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      Fake Rock Nearly Crushes Opera Star: Accident or Sabotage?

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      Feuding stagehands, falling props: It might sound like the plot of an opera, but in France it has been the subject of a court case.LONDON — The tenor Robert Dean Smith was lying onstage — eyes closed, pretending to be dead — when he felt something very close above him.Smith was appearing as Tristan in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse in France, and he assumed that what he sensed looming was his colleague, the soprano Elisabete Matos, who was singing Isolde. She’d probably decided to alter the choreography and had come to stand over him, he thought.But when Smith opened his eyes, he saw a 467-pound fake rock hanging just inches from his face. “I panicked and just threw it out of the way,” he recalled of the 2015 incident in a telephone interview. He rolled out from underneath the object, and quickly got to his feet — which likely confused an audience that had watched Tristan die a short while before. (His co-star kept singing throughout.)The cause of this dangerous mishap was at first a mystery. But the reality turns out to be so bizarre that it could be an opera itself.Robert Dean Smith and Elisabete Matos onstage in “Tristan und Isolde” at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse in 2015Partrice NinLast week, a court in Toulouse found a stagehand at the theater guilty of tampering with the computer system that controlled the prop rock’s descent. The production, which was directed by Nicolas Joel, intended for the object to stop about 30 inches above the tenor, and its continued descent at the performance in question was only stopped when another member of the technical staff realized something had gone wrong, according to a report in La Dépêche du Midi, a local newspaper.According to the prosecutors, the stagehand, Nicholas S., whose surname has not been revealed by French newspapers out of respect for his privacy, had long been in conflict with a rival stagehand, Richard R., whom he hoped would be blamed for the error. Two months before the incident, Nicholas S. had won a court case where he accused Richard R. of assault.Nicholas S., who denied the allegations that he had tampered with the computer system, was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence and made to pay a symbolic one-euro fine to the Théâtre du Capitole. His lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.Smith, the tenor, said he had never imagined someone had been trying to hurt him or had tampered with the equipment. “I’ve seen too many accidents onstage,” he said. “I’ve seen trapdoors open with people on them, and doors and walls fall down onto people.” Smith once cut his hand open while playing Don José in Bizet’s “Carmen,” because someone had forgotten to blunt the knife.In 2008, Smith was actually the beneficiary of such a mishap — making his Metropolitan Opera debut, as Tristan, after the tenor Gary Lehman was injured during a prior performance because of a prop malfunction. Lehman had been lying on a palette on a steeply raked section of the stage when the palette broke loose from its moorings and plummeted into the prompter’s box. Lehman hit his head and could not take part in the next performance.Given the frequency of accidents onstage, that the 2015 incident was the result of feuding stagehands was “just really bizarre and very unfortunate for the theater,” Smith said.After the 2015 performance, the tenor apologized to Matos for his part in ruining the show. After that, he said, he had tried to ensure he died onstage in positions where he could keep his eyes open to see if anything was coming.Constant Merheut contributed reporting from Paris. More

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      Sondheim Is Writing a New Musical, and Hopes to Stage It Next Year

