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      How a Broadway Producer Spends His Sundays

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      Theater may be struggling, but Ron Simons is committed to opening his next show, “For Colored Girls,” this spring.Ron Simons, one of a handful of Black Broadway producers in New York, has won Tony Awards for “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” “Porgy & Bess,” “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” and “Jitney.” Not to be outdone by the pandemic, he recently produced “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which closed last month, and his next show, “For Colored Girls,” is scheduled to open this spring.“Recent events have allowed us to be fully expressed,” said Mr. Simons, alluding to the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and the unrest and conversations about race that followed. “If done correctly, through storytelling, shows like ‘Thoughts of a Colored Man’ and others will help dispel ignorance and hatred.”Even though Broadway attendance is down and casts and crews are struggling to evade the Omicron variant, Mr. Simons remains optimistic. “People forget how long Broadway has been around,” he said. “Broadway is an institution that is not going away. It’s still strong and becoming more inclusive.”Mr. Simons, 61, lives with his partner, Jbya Clarke, 53, a personal trainer and wellness professional, on West 54th Street.THEATER HOURS Depending upon what time I got to bed the night before, Alexa wakes me with an obnoxious beeping sound around 10 or 11 a.m. When I’m raising money for a show, like I am with “For Colored Girls,” I tend to work into the wee hours of the night on Saturdays. I pick up the phone to see if there are any fires with the shows and if they need to be put out.“I tend to work into the wee hours of the night on Saturdays,” said Mr. Simons, who likes to sleep in on Sundays. Laila Stevens for The New York TimesPURGE Jbya is already up and has made coffee. Right now we’re drinking two coffees from Café Britt, one that’s Hawaiian and another that’s Costa Rican. I’ll drink it in whatever mug is available with cream and Stevia. That’s followed by a green juice made with spinach, pineapple, mango, collagen and MCT oil. It’s very cleansing. I have an addiction to fast food, it’s cheap, fast and easy. This helps the detox process. Every year I do an 11-day purge in mid-January. All I have is green drinks with protein powder. I like to start the year off with a healthy disposition. The purge makes me feel lighter and makes my brain clearer.SPIRITUAL STREAM I’m a member of The R.O.C.K. church in Houston. My cousin is married to the pastor. She preaches and oversees operations, so I watch the morning service on my computer. I find her inspiring. I’m always looking for inspiration and beauty. That’s how I counteract the news that’s been spreading over the country. I might meditate as well.He likes to tune in to services from a Houston church whose pastor is married to his cousin. “I’m always looking for inspiration and beauty.”Laila Stevens for The New York TimesBRUNCH By noon we are thinking about places to have brunch. Our favorite is Cookshop. I always say I won’t get a cinnamon roll, which come out warm and delicious, so I order wheat toast. I end up getting the cinnamon roll, too. And French fries. They’re my nemesis. We have one or two friends join. Sometimes we make brunch at our house, or we do it potluck, which is a good way to reconnect with some important people in our lives.MATINEE I’m a Tony voter, so I have to see all the new shows. If we don’t eat brunch we see theater instead. Because I’m so exhausted from the week, I tend to fall asleep at night, so Sunday makes me more of an alert audience member.Socializing in Chelsea, the Manhattan neighborhood where Mr. Simons and Mr. Clarke will often go for brunch. Laila Stevens for The New York TimesLUNCH WITH LIGHTING After theater Jbya and I walk around Hell’s Kitchen. I’m on a mission to have dinner at all the Hell’s Kitchen restaurants. Eating out is a different energy than eating in front of the TV. I look at the menus, what they’re serving and how are they rated. If there are a number of dishes that appeal to me I’ll consider going in. And it has to be clean with nice lighting. I’m a man of the theater. I always talk to people about the mood that lighting brings. Then we walk home because I’ve gained 20 pounds since Covid.PILES OF THINGS From 5 to 7 p.m., Jbya and I split up. He goes into his man cave, which is our media room, closes the door, turns off the lights and draws the shades. Then he watches something about the royal family, RuPaul or the Kardashians. I talk myself into opening mail, which I have let pile up for a month so that my box is so full it has to be given to our doorman to hold. Mail creates action items — like responding to an invite, paying a bill or cashing checks, all of which I hate doing. Or I try to organize my office, which usually looks like a hurricane hit it. Everything ends up sitting on my desk. Even though I create piles of things I need to do, it still looks like a mess. I’m a borderline hoarder. I love tchotchkes.The terrace of their home in Midtown Manhattan is one of their favorite places. Laila Stevens for The New York TimesTRAYS, TALK By 7 we’re deciding where to order in from, Seamless or Uber Eats. We might do Chinese food or Burger King. Jbya is a vegetarian and loves their Impossible Whopper; I usually order a Whopper, French fries and Diet Coke if I don’t have any at home. I finally bought TV trays, which makes me feel retro, which we bring into the media room. This is the best time for us to spend together. Evenings during the week are hard. We’ve both had very different days. He’s ready to talk and I’m all talked out from doing it all day. I’m still trying to navigate that so Sunday is a real coming together time for us.ACTION-PACKED ESCAPE We just finished “Tales of the City.” We like thrillers and science fiction, which is what we look for. I’m finishing the casting for “For Colored Girls” and am still in the capital-raising phase, so all week I’m dialing for dollars. Nights like this, I want something thrilling to wash over me like “The Bourne Identity” series, which we can watch over and over again, or “The Matrix” or “The Lord of the Rings.”Sunday evenings are for dinner and light viewing. “This is the best time for us to spend together.”Laila Stevens for The New York TimesGAMES PEOPLE PLAY By 1 or 2 a.m. we’re back in the bedroom. I call Alexa and she glows. I ask for a reminder about something or I’ll set the alarm. Then I tell her to play thunderstorm noise. It’s our version of white noise. Jbya falls asleep first. If I can’t, I play games for 45 minutes on my phone. I take West Game very seriously. It’s a fighting game where you build your town and battle against other players, and Toy Blast, which is a pattern-matching puzzle game. My lids get heavy and I fall asleep.Sunday Routine readers can follow Ron Simons on Instagram @ronaldksimons More

