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    Sharon Pollock, Playwright Who Explored Canada’s Identity, Dies at 85

    Ms. Pollock was best known for dramas inspired by historical events that examined racial tensions and other volatile issues.Sharon Pollock, an oft-produced Canadian playwright who was known for works that explored Canadian history and identity at a time when few of her contemporaries were doing so, died on April 22 at her home in Calgary, Alberta. She was 85.Her daughter Lisa Pollock said the cause was cancer.Ms. Pollock’s works covered a wide range, but she was especially known for dramas inspired by historical events. Her best-known play, “Blood Relations” (1980), was a take on Lizzie Borden and the ax murders of her father and stepmother in 1892 in Massachusetts (Borden was acquitted). But most of her history-inspired plays involved events in Canada’s past.“Walsh” (1973), one of her first staged works, was about James Walsh of the North-West Mounted Police and his handling of Sitting Bull and the Sioux Indians who had come from the United States in the 1870s seeking refuge. “One Tiger to a Hill” (1980) was inspired by a 1975 hostage-taking at a prison in British Columbia.These and her many other historical works didn’t merely document an event; they used it as a jumping-off point to explore themes like racial tension. That was at the core of her “End Dream,” about a real-life 1924 case in Vancouver in which a Scottish nanny died under murky circumstances and a Chinese servant was charged. The charges were later dropped.“I am only interested in historical things if I can manipulate them,” she told The Globe and Mail of Canada when that work was given its premiere in 2000 by Theater Junction in Calgary. “I want to make something bigger than the mystery.”Anne Nothof, a professor emerita at Athabasca University in Alberta who writes frequently about Canadian drama, said Ms. Pollock viewed theater “as a means of illuminating the dark corners of apathy and ignorance” and used it to examine areas of history that were often sanitized.“In her plays, she provided multiple perspectives on historical events,” Dr. Nothof said by email. “Pollock was committed to creating a theater that responded to the past and the present, that challenged historical and personal assumptions.”Stephen Hair and Julie Orton in “Blow Wind High Water.” Staged at Theater Calgary in 2017, it was Ms. Pollock’s last new produced play.Trudie LeeMs. Pollock had a long relationship with Theater Calgary, where she was artistic director in 1984 and 1985 and where four of her plays had their premieres, including “Walsh” almost 50 years ago and her last new produced play, “Blow Wind High Water,” in 2017.Two of her plays, “Blood Relations” and “Doc” (1984), received the Governor General’s Literary Award, a top honor in Canada, and in 2012 Ms. Pollock was given the Officer of the Order of Canada designation “for her contributions to the theater as an award-winning playwright, actor, artistic director and teacher.” That same year, when the University of Calgary held a conference celebrating her, it was called simply “Sharon Pollock: First Woman of Canadian Theater.”Mary Sharon Chalmers was born on April 19, 1936, in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Her father, Dr. George Everett Chalmers, has a hospital in Fredericton named after him, and her mother, Eloise (Roberts) Chalmers, was a nurse. She was also an alcoholic; Ms. Pollock painted a stark picture of her early years in “Doc,” a play that had autobiographical elements, and she talked bluntly about her mother.“To be truthful, I didn’t like her very much,” she told The Calgary Herald in 2013. “She was an ugly drunk. She didn’t go somewhere nice and quiet and drink herself into oblivion. I always say that every statutory holiday she would try and kill herself. Eventually she succeeded. I think I was 17 when that happened.”She dropped out of the University of New Brunswick in 1955 and married Ross Pollock. But their relationship, she said, was troubled, and the marriage ended after about a decade. In 1966 she moved to Calgary with the Canadian actor Michael Ball, with whom she had a long-term relationship.From left, Amanda Dahl (Ms. Pollock’s daughter), Kate Trotter and Susan Hogan in “Doc,” a 1984 play that had autobiographical elements.George GammonShe began her theater career as an actress. In a 2008 interview with the The Calgary Herald marking the 40th anniversary of Theater Calgary, she recalled working with that company in its early years. She had especially vivid memories of the old QR Center, which was notorious for a leaky foundation.“The dressing rooms were in the basement, so in the spring you’d have about three inches of sewage and horrible water all through the dressing room areas,” she said.The seepage, she said, somehow always seemed to be worst when a production called for period costumes.“You not only had to watch your feet,” she said, “but you had to hold up these reams of skirt, or else you’d enter onstage with a kind of osmosis — water creeping up all over the edge of your clothes.”(Perhaps appropriately, a decade later “Blow Wind High Water” was part of that theater’s 50th-anniversary season. It was about a Calgary flood.)Ms. Pollock’s plays were staged at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, the Neptune Theater in Halifax and many other theaters, including the Garry Theater in Calgary, which she ran for five years in the 1990s. She also served in executive roles at Theater New Brunswick and other houses, though her strong personality sometimes led to clashes with board members.Ms. Pollock in 2017.via Theatre CalgaryStafford Arima, Theater Calgary’s current artistic director, experienced that personality when he staged her final play.“I fell instantly in like with Sharon’s no-filter way of communicating,” he said by email. “Her energy reminded me of a glorious tsunami wave that engulfed any space she inhabited — whether it was a rehearsal room or a coffee house.”In addition to her daughter Lisa, she is survived by five other children, Jennifer Pollock, Kirk Pollock, Melinda Tracey, Michele Pollock and Amanda Dahl; 12 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.In a “Playwright’s Note” in the program for “Blow Wind High Water,” Ms. Pollock addressed the audience in words that might well have applied to many of her plays:“I hope you’ll experience in some small way some small parts of history that have made the place you live in the place it is.” More

