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      Dramatizing the Story of a Gay Mid-Century Tattoo Artist Who Was So Much More

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      “Underneath the Skin,” a theater piece by John Kelly, meditates on the life of Samuel Steward, who always lived boldly when others dared not.You might not expect a show about a man who wrote for the Illinois Dental Journal to come with a warning about “nudity, graphic images and adult themes.” But Samuel Steward, the subject of John Kelly’s “Underneath the Skin,” which begins previews at La MaMa on Thursday, may well be one of the wildest figures to ever prowl the outer reaches of American literature.Steward was an academic and a tattoo artist, a friend of Gertrude Stein’s who had trysts with Rudolph Valentino and Thornton Wilder, and such a meticulous documentarian of his own sex life that his extensive records, which included a detailed “Stud File,” were catnip to a certain Alfred C. Kinsey.“With this one, I just had to go for the gusto,” Kelly, 63, said of the piece, which he wrote, designed, directed and stars in. (Three other actors play various characters, and Lola Pashalinski appears on video as Stein.) “I’m at the point where I want to say ‘Screw you’ to everything, in a good way, and kind of puncture through a membrane of whatever’s left of propriety in my life.”Steward, who died at 84 in 1993, realized he was gay when he was quite young, and he steadfastly remained true to himself in an era less than hospitable to his kind. Even as society became more accepting, he was an outlier.This made him an ideal subject for Kelly, a polymathic visual artist, writer and performer with a decades-long history of creating shows about such real-life figures as Egon Schiele, Joni Mitchell, Caravaggio and the cross-dressing trapeze artist Barbette, each of whom he turned into characters in dance-theater fantasias. But even compared to those subjects, Steward led an extraordinary life — Justin Spring’s biography, “Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade,” which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2010, is an eye-popping, mind-blowing page-turner.John Kelly in “Underneath the Skin” at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club. The show is designed as a series of vignettes pulled from many stages of Steward’s life.Albie Mitchell“Underneath the Skin” guides us through Steward’s early years and sexual adventures, his trips to Europe in the 1930s, where he met Stein, Thomas Mann and Lord Alfred Douglas. (The show also elegantly brings to life its subject’s taste for group sex.)Feeling stifled by his American milieu’s oppressive propriety, Steward embraced a new creative outlet in the early 1950s. “He became enamored with tattoo culture, the underworld aspect of it, the sexy aspect of it, the human-contact aspect of it,” Kelly said.Steward started practicing tattooing on Chicago’s Skid Row, often applying his skills (in more ways than one) on sailors from the nearby Great Lakes training station; eventually he resettled in Berkeley, Calif., where he counted the local Hells Angels among his clients. That his canvasses included both the scandalous director Kenneth Anger (who had the word “Lucifer” tattooed across his chest) and Frederick IX, King of Denmark (whom he invited to drop into his shop), is a testimony to the range of people Steward encountered. Those extremes are reflected in a life where the literati rubbed elbows with rough trade, and violence was a frequent occurrence — sometimes consensual (this sadomasochism aficionado titled his general-interest column in the Illinois Dental Journal “The Victim’s Viewpoint”) and sometimes not.Kelly has created shows about such real-life figures as Egon Schiele, Joni Mitchell and the cross-dressing trapeze artist Barbette, each of whom he turned into characters in dance-theater fantasias.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesThrough it all, Steward never stopped writing: There was the Stud File (the subject of a Museum of Sex exhibition, “Obscene Diary,” in 2011) but also a detailed journal, essays, fiction. After a “legitimate” novel tanked in 1936, he went on to publish, under the name Phil Andros, erotic pulp fiction. Walking over to a low table in his living room, Kelly picked up some Andros books, including “The Boys in Blue” and “Greek Ways,” that he had managed to procure. “They were very expensive,” he said with a sigh.Steward’s punctilious, frank documentation of his sexual adventures was one of the things that appealed to Kelly, himself a diarist whose decades-long practice fueled his 2018 “live memoir” of a show “Time No Line.” But despite the abundance of biographical material, the new piece, which was first presented at N.Y.U. Skirball in 2019, is not a straightforward retelling. “Samuel Steward touched every single aspect of gay male sexuality over the course of the 20th century, and his life demanded to be theatricalized in some form, and obviously not in an episodic manner,” said Jay Wegman, the director of N.Y.U. Skirball, who commissioned the show. “John’s interpretation is more a meditation on his life.”The show is designed as a series of vignettes pulled from many stages of Steward’s life, sometimes re-enacting scenes he had described in his diary. To properly channel him, Kelly immersed himself in primary sources. “I wanted to find as many of his actual words as I could,” he said. “I had to find his voice, see photographs of him at different points in his life, see his drawings, see his tattoo designs, and develop a sense of his trajectory. What kind of flesh do you put on the bones? That’s a recipe of movement, of design, of video, of music.”For him, “Underneath the Skin” is a semaphore that signals a presence now too easy to forget. “I’m trying, in a polite way, to shove this story down people’s throats — meaning the 20th-century history of gay and lesbian and trans people who found ways of having a life when there were so many risks,” he said. “What makes him unique is the fact that his ephemera comes down to us so we have actual proof, so to speak, of his existence.”The specifics of Steward’s life can feel remote today, yet one thing still resonates loudly — his formidable will to be true to himself, and to connect. “Even when he’s musing on mortality and old age at the end of the piece, there’s still these images that come in the video of that quest for contact,” Kelly said. “It’s human nature: We need to make contact, we need to find warmth.” More

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      Does Broadway Need Another ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Musical? Pat Benatar Says Yes.

