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      Alan Cumming Uses Dance to Get at the Truth of Robert Burns

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      GLASGOW — Rain pours down, thunder growls, lightning flickers. Fragments of melancholy melody emerge from the tumult, and a lone, silhouetted figure appears onstage, moving his upper body in sinuous circles, entwining his arms and gesturing with slow deliberation. Then he walks forward, opens his arms and smiles impishly. “Here am I,” he announces.Here he is: The Scottish poet Robert Burns, embodied by the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in the one-man dance-theater show “Burn,” coming to the Joyce Theater on Sept. 20.Conceived by Cumming and the choreographer Steven Hoggett, “Burn,” which had its premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival in August, is an unlikely hybrid: A movement-focused show performed by a famous actor with no dance training, about a man whose medium was words.Why dance? Why Burns?Cumming answered those questions at some length a few days after that Glasgow performance, in a video interview from Aberdeen, where — between performances of “Burn” — he was filming the second season of a Scottish travel series with the actress Miriam Margolyes. To boil it down: He loves a challenge, he loves dance even more, and he had been thinking about taking on another physically demanding role since reprising the role of the M.C. in “Cabaret” eight years ago. (He won a Tony Award for the performance in 1998.)Vicki Manderson, left, did the choreography with Hoggett (back to camera). Here, they are rehearsing with Cumming iin Glasgow.Tommy Ga-Ken Wan“When that ended in 2015, I was 50,” he said. “I felt sad to think I’m never going to be as fit as this again, this is it. Then I slowly began to think, No, I have one more thing left in me.” He added, “I put it into the universe.”The universe responded. In 2018, he went backstage at the Joyce Theater after watching “The Tenant,” choreographed by Arthur Pita, the partner of his old friend and flatmate Matthew Bourne. While chatting with Pita, Cumming was introduced to Linda Shelton, the executive director of the Joyce. “She asked me if I had any dancey ideas,” Cumming said. “I do!,” he answered.He had been thinking about Burns at that time, he said, prompted in part by writing an autobiography and revealing dark aspects of his own past. “It made me think how we don’t have a holistic picture of our icons,” he said. “Burns is everywhere in Scotland — on statues, milk bottles, chocolate boxes — he is a sort of Scottish DNA wallpaper. But we don’t really know who he is. Somehow, at that moment, the two things, Burns and dance, merged in my mind.”He told the Joyce team that he wanted to do a dance-theater piece about the poet with the choreographer Steven Hoggett. But he neglected to mention he hadn’t yet asked Hoggett.“It’s true,” Hoggett said in a video interview from New York, where he is working on a coming production of “Sweeney Todd.” The two men — friends since 2007, when they collaborated on the National Theater of Scotland’s “The Bacchae” — were having dinner one night when Cumming asked him what he thought about the idea. “I said it sounded fantastic and he should do it,” Hoggett recounted. “He said, ‘Good, because you are doing it, too.’”Cumming wanted to work with Hoggett, he said, because the choreographer comes from an experimental background (he founded the physical theater group Frantic Assembly) and has extensive experience working with actors. “He brings that energy and aesthetic to the more commercial work,” Cumming said, “a more narrative-led, Pina Bausch-y way of letting bodies tell a story.”Cumming, right, said that Hoggett, left, brings “a more narrative-led, Pina Bausch-y way of letting bodies tell a story.”Tommy Ga-Ken WanCumming and Hoggett began a residency at the National Theater of Scotland, which produced the show with the Edinburgh International Festival and the Joyce. Although their first idea, Hoggett said, was to look at Scottish male identity, they changed focus entirely after Kirsteen McCue, a professor of Scottish literature and a director of the Center for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, talked to them about the poet. McCue suggested they read his letters and the research of her colleague, Moira Hansen, who posits that Burns might have suffered from bipolar disorder.