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      Review: Danai Gurira Makes a Sleek Supervillain of Richard III

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      At Shakespeare in the Park, athletic stamina and action-hero charisma muddy the meaning of a play about disability.Richard of Gloucester may be the killingest character in Shakespeare, personally knocking off or precipitating the deaths of more than a dozen people who get in his way. To be fair, he does so over the course of three plays, while top competitors like Macbeth and Titus Andronicus have just one.Still, lacking a prophecy, a particular vengeance or a bloody-minded wife to flesh out his motives, Richard remains the most mysterious in his evil; to make a success of the fabulous mess that is “Richard III,” you must decide what to do about that.The tonally wobbly and workmanlike revival that opened on Sunday at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park doesn’t decide. Whether Richard chooses his evil in reaction to the world’s revulsion — a “lump of foul deformity” is one of the nicer descriptions of him — or whether he was merely born to be bad is a question the Public Theater production, starring the tireless Danai Gurira as Richard, does not reach. We never learn what Richard means by the word “determined” when, in his first speech, he says that “since I cannot prove a lover/I am determined to prove a villain.” Is he bent on villainy, or was he pre-bent?Actually, in Robert O’Hara’s staging, that speech no longer comes first. In a sign that he will focus on action and not psychology, O’Hara instead opens with the gruesome final scene of “Henry VI, Part III,” the immediately preceding play in Shakespeare’s chronicle of 15th-century royal intrigue. In O’Hara’s characteristically droll take on awfulness, Richard coolly stabs King Henry to death, for good measure stuffing the corpse’s mouth with the royal pennant and wiping his knife on it too.As a means of showing us that Richard intends to replace the Lancasters on the throne with the Yorks — including, as soon as possible, himself — this is highly effective. And Gurira, the fierce General Okoye of the “Black Panther” films, certainly never disappoints as an action hero. Looking like a supervillain in black knee-high boots and stretch denim trousers, with her hair shaved into heraldic patterns, she is unflaggingly energetic, vocally thrilling and, as events become more hectic, more and more convincing.But for much of the play, the flash and fury of her performance, with its surface swagger and glary stares, too often feel like decoys. As Richard schemes his way from the sidelines to the throne, dispatching two young princes along the way, we get his gall but not his emotion, even as his words tell us that he understands the monstrousness of his methods. “Was ever woman in this humor wooed?” he asks after proposing marriage to Lady Anne, whose husband he has just murdered. As staged by O’Hara, the seduction is humorous in the comic sense too, involving a trick knife, a humongous ring, and a moment when Richard, sitting on the corner of the bier, brushes some part of the inconvenient body aside as if it were a crumb.From left, Richard’s aggrieved mother, the Duchess of York (Monique Holt), with Anne (Ali Stroker) and the ensemble member Thaddeus S. Fitzpatrick in “Richard III.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd bodies, not just body counts, are crucial in “Richard III.” It’s worth noting that Ali Stroker, this production’s Anne, uses a wheelchair. Richard’s aggrieved mother, the Duchess of York (Monique Holt), uses sign language. So does one of the assassins, played by Maleni Chaitoo. Gregg Mozgala, in two important roles — Edward IV, who succeeds the dead Henry, and Richmond, the play’s hero, who eventually kills Richard — has cerebral palsy.Though they all have excellent moments, the admirably diverse casting only underlines for me the problem of a Richard who is not disabled. For centuries, of course, that has been the norm; mostly the role has been played by actors sporting more-or-less absurd humps, lumps, prostheses and braces to simulate the “bunch-back’d toad” described in the text. When Arthur Hughes, an actor with radial dysplasia, took the role at the Royal Shakespeare Company this summer, he was thought to be the first disabled person ever to do so at that theater.It is nice to dream of a time when disabled actors are employed so frequently, and in so many kinds of roles, that we need not discourage others from playing this one. And it’s true that the historical Richard probably suffered from nothing more than scoliosis, as an analysis of his recently discovered skeleton suggests. Shakespeare, I’ve said before, was a poet, not an osteopath.But what was once the norm can now seem a kind of ableist mummery, which this production attempts to sidestep by offering a Richard with no physical impairments at all. When other characters, and even the man himself, scorn his disabilities and mock his ugliness, we are forced by the evidence of our senses to treat the derision metaphorically. (Richard, we tell ourselves, is morally toadlike, not physically so.) And though I usually enjoy being asked to see familiar characters in unfamiliar skins, in this case the sidestep blocks access to the deepest elements of the drama.Those elements are what keep the otherwise ragged “Richard III” in the repertory. The verse is extraordinarily pungent and the questions obviously eternal. When a production has us asking to what extent Richard’s evil is the product of people’s hatred of him, as opposed to his prior hatred of himself, it forces us to ask the same of our own leaders. In this season of our discontent, the scene in which Richard cynically holds up a Bible as a ginned-up crowd clamors to make him king is one you may find familiar.Though we don’t get to ask those profound questions in this production, there are nevertheless compensations. The staging itself is lovely, with Myung Hee Cho’s revolving circles of gothic arches speeding the action and suggesting the inexorability of Richard’s rise and fall. (The arches are lit in beautiful pinks and purples by Alex Jainchill.) Dede Ayite’s witty mixed-period costumes score sociological points at a glance, from Anne’s tacky trophy-wife regalia to the doomed young princes’ spangly gold sneakers.Glistening too are some of the performers in secondary roles, which, in this play, means all roles but Richard. Sanjit De Silva turns Buckingham, the king’s chief enabler, into a hopped-up hype man, high on the fumes of ambient amorality. Paul Niebanck makes a powerful impression as Richard’s brother George, who incorrectly believes he can talk his way out of anything. And as Queen Margaret, the widow of Henry, Sharon Washington demonstrates with brutal efficiency how specific hatred can soon become general, blistering everyone, even herself, in its path.But these coherently interpreted characters do not add up to a coherent interpretation of the play, which wobbles between shouty polemics and a kind of Tudor snark. It may be that “Richard III” is in that sense uninterpretable; written to flatter Shakespeare’s royal sponsors, who were descendants of the victorious Richmond, its brilliance has always borne the sour odor of propaganda. That sourness is not sweetened by the fact that, to modern noses, the good guys smell a lot like the bad ones. If history plays cannot untangle for us what history itself leaves a jumble, they should at least help us figure out why.Richard IIIThrough July 17 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Ain’t No Mo’’ to Take Flight on Broadway