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      The actor Nathan Lane said he had recently participated in a reading of the show, titled “Square One.”Stephen Sondheim, the 91-year-old composer and lyricist widely regarded as among the greatest musical theater artists in history, is writing another show and said he hopes that a production will be staged next year.“I’ve been working on a show for a couple years with a playwright named David Ives, and it’s called ‘Square One,’” Sondheim said Wednesday night during an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” “And we had a reading of it last week, and we were encouraged, so we’re going to go ahead with it. With any luck, we’ll get it on next season.”Sondheim did not reveal any other details, and he did not immediately respond to an email seeking clarification. But the actor Nathan Lane, in an appearance earlier that day on “Today,” said he had participated in the reading last week.“I just did a reading of a new Sondheim musical,” Lane said. “It was very exciting. Bernadette Peters and I. A whole group of wonderful people.”“Square One” is a version of a project that Sondheim and Ives have been thinking about for years, but had set aside while they tried to write a musical adaptation of two films by Luis Buñuel. Both projects were being developed in association with the producer Scott Rudin, who has stepped back from producing theater after renewed media attention concerning his bullying behavior toward subordinates and collaborators. Sondheim had once said he hoped for a production of the Buñuel musical in 2017, but it didn’t happen, and last year, he told the Public Theater, which had been planning to stage the Buñuel musical, that he was no longer working on that show.In the meantime, Sondheim fans will have plenty of opportunities to revisit his work. Steven Spielberg is directing a new film adaptation of “West Side Story,” with a screenplay by Tony Kushner, that is scheduled to open Dec. 10. Sondheim wrote the lyrics for that 1957 musical.Also, a revival of “Company,” in which the genders of the protagonist and several other characters have been swapped, is scheduled to resume previews Nov. 15 and to open Dec. 9 on Broadway. The revival, directed by Marianne Elliott and starring Katrina Lenk and Patti LuPone, got through nine preview performances before theaters were shut down in March 2020. Sondheim wrote the show’s music and lyrics.Off Broadway, the Classic Stage Company is planning, on Nov. 2, to start performances of a starry revival of “Assassins,” directed by John Doyle, which was also delayed by the pandemic. Sondheim wrote that show’s music and lyrics.And the “Encores!” program at New York City Center is planning a revival of “Into the Woods,” directed by Lear deBessonet and featuring Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife, next May. Sondheim wrote that show’s music and lyrics. More

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      ‘Hamilton’ Cancels Atlanta Performance Over Covid Concerns

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      After some members of a touring company tested positive for the coronavirus, Wednesday night’s show did not go on.“Hamilton” canceled a performance in Atlanta Wednesday night after some members of a touring company tested positive for the coronavirus, and the show was unable to get test results for other company members before curtain.The cancellation, of a touring production at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, is a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic is likely to remain a disruptive factor as large-scale theater resumes performances across the country this fall. Throughout the pandemic, returning performing arts events around the world have been canceled or postponed because of health concerns; now, as Broadway shows reopen in New York and on tour, producers say they expect occasional incidents like this.A “Hamilton” spokesman said he expected the Atlanta production to resume performances Thursday night. The show is adding a performance next week for those patrons who held tickets to the Wednesday night performance and are willing to be rescheduled; refunds or exchanges are also available.“We received some positive cases last night in the company, and needed to confirm that everyone else was negative,” said Shane Marshall Brown, the “Hamilton” spokesman. “The turnaround time for the P.C.R. tests were unexpectedly delayed and we were unable to get them back in time to continue with the show.”On Broadway, where nine shows have begun runs since June, none has yet canceled a performance. At “Waitress,” a cast member tested positive a few days before the first performance; she was replaced by an understudy while she recovered from Covid, and the show went on. More

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      Andrew Garfield Can’t Remember Who He Was Before ‘Tick, Tick … Boom!’

