Theater

Broadway will remain closed for at least the rest of this year, and many shows are signaling that they do not expect a return to the stage until late winter or early spring.The Broadway League said Monday that theater owners and producers will refund or exchange tickets previously purchased for shows through Jan. 3. Given the unpredictability of the coronavirus pandemic that has prompted the shuttering of Broadway, the League said it was not yet ready to specify exactly when shows will reopen.“Returning productions are currently projected to resume performances over a series of rolling dates in early 2021,” the League said in a statement. Among the logistical issues industry leaders are discussing with government and medical officials: “screening and testing, cleaning and sanitizing, wayfinding inside theaters, backstage protocols and much more.”“I’m cautiously optimistic, with the latest information that we’re getting from scientists and medical professionals, that we’re getting close to some protocols that would work in New York and on the road,” Charlotte St. Martin, the League’s president, said in an interview. “As long as they hold up, I do think that after the first of the year, a rolling rollout of shows reopening is possible.”St. Martin said that the rising levels of coronavirus cases in some parts of the country reinforced the industry’s cautious approach. “Frustration goes by the wayside when you’re talking about risking people’s life or health,” she said.Broadway shows went dark on March 12, and already this has been the longest shutdown in history. At the time, there were 31 shows running, including eight still in previews; another eight were in rehearsals before beginning previews.Thus far three shows, the Disney musical “Frozen,” which had opened in 2018, a new Martin McDonagh play called “Hangmen,” and a revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” both of which were in previews, have announced that they will not resume performances when Broadway reopens.Several producers have indicated that they are looking several months into the new year for a resumption of Broadway shows. The earliest date chosen thus far is for “The Minutes,” a new play by Tracy Letts, which hopes to open March 15. A revival of “American Buffalo,” a play by David Mamet, is aiming for April 14; “MJ the Musical,” a new show about Michael Jackson, says it will open April 15, and “The Music Man,” a revival starring Hugh Jackman, plans to open May 20.Several other shows have said they plan to open next spring, but have not announced exactly when, including a revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite” starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, as well as Lincoln Center Theater’s new musical, “Flying Over Sunset,” and Roundabout Theater Company’s revivals of the musicals “1776” and “Caroline, or Change.”Roundabout last week also announced that it would stage “Birthday Candles,” a new play by Noah Haidle that had been scheduled to open this spring, in the fall of 2021, and that in the winter of 2021-22 it would stage the first Broadway production of “Trouble in Mind,” a 1955 play by Alice Childress. The Childress play, which is to be directed by Charles Randolph-Wright, is about racism in theater, and is the first by a black writer added to the Broadway calendar since an intensified national discussion about racial injustice was prompted by the killing of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis. More

The Broadway League, a trade association that is the closest thing to a governing body presiding over America’s biggest stages, has decided to undertake a sweeping audit of diversity in the industry in response to the unrest over racial injustice that is sweeping the nation.The League, whose members include Broadway theater owners and producers, as well as presenters of touring shows around the country, will hire a company to survey all aspects of the industry — onstage, backstage and in the many offices that power the productions, according to Charlotte St. Martin, the League president and chief executive.She said the League could not mandate participation by other companies and organizations but that its leadership would strongly encourage all affected entities, including labor unions and nonprofits that operate on Broadway, to cooperate with the researchers.“I think we have done a good job onstage, and we’ve done a good job with the Tony Awards, but in a lot of our backstage areas we haven’t done as good a job, and if people are frustrated, they have the right to be,” St. Martin said. “We have to change, and we will change.”The audit is one of several measures the League’s board has decided to take in response to the uproar over racism that has roiled the country since George Floyd was killed in police custody last month in Minneapolis. Many theater artists have taken to social media to detail instances in which they felt mistreated because of race, and several have formed new organizations to press for change.St. Martin said the League had also decided to change its bylaws to make it easier for industry leaders of color to join its board. In addition, she said, the League will hire an executive to oversee its equity, diversity and inclusion efforts; undertake an assessment of its 19 existing diversity initiatives; make unconscious bias and anti-racism training mandatory for its staff and leadership; and offer the training to its members.The League currently has a board of about 50, two of whom are black. Both of them welcomed the changes.