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      'West Side Story' Will Return $10 Million Federal Aid

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      The Broadway revival received federal aid through the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program. But the show decided not to reopen, and said it would return the money.Earlier this summer “West Side Story,” the ambitious, avant-garde-tinged revival of the classic musical, got some significant relief: $10 million in federal funding. It was the maximum amount allowed under the new Shuttered Venue Operators Grant initiative, which devoted $16 billion in federal aid to help music clubs, theaters and other live-event businesses recover from the pandemic.But even with that aid in its war chest, the show announced this week that it would not return to Broadway. Asked about the grant on Tuesday, the show said it would give back the money.“‘West Side Story’ will be returning the entirety of the S.V.O.G. grant with the hope that another production will be able to use the funds,” a spokesman for the show, Rick Miramontez, said in a statement.The revival — which was reimagined by the director Ivo van Hove and the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker — opened to mixed reviews in February 2020, less than a month before the coronavirus outbreak shut down Broadway. While it was closed, its lead producer, Scott Rudin, announced in April 2021 that he would step back from active roles in his Broadway productions after he came under fire for a long history of abusive behavior; he said that he hoped the show would reopen without him.Federal records showed that Danish San Juan Limited Liability Company, which court records said had been formed by Rudin to operate “West Side Story,” had been approved to receive $10 million under the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant initiative. Documents posted by the Small Business Administration, which runs the grant program, say that the federal funding is intended for “entities that are currently operating or intend to resume full operations.”“West Side Story” had grossed $1.5 million in ticket sales the week before the pandemic closed it down. Miramontez did not respond when asked to elaborate on why the show had decided to close, despite the federal aid.During the long shutdown, and with the prospects for rebounding uncertain, Broadway shows, nightclubs and arts institutions across the city jumped at the prospect of federal relief. This spring, after a long wait and many hiccups, more than 10,000 music clubs, theaters and other live-event businesses across the country got a share of a $16 billion federal grant, records show.The records also show that many of New York’s best known cultural institutions got millions of dollars in funding, as did Broadway musicals like “Hamilton” and “Hadestown,” which plan to open next month.Stacy Cowley contributed reporting. More

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      Lend Us Your Ears, and Don’t Forget Your Farm Boots

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      Seeing a play at Willow Wisp Organic Farm in Damascus, Pa., has a simple but highly recommended dress code: sturdy shoes.At the farm, which recently finished a run of a site-specific play about climate change, the boundless stage includes a courtyard lined with hydrangeas, greenhouses and a field of flowers. Over four nights last week, audience members trekked the outdoors there, walking from scene to scene, as the actors, musicians and stilt walkers performed in vibrant, whimsical costumes.The performance is the second installment of a decade-long series, “Dream on the Farm,” in which the Farm Arts Collective, whose home is on the 30 acres, plans to produce one play a year centered on climate change.“This is an intense and troubled time and as an organic farmer and theater maker, we’ve got to keep making work about this issue,” said Tannis Kowalchuk, the ensemble’s artistic director, who started the farm — which sits just across the river from New York — with her husband, Greg Swartz. (They sell their wares at the Union Square and Grand Army Plaza farmers’ markets.)Tannis Kowalchuk, artistic director of Farm Arts Collective, directed the show. She is also a co-owner of Willow Wisp Organic Farm with her husband, Greg Swartz.Jess Beveridge, left, and Annie Hat at a rehearsal in June. The show was the second of 10 annual plays about climate change that the collective is planning to perform.A rehearsal inside a Farm Arts Collective greenhouse on a rainy day. The collective is a group of artists and farmers. This year’s play transported guests into an “Alice in Wonderland”-esque fantasy in which two scientists, the astronomer Carl Sagan and the biologist Lynn Margulis, are brought back from the dead to help save life on Earth from the climate disaster. Audience members watch as Sagan encounters eccentric characters representing the atmosphere and the hydrosphere, as well as a man trying to find a way to escape the planet through space travel. The rest of the group followed the Margulis character on the other side of the farm. (The audience was split into two to avoid overcrowding.)At the end of the show, the audience of about 80 people received chilled cucumber soup made from ingredients grown on the land.Audience members walked from scene to scene, including through a corridor of painted fabric, essentially going on a walking tour of the farm.Audience members made their way to the next act.An assistant director’s notes and a snack from the harvest table.Waiting in the wings: Daniel Lendzain chilled out before making his entrance on opening night.It was the job of Simon Kowalchuk-Swartz (son of Kowalchuk and Swartz), to transport the musical instruments. The pianist Doug Rogers, left, also helped compose original music, and the guitarist Melissa Bell helped write the play.But the reality of the pandemic burst the fantasy bubble on Sunday after one of the people in the accompanying band tested positive for the coronavirus, despite having been vaccinated, and the arts collective decided to cancel the fifth and final performance.Kowalchuk said she hopes the play will be performed again, though. She has imagined bringing it to New York City, where the ensemble might be able to find a new stage in a park or botanical garden.The “Alice in Wonderland”-esque play posed a question: Is it better to look at climate change through a wide angle lens or a microscope?Marguerite Boissonnault played the character Fungus.Gregg Erickson played the character Hydrosphere.Cast members, including Hudson Williams-Eynon, center, in white, faced off in a tug-of-war.Williams-Eynon, Beveridge and the rest of the cast took a bow after a performance. More

