Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      A Milestone for Broadway as ‘Pass Over’ Begins Performances

      by

      The play is the first staged on Broadway since the pandemic-prompted shutdown, and is one of seven by Black writers planned this season.Anne Grossman and Jennifer Rockwood hustled into Broadway’s August Wilson Theater shortly before 8 p.m. Wednesday and, beneath their face masks, smiled.They had shown their proof of vaccination, passed through metal detectors, and, as they stepped down into the lobby, marveled at being back inside a theater. “It’s thrilling” Grossman said, “and a little unsettling.”The two women, both 58-year-old New Yorkers, were among 1,055 people who braved concerns about the highly contagious Delta variant in order to, once again, see a play on Broadway. It was the first performance of “Pass Over,” by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, which is the first play staged on Broadway since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered theaters in March of 2020.“I wanted to be part of the restart of live theater.” Rockwood said.The play, both comedic and challenging, is about two Black men trapped under a streetlight, afraid that if they dare to leave their corner, they could be killed by a police officer.The crowd, vaccinated and masked but not socially distanced, was rapturous, greeting Nwandu’s arrival with a standing ovation, and another when she and the play’s director, Danya Taymor, walked onstage after the play to hug the three actors.Those attending the play were required to show proof of vaccination to enter, and to wear masks while inside the theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe night was significant, not only as Broadway seeks to rebound from a shutdown of historic length, but also as it seeks to respond to renewed concerns about racial equity that have been raised over the last year. “Pass Over” is one of seven plays by Black writers slated to be staged on Broadway this season, and, like many of them, it grapples directly with issues of race and racism.“Thank you for celebrating Black joy!” the playwright, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, told celebrants at an afterparty on West 52nd Street, outside the theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe street in front of the August Wilson Theater was cordoned off for a block party after the show. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesPatrons expressed a mix of emotions. “I am a little nervous about being in a theater setting, because I haven’t been in that type of setting since the pandemic began, but a lot of precautions were taken, and that gives some comfort level,” said LaTasha Owens, 45, of New York. “But this is timely, and of interest, so I’m looking forward to being back.”After the play concluded, hundreds of people gathered for a block party on West 52nd Street, in front of the theater, chatting and dancing as a D.J. played music and exhorted “If you had a good time, I need to hear everybody say ‘Pass Over’ right now!”Playgoers danced at the block party after the show. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe party was held outside in part to reduce Covid risk.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNwandu addressed the crowd from a balcony above the theater marquee, saying she felt like “Black Evita!” “Do you know how crazy it is to write a play about a plague and then live through a plague?” she asked. Later, she added, “Thank you all so much for being vaccinated, and thank you for celebrating Black joy.”The play is not the first show on Broadway since the pandemic erupted: “Springsteen on Broadway,” a reprise run of a Bruce Springsteen concert show, began performances on June 26, and there have been a few special events and filmed performances in theaters since the shutdown. But the return of traditional theater is a milestone for the industry; the start of “Pass Over” will be followed on Sept. 2, if all goes as planned, by the resumption of two musicals, “Hadestown” and “Waitress,” and then on Sept. 14 five shows are slated to begin performances, including the tent pole musicals “Hamilton,” “The Lion King” and “Wicked.”The audience gave a standing ovation to the three actors, Jon Michael Hill, Namir Smallwood and Gabriel Ebert.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Pass Over” was previously staged at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater in 2017, and that production was filmed by Spike Lee and is streaming on Amazon. The play then had an Off Broadway production at Lincoln Center Theater in 2018. Nwandu has substantially revised the ending for Broadway. More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      Ian McKellen Returns as Hamlet in U.K. Production

