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    New York City Center Taps Veteran Arts Administrator as Its Next Leader

    Michael S. Rosenberg, the managing director of the McCarter Theater Center, will succeed Arlene Shuler as the City Center president and chief executive.New York City Center, a nonprofit known for its starry short-run musical revivals as well as its contemporary dance programming, is naming a New Jersey arts administrator as its new leader.The City Center board has selected Michael S. Rosenberg, currently the managing director of the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, N.J., as its next president and chief executive. Rosenberg will start Nov. 1, succeeding Arlene Shuler, who is stepping down after 19 years at the organization.“City Center is a singular performing arts center, not just in New York, but in the U.S., with its combination of dance and musical theater,” Rosenberg said in an interview. “It’s can’t-miss artists and performances, time and time again.”Rosenberg said he had seen multiple programs at City Center over the years, and that he considered a 1988 show he saw there, Bill Irwin’s “Largely New York,” as having significantly influenced his thinking about theater.City Center, which was founded in 1943 by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and operates in a city-owned neo-Moorish theater in Midtown, is a sizable organization: Its current annual budget is $29 million, and it employs 157 people (some of them part-time).The chairman of the City Center board, Richard E. Witten, said the organization was in strong financial shape and had multiple applicants from which to select Shuler’s successor. “We saw a lot of people in the process, and Michael stood out repeatedly,” Witten said.Rosenberg, 54, has been at the McCarter since 2018. He previously spent nearly a decade as the managing director of the La Jolla Playhouse, a San Diego theater with an outsize history of developing Broadway-bound musicals.City Center is best known for two annual programs: Encores!, which is a series of minimally staged, concert-style productions of older Broadway musicals, many of which have been forgotten or abandoned because — for one reason or another — they have been considered unrevivable, and Fall for Dance, an affordably priced festival of international dance companies.Encores! is in the early stages of its own transition — Lear deBessonet took over the program during the pandemic, and her first season of in-person programming was bumpy: The initial two shows, “The Tap Dance Kid” and “The Life,” were not particularly well-received, prompting hand-wringing about whether Encores! was in trouble. But then deBessonet directed a rapturously received revival of “Into the Woods” that quickly transferred to Broadway, where it has been both popular and successful. The program also has a new music director, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, and a producing creative director, Clint Ramos, who is working with deBessonet.Both Rosenberg and Witten said they were fully supportive of the Encores! program. “Not every show was a critical hit, but it was a successful year in terms of what was planned and what Lear hoped to do, and it wound up with a bang,” Witten said. “We’re very excited about the upcoming year.”Before the pandemic, City Center also ran an Encores! offshoot — Encores! Off Center — that revisited Off Broadway musicals; that program has not yet returned, and Rosenberg said its future had not been decided, but that “it’s another interesting way of opening up the canon and having more projects from which to choose.”City Center has already outlined plans for a 2022-23 season that is more robust than the one that just ended, which was slimmer than usual because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The next season will include a wide array of dance, including the first Fall for Dance Festival featuring international companies since 2019, as well as work from Twyla Tharp, Alvin Ailey, the National Ballet of Canada, Dance Theater of Harlem, Ballet Hispánico and many more.The theater programming will include a fund-raising run of the musical “Parade,” starring Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond. And then, next spring, Encores! will feature revivals of “Light in the Piazza,” “Dear World” and “Oliver!” More

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    A Last Taste of Summer Theater, as Paris Heads Back to Work

