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      ‘Cabaret,’ Starring Eddie Redmayne, Leads Olivier Award Nominees

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      A revival of the 1966 musical, with Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles, is up for 11 awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.LONDON — A revival of “Cabaret” that has been a topic of conversation here for its sky-high ticket prices as much as its stellar cast dominated the nominations for this year’s Olivier Awards — Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys — that were announced on Tuesday.The musical secured 11 nominations including a nod for best musical revival, as well as for best actor and actress in a musical for its stars Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley.Its prominence was perhaps unsurprising given the acclaim “Cabaret” has received since opening last December in a production that transforms the West End’s Playhouse Theater into a seedy nightclub straight out of 1920s Berlin.Audiences enter the show through the theater’s backstage corridors, and can even have a preshow meal once inside, partly explaining why tickets cost up to 325 British pounds (or about $420).Matt Wolf, reviewing the show for The New York Times, called it “nerve-shredding” for its portrayal of a world on the verge of Nazism. Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph called it “2021’s kill-for-a-ticket theatrical triumph,” suggesting readers “dig like your life depended on it into your pockets” to pay for a ticket.Even with such praise, “Cabaret” faces stiff competition in the musical categories, especially from a revival of Kathleen Marshall’s 2011 Broadway production of “Anything Goes” at the Barbican, which secured nine nominations including for best musical revival and a best actress nomination for Sutton Foster as Reno Sweeney. Foster won a Tony in 2011 for the same role.Sutton Foster has been nominated for an Olivier for her role in “Anything Goes.”Peter Nicholls/ReutersIn the nonmusical categories, the nominations are led by “Life of Pi,” Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s best-selling novel telling the story of a boy stuck on a lifeboat with a tiger. That play, at Wyndham’s Theater, has secured nine nods, including a best supporting actor nomination for the seven puppeteers who bring the tiger to life.“Life of Pi” was also nominated for best new play, where it is up against “2:22: A Ghost Story,” a haunted-house thriller that was at the Noël Coward Theater, “Cruise,” a tale set in London’s Soho in the ’80s (that was at the Duchess Theater), and “Best of Enemies,” James Graham’s play about the rancorous 1968 TV debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal that was at the Young Vic.One of the most highly contested categories is likely to be best actress in a play, where Cush Jumbo is nominated for her performance as Hamlet at the Young Vic Jumbo is up against Emma Corrin, nominated for her role in “ANNA X” at the Harold Pinter Theater, the singer Lily Allen for “2:22: A Ghost Story” and Sheila Atim for a revival of “Constellations,” at the Vaudeville Theater.The winners will be announced in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London on Apr. 10. More

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      Interview: Exploring far flung lands with Lulu Raczka

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      Writer Lulu Raczka on reworking of the classic Gulliver’s Travels for a new younger audience

      The Unicorn Theatre is inviting us on an epic, exciting adventure for ages 7+ this Easter, in the somewhat surreal world of Gulliver’s Travels. This production is a radical reimagining of Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satirical novel. Just like in the original we get to look at our world from new perspectives, but now we have a whole host of new and interesting ways to do so. Everything Theatre asked writer Lulu Raczka tell us a bit more about what to expect.

      So Lulu, in this production Lemuel Gulliver is recast from an 18th-century, average man, who encounters strange lands and peculiar people after being shipwrecked, to a 21st-century girl who desperately wants to escape her home life. They seem radically different. How can such an old novel give insight into our modern world?

      Jonathan Swift wrote a book in which a man travels through multiple societies that are very different from his, and from which he is very different. Some value intellect above all, some strength: in some Gulliver is giant and powerful, in some tiny and insignificant. All of these different societies make us reflect on our own – what do we value, and what should we value? And what’s our place within the world? Are we powerful? And if we are, what do we do with that power? Though the specifics are different, the fundamental questions Swift asks are as important in the 21st Century as they were in the 18th. In terms of making Gulliver a teenage girl, we thought that as anyone can ask these big questions, and everyone should, why not make our Gulliver more reflect the young people we were making the show for?

      Are you still planning to take your audience to new and extraordinary places, like in the book, seeing the world differently?

      We have been very ambitious, and tried to put most of the book on stage! So through the unbelievable talent of the cast and design team, we’ll see Gulliver be giant amongst the Lilliputians, be tiny in Brobdingnag, chat to the mathematicians and scientists in Laputa, and be the only human amongst the Houyhnhnms, the sentient horses. Hopefully after this, the audience will see the world a little differently!

      You have a great team of creatives on board and I’m particularly excited to experience the sound design by the amazing Ringham brothers. How has it been working with such diverse talents? Have you found new possibilities have emerged from these interesting collaborations?

      The show would never have been possible without such close collaboration with the design team, most of whom have been on board since the first morning of the first workshop. Though it’s always true that collaboration is necessary to create great theatre, usually the script is written first, with the design teams hired later; and sometimes the writer doesn’t interact with the design team at all. This couldn’t happen here. Jaz and I needed to know what was actually possible, so before a word was written we were planning with Rosie, Jess, Ben, Max and Jack, and now continue that with Owen, Josh and Jack. This is such a great way to work – and I hope I’ll be able to do it more in the future!

      The show was delayed for ages by the pandemic, so it must feel great to be finally getting it on stage. Has it changed much since it was originally devised? Has anything unexpected emerged from the pause?

      It hasn’t changed that much really, except for one scene. There’s a section in the book in which Gulliver interacts with famous people from the past, and so in our show, our Gulliver talks to Winston Churchill. The scene was always condemning him, but the conversations that have occurred in the last few years about racism, and how we discuss it, made us rethink how we went about condemning him. It’s not a massive change, but a very important one.

      We’re promised laughter, playfulness and invention, all of which are great reasons to see the show, but apart from being a fun entertainment for the Easter hols, is this a production that challenges young audiences to think about particular themes?

