of 30,000 performances, nearly 75 years’ worth. (And he has just turned 75 himself.) What the shows have grossed in New York City — $1.4 billion for “Phantom” alone — could finance a moon mission, or pay off thousands of mortgages for employees and send their children to college.Lloyd Webber, not only British but a Lord, has been, in that sense, America’s most successful theater composer. We can argue that “Evita” wasn’t good for the culture — and “Cats” not good for anything — but somehow, he and Broadway made a match that’s lasted like no other. Even without the blessing of critics, and just like “Bad Cinderella,” it’s an implausible story about a real marriage of love.Bad CinderellaAt Imperial Theater, Manhattan; badcinderellabroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

Miki Nakatani and Mikhail Baryshnikov star in this meticulously handsome stage adaptation of Yasushi Inoue’s 1949 novella.In a corner of a shallow pond, its dimly lit surface dotted with lily pads, a barefoot young woman crouches to light a stick of incense. It’s an elegant bit of stagecraft: The wisps of smoke waft low across the water as the woman meanders through it, splish-splashing softly, ankle-deep.Design is both triumph and downfall in “The Hunting Gun,” a stage adaptation of Yasushi Inoue’s 1949 novella of the same name, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan. Telling its story through three women’s letters to the same man, the play stars the Japanese actor Miki Nakatani as the women, and Mikhail Baryshnikov in the wordless, physically eloquent role of the man.Shoko, the 20-year-old among the water lilies, is the author of the first letter. Her message to Josuke (Baryshnikov) is a torrent of grief for her mother, Saiko, who has recently died; shock at Saiko’s yearslong affair with the married Josuke, which a diary has revealed; and affectionate memories of Josuke and his betrayed wife, Midori, who have been kind to Shoko since she was a child.Shoko speaks her letter in Japanese while lucid, well-paced English supertitles are projected high upstage. Beneath them, on the other side of a screen, the well-dressed Josuke listens, his steady gaze giving way to anguish.The fundamental frustration of François Girard’s immaculately handsome production is the placement of the supertitles. Adapted by Serge Lamothe, this play is dense with language and dependent on it for most of its meaning. It isn’t enough for audience members to know the story’s outline in advance, or even to have read the novella.Yet the English text appears so far above Nakatani on François Séguin’s set that non-Japanese speakers are forced to choose between following the narrative and watching Nakatani, which is unfair to both the actor and the observer. Design becomes an obstacle to understanding.This is unfortunate in an otherwise meticulously calibrated production, exquisitely lit by David Finn on a tricksy set whose surface transforms from water to stone to wood, not a whit of it digital. In Renée April’s costumes, Nakatani sheds skin after skin, morphing from the prim-looking Shoko into Midori, in fit-and-flare red, then into the white-clad Saiko, who calmly dresses herself for death.This sartorial unlayering parallels the peeling away of secrets and lies with each letter to Josuke. The furious Midori — curiously hypersexual in manner as she addresses the husband who has rejected her — informs him that she has known for years about his affair with her cousin Saiko. Then Saiko tells him, with unsparing honesty, why she has decided to die.Josuke, a hunter who once aimed a rifle at his wife, receives her letter with cold contempt, while the missive from the dead Saiko undoes him. Baryshnikov, possessed of such expressive grace, conveys all of this unshowily. But he is upstage with the supertitles just above him, and that pulls focus from Nakatani. It’s as if the director decided that the play was about the man all along.The Hunting GunThrough April 15 at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Manhattan; thehuntinggun.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

Producers including Steven Spielberg have been exploring several possible incarnations of the decade-old TV series. Now they have a plan.A long-discussed stage musical version of the television series “Smash” is finally coming to Broadway … but fans are going to have to wait a bit more.The adaptation’s producers, who include Steven Spielberg, announced Wednesday that they expect to bring the show to Broadway during the 2024-25 theater season. They said the musical will be directed by Susan Stroman, a five-time Tony winner whose latest endeavor, “New York, New York,” starts previews on Friday.The “Smash” musical will be based on the two-season series, broadcast on NBC in 2012 and 2013, about a group of New York City theater artists struggling to bring “Bombshell,” a musical about Marilyn Monroe, to the stage. The show, with plenty of soap-style backstage drama and exuberant production numbers, was dreamed up by Spielberg, developed by Robert Greenblatt and created by Theresa Rebeck, and, although its TV run was canceled because of declining ratings, it retains a passionate fan base.