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      Musicals Return to Broadway With ‘Waitress’ and ‘Hadestown’

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      The song-and-dance shows that are Broadway’s bread and butter began a staggered return to the stage Thursday. For audiences, vaccinations and masks were mandatory.Sara Bareilles stepped onto the stage of the Ethel Barrymore Theater a few minutes after 7 p.m. Thursday, a white apron over her blue uniform, as a looped recording of her voice began to intone pie ingredients. “Sugar. Sugar. Sugar, butter. Sugar, butter. Sugar, butter, flour.” And then, with a single note from a keyboard, a high piano chord and a whoosh from a cymbal, she launched into a song about baking.One hour later and one block north, André De Shields slowly walked across the stage of the Walter Kerr Theater in a silver suit with iridescent silver boots, and, after a long arresting pause, asked the cast, and then the audience, and then the trombonist, a short question: “Aight?” The actors assented; the audience applauded, and the trombonist, Brian Drye, began to vamp.And just like that, Broadway musicals are back on Broadway.Well, to be more precise, two musicals are back on Broadway: “Waitress,” about a gifted baker in an abusive marriage, and “Hadestown,” a contemporary retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.With a note from a keyboard, a piano chord and the whoosh of a cymbal, “Waitress” brought musical theater back to Broadway. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesEven on this first night, there was a reminder of the challenges involved: An actress in “Waitress,” who had been fully vaccinated, tested positive for the coronavirus, and couldn’t perform. The rest of the cast was tested, the actress who tested positive was replaced by an understudy, and the show went on.The return of musical theater — the financial backbone of Broadway — marks another milestone as the theater business, and the theater community, seek to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, which forced all 41 Broadway theaters to close on March 12, 2020. On Sept. 14, four of the industry’s tentpole shows — “The Lion King,” “Wicked,” “Hamilton” and “Chicago” — will reopen, with many more musicals planning to start or restart performances throughout the fall.Audiences were extremely enthusiastic after months away. Both of the reopening musicals sold out on Thursday. At “Waitress,” there was even a standing ovation for a recorded preshow announcement reminding people to keep their masks on.“We want everything to come back,” said Valerie Tuarez, 21, who said she had fallen in love with “Waitress” through the cast recording and was now seeing it for the first time.Some “Hadestown” fans arrived with the show’s signature red flower. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAt “Hadestown,” Joey Casali, 18, was wearing the show’s signature bloom — a red ranunculus — behind his right ear. He said he had seen the show five times before the pandemic and was ready for his long-delayed sixth visit. But he was also mindful of the bigger picture.“This signifies Broadway coming back,” he said. “All eyes are on New York tonight.”Among those celebrating the “Waitress” reopening was Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, who had worked to secure aid to help live entertainment businesses and cultural organizations recover from the pandemic. He told the cast before the show that the theater industry was not only beloved, but essential.“Without Broadway,” he said, “New York would never come back economically.” More

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      ‘The Doors Didn’t Open Easily’ on Her Path to ‘Cinderella’

