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      'Schmigadoon!' Is an Ode to Broadway Musicals, and Pokes Fun At Them Too

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      One would think that everyone involved in the parody series “Schmigadoon!” was in love with the sometimes hokey, sometimes magical musical genre. Not quite.The director Barry Sonnenfeld has never been a theater guy.“I am not a fan of Broadway musicals,” he grumped affably over the phone. “I’m not a fan of filmed musicals. I don’t understand why people would stop talking and start singing.”So Sonnenfeld, who is best known for the “Men in Black” movies, was a curious choice to direct the new Apple TV+ comedy “Schmigadoon!,” a series whose very title screams musical theater spoof.The showrunner, Cinco Paul, a fan of Sonnenfeld’s work on the highly stylized and intermittently musical cult series “Pushing Daisies,” was unaware of the director’s aversion until they were shooting last fall, mid-pandemic, in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a blockbuster cast filled with Broadway stars.“Here we are on the set,” Paul recalled, “and he’s half jokingly saying, ‘Why are there so many songs?’”If you count reprises, they number nearly two dozen — composed by Paul, who created the show with Ken Daurio — spread over six half-hour episodes that air starting July 16.An affectionate, knowing sendup of classic American musicals, “Schmigadoon!” stars Cecily Strong of “Saturday Night Live” and Keegan-Michael Key, lately of Netflix’s “The Prom,” as a contemporary couple in a stagnating relationship. On a backpacking trip, they stumble into a frozen-in-time, trapped-in-a-musical town called Schmigadoon, which they can’t escape until they find true love.Paul, who grew up on his mother’s Broadway cast recordings and played piano for musicals as an undergraduate at Yale, said he came up with the kernel of “Schmigadoon!” almost 25 years ago. Not knowing what to do with the idea, he put it away until Andrew Singer at Lorne Michaels’s production company, Broadway Video, mentioned their interest in musicals a few years ago. A match was made.According to Strong, Michaels is — like her — “a musical dork.” And the show brought on stage-savvy writers, including Julie Klausner (“Difficult People”) and Strong’s fellow “S.N.L.” star Bowen Yang.In Schmigadoon, the locals include the sweet, melancholy Mayor Aloysius Menlove, played by the Tony Award winner Alan Cumming; the moral scourge, Mildred Layton, played by the Tony winner Kristin Chenoweth; and the handsome carny Danny Bailey, played by Aaron Tveit, who got news of his Tony nomination for “Moulin Rouge!” during the series shoot. Other boldface names from Broadway include Jane Krakowski, Ann Harada and Ariana DeBose.Recently, Paul, Sonnenfeld and members of the cast spoke separately by phone about “Schmigadoon!” and their affinity, or lack thereof, for musicals. These are edited excerpts from those interviews.“Musicals are charming, and they’re so entertaining, but they’re also sometimes dumb, and sometimes they’re problematic,” said the series co-creator Cinco Paul.Adam Amengual for The New York TimesCINCO PAUL I wanted real musical theater people. I wanted people who did eight shows a week and had those chops, because I wanted everybody to do their own singing, and I wanted to capture that singing live on set to the extent it was possible. The amount of talent we were able to get was phenomenal and was unfortunately because they weren’t able to work anywhere — because theaters were shut down. In many cases, the parts were written for these actors.BARRY SONNENFELD When I interviewed for the job, I said: “Look, here’s the thing. I want to shoot this entirely onstage and I want to shoot it in Vancouver because Vancouver has really great stages and really good crews, and it’s also cheaper.” What was surreal and wonderful was that Vancouver was the only film center that was open when we shot. L.A. was shut down. New York was shut down.CECILY STRONG We had to go shoot our “S.N.L.” intros right before I left for Vancouver. It’s like, you’re around New York and you’re seeing all these theaters shuttered. It’s a little devastating. More

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      Interview: Morosophy go all Intropection

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      Replay our interview with Cordelia and Josh from Morosophy about their show Introspection, available online as part of Brighton Fringe Festival, plus their Edinburgh Fringe plans for their show, For All The Love You Lost.