      by

      As England’s theaters welcome capacity audiences again, Ian McKellen is back in a role he first played a half-century ago.LONDON — If you’re going to fully reopen a theater in these edgy times, it helps to have an actor whose presence feels like an event. That’s absolutely the case at the elegant Theater Royal in Windsor, England, where Ian McKellen, 82, is currently playing Hamlet, of all roles, and will stay on into the fall in a new production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” (“Hamlet” runs through Sept. 25.)When the director Sean Mathias’s production started previews in June, coronavirus protocols in England required social distancing in playhouses, meaning numerous seats were left unsold. But those rules ended July 19, when the government rolled back restrictions on social contact. Theaters now have to choose for themselves whether to put their entire capacities on sale, and some smaller venues are still operating with caution by spacing seats out.At the “Hamlet” matinee I attended, this was not the case, and a full and expectant house had gathered to see McKellen return to a role he first played a half-century ago. The demographics of the Windsor playgoing public skew older, and during a post-show question-and-answer session with the cast, one man in the audience recalled seeing McKellen’s previous run as literature’s most famous Dane, in the early 1970s. (The actor tackled a more age-appropriate Shakespeare tragedy, “King Lear,” on the West End in 2018.)McKellen with Jenny Seagrove as Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude.Marc BrennerYou might wonder how an octogenarian might inhabit the angst of a perpetual student who can’t shed the memory of his father or an unusual attachment to his mother. McKellen’s achievement is to render age irrelevant, so that we seem to be peering into the soul of a character this actor understands from the inside out. And as mortality rattles Hamlet more and more, it’s doubly moving to hear those lines spoken by an actor now in his ninth decade.The production belongs to the here and now, and is presented on a multitiered, industrial-looking set with the actors in modern dress: Alis Wyn Davies’s Ophelia strums a guitar, and Jonathan Hyde’s excellent Claudius suggests a corporate apparatchik with his eye on the prize.But it’s McKellen everyone has come to see, and the Tony-winning actor who found global renown in the “Lord of the Rings” and “X-Men” movies doesn’t disappoint. As if taking a leaf from his character’s instruction to the players in Act III’s play within a play, he speaks Shakespeare’s verse “trippingly on the tongue,” so that the time-honored soliloquies become extensions of thought, rather than set pieces. I’ve rarely heard “To be, or not to be” communicated as easefully as here.Not all the cast is at McKellen’s level, and there doesn’t appear to be much of an overarching vision. But whether riding an exercise bike or scaling the skeletal set, McKellen is always the nimblest presence; the actor’s the thing, and the audience made its appreciation thunderously clear.I witnessed a comparable ovation at another full house recently, this time in the 2,300-seat London Coliseum, where the star attraction is the return of the English musical theater veteran Michael Ball, playing Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray” through Sept. 29. Ball won the 2008 Olivier Award for his performance as this demure, soft-spoken laundress when the Broadway hit first came to London, and his affection for the generous-hearted show seems only to have deepened since. A heartthrob back in the day, Ball dons Edna’s apron and slippers without any sidelong winks.Lizzie Bea as Tracy Turnblad, Michael Ball as Edna Turnblad and Les Dennis as Wilbur Turnblad in “Hairspray” at the London Coliseum.Tristram KentonIt is a gift of a part. Edna is a wife and mother in 1960s Baltimore who long ago made peace with the life she never got to lead. (“I wanted to be the biggest thing in brassieres,” she says, meaning designing, not washing and folding, them.) Imagine her surprise, then, when her feisty daughter, Tracy (a spirited Lizzie Bea), turns out to be a consciousness-raising rabble-rouser, railing against racial segregation.Tracy’s transformation prompts her mother to unleash a previously unknown energy, and a dimpled Ball is a riot emerging, eyes gleaming, for the final number in a glittering pink party frock.Addressing the audience after the curtain call, Ball sounded moved to see a near-capacity crowd again. No wonder he looked ready to shake and shimmy all night, or at least until Edna’s sequins fell off.Social distancing was still the order of the day when I caught the Joseph Charlton two-hander “ANNA X,” which has just finished its run at the Harold Pinter Theater but will have five performances next week at the Lowry in Salford, near Manchester.The director Daniel Raggett’s high-octane production showcases a 25-year-old talent, Emma Corrin, who has been lauded as Princess Diana in “The Crown” and is clearly due for a major career. “ANNA X” casts Corrin in a fictionalized version of a real-life Russian, Anna Sorokin, who cut a swath through New York society before serving time in prison for fraud.Appearing alongside the engaging Nabhaan Rizwan as the ambitious techie, Ariel, whom Anna pulls into her alluring orbit, Corrin is both charismatic and inscrutable, as befits Anna’s shifting, twisted psyche. Let’s wish Corrin a return to the West End at a time when she, too, is allowed a full house.Nabhaan Rizwan and Emma Corrin in “ANNA X.”Helen MurrayHamlet. Directed by Sean Mathias. Theater Royal Windsor, through Sept. 25.Hairspray. Directed by Jack O’Brien. London Coliseum, through Sept. 29.ANNA X. Directed by Daniel Raggett. The Lowry, Salford, Aug. 11-14. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Interview: Stephen Badham on Illyria Theatre and the joys of outdoor theatre

      by

      Photo credit @ J L Dunbar Photography

      Author: Everything Theatre

      in Features and Interviews

      4 August 2021

      7 Views

      Listen to our interview with Stephen Badham, from Illyria Theatre, a theatre company that put on outdoor touring shows. Stephen tells us about their summer season, what it’s like to put on outdoor shows in the British weather, and why they are determined to set high standards in how they look after their actors.

