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      ‘The Antelope Party’ Review: Friendship Is Magic, With Exceptions

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      Paranoia takes root among five friends who fear their “My Little Pony” role playing game is being targeted in this new play at the Wild Project.Eric John Meyer’s “The Antelope Party,” a presentation of the Dutch Kills Theater Company that had its New York premiere recently at the Wild Project, uses a classic movie thriller structure to explore the potential real-world dangers of wish-fulfillment fantasy groups.But is the kind of harm that befalls the Rust Belt Bronies Meet Up Group for Adult Fans of “My Little Pony” unique, or can it happen to any collective?These bronies and pegasisters — as adult fans of the franchise are known — gather regularly with the hushed secrecy of political subversives at the Western Pennsylvania home of their genial host, Ben (Edward Mawere), some time in the 2010s. Those who have answered Ben’s online call for a role-playing game include Maggie (Lindsley Howard), a young woman who lives with her protective father; the aloof 20-or-30-somethings Doug (Quinn Franzen) and Rachel (Caitlin Morris); and Shawn (Will Dagger), who joined after his revelatory AMFE (After My First Episode) moment.One night, Maggie makes a misstep. Dressed in full-on Pony attire, something the group’s members usually avoid to dodge harassment, she is picked up by members of a neighborhood watch on her way to Ben’s apartment. That same night Jean (Anna Ishida, appropriately baffled) shows up at Ben’s place, but soon realizes she has mistaken the group for another — 9/11 truthers like herself — and is promptly shown out. These incidents set the Rust Belt Bronies on a paranoid spiral, which is made worse when they discover that the neighborhood watch is actually a group called the Antelope Party, whose mission is to rid the country of homeless people, street kids and other “wild dogs.”The shift is a bit of bait-and-switch: Instead of examining the intricacies of “My Little Pony” fandom, “The Antelope Party” has more in common with sociopolitical films like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in which suspicions about the mysterious “outsider” stoke fears among a particular group of people. Meyer explores these dynamics, and how people gain power in social groups: Is it granted, won by force or is it more unpredictable?From left, Dagger, Quinn Franzen, Anna Ishida, Mawere and Morris in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe ensemble members are convincing in their portrayal of vulnerability. Dagger’s wimpy Shawn is a believable beta male whose desperation for social standing leads him to dark places, and Howard’s Maggie is perfect as the peppy type whose “daddy’s girl” veil hides a sinister reality. The charismatic Mawere is intensely watchable as Ben, a host who is eager to please.In her direction of the cast, Jess Chayes leans into the characters’ cautiousness in social settings by smartly avoiding to stage action when none is called for, though the play never feels sluggish. And Yu-Hsuan Chen’s clever one-room set — the walls fold in and out to create spaces outside of the group’s meeting spot — emphasizes their precarious hold on this made-up world.As in her work on WP Theater’s “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” another pessimistic tale of a group’s descent into chaos, Chen shows an innate understanding of the intimacy of small spaces, and of how the clutter strewn about amounts to an intensely personal ecosystem. Here, Ben’s fuzzy neon pillows and “My Little Pony” throw blankets are paraphernalia that can be quickly hidden, should a judgmental outsider arrive.By taking various precautions — part childish desire to protect their cool little club, part survival response to actual danger — the group believes itself impervious to outside forces. But “The Antelope Party” crafts a clever little awakening for them, and anyone who shares their belief that there is safety in numbers.The Antelope PartyThrough Nov. 21 at Wild Project, Manhattan; theantelope.party, Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Ed Bullins, Leading Playwright of the Black Arts Movement, Dies at 86

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      He wrote not for white or middle-class audiences, but for the strivers, hustlers and quiet sufferers whose struggles he sought to capture in searing works.Ed Bullins, who was among the most significant Black playwrights of the 20th century and a leading voice in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Saturday at his home in Roxbury, Mass. He was 86.His wife, Marva Sparks, said the cause was complications of dementia.Over a 55-year career in which he produced nearly 100 plays, Mr. Bullins sought to reflect the Black urban experience unmitigated by the expectations of traditional theater. Most of his work appeared in Black theaters in Harlem and Oakland, Calif., and perhaps for that reason he never reached the heights of acclaim that greeted peers like August Wilson, whose plays appeared on Broadway and were adapted for the screen (and who often credited Mr. Bullins as an influence).That was fine with Mr. Bullins. He often said that he wrote not for white or middle-class audiences but for the strivers, hustlers and quiet sufferers whose struggles he sought to capture in searing works like “In the Wine Time” (1968) and “The Taking of Miss Janie” (1975).