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      Review: Shakespeare’s ‘Merry Wives,’ Now in South Harlem

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      Jocelyn Bioh reshapes a comedy of clever women, frail men and harsh revenge into one of love and forgiveness, just when New York needs it.Who couldn’t use a warm welcome back to live theater like the one being offered these late-summer evenings in Central Park? There, Jocelyn Bioh’s “Merry Wives,” a joyful adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” set in an African diasporic community in Harlem, is doing everything a comedy can do to embrace all comers.First, the director Saheem Ali, who was born in Kenya, delivers enthusiastic greetings over the Delacorte Theater’s loudspeakers. Next, Farai Malianga, a drummer from Zimbabwe, leads the audience in a call and response chorus of vernacular African salutations: “Asé” (Nigeria), “Yebo” (South Africa) and “Wau-Wau” (Senegal) among them. By the time the play proper starts, we are all guiltless cultural appropriators.Or should I say the play improper? Purists who pine for the original (circa 1597) text — and possibly the world in which it existed — will find plenty that gets their goat in Bioh’s makeover, including roasted goat. She has cut the number of characters nearly in half and the running time by more than a third. (Ali’s production comes in at a swift 110 minutes, with no intermission.) Much of Shakespeare’s wordplay, incomprehensible without an Elizabethan thesaurus, has been swept away along with words like “master” and “mistress” and their buzzkill implications.Thankfully, Bioh has not replaced them with woke lecturing. She has said she wanted a “Merry Wives” that her Ghanaian family could enjoy, and in achieving the goal has not excluded the rest of us. Or, rather, she has made us all a part of the family, perhaps erasing some of Shakespeare’s worldview in the process, but underlining the human qualities we know from our own households — or, if not, from popular culture.So Jacob Ming-Trent, as the idle, appetitive Falstaff, hilariously combines into one bigger-than-life portrait your drunk uncle, a horndog Redd Foxx and some would-be Barry White. The identical mash letters he writes to the two upright wives of the title — the tart Madam Ekua Page (Pascale Armand) and the glamorous Madam Nkechi Ford (Susan Kelechi Watson) — are instantly familiar as the delusions of a sitcom character who, in thinking he’s a catch, sets himself up to be caught.Jocelyn Bioh’s “Merry Wives” takes audiences to 116th Street in South Harlem, an area teeming with West African shops and culture.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat the letters are discovered while Madam Page is having her hair done at a Senegalese braiding salon on 116th Street tells you a lot about the production’s good humor. The salon is part of Beowulf Boritt’s elaborate transforming puzzle of a set, which also includes an urgent care clinic run by Dr. Caius (David Ryan Smith) and Mama Quickly (Shola Adewusi), and a laundromat, wittily called the Windsor, where the women’s revenge on Falstaff is eventually carried out amid baskets of “foul linen.”If the production — including Dede Ayite’s costumes and Cookie Jordan’s wigs — looks especially grand, that is part of the welcome too. The Public Theater could not of course stage any Shakespeare in the Park last year, and for 2021 decided to make the most of its resources by combining its usual two productions into one. The choice of material was likewise a twofer: a big comedy when we really needed one after a small, grim year, yet also a play celebrating Black life in America, when we really needed