Theater

It’s official: There will be no Broadway shows in New York this summer.The Broadway League, a trade organization representing producers and theater owners, said Tuesday that Broadway’s 41 theaters would remain shuttered at least through Labor Day.The announcement is not a surprise; the coronavirus pandemic is continuing to kill more than 150 people a day in New York state (down from the peak of 800), and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has put arts and entertainment in the last phase of his reopening plan.It remains unclear when Broadway might reopen. Many industry officials believe it will be considerably later than Labor Day. The practical effect of Tuesday’s announcement is that box offices and authorized ticket sellers should now refund or exchange tickets for shows through Sept. 6. Industry leaders have been extending the shutdown incrementally as a way of managing cash flow, as well as managing expectations.“As we’ve been put in phase four of the governor’s plan, we felt that Sept. 6 was a reasonable distance of time for refunds and exchanges, while we fully understand that we may not be back at that time,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the Broadway League’s president. “Broadway will be back when the governor tells us it’s safe to be back — we’re working closely with his office and with experts to know when that will be.”Theaters have been closed since March 12, when Cuomo barred gatherings of more than 500 people. The closing has disappointed legions of fans, cost thousands of people their jobs and prompted the jettisoning of two productions that were in previews but had not yet opened: the new Martin McDonagh play “Hangmen,” and a revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”Broadway is expected to be among the last sectors of the economy to reopen because its finances depend on assembling large crowds in confined spaces and its workplaces, onstage and backstage, place cast and crew in proximity to one another.The industry has other challenges, too. In recent years, its audiences have included large numbers of tourists and seniors, two groups that seem likely to return to Times Square more slowly than others. And its ticket prices are high, which could be a deterrent if the economy stays weak and unemployment remains high.In Britain, the Society of London Theater last week announced that shows in the West End have been canceled until June 28. “This does not mean theaters will reopen on 29 June,” the society’s announcement said. “If further cancellations are necessary they will continue to be announced on a rolling basis.” More

It’s going to be quite a while before anyone sees “Hamilton” onstage again.But there’s now another option: Disney announced Tuesday that it plans to stream a filmed version of the stage production beginning July 3 on Disney Plus.The plan is a pandemic-prompted shift: Just three months ago, Disney announced that it was preparing the film for release on Oct. 15, 2021.But the cancellation of all live performances, as well as the uncertain appeal of movie theaters, led the company to fast-track the film, moving up the release date by 15 months.“In this very difficult time, this story of leadership, tenacity, hope, love & the power of people to unite against adversity is both relevant and inspiring,” Disney executive chairman Robert Iger said on Twitter.The movie consists largely of filmed performances, featuring the original Broadway cast, shot at the Richard Rodgers Theater in June 2016. The film, like the stage production, is directed by Thomas Kail; Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the musical, stars in the title role.The release date is not accidental: the musical depicts the American Revolution, and July 4 is Independence Day in the United States.“Hamilton,” about the life and death of Alexander Hamilton, who was the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury, has been a huge blockbuster since opening on Broadway in 2015. The show won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for drama, as well as 11 Tony Awards, including the prize for best new musical.The show has grossed $650 million on Broadway, where it has been seen by 2.6 million people. And, before live performances around the world were shuttered in an effort to limit the spread of the coronavirus, it was also playing in London and several North American touring productions.Disney Plus, with more than 50 million subscribers, has been one of the bright spots in the ailing Disney empire, which, because of its dependence on theme parks and moviegoing, has been hit hard by the pandemic.This is not the first time Disney has changed its streaming plans as it adapts to a marketplace transformed by this unexpected moment: in March the company began streaming the animated film “Frozen 2” three months earlier than planned, citing “this challenging period.”This is also not the only Miranda movie affected by the pandemic: a feature film adapted from his earlier musical, “In the Heights,” has been delayed. Originally scheduled to be released next month, the film is now set to be released a year later, on June 18, 2021.In addition, Hulu is planning to stream a documentary feature about Freestyle Love Supreme, the rap improv group co-founded by Miranda, Kail and Anthony Veneziale, beginning June 5. The documentary, titled “We Are Freestyle Love Supreme,” is directed by Andrew Fried. More