      Introspection is a unique approach to storytelling, allowing audiences to create their own narrative in their mind with the assistance of audio, soundscape and one nameless performer, guiding the audience, raising questions such as: How do we perceive the world? How do we perceive ourselves? and how do our perceptions change, while our eyes remain the same? This experience allows audiences to create a stage in their minds, using their senses to experience their own unique performance. The audience’s unique experience is a consequence of their own actions, perceptions and the aesthetics of interaction. No two audience members will share the same experience.

      Morosophy emerged in 2019 at Royal Holloway University of London, initiated by Joshua Thomas as he presented his debut original piece ‘For All the Love you Lost’. Since then, the company has dived deep into the creation of new and original writing. Morosophy were shortlisted for TheSpaceUK’s Make do and mend award for ingenuity in lockdown award for their virtual production of ‘To Me, That’s What Love is’ in Online@TheSpace Season 2. Morosophy have now joined creative forces with Somerset based company Black Hound Productions to explore more digital avenues and are delighted to present the audio experience, Introspection.

      More details and booking information for Introspection can be found via the below link. More

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      Playlist: ET radio show 30 June 2021

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      Author: Everything Theatre

      in Features and Interviews, Radio playlist

      2 July 2021

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      Interview with Morosophy

      Listen back as we discuss their current audio play Introspection, plus their upcoming Edinburgh Fringe show, For All The Love You Lost.

      More details of introspection can be found here

      Shows, Venues & Theatre Companies mentioned

      Music Playlist

      Cooper Temple Clause – Let’s Kill MusicReverend and the Makers – He Said He Loved MeJim Bob – Jo’s Got PapercutsBeta Band – HumansBoo Radleys – Barney and MeChemical Brothers – Let Forever BeCold War Kids – Hung Me Up To DryThe Futureheads – Hounds of LoveBlancmange – The Day Before You CameCatherine Anne Davis & Bernard Butler – Sabotage (Looks So Easy)Kings of Convenience – I’d Rather Dance With YouMercury Rev – Goddess on a HiwayChina Crisis – King In A Catholic StyleMenace Beach – Give BloodThe Magnetic Fields – A Chicken With Its Head Cut OffDan le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip – Five MinutesLazarus Original Cast – ChangesMy Latest Novel – Pretty In A Panic More

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      For Angélica Liddell, Each Performance is About Survival

