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      ‘The Woman Gave Him His Ticket, and He Walked Off’

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      In tribute to a New York City institution, this week’s Metropolitan Diary offers reader tales of encounters with Stephen Sondheim.Going UpDear Diary:A few years ago, I went to see a friend in a play at the Signature Theater in Manhattan. The elevator was empty when I got in. Seconds later, Stephen Sondheim got in too and stood almost shoulder to shoulder with me.I froze. I couldn’t speak.After exiting the elevator, we both approached the young woman at the box office. He was in front of me.“Reservation, Sondheim,” I heard him say.The woman gave him his ticket, and he walked off.It was my turn.“Mere mortal,” I said.“Aren’t we all?” she replied.— Ellen RatnerVote For The Best Metropolitan Diary Entry of 2021We’ll have published 255 Diary entries this year by the time it ends. We need your help choosing the best. New York Times editors narrowed the field to five finalists. Now it’s up to you to vote for your favorite.Close CallDear Diary:I was a freshman at Marist College in fall 1983 when I returned to my dorm room to find a message scrawled on the little whiteboard hanging on my door: “Stephen Sondheim called. Call him back at … ”Figuring it was one of my theater-loving friends from home making a joke, I called back from the pay phone at the end of the floor, only to discover that it was in fact Stephen Sondheim’s office number.His assistant answered and asked when it would be convenient for him to call me back. I was so stunned that I didn’t ask why he was calling or how he had gotten the pay phone number. (It turned out he had tried my home in the Bronx first, and my mother had given him the pay phone number. “Did a Stephen Sondheim get ahold of you?” she asked when I called later.)I explained to Mr. Sondheim’s assistant that I was in college and could only be reached at a communal pay phone but that I could be at it any time the next evening.When the next night came, the phone rang at the designated time. I answered on the first ring. It wasn’t Mr. Sondheim. The caller was Gerald Chapman, his creative partner in the Young Playwrights Festival, a contest for teenagers that the two had recently started.Mr. Chapman was calling to tell me that a one-act play I had written in high school had been selected as a semifinalist. (I had forgotten that I submitted it.)So, I never got to speak with the theater legend, but in my mind, I can still see the message on that erasable board: “Stephen Sondheim called. Call him back at … ”— John RocheEast Side StoryDear Diary:One Sunday night in the early 1980s, I dropped by my office on Park Avenue and 48th Street. As I was heading across Park Avenue to a parking garage in my small two-seater, a car ran a red light and T-boned me.My car was crushed, and I was pretty shaken up. The police came to the scene. The other driver told the officers that I had run the light.There were three people on a nearby corner who had seen the whole thing. Without hesitating, one approached the officers. He told them what he had witnessed and confirmed my story: The other driver had run a red light before crashing into me.Still shaken, I approached the man and thanked him. He was reserved, humble and forthcoming. I asked for his name and phone number in case my insurance company needed to contact him. It was only when he told me his name that I learned this witness was Stephen Sondheim. Extraordinary!The insurance company said later that the other driver’s claim had been closed because of the witness’s account. I called Mr. Sondheim to thank him again for stepping forward.He asked how I was feeling.— Barry A. BryerFirst Name, PleaseDear Diary:Many years ago, my husband and I decided on the spur of the moment to see a Broadway show. We phoned and reserved tickets.When we arrived at the box office, my husband got on the line, and I stepped to the side and stood next to a young man.The person in front of my husband was Stephen Sondheim.The woman at the box office asked Mr. Sondheim for his first name.“I hope she doesn’t ask him to spell it,” I said quietly.The young man next to me laughed.— Marcia AltmanWaving HelloDear Diary:I was waiting for a crosstown bus on East 49th Street near Second Avenue the day before Thanksgiving on my way to see a matinee of “Company.”Stephen Sondheim’s townhouse is across the street, and I noticed that the blinds in the second-story window were open. I don’t know why, but I felt moved to get a better look.I crossed the street and was on the sidewalk just beneath that window when I saw Mr. Sondheim suddenly swing around in a chair and wave.Reflexively, I waved back.I realized later that he had probably been trying to get the attention of the driver of the Lincoln Town Car that had just pulled up. It all happened so fast. I had walked past his house many times in the 30 years I had lived in the neighborhood, and nothing like this had ever happened before.I went back to the bus stop. The driver locked the car and walked up the block. And Mr. Sondheim disappeared into his house.— Christina ClarkeRead all recent entries and our submissions guidelines. Reach us via email diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter.Illustrations by Agnes LeeSubmit Your Metropolitan DiaryYour story must be connected to New York City and no longer than 300 words. An editor will contact you if your submission is being considered for publication. More

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      Patti LuPone on 'Company,' Stephen Sondheim and More

