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      Miss the N.Y.C. Subway? These Radio Plays Bring It Back to Life

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMiss the N.Y.C. Subway? These Radio Plays Bring It Back to LifeA new audio series from Rattlestick Playwrights Theater imagines the bustle of the trains before the pandemic — one story and one station at a time.From left: Alexander Lambie, Ren Dara Santiago and Julissa Contreras, contributors to an audioplay series with episodes set inside the No. 2 train, at the Wakefield 241 Street station in the Bronx.Credit…Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesDec. 24, 2020Jasmine, a student at Brooklyn College, sprints across the platform to catch an idling train. She had lingered on the No. 2 a second too long, distracted by a performer-cum-mystic doling out free advice that felt eerily relevant. Now she was moments away from missing her transfer.“Don’t close the door, don’t close the door, don’t close the —” she prays under her breath, just as the subway car’s metal doors snap shut in front of her.So ends the first episode of “The M.T.A. Radio Plays,” a new series of audio dramas created by the playwright Ren Dara Santiago and directed by Natyna Bean, among others. The series, presented in collaboration with the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, brings listeners inside a No. 2 train as it snakes from the Bronx to Brooklyn.Conceived as a love letter to city life in pre-pandemic times, each 10-to-15-minute episode is set at a stop on the No. 2 and tells the story of various New Yorkers as they navigate chance encounters with strangers, arguments with lovers or conversations with friends aboard the train.There are the subway buskers who storm train cars like tornadoes. There are eavesdropping riders who offer unsolicited advice and, often, welcomed camaraderie. There are the strangers who will not stand clear of the closing doors, the spirited child staring through a train window with glittering eyes and the omniscient voice of a conductor who keeps the train, and the city, moving through it all.Taken together, the plays elevate those once ubiquitous moments from the mundane trials of a daily commute that bind the city’s collective DNA.“When you claim New York, then naturally everyone who exists here is community,” Santiago said in a phone interview one recent morning. “You can exist in a neighborhood that is very specific, ethnically or otherwise, and feel like that is all of New York. But it’s on the subway where we get to encounter all these other identities.”Contreras wrote about a woman mulling a breakup who receives advice from a stranger.Credit…Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesLambie’s episode follows a single mother diverted from visiting a romantic partner.Credit…Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesFor New Yorkers, the series may feel like a nostalgic embrace. In the scrum of a rush-hour train, everyone from executives to office cleaners were pushed and shoved in a daily reminder that the New York hustle leaves few unscathed. Here too were the round-the-clock performances of Manhattan’s least expensive show, in which New Yorkers were at once audience members and leading actors performing scenes from their private lives on a public stage.That choreography is one Santiago knows well. The 28-year-old Harlem native spent her middle school days squeezing into packed No. 1 trains each morning and her early 20s slipping into No. 2 cars for her daily three-hour round-trip commute to work. (Like many of the playwrights involved in the series, she still relies on the No. 2 today).The first three episodes, which are available online at the Rattlestick website, begin at the northern tip of the line at the Wakefield-241 Street station in the Bronx. There, in a play by the 29-year-old Julissa Contreras, listeners meet the character named Jasmine as she is consumed by thoughts of a recent breakup and a subway performer offers her seemingly prophetic advice.The next episode, written by Alexander Lambie, 29, picks up 15 stops later at the Intervale Avenue station, where a single mother bumps into a friend and abandons a plan to visit a questionably committed lover. And at the Prospect Avenue station, the writer Dominic Colón, 44, introduces a young man whose angry call with his boyfriend prompts another rider to offer some sage advice.In a nod to the New Yorkers who make up the bulk of subway ridership today, every play also features at least one essential worker.Implicit in each vignette are the lofty life questions the playwrights wrestled with as the shrinking of urban life turned their gaze inward: What does a healthy relationship look like? How can you tell when to let go of love? How do we survive a love lost?“A lot of the inspiration are the unspoken love stories that we pass by as commuters each day,” Contreras said. “We wanted to focus on millennial lovers who are in this complicated space of finding themselves.”Of course this spring, those connections felt even more distant. With a suddenness as stunning as its deadly wake, the pandemic brought the city to a standstill.“You can walk around, close your eyes and feel like you’re inside the story,” Santiago says in praise of audio plays.Credit…Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesAs theaters went dark in March, Santiago’s own Rattlestick debut production, “The Siblings Play,” was shut down days before its world premiere. By April, the subway had emptied of riders. Lives that were lived in multiple boroughs were suddenly confined to single neighborhoods.“We’ve lost perspective,” said Bean, 28, one of the series’ directors. “Being in our homes every day, we are left to our own assumptions and prejudices. We aren’t forced to engage with people we might not have otherwise if we hadn’t gotten on the train.”That is exactly the void that she and Santiago, approached by Rattlestick, set out to fill. In May they enlisted 17 playwrights to craft stories that reflected the people living in the communities served by the stations.By then, many theaters had moved online, with prerecorded performances and virtual play readings, many of which translated awkwardly onscreen.“There was no creation of community,” Santiago said. “It felt like we were pretending it wasn’t through a screen, instead of embracing that the person watching online also exists and we can write new plays for a new medium.”But if intimacy is where those onscreen productions fall short, it is where radio thrives.The ambient sounds alone can transport a New Yorker into the sprawling underground: The familiar clink-clink-clink of a turnstile grinding forward. The earsplitting screech of a train as it winds across metal tracks. The crackle of a conductor’s voice broadcast inside a subway car.“The voices are in your ears, you can walk around, close your eyes and feel like you’re inside the story. You can see these characters or you put their voice on people walking by you,” Santiago said. “That feels more like true theater to me because it allows the person to be immersed.”The next set of episodes in the series will be available online in February, with the remaining plays released every few weeks through May.As this season nears its end, listeners arrive at the Church Avenue station in Brooklyn, where two friends debate whether or not to help a sick fellow passenger. And just before the train ends its run, Jasmine’s ex-boyfriend enters the car and encounters the same mystical performer whose spiritual counsel opened the series.Santiago plans to continue the series in subsequent seasons devoted to every train line that winds across the city.“I hope the stories will resonate with people,” she said. “They’ll think ‘Oh, I had a moment like that on the train!’ Those small interactions make people feel recognized and now, listening to them, maybe less alone.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Roger Berlind, 90, Dies; Broadway Impresario Who Amassed 25 Tonys