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      Review: In ‘Whisper House,’ the Living Are the Pawns of the Dead

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      A lighthouse keeper, the nephew living with her and a Japanese employee are on alert for U-boats and graver threats in this chamber musical set in 1942.The ghosts, at least, are having fun.Sunken eyed, in moldering Jazz Age whites, they slink and shimmy around 59E59 Theater’s petite stage — about the size of a backyard swimming pool — luring characters to their various dooms. There are only four living characters and a limited supply of calamity, but still these spirits put in overtime. In Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow’s pocket Gothic, “Whisper House,” the ghosts (Alex Boniello and Molly Hager) deliver 12 of the 14 songs, each a hymn to a wicked hereafter.“It’s good to be a ghost,” they sing. “It’s better to be dead.”A chamber musical planted in Maine’s stony soil in the early 1940s, “Whisper House” had its world premiere in 2010 at the Old Globe in San Diego and played London in 2017. It has spent the past couple of years in a kind of limbo, having clocked a single 59E59 performance before the 2020 theater shutdown. It returns, tentatively, in a moment of renewed anxiety and upgraded face masks.The show, about the fear of the unknown and the trust that love requires, can feel indefinite, too. Directed by Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the cherished theater company the Civilians, it has mood for days. (All credit to Jorge Arroyo and Jeff Croiter’s sepulchral lights and a surfeit of stage fog.) And the music haunts prettily. When the ghosts are singing, anyway. But none of the living characters feel precisely real and the book scenes totter under the weight of metaphor.“Whisper House” opens with a boy named Christopher (Wyatt Cirbus, who looks as if he has never seen the sun), a near-orphan sent away to live with his aunt, Lily, a lighthouse keeper in coastal Maine.Lily (Samantha Mathis) has a Japanese employee, Yasuhiro (James Yaegashi), and a nodding friendship with the local sheriff, Charles (Jeb Brown). This is 1942. Roosevelt’s executive order and the threat of nearby U-boats mean that Yasuhiro has to go. But he wants to stay and Lily wants that, too. The ghosts, with Christopher as their pawn, have other ideas.That sets the lighthouse table for tragedy. But the trouble with the story, conceived with Keith Powell, is that you have to abandon psychology to make it happen. Would a woman with Lily’s stoic good sense trust a traumatized child with a secret? Would Yasuhiro try to bribe him? The more you think about the living characters, the flimsier they seem. If your ghosts are your most substantial creation, what has gone wrong?“We don’t believe in you,” the ghosts sing to the living. They have a point. The plot also absolutely depends on ignoring the wet and the weather.Wyatt Cirbus, left, and Samantha Mathis as the nephew and aunt in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut the music is mostly lovely, if unvaried. As in Sheik’s score for “Spring Awakening,” it melds pop balladry with folk and it carries his very particular mix of romanticism and cynicism. (Sheik has a reputation for one-hit wonders, but this ignores some fine if piecemeal work over the years, as well as his lush Gullah-inflected score for “The Secret Life of Bees.”) The lyrics, co-written with Jarrow (“SpongeBob SquarePants the Musical”), are clever for the ghosts and pallid for everyone else, freighting Yasuhiro with the awkward solo “The Art of Being Unseen.” That neither Yaegashi, always a welcome presence, or Mathis, stuck with a costume-party Katharine Hepburn accent, are vocal powerhouses probably doesn’t help. The orchestrations, credited to Sheik, Jason Hart, Simon Hale and Wiley DeWeese, contain some fine surprises, like the bright blare of a horn. The choreography, from Billy Bustamante, mostly seems an afterthought.If the show spends about 85 of its 90 minutes inclining toward tragedy, its creators have something gentler in mind. The ultimate theme of “Whisper House” is that we must love another or die, a comforting thesis in a moment that demands — in every auditorium — so much mutual faith and care. Then again, there are the paired, smirking ghosts to imply the contrary. Turns out you can love another and die.Whisper HouseThrough Feb. 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      When Britney Came to Brecht’s House