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      BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Romeo, devastated and bereft, gazed over Juliet’s lifeless body, lying atop a table in a rehearsal studio at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts here. But rather than offer a farewell soliloquy before taking his own life, in this adaptation of the Shakespeare play, Romeo broke into song, the lyrics familiar to any rock music fan who grew up in 1980s.We belong to the lightWe belong to the thunderWe belong to the sound of the wordsWe’ve both fallen under.Sitting behind a table as she observed this first full rehearsal, Pat Benatar, who sang “We Belong”— a touchstone of the MTV era that reached No. 5 on the Billboard chart in 1984 — stopped taking notes and began to cry. When the run-through was finished, Benatar turned to her husband and musical partner, Neil Giraldo. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m going to have to go fix my mascara.”Khamary Rose as Romeo and Kay Sibal as Juliet during rehearsals of “Invincible,” which uses Benatar’s rock anthems from the 1980s to drive the narrative of Shakespeare’s 16th-century story.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesThe story of “Romeo and Juliet” has been presented in countless ways over the years, most recently as the jukebox musical “& Juliet,” with songs by Max Martin, which opened on Broadway this month. The Benatar-Giraldo version, “Invincible — The Musical,” is five years in the making, the result of a circuitous route that includes two competing ideas for a Benatar-inspired play, a cease-and-desist order, and a reconciliation that created an alliance between a television showrunner-playwright and the singer whom he idolized as a boy growing up in Southern California.Bradley Bredeweg, the creator and showrunner of “The Fosters,” wrote the book for “Invincible,” which molds together Benatar and Shakespeare, using rock anthems from the 1980s to drive the narrative of a story written in the 16th century. In previews now at the Wallis, it is scheduled to open on Dec. 2 and run through Dec. 18.The show’s creative team, from left: the musicians Neil Giraldo and Benatar; Tiffany Nichole Greene, the director; and Bradley Bredeweg, the book writer.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesEven with the reimagining of the play, the tragic tale of these two young lovers is as moving as ever, so it was hardly a surprise that Benatar began crying. But it was more than the tragedy of their tale; she had just watched, often mouthing along to the words, a celebration of the career she and her husband have built at arenas and concert halls over the decades, sung by actors who were not even born when their first big hit, “Heartbreaker,” reached the top of the charts.“You have to understand,” Benatar, 69, said as she headed out for a Sunday morning rehearsal. “I’m the only person who has sung these songs for 43 years. I can’t wrap my head around it.”“I didn’t think I was going to live past 45,” she said, remarking on the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, “so I’m pretty delighted to be here.”Rose and Sibal as Romeo and Juliet. The show began preview performances last weekend.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesThat said, the opening of “& Juliet” in New York makes for an unfortunate coincidence of timing for Benatar, Giraldo and Bredeweg, who are hoping their show will also go to Broadway — not that they profess any worry about the competition arriving at the Stephen Sondheim Theater after a successful run on London’s West End. “This is not a jukebox musical,” Giraldo, 66, said of their version, which includes 28 Benatar songs. “Wouldn’t do that. This isn’t ‘Jersey Girls.’”It almost didn’t happen. Bredeweg, 46, who was surrounded by Benatar music at his home, in the car and at malls when he was younger, came up with the idea when he was driving to San Francisco from Los Angeles. He had just reread “Romeo and Juliet” and popped a greatest-hits Benatar album into the CD player. “One song after another, they kept coming — ‘Heartbreaker,’ ‘We Live for Love,’” he said. “I started to realize that they are all the songs — if you line that up into the perfect order, they line up with the play we all know. These songs were almost written for this beloved story.”Kelsey Lee Smith, center, and other ensemble members during rehearsals.Roger Kisby for The New York Times“That night I get to my cousin’s house and I said I need an hour before I go to dinner, and locked up myself in a room and came up with the first outline of what became ‘Invincible.’”After writing the musical, Bredeweg convinced the Rockwell Table & Stage, a theater in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles that has since closed, to let him stage it there. The early version, known as “Love Is a Battlefield,” ran for six months, selling out on many nights.Unbeknown to Bredeweg, Benatar and Giraldo had been working in New York on their own show, using their songs to tell the tale of the challenges of being musicians who were romantically involved and confronting the music industry. “For many years, people kept saying, ‘You should do a story of your life. People don’t know the professional side, they don’t know about how the secret partnership works,’” Giraldo said. “It’s not all wine and roses.”They caught wind of Bredeweg’s show, and sent their manager to see it — and quickly realized the implications of the conflict. “We sent a cease-and-desist letter,” Benatar said. “He didn’t have the permissions. We felt, ‘Let’s just stop this right now.’ We felt really bad, but we had to do it.”The show includes 28 Benatar songs, and a book by Bredeweg, the showrunner for “The Fosters.” Roger Kisby for The New York TimesBredeweg was floored. “It was the scariest letter I have ever seen,” he said. “We shut it down.”As time went on, Benatar and Giraldo grew increasingly skeptical about the prospect of building a jukebox show based on their own lives. “Whether you like them or not, these shows are not timeless: They have a shelf life,” said Benatar, who this year was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “You get to a point where you’ve had enough you.”Intrigued by what they had heard about the show in Los Angeles, they asked Bredeweg to come east and talk about a possible collaboration. He joined them on their tour bus as it rolled through Connecticut.“When I heard that our songs lined up to tell the story lyrically of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ I thought, ‘Now, wait a second: That sounds like a damn good idea,’” Benatar said. “Especially when he showed me using ‘We Live for Love’ for the balcony scene.”“He’s such a generous guy,” she said. “Even though we shut down his production, he was such a generous guy.”Josh Strobl and Rose practicing choreography.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesThe concept of a Benatar-Shakespeare mash-up is certainly adventurous and gave some people pause — including the woman who is now directing the show. “When I first came along, I was like, who knows? This is such a wild card — maybe it will work, maybe it won’t,” said Tiffany Nichole Greene, the director. “I thought, if we agree, great; if not, I get to meet Pat Benatar.”The more Bredeweg researched Benatar and Giraldo’s career, the more he was convinced that he could put their music in service of his play, without its having the forced feeling of a jukebox musical — in no small part because of the two musicians themselves. “Everyone used to say they were considered the Romeo and Juliet of the rock ’n’ roll industry,” he said of the couple. “Everyone tried to break them up at every step along the way.”The show is also an unusual production for a theater like the Wallis, known more for plays and classical music, and reflects its struggles as it rebuilds an audience after pandemic losses. Coy Middlebrook, the acting chief artistic officer, said the Wallis was hoping a new audience would be drawn by the promise of an innovative production powered by the music of two known rock celebrities.Some of the ensemble members during a recent rehearsal of the show, which promotes peace in a divided world.Roger Kisby for The New York Times“Much of our music until this point has been classical programming,” Middlebrook said. “This was an opportunity for us to move into the pop-rock genre. We are all still coming back and building back. It’s a challenge. We knew this might be an opportunity to get people to come out of their homes.”Benatar and Giraldo have been at every rehearsal, sitting with Bredeweg, discussing tweaks and changes between breaks. Though based on “Romeo and Juliet,” this play is told mostly in modern English. The story has a number of twists on what Shakespeare wrote; for example, the matriarchs of the Capulets and Montagues are central figures in this version.Be that as it may, the question remains: Is Broadway hungering for two jukebox musicals based on “Romeo and Juliet”?“The only thing that relates to this being a jukebox musical is that these songs were once played on a jukebox,” Benatar said. “I love that it is dueling ‘Romeo and Juliets.’ It’s amazing.” More

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      In Paris, First-Person Trauma Jumps from Page to Stage

