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      Bringing Stages to Storefronts in a Theater-Hungry City

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyExit InterviewBringing Stages to Storefronts in a Theater-Hungry CityMiami New Drama gave audiences a window on the “Seven Deadly Sins” when it took over part of a pedestrian mall for a production. Michel Hausmann, the artistic director of Miami New Drama, waves to passers-by from inside one of the storefronts where his company presented “Seven Deadly Sins.”Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesFeb. 2, 2021MIAMI — As the final performance of Miami New Drama’s “Seven Deadly Sins” ended Sunday night, the actors streamed onto Lincoln Road, thanking the company’s artistic director, Michel Hausmann. They had spent months performing separately, inside adjacent vacant storefronts on this South Beach pedestrian mall, to an audience that watched and listened from a distance.Whooping and hugging each other, they gathered around the gregarious Hausmann at the outdoor bar lit by a neon “Purgatory” sign. They continued celebrating, even as the glowing red signs, reading “Lust” “Greed” “Wrath” and more, flickered off and the block turned dark.The pandemic closed the city on March 13, the eve of the opening of Miami New Drama’s first musical. To keep the 5-year-old company going, Hausmann, who is from Venezuela, commissioned seven notable playwrights — five Latino or Latina, two Black — to write short works that would fit under the “Seven Deadly Sins” rubric.They included Aurin Squire, who imagined sloth as a white woman claiming Black identity. Carmen Pelaez envisioned pride as the arrogant statue of John Calhoun, an outspoken defender of slavery, challenging the crowd that is pulling him down. Moisés Kaufman, who co-founded New Drama with Hausmann, portrayed greed by way of a brother and sister clashing over their father’s will.Six of the plays, all with either one or two actors, were staged in glassed-in storefronts, the seventh in the loading dock of the Colony Theater, the company’s regular home on Lincoln Road.Guides led audience groups of 12 from store to store, where they listened to the actors over iPods Velcroed to their bright red, socially distanced chairs.Audience members watch as the actress Jessica Farr performs in the “Lust” section of “Seven Deadly Sins,” written by the playwright Nilo Cruz.Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesActors performed inside the storefronts while audience members listened on headphones.Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York Times“Seven Deadly Sins” was extended twice, selling out for most of its two-month run. According to Actors Equity, “Seven Deadly Sins,” produced at a cost of $580,000, was the biggest live professional theater production in the country at the time, employing 100 theater workers, from stage crew to designers and actors. And thanks to meticulous precautions — including individual dressing room/rehearsal spaces — no one got sick.On the phone the morning after the show wrapped up, Hausmann reflected on the inspiration for the production and why it mattered. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did you feel seeing this show end?I cried when we couldn’t extend again. Then I made my peace with it. I feel like we pulled off a miracle. Not only artistically, but that the health protocols worked.How did you come up with the idea?I was extremely pessimistic when the pandemic hit. I’m normally an optimist. But I understood what we were facing was an unprecedented disruption. I’d been thinking for years about the empty storefronts on Lincoln Road. I was packing my office knowing I wouldn’t return for a very long time, and it hit me walking to my car and looking at those storefronts and boom! I saw the actors inside, the audience outside.“Although this is literally 40 paces from our door,” Hausmann said of the storefront experiment, “it was like producing on the moon.”Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThen I had the good and bad fortune of breaking my knee and wrist riding my bike. I spent weeks in bed. It was a quarantine inside the quarantine. My escape was imagining what I could do with the storefronts. I borrowed Thornton Wilder’s idea of doing 10-minute plays around the seven deadly sins, and a production in Venezuela in 1974 that commissioned different authors.Then what?My first call was to Dan Gelber, the Mayor of Miami Beach. I told him we have this crazy idea that is impossible to pull off without the support of the city. He said, “We’re all in.”What were you worried about?Everything. We’ve become pretty good at producing shows inside the Colony Theater. Although this is literally 40 paces from our door it was like producing on the moon. We had to create seven different theaters — lighting, sound, sets. It was uncharted territory.Any surprises?We had an incident before we opened where a man who I assume was a white nationalist was so offended by the Calhoun set that he threatened to bomb not only that storefront, but the Colony. He made that threat in a credible way. Twenty minutes later the whole block was taken over by police. That’s frightening, but that’s what theater should do. Theater needs to be political.Digital programs for the show were scannable.Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesOne of the staff members who guided attendees to their seats, and from show to show.Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesHow did Covid-19 protocols shape the process?We had to have three negative tests before we were even allowed to be outdoors together. After that we had to have two negative tests every week. I got very good at it — now I can share important tips. Breathe in while the swab is going in.You’ve always produced theater with a political dimension. How did that enter here?I gave the playwrights a broad mandate: Pick your favorite sin and write a 10-minute play with one or two actors. What they brought back was a look at American society through the seven deadly sins. We helped process what it means to live in America in the year of the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and political reckoning.Given everything else going on, why was it important to stage live theater this year?I felt a great sense of responsibility to the theatrical ancestors who figured out how to do theater in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, during apartheid in South Africa, in the living rooms of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. To keep the flame alive.I felt an even bigger responsibility to our local artists. We never furloughed anyone. We employed a hundred people for the setup of the play and 60 professional actors and techs for the almost three months we were rehearsing and performing. Even if the play had had no artistic merit, that for me is dayenu. [Hebrew for “It would have been enough.”]What else did you learn?It’s liberating to understand we are in the business of live storytelling. The possibilities are really endless.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Blood Meal’ Review: Just Us, Locked Down in a Dollhouse

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘Blood Meal’ Review: Just Us, Locked Down in a DollhouseCleverly edited and darkly funny, the latest Theater in Quarantine show finds a nervous couple afraid to go out or let anyone in. Sound familiar?Lee Minora, left, and Joshua William Gelb in Scott R. Sheppard’s “Blood Meal,” which is shot and edited live with the actors in different settings.Credit…Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in QuarantineFeb. 2, 2021The bugs have made Sam and Lindsay prisoners of their own home. To battle the invasion, the couple live in bare rooms, the furniture wrapped in plastic. They don’t leave the house and don’t welcome anybody in, either: They refuse entry to Girl Scouts selling cookies and after drinks with friends on the porch — in the middle of winter — they throw their clothes in garbage bags.Any resemblance to a certain pandemic is entirely not coincidental, and in just 32 minutes Scott R. Sheppard’s darkly funny new play, “Blood Meal,” captures our zeitgeist with satirical accuracy.What makes the show even zeitgeistier is that it is the latest salvo from the prime purveyor of inventive stagecraft in the age of Covid: Joshua William Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin’s Theater in Quarantine.For the past 10 months, the pair have turned a small closet in Gelb’s apartment into a performing space that has hosted everything from an “expressionistic musical portrait” of Mother Teresa (“I Am Sending You the Sacred Face”) to an adaptation of a Polish science-fiction story (“The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy”).In creating Theater in Quarantine, Gelb (with Minora) has shot many pieces from a closet in his apartment.Credit…Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in Quarantine“Blood Meal” ups the ante: Gelb (who directed and plays Sam) and Lee Minora (Lindsay) are performing live from separate closets — hers was built in the basement of La MaMa. The magic of technology brings the actors together so Sam and Lindsay can have sex and share a bath. We even watch them move about a cross-section of their home, as if it were a dollhouse. (Gelb and Stivo Arnoczy did the video design; Alex Hawthorn was responsible for the software that synced the action.)The setting itself creates a