“You have to make your voice do everything,” James Monroe Iglehart said. If you have seen Iglehart onstage — as the genie in “Aladdin,” say, or as Jefferson in “Hamilton” — you will have admired his nifty footwork and kinetic facial expressions. Those don’t matter now. In his apartment, in front of his “really expensive” microphone, he creates characters with vocals alone.Since theaters shut down in March, some Broadway actors have found a new stage. Over the last month, a host of audio dramas and musicals have appeared: “Little Did I Know,” about recent college grads who take over a summer theater; “Bleeding Love,” about a post-apocalyptic city in which people are afraid to go outside; “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors,” about well, Dracula; “Closing the Distance,” an anthology series about quarantine; and “The Pack Podcast,” another anthology series.These shows have been assembled, wholly or in part, by stage actors in isolation. Some, like Iglehart, who has done voices for Disney series, and Annaleigh Ashford, who played a troll in “Frozen” (“I’m very proud of that”) have considerable voice-over experience. Others have little or none. Among them, they have recoded only a handful of audiobooks, a reliable source of income for actors between live jobs.All are trying to master the form’s technical specifics — “the spit or the plosive p’s, those things get in the way,” Kelli O’Hara said — and pull off decent sound quality while stuck at home. “It’s been really challenging with a 3-three-year-old,” Ashford said. But in offices, bathrooms and beneath duvets, they are making themselves heard.An audio drama isn’t the same as a stage show. “What makes theater a unique art form is that the actors and the audience are in the same room,” Taylor Trensch said. But maybe it kind of is. O’Hara said that while recording, “I felt that same rush of desire to communicate.” Maybe it’s even better. As she pointed out: “We’re using your imagination. We’re not giving you everything. We’re letting you build the world while you listen.”And everyone agreed that with theaters shut, it was good to have something to do. “Oh my gosh, it was nice to just have a reason to be creative,” Trensch said. That these were all paying gigs helped too.We spoke to performers about recording at home, building a role through phonemes alone and whether audio drama can replace live theater — for now, anyway. These are excerpts from the conversations.Lesli MargheritaPodcast: “Little Did I Know”Character: Lizzie, “a woman who knows exactly what she wants”Where did you record? On my bathroom floor with a microphone on my toilet — incredibly glamorous — and my dog just laying by the bathtub.How do you develop a character using just your voice? I have to rehearse in front of a mirror first. I have to act with my face, with my entire body, because otherwise nothing will come through. It’s a bit lonely.Does this substitute for live theater? I think it’s a great substitute. I love that the audience can be engaged in their imagination, seeing these characters the way that they want to see them. Seeing things on Zoom for me is not the same — an apartment in the background doesn’t do it for me.Sarah StilesPodcast: “Bleeding Love”Character: Bronwyn, “a total dreamer, that quintessential fairy tale ingénue”Where did you record? In my bedroom, right by a window, which is not necessarily the best thing, but I have big curtains.How do you develop a character using just your voice? Voice-over work has made me a better actor. The specificity of every moment, every breath, every pitch is so important. It becomes very intimate.Does this substitute for live theater? I love this medium. I love telling stories in this way.Ashley ParkPodcast: “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors”Character: Lucy Westfeldt, “this strong, spunky, fiery, smart, savvy ingénue”Where did you record? I’m in San Antonio with my parents, recording in our home office. With some of the racier scenes, my parents were like, “What was happening in there?” More

