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      Antony Sher, Actor Acclaimed for His Versatility, Dies at 72

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      In his long career, most of it with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he played everyone from King Lear to Primo Levi to Ringo Starr.Antony Sher, an actor known for his masterly interpretations of Shakespeare’s great characters and for his versatility, died on Thursday at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. He was 72.The cause was cancer, said the Royal Shakespeare Company, with which Mr. Sher had been closely associated for more than four decades. Gregory Doran, the company’s artistic director and Mr. Sher’s husband, had announced in September that he would take compassionate leave to care for Mr. Sher.Mr. Sher was 32 when he first attracted notice as an actor, playing the leading role of a libidinous, manipulative lecturer in a 1981 BBC adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s novel “The History Man.” He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company the next year.His breakthrough came in 1984, in the title role of Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” He performed on crutches, which he used as an extension of Richard’s contorted physique and psyche to evoke Shakespeare’s description of the character as “a bottled spider.”In The Times of London, Sheridan Morley described his portrayal as “the only one in our lifetime to have challenged the 40-year memory of Olivier in that role.” Other critics agreed that it was a career-making performance. “In this unabashed attempt at incarnating evil, Mr. Sher is monstrously convincing,” Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times.In 1985 he won an Olivier Award both for his performance as Richard and for his subsequent role as a drag queen in Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy.” In his acceptance speech, he said he was happy “to be the first actor to win an award for playing both a king and a queen.”Mr. Sher went on to play numerous great Shakespearean roles, including Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” (1987), Leontes in “The Winter’s Tale” (1999), Iago in “Othello” (2004), Prospero in “The Tempest” (2008), Falstaff in “Henry IV,” Parts One and Two (2014), and the title roles in “Titus Andronicus” (1994), “Macbeth” (1999) and “King Lear” (2016).“The voice alone is rich, roaring music,” Charles Isherwood wrote in a 2014 New York Times review of “Henry IV,” adding that “Mr. Sher manages to make Shakespeare’s often arcane language sound as familiar as the slang you’d hear on the streets today.”In 1987, when playing Shylock, Mr. Sher noticed “a handsome chap playing Solanio,” he later recalled, “so I asked the director who he was.” It was Mr. Doran, who would become his partner and, in 2015, his husband.After a tense first collaboration, when Mr. Doran directed Mr. Sher in the title role of “Titus Andronicus,” a production they took to Mr. Sher’s native South Africa in 1995, they determined that they wouldn’t discuss work at home. (They went on to work together extensively, but not exclusively.)In addition to Mr. Doran, Mr. Sher’s survivors include two brothers, Joel and Randall.Mr. Sher’s dramatic range was extensive. He won rave reviews for his performances in “Cyrano de Bergerac” and Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” both directed by Mr. Doran. He played Arturo Ui in Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” and Joseph K in an adaptation of Kafka’s “The Trial,” and he won his second Olivier Award in 1997 for his portrayal of the painter Stanley Spencer in Pam Gem’s “Stanley.” He was awarded a knighthood for services to the theater in 2000.Mr. Sher won his second Olivier Award for his portrayal of the painter Stanley Spencer in Pam Gem’s “Stanley.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Sher was also a prolific writer and an accomplished artist. He published an autobiography, “Beside Myself,” in 2001, as well as four novels, two plays and three theater diaries, illustrated with his sketches and paintings.In many of his books he described his connection to, and ambivalence about, South Africa. “Home. Love. Hate,” he wrote in his autobiography. “A triangle, a difficult equation, it’s always there for me.”In 2004 he wrote and starred in “Primo,” an adaptation of “If This Is a Man,” Primo Levi’s unsparing 1947 account of daily life in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Writing about the 2005 Broadway production, Ben Brantley of The Times said that Mr. Sher “creates a portrait in which brutal memory penetrates the very marrow of one man’s existence.”Mr. Sher in the 2005 Broadway production of “Primo,” based on Primo Levi’s 1947 Holocaust memoir, “If This Is a Man.”Ivan KynclHe frequently spoke of being drawn to playing outsiders and misfits. “I was a white Jewish South African and I didn’t feel like I belonged in the classical British theater,” he said in an interview with The Times before the premiere of John Kani’s “Kunene and the King” in 2019. “I always felt a bit like an interloper.”In what was to be his last role, he played a terminally ill South African actor preparing to play King Lear. In the interview, he said that he had tried to leave his South African identity behind when he moved to Britain, but that he could now celebrate the way his life “had come full circle.”Mr. Sher with John Kani in “Kunene and the King,” written by Mr. Kani, in 2019. In what turned out to be his last role, Mr. Sher played a terminally ill South African actor.Ellie KurttzAntony Sher was born in Cape Town on June 14, 1949, the third of four children of Emmanuel Sher, an importer of animal hides, and Margery (Abramowitz) Sher, who ran the house. “Her role in life was of commander in chief, and that often meant battle conditions,” Mr. Sher wrote of their life in Sea Point, the middle-class white suburb where he grew up.Although his grandparents were Lithuanian Jews who had fled pogroms in Europe, Mr. Sher said he had little sense growing up that they were living amid similarly oppressive conditions for Black people in apartheid South Africa. “My family was typical of white families at the time, almost ignorant about apartheid, which sounds impossible but true,” he said in 2019. “I became politicized much later in England.”Short, slight and bespectacled, Mr. Sher never felt he fit in at the sports-mad boys’ school he attended. Sent by his mother to elocution classes, he was introduced to the plays of John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker. By 16, he had decided to go to drama school in London.First however, he had to do nine months of national army service, obligatory for all white men in South Africa. Although it was a traumatic experience, he wrote in his autobiography that he later came to regard it as “a kind of research trip” for playing Macbeth, Richard III, Cyrano and others.In 1968, Mr. Sher flew to London with his parents and auditioned for both the Central School of Speech and Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Both turned him down. The Royal Academy’s letter, he recalled, was particularly wounding. “We strongly urge you to seek a different career,” it said.He found a place at the Webber Douglas Academy, where his teachers included Steven Berkoff, then performed with the theater group Gay Sweatshop before landing the role of Ringo Starr in Willy Russell’s Beatles musical “John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert,” which transferred to the West End. During the run of the show, Mr. Sher met Jim Hooper, a fellow actor, with whom he would live for the next 18 years.It took Mr. Sher a long time to admit openly that he was gay; he had two relationships with women after drama school and a brief marriage before publicly acknowledging his homosexuality in 1989. Rather disappointingly, he wrote, that revelation “made no impact whatsoever.”He also tried hard, early on, to shed any traces of a South African identity, telling people he was British. “It wasn’t just that I was ashamed of apartheid,” he wrote. “I was also ashamed of coming from a cultural wasteland. How could you become a famous actor if you were a white South African?”After “The History Man,” Mr. Sher appeared in a handful of films, including “Mrs. Brown” and “Shakespeare in Love,” but his career remained firmly anchored in the theater. He overcame a cocaine addiction in the mid-1990s and later remarked that he had been able to use that experience in playing Falstaff.“For an actor,” he said, “nothing is wasted.” More