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      Several intimate literary accounts of pain and suffering have been adapted for the theater recently — with varying success.PARIS — When Vanessa Springora’s memoir, “Consent,” was published in 2020, it was the start of an overdue reckoning with child sexual abuse in France. Now the book has made its way to the stage, in a Paris production by Sébastien Davis that captures its raw impact yet lacks, at times, the clarity of purpose that Springora found in her writing.It’s not for lack of star power. For this monologue, Davis has cast Ludivine Sagnier, a movie actress who is a household name in France. She has rarely appeared in theater productions: Her last stage role was a decade ago, in Christophe Honoré’s “Nouveau Roman.”On the smaller second stage of the Espace Cardin, Sagnier looks increasingly assured as “Consent” unfolds. The production tracks the book closely, with some cuts. Springora’s troubled family background sets the scene for her encounter, at 13, with Gabriel Matzneff, then a famous author in his 50s who advocated for pedophilia in broad daylight and wrote extensively about his sexual encounters with teens. For two years, in the mid-1980s, he trapped Springora in a controlling sexual relationship, to which plenty of adults — and even the French police — turned a blind eye.In recent years, trauma memoirs have increasingly found a home in French playhouses. The works of Édouard Louis, now fodder for a wide range of international productions, are a prime example; later this season, one of Annie Ernaux’s most recent autobiographical books, “A Girl’s Story,” about her traumatic first sexual experience, is due for an adaptation at the Comédie-Française.While not innately theatrical — first-person narratives lend themselves to monologues, but not much else — these personal accounts of abusive situations tap into the cultural mood and offer neat emotional arcs. A one-woman show like “Consent” is also relatively cheap to produce and tour, no small advantage in straitened times for the arts.The set of “Consent.”Christophe Raynaud de LageAnd “Consent” is a story worth telling onstage. A proportion of audience members at any given performance will have lived through the permissive years Springora revisits: In the wake of the student uprisings of May 1968, the mantra “It’s forbidden to forbid” was taken literally by many French intellectuals. Sexual relations between minors and adults shouldn’t be criminalized, thinkers including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir argued. “Consent” is an indictment not just of Matzneff, but of the culture that allowed pedophiles to operate freely, and Sagnier is especially convincing when she brings it to life. With hints of dark humor, she mimics the men who surrounded the teenage Springora. There is her stepfather, who kisses her on the lips after announcing that he is separating from her mother, and the philosopher Emil Cioran, a friend of Matzneff’s, who explains to her just how “lucky” she is to be his child muse.Sagnier takes longer to settle into the role of Springora herself. Early on, when she talks about Springora’s absent father, her delivery falls somewhat flat, and isn’t helped by the heavy-handed live drums that are the musical accompaniment throughout. In a pink tank top and a white tracksuit, her hair in a ponytail, she looks like an overly gauche teenager. This staging choice starts to pay off when Springora and Matzneff meet, because it is so far removed from Matzneff’s idealization of Springora as a youthful “goddess.” As Sagnier lies on the shimmering black sheets of an onstage bed, the absurdity of their budding sexual relationship is clear.As Springora grows older, this traumatized child evidently remains within. The scene in which Sagnier wonders if she was “the accomplice of a pedophile,” because she outwardly “consented” to the relationship, is genuinely upsetting.Yet Davis intersperses “Consent” with fussy attempts at representing Springora’s fraying sense of self, as Matzneff creates a fictionalized version of her through his writing. A semi-opaque screen forms the backdrop of the production, and at several points, Sagnier is required to strip to her underwear and assume a puppetlike pose as she delivers lines in silhouette.The handful of scenes in which Sagnier acts out sex acts — opening and closing her legs suggestively, or thrusting while sitting on a chair — are equally odd when sexual exploitation is the driving theme. Davis’s heart is certainly in the right place, but avoiding any hint of sexualization would have been a cautious, sensitive choice, especially for a male director telling this story.Dominique Blanc in “Pain” at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, directed by Patrice Chéreau and Thierry Thieû Niang.Simon GosselinThere are also more subtle adaptations of first-person trauma tales playing in Paris. At the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, the actress Dominique Blanc has revived “Pain,” a production created for her in 2008 by the towering French director Patrice Chéreau, who died nearly a decade ago.While productions regularly outlive their creators in opera or in dance, it happens much more rarely in contemporary theater, and “Pain” is a welcome opportunity for younger theatergoers to acquaint themselves with Chéreau’s dramatic work. The production was based on a 1985 book of the same name, in which the French author Marguerite Duras gives an unvarnished account of her long wait for her husband’s return from a Nazi concentration camp, at the end of World War II.Blanc, a highly regarded artist, took a short leave of absence from the Comédie-Française to recreate “Pain” with Chéreau’s former assistant, Thierry Thieû Niang, and the result hasn’t aged. A wooden table and a few chairs provide the setting. Blanc sits with her back to the audience at the start of the show, her shoulders sinking before a word is spoken, and recreates Duras’s anguished routine — and the agonizing weeks that her husband, the writer Robert Antelme, spent close to death after his return — so starkly, so plainly, that not a single hand movement feels out of place.Yuming Hey, right, and Nicolas Martel in “Herculine Barbin: Archaeology of a Revolution,” directed by Catherine Marnas at the Théâtre 14.Pierre PlanchenaultWhile “Consent” and “Pain” draw on well-known literary works, “Herculine Barbin: Archaeology of a Revolution,” at the Théâtre 14, introduces a memoirist few in France know. Herculine Barbin, later known as Abel Barbin, was the first recognized intersex person in the country, after a 19th-century court decided in 1860 that they had been wrongly assigned a female identity at birth.The director Catherine Marnas relies on the account Barbin left of their life to recreate the events that led to their death by suicide, in 1969, in a funereal yet often compelling production. Marnas was especially inspired to cast Yuming Hey, a nonbinary actor, as the play’s central figure.Wrapped in white sheets that act variously as a shroud and period clothes, Hey cuts a quietly melancholy figure as Barbin, an outcast who struggled to leave being a woman behind in a society unequipped to understand that transition. Some accounts of trauma are probably best left to literature, but “Herculine Barbin” feels as if it earned its turn onstage.Le Consentement. Directed by Sébastien Davis. Théâtre de la Ville/Espace Cardin, on tour and at Théâtre de la Ville/Les Abbesses from Feb. 28 to March 1.La Douleur. Directed by Patrice Chéreau and Thierry Thieû Niang. Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, through Dec. 11.Herculine Barbin: Archéologie d’une Révolution. Directed by Catherine Marnas. Théâtre 14, through Dec. 3. More

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      Michael Feingold, Forceful Drama Critic, Dies at 77