that as well.Not just Black life, though. The celebration is universal, which does not always jibe with the petty meanness of the Shakespeare. Casually misogynist references have therefore been excised, so that one character, Anne — the marriageable daughter of Madam Page and her husband, Kwame (Kyle Scatliffe) — is said to speak “sweet-sweet like a woman,” not “small” like one. Abuse of even a fictional female has been flipped: When Falstaff, in the second of his three comeuppances, is beaten “most pitifully” while wearing a ludicrous disguise, it’s as the old man of Benin (“dressed like some ol’ Black Dumbledore”) instead of Shakespeare’s old woman of Brentford. And Bioh has made several adjustments to embrace queerness where the original used it merely for humor.MaYaa Boateng, left, as Fenton and Abena as Anne Page, who is courted by three suitors in “Merry Wives.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThese substitutions do not feel politically correct so much as warmly embracing. Anne’s three suitors still include the dim Slender (Joshua Echebiri) and the frankly mincing Dr. Caius. But the third, Fenton, is now a pure-hearted woman (MaYaa Boateng) instead of a fortune-seeking man. That Anne’s parents make no fuss about Fenton’s sex (their objections are mostly financial) may feel somewhat utopian, but Anne’s sure preference for her, as expressed in a performance by the actress Abena that’s a standout even in this across-the-board excellent ensemble, is indisputable.The spurned suitors are let off lightly here; in a switch from the original, both end up liking the match they are tricked into when they cannot have Anne. Unfortunately, the Falstaff part of the story is not, as it should be, more dangerous. With his shin-length shorts and virtual reality goggles, chatting with the audience about a pandemic spent watching Netflix and eating snacks, Ming-Trent’s Falstaff is more of a clown than a menace. As Bioh has written the character, we are forced to conclude that his lust is grotesque because, in an otherwise body-positive production, it is housed in a figure “about two yards wide.”From left, Susan Kelechi Watson, Pascale Armand and Kyle Scatliffe in the play, with costumes by Dede Ayite and an elaborate set by Beowulf Boritt.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf that puts too much emphasis on the character’s outer traits, missing the opportunity to use his story to examine men’s inner frailty, Bioh’s script — and Ali’s supple direction — balance that in the story of Madam Ford’s husband, who suffers from the jealous fear that his wife is unfaithful. In a conventional production, Ford is laughable; here, Gbenga Akinnagbe makes the man’s misery quite real. His relief, when his wife forgives him after first torturing him with false evidence, is thus a more moving moment than usual.Forgiveness, instead of revenge, is the evening’s unexpected theme. And not just for the characters. Near the end, in a coup-de-outdoor-theater, Boritt’s set slides away and offers us all a magical view of Central Park, lit as if it were a heavenly playground by Jiyoun Chang. Can we hope that this marks the beginning of a happier moment in our city and country?Bioh suggests as much. It is not merely Falstaff she has in mind when demonstrating, in this healing adaptation, that even the worst old reprobates can be taught a lesson and welcomed back into the family. After all, whether from Ghana or Zimbabwe or Brooklyn or Stratford-upon-Avon, we are all, if you look back far enough, an African diasporic community.Merry WivesThrough Sept. 18 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘The Tempest’ Starkly Amplifies Prospero’s Evolution