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    Broadway Is Reopening. But Not Until September.

    Even as New York City begins to reopen this summer, Broadway will not resume performances until Sept. 14. Here’s why.Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo says that most pandemic capacity restrictions will ease in two weeks. Mayor Bill de Blasio says he wants the city to fully reopen on July 1. But Broadway, a beacon for tourists and an engine for the economy, is not quite ready to turn on the stage lights.Most shows are not planning performances until September or later. But there are signs of life: Mr. Cuomo said Wednesday that Broadway shows would start selling tickets for full-capacity shows with some performances starting Sept. 14.Why the four-month wait? With as many as eight shows a week to fill, and the tourists who make up an important part of their customer base yet to return, producers need time to advertise and market. They need to reassemble and rehearse casts who have been out of work for more than a year. And they need to sort out and negotiate safety protocols.But the biggest reason is more gut-based: individually and collectively, they are trying to imagine when large numbers of people are likely to feel comfortable traveling to Times Square, funneling through cramped lobbies and walking down narrow aisles to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers. Most Broadway shows lose money even in the best of times, so producers say there is no way they can afford to reopen with social distancing, given the industry’s high labor and real estate costs.“We’ve never done this before,” said Victoria Bailey, executive director of TDF, the nonprofit which oversees the TKTS ticket-selling booth in Times Square. “The last time the theater industry opened from a pandemic, Shakespeare was still writing new plays.”Broadway’s emerging timeline, which is constantly being re-evaluated, serves as a reminder that New York’s rebound from the pandemic will be slow and gradual. Edicts from elected officials are only one factor in reopening: every economic sector will have to figure out when and how to restart, and every individual will have to figure out when and how to re-emerge.Broadway, home to 41 theaters, drew 14.6 million people who spent $1.8 billion on tickets in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic forced them all to close March 12, 2020, and reopening is clearly going to be far more complicated than shutting down. One of the biggest challenges the industry faces is the dearth of tourists, who made up roughly two-thirds of the Broadway audience before the pandemic struck.“We had such a good year before the shutdown, but now we need the ability to reignite the energy that we were sailing on,” said Tom Hulce, a lead producer of “Ain’t Too Proud,” a jukebox musical about the Temptations. “We basically are starting from zero advance, as most shows are, and now we need time to reach out and build back up.”“Ain’t Too Proud,” a jukebox musical about the Temptations, had a good year before it closed, but needs time to build back its audience.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAbout 30 shows are currently planning to begin performances on Broadway before the end of 2021 — approximately half starting in September, and the rest spread out across the year’s final quarter.Among the first to go on sale following the governor’s announcement: “The Phantom of the Opera,” Broadway’s longest-running show, which said Wednesday evening that it would put tickets on sale Friday in anticipation of resuming performances Oct. 22. “Emphatically: Yes, we are coming back,” said the show’s composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber.The three juggernaut musicals that were the biggest box office grossers before the pandemic — “Hamilton,” “The Lion King” and “Wicked” — have been planning to jointly announce next week that they expect to reopen in mid-September. Those shows, with their well-known titles and fervent fans, face lower hurdles than others in reintroducing themselves to potential ticket buyers, and they are also the most able to withstand financial risk.A number of other musicals are also hoping to open in September, including the long running “Chicago,” the David Byrne concert show “American Utopia,” Disney’s “Aladdin” and the inspirational Canadian hit “Come From Away.” Each is confident they can find an audience even as some forecasts suggest that it could be several years before tourism fully recovers.“I do think there’s going to be a real push to reach out to the tristate area, to day-trippers, and to locals,” said Sue Frost, a lead producer of “Come From Away.” “But does the pent-up demand explode and then go dormant? If we don’t put our toe in the water, we won’t know.”The longest running show in Broadway history, “The Phantom of the Opera,” which opened in 1988, said it will resume performances on Oct. 22.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere remain many uncertainties. Will masks be required for patrons? (Probably, at least at first.) Will performers sign autographs at the stage door? (Probably not, at least for a while.) Will vaccinations be required? (Governor Cuomo said he would prefer that, but said it would be up to the theater industry to decide. “Are you willing to go into an indoor theater and sit there for two hours next to a person who you don’t know if they are vaccinated or unvaccinated?” he asked. And “Phantom,” in its announcement, said protocols could require vaccination or negative test verification.)Even the frequency of performances is still to be determined. The Broadway League and several labor unions have been talking about the possibility of opening with fewer than the customary eight shows a week. That would mean lower pay for cast and crew, a concession they are likely to consider only if theater owners take the same percentage cut in rent.Pricing practices are expected to be fluid. Several producers said they expect to start selling tickets at prices similar to those in place before the pandemic, but that they could adjust depending on what demand looks like. One change that seems certain in the post-pandemic era: more liberal refund policies. (“Phantom,” for example, said all tickets could be refunded or exchanged until two hours before a performance.)“There’s never been a time when all the tickets have basically gone on sale at once, so there’s going to be a lot of learning,” said Brian Fenty, the chief executive of TodayTix, which runs a popular ticket-selling app.Every show faces casting complications, because most, if not all, contracts with actors have expired and will need to be renegotiated. Some performers need to recondition their bodies or their voices. Some are dealing with lingering effects of Covid. Some ensemble members may decide that life in, say, Nebraska is actually better than life in New York. Some child actors — and there are children in the casts of a half-dozen shows — have aged out of their roles. Elizabeth Stanley, a star of “Jagged Little Pill,” is pregnant. And Karen Olivo, whose character is central to “Moulin Rouge!,” issued a critique of Broadway’s priorities and the industry’s lack of response to abusive behavior and said she would not return.Karen Olivo of “Moulin Rouge!” decided during the pandemic that she does not intend to return to Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway has been rocked not only by the pandemic, but also by the unrest over racial inequity that coursed through the country last year after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed by police.All of the new plays announced for Broadway this fall are by Black writers. Two are commercial productions — Keenan Scott II’s “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” about a single day in the life of seven Black men in Brooklyn, and Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” about two Black men trapped by existential dread in a society where too many Black people are killed by police.“We are leaning in to the conversation that’s happening in America,” said Brian Moreland, a lead producer of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which is aiming to open in October.There will also be three nonprofit productions of plays by Black writers on Broadway: “Clyde’s,” a new play by Lynn Nottage presented by Second Stage; “Lackawanna Blues,” a one-man show by Ruben Santiago-Hudson presented by the Manhattan Theater Club; and “Trouble in Mind,” a classic play by Alice Childress getting its first Broadway production via the Roundabout Theater Company.“It’s been a really hard year for the not-for-profits — we’re all suffering, and we all have deficits,” said Carole Rothman, the artistic director of Second Stage, who said she hopes to start performances of “Clyde’s” in November, after opening her smaller Off Broadway stage a little earlier. “I’m an optimist,” she said. “Definitely there’s going to be an audience chomping at the bit to see theater.” “Lackawanna Blues,” a one-man show by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, standing, is one of several works by Black playwrights coming to Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA handful of shows are not expected to return until 2022. The most prominent among them is the two-part play, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which is rethinking its length and structure before deciding how and when to reopen. And plans for a pair of shows produced by Scott Rudin, “To Kill a Mockingbird” and a revival of “West Side Story,” are unclear following his decision to step back from active involvement after a series of news reports detailed his bullying behavior toward employees and collaborators.Expect at least four new Broadway musicals to open this fall, including “Six,” the concert-style British pop show about the ill-fated wives of King Henry VIII, which was just 90 minutes from opening when theaters closed, as well as “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Diana” and “Flying Over Sunset.” And a fifth new musical — “MJ,” about a chapter in the life of Michael Jackson — is planning to start performances late this year.The lead producer of “Phantom,” Cameron Mackintosh, said the return of theater is essential for the cultural and economic life of both New York and London, but acknowledged that much is unknown.“No one is taking this for granted, and no one is assuming we’re going back to what it was pre-Covid,” he said. “We need to be completely optimistic, but also pragmatic, because none of us have been in this situation before.” More

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    Online or In-Person? Soon, British Theatergoers Can Decide