      I think underneath all the silliness there’s some pretty big themes. The book asks big questions about how we relate to the world around us, and about the kind of world we want to live in, and I hope our show has brought these thoughts alive. In our show we’ve added a framing device of Gulliver entering the world of the book to escape a difficult situation at home, so we’re also asking questions about the function of storytelling, and the place of imagination.

      What do you hope that the audience members will take away from their experience?

      I hope they think about all the big ideas, but I also hope they have fun on the bus home wondering what they’d do if they were really, really tiny.

      Thanks so much to Lulu for taking time to chat with us. We’ll be reviewing the play soon, so watch this space to find out more about it!

      Gulliver’s Travels is a Unicorn Production, and is playing now until Saturday 16 April. Tickets start from £8 for under 18s, and £14 for adults. Further information and booking via the below link. More

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      The Flea Theater, Experimenting Again, Walks a New Tightrope

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      Back from the brink of extinction, the Off Off Broadway fixture is testing a new structure that gives artists the autonomy they demanded.Since its inception in the mid-1990s, the Flea Theater has positioned itself as a haven for experimentation, an unpretentious home for risk-taking and for young actors eager to get their start.But for years, discontent simmered beneath the surface.Actors were frustrated by the fact that the theater asked for lots of work with no pay; Black artists felt mistreated even while working on shows meant to center Black experiences; artists felt exploited, intimidated, voiceless.In 2020, the bad feelings bubbled over when an actress who had performed at the Flea, Bryn Carter, published a letter detailing her experiences, pointing out what she described as elitist, racist and soul-crushing encounters and attitudes.When the reckoning at the organization collided with the pandemic shutdown, the survival of the Flea became uncertain.“What we’re doing is driven by our mission,” said the Flea’s artistic director, Niegel Smith, right, with Hao Bai, the show’s lighting, projection and sound designer.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesBut now, the Off Off Broadway nonprofit theater is fighting to come back — this time with a new hybrid structure built to give complete artistic autonomy to a group of writers, directors and actors that has spoken out against the old Flea. That group, now known as the Fled Collective, is being given funding by the Flea to stage its own programming in the theater’s TriBeCa space. In addition, the Flea will produce shows of its own, but now all actors will be paid and there will be a focus on work by “Black, brown and queer artists.”The first Flea-produced show at the theater in two years, “Arden — But, Not Without You,” took the stage last month and just extended its run.But major challenges, chiefly financial, remain. When the organization’s longtime producing director, Carol Ostrow — a target of much of the criticism — retired following calls for her ouster, about half of the Flea’s board members followed her out the door. The departures resulted in a loss of trustee donations and fund-raising that depleted the organization’s $1.5 million budget by about a third, said Niegel Smith, the organization’s artistic director.Dolores Avery Pereira, a leader of the Fled Collective, which is trying to build a new future within the reconfigured Flea, said she is not discouraged.“I believe that the money will come,” she said. “I choose my artistic freedom every time.”When the Flea was born in 1996, the founders, who included the theater couple Jim Simpson and Sigourney Weaver, viewed it as a passionately edgy alternative to the commercial imperatives of Broadway.From its beginnings, the Flea was seen by aspiring actors as a place they could exercise their talents without needing to present a long résumé or a fancy degree at the door.“If you didn’t go to Juilliard or Yale or Brown, this was a place you could start,” said Adam Coy, a Fled leader who joined the Bats, the Flea’s resident acting company, in 2017.The first Flea-produced show at the theater in two years, “Arden — But, Not Without You,” during rehearsals in January.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe new iteration of the Flea pushes the parameters of that kind of experiment a good bit further in its effort to dismantle traditional hierarchies — think autocratic impresarios — that have long ruled over theater spaces. In its push to democratize the production of works, the Flea is echoing the sorts of demands heard in theater communities across the country over the past two years as the pandemic’s threats to the industry and urgent calls for racial equity have spurred collective organizing among artists.But to pull it off under new financial constraints, the Flea’s leaders have had to reckon with the reality that its output may not match what it had been in the past, especially now that all actors will be paid. (In March 2020, for example, the Flea had 13 employees; it currently has two.)“We do a whole lot less now, and we’ll probably do a whole lot less for a long time,” said Smith, who is one of few Black artistic directors at New York City theaters. “But at least what we’re doing is driven by our mission.”The issue of pay for actors had been kicking around the Flea for years. Some recalled receiving no payment except a single stipend of $25 or $75 after spending weeks in rehearsals, on top of a requirement to spend several hours a month doing unpaid labor around the theater.The issue became particularly frustrating to actors when the Flea opened a new three-theater performing arts complex in TriBeCa which cost an estimated $25 million in 2017. As the Flea was transitioning to the new building, the phrase “pay the Bats” appeared written on the walls of its old theater, said Jack Horton Gilbert, who had been a member of the Bats for about five years. Beyond the question of surviving in New York, the lack of pay focused attention, critics said, on the demographics of who could afford to work for free.Leaders of the Flea have said that, going forward, they intend to employ a more democratic vision of artistic creation that gives actors, writers and other creatives greater voice in productions. Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“By not paying actors, the diversity of the company suffers because the people who can actually be around and invest are privileged,” Carter, who had been part of the Bats troupe, wrote in her June 2020 letter. “Many actors of color have not felt welcome or safe in your doors.”Much of Carter’s criticism was directed at Ostrow, who she said had mistreated her, generally was patronizing toward Black creatives and did “not know how to speak to Black people.” Once, she said, Ostrow had touched her hair without permission. Another time, she said, Ostrow had mixed up a Black lead actor and her understudy.Flea leaders apologized. Ostrow wrote Carter in June 2020 to say that she was “accountable for the behavior that you describe” and was “deeply sorry.”Later that month, a group of artists with the Flea posted a letter on social media condemning the theater for, among other things, creating a culture of “intimidation and fear.” The letter cited a case in which Black artists who took issue with a “trauma-centered” season of works about race were told, the critics said, that they could be replaced; it also repeated the concerns about expecting actors to work for free.“We have seen these same artists paid to cater your events and galas, rather than for their creative work,” the letter said.Members of the Fled Collective met in the Flea Theater in TriBeCa to plan their first season.Christopher Garofalo In response, the Flea’s leadership declared it would pay all artists for their work and said the theater needed to “reckon with the intersection of racism, sexism and pay inequity.”Later that year, the artists’ collective delivered demands to the Flea’s board, which included involving artists of color in planning the season, making sure there was board representation from their ranks and getting rid of Ostrow.In November 2020, Ostrow, who had been working without a salary for years, announced her retirement. Soon after that, five members of the board resigned, Smith said, resulting in a loss of about $475,000 in annual contributions. (Ostrow and her husband, the board member Michael Graff, had been major funders: the couple was listed as having donated more than $500,000 to the Flea’s new building.)Neither Ostrow nor her husband responded to requests for comment.Relations only soured further when the board, in what it said was a cost-saving measure, decided to dissolve its resident artist programs, including the Bats, infuriating the artists’ collective that had worked for months to try to shape an organization that they would be willing to return to.In a statement posted to social media, the artist group, now operating as the Fled, made a bold appeal to the Flea to “hand over the keys.” In a statement to New York Magazine days later, Simpson and Weaver threw their support behind the idea.Later on, Smith shocked Pereira when he told her that he and the board would be willing to explore actually transferring the property in TriBeCa to the Fled.Artwork by Carrie Mae Weems, one of the creators of “Arden,” in the rehearsal space. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe agreement that was actually struck was more modest, but still extraordinary. The Flea, which continues on as a nonprofit, will still own the building. But the Fled, which is made up of about 100 artists, will operate there under a three-year residency, whose costs will be underwritten in part by the Flea. The theater will also provide production and marketing support.Separately, the Flea is producing its own content, like “Arden,” which was funded by a collection of grants. “Arden” includes sculpture and video by the visual artist Carrie Mae Weems, music by the multi-hyphenate artist Diana Oh, as well as improvisational song by the choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili and the designer and director Peter Born.Smith’s own segment of the show addresses the Flea’s recent turmoil head on, something he felt was necessary to do in the first work under the Flea’s new mandate.Wearing a white robe and no shirt, Smith walks around the stage of the small black-box theater in a ritualistic trance, muttering — and eventually shouting — the phrase “this place is fraught.”“This place has held oppressive structures fueled by coercion and ambition,” he says in the show.Some artists say they are still skeptical that an organization with the same artistic director can truly start anew. Others are simply uninterested in performing, or even sitting in the audience, at the Flea again after their personal experiences there.“I just moved on from wanting to be involved in any way in that space,” Carter said, noting that she nonetheless supports the Fled’s work.The leaders of the Fled, which plans to host its first developmental workshop at the Flea in May for a play by Liz Morgan, are unsure whether it will go beyond the three-year contract. The goal right now is to hold the Flea to the promises it has made and to create a model for an effective artist-led theater collective, said Raz Golden, one of the Fled’s leaders.“It hasn’t been easy,” Pereira said. “But it’s a relief to be at the art-making part.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      Tony Walton, Award-Winning Stage and Screen Designer, Dies at 87