“I’m very proud that there are actions being taken, and it isn’t just talk,” said Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, the longtime executive director of Arizona State University Gammage, a large performing arts center whose programming includes touring Broadway shows.“It’s been a long time coming,” she added. “As wonderful as the field is, I often am the only one in the room.”Stephen Byrd, a Broadway producer who also serves on the League board, described similar experiences. “When I walk into a general manager’s office, I don’t see anyone like me; when I walk into an audition, I don’t see anyone at the table that looks like me,” he said. “We do need new voices.”The League is a relatively small trade association — it had 37 employees before the pandemic, and now has 20 — but it is influential because it is the body through which theater owners and producers negotiate labor contracts, interact with government officials and, together with the American Theater Wing, oversee the Tony Awards.Its existing diversity programs are focused in two areas — work force development, aimed at encouraging and assisting people of color interested in careers in the industry, and audience development, aimed at persuading people of color to become more frequent theater patrons.But St. Martin said the current discussion about injustice has persuaded the League’s leadership that it needs to do more.“There’s no question that what we all just experienced has educated us all,” she said. “We have accepted the responsibility to insure that we change the industry through our members.”Drew Shade, the founder and creative director of Broadway Black, a digital platform highlighting black theater artists working in the industry, welcomed the move, but with a note of caution.“It sounds like a really great beginning — a first step,” he said. “But the Broadway League has all the power, and it will be interesting to hear how they plan to distribute control and power within the industry. Maybe there’s a conversation to be had about what else they can do.” More

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The email arrived on my second day as the theater reporter here at The New York Times. It was March 10, 2015, and a publicist from the Public Theater, an Off Broadway nonprofit, was welcoming me to the beat. “I think one of the best ways to get to know the Public right now is to come see HAMILTON,” she wrote. (For reasons I have yet to understand, theater publicists generally put show titles in all caps.)I went to a matinee five days later, and in the five years since, I’ve written more than 100 articles that prominently mention the show. It goes without saying that “Hamilton,” which explores America’s revolutionary origins through the life of Alexander Hamilton, has dominated my tenure — I’ve never known the theater beat without it, and until the coronavirus pandemic prompted an unimaginably long shutdown of Broadway, I thought it would be the biggest theater story I’d ever cover.Now “Hamilton,” which transferred from the Public to Broadway in July 2015, won every conceivable award, and became a much-loved and much-quoted juggernaut, is back in the news, because a live-capture filming of the original cast is streaming on Disney Plus starting July 3. (Yes, I wrote about that too.)So what’s it been like to spend five years on the Hamilbeat?I sensed right from the start that this musical, with its cast made up mostly of actors of color and its score influenced by hip-hop and pop music, was going to be a huge story. I remember being determined, that summer, to land an article about the production on the front page, convinced that the paper needed to make a big early statement about the show as a game-changing reflection on our culture, our politics and our history. Ultimately, the Page 1 gods agreed. I was traveling in Spain when it happened; I felt so affirmed that I didn’t mind the time-zone-busting copy desk questions.A feature that followed about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical upbringing was particularly fun to report — as we explored the Venn diagram in which show tunes and hip-hop overlap, he started playing random songs from his iTunes library and riffing about what each one meant to him. (He insisted I keep one track off the record: It was a Polynesian song, part of his secret research for “Moana.”)But for me, the moment that really illustrated Miranda’s passion for the musical songbook came on the afternoon I joined him to watch “Hamilton” from a hidden bandstand at the Public (his alternate played the lead role while Miranda looked for weaknesses he could address before the Broadway transfer). He asked why I was wearing a tie — he was in a hoodie — and when I explained that after “Hamilton” I was going to the opening of “Fun Home,” he burst, from memory, into a passage from “Ring of Keys,” the