Per Olov Enquist, an acclaimed Swedish novelist, playwright and journalist who for decades was a leading voice in Scandinavian literary and cultural life, died on April 25 in Vaxholm, Sweden, a village northeast of Stockholm. He was 85.The cause was organ failure after years of declining health, said Hakan Bravinger, the literary director of Norstedts, Mr. Enquist’s publisher.A prolific writer who grew restless when not working on a book, Mr. Enquist, better known to his many readers as P.O., published more than 20 novels, along with plays, essays and screenplays. His work has been widely translated and won numerous literary prizes throughout Europe, including the August Prize, twice, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Nordic Council Literature Prize.Mr. Enquist was a co-writer of the screenplay for “Pelle the Conqueror,” a father-son story, based on a novel by Martin Andersen Nexo, set in early 1900s Denmark. Starring Max von Sydow and directed by Bille August, it won the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1988.Kirkus Reviews once referred to Mr. Enquist as “one of the world’s most underrated great writers.”Many of his novels used historical scenarios or famous figures to explore philosophical, religious and psychological themes. He favored self-questioning, truth-seeking narrators and perfected a semidocumentary storytelling approach that borrowed from journalism.His big breakthrough, “The Legionnaires” (1968), was written in the style of a documentary novel. It was based on true events surrounding a group of Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian men who were drafted into the German army during World War II. Although the soldiers surrendered to the Swedish authorities, they were imprisoned and later deported — a lingering wound in Swedish politics that Mr. Enquist probed unreservedly.It was a role he relished: Mr. Enquist became something of a public intellectual, weighing in on issues of the day in his columns for Scandinavian newspapers and on TV.Image“The Royal Physician’s Visit” (1999), a rowdy historical novel about sex and politics, was the Enquist work perhaps best known to American readers.“The Royal Physician’s Visit,” perhaps the Enquist work best known to American readers, is a rowdy historical novel from 1999 about sex and politics in the Danish court of the 1770s, when the rule of young King Christian VII was usurped by his German doctor, who took the queen, Caroline-Mathilde, as his lover.Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Bruce Bawer said Mr. Enquist had “shaped this remarkable story into a gripping, fast-paced narrative,” calling his prose “rich in arresting epigrams and marked by calculated repetitions that give the novel a touch of hypnotic power.”Tiina Nunnally, who translated “The Royal Physician’s Visit” and three other Enquist books, said his writing style was “unlike any other.” She recalled a debate she had with the author’s American publisher, Overlook Press, regarding Mr. Enquist’s use of punctuation.“The editors were a little taken aback because in ‘Royal’ he has hundreds of exclamation marks — sometimes in the middle of a sentence,” Ms. Nunnally said in a phone interview. “They said, ‘Should we normalize it?’ I said, ‘No, it’s his style.’”Mr. Enquist would study a historical subject exhaustively before writing. But he wasn’t interested in just rendering the costumes, furniture or other atmospheric details of the period, Mr. Bravinger said. “He is interested in the psychology, in the characters,” he said. “It’s never a costume drama. It’s a psychology drama.”In his novels, stories and essays Mr. Enquist was equally penetrating in drawing on his childhood in a small village in northern Sweden, his success as a track athlete and his time as a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.In his 2008 memoir, “The Wandering Pine,” which he narrated in the third person, Mr. Enquist was unsparing in describing his years spent drinking, which nearly destroyed his writing career and himself along with it. After emerging from alcoholism in the 1990s, he wrote some of his most celebrated books.Mr. Enquist’s work was frequently characterized as dark or melancholic. But it could also be funny and life-affirming, Mr. Bravinger said.Speaking on a radio show in 2009, Mr. Enquist described puzzling over the meaning of life until, finally, he asked his dog, Pelle. In the end, Mr. Enquist said, he and Pelle determined that it wasn’t that complicated: “One day we shall die. But all the other days we shall be alive.”Per Olov Enquist was born on Sept. 23, 1934, in the isolated village of Hjoggbole, roughly 300 miles south of the Arctic Circle. As he wrote in his memoir, most villagers never left. His father, Elof Enquist, a laborer, died when Per was an infant. His mother, Maria (Lindgren) Enquist, was a schoolteacher who raised her son in an evangelical community. He wasn’t introduced to the movies until he was 16.Driven to