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      No Matter the Role, Antony Sher Made Soaring Seem Possible

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      The actor, who died at the age of 72, was known for his commanding performances of Shakespeare’s Richard III and the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi.To watch Antony Sher onstage was an uncommonly visceral experience. Sher, the South African-born British stage star who died on Thursday at 72, made you feel his performances on a level few other actors achieve.I’m not talking about an emotional reaction here, or not only that. I mean a physical response, the kind that registers in your muscles, your stomach, your bones. A small-framed 5-foot-6, Sher was not, by conventional measurements, a naturally imposing presence.Yet the concentration and physiological specificity with which he embodied characters, from power-hungry medieval monarchs to a 20th-century sensualist painter, made you tense up in anatomical empathy. After attending a Sher performance, I would often throb with the ache that follows a rigorous run on rough terrain. I was even tempted to check my body for bruises.After seeing him in the title role of “Primo,” on Broadway in 2005, I found myself walking gingerly as I left the theater, and I imagined I could sense other audience members doing the same. In that one-man work, adapted by Sher from “If This Is a Man,” the memoir of the great writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, the actor gave palpable shape to the unspeakable legacy of life in a concentration camp, in the very way he moved across a stage.Each step he took had a stiffness and wariness that evoked months of existence as a human beast of burden in shoes that never fit. The simplest everyday movements became an assertion of will over the tidal pull of both terrifying memory and an abused body. And you knew, on a gut level, that the six-digit tattoo etched on his arm was only the most superficial emblem of how this man had been scrawled upon by inhuman hands.That sense of wrestling with and overcoming the limitations of the fallible human form was spectacularly evident in the performance that made him a star: Shakespeare’s Richard III. For that 1984 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, he consulted orthopedic surgeons to understand the exact nature of Richard III’s physical disabilities.The resulting portrait was of the “bottled spider,” the “bunch-backed toad” as a man who had taken thorough inventory of the limitations of his body and transformed perceived weaknesses into weapons. On crutches, he moved faster and more forcefully than anyone else onstage, and you were never not aware of the exhausting energy required. (The process of Sher’s transformation into Richard is documented in his 1985 book, “Year of the King,” a first-rate breakdown of an actor’s creation of a role.)I regret having missed his Lear, some three decades later. But I cherish my memories of his Macbeth, directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company by Sher’s partner (and future husband) Gregory Doran, which came to the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., in 2000, with the marvelous Harriet Walter as the thane’s murderous wife. Unlike Richard III, Macbeth was an able-bodied, rather ordinary looking soldier.But the gap between a mortal body and the spirit that would transcend it was still in thrilling evidence. At one point, Macbeth speaks, almost disparagingly, of his “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on the other …”And Sher’s Macbeth was infused with the sense of ambition stretching arduously to make its possessor smarter, nobler, larger than he really was. His body, in this case, seemed truly to puff up and grow bigger. He looked hot, as in feverish or on fire; the glimmer in his eyes was scary. By the end, the fire had turned to something dead and ashen, and Macbeth had shrunk into an easily vanquished foe.Three years earlier, I had seen him on Broadway as the British painter Stanley Spencer, an artist who focused on the spirit within the palpable flesh and whose often biblical figures were rendered with a fecund earthiness. In Pam Gems’s “Stanley,” Sher seemed almost airborne, a scampering sprite of a man who never walked when he could leap. But even as he did his damnedest to defy gravity, there was no doubt that Stanley’s ecstatic energy had its source in the carnal, the corporeal, the animal, with an attendant, sorrowful awareness of the way of all flesh.Another character in the play describes Spencer’s art in these terms: “He paints people trapped, as it were, in their own flesh, pinned down to this earth, and yet they seek to soar and he makes that seem so very possible.”It’s a worthy epitaph for Mr. Sher as well. Onstage, he truly soared. That you felt, so completely, the effort required for a human body to take flight made you marvel all the more at the accomplishment. More

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      René Pollesch Aims for a ‘Safe Space’ at the Volksbühne in Berlin

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      René Pollesch is the fourth boss of the Volksbühne in four years. The Berlin theater is pinning hopes of a return to its former vibrancy on his collaborative approach.BERLIN — This fall, a new era at the Volksbühne theater got off to a curiously muted start. René Pollesch, the theater’s new artistic director, did not deliver a splashy opening salvo or unveil his first season with a flourish. Instead, four actors parlayed the writer-director’s signature banter in the cumbersomely titled “The Rise and Fall of a Curtain and Its Life In Between.” If the low-key chamber piece seemed typical of Pollesch’s work, it was also hardly earth-shattering.Then again, considering all of the recent turbulence at the Volksbühne, maybe a little restraint isn’t such a bad thing.Ever since the storied Berlin theater’s longtime artistic director Frank Castorf was fired in 2017, the Volksbühne has sailed on choppy waters. Castorf had run the playhouse since 1992 and had doggedly kept the theater’s East German spirit alive in the newly reunified Berlin: His leadership style was iron fisted, but he transformed the Volksbühne into one of the most exciting and influential forces in European theater, and he built a cult following for his own punishingly long reworkings of the classics from a Marxist perspective.From