strange combination of the mundane and the surreal that perfectly suits Sheppard’s sensibility. He co-wrote the Off Off Broadway hit “Underground Railroad Game,” about children and adults re-enacting slavery scenarios, and last June contributed “Topside,” a claustrophobic, unsettling play inspired by the Donald Barthelme nuclear-cloud short-story “Game” to the growing Theater in Quarantine catalog.The zippy “Blood Meal,” which is free on YouTube, is an even better piece than “Topside” because it so skillfully maps a familiar world where an invisible danger lurks everywhere. McLaughlin’s matching costumes for Lindsay and Sam, black with red accessories, make them look like two mimes flailing in paranoid domesticity at the end of the world.Sam is at the end of his rope and desperately wants to believe the infestation has run its course so they can get back to normal and maybe even stop sleeping in the kitchen.Editing technology allows the viewers to watch Minora and Gelb, being filmed separately, take a bath together.Credit…Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in QuarantineLindsay has a more jaundiced attitude. “If we are serious about fighting these bugs, we must always doubt that we are free of them,” she tells him. “Do you understand that? It’s about doubt.”But she starts having the wrong kind of doubt as she increasingly suspects Sam of surreptitiously meeting people outside. Her nagging suspicions and his equivocations drive a wedge in the heretofore united couple. Eventually, Sam pleads for Lindsay to join him in an escape: “Let’s get in the Jetta and take the mountain,” he pleads. “Let’s drink black Manhattans and cuddle like bobcats.”Watching this live play on a screen, at a remove, it’s hard not to think, “Can I come too?”Blood MealOn the Theater in Quarantine YouTube pageAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Cicely Tyson Kept It Together So We Didn’t Fall Apart

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAn AppraisalCicely Tyson Kept It Together So We Didn’t Fall ApartA wonder of poise and punch, the actress dared to declare herself a moral progenitor, taking on roles that reflected the dignity of Black women.In “Sounder,” from 1972, Cicely Tyson is often transfixing in her stillness.Credit…20th Century Fox, via Getty ImagesJan. 29, 2021Updated 4:44 p.m. ETHow odd to celebrate someone for not being who we’ve been programmed to expect. But American entertainment worked hard on the mold that Cicely Tyson refused to fit. So, really, what we’ve been saluting all these decades was historic defiance. She died on Thursday, at 96, just after the release of “Just as I Am,” a juicy, honest, passionately Cicely memoir. (“Well, child, I’ll tell you: my mouth fell open like a broken pocketbook.”) And on the opening pages resides the truth about why, as a performer, she was the way she was.“My art had to both mirror the times and propel them forward,” she writes. “I was determined to do all I could to alter the narrative about Black people — to change the way Black women in particular were perceived, by reflecting our dignity.” Tyson made this vow in 1972, a few years after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at the dawn of the so-called Blaxploitation filmmaking boom that didn’t fulfill her. No hookers, no servants, no big bad mamas. Which meant that, for a woman dependent on an industry that trained its patrons to overlook a beauty as singular and angular and walnut-brown as hers, she’d essentially declared a hunger strike.Alas, she would not be playing the most daring, out-there characters. And let’s face it: the great parts were always headed to someone whiter anyway. The more audacious move was to declare herself a moral progenitor, to walk with her head high so that Denzel Washington might become a man on fire and Viola Davis could learn how to get away with murder.Tyson had a remarkable physical presence, someone sculpted as much as born. Her body was dancer lithe. She seemed delicate. But only “seemed.” She was delicate the way a ribbon of steel holds up its part of a bridge. The deceptive nature of her fineness was right there in the name. Cicely Tyson. Poise and punch.Her mouth comprised an overbite, protruding front teeth and two full lips. The words she spoke brought with them a little extra breath, which, in turn, gave her an everlasting lightness that made us lean toward her so we wouldn’t miss whatever truth she was about to tell. She didn’t write the scripts, yet she never seemed to waste a word. How? And the way she spoke: with the erudite diction fragrant of both old showbiz and old Harlem. No Black woman had ever performed this reliably with this much elegance and surety. Of course, the mold being what it was, nobody