succeed in the world, he earned a degree in literature at Uppsala University, Sweden’s oldest university, and published his first novel before he was 30. He lived much of his life in cosmopolitan cities like Stockholm, Copenhagen and Paris.But his insular, pious childhood remained with him. “If you have had an upbringing like mine, you never get away from it,” he told The Guardian in 2016. “You get to be 80 and read the Bible again. It’s an upbringing that marks you like a branding iron.”On his 70th birthday, in 2004, the journal Swedish Book Review devoted an entire supplement to Mr. Enquist. “This Northern Swedish environment, with its strong evangelical influences, has turned out to be not only the background for much of Enquist’s fiction, but also the stimulus for his lifelong search for truth,” Ross Shideler a professor of comparative literature and Scandinavian at U.C.L.A., wrote in his introduction.But, Mr. Enquist told The Guardian, “I wouldn’t want to change it if I could.” Being free of distractions and steeped in life’s big questions, he said, was good training for a writer.After establishing himself as a journalist and novelist, Mr. Enquist discovered that he had a gift as a playwright. His first play, “The Night of the Tribades,” written in 1975, examined the chauvinism of another Swedish literary star, August Strindberg. It had a brief run on Broadway in 1977 and led to several more plays, as well as a lucrative side career writing for film and television.Mr. Enquist was married three times. His wife, Gunilla Thorgren, a journalist, survives him, along with a son, Mats, and a daughter, Jenny, from a previous marriage.Mr. Enquist’s other novels include “Hess” (1966), about the German politician and Nazi party member Rudolf Hess; “Lewi’s Journey” (2001), about the Pentecostal movement in Sweden; and “The Story of Blanche and Marie” (2004), about Marie Curie. His last novel was “The Parable Book,” published in 2016.Long before he was a literary lion, Mr. Enquist was a champion in the high jump. By some accounts he nearly qualified for the 1960 Olympics in Rome. And he brought that sense of competitiveness to his writing, even to matters like page counts, Mr. Bravinger said.“It would need to be more than 450 pages,” Mr. Bravinger recalled of one Enquist book. “You would think, Who cares? But it was a mind-set. He was always trying to top the last book. And the novel was always the pinnacle.” More

Zev Buffman had been a prominent Broadway producer for two decades when he met Elizabeth Taylor in 1980 at the opening night of his revival of “Brigadoon,” the Lerner and Loewe musical, at the National Theater in Washington.Ms. Taylor, the epitome of screen glamour since the mid-1940s, had almost no stage experience. But Mr. Buffman, a brash Israeli-born impresario, asked her if she would act in a play. Smitten by talking to the actors at the backstage party that night and hoping to recover from a career lull, he recalled, she quickly agreed.In May 1981, eight months after their encounter, Ms. Taylor opened at the Martin Beck Theater on Broadway in Mr. Buffman’s revival of “The Little Foxes,” Lillian Hellman’s drama about a wealthy Alabama family. It was a hit.“From the moment I persuaded Elizabeth to do a Broadway show, I became her shepherd, her keeper, her doctor, her shrink, her best friend,” Mr. Buffman told The Tampa Bay Times in 2011.Bringing Ms. Taylor to the stage was a signature moment in a career that started in the 1950s with bit parts in Hollywood films and blossomed when Mr. Buffman turned to producing shows on Broadway and elsewhere.He died on March 31 at a hospital in Seattle, near Whidbey Island, where he had moved from Florida in 2018. His wife, Vilma (Greul) Buffman, said the cause was pancreatic cancer. He was 89.Mr. Buffman’s fascination with show business began in Tel Aviv, where he was born Ze’ev Bufman on Oct. 11, 1930. His father, Mordechai, ran two movie theaters, and his mother, Clara (Torbin) Bufman, was a homemaker. Both had immigrated from Ukraine.As a youngster, Ze’ev watched movies from the theaters’ projection booths, riveted by films like “Gunga Din” (1939), which he said he saw 78 times, and the fast-patter comedy of Danny Kaye. Already fluent in German, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and Yiddish, he learned English by listening to Hollywood stars. (He later changed the spelling of his surname to Buffman to keep people from mispronouncing it “Boofman.”)After serving as a commando in Israel’s Defense Forces during its War of Independence in 1948, he got a student visa and moved to Los Angeles in 1951, fixated on a Hollywood career. He enrolled at the two-year Los Angeles City College, where a talent scout from Paramount Pictures spotted him in a production of “Stalag 17.”That led to a small role as an