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      Angélica Liddell says she doesn’t care about looking good onstage. Instead, her visceral works give her catharsis that she says keeps her alive.GHENT, Belgium — There is nothing in contemporary theater quite like an Angélica Liddell monologue. The Spanish director and performer, who has crafted her share of monumental productions over the past three decades, pushes herself to grating, visceral extremes onstage.Take her new production, “Liebestod” (subtitle: “The Smell of Blood Doesn’t Leave My Eyes, Juan Belmonte”), which will have its world premiere next week at France’s prestigious Avignon Festival. In a recent rehearsal in Ghent, she railed against Western societies “engorged with rights and eco-anxieties,” against France — “a country obsessed with fame and the elite” — and, above all, against herself.“Not a single word about happiness will pass my lips,” Liddell, 54, warned near the beginning.In other hands, nearly everything she does could come across as self-indulgent. Love or hate them, however, Liddell’s scorching speeches, which can last up to an hour, have earned a cult following in places like Avignon, not least because she throws herself into them as if her life depended on it.And according to her, it does. “I need the stage to survive myself,” she said through an interpreter after her rehearsal, looking spent. “Onstage, I’m allowed to kill myself over and over again. That possibility allows me to avoid real suicide, real madness.”“Liebestod” was commissioned by Belgium’s NTGent as part of a series, “History/ies of Theater,” launched in 2018 by the playhouse’s director, Milo Rau. The series has been less a history lesson than a space for contrasting voices to explore their relationship with the art form.The first installment was Rau’s own “La Reprise.” And after extending an invitation to the Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula in 2019, Rau turned to Liddell.“I was sure she had to be a part of it from the beginning. I admire her as a total artist and performer,” Rau said in Ghent, adding that her monologues “go to the heart of theater.”Liddell’s interests lie in the sinister corners of the human psyche. She has written about terrorist attacks and cannibalism.Colin Delfosse for The New York Times“Liebestod” was inspired by the Spanish tradition of bullfighting, and especially by Juan Belmonte, an innovative bullfighter who died in 1962. Liddell sees a connection between his art form and her own: “Belmonte said that what frees us from death is actually longing for it,” she said, comparing it to a poet’s “death wish.”Liddell’s take on theater history is certainly idiosyncratic. In “Liebestod,” she describes the tradition as populated with “bureaucrats, bit-part players and technicians with rights.” She finds most contemporary theater productions, she said afterward, “naïve and a bit childish, because they’re always focused on the good.”Very nicely — she can be as gentle in real life as she is abrasive in her work — Liddell said that she had no interest in playing nice. “I find these times to be repugnant, because everything is about likes,” she said. “I don’t want to show the best of myself during a performance. I want to show my ugly sides, that I can be a monster as well.”Her interests lie in the sinister corners of the human psyche. She has written about terrorist attacks, cannibalism and her sexual desire for criminals. Her productions are laced with references to art history and religion, and have a ritualistic quality. In “St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians,” a doctor collected her blood onstage, and Liddell’s fluids also make an appearance when she scrapes her hands and legs in “Liebestod.”“It has been a long time since I cut myself in my work, but I needed to create that state of irrationality. Blood is love, beauty and death — like a holy trinity,” she said, before tempering: “I must add that I only do these cuts in front of an audience, never by myself.”Still, Liddell says she doesn’t consider herself an actress. “There is no distance between me and the stage,” she said. “It’s a different level: It’s not a performance, it’s a transfiguration.”Liddell is a rare artist who is wholly uninterested in the current political or social discourse. In 2018, she even produced an anti-#MeToo manifesto, “The Scarlet Letter,” in which she extolled men’s superiority. “People were so pure, so correct, so moralizing,” she said of #MeToo.But surely, I suggested, the feminist movement created the conditions for uncompromising women like her to create freely. Liddell dismissed the idea: “What I needed for my work to happen is to be who I am, to have illiterate parents when I was growing up, poor grandparents, a mother who was intellectually impaired.”Liddell was born in Figueres, Catalonia, to a military family. She attended Madrid’s Conservatory for the performing arts, only to quit when she found the teaching there disappointing. Although she has worked steadily since the early 1990s, producing her work hasn’t always been easy. She has long experienced what she called “friction” with mainstream Spanish theater, to the point that she refused to perform some of her productions in her home country because of a lack of support for her controversial experiments.The situation has improved in the past couple of years, she said, but there have been other disappointments, like in 2016 when no Paris playhouse would stage “What Will I Do With This Sword?”, a five-hour show featuring a scene in which naked women masturbate with dead octopuses.“Producers don’t always understand what the essence of a piece is,” Liddell said. “I find myself continuously explaining what I’m trying to do.”“There is no distance between me and the stage,” Liddell said. “It’s a different level: It’s not a performance, it’s a transfiguration.”Colin Delfosse for The New York TimesIn 2017, for the first time, Liddell directed one of her productions without appearing onstage herself, when “Dead Dog at Dry Cleaners: the Strong” joined the repertoire of Berlin’s Schaubühne theater. “It was a very strange experience to see people do what I do,” she said. “The acting was excellent, but it was very difficult to explain my process.”Would she do it again? “I don’t think so,” she said with a laugh.Her own team is small but close-knit. Some, like her assistant director and frequent actor Borja López, have been with her since her earliest performances. “I need people who understand my obsessions,” she said. “What we are representing isn’t the rational world. They need to defend that, and also understand that sometimes I have no patience.”And performing is an all-consuming business for Liddell. “After the performance, she disappears,” said López, who sat near her during the interview.She is no more sociable during the day. “I don’t do anything,” Liddell said. “I take care of my voice and myself — I don’t even read. I’m very afraid of catching a cold, of not being in the right physical state for the performance.”“I prepare, like a bullfighter,” she said, returning to the inspiration behind “Liebestod.” “The stage is my bull.” More