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      The play, by Jordan E. Cooper, is a biting comedy set in an America that offers to relocate Black citizens to Africa.“Ain’t No Mo’,” an uproarious and piercing comedy that imagines a moment in which the United States offers to relocate Black people to Africa, will be staged on Broadway this fall.Lee Daniels, the Hollywood director, producer and screenwriter, is shepherding the production as a lead producer; this will be Daniels’s first Broadway venture.The play, written by and starring Jordan E. Cooper, was previously staged Off Broadway at the Public Theater in 2019, where Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called it “thrilling, bewildering, campy, shrewd, mortifying, scary, devastating and deep.”The new production is scheduled to begin previews Nov. 3 and to open Dec. 1 at the Belasco Theater. The Broadway production, like the Off Broadway one, will be directed by Stevie Walker-Webb; several members of the design team are new to the show.The play is structured as a series of comedic vignettes held together by scenes at an airport, where a lone flight attendant, played by Cooper, is helping passengers board a so-called “reparations flight” at Gate 1619 (the year enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia). The vignettes explore race in America; Green described it as “nothing less than a spiritual portrait of Black American life right now, with all its terrors, hopes and contradictions.”Daniels, whose projects have included the TV series “Empire” and the film “Precious,” said he went to see the show at the Public while scouting for writers, and was blown away. “I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing or what I was seeing — it was the boldest thing that I’d ever seen onstage, and it worked,” he said. “It examines the value of Black lives in our culture in a way that we have yet to see, ever.”Daniels, describing Cooper, who is now 27, as “Norman Lear meets James Baldwin,” worked with the playwright on the BET sitcom “The Ms. Pat Show” (Cooper was credited as showrunner, creator and executive producer). Daniels said he was determined to bring “Ain’t No Mo’” to Broadway, in part because when he was starting out he didn’t think it was possible for a Black writer to get to Broadway, and in part because “white people have been anointing certain plays, and this is not that.”Daniels is lead producing the play with Brian Moreland (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”), who said, “Jordan E. Cooper has found a way to unlock a very difficult conversation with laughter and joy. The season that’s coming is a heavy season, and it’s going to be fun to have a comedy on Broadway.” More

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      ‘Paradise Square’ Will Close on Broadway After Winning One Tony

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      The new musical was an unsuccessful comeback attempt by the storied producer Garth H. Drabinsky.“Paradise Square,” a dance-rich Broadway musical about race relations in Civil War-era New York City, will close Sunday, after weeks trying to overcome persistently soft sales.The musical, which began previews March 15 and opened April 3, was an unsuccessful comeback attempt by the storied producer Garth H. Drabinsky, who after winning three Tony Awards in the 1990s was convicted of fraud in Canada and served time there.The show, set in Lower Manhattan in 1863, is about a low-income neighborhood in which African Americans and Irish immigrants formed a community that was upended by the Civil War draft riots. The musical is big, with a large cast and lots of production numbers, and won praise for the central performance, by Joaquina Kalukango, as well as for the choreography, by Bill T. Jones and others.It was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, but won just one, for Kalukango. Her rousing performance at the Tony Awards of the show’s 11 o’clock number, “Let It Burn,” was well received, but the night did not translate to enough ticket sales to keep the show alive.“We wanted to give ‘Paradise Square’ every chance to succeed, but various challenges proved insurmountable,” Drabinsky said in announcing the closure.The show has had a long and complicated history. It started, a decade ago, as “Hard Times,” by Larry Kirwan of the band Black 47, and the early productions, at the Cell in New York, relied heavily on the music and life story of Stephen Foster, the 19th-century songwriter.In the years since, with Drabinsky at the helm, it has repeatedly changed book writers and expanded other parts of its creative team; it also moved further and further from Foster’s music and biography. Before Broadway, there was a production at the nonprofit Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, and a commercial run in Chicago; neither was especially well-received, but the production pressed on, convinced that word-of-mouth would be strong.The Broadway production was unable to break through during a competitive season, with tourism still down because of the coronavirus pandemic, and a raft of new shows all seeking attention. “Paradise Square,” with an unfamiliar title, a non-famous cast, and middling reviews, was unable to find its footing; it has consistently sold far less than other Broadway musicals and far less than it needed to sell to pay for its weekly running costs; during the week ending June 5, it grossed a paltry $229,337 and played to houses that were only 59 percent full.The musical was capitalized for up to $15 million, according to a recently updated filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money will be lost. More

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      ‘Into the Woods’ Review: Do You Believe in Magic?