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      The Berliner Ensemble, once known for reverent productions of plays by its founder, Bertolt Brecht, has come roaring into a new decade.BERLIN — In August, the Berliner Ensemble started its season with a bang: a new production of “The Threepenny Opera” that was both an artistic triumph and a box-office smash.Since then, the theater, founded by Bertolt Brecht in what was once East Berlin, has been on a winning streak. This is quite a turnaround for a company that, until recently, was considered tame and even old-fashioned.Yet as of this season, the Berliner Ensemble is perhaps this city’s most consistently exciting playhouse, a place where repertory staples and new works are invigorated by extraordinary actors and innovative directors. Over a single weekend this month, I took in three very different new productions, out of a whopping 20 premieres planned for the season.Along with the new “Threepenny Opera,” the clearest indication of the course that the theater has charted was Christina Tscharyiski’s new version of Brecht’s “The Mother,” a Lehrstück, or “learning play,” from 1932 that the playwright intended to awaken both class consciousness and critical thinking about workers’ struggles.Tscharyiski expands on Brecht’s discussion of the exploitation and dehumanization of the proletariat by adding fresh texts that boldly bring the work into the 21st century. The six actors, playing a variety of roles, hold forth on capitalism’s relationship to feminism and digitization. If this sounds pedantic, I assure you that it is anything but.The production is subtitled “Instructions for a Revolution,” and its nimble players deliver their speeches with manifesto-like zeal. Yet there’s nothing dry or plodding about the production’s forays into theory, especially not with the backing of a rock band performing Hanns Eisler’s original music. And there’s nothing stiff about the eye-popping production, thanks to Janina Audick’s cheeky and colorful set, bare but for a few well-chosen signs and props, and Verena Dengler’s eclectic patchwork costumes.The ensemble in “The Mother — Instructions for a Revolution,” directed by Christina Tscharyiski.JR Berliner EnsembleTscharyiski, a young Austrian director, is the latest in a series of inventive artists who have been invited by the Berliner Ensemble’s artistic director, Oliver Reese, to establish a “new Brecht tradition at the house,” as he told The New York Times in August. In recent seasons, Reese has enlisted a number of progressive theatermakers to help remove the mothballs from a number of Brecht’s plays at the house, which has had a longstanding tradition of effective, if dated, stagings.This is Reese’s fifth season running Brecht’s old house, and the first under his leadership when the Berliner Ensemble has truly gained definition and focus.Beyond engaging distinctive young directors like Tscharyiski, who also oversaw a staggeringly wild production of Elfriede Jelinek’s “Schwarzwasser” earlier this season, and Ersan Mondtag, who has applied his neo-Expressionist gloss to works by Wagner and Brecht, the Berliner Ensemble’s current success is due largely to its troupe of 27 full-time actors, one of the largest in Germany’s theater system. Reese has made a point of casting shows from the company’s acting reserve. Four out of the six actors performing in “The Mother” belonged to the company’s ensemble. I encountered a dozen more house actors the following evening in Mateja Koleznik’s broodingly atmospheric production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” in which no fewer than a dozen ensemble members are part of the sizable cast.Miller’s allegory of the McCarthy witch hunts plays out on a fixed set whose wood panels and green tiles suggest the hallway of a Soviet-era school gymnasium or courthouse. In a program note, Koleznik writes that she conceived of the play’s setting not as Salem, Mass., in 1692 or America in 