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      The choreographer JoAnn M. Hunter has quietly become an important figure in the world of musical theater, especially with her work for Andrew Lloyd Webber.LONDON — Midway through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new “Cinderella,” the male ensemble throws itself into a thrusting, muscle-popping number that perfectly illustrates the musical’s fictional setting of Belleville, a town devoted to beauty in all its superficial forms. It’s also laugh-out-loud hilarious, a sly take on an objectification more usually embodied by a female chorus, and a witty amplification of the musical’s reimagining of the Cinderella myth.That dance (which incorporates kettle bells), and all the others in this West End production, is the work of JoAnn M. Hunter, a longtime Broadway performer and choreographer who has quietly become an important figure in a field that boasts very few women, and even fewer women of color.“A great number of choreographers go their own way,” Lloyd Webber said in a telephone interview, “but JoAnn is completely different, a wonderful collaborator who you can really talk to about what the show needs. She is hugely important to the look of the show.”“Cinderella,” which finally opened on Aug. 18 at the Gillian Lynne Theater here after multiple pandemic-related delays, has a book by Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”) and lyrics by David Zippel (“City of Angels”). It’s Hunter’s third collaboration with Lloyd Webber and the director Laurence Connor, after the 2015 Broadway production of “School of Rock” and the much-lauded 2019 West End revival of “Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”Carrie Hope Fletcher as Cinderella in the new West End production. Tristram Kenton A few critics jibed at Fennell’s rewriting of the Cinderella story: The heroine, played by Carrie Hope Fletcher, is a spirited, grumpy Goth; Prince Charming is M.I.A.; and his younger brother, Prince Sebastian (Ivano Turco), is the shy and awkward hero. But most reviewers concurred that the new musical is a great deal of fun, helped along by the wittily inventive, hugely varied dances that characterize Hunter’s style.“JoAnn M. Hunter’s choreography keeps it all swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes,” Sam Marlowe wrote in The I.Hunter, who is in her 50s, was born just outside of Tokyo, but grew up in Rhode Island with her Japanese mother and American father. She and her older brother were the only mixed-race children in their community. “I got taunted quite a lot, and I didn’t understand what was different about me,” she said.Ballet, which she started studying at 10, proved a savior. “In dance class I didn’t feel different at all,” she said. “I was just a dancer, with dancer friends. I always wonder if that’s why I fell in love with the art form.”At 16, she went to New York City on a summer dance scholarship. One night she bought a standing-room ticket for Bob Fosse’s Broadway musical “Dancin’.” As she watched, she made a silent vow: “I’m not going back home. This is where I belong.” What she saw, she said, was the possibility of “expressing all those things inside you.” Her family, she added, “never hugged, never said ‘I love you.’ But onstage I saw you had permission and freedom to show your feelings.”She went back to Rhode Island just long enough to tell her mother she wasn’t returning to high school, then moved to New York, taking dance classes, working at Barney’s and attending audition after audition, but staying under the radar in spite of her efforts. “I couldn’t get arrested at the time,” she said wryly.After working at the Opryland USA theme park in Nashville in the early 1980s (“we sang, we danced, we did four shows a day; I loved it”), she was hired for tours of “West Side Story” and “Cats.” But she experienced long periods of joblessness and insecurity.There was hardly any diversity on Broadway in the late 1980s, she said, and she felt acutely aware of looking different than the “beautiful tall blond girls” at auditions. “People would look at me, and say, ‘What are you?’” she recounted. “I would answer, ‘whatever you need me to be.’”She played the white cat in “Cats” for 15 months, and began to gain confidence. Then, in 1989, she had an experience that was pivotal for her subsequent choreographic career. She joined the cast of “Jerome Robbins’s Broadway,” an evening-length show of selections from Robbins’s choreography for musicals like “Fiddler on the Roof” and “On the Town.”The ball scene in “Cinderella.” A theater critic credited Hunter with choreography that keeps the story “swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes.”Tristram Kenton“Jerry was a tyrant,” she said, “but I adored working with him, and I think I was absorbing so many lessons without thinking about it. He was unsurpassed at telling a story through movement.”Ensemble roles in Broadway shows (“Miss Saigon,” “Guys and Dolls,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”) followed, and soon Hunter began to work as a dance captain, the ensemble member who can teach the choreography for every character. While she was performing in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 2002, the director, Rob Ashford, asked her to be his choreographic associate.