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      He worked with the directors Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse and Jerry Zaks, winning three Tony Awards and an Oscar for “All That Jazz.”Tony Walton, a production designer who brought a broad visual imagination to the creation of distinct onstage looks for Broadway shows over a half-century, earning him three Tony Awards, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.His daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, whose mother is Julie Andrews, said the cause was complications of a stroke.In more than 50 Broadway productions, Mr. Walton collaborated on designing the sets (and sometimes, the costumes) with directors like Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse and Jerry Zaks, winning Tonys for “Pippin,” “The House of Blue Leaves” and “Guys and Dolls.”He also worked in film, where he shared the Oscar for the art and set decoration of Mr. Fosse’s “All That Jazz” (1979); years earlier, Mr. Walton designed the interior sets and the costumes for “Mary Poppins” (1964), starring Ms. Andrews, to whom he was then married.Mr. Walton’s television work included “Death of Salesman” (1985), which starred Dustin Hoffman, Kate Reid and John Malkovich, for which he won an Emmy.Before the opening of his final Broadway show, “A Tale of Two Cities,” in 2008, Mr. Walton described his process of conceiving a production’s design.“These days, I try to read the script or listen to the score as if it were a radio show and not allow myself to have a rush of imagery,” he told Playbill. “Then, after meeting with the director — and, if I’m lucky, the writer — and whatever input they may want to give, I try to imagine what I see as if it were slowly being revealed by a pool of light.”Mr. Walton with Julie Andrews and their daughter, Emma, in 1963.Associated PressDonald Albrecht, the curator of an exhibition of Mr. Walton’s theater and film work at the Museum of the Moving Image in 1989, told The New York Times in 1992: “He never puts a Walton style on top of the material. He comes from within the work out.”Mr. Walton worked with Mr. Zaks on many Broadway shows, including “Guys and Dolls,” a revival of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “Anything Goes.”“I started directing because I liked working with actors,” Mr. Zaks said in a phone interview. “I had no appreciation for what a set could for a production. Tony pushed me to visualize the different possibilities that might be used to create a set.”For the 1986 revival of John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves,” about a family in Sunnyside, Queens, on the day Pope Paul VI visited New York City in 1965, Mr. Zaks recalled what Mr. Guare wrote in the actor’s edition of the play.“He referred to Manhattan as Oz to the people who lived in Queens,” Mr. Zaks said, “and out of that he came up with a set that always had Manhattan in the distance.”In his review in The New York Times, Frank Rich described the impact of Mr. Walton’s set as a “Stuart Davis-like collage in which the Shaughnessys’ vulgar domestic squalor is hemmed in by the urbanscape’s oppressive brand-name signs.”Four years later, Mr. Zaks added: “I said, ‘Tony, we could do ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ with two sofas and a Kandinsky.’ He said, ‘Trust that, believe that,’ and he made me a better director.”The double-sided Kandinsky hung over the two red sofas on the stage in the play by Mr. Guare, about a mysterious young Black con man.Anthony John Walton was born on Oct, 24, 1934, in Walton-on-Thames, England. His father, Lancelot, was an orthopedic surgeon. His mother, Hilda (Drew) Walton was a homemaker.Ann Reinking in the 1979 film “All That Jazz.” Mr. Walton shared the Oscar for art and set decoration on the film.Museum of Modern Art Film Stills ArchiveHe traced his love of theater to a night during World War II when he was 5 or 6. His parents had just seen the musical “Me and My Girl,” he said in the Playbill interview, and “they had paper hats and little hooters — and had obviously had a few bubbles to cheer them along the way — and they woke my sister and me up and taught us ‘The Lambeth Walk.’”His interest in the theater blossomed at Radley College, which is near Oxfordshire, where he acted, directed and put on marionette shows. After serving in the Royal Air Force in Canada, he studied art and design at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. While there, he was a part-time actor and stagehand at the Wimbledon Theater.After graduating in 1955, he moved to Manhattan where he got a job sketching caricatures for Playbill. His first significant theater project in the United States was an Off Broadway revival of the Noël Coward musical, “Conversation Piece” in 1957.Four years later, after commuting to London where he designed productions for various shows, he was hired for his first Broadway play, “Once There Was a Russian,” set in 18th-century Crimea; it closed on opening night.His next show, the original production of “A Funny Thing,” ran for more than two years, and used his idea to project various sky images onto a curved screen across the stage.For the next 47 years, he toggled between musicals, comedies and dramas like a 1973 Broadway revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” For one of its stars, Lillian Gish, he had designed an eggplant-colored dress that she rejected, telling him that “Russian peasants only wore beautiful pastel colors,” according to Ms. Walton Hamilton. “He said, ‘Of course, Miss Gish,’” she said, then he had it dyed one shade darker with each subsequent cleaning.On the set of “The House of Blue Leaves” at the Lincoln Center Theater in 1986. From left: Christine Baranski, Swoosie Kurtz and John Mahoney.Brigitte LacombeIn the 1990s, he began directing at the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan, the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn., and the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor in New York, which his daughter helped found. At Bay Street, he was also the production designer of a 2003 revival of “The Boy Friend,” which was Ms. Andrews’s directorial debut.Mr. Walton also illustrated the 12 children’s books about Dumpy the Dump Truck, and “The Great American Mousical,” that were written by Ms. Andrews and Ms. Walton Hamilton.“Tony was my dearest and oldest friend,” Ms. Andrews, who met Mr. Walton when she was 12 and he was 13, said in a statement. “He taught me to see the world with fresh eyes, and his talent was simply monumental.”In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Genevieve LeRoy-Walton; his stepdaughter, Bridget LeRoy; five grandchildren; his sisters, Jennifer Gosney and Carol Hall; and his brother, Richard.In 1989, Mr. Zaks recalled being uncertain about the type of hotel for the setting for the farce “Lend Me a Tenor.” Mr. Walton sketched one that had a Victorian style, then another, more compelling one, with an Art Deco design.“The beauty of the Art Deco sketch just blew me away,” he said, “and I knew right away that when things got amok onstage, when people started slamming doors within a beautiful piece of Art Deco architecture, it would be much funnier.” More