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRoger Berlind, 90, Dies; Broadway Impresario Who Amassed 25 TonysHe played a role in producing more than 100 plays and musicals. And while he kept an eye on the bottom line, he could be seduced by sheer artistry.Roger Berlind in 1998 near the Cort Theater, where his production of “The Blue Room,” was playing. He was introduced to the theater world by friends and soon immersed himself in the process of putting on a show.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDec. 24, 2020Roger Berlind, who produced or co-produced more than 100 plays and musicals on Broadway, including such critical and box-office hits as “The Book of Mormon,” “Dear Evan Hansen,” “City of Angels” and revivals of “Guys and Dolls” and “Kiss Me, Kate,” died on Dec. 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90. His family said the cause was cardiopulmonary arrest.During a four-decade career in the theater, Mr. Berlind backed some of the most original work on Broadway and amassed an astonishing 25 Tony Awards, one of the largest hauls on record. (Hal Prince, another prodigious Tony-winning producer, collected 21.)Mr. Berlind helped bring buoyant musicals to the stage, like the smash 1992 revival of “Guys and Dolls” with Nathan Lane, as well as sophisticated literate dramas, like the original 1984 production of “The Real Thing,” Tom Stoppard’s dazzling exploration of the nature of love and honesty. “The Real Thing” swept the Tonys, winning for best play and best director (Mike Nichols) and garnering top acting awards for Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close and Christine Baranski.His route to Broadway was indirect. Able to play the piano by ear, he fancied himself a songwriter, but his dream of making a living that way fell flat and he went to work on Wall Street.He was a partner at a brokerage firm when tragedy struck: His wife and three of his four children were killed in an airliner crash at Kennedy International Airport. Within days, he resigned from his firm.“The whole idea of building a business and making money didn’t make sense anymore,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “There was no more economic motivation.”After a period in the wilderness, he found his way to Broadway, which helped him rebuild his life and establish a whole new career.“The significant thing about Roger is that he made an incredible turnaround,” Brook Berlind, his second wife, said in a phone interview.“His life was utterly bifurcated by the accident,” she said. “There was Act I and Act II. I don’t think many other people could have gone on to such success after such catastrophe.”Success on Broadway came slowly. Mr. Berlind’s first production, in 1976, was the disastrous “Rex,” a Richard Rodgers musical (with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick) about Henry VIII, which the Times theater critic Clive Barnes said “has almost everything not going for it.”James Davis and Ali Stroker in the pre-Broadway run of the 2019 revival of “Oklahoma!” Mr. Berlind was one of several producers on the show, for which Ms. Stroker won a Tony.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs it happened, the music of Mr. Rodgers bookended Mr. Berlind’s career. His last show, of which he was one of several producers, was the darkly reimagined Tony-winning 2019 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” (That show made Broadway history when the actress Ali Stroker became the first person who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony.)After “Rex,” Mr. Berlind co-produced six other shows before he had his first hit with the original 1980 production of “Amadeus,” in which a mediocre composer burns with jealousy over the genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The play, written by Peter Shaffer, directed by Peter Hall and starring Ian McKellen and Tim Curry, took home several Tonys, including best play.Two more successes quickly followed: “Sophisticated Ladies,” a 1981 revue with music by Duke Ellington; and “Nine,” a 1982 musical based on the Fellini film “8½” about a tortured film director facing professional and romantic crises.Along the way were plenty of flops. Producing on Broadway is always risky, with no surefire formula for a hit. It became even more challenging in the late 20th century, as theater people migrated to Hollywood, labor and advertising costs soared and high ticket prices discouraged audiences. Getting shows off the ground required more and more producers to pool their resources, and even then they were unlikely to recoup their investments.One of Mr. Berlind’s achievements was staying in the game. Despite the challenges, he took chances on shows because he believed in them, and because he could afford to lose as often as he won.“I know it’s not worth it economically,” he told The Times in 1998. “But I love theater.”His successes included “Proof,” “Doubt,” “The History Boys,” the 2012 revival of “Death of a Salesman” with Philip Seymour Hoffman and the 2017 revival of “Hello, Dolly!” with Bette Midler.Even as he experienced flops, Mr. Berlind had many successes, like the 2017 revival of “Hello, Dolly!,” starring Bette Midler. He had “enormous fortitude and persistence,” said Scott Rudin, one of his co-producers on this and many other shows.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesScott Rudin, who produced about 30 shows with Mr. Berlind, said that Mr. Berlind was propelled by “enormous fortitude and persistence.”“He was not dissuaded by the obstacles that dissuaded other people,” Mr. Rudin said in an email. “He had enormous positivity, which is much, much more rare than you might think.”That became evident after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when Broadway went dark for 48 hours, a sign of the economic uncertainty that hung over the city.At the time, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani urged theaters to reopen quickly, and they did. But a half-dozen shows closed, and one on the verge of doing so was “Kiss Me, Kate,” in which Mr. Berlind had been deeply involved and of which he was enormously fond. He was enthralled with Cole Porter’s music, and everything in the show had clicked. The winner of five Tonys, including best revival of a musical, “Kate” had been running for nearly two years and was not scheduled to close until Dec. 30, 2001.Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie in the 1999 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate.” The show had been scheduled to close early in 2001, but Mr. Berlind took to the stage on what was supposed to be its final night and declared, “The show will go on.”Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut because of a sharp drop in ticket sales, the production was going to close early. A closing date of Sept. 23 was announced.Just before the curtain rose on what was supposed to have been the final performance, Mr. Berlind, a modest man who evinced little of the showmanship typical in the theater, took to the stage. He held the closing notice in his hand and ripped it up.“The show will go on,” he declared, to an already emotional audience.The cast and crew had agreed to give up 25 percent of their pay and to donate another 25 percent to buy tickets to the show for rescue workers. The move allowed “Kate” to keep running until its scheduled Dec. 30 closing.“That was my Merrick moment,” Mr. Berlind later told The Guardian of London, referring to David Merrick, one of Broadway’s famously outsize showmen.The Guardian went on to praise Mr. Berlind’s exuberant London production of “Kate,” which opened that October, as “a symbol of the indomitability and grace under pressure of a community, indeed a city, that has been reeling since 11 September.”Roger Stuart Berlind was born on June 27, 1930, in Brooklyn to Peter Berlind, a hospital administrator, and Mae (Miller) Berlind, an amateur painter who gave painting lessons while raising her four sons.The family moved to Woodmere, on Long Island, when Roger was 3. He attended Woodmere Academy and went on to Princeton, where he majored in English.His campus life revolved around the theater. He joined the Triangle Club, which performs student-written comedies, and Theatre Intime, a student-run theatrical organization. Years later, in 1998, he donated $3.5 million to build the 350-seat Roger S. Berlind Theater as part of an expansion of Princeton’s McCarter Theater.After graduating in 1952, he joined the Army and served in the Counterintelligence Corps in Germany. At one point he was on a troop ship with Buck Henry, the comic actor and writer who died this year, and the two regularly created shows for the soldiers.When Mr. Berlind returned to New York in 1954, he was determined to become a songwriter.“He loved the big-band music of the ’40s, he could play almost any song from the American songbook and he had a great memory for lyrics,” his son William said in a phone interview. His own tunes ran to the simple and nostalgic, as reflected by their titles, “Lemon Drop Girlfriend” and “Isn’t It a Rainbow Day?” among them. But Tin Pan Alley was uninterested, and, needing a job, Mr. Berlind was pointed by friends to Wall Street.“I had never had an economics course in college,” he told Playbill in 2005, “and I had 26 or 28 interviews before anyone would hire me.”Mr. Berlind, center, in 1968, during his Wall Street days, with his partners Arthur L. Carter, left, and Sanford I. Weill.Credit…Edward Hausner/The New York TimesHe worked for four years at an investment house, then in 1960 co-founded a brokerage firm, Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill, which went through various iterations until it was acquired by American Express in 1981. His partners along the way included Sanford I. Weill, who became chairman and chief executive of Citigroup, and Arthur Levitt Jr., the future chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.It was a heady time for Mr. Berlind. But on June 24, 1975, his world stopped.He had gone to the airport that day to meet his wife, Helen Polk (Clark) Berlind, and three of their children — Helen, 12; Peter, 9; and Clark, 6 — who were returning to New York from New Orleans after visiting Helen Berlind’s mother in Mississippi.While on approach to Kennedy in a severe storm, the Boeing 727, Eastern Air Lines Flight 66, was swept down by a wind shear and crashed, killing 113 of the 124 people on board, including Mr. Berlind’s family.Their son William, 2, was at home in Manhattan with his nurse at the time. As he grew up, he had unresolved issues around what had happened.“Roger was so damaged by the accident that he didn’t spend as much time with William on this subject as he could have,” Ms. Berlind, who married Mr. Berlind in 1979, said.Finally, a psychiatrist told Mr. Berlind that he needed to answer William’s questions, even if he asked the same thing over and over. Eventually, this proved therapeutic for both father and son.“He was present and strong for me,” said William Berlind, a former reporter at The New York Observer and writer for The New York Times Magazine, who followed his father to Broadway and collaborated with him on several shows.“He was marked by the tragedy,” he added, “but it didn’t consume him, and he persevered.”Mr. Berlind in 1993. He had originally wanted to be a songwriter, but his dream of making a living that way fell flat.Credit…Fred Conrad/The New York TimesIn addition to his wife and son, Mr. Berlind is survived by two granddaughters and a brother, Alan.In time, friends connected Mr. Berlind with people in the theater, and he was soon immersing himself in the entire process of putting on a show. He had a reputation for generally being more mindful than many producers about not interfering with the creative process.But Mr. Berlind always insisted that the work he backed have merit. While he kept a cold eye on the bottom line, he could be seduced by sheer artistry.“He had been a tough and successful businessman, but in his theater life he was besotted by talent, and that’s what he invested in,” Rocco Landesman, who produced “Guys and Dolls,” “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Proof” with him, said in an email.“He loved his flops almost as much as his hits,” Mr. Landesman added. “And whenever one of his shows closed, Roger was ‘available’ again.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Christmas Carol’ Review: Brooding Scrooge Gets Ghosted

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘Christmas Carol’ Review: Brooding Scrooge Gets GhostedAn elaborate production streamed live from London makes a miser out of Andrew Lincoln and the rest of us rich with holiday cheer.Andrew Lincoln makes for a particularly charismatic, if obstinate, Scrooge in the Old Vic production of “A Christmas Carol.”Credit…Manuel HarlanPublished More

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      Actors and Writers and Now, Congressional Lobbyists