“JoAnn was always the smartest person in the room as well as the best dancer, and I knew she would be invaluable,” Ashford said in a telephone interview. Hunter, who had just gone through a divorce, wasn’t so sure. (She said her initial response was “aaarghhhh.”) But she had to take the chance.“She is a real problem solver and a great collaborator,” Ashford said. “In a musical, a choreographer has to get inside a director’s head and translate that vision into their own creation. She was always about the goals of the show.”The director Michael Mayer, who hired Hunter to oversee Bill T. Jones’s choreography for “Spring Awakening” in 2006, said in a telephone interview that one of her great gifts is to “understand why the steps are there, what the characters are trying to accomplish through the movement, and how the movement is in conversation with the rest of the elements of the show, even though at that point she hadn’t made up the moves.”Hunter’s first independent choreography for a musical was for a 2008 U.S. touring production of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” “I remember thinking, I’m never going to know unless I try this,” Hunter said. “And if I’m bad, not too many people will have seen it!”Asked whether she thought this kind of insecurity was particularly rife among women, Hunter looked thoughtful. Perhaps, she said. “Men tend to try things without worrying if they have the experience.” She added that the paucity of female choreographers on Broadway didn’t help her confidence.Although there are still relatively few female choreographers working on Broadway, this has begun to change: Camille A. Brown, Michelle Dorrance, Ellenore Scott and Ayodele Casel are all choreographing upcoming Broadway shows. Hunter agreed that women are now somewhat more visible in musical theater. “It’s amazing to think as a dancer I only ever worked with two female directors, Susan Stroman and Tina Landau,” she said. “At the moment these issues are at the front of our brains, as is racial diversity. I hope it’s something enduring, not a fad.”When she choreographed “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” she added, she was still too fearful about a choreographic career to give up the insurance having an Equity card provides. “I am afraid of failure; we all go through life thinking, ‘I’m going to be found out,’” she said. She laughed. “I’m still petrified.”Hunter’s choreography, the director Rob Ashford said, “has the great gift, which she learned from [Jerome] Robbins of ‘just enough,’ of never taking longer than she needs.”Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesHer first Broadway commission came from Mayer, with the short-lived revival of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” Then came “School of Rock.”Hunter said she had worked closely with Lloyd Webber on “Cinderella,” both on Zoom during lockdown, and in person from August last year. “People don’t really understand that a choreographer on a musical does much more than the dance sequences,” she said. “You move people around, deal with the transitions, where the audience’s focus should go. You have to be totally connected to the vision of the composer, writer and director.”The choreographer also often works with a dance arranger, she added, who adapts the score for dance sections. “A script direction might say, ‘goes into a dance moment,’” she explained. “But I think, ‘What do we want to say here?’ You might want a Latin feel, a tango rhythm, a French chanson, as a way of making mood and story more understandable.”For the “Muscle Man” dance in “Cinderella,” for instance, she thought about what the musical was trying to say and suggested a sound equivalent. “They are such macho, testosterone guys, and I had the idea of using kettle bells, which sounds like something dropping and is funny.”For “Cinderella,” Lloyd Webber did the dance arrangements himself. “I sketched out what I thought the dance music should be,” he said. “Then JoAnn took that, and actually stayed very faithful to it, but we added accents and she would ask for elements that the dance might need. It’s a really important collaboration, because you can’t look at the dance if you can’t listen to the music; it has to be good.”Hunter said that while she doesn’t read music, she has an acute sense of instrumentation and rhythm. “I just say things like ‘I don’t want it so pingy-pingy!’” she said. “That way I can make funny funnier and sexy sexier.” She added, “I always want every movement to tell a story. When Prince Sebastian dances at the end, I told Ivano, it’s not about the dance, it’s about you speaking up for yourself.”Her choreography, Ashford said, “has the great gift, which she learned from Robbins, of ‘just enough,’ of never taking longer than she needs.”Hunter, who last year directed and choreographed “Unmasked,” a concert retrospective of Lloyd Webber’s career, is working as both director and choreographer on “SuperYou,” a new musical written by Lourds Lane. Hunter described it as “a superhero, self-empowering piece about women finding their own voice” and said she hopes it will go to Broadway.Hunter added that she was still frequently the only woman on a creative team. “I’ve worked with great people, but the doors didn’t open easily,” she said. “I still feel I am constantly proving myself.” More