“He was able to get the grass roots to come to his plays,” the writer Ishmael Reed said in an interview. “He was a Black playwright who spoke to the values of the urban experience. Some of those people had probably never seen a play before.”Though Mr. Bullins was a careful student of white playwrights like Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, he rejected many of their conventions, pursuing a loose, rapid style that drew equally on avant-garde jazz and television — two forms that he felt put him closer to the register of his intended audiences.He won three Obie Awards and two Guggenheim grants, and in 1975 the New York Drama Critics’ Circle named “The Taking of Miss Janie” the best American play of the year.Not everyone was enamored of his work. Some critics, including some in the Black press, believed he focused too heavily on the violence and criminality he saw in working-class Black life, and reflected it too brutally — “The Taking of Miss Janie,” for instance, opens and closes with a rape scene.But most critics, especially in the establishment, came to respect Mr. Bullins as an artist who was both passionately true to his source material and nuanced enough in his vision to avoid becoming doctrinaire.“He tackled subjects that on the surface were very specific to the Black experience,” the playwright Richard Wesley said in an interview. “But Ed was also very much committed to showing the humanity of his characters, and in doing that he became accessible to audiences beyond the Black community.”Genia Morgan, left, and Alia Chapman in a 2006 production of Mr. Bullins’s “The Taking of Miss Janie,” which was named the best American play of the year by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle in 1975.Gerry GoodsteinEdward Artie Bullins was born on July 7, 1935, in Philadelphia and grew up on the city’s North Side. His father, Edward Bullins, left home when Ed was still a small child, and he was raised by his mother, Bertha Marie (Queen) Bullins, who worked for the city government.Though he did well in school, he gravitated toward the North Side’s rough street life. He joined a gang, lost two front teeth in one fight and was stabbed in the heart during another.Mr. Bullins dropped out of school in 1952 and joined the Navy. He served most of the next three years as an ensign aboard the aircraft carrier Midway, where he won a lightweight boxing championship.He returned to Philadelphia in 1955 and, three years later, moved to Los Angeles. He attended night school to earn a high school equivalency diploma, then attended Los Angeles City College, where he started a magazine, Citadel, and wrote short stories for it.In 1962 he married the poet Pat Cooks. She accused him of threatening her with violence, and they divorced in 1966. (She later remarried and took the surname Parker.)Mr. Bullins’s later marriage, to Trixie Bullins, ended in divorce. Along with his third wife, he is survived by his sons, Ronald and Sun Ra; his daughters, Diane Bullins, Patricia Oden and Catherine Room; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Four other children, Ameena, Darlene, Donald and Eddie Jr., died before him.Restless and unhappy with his work in Los Angeles, Mr. Bullins moved in 1964 to San Francisco, where he plugged into a growing community of Black writers. He also switched from writing prose to writing plays — in part, he said, because he was lazy, but also because he felt that the theater gave him more direct access to the everyday Black experience.His first play, “How Do You Do,” an absurdist one-act encounter between a middle-class Black couple and a working-class Black man, was produced in 1965 to favorable reviews. But he remained unsure of his decision to write plays until a few months later, when he saw a dual production of “The Dutchman” and “The Slave,” two plays by Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, a leading figure of the Black Arts Movement.“I said to myself, I must be on the right track,” Mr. Bullins told The New Yorker in 1973. “I could see that an experienced playwright like Jones was dealing with these same qualities and conditions of Black life that moved me.”In 1967, Mr. Bullins became artist in residence at the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem. The work he produced, mostly there, over the six years represented the peak of his career.The Black Arts Movement, then still primarily an East Coast phenomenon, was a loose affiliation of novelists, playwrights and poets whose work sought to reflect the modern Black experience on its own terms — written and produced by Black people in Black spaces for Black audiences.Mr. Bullins had found his community and, through it, his voice. He fell in with a circle of Bay Area writers, actors and activists, who began performing his work in bars and coffeehouses.Among them was Eldridge Cleaver, who, after his release from prison in 1966, used some of the proceeds from his memoir “Soul on Ice” to found Black House, an arts and community center in San Francisco, with Mr. Bullins as its chief artist in residence.Black House also became the city’s headquarters for the Black Panther Party, founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. Mr. Bullins became the party’s minister of culture.But his role in the Black Panthers was short-lived. The party, from his perspective at least, saw art solely as a weapon, and he chafed at Mr. Seale’s insistence that he create didactic, often explicitly Marxist plays. He also grew frustrated over the party’s interest in building a coalition with radical white allies, when what he sought was a movement wholly independent of white culture.