show’s yearning anthem, beautiful but at that point little-known.I’ve seen the show about eight times, and over the years I’ve taken deep dives into its finances and have written about its prices and its profits and its people. There’s been a persistent, although rarely discussed, tension over how much coverage is too much — the theater desk periodically experiences “Hamilton” fatigue, and producers of other shows occasionally criticize what they see as an overemphasis on the show. But readers seem to love “Hamilton” stories, and that means assigning editors — and not just those in the culture section — do too.The story I waited longest for was about Miranda’s relationship to Puerto Rico, where his parents grew up and where he spent his childhood summers. The island’s influence on his art had always struck me as significant and underexplored. I knew the best way to tell that story would be to see Puerto Rico through his eyes, at least as much as a journalist can, and when he announced that he was bringing “Hamilton” to San Juan, I had my peg. I asked to meet him there, and in fall 2018 he agreed; a devastating hurricane and campus unrest made the story more complex than either he or I could have anticipated, and I’m glad we did it.There were stories that got away. The one I most mourn was about the relationship between toddlers and “Hamilton” — I was intrigued by why the show’s lyrics and melodies are such a memorization magnet for small children — but I never could sell my editors on that one, and now I think the moment has passed.And maybe it’s just as well that I never got to this idea: I wanted to do a story about the German translators tasked with adapting the show’s word-drunk and oh-so-American libretto for its first foreign-language production. But the subject of lyric translation is arcane, the Hamburg production is delayed, and now I think we’ll have to wait to hear “young, scrappy and hungry” auf Deutsch. More

One of the founders of a celebrated nonprofit theater in Virginia stepped down from his position on Wednesday after being accused on social media of sexual misconduct.Signature Theater, located in Arlington, Va., just outside Washington, said that its artistic director, Eric Schaeffer, had retired after three decades with the organization.The theater offered no initial explanation for the leadership change, but it came just three days after a veteran Washington-area actor who had appeared in work at the Signature, Thomas Keegan, said on Twitter that Schaeffer had grabbed his genitals at an awards ceremony in 2018. The actor Joe Carlson made a similar accusation on Facebook, saying that Schaeffer had similarly groped him at a theater benefit in 2016.In a statement, the theater said it had investigated both allegations in 2018 and deemed them “unfounded and likely coordinated.”“Over the past few days, there have been other allegations which have appeared as posts on social media,” the theater added. “To date, Signature has received no formal complaints, but would handle them according to the theater’s comprehensive policies which could include an independent investigation.”Keegan said on Twitter Wednesday that he welcomed Schaeffer’s resignation, and called for the removal of the theater’s board, which he accused of complicity. Sarah Valente, a member of Signature’s board of directors, defended the board’s handling of the initial accusation, saying, “I do not believe that we ignored anything. A thorough investigation was done, we trusted the investigator who came highly recommended, we accepted her findings and moved on.”Valente said that Schaeffer had decided to leave of his own volition, and that the board had accepted his decision. Schaeffer did not respond to a request for comment about the allegations, and in a statement issued by the theater, he did not refer to the circumstances of his departure. “After thirty years, with the world feeling upside down, I am retiring as Co-Founder/Artistic Director,” he said.“I hope that the next generation of leaders can weather the many storms our profession faces,” he added. “To do so, it needs to pull together, dedicate itself to the work, and avoid the toxic polarization that damages not just the institutions, but the work itself, the art.”Founded in 1989 by Schaeffer and Donna Migliaccio, Signature initially staged its work in a middle school auditorium. It then spent years in a former auto garage before finishing construction on a $16 million, two-theater facility in 2007.Under Schaeffer’s leadership, the theater championed musicals by Stephen Sondheim and by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and was honored with the Tony Award for regional theater in 2009. Schaeffer oversaw an acclaimed series of Sondheim musical revivals at the Kennedy Center in 2001-02. And he directed five productions on Broadway, including “Gigi,” a 2011 revival of “Follies,” and “Million Dollar Quartet.”Schaeffer’s rapid resignation in response to an accusation on social media comes at a time when many theater artists have been publicly voicing allegations of misconduct in their workplace. At first, most of the statements concerned racism, but there have also been renewed efforts to seek accountability for sexual misconduct.Keegan said he was prompted to make his allegation public by reading the “commitment to social justice” that Signature published in response to the unrest over racial injustice that followed the police killing of George Floyd, among others. More