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      A strong ensemble, music and movement round out the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s last production in its longtime home at Boscobel House and Gardens.GARRISON, N.Y. — Prospero’s grievance has been gnawing at him a dozen years when at last he speaks of it to his teenage daughter, Miranda, explaining how they were forced from their noble life in Milan into island exile.His own treacherous brother snatched his dukedom away, propelled by “an evil nature” and a craving for power that Prospero — bookish sorcerer, kindly father, distracted ruler — hadn’t suspected in him.Does he sense his own darkness, though? His own lust for dominion? The way Prospero spins his tale, he is a great man and a good guy wronged. But in Ryan Quinn’s fitfully magical production of “The Tempest” at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, the cruelty that lurks in him is abundantly on display.The long-lashed, gold-dusted spirit Ariel (Britney Simpson), forced to do Prospero’s bidding, desires her freedom from him more than anything. The brutish Caliban (Jason O’Connell) wants the same, and to be left in peace on the island that was his before this enslaving invader arrived. Both of them call him master.What’s curious is that Howard W. Overshown’s Prospero, played with a recessiveness consistent with a character most at home in his library, does not dominate the play. He does, however, orchestrate all that happens in it, starting with the storm he whips up to shipwreck his brother (Sean McNall), the queen of Naples (Nance Williamson) and others in a quest for retribution.Comedy is the strongest suit here, led by O’Connell’s bedraggled, delicate Caliban, who sounds like John Lithgow might if he were a downtrodden brute with a sympathetic case to plead. The production’s rollicking high point comes with his discovery by the delightfully put-upon Trinculo (Ralph Adriel Johnson), and their joint discovery by the drunken butler Stephano (Kurt Rhoads).The young lovers Miranda (Kayla Coleman) and Ferdinand (an extraordinarily charming Tyler Fauntleroy) are sweet to watch, while much of the magic of the island comes from the lovely sung enchantments of Ariel.Plumped up with music (sound design and music composition are by Charles Coes and Nathan Roberts) and movement (choreography is by Susannah Millonzi), this production is the festival’s last in its longtime home at Boscobel House and Gardens, where performances take place in an airy tent that frames the expansive lawn and the hills beyond as background scenery. (The company is moving just a few miles away.)Cast members emerge from billowing clouds of fog at the beginning of the play.T. Charles EricksonWhen the show begins with clouds of fog billowing just where the lawn slopes down, and the figures of the company rising through it and coming toward us, we know that Quinn will use the landscape well.There is some flatness to the production, though. At the performance I saw, the first frisson of pleasure came with Caliban’s initial scene: the laughter of an audience that suddenly finds itself in the palm of an actor’s hand. Standout performances — by Simpson and O’Connell, Fauntleroy and Johnson — are more memorable than the storytelling as a whole.But in Overshown’s finely understated interpretation, Prospero’s evolution is starkly clear. When he asks Ariel how the shipwrecked queen and nobles are, she suggests that they are pitiful from his torments: that if he could see them, his “affections would become tender.”“Dost thou think so, spirit?” he asks.“Mine would, sir, were I human,” she says, with such gentleness and dignity that compassion seems the only proper course.And we feel him, very subtly, doing something that wounded, angry rulers seldom do. He begins to let go of his vengefulness.The TempestThrough Sept. 4 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; hvshakespeare.org. Running time 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      ‘West Side Story’ Will Not Return to Broadway

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      The reimagined revival was closed by the pandemic, and then its lead producer, Scott Rudin, said he would step back from active participation in his shows after being accused of bullying.“West Side Story,” an ambitious, reimagined revival of the classic musical, will not reopen when Broadway returns this fall, the show announced Monday, making it one of the biggest productions yet to become a casualty of the pandemic.The show’s lead producer, Scott Rudin, announced in April that he was stepping back from active roles in his Broadway productions after he came under fire for a long history of bullying employees. But Rudin said at the time that while the decisions about the future of “West Side Story” and his other shows would be left to others, he hoped that they would return to Broadway when theaters were allowed to reopen.The “West Side Story” revival — put together by a creative team with avant-garde credentials, including the director Ivo van Hove and the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker — opened in February 2020, less than a month before the coronavirus outbreak shut down Broadway and brought performances around the nation to a halt.“This difficult and painful decision comes after we have explored every possible path to a successful run, and unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, reopening is not a practical proposition,” Kate Horton, a producer on the show, said in a statement. “We thank all the brilliant, creative artists who brought ‘West Side Story’ to life at the Broadway Theater, even for so brief a time, especially the extraordinary acting company, 33 of whom made their Broadway debuts in this production.”News of the closure of “West Side Story” comes as Broadway is cautiously preparing for a return. Preview performances of the play “Pass Over” began last week, and are scheduled to be followed next month by the return of longtime favorites including “Hadestown,” “Hamilton,” “Wicked” and others.Several other shows produced by Rudin are planning to return to Broadway. Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” plans to resume performances on Oct. 5 with Jeff Daniels back in the cast; the production announced that the show would now be overseen by Orin Wolf, who would be given the title of executive producer.Scott Rudin, center, the lead producer of “West Side Story,” said in April that he would step back from active participation in his shows after he was accused of abusive behavior. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut even as Broadway prepares for a triumphant return, the departure of “West Side Story” offers a reminder of the toll the pandemic has taken on the industry.Last May, only two months into the pandemic, Disney Theatrical Productions announced that its stage adaptation of “Frozen” would not reopen. “Mean Girls,” a Broadway adaptation of the 2004 film with a book by Tina Fey, also announced it would not return.The “West Side Story” production, while daring, opened to mixed reviews. A new film adaptation by Steven Spielberg is scheduled to be released in December, but the Broadway show will not be around to capitalize on any interest that the new film version generates. More