“I have no Messianic urge,” he told The New York Times in 1975. “Every other street corner has somebody telling you Christ or Mao is the answer. You can take any Ism you want and be saved by it. If you’re part of some movement and it fulfills you, that’s cool, but I like to look at it all.”He left the party in late 1966, just before Black House shut down.Mr. Bullins considered moving to Europe or South America, but he changed his mind when Robert Macbeth, the founder of the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem, invited him to be the artist in residence there.He arrived in New York in 1967, and the next six years of work, mostly at the New Lafayette Theater, represented the peak of his career. The theater was a complete package: a 14-member acting troupe, 14 musicians, several playwrights and directors, and an affiliated art gallery, the Weusi Artist Collective, that produced sets.Mr. Bullins also led workshops for aspiring playwrights, many of whom, like Mr. Wesley, went on to become significant voices among the next generation of Black theater artists.Kim Sullivan and Shirleen Quigley in the New Federal Theater’s 2013 production of “In the Wine Time.”Gerry GoodsteinA year after arriving, he completed “In the Wine Time,” his first full-length play and the first of a series he called his “Twentieth Century Cycle” — 20 plays that told the story of postwar urban life through a set of friends. In 1971 he won his first Obie, for “The Fabulous Miss Marie” and “In New England Winter.”He left the New Lafayette Theater in 1973, shortly before it closed for lack of funding. His work in the 1970s appeared in the New Federal Theater, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, the Public Theater and elsewhere.In 1972 he got into a war of words with the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, which was putting on his play “The Duplex.” Though he had initially endorsed the production, he later said in an interview that “the original Black intentions” of the play had been “thwarted” and “its artistic integrity stomped on,” turning it into a “minstrel show.”He traded attacks with the producer, Jules Irving, and the director, Gilbert Moses, in The Times and elsewhere, but in the end the play went on. It received mixed reviews.That episode, fairly or not, gave Mr. Bullins a reputation for being hard to work with, one of the reasons he cited for returning to the West Coast in the 1980s. He continued to write plays, but he also produced work by others, including Mr. Reed, at his Bullins Memorial Theater in Oakland, named for his son Eddie Jr., who died in a car crash in 1978.Mr. Bullins returned to school, receiving a bachelor’s degree in English from the San Francisco campus of Antioch University in 1989 and a master’s in fine arts in playwriting from San Francisco State University in 1994.Mr. Bullins in 1999, when he was a professor in the theater department at Northeastern University in Boston.Wendy Maeda/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesThe next year he moved to Boston, where he became a professor in the theater department at Northeastern University. He retired in 2012.By then he had long since changed his mind about his audience, in large part because he and others in the Black Arts Movement had succeeded in their mission to build a Black cultural canon.“Of course Black writers can write for all audiences,” he told The Times in 1982. “My feeling is that the question of whether Black theater should appeal to whites was more valid a decade ago. Since then, Black theater has taken off in all directions.” More

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      ‘Medicine’ Review: One Dose Reality, Two Doses Absurdity

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      Domhnall Gleeson is surrounded by an eccentric cast of characters in Enda Walsh’s surreal play at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Mary, a woman dressed as an old man. Another Mary, a woman in a lobster suit. John Kane, a nervous mental patient in blue pajamas. And a nameless drummer who never speaks. These eccentric characters come together in Enda Walsh’s often baffling yet always arresting new play, “Medicine,” a presentation of Landmark Productions and the Galway International Arts Festival that opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Tuesday.John (Domhnall Gleeson) wanders onto the set, a drab room with the look of a community center hall (design by Jamie Vartan). It’s a mess — the aftermath of a staff party, with streamers and balloons — and John is concerned about it. He putters around, fidgeting and picking things up haphazardly.He’s preparing for the arrival of the two Marys (Aoife Duffin and Clare Barrett) and the drummer (Sean Carpio). They’re there at the institution to run through a script of John’s life, presumably as a kind of drama therapy.Once they arrive and their routine gets underway, the Marys don different costumes and lip sync a recording of dialogue from the people in John’s life, beginning with his parents on the day he was born. As John narrates, the Marys interrupt, to share notes and perform random dances while the drummer scores the scenes. But as John’s story unfolds, he becomes increasingly frazzled.Walsh, a celebrated playwright and director whose enigmatic works include “Grief Is the Thing with Feathers,” “Arlington” and “Rooms,” also writes and directs this play, which feels like a psychosexual absurdist fantasy. How long has John been here? What parts of this are real? Walsh is less concerned with providing answers than he is with making us sit with John’s mounting sense of desolation and shame. In this way, the work resembles a poem or an interpretive dance, resonating with symbols and gestures and feelings, and the rest is for the audience to puzzle through.Aoife Duffin as one of the Marys.