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      Interview: 50 Years of the Orange Tree Theatre

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      Laura Irwin, Curator of Richmond Museum’s exhibition celebrating Fifty Years of the Orange Tree Theatre

      So Laura, this exhibition celebrates 50 years of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. Can you tell us a bit about how it came about?

      It was really the brainchild of one of the Museum’s former Trustees, who is also a Patron of the Orange Tree Theatre. I began in post this time last year when sadly both organisations were closed to the public due to the pandemic, so when they reopened after the best part of 18 months it seemed a really good opportunity to celebrate the resilience of cultural institutions like ours.

      The more I worked on the exhibition, the more I discovered the similarities between our two organisations. Not only are we two independent charitable and cultural institutions in Richmond, but I realised how theatres and museums as places are alike in being intrinsically tied to physical space, physical objects and physical interaction. There’s a sense of the here and now, with an emphasis on ‘the real thing’; the authentic.

      We conducted around twenty oral history interviews with a selection of writers, actors, directors, staff and people involved at the Orange Tree over the years, and this greatly informed the exhibition’s content. Some of these people were there from the very beginning such as Sam Walters and Auriol Smith, who founded the theatre in 1971. Others have been involved more recently such as the actors Liz Heery and Peter Davison, who are Orange Tree Ambassadors and Youth Theatre parents.

      Richmond has a long history of theatres, but the Orange Tree is unique in being in the round. Have you discovered other significant features about it through your research? 

      From the interviews, there’s been an overwhelming sense of the Orange Tree as a family institution, and in particular an extension of Sam and Auriol’s living room! Staff members are incredibly affectionate, and many have done every single job going, above and beyond the call of duty; maybe being roped in as an extra at the last minute, or sourcing a grand piano for that same evening. Often staff have stayed much longer than they originally thought they would.

      The Orange Tree is actually said to be London’s only permanent theatre in the round, and that format stems from the theatre’s origins in a room above the Orange Tree pub, which first hosted its initial incarnation as the ‘Richmond Fringe’. The round space really lends itself to a sense of togetherness, intimacy and community, and from the very beginning in that pub room the audience were able to be very close to the actors and stage, just as they are today. The Orange Tree’s Artistic Director, Paul Miller, describes this gathering together as like the oldest form of storytelling, going back centuries.

      The Theatre has a reputation as a ‘writer’s theatre’, with the focus often on the text itself in productions, so staging and costume are generally pared back to let the script shine through. It’s especially well known for the combination of reviving old and forgotten plays, from writers such as Harley Granville Barker and Terence Rattigan, whilst championing new writers like Martin Crimp or Vaclav Havel, and more recently the acclaimed modern playwrights Alistair McDowall and Zoe Cooper.

