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      Processing the Pandemic at the Manchester International Festival

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      The annual arts event in the north of England suggests that focusing on community and inclusiveness could be a natural, post-pandemic outcome for artists.MANCHESTER, England — “Your City, Your Festival.” The slogan is emblazoned on the 2,000-odd posters strung up around the city center here, above pictures of ethnically diverse faces of various genders and ages. That would be the Manchester International Festival, which, against considerable odds, in a region of England particularly affected by the pandemic, opened on schedule on July 1. (It runs through July 18.)Since its inception in 2007, this festival has had a distinctive identity: It presents only new work, across multiple disciplines, usually through high-octane creative collaborations. But this year, despite the (mostly virtual) presence of artists from 22 countries, the festival feels more local than international, with a strong focus on community, inclusiveness and political engagement, mostly expressed through film and the visual arts.The pandemic’s influence on this is clear. Most of the international participants have not been able to travel to Manchester to research, rehearse or perform. Live performance in theaters is still a risky gamble for producers, and the shared productions that have made ambitious projects financially possible in the past have been off the table.About two-thirds of the 2021 program comprises planned projects that had to be reconfigured “because artists couldn’t be here, or we couldn’t rely on having live audiences,” said John McGrath, the artistic director of the festival. The remainder, he added, were new commissions that “weren’t even previously on our radar.” (The $4.15 million budget is about two-thirds of the previous festival amount, he said.)One of the reconfigured events was Boris Charmatz’s “Sea Change,” which opened the festival on Thursday. Originally planned as an outdoor dance performance before 4,000 people, it instead ran for three hours along Deansgate, a wide central shopping thoroughfare. Timed slots controlled the number of onlookers strolling past the 149 performers, mostly local and nonprofessional, who were arranged in a long, continuous line down the center of the street. As sound reverberated from speakers along the trajectory, the performers gesticulated, shouted, whispered and contorted, before running to touch and displace another in the next group, in an ongoing game of tag.Themes emerged and mutated. One group counted down repetitively from 100; another ran in place in different ways; a third shouted out angry slogans (“My body, my choice!” “Boris, out, out, out!” “Free, free Palestine!”). Others reached out hungrily, lay shrieking on the ground or whooped with exultation. “That’s just how I felt after lockdown ended,” a passer-by said with a laugh to her companion.“All the gestures were linked to current circumstances,” Charmatz wrote in an email after the performance. “The anger about not being able to dance, not being able to touch one another, to be between life and death. Every participant interpreted these ideas in his or her own way.”From left, Sean Garratt, Charmene Pang, Jahmarley Bachelor, Kennedy Junior Muntanga and Annie Edwards in “The Global Playground.” Tristram Kenton“Sea Change” was touching and ambitious in scale but not especially memorable as an artistic enterprise. Neither was the children’s show, “Global Playground,” directed by Sue Buckmaster, which incorporated dance, theater, music, puppetry and ventriloquism. Presented in the round, its central conceit involved a director (Sean Garratt) trying rather haplessly to make a dance movie as first his camera, then a brash puppet, talked back to him, while four charming onstage dancers (Jahmarley Bachelor, Annie Edwards, Kennedy Junior Muntanga and Charmene Pang) eluded his control.Gregory Maqoma’s highly varied choreography for these dancers (as well as Thulani Chauke on two large screens at the sides of the stage — a nod to travel problems during Covid-19) and Garratt’s ventriloquist skills were the best parts of the unevenly paced show, which meandered from one set piece to another. More

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      A Call to Diversify Theater Stage Managers