“They guided us to his mental health, to his relationship with his patron Frances Dunlop, to things that aren’t so sexy, but fascinating,” Cumming said. “When you read the letters — and there are two thick volumes — you realize he is much more fragile, more florid, sometimes obsequious to rich people, a bit stalker-y to women, often depressed.”The men began to work on movement that could evoke Burns’s states of mind, and in the process started to “find out what Alan’s body did and didn’t do,” Hoggett said. “He wasn’t going to learn a rond de jambe,” he added, referring to a step in the basic ballet vocabulary.Instead they did exercises around some of the content of the letters: farming, writing, joy, love, lust, depression. “What happens to the body when you’re using farming implements? What does his joy feel like, where does it spring from?” Hoggett said. “What does it feel like, in the body, to be inspired?”Every day, they would do an hourlong warm-up, then try out various exercises. Together with Vicki Manderson, who choreographed the piece with Hoggett, they would create material and construct movement phrases.“He would try anything,” Hoggett said of Cumming. “I encouraged him to really feel whether something felt right and fit on his body.”Hoggett said of Cumming: “He would try anything.”Tommy Ga-Ken WanIt was hard both physically and mentally. “The sheer pain of it,” Cumming said, grimacing. “It was intense.” It was also scary, he added, to go into rehearsal and not have a structure. “Steven is used to just making things up in the room,” he said. “But actors like to have a script!”Asked whether it had been difficult to memorize movement sequences, and eventually an hour of choreography, Cumming clutched his head in his hands. “I kept thinking, I memorized the whole of ‘Macbeth,’ I can do this!” he said. “But of course, getting the muscle memory of movement into your body is entirely different.”He learned that to tell a story with your body, “you have to think in a different way, let the story touch you in a more nonlinear, visceral way,” he said. “It was an incredibly emotional thing to do. I felt very vulnerable, which is what I want to be.”And, gradually, he became more sure of himself. “The exercises, zoning into the themes we were focusing on in the show,” he said, “gave me more confidence about my body and storytelling. It was a shock to me that some of the movement started coming from me.”He also realized, he said, that he was playing both Burns and the Alan Cumming that people know. “I am asking people to look at me in a different way, and also to look at the character I play in a different way,” he said. “The form really helped tell the story.”Cumming and Hoggett knew early on, Cumming said, that they wanted to use the genre-defying music of the Scottish composer Anna Meredith, whom they both admired. “We press-ganged her a bit,” Hoggett said. “Then she came to a few workshops, saw how forensic we were being with her music, and sent us a lot of stuff that hadn’t been released before.”Meredith, whose memory of those workshops involves “mainly doing a lot of Scottish country dancing with an expert who had come to work with the men,” said that she “loved the ambition of the show,” and the way it revealed unusual aspects of Burns. The score, she said, is made up of both existing tracks and older, sometimes experimental, work that “I hadn’t found a home for.”Cumming working with Manderson.Tommy Ga-Ken Wan“It’s a mix of acoustic and electronic,” she said, “some tracks untouched, others needed edits or extensions to fit the exact length of Alan’s words and rhythms.”Working with Meredith to shape the score also helped in creating a structure for the show, when the men reconvened at Cumming’s home in Scotland last summer. “By then, we had pared down the topics we felt were important to telling the story of who Burns was,” Cumming said. He ticked off key points: Burns’s upbringing on a farm; starting to write; his relationship with Jean Armour (who would be the mother of nine of his 12 children); his affairs with Mary Campbell and others; his poverty, depression, and his love for Scotland and its stories and themes.“To label ‘Burn’ as dance might be stretching a point,” Mark Fisher wrote in The Guardian, adding that Cumming has nonetheless “dared to put himself in an unfamiliar place.”As several reviewers pointed out, there is not a great deal of Burns’s famous poetry in the show. Instead Cumming and Hoggett focus on the autobiographical content of Burns’s letters, evoking the highs and lows of his emotional life through their words, digital projections (Andrzej Goulding), dramatic lighting (Tim Lutkin) and occasional stage magic, as quills scroll independently across a manuscript and a dress rises from the floor to incarnate a character.“When Alan is 90 years old, he can recite Burns poetry in a rocking chair, under a spotlight,” Hoggett said. “And he can do that beautifully. But we wanted to go further and do a show about the man and the way movement can reveal a reality that words often hide.” More