Arab guard in “Flight to Tangier” (1953), where, during a fight scene, Jack Palance accidentally dropped him on a concrete floor, knocking him out cold.Early in the production of “The Ten Commandments” (1956), in which Mr. Buffman played two different Hebrew slaves, he saw a sign that had been written for a scene in modern and not ancient Hebrew lettering. He tried to fix the error from the set, his nephew Alan Fox said in an email, by shouting, “Hey, Ceece!” to the director, Cecil B. DeMille, who remonstrated him for not addressing him as Mr. DeMille. But he also asked Mr. Buffman to keep offering advice.Frustrated at being cast only in minor roles, he turned to producing in the late 1950s. He bought the old Hollywood Canteen, which had provided entertainment to servicemen during World War II, and converted it to a dinner theater.In 1960 he produced a musical revue, “Vintage ’60,” at the Ivar Theater in Hollywood, which became his first Broadway show when he and the producer David Merrick moved it to the Brooks Atkinson Theater that September. It closed after eight performances.The experience did not deter him. He would produce or co-produce dozens of shows on Broadway until 2009, among them “Jimmy Shine” (1968), a comedy starring Dustin Hoffman, and revivals of “Peter Pan,” “Oklahoma!,” “West Side Story” and “A View From the Bridge.” His last Broadway credit was as one of many producers of a revival of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.”In 1969 he presented a memorable flop, “Buck White,” a musical set at a meeting of a black militant group. It closed after seven performances. The star was the former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, who had been stripped of his title for his refusal to enter the draft.“I was amazed at his ability to carry a tune,” Mr. Buffman told The New York Times in 2019. But Ali was lackluster on opening night, following a bravura performance in the final preview.Afterward, Mr. Buffman asked Ali what had happened.“He said, ‘I fought my fight yesterday at the preview,’” Mr. Buffman said. “‘I came to fight again tonight, but I was done.’”Mr. Buffman’s relationship with Ms. Taylor continued after “The Little Foxes.” They collaborated on an ill-fated venture to produce three Broadway plays. The first, Coward’s “Private Lives” (1983), starring Ms. Taylor and her ex-husband, Richard Burton, was a critical and box-office flop, as was “The Corn Is Green,” also in 1983, with Cicely Tyson.Unable to cast their third play, “Inherit the Wind,” Mr. Buffman and other producers instead staged “Peg,” an autobiographical one-woman show starring Peggy Lee. It closed quickly.Recalling his time with Ms. Taylor, Mr. Buffman told The Tampa Bay Times: “In the beginning my relationship with her was wonderful. Later it got more difficult with the drugs and booze.”Mr. Buffman was even busier in Florida than on Broadway. Starting in 1962, he produced shows at the Coconut Grove Playhouse (which he owned) in Miami; the Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale; the Jackie Gleason Performing Arts Center in Miami Beach; the Bob Carr Performing Arts Center in Orlando; and Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater.“He had a great sense of what the general public, who would fill his seats, would like,” Arnold Mittelman, the former producing artistic director of the Coconut Grove Playhouse, said by phone. “He also had the vision to add a 300-seat mezzanine that extended over the 800-seat orchestra.”Some shows that opened at the Florida theaters, like “The Little Foxes,” at the Parker Playhouse, moved to Broadway; others toured the country. Mr. Buffman was also a general partner and producer at the Chicago Theater in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and helped renovate the Saenger Theater in New Orleans.He briefly detoured from theater to sports in 1988 when he became part of the original ownership group of the expansion National Basketball Association team the Miami Heat.“He didn’t know anything about basketball,” Vilma Buffman said, “but he used to say it’s like going to the theater. You go to a game, you go to theater.”He sold his interest in the team in 1992.Theater remained his focus. For eight years, starting in 2003, he was president of the RiverPark Center, a performing arts center in Owensboro, Ky. In 2011, at 81, he became president of Ruth Eckerd Hall. He retired two years ago.In addition to his wife, Mr. Buffman is survived by his son, Gil Bufman; a stepdaughter, Denise Auld; and seven grandchildren. His marriage to Debby Habas ended in divorce.Ms. Buffman said that her husband’s proudest achievement was producing a revival of “Oklahoma!,” because of its subject matter.“He said it was like Israel,” she said. “They came to a new area, developed it and it became a state.” More