Online stages have the spotlight now that real ones are dark. The following companies enable children to watch, perform or learn about theater remotely.ArtsPower National Touring Theater: For $15, families can stream a show from the company for an unlimited time as part of its new on-demand service. All based on children’s books, the hourlong musicals include extras like author interviews and how-to-dance videos. The service’s first title, “Chicken Dance,” adapts Danny Schnitzlein’s comic barnyard tale.artspowerondemand.teachable.comBeat by Beat Press: This theater publisher has created two musicals for ages 7 to 14 that camps, schools and youth groups can rehearse and present virtually. After buying a license ($149.50 until Sept. 1, but organizations with low funds can pay less), the group downloads scripts, recorded accompaniment and other materials. Actors individually record and upload their numbers, which, when viewed successively, coalesce into a show. The choices: “The Show Must Go Online!” or “Super Happy Awesome News!”bbbpress.comChicago Children’s Theater: CCTv, this troupe’s YouTube channel, just made its debut with “Frederick, A Virtual Puppet Performance.” An adaptation of Leo Lionni’s picture book about field mice, it features a surprising narrator: the actor Michael Shannon. On Saturday the theater’s Boing! festival will include the premiere of “Doll Face Has a Party!,” based on the picture book written by Pam Conrad and illustrated by Brian Selznick.chicagochildrenstheatre.orgFunikijam World Music: Offering classes and shows that introduce children 9 and under to a variety of global cultures, the company has presented its menu in a virtual format. In its Totally Awesome Summer program, families can find music videos, online activities, excerpts from recorded performances and many free classes.funikijam.comThe New Victory Theater: Normally the home of international productions, the theater has devised New Victory Arts Break, a free weekly series of activities to do from Monday to Friday. Each package — they’re all on the website — has a theme, like songwriting or tap dance. This week’s edition honors Juneteenth with songs, readings, history and drama.newvictory.orgThe Paper Bag Players: The troupe that makes stories out of cardboard and paper teaches small children to do the same. Its webpage Activities for Kids at Home features weekly video installments with clips from past performances and projects like how to turn a box into a car.thepaperbagplayers.orgImageDIY: Family Musicals!, a fee-based class offered by TheaterWorksUSAcademy, helps families create a musical based on their favorite storybook.TheaterWorksUSA: This national company offers TheaterWorks Anywhere, a webpage with free activities, behind-the-scenes information and video clips of musical adaptations of books like “Charlotte’s Web” and “Dog Man: The Musical.” (Monthly subscriptions, starting at $5, provide access to more content.) It recently introduced TheaterWorksUSAcademy, a fee-based program of skill lessons and master classes, including a DIY: Family Musicals! course that begins on Saturday.twusa.orgTrusty Sidekick: Children can view free videos of nine of the troupe’s shows, a smorgasbord for different ages, on its website through June. But Sidekick Studio, its series of mini-classes, will remain online all summer. So will a video of the company’s latest experiment, “The Planetary Discovery Census,” an intergalactic adventure featuring cast members and the audience interacting on Zoom.trustysidekick.org More

With coronavirus cases sharply down in New York City, residents are preparing to return to dining outdoors and visiting hair salons as soon as next week. But as reopening continues this summer and fall, the city’s major classical music institutions will be silent.On Thursday, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center announced they would cancel their fall seasons. Coming on the heels of similar announcements from the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, the decisions make clear that there will be few, if any, large-scale performances before 2021 in one of the world’s musical centers.“This was a very difficult decision for us to make,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in a statement. “However, the safety of Carnegie Hall’s artists, audiences and staff is paramount.”Lincoln Center — which presents performances as well as acting as a landlord to the Met, the Philharmonic and other organizations — anticipates over $1.3 million in lost ticket revenue from the cancellation of fall events, Isabel Sinistore, a spokeswoman, said in an email.She added that the center had seen about $13 million in lost revenue, including ticket sales and rentals of its spaces, since the pandemic began. The center has furloughed or laid off approximately half its staff, and its leadership team has taken salary cuts.Synneve Carlino, a spokeswoman for Carnegie Hall, said the hall