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      ‘The God Committee’ Review: At a Hospital, Judgment Day

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      In this drama starring Kelsey Grammer and Julia Stiles as cardiovascular surgeons, doctors have one hour to choose a heart transplant recipient.“The God Committee” ostensibly ponders the ethical compromises involved in choosing organ transplant recipients, but it mostly illustrates the dangers of facile twists.A teenage cyclist is killed in a hit-and-run that the screenwriter-director, Austin Stark, gratuitously plays for shock. The cyclist’s heart is helicoptered to New York, but the woman in line to receive it through normal channels dies during prep. That leaves the hospital’s heart transplant committee with an hour to decide who gets it.Should it go to a patient whose husband died on Sept. 11, 2001, but who is mean to the nurses? Should it go to an overweight doorman who has bipolar disorder, but who is trying to put three daughters through college? Or should it go to a much younger cocaine user and possible batterer whose father (Dan Hedaya) is dangling a $25 million grant?As agonizing as this emergency decision would be, the setup plays like a false trichotomy, compounded by ancillary ironies contrived for dramatic purposes. An eminent cardiovascular surgeon (Kelsey Grammer) on the committee has been having an affair with the group’s newest member (Julia Stiles). A lawyer-turned-priest (Colman Domingo) essentially acts as both.And in a device that has been added since “The God Committee” played in a stage version, written by Mark St. Germain, the movie crosscuts between these events, set in 2014, and the future, December 2021, when Grammer’s ailing character, nearing a scientific breakthrough, is himself a bad candidate for a transplant. A natural ham, Grammer only amplifies what is grandiose and bogus in this material.The God CommitteeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Generational Divides Emerge Onstage in Germany