1953, but rather a “retro future dystopia” that recalls “The Handmaid’s Tale.”Her production achieves a remarkably effective mood of gothic menace, thanks largely to Raimund Orfeo Voigt’s handsome yet confining set, Ana Savic-Gecan’s severe costumes and Rainer Casper’s chiaroscuro lighting. Then there is Michael Gumpinger’s sinister music, chanted by a five-woman chorus credited as “the girls of Salem.” Clad in green schoolgirl uniforms, they loll in chairs, balance upside down and hang from doorways like acrobatic Balthus models.Having effectively established its horror atmosphere, however, the production has little to say about the play itself. Most of the actors, locked into the prison of this claustrophobic production, seem on their own when it comes to embodying Miller’s characters and their thorny relationships. Yet two ensemble members of different generations steal the show.Lili Epply in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” directed by Mateja Koleznik.Matthias HornBettina Hoppe, 47, makes for a tightly coiled Elisabeth Proctor. With modesty and restraint, she breathes convincing life into her pious character, whose fortitude and inner pain are the emotional core of the production. As her rival, Abigail Williams, the Proctors’ former maid and the ringleader of the “bewitched” girls, Lili Epply, 27, a new ensemble member, deftly shifts between the character’s various states — girlish, seductive, defensive, vindictive, and drunk on power — without ever hamming things up.After the vast panorama of “The Crucible,” with its 21 performers onstage, the focus narrowed again for the most unexpected entry of the weekend: “It’s Britney, Bitch,” a one-woman show for the actress Sina Martens, directed by Lena Brasch, that is both a homage to the pop star and a plea that we take Spears seriously. Ultimately, Marten presents the singer as more of a badass than a victim: “‘Toxic’ was way earlier than your ‘toxic masculinity,’” runs one memorable line.Alone onstage in the Werkraum, the company’s tiny supplementary venue, Martens sings, dances and even crawls her way through the 70-minute evening, donning a long blond Barbie wig or bald cap to slip in and out of the pop star’s skin. The dialogue is drawn from both Spears’s statements in court and freshly composed texts by four writers.One is an imagined missive — in language reminiscent of Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” — to Jamie Spears, who controlled much of his daughter’s personal and professional life during a 14-year conservatorship that was dissolved this past November. At other times, Martens grapples with Spears’s double role as a model of female empowerment and a symbol of a crassly sexist culture, reflecting on the news media’s fixation with her breasts and virginity. Why is it so difficult, Martens ponders in one monologue, for society to take female suffering seriously? “Janis Joplin didn’t die from melancholy,” she says. “Janis Joplin died from heroin.”Breaking up all the talk are arrangements of several Spears hits in all but unrecognizable versions by Friederike Bernhardt that turn the pop chartbusters into gloomy cabaret ballads. At the end of the evening, Martens appears in a red jumpsuit like the one Spears famously wore in the music video for “Oops … I Did It Again” to dance the original choreography while lip-syncing along with the pop anthem. Through their mandated masks, the compulsorily vaccinated audience members, sitting shoulder to shoulder, cheered Martens on. Like the Berliner Ensemble’s other new productions I attended, “It’s Britney, Bitch” was sold out: no mean feat in normal times, but little short of miraculous during the pandemic’s latest surge.Die Mutter — Anleitung für eine Revolution. Directed by Christina Tscharyiski. Berliner Ensemble. Through Feb. 11.Hexenjagd. Directed by Mateja Koleznik. Berliner Ensemble. In repertory.It’s Britney, Bitch. Directed by Lena Brasch. Berliner Ensemble. Through Feb. 27. More