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      Her friends say there is nothing more fun than hanging with Patti LuPone while she’s having a glass of wine.That’s not true. There is something more fun: sharing a whole emerald bottle of Perrier-Jouet and dishing with Patti LuPone.Feuds! Lovers! Temper tantrums! Dictatorial directors! Wrongs avenged! Madonna’s “dead” eyes! Andrew Lloyd Webber’s perfidy! And, of course, teary memories of Stephen Sondheim.Last month, Mr. Sondheim, 91, died suddenly at home in Roxbury, Conn., just as he was about to come to New York to be celebrated at the openings of highly anticipated makeovers of two of his milestone collaborations: “West Side Story,” a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, and “Company,” the acidic musical about a terminally ambivalent Manhattan singleton. On Wednesday night, the Broadway lights were dimmed for the composer.Two years ago, when the pandemic shut down Broadway during previews for “Company,” Ms. LuPone retreated to her basement in Connecticut, where she posted videos that went viral showing off her pinball machine, her jukebox, her Ethel Merman cassettes, her husband’s bong and her dance moves to “Hava Nagila.”Now she’s back, picking up where she left off playing Joanne, the jaded, older friend of the singleton. When Ms. LuPone played the role in London before the pandemic, critics gushed and she won an Olivier. In this production, Bobby morphs into Bobbie, a woman whose friends want her to settle down, even though they concede marriage is a mixed bag.As one of Bobbie’s pals sings in the high-velocity “Getting Married Today”: “What’s a wedding? It’s a prehistoric ritual/ Where everybody promises fidelity forever/ Which is maybe the most horrifying word I ever heard of.”Bobbie is played by the lissome Katrina Lenk, who won a Tony in 2018 for her mesmerizing performance as Dina in “The Band’s Visit.”“I think it’s more poignant to have a woman,” Ms. LuPone said, “because we get asked that question, ‘When are you going to get married? The clock is ticking. Eggs are getting old.’ Boys don’t get asked that question, especially when they’re 35, boinking beautiful women.”Who better to mark this Broadway phoenix moment with than Ms. LuPone, the Long Island native who has been called “the goddess of the modern musical” by The Guardian? She is that very particular kind of animal, perhaps the last of the breed, a genuine Golden Age Broadway star, the kind that can turn a theater into a living room, throwing out an electric current that makes 1,000 people feel as if they are being spoken to, and sung to, individually.As Joanne, Ms. LuPone raises a martini glass in her socko “Ladies Who Lunch” number, with its famed primal scream — “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh, I’ll drink to that!”(Mr. Sondheim instructed the singer, who gets passionate about Republican political moves, to unleash her scream by thinking of how she feels when she reads a newspaper.)Patti LuPone as Joanne in the musical “Company.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe role of the salty, hard-drinking Joanne was originated in 1970 by the salty, hard-drinking Elaine Stritch, a Sondheim pal. As Alexandra Jacobs, a book critic for The New York Times, wrote in her biography of the actress, “Still Here,” Ms. Stritch always had her flask of Hennessy backstage when she was playing Joanne, the sort of wealthy Upper East Side woman who might drink vodka stingers and carry a bichon in her Birkin.Ms. Jacobs wrote in The Times that while “Company” is not as well known as other Sondheim shows, it has acquired a cult status among Gen Xers and millennials, who appreciate the fact that it is “drier than a sauvignon blanc, more New York than the Yankees.”Onstage, Ms. LuPone drinks water in her martini glass. But real bubbly is required to toast the lights returning to Broadway.Remembering SondheimAfter a preview performance the other night, we met up and looked for a Times Square bar, but it’s hard now to find one that stays open after shows, or one at all, really. (“Company” opened Dec. 9 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, and Jesse Green, a Times theater critic, called Ms. LuPone’s performance “perfectly etched,” in an otherwise mixed review.)“McHale’s, Charlie’s, Sam’s, Barrymore’s,” Ms. LuPone said, reeling off the names of bars that have closed.So we ended up setting up our own bar — complete with votive candles and vintage coupes — in a room at the Civilian on 48th Street. The small hotel is decorated as a homage to Broadway, with costumes and pictures from shows, so naturally we found a photo of Ms. LuPone that happened to be on the wall of our ersatz bar, a shot of her as Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd,” co-written by Mr. Sondheim..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}I asked her if there was anyone she’d like to make into a meat pie, and she shot back, “Do you have to eat it?”In her dressing room, Ms. LuPone keeps a typewritten note sent to her before the pandemic hit by Mr. Sondheim, who was clearly growing more sentimental: “Every now and then I’m brought up short by realizing what a wonderful singer you are. That’s apart from the acting and performing and the attention to detail. In any event, I just felt I had to put it in print. Thank you for enhanceing [sic] my shows — and everyone else’s for that matter, Love, Steve.”Ms. LuPone choked up talking about it. “I just was so flummoxed by it,” she said, still referring to the composer in the present tense. “Steve doesn’t give compliments. I beg your pardon. Steve does give compliments, but they’re hard-earned. His notes can be devastating, which I’ve had several of.”She got a bad note when she was playing Fosca in “Passion” at Lincoln Center; Mr. Sondheim berated her about her enunciation, saying all he heard was “monotonous mush.”“I said in my head, ‘If it was anyone with less experience than me, they would have turned in their equity card,’” she said. “It was a dress down that — I was lost. That’s been my big downfall. I’m a flannel mouth. John Houseman called me a flannel mouth when I was in school.”A Sondheim score “is not easy to sing accurately. It’s a challenge to interpret the lyrics as he intended them with depth,” she said with understatement. “That is a big accomplishment. Steve makes me better. I keep saying, ‘Who will make me better now that Steve is gone?’”Some who worked with Mr. Sondheim thought that he was harder on Ms. Stritch and other women than on men, perhaps because of his dreadful relationship with his mother. He told Meryle Secrest, who wrote his biography, that after his father left for a younger woman, his mother was sexually inappropriate with him: “What she did for five years was treat me like dirt, but come on to me at the same time.” After that, Ms. Secrest said, Mr. Sondheim strived to maintain “a safe psychic distance” from women making overtures, “imagined or real.” (His domineering mother surely shaped his portrait of Rose in “Gypsy.”)“He’s not hard on people that don’t threaten him,” Ms. LuPone said. “I think he was hard on me because — I don’t know. I can’t answer for him but he was hard on me. I’ve got stuff in my scrapbook, the mean stuff and good stuff.” She saves everything, even the hate mail she got after she said she would refuse to perform if Donald Trump came to a show.The petite Ms. LuPone is routinely referred to as a towering legend, but in person she’s earthy, calling everyone from stagehands to fellow cast members to me “doll.”“She’s really warm hearted and bawdy and thinks of herself as a broad,” Ryan Murphy said. “She says what’s on her mind. And she knows where all the bodies are buried.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesOne of the numbers in “Company” is “Being Alive,” and no one is more alive than Ms. LuPone, 72, who cherishes her fiery Sicilian temperament and her ability, as the writer Karen Heller put it, to “nurse a grudge like cognac.” But it’s easy to see the vulnerability threaded through the bravado.She has her own vocabulary on Broadway: Her rhapsodic fans are called “LuPonettes” and when she publicly burns someone — from an arrogant composer, to a Hollywood star who descends on Broadway for a guest turn, to a littering or photo-snapping or texting audience member — it’s called being “LuPoned.”When she does online forums with fans, she elicits comments like this one: “I wish Patti LuPone was my terrifying but beloved aunt.”Ryan Murphy cast her in roles in “Glee” (causing his young cast members to go “gaga,” he said), “American Horror Story” and his “Hollywood” limited series.“Patti has this insane, volcanic power within her body to sing like that,” Mr. Murphy said. “She is, to the American musical theater scene, what Meryl Streep became to the film world. There will never, ever, ever be another person like Patti LuPone who has that power.“Some might think of her as a diva, but she’s really warm hearted and bawdy and thinks of herself as a broad. She says what’s on her mind. And she knows where all the bodies are buried.”Her friend Joe Mantello, the acclaimed Broadway director and actor who worked with her in “Hollywood,” talked about her duality: “She understands that she’s a great star, she’s a legend. But there’s a part of her that also sees herself as part of Juilliard Group One, a working actress,” he said, referring to the first drama class at the school.After “War Paint,” the 2017 musical in which she played Helena Rubinstein, Ms. LuPone swore she would never do another musical.“I have two new hips and one new shoulder,” she told me. “Musicals are killers. They were breaking my body.”But when she was offered the chance to do “Company” with the British director Marianne Elliott, who directed the Tony Award-winning 2018 Broadway revival of “Angels in America,” Ms. LuPone could not resist.The singer is still afraid of Covid, and she had crying jags about returning to Broadway because “I just don’t want to do musicals anymore.” But she’s back belting, her mezzo-soprano voice still thrilling 41 years after she won her first Tony as Eva Perón in “Evita.” (She won a second Tony playing Rose in Mr. Sondheim’s “Gypsy” in 2008.)And, despite the hip surgeries, she’s back dancing — in heels, no less.“Did you see I tripped tonight?” she asked, adding merrily: “The next musical is in a wheelchair.”I told her that her voice — what she calls “two tiny muscles” and what Mandy Patinkin calls “the two tiny rubber bands in your throat” — sounded amazing.