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      New York Theater Workshop Plans a Summer Reopening

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      The Off Broadway institution unveiled a “superseason” of performances beginning in August, and continuing through 2022-23.One major Off Broadway institution announced its return to live performances on Tuesday when New York Theater Workshop unveiled its 2021-22 season, which will begin in August and overwhelmingly feature projects by women and people of color.Among the five productions announced is “Sanctuary City,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok, which was eight preview performances into its run last March before the pandemic brought live theater to a standstill. That play, about two teenage children of undocumented immigrants, will be directed by Rebecca Frecknall and is planned for September.New York Theater Workshop also said it had slated four shows so far for 2022-23, including a staging of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” that had originally been planned for 2020. Directed by Sam Gold and adapted by Clare Barron, its starry cast was set to include Greta Gerwig, Oscar Isaac, Steve Buscemi, Chris Messina, Lola Kirke and more. The new ensemble hasn’t been announced, but Jeremy Blocker, the theater’s managing director, said in an interview that “the goal is to keep that incredible company together.”Unveiling two seasons at once — a “superseason,” as James C. Nicola, the theater’s artistic director, coined it in an interview — is a way to both “make a big noise” about coming back to the stage and to honor commitments made to artists before the pandemic, he said. But perhaps most notably, it offers some breathing room for his successor when Nicola steps down in June 2022 after leading the theater for 34 years — a tenure that has included early runs of the acclaimed “Slave Play” and Tony Award-winning musicals like “Rent,” “Hadestown” and “Once.”“I realized how, having done it for 30-something-odd years now, how personal this is — how personal it is to be in a conversation about work that’s still in the state of being imagined by an artist,” Nicola said. “It’s going to be a really interesting challenge to not be a part of that for a while once I leave.”The 2021-22 season is set to open in August with Whitney White’s “Semblance,” which is being billed as a “filmed theatrical experience” on the perception of Black women, presented both virtually and as an immersive installation. White, who last year won an Obie Award for her direction of “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” will also direct the world premiere of “On Sugarland,” written by the fellow Obie winner Aleshea Harris, in early 2022.This fall, Kristina Wong will build on her streamed work “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord” for a new show about creating a homemade face-covering enterprise during the pandemic. It will be directed by Chay Yew. And closing out the season is the musical “Dreaming Zenzile” — a world premiere based on the life of the South African musician and activist Miriam Makeba — written and performed by the singer Somi Kakoma, and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz.“What is emerging to me in that season ahead is the nature of community — the necessity, the compulsion, that we have as a species to gather,” Nicola said. “To be a part of a family.”Following “Three Sisters” in 2022 is “american (tele)visions,” a multimedia memory play about an undocumented Mexican family, written by Victor I. Cazares — the theater’s playwright in residence — and directed by Rubén Polendo. Liliana Padilla’s “How to Defend Yourself,” about a group of college students channeling their emotions through a self-defense class after a fellow student is raped, will follow. Padilla is set to co-direct with Steph Paul and Rachel Chavkin, whose New York Theater Workshop credits include the Off Broadway run of “Hadestown.”That season’s final production, of those announced so far, is “The Half-God of Rainfall,” a contemporary myth, written by Inua Ellams (“Barber Shop Chronicles”), about a hero who is half Nigerian mortal and half Greek god.Coronavirus safety protocols might change, but for now the theater is planning to ask audience members for proof of vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test, and to require that masks be worn in the house.Performance schedules have not yet been announced, but when live shows return to New York Theater Workshop’s stage, employees in the industry who lost work during the pandemic will have one less financial worry: Their tickets will be free. More

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      ‘Bill’s 44th’ Review: Where Are All the Party People?