    As offices and schools reopen, ParisOffFestival brings a carnival atmosphere to an area of low-income housing in the city.PARIS — “Dear neighbors!” an affable puppet called out from a third-floor window here last week. In the packed street below, a mix of theatergoers, local families and passers-by looked up. As more puppets appeared in the windows of an apartment building in the city’s south and addressed the crowd about loneliness and the “bitter pills” of daily life, the spectators murmured in approval.The strangely uplifting spectacle was part of ParisOffFestival, an annual event that began two years ago, but which already occupies a special niche in the Paris theater calendar. Run by the Théâtre 14 over three days in early September, it strives to keep the spirit of summer festivals going, even in the midst of “la rentrée,” the reopening of offices and schools that signals the end of the lengthy summer holidays in France.Seven theater productions, as well as readings, were performed during daytime hours in the courtyards of subsidized apartment buildings, in the Théâtre 14’s garden and at a local stadium, all a short walk apart. Also close by, the small pedestrian street where the puppets made their appearance acted as a welcome area for the public to hang out, with beer, cotton candy and loungers at the ready.All of the festival’s performances were free, a big investment from the small Théâtre 14, a city-run playhouse inaugurated in 1982, whose annual budget of around $800,000 is just a fraction of what the biggest stages in Paris receive.The Théâtre 14 used to keep a low profile, but since 2020, a new management team — the actor-director Mathieu Touzé and the arts administrator Édouard Chapot — has found creative ways to insert the institution into the national conversation, from partnerships with high-profile playwrights to yearly events like ParisOffFestival and Re.génération, a spring festival devoted to site-specific work.The first edition of ParisOffFestival, in the summer of 2020, was a quick-thinking response to the coronavirus pandemic. After the cancellation that year of the Avignon Festival, French theater’s biggest event, Touzé and Chapot offered their help to 15 companies that had been due to perform in the Avignon Fringe. The Fringe is known as “le Off” in French, hence the name of the festival, which has stayed, even as Avignon reopened for business.That first edition, Chapot said recently, allowed the new team to meet locals who had never set foot inside the Théâtre 14. While the red brick buildings in the area near the playhouse look, at first glance, like standard bourgeois Paris dwellings, the neighborhood is primarily composed of low-income housing developments. For many there, going to the theater is an unnecessary luxury, even when it’s just a few yards away.Florence Janas and Mathias Bentahar in “Florence & Moustafa.”Théâtre 14So ParisOffFestival takes theater to them instead, with additional funding coming this year from Paris Habitat, the city’s social housing authority. Last Saturday, two of the shows were staged in the courtyards of apartment complexes that Paris Habitat runs. As the mock wedding depicted in Guillaume Vincent’s “Florence & Moustafa” unfolded, a few people stepping out of their homes were stopped in their tracks and watched a scene or two, looking startled. (Others sped past, headphones firmly on.)For those paying attention, the selected shows proved engaging, with “Florence & Moustafa” an especially witty choice. It was designed as an offshoot of a much larger production, Vincent’s sprawling and extravagant “One Thousand and One Nights,” first seen at the Odéon playhouse in 2019. Like that show, “Florence & Moustafa” puts a contemporary spin on Arabic folk takes, but it requires only two actors, a table and a few props.The action started at the housing project’s gate. In full wedding attire, the performers, Florence Janas and Mathias Bentahar, welcomed audience members as the bride and groom might greet guests at a slightly unhinged reception. As they directed people to their seats, they traded thinly veiled barbs between declarations of love — and then asked someone in the first row to help them butter slices of toast.The audience didn’t get to share the food, but the interplay between Janas’s over-the-top unpredictability and Bentahar’s quiet confidence kept the proceedings lively. Like “One Thousand and One Nights,” “Florence & Moustafa” constantly slips between modern references and folk tales, which are interwoven as the characters’ back stories. Florence, we hear, tricked a former husband who had already married and disposed of seven wives; Moustafa found a magic lamp and squandered his three wishes, in a case of penis enlargement gone very wrong.That surreal energy carried over to some of ParisOffFestival’s other offerings. “Crust,” a one-man show starring the juggler Guillaume Martinet, made delightful use of the event’s backdrop. As the audience waited for him near the edge of a street, he peeked at us from behind parked cars, then sheepishly came closer wearing just white underwear and moon boots, like a curious alien, at once eager and scared.His supple juggling came as an extension of his loose-limbed stage character, catching props even as he spun, hung from window rails and crawled on the floor. When a photographer attempted to snap him up close, he played hide and seek, then climbed on top of a construction site container and continued his act there.Other productions felt more haphazard in their attempts to craft an overall narrative, including “The Windows,” the puppet show, which was designed by the company Les Anges au Plafond. Leaning out from the casements of a single building, the various characters — lonely inhabitants, a care services worker for the elderly and, inexplicably, some birds and a goat — never really made sense in relation to one another.