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      For decades he wrote about theater in The Village Voice, but he also was a dramaturge and a Tony-nominated translator.Michael Feingold, whose learned writing about the theater was a fixture of The Village Voice for decades, and who was also a dramaturge, a translator and a Tony Award-nominated lyricist and adapter, died on Nov. 21 in Manhattan. He was 77.Daniel Pardo, one of his executors, confirmed the death, in a hospital. He said Mr. Feingold had had a longstanding heart condition.Mr. Feingold had an encyclopedic knowledge of plays and musicals, which he drew upon as he sized up productions, beginning in the early 1970s and continuing until recently. He did not pull punches, even if his target was a venerable veteran.He once dismissed Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose music is often said to be derivative, with this line: “Webber’s music isn’t so painful to hear, if you don’t mind its being so soiled from previous use.”In 2003 he assessed Neil Simon’s last produced play, “Rose’s Dilemma,” saying that it “doesn’t mean anything to anybody and doesn’t reveal any understanding, on its author’s part, of how plays are written.” Mr. Simon at that point had won multiple Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Theatrical trends did not impress Mr. Feingold either, especially Broadway’s late-20th-century fixation on big-budget musicals that, as he once put it, were about “large, mechanized objects” rather than characters. His 1991 takedown of Cameron Mackintosh’s production of “Miss Saigon,” which ran on Broadway for 10 years and was famed for its onstage helicopter, was part of theatrical lore.“Every civilization gets the theater it deserves, and we get ‘Miss Saigon,’ which means we can now say definitively that our civilization is over,” Mr. Feingold wrote. “After this, I see no way out but an aggressive clearance program: All the Broadway theaters must be demolished, without regard for their size, history or landmark status.”He went on to list other things that needed to be done away with, including the staff of The New York Times (where the critic Frank Rich had praised the show). Also, he said, “Cameron Mackintosh and his production staff should be slowly beaten to death with blunt instruments; this year’s Pulitzer Prize judges in drama could be used for the job.” Those judges had, weeks earlier, given the drama Pulitzer to Mr. Simon for “Lost in Yonkers.”But Mr. Feingold was not a critic who would just sit and snipe. He was active in creating for the theater himself, even while writing criticism for The Voice.He translated numerous European works for the American stage, especially those of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His adaptation of the Brecht-Weill collaboration “Happy End” even made Broadway in 1977, with Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd in the cast. He shared Tony nominations for the book and for the score. He earned another Broadway credit in 1989 for his translation of another Brecht-Weill work, “Threepenny Opera.” His translation earned some favorable comments, but critics trashed the show, which featured the rock star Sting.Mr. Feingold spent time as literary manager for the Yale Repertory Theater, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., roles in which he would read scripts and often help shape ones that were accepted for production. The theater historian Jeffrey Sweet, in his book “The O’Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater” (2014), recounted the role played by Mr. Feingold in propelling the career of August Wilson.In 1982, when Mr. Wilson was still largely unknown, he brought his play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” to the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., where Mr. Feingold was doing dramaturgy. The first reading of the piece, directed by William Partlan, lasted more than four hours. Mr. Partlan and Mr. Feingold talked Mr. Wilson through the necessary trimming.“Cutting was a torment to him,” Mr. Feingold said in an interview for the book. “Cutting was always a terrible struggle for August because every word was blood.”Another reading was held, and this time the play was 90 minutes shorter. Mr. Rich, the Times critic, was in the audience and was impressed. His enthusiastic write-up in The Times jump-started Mr. Wilson’s career.“While there’s nothing novel about rich language in the theater,” Mr. Rich wrote, “it is quite unusual in 1982 to find a playwright who is willing to stake his claim to the stage not with stories or moral platitudes, but with the beauty and meaning of torrents of words.”Mr. Feingold wrote for The Voice from 1971 to 2013, when he became a victim of downsizing (though he would return later in a limited capacity). Robert Simonson, reporting on that dismissal in Playbill, said that Mr. Feingold’s writing was known for “erudition and understanding of theater history, both ancient and modern, and how current plays fit in with that continuum.”Mr. Feingold, right, in 2015 at the Obie Awards with, from left, the costume designer William Ivey Long, the performer Lea DeLaria and Heather Hitchens, the president of the American Theater Wing. Mr. Feingold was often a judge for the Obies, and he received one of his own in 2020.Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for American Theater WingMr. Feingold was born on May 5, 1945, in Chicago. His mother, Elsie (Silver) Feingold, taught piano, and his father, Bernard, managed a tannery.Michael grew up in Chicago and Highland Park, Ill., where the family moved when he was in high school. The Highland Park high school he attended had a drama club where, as he put it in an interview with the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project in 2018, “I did some inept acting and some slightly less inept directing.”He became further interested in theater at Columbia University, where he earned a degree in English and comparative literature in 1966. He had taken a senior seminar from Robert Brustein, who was then known primarily for his theater criticism, and in the fall of 1965 asked if Mr. Brustein would write him a recommendation to support his application to the Yale School of Drama. After Christmas break, he asked if Mr. Brustein had remembered to do so.“He smiled mysteriously and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’” Mr. Feingold said in the oral history. “And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Read The Times tomorrow.’”The next day the newspaper reported that Mr. Brustein had just been named dean of Yale Drama.“So he wrote the recommendation and then he accepted it,” Mr. Feingold said, “feeling that he should take his own advice.”Mr. Feingold had wanted to study playwriting at Yale, and he did, but Mr. Brustein steered him toward criticism as well. He began writing for The Voice, and in 1983 he was named its chief drama critic.Mr. Feingold, who lived in Manhattan and who leaves no immediate survivors, was often a judge for the Obie Awards, which recognize Off Broadway work. In 2020 he received one of his own, a special citation recognizing “his extraordinary service to the theater.”He was, above all, a champion of theater that is bold and challenging. In 1993 he was the editor of “Grove New American Theater,” a play collection that included work by Karen Finley, Mac Wellman and other cutting-edge writers.In the introduction to that book, he lamented the cyclical nature of American theater: a period of innovation, then stagnation, repeated endlessly, stunting growth.“If the theater doesn’t grow up, the American public doesn’t grow up either,” he wrote. “Instead, it gets hotted up, every 20 years or so, over the same issues — sex, politics and religion — the three matters that art, according to some strangely permanent lunatic fringe of American opinion, must never be allowed to deal with, at least not in any open manner.” More

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      The Museum of Broadway Is Open. Here Are 10 Highlights.