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesJohn recounts abuse by his parents and peers when he was a child, and maltreatment at the hands of a worker at the institution. He scrutinizes his mother’s negligence and overt sexuality, and conflates his budding erotic desires as a teen with his yearning for maternal love and attention. All the while the narcissistic Lobster Mary (or Mary 2, as the script calls her) controls the performance: She harasses Mary 1 and bullies John.If that weren’t Freudian enough, Walsh plants recurring images and themes throughout, implying connections between John’s version of his past and the present moment with the actors.What the two Marys are doing here is its own theater — a production that Mary 1 starts to suspect is cruel. As they step into and out of the personalities in John’s life, the lights shift with Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” playing. (Adam Silverman handles the mercurial lighting.)Barrett gives a menacing performance as Mary 2, who embodies some of the more brutal characters in John’s tale and aims her own shots of hostility at Mary 1 (Duffin, who appeared as Ophelia opposite Ruth Negga in “Hamlet” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2020). Duffin’s Mary is empathetic, so much so that she inhabits John’s story, and at some point the voice-over of a character she’s playing overlaps with her voice as she speaks the same lines. The language here — which Walsh writes with aureate poeticism, full of vivid imagery and pointed symbolism — is what gives the show its melancholic beauty.Clare Barrett as the other Mary.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThen there’s Gleeson himself, with his impressive performance. He is a chameleonic TV and film star (“Harry Potter,” “Star Wars,” “Run”) who can convey anything from a villainous sneer to a sensitive whimper with his entire physical bearing. Despite his height, Gleeson seems to wilt like a flower in want of sun. He nervously shuffles around the stage or gets worked into a frenzy — huffing and flailing with explosive bravado, seamlessly accompanied by Carpio’s percussion. (Helen Atkinson handily controls the layered sound design.)There could easily be more Gleeson — and by that I mean more of John’s perspective, because we get only snapshots of his life. By the end, John reasserts that he’s “not like other people” and belongs in the institution. It seems John is a victim of a kind of manipulation; the drama therapy isn’t to help him but to gaslight him into believing he mustn’t ever try to seek freedom. Beneath all the oddities of Walsh’s script is a criticism of the ways in which society fails the mentally ill.It’s unclear whether Walsh is also indicting theater — this is, after all, a play in which a play is used toward devious ends. So perhaps “Medicine” is simply a work of fanciful mysteries. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. The emotional core of the show is always prevalent.By the end, John’s dejection feels as familiar as a phantom pain. He may still be within the same sad four walls where he began, but Walsh’s production transforms the space from one of isolation into one of empathy that even the audience can share. Because ultimately, a couple of doses of human connection is the best medicine anyone can ask for.MedicineThrough Dec. 5 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      On the Scene: ‘Spring Awakening’ Returns 🎭

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      On the Scene: ‘Spring Awakening’ Returns �� Matt Stevens��Reporting from BroadwayMatt Stevens for The New York TimesTickets for the benefit, ranging from $50 to $5,000, sold out quickly. The line to enter the theater, on 45th Street near Eighth Avenue, would eventually stretch down the block.Because of delays seating attendees, the show started over an hour late. More

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      Review: ‘Morning’s at Seven’ Awakens Again, Only to Hit Snooze

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      Paul Osborn’s 1930s play is revived, with its thin psychology, predictable structure and somewhat bitter slice of small town life intact.Paul Osborn’s “Morning’s at Seven” debuted on Broadway in 1939, and has clung to the fringes of the theatrical canon ever since. A dyspeptic example of American realism, like an apple pie lightly dusted with arsenic, it plunks its audience into the adjoining backyards of two modest Victorian houses that a few sisters in their 60s and 70s call home. During a late afternoon and the following morning, marriages crumble, siblings quarrel, a brief affair surfaces, an engagement breaks, a mother smothers. Just one big not especially happy family.Old fashioned even when it opened, “Morning’s at Seven” became a regional theater darling and yielded two Broadway revivals, likely because it provides hefty roles for aging actors. Now, it is being staged at the Theater at St. Clement’s, where a new production by Dan Wackerman for his Peccadillo Theater Company opened Monday evening. It has a typically imposing cast — including Lindsay Crouse, Alma Cuervo, John Rubinstein, Tony Roberts — that would have been a bit starrier, but Judith Ivey tore a tendon during previews. Luckily, Alley Mills sidled in, reuniting with Dan Lauria, her spouse on “The Wonder Years.”Peccadillo provided the last show I saw, “Sideways: The Experience,” in March 2020, before theaters closed for the pandemic. It was a work written and staged with such casual and thoroughgoing sexism, I