“Divine Wind,” a one-man show directed by Cécile Bernot, brought a virtuosic performance from David Jonquières, a gifted mime who can also mimic cartoonish sound effects. While his imitation of a plane going down is uncanny, his attempt to retell a part of World War II history — the events of 1941 in the South Pacific — felt repetitive and came uncomfortably close to offensive caricature in its depiction of Japanese characters.Adrian Saint-Pol and Elsa Guedj in “Infinity Minus One.”Théâtre 14On the other hand, Luna Muratti’s “Infinity Minus One,” also staged in a housing project courtyard, never lost its sense of grace, despite being drowned out at times by gusts of wind and passing cars. The show was inspired by a young French poet, Alicia Gallienne, who died at the age of 20; her work was published posthumously in 2020 by her cousin Guillaume Gallienne, a star actor in France.Gallienne’s poetry is a lovely discovery, full of dreamlike visions and suspended non sequiturs addressed to an elusive other, and here it was ideally delivered by the actress Elsa Guedj, seen recently in the Netflix series “Standing Up,” with help from the flutist Adrian Saint-Pol. Guedj has that rare ability to convey emotions bubbling up without yet being fully formed.“I have eyes in the shape of departure,” she whispered early on, before addressing Saint-Pol, who doubles as the love interest in Gallienne’s poems. By the time she covered his eyes with her hands and closed hers, at the end of “Infinity Minus One,” the surrounding noise was forgotten. The summer festival season may be over, but this was a welcome encore. More

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    Review: In ‘Kate,’ Tracing the Tears of a Clown

    The comedian Kate Berlant’s latest experiment, directed by Bo Burnham at the Connelly Theater, positions her as an actress with a semi-traumatic origin story.There are more than 40 individual muscles in the human face, and when Kate Berlant tries to cry, she gives all of them a workout. An open-mouthed frown suggests the mask of Greek tragedy; a pout transforms her into a gargoyle. Her brow furrows and smooths. Eyes squint, widen and cross. Lips quiver. Nostrils flare. A camera captures each shift, and a projector then throws the image onto a giant screen. Still, the tears don’t come. Some people in the audience will laugh at this. Some won’t. Some will be too busy wondering if this bit is ha-ha funny or cringe funny or merely mortifying, a convergence of pleasure, perplexity and embarrassment that is, I would hazard, exactly where Berlant and her 15-foot-face face want us.A grande dame of experimental comedy, Berlant is a thinking woman’s comic. To put it a little more precisely, she is a comic for all the girls out there who think too much. Her latest experiment, at the Connelly Theater, is “Kate,” directed by Bo Burnham, a brainy, busy, dizzy, prankish one-woman show. The confessional solo is a hallowed form downtown; Berlant desecrates it from every side. She plays with its creeds the way that a cat might toy with a mouse — teasing, batting, swiping, mauling.The show positions Berlant as Kate, an actress with a semi-traumatic origin story and a style too brash and crass for film work. “Kate” is structured — loosely, like drawstring pants — around Kate’s failed attempts, from childhood onward, to cry on camera. Crying functions here as the high-water mark (salt water, presumably) of actorly truth and authenticity. But what is authenticity anyway? And why would you go looking for it at a theater-comedy hybrid like this one? Sincerity doesn’t live here anymore. Joke’s on you.Impatient, stylized, cerebral, Berlant’s comedy has never been for all markets. (Or maybe she’s not for … men?) Nearly a decade ago, my colleague, Jason Zinoman, described her as “not to everyone’s taste.” Marc Maron, on a recent episode of the WTF podcast, introduced her this way: “She’s an odd presence. But funny.” Her comedy resembles an infinite recursion, a hall of mirrors in which the reflections rarely flatter.The show positions Berlant as Kate, an actress with a semi-traumatic origin story and a style too brash and crass for film work.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHere, the auto-fictional games begin as soon as you enter the lobby of the Connelly, a dainty theater folded into an East Village side street. Berlant is already everywhere, in a way that suggests both formal daring and pathological narcissism. Her stage outfit is on display behind a glass vitrine, as though borrowed from the Met’s Costume Institute. Her notebook is on exhibit, too. You can buy a beer at the “Katecessions” stand, pose with black-and-white photos of Berlant, visit a reproduction of her childhood living room, view the lunar phase at the moment of her birth. And there in the middle of it all is Berlant herself, in dark glasses and with luxuriant curls, wearing a sign that says, “Ignore Me.”If her previous projects — her film and television cameos; her sketch show with John Early; her podcast with Jacqueline Novak, Poog — have not yet won you over, how you respond to “Kate” may have to do with how much you enjoy seeing theatrical tropes savaged. (Me, I enjoy that a lot.) The accents, the miming, the assumption of multiple characters, the buildup to some terrible trauma, all are satirized here. Berlant is very much in on each joke. But Kate, her serious and self-possessed character, is not.