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      Sondheim’s ‘Assassins’ Ends Run Early Because of Coronavirus Cases

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      The Classic Stage Company’s production of “Assassins,” the Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman musical, became the latest show to cut its run short because of the coronavirus, announcing Tuesday that it would cancel its remaining performances.The Off Broadway musical, which began previews in November and had been running for roughly 12 weeks, had been scheduled to continue through Jan. 30. In a brief statement, Classic Stage Company said the handful of remaining performances this week had been scrapped because of “positive COVID-19 tests within the company.”Sondheim, who wrote the music and lyrics for “Assassins,” died on Nov. 26, adding resonance to the timing of the revival and creating a spike in demand that made the show one of the toughest tickets in New York this winter. On the evening Sondheim died theatergoers flocked to the Lynn F. Angelson Theater — where “Assassins” was playing — and to other Sondheim sites, including the Broadway theater where a revival of “Company” was playing, saying they felt drawn to the venues and sought a way to memorialize the songwriting titan.The production, directed by John Doyle, had been fully sold out before Sondheim’s death; in the aftermath, the number of people regularly entering a digital lottery hoping to score $15 tickets ballooned, with roughly 5,000 people entering on some days in the hopes of nabbing one of the small theater’s 196 seats.All ticket holders will be refunded for the cancellations, the company said. More

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      Touring Through Omicron: Broadway Shows Hit Bumps on the Road

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      The “Mean Girls” tour made it to Oklahoma before it was knocked out by the coronavirus. At first, the production had been able to keep going by flying in alumni from its Broadway run, but ultimately the number of company members testing positive was just too high, so earlier this month the show decided to cancel its remaining shows in Tulsa, and then postponed the runs that would have followed in two Wisconsin cities, Madison and Appleton.When the show hit the pause button, Jonalyn Saxer, the actress playing Karen Smith, found herself with two weeks off and no home of her own — like many actors, she gave up her New York apartment and put her stuff in storage when she signed on to tour. The show offered to fly her wherever she wanted to go, and she chose her parents’ house in Los Angeles.“I was home over Christmas, and when I left I said, ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back,’ ” she said. “Two weeks later, I was like, ‘Hi Mom and Dad!’”The lucrative touring market for Broadway shows is being jolted by the Omicron surge, as coronavirus cases increase in parts of the country even as they have begun to fall in the nation as a whole.This past weekend, productions of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” in San Francisco and “The Prom” in Baltimore were canceled because of positive tests in their companies.“Hamilton” has been particularly hard hit: This month it halted all four of its American touring productions, in Buffalo, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and San Antonio, because of positive coronavirus tests.The phenomenon is in some ways similar to what happened on Broadway, where so many theater workers tested positive in December that half of all shows canceled performances on some nights. But there is a key difference: Whereas on Broadway, there has also been a damaging drop in ticket sales, elsewhere in the country, producers say, attendance has generally remained steady.Gabrielle Bappert checked the vaccine cards of ticket holders at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis before a performance of “Come From Away.”Tim Gruber for The New York Times“Touring, when we can perform, is going great — the audiences are showing up, and the audiences are enthusiastic,” said Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton.” “Touring is not going great when Covid sweeps through our company, which has happened to every one of our tours.”For actors, touring now involves less sightseeing, and more risk management, than it once did.“It’s the highest of highs, because we’ve been waiting for a year and a half to be back doing what we love to do, but it’s not the same,” said Saxer, who tested positive for the virus in November when her tour was in Spokane, Wash., and recovered while quarantining there.“It’s not like we can say ‘Let’s go check out this cool bar,’ because actors all around are losing their jobs because someone tests positive,” she added. “It does raise the stakes.”Christine Toy Johnson, an actor in the “Come From Away” tour, said she had not eaten inside a restaurant since July.