Castorf, the torch passed to Chris Dercon, a Belgian who was previously the director of Tate Modern in London, and who planned to turn the Volksbühne into a showcase for visiting performers from around the world.The regime change didn’t go as planned. For many in Berlin, the replacement of a provocateur from the former East Germany with a slick international transplant was an all-too-potent symbol of a city that was losing its edge. Protesters briefly occupied the theater and, after a series of increasingly hostile episodes — including one in which feces were left in front of the artistic director’s office — Dercon quit, only a few months into the job.In 2019, Dercon was succeeded by Klaus Dörr, a veteran theater administrator who was supposed to stabilize the Volksbühne until a permanent artistic director took the reins. But this March, Dörr abruptly resigned after 10 of the Volksbühne’s female staff members accused him of sexual harassment and creating a hostile workplace.Pollesch said the Volksbühne’s spirit came from “the way people interact with each other here, how the entire staff is involved in what’s happening onstage.”Thomas AurinIt was against this stormy backdrop that Pollesch, 59, arrived this summer to lead the house. All of the theater’s hopes for a return to its former vibrancy have been pinned on Pollesch, a veteran of Castorf’s Volksbühne who is considered one of Germany’s most distinctive theatrical auteurs, and whose start here is both a homecoming and a new beginning.In an interview at the theater, Pollesch spoke lovingly of the “spirit of the old Volksbühne” that he had felt since he saw his first play at there at 17. “It’s the way people interact with each other here, how the entire staff is involved in what’s happening onstage,” he said.But he was also quick to dispel the hope, or the fear, that he was a Trojan horse for reinstating the theater’s old guard.“We are not Castorf,” he said. “Castorf ran the theater very differently than we do.”By “we,” Pollesch means himself and a team of actors and theater professionals that he has assembled as an advisory committee. It’s a cooperative model that is rare in the German theater world — and unique for a theater the size of the Volksbühne, which has a large staff and a full-time acting ensemble.Pollesch described how the members of the committee helped him plan his inaugural season: The actor Martin Wuttke, a regular collaborator who is best known for portraying Hitler in the film “Inglourious Basterds,” recommended the Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo; the actress Lilith Stangenberg proposed the Filipino experimental filmmaker Khavn de la Cruz. The Volksbühne will premiere works by both directors early next year, Pollesch said.With the young French director Julien Gosselin and the Argentine choreographer Constanza Macras also working at the house this season, the Volksbühne’s globe-trotting lineup looks like it could have sprung from one of Dercon’s unrealized seasons. But that program was not the result of any agenda to make the house more international, Pollesch said. It emerged organically from his discussions with the advisory board.That collective approach also mirrors the way the director develops his own quirky plays through intense collaboration with a small group of artists he knows and trusts. A typical Pollesch show is characterized by fluent, chatty dialogue that combines the silly with the philosophical, and by high-energy performances from a group of charismatic actors. Pollesch devises the text of his plays, as well as the staging, for specific performers, whose creative input during the rehearsal process effectively make them co-authors.From left: Franz Beil, Astrid Meyerfeldt, Inga Busch and Christine Gross in “Mr. Puntila and the Giant Thing in Mitte,” a show by Pollesch.Luna Zscharnt“Often, he sets out with nothing more than a theme, a title,” Wolf-Dieter Ernst, a professor of theater studies at the University of Bayreuth, said in an email. He added that performers loved working with Pollesch because his method created a “a kind of safe space for exhausted actors and actresses.” By applying a similar approach to running the Volksbühne, Pollesch was trying to “run a theater in a more democratic, and less toxic, way,” Ernst said.Pollesch, who was born in Friedberg, a small city outside Frankfurt, studied theater at the nearby University of Giessen. In the 1980s, that school was considered the theoretical cradle of “postdramatic theater,” a self-reflexive and deconstructive approach to writing and directing for the stage. Inspired by the theories of Bertolt Brecht and by postmodern artists like the director Robert Wilson, the playwright Heiner Müller and the performing ensemble the Wooster Group, postdramatic theater is less concerned with plot or textual fidelity than with exploring — and exploding — the relationship between a stage presentation and its audience.Postdramatic theater is often dense, difficult and theoretical, yet Pollesch’s work is anything but. The lack of narrative or conventional characters may confound expectations about what theater is, but his plays rarely feel obtuse or obscure. In fact, they’re surprisingly fun and punchy — and rarely exceed 90 minutes.In Pollesch’s first stint at the Volksbühne, he ran its smaller, off-site venue, the Prater, from 2001 to 2007. He also staged shows on the main stage, where his work contrasted sharply with productions by Castorf, whose dark, demanding shows could last up to 12 hours.Since Castorf’s ouster, Pollesch has been a fixture at another storied Berlin playhouse, the Deutsches Theater, and has also worked on main stages in Zurich and in Hamburg, Germany. Last year, Berlin critics and audiences went gaga for a Pollesch show unexpectedly staged at the Friedrichstadt-Palast, a 2,000-seat revue theater.Yet the director’s inaugural work for the Volksbühne has met with a different response.“Rise and Fall of a Curtain” hardly amounted to the grand statement of purpose that many expected. If it was unmistakably Pollesch, it also felt slight, as if the director was up to his old tricks at a time when he was expected to wow everyone with a bold new vision. The critical consensus was that the auteur was writing tired backstage chatter for an audience of his own groupies.Margarita Breitkreiz in “The Rise and Fall of a Curtain and Its Life In Between.”Christian Thiel“Instead of timpani and trumpets and manifestoes to usher in a new start, we get a display of cluelessness,” wrote Peter Laudenbach, a theater critic, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. Reviewing “Mr. Puntila and the Giant Thing in Mitte,” the house’s third new Pollesch production in three months, Laudenbach concluded that it added to the “disappointing picture that the Volksbühne under Pollesch has offered so far.”The director’s flexible and collaborative approach to programming, and the fact that the theater is tight-lipped about its plans, make it difficult to say what the future of the Volksbühne under Pollesch may look like. The director is much clearer about what not to expect. The old Volksbühne’s classic productions won’t be coming back, he said, recalling the disappointment he once felt after seeing a decade-old revival at the theater during the Castorf era.“It had nothing to do with now,” he said. “You can watch movies that were made in a different era,” he added. “Theater ages insanely fast.” More

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      Wajdi Mouawad's 'Mother': Was It Worth It?