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      This poignant, comic puppet play, by Dorothy James and Andy Manjuck, is as much about the ingenuity of the mind as it is about loneliness.There are shows so delightfully unexpected that you hesitate, when writing about them, to give anything away. “Bill’s 44th” is one of those — a poignant, comic puppet play for grown-ups about a birthday party whose guests fail to appear.Perhaps they had been to one of Bill’s shindigs before. They might have anticipated the forlorn tray of crudités, with celery sticks browning at the ends. Or foreseen that he would spike the punch to near-lethal levels, then want to bust some disco moves. With his bald papier-mâché head and thick Tom Selleck mustache, Bill is not, truth be told, the suavest of men.He is, however, enormously endearing, especially in his jaunty party hat. And in Dorothy James and Andy Manjuck’s “Bill’s 44th,” which had a brief live (and live-streamed) run last week at Dixon Place and is streaming on demand starting Tuesday, he is sweetly eager — impatient, even — to fill his solitary apartment with camaraderie and celebration.But in a wordless piece that is as much about the ingenuity of the mind as it is about loneliness, getting ditched is not such a formidable obstacle to having company — not once the boozy punch kicks in and Bill’s imagination cuts loose.All head and torso, Bill has a middle-aged paunch that strains at his sweater. The rest of his body is built on an illusion. The hands that emerge from his cuffs belong to James and Manjuck; his legs are Manjuck’s. His isolation, meanwhile, belongs to all of us: our pre-vaccine pandemic selves, having to make do for so long without the people we wished would surround us.Let me stop right here and tell you that this not-quite-hourlong show is buoyant, mesmerizing, joy-inducing — and that I’m about to wreck some of its more winsome visual surprises, which you might prefer not to see coming. Should you read the rest of this review? Maybe not, if you’re planning to watch “Bill’s 44th.”Because this is also a show about the nature of puppetry, and puppets, it turns out, are all around us. That tray of crudités? Bill rustles through the carrot sticks and finds the makings of a cheery orange friend he dubs Cary. With drawn-on eyes and smiling mouth, this is a guest for Bill to clink plastic cups with. Soon the party balloons get faces, too, and social dynamics come into play. It’s only when Cary turns human-size that things get really wild, though, and Bill has a partner to dance with. (Jon Riddleberger rounds out the excellent team of puppeteers.)With jazzy music by Eamon Fogarty and dreamy lighting by M. Jordan Wiggins, “Bill’s 44th” plunges its audience fully into a fantasy that, for all its silliness, leads its hero through stubborn hope and bitter disappointment toward a feeling of comfort in his own skin and an awakening to the world around him.This isn’t the birthday that Bill had hoped to have. But for the audience, his 44th is a gift.Bill’s 44thAvailable on demand June 8-15; dixonplace.org More

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      Bruce Springsteen Will Return to Broadway in June

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      “Springsteen on Broadway” opens on June 26 at the St. James Theater; audience members will be required to show proof of full Covid-19 vaccination to enter.Bruce Springsteen is returning to Broadway.“Springsteen on Broadway,” the rock legend’s autobiographical show, which ran for 236 performances, including seven previews, in 2017 and 2018, will open on June 26 at the St. James Theater, at 246 W. 44th Street, and have additional performances through Sept. 4, according to an announcement. As of now, the show will be the first to open on Broadway since the pandemic shut down performances in March 2020. While some Broadway productions have set return dates as early as Aug. 4, most have targeted mid-September for their reopenings.Tickets go on sale Thursday at noon Eastern time through SeatGeek, the show’s official ticket seller. SeatGeek, a challenger to Ticketmaster, has a deal with Jujamcyn Theaters, which operates the St. James as well as the Walter Kerr Theater, where “Springsteen on Broadway” had its initial run.Although Broadway theaters and producers have said they plan to reopen their full lineup of shows after Labor Day, the speed of vaccination, and promising downward trend of coronavirus cases in the United States, have encouraged many performers and producers throughout the entertainment industry to move forward quickly.According to the show’s announcement, audience members will be required to show proof of full Covid-19 vaccination along with their tickets to enter the theater. Entry times will be staggered, and attendees will be required to fill out a Covid-19 health screening within 24 hours of the show.“Springsteen on Broadway” — which had its genesis in a private performance at the White House in January 2017, in the closing days of the Obama administration — is a mostly solo show by Springsteen, drawing from his catalog of hits and his 2016 autobiography, “Born to Run.” The show weaves in stories from throughout Springsteen’s career, with insights into how he wrote songs like “Born in the U.S.A.” (His wife, Patti Scialfa, joined him in some songs.)The show was a blockbuster hit, selling $113 million in tickets and playing to a total of 223,585 fans. It was also filmed for a Netflix special of the same title, which went online shortly after the last performance in December 2018.Proceeds from the opening night of “Springsteen on Broadway” will be donated to a number of charities, including the Boys & Girls Clubs of Monmouth County in New Jersey, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and Food Bank for New York City. More