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      New initiatives aim to broaden the pool of stage managers of color and introduce antiracist practices into graduate training.Perhaps the hardest-working people in theater, stage managers oversee all aspects of a production. They work closely with the director to mark down every piece of staging — from where the actors and sets are placed, to the sound and lighting cues. During “tech week,” when a show loads into a theater, they run the rehearsal process to ensure that technical aspects of a production flow smoothly before opening night.The stage manager is also responsible for communicating with all the various backstage teams, from the lighting and sound experts to the dressers helping actors do quick changes.“A stage manager is like a conductor,” said Lisa Porter, who over a 25-year career has worked on shows at the Public Theater and the La Jolla Playhouse, among others. “We conduct the tempo and the tone of rehearsals throughout the entire process.“That’s why,” she added, “I believe fluency around antiracism is so important.”Like many positions in theater, however, stage management has remained stubbornly homogeneous. A study published by Actors’ Equity Association (the union for both actors and stage managers) revealed that between 2016 and 2019, 76 percent of stage managers employed on theatrical productions across the country were white. Only 2.63 percent were Black. As with many industries and areas of the arts, the George Floyd protests forced Broadway into a conversation about representation, and Black stage managers and their white allies have been active participants. They are establishing new organizations for racial equity, creating more opportunities for up-and-coming stage managers of color, and even examining aspects of their job that may do more harm than good.Because stage management is a behind-the-scenes job, many people who grow up doing theater don’t know it exists.Narda E. Alcorn, who is stage managing Shakespeare in the Park’s “Merry Wives” this summer, started as an actress. During her sophomore year at Los Angeles County High School of the Arts, she realized she wasn’t the best in her class, but discovered another set of skills.“I was very aware of diversity, representation, and trying to be inclusive, but I was not actively antiracist” until recently, said Narda E. Alcorn, a veteran stage manager.Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times“I knew how to anticipate people’s needs,” she said, “and how communicate to different types of people, like how to speak differently to an actor versus a director or a production person. I didn’t realize there was a job for it until my teacher, thank goodness, recognized it in me.”Alcorn, who is Black, received a BFA in production management from DePaul University and an MFA in stage management from Yale Drama School, where she met Porter, who is white.They’ve been friends ever since, and are both professors of stage management: Porter at the University of California at San Diego, Alcorn at Yale. They incorporated their respective experiences into their 2019 book, “Stage Management Theory as a Guide to Practice.”“Race has always been a factor when Lisa has received a job and when I’ve received a job, conscious or unconsciously,” Alcorn said. “However, in our country, whiteness is not named: It is the default, the norm. Peers have often cited my race as the reason I was hired, whereas with Lisa they cite her experience and skill. For years I felt diminished and tokenized.” (Porter agreed with her colleague’s assertions.)When Black stage managers do get hired, it can be difficult for them to make their voices heard.After graduating with an MFA in stage management from the Columbia University School of the Arts, R. Christopher Maxwell was hired to work on the acclaimed Broadway production of “Oklahoma!” But instead of being put on the stage management team, he was hired as a production assistant, a lower position in the hierarchy.Maxwell, at center, working on “Mlima’s Tale” at Repertory Theater of St. LouisNeeta Satam for The New York TimesThe play script from which Maxwell calls cues.Neeta Satam for The New York TimesLaying down marks on the stage.Neeta Satam for The New York Times“I didn’t have a voice in the room,” said Maxwell, who is currently assistant stage manager for Lynn Nottage’s play “Mlima’s Tale” at the Repertory Theater of St. Louis.Even on shows where he has been a more prominent part of the production, Maxwell said he has struggled to get others to listen to him. On one show, he said he tried to explain to a white production manager that the dancers in the chorus had to wear a certain kind of shoe that matched their skin tone. “They didn’t listen and bought the wrong kind of shoes,” he said.Before the murder of George Floyd, Alcorn, Maxwell and other stage managers of color had rarely spoken up about their experiences.Lisa Dawn Cave, who has been stage managing since the 1990s, helped found Broadway & Beyond.Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times“After George Floyd, people were able to see the disparity in how people of color are treated,” said Lisa Dawn Cave, a Black woman who has been stage managing since the late 1990s. “It’s not that people didn’t take it seriously, it’s that they didn’t see it as widely as they thought, or they’d say, ‘Yes, it’s happening, but we hired one person of color on the team so it’s fine.’”The statistics from the Equity study show the importance of making sure there are Black stage managers in the pipeline. “I only knew four or five of them,” Maxwell said. “So it became my personal mission to see who was out there.”As part of that mission, he co-founded the Black Theater Caucus, where he is currently vice president of production artists. They have partnered with organizations like Cave’s Broadway & Beyond to create initiatives for stage managers of color who have been overlooked.Maxwell has become a delegate to Equity, where he helped to successfully pass a bill that resolves to track the hiring practices of the union’s bargaining partners, increase digital access to auditions, and recognize Indigenous people in union communications.He has also highlighted Black and Latino workers in an Instagram series called Celebrating 101 Black Stage Managers. The Stage Managers’ Association took notice, offering free membership and setting up meetings with veteran stage managers for those singled out.Matthew Stern, who has been stage managing for more than 20 years, runs the Broadway Stage Management Symposium, an annual networking event that created scholarships this year that allowed five stage managers of color to attend the May conference.Matthew Stern runs an annual networking event which this year created scholarships to bring in stage managers from underrepresented groups.Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times“It makes you realize that of course there are great Black stage managers,” said Stern, who is white. “We just don’t know them because we haven’t been in the same circles, and because of our circumstances and our privilege.”American regional theaters have also stepped up. On June 30, the Alliance Theater in Atlanta announced that Shaina Pierce, a Black graduate of the University of Alabama, would be their first holder of a new fellowship for BIPOC stage managers.For Alcorn, change needs to start with training itself.In the past, she said, “I was very aware of diversity, representation and trying to be inclusive, but I was not actively antiracist, because I didn’t actually recognize it as a value. Now I believe it’s as important as empathy, kindness and striving for excellence.”In a 2020 essay for the theater website HowlRound, Alcorn and Porter admitted that as stage managers, they had “unconsciously and complicitly upheld white supremacy culture within the production process.” Now when she teaches stage management, Alcorn shows students how to dismantle preconceptions that she believes can cause harm, like perfectionism.“Stage managers are human beings who make mistakes and errors like every other member of a team,” she said. “I prefer to teach the value of excellence,” which she defines as “addressing mistakes with grace and generosity, and moving forward with greater understanding.” More

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      Review: ‘The Watering Hole’ Can’t Quite Quench a Thirst

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      The collaborative project conceived by Lynn Nottage is too heterogeneous and muddled to rally around one clear theme or concept.The day I went to the Signature Theater it was so hellishly hot out that it felt as if the air was clinging to my skin. So I stepped into the air-conditioned coolness of the Pershing Square Signature Center for “The Watering Hole,” a theatrical installation conceived and curated by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon. What I’d hoped for was refreshment. What I left with was a thirst for a more memorable and neatly composed offering.“The Watering Hole,” directed by Haymon, is a collaborative project featuring work by Haymon and Nottage along with Christina Anderson, Matt Barbot, Montana Levi Blanco, Stefania Bulbarella, Amith Chandrashaker, nicHi douglas, Iyvon E., Justin Ellington, Emmie Finckel, Vanessa German, Ryan J. Haddad, Phillip Howze, Haruna Lee, Campbell Silverstein, Charly Evon Simpson and Rhiana Yazzie. For each 80-minute show, a small audience is split into two groups and led through the lobby, dressing rooms, theaters and backstage areas, where they encounter sculptures, audiovisual installations and interactive activities.Part of the conceit, after all, is locating the theater as a gathering space — a place for collaboration. At least I think it is. The production is too heterogeneous and muddled to rally around one clear theme or concept.The grand staircase of the Signature Center is the first stop. The whole space is outlined with sea-blue walking paths and water drop stickers marking where to stand at a safe social distance. Audio interviews from the artists, in which most of them talk about ancestry, play through speakers. So this show is about heritage