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      By asking the singer Bertrand Cantat to contribute to his latest show, the director Wajdi Mouawad has overshadowed his own production.PARIS — Traumatized individuals reach a standoff. They talk past each other; the more powerful party is too hurt to mitigate the pain they inflict. Ultimately, no one wins.Recently, this story unfolded both on- and offstage at La Colline — Théâtre National, the Paris playhouse led by the Lebanese-born theatermaker Wajdi Mouawad, one of the biggest names in contemporary French theater. In November, Mouawad unveiled a very personal new play, “Mother” (“Mère”), inspired by his family’s exile from Lebanon during the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990. In the weeks leading up to the premiere, however, “Mother” became embroiled in conflicts of its own.In early October, the hashtag #MeTooThéâtre began trending in France; with it came a wave of testimonies about sexual abuse and harassment in the country’s playhouses and drama schools. A collective of the same name was created to agitate for change, and Mouawad’s programming was quickly singled out for criticism. In 2022, La Colline theater is set to host a production by the director Jean-Pierre Baro, who has been accused of rape, a charge he denies. Additionally, the composer and singer Bertrand Cantat, who was convicted of killing his partner Marie Trintignant in 2003, was commissioned by Mouawad to create the music of “Mother.”It’s not the first time Mouawad has hired Cantat. In 2011, the singer even appeared onstage in one of Mouawad’s shows, a play titled “Women” (“Des Femmes”). The ensuing controversy led to the cancellation of a number of tour dates and Cantat’s withdrawal from the cast when the production played at the Avignon Festival.Wajdi Mouawad and the actress Aida Sabra, who plays his mother in the production.Tong-Vi NguyenMouawad’s response to #MeTooThéâtre has been rigid. In an open letter on Oct. 19, he likened his detractors to “a contemporary form of the Inquisition” and said they were engaged in a “lynching.” He added that claims should be adjudicated only in court. On Oct. 19, a demonstration in front of La Colline delayed the “Mother” premiere by 30 minutes. The protesters called on Mouawad to resign, and booed the audience members walking into the theater.Was it worth it? That question should be asked of Mouawad, who has been known until now as a progressive supporter of multicultural stories and a promoter of young artists. On opening night, when he came out into the auditorium for a preshow announcement, he carried on as if nothing had happened. Yet this stance interferes with the reception of what is otherwise a strong production, to which Cantat actually made a minimal contribution.The French singer Bertrand Cantat, who was convicted of murdering his partner Marie Trintignant in 2003. Mouawad’s inclusion of Cantat’s music in the production has drawn criticism, and it’s not the first time he has hired him.Xavier Leoty/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe play is centered around Mouawad’s own mother, Jacqueline. In 1978, she fled war-torn Lebanon with her three children, while her husband stayed behind. The family landed in Paris, where they spent the next five years anxiously waiting for the phone to ring, with news that they could return home.“Mother” recreates vignettes from their fractured home life amid an unfussy wooden set. Two superb Lebanese actresses, Aida Sabra and Odette Makhlouf, play Jacqueline and Mouawad’s sister Nayla. (His brother is mentioned, but not shown.) While the young Mouawad is played by a child, Dany Aridi on opening night, the director himself is never far away. Throughout, Mouawad observes the proceedings up close onstage, moves furniture and props around and, ultimately, takes the spotlight to confront his mother, who in real life died from cancer in 1987.There is a harrowing amount of raw pain in “Mother.” In a vivid mix of Arabic and French, Sabra perfectly captures Jacqueline’s deteriorating mental health, and the unprocessed anger she projects on to her children. She berates her young son for not learning French faster, yet never really adjusts to life in Paris. On the phone, early on, she cries: “I am in ruins.”Members of the cast, including Makhlouf and Mouawad, at far left. The play is being performed at La Colline — Théâtre National in Paris through Dec. 30.Tong-Vi NguyenFurther weaving reality into fiction, Mouawad cast Christine Ockrent, a well-known news anchor who was a near-daily presence on French television in the 1980s, in her first stage role. In her best broadcast voice, Ockrent reads dispatches from Lebanon, but also becomes an imaginary presence in the characters’ lives, chatting with the children and cooking with Jacqueline.Mouawad’s own meta-dialogue with his mother is both the high point of the show and a clue to his overall state of mind. “I wrote this scene to talk to you,” he tells Sabra, playing Jacqueline. He has been unable to cry since his mother’s death, he adds, before pleading with her to tell his younger self “that you love him, once.”It doesn’t take a therapist to see that Mouawad’s grief, at this point, goes far beyond acting. Onstage, he mentions the loss of his father to Covid last year; his long-term theatrical collaborator and mentor, François Ismert, also died in early September. In a scene near the end of “Mother,” Mouawad pulls out a gun and pretends to shoot himself, seven times.What of Cantat? His contribution amounts to six recorded songs — no more than 15 minutes, over two and a half hours. Several of them are raspy reinterpretations of classic French songs from the era the play is set in, and Cantat is buried down the list of credits. On opening night, unsurprisingly, he didn’t come out for a bow.The young Mouawad is played by a child, Dany Aridi, on opening night, at left, with his mother Jacqueline, played by Sabra. Sabra perfectly captures Jacqueline’s deteriorating mental health, along with her unprocessed anger.Tong-Vi NguyenThe songs are too anodyne, and fleeting, to add much to “Mother.” It is pretty disturbing, however, to hear Cantat sing sensual lines at one point to Makhlouf, as Mouawad’s sister. For those in the audience who are aware of the singer’s identity, and there will be many, moments like this are an obstacle suspending disbelief. Cantat may have served his prison sentence for murder, but that doesn’t mean his presence is neutral; it actively distracts from the story of “Mother,” something no other singer would have done. (As a friend from Lebanon pointed out after the show, a Lebanese composer would also have been a more coherent choice.)Mouawad may be too deep in his feelings to realize this. He has always been hierarchy-averse, and his open letter about #MeTooThéâtre, as well as “Mother,” make it clear that he sees himself as on the side of the oppressed. “I won’t be pitted against the notion of a victim. I was a victim,” he wrote. But two things can be true at once. The traumatized boy who experienced exile grew up to become the powerful artistic director of one of France’s most prestigious theaters. Criticism comes with the territory; an understanding of the zeitgeist in which theater productions come to life should, too.In any other context, “Mother” would have been hailed as an unqualified success. Yet the presence of Cantat on the creative team is the hill on which Mouawad has chosen to die. From the audience perspective, it’s simply not worth it.MèreThrough Dec. 30 at La Colline — Théâtre National in Paris; colline.fr. More

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      ‘A Sherlock Carol’ Review: Crime-Solving on Christmas Eve