    Live theater is set to return in England starting May 17, but many online offerings will remain.LONDON — Is watching a play on your laptop enough? This question will be put to the test starting May 17, when theaters in England reopen after a five-month shutdown.Some shows here are experimenting with filmed versions in advance of — or to run alongside — the same play in three dimensions, offering a choice to possibly skittish audiences who may be wary of entering a theater.When Ben Brown’s spy drama “A Splinter of Ice” begins a tour of British theaters on June 8, those who wish to can see it live, as long as they wear masks and maintain social distancing, for the first part of its travels at least. (Such protocol may change from June 21 onward, as the British move still further out of lockdown.) For everyone else, a filmed version, running online through July 31, was shot on the stage of the Everyman Theater in Cheltenham, England. It stars the same distinguished pair of actors, Oliver Ford Davies and Stephen Boxer, who will take the play out on the road.The actor Jack Holden’s feisty performance in his self-penned play “Cruise” was available online through April, in a film shot in the East End, across town from the Soho district where it is set. Holden will return to the show at the Duchess Theater, on the West End, from May 18, hoping that the play’s online run has raised awareness of its onward life onstage.Of course, none of this is new. The 2012 National Theater production of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” was shown in movie theaters around the world via NT Live long before it opened on Broadway, where it ran for two years and won five Tony Awards: The screen version surely whetted New York appetites.The difference this time is that many potential audience members will be wary about sitting in crowded auditoriums. These new streamed productions offer a choice — and an additional income source as well.Other British playhouses, including the Almeida and the Orange Tree Theater, both in London, also plan to present works both ways. The risk is, however, that the filmed version will seem sufficient and dampen the desire to experience it onstage.“A Splinter of Ice,” set in Moscow in 1987, tells of an encounter between the novelist Graham Greene, then in his 80s, and the British intelligence officer Kim Philby, who died the following year, at age 76, 25 years after he defected to the Soviet Union. An armchair drama heavy on exposition, Brown’s play doesn’t feel especially theatrical and works fine as an onscreen vehicle for its two splendid leading men.Stephen Boxer, right, and Oliver Ford Davies in Ben Brown’s “A Splinter of Ice.”James FindlayFord Davies, 81, brings a world-weary geniality to the role of Greene, who functions for the most part as an interlocutor trying to make sense of Philby, the onetime journalist who was part of the celebrated British spy ring known as the Cambridge Five.Boxer, his co-star, finds a prickly intelligence in the role of Philby, who refers to himself as “the most wanted man in England” and who, the play suggests, may have been the inspiration for the “third man” of Greene’s 1950 novel. Lovely as it is to see seasoned actors in the flesh, the screen version gives a gratifying close-up view of Ford Davies’s kind, quizzical eyes. The writing is labored at times, but its stars give it a lift, and a heavily accented Sara Crowe completes the cast as Philby’s wife, Rufa, a role that will be re-cast for the tour.“Cruise,” on the other hand, is a far more visceral piece of writing, and its online version makes you want to partake of Holden’s enthusiasm firsthand. A springy study in London gay life in the 1980s and today, the 90-minute play tells of an L.G.B.T. help line volunteer in his early 20s. Accompanied onscreen in a nonspeaking role by sound designer John Elliott, who spins the disco tracks (Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” for one) of a bygone age, the character of Jack gets absorbed in the elaborate story of a decades-older caller named Michael. This unseen character, voiced by Holden, has made his way through the fearsome years of the AIDS epidemic, even as many around him have not, and wants to enlighten Jack about the hedonistic days (and nights) of an era unknown to the younger man.At times, the play feels like an English footnote to “The Inheritance,” Matthew Lopez’s two-part glance back at the losses of a generation of gay American men, and few could claim that Holden’s writing, however vivid, breaks new ground. But watching the author dart about onscreen leaves you keen to be in the same room with that bristling energy. In a few weeks, we’ll be able to do just that. More

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    Preview: Pheromone, Streaming from 12 May

    Open the door to number nineteen, where love hits the rocks like gin and tonic…..

    In Eva’s world, time has eclipsed. Her kingdom is ruled by imagination and her ever-changing mood. Waltzing through her mind on a daily basis, control is her vice, and to be forgotten is her greatest fear.

    Meet David. Her forever child. He’s thirty-six and never left home. Eva treats him like a king one minute, and a worm the next. Trying desperately to win his mother’s approval, he works night and day without complaint. All he wants is to meet a nice lady and start a life of his own. But every bachelorette is scrutinised and sent packing. How can David ever find love under the watchful eye of his mother?

    In walks the devil Herself. Charming and seductive, she weaves her way into these four walls, turning their landscape inside out.

    Pheromone spits fire, glamour, and the wrath of God into 1950’s Ireland.

    It explores male domestic abuse, and strong women in the Irish household, who don’t always love with a warm heart.