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      The Encores! revival of this fairy-tale musical, with songs by Stephen Sondheim, arrives on Broadway with its humor, wonder and humanity intact.After the woods and the wolf and the dark and the knife, Little Red Riding Hood has learned a thing or two. In the first act of “Into the Woods,” while modeling a cloak made from the wolf’s pelt, she shares her wisdom. Be prepared, she advises in “I Know Things Now.” Watch out for strangers. Stephen Sondheim’s bone-dry lyrics supply one more maxim: “Nice,” Little Red concludes, “is different than good.”True. But isn’t it splendid when a work of musical theater is absolutely both?Lear deBessonet’s superb production of the Sondheim and James Lapine modern classic “Into the Woods,” which originated at Encores! in May, has made the journey west and south to Broadway. Despite some cast changes, its humor, wonder and humanity have arrived intact. Indeed, they may glimmer even more brightly at the St. James Theater than they did at City Center. So if you saw that recent staging, should you go into the woods again? Unless your budget doesn’t run to Broadway prices, of course you should. To put it another way: Wishes come true, not free.A pastiche of a half-dozen Perrault and Brothers Grimm fairy tales, “Into the Woods” debuted at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego in 1986 and on Broadway the following year. It had a respectful Broadway revival, directed by Lapine, in 2002, and a misbegotten stint at Shakespeare in the Park in 2012. Disney adapted it into a pretty, somewhat empty live action film in 2014. For decades it has remained a favorite among high school drama clubs though many of those clubs stage only the first act, when happily ever after seems possible.As Sondheim and Lapine knew, a happy ending depends on where you stop the story. Turn enough pages and death puts in an appearance, disillusion, too. Perhaps this seems like a grim lesson from a show with Cinderella (Phillipa Soo), Jack the Giant Killer (Cole Thompson) and Little Red Riding Hood (Julia Lester) among its central characters. But if you reread those original tales, they skew pretty dark. Of Sondheim’s work, only “Sweeney Todd” has a comparable body count. Yet somehow its tone is hopeful.The cast of “Into the Woods,” includes, from left: Kennedy Kanagawa (with Milky White), Cole Thompson, Brian d’Arcy James, Joshua Henry, Patina Miller, Phillipa Soo, David Patrick Kelly, Sara Bareilles and Lester.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA work of giddy playfulness and moral seriousness, “Into the Woods” forges a path from innocence into experience. It asks its characters (the surviving ones, anyway) to exchange the narcissism of childhood — the wishing, the wanting — for a more nuanced ethical framework that emphasizes interdependence. This is the message of the show’s heartbreaker ballad, “No One Is Alone,” which Sondheim articulated even more directly in a 1991 PBS interview. “We are all responsible for each other,” he said.The mood at the St. James on a recent evening did not, however, suggest deep moral inquiry. And judging by the hats worn indoors, the masks not worn at all and at least one surreptitious phone camera, everyone was handling responsibility a little differently. So what were the vibes? Pleasure, anticipation, celebration. When the lights came up, the crowd screamed and screamed and screamed. I expected panties — or given the source material, the occasional dancing slipper — to be thrown at the stage.DeBessonet’s staging, refined but little altered from the Encores! outing, uses only a wide set of stairs and a downstage strip in front of them. The set, designed by David Rockwell, with storybook lighting by Tyler Micoleau, sketches a forest in the simplest terms — descending birch trunks, a rising moon. Behind the actors, sit the musicians, conducted by the invaluable Rob Berman. If your eye should stray from the actors — a big if — you can watch them implement the chiming score, magic made visible.If the production’s style is minimal, it is never austere and on this mostly blank canvas, deBessonet, aided by Lorin Latarro’s playful choreography, paints in rich and plentiful tones. Kindness is a watchword of deBessonet’s work, as seen in her many Public Works productions. A recognition of shared humanity, too. Here it seems to extend everywhere, to actors and audience both. I have rarely seen a show in which the cast had this much fun. In the case of Gavin Creel, who went up on the second verse of “Any Moment” and covered — sort of — by kissing his co-star Sara Bareilles, arguably too much fun. Throughout there is a feeling of largess that only occasionally shades into indulgence. And honestly, some of that indulgence (as in “Agony,” sung to pieces by Creel and his co-prince, Joshua Henry) is a joy, too.Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife and James as the Baker. “Together they find some fine rhythms in the roles of a married couple only beginning to know each other,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBareilles’s performance as the Baker’s Wife has only grown, beanstalk-like, since the Encores! production. Best known as a singer-songwriter and the composer of “Waitress,” she has more recently established herself as a comic actor on “Girls5Eva.” Here, her comedy has both broadened and deepened. While she and Neil Patrick Harris had a wild, nervy chemistry at Encores!, she is now partnered by the mellower Brian d’Arcy James. Together they find some fine rhythms in the roles of a married couple only beginning to know each other.Soo, a shimmering soprano who can make each emotion as legible as skywriting, gracefully replaces Denée Benton. (Benton replaced her in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” when it moved to Broadway; fair’s fair.) And Patina Miller, replacing Heather Headley, renders the Witch with a fierce, dangerous glamour, trading Headley’s initial restraint for more ardent shadings. On this recent evening, the puppeteer Kennedy Kanagawa was out sick, but his understudy, Cameron Johnson, was an able herdsman for Jack’s pal, Milky White. That cow still kills. And the children’s chorus is gone. Thank God.During the second act, I worried — though worry is too strong a word — that maybe this production had become too funny, too lightsome. The devastations of the second act didn’t flatten me the way they had two months ago. But really, who wants flattening right now? Instead this show values resilience, connection.At the end, once Soo had trilled the final ambivalent syllables, the audience leaped to its collective feet. The actors bowed and curtsied and smiled. The rest of us clapped and clapped.No one was alone.Into the WoodsThrough Aug. 21 at the St. James Theater, Manhattan; intothewoodsbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      At BroadwayCon, Hillary Clinton Celebrates Women in the Theater