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      Mal Z. Lawrence, Noted Catskill Quipster, Dies at 88

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      A popular comic in the Catskills’ heyday as a resort area, he brought borscht belt humor to audiences all over the country, including on Broadway.Mal Z. Lawrence, a mainstay of comedy in the Catskills during the latter years of that resort area’s heyday and one of the four performers who brought borscht belt humor to Midtown Manhattan in 1991 in the hit show “Catskills on Broadway,” died on Monday in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 88.His talent agent, Alison Chaplin, confirmed the death, in a hospice center.Mr. Lawrence came to prominence in the Catskills in the 1950s but soon was known all over the country, playing Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Florida and other stops on the comedy circuit where his brand of relatively mild Jewish-tinged humor was greeted enthusiastically. To a Florida audience he might joke about the Catskills; to a Northern audience, he’d poke fun at Florida.“I worked a place down there called Century Village of West Palm Beach,” one routine went. “Working there was like appearing in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. If you didn’t have a handicapped parking sticker, there was nowhere to put your car.”The Catskills, which drew a heavily Jewish crowd, gradually declined during the 1960s as a summer vacation destination. Mr. Lawrence, though, kept the flame alive; he was still performing his borscht-belt-style routines as he neared 80, working material at venues in Florida, New Jersey, Illinois and elsewhere that would have fit comfortably into his act a half-century earlier.He recognized that his style of humor had acquired an added dimension of nostalgia, something he, Dick Capri, Marilyn Michaels and Freddie Roman turned into gold in December 1991 as the original cast of “Catskills on Broadway.” The show was little more than each of them in turn doing about 30 minutes of jokes, with Mr. Lawrence going last. Opening at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, it ran for more than a year and then enjoyed a healthy touring life.“‘Catskills on Broadway’ manages to reproduce the ambience of the Catskills,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review of the Broadway premiere for The New York Times. “The basic difference is that on Broadway there is not a nosh in sight. But there is a groaning board of jokes about eaters and stuffers. As Mr. Lawrence observes, everyone in the Catskills wears warm-up suits. Warming up for what, he asks, sumo wrestling?”Mr. Lawrence also acted, portraying secondary characters in films including “Rounders” (1998) and “Boynton Beach Club” (2005) and occasionally turning up in plays. In 1997 he was part of the Broadway cast of a revival of “Candide” directed by Harold Prince, playing (as Ben Brantley’s review in The Times described it) “a giddy assortment of supporting roles.”To play them, he shaved the mustache he had been sporting for some years.“I look 20 minutes younger now,” he told Jewish Exponent at the time.Mr. Lawrence at his home in Monticello, N.Y., in the Catskills, in about 2014. He later moved to Florida. Marisa ScheinfeldManny Miller was born on Sept. 2, 1932, in the Bronx and grew up there. “Mal Z. Lawrence,” as he variously told the story over the years, was the suggestion of an early agent, or perhaps several different agents. “Lawrence” was borrowed from a Long Island village where he was appearing. As for the Z, which stood for nothing, “My agent told me I’d get more marquee space,” he said.He was a decent baseball player as a youth and said he even tried out for the Yankees, but nothing came of it.He was drafted into the Army in 1953, and while serving over the next two years began finding his way toward a comedy career. He resembled Jerry Lewis, he said, and he teamed with another soldier to do a knockoff of Mr. Lewis’s routines with Dean Martin for the amusement of fellow servicemen.He went to work in the Catskills in 1955 at Sunrise Manor in Ellenville, N.Y. He started out as a tummler, or social director, whose job was to keep guests entertained throughout the day and encourage them to join in group activities.“I took women on walks, did Simon Says,” he recalled in an oral history for “It Happened in the Catskills,” a 1991 book edited by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer. “The first time I did Simon Says, I gave away 30 T-shirts. I couldn’t get anyone out.”Soon he was performing, both at Catskills resorts and at small nightclubs in Eastern cities. If he never made the jump to television or film stardom like Danny Kaye, Buddy Hackett and other comics who started in the Catskills, he did work steadily.The Broadway show evolved from a one-night show at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island that was enthusiastically received, although not everyone was convinced it would work on Broadway.“Many knowledgeable people said that it wouldn’t go,” Mr. Lawrence told The Washington Times in 1993, when the touring version of the show played the nation’s capital. “I think I was one of those people.”In 2000 he, Bruce Adler and Dudu Fisher brought a similarly styled show, “Borscht Belt Buffet on Broadway,” to Town Hall in Midtown. He was the closer in that show as well.“Pronouncing himself thrilled to be on West 43rd Street at the height of the off-season,” Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in a review in The Times, “Mr. Lawrence is soon running through topics like doddering security guards in Florida, gambling in Atlantic City, meals in Catskills resorts, old age and the effects of marriage on behavior. The audience exits smiling.”In 1980 Mr. Lawrence married Patty Heinz, who survives him. They lived in Delray Beach.Mr. Lawrence was not the type of comic to dwell on comedic principles or technique.“My philosophy is, ‘Do anything that you have to do to make them laugh,’” he told The Washington Times. “What else can we do?” More

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      In ‘Back to The Future: The Musical,’ the Car Is the Star of the Show