    Pheromone is available to stream from 12 May until 23 May. Tickets are £10 plus £1 booking fee. Bookings and further details via the below link. More

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    Back in the Girdle Again: Getting Fitted After a Year Untouched

    Confessions of an actress seeking reassurance — and sleeves — as she steps before a live concert audience again.The actress and singer Melissa Errico returns to the fitting room for the first time since March 2020. Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesHere I am, back at the confessional at last. Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It has been 13 months since my last visit to you. The father-confessor, to whom I am looking for absolution, is Eric Winterling, one of the great Broadway costume makers, and my confession is that (whisper it!) the pandemic had been unkind to my arms. To be specific, my upper arm in the rear, with a strange new pocket of femininity developing just to the interior of my elbow, on both sides.I had to confess this news because that is what actors do when we are in a costume fitting. For a show, we want to make an impression, and that means we have to deal with our bodies, and we need someone to whom we can tell the truth.A lovely fitter named Rita zips me into a dress and adjusts my undergarments. The pandemic has been filled with women writing about their bra drawers and what they don’t need; a woman actor has an additional secret drawer filled with Spanx and other strange, confining underwear, some almost medical, with fiercely strong zippers.The dress needed to say femme fatale — betrayal! cruelty! jazz! — while, of course, covering the arms.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesThat morning I had ransacked mine for the first time in forever. “Back in the girdle again,” I hummed to myself. I turned to Rita as I struggled into one, and said I hoped her day was going well. She said simply, “You are the first actor I have seen in a year.”Eric slipped into the room, turned me to the mirror and laid his hands on my hips — the first time that had happened in a long time, too. We stared at me in three-sided reflection, and I asked, meekly, if I was now a singer who required sleeves.His task was to find, or create, a dress in which I could sing an evening of film noir-inspired songs — many, dauntingly, in French — to a limited in-person audience on May 6 for the French Institute Alliance Francaise. It will be the first time I have sung in front of living people since March 2020. Four cameras will be present, for those watching virtually, making it a concert in the round, so to speak.Eric Winterling, one of the great Broadway costume makers, created a dress of his own after several Donna Karans were rejected.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesThe dress needed to say femme fatale — betrayal! cruelty! jazz! — while, of course, covering my arms. No stranger to creating costumes for ripening actresses, Eric projected confidence that the vintage improves in a tightfitting bottle. I tried to trust him.Intimacy, humor and humiliation hung in the air as we quickly tested a series of sleek Donna Karan gowns he had assembled, all of which were wrong on me in various, dreadful ways. Then he spoke decisively. “It would just be easier if I made you a whole new dress,” he said, adding benevolently, “Angela Bassett ruined everything with her toned arms.”A Psychic EncounterOf all the intimacies of an actor’s life, none is as intimate as that with the costume fitter; he is your confessor and also, sometimes, your co-conspirator.As a child growing up in a suburb of Philadelphia, Eric spoke sewing the way a violin prodigy speaks music. He watched his mother and used his paper route money at age 9 to buy dress patterns.“The dress is made in the fitting room,” he says, quoting the designer Jane Greenwood.Landon Nordeman for The New York Times“I have three brothers — they were very athletic,” he tells me. “One day, I realized that in the back of the pattern books in the fabric stores, they had stuffed animal patterns and Barbie dress patterns. And that was it. I was off to the races.” His first triumph was an orange gingham stuffed dog that he made from a store-bought Simplicity pattern.Eric studied costume design at Temple University, and after three years working as resident costumer of the Houston Grand Opera, he moved to New York in 1987, taking a job at Terilynn Costumes. When they closed, Eric decided to start his own costume-making business, though he was only 29.“I’m rarely the designer, as a matter of fact,” he explains. “I decided a long time ago that I’m much better at interpreting designer sketches than designing myself. And so, I thought that what I could do sewing was much more useful for the world.”Before the pandemic, as many as 15 shows were being worked on at once in Eric’s shop.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesEric’s light-filled Flatiron district fitting room has French doors that open out to 8,200 square feet of industrial space, with 38 sewing machines and 18 cutting tables, while hundreds of yards of rolled fabric lie on shelves like sacred scrolls. If he is my confessor and the studio his cathedral, the fitting room is the mirrored apse where the very essence of his craft takes place.