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      Six Lyrics That Show Why ‘Hamilton’ Is Tough to Translate

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      A direct transfer of words was never going to work for such a complex show. So the team involved got creative.How does one translate “Hamilton” into another language? That was the challenge facing Sera Finale, a rapper-turned-songwriter, and Kevin Schroeder, a seasoned musical theater translator, when they were asked to collaborate on a German version of the show — the first in a language other than English.The project turned out to be just as complicated as they had feared: complex rhyme schemes, elaborate wordplay and so many songs. There were drafts and demos and revisions; a member of the “Hamilton” music team, Kurt Crowley, learned German to help coordinate the process, and ultimately Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator, had to approve or reject each line.Here are six lyrics that demonstrate some of the challenges the team faced as they sought to preserve the meaning and melody of the original, but in a language with different sounds and syntax. The first line is the original English lyric; the second is the German lyric; and the third is the so-called back translation, which is what the German words literally mean in English.Avoiding HyperboleBurr: How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a/Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten/Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor/Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?“Alexander Hamilton” (English)Gino EmnesBurr: Wie wird ein Bastard/der vom Schoß einer trostlosen Dirne kroch/Aus ’nem gottverdammten, verlor’nem Loch in der Karibik/Ohne Titel, ohne Mittel, ohne Werte/Am Ende doch ein Held und ein Gelehrter?(How does a bastard/Who crawled out of the lap of a bleak harlot/From a goddamned, lost hole in the Caribbean/With no title, no means, no merits/In the end still become a hero and a scholar?)“Alexander Hamilton” (German)Gino EmnesThese are the first words from “Alexander Hamilton,” the musical’s opening song, which introduce the title character with a description of his humble upbringing. The challenge here was to maintain the original lyric’s directness without overstating the case or demeaning the West Indies. The original proposed German lyric referred to Hamilton as a “Bastardblag,” an arcane word meaning bastard brat, to his mother as a “Hure,” meaning whore, and to the islands of Hamilton’s upbringing as “verdreckten,” meaning filthy. Miranda thought those words went too far, and asked for them to be dialed back. “The first draft was almost Trumpian,” he said, alluding to a coarse phrase the former president used to refer to Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations. “To me that’s not the intent of the lyric. I never wanted to comment on Nevis, or St. Croix. It was just this really small part of the world. That’s an example of something that could easily get lost in translation if you’re not on it.”✣ ✣ ✣Quoting Rap SongsBurr: Ah, so you’ve discussed me/I’m a trust fund, baby, you can trust me.“The Schuyler Sisters” (English)Chasity Crisp and Gino EmnesBurr: Schiess mich über’n Haufen, doch/Du bist’n Babe, ich möcht’ dein Badewasser saufen.(Shoot me down but/You are a babe, I’d like to drink your bath water.)“The Schuyler Sisters” (German)Chasity Crisp and Gino EmnesThe original “Hamilton” score includes a number of quotations from American hip-hop songs. Most of them were cut from the German version because the translations made them unrecognizable. But, in an effort to accomplish the same effect, the translators inserted several quotations from German hip-hop songs into the German score. In a section of the song “The Schuyler Sisters,” when Aaron Burr flirts with Angelica Schuyler, the translators found a place to insert a phrase meaning “You are a babe, I’d like to drink your bath water,” from a 1995 German song “Ja klar,” which was a hit for Sabrina Setlur, who rapped as Schwester S. Miranda, who listened to each German song quoted before approving the citations, said he views “Hamilton” as a love letter to hip-hop, as well as to musical theater, and that he considers the hip-hop quotations as a point of entry for some audience members. “A hip-hop fan who comes in, maybe, with their arms crossed, hears those references and goes ‘OK, the person who wrote this obviously loves this culture and loves the music’,” he said. “And so we wanted to continue to reflect that.”✣ ✣ ✣New ImageryAngelica: So this is what it feels like to match wits/With someone at your level! What the hell is the catch?/It’s the feeling of freedom, of seeing the light/It’s Ben Franklin with a key and a kite/You see it right?