“I’m going to be talking about something I’ve never talked about,” she says in an early scene, in the sleek, practiced rhythms of someone who has spent too long in the rehearsal room. “See, I have this secret? The show is a mess. It’s about me, so of course it is.”Berlant can run hot, like a Cassavetes heroine with big theater kid energy, tumultuous, but bright with it. Burnham’s more detached style, most conspicuous in the filmed segments, cools her down, further levering open the gap between performer and character. The Kate of the show insists that everything depends on whether or not she can cry on camera. (Part of the show’s schtick is that there’s a Disney+ executive whom she wants to impress.) But Berlant and Burnham seem up to something more destabilizing, the suggestion that authenticity is just one more act, that truth is, at best, contingent and transitory. Although “Kate” borrows elements of Berlant’s biography, it’s fiction through and through, which means that it withholds the very thing the lobby teases: knowledge of Berlant herself.It’s a great joke, if a nihilistic one. And here’s one more, a swipe at the theater itself. Because if you really were going to reveal your terrible secret, unpacking your heart with words, why would you do it for 150 people on the Lower East Side? Wouldn’t you just put that mess online?Here is how Kate, in a moment of outrage explains it: “Do you realize that if I posted a video to Instagram and it got 150 likes, I would kill myself?”KateThrough Oct. 8 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; kateshow.net. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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    A New ‘Christmas Carol’ for Broadway

    Jefferson Mays will bring his adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic to the Nederlander Theater starting in November.A virtuosic one-man production of “A Christmas Carol,” in which a single actor plays more than 50 roles, including a potato, will be staged on Broadway during the coming holiday season.The actor is Jefferson Mays, a Tony Award winner with a lifelong passion for the Charles Dickens story (like many) who has been honing this production for years. In 2018, he first performed it at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles; in 2020, when the pandemic precluded in-person performances, he made a filmed version shot at the United Palace in Upper Manhattan.Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called Mays’s performance in the film “astonishing” and said the adaptation was “an opportunity to make what was already a classic story feel new, while also making it feel as if it should matter forever.”The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on Nov. 8 and to open on Nov. 21 at the Nederlander Theater; the shelf-life of “Christmas Carol” productions tends to be short, and this one is slated to close on Jan. 1.Mays is a gifted shape-shifter — in 2004 he won a Tony Award for playing 35 characters in the solo show “I Am My Own Wife,” and in 2014 he was nominated for another Tony Award for playing eight roles, in the musical comedy “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.” (He was nominated again in 2017, for playing a Norwegian diplomat in a political drama, “Oslo.”)Mays is now on Broadway playing Mayor Shinn in a lavish revival of “The Music Man”; he will leave that production some time this fall to prepare for “A Christmas Carol.”The Dickens novella, with memorable characters including Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim and four ghosts (don’t forget Jacob Marley!), is a widely staged, and frequently adapted, redemption story; the last version on Broadway was in 2019.The new version was adapted by Mays and his wife, the actor Susan Lyons, along with Michael Arden, who is directing the production. The idea was conceived by Arden and Dane Laffrey, who is the production’s scenic and costume designer; the producers are Hunter Arnold and Kayla Greenspan. More

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    On the Scene: Lea Michele in ‘Funny Girl’ 🎭

    Julia Jacobs/The New York TimesEntering the show, theatergoers shook off the rain and buzzed with anticipation. One fan of Michele’s, Stephen Carella, 24, said it felt surreal to be there after watching her play Brice on the TV show “Glee.” “It is just a pop cultural moment,” Carella said. More

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    Josh Groban to Star in ‘Sweeney Todd’ Revival on Broadway