“I made a pact with the devil because, believe me, I’ve abused it,” she said. “In my entire life, I smoked, I took drugs, I blew out vocal cords. I had the vocal cord operation. It’s shocking to me that I still have a voice. I feel like Ethel Merman.”At the preview, the audience was primed to see their Patti again. They got excited before the show started, merely listening to a recording of her voice ominously warning everyone to turn off their phones. (Ms. LuPone famously snatched a phone from an audience member during a 2015 performance at Lincoln Center, after the woman would not stop texting.)“Musicals are treacherous animals,” Ms. LuPone said, talking about all the backstage drama and sniping. “Hits can go south faster than flops. In hits, people become entitled. In flops, you’re holding on for dear life.”Ms. LuPone and Stephen Sondheim at a rehearsal for “Sweeney Todd.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘A Burden and a Blessing’She said that this final act of her career is a lot easier than clambering up to Broadway.“I went through emotional abuse because it was the thing to do to get a performance out of somebody,” she recalled. “I never had the casting couch. They said, ‘Get out!’ They never said ‘Come in.’ I never went through any kind of sexual harassment. No, it was mental and emotional harassment.”She has said that she could be her own worst enemy, letting her temper fly.It would happen in taxicabs, she said. If she thought drivers were cheating on the meter, she would do battle, jump out without paying and yell a raunchier version of “Don’t ever mess with a New Yorker!”Mr. Patinkin, who played Che to her Evita, backed up her tales of pugilistic prowess.When they were on the road doing a concert tour, she once came in with a black eye. She explained that a guy in the parking lot had stolen her space; she had “mouthed off,” and he smacked her.“But you should have seen what I did to him!” she kvelled to Mr. Patinkin.“She doesn’t pull any punches,” he said. “She gives it to you right on the chin.” It doesn’t sound like a metaphor.“I’ve gotten in trouble since I was a toddler for questioning,” Ms. LuPone said. “I got in a lot of trouble in school. When I got out of Juilliard and got into the professional world, there was some weird behavior. Mean stage managers, lousy agents that didn’t protect me. I was completely alone in ‘Evita,’ I had to fight the battles myself.”She has talked about Hal Prince, the director, bullying her, as other British members of the cast tried to prod her to do the part as it had been done in London by Elaine Paige, to which she replied: “Shut up.”“It was like a battlefield from my dressing room past the stage management to the stage,” she said. “It was Beirut. I was safe onstage and I wasn’t even safe on the stage because I couldn’t sing it, so I was in fear every minute.”Ms. LuPone may have felt as if she was in a war zone, but her co-star felt as if he was in heaven.“You’ll never find a better partner to be with onstage, she’s just absolute magic,” Mr. Patinkin said. “I’ve never felt safer with anyone. She could throw a dagger right between my eyes and I know it would stop one millisecond right before it hit my forehead.”“If you feel a little tired or worn out, if something has happened to you,” he added, “she’ll pick you up and make sure you’re alive.“Patti is so sensitive, she sings like a child, very truthfully. She can’t let certain feelings go, which is a burden and a blessing. She fights through it all and gives everything, until there’s nothing left in her.”As she sipped champagne and nibbled on prosciutto, Ms. LuPone looked like she had plenty more in her.“I have scars,” she mused. “And why are we called ‘bitches’ or ‘difficult to work with’ when we’re simply asking for what we need?” It infuriates her, she said, because it is men who are using those labels.“Apparently, I was persona non grata in California after ‘Evita,’ because everybody heard I was difficult in New York. It’s like, ‘Wait a minute, you want to know why I was difficult?’ No, it’s just, ‘You were difficult so you’re on the Life’s Too Short list.’ I’m saying this for every woman and guy that goes through that. Your talent will out. Your talent will carry you, if you stick to it and honor your talent.”In the wake of #MeToo, she noted, abusive bosses get the hook.“There’s no more bad guys left in the world,” she said with a sly smile. But her black humor is still intact, so she added that, for her show, “We had to go through two days of sensitivity training. I wanted to kill myself.”She played Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard” in London, before it came to Broadway. In 1994, when Andrew Lloyd Webber fired her and replaced her with Glenn Close, she wrote in her memoir, “I took batting practice in my dressing room with a floor lamp. I swung at everything in sight — mirrors, wig stands, makeup, wardrobe, furniture, everything. Then I heaved the lamp out the second-floor window.”She sued him and used the $1 million she won to build a pool at her Connecticut house, now christened the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool.“The only thing we didn’t do is the police drawing on the bottom of the pool,” she said, laughing.After decades of trading insults, she says simply that Mr. Lloyd Webber is “a sad sack.” Her irritation at Ms. Close still simmers. And then there’s Madonna: In 2017, she told Andy Cohen: “Madonna is a movie killer. She’s dead behind the eyes. She can’t act her way out of a paper bag.” She added, for good measure: “She should not be on film or stage.”When we left the theater, Ms. LuPone said we were exiting through “the Madonna door,” called that because when Madonna acted there in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” in 1988, she made a quick getaway by this door to try to avoid the throngs outside.“That’s when she had that body, in that period when she was staggeringly beautiful,” Ms. LuPone said. “I couldn’t look at anything else but her body. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. It was just like, ‘Wow.’ She did have presence onstage in that respect, when she came onstage with that body.”I asked Ms. LuPone if it smarts to leave every night by the Madonna door, given that Madonna got the Eva role in the movie.“I always thought that Judy Davis would have been stunning in the movie, and get somebody else to sing it — get Marni Nixon,” she said, referring to the ghost singer for Natalie Wood in “West Side Story” and Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady.”“I want to see somebody that’s going to be electrifying and Madonna is not an electrifying presence on camera,” Ms. LuPone continued. “She’s just not — not for that score, which is insane.“When Mandy and I did it onstage, thank God we had training from Juilliard, so we were able to connect the dots dramatically, because there really wasn’t anything there.”Ouch.I asked about her husband, Matt Johnston, whom she met when he was a cameraman on a 1987 TV movie in which she portrayed the young Lady Bird Johnson. (Mrs. Johnson told her, “Evita was a bird of paradise, and I’m just a little mouse.”) How has the star stayed married for so long in showbiz?“Because Matt gave up show business,” she said. “He became Mr. Mom and a farmer, and he is egoless. He understands what this is that I have to do, and he supports it.” They have a son named Josh, 31, a filmmaker.I was curious about her seven-year romance with Kevin Kline, which got off to a fractious start at Juilliard.“We were at each other in the very beginning,” she said, “and then one day in art history class, we were just all over each other.”And did it really end, as she wrote in her memoir, when Mr. Kline collided with “a chorus girl in Boston while he was doing ‘On the Twentieth Century.’”“Well, it depends on who you ask,” Ms. LuPone said mischievously. “I wanted to move to an apartment that had doors because I was in a tiny little apartment on 21st Street. Kevin thought that was a commitment.”But she still treasures the telegram Mr. Kline sent her on opening night of “Evita”: “InEVITAble!”When I left her outside her New York apartment at 2 a.m., I felt very awake and caught up in the Patti of it all.“Bye, doll,” I called out.“Bye, doll,” she sang back.“Your talent will out,” Ms. LuPone said. “Your talent will carry you, if you stick to it and honor your talent.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesConfirm or DenyMaureen Dowd: You chided Neil Patrick Harris for not knowing what he was doing in rehearsals for your limited “Company” run at Lincoln Center in 2011.Patti LuPone: True. We had 10 days. He came in and he didn’t know anything.You once played a vengeful ghost who haunted a laundromat and lived in a dryer.Confirm.Your ideal “Ladies Who Lunch” outing would include Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Patti Smith and Bette Davis.Yes.You started your career as a toddler with a Marilyn Monroe imitation.Yes. My mother used to make me come out when I was 3 or 4 and go like this (pursing her lips).You have a long rider attached to every contract that you think of as a scrapbook for every mistake you’ve ever made.Exactly. What’s in the dressing room. What my transportation is. Just to make sure I’m not stressed out when I get there. I learned from Ryan Murphy to ask for “portal to portal.”As Helena Rubinstein said, “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”I do think that’s true.It was intimidating to sing “Ladies Who Lunch” at Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday party 10 feet away from Elaine Stritch.No, I felt honored. I started singing the line “Does anyone still wear a hat?” and I looked straight at Elaine, who had a hat on, to pay homage. Elaine always said very wise things to me. She was a lovely mentor and a lovely friend.At Juilliard, John Houseman was just as frightening as he was in “The Paper Chase.”He was tough and scary. I got in an elevator with him once in 1969, 1970. I said, “Hi, Mr. Houseman.” He turned to me and said, “Louise Bernikow says you’re the most illiterate person she’s ever met.”You sang “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” better than the senior George Bush.Can I tell you something about Barbara and George? I did a performance at the East Wing when they were in the White House. And the next time Matt and I went back, we were in the line and I said, “We got pregnant the last time we were here!” At the Willard.By happenstance, you sang at Ryan Murphy’s wedding, which was so private, he didn’t invite any of his friends.I was singing in Provincetown, and I ran into Ryan. So I came to see him come out of his room and sang “Here Comes the Bride” and threw rose petals in his path.You were jealous when Madonna performed in leather and a mesh teddy at the Boom Boom Room during Pride Week.I can’t think of anything funny about Madonna. More