“It’s crazy that we’re still talking ‘Smash,’ but not a week has gone by where somebody doesn’t tell me they miss the show, so it’s kind of great to be seeing it in another incarnation,” said Neil Meron, who was an executive producer of the TV series.Meron and Greenblatt, who will produce the adaptation with Spielberg, said the stage version would be funnier than the television show, and that it would include some of the same characters, but also new ones, and would be set in the present day.“It’s a backstage comedy about the putting on of a Marilyn Monroe musical,” Meron said, while Greenblatt’s summation was: “We’ve been calling it a comedy about a musical.”The musical will feature a score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, including songs they wrote for the television series as well as new ones; the team is best known for the Tony-winning score of “Hairspray” and is represented on Broadway this season by “Some Like It Hot.” The book will be written by Rick Elice (“Jersey Boys”) and Bob Martin (“The Drowsy Chaperone”). Joshua Bergasse, who choreographed the television series, will do the same for the stage show.The producers oversaw a developmental reading of the script about a year ago, and said they expect more workshops before the move to Broadway. The long lead time was needed to accommodate the schedules of the creative team, they said; casting has not yet been determined.“Every few years the show comes back into our lives, and now we’re excited to go on a new adventure with it,” Greenblatt said.The creative team has always imagined there would be a path from the television show to the stage, but its form has changed over time. In 2013 there was a concert performance of songs from “Hit List,” the musical that was a subject of the second season, and in 2015 an effort to develop a Broadway adaptation of “Bombshell,” the musical that was the subject of the first season, was announced after a concert performance of songs from that show.But then in 2020, the current producers announced that they would develop a loose adaptation of the series itself, rather than working with one of the musicals-within-the-television-show.“What we didn’t want to do was just put the TV series onstage — we wanted our own spin on it,” Meron said. “We are very conscious of our fan base, and very conscious that there’s a new audience that’s never been exposed to ‘Smash’ before. So our take is more comedic and more of a love letter to Broadway.” More

“Fish in a Tree” at New York City Children’s Theater pulls viewers into the mind of an 8-year-old girl with dyslexia, using projections and immersive sound design.At Theater Row in Manhattan, a gigantic notebook, filled with lines of type, stands open onstage. As the audience gazes at the pages, the letters refuse to stay still. They push together and pull apart, all the while bobbing like drowning swimmers.Rubbing your eyes won’t help. This moment from “Fish in a Tree,” a world premiere from New York City Children’s Theater, reveals the way a social studies textbook appears to Ally Nickerson, the play’s 8-year-old heroine. Although Ally doesn’t know it yet, she has dyslexia, a learning disability that, according to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity, affects 20 percent of the population.The goal was “to give our audience a real picture of what it’s like,” said Barbara Zinn Krieger, the company’s artistic director, who consulted more than a dozen experts on dyslexia while writing the show. Adapted from a 2015 best seller of the same title by Lynda Mullaly Hunt, “Fish in a Tree” relies on digital technology more than any other production in the company’s more than 25-year history. It focuses on Ally’s life both at home, where her brother has a secret of his own, and at school, where Ally, who has become a troublemaker to hide her disability, faces bullying from two girls.Although Ally is a sixth grader in the book, Krieger wanted her to be younger onstage, “especially when I discovered that the earlier you discover somebody has dyslexia, the better off the child is,” she said.Throughout the show, which opens on Saturday, Kylee Loera, the creative team’s video designer, uses the onstage notebook’s surface as a screen on which to show both still and animated images of Ally’s outer and inner lives: not only the pages she struggles to read, but also her family’s kitchen, her school, and her fantastical daydreams, or “mind movies.”But most of all, the notebook, which Ally calls her Sketchbook of Impossible Things, is the home for her artwork. (One of its blank pages is also outlined on the floor of Ann Beyersdorfer’s set.) In the sketchbook, which Ally carries with her, she draws fanciful creatures and encounters, which take shape onscreen overhead as the audience watches. And as Ally, portrayed by Lily Lipman, changes over the hourlong action — acquiring a diagnosis, a mentor and self-esteem — her art changes, too, shifting from black-and-white to color.As Ally changes over the hourlong action, her art changes, too, shifting from black and white to color.