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      Interview: Secretariat swing the Hexenhammer

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      Suzy Kohane and Sidsel Rostrup on new show Hexenhammer

      Suzy and Sid created their theatre company, Secretariat, in 2019, just a few months before the world came to a halt in 2020! Their debut show, Hexenhammer, was due to play at the Vault Festival soon, until the festival became another casualty of covid.

      But that didn’t stop the pair finding time to chat to Everything Theatre about why they decided to set up a theatre company, and what Hexenhammer is all about.

      The interview was also the first conducted by Lily Middleton, one of our wonderful reviewing team.

      Hexenhammer

      Heinrich and Jacob are medieval monks. They’re also modern day incels, and sometimes they’re Jordan B Peterson. A new evil and medieval double act tackling misogyny and the manosphere.

      There are currently no confirmed dates for the show. If you want to keep up to date with any announcements of where this show will be playing, follow Secretariat on Twitter via the below link. More

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      As Broadway Struggles, Governor Hochul Proposes Expanded Tax Credit

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      With Omicron complicating Broadway’s return, Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed more assistance for commercial theater, which her budget director called “critical for the economy.”As Broadway continues to reel from the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Kathy Hochul is proposing to expand and extend a pandemic tax credit intended to help the commercial theater industry rebound.Ms. Hochul on Tuesday proposed budgeting $200 million for the New York City Musical and Theatrical Production Tax Credit, which provides up to $3 million per show to help defray production costs.“They were starting to recover before Omicron, and then, as you have all seen, a lot of these performance venues had to shut down again, and those venues are critical for the economy,” the state budget director, Robert Mujica, told reporters.The tax credit program, which began last year under Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was initially capped at $100 million. Early indications are that interest is high: Nearly three dozen productions have told the state they expect to apply, said Matthew Gorton, a spokesman for Empire State Development, the state’s economic development agency.The Hochul administration decided to seek to expand the tax credit program — and to extend the initial application deadline, from Dec. 31, 2022 to June 30, 2023 — as it became clear that Broadway’s recovery from its lengthy pandemic shutdown would be bumpier than expected.Shows began resuming performances last summer, and many were drawing good audiences — Ms. Hochul visited “Chicago” and “Six” in October, while Mr. Gorton saw “The Lehman Trilogy” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”But the industry is now struggling after a spike in coronavirus cases prompted multiple cancellations over the ordinarily lucrative holiday season, and then attendance plunged. Last week, 66 percent of Broadway seats were occupied, according to the Broadway League; that’s up from 62 percent the previous week, but down from 95 percent during the comparable week before the pandemic.“Clearly, we’re not out of the woods yet,” said Jeff Daniel, who is the chairman of the Broadway League’s Government Relations Committee, as well as co-chief executive of Broadway Across America, which presents touring shows in regional markets. Mr. Daniel, still recovering from his own recent bout of Covid, welcomed the governor’s proposal, and said the League would work to urge the Legislature to approve it.“Every show we can open drives jobs and economic impact,” said Mr. Daniel, who noted the close economic relationship between Broadway and other businesses, including hotels and restaurants. “If we can maximize Broadway, we maximize tourism.”Under the program, shows can receive tax credits to cover up to 25 percent of many production expenditures, including labor. As a condition of the credit, shows must have a state-approved diversity and arts job training program, and take steps to make their productions accessible to low-income New Yorkers. More

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      ‘This Beautiful Future’ Review: Love Glows in War’s Shadow