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      ‘Diana, the Musical’ to End Broadway Run on Dec. 19

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      The royal musical had a bumpy road to Broadway, from a delay caused by the pandemic to a filmed version of the show on Netflix that was widely panned.After surviving the pandemic, which forced its closure after nine preview performances, and a widely panned filmed version for Netflix, “Diana, the Musical” announced on Friday that it would end its Broadway run on Dec. 19. It originally had an open run.“We are extraordinarily proud of the ‘Diana’ company and of the show onstage at the Longacre,” the producers, Beth Williams of Grove Entertainment, Frank Marshall and the Araca Group, said on Friday in a joint statement. “Our heartfelt thanks go out to the cast, crew and everyone involved in creating the show. And to the audiences who have shown their love and support at every performance.”The show, which is about the ill-fated marriage of the Princess of Wales to Prince Charles, began previews on Nov. 2 at the Longacre Theater, and opened on Nov. 17. At the time of its closing, it will have played 33 performances and 16 previews.The reviews for the musical were mostly negative. In his review for The New York Times, Jesse Green wrote, “If you care about Diana as a human being, or dignity as a concept, you will find this treatment of her life both aesthetically and morally mortifying.”The show, which had a pre-Broadway production at La Jolla Playhouse, featured Jeanna de Waal in the title role and Roe Hartrampf as Prince Charles. It was directed by Christopher Ashley, choreographed by Kelly Devine, and written by Joe DiPietro and David Bryan (the Bon Jovi keyboardist), who created the Tony Award-winning musical “Memphis.” More

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      Review: In a Gender-Flipped Revival, ‘Company’ Loves Misery