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn devising an onstage gateway to Ally’s imagination, “We were like, what if the portal is actually her notebook?” said Sammy Lopez, the show’s co-director. “And what if we gave the audience the opportunity to jump into the notebook with Ally? And so that kind of inspired the ways in which we built out the physical life of the show.”Ally’s sketches, which she often draws during class, are by the illustrator Ben Diskant, who is dyslexic himself. He based some of the images on references in the novel, like boxing lobsters and a small fish with wings. (The work’s title comes from a quotation attributed, probably falsely, to Einstein: “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”) Diskant, however, also contributed his own ideas, sketching animals because, he said, he has always found their lack of language comforting.Drawing “has set me free creatively from having to explain myself in any written form or any verbal form,” he said, adding, “and so I really relate to Ally in that way.”Loera designed the imagery for Ally’s “mind movies.” As these adventures unfurl onscreen, or, in one case, as shadow puppetry, the show’s young adult performers, who also play Ally’s third-grade classmates, teacher and brother, simultaneously act them out. For instance, Ally sees herself being jailed in her imaginary film “The Prisoner.” As her schoolhouse morphs into a prison in the projection, Louis Baglio, in the role of Ally’s new teacher, Mr. Daniels, adopts clothing and props to become a Wild West sheriff. (This all occurs comically to the strains of the theme from the 1966 western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”)“We have to teach our young audience that, during this play, you’re going to see the players create, you’re going to see them step into Ally’s mind,” said Melissa Jessel, the production’s other co-director. Music, she added, “really helps to engage.”From left, Sadie Veach, Fernando Mercado, Lipman, Louis Baglio and Madison B. Harris. The actors who play Ally’s classmates and teacher also double as characters in the imaginary sequences Ally creates.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn addition to film-score excerpts and a musical theme that serves as a bridge between Ally’s reality and her imaginings, Glenn Potter-Takata, the production’s sound designer, uses a buzzing noise to accompany Ally’s dyslexia-associated headaches. Occasional voice-overs — “Why, why, why can’t I read like everyone else?” — further disclose her thoughts.The show’s creators also added detail and texture to the novel’s explanation of the condition. A dyslexic teacher Krieger consulted described it as like trying to extract information from mental filing cabinets, but selecting it in the wrong order. That analogy went into the script.So did up-to-date tools for dyslexic students, which the show’s dramaturge, Taylor Janney-Rovin, an educator who instructs dyslexic children at Valence College Prep, in Queens, suggested. Mr. Daniels, whose help Ally finally agrees to accept, introduces Ally — and the audience — to multisensory techniques for children with learning disabilities. These include skywriting — writing letters large in the air — and drawing words in shaving cream.Krieger continued to modify her script drafts in response to internal feedback. (In the cast, creative team, company management and staff, there are seven people with disabilities.) She had invented an encouraging statement from Ally’s grandfather, “Anything is possible if you try hard enough.” Lipman, who is on the autism spectrum and has an auditory processing disorder, objected to this wording for its implied burden on those in similar circumstances. Krieger rewrote the line as “Many things are possible if you believe in yourself.”Lipman approved the revision. “The biggest moment for me is when Ally’s like, ‘So there’s a reason why I can’t read,’” she said. Her character realizes that her classmates have an advantage, Lipman added, and “it’s just that I didn’t get that piece that they all got.”The play, however, is not intended just for young people with disabilities. Its examination of bullying, friendship and sibling bonds is geared toward a larger audience, as is its wide embrace of creativity.The company’s hope, Jessel said, is that “children walk away from the story interested to explore their own imaginations.”Fish in a TreeThrough April 9 at Theater Row, Manhattan; nycchildrenstheater.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

Members of the puppetry team for “Life of Pi” discuss making the show’s animals seem all-too-real on a very crowded lifeboat.Fair warning: This article is riddled with spoilers about puppet deaths in “Life of Pi,” the stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s best-selling novel about a shipwrecked teenager adrift on the Pacific Ocean. He shares his lifeboat first with a menagerie of animals from his family’s zoo in India — large-scale puppets all, requiring a gaggle of puppeteers — and eventually just with a magnificent, ravenous Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker that takes three puppeteers to operate.Now in previews on Broadway, where it is slated to open on March 30 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, the play picked up five Olivier Awards in London last year. Puppetry design by the longtime collaborators Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell was included with Tim Hatley’s set in one award, and, unprecedentedly, a team of puppeteers won an acting Olivier for playing Richard Parker.Caldwell, who is also the production’s puppetry director, and two of those Olivier-winning puppeteers, Fred Davis and Scarlet Wilderink, sat down at the Schoenfeld one morning last week to talk about bringing the show’s puppets to life — and then, in several scenes, to vivid and often gruesome death. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Foreground, from left: Fred Davis, Scarlet Wilderink and Finn Caldwell. Behind the tiger, from left: Andrew Wilson and Rowan Ian Seamus.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt’s a very crowded lifeboat. Who all is in there, and how complex is that dance?SCARLET WILDERINK That is such a beautiful way to describe good puppetry. Because it is a synchronicity like dance that looks completely unchoreographed. Well, what have we got in there? We’ve got hyena. Rat for a short time.FRED DAVIS Zebra. Orangutan. Tiger. And Pi.FINN CALDWELL In the end of the first act, where we see the tiger’s about to kill the hyena, and the hyena’s killed the zebra and everything else — we call that section Megadeath. How many puppeteers do we use in Megadeath?WILDERINK Three, five, six, eight, 11.CALDWELL Eleven puppeteers. That’s the most puppeteers we’ve ever used on a show in one sequence.Richard Parker is such a cat. He seems plush and furry with padded paws, and he hogs the bed. How do you figure out animal movement?CALDWELL We look at anatomy. We look at pictures of skeletons of tigers, blow that up to a real tiger size and start marking on pieces of paper on the wall where the joints are all going to be. Because when we build on a framework, our armature, it wants to move like a tiger, because the limbs are all the right length. The joints want to move in the right way.Hiran Abeysekera, left, as Pi, with Richard Parker, eventually the last surviving passengers aboard a lifeboat stranded in the Pacific Ocean.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesDAVIS In terms of bringing it to life, we start off by looking at videos of tigers moving in different environments — when they’re relaxed, when they’re hunting, analyzing their foot patterns and how their weight shifts from one paw to another, how their tail flicks when they’re feeling a certain way. One thing that is always challenging for us to do is the noises. Because no human has the same lung capacity or vocal cords as a tiger.WILDERINK One of the most helpful tools for us is imagination. If the puppeteer is really seeing the thing, the audience will see the thing. The tiger’s fur, you know, he doesn’t have real fur. But if you imagine the softness of it, this sort of stretchiness of their skin, the weight — like if he collapses into Pi, how do you make him look like he’s soft in his lap? It’s part of the design because we’ve got all those bungees that tie all of the armature together, which makes him look like that. But the sensory stuff, I think, is in our minds.What is it that makes the audience believe?CALDWELL It’s you and I as 3-year-olds going, “There’s a doll. Should we agree that this is real and play a game together?” That’s the same offer that you make to the audience: “Here’s a tiger. Do you want to agree that it’s real with us?” That means that they then take part in the creation. Intellectually, we know it’s a puppet. But really quickly, most people want to buy into the game.Why is violence sustained by puppet animals so shocking and affecting?CALDWELL If it was the real animal, you’d be really worried about the situation. You’d be like, “Is that a real hyena?” With a puppet, no matter what it’s playing, all you have to worry about is what it’s telling you onstage. The puppets are only there to be themselves, so that when you start to wound them, all the audience is thinking is, well, (a), I’ve taken part in bringing this thing to life, and now you’re killing it in front of me, and (b), this is all that’s happening. All you’re getting is the pure story, the pure thing that’s happening, and so I think you get the straight emotional connection to it.The puppetry team also built and operated a hyena, a zebra, a goat and an orangutan.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAnd yet you really do not expect to hear a puppet’s neck crack.WILDERINK It is so rare that you get to do something so grisly with puppets. That’s why I love it so much. If the zebra is being attacked, the orangutan is being killed, the goat’s being killed, I love hearing the audience react to it and then be surprised by their own reaction. Because they don’t realize how invested they are until it happens. They feel the shock and the pain of the orangutan dying, and then they’re surprised by the fact that they believed it so much.DAVIS One of my favorite things that’s happened: The goat’s head came detached from the goat’s body. Something got broken in there. Through that last scene in the zoo in Pondicherry, where the goat gets brought on and shoved in the tiger cage, the puppeteer’s doing a dutiful job of keeping the body and the head attached. And then we get in there and the goat gets attacked by the tiger. As the tiger, you don’t know that the head’s come off the goat. So the neck breaks, and then you see that it’s actually disconnecting. What we decided in the moment, we left with the body, left the head on the stage. The tiger went away, came back, picked up the head and then left. We spoke to the actors afterward and they were like, “I was crying. I’m scarred from seeing that happen. Why did you do that?” I’m like, “Well, you know, it’s a tiger.”Seven puppeteers who operated from “Life of Pi” shared the Olivier Award for best supporting actor in 2022.