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      The former secretary of state moderated a discussion on Friday afternoon about successes and barriers for women working in the theater.“There’s a lot to worry about right now in our country and the world,” Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, told a packed room of about 500 people gathered at the grand ballroom at the Manhattan Center on Friday afternoon. “And I think we need theater and the arts more than ever.”Clinton was speaking at the seventh BroadwayCon — an annual haven for the most passionate theater fans — where she was moderating a panel celebrating women on Broadway. It was the first in-person edition of the three-day event, which continues through Sunday, since 2020. (The 2021 edition was virtual.)The event allows musical theater aficionados — many of them costumed as favorite characters like Elphaba from “Wicked” and Anne Boleyn from “Six” — to meet and take photographs with the stars of their favorite shows.Clinton led an hourlong panel titled “Here’s to the Ladies,” a riff on a Stephen Sondheim lyric from the song “The Ladies Who Lunch” from the musical “Company.” Participants included the actresses Vanessa Williams (who stars as the first lady in “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive”), Julie White (who plays the White House chief of staff in “POTUS”), Donna Murphy (the veteran stage actress who has recently appeared in the television series “The Gilded Age” and “Inventing Anna”) and LaChanze (“Trouble in Mind”).Clinton, a noted theater fan, recently saw “POTUS” and said she was “looking forward to seeing a lot more shows in the weeks to come.” Michael Loccisano/Getty ImagesThere was a burst of applause and a 20-second standing ovation after Clinton entered the room, taking a seat in a plush white chair backed by a glowing, Hollywood-style BroadwayCon sign. Clinton, a noted theater fan, said she had attended performances of “Plaza Suite” and “POTUS” in the past week, and that she was “looking forward to seeing a lot more shows in the weeks to come.” (She received a round of applause at “POTUS” on Wednesday night after the scene in which Lilli Cooper, who plays a White House reporter, reviews the accomplishments of the first lady, played by Williams, and asks, “Why aren’t you president?”)Then Clinton had LaChanze and Williams discuss their work with the nonprofit Black Theater United; the group, formed over six months of Zoom meetings during the pandemic, aims to combat racism in the theater community.“There’s so much you can be proud of,” Clinton told them, “with the changes and awareness and consciousness and most effectively in actually hiring and retaining and recruiting more diversity.”The discussion then turned to the women’s experiences of motherhood, including balancing life and work. White extended the conversation beyond the stage, noting that women who have careers have to sort out child care, relying on family when none is available. “It’s an ongoing problem,” she said, joking that she thought one of the two nursing mothers in “POTUS” — one of whom appears onstage — “actually pumped during her audition.”White and Williams also discussed what it was like to work with a mostly female creative team for “POTUS,” which was written by Selina Fillinger and directed by Susan Stroman.From left, LaChanze, Murphy, Clinton, Williams and Julie White spoke about inclusion, motherhood and more during their panel on Friday.Michael Loccisano/Getty Images“It’s a sense of ease — you walk into a room and there’s all females,” Williams said. “You can relax, and be funny, and ask questions, and probe, and know that there is no judgment because you’re a woman.”White added: “There was no right or wrong. There was none of that subtle patriarchy that’s always kind of there, like, ‘Get it right, lady’ — in other words, what my vision is” of what’s right.Clinton spoke to her own experience as an up-and-coming lawyer navigating the workaholic environment of Washington, sharing a story of an older male lawyer telling her to leave her door closed when she went out to dinner so everyone would think she was still working.“I said, ‘But don’t they eat?’” she said. “He said, ‘No, no, you don’t understand, it’s all perception. When you get back from dinner, walk around the office and loudly announce to people, “What are you all doing? Anything I can do to help?” Even if you’ve been at dinner for two hours, they’ll think you’re back. They think you never left.’”“My God,” Clinton said to applause. “That is exhausting — just get your work done, and then go home!”White noted that she had become more comfortable advocating for herself as she’d progressed in her career. When she was young, she said, “You’re always looking at the director like, ‘I hope he likes me,’” she said. “Then you grow up and evolve and you become more interested in what you want to tell.”She said she had become notorious for not taking notes from directors “because the power is in me, the creation is in me,” adding, “I’ve become really irritating now!”Clinton concluded the event by asking each of the women what they hadn’t yet done that they wanted to do.“Besides the show where you and I solve crimes?” White asked. “I want to play the president of the United States.”“Well, I can give you lots of notes on that,” Clinton said.“You know I won’t take them!” White responded to applause.Elexa Bancroft, a 35-year-old artist from Atlanta, attended the panel on a break from selling her mixed-media art at the marketplace downstairs. “I needed that female empowerment in my life so badly,” she said. “Being a young female entrepreneur myself and trying to get my art out into the world and seeing how far those women have come in their jobs, it’s really inspiring.”Other events set for the weekend include “When Broadway Was Black: Celebrating the Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way”; a presentation by the author and cultural historian Caseen Gaines on Saturday afternoon that celebrates the centennial of the 1921 musical comedy “Shuffle Along,” one of the first successful all-Black Broadway musicals; and “Dreaming the Queer Future: TGNC Representation and Playwrights in the American Theater,” a discussion on Sunday morning that includes the Tony-nominated actress L Morgan Lee of “A Strange Loop” and the playwright Roger Q. Mason and focuses on trans and gender nonconforming representation in theater.“It definitely feels more inclusive this year,” Bancroft said. More