had ever asked a Black woman to do any such thing. (Diahann Carroll appeared to be her sister in dignity.)In a scene from “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” the title character, played by Tyson, fights segregation by drinking from a fountain reserved for white people.Credit…CBS, via Getty ImagesTyson was a peculiar kind of famous. I was never told of her importance. I just knew. Everybody knew. This woman was somebody. She looked sainted, venerated — at 29, 36, 49 and 60. Even in anguish. It’s possible that happens once you’ve played a 110-year-old formerly enslaved woman in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and after you’ve played Kunta Kinte’s mother. Or maybe those roles happen because you radiate venerability.She could act with her entire head yet scarcely move it at all. That’s her in most of “Sounder,” transfixing in her stillness. “Sounder” itself is a quiet, Depression-era movie, from 1972, built around Louisiana sharecroppers named Nathan and Rebecca Morgan, their three children and the family dog, Sounder. It’s foolishly lit. The night scenes are brightened by lanterns, which wouldn’t be my first choice for a movie with this much brown skin. Tyson spends a few scenes under a big straw hat that hides half her face.For lots of actors this would be death, because they’re too vain to stand for it or lack what it takes to overcome that kind of obscurity. For that sort of actor it’s all in the eyes. Over four decades of watching this woman work, I discovered that her technique rarely relied on her eyes, although they could glitter and dance. Tyson was another sort of actor: a life force. She emanated and exuded: hurt, warmth, joy, suspicion, fear, hauteur, love — an ocean of love.“Sounder” is a quiet movie set in Louisiana; from left, Paul Winfield, Yvonne Jarrell, Cicely Tyson, Kevin Hooks and Taj Mahal. Credit…20th Century Fox, via Everett CollectionCICELY TYSON WAS known to all people. But in Black homes, Tyson epitomized “household name.” A fixture even more than a star, either way an illuminant. A natural resource, a wonder, a font, a dream, a beacon. What other actor worked with such clear purpose, vocation and seriousness on the one hand and with a devastating smile on the other? Tyson knew what she represented. An honorary Oscar, three Emmys, a pile of Emmy nominations and a Tony all came her way. Just as fittingly for a woman who willed herself to matter, so did eight N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards.One of those was for playing Marva Collins in “The Marva Collins Story,” a pat yet ultimately astonishing Hallmark Hall of Fame production that CBS aired in 1981. Collins taught at a Chicago public school that the movie turns into a zoo everywhere but inside her classroom. It’s quintessential Tyson. The school system’s bureaucracy and low expectations inspire Collins to open a private school in the upstairs unit of her house. When a white teacher all but calls her uppity, Marva treats her to a death stare and says, “I dress the way I do, Miss Denny, because I happen to believe my children deserve a positive image.” Tyson is loose and charming and sharp; married to a carpenter played by Morgan Freeman; romantic, funny, unflappable and — thank the lord — well lit, the teacher of parents’ dreams, the actor this country needed in more slam-dunk roles just like this.Tyson plays a Chicago public school teacher married to Morgan Freeman’s character in “The Marva Collins Story,” from 1981.Credit…CBS, via Getty ImagesConsider the parts she could have played if the movies were fairer. Consider what we’d be saying now if her standards were lower. How’s that for fairness?I often got the sense that Tyson was hanging on to a little something, perhaps for herself, which, in turn, compelled us to hang on more tightly to her. In “Sounder,” after a judge sentences Nathan to a year of hard labor, the film cuts to Rebecca, seated in the rear of the court surrounded by her children and two friends. Rather than wail, she just looks on in solemn comprehension, a hand supporting her head. Of course, she’s devastated; the marriage is strong. But in that moment, what you see Tyson performing is resolve, strategy. She knows that she now has to do the farming — the sharecropping — on her own. The moment hits you harder for all that Tyson doesn’t do. Poise, punch.She rarely broke down. She never cracked up. She held it together, lest the rest of us fall apart. “Marva Collins” was as close as Tyson ever got to her wits’ end. And even then: she was losing it for her people. There were other exceptions. The scene in “Sounder,” say, in which Nathan, freshly sprung from that labor camp, hobbles up to the road as she runs a 100-yard dash toward