“The dress is made in the fitting room,” Eric tells me, quoting the designer Jane Greenwood, with whom he has often worked, and whom I first met when she designed (and he made) the costumes for the Broadway musical “High Society.” (Just over my shoulder, on the back wall, hangs a framed, and fading, sketch of me as Tracy Lord in my — her! — wedding gown.)The fitting room itself has to be just so: “This room is 400 square feet, and not just a corner of the room with a curtain on it. You have to really have people be comfortable in it.” Eric long ago installed stage lighting on the ceiling.The final product is bosomy without being modern, the neckline inspired by Jane Greer’s in the 1947 noir film “Out of the Past.”Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesAnd he understands that a costume fitting is a psychic encounter as much as a physical one. “You have to listen to people,” he says. “What the person who’s wearing the costume sees with her eyes, you have to make the match through the process of a fitting. You have to switch each other’s glasses to just see what they’re seeing.”Struggling to Stay OpenBefore the pandemic, as many as 15 shows were being worked on at once in Eric’s shop. His atelier created Elphaba’s witchy dress for “Wicked” (designed by Susan Hilferty) and the blue velvet harem ensemble for the Genie in “Aladdin” (designed by Gregg Barnes). He solved the challenge of the breakaway costume for Elsa as she belts “Let It Go” in “Frozen.”Nearly 50 full-time employees were working in Eric’s studio, hailing from the Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Thailand, Japan, the Czech Republic and Russia, among other places. Now, though, he is working with only a third of his usual team.He’s been active with the new Costume Industry Coalition, which raises awareness of how hard hit this sector has been. Last summer, he struggled even to keep his shop open.“I spent a lot of time last May, June, driving things around to people’s homes, like this ice dress,” he says of a beaded number, intended for a Tokyo production of “Frozen.” “It had to be hand-painted over here, and then it had to go over there to be beaded, then it had to go to New Jersey to be made.”Eric understands that a costume fitting is a psychic encounter as much as a physical one. “You have to listen to people,” he says.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesHis staff was working and sewing from home, and he lent his studio to organizations making P.P.E.; instead of magical dresses, they made protective gowns. And television work, including HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” replaced the theater.I sensed that one reason Eric was pleased to make me a dress was because he saw it as an offering to the Gods of the Balcony: If I go on making dresses, the singing will come back.Sleeves Again!At my second fitting a week later, a black sequined gown was placed on my body. I stepped into it, and Rita guided my voluptuous elbows into two tunnels of sparkling masquerade. Sleeves!She zipped me into a near-finished, brand-new dress and sat on the floor to stare at the hemline while Eric came in to get a look. The look was bosomy without being modern, the neckline inspired by Jane Greer’s in the 1947 noir film “Out of the Past.” While describing a Parisian bead-and-sequin shop he loves called Fried Frères, Eric tended to my arms and pinched the fabric, experimenting with taking it in, or shortening the sleeves.After 14 months of Lululemons and T-shirts, I had a real costume on my body. It felt wonderful to be in a slinky, sinuous gown with a flirtatious satin sash. I felt like a candy box.Inspiration for a noir-era costume and cabaret show.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesI’m no stranger to doing cabaret jobs in rented gowns — there is an app for slightly-used dresses for gently-worn actresses — so this feeling was precious. Eric and I looked at each other. The costumer-confessor and actress-penitent were in a state of hope. He, because sewing is what he does; she, because despite all the agonies, singing is what she does. That’s the irony of the actor’s life: The costume frees us from the insecurities that the need for a costume creates. It’s the actor’s version of infinity — a new look, a new role, a new possibility.More practically, I suggested he could tighten the waist.“There is no need,” he reminded me. “You have to sing. You have a lot to do in this dress. It’s fine as it is.” I wiggled my hips, with a few bars of “Put the Blame on Mame.” Eric let out an audible sigh. He moved to the back of the room and turned off the lights. Then he flipped the switch, and the ceiling’s stage lights burst into a warm glow.“There’s the magic,” he said. I was dressed.Melissa Errico is an actress and singer. “Mystery,” her new concert, is Thursday at 7 p.m. at Florence Gould Hall in Manhattan; stream at fiaf.org. More