    Groban, playing the title character, will be joined by Annaleigh Ashford in a production scheduled to open in March at the Lunt-Fontanne.The demon barber of Fleet Street is returning to Broadway.“Sweeney Todd,” the deliriously gruesome Stephen Sondheim-scored musical about a wronged man bent on revenge, will get a big-cast, big-orchestra, big-budget revival next spring starring Josh Groban in the title role.Groban, a pop star renowned for the timbre of his voice, will star in the title role opposite Annaleigh Ashford, a Tony-winning actor with a gift for comedy, who takes on the part of Todd’s co-conspirator, a pie shop owner named Mrs. Lovett.The “Sweeney Todd” revival, quietly under discussion for three years and encouraged by Sondheim, who died in November, has been one of the worst-kept secrets on Broadway — speculated about for months on chat boards, and detailed last month in the email newsletter Broadway Journal.On Tuesday, the production made it official: The revival will begin previews Feb. 26 and open March 26 at the 1,500-seat Lunt-Fontanne Theater.“This show is full of such great scary fun,” Groban said in an interview. “It is Grand Guignol, it is penny dreadful.”“There is obviously a plot here that is absurd and monstrous,” he added, “but then there is also an incredible back story to this character that makes the role even more terrifying, because for all intents and purposes this was a civilized, good man that was driven to this.”Groban, who has long loved the musical’s score — he named his dog Sweeney — said he believed the role fit his strengths. “I was not ever a song-and-dance man, so for me to have roles that were cerebral and were gritty and interesting — and baritone — these were roles I felt I could really sink my teeth into,” he said. “We all have these roles that we think to ourselves, ‘If this were ever to happen, I would give it everything that I’ve got,’ and this is certainly one of those roles for me.”Annaleigh Ashford with Jake Gyllenhaal in the 2017 Broadway production of “Sunday in the Park with George.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAshford, who starred in the Sondheim musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” said she had wanted to play Mrs. Lovett since she was in her early teens, “before it was appropriate for me.”“This role is one of the finest ladies of the American musical theater canon,” she said. “She does a terrible thing, and she is a monster, but I’ve always seen her as a woman who is trying to find love and trying to be loved.”The production has an all-star team. It will be directed by Thomas Kail, the Tony-winning director of “Hamilton,” and produced by Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton.” The choreographer is Steven Hoggett, an acclaimed British movement director, and the set designer, Mimi Lien, is not only a Tony winner but also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.This will be Groban’s second star turn on Broadway — in 2016 he led the cast of “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812,” winning strong reviews and a Tony nomination. Ashford has a longer Broadway track record; she has appeared in seven Broadway shows, winning a Tony in 2015 for “You Can’t Take It With You” after scoring her first nomination in 2013 for “Kinky Boots.”The revival of “Sweeney Todd,” which has a book by Hugh Wheeler, comes at a time of intensified interest in Sondheim’s work. A new production of “Into the Woods” has been among the best-selling shows on Broadway this summer, and an upcoming Off Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” with a cast led by Daniel Radcliffe, is likely to be a tough ticket, given that the New York Theater Workshop, where it is being staged, has only 199 seats.Sondheim and Groban had developed a friendly relationship in the years before the composer’s death — Groban periodically performed Sondheim’s songs in concert, and Sondheim reached out when “The Great Comet” began its run. Sondheim died just three days before the revival’s first workshop began; he had been planning to attend a read-through on the workshop’s final day.The original production of “Sweeney Todd” opened on Broadway in 1979 and won eight Tony Awards, including one for best musical. It has been revived twice on Broadway and staged widely elsewhere; in 2007 it was adapted into a Hollywood film directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.Jeremy Secomb, left, as Sweeney Todd, and Siobhan McCarthy as Mrs. Lovett, in a 2017 revival at the Barrow Street Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe last two major New York productions were both small scale and intense — there was the 2005 Broadway revival, in which the actors also served as musicians (Patti LuPone, as Mrs. Lovett, played the tuba), and there was an immersive Off Broadway production in 2017 at which a former White House pastry chef served pies.The new revival veers in the other direction: big. It will have a cast of 26, and an orchestra of 27, Seller said, with a budget of about $14 million. Kail, who is friendly with Groban and put the production together after learning of his interest in the role, said that the revival would remain set in the 19th century, and that its size would offer “the opportunity to really embrace the scale and the scope” and to “let it live in that fullness.”“We’re really excited to make something that is able to touch all of those things that ‘Sweeney’ can do,” Kail said. “It can thrill you, it can make you laugh, and there’s also epiphany.” More