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      Mark Shanahan remixes Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens into a clever, crowd-pleasing holiday comedy that happens also to be a murder mystery.It’s been three years since the grim tussle on the cliff above Reichenbach Falls, where the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty plunged to his death.But for Sherlock Holmes, the demise of his nemesis has proved unmooring. In London, lawlessness continues apace, yet the great detective has given up the fight. Adrift in ennui, he no longer bothers to ensnare the city’s evildoers. His faithful Dr. Watson, eager to get the band back together, can’t even entice Holmes to come to his house for Christmas.“There is no greater fool than one who shouts ‘Happy Christmas!’ in a city throughout which the foulest of mankind lurks ’round every corner,” Holmes growls. “I’ll thank you to leave me alone, Watson.”Bit of a Grinch, isn’t he. Bit of a Scrooge, even. In “A Sherlock Carol,” Mark Shanahan’s arch charmer of a holiday mash-up, Holmes — not Dickens’s Scrooge — is the one who is “solitary as an oyster.”At New World Stages, Shanahan directs a cast of six, wonderfully led by the Broadway veterans Drew McVety as Holmes and Thom Sesma as Scrooge. Remixing Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens, this is a clever, crowd-pleasing holiday comedy that happens also to be a murder mystery.It isn’t aiming for sumptuous elegance, like Matthew Warchus’s large-cast, high-design production of Jack Thorne’s “A Christmas Carol,” seen two seasons ago on Broadway. This is a simpler, streamlined affair looking for — and, crucially, finding — silly, festive fun.On Christmas Eve 1894, the grumpish Holmes is haunted by a spirit: Moriarty, whose presence he feels stalking him everywhere.And the beatific, reformed Scrooge? Found dead that very day by a doctor who believes there was foul play. A fan of Watson’s stories, the doctor entreats Holmes to investigate — and is thrilled when the uncannily observant detective, while refusing his appeal, says he’s known everything about him since the moment he walked in.McVety on the case.Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMadePartisans of “A Christmas Carol” get a sweet thrill as well when Holmes, too arrogant to resist, gives a quick rundown of his intel on this stranger: He was poor in early childhood, illness shadowed his first years of life, the dead man was his benefactor. In an instant, we recognize the doctor — Tiny Tim, all grown up and doing well.After he tells Holmes that a famous diamond had been on its way to Scrooge, who recently received a death threat, the detective relents and takes the case.“The game is afoot,” he says, suddenly saucy, tossing one end of his scarf around a shoulder.And off we go into a sprightly escape of a play with a fine, much-doubling ensemble and a design team trailing reams of Broadway credits: Anna Louizos, set; Linda Cho, costumes; Rui Rita, lighting; John Gromada, music and sound; Charles G. LaPointe, hair and wigs. This production is in very good hands, and so are we.There is a curious shortage lately of plays to make us laugh, let alone to tickle both children and adults. For admirers of Doyle and Dickens, here’s one.A Sherlock CarolThrough Jan. 2 at New World Stages, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, asherlockcarol.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      ‘The Mood Room’ Review: 1980s Anomie, California Style

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      In Big Dance Theater’s new work, premiering at BAM Fisher, Annie-B Parson melds her sensibility with that of the Conceptual artist Guy de Cointet.The first thing we learn about the five sisters gathering in their childhood home in Annie-B Parson’s “The Mood Room” is that it’s been a year since their parents died. One of the sisters tells us that. They all talk a lot, though very little about grief.Something is clearly wrong. The sisters are anxious and depressed. They can’t always tell one another apart; their own identities aren’t stable. One sister has become allergic to the sun. The water isn’t clean. They have many ideas about how to fix the problems: doctors and diets, new lighting and other purchases and changes of scene, vacations to exotic locales or just a retreat to the room of the title.Even without a program note, you might guess from the sisters’ speech and from the interior décor that we are in the early 1980s — a 1980s that hasn’t ended. The production, which Big Dance Theater debuted at BAM Fisher on Tuesday, takes its text from “Five Sisters,” a 1982 work by the Conceptual artist Guy de Cointet. Born and raised in France, he lived in Los Angeles and captured the self-absorption of some of the city’s inhabitants with a mixture of amusement and alarm.Michelle Sui and Moran.Julieta CervantesIn a program note, Parson calls de Cointet “an artistic soul mate,” and it is remarkable how much his text seems to call for her customary approach. Roaming an elegantly tacky interior of fringe curtains and beige carpeting (kudos to the designer Lauren Machen), the sisters emphasize the artificiality of their speech, drawn from commercials and soap operas and bits of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” all treated equally. Often before underlining a word, they pause and pose.That pausing and posing is pure Parson. The sisters dance a lot here, sometimes in girl-group formation, step-touching as a disco ball revolves. But every second of the show is tightly choreographed, tightly controlled, down to how they hold their water glasses and dangle their feet. The anxious mood derives from this exertion of control, especially as the sisters react to and remark upon shifts in light and sound.The addition of music by the experimental laptop artist Holly Herndon is an inspired choice. Full of vintage noises, it’s like a spliced memory reel of the era, echoing Laurie Anderson without sampling or recognizable quotation. The sisters keep characterizing it differently (“what odd music,” “what thoughtful music”) and yet accurately.The cast is also expert: Kate Moran as the sister with the sun allergy, Elizabeth DeMent as the sleepy-eyed workaholic, Myssi Robinson as the clean-lined dancer with hearing and hip problems, Michelle Sui as the painter. Theda Hammel, appearing briefly without the other sisters, introduces a welcome, looser humor — at once the most Chekhovian and contemporary, dishing about a guy she’s met, rearranging household objects before saying, “That’s how I remember it.”That earns a laugh, but otherwise, humor is thinly spread. Across an hour, sisters accumulate and one finally leaves, but nobody really changes. Which is the point, a static point perhaps more suited to museums and art galleries than a theater. The program note cites “the enduring damage of the Reagan era” and consumerism consuming civic engagement, but the production doesn’t carry that much political weight. Yes, such people as these sisters exist, in Los Angeles and in all of us. The question is: Are you in the mood to spend time with them?The Mood RoomThrough Sunday at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org More

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      U.K. Theatergoers Cover Up Again, After Months Without Masks