      This interview was originally broadcast on our Runn Radio show on 4 August 2021.

      You can find out more about Illyria Theatre and their current productions on their website, via the below link. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Interview: Sam Carlyle talks about her show and flexibility

      by

      Listen to our interview with Sam Carlyle, as she talks about her new show, along with being flexible at a job interview and suggesting a new job as a Reverend who will do your vows to the tune of your favourite pop song.

      This interview was first broadcast on Runn Radio on 4 August 2021

      Sam Carlyle: My Life and Other Jokes

      [embedded content]

      You may be asking “Who even is Sam Carlyle?”, but after this cabaret you’ll certainly know her name (along with way too much else..)

      Accompanied by the fantastic pianist Thomas Duchan, Sam shares her many embarrassing anecdotes by putting her own twist on some classic nineties and noughties hits to aid the stories along: From customer service nightmares to dating disasters, toilet complications to weird encounters, Sam shares it all!

      So come on down for an intimate evening of mortifying stories and a setlist that you’ll know and love. You are sure to leave comforted that these things happen to everyone or beaming away because at least these things haven’t happened to you!

      My Life and Other Jokes plays at Canal Cafe Theatre 16 and 17 August (7.30pm) and Musuem of Comedy 19 and 20 August (7.00pm). Further information and booking details via the below link. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Where Do Theater Artists Go to Ask Questions? Poughkeepsie.