      Tell me a bit about the founding of the Orange Tree in that pub room, and what changes it has had over 50 years.

      ‘Richmond Fringe’ as it was then known founded was in 1971 by Sam Walters and his wife Auriol Smith. Sam was an actor and director, and Auriol an actress. They felt the need for a local, independent theatre venue outside of the West End and invited theatrical friends and former colleagues to help choose a suitable space. The group went on a pub crawl – well, two actually! – to find it, and eventually settled upon the upstairs room of the Orange Tree pub. And it really was just a room, with no stage, no backstage space, no seating or any of the normal trappings. Without artificial lighting, shows were performed at lunchtime in the daylight, and very nearly in the round.

      During my research I came across the now infamous story of the company’s first performance, Go Tell It on Table Mountain. Sam and friends had been expecting a handful of audience members to show up, but there were over 100 waiting to get in to the first performance, so he had to ask them to go for a pint in the pub downstairs and come back later, when they would perform it again. Shows were regularly oversubscribed from then on, with queues around the block and everyone clamouring to get in

      The first big change came in 1975 with a refurbishment to the pub. It became a licensed theatre, with fire exits, church pews and an office-cum-dressing room. Later, in 1991, they moved to the current venue, and formally established the space as in the round.

      Sam Walters retired in 2014 after 42 years at the helm, by which time he was longest-serving Artistic Director of a British Theatre. But Paul Miller then arrived and put his own stamp on things: some brave new productions such as Pomona and An Octoroon were incredibly successful and perhaps brought in a new crowd. The theatre’s ethos remained, however, with its focus on writing, the in the round format, and community.

      It’s not all been easy going though. The theatre lost all its Arts Council funding on Paul Miller’s very first day, so that was challenging! When the pandemic hit, the theatre really had to draw on its creativity, introducing live-streaming shows and then offering productions for socially-distanced audiences once it re-opened.

      You are going to be talking to the Richmond Local History Society about the exhibition next month, in conversation with Paul Miller. This sounds like a great opportunity to extend the reach of the Orange Tree’s story! How does it feel bringing local heritage and a leading edge, contemporary performance space under the same umbrella? 

      Great! We have a lot of similarities and this a wonderful opportunity to crossover our audiences, some of whom may not have visited the other venue. Interestingly, we discovered in interviews about the Orange Tree’s heritage that the Museum’s current location was for a short time even considered as a potential new venue for the theatre in the late 80s, and their offices were, for a while, across the road from the Museum in one of the buildings I can see from my office, so we have close historic ties too!

      Is it fair to say that both the Museum and the Theatre play important roles in the community?

      Absolutely, and they are just natural partners. The theatre was really pioneering in community work, setting up an education and participation programme back in the early 80s. They took musicals into old people’s homes for singalongs, and in 1982 one of its trainee directors Antony Clark set up workshops to bring Shakespeare into schools. This is still done as Primary Shakespeare, for pupils who may never have been to the theatre before. It also has its Youth Theatre, which is going strong.

      The Orange Tree had to raise £750,000 in the late 80s/early 90s in order to move into its current home, and it’s a testament to its place in the local community that this was achieved through raffles, fundraisers and donations.

      Similarly the Museum offers the community a chance to learn about its local history and see real objects. We run family workshops, outreach activities like talks, handling objects and summer fairs, as well as being supported by a team of around 25 volunteers, most of whom are locals.

      Together we are running a learning and community programme to accompany the exhibition including curator tours, family workshops in school holidays involving storytelling and Arts Award summer schools where students will have chance to visit behind the scenes at the Orange Tree before participating in arts and crafts activities at the Museum.

      There are so many different artefacts, images and interviews in the exhibition; do you have any favourites?

      The incredibly realistic rabbit’s head from An Octoroon and the Cthulhu mask from Pomona are both extraordinary artefacts, and it’s exciting to have them here, not just because they are so cool, but also because it’s not every day that we get to display something like them in the Museum’s showcases.

      I was particular happy to find a few images from The Room at the pub in its early days, complete with church pews, ‘do not disturb’ signs and makeshift storage. And then the interviews are all so fascinating, particularly those with behind the scenes staff like the Technical Manager and Wardrobe Supervisor, and a former Theatre Manager talking about how ‘the show must go on’; sewing hems at midnight, converting the stage to a swimming pool, a garden and growing real flowers onstage, trying to find enough seats to cram as many people in as possible.

      We’ve also had some wonderful memories about audience interaction from Sam Walters and the actress Clare Moody, which are well worth a listen.

      The exhibition is running until 31 August – will there be a life for it afterwards? 

      We have just released an online version, which will give it a whole new life, beyond the physical collection, and importantly will give further access, allowing people to listen to the interviews from home.

      There’s a possibility that the Royal Holloway Archives, where the Orange Tree Theatre’s archive material is currently kept, will be able to acquire audio interviews. All the material they hold will eventually all be catalogued, digitised and made available online for future researchers

      And our fabulous partnership with the theatre will, of course, continue. The Orange Tree are running their 50th anniversary season throughout the year, so check out their website for plays and events.

      Many thanks to Laura for taking the time to chat with us.

      The Museum of Richmond’s Exhibition OT50: Fifty Years of the Orange Tree Theatre runs until 31 August and is free to attend. https://www.museumofrichmond.com/whats-on/

      It is also available online here.

      Laura Irwin will be in conversation with Artistic Director Paul Miller for the Richmond Local History Society on Monday 14 March. Tickets are free to members, and non-members can pay £5 to attend. Book via the below button. More

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      Feature: Sophie Swithinbank on writing Bacon

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      Award-winning new play, Bacon, explores masculinity, sexuality and class through the eyes of an unlikely friendship.