and ancestry? Well, no. Because there’s all of the water, like a video of Haddad in which he talks about how he, as a disabled man, learned how to swim. So perhaps it’s about independence and resiliency? Then what about German and Lee’s original song, “This Room Is a Broken Heart,” which plays on a mind-numbing loop in the lobby and talks about water as a symbol of grief? And Anderson and Haymon’s karaoke-inspired piece in a dressing room, where there’s a “Big”-style floor piano that you’re invited to use to accompany a song playing on the TV?These are the parts of the show that fly off into the theater ether, like the piece that shows a projection of a figure in a lotus pose who talks about energies, frequencies and chakras. But then this is paired with more literal meditations on water: In one part of the show, in some back hallway, there’s a corner set up for a “dance break,” with a mound of sand, blue and pink fluorescent lights and some slightly deflated beach balls. In that same hallway there’s a corkboard with beach photos and water-themed poems by Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, Ada Limón and Natalie Shapero, among others.The most traditional theater piece, “Spray Cap” (created by Barbot and Chandrashaker with Colon-Zayas), a monologue about yearning to come together and celebrate summer after a time of pandemic and isolation, is also the strongest. It’s not just the straightforward approach but the cohesion of it — the clarity of voice and themes, and the clear tie to the installation at large — that highlights what the rest of the production lacks. Even the set design — a stage with two park benches and some crates arranged around a giant hydrant that puffs out steam — fits perfectly with the speaker’s desire for everyone to “come out” and let themselves go in the brutal heat of a summer when people can finally meet up and touch.“Spray Cap” has one of the few designs that actually work in the installation, unlike the handwritten notes and scrolls with words and reflections taped on the walls throughout the complex. Haddad’s video is played in a dark room with a ceiling that projects water scenes and a reflective floor that matches the same cool blue of the pool. And one of three lobby sailboat sculptures — an ornate medley of trinkets and knickknacks like bird figurines, shells and water bottles, along with a white baby piano — is a stunning visual work by German and Lee.But all this still fails to illuminate the upshot. Because “The Watering Hole” also seems to have an interest in a kind of community service. Nottage has said that the “inspiration and organizing principle” of the project came from a collaborative reflection on the Signature as a meeting place. And so one part of the show invites the audience to write on little “sails” what makes them feel safe and add them to a boat in the lobby. And another boat in the lobby holds postcards that audience members are prompted to fill out and write to incarcerated people. Though well-intentioned, it’s hard to find the connective tissue here or, as Nottage says, the organizing principle.Whatever “The Watering Hole” means to express, it’s drowned in this sea of artists.The Watering HoleThrough Aug. 8 Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; 212-244-7529, signaturetheatre.org. More

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      Review: In ‘Enemy of the People,’ Water and Democracy Are Poisoned

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      Ann Dowd stars in a contemporary rewrite of Ibsen’s play that forces a community, played by the audience, to make a series of fateful choices.Elections in Weston Springs are so simple. When a question comes before the townspeople, they confer in small groups, reach a consensus, press a button marked “X” or “O” and get the result, all within a minute. To a New Yorker, that sounds nice right about now.But alas, Weston Springs, with its world-famous hot-water baths and grass-roots democracy, isn’t real. It’s the invented setting for “Enemy of the People,” Robert Icke’s enjoyable if gimmicky rewrite of the 1882 Ibsen drama originally called “En Folkefiende.” That play, structured traditionally in five acts, had 11 speaking roles and heaps of extras; Icke’s 95-minute version, which opened Wednesday night at the Park Avenue Armory, is a shiny one-woman show starring the formidable Ann Dowd as everyone.Well, not quite everyone. For the occasion, the Armory’s 55,000-square-foot Drill Hall has been set up as a kind of laboratory of democracy, with a map of Weston Springs painted on the floor and 45 tables, seating two to five citizens each, deployed at different “addresses.” My pod of four was at Table 16, otherwise known as 16 Waivers Way.So the audience plays the extras, each table getting one vote. As Dowd explains in a brief prologue, the results of the five “elections” that take place during the performance will affect the direction and even the content of the play, and help us answer its overriding question: “What does this community think?”I’m not sure that goal was ever achieved. True, we voted on issues raised by the plot, which involves a public health crisis that butts up against an economic one when Professor Joan Stockman, chief scientific officer of the Weston baths, discovers lead in the water at levels even higher than the levels found in Flint, Mich., in 2015. (In the Ibsen version, the pollutant was apparently salmonella, which caused typhoid.) Surely the thing to do, Joan assumes, is to shut down the joint until new pipes can be laid, regardless of cost.But the mayor — who, as it happens, is Joan’s older brother, Peter — doesn’t see it that way, or can’t afford to. The baths are not merely successful in themselves but have brought prosperity to the town as a whole. Since the complex was refurbished, tourism has increased ninefold, drawing people to its pools and potations while also creating an ancillary industry of high-end hotels and candle shops. When Peter learns that remediating the problem will take at least five years, and untold millions, he conveniently begins to suspect that the science is wrong.The formidable Ann Dowd plays all of the characters, including the two opposing siblings at the heart of the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat both siblings are played by Dowd is a problem, and a plus. The plus is that Dowd is, as fans of “The Leftovers” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” know, an endlessly and effortlessly compelling actor, apparently unafraid of any extreme of human depravity. Her baseline naturalism — just looking at her face, taking in her posture, you believe that whomever she’s playing exists — allows for some terrifying flights into surreal psychology.That’s the problem, too. Ibsen already loaded the deck in creating the contrasting siblings: Thomas — as Joan was originally known — was candid but excitable and arrogant; Peter, devious but phlegmatic and cordial. Because Dowd is playing both, and because she is a tiny figure on Hildegard Bechtler’s giant catwalk of a stage as it branches out amid the tables, she must push both characterizations to extremes.So Peter, as projected live on jumbo screens, is no longer a worm but a snake, making arguments that (it seemed to me) were utterly transparent in their hypocrisy. And Joan, in return, is a mad fury instead of a mere idealist. As she bullies her brother, she undermines her positions by making them seem personal or even pathological. (She’s nasty to her husband, too, as Ibsen’s character never was to his wife.) Far from receiving the gratitude she expects for saving lives, she manages to make a mayor who is willing to sacrifice people for profit seem almost prudent and reasonable.I suppose that isn’t so extreme. We have only to look at Flint — or at Covid-19 or the building collapse in Surfside, Fla. — to see how often, in real life, the advice of experts may be perverted by political or even democratic means. (Condominium boards, no less than municipal officials, are elected.) Biologists, virologists and engineers are just some of the modern-day scientists who become “enemies of the people” by trying to save them.But neither Ibsen’s Thomas nor Icke’s Joan is able to stop at advancing a lifesaving crusade; both extend their arguments into weird, troubling territory. Enraged, Joan shouts that “molecules are not subject to majorities” and “facts are not a democracy” — viewpoints that soon merge into a profoundly elitist and even eugenicist worldview. In a properly organized society, she suggests, only experts would be allowed to vote. Or maybe only her.In writing Joan this way, Icke, the director of the acclaimed Andrew Scott “Hamlet” in London and the excessively brutal “1984” on Broadway, puts an even heavier thumb on the scales than Ibsen, never a light touch, did. Clearly the attempt is to balance the arguments, or at least to balance our antipathy toward them. The voting likewise forces our hands, as the ballot issues are worded tendentiously. The last of them — “Who is the enemy of the people?” — requires you to choose between Peter and Joan, as if that were how democracy worked or was even, at least at Table 16, a question.In Robert Icke’s version of the Ibsen classic, the audience is forced to consider whether democracy is the same as consensus, and their votes determine the direction of the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe voting concept is further trivialized by the doomy “quiz” music that plays as you deliberate, and, more fatally, by the outcome’s barely altering the experience of the play. Apparently, Dowd performs different scenes at two points, depending on the tally; on Wednesday, we met a local physician and the