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    7 New Musicals Are Headed to Broadway This Fall

    Behind every new New York season are a lot of wannabes, also-rans and hopeless cases to keep track of.I have friends who keep a spreadsheet of every show they’ve seen, cross-indexed to their Playbill collection.I’m the opposite. I toss my Playbills but keep Excel fired up with compulsive catalogs of what’s coming next.Especially for musicals, it’s a highly unreliable list. Some shows have sat on it undisturbed since the 20th century. I don’t think the stage adaptation of “My Man Godfrey,” first announced in 1985 and occasionally re-announced ever since, will ever actually open on Broadway. And was ABBA really going to write a version of “Marty”? No, that must have been a typo — though I’m not sure for what.On the other hand, at least one show I thought would never make it off the list unfortunately did. (Clue: It involved an escape to Margaritaville.) In my “comments” column for dubious entries, I sometimes include useful information like “Whut?”In any case, it’s around this time of year that I traditionally cull and update the herd, getting excited or terrified about what’s headed my way. So far, seven Broadway musicals are in the “definite” column, having been officially announced for the fall.They make an unusual grouping. To begin with, only one, “1776,” is a revival — and that one might as well be new. As reshaped by Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page in the post-“Hamilton” manner, and featuring a cast of women, nonbinary and transgender performers, the American Independence pageant aims to offer a more inclusive history than our real past did.Also unusual: Among the six new musicals, only “A Beautiful Noise,” based on the life and songs of Neil Diamond, is a biographical jukebox. (Will Swenson, who does swagger very well, stars.) And only two others — a very modest proportion compared to most seasons — are Hollywood adaptations.One of those is “Almost Famous,” based on Cameron Crowe’s 2000 coming-of-age film about a young man swept up in a 1970s rock ’n’ roll dream. It may ensure some authenticity that Crowe has written the book for the show, and, with the composer Tom Kitt, the lyrics.The other Hollywood adaptation is “Some Like It Hot,” based on the 1959 Billy Wilder comedy. If you think you’ve seen it onstage before, you’re partly right; it was first turned into a musical, called “Sugar,” in 1972. That version’s score was by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill; this one’s by their natural inheritors, the “Hairspray” team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman.The remaining incoming musicals, though no less exciting, may be even more familiar. (I’ve already seen two of them in earlier productions.) “Kimberly Akimbo,” based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s play about a girl with a premature-aging condition, ran Off Broadway, at the Atlantic Theater Company, last season. “KPOP,” a behind-the-scenes look at the Korean pop music industry, was another Off Broadway hit, in 2017. Both will have big adjustments to make for larger theaters and audiences, and I’m eager to see how they do it.Then there’s “& Juliet,” which has been playing in London (with a pandemic interruption) since 2019, and which is the only show on my spreadsheet to start with a typographical symbol. From a distance, it appears to be a mash-up of several Broadway tropes: updated Shakespeare, romantic fantasy and hit parade. Its songs, by Max Martin, are mostly familiar from recordings by Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Backstreet Boys and the like.But the seven sure musicals this fall are only the tip of my Excel iceberg. Slightly below the water line are shows almost certain to announce their arrival quite soon, including the revival of Bob Fosse’s “Dancin’,” the stage adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada” and the London hit “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.”Diving a bit deeper, we get to a larger school of wannabes. Many seem fascinating; “Lempicka,” for one, about the hedonistic Polish painter, has been getting good reviews for its various tryout productions.Others seem stuck in development hell. “Harmony,” the Barry Manilow show about a singing group in Nazi Germany, had its world premiere in 1997; it took 25 years to get as far as the tip of Manhattan, where it had a brief run this spring. At its final performance there, Manilow’s collaborator Bruce Sussman told the audience, “I’d like to think of today as only the end of the beginning!”Everyone does, even the bottom feeders, those mystifying creatures someone apparently once considered a good idea. “Magic Mike”? “The Honeymooners”? The Baby Jessica Falls in the Well musical? The adaptation of “Paradise Lost”? (Only one of those is made up.)But for list-compulsives like me — my spreadsheet includes nearly 100 titles, from “A Little Princess” to “Zanna” — the quality of the product hardly matters. What I like to contemplate is the vast array. Sometimes I envision the titles as a swarm of planes taxiing at airports all over the country: “Bhangin’ It,” “Trading Places,” “Black Orpheus,” “Beaches,” even the “Untitled Roy Rogers Musical.” They haven’t lifted off yet, and some of them are out of fuel, but they’re on the runway, eager noses all pointed in our direction. More