“In some cities, we’re in hotels and we’re the only people wearing masks,” she said. “It’s very stressful — I’m not going to lie. But it’s also been an exciting time to be back in the theater, making art again.”There are currently about three dozen shows moving from venue to venue, stopping at a mix of nonprofit performing arts centers and for-profit theaters in nearly 300 North American cities, according to Meredith Blair, the president and chief executive of the Booking Group, an agency that arranges touring shows. The shows bring in a lot of money: those featuring union actors (there are also tours with nonunion casts) grossed $1.6 billion at the box office in 2018-2019, which was the last full season before the pandemic; that’s just slightly less than the $1.8 billion spent by theatergoers attending Broadway shows in New York City during the same period, according to the Broadway League.While there has been a damaging drop in ticket sales on Broadway, producers say that attendance has generally remained steady elsewhere in the country.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesThere appear to be several reasons the touring audience has remained more stable than the Broadway audience. Most of the venues that present touring productions depend on locals, rather than visitors, so they are less vulnerable to the drop in tourism that has walloped Broadway. Many of the touring venues have large numbers of subscribers who, remarkably, retained their subscriptions throughout the pandemic. And some venues are in parts of the country where residents have been less inclined to make changes to their routines because of Covid.“There’s a huge difference between New York and the audience on the road,” said Rich Jaffe, a co-chief executive of Broadway Across America, which presents Broadway tours in 48 North American markets. “On the road, they consider these venues their theaters — it’s a big part of their communities, supporting jobs and creating economic ripple effects for local downtowns that are quite significant. If we have a show, the audience is there.”Many North American tours are bypassing Canada because of government-mandated capacity restrictions there. But in the United States, where there are generally no capacity limits, venue operators seem pleased with how things are going, despite the bumpiness of Omicron.“We’ve already presented five weeks of touring Broadway, and we’ve had great attendance — our audiences are showing up enthusiastically,” said Joan H. Squires, the president of Omaha Performing Arts, which hosted touring productions of “Cats” and “Hamilton” in the fall and then “Dear Evan Hansen” in the days before and after the New Year’s holiday. Squires wound up scanning tickets at the door for “Dear Evan Hansen” because too few volunteer ushers were available, but she attributed that more to winter weather than Covid concerns.Most shows are requiring that audiences wear masks, except where such requirements are barred, and vaccination rules are up to local jurisdictions.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesThe biggest brand names, as always, are selling the strongest. And “Hadestown,” which won the Tony Award for best musical in 2019 and began its tour in October, is starting strong. “‘Hadestown’ arrived just as we were starting to see Omicron spike, and it far exceeded our targets for attendance and sales,” said Maria Van Laanen, the president and chief executive of Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in Appleton.Presenters in some cities describe a softening of sales as Omicron hit. “We certainly noticed a slower pattern of buying over the holidays — in any other year, we would have been completely sold out, but that obviously wasn’t the case because there was some hesitancy,” said Jeffrey Finn, the vice president of theater producing and programming at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. “That said, I’m watching a big upturn as we head toward the spring with the hope and expectation that Omicron won’t be as present.”Safety precautions vary across the country. Most shows are requiring that audiences wear masks, except in cities where such requirements are barred; vaccination rules for audiences follow local government protocols (actors and other theater workers are required to be vaccinated).Keeping tours going has required shows to add staff members. “Hamilton” now employs seven “universal swings,” who are versatile performers ready to travel anywhere they are needed to fill in, up from four before the pandemic; “The Lion King” has brought in three additional swings.After canceling three performances, “Come From Away” returned thanks to a blended cast that included veterans of every production, including Broadway, Australia, Canada and Britain. Tim Gruber for The New York Times“Come From Away” offers a particularly vivid case study in the creativity also required to keep shows afloat. The company got hit by Covid earlier this month as it arrived in Minneapolis, where it was scheduled to spend two weeks.“We went 15 weeks without any problems, but then Omicron came and started to wreak havoc,” said Johnson, who has been with the tour since 2018. “At one point half the cast was sidelined.”The producers canceled three performances, which bought them enough time to bring in actors from California, New York and Toronto, and the show then resumed with a blended cast that included alumni not only from Broadway but also from productions in Australia, Canada and Britain.