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyStanding Up For TheaterActors and Writers and Now, Congressional LobbyistsBe an #ArtsHero started with a failed effort to extend unemployment benefits. It’s gone on to be a prime proponent of the message: Cultural work is labor.The founding members of the advocacy group Be an #ArtsHero, clockwise from top left: Jenny Grace Makholm, Carson Elrod, Brooke Ishibashi and Matthew-Lee Erlbach.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDec. 23, 2020Art is what binds us. It illuminates the human condition. It’s good for the soul.Those are the kind of arguments you usually hear when artists and cultural institutions ask for money. The advocacy group Be an #ArtsHero, which was created this summer by four New York theatermakers, takes a different approach.“We are an industry, not a cause,” one of the volunteer group’s four organizers, the writer-director Matthew-Lee Erlbach, said of the arts sector in a recent video interview. “According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, we generated $877 billion. It’s more than agriculture and mining combined.” Yet, he pointed out, there’s no federal department of arts and culture, while transportation and agriculture have spots in the cabinet.Erlbach and his Arts Hero founding colleagues — the actors Carson Elrod and Brooke Ishibashi and the writer-director-performer Jenny Grace Makholm — are not cultural mucky-mucks used to the corridors of power. When the performing arts shut down, what was on their mind was their own survival.Ishibashi said the campaign began simply as a way to rally the sector to advocate for the extension of Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation that was due to expire in August.“We started by cold-calling people and building out assets and saying, ‘Here’s a tool kit, please spread the word.’ We lobby differently because we lobby for ourselves and our own desperate need. We are all worried about how we’re going to pay our rent and our mortgages.”The unemployment compensation wasn’t extended at the time, but Be an #ArtsHero forged ahead. They started creating economic reports for members of Congress — in a joint conversation, Ishibashi and Erlbach referred casually to relief efforts the group is backing, an alphabet soup of acronyms like CALMER (Culture, Arts, Libraries and Museums Emergency Relief) and DAWN (Defend Arts Workers Now).Following up on the lobbying efforts of long-running organizations like Americans for the Arts, the group has pushed to help shape legislative language so bills include relief to artists and workers, not just institutions. Erlbach’s widely circulated open letter to the U.S. Senate arguing for emergency relief drew 16,000 signatories, including rank-and-file members of the culture sector and celebrities, institutional and union leaders, and advocacy groups.The letter hammered the group’s essential point: The arts matter because they represent a lot of money and they create jobs.“We’re here to change the conversation so arts workers can understand their intrinsic value because it’s tied to an economic worth, a dollar amount,” Ishibashi said. “Those numbers are unimpeachable.”Erlbach added, “Ironically, the arts has a story problem in this country.”“We are here to become a legislative priority, and part of doing that is reframing the paradigm that we are labor,” he said. “Whether you’re an usher, a milliner, a museum docent, an administrator or a publicist, you’re an arts and cultural worker. ”Erlbach, who leads the group’s political-outreach team, says that Be an #ArtsHero has met with representatives from dozens of House members and over 60 Senate offices.“It felt like the legislative process is something someone else does,” he said. “Now that’s something that we do.”The stimulus bill just passed by Congress delivered some good news for the arts, including weekly unemployment supplements. “At $300, what passed was not enough,” Be an #ArtsHero said in an email statement. “But it was something, and we are proud to have lent our voice to the cause of getting it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Rebecca Luker, a Broadway Star for Three Decades, Dies at 59

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRebecca Luker, a Broadway Star for Three Decades, Dies at 59Her Broadway career, fueled by her crystal-clear operatic soprano, brought her Tony Award nominations for “Show Boat,” “The Music Man” and “Mary Poppins.”Rebecca Luker as Maria, surrounded by the von Trapp children, in the 1998 Broadway revival of “The Sound of Music.” She also starred in hit revivals of “Show Boat” and “The Music Man.”Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDec. 23, 2020Rebecca Luker, the actress and singer who in a lauded three-decade career on the New York stage embodied the essence of the Broadway musical ingénue in hit revivals of “Show Boat,” “The Sound of Music” and “The Music Man,” died on Wednesday in a hospital in Manhattan. She was 59. The death was confirmed by Sarah Fargo, her agent. Ms. Luker announced in February that she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig’s disease.Ms. Luker’s Broadway career, fueled by her crystal-clear operatic soprano, brought her three Tony Award nominations. The first was for “Show Boat” (1994), in which she played Magnolia, the captain’s dewy-fresh teenage daughter, whose life is ruined by marriage to a riverboat gambler. The second was for “The Music Man” (2000), in which she was Marian, the prim River City librarian who enchants a traveling flimflam man who thinks — mistakenly — that he’s just passing through town.In between, Ms. Luker delighted critics by playing against type in a 1997 Encores! production of “The Boys From Syracuse.” As Adriana, the neglected wife who gets her groove back (with her husband’s long-lost twin brother), she wore slinky 1930s gowns and exuded what Ben Brantley, in his review for The New York Times, called “a disarmingly confectionary sexiness.”Ms. Luker, center, with Debbie Gravitte, left, and Sarah Uriarte Berry in the 1997 Encores! production of “The Boys From Syracuse.” Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPlaying Adriana was fun, Ms. Luker admitted. “For the first time in my life, I got to do a bit,” she told The Times in 1998. “Learning to turn to the audience, learning to hold for laughs — I ate it up with a spoon.”But by the end of that year, she was deep into ingénue territory again, playing Maria, the undisciplined novice nun turned live-in governess of seven, in “The Sound of Music.”When she earned her third Tony nomination, this one for best featured actress in a musical, it was for playing Winifred Banks, a married Englishwoman with two children and a gifted nanny, in “Mary Poppins” (2006).For all her success in musicals, Ms. Luker did not identify as a show-tunes type. “I am so not a musical theater person,” she told Playbill in 2003. “I love rock music and jazz. I love the ’70s stuff I grew up with.”Rebecca Joan Luker was born on April 17, 1961, in Birmingham, Ala., and grew up in Helena, a small town nearby. She was one of four children of Norse Doak Luker Jr., a construction worker, and Martha (Baggett) Luker, the local high school’s treasurer. Rebecca sang in her church choir (First Baptist of Alabaster) and was a member of the Thompson High marching band.In high school, she entered a beauty pageant. Singing “Much More,” the ballad of girlish dreams and determination from “The Fantasticks,” she won a college scholarship as first runner-up to Alabama’s Junior Miss.That took her to the University of Montevallo, just 14 miles from her parents’ home, where she was a music major and received her diploma in 1984. Graduation was a year later than planned because she took a break to work with Michigan Opera Theater, where she met her future New York agent. Just five years after college, she was on the Broadway stage, assuming the lead female role in “The Phantom of the Opera”— Christine, the chorus girl who is the object of the phantom’s affections.