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    Shakespeare or Bieber? This Canadian City Draws Devotees of Both

    For nearly 70 years, Stratford, Ontario, has attracted legions of theater fanatics to its Shakespeare festival. About a dozen years ago, a very different type of pilgrim began arriving: Beliebers.STRATFORD, Ontario — It’s a small city that practically shouts “Shakespeare!”Majestic white swans float in the Avon River, not far from Falstaff Street and Anne Hathaway Park, named for the playwright’s wife. Some residents live in Romeo Ward, while young students attend Hamlet elementary. And the school’s namesake play is often performed as part of a renowned theater festival that draws legions of Shakespeare fans from around the world, every April to October.Stratford, Ontario, steeped in references to and reverence for the Bard, has counted on its association with Shakespeare for decades to dependably bring in millions of tourist dollars to a city that would otherwise have little appeal to travelers.“My dad always said we have a world-class theater stuck in a farm community,” said Frank Herr, the second-generation owner of a boat tour and rental business along the Avon River.Then, about a dozen years ago, a new and typically much younger type of cultural enthusiast began showing up in Stratford’s streets: Beliebers, or fans of the pop star Justin Bieber, a homegrown talent.William Shakespeare Street in Stratford.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesA star dedicated to Justin Bieber outside the Avon Theater where he would busk as a child.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesResidents don’t have much trouble telling the two types of visitors apart. One clue: Look at what they are carrying.“They’ve got the Shakespeare books in their hands,” Mr. Herr said of those who are here for the love of theater. “They’re just serious people.”Beliebers, on the other hand, always have their smartphones at the ready to excitedly document the otherwise humdrum landmarks connected to the pop star: the site of his first date, the local radio station that first played his music, the diner where he was rumored to eat.Unlike Shakespeare — who never set foot in this city, named after his birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, England — Mr. Bieber has genuine and deep connections: He grew up here and is familiar to many.“I know Justin,” Mr. Herr said. “He was always skateboarding on the cenotaph, and I was always kicking him off the cenotaph,” he added, referring to a World War I memorial in the gardens next to Lake Victoria.A cutout of Justin Bieber in the Stratford Perth Museum. The setting is meant to replicate the steps of the city’s Avon Theater. Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesDiane Dale, Mr. Bieber’s maternal grandmother, and her husband, Bruce, lived a 10-minute drive away from downtown Stratford, where the fledgling singer, now 28, could often be found busking on the steps of Avon Theater under their supervision, collecting as much as $200 per day, she said in a recent interview.Those steps became something of a pilgrimage site for Mr. Bieber’s fans, especially those vying to become “One Less Lonely Girl” during his teen-pop dreamboat era.Another popular stop on the pilgrim’s tour was Ms. Dale’s doorstep. After fans rang her doorbell, she would assure them that her grandson was not home, though that didn’t stop them from taking selfies outside the red brick bungalow.“Justin said, if you don’t move, we’re not coming to visit you anymore,” Ms. Dale, a retired sewer at a now shuttered automotive factory in town, recalled. She has since relocated.Businesses in Stratford that benefited from this second set of tourists began speaking of “the Bieber Effect,” a play on the “Bilbao Effect” in reference to the Spanish city revitalized by a museum.Justin Bieber’s grandparents’ former home in Stratford.