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      ‘The Most Happy Fella,’ Sliced, Diced and Not Very Happy

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      Having revamped “Oklahoma!” into a dark X-ray of itself, Daniel Fish rethinks another Golden Age classic with “Most Happy in Concert.”RED HOOK, N.Y. — It was useful to remember as I watched “Most Happy in Concert,” the bizarre and fascinating 75-minute cantata that just finished a run here on Saturday evening, that the neatly cut lawn at Montgomery Place, the grand Hudson River estate where the show was performed, does not much resemble the vineyards of Napa Valley. That’s where “The Most Happy Fella,” the 1956 Frank Loesser musical on which the concert was based, takes place.But however I tried to convince myself that despite their enormous differences, the two works, like the two locales, might both be beautiful, my ear told me no. The original is a heart-lifting achievement; the concert merely sucks its blood.To be fair, “Most Happy in Concert” is very much a work in progress, easy to react to but difficult to assess. Originally scheduled for a staged production as part of the Bard SummerScape series in 2020, following workshops going back to 2018, it was postponed by the pandemic and emerged into public view for this three-night stand in denatured form, fully orchestrated but without scenery, costumes or movement. Even with those provisos, and with a relatively high tolerance for tinkering with classic musicals, I felt that Daniel Fish, who conceived and directed the adaptation, had not yet made a convincing argument for what made the tinkering worth it.Fish could be forgiven for heaving a been-there sigh right now. Much the same criticism was lobbed at his SummerScape production of “Oklahoma!” in 2015, even though it became a hit at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn three years later and, after transferring to Broadway, won the 2019 Tony Award for best revival of a musical. That adaptation set the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic in a kind of community party room, with streamers and banjos and chili at intermission. You could hardly have missed — and many critics were enthralled by — the way this new light seemed to reveal the work’s bones like an X-ray delivering bad news.“The Most Happy Fella” is a different animal. Though some consider it an opera, Loesser preferred to call it “a musical with a lot of music” — almost three glorious hours’ worth. Everything he could turn into song, he did, brilliantly absorbing the story of Tony, a Sicilian immigrant grape farmer, and Rosabella, the much younger bride he obtains through deception, into arias, toe-tappers, recitatives and chorales. The result is a long, difficult and, at this point, almost prohibitively costly show to mount; with its intricate echoes and leitmotifs it is also hard to cut. Still, Broadway’s Golden Age produced few more exhilarating works, and some of us will go anywhere to find it.That seems to be what Fish did, too.Tina Fabrique, singing “Young People,” in the concert production by Bard SummerScape.Maria BaranovaMikaela Bennett singing “Somebody, Somewhere” in the concert production at Montgomery Place.Maria BaranovaWorking with his “Oklahoma!” collaborators Daniel Kluger and Nathan Koci, Fish must have realized that he could not preserve the integrity of the score or the wide-screen story in a small-scale production. His solution, which will displease purists, and plenty of impurists as well, was to do away with the dialogue altogether and put the music through a high-speed chipper.Many great numbers were lost in the process; the climactic “My Heart Is So Full of You,” for instance, emerged as a few wisps of melody dispersing in the night air. The songs or song particles that survived this almost aleatory process were assigned to seven performers — all female or nonbinary and sitting glumly on stools — in kaleidoscopic shufflings that prevented the creation of any sustained characterization. Everyone played anyone, and thus no one.If you didn’t know the plot, you would therefore be unable to discern it here. Melodies were handed over in mid-phrase, songs were sung out of order or sampled briefly before crashing into others. On the rare occasion when Fish allowed a number to be performed intact, it was, as he may have intended, a revelation, like the moon cracking through clouds. Yet even this seemed random. It made sense to let the ravishing soprano Mikaela Bennett sing all of “Somebody, Somewhere,” Rosabella’s aching introductory number, but in another extended solo, the belter Tina Fabrique made an R&B showstopper out of “Young People,” originally a minor minuet.I don’t mind that the soundscape of Loesser’s Napa, with its tarantellas and Italianate arioso, was dumped in favor of arrangements and orchestrations for a 12-player ensemble that favored smoky bebop, sour jazz fusion and — was this sarcastic? — something you might have heard on an Andy Williams special. (To listen to the spectacular original orchestrations, by Don Walker, I need merely hit play on the original cast album.) And I enjoyed discovering new ideas inside many of the songs, even if the formerly celebratory, up-tempo “Abbondanza” now had all the vivacity of a funeral march.But unlike Fish’s “Oklahoma!” — in which the dialogue and score were left intact — “Most Happy in Concert” works so hard to be new for newness’ sake that it feels like open season on musical comedy. In a developing work, that arrogance is understandable and maybe even necessary; I look forward to seeing “Most Happy” again. I hope that when I do, I’ll be able to discern what Fish is trying to develop it into.Mary Testa, center, with the cast of this Bard SummerScape program.Maria BaranovaIt’s not as if the original needs “correcting” for dramaturgical or political reasons, like so many Golden Age musicals. And though it was nice to hear sopranos and altos sing a score that typically includes tenors, baritones and basses as well, it has to be said that few of the singers, who also included Jules Latimer, Erin Markey, April Matthis, Mallory Portnoy and Mary Testa, made musicality a priority; angst and anomie were the top notes. Their sound was sometimes, I assume deliberately, harsh and unbeautiful.And yet the show’s emotional world is often harsh and unbeautiful too. Tony, for all his heartiness, has spent a lifetime believing he’s too homely and stupid to marry. Rosabella — which isn’t even her real name — thinks that as a poor woman she has no choice but to go with any man who might ask.These feelings, Fish seems to posit, belong not just to them. Dissociating the story’s emotions from individual characters and even plot may be a way of showing that they exist universally, as a kind of magma boiling beneath us all.Perhaps it’s best, then, to look at “Most Happy in Concert” as an abstract painting that creates meaning through a collision of forms. Which is not to say it has no theme. The pun in the evening’s title lets you know you are listening to the cries (sometimes gorgeous, sometimes ugly) of people who are “most happy” not when alone but “in concert”: who crave love but don’t know it, or are too afraid to ask.Of course, that was the show’s theme in the first place. More