started to think that maybe shutting down some theater wasn’t so bad after all. So to say that “Morning’s at Seven” is an altogether more pleasurable experience is maybe not saying very much. With its thin psychology, predictable structure and characters to laugh at, not with, the play serves a snoozy, somewhat bitter slice of small town life. Imagine Thornton Wilder without the radicalism, William Inge without the melancholy, Lillian Hellman without the flash.Those neighboring Gibbs sisters — living with their husbands, except for Arry (Mills), who remains unmarried — have enjoyed relative contentment for 40 or so years. But one afternoon, Homer (Jonathan Spivey), the 40-year-old, failed-to-launch son of Ida (Cuervo), has come for an overnight visit and brought Myrtle (Keri Safran), his girlfriend of a dozen years. Somehow, that triggers the temporary cave-in of at least two marriages and considerable unrest in the home that Cora (Crouse) shares with her husband, Thor (Lauria), and kid sister, Arry.As expected, these practiced actors perform with relish and finesse. Crouse is nicely sour as Cora, the villain of the piece until she isn’t. And Cuervo neatly represses some of Ida’s hysteria. Roberts, as David — the husband of Esty (Patty McCormack), the eldest Gibbs sister and the only one who doesn’t effectively live with them — earns outsize laughs for some of the play’s meanest speeches. As the younger couple, Spivey and Safran overplay their roles, but seemingly with Wackerman’s encouragement.Mild yet ungentle, “Morning’s at Seven” — which borrows its title, ironically, from a cheery Robert Browning lyric — lets its characters politely abrade each other for the first two acts before tying up the story in a tidy comedic bow. What’s most distinct about the play is the acidity that runs through it, and the suggestion that maturity doesn’t necessarily breed content.“I always thought of getting old sort of like going to bed when you’re nice and drowsy,” Arry says. “But it isn’t that way at all.” In its grimmer moments, the play hints at something wormy at the heart of this American pastoral. But instead of offering a wake up call, it repairs its broken family and just goes back to sleep.Morning’s at SevenThrough Jan. 9 at Theater at St. Clement’s, Manhattan; morningsat7.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      If Remote Work Empties Downtowns, Can Theaters Fill Their Seats?

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      Since the pandemic, San Francisco has embraced work-from-home policies. Now venues and concert halls are wondering if weeknight audiences are a thing of the past.SAN FRANCISCO — As live performance finally returns after the pandemic shutdown, cultural institutions are confronting a long list of unknowns.Will audiences feel safe returning to crowded theaters? Have people grown so accustomed to watching screens in their living rooms that they will not get back into the habit of attending live events? And how will the advent of work-from-home policies, which have emptied blocks of downtowns and business districts, affect weekday attendance at theaters and concert halls?Nowhere is that last question more urgent than here in San Francisco, where tech companies have led the way in embracing work-from-home policies and flexible schedules more than in almost any other city in the nation. Going to a weeknight show is no longer a matter of leaving the office and swinging by the War Memorial Opera House or the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall.“As people work from home, it is going to change our demographics,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “It’s something that could be a threat. We’re all trying to wait and see whether there’s a surge of interest in live activity again or is there a continuation of just being at home, not coming into the city from the suburbs.”Arts groups are trying to gauge what the embrace of more flexible work-from-home policies will mean for their ability to draw audiences in a city whose housing crunch has already driven many people to settle far from downtown. Close to 70 percent of the audiences at the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony — two nationally recognized symbols of this city’s vibrant network of performing arts institutions — live outside the city, according to data collected by the two organizations.“As people work from home, it is going to change our demographics,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, which presented a new production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” this fall.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaSome economists see the trend of remote work persisting. “It’s likely we are going to have more people working from home than other places,” said Ted Egan, the chief economist for the city and county of San Francisco. “The tech industry seems to be the most generous for work-from-home policy, and employees are expecting that.”Twitter announced in the early months of the pandemic that it would allow almost all of its 5,200 employees, most based at its San Francisco office, to work at home permanently. At Salesforce, which has 9,000 employees, employees will only have to come to work one to three days a week; many will be allowed to work at home full time. Dropbox, which has its headquarters in San Francisco, also has adopted a permanent work-from-home policy. Facebook and Google, both of which have a significant presence in San Francisco, have implemented work-from-home policies.Egan said that the trend might pose more of a problem for the city’s bars and restaurants than for