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      Since England’s theaters reopened without restrictions in July, one thing has been as notable as the action onstage: the lack of masks in the audience.Unlike in Broadway theaters, patrons here have not been required to wear face coverings, and many attendees have chosen to ignore preshow announcements encouraging them to mask up.Several visiting theater critics have been left aghast. Laura Collins-Hughes, writing in The New York Times in September, said that at “nearly every production I saw, there were loads — sometimes a majority — of barefaced people in the crowd, which felt reckless and delusional.”Peter Marks, writing in The Washington Post in November, called London’s theaters “consistently shocking these days.” That had nothing to do with the action onstage, he added; it was entirely down to the absence of masks.Now, that image may be about to change. On Saturday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made masks mandatory in stores and on public transportation in England, responding to the newly discovered Omicron variant of the coronavirus.He did not make them mandatory in theaters, but several venues have now done so voluntarily. On Monday, the Royal Shakespeare Company said face coverings would be required at its theaters in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, unless an attendee is under age 12 or has a medical exemption.“We want to do all we can to ensure that we do not have to cancel performances and disappoint our audiences,” the company’s executive director, Catherine Mallyon, said in a news release.Other theaters quickly followed. On Monday, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer and theater impresario, quietly strengthened rules for the six theaters he owns in the West End. His company website was updated to say, “All audience members must wear a face covering throughout their visit, except when eating and drinking, or if they are medically exempt.” Previously, those theaters requested masks, but did not require them.On Tuesday, the National Theater, the Royal Opera House, the English National Opera and the Old Vic also said they would make masks mandatory.The rules might only last a few weeks. The National Theater’s website says the measure will be in place until Dec. 19, “when the next government review of Covid measures is due.”So far, there appears to be little resistance to the changes. Kate Evans, a spokeswoman for the Royal Shakespeare Company, said 45 people had asked for refunds or to exchange their tickets for vouchers to see a future show since the mandate was announced, out of 6,000 who had booked to see its current show, “The Magician’s Elephant.”“The majority of feedback we’ve received around the decision has been very positive,” she said. More

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      The Great ‘West Side Story’ Debate

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      With the Steven Spielberg film coming soon, three critics, a playwright and a theater historian weigh in on whether the musical deserves a new hearing — and how.Since its Broadway premiere in 1957, “West Side Story” — a musical based on “Romeo and Juliet” and created by four white men — has been at once beloved and vexing.The score, featuring such Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim classics as “Somewhere” and “Maria,” is considered one of the best in Broadway history. The cast album was a No. 1 smash. The 1961 movie won best picture and nine other Oscars. The show has been regularly revived, most recently on Broadway last year in a short-lived radical rethinking by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove. And now, this month, a movie remake by none other than Steven Spielberg.And yet, from the beginning, the show (directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with a book by Arthur Laurents) has discomfited some audience members and critics — for its violence, its mix of tones and, especially, for the way it underscores stereotypes of Puerto Ricans as gang members. Not to mention that the 1961 movie featured the white actress Natalie Wood playing the Latina role of Maria.Why does “West Side Story” continue to have such a large cultural footprint? Should it? Is it possible to be true to such richly emotional material and still be responsive to our moment?The dance-at-the-gym sequence in the new “West Side Story” film.20th Century StudiosWe asked five experts to weigh in: Jesse Green, the chief theater critic at The New York Times; Isabelia Herrera, a Times critic fellow; Carina del Valle Schorske, a contributing writer at the Times Magazine and the author of a 2020 Times Opinion piece challenging the show’s place in the culture; the Tony Award-winning playwright Matthew López (“The Inheritance”); and Misha Berson, the author of “Something’s Coming, Something Good: ‘West Side Story’ and the American Imagination.”They gathered before seeing the new film and just before news broke that Sondheim, the show’s lyricist and the last survivor from its creative team, had died at 91. Scott Heller, the interim editor of Arts & Leisure, kicked off the conversation, and it got going quickly from there.SCOTT HELLER What stays with you about the first time you saw “West Side Story”? Or the most memorable time?JESSE GREEN The first time I saw it was in a high school production featuring extremely clumsy dancing, warbly singing and an all-white (non-Latinx) cast. Memorable, but not in a good way. Luckily, I had already gotten to know it by then — from the music.MATTHEW LÓPEZ My relationship to “West Side Story” is a bit unusual in that my father was in the film as an extra. He’s clearly visible in the opening scene on the playground, just after the prologue. When I was perhaps 7, my parents showed it to me, and it was incredibly exciting to see my father at 14 years old. And it was the first time I’d ever seen any kind of popular entertainment with Puerto Rican characters. It was not until later that my relationship to the show changed. I saw the revival in 2009 (my first time seeing it onstage), and I was shocked at how thinly the Puerto Rican characters were drawn.MISHA BERSON I’m probably the one person here who saw the original — actually a Broadway tour that came through Detroit when I was 9 years old. I went with my dance class, and though it was something of a blur and I didn’t understand it much, I was captivated by the dancing, the music, the energy and excitement of the show. I became obsessed with it, but as an adult didn’t see another vibrant, fully realized production until the 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle did an excellent revival in 2007.ISABELIA HERRERA Unfortunately, my memories are wrapped up in a microaggression that has stayed with me since high school. My family is Dominican, from the city of Santiago de los Caballeros, and I am likely one of the only kids of Dominican descent who attended my high school. I remember when, in English class, a white classmate reprimanded me for not having seen “West Side Story” at the time, saying, “But aren’t you Puerto Rican?!”A scene from “West Side Story” on Broadway, starring Chita Rivera, foreground, as Anita.John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesCARINA DEL VALLE SCHORSKE Ugh, Isabelia, that’s such a familiar story! In a messed-up way, your classmate’s confusion makes sense, because the musical itself might just as well be about Dominicans — it’s that general. I first saw “West Side Story” on a VHS tape my mom and I rented from the public library when I was maybe 9 or 10. I grew up in California, away from my Puerto Rican family in Washington Heights, so I thought I might find something out about my culture that I didn’t know before. But nothing onscreen — beyond the latticework of fire escapes — reminded me of the people or neighborhood I knew from frequent visits to New York. I finished the movie feeling even more confused than I was before about what being Puerto Rican was supposed to mean — to me, and to the “average” American.