      “London, present day, it’s Year 10’s first day back at school. Mark is new, Darren is out-of-control. Mark is too scared to make friends, Darren too scary. These boys need each other, but neither of them is going to admit it.”Extract from Bacon

      Bacon is about what happens when teenagers learn to bully and humiliate each other before they learn to love and accept themselves. The play is based on real events. It’s two central characters, Mark and Darren, were born from a real act of bullying I witnessed whilst working as a nanny. I began to wonder if the seven-year-old boy I was looking after might grow up to copy that behaviour, which led me to explore the idea of learning negative behaviours in my writing. Subsequently, other experiences attached themselves to the story. I began to connect the bullying incident to an intense and semi-toxic relationship I had experienced growing up. It was a confusing, dangerously exciting time; and through the play I intend to encompass that light, teenage, carefree lack of perspective, full of blindness. Remember, if you will, how difficult it is to learn how to be an adult when you are still a child. 

      Some people have asked me why I chose to write from the perspective of two teenage boys. Others seem surprised to discover that I am not male, while the play is seemingly rooted in masculinity. It is true to say that I have observed the behaviour of men more than the behaviour of women because men, historically, have been more visible. This is perhaps why I am drawn to writing male-dominated stories. I often feel my natural viewpoint is an open one, not particularly connected to gender. Mark and Darren are the characters through which I can best tell this story and their journey makes perfect sense to me. A number of people, regardless of age or gender, have said on reading the play, ‘this is my story’. The notion that the boys’ story is, in some ways, everyone’s story, is what makes it a complex and vital narrative through which to explore identity and sexuality. The play also explores the binaries of class in relation to sexuality, and how confidence and acceptance can be closely related to social standing, from family to family. 

      The play’s own journey to stage has not been an easy one. Thanks to the pandemic, it has faced two postponed runs, one in London, one at the Edinburgh Fringe, but being able to at last share it with audiences at the Finborough Theatre is something I am hugely grateful for. Seeing it come together in the lively buzz of rehearsals fills me with joy and the playful energy that the cast and director are bringing to the piece is really breathtaking. The production is fearlessly directed by Matthew Iliffe and stunningly designed by Natalie Johnson, who have worked in collaboration to physicalise the central notions of unevenly distributed power and control within the play. Mark is played by Corey Montague-Sholay, who will melt your heart, and Darren is played by William Robinson, who will break it.

      Bacon is a relationship drama for the modern age. At once tragic and euphoric, it questions whether we can do better to guide teenagers through the process of becoming adults. At the heart of Bacon, is the study of the journey from boy to man, and why so often, boys fail to make it there. 

      Bacon won the Tony Craze Award at Soho Theatre in 2018. It plays at the Finborough Theatre from 1-26 March 2022.

      You can also read our 5-star review of the play here. More

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      Andrei Belgrader, Director Who Influenced Future Stars, Dies at 75