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    ‘Pass Over,’ About Black Men Trapped by Dread, Heads to Broadway

    The play, by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, has previously been staged at several prominent theaters and filmed by Spike Lee for Amazon.“Pass Over,” a searing play about two Black men trapped by existential dread in a world where too many of their peers have been killed by police, is coming to Broadway.A team of producers who include the playwright, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, said Tuesday that they would mount a new version of the play at the August Wilson Theater on Broadway later this year. The production will be directed by Danya Taymor.The play, an 85-minute riff on “Waiting for Godot,” began its life in 2017, directed by Taymor at Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago. That production was filmed for Amazon Prime Video by Spike Lee, and in 2018 the play ran at Lincoln Center Theater. It has since had several other productions, including at the Kiln Theater in London.The play, in which two friends pass time on a city street corner, sharing fears and dreams, was prompted in part by the death of Trayvon Martin, and draws on the Book of Exodus. Nwandu reworked the play’s ending between the Steppenwolf and Lincoln Center productions, and said she now plans to do so again. In earlier versions, one of the two main characters died at the end; Nwandu said that in the Broadway version, they will both survive.“I wrote the other versions of the play out of anger, and out of a desire to shock white people into caring about the fact that Black lives matter,” Nwandu said. “Now I’m ready to step back from that role of needing to indict white America. White America has been indicted, and continues to be indicted, by the actual death of Black people, so nobody needs to see that theatrically rendered anymore.”She said the play “is still largely a lament,” but that she is now envisioning a tonal shift at the end, as she thinks about her own emotional well-being and that of her audience. “We all know we need some sort of communal healing,” she said. “We have to witness. We have to grieve. And we have to heal, so we can go out into the world and fight these battles.”The Broadway production will have an eclectic producing team: Matt Ross, a longtime theater publicist who is becoming more active as a producer; Jujamcyn Theaters, the company that operates the August Wilson Theater; Lincoln Center Theater, the nonprofit that presented the play Off Broadway; Concord Theatricals, a publishing and licensing company with a growing footprint in the theater world; Renee Montgomery, a retired basketball player who is an owner of the Atlanta Dream W.N.B.A. team; the actor Blair Underwood; Madeleine Foster Bersin, who, along with Ross, was part of the producing team for “What the Constitution Means to Me”; and Nwandu.The cast has not yet been announced. More

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    With Her Final Album, Rebecca Luker Bids a Fond Farewell

    The much-loved Broadway soprano, who died in December, had one more miracle up her sleeve.The last solo number on “All the Girls,” the new duo album from the sopranos Rebecca Luker and Sally Wilfert, is a piece of specialty material for Luker called “Not Funny.”It’s funny.In the song, by Michael Heitzman and Ilene Reid, Luker twits her image as a “spoonful of saccharine” but also punctures it. The gist is that lower-voiced belters get all the laugh lines, possibly because it’s so “hard to land a joke up here” — in the soprano stratosphere. Playing Laurey in “Oklahoma!,” Luker complains, “I’ll sing my ass off, but Ado Annie steals the show.” Then she disproves it by ripping a thrilling high C.Luker was 58 when she last performed the number live, during a concert with Wilfert at Merkin Hall in Manhattan. That was in September 2019, 15 months before she died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig’s disease.As yet undiagnosed that night, she had some trouble climbing onto the de rigueur stool, but she sounded as beautiful as ever, clearly enjoying the chance to sing songs about sisterhood with someone who was in fact as close as a sister. They met, Wilfert recalls, at a reading in 2005; when Wilfert said “I’m going to the bathroom,” Luker said, “I’m going too” and they sat “in adjacent johns,” yakking.Luker enjoyed the chance to sing songs about sisterhood with Sally Wilfert, who was as close as a sister. David AndrakoDespite Luker’s unshakable ingénue rep — built on Broadway roles including Lily in “The Secret Garden” (1991), Magnolia in “Show Boat” (1994), Maria in “The Sound of Music” (1998) and Marian in “The Music Man” (2000) — she was by the time of the Merkin Hall concert a sophisticated Broadway veteran and a complex actor, even taking over the crushing role of Helen in “Fun Home” in 2016. Though her voice remained infallibly lustrous, with classical size and control yet zero operatic fussiness, it was