“I finished the movie feeling even more confused than I was before about what being Puerto Rican was supposed to mean — to me, and to the ‘average’ American.”GREEN I’ve never seen musicals as documentaries. They often rely on stereotypes to make larger points than they could if they focused on specific, actual characteristics. Without the stereotypes, you probably couldn’t have ensembles. The question is whether the stereotypes are vile, destructive. As a white, non-Latinx person, I’m not the right person to judge that. But I would just say that the Jets are stereotyped, too, and, in the source material, so are the Veronese.BERSON Do you trust that everyone knows the source material is Shakespeare’s R&J? I wish I did!DEL VALLE SCHORSKE “The Jets are stereotyped, too,” but white teens are not harmed by such stereotypes because there have always been such a wealth of representations to choose from. And at the time of the musical’s debut, there wasn’t a general suspicion in the air that any white teen might be a gangster, so “West Side Story” wasn’t, for them, reinforcing an expectation of criminality that was already violently shaping the politics of the period.GREEN Would you say the Puerto Rican characters are less well characterized than the white ones: the Poles, Italians and others? My sense is that most characters in most musicals are poorly characterized in terms of their ethnic or racial or other identity because that’s not what those shows are really about. Don’t get me started on gay and Jewish stereotypes in musicals, which I guess I’m especially aware of as a gay Jew.BERSON The creators of the show, though they were all white men, were not simply oblivious to what actual Puerto Ricans were like in New York at the time. For instance, Jerome Robbins visited Puerto Rican youth dances and social gatherings, and tried to incorporate some of the popular dance movements he saw in his choreography. He also tried to recruit as many Latinx performers as possible, which was difficult because there were so few opportunities for them to get the Broadway experience and training the show demanded. Also, Bernstein had always loved and admired Latin music and tried to meld some of the rhythms into his score.“The creators of the show, though they were all white men, were not simply oblivious to what actual Puerto Ricans were like in New York at the time.”DEL VALLE SCHORSKE That’s interesting, about Robbins. I’m quite familiar with a broad range of Latin rhythms, and I don’t hear or see the influence — unless you’re counting the Spanish paso doble on the rooftop. I do love some of the choreography, especially the anxious, tightly coiled “Cool,” performed by the Jets. It’s good to know that someone was at least trying to do their homework after Sondheim confessed he’d “never even met a Puerto Rican.” In this conversation, I really hope we can move beyond the false binary: “documentary” versus “work of imagination.” Does a work of imagination really have to be so “superficial and sentimental,” which is how the Black Puerto Rican journalist Jesús Colón described West Side Story when it debuted?GREEN In musical theater, that isn’t a false binary. Some shows operate at a granular level, risking larger insignificance, and others work more broadly, risking stereotype. “West Side Story,” as Misha can tell us more definitively, was an idea looking for an ethnicity. And it does seem to me that in landing on Puerto Ricans vs. whites (instead of Jews vs. Catholics as originally imagined), it was taking advantage of a news hook of the time without any deep engagement in Puerto Rican-ness. I guess the question is whether it’s possible for a work to rise above that when it is primarily looking at the eternal paradigm of outsiders and insiders, and the tragedy of love that tries to cross those boundaries.Richard Beymer as Tony and Natalie Wood as Maria in the 1961 film, which won 10 Academy Awards including Best Picture.MGMBERSON That is “Romeo and Juliet,” Jesse, which one could say (as you indicated) had little to do with the actual Verona (which Shakespeare never visited) but still is a potent portrayal of love in the crossfire of hate. I also want to add that though characters in musicals tend not to be deeply complex and contoured, Bernardo and Anita are not portrayed simply as bad kids spoiling for a fight. They are more sympathetic than that, as leaders and lovers, at least to my understanding — in some ways more so than Jets members.And a moment of historical context may be helpful here: At the time of the show’s creation, there was national alarm about the growing “threat” of youth violence during the postwar malaise, and that was true of Black, Irish and other groups of kids. And there was also, among these liberal artists, a real concern about racial/ethnic prejudice and the rising backlash against immigrants of color. These things are still meaningful, and one of the reasons I think young people especially are still very much drawn to the material despite its flaws.DEL VALLE SCHORSKE I would be more sympathetic to the possibility of “West Side Story” rising above that fault if its creators, or re-creators, were not taking advantage of Puerto Ricans as the “news hook” for liberal street cred. If it’s supposed to be some universal and culturally interchangeable narrative, then it doesn’t get to count as a serious exploration of Puerto Rican or so-called Latinx life.GREEN I agree that “West Side Story” is not a serious exploration of those things. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a serious exploration of something else. I say this even though I don’t actually think it’s the greatest musical ever written; it has plenty of aesthetic flaws beyond the political ones we’re discussing. My love for it comes mostly from the way the songs tell the story — though I know that too is a point of contention. For me, Sondheim’s lyrics get at the twitchy excitement (and anger) of youth like nothing else in musical theater ever has — as do Bernstein’s polyrhythms and percussion, whatever their actual sonic origin.HELLER Matthew, I’m going to circle back to you, as a theater artist whose response to the material has changed over time. Among other things, you wrote a play about the play and its impact on a Puerto Rican family. Tell us about it — and was it informed by your new insights into where the original fell short?LÓPEZ The movie did spark my nascent creative brain as a piece of drama — the music, the dancing — and as cinema. Seeing the revival, though, I realized how much the Puerto Rican characters — and thereby the performers playing them — were not invited to the party, so to speak. A meal had been laid out and half the cast seemed left to go hungry. My family loved “West Side Story,” but as I thought about it, I realized their love for the show wasn’t reciprocated by it.All of this led me to begin writing “Somewhere,” which is set in the neighborhood that was ultimately destroyed to build Lincoln Center. A Puerto Rican family of dancers and performers who dream of being cast in “West Side Story” (or anything Jerome Robbins created) but who, by the realities of their situation, are only left dreaming. I think in some ways, I was attempting to tell the offstage story that you don’t see.DEL VALLE SCHORSKE Matthew, it seems like “Somewhere” shows us how to engage with a “canonical” work without reproducing its limitations. I’m interested in the way Puerto Rican artists have creatively navigated the musical’s constraints, but I’m also hungry for … anything else! In her memoir, Rita Moreno wrote about how difficult it was to