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      In the movie musical, Garfield plays the creator of “Rent,” who died unexpectedly at 35. Making the film helped Garfield process a death in his own life.Jon (Andrew Garfield) is throwing a party, though there’s hardly a reason to celebrate. He’s riven with anxiety, his cramped apartment is overpacked with people, and he’s just spent money he doesn’t have, a down payment on success that will not come within his lifetime. But still, with a wide grin, Jon toasts his friends, leaps on his couch and sings, “This is the life!”Jon is Jonathan Larson, the composer and playwright who died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm at age 35 in 1996 just before his new musical, “Rent,” would become a global smash. The new film “Tick, Tick … Boom!” portrays Larson struggling to find success in his late 20s, as he frets about whether he should pack it in and choose a more conventional path than scripting musical theater.Larson originally created “Tick, Tick … Boom!” as a solo show, “Boho Days,” starring himself in 1990; after his death, it was reworked by the playwright David Auburn into a three-person production that the “Hamilton” creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, saw in 2001, when he was still a senior in college.“Here’s this posthumous musical from the guy who made me want to write musicals in the first place,” said Miranda, who’s now made his feature directorial debut with the film.Miranda saw Garfield in the 2018 Broadway production of “Angels in America” and thought he was “transcendent” in that show. “I just left thinking, ‘Oh, that guy can do anything,’” the director recalled. “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I just felt like he could do anything. So I cast him in my head probably a year before I talked to him about it.”Miranda put Garfield through his paces, sending him to a vocal coach and ensuring that the actor would be able to play enough piano so the camera could pan from his fingers to his face throughout the film. But those are just the technical aspects of a performance that is impressively possessed: Garfield plays the passionate, frustrated Larson with enough zealous verve to power all the lights on Broadway.Garfield as Jonathan Larson in a scene from “Tick, Tick … Boom.”Macall Polay/NetflixIt’s all part of a very busy fall for the 38-year-old actor, who recently appeared in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” as the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker and, it’s rumored, will suit up alongside Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” out in December. (Of that supersecret superhero team-up, Garfield can divulge nothing.) Still, it’s clear that “Tick, Tick … Boom!” meant much more to him than he initially expected.“It’s a strange thing when there’s someone like Jon that you didn’t have any relationship to before, and then suddenly now there’s this mysterious forever connection that I am never, ever going to let go,” Garfield told me on a recent video call from Calgary, Canada, where he’s shooting “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a limited series. “I just feel so lucky that Jon was revealed to me, because now I don’t remember who I was before I knew who Jon was.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.How did “Tick, Tick … Boom!” originally come to you?One of my best friends in New York is Gregg Miele, and he’s the great body worker and massage person of New York City — he works on all the dancers and actors and singers on Broadway and beyond. Lin was on his table one morning and asked, “Can Andrew Garfield sing?” And Gregg, being the friend that he is, just started lying, basically, and said, “Yes, he is the greatest singer I’ve ever heard.” Then he called me and said, “Hey, go and get some singing lessons because Lin’s going to ask you to do something.”Lin and I had lunch, and he told me briefly about “Tick, Tick” and Jon. I’m not a musical theater guy in my history — it’s not something that I’ve been introduced to until the last few years, really. So Lin left me with a copy of the music and lyrics, and he wrote at the front of it, “This won’t make sense now, but it will. Siempre, Lin.”Garfield hadn’t done much singing when he was cast in “Tick, Tick … Boom” opposite musical theater veterans. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.’”Alana Paterson for The New York TimesYou’ve performed in plays like “Angels in America” and “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway, but in this film, Lin surrounded you with a lot of musical-theater ringers, and even some of the smallest roles and cameos are filled by major players from that world. That had to have been a daunting space to step into.I remember a very specific moment where we were in music rehearsal. Alex Lacamoire was at the piano walking us through the songs — he’s Lin’s musical arranger and producer — and I was with [“Tick, Tick” co-stars] Robin de Jesus and Vanessa Hudgens and Josh Henry and Alex Shipp. You can imagine how I’m feeling! They’re all just pros, they know exactly what they’re doing, they’re making notes. I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m going to die.”Then it comes time for me to get into the song and I’m just trying to get through it. I remember Alex Lacamoire going, “Woo, Andrew!” And then everyone behind him, like Josh and Vanessa and Alex and Robin, were like, “Yeah baby, that’s it baby! You got it, baby!” I go beet red and five minutes pass, and I’m