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      In Times Square, a 26,000-square-foot space details the history of theater with objects like Patti LuPone’s “Evita” wig, a Jets jacket from “West Side Story” and more.When a Broadway show closes, the next stop for the hundreds of costumes, setpieces and props is often … the dumpster.“The producers often stop paying rent in a storage unit somewhere, which is heartbreaking,” said Julie Boardman, one of the founders of the Museum of Broadway, which opened in Times Square this month.Boardman, 40, a Broadway producer whose shows include “Funny Girl” and “Company,” and Diane Nicoletti, the founder of a marketing agency, are looking to reroute those items to their museum, a dream five years in the making.“We see it as an experiential, interactive museum that tells the story of Broadway through costumes, props and artifacts,” Nicoletti, 40, said of the four-floor, 26,000-square-foot space on West 45th Street, next to the Lyceum Theater.The museum was a self-funded project at the start, Nicoletti said, as they drew from Boardman’s connections to secure meetings with major players in the New York theater industry, including theater owners; the heads of the American Theater Wing, the Broadway League, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS; and executives from the licensing companies. (Boardman and Nicoletti declined to share the for-profit institution’s budget and early investors. Tickets cost $39 to $49, with a portion of each ticket benefiting the nonprofit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.)The museum occupies a building next to the Lyceum Theater on West 45th Street.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOriginally scheduled to open in 2020, the museum was delayed by the pandemic — though that gave Boardman and Nicoletti more time to acquire artifacts, photographs and costumes. A majority of the more than 1,000 objects and photographs on display are loans from individual artists, creators and producers, as well as performing arts organizations like Disney Theatrical Productions and the Public Theater.The space is organized chronologically, starting with Broadway’s beginnings in the mid-18th century and running to productions onstage now. And more than 500 shows are highlighted here in the form of items like a pair of tap shoes from the current revival of “The Music Man” and the arm cast that the actor Sam Primack wore onstage in September during the final Broadway performance of “Dear Evan Hansen.” Several of the rooms were dreamed up by the same set designers who worked on the shows the spaces are devoted to, among them Paul Clay (“Rent”) and Bunny Christie, who designed the recent revival of “Company.”Nicoletti and Boardman said they also wanted to reveal how shows are made, and highlight the roles of costumers, press agents and stage managers. To that end, a first-floor space, by the set designer David Rockwell, takes visitors behind the scenes of the making of a Broadway show.“People don’t realize shows take five, seven, 10 years to put together,” Boardman said.In addition to rotating the items on display in the permanent areas, Boardman said, the museum plans to host two or three special exhibitions each year in a first-floor space that is now devoted to the drawings of the theatrical caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.And as notable Broadway productions end their runs, well, they’ll be ready.“We already have a glove from ‘MJ,’” Boardman said. “And we’re getting a ‘Strange Loop’ usher hat.”Here are 10 highlights from the collection.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway AIDS QuiltThis quilt, meant to mourn those lost to AIDS and show solidarity with those living with it, was one of the first projects initiated by the organizations Broadway Cares and Equity Fights AIDS. Shows running on Broadway in the late 1980s created handcrafted 7-inch-by-7-inch squares, with much of the work handled by the productions’ wardrobe teams. (Look for the square for the 1984 Terrence McNally musical “The Rink,” which is signed by Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera, who won a Tony Award for her role the show.)Patti LuPone ‘Evita’ WigYou aren’t likely to see a Museum of Broadway Wigs anytime soon. That’s because wigs are expensive, and they’re often reused, dyed or cut for new productions, said Michael McDonald, a costumes and props curator for the museum. But this one, created for LuPone by the celebrated wigmaker Paul Huntley for the original 1979 Broadway production of “Evita” — and possibly worn on the production’s opening night — was a gift to her. Each of the approximately 100,000 strands was fitted through a minuscule hole, one by one, to create an accurate hairline, resulting in a seamless look. “It’s hard to believe there’s bobby pins, a cap and a full head of her own hair under the wig,” McDonald said as he pointed to a photograph of LuPone wearing it.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara Krulwich/The New York Times‘West Side Story’ JacketThis Jets jacket, worn by the actor Don Grilley, who succeeded Larry Kert, who played Tony in the original 1957 Broadway company of “West Side Story,” hung in a closet for decades. It was given to the museum by Grilley’s widow, Lesley Stewart Grilley. (Don Grilley died in 2017.) “We got lucky,” McDonald said. “There aren’t many costumes still around from the original.”‘Hair’ Military JacketClearly built to last, this red-and-green military jacket was worn by an ensemble member in the original 1968 production of “Hair,” the 2008 Public Theater revival in Central Park, the 2009 Broadway revival and that production’s 2010 transfer to London. But it most likely dates back even further, said McDonald, who received a Tony nomination for designing the costumes for the Broadway revival and loaned the jacket to the museum. “It was likely used in a production of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ at the Public in the 1960s,” he said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara Krulwich/The New York TimesLittle Red Dress From ‘Annie’The iconic fiery red frock from the 1977 Broadway musical about a little orphan with curly red hair whose pluck and positivity wins the heart of the billionaire Oliver Warbucks (not to mention the audience) is on loan from the Connecticut nonprofit Goodspeed Musicals. (“Annie” originated at Goodspeed Opera House in 1976.) “It’s honestly the most instantly recognizable costume on earth,” said Lisa Zinni, a costumes and props curator for the museum.Meryl Streep’s Broadway Debut CostumeLuke McDonough, the longtime costumes director at the Public Theater, had the foresight to hold on to this one: a floor-length, off-white lacy number worn by a then-little-known actress named Meryl Streep, who made her Broadway debut in the Public’s production of “Trelawny of the ‘Wells’” at Lincoln Center in 1975. (One of her co-stars was another fresh face making his Broadway debut: Mandy Patinkin.)Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Phantom of the Opera’ Chandelier InstallationEach of the 13,917 glistening crystals in this piece, which were fashioned by the German artist Ulli Böhmelmann into hanging strands, is meant to represent one performance the Broadway production of “The Phantom of the Opera” will have played from its opening on Jan. 26, 1988, through its closing night performance. Though the final show was originally set for Feb. 18, 2023, the production announced Tuesday that it had been pushed to April 16 amid strong ticket sales (Böhmelmann plans to add the necessary crystals). ‘Avenue Q’ PuppetsIn the early days of the 2003 Broadway production of the puppet-filled musical comedy “Avenue Q,” the show’s low budget meant the puppeteers had to put their charges through quick changes. The show initially had only three Princeton puppets — but he had eight costumes — meaning the puppets took a beating from changing clothes multiple times eight shows a week. “Eventually, they had a puppet for every costume,” McDonald said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAl Hirschfeld Foundation; Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGershwin Theater Set ModelThis scale model, which is just over five feet wide, was designed by Edward Pierce, the associate scenic designer of the original Broadway production of “Wicked,” and took four people seven weeks to build. It includes more than 300 individual characters — and another 300 seated audience members in the auditorium. (See if you can find the Easter egg: a small model of the set model, with the designers — who look like the actual designers — showing the director a future design for “Wicked.”)Al Hirschfeld Etching of Barbra StreisandThe theater caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who was most famous for his sketches that ran in The New York Times the Sunday before a show opened, created around 10,000 drawings over his 82-year career. But one of his most popular pieces was his 1968 portrait of Barbra Streisand — captured here in a 1975 etching — which he drew on the Sunday before “Funny Girl” opened in March 1964. It depicts Streisand looking into a mirror showing a 1910 photo of Fanny Brice, whom she played in the Jule Styne musical. “For him, a caption was a toe-curling admission of failure,” said David Leopold, the Al Hirschfeld Foundation creative director who curated the special exhibition. “He wanted the drawing to stand on its own two feet.” More