      by

      New York Stage and Film provides an unlikely haven for inquiring writers of new plays and musicals.POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. — For Michael R. Jackson, the question was quite specific. What kind of underscoring do you write for a melodramatic yet serious musical inspired by soap operas, Lifetime movies and “Law and Order: SVU”?Jackson has been developing his musical, “White Girl in Danger,” since 2017, through so many workshops and readings that he can barely list them all. He had already nailed down the plot, about a Black performer on a surreal soap who schemes, from the “blackground,” to outshine the white stars and get a story of her own.Now he needed to figure out something smaller but crucial: how to apply the organ stings, ominous monotones and other instrumental plot thickeners that would underline the satire and keep the audience on track.That was the reason he spent two weeks recently on the stately campus of Marist College here, working in free rehearsal halls and sleeping in an undergraduate dorm bed. He was a guest of New York Stage and Film, the quietly influential incubator of new plays and musicals (and screenplays and television scripts) offering year-round workshops and residencies. And though its theater season each summer is a must-see in the industry, even that is more inward facing than outward, with only a few performances of each show and no reviews allowed.Call it a concierge service for works in progress.“These days have been nothing short of stupendous and invaluable,” Jackson told me last week as “White Girl” was preparing for its debut under an open-sided tent along the Hudson River. He was not referring to the festival’s coffers; the Marist season was pay-what-you-can. Rather, like all the artists I spoke to, he was excited by what he’d learned in rehearsal, and by what he expected to learn from the audience that weekend as it laughed, gasped, cheered or fell silent.“What question are you asking that you can’t ask anywhere else?” said Chris Burney, Stage and Film’s artistic director, discussing what he sees as the organization’s mission. “What’s your big dream project? That’s why we are here, outside the bounds of the commercial theater.”This year, most of New York Stage and Film’s productions took place in a tent on the banks of the Hudson.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesOutside its bounds, perhaps, but not a stranger to it. Many shows developed at Stage and Film in its 37 seasons have had long and profitable afterlives. The best known is “Hamilton,” which appeared as “The Hamilton Mixtape” in 2013, but Poughkeepsie has also been a stop in the journey of “The Wolves,” by Sarah DeLappe, “The Humans,” by Stephen Karam and “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” by Taylor Mac.Those were big works, and so is “White Girl”: Stage and Film hosted Jackson and a company of 22, while providing advice, support, space and two paid apprentices. Jackson, who won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for his musical “A Strange Loop,” now wending its way toward Broadway, is a big name, too, and “White Girl” is already on track for a New York production, after several workshops over the last two years at the Vineyard Theater.But the season’s smaller shows, by artists not yet as well known, got much the same treatment as they set out to answer their own idiosyncratic questions. Though I didn’t get to see “South,” by Florencia Iriondo, who was turning her five-character musical into a solo show so it could be performed more easily in a pandemic environment, I saw the other four productions on offer, three in the tent and one online, with a huge star, Billy Porter, attached.At whatever stage in their evolution, from nowhere near finished to almost complete, the shows received the same careful, sheltered airing. Audiences included some theater professionals but they did not bring with them the hothouse feeling that so often and unhelpfully hangs over developmental work in New York City.Well, the tent was hot, especially at matinees. (Admission included a precautionary temperature check as well as a jaunty paper fan.) And the atmosphere was more informal than in previous seasons, which were held at theaters on the campus of Vassar College nearby.The switch was not an aesthetic choice, though. Two weeks before Burney was to announce his first season as artistic director, in March 2020, the pandemic hit. Vassar shut down in the middle of spring break, meaning that Stage and Film, even if it were functioning by summer, could not do so there; the dorms that usually housed artists were filled with the students’ abandoned belongings.Nygel D. Robinson and Brian Quijada in “Mexodus.”Buck LewisThe Vassar programs were canceled, but some of this season’s most promising productions emerged from the disaster. One was “Mexodus,” by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, which began when Quijada was “scrolling good old Facebook many years ago,” he told me, and came upon a bit of history he’d never learned, about thousands of Black people who had escaped slavery not by the familiar northern route but by a southern one, leading to Mexico.“My parents” — who are from El Salvador — “both crossed in the ’70s,” Quijada said, meaning from Mexico to the United States. “I wanted to explore this reverse border story but didn’t know how I would do it alone.”He didn’t have to; Robinson, whom he met at a conference, was on board the minute Quijada shared the idea; they began riffing on ideas the next day, including one that became the first song.“It could have just been a little passion project,” Robinson says, “if Stage and Film hadn’t put some fire under it.”The fire came in the form of an offer, said Quijada, who had worked with the institution before: “They said, ‘Is there anything you want to do? We have funds.’”This is not the kind of question artists, no matter how seasoned, usually hear from producers. When Quijada and Robinson picked their jaws up off the floor, they shared their idea, which as yet had no plot or structure.Stage and Film loved it anyway, suggesting that the two write a song each month from their quarantines in different cities as they built the story into a virtual concept album. Then, when live theater returned, Burney promised to bring them to Poughkeepsie to work on it in person. “They even sent me a new bow for my bass,” Robinson said.By the time the two men arrived here in July, the score was in good shape to tell the story they’d settled on, about an enslaved Black man (played by Robinson) who crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico after murdering a white man who has raped his sister. He nearly dies en route but is nursed back to health by a Mexican farmer (Quijada) with a troubled past of his own.The specific question the authors needed to answer was technical: How could they perform the music they had created electronically during the pandemic, including frequent looping, in a live environment?When I saw “Mexodus,” they were still sorting out that complicated choreography, but it never got in the way of the story, or of the feedback the artists were receiving from the audience.“Interstate,” a pop-rock musical, took nine years of work.Buck LewisThe creators of “Interstate,” a more traditional pop-rock musical — if one about nontraditional characters — wanted to address a problem that was itself more traditional: How could their second act best develop the themes of the first? After nine years of work, the setup, about a lesbian and a transgender man who tour as a duo called Queer Malady, was working just fine. But when a developmental production in Minneapolis was shut down by the pandemic, Melissa Li and Kit Yan felt that the rest of their show, focusing on the duo’s conflicts and a desperate fan, still needed work. Stage and Film stepped in.The presentation I saw thus skipped the first hour, starting just two songs shy of what would normally be the intermission. If that foreshortening meant meeting the characters in mid-arc, it allowed the audience to feel it was meeting the show in mid-arc, too; like the other productions at Stage and Film, it was revealing itself before being set in stone.That’s a thrill pretty much unique to this model of development. Still, a static production of new work can be thrilling too. That was the case with Porter’s show, “Sanctuary,” for which he is writing the book, about a pop diva with big issues, and Kurt Carr is writing the gospel score.The video that streamed for five days recently didn’t include any dialogue; Porter says that his work with Stage and Film is aimed at figuring out the tone of the book scenes in the context of such overwhelming music. (The soloists included Deborah Cox and Ledisi; Broadway Inspirational Voices was the luxury chorus.) If it was not quite stage and not quite film, “Sanctuary” is nevertheless the kind of thing Stage and Film does best: letting you experience new work before all its questions are answered. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      After 40 Years, a Luminary of Theater’s Avant-Garde Departs