“It’s the never-ending Rubik’s Cube of trying to keep a show up and running,” said Sue Frost, a lead producer of “Come From Away.”Among those who flew in was Happy McPartlin, a standby in the Broadway cast, who had just recovered from her own case of Covid. “I said, ‘Of course,’ because that’s what we do here,” she said. “I knew the state we were in. We had a couple of bad weeks where the numbers were not in our favor, and one of the people from the tour came in and saved us. I said, ‘If you guys need me, I’ll do the same for you.’”Not all of the cancellations have been short-lived. In December, “Ain’t Too Proud” canceled two weeks in Washington; “The Lion King” missed 12 performances in Denver, while “Wicked” canceled six performances in Cleveland. “Hamilton” shut down for a month in Los Angeles, and upon its reopening next month, it is now scheduled to stay just six more weeks, rather than running into the spring as initially anticipated.“I almost forgot about Covid for a little bit because we got so used to it, and it was so much fun to do the show, but then Christmas Eve we had so many positive tests we couldn’t do the show, and we canceled a half-hour after it was supposed to start,” said Nicholas Christopher, who plays Aaron Burr in the Los Angeles production of “Hamilton.” Christopher had moved from New York to Los Angeles for “Hamilton”; he, his wife, and their new baby all tested positive in December, and then he found out the show’s Los Angeles run was ending.“It’s very eye-opening, and very humbling, and makes me appreciate what we do even more, because it’s been taken away so many times,” he said. “It’s almost like PTSD, having the show be shut down again. It still feels like a dream that I’m ready to wake up from.” More

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      Review: ‘Just for Us’ Reaches Across the Chasm

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      The return of this brisk, smart provocation of a monologue is a cheering development, all the more so because it’s a belly-laugh funny show.On a narrow, curving street in the West Village of Manhattan, a sign of hope: A production that went dark just before Christmas, as the Omicron variant descended on the city, has opened back up at the Cherry Lane Theater.Sure, that’s what the comedian Alex Edelman’s publicists said would happen when his solo show, “Just for Us,” abruptly cut short its run there in December, promising a Jan. 24 return. But when a production goes into pandemic hibernation, it’s easy to worry that it won’t emerge again.The return of “Just for Us,” then, is a cheering development, all the more so because it’s a belly-laugh funny show. A brisk, smart provocation of a monologue, it’s about race and identity in American culture, and about the tantalizing impulse to reach across the chasm to the hard-core bigots among us.Such as the white supremacists who, Edelman tells us, tweeted a public invitation to a meeting they were having in Queens — though when he took them up on it, he went as an infiltrator. Hoping that no one would realize he was Jewish, he didn’t exactly have unity on his mind. But then he spied an attractive woman he calls Chelsea, and decided to chat her up.“I thought to myself, with no irony: You never know,” he says, and widens his eyes at his own idiocy.He twines the story of that prepandemic gathering, which began with the assembled racists grousing about the then-recent wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, with a recollection from his early childhood: the time his mother, seeking to comfort a bereaved friend, decided that their Orthodox Jewish family would host a Christmas celebration for her, complete with presents and a tree. With a dreidel on top.Is the dreidel detail true? An embellishment? Either way, it works. Tom Stoppard makes a similar joke in his recent epic play “Leopoldstadt,” only there the tree topper is a Star of David. The two shows are apples and oranges, but antisemitism and assimilation are major themes in both. Stoppard is writing about historical Nazis, while Edelman disparages the 21st-century bigots as “Nerf Nazis”: pathetic wannabes. “These are not life’s winners,” he says.Directed by Adam Brace, “Just for Us” is an inherently political piece from a comedian who says he has tended to avoid talking politics onstage. (“Because it bums everybody out!” Edelman booms near the start.) It’s about whiteness, the privileges that accompany it and the hierarchy that — as he saw growing up in Boston — rates Mayflower-descendant types as an aspirational American ideal.More philosophically, the show pokes and prods at empathy and morality, and the ways that othering whole categories of people makes it easy to dehumanize them. Which is a sharply relevant observation in the midst of this ideologically polarized public health crisis.“It’s so hard to hate up close,” Edelman says, but of course that isn’t true for everyone. The white supremacists at the meeting, it turns out, seemed to have no problem with hating him. Which rankled, because part of him wanted them to like him. And yes, he knows that’s absurd.Edelman ends “Just for Us” on a deliciously funny high: by recounting his petty, perfect act of vengeance against the white supremacists. The show itself counts as another revenge — bigger, bolder and with the audience at the Cherry Lane firmly on his side.Just for UsThrough Feb. 19 at the Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; cherrylanetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ Fires Its Harry Potter