find substantial roles after “West Side Story”: I’m kind of depressed by the fact that she’s still defined by the show in 2021. I mean, Moreno performed in plays by Lorraine Hansberry, she spent decades in psychoanalysis — doesn’t she deserve to grow?LÓPEZ I do have to cop to a bifurcated mind on this. There’s a part of me that really loves “West Side Story” and a part of me that really hates that I love “West Side Story.” I think Lin-Manuel Miranda once called it “a blessing and a curse,” which is a sentiment I understand.BERSON It makes total sense to have a conflicted opinion of the show, especially if it speaks to you so personally. It’s not equivalent, but as a Jewish woman, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” drives me up the wall! Meanwhile, I can readily imagine Latinx performers might both love and resent “West Side Story” — love the way it has given many employment and its exhilarating use of dancer-actor-singers, but resent it for all the reasons you, Carina and others have stated. Popular culture is often a double-edged sword that way.GREEN New work from new artists is the lifeblood of the theater. Yet engaging with the old ones, which were new once, can also be pleasurable and valuable — unless they have become the equivalent of Confederate statues that need to come down. Is “West Side Story” a Confederate statue? I don’t think so.“Is ‘West Side Story’ a Confederate statue? I don’t think so.”BERSON If we are now designating imperfect musicals as Confederate statues, I think that’s scary. “West Side Story” gets produced a lot because it can accommodate a teenage cast (there have been thousands of high school productions) and because it is a kind of cultural touchstone that still excites people. Confederate statues glorify bigotry and apartheid. There’s a difference.DEL VALLE SCHORSKE Audiences are taught what should resonate with them — nothing becomes a “cultural touchstone” by accident — and the more a certain narrative gets repeated, the more sentimental associations it accrues. “West Side Story” might not be a Confederate monument, but it is a monument to the authority of white Americans to dominate the conversation about who Puerto Ricans are. And each revival renews that authority and co-signs the narrative for a new generation.GREEN All art is political, yes, and deserves to be judged as such. But art is not just political, and deserves to be judged on other grounds, too. If there is no pleasure to be had in “West Side Story” then it cannot possibly overcome the problems we’re discussing. But if it does offer pleasure, then we, as individuals, are free to weigh it against those problems. The balance will be different for different people, not necessarily corresponding with identity.The most recent Broadway revival, directed by Ivo van Hove, featured video projections. It was critically divisive and had a short run, in part because of the pandemic.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHELLER Matthew, you and I had some provocative back-and-forths about critical responses to “The Inheritance” and its depictions of the gay community, and you were good enough to write a piece for us, in which you made this point: “No one piece of writing about our complex, sprawling community will ever tell the entire story, and I believe that is a good thing: It creates an unquenchable thirst for more and more narratives.” Does that hold for “West Side Story” as well?LÓPEZ I don’t think it’s an apt comparison. “The Inheritance” is a gay play written by a gay man whereas “West Side Story” is purported to be about Puerto Ricans and was written by white men. And while there are heterosexual characters in “The Inheritance,” they aren’t serving the same dramatic function in my play that the Puerto Rican characters do in “West Side Story.” And I used the word “function” purposefully, for that is what they feel in the story. I’d love to see a “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”-style rethinking one day.DEL VALLE SCHORSKE I agree that any future engagement with “West Side Story” that actually deepens the material would have to abandon all loyalty to the show as written, the way “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” completely reimagines “Hamlet.” It’s an independent work of art that deconstructs the canonical play. I doubt the creators of “West Side Story” gave a single thought to “new narratives” that might emerge from their musical, let alone new Puerto Rican narratives. And it doesn’t seem like the power brokers of Broadway or Hollywood are really thirsting for them, otherwise the same material wouldn’t get recycled over and over.HELLER So we are getting to the Spielberg movie.HERRERA I’m also skeptical of how much the thirst for new narratives comes from a genuine place, rather than a response to an industry that is clearly grappling with questions of racism and struggling to navigate critiques about representation. Honestly, I think there is something sinister about capitalizing on the nostalgia of a Hollywood artifact, casting an all-Latinx Sharks cast, while still using the liberal language of “inclusion” and “diversity” as armor against critique. The fact that “West Side Story” is being remade with these issues in mind doesn’t necessarily absolve it of its original missteps.BERSON So is there no place for “West Side Story,” even with the best of intentions? Does that mean there’s no place for “Othello” or “Merchant of Venice,” which are problematic but still dramatically vital works? Can we still see the show, or not see it, and have fruitful debate about it?DEL VALLE SCHORSKE I’m not advocating the wholesale erasure of “West Side Story.” I’m saying, let’s stop pouring literally hundreds of millions of dollars into propping up its relevance, and let’s stop minimizing its flaws.HERRERA Misha, I think we can certainly still have a fruitful debate about it! When discussions around colorism mushroomed online surrounding the film adaptation of “In the Heights,” I mentioned in our roundtable that criticism emerges from a place of love — a desire to make art, life and politics better. I don’t see these critiques as mutually exclusive.BERSON That is very well said. And just my awareness of the politics of librettist Arthur Laurents and composer Leonard Bernstein especially — who were both blacklisted in the ’50s for their civil rights and other activism — makes me think they would probably share some of these concerns and find them meaningful. But the show has intrinsic artistic power, and I think will survive. It is encouraging to me that someone with the skill and sensitivity of Tony Kushner is the screenwriter/adapter. I hope it’s great, and I hope it’s the last!HELLER Do others hope the remake is great?HERRERA I don’t know if there is such a thing as a great remake, but I’m certainly hoping this version releases its grip on stereotypes, offers its more underdeveloped characters a bit of autonomy and perhaps provides more texture about the actual life and experiences of Puerto Rican migration at the time. And please, give us at least a few songs with actual Afro-Caribbean rhythms! A plena take on “I Feel Pretty”?GREEN Authenticity isn’t the goal; if “Hamilton” were authentic, it would be mostly minuets. I want the new movie of “West Side Story” to succeed if it’s good, if it manages to move people. But if only white people are moved, it will be a failure.LÓPEZ I’m excited to see what Spielberg, Kushner and [the choreographer Justin] Peck do with the material for a 21st-century audience. It’s a perfect opportunity to honor what’s glorious about the show, and address what is flawed.DEL VALLE SCHORSKE I want it to flop so we can move on. More