him, tears flying from her face, her arms flung open. This is no way to run a dash. Instead, she invented a run powered not by muscles at all but entirely by heart. That sprint goes in the national registry of great American movie shots. And how about when ancient Miss Jane takes that drink at the “white only” fountain? You can show that to a Martian and he’d wipe the water from his mouth.Tyson knew her place. It was in our movie palaces and living rooms, but also at Black families’ kitchen and dining room tables, an emblem of her race, a vessel through whom an entire grotesque entertainment history ceased to pass because she dammed it off; so that — in her loveliness, grace, rectitude and resolve — she could dare to forge an alternative. She walked with her head high, her chest out, her shoulders back as if she were carrying quite a load that never seemed to trouble her because she knew she was carrying us.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Poltergeist’ Review: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Madman

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘The Poltergeist’ Review: Portrait of the Artist as a Young MadmanA breakneck performance by Joseph Potter as an embittered former prodigy carries this unnerving monologue from Philip Ridley.Joseph Potter as a once-promising artist in Philip Ridley’s darkly comic play “The Poltergeist.”Credit…Matt MartinJan. 29, 2021The mind of a neurotic artist is a terrifying place to be. Trust me, I know: I’ve had a 30-year residency in one, and it’s no picnic.Still, the artist at the center of “The Poltergeist,” a new solo play by Philip Ridley presented by Tramp and streaming courtesy of London’s Southwark Playhouse, functions on a whole different level. As a teen, Sasha (Joseph Potter) was dubbed a prodigy thanks to his large-scale murals. He was going to be a star, but now, years later, he’s a nobody, self-consciously making smudged watercolors and sketches that he immediately declares worthless.It’s hard to focus on your next masterpiece when you have something permanently stuck in your craw. Sasha prattles through an interior monologue of such unrelenting vitriol about himself, his art and the world around him that he seems hollowed out, a black hole masquerading as a person.When he and his supportive boyfriend, an actor named Chet, go to a niece’s birthday party, Sasha barely manages the smiles and chat and cake. He pops too many painkillers and hardly veils his resentment for his brother and sister-in-law. He trashes the house when no one is looking. He grows more riled up as casual conversations veer closer to the topic of his artistry and the reason he never lived up to his promise. (No spoilers here, but it involves a familial act of betrayal.)Ridley, a screenwriter and playwright (“The Pitchfork Disney,” “Mercury Fur”), regularly trades in a brand of tragicomedy that’s like a blackout on a winter night: acutely dark.“The Poltergeist” is airtight, if not claustrophobic. It almost entirely happens at that one birthday party, with Sasha re-enacting every conversation he has with other guests, rapidly interjecting his own thoughts. The playwright meticulously unwraps his psychology, interrupting the churlish commentary with lush and tender descriptions of color, like the “magenta, crimson lake, viridian, burnt sienna, cinnabar green” he’s putting to use in a painting.All this makes Potter’s job, alone on a bare stage for 75 minutes, tough. He is riveting to watch, full of breakneck energy and Olympian-level verbal agility, especially when he pingpongs from one character to another.This perfectly captures the manic mechanics of Sasha’s brain, but “The Poltergeist” sometimes moves so quickly that things become a garble. Part of the issue is Wiebke Green’s direction, which paces the show like an emotional roller coaster that rises and falls in predictable intervals, without surprise.It goes like this: a barrage of gripes and observations from Sasha, followed by long pauses when he lets deeper feelings finally catch up to him. Some pearls of comedy in the script get left by the wayside, though the emotional conclusion is rich and gratifying.Despite its occasional muddle, “The Poltergeist” is gripping from start to finish, one of the most visceral immersions inside a disturbed character’s mind I’ve ever seen. I’ll happily Airbnb there, especially if Ridley is my host. But I’m giving back the keys when it’s over.The PoltergeistThrough Feb. 28; southwarkplayhouse.co.ukAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A Broadway Theater Owner Rethinks Post-Pandemic Ticket Selling