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      Playing Neil Diamond: A Dream Role, and a ‘Crazy Privilege’

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      Will Swenson, the star of “A Beautiful Noise,” has come a long way from his days as an eighth grader wooing girls with his Diamond repertoire.Back in the era of the eight-track tape, the actor Will Swenson’s father played Neil Diamond albums practically on a loop. A poster of Diamond, the Brooklyn-born singer-songwriter most famous for the singalong behemoth “Sweet Caroline,” hung on a wall in the family’s garage.So when Swenson was in eighth grade, looking to “woo girls around the campfire” with his guitar, it was obvious to him that a few Diamond tunes belonged in his repertoire.“My go-to was ‘Play Me,’” he said, “which is the most sexual song ever, and I don’t think that it dawned on my innocent little Mormon brain that I was singing just lascivious lyrics to these innocent little Mormon girls.”In early November in his dressing room at the Broadhurst Theater, Swenson laughed at that memory in what he called his “post-show morning voice”: extra deep with a touch of sandpaper. Given the demands of his song-heavy current Broadway gig — playing the title character in “A Beautiful Noise, The Neil Diamond Musical,” which opens on Dec. 4 after a month of previews — it was probably not the kindest thing to ask him to tax his voice further by giving a 90-minute interview.“It’s all right,” he said, an hour in. “Necessary evils.”With a book by Anthony McCarten, whose Warhol-Basquiat play, “The Collaboration,” opens on Broadway later in December, “A Beautiful Noise” is both a conventional jukebox musical and a strange beast, structurally. Michael Mayer, its director, aptly described it this way: “The first act is a musical wrapped in a play, and the second act is a play wrapped in a concert.”Swenson, who portrays the Neil Diamond of the 1960s to the 1990s, in the musical, which opens Dec. 4 at the Broadhurst Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe conceit that makes it what Swenson considers a memory play involves the present-day Neil Diamond, played by Mark Jacoby, talking through his life and lyrics with his therapist, played by Linda Powell. The real Diamond, now 81, spent years in psychoanalysis.Swenson, who at 50 can easily look much younger, headlines as the Neil Diamond of the 1960s to the ’90s. (In the interest of vocal preservation, Swenson plays the role seven times a week instead of the usual eight. Nick Fradiani takes over on Wednesday nights.) An anxious Jewish songsmith from Flatbush whose family name actually is Diamond, he writes the Monkees hit “I’m a Believer,” finds his feet as a performer on the tiny club stage of the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, inadvertently signs a record deal with the Mafia that comes back to bite him hard and over the years walks away from one marriage and then another.And amid all that, evolves into a globe-trotting, sequin-wearing, arena-playing star.For Swenson, doing a Diamond impression long ago became a kind of party trick. At some concerts given by his wife, Audra McDonald, he has come on toward the end to sing a little Diamond with her, mischievously.“We would set up ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers’” — the Diamond-Streisand duet about a couple whose love has died of neglect — “by saying, ‘Well, this is kind of our song. It kind of represents our emotional relationship,’” he said.A Tony Award nominee for playing Berger in Diane Paulus’s 2009 Broadway revival of “Hair,” and an Obie Award winner for his 2018 performance as Satan in “Jerry Springer — The Opera,” he’s been dangerously sexy in “Murder Ballad,” unnervingly menacing in “Assassins” — and fortuitous offstage in “110 in the Shade.” That 2007 Broadway production is where he met McDonald, whom he married in 2012, and with whom he has a 6-year-old daughter.To hear Swenson tell it, though, Diamond is the role he’d been waiting for since well before “A Beautiful Noise” became “a twinkle in anybody’s eye.” Playing a series of eight guitars as he traces the arc of Diamond’s life, he’s aiming for something deeper than mere mimicry.“I have strong feelings,” he said, “about the blurry line — the tricky, tricky line — between honoring a sound and, well, impression and impersonation.”But how to craft a performance that captures Diamond for eagle-eyed fans while allowing himself interpretive latitude?“That is the question, isn’t it,” Swenson said, wryly borrowing a line from early in the show, when Diamond has yet to find a sound that is his own.Neil Diamond circa 1968. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesABOVE THE COUCH in Swenson’s dressing room, near a photo of him and McDonald with their older children on their wedding day, is a framed, poster-size image of Swenson with Diamond at Fenway Park in Boston, when the cast of “A Beautiful Noise” went there to sing “Sweet Caroline” last June.That appearance — at the ballpark where Diamond had sung the same song in 2013 to comfort a city stricken in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing — was a promotion for the show, which was in town for its pre-Broadway run. It was also a rare public performance by Diamond, who retired from touring in 2018 after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.“It was just beautiful,” Swenson said, “to sort of watch him step into that piece of himself that I’m sure he’s missed so much.”A note in the Playbill for “A Beautiful Noise” suggests the profundity of that longing. Titled “Letter From Neil,” and dated September 2022, it begins:“The idea of a Broadway musical about my life has always been a daunting one. It wasn’t until the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease prematurely ended my touring career that I started to seriously consider the prospect. I say ‘prematurely’ because my heart and soul would tour until the day I die if only my body would cooperate.”The symptoms of Parkinson’s manifest differently in different people, but voice, movement, balance and cognition can all be affected. There’s an ache, then, built into the show’s celebration of Diamond’s life and music. Someone else — someone whose body will cooperate — gets to be onstage, performing Diamond’s songs in front of his fans. I asked Swenson if he thinks about that poignancy.“Yeah,” he said, misting up. “It’s a crazy privilege. Especially because he does it better. Like, I’m the poor man’s version, and you’re screaming for me.”But such is the curious performer-audience dynamic of jukebox biomusicals, whose playlists so instantly unlock remembrance that they might as well be madeleines. And just as Michael Jackson fans react to Myles Frost in the title role of “MJ” as if Jackson himself were in the room, Diamond fans respond to Swenson as if they were at a Diamond concert back in the day.It’s quite a thing to behold. At the first preview of “A Beautiful Noise,” in early November, a sea of mostly older audience members needed merely the slightest cue not just to sing along (which, in the case of a few judiciously chosen songs, the show encourages) but also to perform the same movements in unison — air punches, raised arms. To an uncanny degree, they knew precisely what was expected of them, because Diamond had expected it.Steven Hoggett, 50, the show’s choreographer, finds this tapping of physical memory “professionally fascinating,” particularly when he watches the crowd from above. The son of Diamond fans, Hoggett grew up in Britain knowing the albums his parents played, like “The Jazz Singer” (1980), and singles that charted there, like “Beautiful Noise.” But he looks in wonder at the Diamond faithful, whose bodies have retained their kinetic history.“These people,” he said, “they’re responding to gigs they went to when I was 4.”Giving Diamond fans possibly the closest thing they can get now to the live concert experience of an artist they love, Swenson is the beneficiary of all that nostalgic affection, which he knows isn’t really for him.“I feel like I’m lying to them sometimes, because I’m like” — and here Swenson dropped his voice to a whisper — “‘I’m not Neil.’”BEFORE SWENSON MADE it big on the New York stage, he was a star of Mormon cinema.Born in Logan, Utah, the second of four siblings, Swenson spent his early childhood in Glendale, Calif., doing shows at his grandparents’ theater. His grandmother, the biological daughter of a Ziegfeld Follies girl who gave her up for adoption, was a playwright — “three-act, family-friendly comedies, mostly,” Swenson said.He was 12 when his parents moved the family to Salt Lake City to start their own theater, and about 16 when he met the girl who would become his first wife.Between high school and starting college at Brigham Young University, he went on a two-year mission to Ecuador. During that trip, which he remembers as “a beautiful time” in his life, he kept waiting in vain for confirmation from God that everything he had been taught about Mormonism was true.Swenson at Carmine Street Guitars. In the show, he plays a series of eight guitars as he traces the arc of Diamond’s life.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesThen in 1999, he joined the second national tour of “Miss Saigon.” As the show crisscrossed the country, he visited sites that figured in Mormon history, read books about the church, discovered unsettling things that he had not known about it.“Having to tell my mom that I was going to leave the church was maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Swenson said. “From the time that I decided that I had to leave the church to the time that I legitimately was open and honest about it with everyone was probably a 12-year journey.”In the early 2000s, as he was starting out in New York, he returned to Utah to star in a movie called “The Singles Ward,” as a standup comic whose wife divorces him, which dumps him back into the Mormon dating pool. The film was a niche success, so he did some more, including a sequel to “The Singles Ward.”But the apex was “Sons of Provo,” which Swenson co-wrote, directed and starred in. A clever, very funny mockumentary about a Mormon boy band, it doesn’t come off as the slightest bit mean, even when you know that he eventually left the fold.Does it matter, by the way, that a former Mormon from Utah has been cast as a Jewish guy from New York? To Mayer, 62, who is Jewish — and whose other current Broadway show is the revival of “Funny Girl” — the answer is no.“The thing about Neil that is most compelling,” he said, “isn’t necessarily the fact that he’s Jewish or that he’s from Brooklyn as much as he is a bit of a victim of a generational anxiety and depression. And I feel like that is not unique to the Jews.”There is also an argument to be made from what Swenson recalls as Diamond’s response at the first reading the actor did of the show. Performing for him, as him, from just a couple of yards away, Swenson worried initially that Diamond was bored, because he listened with his eyes closed.“I think we got to ‘Solitary Man,’ and he started kind of rocking and tapping his thumb and sort of mouthing the words,” Swenson said. “And then we got to, I think, ‘Sweet Caroline.’ And he kind of raised his hand, singing along, and it was just like: Oh, my God.”Swenson isn’t Diamond; it’s true. But even for the man himself, he can play the part. More