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      How Lin-Manuel Miranda and Friends Made an Old Bookstore New

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      The century-old Drama Book Shop in Manhattan struggled for years. Then “Hamilton” happened.A sculptural representation of a bookworm — 140 feet of scripts and songbooks, twisted along a steel skeleton — corkscrews across the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan. It starts with ancient Greek texts and, 2,400 volumes later, spills into a pile that includes “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.”This 3,500-pound tribute to theatrical history is the centerpiece of the century-old bookstore’s new location, opening Thursday on West 39th Street.The shop — like so many bookstores around the country — had brushes with death, caused not only by e-commerce but also by fire and flood, before encountering a rent hike it could not withstand, in 2018. The beloved institution, where students, artists, scholars and fans could browse memoirs and bone up for auditions, was in danger of closing.Then came an unexpected rescue. Four men enriched by “Hamilton,” including the musical’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda; its director, Thomas Kail; its lead producer, Jeffrey Seller; and the theater owner, James L. Nederlander, bought the store from its longtime owners. Kail has a particularly close relationship with the shop — 20 years ago, just out of college, he formed a small theater company in its basement. After he teamed up with Miranda, the two worked on “In the Heights” there.“I was not born in a trunk; I was born in the basement of the Drama Book Shop,” Kail said. “All of my early creative conversations and relationships were forged in that shop, and the thought of it not existing was painful. I couldn’t imagine New York City without it, and I didn’t want to imagine New York City without it.”The store’s decorations include replicas of armchairs used in the musical “Hamilton.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times More

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      Peek at Broadway Comeback: Times Event With “Me and the Sky”

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      When The Times staged a musical number for its live event series, the performance served as a sneak preview of a theater world preparing for takeoff.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.In March, Zoe Gertz, an Australian actress, was asked by The New York Times if she would be interested in singing the soaring anthem “Me and the Sky” for an episode of its Offstage event series, which examines the theater industry during its pandemic hiatus. The number is from the Australian touring production of the 9/11 musical “Come From Away.”After teams worked on in-house music and stage direction, Ms. Gertz belted the ebullient anthem to the rafters of a simple stage at Her Majesty’s Theater in Melbourne, sans audience but backed by six musicians and five castmates of the production’s female ensemble. And it all came together in just over two weeks.“I am suddenly aliiiiiive,” Ms. Gertz sang with an irrepressible smile as she told of her character’s love for flying.The sentiment seems to be spreading. Broadway’s reopening will now occur in August. In Australia, “Frozen,” “Hamilton” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” were running at or near full capacity in Sydney and Melbourne for months (though masks were still required) until a recent lockdown in Melbourne put shows in that city on hold again. The performance for the Times event served as both a reminder of theater’s vitality during the pandemic and a preview of the energy to come.The musical number began to take shape in early March after The Times’s theater reporter, Michael Paulson, suggested recording a special video of the inspirational song for the Offstage series, which streamed live on April 29 and is still viewable by Times subscribers.“We wanted a song that was both good and would make sense out of context for people who hadn’t seen the show,” Mr. Paulson said. “It’s also a song that works without a very elaborate band or orchestra and is essentially a solo number.”The four-and-a-half-minute track chronicles the tale of the real-life American Airlines pilot Beverley Bass, who was among the pilots with planes full of passengers who were diverted to Newfoundland on Sept. 11, 2001.“One of the many emotions captured in this song is Beverley having to come to terms with the job she loves being put on hold, and not knowing when she might fly again,” said Rachel Karpf, the director of programming at The Times who helped plan the event with Beth Weinstein and Rachel Czipo. “We saw some parallels to the experience of theater workers in Australia and around the world this past year, as their industry was brought to a near-total standstill by the pandemic.”Ms. Karpf said the Events team began discussing ideas for the episode in early January with Mr. Paulson; Scott Heller, then The Times’s theater editor; and Damien Cave, the Sydney bureau chief. Mr. Cave and Mr. Paulson were working on a story about the return of Broadway shows in Australia, which has been much more successful at containing the virus than the United States. More

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      How Comfy Are Your Seats? The Space

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      We absolutely adore The Space Arts Centre. And not just because one of our reviewers also happens to be heavily involved! It’s a venue that promises a home for exciting new writing, offering a place to try out new works that might not otherwise get the chance to grow. We might not love every play we see there, but we love that they are always willing to take the risk to try something different. It’s what draws us back at every opportunity.