“Satisfied” (English)Chasity CrispAngelica: So kribbeln Schmetterlinge, wenn sie starten/Wir beide voll auf einem Level, offene Karten!/Das Herz in den Wolken, ich flieg’ aus der Bahn/Die Füße kommen an den Boden nich’ ran/Mein lieber Schwan!(So that’s how butterflies tingle when they take off/We’re on the same level, all cards on the table!/My heart in the clouds, I’m thrown off track/My feet don’t touch the floor/My dear swan!)“Satisfied” (German)Chasity CrispThe original language is packed with American metaphors and idioms that just don’t translate. So the translators were given license to come up with their own turns of phrase. This example is from the song “Satisfied,” in which Angelica Schuyler, preparing to toast Hamilton’s marriage to her sister, recalls the first time she met him. The images are completely different (and the references to Ben Franklin are gone) but the meaning remains. “That section sounds fantastic, and gives the same feeling of falling in love for the first time,” Miranda said. “The metaphor may be different, but it keeps its propulsiveness.”✣ ✣ ✣Prioritizing MeaningEliza: You forfeit all rights to my heart/You forfeit the place in our bed/You sleep in your office instead/With only the memories/Of when you were mine/I hope that you burn“Burn” (English)Ivy QuainooEliza: Du nahmst dir das recht auf mein Herz/Den Platz hier in unserem Bett/Ich lösch unser leben komplett/Dir bleibt nur die Asche/Du warst einmal mein/Ich hoffe du brennst(You took the right to my heart from yourself/The place here in our bed/I am erasing our life completely/All that’s left for you is the ashes/You used to be mine once/I hope that you burn)“Burn” (German)Ivy QuainooThere were many moments when Miranda et al. allowed the German translators to bend the original meaning in order to preserve lyricism and melody. But there were other moments when they insisted on literalism, and the end of the song “Burn,” in which Eliza Hamilton expresses her outrage at her husband’s infidelity, was one of those. The translators initially sought to have Eliza repeat “brenn’n,” a shortened form of the word for “burn,” throughout the song. But that meant changing the final line of the song from words meaning “I hope that you burn” to words meaning “All this shall burn.” Miranda rejected that idea, insisting that Eliza direct her anger squarely at her husband. So now the song ends with “brennst,” which is not a perfect echo of the word used earlier in the song, but which preserves the original meaning: “You burn.” “I really just wanted to make sure the last line was personal: ‘It’s not about the world — it’s about you. This is what you did, and these are your consequences’,” Miranda said.✣ ✣ ✣Protecting ChoreographyHamilton: Teach me how to say goodbye/Rise up, rise up, rise up/Eliza“The World Was Wide Enough” (English)Benet MonteiroHamilton: Weitergeh’n und Abschied nehm’n/Frei sein, frei sein, frei sein/Eliza(Move on and say goodbye/Be free, be free, be free/Eliza)“The World Was Wide Enough” (German)Benet MonteiroIn the show’s penultimate song, “The World Was Wide Enough,” Hamilton dies. As that moment nears, he repeats the phrase “Rise up,” perhaps alluding to ambition, or revolution, or perseverance, and pictures his wife. The German translators at first proposed a lyric that preserved the internal rhyme of the lyric, but altered its meaning, using the word “leise,” which means quietly, and which beautifully echoes the name “Eliza,” to replace “Rise up.” But choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler objected, because the movement at that moment has the ensemble becoming more active — more “rise up” than “quietly” — and he felt it was important to preserve the relationship between the words and the movement. The translators went back to the drawing board, and came up with something less poetic but more protective of the dance concerns. “The complicating factor is that Andy choreographs to lyric, so when the lyrics underneath the movement have changed, what adjustments have to happen?” Miranda said. “I’m trying to keep those connected.”✣ ✣ ✣A Pointed AdditionHamilton: America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me“The World Was Wide Enough” (English)Benet MonteiroHamilton: America, durch deine Brust pumpt Sklavenblut, Moral und Wut.(America, through your breast is pounding the blood of slaves, morality and rage.)“The World Was Wide Enough” (German)Benet MonteiroThe German translators saw an opportunity to interpolate a reference to America’s troubled history with slavery. “Our version is kind of a German perspective on America,” said Kevin Schroeder, one of the translators. “He’s saying ‘unfinished symphony,’ and that also implies there are some flaws.”Audio production by Arjen Mensinga and More