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      The Broadway production of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” has fired the actor playing the title character, citing unspecified concerns about his conduct.The show on Sunday issued a statement saying that James Snyder, who played the title role for about a year before the pandemic and then rejoined the show when it restarted last fall, had been terminated following a complaint by Diane Davis, the actress playing his wife, Ginny. (The play begins 19 years after the conclusion of the Harry Potter novels, by which point the boy wizard has become a married man, with children of his own.)The show said that Davis had made a complaint “regarding the conduct of fellow cast member James Snyder” Nov. 19, a week after it had resumed performances following the lengthy pandemic shutdown. A spokesman declined to provide any further details, but the statement noted that the show has “strict prohibitions against harassment in any form.”The production said that, once it received the complaint, it suspended Snyder and commissioned “an independent investigation by a third party,” and that when the investigation was completed “the producers decided Mr. Snyder should not return to the production and terminated his contract.” Steve Haggard has been playing Harry Potter during Snyder’s suspension, and will continue doing so. Davis has taken a leave of absence, the producers said.Snyder, 40, previously starred in “Cry-Baby” and “If/Then” on Broadway, and also appeared in “In Transit.” He did not respond to an email seeking comment. More

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      A Reimagined ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ for the Covid Era

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      Robert O’Hara directs a trimmed-down revival of Eugene O’Neill’s classic, with a colorblind cast and a weary eye on the pandemic and the opioid crisis.Of the time-honored classics of American theater, Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is one that usually takes its own concept of time seriously. A four-act work based on the playwright’s own dysfunctional parents, it follows the disintegration of the Tyrone family — by disease, ego, addiction and codependency — through the course of a claustrophobic August day at their seaside home in Connecticut. Widely considered O’Neill’s masterpiece, it typically runs just under four hours.The writer and director Robert O’Hara, a Tony nominee for his direction of “Slave Play,” is doing it in under two.Presented without an intermission by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” has reunited O’Hara with fellow “Slave Play” alums, the actor Ato Blankson-Wood and the designer Clint Ramos, for a shortened production that confronts the play’s themes head on and brings them into 2022.“There is so much velocity in the writing that it moves at a fast clip, and with so much richness,” O’Hara said after a rehearsal last week. “The family doesn’t get an intermission throughout this one long day, so it’s quite interesting to get to sit with them in real time.”The decision to trim the material happened early and organically, O’Hara explained. “Once you put the knife in, you’re just like, ‘Are we going to pretend that we’re not editing this?’” he quipped. It was then bolstered by his wariness of having people gather for too long, given the latest Covid-19 variant.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“For me, it feels like a Covid production of ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ built for right now,” he said. “We didn’t want to ask an audience to sit for four hours in a theater, just because that’s the way it’s usually done. If anyone’s coming in looking for that experience, they should know that it’s not this.”He began conceiving the production, now in previews and opening Jan. 25, before the pandemic. Initially he was hesitant to tackle the play because of the demands placed upon producing classics.“It’s difficult to get these big chestnuts if you’re going to do it Off Broadway,” he said, referring to the challenges of securing production rights. “You can ask, but someone’s usually holding them in order to bring them back in a big way.”O’Hara credits the actress Elizabeth Marvel, who portrays the morphine-addicted mother, Mary, as instrumental to getting the production off the ground.“We started just talking about this play, but then the world made its urgency all the greater,” Marvel said. “I’ve seen probably 11 or 12 productions in my lifetime, and it’s always the same: in the same drawing room with billowing curtains, and with period corsets.“But there’s absolutely no reason,” she continued, “it can’t be right here, right now. It very much speaks to this moment, when a lot of people are having to return home to their families, dealing with addiction and codependency during a crisis, while not being able to get out.”In addition to contemporary allusions to the opioid crisis, reflecting Mary’s own addiction, the production is set amid the coronavirus pandemic. The youngest Tyrone son, Edmund (Blankson-Wood), afflicted by what is traditionally hinted to be tuberculosis, now wears a face mask. Projections at the beginning of the play display C.D.C. announcements and news footage from the early days of the pandemic, including surreal revelations like the Bronx Zoo tiger testing positive for the virus.“We wanted projections to be a dreamlike window into Mary’s psychological space, especially when she succumbs to her addiction,” Ramos said on a video call. “The visual landscape, through Yee Eun Nam’s projections, gets very dreamy and dense to directly represent that.”Marvel, left, as the morphine-addicted mother, Mary, and Blankson-Wood as her sickly son Edmund.