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      ‘Phantom of the Opera’ to Delay Broadway Closing After Sales Spike

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      Last week was the highest-grossing in the show’s 35-year history.“The Phantom of the Opera” is going to continue haunting Broadway a while longer.The musical — the longest-running show in Broadway history — announced in September that it would close in February, ending a storied run shortly after celebrating its 35th anniversary.But immediately after the closing was announced, ticket sales spiked. And last week, when Broadway was bolstered by Thanksgiving travelers, “Phantom” enjoyed its highest-grossing week ever: $2.2 million.So on Tuesday the show’s producer, Cameron Mackintosh, plans to announce an eight-week extension of the run, to April 16.“What a phenomenal response there has been to the show ending,” Mackintosh said in a telephone interview on Monday. “We’ve sold out virtually everything that we have on sale.”And why not run forever? The answer is simple: Until the closing announcement, the show was not selling enough tickets to defray its rising running costs. The slow return of audiences to Broadway following the pandemic and inflation were both contributing factors.“For most of last year, we were losing every week,” Mackintosh said. “There comes a point when you become theatrical wallpaper. People took it for granted that it’s going to run forever.”Those driving the surge in sales include fans hoping to catch the show before the closing.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe turnabout at the box office has been significant. The week before the closing plan was announced, the show grossed $867,997. After the announcement, the numbers began to climb.Broadway is gradually rebuilding following the lengthy pandemic shutdown and last winter’s Omicron slump, which forced a number of shows to close.Thanksgiving week — traditionally one of the biggest of the year for Broadway — saw a modest uptick in grosses from last year. The 33 shows running this year grossed $37.5 million last week, up from the $32.5 million that the 33 shows running last year earned during the same period. But Broadway has yet to return to prepandemic levels: in 2019 there were 35 shows running, and they grossed $41.7 million.Those driving the surge in “Phantom” sales include people who have seen the show before but want to catch it again before the closing, as well as those who have never seen it and realize it’s now(ish) or never.“The reason it is sold out is because it’s coming off, absolutely,” Mackintosh said. “We know that one of the reasons that it’s doing it is because this is your last chance to see the great show.”Among the recent patrons: Lucas Perez, a 37-year-old smoke shop worker from Manalapan, N.J., who bought a pair of tickets as soon as the closing was announced. He had seen the show twice before — once as an elementary school student, and once as an adult — but wanted to bring his mother, who had never been. They went in mid-October.“It felt like I was saying goodbye to an old friend, to someone I’ll never see again,” Perez said. “I was very nostalgic the whole time. There’s something about the experience of ‘Phantom’ that other shows don’t have.”Featuring soaring music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, “Phantom” is a Gothic melodrama about a masked music lover who haunts the Paris Opera House and becomes fixated on a young soprano. The Broadway production, directed by Hal Prince, is a large-scale spectacle, with a 27-person orchestra and a famously crashing chandelier, emblematic of an earlier era of hyper-romantic musical theater. In 1988, the year the show opened, it won seven Tony Awards, including the one for best musical.Christina DiCillo, a 31-year-old Queens resident who works in the advertising department at the website TheaterMania, is a “Phan” — what the show’s superfans call themselves — who has seen the show 46 times so far, and hopes to hit 50 before it closes. She and her twin sister saw a touring production of the show when they were growing up in Buffalo; now they have each seen it repeatedly in multiple locations. (Christina has seen it in London, Las Vegas and South Korea, among other places.)“I feel bad for people that are just discovering it now,” she said. “The music always gets me, and when I’m there I’m transported. I keep thinking, ‘Maybe this time is the time it won’t feel as magical,’ but every time the chandelier rises you get the chills down your spine. I see a lot of Broadway shows for fun, and some of them are better and some of them are worse, but that’s one I know I’m going to love every time.”The Broadway run has been seen by 19.9 million people and has grossed $1.3 billion; at the time of its closing it will have had 13,981 performances. According to the production, it has employed about 6,500 people, including 400 actors.Mackintosh said there would be no further extensions. Following the show’s closing, he said, the Shubert Organization is planning a renovation of the Majestic Theater, where “Phantom” has run since its opening. The show will mark the end of its Broadway run with an April 14 benefit performance to raise money for charities, and a final performance with an audience including alumni and friends of the show.“Phantom” had a lengthy North American touring life, playing 14,500 performances in 77 cities, and productions are currently onstage in London (where running costs were lowered by reducing the orchestra size) and in Melbourne, Australia. A version in Mandarin is scheduled to open in China next year, and the actor Antonio Banderas is working on a new Spanish-language production.“It’s not like the show is going anywhere — the show will be done and is being done all over the world, and I’m sure it will come back to America and we’ll do a tour in the future,” Mackintosh said.And will it return to Broadway? “I’m sure at some point it will,” he said. “It’s a great show, and the great classics do come back.” More