just like, “Hey guys, sorry.” I start crying, and I say, “I don’t know if I’ve ever been this happy in my entire life, to be surrounded by the most supportive liars I have ever known.”Garfield working with his director, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who cast him after seeing the actor in “Angeles in America.” Miranda recalled, “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I just felt like he could do anything.”Macall Polay/NetflixJonathan spends the movie anxious about this ticking that only he can hear. How did you interpret that?There was a line in the original one-man show “Boho Days”: “Sometimes, I feel like my heart is going to explode.” It was too on-the-nose for people after he passed away, and they had to cut it, but he spends the story trying to figure out what this ticking is: “Is it turning 30? Is it that I haven’t succeeded? Is it some unconscious idea of my girlfriend’s biological clock combined with the pressure of my career? Or is it all of my friends who are losing their lives at a very young age because of the AIDS epidemic?”It could even be a musical metronome. The way you play Jonathan, as this theatrical person who feels so deeply and urgently, it’s almost like he needs to break into song because normal life just doesn’t cut it.Everything is up at an 11. Even when he’s making love, it’s at 11! Somehow he knows that this is all going to end, that this is all so ephemeral, and I think he was acutely, painfully aware that he wasn’t going to get all of his song sung. And I think he was also agonizingly aware that he wasn’t going to get the reflection and recognition that he knew he was supposed to have while he was still breathing.On the last day of shooting, what I understood is that Jon had it figured out. He knew that this is a short ride and a sacred one, and he had a lot of keys and secrets to how to live with ourselves and with each other and how to make meaning out of being here. Once he accepted that, he could be fully a part of the world, and then he could write “Rent.” I don’t think there’s an accident in that. That very visceral knowing of loss and of death, that’s what gives everything so much meaning. And without that awareness, we will succumb to meaninglessness.So what kind of meaning did this story give to you?Every frame, every moment, every breath of this film is an attempted honoring of Jon. And, on a more personal level, it’s an honoring of my mom. She is someone who showed me where I was supposed to go in my life. She set me on a path. We lost her just before Covid, just before we started shooting, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. So, for me, I was able to continue her song on the ocean and the wave of Jonathan’s songs. It was an attempt to honor him in his unfinished song, and her in her unfinished song, and have them meet.I think that’s part of the reason I didn’t want this movie to end, because I got to put my grief into art, into this creative act. The privilege of my life has been being there for my mother, being the person that gave her permission when she was ready. We had a very amazing connection, and now an audience will know her spirit in an unconscious way through Jon, which I just find so magical and beautiful.“I’ve lost people before, but one’s mother is a different thing,” Garfield said, adding, “Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm.”Alana Paterson for The New York TimesStill, that’s a lot to deal with while you were shooting this movie. It can’t have been easy.I was hesitant whether I was going to share that, but I feel like it’s a universal experience. In the best-case scenario, we lose our parents and not the other way around, so I feel very lucky that I got to be with her while she was passing, and I got to read her favorite poems to her and take care of her and my dad and my brother. I’ve lost people before, but one’s mother is a different thing. It’s the person that gives you life no longer being here. Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm. For me, everything has changed: Where there was once a stream, there’s now a mountain; where there was once a volcano, there’s now a field. It’s a strange head trip.You put parts of yourself in other people, almost like they’re the stewards of who you are. And when you lose those people, suddenly you become their steward.As you say, it’s like my mother now lives in me in a way that maybe is even stronger than ever when she was incarnate. I feel her essence. For me, it only comes when one can accept the loss, and it’s so hard for us to do that in our culture because we’re not given the framework or the tools to. We’re told to be in delusion and denial of this universally binding thing that we’re all going to go through at some point, and it’s fascinating to me that this grand adventure of death is not honored.Actually, the only thing that gives any of this meaning is if we walk with death in the far corner of our left eye. That’s the only way that we are aware of being alive in this moment. I think that was the legacy that Jon leaves and the legacy that my mom leaves for me personally, is just to be here. Because you’re not going to be here for long.It reminds me of what was written on your script before all of this happened: “You don’t understand now, but you will.”“You don’t understand now, but you will.” I’m still reeling from the download of understanding what Jon’s life was about, what my mother’s life was about, what all of this is about. Oh God, how lucky to explore that in one’s work! More