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      A devoted fan of the 1985 movie helped the London production’s creative team recreate the iconic time-traveling DeLorean, down to the last detail.LONDON — During a recent performance of “Back to the Future: The Musical,” at the Adelphi Theater here, the audience couldn’t stop cheering.They cheered a preshow announcement asking everyone to turn off their cellphones, “since they weren’t invented in 1985,” the year the original movie was released. They cheered when Marty McFly, the show’s main character (played by Olly Dobson), skateboarded onstage in an orange body warmer. And they cheered, again, when he started singing, surrounded by break dancers and women in aerobics getup to complete the 1980s vibe.But the loudest applause came about 20 minutes in. After three loud bangs and a flash of light, a DeLorean car seemed to magically appear in the middle of the stage, lights bouncing off its steel bodywork and gull-wing doors.The audience went wild.Bob Gale, who co-wrote the original movie with Robert Zemeckis and wrote the musical’s book, said in a telephone interview that he always knew the car would be vital to the show’s success. “We knew if we pulled it off, it was going to make the audience go nuts,” he said.He added he had been working on making that happen for over 15 years. In 2005, Gale recalled, Robert Zemeckis took his wife, Leslie, to see “The Producers” on Broadway — another musical adaptation of a cult film. As the couple left the theater, she asked if he had ever considered doing a “Back to the Future” musical. Neither Gale nor Zemeckis had any professional theater experience, but decided to give it a shot — yet finding a producer who would take the project on their terms took the better part of a decade, Gale said.Getting the car right didn’t take as long, but Simon Marlow, the show’s production manager, said it was still a yearlong process. There were two challenges: to achieve the impression of movement and speed on the cramped stage of a theater, and to make sure every detail of the car onstage matched the DeLorean in the movie. “‘The ‘Back to the Future’ fan base is massive, and they’re very pedantic,” Marlow said.Steven Wickenden poses with his replica of the DeLorean time machine, near his home in Deal, southern England.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesOnly about 9,000 of the stainless-steel cars were made at a factory in Northern Ireland before the company went bankrupt in 1982 (John Z. DeLorean, the company’s founder, went on to be tried, and acquitted, for trying to sell cocaine to prop up his firm’s finances). So Marlow’s team contacted Steven Wickenden, a “Back to the Future” superfan who lives in the seaside town of Deal, England. He owns a drivable replica of the movie’s DeLorean that regularly appears at fan events.Wickenden, 49, said in a telephone interview that he had loved the DeLorean since watching the “Back to the Future” movies on videocassette as a teenager. It was “so cool and futuristic,” he said. In 1980s Deal, a local greengrocer and a dentist had owned DeLoreans, he added. “As far as I was concerned, we had two time machines driving around town,” he said.When he was 21, Wickenden traveled to Universal Studios in Florida to see one of the film’s original cars, he said, and eventually his wife bought him his own as a 40th birthday gift.Wickenden said he was surprised when the musical’s producers got in touch. He put the car onto a truck — because, under the terms of its “classic car” insurance, allowed mileage is limited — and took it to Souvenir Scenic Studios, a London prop maker, where “six or seven guys” used 3-D scanners and took thousands of photos, to capture its likeness, inside and out, to use as the basis for the onstage version. (They called him later to check some details, like the original brand of the tires, he said.)Once the model was made, the show’s team had to “pack it with engineering,” Marlow said, including a device that allows it to spin on its axis (so it looks like it’s doing stunt turns) and pneumatic equipment that lets it tilt in the air (when it crashes into a farmer’s barn). Projections also help create the illusions of movement.“We’re pushing the technology to the limit,” Marlow said. He added that around 20 people had worked on developing the production’s car and associated visual effects.Creating the impression of movement and speed on the cramped stage of a theater was one of the show’s main challenges, a producer said.Sean Ebsworth BarnesAlthough the DeLorean is one of the most memorable features of both the movie and the musical, Gale said it wasn’t part of the original concept. In the first script he wrote, in the 1980s, Marty McFly climbed into a fridge to travel through time; he swapped the fridge for a car when the movie was in preproduction. In addition to its futuristic look, the DeLorean was notorious at that the time because of its maker’s cocaine trial, Gale said, so it seemed an attention-grabbing choice.At the Adelphi Theater, all the hard work on the car seemed to pay off. Ten audience members — many dressed as “Back to the Future” characters or wearing DeLorean T-shirts — said that the car had been a highlight. “I was in tears the first time I saw the DeLorean come out,” said Stephen Sloane, 43. “It’s just got the ‘wow’ factor,” he added.Yet for all the team’s painstaking attention to detail, Roy Swansborough, 44, said he had noticed a few differences between the stage and movie cars. “The steering wheel is slightly different,” he said. But his wife, Beverley, said he was splitting hairs. “If you don’t look too carefully, you can go, ‘Oh, it’s like watching the film,” she said.The only moment of the show when the actors seemed to upstage the DeLorean came right at the end. The cast all came onstage for a final song and dance number, and each player took their moment to claim an ovation. But the car didn’t get one of its own. Despite all the technical wizardry, the one thing it can’t do is bow. More

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      This Theater Brings Nature Right Into the Drama