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      Bobby is now Bobbie in this confusing, sour remake of the 1970 musical by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth.If there was ever a good time to dislike “Company,” now isn’t it.No, the death on Nov. 26 of the composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim makes this more properly a time for sorrow and gratitude. He was, after all, the man who wrote those feelings into a beautiful “Company” song — “Sorry-Grateful” — and, in so doing, introduced ambivalence at an almost cellular level to the American musical theater.But let’s face it, the revival that opened on Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater is not the “Company” Sondheim and the book writer George Furth (along with the director Hal Prince) unleashed on Broadway in 1970. Sure, the score remains great, and there are a few perfectly etched performances in supporting roles, especially Patti LuPone’s as the undermining, pickled Joanne.As directed by Marianne Elliott, however, in a gender-flipped version abetted by Sondheim himself, what was once the story of a man who is terrified of intimacy becomes something much less interesting: the story of a woman who is justifiably tired of her friends.That woman — now Bobbie instead of Bobby, and played by the winsome Katrina Lenk — no longer hears the busy signal of missed emotional connections that pulsed through the songs in their original incarnation. This time, what accompanies her as she studies five partnerships and samples three lovers is the ticking of a biological clock.Reframed that way, and with heaps of oversize symbolic baggage piled on top, the story comes to seem overwrought and incoherent. Gone is the affirmative lesson Bobbie learns from the smothering couples attending her 35th birthday party — a milestone she’d rather ignore. Instead, as if to prove that “Company” loves misery, this production drags her off the pedestal of her aloofness and into the mud of a long, dark night of the soul. At one point she vomits into a bucket.Indecent proposal, from left: Terence Archie as Larry, Patti LuPone as Joanne and Lenk.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNot that coherence was ever the material’s strong point. From the start, critics complained about a main character who seemed dangerously recessive, observing other people’s foibles in loosey-goosey comic sketches that barely added up. No wonder: They started life as separate one-act plays..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In one of those sketches, the low-level friction between a husband and wife erupts in a jiu-jitsu match; in another, the apparently perfect shine of marital bliss turns out to be the glow of impending divorce. A third couple learns the meaning of devotion while smoking pot; a fourth couple — now configured as two gay men — experiences hiccups on the way to the altar.Still, as strung together by Sondheim’s diamantine songs, “Company” offered a groundbreaking way of looking at its subject, less through a microscope than a kaleidoscope. Sarcasm warming into insight was the hallmark of the style, which borrowed the nonrepresentational techniques of midcentury drama and wed it to a psychological acuity rarely before seen in American musicals. The result was a new method of storytelling in which thematic consistency trumped conventional plot — and nearly obliterated it.Though fascinating in theory, and worth considering as a way of reorienting the original’s outdated sexual politics, Elliott’s idea that the material could be regendered for a new era completely disrupts that consistency. Aside from Sondheim’s customized new lyrics, only a few of the alterations made to accommodate the thesis scan. One involves the gay couple, Jamie (formerly Amy) and Paul. For them, getting married really is the terrifying unknown described in the showstopping, tongue-twisting “Getting Married Today.” Explaining his decision to cancel the ceremony, Jamie (Matt Doyle) says, in a line that’s been added: “Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.”That moment rings true. But when Bobbie takes advantage of Jamie’s jitters to suggest that he marry her instead of Paul, she doesn’t seem needy or wolfish, as Bobby did when propositioning Amy; she seems foolish and disrespectful. That Lenk fails to make sense of the moment is not her fault. There are no lines or logic that would allow her to do so.From left, Jennifer Simard and Christopher Sieber, with Lenk. The low-level friction between Simard and Sieber’s characters, a husband and wife, erupts in a jiu-jitsu match.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEven more flummoxing is the scene in which, as originally written, Joanne, tired of Bobby’s passivity, and perhaps her own, suggests they have an affair. Short of turning Joanne into a lesbian, which might have been more interesting, Elliott has little choice but to turn her into a pimp, goading Bobbie to “make it” with her husband, Larry. Perhaps if Larry were not a tertiary character, barely fleshed out in Furth’s script, this might not seem like a directorial hail-Mary pass.Yet it’s amazing what a little LuPone can do to distract from such things. Whether swinging her legs like a mischievous child or squatting on a toilet — yes, Elliott’s staging goes there — she brings her precision comedy and riveting charisma to every moment she’s onstage. Her two big numbers, “The Little Things You Do Together” and “The Ladies Who Lunch,” both left pretty much alone, are uncommonly taut and specific.Too bad that Lenk, so beguiling in “The Band’s Visit” and “Indecent,” is not as lucky, both miscast and mishandled. Bobby’s transformation into Bobbie has been accomplished at the cost of a few ribs, turning the character into a rag doll. Unable to meet the dramatic and vocal demands of the role, Lenk seems merely pummeled by it. To be fair, Elliott’s staging, full of athletic busywork and “Alice in Wonderland” contortions of scale on Bunny Christie’s almost too-fascinating set, is quite a workout. Maybe that’s why Christie, who also designed the costumes, has oddly given Lenk plain white sneakers to wear with her dressy scarlet pantsuit.But in trying to disguise the show’s revue-like structure by centering the action in Bobbie’s mind, Elliott paradoxically causes her to recede even further than usual. (At one point she brings on a battalion of Bobbies, as if to compensate.) In response, you become uncommonly grateful for secondary characters who have clear things to do and do them smartly, like Jennifer Simard as the jiu-jitsu wife and Claybourne Elder as a himbo flight attendant.Eventually, though, the show runs out of distractions.Sondheim was collaborative to a fault; it’s no contradiction that he hotly resented criticism of Furth’s work on “Company” and yet (after initial skepticism) eagerly endorsed Elliott’s renovations. “What keeps theater alive is the chance always to do it differently,” he told The Times shortly before his death. This was no mere bromide; Sondheim allowed a masterpiece like “Sweeney Todd” to be cut to ribbons for Tim Burton’s film and saw the cult flop “Merrily We Roll Along” through more surgeries than Frankenstein’s monster.In that sense, this “Company” is perfectly in line with his intentions: It’s new. And truth be told, I was never less than riveted — if usually in the way Bobby is, eyeballing messy marriages. Nor is the chance to hear the great score live with a 14-piece orchestra to be taken lightly; is there a more exciting opening number than the title song?So I guess I’m sorry-grateful. Sorry for not liking this version of “Company” better — and grateful to Sondheim for providing the chance to find out.CompanyAt the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; companymusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      Interview: Time to hear The Awesome Truth!

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      Actor LJ Parkinson on Cinderella: The Awesome Truth!

      There are some fantastic festivities at the Polka Theatre in Wimbledon this Christmas, with Cinderella: The Awesome Truth! taking to the stage. It’s a twist on the traditional Cinderella story that brings it bang up to date with loads of songs, laughs and a message of kindness. We chatted with LJ Parkinson who plays Dandini to find out a bit more about the show.

      So LJ, there’s some serious partying going on at the palace just now. Do you think you and the rest of the cast can take the pace? How have the audiences been responding to Cinderella? 

      The audience response has been fantastic! It’s funny you should mention about the pace because I am currently performing the show from a wheelchair as I am injured, but the show hasn’t lost one moment of its momentum or sass… it’s opened up new dynamics between us all and though I found it very difficult at first I’ve found my way through the challenge.

      This is not a traditional version of the story, is it?  What makes it so different, and what is your role in the show?

      No, it’s not a traditional version of the story, we felt that the traditional story wasn’t inclusive and doesn’t present healthy views on beauty and self-esteem and that’s what we set out to rectify. So many families are multi-cultural, and representation and diversity is really important to us all here so it’s vital we tell these stories. We explore many themes in this play including gender identity, fat phobia, social media pressures and platonic friendships, which equip the audience with stronger tools to navigate this modern society that tells you that you have to be a certain way or you’re ugly … we took ugly and made it about being uniquely glorious and loud and proud !

      There are some cracking songs in the production, any favourites?

      So my favourite song is “Because You’re Awesome” and is the duet between Cindy and Ella. Their voices are so beautiful and to see the friends go on this challenging journey to sisterhood is a really hopeful message that when families merge together that can overcome it and nothing will be lost: in fact you can gain a sister and become an unbeatable force!

      One of the things that works really well in the show is the audience interaction. What’s the funniest or weirdest thing the kids have shouted out to you?

      So in the top of Act Two I come out on stage and have a chat with the children about using our imaginations to build the party for Prince Francis. At one point I ask what music we were listening to and one small child shouted “Chopin!” This was for certain the highlight of my entire career – I think it turned out we were listening to Chopin, eating chocolate sausage rolls and sushi decorated the entire palace. Classic!