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      Larry Storch, Comic Actor Best Known for ‘F Troop,’ Dies at 99

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      His well-honed comic timing, and the mimicry skills he had developed in nightclubs, served him well on one of the sillier sitcoms of the 1960s.Larry Storch, who played a memorable television oddball on the 1960s sitcom “F Troop” and for years carried a secret in his personal life that was odd in an entirely different way, died on Friday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 99.His stepdaughter, June Cross, confirmed the death.Mr. Storch had a long career as a nightclub comic and as a character actor on the stage and the big and small screens. But his other work was dwarfed by the impression he made during the two-season run of “F Troop” on ABC, from 1965 to 1967.The show was a slapstick comedy about an outpost called Fort Courage in Indian country just after the Civil War, and Mr. Storch played Cpl. Randolph Agarn, one of the bigger misfits in a unit full of them. Agarn and his business partner, Sgt. Morgan O’Rourke, played by Forrest Tucker, were constantly hatching moneymaking schemes, most of them involving the local Indian tribe, the Hekawis.O’Rourke was the brains of the partnership; Agarn provided the idiocy, and Mr. Storch’s well-honed comic timing served him deliciously in the role. So did the mimicry skills he had honed in nightclubs, where his act included all sorts of impersonations: In various “F Troop” episodes he played not only Agarn but also assorted Agarn relatives, who somehow found their way to the fort from far-off locales. “I had cousins who came from Moscow, Mexico, Montreal,” Mr. Storch recalled in a 2009 interview. “F Troop” wasn’t on long. But, like many sitcoms in that era of limited television choices, it burned itself into the minds of those who watched it, perhaps in part because it trafficked in the kinds of stereotypes — especially those hard-drinking, firewater-brewing Indians — that would soon disappear from television.Mr. Storch, in a 2007 interview with The Asbury Park Press, credited Mr. Tucker with securing him the role of Agarn.“I was supposed to be the sergeant,” Mr. Storch said, “but when they saw Forrest Tucker dressed in a cavalry suit — he looked like a polar bear — they said, ‘That’s going to be it.’ And Forrest Tucker said: ‘Wait a minute. I’m going to need a corporal around here, and I think he and I would have good chemistry.’” The “he” was Mr. Storch.When not clowning around on the stage or screen, Mr. Storch was party to an unusual secret at home. Before he and his wife, Norma Greve, were married in 1961, she had had a biracial daughter, Ms. Cross, with a Black performer named Jimmy Cross. Mother and child left Mr. Cross soon after June’s birth in 1954, but since the girl was dark-complexioned enough that she could not pass as white, she and her mother began encountering racism. When June was 4, Norma asked friends, a middle-class Black couple in Atlantic City, N.J., to raise her.Later, when the Storches were married and living in Hollywood, June would come to visit, and they would explain to friends that she was an abused child of former neighbors and that they had adopted her, but that she lived most of the year with Black friends.“In those days, people were encrusted in prejudice,” Mr. Storch explained to People magazine in a 1996 interview. “We saw no reason to rock the boat.”June Cross later became a television producer and then a professor at Columbia University. In 1996 she told her story in “Secret Daughter,” a documentary broadcast on PBS, which won an Emmy Award. The personal story of Mr. Storch and his wife has another wrinkle as well. In 1948, years before they were married, they had a daughter, whom they put up for adoption. After Ms. Cross’s documentary came out, the Storches and that daughter, Candace Herman, were reunited.After “F Troop,” Mr. Storch found steady work on other TV shows. He played a reporter who impersonates a priest in a 1969 episode of “The Flying Nun,” with Sally Field.ABC Photo Archives/Disney via Getty ImagesLawrence Samuel Storch was born on Jan. 8, 1923, in Manhattan. His father, Alfred, is described in several biographical listings as a real estate agent, though in a 1983 interview with The Washington Post Mr. Storch said he was a cabdriver. His mother, Sally (Kupperman) Storch, was a telephone operator who later had a jewelry store and ran a rooming house.Ms. Cross, in a telephone interview, said that as a child Mr. Storch would pick up voices and accents from the rooming house guests (Orson Welles, he always said, was one) that served him well later as a comedian.Mr. Storch left high school during the Depression when he found that he could make a few dollars doing impressions in the city’s clubs and acting as M.C. for vaudeville shows. He served in the Navy during World War II. By the time television came along, he was a well-established comic in the city and had used his mimicry skills to gain a foothold in radio.He first came to the attention of television audiences in 1951 as a guest host of “Cavalcade of Stars,” and in 1953 CBS picked him to host the summer replacement show that filled Jackie Gleason’s Saturday night slot. A string of television appearances followed, including a recurring role on “Car 54, Where Are You?” Mr. Storch was also the voice of the TV version of Koko the Clown in scores of cartoon shorts, and teamed with his friend Don Adams as one of the voices in the 1963 cartoon series “Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales.”Then came “F Troop,” which brought Mr. Storch an Emmy nomination in 1967. He worked steadily in television through the 1980s, doing guest spots on “The Flying Nun,” “The Love Boat,” “Love, American Style” and numerous other shows. In 1975 he reunited with Mr. Tucker in a live-action children’s show called “The Ghost Busters,” in which the two men played detectives who searched for spooks. (The show was unrelated to the later “Ghostbusters” movies.)One of Mr. Storch’s Navy friends was a fellow sailor named Bernard Schwartz, who became better known as Tony Curtis and gave Mr. Storch roles in several of his films, including “40 Pounds of Trouble” (1962), “Sex and the Single Girl” (1964) and “The Great Race” (1965).Mr. Curtis and Mr. Storch teamed up again years later, in 2002, in a stage musical version of “Some Like It Hot,” the 1959 Billy Wilder movie that had starred Mr. Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. (The show drew upon the 1972 Broadway musical “Sugar” and added new material.) Mr. Curtis played not his original role, a musician on the run from gangsters who joins a band disguised as a woman, but the millionaire Osgood Fielding; Mr. Storch played the band manager, Bienstock.That show, which toured the country, never made Broadway, but Mr. Storch had a half-dozen Broadway appearances to his credit, beginning with “The Littlest Revue,” a 1956 show that also starred Joel Grey. In 1958 he appeared in the play “Who Was That Lady I Saw You With?,” and he had roles in revivals of “Porgy and Bess” (1983), “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1986), “Annie Get Your Gun” (2000) and “Sly Fox” (2004). His other films included Blake Edwards’s “S.O.B.” and the disaster movie “Airport 1975.” His vocal talents turned up in numerous cartoons as well as in McDonald’s commercials (“the most money I ever made,” he said in 2009).Mr. Storch’s wife died in 2003. His brother, Jay, an actor who used the name Jay Lawrence, died in 1987. In addition to Ms. Cross and Ms. Herman, he is survived by a stepson, Lary May, the author of several books on film and popular culture; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Mr. Storch at a birthday party for Jerry Lee Lewis at B.B. King Blues Club and Gril in Manhattan in 2017. He continued to make public appearances late in life.Derek Storm/Everett CollectionMr. Storch was still making public appearances late in life. In June 2014 he served as mayor for a day of Fort Lee., N.J., a town where he had once performed. That September he appeared at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles and was honored with a star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars.In 2016 he was honored by Passaic, N.J., the city the fictitious Corporal Agarn called home. Mayor Alex Blanco said at the ceremony that Passaic had been mentioned all over the world because of “F Troop”; Mr. Storch said that he had never been there before, but that he had chosen Passaic for his character’s hometown because “it sounded tough.”In his later years Mr. Storch maintained an active Facebook page and posted videos on TikTok. He also put in appearances at Wild West City, a western-themed attraction in Stanhope, N.J. In July 2021, at 98, for what was billed as his final public appearance, he toured the site in a sporty red sedan, hamming it up for onlookers.Mr. Storch could sometimes be seen playing the saxophone, a lifelong hobby, in Central Park. Another signature activity, even late in life, was standing on his head. “It helps your breathing,” he explained in 2002 to a reporter for The Detroit News, while standing on his head. “The blood goes to your brain, whatever brain you have.” More

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      ‘He Presented Another Path’: Actors and Directors on Peter Brook

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      Patrick Stewart, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Tina Landau and Tim Robbins on being challenged and inspired by the legendary theater maker, who died last weekend.The actor Kathryn Hunter heard the news of the director Peter Brook’s death, last weekend at 97, in a telephone call from his longtime collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne. Then Hunter, an Olivier Award winner who played the witches in Joel Coen’s film “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” set off across London for Shakespeare’s Globe.“I’m playing Lear, which was, of course, Peter’s great, great play,” she said the other day, describing herself as overwhelmed at his loss after many years of working with him, including in New York. “As I was cycling in, I felt and almost saw a huge great light, and I felt it was Peter’s spirit.”That sort of mystical event seems apt for Brook, who over his long, globe-trotting career attained a kind of guru status — not least through his nine-hour landmark production “The Mahabharata,” a 1985 adaptation of the Sanskrit epic, and with revered texts like his 1968 book of theater principles, “The Empty Space.”Always in print: Brook’s “The Empty Space” laid out his principles of theater. London-born and Paris-based, Brook directed nine shows on Broadway, most famously his “Marat/Sade” in 1965 and his enduringly influential “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1971. In recent decades in New York, he was a questing favorite at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Theater for a New Audience.Friends and colleagues who worked with him on this side of the Atlantic, and theater makers who never met him but look reflexively to his tenets — including openness and presence in the moment — spoke by phone this week about Brook’s impact as an artist and a human being. These are edited excerpts from those interviews.Can you spot Ben Kingsley in Brook’s 1970 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Stratford-upon-Avon, England? (He’s hanging top right.)Donald Cooper / Alamy Stock PhotoPatrick StewartThe actor on being cast, as a replacement, in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in which he made his Broadway debut as Snout the tinker.One day I got off the subway. I found Peter standing alongside me, and we set off to cross the road when the lights were pedestrian lights. Peter said, “How are you?” I said, “Actually, Peter, I’m not very happy.” And he stopped dead, right in the middle of Seventh Avenue, and he turned to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “What is it? What’s wrong?” By then, the lights had changed, and the traffic was roaring down Seventh Avenue. He said, “No, no, tell me. I want to know.” I had to take him by the arm and almost drag him out of the way. We would have both been knocked down. What I mean is that when he turned to me and said, “What is it?,” there was no question, from the