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      In London, Musicals That Stay True to a Brand

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      “Frozen” and “Back to the Future: The Musical” are sure to please fans of the original screen works, without offering much more of interest.LONDON — There’s a human story embedded within the shiny toy that is “Back to the Future: The Musical,” which opened Monday night at the Adelphi Theater here. But you pretty much know from the start that a revved-up audience is saving its greatest roar of recognition for a certain prop.That would be the whiz-bang car so beloved from the 1985 blockbuster film that it’s the calling card for the Tony-winning director John Rando’s transcription of the film on the West End. (A run in Manchester in March 2020 was cut short by the pandemic.)And so it proves. Scarcely has the vaunted DeLorean made its way onto a set by Tim Hatley — which itself resembles a mammoth LED-framed computer console — before the theater erupts in cheers that back in the past, so to speak, might have been reserved for legends of the stage. Its gull-wing doors all but ready to take flight, the vehicle later soars into the auditorium, doing a somersault in the process. “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” eat your heart out.The result honors a hard-working array of lighting, sound and video designers — not to mention Chris Fisher’s illusions — and recalls the era of the 1980s mega-musical and its dependence on visual effects: the falling chandelier in “The Phantom of the Opera” and the whirling helicopter in “Miss Saigon,” to cite just two examples.What about the actors? “Back to the Future”’s opening performance, as it happened, suffered a last-minute cast replacement when its (terrific) co-star, Roger Bart, was sidelined that day by a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. The role of the wild-haired Doc Brown — immortalized by Christopher Lloyd onscreen — has been given over temporarily to Bart’s understudy, Mark Oxtoby. I caught Bart’s gleeful performance, manic and unexpectedly touching, at the final preview.Still, can you imagine the mayhem that might ensue were the show’s mechanized capabilities to shut up shop? That would bring to grief a stage venture that, as with so many films turned stage musicals, exists essentially to honor the brand. As with “Frozen,” the Disney extravaganza that opened on a newly bustling West End a mere five days earlier, the creators must give obsessives a reasonable facsimile of the movie while attempting to find something uniquely stage-worthy to what, after all, is a franchise. (Both musicals go heavy on the merchandise.)Olly Dobson as Marty McFly in “Back to the Future: The Musical.”Sean Ebsworth BarnesThe need to think outside the celluloid box explains the 16 new songs from the Grammy winners Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard currently overburdening a story known onscreen in musical terms for Huey Lewis and the News rocking out “The Power of Love.” That ever-welcome rouser shows up just in time to fuel a clap-happy finale.The new songs, by contrast, feel largely like filler, though Bart lands the appealingly plaintive “For the Dreamers,” and Olly Dobson brings boundless energy and a strong voice to that wannabe rocker Marty McFly — the teenage time-traveler played in the movie by Michael J. Fox. “Something About That Boy” has an up-tempo catchiness appropriate to the era of “Grease” to which the material pays homage, and several numbers reference time specifically, as befits a sci-fi narrative in which the skateboard-happy Marty is forced to repair nothing less than the space-time continuum.And yet it’s the DeLorean again that prompts a double-page program spread explaining such vehicular specifics as temporal field stabilizers, a Tachyon Pulse Generator and, most crucially, a Flux Capacitor. That last item gets a workout as the engine — you’ll forgive that word choice — that drives the plot when an anxious Marty hurtles back to 1955 in an effort to bring his parents together so as to ensure that his own existence isn’t erased.Because 1985 is by now itself long ago, the book by Bob Gale (a co-author, with Robert Zemeckis, of the film) has sensibly jettisoned the Libyan terrorists who figure in the movie. Instead, we get a rather desperate-seeming reference to the current appetite for kale, and a tongue-in-cheek allusion to 2020 as a time without war, crime or disease.I hadn’t recalled the degree of Oedipal depth to a story that finds Marty resisting advances from his own mother, Lorraine (a clear-voiced Rosanna Hyland), in order to bring her under the romantic 1950s sway of the geeky George (an immediately appealing Hugh Coles). This slow-blooming charmer, given in song to rhyming “myopia” and “utopia,” is the one who belongs in Lorraine’s arms, not her own son.A bromance develops along the way between Marty and Doc, a mentor of sorts who in this iteration breaks the fourth wall more than once to express dismay at finding himself surrounded by choreographer Chris Bailey’s high-stepping chorus line. The surprise, in context, is understandable. After all, it can’t be easy folding dance into a scenario in which the car gets all the best moves.Samantha Barks, left, as Elsa and Stephanie McKeon as Anna in Disney’s “Frozen,” directed by Michael Grandage at the Theater Royal Drury Lane.Johan Persson“Frozen” induces gasps of its own when the vast stage of the Theater Royal Drury Lane gives itself over to a shimmering icescape against which the magic-endowed Elsa can belt out “Let It Go” — the Oscar-winning power ballad from the 2013 animated film that sends the audience into the intermission on a high. But for all the transformations wrought by Christopher Oram’s set, the emphasis remains firmly on the characters, not least the reined-in Elsa (Samantha Barks) and her comparatively harebrained younger sister, Anna, whose bumptious peppiness is meant to seem endearing but, I’m afraid, left me cold onscreen and again onstage. (A perky Stephanie McKeon, it should be said, delivers what the part requires.)It’s Barks’s superbly realized Elsa who benefits most from this reconsideration of a show that was the first Broadway title forced by the pandemic to call it quits. Having had time to look at the material afresh, the director Michael Grandage and his team have beefed up the fraught emotional state of a snow queen at savage odds with her own powers and given the siblings a duet, “I Can’t Lose You,” that places this show on a continuum set by “Wicked” and centered around a literal or figurative sisterhood.The plotting is still peculiar: Anna and Elsa’s parents die at sea, a loss that seems barely to register, and a lot of the shifts in behavior look decidedly arbitrary. Oh, and how else to explain that second-act opener, “Hygge,” involving the ensemble emerging semi-clad from a sauna, beyond giving the choreographer Rob Ashford something to do?A definite bonus to the London production is the restoration for a reported 60 million pounds of the theater itself, which now looks sufficiently luxuriant that I, for one, might be cautious about inviting many thousands of people through such elegantly appointed portals. “Frozen” is sure to attract innumerable families throughout its run. Let’s just hope these hungry and thirsty patrons treat their newly ravishing surroundings with respect.Back to the Future: The Musical. Directed by John Rando. Adelphi Theater.Frozen. Directed by Michael Grandage. Theater Royal Drury Lane. More