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Broadway Theater Owner Rethinks Post-Pandemic Ticket SellingJujamcyn, which operates five of the 41 Broadway houses, said that when theater returns it will use SeatGeek instead of Ticketmaster.In a sign that some theaters are rethinking how they will operate when Broadway reopens, Jujamcyn Theaters is overhauling its ticketing practices.Credit…David S. Allee for The New York TimesMichael Paulson and Jan. 29, 2021As many live performance venues rethink their operations in anticipation of a post-pandemic reopening, one of Broadway’s major theater owners has decided to overhaul its ticketing practices.Jujamcyn Theaters, home to the musicals “Hadestown,” “Moulin Rouge!” and “The Book of Mormon,” said Friday that it had reached an agreement with SeatGeek, a disruptive newcomer to the marketplace, to handle of all its ticketing. It had been using Ticketmaster, the dominant platform for concerts and other live events.The agreement is SeatGeek’s first on Broadway; the company, which is based in New York, works primarily in the sports industry in the United States, but also has theater clients in London’s West End.“We’re always scanning the landscape for what is new and what is possible, but the shutdown really changed what we were looking for,” said Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn, which operates five of the 41 Broadway theaters. “There are capabilities that SeatGeek has built that speak directly to the now, and also, I think, to the future.”Roth would not describe the financial details of the arrangement, but said he had been impressed by the company’s technological flexibility, as well as its use of historical and comparative pricing to help customers assess ticket value. He said that beyond selling tickets, its technology could be used to allow customers to order food and drink, arrange transportation, purchase merchandise and get other information. SeatGeek will also allow tickets for Jujamcyn shows to be resold through its platform.The deal is a coup for SeatGeek, which began in 2009 as an aggregator of listings on the secondary ticketing market but has become a significant competitor to Ticketmaster in selling tickets directly on behalf of theaters and sports teams. SeatGeek sells tickets for the Dallas Cowboys, the Cleveland Cavaliers and a number of Major League Soccer teams.Danielle du Toit, the president of SeatGeek Enterprise, the company’s primary sales platform, said the Jujamcyn deal would showcase innovations like allowing patrons to order a glass of Champagne to be delivered to their seat at intermission.“For the average Joe,” du Toit said, “the idea is that it’s easy, it’s intuitive, it’s fast, it’s enjoyable.”The shutdown of live events during the pandemic has dealt a blow to all venues and ticketing companies. But behind the scenes, it has also sped up some changes that had been bubbling through the business for years, like contactless concessions sales and the transition to mobile, paperless ticketing. Roth said Jujamcyn had not yet determined whether paper tickets would still be used post-pandemic.Some venues and sports teams have also used the pause to rethink their ticketing alliances; in November, for example, two Houston soccer teams, the Dynamo FC and its affiliated women’s club, the Dash, signed with SeatGeek.When events return, many venues and ticket sellers say they expect extensive safety protocols that may even be embedded into the ticketing process. Late last year, Ticketmaster said it was considering implementing plans like confirming a patron’s vaccination status through a third-party smartphone app. A Ticketmaster spokeswoman said this week that the company was still awaiting federal and state guidance about reopening; Ticketmaster said on Friday it had no comment about losing Jujamcyn as a client.Du Toit said that the slowdown of events gave SeatGeek the opportunity to develop the kinds of features that are part of its Jujamcyn deal.“We’ve used this downtime to dig deeper into our technology,” she said.“The Book of Mormon,” “Hadestown” and “Moulin Rouge!” were all selling strongly before the pandemic and plan to return once theaters can reopen. Two other musicals housed in Jujamcyn theaters, “Frozen” and “Mean Girls,” have announced that they will not resume performances post-pandemic, so the company has two vacant houses to fill.SeatGeek becomes the third major ticketing services provider on Broadway; many theaters use Telecharge, which is owned by Broadway’s biggest landlord, the Shubert Organization; Jujamcyn had used Telecharge until switching to Ticketmaster in 2016. Ticketmaster continues to work with the Nederlander Organization, another major Broadway landlord. Of course, many consumers purchase tickets not through the primary ticket sellers, which handle direct sales online and at the box office, but also through brokers, resellers, or intermediaries like TKTS and TodayTix.The average Broadway ticket cost $121 last season. It remains unclear whether prices will change when Broadway reopens, although many producers expect less premium pricing (those are the highest-priced tickets for the hottest shows; for example, before the pandemic “Hamilton” was regularly selling many of its seats at premium prices of $847 each), at least in the short-term, as the industry seeks to rebuild.