      It’s brilliant to see a non-binary actor like yourself taking on such a traditional pantomime role and totally redefining it, whilst just being your authentic, hilarious self. Do you think this normalising approach might encourage new audiences, who will see themselves represented in what you do?

      I think it’s so important to introduce actors and characters that are from all walks of life whether it’s gender identity race or disability or non-conventional families. In the news they tend to focus on issues like bathrooms and JK Rowling. Whilst those things are important for some people, I am more focussed in carving out a path to experience the world in full colour and allowing my authentic self to thrive without prejudice and encourage others to do so too. By having a non-binary character in a kids show, we are showing people from a young age before the world has told them there’s something wrong with being different from the heteronormative, that we exist and actually we are a lot of fun and that is nothing to be ashamed of.

      Another interesting member of the cast is Sass. Have you ever worked with a squirrel before, and are you likely to do it again?

      I have never worked with a squirrel before but I have heard on the grapevine that there are a couple of agencies trying to put Sass on their books so I’m sure we’ll see Sass on the West End very soon! I hope they put in a good word for me.

      As you’re playing Dandini, the palace chef, will you be cooking Christmas lunch this year, and will there be sausage rolls?

      I absolutely will be cooking Christmas lunch this year for all the cast including Sass so I will have to put in a nut roast!! I’ll be dazzling them with my special Yorkshire puddings and the best beef dripping roast potatoes… although my special cheese soufflés and chocolate sausage rolls are also going on the menu… It’s going to be the best Xmas ever!!!

      Many thanks to LJ for taking the time to chat with us. You can enjoy Cinderella: The Awesome Truth! at the Polka Theatre until January 30. Further information and tickets at the link below. More

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      A Standing Army of Actors Keeps Germany’s Theaters Going

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      In a country where the director is king, it’s the hundreds of full-time players in the many house ensembles who have assured that the lights stayed on during the pandemic.BERLIN — One of Germany’s best-known theatrical exports is Regietheater, a staging approach that grants directors godlike powers to rewrite and reinterpret plays as they see fit. The aesthetic sensibilities, philosophical preoccupations and egos of directors here help set the tone and define the identities of the country’s highest-profile playhouses. But make no mistake: German’s rich theater landscape is sustained by the hundreds of actors employed full time by the country’s 142 publicly owned theaters, as well as by several private ones.This truth has never struck me as forcefully as in the past 20 months during the coronavirus pandemic, in and out of lockdown, with all the resulting hygiene and distancing measures.One of the main reasons theater here has been able to rebound after repeated closures is that Germany effectively has a standing army of actors, most of whom continued to receive most of their salaries even during the monthslong stretches when stages were dark, thanks to a government program for furloughed workers. This also meant players on hand for digital theater experiments during lockdowns and for live performances in cleverly modified formats once theaters reopened. Now, as theaters once again begin limiting attendance to promote social distancing, the actors they employ are at the ready to play for limited audiences.Long before the pandemic turned much of our everyday reality on its head, house actors have been prized for their flexibility. Most of them are expected to be dramatic chameleons, moving from main to supporting roles in plays by Shakespeare or Sarah Kane as circumstances demand. The number of actors in a theater’s ensemble can vary wildly. In Berlin, the Deutsches Theater has 37 full-time actors, while the nearby Volksbühne employs a mere 12. Most ensemble actors are accustomed to grueling schedules and a grab bag of roles.Angela Winkler and Joachim Meyerhoff in Christian Kracht’s “Eurotrash,” directed by Jan Bosse at the Schaubühne in Berlin.Fabian SchellhornOne of Berlin’s most recently anointed acting gods is Joachim Meyerhoff, a member of the Schaubühne in the capital since 2019. After winning acclaim in productions of works by Molière and Virginie Despentes, Meyerhoff, one of 30 actors in the Schaubühne’s ensemble, starred in the late November premiere of “Eurotrash,” an adaptation of a novel by Christian Kracht that was a best seller this year in Germany.Meyerhoff brings a nervous, uptight energy to Kracht’s autobiographical narrator, a middle-aged son who tries to connect with his estranged mother during a dysfunctional road trip from Zurich to the Alps. The show’s director, Jan Bosse, stages this offbeat buddy comedy aboard a small yacht on an unadorned stage. It’s a delightfully absurd touch that visually enlivens what is an overlong and dramatically thin evening, despite the commanding central performance.During two intermissionless hours, much gets tossed overboard, including colostomy bags, vodka bottles and thousands of Swiss francs, but Meyerhoff’s pained and deadpan performance as a man-child struggling to connect with a mentally ill mother remains the emotional focus of the evening. As the stony, alcoholic and self-destructive matriarch, Angela Winkler is unable to invest her character with enough emotional nuance to make us truly care about the parent-child relationship. In the end, finding the actress onstage in 2021 is itself more moving than her actual performance: Winkler belonged to the ensemble of the Schaubühne in the 1970s, during the long tenure of the artistic director Peter Stein.To see this 77-year-old next to Meyerhoff is to be reminded of the Schaubühne’s long tradition of acting excellence.Less than a week later, I found the great female performance that had eluded me at the Schaubühne in southern Germany, in an unusual production of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit” that stars the Belarusian Israeli actress Evgenia Dodina, a recently minted ensemble member at the Schauspiel Stuttgart.Evgenia Dodina  in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit” at the Schauspiel Stuttgart.Julian Baumann“The Visit,” one of the few postwar German-language plays to achieve international success, has had many lives since its 1956 premiere in Zurich. It’s been adapted for the big screen and turned into an opera and a Kander and Ebb musical. Shortly before the pandemic hit, a misbegotten version by Tony Kushner played the National Theater in London. Yet the Stuttgart production, by the theater’s artistic director, Burkhard C. Kosminski, is perhaps the most unusual of all these incarnations.Dürrenmatt’s perverse plot, about a wealthy woman who returns to her impoverished hometown and offers to make the villagers rich in exchange for lynching the man who wronged her long ago, has often been interpreted as an allegory for postwar European life in the shadow of National Socialist crimes. That reading is made explicit by this fascinating and frustrating production, in which the play’s titular character is a Jewish woman whose being driven out of town in 1940 saved her from perishing in a concentration camp.When she meets her old flame (Matthias Leja, another of the theater’s 31 ensemble actors), they flirt nervously in both German and Hebrew. While Kosminski reimagines the main character’s background, Dodina periodically steps out of the play to narrate, in Hebrew, her own biography as well as her mother’s and grandmother’s wartime experiences fleeing the Nazis across Central Asia. Dodina is mesmerizing as the play’s avenging fury, as well as in her personal monologues, but it’s hard to see how the various elements add up. In the end, the modified and abridged Dürrenmatt text and the actress’s family reminiscences are an odd match, despite Dodina’s committed and captivating portrayal.The performance of “The Visit” I attended was the last that played to a full house. The next day, much of southern Germany slashed the numbers allowed in theaters there. Stuttgart got off lightly with 50 percent of capacity; in nearby Munich, most cultural events can go ahead with only a quarter. But for the most part, theaters, and their actors, have soldiered on as best they can while performing, once again, to comically small audiences.Delschad Numan Khorschid, left, and Steffen Höld in “Absent Dreams” in Munich. Sandra ThenTwo hundred and twenty masked spectators were allowed into the 880-seat Residenztheater in Munich for a recent performance of “Absent Dreams,” a trilogy of plays by the Dutch author Judith Herzberg that is a sprawling saga of an extended Jewish family in Amsterdam. Memories of the Holocaust and of perished relatives loom in the background, but Herzberg is more interested in showing the vibrancy of these characters and their complex relationships than in suggesting that they are hopelessly crippled by trauma. The director Stephan Kimmig’s five-hour production resounds with a kind of epic intimacy that the theater has been honing under its new artistic director, Andreas Beck. The large dramatis personae of “Absent Dreams” are played exclusively by members of the theater’s 50-actor ensemble, the biggest in Germany. For the duration of this long evening, 15 of them populate the vast stage, some in multiple roles.Yet beyond the accomplished performances, which are too many to enumerate, the production achieves a remarkable cohesion from the almost conspiratorial sense of rapport engendered by a group of actors who have been performing alongside one another, in both main and supporting roles, night after night and in play after play.As I watched Herzberg’s protagonists come to life, I could see the engine of Germany’s mighty theatrical tradition at close range. Throughout the pandemic, that dynamo has proved unstoppable.The Visit. Directed by Burkhard C. Kosminski. Schauspiel Stuttgart, through Jan. 30.Absent Dreams. Directed by Stephan Kimmig. München Residenztheater, through Feb. 23.Eurotrash. Directed by Jan Bosse. Schaubühne Berlin, through Jan. 2. More