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      Theaterlab stages a gimlet-eyed romance involving a girl and a young Nazi soldier in Occupied France by the playwright Rita Kalnejais.In the tiny lobby of Theaterlab, on West 36th Street, you need to show proof of a booster vaccine before you can get your tickets. You have to wear a high-grade mask, too, though if you show up unequipped, the person at the box office will cheerfully hand one over.If the wartime teenagers at the center of Theaterlab’s current play, “This Beautiful Future,” could project themselves across the decades to our time, they might recognize that spirit of getting on with things, carefully.Not that Elodie (Francesca Carpanini), a 17-year-old in Chartres, France, has much patience for caution herself. It is August 1944, a critical point in World War II, but she is smitten with a boy, and that overrides everything big and scary that the grown-ups have set in motion in the world.Otto (Justin Mark) is 16 and new in town, bashful and awkward and easy to tease. The first time they speak, Elodie razzes him reflexively. But there is a sweetness to him that she falls for, and on the night when they meet in an abandoned house with thoughts of sex and romance swirling in their heads, she wants him to dance with her.“I don’t usually dance,” he says.“Why not?” she asks.“’Cause the girls say no.”Smart girls.Despite the enchanting haze of wistfulness that hangs over “This Beautiful Future,” by Rita Kalnejais, an Australian playwright based in London, the play is a gimlet-eyed romance. Its lovers are as young and unworldly as Liesl and her Nazi boyfriend, Rolfe, in “The Sound of Music.”“This Beautiful Future” achieves a remarkable, aching alchemy, not because Elodie and Otto are star-crossed but because they’re ordinary, and because if not for the war, they might have retained their innocence.Carpanini and Mark, with Austin Pendleton and Angelina Fiordellisi in their karaoke booth on Frank J. Oliva’s set.Emilio MadridOtto is a Nazi, a member of the occupying force; Elodie pushes away her discomfort at that. She is too naïve to realize that her Jewish neighbors who were arrested will not be coming back, or that Otto — the kind of wide-eyed, easily led soldier who fanboys the strongman he calls “Mr. Hitler” — has shot local people dead.Kalnejais frames their story with a benevolent pair of elders, played in Jack Serio’s wonderfully cast production by Angelina Fiordellisi and a rumpled-to-perfection Austin Pendleton. From their upstage karaoke booth on Frank J. Oliva’s set, they watch over the young couple with sympathy and concern. Between scenes, they sing (or, in Pendleton’s case, speak-sing) songs from Elodie and Otto’s time and our own, and utter laundry lists of simple things they would change if they got a do-over in life.“I wouldn’t lose sleep over money,” he says. “Or being unlovable.”“I’d sleep knowing it all changes by morning,” she says.Elodie and Otto, just starting out, don’t have that kind of wisdom yet. But they do have hope, and you can hear it in their plans for a sunny future together. They have no idea how vulnerable they are, or how brutal the world is prepared to be.Otto might have some clue, though, if only he would listen to himself.“There’s nothing cruel about choosing who lives and who dies,” he says, defending his mission. “We’re not just randomly picking people off. I couldn’t do that. This is about choosing a future where everyone’s clean.”What might this morally warped boy have been — what might the world have been — if Hitler had taken an office job instead of going into politics? “This Beautiful Future” wants to know.With an ending that’s gentle and wondrous and fragile as new life, it is a play about choosing, step by step, a genuinely better future — and about what might have been, what never should have been and what can’t ever be taken back.This Beautiful FutureThrough Jan. 30 at Theaterlab, Manhattan; theaterlabnyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘The Kite Runner’ Is Coming to Broadway