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      A lush forest makes a spectacular backdrop for the stage of the Théâtre du Peuple, in eastern France.BUSSANG, France — Hundreds of productions have been performed at the Théâtre du Peuple, a 126-year-old playhouse in this village 45 miles from the border with Germany. Yet no matter how good the actors, they are often upstaged by the theater’s unusual backdrop: a steep forest, visible right behind the stage.Framed like a painting by a wooden wall, the view brings nature into the proceedings — and visitors can’t get enough of it. This summer, two hours into “And Their Children After Them,” a new production by Simon Delétang, the otherwise plain set was lifted to reveal the trees beyond. The scene drew oohs and aahs from the audience, followed by spontaneous applause.This indoor-outdoor setup in the Vosges Mountains has sustained the Théâtre du Peuple (or People’s Theater) through many incarnations. Founded in 1895 by the playwright and director Maurice Pottecher, who was inspired by visits to Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany, it became known as a pioneering example outside Paris of “popular theater,” drawing audiences from all social backgrounds. Decades before the postwar push by the French government to decentralize a cultural scene concentrated in the capital, Pottecher convinced local workers to attend his plays and perform in them.While amateurs are still cast in one production every year, professional actors have long since taken over most roles, and the Théâtre du Peuple now sits on a curious artistic fence. On the one hand, its founder, nicknamed Le Padre, lingers in the background — literally, since he is buried in the theater’s garden with his wife, the actress Camille de Saint-Maurice. His motto, “Through art, for Humanity,” still adorns the proscenium arch.On the other hand, Pottecher’s own plays — which formed the bulk of the repertoire from 1895 to his death in 1960, and had a strong moralistic streak — have long since fallen out of fashion. “Every director arrives thinking it would be great to perform Pottecher again, but when you read him, it’s not possible: It’s dated,” Delétang said in an interview in Bussang.The exterior of the Théâtre du Peuple, which was founded in 1895.Christophe Raynaud de LageInstead, artistic directors are appointed for four-year terms by the Association of the Théâtre du Peuple, a local governing body, and given free rein. Delétang, who co-directed a small theater in Lyon, Les Ateliers, from 2008 to 2012, had no professional experience in Bussang when he was appointed four years ago. His contract was recently renewed through 2025.The current season, which runs through Saturday, suggests Pottecher’s legacy now lies mainly in the experience of attending the Théâtre du Peuple, rather than in the shows themselves. Before a recent performance of “And Their Children After Them,” locals could be found picnicking in the theater’s garden, a longstanding tradition, with Delétang and the show’s actors tending the bar and making themselves available for a chat.In that sense, Bussang is a forebear to the generation of rural festivals, like the Nouveau Théâtre Populaire, that have sprung up around France over the past decade and emphasize approachability.The programming of those events couldn’t be more different, however. While newer events have favored collective decision-making and diversity, the Théâtre du Peuple only just welcomed its first female director, Anne-Laure Liégeois, for a staging of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” in July. Onstage, Bussang’s productions are also slicker and more aligned with the standards of publicly funded French playhouses — leafy backdrop aside. “And Their Children After Them” and “Our Need for Consolation Is Insatiable,” the two productions on offer in August, could have fit right into the lineups of a number of highbrow Parisian theaters.Simon Delétang, center, during a rehearsal for “Our Need for Consolation Is Insatiable.” Jean-Louis Fernandez“Our Need for Consolation Is Insatiable” started life last year as a response to the pandemic. After the Théâtre du Peuple’s 2020 season was canceled, Delétang directed and performed this 40-minute show, based on an autobiographical essay by the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman, as a compensation of sorts. Billed as an “electro-rock oratorio,” it was first shown here last summer, outdoors, with live music by the band Fergessen.Perhaps it shouldn’t have transferred to the main stage, though, where it lands awkwardly. Dagerman’s meditation on life and depression, written in 1951, comes across as profoundly self-involved in the Théâtre du Peuple’s interpretation. Smartly dressed, his feet planted shoulder width apart throughout, Delétang seems to embody a dandy’s despair rather than any larger malaise.It doesn’t help that Dagerman returns time and again in his essay to the naïve notion of complete freedom from society’s shackles as the ultimate “liberation.” Last year, that could conceivably have been understood as channeling the desire for a release from lockdowns. Public debate in France has moved on; this summer, it has been focused on whether or not vaccine passport mandates infringe on personal freedom, and in that context, Delétang’s ode to self-determination took on an entirely new meaning — an unfortunate coincidence, since the season was programmed months ago.“And Their Children After Them” adheres more closely to Pottecher’s humanist ideal. The play is based on a Goncourt Prize-winning novel by Nicolas Mathieu, who grew up in the Vosges region. Like the book, Delétang’s production follows a group of friends in the 1990s, in a rural part of eastern France increasingly left behind by deindustrialization.From left, Agathe Barat, Lise Lomi and Elsie Mencaraglia in “And Their Children After Them.”Jean-Louis FernandezAlthough it opens with Nirvana’s 1992 hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and ends with France’s landmark victory at the 1998 soccer World Cup, the stage version of “And Their Children After Them” often leaves the historical context aside to focus on the horniness of teenagers. Anthony, the main character, is desperate to attend parties and sleep with girls, who in turn grapple with their own sexuality.Delétang designed the production for the graduating class of a renowned Lyon drama school, the ENSATT, and provided everyone with a chance to shine. Very few scenes are acted out in a conventional sense. Instead, the 13 actors take turns narrating the story and loosely playing the main characters. To indicate a kiss, for instance, two actors describe it to the audience without touching each other, merely closing their eyes to signal pleasure.It proves a smart directing choice to avoid extensive nudity and any problematic gender dynamics, and the young cast takes to Mathieu’s text with a solid sense of rhythm. The downside is a lack of movement over three hours, as Delétang’s static posture in “Our Need for Consolation Is Insatiable” is replicated here by every performer.Counterintuitively, given how often the teenagers from Mathieu’s novel find themselves in the woods, Delétang also opts to open the Théâtre du Peuple’s back wall only at the very end, when the characters are reunited at a city fair. Is it entertaining, at that point, to see a motorbike drive out of the forest into view? Yes. Are there better ways to use the Théâtre du Peuple’s surroundings? Probably. All the more reason to return to Bussang. More