look in his eyes, that I was the only thing of importance in that moment. And that impressed me very, very much.Robert FallsThe director — who said he revisits Brook, via “The Empty Space” and films of his work, each time he stages a classic — on vivid first impressions of Brook’s artistry.I grew up in a farming community in downstate Illinois, the land of corn and soybeans. And when I was 12 years old, in 1966, I opened up America’s magazine: Life magazine. And there was this spread of “Marat/Sade” that was terrifying and gorgeous — a two-page spread of an image of beheaded aristocrats. Just a few years later, I saw “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in its American tour. It remains to this day the most mind-blowing experience of the theatrical event, of how theater can be made: circus, magic and absolute clarity of a text, and joy, actually, and surprise — again, terror. He really did, I think, change the way we look at Shakespeare.Tina LandauThe director on what Brook has bequeathed.He really catapulted us into the modern era of how we experience space when we sit down and collaborate. And that theater is a collaborative form, and that the greatest and ultimate collaboration is between the performers and the audience.Brook, right, with the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney.via ALL ARTSTarell Alvin McCraneyThe playwright and screenwriter on witnessing Brook “model a life as an artist” at his Paris base.He was consistently workshopping plays, and I would find time to go do them. I spent the last however many years that was, 15 years, basically being a part of this ad hoc company around the world, which many people were. I always left it feeling very full. Like I had done a retreat, almost, in theater. Sometimes I would write, sometimes I would act, sometimes I would just watch. Sometimes I would move a set piece. And we always shared a meal. No matter what, there was a break so that we could be human beings and have a meal.Peter would attract a whole room full of folk. But the room understood that there was a space for everybody here. He was showing us that that is the practice: You have to practice making room for everyone.Tim RobbinsThe actor-director on Brook as challenge and inspiration.Reading “The Empty Space” when I was in college gave me the confidence to know that the theater that I wanted to do was legitimate and important. For me, that was the bible. I actually went to Paris a couple months ago, and I was going to meet him in person and have some lunch, and he was too ill. But Peter will be alive for a long time. He presented another path.A scene from “The Mahabarata” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in 1987.Giles Abegg, via BAM Hamm ArchivesKaren Brooks HopkinsThe former president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music on the magic dust that Brook sprinkled in 1987 by staging “The Mahabharata” there, for which BAM converted an old cinema into what is now its Harvey Theater.When you run an arts institution, you need great artists to work there. And Peter Brook made our reputation. I mean, there were others, too. But Brook, “The Mahabharata,” it just locked it in. It changed the whole Brooklyn thing, from people not coming to people knowing that this was the place to see something that would blow your mind that you wouldn’t see anywhere else.Jeffrey HorowitzThe artistic director of Theater for a New Audience, Brook’s frequent New York stage in recent years, on first pursuing him in the early 1970s.I decided to go out to Aspen, Colorado, and track down where Peter Brook was staying. I waited in the Hotel Jerome, and he came out. I said, “Mr. Brook, I wonder if I could audition for you. I’m a great admirer of your work.” Instead of dismissing me, he stopped and looked at me. Then he said, “What have you done?” I said, “Well, I’ve just graduated from drama school, so I don’t have any professional credits.” He just shook his head, gently: No. Didn’t say a word. But the troupe that he was with, I got to know some of the actors. They would invite me to rehearsals. So every time they came to New York for years, I would go to these rehearsals. And he let me watch.Gregory MosherThe director on bringing Brook and his production “Tierno Bokar” to Columbia University and Barnard College in 2005.One night, Peter was sitting on the aisle about halfway up, and right next to him was a student on his cellphone. The show started and the kid did not put away the cellphone. I just braced myself for Peter walking up the aisle where I was sitting in the back row and saying, “What is going on with the cellphones?” I didn’t let him get any momentum. I went down to him afterward and said, “It was good tonight, right? It’s so beautiful.” And he said, “Yes, the most interesting thing happened. There was a boy sitting next to me and he seemed very engaged in the play and also on his phone. And that was so interesting to me,” says Peter, “that both of those things could be true.”Michael Pennington in Arin Arbus’s 2014 production of “King Lear.”Ruby Washington/The New York TimesArin ArbusOn Brook giving her the courage to direct “King Lear,” which she did to acclaim for Theater for a New Audience in 2014.I felt very interested in the play. I also felt like, who the hell do I think I am? I was kind of paralyzed by that. We were in Paris for some reason, so I went to his apartment, and we talked for like half an hour. He was like, “What interests you about the play? What do you feel connected to?” You can talk about those plays for hours with people, and we didn’t. It was light. He was like, “Oh, well, you have to do it. There’s no way to find out the answers to the questions that you have unless you do it.” Kathryn Hunter and Marcello MagniThe actors, who are a married couple, on their yearslong collaboration with Brook.Hunter It was slow and it takes time, because what he’s looking for is not product. It was more about peeling away anything that was obstructing what is essentially you, so that you could really share something very fine and mysterious with the audience. When we’d go away and work with other people, coming back to Peter, I’d feel: I’m a very crass, crude person. I have to sensitize myself again.Our last production, and Peter’s last production, was Beckett’s “Happy Days,” in French.Magni We did a version where Willie appeared and was not hidden. Peter wanted to see the relationship between Winnie and Willie.I now resist a lot when I’m in a rehearsal room when I feel there is too much of a concept before you start to work. He allowed us a journey. With failure and with accidents and with bumps. But at the end, we would have come up with the stories. He was sending us the message: Go inside yourself. Be true. More