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMarvel’s husband, the actor Bill Camp, plays the family’s patriarch, James, and he was cast as the eldest son, Jamie, in a 1996 production at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. The edited script, he said, “became about distilling the story’s actions rather than experiencing the longness of the situation.”“The family’s desires and dysfunctions are streamlined in a way that is already in the writing; we just hit it really fast,” he added. “It’s in your face, just like everything that is happening is in our faces now, and we don’t have time to sit around and meander our way into those things; they’re immediate.”Jason Bowen rounds out the Tyrone clan as Jamie: a colorblind casting choice (Bowen and Blankson-Wood are Black, Camp and Marvel are white) that O’Hara said is intentional, though not one he wanted to factor into the DNA of the production.“I was never going to do this play with all white people; it wasn’t anything that I had to think about,” O’Hara said. “Elizabeth had mentioned Ato, being a fan of his, so we only held auditions for Jamie, and Jason killed it. There was no manufacturing of the cast’s racial dynamics for any reason other than wanting the best actors we could find.”Bowen notes that the heft of the story’s themes, as written, override any possible racial interpretation the cast could’ve envisioned.“It’s a play about a family as they navigate addiction, and that’s something that transcends any racial aspect that we could even attempt to investigate,” Bowen said. “The play’s not about that. Robert could’ve come in with some conceptual idea he wanted to introduce, but it’s still going to boil down to these relationships.”Blankson-Wood, who was performing a return engagement of his Tony-nominated role in “Slave Play” while rehearsals for “Long Day’s Journey” took place during the day, said that being able to act in a production that did not take his own race into account was “liberating.”“The fact that I do not have to carry how I, as a Black person, fit into this family is just pure acting to me, because it focuses only on the imaginative truth of the work,” he said. “From an outsider’s perspective, I get the impulse to want to understand the racial dynamic, but that’s something I’m excited for the audience to do; that’s their job.”O’Hara, who directed an audio production of another American classic, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” as part of Williamstown Theater Festival’s Audible season in 2020, will direct an audio presentation of the production once the Minetta Lane run closes Feb. 20. He said Audible’s expansive reach helped in securing the rights to the radically altered production, which might have been denied to a regional theater.“What’s amazing about this turn to streaming and digital is the democratization of theater, so more people will be able to access it,” Blankson-Wood said. “Though I do feel pretty strongly about sitting in a dark room with other human beings. But, with an audio production like this, when you take all the scenery and stuff away, and there’s only talking and listening, it deepens the work.” More

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      After Being Stuck in Russia, Kirill Serebrennikov Directs a Play in Germany

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      Kirill Serebrennikov is living under a three-year travel ban, but to his surprise, Russian authorities approved his request to direct a play in Hamburg.HAMBURG, Germany — At first glance, a recent rehearsal at the Thalia Theater here looked much like any other. Onstage, the actors ran through the final scene of a play called “The Black Monk,” trying to get the flow just right.“Stop, stop, stop,” the director, Kirill Serebrennikov, cried from the middle of the auditorium. He wasn’t happy with the projections beamed onto moons suspended above the performers, and started to troubleshoot.It was business as usual in theater, but for Serebrennikov — one of Russia’s most prominent directors, whose stage work is produced across Europe — the chance to oversee the production in person was an unexpected surprise. It was the first time in more than four years that he had been able to set foot outside of his home country.Serebrennikov’s provocative stage work, which often deals with topics considered taboo in Russia, like homosexuality, has been seen as critical of life under President Vladimir V. Putin. Perhaps too critical, since for the last four and a half years Serebrennikov has been embroiled in a financial fraud case that is widely seen by Russia’s intelligentsia as part of a crackdown on artistic freedom.