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      Interview: David Brady tells us what he has been up to: Lately

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      David Brady of Proforca on new play Lately

      LIsten back to our interview with David Brady from Proforca, whose play Lately, is on at Lion and Unicorn Theatre from 7 to 18 September.

      You can book tickets for the play here

      This interview was original broadcast on our Runn Radio show on 1 September 2021.

      Lately @ Lion and Unicorn Theatre

      The Monster Always Wins”

      Cal & Alf. Callum & Alison. They were supposed to be part of each other’s lives forever, if only the universe had let things happen the way they should. 

      But whoever they were before, they’re different people now, and the problem with living here is that is always pulls you back again, no matter how hard you try to get away. 

      And the universe that sent them spinning into free-fall throws them together again when the girl who ran away comes back to find out what happened to the boy who didn’t want to leave. 

      And the question that the universe needs to answer most of all now is – Whatever happens to those bits of us we leave behind and thought we’d lost forever?  More

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      in Theater

      Richard Nelson’s New Play Closes a Chapter of Theater History

      by

      “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad” is the 12th and final installment in the quiet yet sweeping “Rhinebeck Panorama.”A character named Kate tells a story, of a story told to her, about a man attending a play. The actors are all deaf, and they rest their cheeks and chins on a big table, which stretches out to the audience, to feel the vibration of a spinning top. From his seat, the man leans in and puts his forehead on the surface.“He wants to share in what the characters are feeling,” Kate says. “He wants to be at that table too.”Kate’s monologue is delivered almost in passing — no one onstage even responds to it — yet it reflects, in just a few lines, the mission and magic of Richard Nelson’s decade-long, 12-play project called the “Rhinebeck Panorama,” which concludes with “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad,” opening Sept. 8 at Hunter College’s Frederick Loewe Theater.These works, written and directed by Nelson — and realized with aesthetic unity by a consistent creative team and a de facto acting company — contain the four Apple Family plays, which feature a family gathering in Rhinebeck, N.Y., on days that happen to be of national significance; the Gabriels trilogy, about another Rhinebeck household that we visit at three points during the 2016 election year; three pandemic Zoom plays that revisit the Apples as they talk through collective trauma in real time; and a two-part exploration of the Michaels, an artistic family on the verge, then the other side, of immense loss.Charlotte Bydwell in one of several dance scenes in “What Happened?,” which takes place after the death of a dance luminary.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlong the way, Nelson has established a style of theater that has its roots in Chekhov: not naturalistic or realistic, but, as Nelson said in a recent interview, an attempt at verisimilitude. Through the dozen plays he makes a case — in our cultural moment of polarized absolutes — for questioning, nuance and, above all, conversation as a way to connect people, process the unknown and ultimately be in the world.“Centuries from now, when people want to know what a certain class of person lived like in America, they’ll go to Richard’s plays,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which produced nearly all of the panorama. “The characters are individual, yet they capture the shape of our time.”The plot of each Rhinebeck play couldn’t be more simple: A family prepares or eats dinner. Conversations are discursive, guided more by the timeline of the meal than anything else; but within them are sprawling and subterranean dramas that reveal themselves through ordinary discussion rather than traditional theatricality. Conflicts are rare — raised voices, even rarer.If the series has a broad arc, it is in how the characters relate not just to time, but to place: the Apples find a home in Rhinebeck, while the Gabriels are pushed out of it and, the Michaels, by the end, are assembling around a table in France.“Rhinebeck is a complicated place, as all places are,” said Nelson, who has lived in the Hudson Valley town since the early 1980s. “You take something small, and you just look at it enough, and you see all the pieces and all the things.”The plays have all been set on the days when they open. But despite that specificity of time and location — and a milieu of predominantly white, educated people — they have achieved broad resonance, including international adaptations and imitations. And by being presented in the round in small spaces, they also elicit the intimacy of a private gathering.From left, Jay O. Sanders, Nelson and Maryann Plunkett — whom Nelson called “the beating heart” of the Rhinebeck plays.