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      His Yale Rep and American Repertory Theater productions included early work by Cherry Jones, Mark Linn-Baker and more, and he directed starry Off Broadway shows.Andrei Belgrader, who directed numerous high-profile stage productions off Broadway and in regional theaters and was an important influence in the careers of John Turturro, Cherry Jones, Tony Shalhoub and other respected actors, died on Feb. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 75.His wife, Caroline Hall, said the cause was lung cancer.Mr. Belgrader, who emigrated from his native Romania in the 1970s after chafing at the artistic censorship there, caught the eye of Robert Brustein, founder of the Yale Repertory Theater, who by the end of the 1970s had him directing there. When Mr. Brustein, who had also been dean of the Yale School of Drama, moved to Harvard University and founded the American Repertory Theater there in 1980, Mr. Belgrader began directing productions there as well.Both A.R.T. and Yale Rep were proving grounds for young actors, and Mr. Belgrader challenged them in ways that had a lasting effect.“He would make odd but incredibly imaginative requests of you as an actor and would be delighted when you could fulfill these requests,” Mark Linn-Baker, who was Touchstone in Mr. Belgrader’s 1979 “As You Like It” at Yale Rep while still a student at the Yale drama school, said by email.Four years later Mr. Linn-Baker, who would soon find television fame on the long-running ABC series “Perfect Strangers,” played Vladimir, one of the leads (John Bottoms was Estragon, the other of Beckett’s famous tramps), in “Waiting for Godot” at A.R.T. directed by Mr. Belgrader. Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe called the production “a perfect Beckettian vaudeville act on the precipitous edge of the void.” Also in that production, in the supporting role of Pozzo, was Mr. Shalhoub, now an Emmy and Tony Award winner.“One of his great skills was bringing people out of their comfort zones in terms of their performances,” Mr. Shalhoub, who two decades later would recruit Mr. Belgrader to direct episodes of his hit TV series, “Monk,” said in a phone interview. “He had a way of instilling courage and moments of abandon.”Mr. Belgrader, who was partial to Beckett, revisited “Godot” in 1998 at Classic Stage Company in Manhattan, with Mr. Shalhoub elevated to the role of Vladimir and playing opposite Mr. Turturro as Estragon, and Christopher Lloyd as Pozzo. Mr. Turturro, who had studied under Mr. Belgrader decades earlier at Yale, worked frequently with him over the years, including in an acclaimed staging of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at Classic Stage in 2011. Ben Brantley of The New York Times named it one of the 10 best productions of the year. “Andrei Belgrader’s funny, sad and freshly conceived interpretation opened the walls between Chekhov’s then and our now,” he wrote.Mr. Turturro, in a phone interview, said Mr. Belgrader excelled at helping actors mine playwrights like Beckett and Chekhov for the deepest meanings and emotions in their work. The key, he said, was that he gave the actors time to make the discoveries.“I remember many times in rehearsals you would think, ‘This is terrible,’ and he would just be very, very patient,” Mr. Turturro said.It was something Mr. Turturro experienced in 2008 in a Belgrader-directed production of Beckett’s “Endgame” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in which the character he played, Hamm, has a particularly difficult monologue.“He worked me to death in that monologue,” Mr. Turturro said. “He wasn’t unsatisfied, but he knew you could go further, and then one day you did.”John Turturro and Dianne Wiest in Mr. Belgrader’s 2011 staging of “The Cherry Orchard,” which Ben Brantley of The Times called one of the best productions of the year.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAndrei Belgrader was born on March 31, 1946, in Oravita, Romania. His father, Tiberiu, was an economist, and his mother, Magdalena (Gross) Belgrader, was a translator.He began training to be an engineer but didn’t like it and instead gained entry to the Institute of Theater and Film in Bucharest, where he began directing.“In Romania, theater was more important, I think, than in the West,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. “It was really the only form where, in a hidden way, things could be discussed.”Well, up to a point. Romania was under Communist rule, and Mr. Belgrader had his first run-ins with censors while still a student.“They banned almost everything, even Romanian comedies,” he said. “Our trick was to do classical plays, because it was hard to say Shakespeare was anti-Communist.”But battles with censors eventually wore him down, and in the late 1970s he left the country. Ms. Hall said he spent time in a refugee camp in Greece and eventually, with the help of a charity, was able to come to New York, where he stayed with other Romanians and drove a cab to improve his sparse English.“Cabbies in New York don’t speak English and they don’t know where they’re going,” he told The Chronicle. “I was one of them.”Somehow he managed to mount two small theater productions, Buchner’s “Woyzeck” and Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida.” The second is the one that caught Mr. Brustein’s eye.Mr. Belgrader was still not particularly fluent when he began directing at Yale Rep.“It was very peculiar,” Thomas Derrah, who was in the cast of the 1979 “As You Like It” with Mr. Linn-Baker, told The Globe in 1998. “He was trying to communicate what he wanted me to do, and there wasn’t a whole lot of English in there.”A year later, at A.R.T. in Cambridge, he mounted another production of the same play and essentially started the career of Ms. Jones, who had only recently graduated from the drama program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh when she was cast as Rosalind.“In June 1980 I was the last audition of the last day of auditions for Andrei’s ‘As You Like It’ at the A.R.T.,” Ms. Jones, now a multiple Emmy and Tony Award winner, said by email. “Andrei was unlike any director or man I’d ever seen. And with an accent I’d never heard. In an instant he transformed the trajectory of my life.”Stanley Tucci, Elaine Stritch, Oliver Platt, Dianne Wiest and Marisa Tomei are also on the long list of actors directed by Mr. Belgrader over the years. When he wasn’t directing, he was teaching — at Yale, Juilliard, the University of California at San Diego and, at his death, the University of Southern California.He gravitated toward challenging plays that had dark elements, but that also had humor.“He’s a great farceur,” Mr. Brustein once said of him. “He finds that area where farce and dreams meet.”In addition to his wife, whom he married in 2001, Mr. Belgrader is survived by a daughter, Grace, and a sister, Mariana Augustin. He lived in Los Angeles.On a 2005 episode of “Monk,” Mr. Belgrader showed that he could direct even the most inexperienced actors. In the episode, “Mr. Monk and the Kid,” a beloved one to fans of the series, Mr. Shalhoub’s obsessive-compulsive title character gets help solving a crime from a 22-month-old boy (played by 2-year-old twins, Preston and Trevor Shores). The toddler character had a lot of screen time, placing particular demands on Mr. Belgrader.“It was a tricky episode,” Mr. Shalhoub said, “and he knocked it out of the park.”Ms. Jones said that Mr. Belgrader liked to demonstrate that his dog, Hector, could sing along to Janis Joplin.“Before he put the recording on he told me not to laugh during Hector’s truly astonishing howls,” she recalled. “He said, ‘You must respect the artist.’ And he meant it. Whether a dog or an actor.” More

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      Muriel Miguel and the Native American Bohemia in Brownstone Brooklyn