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      At newly reopened playhouses, once-legendary and younger directors take very different approaches to their mammoth productions.BERLIN — Theatergoers know what to expect from a Frank Castorf production. The director, who helped shape the last 30 years of German theater, favors a deconstructive approach to the classics, reams of dialogue barked like manifestoes and manic performances over a marathon running time.All these Castorf hallmarks — and others — are on display in “Fabian, or Going to the Dogs” at the Berliner Ensemble, but they can’t help but feel old hat, especially when viewed alongside premieres from some of Germany’s most distinctive young theater artists.Scheduled to premiere in spring 2020, but delayed by the pandemic, “Fabian,” at five hours, is roughly two hours shorter than initially expected. I’m glad that the director, who is 69, used the extra rehearsal time to trim some fat. Perhaps the former enfant terrible has mellowed with age.Castorf ran the Berlin Volksbühne for 25 years before being fired in 2017, and this is his third production at the Berliner Ensemble since. It was loosely inspired by Erich Kästner’s 1931 novel about Berlin’s infernally decadent tailspin in the years before the Nazi takeover, but aside from some period details in Aleksandar Denic’s intricate set, there is little Weimar flavor to the production.Instead, Castorf treats the audience to a grim parade of high-octane acting and complicated, often messy, stagecraft that doesn’t seem to refer to anything outside itself.In typical Castorf style, there’s an off-kilter stage that rotates nonstop and actors performing out of sight and captured live via video. The show also features many of the director’s signature props, including gallons of stage blood (for bathing) and potato salad (for dancing in).Probably many of the graying spectators seated in the theater saw Castorf’s revolutionary productions in their youth. But by this point, he’s gone from legend to relic. I found myself wondering (and not for the first time) if his once radical brand of deconstructive theater is now an aesthetic dead end.As often with his work, one detects a strong misogynistic undercurrent, with female characters brutalized or presented as sexually available objects of gratification. So it was refreshing to see the cast’s five actresses transcend their limited roles by giving self-assured performances, especially the Russian-born Margarita Breitkreiz, who projected a feverish intensity, and the young French actress Clara De Pin, who recited Baudelaire and crawled into the audience as part of her physically adroit, courageous performance.Castorf’s quarter-century tenure at the Volksbühne was without parallel in modern Berlin theater history, but Thomas Ostermeier’s 21-year reign as the head of the Schaubühne comes close. “Vernon Subutex 1” is this 52-year-old director’s 41st show at the theater, and it suggests that Ostermeier’s verve-filled productions, which place a more traditional emphasis on the author’s text and on acting, may also be losing their bite.Joachim Meyerhoff in Thomas Ostermeier’s “Vernon Subutex 1.”Thomas Aurin“Vernon” is drawn from the French author Virginie Despentes’s kaleidoscopic trilogy of novels about contemporary French society. Published between 2015 and 2017, the books quickly became a pop cultural phenomenon and earned the author comparisons to Balzac. They have inspired numerous stage adaptations and deserve to be better known in the United States, where the final volume was recently published.The cycle’s title character is a down-on-his-luck former record store owner who embarks on an odyssey through Paris after he is evicted from his apartment. The Schaubühne production is largely faithful to the structure of the novels, where a large cast of highly opinionated characters narrate the chapters in a dazzling merry-go-round of storytelling. But what’s so alive and fresh on the page falls flat here, especially given Ostermeier’s dutiful expository approach and the show’s four-hour length.Despite some inspired performances — particularly from Joachim Meyerhoff as Vernon and Stephanie Eidt as the ex-groupie Sylvie and the reputation-destroying Hyena — the hours drag by. An onstage band, fronted by Taylor Savvy, performs at the earsplitting volume typical of Broadway musicals and is unable to ignite the dramatic spark missing from the production.Like “Fabian’s,” “Vernon’s” premiere was repeatedly delayed by the pandemic. Finally onstage this summer, they arrived around the same time as plays by young German directors who have been reared on a steady diet of Castorf and Ostermeier.The first thing you notice about productions by Ersan Mondtag, one of this group, is their visual flair. He designs his own sets (and sometimes the costumes), which frequently recall German Expressionism or Pee-wee’s Playhouse, while his actors perform with the mannered rigor favored by Robert Wilson.Mondtag’s “wagner — der ring des nibelungen (a piece like fresh chopped eschenwood),” also at the Berliner Ensemble, is an irreverent reworking of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, written by Thomas Köck with music by Max Andrzejewski.From left, Philine Schmölzer, Peter Luppa and Emma Lotta Wegner in Ersan Mondtag’s “wagner — der ring des nibelungen (a piece like fresh chopped eschenwood).”Birgit HupfeldSurprisingly, the music is one of the less exciting parts of the show, in which Wagner’s gods, dwarves and hapless humans cavort in an oversize kitchen. Or perhaps the set is a collective delusion created by Wotan, the head god, who keeps everyone confined to an asylum.Following the general contours of Wagner’s tetralogy, Köck’s version seems inspired by “Rein Gold,” the Austrian Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek’s Marxist deconstruction of the “Ring.” Köck also puts an environmental gloss on the epic, while interrogating the nature of myth and history.Like “Fabian” and “Vernon Subutex,” this production lasts more than four hours. And though it does drag here and there, it never did when Stefanie Reinsperger’s Brünnhilde or Corinna Kirchhoff’s Wotan was onstage.In late June, Mondtag had three new shows running in Berlin, including his first dance piece, “Joy of Life.” Next season, he is scheduled to make his debut at Deutsche Oper Berlin with a staging of Rued Langgaard’s “Antikrist.”Like Mondtag, Pinar Karabulut, 34, is one of today’s most pointedly idiosyncratic young German theater directors.“The Leap From the Ivory Tower,” at the Münchner Kammerspiele in Munich, feels more mature than some of the director’s other recent productions. At two-and-a-half hours without intermission, it’s a fascinating deep dive into the life and wide-ranging work of the German writer Gisela Elsner, who committed suicide in 1992.Gro Swantje Kohlhof, left, in Pinar Karabulut’s “The Leap From the Ivory Tower.”Emma SzabóIn one striking scene, German children in a bombed-out city play at being concentration camp guards and prisoners. In another, former Nazis set out for a hunt in the Bavarian forest. Later, the writer finds herself attacked by a clueless West German TV anchor during a cringe-worthy interview.The show blends grotesque and unsettling humor with energetic performances and surreal touches. One of the few missteps is a film screened as part of the production about sad bourgeois couples engaging in orgies, the subject of Elsner’s novel “The Touch Ban.” Overlong and meandering, it recalls the sordid exuberance of the copious live video in “Fabian.”Nevertheless, there is something liberating about Karabulut and Mondtag that audiences here respond to. I’m convinced that we’ll be seeing more of their stylish aesthetic as the once avant-garde provocations of the past become nostalgia-laden chestnuts.Fabian, or Going to the Dogs. Directed by Frank Castorf. Berliner Ensemble.Vernon Subutex 1. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Berlin Schaubühne.“wagner — der ring des nibelungen (a piece like fresh chopped eschenwood).” Directed by Ersan Montag. Berliner Ensemble.The Leap From the Ivory Tower. Directed by Pınar Karabulut. Münchner Kammerspiele.All shows will return next season. More