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJay O. Sanders, who along with his wife, Maryann Plunkett — “the beating heart” of the panorama, as Nelson called her — has starred in all 12 plays, recalled asking a question during “The Gabriels” that was promptly answered by a man in the audience who, like the one in Kate’s story, seemingly wanted to join them at the table.But that is the effect of Nelson’s style, in which no arguments are made and people represent nothing; as Sanders said, “The drama of just living is enough.” In a note for “What Happened?” Nelson includes a telling quote from a hero of his, the early-20th-century theater artist Harley Granville-Barker:One is tempted to imagine a play — to be written in desperate defiance of Aristotle — from which doing would be eliminated altogether, in which nothing but being would be left. The task set the actors would be to interest their audience in what the characters were, quite apart from anything they might do.Easier imagined than done. Nelson said that any time he has written a line that sounds like him or his beliefs, it gets cut. “The truth,” he added, “comes from the characters speaking to another character, and not for the audience to overhear.”In rehearsals, actors are directed to talk as they would at home, not to project as they typically would. They are aware, at all times, of where they are directing their questions or lines. In real life, Nelson said, rarely does someone speak to an entire room; so his characters don’t either.“It’s very unusual,” Sanders said. “And it takes a lot of courage.”The plays have flashes of prescience and recognition. You can, for example, trace former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s career through the seven Apple plays, which open in media res with an expletive and mention of his name. The first installment of “The Gabriels,” from early March 2016, includes the now-haunting line, “Don’t you feel something really bad is going to happen?”At times, though, Nelson’s characters — and perhaps Nelson himself — have been unequipped to deal with history in the making. The Apples gathered on Zoom in early July 2020, amid the upheaval of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the theater industry, platitudes reigned; but in Rhinebeck, a group of white people didn’t really know how to talk about it.Their not thoroughly engaging with Black Lives Matter frustrated some in the moment, including The New York Times’s critic, Jesse Green. But that wouldn’t fit Nelson’s approach to theater. Instead, the Apples ask questions with no answers, and are quietly saddened by a world that might be passing them by.“What you don’t want to do is make an argument,” Nelson said. “I don’t think my characters are confident about what’s going on. Everybody has their own journey.”Plunkett and Sanders, center, seen here in the 2011 play “Sweet and Sad,” have acted in the entire “Rhinebeck Panorama.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat tension arises again in “What Happened?” — “I don’t know” is a common line — the first of the staged Rhinebeck plays not to be produced by the Public. (Presented by Hunter Theater Project, it is being underwritten by a single donor, Susie Sainsbury. The second two Zoom plays were also independently produced.)There are no bad feelings between Nelson and the Public; the separation was a matter of logistics. “He was not going to let a pandemic slow him down,” Eustis said of Nelson. “It was sad for me that for the first time, I couldn’t keep up with him. So on a level it breaks my heart that this is not at the Public.”Nelson felt that “What Happened?” couldn’t wait any longer. He had written a version last year for a live theater season that never came, with politics on his mind as the election approached. But he rewrote it to open now, as live theater re-emerges in New York. Gone are any mentions of the current or former president; instead the loss presaged by the first play in 2019 — the matriarch, a modern dance luminary named Rose Michael, has cancer — permeates its sequel.That, in addition to the setting of Angers, France, makes for a departure from the panorama. “What Happened?” may be a mirror of the present, with characters regularly sanitizing their hands and sharing how they passed time in lockdown, but its preoccupations are also comparatively abstract: the loss of life, of youth, of work.And of Rhinebeck itself. Plunkett said that during a recent rehearsal it hit her: “I found myself tearing up. This specific place that we resided in and explored for a decade — not many people have gotten to do that, and I’m very fortunate. You realize how short a decade is.”Nelson may return to Rhinebeck in the future — he has written a television series of Chekhov stories set there in the present — but for now “What Happened?” is the last time he is bringing a family together at a dinner table to weave, as the critic Ben Brantley once wrote, “momentous history in the fabric of the quotidian.”The audience is, as always, invited to the table. “We’re living in a moment of confusion, tragedy and loss, but together,” Nelson said. “We are not alone.” More