her intelligence in deploying it that kept her in demand well past the industry sell-by date for most stars of that repertoire.Nor did her intelligence let up as “All the Girls” was put together. Her husband, the Broadway performer Danny Burstein, says her notes for the producers were “meticulous” despite her suffering. Tommy Krasker, the head of PS Classics, her longtime label, says she listened to mixes with the “clarity of mind and healthy self-criticism” she’d always displayed in their 20 years of working together. When she thought a joke in “Not Funny” wasn’t landing as well as it might, she asked that the piano part, performed by her music director, Joseph Thalken, be rerecorded. The joke now lands like a gymnast after a handspring.What’s remarkable about this is not only that Luker’s health was quickly deteriorating, but that such a fond, full-smile, no-dud album got produced at all, let alone in the middle of a pandemic. How it happened is the kind of story that Luker, whose death came just two days before the digital release of “All the Girls” on Christmas — and in whose honor an A.L.S. fund-raising concert entitled “Becca” will be streamed on Tuesday — would have loved for its unlikeliness and bittersweet ending.Recording dates had been set for March 2020. The lockdown delayed that plan, but by the time PS Classics could safely book a studio again, in August, Luker could no longer sing. Her final performances, in “An Evening With Sheldon Harnick … and Friends” at the York Theater in March and in a three-song concert streamed from home in June, had been achieved with mounting difficulty as she gripped the arms on her wheelchair to make the notes emerge. By autumn she could not make them at all.Though it might have been sensible to abandon the album at that point, Krasker and the producer Bart Migal decided to try an experiment, attempting what Krasker calls “the first studio album made without ever stepping in the studio.” Thalken, the music director, was able to weave new orchestrations around surprisingly good recordings of the Merkin Hall rehearsal and concert; musicians recorded the new parts in their homes; the producers mixed the result; and by some miracle what emerged sounded pristine.Though Luker and Wilfert have distinctive voices, they can sound nearly identical when singing together. Genevieve Rafter KeddyBut not just pristine: rich and compelling. Though Luker and Wilfert have distinctive voices when singing separately, they can sound nearly identical when singing together. (They have the same voice teacher.) Listening to playbacks, even they could not always figure out who was who. In duets like “You Are My Best Friend” (the charming opener) and “Isn’t It Better?” (a Kander and Ebb torch song here turned into an anthem of sisterly support) something sublime happens as the two voices, blending so closely, seem to multiply even as they merge.That effect is at its height in the album’s finale, an unexpected pairing of the Patty Griffin song “Be Careful” with “Dear Theodosia,” a number sung by Aaron Burr to his infant daughter in “Hamilton.” As performed by Luker and Wilfert, “Theodosia” feels like a promise from today’s women to their spiritual daughters to leave them a safer world. “Be Careful,” whose lyric provides “All the Girls” with its title, is wrenchingly ambivalent, celebrating women’s strength but also their fragility — and ending, in this arrangement, on a daringly unresolved harmony.Which feels only right. Strong as the album is — five poetry settings by Thalken are especially lovely — it inevitably comes wrapped in a shroud of loss. I don’t mean just the loss of Luker herself. Her kind of voice (and Wilfert’s) is gradually being squeezed out of musical theater, as classically trained sopranos give way to the kind described so saucily in “Not Funny,” which Kelli O’Hara will sing at Tuesday’s concert. Most new works are written for belters.The greater loss is of course personal. Many of us, mourning a loved one, are grateful for any scrap of their voice that might be preserved in a phone message or video. That’s not Burstein’s situation. He has lots of Luker’s albums to listen to. The problem is that though they are comforting they are also devastating — especially, on “All the Girls,” that final medley, with its aching Griffin lyric: “Be careful how you bend me/Be careful how you send me/Be careful how you end me.”In any case, the albums are what Luker gave us, not him. More than her public voice, what Burstein misses most after 20 years of marriage is her private voice: the one he heard in car rides spent harmonizing together to ’70s hits on the radio.“Now it’s just me and the radio,” he says.By comparison, the rest of us are lucky. Listening to “All the Girls,” in some ways Luker’s funniest and wisest album, we get to keep her singing next to us forever.Rebecca Luker and Sally Wilfert“All the Girls”(PS Classics)Becca: A Night of Stories and Song in Memory of Rebecca LukerMay 4 at 7:30 p.m.momenthouse.com/targetals More