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesBut one of the problems with pop fame is that it can be fickle. As fans have aged out of their teen infatuation with the musician, “Bieber fever” has cooled and the number of pilgrims has dropped.The issues that have long afflicted other Canadian cities, like increased housing prices and drug addiction, are more often peeking through the quaint veneer of Stratford, a city of about 33,000 people bordered by sprawling fields of corn in the farmland region of southwestern Ontario.But more than 400 years after his death, Shakespeare’s magnetic force remains fully intact.The theater festival, which draws over 500,000 guests in a typical year and employs about 1,000 people, features Shakespeare classics, Broadway-style musicals and modern plays in its repertoire.Early in the coronavirus pandemic, the festival returned to its roots, staging a limited run of shows outside under canopies, as it did during its first four seasons, starting in 1953. In 1957, the Festival Theater building opened with a summer performance of “Hamlet,” with the Canadian actor Christopher Plummer in the titular role.The Tom Patterson Theater, a new addition to the Stratford Festival.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesThis year’s production stars a woman, Amaka Umeh, the first Black actor to play Hamlet at the festival.While it’s unknown how popular Mr. Bieber will be four centuries from now, the appeal of someone who has sold over 100 million digital singles in the United States alone doesn’t dissipate overnight.And Stratford has taken steps to permanently memorialize his youth here.Mr. Bieber’s grandparents had hung on to boxes of his belongings, including talent show score sheets and a drum set paid for the by the community in a crowdfunding effort — until a local museum presented them with an opportunity to display the items.“It’s changed the museum forever, in a myriad of ways,” said John Kastner, the general manager of the Stratford Perth Museum.After informing the local newspaper that the museum was opening an exhibition, “Justin Bieber: Steps to Stardom,” in February 2018, Mr. Kastner said, he was flooded with calls from international media.“We were going to do one room, like one 10-by-10 room,” Mr. Kastner said. He called his curator. “I said, ‘We have a problem.’”Angelyka Byrne walking through the Bieber exhibit at the Stratford Perth Museum.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesThey cut the agricultural exhibition that had been planned for the adjoining space, which proved helpful in accommodating the 18,000 visitors in the first year of the Bieber show, a huge jump in attendance from the 850 who visited the museum in 2013.The Bieber show, on view through at least next year, has brought in thousands of dollars in merchandise purchases, Mr. Kastner said, giving the modest museum some welcome financial cushion.Mr. Bieber has also made a handful of visits, marking his name in chalk on the guest blackboard and donating some more recent memorabilia, including his wedding invitation and reception menu, featuring a dish called “Grandma Diane’s Bolognese.”But even before the Beliebers descended on the town, young people had been coming to Stratford by the busload thanks to organized school visits, with 50,000 to 100,000 students arriving from the United States and around Canada each year.With the exception of the pandemic border closures, James Pakala, and his wife, Denise, both retired seminary librarians in St. Louis, have been coming to Stratford for about a week every year since the early 1990s. Thirty years before that, Ms. Pakala traveled to Stratford with her high school English literature class from Ithaca, N.Y., and the trip has since become a tradition.The Shakespearean Gardens in Stratford.Brett Gundlock for The New York Times“I love Shakespeare and also Molière,” said Mr. Pakala, 78, who was studying his program outside the Festival Theater before a recent production of Molière’s comedy “The Miser.”Other guests enjoy the simplicity of getting around Stratford. The traffic is fairly light, there is ample parking and most major attractions are a short walk from one other, with pleasant views of the rippling river and picturesque gardens.“It’s easy to attend theater here,” said Michael Walker, a retired banker from Newport Beach, Calif., who visits each year with friends. “It’s not like New York, where it’s burdensome, and the quality of the theater here, I think, is better than what’s in Los Angeles or Chicago.”Here for Now Theater, an independent nonprofit that opened during the pandemic and plays to audiences of no more than 50, enjoys a “symbiotic relationship” with the festival, said its artistic director, Fiona Mongillo, who compared the scale of their operations as a Fiat to the festival’s freight train.Performing “Take Care” at the Here for Now Theater in August.Brett Gundlock for The New York Times“It’s an interesting moment for Stratford because I think it’s growing and changing in a really lovely way,” said Ms. Mongillo, citing the increased diversity as Canadians from neighboring cities have relocated to a town that was formerly, she added, “very, very white.”Longtime residents of Stratford, like Madeleine McCormick, a retired correctional officer, said it can sometimes feel like the concerns of residents are sidelined in favor of tourists.Still, Ms. McCormick acknowledged the pluses of the vibrant community of artists and creative people, one that drew her musician husband into its orbit.“It’s a strange place,” she said. “There’s never going to be another place that’s like this, because of the theater.”And Mr. Bieber. 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