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesI’m wondering: What did winning the Olivier mean to you?DAVIS It was really big. It’s also really validating, because I think when you’re involved with the puppetry that we’ve done over the last few years, we believe and invest in these puppet characters as much as anyone would a human character.It’s acting, yes?DAVIS It is acting. But I think a lot of the time, from an outside perspective, it cannot be considered acting or judged as harshly as acting. We want people to be looking at it and considering it worthy of criticism. That’s what was so heartening: that what we were doing was believable enough that people wanted to judge it.WILDERINK I had people from all over the world — puppeteers, puppet theater companies — contacting me on social media, saying how many waves it’s created in their communities. It felt very special on a global scale.CALDWELL It was just amazing that the industry sat up and took notice. It mainly just feels like a door opened — and an invitation to what we can do next. More

Zora Howard’s new play at the Flea catches three men during a few moments of their breathless eternity.Walking into the Flea for Zora Howard’s “Hang Time” is like stepping into a horror film. Darkness pervades the black box theater, and cicadas carry on conversations in some unseen woods. A large obstruction — perhaps a statue? or installation? — interrupts the space. Then it becomes clear: Three Black men seemingly hanging from invisible ropes above an elevated round platform. Lights faintly illuminate their slumped heads and shoulders; their shadows are cast on the right wall, evoking Kara Walker’s silhouettes. You have to pass by them to get to your seat.Howard, who wrote and directed this production, certainly knows how to make an impression.In this hourlong premiere, produced by the Flea and WACO (Where Art Can Occur) Theater Center in Los Angeles in partnership with Butler Electronics, the three lynched men, named Bird (Dion Graham), Slim (Akron Watson) and Blood (Cecil Blutcher), have conversations about women, work, fatherhood and loss. The space is bare, and the play stops as suddenly as it starts — as if we’re catching just a few moments in a breathless eternity.Even though there are no visible signs of the men’s restraints, occasionally we hear the sound of ropes tightening, and the men jerk backward and stiffen into their signature pose. The limp lolls of their heads, the surfacing veins of an extended neck, even the synchronized eye movements: This dance of rigor mortis is a master work of small intricacies, even if it grows more gratuitous and less poignant with every reoccurrence.Bird, Blood and Slim are like three chapters in the life of a Black American man: Blood (as in “Young Blood”) is still coming into his own. Slim is the clown, who sings, jokes and brags about his machismo. Bird, the eldest, is the sanctimonious curmudgeon, who preaches a gospel of God, firm morals and hard work, but also has his own losses that have hardened him. Each of the perfectly cast actors manages to straddle the line between realism and the metaphorical space where “Hang Time” exists.Howard draws out every subtlety of her already fine-tuned dialogue, which renders innocuous expressions into brutal double entendres about the men’s hanging bodies (“Look at him getting all red in the face,” Slim jokes at Blood’s expense). But the men don’t just communicate with words; they also grunt, snort and chortle, and at times the wordless exclamations form their own harmony.To accentuate the emotional shifts, Megan Culley’s sound design — which brings the outside world into the space, from rustling leaves to the bellowing of a train — works in tandem with the portentous lighting (by Reza Behjat) and the script’s varied pacing and silences. And the jeans, sneakers and plaid button-down shirts (by Dominique Fawn Hill) worn by the men are discreetly shabby and tattered, so you may not notice the bullet holes and bloody tears until late.There are purposely unanswered questions, including how these men ended up here. Bird, Blood and Slim never mention their deaths; they seem only vaguely aware of their predicament. They repeat exchanges, never seem to grasp the time, and talk about the weather and their plans as if the future were someplace they could actually confront.In both this work and her captivating 2020 play “Stew,” a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, Howard writes her characters into a Möbius strip of trauma and injustice that is Black American history.And while “Hang Time” offers a work of theater that’s undoubtedly moving, it’s also too static to leave a more lasting impression. Even the absurdist purgatories and in-between spaces of Beckett, whose language has the same kind of circuitousness, take us someplace, even if we ultimately end up back where we started.“Hang Time” begins with a visual declaration of horror but, amid its chitter and chatter, never seems to finish the conversation.Hang TimeThrough April 3 at the Flea Theater, Manhattan; theflea.org. Running time: 1 hour. More