      by

      “I have the energy, I have the interest,” says Blanka Zizka of the Wilma Theater. “But I need to go a different way.”When Blanka Zizka retired from her post as artistic director of the Wilma Theater at the end of July, it was truly the end of an era.“I have been at it for 40 years,” Zizka said in a video interview from Philadelphia, where the company is based. “That’s a long time.”Zizka and her husband, Jiri, were born in Czechoslovakia, where they immersed themselves in the underground scene of late 1960s and early ’70s, notably the work of innovative titans like Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor. The couple eventually emigrated to the United States and then landed at the Wilma Project in 1979, becoming artistic directors in 1981. They divorced in 1995, and she became the sole artistic director of the renamed Wilma Theater in 2010.And now, at 66, she will be its artistic director emeritus.Throughout the Wilma’s history, the Zizkas championed demanding work by directors and playwrights. The theater has had a fruitful association with Tom Stoppard, for example, who described Blanka in an email as “an intellectual steeped in theater language; a ‘writers’ director’ but freethinking in what she wants the audience to see.”The Wilma also often put on visually daring productions that stood out from the comparatively naturalistic fare by many regional companies. In recent years, Blanka also encouraged the resident acting company, the HotHouse, to explore experimental techniques and pushed artists to supersize their ambitions. (She will continue to work 20 hours a month over the next two years, some of which she said she is likely to spend with the HotHouse).“She taught me, as a young, queer, Black artist in the theater, that I could write Black queer stories at the scale that she was directing,” said James Ijames, who is now one of the Wilma’s artistic directors, with Yury Urnov and Morgan Green. “She just really blew open what I thought was possible.”In the video interview, Zizka shared the joys and frustrations of her years running a regional American theater company. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Keith J. Conallen, a HotHouse company member, in “Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq,” a 2014 production by Paula Vogel.Alexander IziliaevWhy leave the Wilma now?I started to think about it very strongly last August. Suddenly, I was spending some time with my son, who is now 44 and lives in Bellport, N.Y. I was always feeling so guilty about him because I felt I’ve never been a great mom; theater was always my first priority. It’s hard to say, but that was the reality. So it was kind of a reunion, in a beautiful way. I also spent two or three hours a day biking in wetlands and I realized: Oh my God, I’ve been living all my life in a space without windows. I started to feel something that I have not felt since I was about 15 or 16, this sense of freedom and of loving beauty and colors in nature. And I felt I need to experience it more before I kick the bucket [laughs].And yet in a 2015 interview, you said: “I feel that, professionally, if I’m lucky, I have, like, 10 years. There is not a history of old women running theaters.” Did you defiantly plan to stay on for another decade at the time?I said that exactly out of those feelings, but I don’t feel it anymore. I feel like that if I had wanted to stay at the Wilma, I could have. I have the energy, I have the interest. I didn’t lose the love for theater, for sure. But I need to go a different way. And there is also the danger of becoming your own prison for anybody who works in an institution for a long time.What were your earliest memories of American theater, having grown up behind the Iron Curtain?I never studied at university. I was working as a cleaning woman in the library during the day and doing underground theater in the evening. We used to go to Poland for a weekend to just see shows and I was able to see the Living Theater and Bread and Puppet Theater, the experimental-happening scene, Joseph Chaikin — those are my heroes. But that period was over by the time I got here.What were your early years in Philadelphia like?We were taking it step by step. We spoke very bad English — I could not ask for a cup of coffee, basically. For us it was about how do we survive? How do we support ourselves and our child? How do we learn English? I met people and I offered to teach them what I knew from Grotowski. When you are young, you’re audacious about teaching and you know nothing [laughs].Stoppard has played a big role at the Wilma, but what are other artists who have been meaningful to you?Athol Fugard was very important for me in the early days. In 1988, I produced “Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act,” which is about a white librarian and a Black schoolteacher falling in love. And the play is done in the nude, 90 percent of it. That was very daring at the time.Do you think it could be done now?I don’t know. That’s a question. I do want to mention Paula Vogel. She’s an amazing, generous artist who takes care of her colleagues. “I was working as a cleaning woman in the library during the day and doing underground theater in the evening,” Zizka said about her past.Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesHow so?I had commissioned her to do a play, and she was doing a workshop, and I had to participate. I was terrified because my English is so bad. She said, “You can just write characters the way you speak.” Easy, right? [Laughs] She was constantly on me and said, “You have to keep writing.” So I did. Another person who was very helpful was Stew [of the musical “Passing Strange”]. He was my boyfriend for a moment, about six years ago. Like Paula, he encourages people to try things out and not to be afraid.What do you think are some of the biggest challenges facing American theater?In American theater, the people who are actually creating the work are the only people who are freelancers. How do you run theaters when you are surrounded by administrative staff only? Once foundations are away from the scene, you start pushing toward rich individuals. They can be great people, they can really love you — but something can happen in their life, and they move on. Because of this need to get money from so many different sources, you have to make people feel good; you have to do great parties. So your administrative staff is growing, and you are putting money there instead of into the art.You came of age with avant-garde theater, and at the Wilma you never stopped pushing the intellectual and aesthetic envelope. That’s not the easiest sell.The Wilma has been quite progressive in terms of programming, but it was very difficult for us to retain audiences. In America we are now in the grip of consumerism, where an audience wants theater to be exactly “the way I feel it, the way I want it, and if it’s not that I don’t like it and I will never come back again.” That is a very difficult situation to be in. The only reason I want to do theater is an exploration of life. Entertainment is part of life, but I don’t want the theater to be any escape from reality. Reality is beautiful, and there are multitudes of possibilities. But this consumerism and narcissism I find in American audiences at this time is really detrimental to the theater culture. More