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      The First Play Returning to Broadway Is Doing Things Differently

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      Anna Martin and Phyllis Fletcher and After the opening night performance of “Pass Over,” hundreds gathered for a block party. The playwright, Antoinette Nwandu, spoke to the crowd from a balcony above the theater marquee.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis episode contains strong language.Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over” made its Broadway debut this week. Drawing on “Waiting for Godot” and the Book of Exodus, the play follows two Black men trapped on a city block — both by existential dread, and by the fear of being killed by police.But Broadway audiences won’t see the play’s original ending, which featured the death of one of the main characters.“I no longer wanted to work on a play that ended with the murder of a Black man,” said Nwandu, who rewrote the final scene. “I want to focus on life.”Nwandu’s play was the first to debut on Broadway since theaters closed their doors in March of 2020 and the first since a coalition of theater artists of color demanded change from the theater ecosystem in America.Nwandu spoke with the theater reporter Michael Paulson about the changes she is personally bringing to theater, and her hopes for the industry — still grappling with the pandemic — as the curtains rise again.“Thank you for celebrating Black joy!” Nwandu told celebrants at an afterparty on West 52nd Street, outside the theater. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAudience members in masks react after the curtain call.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTheatergoers gave a standing ovation to the three actors: Jon Michael Hill, left, Namir Smallwood and (unseen) Gabriel Ebert.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times More

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      A Milestone for Broadway as ‘Pass Over’ Begins Performances

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      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