“Phantom” was her Broadway debut; she began as the understudy to the original star, Sarah Brightman; became an alternate; and took over as Christine in 1989. She remained with the show until 1991.Ms. Luker moved on immediately to another Broadway show: She played a ghost, the little orphan girl’s dead Aunt Lily, in “The Secret Garden.” In his review in The Times, Frank Rich singled out “I Heard Someone Crying,” Ms. Luker’s haunting trio with Mandy Patinkin and Daisy Egan, for special praise.Ms. Luker in performance at the Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2005. In addition to her theater work, she had a thriving cabaret career.Credit…Rahav Segev for The New York TimesIn several of her later Broadway roles, Ms. Luker replaced the original actress in a long-running hit. She took over as Claudia, the director-protagonist’s movie-star muse, in “Nine” (2003); Marie, the temperamental fairy godmother, in “Cinderella” (2013); and Helen, the frustrated wife and mother who misses being an actress — just as Mrs. Banks had in “Mary Poppins” — in “Fun Home” (2016).She grew older gracefully in a number of her later Off Broadway roles. Twenty years after starring in a 1996 revival of “Brigadoon” as Fiona, a Scottish lass so rare she really does come along only once a century, she played a droll Buffalo matron in A.R. Gurney’s comic drama “Indian Blood” (2006). In 2011, she was an Italian duchess grieving her son’s death in Maury Yeston’s musical “Death Takes a Holiday.”Ms. Luker also had a thriving cabaret career, appearing at intimate venues like Café Carlyle and Feinstein’s/54 Below, but she professed a special love for “the live experience in front of an orchestra.”The stage was always her first home, but she did finally make her screen acting debut in her late 30s when she appeared in “Cupid and Cate” (2000), a Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie in which she played the heroine’s perfect and perfectly sensible sister. Between 2010 and 2020, she had guest roles on series including “Boardwalk Empire” and “N.C.I.S. New Orleans” and appeared in three feature films, including “Not Fade Away” (2012), a drama about a teenage rock band.Her final stage role was as a small-town minister’s narrow-minded wife in a 2019 Kennedy Center production of “Footloose.” She performed at a concert in honor of the lyricist Sheldon Harnick in March 2020.Ms. Luker at home in 2015 with her husband, the actor Danny Burstein.Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesHer last performance was in June, via Zoom, in a prerecorded benefit performance, “At Home With Rebecca Luker.”“When I sing,” she told The Times shortly before that show, “I think it heals me. It helps me feel like I’m still a part of something.”Ms. Luker married Gregory Jbara, an actor, in 1993; they divorced in 1996. In 2000 she married the actor Danny Burstein, whom she met when they starred together in “Time and Again” in San Diego.Mr. Burstein survives her, as do two stepsons, Zachary and Alexander Burstein; a brother, Roger; a sister, Suzanne Luker; her mother, Martha Hales; and her stepfather, Lamar Hales. Another brother, Stephen, died last year.Looking back on her career in a 2016 Theater People podcast, Ms. Luker expressed gratitude for the roles she’d had but admitted that she probably should have broken out of the leading-lady mold — studied acting longer and more seriously, appeared in more plays, done more comedy.“I wish I had branched out a little more,” she said cheerily. “Maybe played a bitch or something.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Breakout Stars of 2020

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Breakout Stars of 2020Here are the 12 stars and trends that managed to thrive and shine in an impossible year.Clockwise from bottom left: Sarah Cooper, Maria Bakalova, the hand of the artist Salman Toor, Jonathan Majors and Radha Blank.Credit…Clockwise from bottom left: Lacey Terrell/Netflix; Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times; Peter Fisher for The New York Times; Adria Malcolm for The New York Times; Douglas Segars for The New York Times Dec. 23, 2020Updated 7:44 a.m. ETWhile plenty of us felt trapped this year, wandering through the same spaces and talking to the same people, it was the artists and entertainers who kicked open windows to new sights, sounds and experiences. Yes, the pandemic dealt a significant hit to the culture world, but nothing could derail its creativity. So, despite the limitations, stars in a variety of disciplines managed to thrive and shine, and by doing so, made a difficult year more tolerable for most everyone. Here are 12 artists and trends who gave us a fresh perspective in 2020.Radha Blank wrote, directed and starred in the autobiographical satire “The 40-Year-Old Version.”Credit…Douglas Segars for The New York TimesFilmRadha BlankRadha Blank was the hero many of us needed in 2020, when the concept of time got an overdue interrogation. In her autobiographical satire “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” which was on Netflix, she portrays a playwright who — refusing to believe that her dreams have an expiration date — pivots to rap as a grown woman. Like her character, Blank, who grew up Brooklyn, is a 40-something playwright who knows what it’s like to fight to elevate her voice.And elevate it she did. She wrote, directed and starred in the film, her first feature, a New York Times Critic’s Pick that A.O. Scott called “a catalog of burdens and also a heroic act of unburdening.”In “I May Destroy You,” Michaela Cole explores sexual assault, truth, revenge and trauma; she also created the HBO series.Credit…Natalie Seery/HBOTelevisionMichaela CoelMichaela Coel may have created the most important TV show of 2020: “I May Destroy You.” The series, which premiered on HBO in June, is inspired by Coel’s own experience with sexual assault, and in it, she deftly plucks apart ideas around truth, revenge, anxiety, trauma and fear.Coel, a 33-year-old British-Ghanaian writer and actor, plays a writer who is drugged and raped in a bathroom stall. The assault leaves her traumatized and grappling with hazy, fragmented memories. “Coel brings a superb discipline to the portrayal of distress,” wrote Mike Hale, a TV critic at The Times.In a critic’s notebook, Salamishah Tillet, a professor and contributing critic at large for The Times, noted that the show could be considered “part of a larger cultural trend in which Black women’s experiences with sexual assault are appearing with greater frequency and treated with more sensitivity.” (She pointed to the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” and TV shows like “Queen Sugar,” “The Chi” and “Lovecraft Country” as examples.)