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      A Bollywood Favorite Is Remade for the Stage, Raising Eyebrows

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      Some have taken issue with the reframing of the musical, which now focuses on the love story of an Indian American woman and a white American man.SAN DIEGO — It is one of the most successful Bollywood movies of all time. Though released in 1995, it still plays daily at a movie theater in Mumbai. Its songs are a mainstay at weddings. Its lead actors became Bollywood superstars. And now “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge,” or “DDLJ,” has hit the stage.“Come Fall in Love — The DDLJ Musical” is currently in previews at the Old Globe here before a planned Broadway run. Fans of the film had been abuzz after producers announced the stage adaptation last fall, but when the show’s cast was revealed this summer, social media lit up with criticism. The news that a white actor, Austin Colby, would play the role of Rog, who was known as Raj in the film and played by the Indian star Shah Rukh Khan, led many fans of the movie to accuse the musical of whitewashing.The show’s creators say they want to tell the story of two cultures coming together. But critics of the casting decision see a missed opportunity. Amid increasing demands for more inclusive hiring and storytelling in the entertainment industry, South Asians are still underrepresented onstage and onscreen.“Just when you think we are moving on wards & upwards we are right back to square one,” Andy Kumar, an India-based performer known as VJ Andy, wrote in a tweet. “Why can’t our stories be told as they are? Without a white wash??” On Instagram, negative comments were sprinkled among the responses to Colby’s excited post about his casting. “Haven’t y’all colonized enough,” one user wrote. Another commented: “It is embarrassing that as a white man you are willingly stealing opportunities from men of color. This isn’t something to be proud of.”The chef Vikas Khanna, who was born in India and lives in New York, has also expressed his disapproval on social media. “They took away a star from us,” Khanna said during a video call. “All these guys would have gone in for auditions and the parents would have been: ‘My God, my boy is going to be Raj!’” More on IndiaA Predator’s Return: Scientists are bringing cheetahs back to India to see whether the animal’s population there can be restored after being hunted into extinction.Economic Trends: As global economic growth slows sharply, with many major economies gripped with worries of recession, India has been a conspicuous exception as its economy continues to grow.An Electric Vehicle Push: India’s success with two- and three-wheeled electric vehicles that sell for as little as $1,000 could be a template for other developing countries.Keeping the Milk Flowing: Indian scientists are getting creative in an effort to help the country’s dairy producers, and animals, adapt in a hotter world.“Doing this, you’re making our kids feel less than,” he added. “Let’s not move back. We’ve worked really hard to be on the stage.”“DDLJ” was one of the first Indian films to center on a love story between nonresident Indians (known as N.R.I.s), a reflection of the large numbers who were emigrating. It focuses on two young N.R.I.s living in London — the party boy Raj (Khan) is rich, entitled and Western, quite the opposite of the old-fashioned Simran (Kajol) and her hardworking traditional father, who says to Raj in the film: “You call yourself an Indian? You give India a bad name.” But when Simran ‌returns to India for her‌ arranged marriage, Raj and Simran try to persuade her father‌‌ to let their love conquer all. In addition to the central love story, the movie also resonates because of its focus on love of country and family.The film “touched a nerve” with N.R.I.s who were “navigating between two or three cultures,” Rajinder Dudrah, a professor at the Birmingham Institute of Media and English, explained in an interview. Individuals were having to grapple with the tension between Indian tradition and Western ideas just as this movie was highlighting them. “The idea of ‘dil hai Hindustani,’ the heart is Indian,” was also conveyed in the film, Dudrah added, “meaning that no matter where in the world you were, if you were of Indian descent, you had an attachment to India.”Narayan, with ensemble members, in the musical, which has nods to the film and a similar narrative arc.Jim CoxWhile there are nods to the film — pigeons, fields of mustard flowers, a mandolin cameo — and the narrative arc remains, this “DDLJ” is decidedly American. Raj has been transformed into Roger (or Rog), and the leads now live in Massachusetts, meeting as Harvard students in Cambridge. Aditya Chopra, who directed the movie, is also directing the stage show; the book and lyrics are by Nell Benjamin, who wrote screen-to-stage adaptations of “Legally Blonde” and “Mean Girls.”In August, Chopra posted a statement on Instagram explaining his original vision for the film involved a white male lead. (Apparently his first choice was Tom Cruise.)‌ “The most powerful way to depict a country’s culture and values is to see it from the perspective of someone who does not belong to the same culture,” Chopra wrote, explaining his goal is to showcase Indian culture to a global audience. “That is the starting point of ‘Come Fall in Love,’ the story of Indian Simran, her culture and heritage through the eyes of American Roger.”In an interview earlier this month, Benjamin said she was not surprised by the reaction “given the lack of representation” in the theater, but the uproar was still unsettling. “I was distressed that people thought that Adi [Chopra] or me or anyone would want to whitewash this movie,” she explained. “That would suggest that ‘Oh, well, when we do it, she’s going to fall in love with this guy because he’s better than the options.’ That’s not the story. I believe people who come to see the show will get that.”The musical’s writers stressed that the production still showcased a predominantly South Asian cast, including Shoba Narayan, who plays Simran, and a production spokeswoman said that South Asians represented more than 50 percent of cast members.Benjamin said the creators had considered writing the male lead as an Indian American or a half-Indian man but believed it would have been an “easy choice” that wouldn’t have worked as well. “If you don’t excavate it, you don’t add value to it,” she said, adding that Chopra “is perfectly capable of doing the exact movie as a musical, developing it in Mumbai and then renting a theater in New York, but that’s not what we wanted to do together.”Not everyone was critical of the direction the stage musical has taken. The Bollywood screenwriter Shibani Bathija (“My Name Is Khan,” “Fanaa”) saw the advantages in changing the lead’s ethnicity to make the story work for a general audience. “I think having him be South Asian would be more problematic, because where is all this objection coming from,” she said, referring to the family’s disapproval of the central couple’s relationship. The United States focuses less on caste and class differences than India or Britain, she said, so the possible differences between two South Asians would not be as apparent to an American audience. “If you hadn’t watched the film, you wouldn’t get it,” she said. “There would need to be another level of explanation that maybe wouldn’t serve the creative.”The musical’s composers, Vishal Dadlani and Shekhar Ravjiani, known as Vishal & Shekhar, also disagreed with the criticism. Ravjiani said they were proud to represent India through the musical, for which they have created an 18-song score. (The two did not write the film’s original songs, which have become classics, and only a few melodies from the movie are briefly heard in the musical.) Dadlani reiterated that Chopra wanted to tell this specific story and that it was “ridiculous” to say that “just because you’re an Indian filmmaker, you should write the story differently.”“It’s not about color, it’s not about white or brown,” Dadlani added. “It’s about a boy who’s in love with a girl and whose family is different than the girl’s family.”However, Benjamin, interviewed separately, thought of color as a storytelling tool. She explained that in her view, “with the change to Rog, you’re talking about color” and discussed how Roger’s “whiteness” gave him privilege, making things easy for him, until he faced Simran’s father.Despite the criticism of the show, among the three dozen or so audience members interviewed in San Diego, the response was mostly positive — from those familiar with the film and those who weren’t.One of the few dissenting voices was Shebani Patel, who flew in from San Francisco to see the show: “I was not pleased with the casting. I don’t hate the show, but it’s not our show.” More

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      Broadway’s ‘Music Man’ Revival Will End Run on Jan. 1

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      The show’s producers have decided not to recast after stars Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster finish runs of slightly more than a year in the show.An enormously popular Broadway revival of “The Music Man” will end its run on Jan. 1, reflecting a decision by the producers not to recast after the departure of the show’s stars, Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster.The production began performances Dec. 20, so Jackman and Foster will have been in the show for a little more than a year once it closes. And both of them have been working on the project for several years, because it was, like many other shows, delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.“We managed to get Hugh and Sutton until the first of January, which is a remarkable commitment, and I felt really strongly that they have created such a unique event between them, trying to think of somebody who could follow on that became impossible,” Kate Horton, one of the lead producers, said in an interview. “This was its own particular magic.”At the time of its closing, the revival will have played 358 regular and 46 preview performances, according to the production. Like many other shows, it lost some performances to coronavirus cancellations, including during an ordinarily lucrative stretch over the holidays last December when both Jackman and Foster tested positive for the virus.Horton said that the production has not yet recouped its $24 million capitalization costs, but that it will do so before closing. “The stops and starts were costly in lots of ways, including financially,” she said. When performances had to stop last December, it “was a big body blow to the show, and I had a moment of not knowing if we were going to be able to really keep it going — we were all over the place in terms of what Covid was throwing at us, and it’s probably one of the most challenging moments I’ve had in my career,” she added. “The fact that we continued and are going to recoup might not seem like a miracle, but it feels like it for me.”Horton is co-producing the show with the billionaires Barry Diller and David Geffen. The three took over when the initial lead producer, Scott Rudin, stepped away from his role amid accusations of bullying behavior.Despite tepid reviews from many critics, and despite winning zero Tony Awards, the show has consistently sold out, with a high average ticket price. The revival has been the top-grossing show on Broadway throughout its run; for a long time, it was grossing over $3 million a week, which is huge for Broadway, although recently its grosses have softened slightly to a still enviable level of $2.7 million to $2.9 million a week.As of Sept. 4, the revival had grossed a total of $106 million and had been seen by 400,435 people.“The Music Man,” a classic of golden age musical theater, was written by Meredith Willson and first played on Broadway in 1957; this revival is directed by Jerry Zaks and choreographed by Warren Carlyle. More