its performing arts institutions. “My suspicion is that performing arts are going to be less sensitive to working from home than other sectors,” he said. “It’s not the kind of purchase you do after work on a whim, like going for happy hour.”Attendance has been spotty as this city’s art scene climbs back. Just 50 percent of the seats were filled the other night for a performance of “The Displaced,” a “gentrification horror play” by Isaac Gómez, at the Crowded Fire Theater. “We had sold-out houses on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and much lower participation on Wednesday and Thursday night,” said Mina Morita, the artistic director. “It’s hard to tell if this is the new normal.”There were some patches of empty seats across the Davies Symphony Hall the other night, as the San Francisco Symphony presented the United States premiere of a violin concerto by Bryce Dessner, even though it was the third week of the long-delayed (and long-anticipated) first season for Esa-Pekka Salonen, its new music director. The concerto, with an energetic performance by Pekka Kuusisto, the Finnish violinist, was greeted by repeated standing ovations and glowing reviews.Attendance in October was down 11 percent compared to before the pandemic, but the symphony said advance sales were strong, suggesting normal audiences might return in spring.Twitter announced in the early months of the pandemic that it would allow almost all of its 5,200 employees, most based at its San Francisco office, to work at home permanently.Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images“The audience is back,” Salonen said in an interview before he took the stage. “Not what it was, but they are back. Some nights have been a little thinner than others. By and large, the energy is good. Our worst fears have been dispelled.”The San Francisco Opera also began its new season with a splashy new hire: a new music director, Eun Sun Kim, who in August became the first woman to hold the position at one of the nation’s largest opera companies. She conducted a new production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” this fall that incorporated chain-link fences and flickering video screens to update the story of the liberation of a political prisoner.Even so, the opera, which can seat 2,928 with Covid restrictions, sold an average of 1,912 tickets per show for “Fidelio,” its second production of this new season. That’s better than its second production in 2019, Britten’s “Billy Budd,” a searing work that does not always attract big crowds. But it drew fewer people than the opera’s second production in 2018, “Roberto Devereux,” which sold an average of 2,116 tickets a performance.“The urgency to be bold, to be innovative, to be compelling to get audiences to come back or give us a try for the first time has never been stronger,” Shilvock said. “There will be a hunger for things that have an energy, that have a vitality, that give a reason to come into the city.”Even before the pandemic, cultural organizations were dealing with challenges that threatened to discourage patrons, including a stressed public transportation system, traffic, parking constraints and the highly visible epidemic of homelessness. And many institutions were struggling to make inroads in attracting audiences and patrons from the tech industry, which now accounts for 19 percent of the private work force.Now, facing an uncertain future as they try to emerge from the pandemic shutdown, arts organizations are embracing a variety of tactics to fill seats..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-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;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-w739ur{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-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.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;}Hope Mohr, the co-director of Hope Mohr Dance, said that her organization was spending $1,400 per night to livestream performances, so audiences could choose between coming into San Francisco or watching from their living rooms.“A hybrid experience — I have to do that from now on,” she said. “My company usually performs in San Francisco, and I have audience coming from all over the bay.”These calculations are taking place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety. It is not clear how much these early attendance figures represent a realignment, or are evidence of audiences temporarily trying to balance their hunger for live performances against concerns about the spread of the Delta variant — even in a city where 75 percent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated. Lower attendance figures have been reported by performing halls across the country.“The audience is back,” Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, said. “Not what it was, but they are back. Some nights have been a little thinner than others. By and large the energy is good. Our worst fears have been dispelled.”Christopher M. Howard Opening nights have found performers relieved to be playing to real crowds again and audiences delighted to be back. “The convenience of at-home entertainment has made it not as desirable for some folks, ” said Ralph Remington, the director of cultural affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission. “But that being said, even though the density of the numbers isn’t as great as it was prepandemic, the audiences that are coming are really enthusiastic.”Advance sales for “The Nutcracker” at the San Francisco Ballet, with one-third of the tickets going for just $19 a seat to help bring in new patrons (the average ticket price is $136), have been moving briskly.Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the ballet’s interim executive director, said she hoped that working from home had made people eager to break out of their increasing isolation. “I would do anything to get out,” she said. “I hope that’s a good sign for our season.”At the height of the pandemic, about 85 percent of San Francisco-based employees worked from home; that number is about 50 percent now, said Enrico Moretti, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.“I think it’s possible that people are not going to commute from Walnut Creek at night to go to downtown San Francisco for the opera to the same extent,” he said. “But I don’t expect those office buildings will sit empty. There will be other people moving into them.”The Magic Theater, a 145-seat-theater in Fort Mason, just beyond Fisherman’s Wharf, has been experimenting with different kinds of programming, such as a poetry reading, and pay-what-you-can seats to lure patrons who live — and now work — far from the theater.“This is going to be an interesting year for everyone,” said Sean San José, its artistic director. “Are people going to come back? The zeitgeist is telling us something. Maybe we should listen. This ain’t a pause. We have got to rethink it.” More

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      'For Colored Girls' Broadway Revival Opening March 2022

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      Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem begins performances in March at the Booth Theater, home to the original 1976 production.The previously announced Broadway production of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” directed by Camille A. Brown, now has an opening date. After beginning previews on March 4, 2022, the show will open on March 24 at the Booth Theater, producers announced Monday.Brown, who will be making her Broadway directorial debut, choreographed the director Leah C. Gardiner’s well-received 2019 revival of Shange’s choreopoem for the Public Theater. But this Broadway production, which Brown will also choreograph, will be fully reimagined.“Of all the shows to be given as an opportunity to debut as a first-time Broadway director and choreographer, “for colored girls …” feels like a gift,” Brown said in a news release Monday. “I’m thrilled that I’ve been entrusted to combine all the parts of myself — dance, music and theater arts — to shape and share this timeless story again with the world.”Shange’s landmark work incorporates poetry, song and dance to tell the stories of seven women who are identified only by the hues of the dresses they wear. In his review of the recent Off Broadway revival, Ben Brantley detailed some of the show’s history as it made its way from bars and clubs to become “one of the most unexpected theater hits to emerge from the chaotic 1970s.” He added: “Shange’s free-form text was neither linear nor literal in its depiction of Black women struggling to claim their own voices from a society that had either ignored or actively silenced them.”Shange has inspired many, and her death in 2018 prompted a renewed interest in her work. The playwright Keenan Scott II has credited Shange’s “for colored girls” as an initial inspiration for his debut Broadway production, “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” He recently said that in college, a class screening of the Shange work was his first — and essentially his only — exposure to theater by Black playwrights at the time.Brown is a Tony Award nominee for her choreography in “Choir Boy.” She most recently choreographed and co-directed the Terence Blanchard opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in September. The Times’s dance critic Gia Kourlas said Brown’s step number for the opera “stops the show in its tracks.”Casting will be announced at a later date. More

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      Review: This Revival of Sondheim’s ‘Assassins’ Misses Its Mark

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      The production lacks the power to unsettle despite a fine cast of killers and wannabes who changed, or at least made, history gunning for presidents.The one reliably blood-chilling moment in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s “Assassins” comes courtesy of a killer who is, at best, a footnote in American history: Charles J. Guiteau, the lawyer who shot President James A. Garfield in 1881.Guiteau aims his gun at the audience, panning over us slowly, deliberately, in tension-filled silence. The music is stopped. The menace is visceral.“Facing the barrel of a gun, even when it’s just in a musical, is the kind of shock that can exist only in live theater,” Sondheim wrote in his 2011 book “Look, I Made a Hat,” in which he called this lingering, life-or-death moment in “Assassins” his favorite in a show rife with gun-waving murderers and murderers manqué.I’d wondered how that confrontation would land in John Doyle’s current revival at Classic Stage Company, not so much because of the state of our armed-to-the-teeth nation but because of the shooting last month on the set of the Alec Baldwin film “Rust,” where a real gun fired a real bullet that killed a real person, when it was all meant to be pretend.The surprising answer is that it doesn’t land at all, because Doyle has defanged the moment, speeding it up to a manic pace. His jittery Guiteau, played by a creepily unnerving Will Swenson, swings the gun left, right and center so fast that there’s no time for us to feel endangered, no time for the threat to lodge