“By offering multifaceted endings,” Tillet went on, “Coel gives victims of sexual assault, particularly Black women who have survived rape, some of the most radical and cathartic moments of television I have ever witnessed.”ComedySarah CooperSarah Cooper, 43-year-old comedian, made her mark in 2020 by pantomiming the words of President Trump in viral videos that have been viewed tens of millions of times across social media. Jim Poniewozik called her first Trump lip-sync, “How to Medical,” a “49-second tour de force” and said Cooper was helping to develop “a kind of live-action political cartooning.”“Cooper’s Trumpian drag is partly a caricature of performative masculinity,” Poniewozik wrote.The success of her videos helped land Cooper a Netflix special, “Everything’s Fine,” directed by Natasha Lyonne. “This special shows that she can do much more than lip-sync,” Jason Zinoman, a comedy columnist at The Times, said of the production. “She has a promising future as an actor in television or movies.” She currently has a show in the works for CBS.Maria Bakalova, the Bulgarian actress who plays Borat’s teenage daughter in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.” Credit…Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesFilmMaria BakalovaIt’s no easy feat to stand out next to the unabashed actor-prankster Sacha Baron Cohen, but Maria Bakalova, a 24-year-old from Bulgaria, was riveting as the teenage daughter of his Borat character in his most recent mockumentary film. As the culture reporter Dave Itzkoff put it in The Times: “Sacha Baron Cohen may be the star of ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,’ but it is Maria Bakalova who has emerged its hero.”Her performance also grabbed headlines for an edited scene involving President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is seen putting his hands down his pants in a hotel room, where Bakalova, impersonating a TV journalist, is interviewing him. He later denied any wrongdoing.About the opportunity to star in a major American film, Bakalova said: “I will be really grateful to Sacha for giving this platform to an Eastern European, to play a strong and complicated character who’s not just one thing.”Adrienne Warren was nominated for a Tony for her starring role in “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical.” Credit…Molly Matalon for The New York TimesTheaterAdrienne WarrenAdrienne Warren’s starring role in “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical” earned her a Tony nomination in October for best actress in a musical. But it was her vocal and steadfast stand on racial injustice, including in the arts world, that brought Warren, 33, more deeply into one of the most urgent conversations of 2020. In an impassioned, impromptu speech this summer — during the Times event Offstage: Opening Night on the subject of being Black on Broadway — she questioned whether she even wanted to continue performing as part of an institution that didn’t stand up for people like her.“The last thing on my mind right now is me going back to Broadway,” Warren said. But in an interview with The Times after her nomination, she said, “I know this is what I’m supposed to do, but the question is whether I want to do it at the address I’ve been doing it.”As for what a dream role might look like for her in the future: “I want to make sure that I’m telling stories that represent me as a Black woman and also push the needle forward in ways that resonate with people, both in this nation and abroad,” she said.Jonathan Majors made a mark in both HBO’s “Lovecraft Country” and the Spike Lee drama “Da 5 Bloods.”Credit…Adria Malcolm for The New York TimesTelevisionJonathan MajorsJonathan Majors isn’t afraid of pain, and that may just be his secret to success. “I’m willing to hurt more,” he told Alexis Soloski in The Times over the summer. “It doesn’t bother me.”The 31-year-old star had a big year doing just that to great effect onscreen, as a Korean War veteran in the supernatural HBO thriller “Lovecraft Country,” set in 1950s Jim Crow America, and the son of a Vietnam War veteran in “Da 5 Bloods,” Spike Lee’s drama for Netflix that was named a Critic’s Pick in The Times by A.O. Scott.“Emotions in the men in my family run deep,” Majors told Soloski — who described him as “an actor of precision and intensity.” When asked if acting gave him a place to put those big emotions, he said: “With acting, it was almost like I was in a corridor, and it just appeared to me and said, ‘Go that way, son.’ I didn’t get in trouble once I started acting. I had a place to put the energy, to put my focus.”The artist Christine Sun Kim performing in American Sign Language at the Super Bowl in Miami in February.Credit…A J Mast for The New York TimesArtChristine Sun KimIn February, just minutes ahead of the Super Bowl in Miami, the artist Christine Sun Kim stood at the 40-yard line performing in American Sign Language as Yolanda Adams sang “America the Beautiful” and Demi Lovato sang the national anthem.“As a child of immigrants, a grandchild of refugees, a Deaf woman of color, an artist and a mother, I was proud to perform,” she wrote in an Op-Ed for The Times afterward. But because only a fraction of her performance was aired, she called the experience “a huge disappointment — a missed opportunity in the struggle for media inclusiveness on a large scale.”“Being deaf in America has always been political,” she wrote.Kim, 40, who was born in California and is now based in Berlin, has spent years channeling this perspective into her art. At the Whitney Biennial in New York last year, she exhibited hand-drawn charcoal drawings from her “Degrees of Deaf Rage in the Art World,” and in 2013, the Museum of Modern Art selected her for its exhibition “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” dedicated to sound art.“I want people to start thinking about what deafness means,” she told Vogue this year, “and maybe that will reduce the stigma and society will be more inclusive of people with disabilities.”MusicVerzuzYou could call it a battle, a face-off, a showdown. But Verzuz is also something else entirely: a pandemic pivot, cutting right to the very core of quarantine entertainment by combining livestreaming and nostalgia while filling a hole left by canceled live shows and shuttered clubs.Since April, Verzuz, the creation of Swizz Beatz and Timbaland, has streamed over 20 battles. Each one has brought together two hip-hop or R&B heavyweights: Gladys Knight vs. Patti LaBelle, Erykah Badu vs. Jill Scott, Gucci Mane vs. Jeezy, Babyface vs. Teddy Riley, Snoop Dogg vs. DMX, Ludacris vs. Nelly, to name a few. Millions of people have tuned in.Initially, Verzuz was streamed on Instagram Live. In July, Verzuz and Apple Music announced they’d struck a partnership which allowed the videos to be viewed live and on-demand on that platform, too.Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The Times, called the events staples of this era and “less battles in the conventional sense than choreographed chest-puffing combined with bows of respect.” To that point, there is no winner winner. As Swizz Beatz told ABC News: “The people won, the culture won, the music won.”The artist Salman Toor has his first solo museum show, “How Will I Know,” up at the Whitney Museum of American Art.Credit…Peter Fisher for The New York TimesArtSalman ToorThe painter Salman Toor was about to have his first solo museum show, “How Will I Know,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art early this year when the shutdown thwarted the whole thing. He took it pretty well. “My first reaction was, thank God,” he told The Times in June. “I’m not a social animal.” But disappointment inevitably crept in as he realized the exhibition might never happen.Thankfully for him and fans of figurative and queer art, the show eventually did go up at the Whitney, where it will appear through April. And that’s only the start for Toor. Over the summer, he joined the gallery Luhring Augustine, which will open an exhibition of his work in the next few years.Toor, 37 — who was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, and moved to the United States in 2002 — primarily depicts gay men of South Asian descent. In The Times, the writer Ted Loos described Toor’s contemporary settings: “iPhones appear here and there, the glow emanating from them emphasized with bright lines.” Toor said that he aspired to represent “what this new free space is like,” referring to living an openly queer life. In Pakistan, gay sex is illegal. “People are curious to know what it means to have the freedom of so much choice, and what is the nature of that freedom and what is the cost of that.”TheaterElizabeth StanleyUp against Adrienne Warren for that Tony is Elizabeth Stanley, who was nominated for her gutting performance as Mary Jane — “a brittle tiger mom suppressing secret trauma,” as Jesse Green, a theater critic for The Times, put it — in “Jagged Little Pill,” based on Alanis Morissette’s smash album from 1995. When Broadway shut down, Stanley, 42, did not take too long before shifting her energy toward digital performances.In April, she told Deadline that she’d already been wondering about what else she could do during the pandemic: “How can I twist to this and find something new and exciting out of this time?”What came of that question epitomized what much of theater looked like in 2020: creating new digital spaces for live performance.In April, she delivered a jaw-dropping rendition of “The Miller’s Son” from “A Little Night Music,” for the acclaimed event “Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration.” In June, she sang her wrenching rendition of “You Learn,” from “Jagged Little Pill,” for an Opening Night Times event on the future of Broadway. On Dec. 13, Stanley and her “Jagged Little Pill” co-stars reunited for “Jagged Live In NYC: A Broadway Reunion Concert.”Kali Uchis performing in Atlanta in 2018. She recently released the album “Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios).”Credit…Paul R. Giunta/Invision, via Associated PressMusicKali UchisIn 2018, Kali Uchis released a debut album titled “Isolation.” Clearly she was ahead of her time. In November, the Colombian-American artist — with a moody, seductive, dance-inducing style — dropped her second studio album, this time predominantly in Spanish, “Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios).” (Its lead single, “Aquí Yo Mando,” features the up-and-coming rapper Rico Nasty.) The album “goes genre-hopping and era-hopping, from romantically retro orchestral bolero to brittle reggaeton,” Jon Pareles, the chief pop music critic of The Times, wrote this month.Having grown up between Colombia and the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area, Uchis, 26, had many inspirations and influences, she told Interview magazine. “The last thing I ever want to do is be a predictable artist. I love that my fans never know what to expect when I drop a song.”DanceThe Year of the SoloIt wasn’t just that the coronavirus put an end to live performance in March. The need for social isolation uprooted every part of what gets a dance onto a stage: Suddenly, there were no more classes, no more rehearsals. How to fill that void? The solo.This solitary form has provided an outlet for frustration, for sadness and even for euphoria as dance artists continue to find meaning through movement. It’s true that some attempts have been sentimental and aimless, but much good has emerged from it, too. Instagram, from the start, illuminated these explorations in a steady stream of posts; choreographers worked with dancers remotely to create films in which the body could be fearless and free. “State of Darkness,” Molissa Fenley’s 1988 solo revived for seven dancers, was a glittering, harrowing reminder of the achievement that comes from strength, both internal and external.One of its interpreters, the dancer Sara Mearns, said that she saw herself as “someone that has gone through really, really hard times, but then in the end has come out stronger and on top.” Yes, dance and dancers are suffering right now. But the solo has given it — and them — a powerful voice. — Gia Kourlas, dance critic for The New York TimesAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Catie Lazarus, Comedian With a Lot of Questions, Dies at 44