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      Jean-Claude van Itallie, ‘America Hurrah’ Playwright, Dies at 85

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      He was a central figure in the experimental theater movement for decades. His best-known work, a trilogy of one-acts, opened in 1966 and ran for more than 630 performances.Jean-Claude van Itallie, a playwright, director and performer who was a mainstay of the experimental theater world and who was especially known for “America Hurrah,” a form-bending trio of one-acts that opened in 1966 in the East Village and ran for more than 630 performances, died on Sept. 9 in Manhattan. He was 85.His brother, Michael, said the cause was pneumonia.Beginning in the late 1950s, Mr. van Itallie immersed himself in the vibrant Off Off Broadway scene, where playwrights and performers were challenging theatrical conventions. He joined Joseph Chaikin’s newly formed Open Theater in 1963, and his first produced play, “War,” was staged in the West Village. He was a favorite of Ellen Stewart, who had founded La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in 1961.Mr. van Itallie’s early works, including components of what became “America Hurrah,” were generally performed in lofts and other small spaces, but for the full-fledged production of “America Hurrah,” in November 1966, he moved up to the Pocket Theater on Third Avenue. The work caused a sensation.“I think you’ll be neglecting a whisper in the wind if you don’t look in on ‘America Hurrah,’” Walter Kerr began his rave review in The New York Times. “There’s something afoot here.”The first play in the trilogy, “Interview,” looked at the dehumanizing process of job hunting. In the second, “TV,” a commentary on mass media’s ability to trivialize, three people in a television ratings company watch a variety of shows; gradually the ones they’re watching take over the stage, and the three “real” people are absorbed into them.The third piece was “Motel,” which was first performed in 1965 at La MaMa E.T.C. and which the script describes as “a masque for three dolls.” (Robert Wilson, still early in his groundbreaking career, designed the original set.) Writing about a London production of “America Hurrah” for The Times in 1967, Charles Marowitz called it “a short but stunning masterpiece.”In it, a monstrous doll, the “Motel-keeper,” presides over a motel room and emits a stream of increasingly arcane patter. Two other dolls arrive at the room and proceed to trash it, scrawling vulgar graffiti on the wall and eventually dismantling the Motel-keeper.In 1993, when the Dobama Theater in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, mounted a revival of “America Hurrah,” Marianne Evett, theater critic for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, reflected on its original impact.“When it opened,” she wrote, “it rocketed to fame, announcing that a new kind of American theater had arrived — deliberately experimental, savagely funny, politically aware and critical of standard American life, its institutions and values.”Mr. van Itallie continued making new work for more than half a century, and also founded Shantigar, a retreat in western Massachusetts, where he nurtured aspiring theater artists. Just two years ago, La MaMa staged the premiere of his new play, “The Fat Lady Sings,” about an evangelical family.“Jean-Claude van Itallie was an artist who was constantly questioning and digging into the deeper realms of our human existence and spirit,” Mia Yoo, artistic director of La MaMa, said by email. “In this moment of change it is artists like Jean-Claude whom we must look to.”Mr. van Itallie in 1999 in his one-man show, “War, Sex and Dreams,” at La Mama E.T.C. It related his childhood escape from the Nazis, his life as a gay man and how he coped with sudden fame in the 1960s. Peter MacDonald/La MamaJean-Claude van Itallie was born on May 25, 1936, in Brussels to Hugo and Marthe (Levy) van Itallie. The family left Belgium as the Nazis advanced on the country in 1940, and by the end of the year they had reached the United States. They settled in Great Neck, on Long Island. Hugo van Itallie had been a stockbroker in Brussels and resumed that career on Wall Street.Jean-Claude’s parents spoke French at home, something that influenced his later approach to theater, he said.