“The Black Monk” features a large cast of Russian, German, American, Armenian and Latvian actors, dancers and singers.Hayley Austin for The New York TimesBeginning in August 2017, Serebrennikov spent nearly 20 months under house arrest in Moscow, and was later convicted of embezzling around 133 million rubles, or around $2 million, in government funds allocated to a festival that was put on at the Gogol Center, the avant-garde theater Serebrennikov used to run. The high-profile court case resulted in a suspended sentence for the director in June 2020, but also a three-year ban on his traveling outside of Russia.So when the director arrived at Hamburg Airport on Jan. 8, Joachim Lux, the Thalia’s artistic director, greeted him with astonishment.In a statement issued by his theater, Lux sounded relieved, noting that his playhouse had overcome “all pandemic and political obstacles” to bring the director to Hamburg. He called the director’s safe arrival “a great miracle that gives strength in difficult times!”Among those most surprised was Serebrennikov himself.The director explained that his request to leave Russia so he could direct a production based on a little-known story by Anton Chekhov was unexpectedly approved, and on very short notice.Since his arrest, Serebrennikov has come up with inventive ways to direct from a distance. For “The Black Monk,” he was able to be there in person again.Hayley Austin for The New York Times“Please allow me to go to Hamburg for work,” the director had asked Russian officials, he said during a recent news conference in the foyer of the Thalia. It was the same standard request that the authorities had rejected numerous times before. However, earlier this month, “they just gave the permission for this project,” Serebrennikov said, adding that the authorization to travel came through at the very last minute.“They just signed the paper right after the New Year holidays,” said the 52-year-old director, dressed in black and wearing lightly tinted sunglasses and a baseball cap. “Probably I was a good guy, my behavior was good and that’s why they said OK,” he added.In an interview after the news conference, Serebrennikov said he had given up trying to understand exactly why he was let out of Russia to direct “The Black Monk.”“Here I am. I’m in Hamburg,” he said with a shrug. “We are creating theater together with a lot of very talented people in one of the best theaters in the world.”When he was unable to leave Russia, Serebrennikov found resourceful ways to keep his work going abroad. In November 2018, when he was still under house arrest and prohibited from using the internet, he directed a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” at the Zurich Opera using a relay system for video files that involved a USB stick hand-delivered to him by his lawyer in Moscow.Similar technological workarounds have allowed him to remain highly prolific in captivity of one kind or another. Since the Zurich “Così,” he has also had artistic control of stage productions in Germany and Austria and completed two well-received films, “Leto,” in 2018, and “Petrov’s Flu” in 2021, both of which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, in the director’s absence.Filipp Avdeev, left, and Gurgen Tsaturyan in “The Black Monk.”Hayley Austin for The New York TimesIn much of Serebrennikov’s recent stage work, confinement has appeared as a central theme, including in his production of “Outside,” which played in Avignon and Berlin, and his 2021 staging of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” at the Vienna State Opera, which was partially set in a prison. His production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s “The Nose,” which opened the current season at the Bavarian State Opera, featured scenes of state violence and repression in a dystopian yet oddly contemporary Russia.Serebrennikov speculated that being forced to practice his craft remotely over the months he spent under house arrest gave him an edge once the pandemic began. “It was my personal rehearsal for Corona,” he said with a wry laugh.Since his legal woes began in 2017, Serebrennikov has become an emblem of artistic freedom in the face of government repression. But the director said he was uncomfortable with this role. “I’m a working animal,” he said. “I don’t want to be a symbol.”Even by the director’s standards, “The Black Monk” is a challenging production. It features a large cast of Russian, German, American, Armenian and Latvian actors, dancers and singers, has dialogue in three languages and incorporates music by the Latvian composer Jekabs Nimanis.“We have not too much time,” Serebrennikov said of the two weeks he has in Hamburg to finish the production. And while he seemed glad to be back to “in person” directing, he said that working remotely is an artistically viable alternative.“We get used to having a lot of digital life around us,” he said. “Of course, personal presence is much more preferable for me, but Zoom is OK,” he added.“We are creating theater together with a lot of very talented people in one of the best theaters in the world,” Serebrennikov said of “The Black Monk.”Hayley Austin for The New York TimesAfter “The Black Monk,” Serebrennikov has a number of other international productions on the horizon, including an opera at this summer’s Holland Festival in Amsterdam, and a possible tour of “The Black Monk.” Whether he’ll be allowed to travel for either is unclear.“It could happen, but nobody knows,” he said. “I prefer to be in the moment and not to hope too much,” he added, alluding to his own legal predicament and the wider world’s battering by the pandemic.Under the conditions of his travel permit, Serebrennikov must return to Russia on Jan. 22, the day after “The Black Monk” opens. The director said he had every intention of going back to Moscow, where he will start work on a film that will be his first in English.“I’m a reliable person,” he said, adding that “the people who allowed me to leave are probably at risk as well.” More

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      Augmented Reality Theater Takes a Bow. In Your Kitchen.