mayor’s public relations chief, whereas other audiences may spend time with Joan’s husband and a newspaper editor. But any one audience can only know the one sequence it sees, so the dramatic value of the gimmick is moot.Which is not to say that “Enemy of the People” is too. Though it has stripped away most of the detail that Ibsen uses to dramatize the way civic crises arise from (and filter back down to) domestic ones, it offers a compensatory challenge. Icke asks us to dramatize these issues for ourselves, at our own tables. Communally, we are forced to consider: Is democracy the same as consensus? Is the ballot the best guarantor of good policy?I ask because the four residents of 16 Waivers Way, split 2-2 on a key issue and unable to decide how to decide, ran out of time without hitting “X” or “O.” Ranked voting, anyone?Enemy of the PeopleThrough Aug. 8 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; 212-933-5812, armoryonpark.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘The Great Filter’ Review: Earth Men, Home Alone

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      Frank Winters’s play, about two astronauts in lockdown after a mission, uneasily grafts tropes borrowed from hard sci-fi and odd-couple comedy.An “experiment that could forever revolutionize the way that humanity interacts with the cosmos.”“TF-7 cloud seeding.”“Terraformation initiative.”Men in NASA-branded outfits speak these lines, which are not even linked to a Jeff Bezos joke: You don’t often hear this kind of talk onstage, so having it bandied about in the new show “The Great Filter” elicits a frisson of delight for audiences drawn to the tiny intersection of the Venn diagram of theater and science fiction.Sadly, Frank Winters’s play squanders that promise, and ends up as stuck in place as its two characters, a pair of astronauts held in lockdown after their return from an expedition. (The show, at the Wild Project through Saturday, will stream July 29-Aug. 29, with all the ticket sales donated to the Cultural Solidarity Fund.)David and Eli (Jason Ralph and Trevor Einhorn, co-stars in the Syfy series “The Magicians”) have been kept in isolation for three weeks in tight living quarters. James Ortiz’s excellent white set has a slightly old-fashioned vibe, vaguely spacey but not antiseptic, and suggests a hazy timeline for the show: This could be an old Apollo mission we’ve never heard of, or a near future in which terraforming other planets has become a matter of survival. (Ortiz’s own play “The Woodsman,” which told the back story of the Tin Man from Oz, did quite well a few years ago.)Countdown to what? Einhorn and Ralph in limbo.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWinters does not really explore that angle, nor does he get into specifics about what Eli and David were up to in space, because his main concern is the return to Earth. One day, just before a scheduled news conference, the men are facing radio silence from the control center. Comms are dead, except for one message, equally cryptic and disturbing: “No survivors,” in Morse code.Making things even more tense, the men notice a countdown clock in their habitat; there is about an hour left on it, and they don’t know what will happen when it hits zero.David, the mission commander, brainstorms: “If we could somehow redirect the pressure from one of the back up generators into a J-cell unit with enough force,” he muses. But this is not “The Martian,” in which Matt Damon jury-rigged his way through hostile circumstances. Instead, we are in the kind of story where a gun mysteriously appears — what? — and building a bomb becomes an option.While David tries to find solutions, including dumb ones (see: bomb), Eli paces around, listening to himself talk and talk and talk. He’s classified as a “specialist” but it’s unclear of what, and it comes as a shock to learn that he’s a college professor.“The Great Filter” uneasily tries to graft together tropes borrowed from hard sci-fi and odd-couple comedy. At times you could picture John Mulaney and Nick Kroll doing an Eli and David skit, and maybe the show, which Winters also directed, if it went all in on the comedy. This would also play to the combined strength of Ralph and Einhorn — who founded the “apparel and whatnot” company Looks Like a Great Time, one of the show’s producers — and have a natural rapport that enriches the characters’ opposites-thrown-together dynamic.As it is, the play can’t decide what it wants to do, or how, and just give us hints of what could have been. It is not lost in space, but, more prosaically, close to home base.The Great FilterLive through July 3 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; on-demand July 29 to Aug. 29; thewildproject.com. Running time: 1 hour. More

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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