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      ‘West Side Story’ Review: In Love and War, 1957 Might Be Tonight

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      Steven Spielberg rediscovers the breathing, troubling essence of a classic, building a bold and current screen musical with no pretense to perfection.“West Side Story” sits near the pinnacle of post-World War II American middlebrow culture. First performed on Broadway in 1957 and brought to the screen four years later, it survives as both a time capsule and a reservoir of imperishable songs. What its creators attempted — a swirling fusion of literary sophistication and contemporary social concern, of playfulness and solemnity, of realism and fantasy, of street fighting and ballet — hadn’t quite been attempted before, and hasn’t been matched since.The idea of harnessing the durable tragedy of “Romeo and Juliet” to the newsy issues of juvenile delinquency and ethnic intolerance must have seemed, to Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, both audacious and obvious. In the years since, “West Side Story” has proved irresistible — to countless high-school musical theater programs and now to Steven Spielberg, whose film version reaffirms its indelible appeal while making it feel bold, surprising and new.This isn’t to say that the show has ever been perfect. Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics (and who died just after Thanksgiving at 91), frequently disdained his own contributions, including the charming “I Feel Pretty.” The depiction of Puerto Rican and Anglo (or “gringo”) youth gangs has been faulted for sociological imprecision and cultural insensitivity. Shakespeare’s Verona might not translate so easily into the slums of mid-20th-century Manhattan.But perfection has never been a relevant standard for musicals. The genre has always been a glorious, messy mash-up of aesthetic transcendence and commercial ambition, a grab-bag of styles and sources held together by the energy, ingenuity and sheer chutzpah of scrappy and resourceful artists. This may be especially true at the movies, where the technology of cinema can enhance and also complicate the artistry..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Spielberg’s version, with a screenplay by Tony Kushner that substantially revises Laurents’s book and new choreography by Justin Peck that pays shrewd tribute to Robbins’s genius, can’t be called flawless. The performances are uneven. The swooning romanticism of the central love story doesn’t always align with the roughness of the setting. The images occasionally swerve too bumpily from street-level naturalism to theatrical spectacle. The seams — joining past to present, comedy to tragedy, America to dreamland — sometimes show.But those seams are part of what makes the movie so exciting. It’s a dazzling display of filmmaking craft that also feels raw, unsettled and alive. Rather than embalming a classic with homage or aggressively reinventing it, Spielberg, Kushner, Peck and their collaborators (including the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, the production designer Adam Stockhausen, the editors Sarah Broshar and Michael Kahn and the composers Jeanine Tesori and David Newman) have rediscovered its breathing, thrilling essence.The 1961 movie, directed by Robbins and Robert Wise, was partly filmed on location in a neighborhood that was already vanishing. In Spielberg’s 1957, the destruction is well underway. Wrecking balls and cranes tower over piles of smashed masonry that were once tenement buildings. A sign posted at one of the demolition sites shows a rendering of the shiny Lincoln Center arts complex that will rise where the slums once stood.This “West Side Story” is explicitly historical, grounded in a specific moment in New York City’s past. Kushner (whom I profiled in a recent issue of T, The New York Times Style Magazine) has brought a level of scholarly care to the screenplay far beyond what Laurents and the others were able or willing to muster.Shakespeare’s play supposes “two households, both alike in dignity”; in Act III, Mercutio famously calls down “a plague” on both of them. But such symmetry, while structurally necessary to the source material — who were the Montagues and Capulets, anyway, and who really cares? — doesn’t map easily onto the West Side as Kushner and Spielberg understand it.David Alvarez at center as Bernardo, leader of the Sharks, in the film.Niko Tavernise/20th Century StudiosThe Jets and the Sharks, a white teenage gang and their Puerto Rican antagonists, aren’t mirror images of each other. Ostensibly contending for control over a few battered blocks in the West 60s, they collide like taxis speeding toward each other on a one-way street.The Sharks are children of an upwardly striving, migrant working class, a generation (or less) removed from mostly rural poverty in the Caribbean and determined to find a foothold in the imperial metropolis, where they are greeted with prejudice and suspicion. Bernardo (David Alvarez), their leader, is a boxer. His girlfriend, Anita (Ariana DeBose), works as a seamstress, while his younger sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler), toils on the night shift as a cleaner at Gimbels department store. Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera), who Bernardo and Anita believe would be a good match for Maria, is a bespectacled future accountant. (But of course Maria falls for Tony, a reluctant Jet played by the heartthrobby Ansel Elgort.) All of them have plans, aspirations, dreams. The violence of the streets is, for Bernardo, a necessary and temporary evil, something to be overcome through hard work and communal cohesion on the way to something better.The Jets, by contrast, are the bitter remnant of an immigrant cohort that has, for the most part, moved on — to the Long Island suburbs and the bungalows of Queens, to a share of postwar prosperity. As the policemen Officer Krupke (Brian D’Arcy James) and Lieutenant Schrank (Corey Stoll) are on hand to explain — and as the Jets themselves testify — these kids are the product of family dysfunction and societal neglect. Without aspirations for the future, they are held together by clannish loyalty and racist resentment — an empty sense of white entitlement and a perpetually expanding catalog of grievances. Their nihilism is embodied by Riff (the rangy Mike Faist), the kind of brawler who would rather fight than win.As the song says: “Life can be bright in America/If you can fight in America.” But what lingers after this “West Side Story” is a darkness that seems to belong more to our own angry, tribal moment than to the (relatively) optimistic ’50s or early ’60s. The heartbreak lands so heavily because the eruptions of joy are so heady. The big comic and romantic numbers — “Tonight,” “America” and, yes, “I Feel Pretty” — burst with color and feeling, and the silliness of “Officer Krupke” cuts like an internal satire of some of the show’s avowed liberal pieties.The cast members — notably including Rita Moreno, who was Anita in 1961 and who returns as a weary, wise pharmacist named Valentina — bring exactly the sincerity and commitment that a movie like this requires. There’s a reason “West Side Story” is a staple of the performing arts curriculum, and for all the Hollywood bells and whistles, the essence of Spielberg’s version is a bunch of kids snapping their fingers and singing their hearts out.The voices are, all in all, pretty strong. Zegler sings some of the most challenging numbers with full-throated authority, but she and Elgort don’t fully inhabit the grand, life-altering (and -ending) passion that their roles require. Tony and Maria are sweet and likable, but also a bit bland, and their whirlwind progress from infatuation to eternal devotion, which unfolds over a scant two days, feels shallow against the big, complicated forces moving around them.This is partly a consequence of Kushner and Spielberg’s commitment to realism and historical nuance, and in some ways it works to the movie’s advantage. The center of tragic gravity shifts away from Tony and Maria to Bernardo and Anita, and also to Riff. It helps that Alvarez, Faist and — supremely — DeBose are such magnetic performers. When DeBose is onscreen, nothing else matters but what Anita is feeling. But the characters also have a deeper, more complicated stake in the story. They aren’t just foils or catalysts for the action, as their counterparts are in Shakespeare. They are the ones for whom the question of what it is to be in America becomes a matter of life and death.West Side StoryRated PG-13. Never was a story of more woe. Running time: 2 hours 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Selling Kabul’ Review: Trapped in a War, and an Apartment