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      The Immersive Storytelling Studio at the National Theater in London is using technology to bring a miniature musical to viewers’ homes. It’s one of several high-tech British projects pushing dramatic boundaries.LONDON — Standing in front of a golden bandstand, dressed in a white satin gown and pearls, the vocalist Nubiya Brandon sashayed to a gentle beat. Stepping toward the spotlight, she took a lazy turn around the stage, singing a playful calypso number and smiling occasionally at the band behind.The weird thing about this show, called “All Kinds of Limbo,” was that Brandon appeared to be in this reporter’s kitchen. The singer was in fact an eerily realistic holographic avatar on a mobile phone screen; her performance had been recorded and was now being broadcast in augmented reality from the National Theater in London.Via the technology’s strange alchemy, which overlays digital imagery onto whatever a camera phone is pointing at, Brandon seemed to be singing and sashaying on the countertop. After she took a bow, her image evaporated and the bandstand faded into nothingness, leaving only a sink full of washing up behind.The success of digital-only theater productions has been one of the pandemic’s surprise silver linings: Audiences have been willing to try them and theater companies have found fans thousands of miles away. But could immersive technologies provide a more intriguing path forward for drama, one that will endure once Covid-19 (hopefully) subsides? Augmented reality (A.R.) and virtual reality (V.R.) are already changing gaming, music and art; might theater be next?“All Kinds of Limbo’s” director, Toby Coffey, said he hopes so. In 2016, he set up the National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio, which operates as a kind of “start-up” within the company, he said in a recent interview at the studio’s modest space, which was crowded with a jumble of technical equipment. The team’s brief is to see how live theater and new technologies can interact and intersect.Toby Coffey, who founded the National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio in 2016.Suzie Howell for The New York Times“Theater makers are naturally fascinated: They’re used to working in 3-D,” Coffey said. “As soon as you bring a director or stage designer or choreographer into V.R., you see their brains whirring.”The studio’s first production, “Fabulous Wonder.land,” was a V.R. music video featuring a track by the musician Damon Albarn with words by the playwright Moira Buffini. The team has since made 360-degree films of live shows, developed a one-on-one piece in which an audience member interacts with a live actor while wearing a V.R. headset and created a mixed-reality “exhibition” about government welfare cuts.“All Kinds of Limbo” came into being in 2019 after the National Theater had a hit with “Small Island,” a play about postwar Jamaican immigration to Britain. Coffey and his team commissioned Brandon, the vocalist, and the composer Raffy Bushman to create a 10-minute song sequence responding freely to the play’s themes. It was written, performed and motion-captured that year, and was initially presented as a V.R. experience in one of the theater’s event spaces.Brandon performing in a motion capture studio to record “All Kinds of Limbo.”The National TheaterWhen the pandemic shut down British performing venues in March 2020, Coffey accelerated plans to turn “All Kinds of Limbo” into an at-home experience. The retooled version can be watched via A.R. on a mobile device, via a V.R. headset, or on a regular computer. Brandon’s performance stays the same, but, depending on the device used, the experience feels subtly different.To summon some of theater’s shared intimacy, it’s being ticketed and broadcast as live, although the show is recorded. Other people attending virtually are represented by blades of moving white light and, by playing with the settings, you can move around the space and see the action from different angles.It’s a short piece, but “All Kinds of Limbo” does feel like the glimmering of a new art form: somewhere between music video, video game and live cabaret show.Over the last few years, Britain’s theater scene has become a test bed for similar experiments. Last spring, the Royal Shakespeare Company co-produced an immersive digital piece called “Dream” that featured actors performing using motion-capture technology and was watchable via smartphone or computer. Other projects, such as shows by the Almeida theater in London and the company Dreamthinkspeak in Brighton, England, require participants to turn up in person and get equipped with VR headsets.Francesca Panetta, a V.R. producer and artist who was recently appointed as the alternate realities curator at the Sheffield DocFest film festival, said in a video interview that practitioners from audio, gaming, theater, TV and other art forms were collaborating as never before. “Many different people are trying to explore this space and work out what it really is,” she said. “No one is quite sure.”One of the most keenly awaited partnerships is between the immersive theater troupe Punchdrunk, which pioneered live site-specific shows such as “Sleep No More” and “The Masque of the Red Death” in the mid-2000s, and the tech firm Niantic, best-known for the wildly successful A.R. game Pokémon Go.Speaking by phone, Punchdrunk’s co-founder Felix Barrett seemed invigorated by the creative possibilities. “We’re on the cusp of a new form of entertainment,” he said. “It’s a new genre; it just hasn’t been named yet.”Later this year, Niantic and Punchdrunk plan to unveil the first results of their collaboration. Barrett was reluctant to reveal too much, but said that it would offer participants “a citywide adventure” that will feel like an immersive video game happening in the real world. “Our goal is to try and make you the hero of your own living movie,” he said.Ambitious as such projects are, they are also — at least by theater standards — time-consuming and forbiddingly expensive. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Dream” wouldn’t have been possible without corporate sponsorship and a hefty grant from a roughly $55-million British government fund promoting digital arts innovation. The latest iteration of “All Kinds of Limbo” relies on a partnership with Microsoft and the livestreaming platform Dice.Production work on “All Kinds of Limbo.” The show can be watched via A.R. on a mobile device, via a V.R. headset, or on a regular computer, through Jan. 30.The National TheaterThere’s also the question of audience. Though theater-led projects such as “Dream” and “All Kinds of Limbo” have gained positive reviews, they have attracted only a tiny fraction of the 12 million viewers who watched a 2020 virtual performance by the rapper Travis Scott in the online game Fortnite. The chances of monetization at scale look slim, at least for now.And the irony is that, while the pandemic may have whetted audience appetites for digital drama, it has had devastating consequences for theater companies themselves. The National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio originally had four staff members; after belt-tightening layoffs in the company, it’s now just Coffey and one full-time co-worker. “Even before the pandemic, we could have been doing 10 times more than we had resource to be able to do,” Coffey said. “We need to work within those restrictions.”What happens next is up for debate. The National Theater is working on redeploying the app and distribution platform used for “All Kinds of Limbo” into something that works for other projects. Panetta said that the metaverse, if it genuinely takes off, offers its own possibilities for live performance. “It’s difficult to see what the pathway is; I suspect it’ll be a mix of many different things,” she added.So how long until we’re watching Ibsen or Shakespeare in augmented reality at our kitchen tables? Coffey laughed, then cautioned that designing successful A.R. performances was still an emerging skill. “But some day it’ll happen, I have no doubt,” he said.All Kinds of LimboStreaming through Jan. 30; allkindsoflimbo.com. More

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      Review: ‘Addressless’ Is on the Streets and in Your Home

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      This hybrid of theater and game asks us to consider homelessness empathetically but can’t overcome the friction between education and entertainment.In June, after a series of court battles, 60-some men were moved out of the Lucerne, an Upper West Side hotel that had served as a shelter during the first year of the pandemic. Their presence had divided the neighborhood, with some residents starting a Facebook group to complain about how the men had decreased their quality of life, even as there was no discernible uptick in the local crime rate.One of the Lucerne’s residents, Shams DaBaron, who first became experienced homelessness as a child, found himself representing his fellows. At a rally in September 2020, he spoke up, saying: “Despite our being homeless we can do the right thing. Don’t criminalize us, don’t dehumanize us, let us all come together with both sides and make this thing work.”These days DaBaron has found a different way to get people to come together. A virtual one. He is a star of “Addressless,” a theater and video game hybrid presented by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. DaBaron plays Wallace, a single father in the shelter system. (DaBaron is housed now, but the character’s experiences mirror his own.) The other homeless characters are Joey Auzenne’s Louis, a veteran with untreated back problems; and Bianca Norwood’s Josie, a queer teen runaway. The “games master” is Hope Beaver, a licensed social worker at a family shelter on the Lower East Side.A creation of Martin Boross, a Budapest-based director, and the playwright Jonathan Payne, “Addressless” has empathy in mind. Its subtitle is “A Walk in Our Shoes.” By splitting its audience into three groups, each assigned to a particular character, it asks us to participate in that character’s life choices. As often as not, all of the choices on offer are bad ones. The goal is to leave your character with enough money and enough health points to enter a housing lottery. Staged via Zoom, the show alternates live performances and breakout-room chats with amateurish filmed sequences.((“Joey Auzenne as Louis and Hope Beaver as Social Worker of “Addressless”))via The Chamber GroupThere’s an obvious tension between wanting to excite empathy for the homeless and making a game of the situation, reducing a person’s life to “health points” and a cash amount. (A subtler tension: participating in a show about the housing crisis from the comfort of your own home.) “Addressless” takes pains to show that people experiencing homelessness are more than just numbers on a caseworker’s docket. Then the show shrinks them down to numbers anyway.Winning becomes paramount, the unhoused person’s experience less so. Auzenne and Norwood are trained actors and able to disappear into character. That DaBaron and Beaver are not only intensifies this friction between entertainment and education.The game often doesn’t play fair. (Then again, a state that has enshrined the right to shelter into law and yet doesn’t provide it isn’t playing fair either.) More irksome, “Addressless” doesn’t follow through on its choose-you-own-adventure premise. In the show’s first section, participants can choose where characters sleep — on the streets, in a shelter, on a friend’s couch. After that, the characters choose for themselves. Not always wisely. But there’s poignancy in some of the dilemmas, like whether Louis, who is injured on the job during a trainee period, should go back to work, risking his health, or take time off to heal, risking his continued employment.For many housed New Yorkers, day-to-day interactions with homeless people will be defined by arm’s-length benevolence (donating to a food or coat drive) or inconvenience (panhandlers on the subway). Even if “Addressless” sometimes sacrifices deep identification to its game structure, it wants us to do better, and the show’s chat function provides a list of resources to enable that. Some participants seemed primed to use them.As a Sunday evening show concluded, one woman unmuted herself. “My heart just breaks for everyone who experiences this,” she said.AddresslessStreaming through Feb. 13; rattlestick.org. Running time: 2 hours. More