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      Kenward Elmslie, Poet and Librettist, Dies at 93

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      He collaborated on operas with Jack Beeson and Ned Rorem and published numerous poetry books. Late in life, he was victimized by theft.Kenward Elmslie, who wrote poetry, opera librettos and stage musicals, and who late in life made headlines when his chauffeur bilked him out of millions of dollars and several valuable artworks, including one by Andy Warhol, died on June 29 at his home in the West Village. He was 93.The poet Ron Padgett, a friend since the 1960s, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Mr. Elmslie had been dealing with dementia for many years.Mr. Elmslie, a grandson of the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, became interested in musical theater while in high school, and in 1952 he met and became a lover of John Latouche, a lyricist who worked with Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington and others and had numerous Broadway credits. Mr. Elmslie is said to have helped Mr. Latouche on some of his projects, generally uncredited.After Mr. Latouche’s death in 1956, Mr. Elmslie continued to live in the house they had shared in Vermont, alternating between there and Manhattan. And he began to have success himself as a lyricist and librettist.He provided the libretto for the Jack Beeson opera “The Sweet Bye and Bye,” which was first performed by the Juilliard Opera Theater in New York in 1957. In 1965 he worked with Mr. Beeson again, on “Lizzie Borden,” an embellished version of the famed ax-murder case, which premiered that year at City Center in New York. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.“The performers, the composer, the librettist, the designer and the director shared the bows at the end,” Howard Klein wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Many bravos were heard.”Ellen Faull and Richard Krause in a scene from the Jack Beeson opera “Lizzie Borden,” for which Mr. Elmslie wrote the libretto. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.NET Opera, via PhotofestMr. Elmslie’s other opera credits included the libretto for Ned Rorem’s “Miss Julie” (1965). He also dabbled in songwriting — his “Love-Wise,” written with Marvin Fisher, was recorded by Nat King Cole in 1959 — and in theater, even accumulating a Broadway credit as book writer and lyricist for “The Grass Harp,” a musical based on a Truman Capote novel that opened in 1971 but, unloved by critics, closed days later.W.C. Bamberger, in the introduction to “Routine Disruptions,” a 1998 collection of Mr. Elmslie’s poems and lyrics, wrote that it was during lulls in his opera and lyric-writing work that Mr. Elmslie began trying his hand at poetry. He was plugged into the New York art and literary scene and had befriended Barbara Guest, John Ashbery and other poets. His first collection, “Pavilions,” appeared in 1961, followed by more than a dozen others, including “Motor Disturbance” (1971) and “Tropicalism” (1975).In the 1970s, as editor of Z Press and its annual Z Magazine, Mr. Elmslie published many of the poets he admired. His own work defied categorization. There was plenty of wit, as in “Touche’s Salon,” which shamelessly dropped names to evoke a 1950s gathering at Mr. Latouche’s penthouse:Meet Jack Kerouac. Humpy and available.His novel On The Road is unreadable. And unsalable.John Cage is sober, Tennessee loaded.Better not ask how his last flop show did.But his more serious poetry could be ambitious, as well as dense. Mr. Ashbery once said that it was like the notes of “a mad scientist who has swallowed the wrong potion in his lab and is desperately trying to get his calculations on paper before everything closes in.”Mr. Elmslie came to combine his various hats — librettist, songwriter, poet — both in his books, some of which were collaborations with visual artists, and in his poetry readings, which might find him in costume delivering a song in addition to reading his verses. Susan Rosenbaum, reviewing his 2000 book, “Blast From the Past: Stories, Poems, Song Lyrics & Remembrances,” in Jacket magazine, noted that the printed page didn’t do justice to his wide-ranging interests.“For an artist as multitalented as Elmslie, the book is a limiting format: One wants to see and hear his musical works in performance, to visit the galleries where his visual collaborations are displayed,” she wrote. “But the very ability to elicit this desire — to reveal poetry’s affinities with song, theater and visual art — is a measure of the talent of this unique poet.”Kenward Gray Elmslie was born on April 27, 1929, in Manhattan. His father, William, met Constance Pulitzer, Joseph Pulitzer’s youngest daughter, when he was working as a tutor for another of the Pulitzer children. They married in 1913.Kenward grew up in Colorado Springs and Washington, D.C., and graduated from Harvard University in 1950 with an English degree. In New York in the 1950s and ’60s, he mixed easily with an artsy crowd. A 1965 article in The Times about a trendy party in the Bowery had him among the guests, with Warhol, the photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, the pioneering electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, all gathered to hear a reading by William S. Burroughs.The year before that party, Warhol had given Mr. Elmslie one of his Heinz ketchup box sculptures, a classic example of Warholian Pop Art. More than four decades later, in 2009, the work was stolen, along with other valuable items and several million dollars. “Pulitzer kin hit in pop art scam,” the headline in The Daily News read.In 2010, James Biear, who had been Mr. Elmslie’s chauffeur and caretaker, was indicted in the thefts. News accounts at the time said he took advantage of Mr. Elmslie’s dementia, which was already in its early stages. In 2012 Mr. Biear was sentenced to 10 years in prison.In 1963 Mr. Elmslie began a long relationship with Joe Brainard, an artist and writer with whom he also collaborated on various projects. Mr. Brainard died in 1994. Mr. Elmslie is survived by a half sister, Alexandra Whitelock. More