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Tonys Voting is Coming Soon. The Awards? We Still Don’t Know.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTonys Voting is Coming Soon. The Awards? We Still Don’t Know.Organizers of the ceremony have firmed up dates for selecting favorites, but won’t commit to an event until plans for Broadway’s return are set.Elizabeth Stanley, center, in the musical “Jagged Little Pill,” which was nominated for 15 Tony Awards, the most of any show in the abbreviated 2019-20 season.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJan. 29, 2021The question has preoccupied Broadway lovers for months: When are the Tony Awards?On Friday, the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, the two organizations that oversee the awards, took a step toward clarifying their latest thinking.They said two things: One, the much-delayed awards will be scheduled “in coordination with the reopening of Broadway.” And two, the voting will take place from March 1 to March 15.What does that mean? It means, first, that the process is moving forward. The 784 (give or take a few) voters will be soon able to cast ballots for the best work of the season that began in April 2019 and ended, prematurely, in February 2020. (Theaters were open until mid-March, but Tony administrators decided only shows that opened by Feb. 19 would be eligible for awards because too few voters had seen those that opened later.)The voters will be choosing among a group of nominees announced last October. The best musical nominees are “Jagged Little Pill,” “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” and “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical,” and the best play nominees are “Grand Horizons,” “The Inheritance,” “Sea Wall/A Life,” “Slave Play” and “The Sound Inside.”It also makes official what has become increasingly apparent: the ceremony will look forward, toward the 2021-22 season, as much as it looks backward, to the 2019-20 season. The coronavirus pandemic has scuttled a 2020-21 season.The ceremony, which is typically aired on network television, looks likely to promote the return of Broadway, and the presenters are not committing to a date because they don’t know when reopening will happen. Many producers are currently hoping for September, in which case a ceremony could take place in June, but throughout the pandemic many such predictions have come and gone.The Tonys were originally scheduled to take place last June.As was true the last time voting took place, in the spring of 2019, all voting will be electronic, and the voters, who are mostly producers, presenters, and people who work in the theater industry, can only vote in categories in which they have seen all the nominees. A subset of voters are allowed to vote in the categories of best orchestrations and best sound design, because those categories have been deemed too specialized for the full pool of voters to decide.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Review: Playwriting and Bug-Hunting Wed in ‘The Catastrophist’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReview: Playwriting and Bug-Hunting Wed in ‘The Catastrophist’Pandemics and ordinary tragedies clash in Lauren Gunderson’s overwrought portrait of her husband, the virologist Nathan A. Wolfe.William DeMeritt as the pandemic expert Nathan A. Wolfe in “The Catastrophist.”Credit…via Marin and Round House TheatersJan. 28, 2021Theater is not just not science, says the title character in “The Catastrophist”: It’s fraud. “Very nice, well-lit fraud.”That’s a harsh judgment, especially coming from Lauren Gunderson, America’s most-produced living dramatist. It’s also an acrobatic flip of perspective that, like her new play, deserves high points for difficulty if not execution.I say that only partly because the title character of “The Catastrophist” is Gunderson’s husband, Nathan A. Wolfe. Wolfe is a renowned virologist who has played a major role in shaping our understanding of zoonotic infection: the process by which viruses — like Ebola and the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 — jump from animals to humans.So to recap, we have a playwright creating a stage version of her husband, who undermines her work with words she’s given him. That’s