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      With an ‘Othello’ of His Own, Clint Dyer Comes Full Circle

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      LONDON — When Clint Dyer was an aspiring actor in the mid-1980s, he made his first visit to the National Theater, the revered London playhouse whose productions are a showcase for the great and good of British drama. “I’d never seen a stage that size,” Dyer recalled recently. “I’d never seen actors of that level. What a thing! How inspiring!”But when Dyer walked out of the auditorium after the show, he saw something that changed his mood instantly, he said: On a wall was a large photograph from a 1960s production of “Othello,” with the actor Laurence Olivier in the title role — in blackface. The sight “broke my heart,” Dyer said.Dyer, who is Black, said he grabbed a pen and wrote the words “Shame on you” in the whites of Olivier’s eyes.Almost four decades later, Britain’s theatrical landscape has changed radically. Last year, Dyer, 54, was named as the National Theater’s deputy artistic director — a position that makes him arguably the most high-profile person of color in British theater. On Wednesday, he premieres his own production of “Othello” at the playhouse.“It’s such a strange feeling that I’m in this building, directing the play that broke my heart,” Dyer said in an interview. “The beauty of that circle is almost overwhelming.”As the deputy artistic director of the National Theater, Dyer is arguably the most high-profile person of color in British theater.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesThe National Theater rarely stages the lengthy “Othello,” but previous productions have been landmark events. Those include John Dexter’s 1964 production with Laurence Olivier (so revered that photographs from the show were still on display two decades later), Sam Mendes’s 1997 staging featuring David Harewood in the lead and Nicholas Hytner’s acclaimed 2013 production starring Adrian Lester as Shakespeare’s tragic hero, a Moor who murders his wife Desdemona after he is tricked into believing that she is having an affair.Dyer’s “Othello” — which sets the play in an arena populated by black-shirted thugs who seethe whenever Othello (Giles Terera) goes near his white wife (Rosy McEwen) — is highly anticipated, especially given that Dyer is the first Black director to tackle the play at the theater.During a recent rehearsal break, the director said he was hoping to do something new in this show. “As a Black man, I’ve always found productions problematic,” he said, adding that most directors play down the issue of race and focus on male jealousy, even when a Black actor takes the lead role. “The irony is,” Dyer said, “the way we’ve been performing ‘Othello’ has in some ways highlighted our racism more than the actual play.”Rosy McEwen as Desdemona and Giles Terera as Othello in the production by the National Theater, where Dyer is the first Black director to tackle the Shakespearean tragedy.Myah JeffersTo some theatergoers, Dyer’s rise to the heart of Britain’s theatrical establishment may appear swift. He was little known here until a play he directed and co-wrote, “Death of England,” opened in February 2020, just a few weeks before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered London’s playhouses. The play, about a working-class man coping with his conflicting feelings for his deceased father, was a critical hit for the National Theater.Yet for almost two decades, Dyer had been toiling away in London’s theater land. Born in 1968, he was brought up in Upton Park, a poor district of East London. His mother was a nurse, and his father worked at a Ford car factory. He wanted to be a soccer player, he said, but after acting in a school play, older schoolmates encouraged him to attend Saturday morning workshops at the Theater Royal Stratford East. Soon, he was acting in a play directed by Mike Leigh, and theater administrators pushed him to try his hand at writing and directing, too.In 2004, Philip Hedley, the theater’s artistic director at the time, asked Dyer to direct his first production, “The Big Life,” about four immigrants to Britain from the Caribbean who take a vow to avoid women and wine, but swiftly break it. Based on Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” the musical transferred to the West End, though Dyer struggled to get directing work afterward.Hedley said that race was “the only reason” Dyer’s career didn’t take off at the time. If he had been white, “he’d have been the hot property,” Hedley said. Dyer said he restarted his career by taking acting gigs, and writing and directing plays on the side. It was 15 years before he directed in the West End again, with “Get Up, Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical.” He is now developing a Muhammad Ali musical for Broadway.“It’s such a strange feeling that I’m in this building, directing the play that broke my heart,” said Dyer. “The beauty of that circle is almost overwhelming.”Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesThere is curiosity in Britain’s theater world not just about Dyer’s “Othello,” but also about his plans as the National Theater’s deputy director. Dominic Cooke, a former artistic director of the Royal Court who is one of the National’s associate artists, said Dyer was chosen for the role partly because of his “really strong take on the politics of race.”The theater has long set targets to increase diversity on its stages, including one for 25 percent of performers to be people of color. (Last season it surpassed most of its objectives, with nonwhite artists making up 36 percent of its performers.) Dyer said “targets are valuable,” but it shouldn’t just fall to casting directors to increase diversity onstage. “We should really be going to writers,” Dyer said, adding that he wanted to ask playwrights to consider the diversity of their characters from the moment they began working on a play.Writers “should be doing the work to actually go out and learn about different cultures, different people and find the vernaculars that they speak in,” Dyer said.For all that focus on race, Dyer said his main responsibility as the National Theater’s deputy director was nothing to do with diversity, but simply “to sell tickets” — and that started with his “Othello.” For an artist of his generation, it felt like “a big deal” that a Black director was staging the play there, he said, but younger people might not see it as significant.That didn’t bother him, he said. “I’m glad they don’t think this is a big deal, as I do,” Dyer added. “Because they shouldn’t. It should be bloody normal.” More