      So who better then to be the second venue in our How Comfy Are Your Seats? series than The Space’s Deputy Director, Matthew Jameson, to share more on why you really should be visiting this wonderful building soon.

      Let’s dive straight in, what’s your role at The Space?

      It was an ever shifting, no-two-days-the-same kind of job even before the pandemic, and now it’s even more varied. I tend to manage the visiting companies and productions, co-ordinate marketing, deal with site maintenance and handle in-house producing, with a few bits of dramaturgy, programming and directing thrown in. I’m also the livestream camera operator and currently the de facto bar manager (but don’t get me talking about the bar…)

      We’ll be honest, last time we come we got a little lost due to road works, tell us the best way to get there.

      Not a problem, every first visit is a step into the unknown, but it does get easier. You can’t go too far wrong with the 5 minutes walk from Mudchute DLR. And we’ve got 3 buses that stop right outside the venue with a helpful announcement from Canary Wharf, who have just streamlined the bus traffic. If you’re feeling leisurely, you can catch the Thames Clipper to Canary Wharf Pier, which is a lush journey from Central London or the East.

      Right, we know how to find you, but once we get there, what’s on offer before we head in for a show? Is it time to mention that bar?

      Oh go on, get me talking about the bar! We’ve recently taken on management of the in-house bar (now named ‘the Space Bar’) and we are loving being pub landlords. We’ve got a long, sun-trap beer garden for this weather as well as an atmospheric inside seating area just at the back above the theatre, converted from what used to be the church’s vestry. We’ve been listening to our artists and audiences about what they want from a bar, so have been making some changes to our stock which have been very popular. We’re in the process of re-opening the kitchen to bring back a limited menu, hopefully from mid/late June, which we’ll expand as we go.

      And once we head inside, what’s the size and layout for a show?

      Under social distancing, we’ve been operating in either end-on, or reverse end-on for our raised main stage. Currently our max capacity is 40, and we’ve already had some sold out shows since re-opening. We’re lucky that we have no fixed seating, so in non-Covid times, anything goes! In the round, traverse, promenade, you name it, someone has staged it here.

      What type of shows are The Space’s forte?

      We’re all about new writing and/or emerging artists. But ’emerging’ doesn’t just mean artists under 30! We’re all about giving a platform to companies who want to showcase their skills, make socially relevant work or just need a supportive environment to get their show off the ground. For internal productions, we’ve had a cracking run of new writing festivals pre, during and post-lockdowns, which we’re bringing home with the Foreword Festival (playing from Next Tuesday 8th with Laura Horton‘s Labyrinth Diet to open). We’ve got four new scripts which were selected from our script development programme, ScriptSpace, that we’re giving full productions to.

      What can people normally expect to pay for a ticket for a show?

      It’s largely up to the companies that perform with us, but we try to cap our standard price and concessions as £15 & £12. For online viewers, we’ve been conscious of economic accessibility, so our livestream prices operate on 3 bands: £10 standard, £15 supporters rate and £5 low income rate. We want to make sure that everyone who wants to see our shows can, regardless of financial or geographical barriers.

      Any personal highlights from past shows?

      We’ve had a lot of brilliant work during my time here. I always love work that fully embraces the uniqueness of the venue, so Threedumb Theatre‘s revolutionary The Black Cat was a great example of how you can truly embrace streaming and digital theatre fusion. I also have great memories of Two Fest, our last in-house, in-venue production before the pandemic, 13 plays over three bills across two weeks. Absolute madness, but nuanced, varied work throughout.

      Do you have any “they played here first” stories of big names or shows that started with you?

      It’s our 25th anniversary as a venue this September, so we’ve seen a fair few who are now household names (including Les Enfants Terrible) as well as our dear patron Sir Ian [McKellen], who rehearsed and kicked off his 80th birthday one-man show here. We’re more excited about the next steps and developments of recent projects such as Four O’Clock Flowers by Louise Breckon-Richards, which is hitting the film festival circuit having debuted as a play at the last Foreword Festival in 2019. The companies and artists we have at the Space today are tomorrow’s headliners, see them here first!