“I had the good fortune to grow up in a couple of languages,” he said, “and I think that makes you realize that no single language contains reality, that words are always an approximation of reality, that language and even thought are perspectives on reality, not reality itself.”He was active in the drama club at Great Neck High School and in student productions at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he spent his senior year. In 1954, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he continued to study theater and wrote his first one-act plays before graduating in 1958. His honors thesis was titled “The Pessimism of Jean Anouilh,” the French dramatist.Mr. van Itallie settled in Greenwich Village. He worked for several years adapting and writing scripts for television, particularly for “Look Up and Live,” a Sunday morning anthology program on religious themes broadcast on CBS. It was a period when many TV shows had corporate sponsors that had to be appeased, but his wasn’t one of them; “Look Up and Live” gave the writers a measure of freedom.“All you had to do was please God and CBS,” he said.He was continuing to write plays on his own. “Motel,” the third piece of the “America Hurrah” trilogy, was actually the first to be written, in 1961 or ’62.“I was about three years out of Harvard, living in Greenwich Village and knocking on the door of Broadway theater,” he told The Plain Dealer decades later. “And I wasn’t getting in. I think that ‘Motel’ grew out of my anger — partly at that situation, but probably a much deeper anger at the way my mind had been conventionalized and conditioned. It just rose up out of me.”The success of “America Hurrah” in New York spawned other productions, though they sometimes ran into resistance, including in London, where the graffiti scrawled in “Motel” offended censors. In Mobile, Ala., a production by the University of South Alabama at a city-owned theater in 1968 was shut down by the mayor, Lambert C. Mims, after two performances.“It is filth, pure and simple,” the mayor said, “and I think it is a crying shame that Alabama taxpayers’ money has been used to produce such degrading trash.”Among Mr. van Itallie’s other works with Open Theater was “The Serpent,” a collaborative piece inspired by the book of Genesis that he shaped into a script. It was first performed in Rome during a European tour in 1968 and later staged in New York.In the 1970s Mr. van Itallie became known for translations.“I did my work as a playwright backwards,” he once said, “creating new theatrical forms in the ’60s, and in the ’70s going back to study masters like Chekhov.”Later still he did some acting, including performing a one-man autobiographical play called “War, Sex and Dreams,” which related his childhood escape from the Nazis, his life as a gay man and how he coped with sudden fame in the 1960s. D.J.R. Bruckner reviewed a performance of the work at the Cafe at La MaMa in 1999 for The Times, calling it the “often amusing and often sad confession of a man in his 60s whose heart is lonely and who teases one into wondering what, despite his remarkable candor, he is leaving out.”Mr. van Itallie split his time between a home in Manhattan and the farm in Rowe, Mass., which is home to his Shantigar Foundation. In addition to his brother, he is survived by his stepmother, Christine van Itallie.In remembering Mr. van Itallie, Ms. Yoo called to mind her predecessor, Ms. Stewart, who died in 2011.“I think of Ellen Stewart and him looking down at us and insisting that we move and make change,” she said. More