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    Preview: Godot is a Woman, Pleasance Theatre

    In 1953 a man wrote a play about waitingIn 1988 he sued five women for trying to perform itIn 2001 Madonna released ‘What It Feels Like for a Girl’ It’s 2020 and we’re still waiting.

    Playing between 8 – 12 June 2021

    After two postponements in 2020, Godot is a Woman is finally set to hit the stage. Third time lucky.

    Silent Faces make ensemble-led devised theatre and are proud to be an integrated company of disabled and non-disabled artists. Godot is a Woman follows the critically acclaimed A Clown Show About Rain (“Delightful” Scotsman) and Follow Suit (“Marvellously comic and compelling” The Stage).“We’re excited to see Silent Faces take a swing at the patriarchy with Godot is a Woman. The Beckett Estate’s refusal to allow women to do Waiting for Godot (and who even knows where they stand on gender non-conforming people) seems a relic of a bygone time and deserves interrogation.  In their inimitable style, I have no doubt that Silent Faces’ new show will not only rage but question, challenge and hopefully inspire us all!” Nic Connaughton, Head of Theatre at Pleasance Theatre

    With their trademark style of playful and political physical theatre, Silent Faces explore permission, patriarchy and pop music in Godot is a Woman.

    We all know what it’s like to wait, don’t we? Waiting for our banana bread to come out the oven, waiting for Boris Johnson’s 5 o’clock announcement, waiting for permission from male playwrights to perform plays about the human condition. Since Waiting for Godot was written, non-men all over the world have been waiting to fill the boots of Vladimir and Estragon. Nearly 70 years later, the playwright is dead and his estate still says no to the casting of women.

    Today Ariana Grande tells us that ‘God is a Woman’… so we’ve decided we’re done waiting. Samuel Beckett? As Grande would say: thank u, next.

    The show plays between 8 and 12 June, with a matinee performance as well on the Saturday. More