some heavy form-and-function sleight of hand, but perhaps Gunderson sees theater as a parasite — a useful one — injecting its genetic material into foreign hosts, much the way viruses do.Certainly “The Catastrophist,” available to stream through Feb. 28, is as likely as the rest of Gunderson’s plays, many about science, to go viral. She has a knack for writing to the needs of actual theaters — in this case, Marin Theater Company in Mill Valley, Calif., and Round House Theater in Washington. Previous works including “I and You,” “Natural Shocks” and “The Half-Life of Marie Curie” have strong hooks, minimal production requirements and few, if juicy, roles.The solo show is expertly shot inside an empty theater.Credit…via Marin and Round House TheaterThat’s the case here as well. Wolfe (William DeMeritt) is the only character, the set is bare, and the premise is timely. Too timely, perhaps. Begun last April but set in 2016, “The Catastrophist” uses the coronavirus as an invisible antagonist and shadow mascot, which means imbuing Wolfe with a kind of heroic prescience. I’d call it self-serving except that in a play that isn’t autobiography the question of “self” has been fudged.In any case, the baleful tone of the 80-minute monologue — beautifully filmed with three cameras in front of an empty audience at the Marin company’s Boyer Theater — gives “The Catastrophist” the feeling of a staged lecture, as if Cassandra got a TED Talk. But Wolfe’s own TED talks are much less self-burnishing; he seems like your cool 10th grade science teacher. As written by Gunderson, though, he comes off as a science snob with a serious case of I-told-you-so smugness.That’s especially true in the first half. After a scene that announces the play’s coyly unstable narrative — “Was there a prologue I should be aware of?” Wolfe asks — we are introduced to the science of virology and Wolfe’s history as a bug hunter. His years of research in Cameroon, risking something horrifically called simian foamy virus, are duly honored and unduly exoticized. Later, despite suffering from what Gunderson presents as an equally horrific affliction — kidney stones — he staggers to lunch to warn the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of “this new Ebola outbreak in West Africa.”“I could tell it was going to bad,” he says, as if he were the only one. “And it was.”This part of the play is essentially a promotional résumé, poetically phrased and embroidered with metatheatrical doodads. From time to time, Wolfe is interrupted by creepy music, loud heartbeats and a voice in his head that we cannot hear. (The sound design, full of clichés, is by Chris Houston.) It gradually becomes clear that the voice is Gunderson’s, chattily keeping Wolfe and, through him, the audience abreast of her compositional tactics. At one point he tells us that his wife has changed the play’s title, formerly “The Virologist,” to “The Catastrophist.”It’s lovely that Gunderson loves her husband so much that she agreed to write about him despite initial misgivings, and that she apparently could not keep her distance from him even for 80 minutes. DeMeritt helps you understand why: His take on Wolfe is smart and sexy enough to make the character’s snark compelling and his enthusiasm for science contagious. Jasson Minadakis’s staging and the camerawork by Peter Ruocco do well by the story, too, getting a lot of visual variety out of a rather stiff setup; terrific lighting by Wen-Ling Liao helps.But by the time the play, in its second half, takes a turn toward the purely personal, focusing on Wolfe’s own disappointments and milestones rather than biology’s, the thread of the storytelling has completely frayed.Except for an unseemly moment in which Wolfe is permitted to fulminate against unspecified critics who accused him of botching the American response to Ebola, virology now disappears. Instead, Gunderson has Wolfe dive into the death of a parent, the birth of a child and his own medical scare as if these universal human events, however sad or happy, were tragedies and blessings on the order of pandemics and vaccines.This undermines the whole play: When the ordinary stuff of life is forced to serve as drama, the truly dramatic stuff comes to seem ordinary.What’s left from the self-canceling content is the form, and if you’ve ever seen one of Gunderson’s plays, with their switcheroo dramaturgy, you won’t be surprised by the surprise near the end of this one. It’s not very original, but it does allow Gunderson to assert her dominance in what is, after all, her own field. Theater may still be a fraud but, by hook or by crook, it’s going to be her fraud.The CatastrophistThrough Feb. 28; marintheatre.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More