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCatie Lazarus, Comedian With a Lot of Questions, Dies at 44On her live show “Employee of the Month,” she got laughs by interrogating writers, artists, politicians, intellectuals and her fellow comics.The comedian Catie Lazarus in 2015. She began interviewing prominent people about their careers, she said, “because I couldn’t quite figure out how to break in.”Credit…Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesDec. 20, 2020, 2:10 p.m. ETCatie Lazarus, a writer and comedian who probed the minds of celebrities and created her own late-night comedy universe on her longstanding self-produced live New York talk show, “Employee of the Month,” died on Dec. 13 in her apartment in Brooklyn. She was 44. Her father, Simon Lazarus III, said the cause was breast cancer.In 2011, as the nation recovered from the Great Recession, Ms. Lazarus was just another struggling comic trying to make it in New York. She had dropped out of a doctoral program in clinical psychology at Wesleyan University to move to the city, but as she tried establishing herself on the stand-up circuit, she discovered that stable jobs were hard to find. In light of these circumstances, she started hosting “Employee of the Month,” an interview-based talk show about work and labor at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.Ms. Lazarus asked notable writers, artists, politicians, intellectuals and comedians how they had achieved their enviable careers. She eventually interrogated subjects like Rachel Maddow, Dick Cavett, Greta Gerwig and David Simon. She inquired about disappointment, too — for example, she asked the journalist Kurt Andersen how he felt about getting pushed out of New York magazine.“I started hosting this show because I couldn’t quite figure out how to break in,” Ms. Lazarus told The New York Times in 2015. “I wanted to hear from people who, for the most part, love what they do and have carved out a niche for themselves. It wasn’t just about how they broke in, but what they continue to find worth struggling for, worth the heartache and the rejection and the economic toil and other types of losses that go along with it.”Her disarmingly intrusive interview style developed a following, and in 2014 Ms. Lazarus started hosting the show monthly at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater. A live band accompanied her onstage, and nights crackled with the spontaneous energy of late-night television.Ms. Lazarus with her house band at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in 2017.Credit…Abel Fermin/ShutterstockMs. Lazarus approached her inquiries from a more philosophical level as well, seemingly trying to answer a bigger question: Why exactly do people do what they do for a living during their relatively brief time on earth? She often steered guests into illuminating revelations and spectacle.Wallace Shawn reminisced about how he had considered becoming a taxi driver. Billy Crudup whispered something to her when she asked him how much he was paid for voicing Mastercard ads (she looked shocked). Gloria Steinem tap-danced onstage. And Ms. Lazarus asked Josh Russ Tupper, a co-owner of Russ & Daughters, to participate in a blind taste test of lox from his competitors Zabar’s and Barney Greengrass.“They said you can tell the difference in the lox,” she challenged him. “Do you feel there’s a difference in how your lox tastes?” (Mr. Tupper largely succeeded in identifying his shop’s salmon.)Lin-Manuel Miranda, who appeared on the show, was also a frequent guest in her audience. “Catie was the ultimate New York comedy connector,” he said in a phone interview. “Once you did the show, you were in the alumni group.” He added: “It’s unbelievable the level of connections that came through there. People before they blew up. After they blew up.”“It was,” Mr. Miranda said, “sort of a crime she didn’t have her own TV show.”Catherine Simone Avnet Lazarus was born on April, 26, 1976, in Washington. Her father was a public policy lawyer who had been associate director of the White House domestic policy staff in the Carter administration. Her mother, Rosalind (Avnet) Lazarus, was a federal government lawyer. A great-great-great-grandfather was Simon Lazarus, founder of the Lazarus & Company department store chain, which later became Macy’s Inc.A nursery report card from the Beauvoir School appeared to portend Ms. Lazarus’s future. “Katie is a great talker and will volunteer to sit in the ‘hot seat’ and speak on any topic whether she knows anything about her subject or not,” it read. “The class expects this now and, in fact, the resulting arguments are more lively due to Katie’s proddings.” (Ms. Lazarus delighted in this document as an adult and quoted from it frequently).She attended the Maret School and Wesleyan University, where she received a B.A. and an M.A. in psychology. She eventually pursued a doctorate in clinical psychology at Wesleyan but dropped out after a semester to try comedy in New York. (Ms. Lazarus said that an encouraging chance encounter with Tina Fey, in which they discussed improv, helped galvanize her decision.)Ms. Lazarus first took the stage at Stand Up NY on the Upper West Side, and she relished the nervous rush of trying to get people to laugh. She began performing on the comedy circuit at clubs like Carolines on Broadway and the Laugh Factory. And she took improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, where she started hosting her show. Early guests included Rachel Dratch, Reggie Watts and the Times journalist David Carr.“I was keenly aware that people went on to achieve these great things,” Ms. Lazarus told The Times. “I just didn’t know the steps that were involved to get there. That is why I started my show, because there is somewhat of a science to success.”In 2015, Ms. Lazarus had a career break herself when Jon Stewart gave her his first interview after leaving “The Daily Show.” She pressed Mr. Stewart about his next projects and who he thought might replace him on the show. While discussing his career, she projected an image of him wearing underwear in a spoof of a Calvin Klein ad from his MTV talk-show days.Around 2017, Ms. Lazarus ended her run at Joe’s Pub and brought her show to other venues, including the Gramercy Theatre in Manhattan and the Bell House in Brooklyn. Slate started airing a podcast of the show in 2018. Ms. Lazarus also took the show on the road, hosting it at Largo in Los Angeles and at the Sundance Film Festival.“All these people over the years, they wanted to be interviewed by her,” her father said. “And she shot for the moon. She really thought she could get anybody. She thought she could get Barack Obama. She didn’t get him, but she wasn’t shy about trying.”In addition to her father, Ms. Lazarus is survived by two brothers, Ned and Benjamin; her mother; and her stepmother, Bonnie Walter.In 2019, Ms. Lazarus took a break from her talk show. She had learned she had breast cancer in 2014 and underwent chemotherapy for years. She also wanted to finish a book of personal essays she was working on. As the pandemic took hold of life in New York, Ms. Lazarus spent her time at her apartment in Prospect Heights, writing in the company of her cocker spaniel, Lady.Ms. Lazarus at Joe’s Pub in 2016. “It was sort of a crime she didn’t have her own TV show,” Lin-Manuel Miranda said.Credit…Abel Fermin/ShutterstockMs. Lazarus always hoped her show might get picked up by a network or streaming service, and she was vocal about the gender disparity among late-night television hosts.“Showbiz has notoriously rewarded those who fail upwards,” she told Out magazine in 2018. “If and when Hollywood is ready for a talk-show host with chops, chutzpah, humor, no cavities and a genuine moral compass, will you tell them where to find me?”In her Times interview, Ms. Lazarus was asked what her own dream job was. She answered definitively.“What I do right now,” she said. “Hosting a talk show. I found mine, but it wasn’t intentional.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More