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      Why Did Instagram Pause This Play? Its Creators Still Don’t Know.

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      Marion Siéfert’s “_jeanne_dark_,” about a shy teenager beginning to express her sexuality, contains no nudity yet still ran afoul of Instagram’s opaque policies.PARIS — It was hailed as France’s first “Instagram play.” In Marion Siéfert’s “_jeanne_dark_,” a 16-year-old character, Jeanne, goes live on the app to tell the world about her private frustrations — and as she films herself with a smartphone onstage, Instagram users can watch, too, and weigh in.Yet in early 2021, a few months into the production’s run, Instagram started cutting off these live streams, citing “nudity or sexual acts.” Then the account tied to the play disappeared from the platform’s search results. For months, Siéfert and her team scrambled to understand why their work — which will have its New York premiere on Sept. 14, as part of the French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line Festival — was being repeatedly targeted.“People thought what we were doing was great, the future of creation,” Siéfert said in Paris earlier this month. “But for me, it’s been more like a nightmare.”Siéfert joins a long list of artists and activists who have locked horns with Instagram in recent years over its community guidelines, which ban content the company deems inappropriate. That includes nudity, and especially photos and videos showing women’s nipples (outside of breastfeeding and health-related issues, like a mastectomy), a policy that has prompted an online campaign, “Free the Nipple.”But “_jeanne_dark_” doesn’t fall into this category: Siéfert, who was aware of the policy, steered clear of nudity from the start. When the automated interruptions started, the artistic team filed appeals through Instagram’s in-app system, yet received no response or clarification. They said their attempts to contact employees of Instagram also went nowhere.Only after a series of mock performances on a private account did Siéfert pinpoint the gesture that apparently triggered Instagram’s detection algorithm. At that point, Helena de Laurens, 33, who plays Jeanne, cupped her covered breasts from the sides and moved them up and down.The scene, which Siéfert cut in the spring of 2021, may have fallen foul of Instagram and Facebook’s infamous policy on “breast squeezing,” which was clarified in 2020 to state that hugging, cupping or holding breasts is allowed, but not squeezing in a grabbing motion, because of a surmised association with pornography. (According to Instagram, no such issue was identified with the account _jeanne_dark_. A spokeswoman declined to answer further questions about the company’s moderation policies.)Helena de Laurens, who plays Jeanne. “I had found something that was very funny, I was quite proud of it,” she said of the play.Matthieu BareyreAccording to research conducted by Dr. Carolina Are, a fellow at Northumbria University’s Center for Digital Citizens in Britain, very few appeals to Instagram trigger a response from a human moderator. “It’s an incredibly murky system,” she said in a recent video interview.She traces the increase in heavy-handed moderation on Instagram and Facebook (both owned by Meta) to two bills that passed in 2018, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. Their stated purpose — to hold tech companies accountable for sex-trafficking schemes on their platforms — has led, she said, to bans on a wide range of material Instagram’s algorithm classifies as risqué, not just in the U.S. but around the world. (It has regularly flagged Dr. Are’s own videos, too, since she is also a pole dance instructor.)“Facebook in particular censored female bodies before, but nothing on this scale,” she said. “It creates a chilling effect on expression.”The gesture at issue in Siéfert’s play came with a narrative context. Jeanne, initially a shy teenager who is bullied at school and feels stifled by her Roman Catholic family — her Instagram handle (_jeanne_dark_) is a pun on the French styling of Joan of Arc — has grown emboldened, and begins a pastiche of sexualized music videos.“I had found something that was very funny, I was quite proud of it,” de Laurens said recently in Paris. “There was something a little grotesque and excessive about it. She parodies people, but she also wants to be like them.”Performing “_jeanne_dark_,” de Laurens said, has proved stressful for other reasons, too. Since she is constantly focused on her character’s smartphone, she sees many of the live — and unscripted — Instagram comments. (The stream is also relayed on screens on both sides of the stage, for the theater audience.) While many comments have been funny, and the production team is quick to ban trolls, some have crossed lines and targeted her body.“I don’t want to think about a comment that says I have terrible teeth while I’m onstage,” de Laurens said. “It takes you out of the performance, and it grates.”This Instagram play wasn’t Siéfert’s first artistic brush with social media. The 35-year-old director, whose own sheltered, Catholic upbringing in the French city of Orléans inspired the character of Jeanne, mined Facebook for information about her audience in her first professional production, “2 or 3 Things I Know About You,” from 2016.Once people responded on Facebook that they were attending the show, Siéfert would study their public profiles to create a script based on them. Onstage, she’d comment on screenshots as her character, a naïve alien looking to make human friends. “I would find out about their holidays, but also intimate things, like a bereavement,” Siéfert said. Some people laughed; others were moved or shocked to see themselves through that lens. “Sometimes the information was very beautiful, but at the same time, it was a lot of power.”“People thought what we were doing was great, the future of creation,” Siéfert said of the play. “But for me, it’s been more like a nightmare.”Julien Mignot for The New York TimesSiéfert’s experimental approach to audience interaction was shaped, she said, by the years she spent in Germany — first as an exchange student in Berlin, where she discovered the local performance scene, and later at Giessen’s Institute for Applied Theatre Studies. With “_jeanne_dark_,” she was “interested in bringing theater to a place that isn’t really made for it, that is part of the fabric of people’s daily lives. What we didn’t know was: Are there actually people who will want to watch us on Instagram?”There were — not least because “_jeanne_dark_” had its premiere in the fall of 2020, between the first two waves of the Covid-19 pandemic in France, as the entire theater industry wondered how to effectively harness digital formats. Between 200 and 600 viewers tuned in for the live streams throughout that first season, and the play was honored with a special “digital award” by France’s Critics’ Union in 2021.Yet as the production met with acclaim, new issues kept arising behind the scenes with Instagram, even after the breast-cupping gesture was removed. According to screenshots provided by Siéfert, “_jeanne_dark_” was cut off a total of four times throughout 2021, twice with two-week bans on further live streams, forcing the team to resort to an alternative account. Ironically, Siéfert said, the theater audience often thought the ban notification was “part of the show.”In addition to “nudity or sexual acts,” the final ban, in November 2021, cited “violence and incitation.”“The rules change constantly, you never know where you stand,” Siéfert said. She alleges that starting in May 2021, the account was also “shadow banned” for weeks — meaning that it became nearly impossible to find through the app’s search engine, and existing followers no longer received live notifications. (According to Instagram, the account _jeanne_dark_ wasn’t flagged in a manner that might have led to such issues.)While Siéfert’s next play, “Daddy,” set to premiere at the Odéon playhouse in Paris in 2023, will delve into another virtual world — a video game — it will involve no screens or live digital element. Her experience with Instagram, which she describes as a “hostile space” for artists, has been enough.“It has often been sold as the app for creativity, but it’s just publicity,” she said. “When you actually put a work of art on Instagram, this is what happens.” More