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      'Wicked' Is First Broadway Tour Since Coronavirus Shutdown

      by

      DALLAS — Talia Suskauer knows what it’s like to be green. She remembers the feel of pigment and powder on her arms, neck, and face; how the color seemed to seep into her pores and linger behind her ears; what it was like to see a strange but familiar self staring back from a mirror.She didn’t know that, on a hot July afternoon in Dallas, getting painted once again would make her cry.Sixteen months after the touring production of “Wicked” in which Suskauer stars as the green-skinned witch Elphaba was forced to close, the cast and crew have reassembled in Dallas for a high-stakes effort to start again. The show’s first performance here on Tuesday, the first by any touring Broadway production since the coronavirus pandemic shut down shows across the nation, will be a sign of hope for a battered theater industry, but also a test at a time when the spread of the Delta variant has Americans once again on edge.Talia Suskauer is back as Elphaba, and she has two veterans to help her get into character: Joyce B. McGilberry, left, a makeup supervisor who has been with the show since 2006, and Andrea DiVincenzo Shairs, a hair supervisor, who joined in 2003.Cooper Neill for The New York Times“Each show is going to be someone’s first time back at the theater, so each show is going to be emotional,” Suskauer said. She had her own emotions to draw on, tearing up as she eased back into the makeup chair for the first time since the tour’s March 13, 2020, shutdown in Madison, Wis. “I felt like our purpose was being stripped away,” she said, “and now, to come back, it’s overwhelming.”Touring is a huge part of the commercial theater ecosystem. It’s big money — in the most recent full theater season, 18.5 million people attended touring shows in North America, and those productions grossed $1.6 billion.The resumption of touring will once again allow people who live far from New York to see Broadway titles. And it will provide much-needed income for actors, musicians and other theater workers left unemployed by the pandemic.“If anybody doesn’t love a national tour, there’s something they’re not getting,” said Cleavant Derricks, the Tony winner who is playing the Wizard in the “Wicked” tour.Cooper Neill for The New York Times“If anybody doesn’t love a national tour, there’s something they’re not getting,” said Cleavant Derricks, who in 1982 won a Tony Award for his role in the original Broadway production of “Dreamgirls,” and who now plays the Wizard in the “Wicked” tour. “You’re going from state to state, meeting different people, seeing different aspects of the country, and each night applause comes your way. How can you beat something like that?”A revisionist back story for “The Wizard of Oz,” “Wicked” is a musical theater juggernaut that opened on Broadway in 2003, has sold more than $5 billion worth of tickets and has been seen by more than 60 million people in 100 cities around the world. The show, which revolves around a fraught friendship between the witches Elphaba and Glinda, has been running so long that Suskauer and her co-star and fellow Floridian, Allison Bailey, both saw it as children..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;}“I saw it in New York when I was in seventh grade, and it was so magical,” said Bailey, who plays Glinda. “It’s why I wanted to do theater.”The show, which has been touring since 2005, travels from city to city with 13 trucks that carry the set, costumes and a lot of equipment and supplies.Cooper Neill for The New York Times“Wicked,” with songs by Stephen Schwartz, a book by Winnie Holzman and direction by Joe Mantello, has been touring North America since 2005. The tour now travels from city to city in 13 trucks that transport the set, the sound and light equipment, more than 300 costumes and about 100 wigs.The touring company includes 33 actors, an 18-person crew, six musicians, three stage managers, two company managers and a physical therapist, plus the 16 dogs, one cat and three ferrets brought along for companionship. The traveling company is then supplemented at each stop by 32 local crew members and nine local musicians, as well as dozens of stagehands to help load the set in and out.The resumption of the “Wicked” tour, which comes a month before the first musicals are scheduled to restart on Broadway, will soon be followed by others: Beginning in mid-August, touring productions of “Hamilton” will resume in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Tempe, Ariz., and in September tours of “Frozen” and “My Fair Lady,” as well as the play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” will hit the road.In New York, ticket holders to Broadway shows will be required to show proof of vaccination and wear masks, at least through October. In Dallas, the touring production of “Wicked” is requiring vaccines for cast and crew, but not for the audience, which will be instructed to wear masks. Actors will be barred from interacting with the audience, meaning no stage-door autographs or selfies, and no backstage tours.The cast was masked for rehearsals, except when singing or speaking. During performances, the actors will be unmasked.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesEarly indicators are that audiences are eager to return: The five-week Dallas run has sold strongly, and prices have held steady, ranging from $25 for a lottery ticket to $169 for the best seats.When the pandemic forced the tour to close last year, the crew packed the set and costumes into boxes and left them in the Madison theater, imagining they’d be back in a few weeks. Then, as the shutdown dragged on, the crew went back to load those boxes into trucks. Ten of the trucks spent nearly a year parked in a Wisconsin truck yard, while three, containing temperature-sensitive electronics, wigs and wardrobe, were sent to a climate-controlled warehouse in Pennsylvania.The crew was worried about how the show’s approximately 100 wigs, many of which are made of human hair, would fare during the lengthy shutdown, but they turned out to be in good condition.