      What are the plans for the coming months then, what exciting shows have you got lined up for us?

      We’re currently programmed for our Summer/Autumn season until the end of October, which is a far longer season than we’ve ever had before, but we’ve had plenty of pre-Covid projects to reschedule as well as many new and exciting shows approach us. I’m particularly excited for our first partnership with the London Horror Festival in October (who are currently taking applications here). There’s also a lot of top secret things being lined up for the 25th anniversary, but you’ll have to watch this Space.

      So tell us just why we should all come along to see a show at The Space? What’s your unique selling point?

      It’s a gorgeous, grade II listed building with the most reasonably priced, atmospheric bar in London. The theatre itself is intimate enough to be personal and grand enough to be epic. The shows we programme are made by the theatre innovators of the future and you’ll want to see them here first.

      Finally, and obviously the most important question of all, how comfy are the chairs?

      The chairs themselves? More padded than average. But the legroom? Unbeatable!

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      Thanks to Matthew for finding time in his very busy day to chat with us. You can find a list of reviews and articles from the Space below. More

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      Review: Connection, Interrupted, in ‘Communion’

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      Christopher Chen’s new play is big on concept and cleverness, but withholds the intimacy that theater-lovers have craved during the pandemic.Last March, I booked tickets to see “The Headlands,” a new play by Christopher Chen. A few days later, live theater vanished like some awful magic act. I never made it to that show. But now Chen, a high-concept playwright with a vertiginous approach to dramatic structure, has created a new one, “Communion,” a clever and chilly digital wisp produced by the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and experienced on Zoom. To see it, as in-person performances prepare to return elsewhere, provides a dizzy kind of symmetry.“Communion,” directed by Pam MacKinnon and starring Stacy Ross, begins as so many recent shows have. A house manager greets the audience (about 40 people on the night I attended), offering a brief tutorial on cameras and mics and gallery view. Then Ross, a beloved Bay Area performer, appears, speaking from what looks like a basement. A nice basement. Ross, wearing a blazer, pigtails and a shrunken porkpie hat, has through-the-roof charisma, even in a Zoom window. This helped during the pro forma opening monologue, a friendly acknowledgment of the limits and possibilities of remote theater. “I always thought it would be interesting to do a Zoom show that somehow really took advantage of this strange intimacy this platform has,” Ross said excitedly.Like works by Will Eno and Lucas Hnath, Chen’s create a tension between the ideas at play — here, presence and absence, truth and lies, trust and manipulation — and the characters who inhabit them. There’s so much intelligence in “Communion,” enhanced by Ross’s mischievous performance and MacKinnon’s sleek direction. But the overall effect is somewhat stingy. It might have felt differently earlier in the pandemic. But at this point, most of us with working Wi-Fi have already thought plenty about presence and absence. I would trade the conceptualism for something more embracingly human.In fairness, “Communion” offers that, too. Late in the show, an unseen force sorts the audience into breakout rooms, asking us to introduce ourselves and perhaps discuss one of the prompts Chen had emailed before the show — chiefly, “In one or two sentences, can you describe a guiding principle you have?” Awkwardly and then with more ease, we introduced ourselves. One man shared a guiding principle, often attributed to Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”The rest of us had no principles. Still, we reveled in one another’s company and in the experience of sharing a work of art together, even though we sat some 4,000 miles apart. (In this, it resembles the recent efforts of groups like 600 Highwaymen.) It made me nostalgic for all those taken-for-granted lobby nods, that post-show race around the corner to discuss the play at a safe distance, that feeling of constituting an audience.“Communion” ends with a few conceptual switcheroos designed to make you question everything you have seen and heard. And I did. But these reveals dangle what people who love theater hunger for — connection, intimacy and yes, sure, communion — then snatch it back again, like Tantalus on a video call. Did you suspend your disbelief? Sucker.I like my disbelief suspended. And if a year of seeing shows from my bedroom has taught me anything, it is that I will take theater where I can find it. Here, I’d locate it less in Chen’s forceful smarts and more in those halting, unscripted breakout room moments, in a grid of people marking time with good will and small talk until we can really, actually be together again.CommunionThrough June 27; act-sf.org. More