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      Indigenous rodeo riders and Wild West actors all gathered at an unassuming townhouse in Boerum Hill. Listening to the grown-ups under the kitchen table, a future experimental theater director.On a quiet street in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, there’s an unassuming yellow-brick house that once served as an unofficial community center for Native Americans in show business. The theater director Muriel Miguel grew up there, and lives there still. When she was a child, in the 1930s and ’40s, Native dancers and actors from all around the country would stop by the house while working in New York. Some would stick around for months, or even years.Ms. Miguel still remembers sitting under the kitchen table and listening to her parents trading songs and stories with these visitors. Sitting Bull’s grandson Crazy Bull, a national archery champion who advised Rodgers and Hammerstein on their production of “Annie Get Your Gun,” was an occasional presence. Douglas Grant, a trick rider from South Dakota, got stranded in New York while on tour with the rodeo and ended up staying with the Miguels for two decades. And then there were the Big Mountains, a family of Mohawk, Comanche and Apache dancers who lived in the back of a gift shop at a so-called Indian village in Wild West City, a theme park that still lies off Route 206 in New Jersey.As a young woman, Ms. Miguel mostly felt embarrassed by the work her parents and their friends did for money — jobs that required them to dress up in ceremonial costumes and act out white people’s fantasies of how Indians behaved. But now, at 84, she wonders if the fake Indian villages and Wild West shows of that era inadvertently contributed to the survival of real Native culture, if only by bringing such a vibrant community together in New York.At a time when the authorities out West were forbidding Native people from practicing their traditions, Ms. Miguel’s family and friends shared their songs and stories freely with one another, planting what Ms. Miguel described as kernels of inspiration in their children. “Today, I’m collecting the corn,” she said. “And it’s overwhelming.”Ms. Miguel during a break for rehearsals of “Misdemeanor Dream.”Adrienne Grunwald for The New York TimesMs. Miguel and her two older sisters, Gloria (95) and Lisa Mayo (who died in 2013 at 89), have often been described as the matriarchs of Indigenous theater in North America.“They made a space for so many people and companies,” Penny Couchie, an actor and choreographer of Ojibwe and Mohawk ancestry, said. “They made no apologies for the way that we tell stories.”In recent weeks, Ms. Miguel has been scrambling to finish preparing for the debut of her latest production, “Misdemeanor Dream,” a collaboration between her company, Spiderwoman Theater, and Aanmitaagzi, an arts group led by Ms. Couchie and her husband, Sid Bobb, on Nipissing First Nation territory in Ontario. The show, which will open on March 10 at La MaMa, the experimental theater in the East Village, represents the culmination of her life’s work so far, she said.Ms. Miguel has been working in the world of experimental theater since the ’60s, when she was an actor in the Open Theater, a pioneering avant-garde ensemble founded by the visionary director Joseph Chaikin. Like many of her past projects, the new play explores the ways in which old stories shape the lives of Indigenous people in the present, for better and worse. Inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” it takes place in a magical realm where fairies, humans and other beings share stories drawn from the performers’ ancestral traditions and personal memories — a father disappearing in the wilderness of northern Quebec, a mother spurning her daughter because she’s so afraid of losing her.The performers, who trace their roots to a dozen Indigenous nations within the borders of the United States, Canada and the Philippines, created the piece using the “story weaving” method. Spiderwoman Theater developed the technique in the 1970s, when the group was a fixture of the downtown theater scene. Over the years, the company has used it to intertwine narratives about everything from family violence to cultural appropriation with pop songs and bawdy jokes and dreamlike images.“It’s important to tell these stories, but they have to be done in a certain way where people don’t feel like they’re being hit over the head,” Ms. Miguel said. “You can tell a painful story and then tell an awful disgusting joke and give a raspberry. You can take things and turn them around.”On a recent Monday, Ms. Miguel took a break from her rehearsal schedule to ride around her neighborhood, telling stories about her own childhood. She sat in the back of a 2012 Toyota Matrix, a red leather hat trimmed with wolf fur resting on the seat beside her, while her wife, Deborah Ratelle, handled the driving. Ms. Miguel has short, silvery hair and a cascading, shoulder-shaking laugh. She wore turquoise rings on most of her fingers and had on mismatched earrings — one turquoise, the other made of oyster shell. “I don’t like sameness,” she said.Heading down Court Street, she pointed at Cobble Hill Cinema, a longtime movie theater that used to be called the Lido. “That was one of the places that my father used to stand outside in his outfit to ballyhoo all these movies,” she recalled. Her father, a Kuna from Panama, would supplement the money he earned as a dockworker by donning the war-bonnet of a Plains Indian chief and beckoning people into the theater to see the latest John Wayne picture. He had lots of jobs like that: playing a generic Indian at Thanksgiving pageants, performing at ceremonies commemorating the supposed sale of Manhattan to the Dutch.In the summer, he would take Ms. Miguel’s older sisters to Golden City, a long-since-forgotten amusement park in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, where they would dance and sing and sit around in teepees. Gloria, who plays the role of The Elder in “Misdemeanor Dream,” dreaded these outings. “People would come and look and say, “Oh, look at the Indians, they’re eating spaghetti,’” she recalled. It turned her off from doing any theatrical work that involved her heritage until, as a divorced mother of two in her late 40s, she joined her sisters in establishing Spiderwoman Theater. “We got to tell our stories our own way,” she said.“Misdemeanor Dream” features Ms. Miguel’s sister Gloria, in the role of The Elder.Adrienne Grunwald for The New York TimesThe Toyota stopped outside P.S. 146, a massive brick building with an imposing stone archway. Gazing through the car window, Ms. Miguel remembered a social studies teacher telling the class that Indians were a thing of the past. “I got up and I said, ‘No, we’re here,” she recalled. She laughed at the memory, her shoulders bouncing. “I had such a big mouth.”That attitude of spirited defiance ripples through her work. When Spiderwoman Theater was formed, in 1975, she conceived of it as a feminist response to the sexism that she says was plaguing the American Indian Movement at the time. The company’s first play, “Women in Violence,” was a vaudevillian clown show that addressed the abuse of women, something that she and her sisters had all endured. “Somehow I was taught that you have to push back,” she said. “Maybe it was my sisters — they taught me that I could do anything I wanted, that I could be anything I wanted.”Ms. Miguel’s family in her mother’s traditional Rappahannock dress, circa 1930.via Gloria MiguelOn the corner of State and Nevins Streets, Ms. Miguel noted that the surrounding blocks had once been home to a community known as Little Caughnawaga. In the first half of the 20th century, Mohawk ironworkers from Canada settled in the area while helping to build the skyscrapers that now dominate the skyline: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler, Rockefeller Plaza. The Rev. David M. Cory, a white pastor who learned Mohawk and gave sermons in the language, allowed Ms. Miguel and her friends to rehearse authentic Native dances in the basement of a church a few blocks away. They formed a dance group, the Little Eagles, that eventually grew into the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, a widely known company that still performs and teaches at schools, theaters and museums.As the car pulled up to the corner where that church once stood, Ms. Miguel groaned. “Ay, yi, yi,” she said. A wooden construction barrier guarded a white condo complex that would not have looked out of place in Miami. Ms. Miguel got out and approached a young man who stood outside the gate in a hard hat, smoking a Newport. “Excuse me,” she said. “What happened to the church that used to be here?”“It got abandoned a few years back,” he said, in an accent that proved to be Turkish.“How sad,” she said. “When I was growing up, a lot of the people who lived here and on the next blocks were Native people. Indian people.”He nodded politely.“It was really wonderful,” Ms. Miguel said.She spent the next 10 minutes regaling him with interesting facts and anecdotes about that time. She praised the minister (“a socialist”) who let them use the space to dance and laughed about how the ironworkers would pile into their cars for the 12-hour trip back to their reservation every weekend, switching seats while driving so they wouldn’t have to waste time pulling over. “Crazy men!” she said.The contractor gave her a contemplative look. “I didn’t know there were Native people living in this neighborhood,” he remarked.She studied his face. “You didn’t know?” She shared a few more details and thanked him for listening. Walking back to the car, she called out, “Tell people the story.” More