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      How Ivo van Hove Turns a Novel Into a Play

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      He draws inspiration from his neighbors, whom he studies from afar as they sit at the cafés near his apartment, drinking coffee in the morning or beer in the late afternoon. “They’re like little Greek choruses,” he says. “Even if you don’t know them, you know them.”

      “Combats” follows a son and his mother as she breaks out of her violent marriage. In one of the play’s most tender scenes, the pair escape their house and enjoy a rare night out at a chic restaurant in Paris. Van Hove chose a white tablecloth to convey the simple power of the moment. Amid the darkness of the play, he says, “there is always hope. There’s always a capacity to transform.” More

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      ‘Burbank’ Review: When Disney’s Animators Went on Strike

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      Cameron Darwin Bossert’s smart new play fictionalizes a 1941 labor dispute to explore the tension between passions and paychecks.On the lawn outside Walt Disney’s snazzy new animation studio in Burbank, Calif., a young woman is out cold. The apple that was going to be her meager lunch has slipped from her grasp and rolled away.It is 1941, her name is Betty Ann Dunbar, and her ambition is to become an animator — though at Disney, being a female artist means having almost no chance of that. She works as a painter and inker instead, and if her salary is so measly that she can’t afford to eat, so be it. She isn’t living her dream, but she is living dream-adjacent, with work on films like “Snow White” and “Fantasia.”“I mean, the stuff we get to make here,” she gushes, after a worried colleague rouses her. “I just love this place so much.”But that’s where you’re vulnerable, isn’t it, if the job you get undercompensated to do also fills your life with meaning. Throughout Cameron Darwin Bossert’s smart and entertaining new play, “Burbank” — a fictionalized retelling of a 1941 strike by Disney animators and the events leading up to it — the tension between passion and paycheck thrums like an underscore.In a spare, well-acted production by the company Thirdwing at the Wild Project, in Manhattan’s East Village, Walt himself bestrides this lively drama, played by the author with a cigarette frequently in hand. On the cusp of 40, stymied by the war that’s eaten into the European box-office prospects for “Pinocchio,” Walt views himself as benevolent, much the way he sees his cherished Mickey Mouse. Sure, Walt expects his people to work long hours — the studio needs a smash ASAP — but it’s not like their environment is unpleasant.“Why the hell would anybody need to unionize at a place like this?” he asks, as baffled as any 21st-century overlord who’s provided every amenity to a captive staff. “We got volleyball.”Except that his employees’ lives are falling apart. Not everyone blames Walt for that; Betty Ann (Kelley Lord) figures she can’t afford to eat because she’s single and bad at budgeting. But many Disney workers, like the animator Art Babbitt (Ryan Blackwell), want a union.The creator of Goofy, Art is watching his marriage collapse because he’s paid more attention to his drawings than to his wife, the dancer whose movements were a model for Disney’s Snow White. And he is haunted by the fate of Adriana Caselotti, who voiced that same character in the studio’s 1937 hit.“Adriana’s contract stipulates that she cannot sing. Or act. In anything else. Ever again,” Art says to Walt. “Why would you do that to someone?”The theme of taking a woman’s voice is woven through this slender play, with its repeated mentions of “The Little Mermaid,” a fairy tale that has lately captured Walt’s imagination. Online, Thirdwing puts the spotlight on female characters in “Disney Girls,” the “teleplay series” that’s a streaming companion to the play. But “Burbank,” the second half of a diptych that started with “The Fairest” — Bossert’s 2021 play about the women of Disney’s ink and paint department — is primarily focused on Walt and Art.Curiously for a piece whose characters are all deeply invested in visual art-making, it’s in appearance that this production falls short — not because it looks like it was made on a shoestring, which it does, but because the set and lighting design, which are uncredited, are underconsidered. The fake-grass mat standing in for the lawn is distractingly bad, while the lighting lacks the fluidity that the play’s shifting moods and locations demand. But the period costumes, by Yolanda Balaña, are nicely done.What’s remarkable about “Burbank,” which does not have a credited director, is that while it’s a labor drama, it sidesteps all of the traps that that phrase implies. Warm and alive, it’s layered with nuance as it captures the anxiety that can grip a workplace amid a labor struggle — and the ruthlessness that can ensue on all sides.BurbankThrough Sept. 18 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thirdwing.info. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      An Inscrutable Monarch, Endlessly Scrutinized Onstage and Onscreen

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      Queen Elizabeth II was portrayed in plays and highbrow films, in made-for-TV movies and broad comedies and, of course, in “The Crown.” Many sought to answer the question: What was she like?She was the most opaque of celebrities, a silent film star somehow thriving in a TikTok world. If no one except her closest friends and family knew what Queen Elizabeth was really like, that’s exactly how she wanted it.Her regal reserve, her impassive expressions, her resistance to personal revelation — all of it made the queen, who died Thursday at 96, an irresistible object of imaginative speculation. She was an outline of a woman that people could fill in however they fancied. And fill it in they did. Over the years, Elizabeth was a character in an endless stream of feature films, made-for-TV movies and television series — biopics, satires, dramas, comedies, you name it — as well as in the occasional documentary, play, musical and novel.Her life was remarkable for being long, her reign remarkable for encompassing so much history. But no one was beheaded, no one was plotted against, no one was imprisoned in a tower. Dramas about her predecessors in the job — Elizabeth I, Henry V, Henry VIII, Richard II, to name a few — are full of grand plots and high stakes. Dramas about Elizabeth II were more inward-looking, all trying to address the tantalizing and unanswerable question about her: What sort of person was she?In “The Crown,” three actors played Elizabeth at different ages. From left, Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton. From left, Alex Bailey/Netflix; Sophie Mutevelian/Netflix; Alex Bailey/NetflixThe actors who have wrestled with that issue are too many to count. “The Crown” alone needed three different women to portray Elizabeth at different eras of her life: Claire Foy in her early life, Olivia Colman in the middle years, and Imelda Staunton as the queen in winter.Here are some additional highlights of the portrayals of Queen Elizabeth on film and onstage, and occasionally in fiction, over the years.As PrincessIn the 2010 film “The King’s Speech,” a very young Princess Elizabeth was played by Freya Wilson, right.The Weinstein Company, via AlamyElizabeth’s early years were marked by two cataclysmic events: her uncle King Edward VIII’s abdication, in 1936, from the throne, which automatically catapulted her fragile father into the job of king and put her next in the line of succession; and World War II, which took place when she was still a teenager.In “The King’s Speech” (2010), the young Princess Elizabeth, played by Freya Wilson, appears briefly in the backdrop of the drama about the efforts of her father, now King George VI, to overcome his stutter and address the nation with confidence and authority when Britain enters the war, in 1939. (The real-life queen was said to have found the movie “moving and enjoyable.”)“A Royal Night Out” (2015) takes place amid the euphoria of V-E Day in London in 1945. Sprung from Buckingham Palace to mingle, incognito, with the ecstatic crowds, Princess Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) and her younger sister, Princess Margaret (Bel Powley), indulge in a wild night of drinking, dancing, flirting, wading in a fountain and riding a city bus.Some Key Moments in Queen Elizabeth’s ReignCard 1 of 9Becoming queen. More