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      Yale Drama Goes Tuition-Free With $150 Million Gift From David Geffen

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      Starting in August, the drama school plans to eliminate tuition for returning and future students, removing a barrier to entry for low-income students and those worried about debt.The billionaire David Geffen is giving $150 million to Yale School of Drama, allowing one of the nation’s most prestigious programs to stop charging tuition.The graduate school, which enrolls about 200 students in programs that include acting, design, directing and playwriting, announced the gift on Wednesday, and said it would rename itself the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University.Yale said it believes the gift is the largest in the history of American theater.The school said that, starting in August, it would eliminate tuition for all returning and future students in its masters, doctoral and certificate programs. Tuition at the school had been $32,800 per year.The move should remove a barrier to entry for low-income students and those worried about incurring high student debt before entering an often low-paying field.“We know, because people have told us, that there are potential applicants out there who think they could never afford graduate theater training at an Ivy League school,” said James Bundy, the drama school dean. He said he hoped that by going tuition-free, that obstacle would diminish.He also said that he hoped that the move would lessen the impact of student debt on the career choices graduates make.“By reducing the debt burden of the average student, we create more resilient artists and managers who are able to make braver artistic choices — they’re able to take that downtown play and they don’t have to have a career selling real estate on the side,” he said. “Not every artist is going to break through at the age of 25 or 26 or 27. Certain kinds of careers take time to build, and entering the professions with less debt is going to make for more interesting and more resounding choices in the long run.”The drama school is home to the Yale Repertory Theater, and its graduates include Meryl Streep, Lynn Nottage and Lupita Nyong’o.It will become the second program at Yale to eliminate tuition; in 2005 the Yale School of Music did so. There are a handful of other tuition-free graduate programs around the country, including N.Y.U.’s medical school.The university’s president, Peter Salovey, said he hoped more schools would follow, particularly in the areas of nursing and public health, where students tend to graduate with high debt and pursue careers that are not highly lucrative.“In general, what should be happening in higher education is an attempt to reduce the financial burden on individuals and families associated with undergraduate education and graduate and professional education,” Salovey said. “I’d love to do this for other programs as well, but it will take the generosity of donors to make it happen.”Geffen, 78, made his fortune in the music and film businesses, and is currently worth about $10 billion, according to Forbes. He has become a major philanthropist with an interest in the arts, previously giving $150 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, $100 million to Lincoln Center for the renovation of the concert hall where the New York Philharmonic performs and $100 million to the Museum of Modern Art.Geffen, through a Yale spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed, but Salovey said the Yale gift came about after years of conversations between the university and Geffen’s foundation. Geffen once taught a seminar at Yale, in the late 1970s, about the music industry, and Salovey said that experience had been positive for Geffen; Salovey also said the university had been aware of Geffen’s interest in supporting higher education and the arts, and had looked for projects that might appeal to those interests.Geffen has maintained a variety of connections to theater throughout his career: In the 1980s, he was among the producers of the original Off Broadway production of “Little Shop of Horrors,” and in the 1990s, he gave the founding gift for the Geffen Playhouse, a major theater in Los Angeles. Over the years he has been credited as a producer of nine Broadway shows, from “Dreamgirls” to the upcoming revival of “The Music Man.”Salovey said he hopes in the future that Yale will be able to build a new theater that will also house the drama school; that project would have to be financed through a separate fund-raising effort, he said. More