is projecting a deficit of approximately $8 million for the fiscal year ending June 30. It anticipates a larger deficit next year, including the impact of losing approximately $13 million to $14 million in ticket revenue and rental income from the cancellation of its fall season.Those losses will be partially offset by furloughs of approximately 50 of the hall’s 274 full-time employees who had still been working this spring. (Another 80 staff members, including ushers and stagehands, had already stopped working when the hall closed in March.) There will be pay cuts for all employees making over $75,000 a year.The hall tentatively plans to reopen its three theaters on Jan. 7, 2021, and Lincoln Center aims to follow on Feb. 6. Carnegie’s opening night gala, originally scheduled for Oct. 7, will become a virtual celebration on a date to be announced.New York’s theaters have been closed since the middle of March. The Met, which hopes to return with a New Year’s Eve gala, has projected that its empty stage will cost it close to $100 million in lost revenue. The Philharmonic plans to return early in 2021. On Thursday, New York City Ballet announced that it, too, would close for the fall, losing its lucrative “Nutcracker” run around Christmastime. Broadway theaters are shuttered at least through Labor Day, but many industry officials believe they will remain closed significantly longer than that.Closures continue outside New York, too: On Tuesday, both San Francisco Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the two largest American opera companies besides the Met, announced the cancellation of their fall seasons. While live musical performances look to be largely out for this fall, several of New York’s museums have announced tentative opening plans. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a national bellwether, is aiming for mid-August. More

The verdict is in: Zoom can, in fact, be an effective new stage for theater.The Boston-based Arlekin Players Theater’s digital production of “State vs. Natasha Banina” reimagines the utility of the medium beyond everyday office meetings and virtual happy hours, using graphics, animation and other interactive elements to create a captivating theatrical experience.The immersive production, directed by Igor Golyak and starring Darya Denisova, is based on “Natasha’s Dream,” by the Russian playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich. Before it starts, an announcement sounds: “By joining us today, you have self-selected to be part of our trial.”Eschewing the virtual equivalent of a theater’s typically silent, anonymous audience, this “live theater and art experiment” encourages viewers to introduce themselves to one another via the Zoom chat, and to take an interactive poll so they can be selected as jurors.But, clearly, this is no typical trial: At the performance I watched, more than a hundred participants peered into their computers from their homes across the U.S. to hear the testimony of Natasha Banina (Denisova), a Russian teenage orphan being tried for manslaughter. Natasha nonchalantly describes her time in the orphanage, among girls who bully one another and supervisors who seem not to care. But Natasha wants more; she had a dream, she tells us, repeatedly, with desperation.And here’s when things got bad, she tells us: When she met a journalist who took an interest in covering her hardships at the orphanage, she became infatuated with him, then obsessed, until she was driven to commit a crime of passion. At the end, the audience votes on her fate: guilty or not guilty?While many productions have been trying to figure out how to use Zoom to mask the fact that we’re seeing theater at a remove, “State vs. Natasha Banina” (presented by the Cherry Orchard Festival) leans into that sense of disconnection. Natasha herself is detached from the world, and as she moves around the white walls of her empty cell, fidgeting and throwing middle fingers up to the camera, we become drawn into her head space.ImageAnton Iakhontov’s animations include the depiction of Natasha’s lover as an astronaut.She draws on the walls, and the sketches come to life thanks to Anton Iakhontov’s brilliantly executed animations: a cigarette smokes; a two-dimensional drawing of a TV conjures a functional one that plays a news segment; a faucet drips hearts that drop to the bottom of the screen.We encounter her imagined lover, too, though never rendered as a three-dimensional human but rather piecemeal, as just a hovering pair of glasses or a drawing of legs and feet, or, most commonly, as an astronaut who strolls alongside her, as though her imagination has fully launched her into space.This mutable virtual tableau is satisfyingly disconcerting. We’re intimately acquainted with Natasha; her mind is open for us to see, with all of its dreams and diversions, and her imagination is suffocating, as she swings wildly between declarations of affection and vicious aspersions.Yet we are asked to judge her. The play’s conceit feeds from this tension, between empathy and dispassionate scrutiny. Zoom ironically makes the interaction even more personal; Natasha looks at the screen and calls out the names of audience members, pleading