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesSome members of the company went home, but some had no homes — they are usually on the road so much, they don’t need them — so they stayed with family, or rented something somewhere.“Since I’ve been married, I’ve never been home this long, ever,” said the tour’s hair supervisor, Andrea DiVincenzo Shairs, who has been with “Wicked” off and on since 2003. “I went to Fort Lauderdale — my husband is there — and we actually still love each other, so it worked out!”“I saw it in New York when I was in seventh grade, and it was so magical,” Allison Bailey, the actress playing Glinda, said of “Wicked.” “It’s why I wanted to do theater.”Cooper Neill for The New York TimesReuniting was fun, but restarting was complicated, and the show set aside three weeks to get ready at Dallas’s Music Hall at Fair Park, the 3,420-seat venue “Wicked” was returning to for the sixth time. The cast was rusty, and needed to re-rehearse the show, while the crew needed to assess each piece of equipment for possible damage after months of disuse.“We were worried about what was going to come out of the trucks,” said David O’Brien, the tour’s production stage manager. “Opening these boxes of clothes, what are we going to find, and what’s it going to smell like?”There were minor problems — a dimmer rack that needed to be reprogrammed, and a warped board in the set floor that caused a sliding statue to jam — but for the most part, the crew was delighted with how well the equipment held up.While the crew reassembled the Tony-winning set, the cast rehearsed in the lobby, working on a sprung floor rented from the Texas Ballet Theater. “It’s been 16 months of singing in your shower, which is different than singing with multiple people,” said Evan Roider, the tour’s music director, “but they came back ready to go.”There were jokes about expanded waistlines and forgotten dance steps. “It’s a little more snug this time around!” Suskauer said of her costume when a button popped as she rehearsed.“Look, it’s Glinda!” Bailey rehearses her entrance in a floating bubble.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesBy the time they were working in the theater, underneath a proscenium featuring the show’s red-eyed dragon, the cast was polishing details. “Careful with your wand!” the associate director, Lisa Leguillou, instructed Bailey as she rehearsed her entrance in a floating bubble. “It’s covering your face!”Onstage, the show hasn’t changed. But backstage, there are many new precautions, including air scrubbers.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThere are, of course, new safety protocols, which the “Wicked” team is sharing in video meetings with crews from other tours as they, too, prepare to restart. Some measures are now familiar: plentiful hand sanitizer, plus masks and gloves and air scrubbers. But there are also more theater-specific strategies. Ultraviolet wands are being used to clean mask interiors, lest too much disinfectant give actors headaches. Actors now scan QR codes for their daily check-ins, in lieu of the traditional sign-in sheet on a clipboard. And partitions are being installed in the orchestra pit to try to contain any aerosols emitted by reed and brass instruments.“Our biggest concerns have been how to reinvent things we do in a Covid world,” said Steve Quinn, the tour’s company manager, who has been touring with “Wicked” for 16 years. “We’re the guinea pigs, and we’re just trying to navigate this.”Among the new safety measures: The cast’s daily sign-in is now digital, replacing the traditional pen-and-paper system. Marie Eife, a member of the ensemble, scanned the QR code as she arrived for rehearsal one morning.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThe company’s excitement about being back together, and making a show, is tempered by some anxiety, particularly among the crew. “I want to make sure I have covered all my bases, so not by my hands would anybody become sick or injured by something I didn’t think of,” said Joyce B. McGilberry, the tour’s makeup supervisor. “I wanted to come back, but I can’t deny my concerns.”The tour company has a wide range of experience. Rebecca Gans Reavis had been playing a flying monkey for just a week before the tour shut down, while Laurel Parrish, the advance wardrobe supervisor, has been with “Wicked” since it opened on Broadway.Reavis, heartbroken, spent the pandemic in Wichita, Kan., where she and her husband took jobs teaching at her mother’s dance studio; Parrish, in northern Manhattan, worked for a cheesemonger while taking on passion projects in embroidery and sewing.“I don’t think I knew how much I missed it until we started back,” Parris said. “Seeing the clothes was like seeing old friends.”When two of the show’s cast members opted not to return after the pandemic, that created openings for the return of an alumnus, Clifton Davis, who at 75 is the oldest member of the tour cast, and a newbie, Anthony Lee Bryant, a Los Angeles-based dancer who had auditioned for the show six times before landing a spot.“Theater is being resurrected, thank God,” said Davis, who is relishing a second go as Doctor Dillamond, an erudite goat who taught at Shiz University when Glinda (then known as Galinda) and Elphaba were students there. Davis previously played the same role in 2012.Anthony Lee Bryant, right, is the only brand-new member of the tour cast, and during rehearsals he took careful notes as he watched other ensemble members dance.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesAs Bryant scrupulously took notes on dance moves, and Davis practiced his bleat, some moments seemed sure to land differently, even though they were crafted years ago. Chief among them: Glinda’s opening line, which Bailey utters as she floats in on her bubble.“It’s good to see me, isn’t it?”“I think I’m going to say it the same, but it’s going to feel different,” Bailey said. “I feel like I’m saying it on behalf of theater itself.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In Carl Hancock Rux’s ‘Vs.,’ the Jury Is Out