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      Broadway’s Biggest Shows Open 🎭

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      Broadway’s Biggest Shows Open ��Adam Nagourney��Reporting from N.Y.C.’s Theater DistrictJeenah Moon for The New York TimesAt the Ambassador Theater, the crowd gave Walter Bobbie, “Chicago” director, an ovation that lasted two minutes.Ovations were repeated, again and again, through the whole first act. “Isn’t this an amazing way to celebrate a 25th anniversary? Oh, my God!” Bobbie said. More

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      'Hamilton' Reopens on Broadway to Giddy Crowds

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      Kristin and Matt Collins, a couple from Annapolis, Md., were standing in line at the Richard Rodgers Theater on the reopening night of “Hamilton” with two extra tickets to give to anyone who wanted them.A few feet away, Chris Graham and Addie Trivers, two musical theater students, were standing watching all the opening-night excitement, wishing they could afford tickets for the show inside.Then Collins approached the two college juniors and asked if they might want to see “Hamilton” tonight. Yes, in fact, they did.“Either he’s telling the truth or we’re being kidnapped,” said Trivers, who used to go from theater to theater asking for cheap tickets before the pandemic, “and either way I’m going with him.”Those two tickets were among the most sought after on Broadway’s night of big reopenings.At the start of the show, the creator of “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda, walked onstage to a standing ovation. “I don’t ever want to take live theater for granted ever again, do you?” he said. “You can mouth along, all you like, no one can see your mouth moving.”The musical sensation, which opened on Broadway in 2015, was the industry’s highest grossing show when the pandemic hit. The week before Broadway shut down, “Hamilton” grossed $2.7 million, more than any other show by far. That week, more than 10,700 people scored the sought-after tickets — and then the production, with the rest of live theater, was forced to a sudden halt.The musical, which won 11 Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, managed to find an even wider audience during the pandemic. In July 2020, Disney+ started streaming a film of the musical with Miranda in the title role. Its release reignited interest in the musical and revived debate on some of the controversies it had sparked, including its treatment of slavery.Judging by the energy of the crowd on Tuesday night, “Hamilton” fever seemed ready to pick up right where it left off.The television personality Al Roker stood on the sidewalk pumping up the crowd, shouting, “Are you ready?”“We had just watched Al Roker walk by and I thought that was the peak of the night,” said Graham. The one downside of getting impromptu free tickets to “Hamilton”: He was worried that he was underdressed in his T-shirt and shorts.Farther down the line to enter the theater, Lauren Koranda, 20, was far from underdressed. She was wearing the floor-length shimmering gown that she had worn to senior prom. On the day the “Hamilton” tickets went on sale, she and her best friend, Maura Consedine, had used about six devices to make sure they got a pair.“It’s such a big night for New York City,” Consedine said. “The city truly feels alive again.” More