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      In Sylvia Khoury’s suspenseful new play, the characters sometimes feel too much like wheels in a machine, but it’s a tense thrill to watch it work.Sylvia Khoury’s “Selling Kabul,” a 95-minute thriller that opened on Monday at Playwrights Horizons, is a play as tautly made as a military bed. You could bounce a quarter off it — or given its provenance, a five-afghani coin — and then throw yourself down to recover your nerves, which the drama will have absolutely mangled.The time is 2013, 12 years after the beginning of America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan, eight years before its unceremonious close and a moment in which the United States has radically reduced its troop presence. The setting, by Arnulfo Maldonado, is the nice enough Kabul apartment where Afiya (Marjan Neshat) lives with her husband, Jawid (Mattico David), a tailor and storekeeper. For months they have shared the apartment with a third roommate, Taroon (Dario Ladani Sanchez), Afiya’s brother, who spends many of his waking hours in the living room closet.At some point in the past, Taroon worked as a translator for the American forces, which has made him a target of the Taliban. Separated from his pregnant wife, he passes his days surreptitiously watching television and checking the status of his special immigrant visa — when the Wi-Fi works, anyway. As the play begins, Taroon’s wife is in labor and he must weigh the risk of seeing her.As directed by Tyne Rafaeli, “Selling Kabul” has elements of a Greek tragedy and an espionage thriller. As a suspense story that unrolls in real time, it also suggests stage chillers like “Rope.” Khoury has built her play like a puzzle box. Every detail of the wordless opening moments, even the offstage noises — a baby crying, an engine revving — will reverberate later on. (This is the rare play in which the sound design, by Lee Kinney, is absolutely crucial to the story.) Pay particular attention to the opening conversation between Afiya and Taroon, a tangle of truth and lies in which each word matters.A structural marvel, “Selling Kabul” can sometimes sound a little hollow at its core. Khoury sketches personalities for the characters — rounded out by Francis Benhamou as Leyla, a chatterbox neighbor — quickly and deftly. We immediately understand Taroon’s impetuousness, Jawid’s equivocation, Leyla’s bright anguish, Afiya’s fretful good sense. (Afiya is the play’s moral center; Neshat is its standout.) But these people mainly serve as devices to urge the drama toward crisis and their speech can seem stilted, as when Taroon reacts to the birth of his son: “He’ll think me a coward. Too scared to show my face in the light of day.”This would matter less in another play, located in an environment more familiar to American audiences, or if we had more plays, particularly plays by writers of Middle Eastern descent, set in this region. But we don’t have many. In terms of what has played in New York, only “Homebody/Kabul,” “Blood and Gifts” and “The Great Game: Afghanistan” come to mind, works by white British and American writers. At its best, theater can bring the faraway very close, personalize the abstract.Acknowledging that too few of us stateside will ever understand the civilian toll of conflicts like those in Afghanistan, I wish Khoury, a playwright of French and Lebanese descent, and Rafaeli had done more to make these characters feel fully human and not just wheels in a beautiful machine. Or maybe this is simply my own regret talking — my memory of seeing the images of the chaos at Kabul airport during America’s botched August exit and realizing that I should have been paying a lot more attention. But that’s the thing about a forever war waged a world away: I didn’t have to. It’s unfair to want “Selling Kabul” to have made me.So enjoy the play instead as a nimble entertainment and a first-rate workout for your sympathetic nervous system — if I still bit my nails I would have no nails left now. And appreciate, too, that while “Selling Kabul” could have ended tragically, it instead offers some morsel of hope to all of its characters, even if it perverts reason to keep that hope alive. (Honestly, there are a few other logical discrepancies, as when fastidious characters suddenly leave the door open. But when you’re tempted to yell, “For the love of all that’s holy, lock the door!” at the stage, clearly a play has got you.)After the lights come back on, you will find an insert in your program with information about the International Refugee Assistance Project, a charity that offers legal aid to people in Taroon’s situation, a way to make that hope more real. Maybe that’s a test of a play, not how well it works within a theater’s narrow walls, but how much it makes you want to act beyond them.Selling KabulThrough Dec. 23 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More