      by

      Where justice is virtual, crimes have no names and audience members step up to the dock to examine anonymous witnesses.Since the pandemic began, American courts have moved millions of hearings online, a development known as “virtual justice.” Carl Hancock Rux’s elliptical “Vs.” adapts virtual justice as virtual theater. In this court, the crime remains unnamed and the identity of the accused a mystery. The interrogator? That would be you. Or at least, a silhouette of you, with some mild technological wizardry superimposing someone else’s deep voice atop your blacked-out outline. Anyway, choose your Zoom background with care.At the top of “Vs.,” a digital experience directed by Mallory Catlett and produced by Mabou Mines, a court clerk gathers its participants into an online chamber. A man (David Thomson) is called as a witness. A witness to what? The interrogator — the role is divided, seemingly randomly, among audience members — asks only two questions: If the witness would like a drink and if the witness was born in November. The witness responds to each with contempt, questioning the court’s values and taste. Here’s part of his answer on the birthdate issue: “Not if we are to consider an opposition to phallogocentricism and the hegemonic ideals contained in patriarchal culture uniting theory and fantasy, challenging such discourse within the frameworks of a constitution blown up by law.” Pity the stenographer.Following this first sequence, the questioning repeats three times, with different audience members as the interrogator and other performers — Becca Blackwell, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Perry Yung — playing witnesses. The dialogue remains mostly the same, with a few variations, as though these are four musicians, each soloing on the same tune. The details never become more definite.Becca Blackwell appears in Carl Hancock Rux’s Zoom play.Onome EkehA cryptic trial pursuing a nameless crime will of course bring the works of Franz Kafka to mind. Though “Vs.” is more of a reverse Kafka, with the witnesses disdaining the court’s authority. “It’s your court,” each says. “Do as you wish. I’m not in it. I never was.” The court seems confused. Me, too, if I’m honest.Rux, a breathlessly inventive multimedia artist, made a thrilling entrance about 20 years ago with “Talk,” an impressionistic puzzle box of a play about art, race, memory and power. “Talk” took a panel discussion as its form, inhabiting and deconstructing its rituals. So there was reason to hope that “Vs.” would bring that same ingenuity to a Zoom courtroom. But the show meshes with the medium only glancingly, mostly through a manipulation of speaker view and camera feed. It hasn’t fully considered what kinds of narrative, imagery and speech inhabit this space successfully. A text this dense, spoken by performers viewed from the chest up, their faces and bodies awash in visual effects, suffers without the mutual entanglement of actors and audiences both present in the same space. Via an online platform, my ability to absorb and parse the language seemed to recede with each repetition. Engagement was virtual, not actual.I don’t take any pride in this inattention. It can represent an ugly kind of privilege. Because if your life or body or lived experience were really on the line, you wouldn’t have the luxury of distraction. But the abstraction of “Vs.” has a deadening effect. In that Zoom window, my face a void, I didn’t feel especially accountable or implicated, just anxious about whether or not any fidgeting (I’m an inveterate fidgeter) would upset the illusion.Even as live performances return, I’m eager for theater artists to experiment with digital tools, discovering new possibilities and new transmedia forms. Nevertheless, “Vs.” feels like a mistrial.Vs.Through Aug. 8; maboumines.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More