with them to see her side of the story.This is the second interactive trial play I’ve seen recently (“Where We Stand” had its audience rule on its protagonist’s rise and fall from grace thanks to a magical interloper). Both are quiet calls for accountability that reach beyond the stage. We are asked for awareness, a vigilant wokeness in regards to a society’s disadvantaged, who are so often born into circumstances that make them figuratively dead on arrival.This conceit could come across as gimmicky or melodramatic if it weren’t for Golyak’s crafty direction and video design, and especially Denisova’s charismatically off-kilter performance. Her ever-grinning Natasha is abjectly alluring: unhinged and almost bestial, as she fidgets, paces and compulsively picks her nose. Natasha’s vehement insistence on her strength and indifference (“I don’t care” is a common refrain) reveals just the opposite, which makes moments of vulnerability, as when she curls up in a ball in the corner of the room and speaks of her mother, that much more riveting.ImageDenisova’s Natasha insists on her indifference, though her actions show otherwise.One can pick up on the play’s political notes: a timely criticism of a system that punishes people who have been marginalized by broken institutions, including orphanages. But the unequal social scaffolding built around Natasha is overshadowed by the grotesque peculiarities of the character herself, and Denisova’s mesmeric rendering. Though the story holds, it’s a missed opportunity, in this current moment of protest.As we each sit in our separate rooms, considering our own inconvenient detentions, “State vs. Natasha Banina” delivers an alternative: not freedom, but a view into another’s imprisonment. The sight is unsettling — the Cheshire grin of a girl trapped in a room with only her fantasies.“State vs. Natasha Banina” is streamable on June 21 and June 28 at the website of the Cherry Orchard Festival. More

An all-star team of black theater artists has formed a new coalition vowing to combat racism in the theater community.Black Theater United counts among its founding members the Tony Award winners Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, Phylicia Rashad, LaChanze, Kenny Leon, Adriane Lenox and Lillias White.The group, whose founders also include the actors Wendell Pierce, Vanessa Williams, Norm Lewis and Brandon Victor Dixon, said it had formed a nonprofit that would seek “to influence widespread reform and combat systemic racism within the theater industry and throughout the nation.”Among its plans: working for social change by pressing for greater participation by hard-to-count communities in the census, and reviewing theater industry practices and assisting black theater artists.The effort is one of several prompted by a wave of national unrest over racial injustice that has followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month.Another group of prominent black theater artists last week issued a “Dear White American Theater” letter decrying racism in the industry.The groups differ in their approach.The “Dear White American Theater” collective introduced itself with a blistering critique of the theater industry, which it called “this house of cards built on white fragility and supremacy,” and then said it plans to turn to next steps.“We are currently collecting data, testimonials and statistics, which will be incorporated into a comprehensive list of demands calling upon white institutions to examine, change and dismantle their harmful and racist practices,” the collective said in a press statement.Black Theater United began by specifying actions it intends to take, including supporting existing efforts to bolster census participation and developing new mentorship programs for aspiring young black theater artists. The group said it will next “constitute an inquiry committee to accurately assess past practices and policies within the theater.”There are several other efforts underway to call out and challenge racism in theater, and to champion black artists. Because the nation is still in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, many of the efforts are online.The Broadway Advocacy Coalition, formed in 2016, last week held three online sessions to discuss racism, and then invited nonblack members of the theater community to sign a “public accountability pledge.”The organization Broadway Black has created a new awards ceremony, the Antonyo Awards, to honor black artists working on Broadway and Off Broadway; the ceremony is to be held on Friday, which is Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the day the Emancipation Proclamation was read in Texas.The intensifying national focus on race and racism have also prompted online panels discussing race in theater, and streaming productions of plays that deal with race.Much of the conversation is taking place on social media. Black artists are sharing personal experiences of racism in theater (some under the hashtag #TheaterInColor); some white women theater artists with large followings invited black women theater artists to take over their social media accounts for a day (mirroring a similar campaign in other sectors of society). More