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      The 2007 play based on Khaled Hosseini’s novel has been widely produced, including on the West End in London. It will come to Broadway in July.A stage adaptation of the best-selling novel “The Kite Runner” will be presented on Broadway in July.The play, which began its life in California in 2007 and has been widely produced since, is planning a limited run, from July 6 to Oct. 30.The announcement is encouraging news for Broadway, which has been clobbered by closings as the coronavirus pandemic continues to roil the industry. But there remain many producers with the appetite and the financing to bring new shows to Broadway as others end their runs.The “Kite Runner” novel, written by Khaled Hosseini and published in 2003, is a coming-of-age story about a man born in Afghanistan whose life is haunted by his failure to protect a childhood friend. The novel, a surprise hit, has sold millions of copies worldwide, and was adapted into a film in 2007.The theatrical adaptation was written by Matthew Spangler, and was first staged in 2007 at San José State University, where Spangler teaches performance studies. It had an initial professional production in 2009 at the San Jose Repertory Theater, which no longer exists, and has since been staged in multiple countries around the world.The Broadway version will be directed by Giles Croft, who has been directing productions of the play since 2013, when he oversaw a run for the Nottingham Playhouse in Britain; he has since directed productions in the West End and on tour in Britain.The play is slated to run at the Hayes Theater, which, with 600 seats, is the smallest on Broadway. The theater is owned by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater, which will rent the space to “The Kite Runner.”The lead producers are Victoria Lang and Ryan Bogner; Daryl Roth will serve as executive producer. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the producers are seeking to raise up to $5.75 million, but a spokesman said that the actual Broadway capitalization is likely to be closer to $4.6 million. More

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      Review: In ‘Witness,’ Seeking a Haven for Jewish Refugees

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      The experience of Jews who fled Germany in 1939 aboard the St. Louis luxury liner is the subject of a new production from the Arlekin Players Theater.Aboard the luxury liner St. Louis, more than 900 passengers waited helplessly at sea. In May 1939, on the eve of World War II, they were Jewish refugees fleeing post-Kristallnacht Germany. Despite having papers meant to let them into Cuba, they were barred from disembarking once they got there.Hoping for a haven, the boat lingered for a while off the Florida coast, while news stories chronicled the passengers’ increasing desperation. Yet the United States also refused the refugees. As the St. Louis carried them back to Hamburg in early June, The New York Times called it “the saddest ship afloat.”That ship is the setting for “Witness,” a livestreaming documentary theater piece from Arlekin Players Theater in Needham, Mass., where the cast performs in front of green screens. Conceived and directed by Igor Golyak, Arlekin’s artistic director, the production bears witness to stories from wave after wave of Jewish refugees over many decades, and to what it sees as the eternal outsider experience of Jews in the United States.But before its ghostly shipboard vaudeville begins, we watch the Emcee (Gene Ravvin) take a smoke break, venting about the wisdom of presenting this piece in this moment.“The Holocaust, the St. Louis,” he says. “I don’t know if this is my thing. I don’t know if we need to talk about it now. I don’t.”When I watched “Witness” on my laptop Friday night, that bit of fretful grousing had a very different feel than it surely would the next day, when a man in Texas took four hostages during a service at a synagogue, and a nearly 11-hour standoff with state and federal law enforcement officers ensued. Suddenly, once again, the urgency of discussing antisemitism was palpable, and not just to people who feel the menace of that bigotry all the time.Written by Nana Grinstein, with Blair Cadden and Golyak, “Witness” is part variety show, pitting passengers against one another for an unnamed “fabulous prize.” The contest results are decided by the audience members, who vote on their screens after each act. The winner, the night I saw it, was the remarkably graceful “Skating on Glass,” set to voice-over memories of Kristallnacht.With scenography and costumes by Anna Fedorova, virtual design by Daniel Cormino and excellent sound by Viktor Semenov, “Witness” often has the digitally buffed surreality of a video game, which might sound like an insult but is not. Like a lot of online theater, it also has a slight trying-too-hard feel.Before the show starts, audience members are urged repeatedly to allow their computer’s camera to show them onscreen with the rest of the crowd during the performance. (There is no hint that acquiescing is optional, but it is.) When the wall of viewers periodically appeared, though, it often looked like people were reading something on their screens — which they might have been, since “Witness” offers chances to click for more historical context. As a visual, it didn’t exactly foster a feeling of connection.“Witness” is an experimental production, with different energy to each of its three acts, the second of which is all audio, like a radio play. Where this multilayered show loses dramatic potency is in the last act, when contemporary characters take over. They talk about antisemitism in the 21st-century United States, but without depth, and only barely connect it to the hatred against other marginalized groups.Even so, this piece does indeed bear witness to what happens when danger threatens Jews for being Jewish, and the culture shrugs.“It was supposed to be different in America,” the Emcee says. “And now look.”WitnessLivestreaming through Jan. 23; zerogravity.art. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More