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      ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ to Slim Down Before Broadway Return

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      Reducio! The play, which had been performed in two parts, will be condensed and restaged in one part when it returns this fall.“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the sprawling stage play that imagines Harry and his friends as grown-ups and their children as wizards-in-training, will be substantially restructured before returning to Broadway this fall.The play, which had been staged in two parts before the pandemic, will return as a single show on Nov. 16.The show was widely acclaimed, winning the Olivier Award for best new play when it opened in London, and the Tony Award for best new play when it opened in New York. But it was costly to develop, costly to run, and costly for theatergoers, who had to buy tickets to two shows to experience it fully.The play’s lead producers, Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, in a joint statement attributed their decision to “the challenges of remounting and running a two-part show in the U.S. on the scale of ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,’ and the commercial challenges faced by the theater and tourism industries emerging from the global shutdowns.”The show will continue to run in two parts in London; Melbourne, Australia; and Hamburg, Germany, but will be a single part in New York, San Francisco and Toronto. It was not immediately clear how long that single part would be; the two parts have a total running time of about 5 hours and 15 minutes.Structured essentially as a stage sequel to J.K. Rowling’s seven wildly popular “Harry Potter” novels, the show was the most expensive nonmusical play ever to land on Broadway, costing $35.5 million to mount, and another estimated $33 million to redo Broadway’s Lyric Theater. Before the pandemic, the play was routinely grossing around $1 million a week on Broadway — an enviable number for most plays, but not enough for this one, with its large company and the expensive technical elements that undergird its stage magic.The play, a high-stakes magical adventure story with thematic through lines about growing up and raising children, was written by Jack Thorne and directed by John Tiffany, based on a story credited to Rowling, Thorne and Tiffany. Thorne and Tiffany said they had been working on a new version of the show during the pandemic, which, they said, “has given us a unique opportunity to look at the play with fresh eyes.”The writers did not say what kind of changes they would make, but the production promised that the new version would still deliver “all the amazing magic, illusions, stagecraft and storytelling set around the same powerful narrative.”“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” began its stage life in London, opening in the summer of 2016, and winning nine Olivier awards — the most of any play — in 2017. It arrived on Broadway in 2018, picked up six Tony Awards, and initially sold very strongly, grossing about $2 million a week. But the sales softened over time, as average ticket prices fell, apparently because of a combination of the lengthy time commitment and the need to buy two tickets to see the whole story, which made it particularly expensive for families.The show has been expanding globally — adding productions in San Francisco and Australia, and planning its first production in a language other than English for Hamburg — making restructuring complicated. But the producers have apparently decided to go to a one-part structure in North America, while maintaining the two-part structure elsewhere in the world, as they try to find the formula for long-term global success. According to the production, the play has already been seen by 4.5 million people.Tickets for the Broadway production will go on sale July 12; ticket prices have not yet been announced. The San Francisco production is scheduled to resume performances at the Curran theater next Jan. 11, and the Toronto production is to begin performances next May at the Ed Mirvish Theater.The two-part play is already running in Melbourne and is scheduled to reopen in London on Oct. 14 and to resume previews in Hamburg on Dec. 1. More