inside us and turn to fear.Granted, maybe we’re all too freaked out right now anyway to have a prop gun pointed at us. But I wish that Doyle had plastered the lobby with unmissable posters explaining, as the digital program does, that the show’s guns “are replicas that were provided, checked, and rendered inoperable” by a weapons specialist. I wish he’d had leaflets printed with the same message, and handed to each person on the way in.I wish he’d kept that long, scary moment. Because racing through it undermines the potency of the show, Classic Stage’s first since the shutdown.Even with a powerhouse cast, this stripped down, off-balance production — originally slated for spring 2020 as part of the Sondheim 90th-birthday festivities — never does find a way to make the audience feel the stakes of its characters’ actions. That’s true whether we view the assassins purely as historical figures or also as metaphors for an aggressive strain of lethal discontent as American as Old Glory.From left: Tavi Gevinson, Kuhn, Will Swenson, Uranowitz, Andy Grotelueschen, Adam Chanler-Berat, Wesley Taylor and Pasquale.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show’s vaudevillian patchwork of stories about volatile 19th- and 20th-century misfits who murdered a president, or tried to, makes us laugh and leaves us humming. But we are ultimately unperturbed.And maybe that, too, is a sign of the times: that we have lately lived through such virulent, brutal threats to our democracy that this motley bunch (John Wilkes Booth! Lee Harvey Oswald! Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme!) hardly seems ominous. What risk they posed, what damage they did, is past.But there are also plenty of parallels to the present in Sondheim’s sharp-eyed song cycle of the ostensibly dispossessed and in Weidman’s often casually violent dialogue. Doyle, a Sondheim veteran who staged the 2017 revival of the Sondheim-Weidman “Pacific Overtures,” infers one contemporary correlation outright with his final stage image, which I will not spoil.“No one can be put in jail for his dreams,” Booth — the alpha assassin, played by Steven Pasquale as a smooth Southern shark — sings to the others in the delusion-packed opening number, “Everybody’s Got the Right.”Gathered at a fairground shooting gallery, they are encouraged to kill a president to win a prize. On Doyle’s set, above a bare thrust stage painted with the Stars and Stripes, a giant round target flashes with projections (by Steve Channon) of the various presidents’ faces.That same screen, bordered with lights that shine red, blue and — peculiarly — not white but pale yellow, is pretty much all the scenery the show gets, which is in keeping with Doyle’s pared-back aesthetic. But the storytelling would have benefited from more visual cues. Many projections are too coldly literal and too far removed from the action to aid it properly.When Giuseppe Zangara (Wesley Taylor), the would-be assassin of Franklin D. Roosevelt, is executed, an image of an electric chair is projected above him. When Guiteau ascends to the gallows for his hanging while singing, with increasing franticness, “I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad,” Swenson has no stairs to dance on; there’s merely a distant projection of an empty noose.From left, Swenson, Rob Morrison (rear) and Ethan Slater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSimilarly, when Booth is in hiding, having shot Lincoln, there is no visual indication that he himself is injured, his leg broken. Pasquale is darkly charismatic, though: singing softly, beguilingly of “blood on the clover” from the Civil War in “The Ballad of Booth,” before the mask of romance slips and he spits a racist slur about Lincoln at venomous volume.The three-piece orchestra, led by Greg Jarrett, is supplemented in trademark Doyle style by some of the cast, notably Ethan Slater as the appealing Balladeer, who strolls the stage in a blue jumpsuit, playing an acoustic guitar. (Costumes are by Ann Hould-Ward.) Later he transforms into Oswald, a despondent young man with a powerful gun that — like many things here — comes wrapped in the flag.Heretical as it sounds, comic dialogue, not song, is this production’s strongest suit. But aside from a curiously underwhelming rendition of “Unworthy of Your Love,” the pretty, poppy duet between Fromme (Tavi Gevinson) and John Hinckley Jr. (Adam Chanler-Berat, who is suitably skin-crawling as the man who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981), it’s not that the musical performances are lacking.It’s that the lighter book scenes really shine, especially the hilariously mercurial ramblings of the wannabe Richard Nixon killer Samuel Byck (Andy Grotelueschen) and the terrifically lively scenes between Gerald Ford’s foiled assassins, Fromme and Sara Jane Moore (Judy Kuhn, handily transcending the role’s scatterbrained-broad stereotype).“Assassins” has been faulted since its premiere three decades ago for a supposed failure to make its disparate parts cohere. It’s also proved many times that they can, yet Doyle’s staging never manages to harness that cumulative power. Faithful though it is to the show’s sung and spoken text, it’s missing some vital connective tissue.Of course, the same could be said of the country. This is a musical with a deep, warning sense of something frighteningly wrong in the fabric of the United States — a nation where, as the song goes, “Something just broke.”You can still hear that alarm in this production. But don’t expect to feel it more than distantly.AssassinsThrough Jan. 29 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More