LONDON — One recent Friday, Nathan Bowen, a graffiti artist, was spray painting a boarded-up storefront in East London.He was wearing a reflective vest, hoping any police officers who drove by would mistake him for a builder. But he still stood out. He was the only person on the whole street.In March, the British government ordered everyone to stay inside, only allowing people out for daily exercise, to buy food or if they were an essential worker. A month later, the lockdown is still in force.Mr. Bowen was not an essential worker, he acknowledged, but he said he was providing a necessary service, of sorts. “In this time, you need people like me to go out,” he said. “If no one’s doing it, the city has no vibe.”Before the pandemic, London teemed with street artists and performers: Buskers sang to commuters on the Underground, street magicians entertained tourists, graffiti artists covered the city’s walls.But now — with a few exceptions like Mr. Bowen — they are all gone. What has happened to the artists who used to add so much life? And when the pandemic is over, will they be able to go back out?The ArtistThe day that London went into lockdown, Mr. Bowen, 35, had a different reaction to the news from most others in the city. He was walking home from a friend’s house, he said, when he saw a storekeeper boarding up their windows.“I just saw that blank board and thought, ‘Yeah! There’s going to be so many opportunities to paint,’” he said.“For me, this lockdown works in reverse,” he added. “Everyone’s left the city now, so it’s time for the underworld to come through.”The next day, he went to the store he’d seen and painted the boards with a construction worker in a face mask, holding open his jacket to reveal a thank-you message for the National Health Service.Mr. Bowen has been going out every couple of days since, he said, and has been shocked to find that he appeared to be the only street artist out. “This lockdown’s a true test,” Mr. Bowen said. “You get all these graffiti guys going on about how they’re so anti-system, so radical, yet this comes around and I haven’t seen one bit of ‘graf.’ ”Frontline, a British graffiti magazine, has been urging its readers to “stay home, stay safe,” since the lockdown began. Even Banksy, perhaps Britain’s most famous street artist, has resisted the urge to go out and paint an attention-grabbing mural. In April, he posted a picture on Instagram of some stencils he’d done around his bathroom with the message, “My wife hates it when I work from home.”Mr. Bowen said that during the pandemic, he was only painting work with supportive messages for the National Health Service, Britain’s beloved state health care provider. He wanted to give hospital workers a boost at this time, he said, and he felt that pieces on other subjects would open him up to criticism for breaking the lockdown.“This is proper street art, as it’s about communication — promoting positive messages that raise the spirits,” he said.On a recent Friday afternoon, nobody stopped Mr. Bowen as he painted. A handful of joggers ran past, giving him a wide berth. Two police cars drove past.The owner of the building did appear, Mr. Bowen said, but rather than chasing him off for property damage, the owner just asked him to add some balls to the painting to reflect the fact the building had been, before lockdown, an adult ball pit.It looked like Mr. Bowen would finish the piece without a hitch, until he encountered a common problem for street artists in London: It started to rain. Mr. Bowen swore and huddled under an awning with his dog Klae (who also wore a reflective vest). He’d just have to come back and finish it tomorrow, he said.The BuskerThe last time that Kirsten McClure was busking in a London Underground station, in early March, she could feel a change was coming.“People were wearing face masks for the first time,” the 52-year-old singer-songwriter said, in a telephone interview. “People in face masks don’t give you much money,” she added.On March 21, Transport for London, the city’s public transportation agency, banned all buskers from its network.“I was really surprised,” Ms. McClure said. “I didn’t think they’d shut it off. I had this fantasy that I’d go and play all these nice soothing tunes for medics going off shift. It was just that weird denial everyone’s had.”Ever since, Ms. McClure, who said she usually made half her income from busking, has been staying at home with her husband and son. She was lucky that she still had income from her second job as an illustrator, she said. Some buskers she knew had started claiming unemployment benefits, she added.She had seen one busker’s desperation at first hand when she went out to exercise and saw an accordionist playing next to a line of shoppers outside a grocery store. “It was pointless — absolutely pointless,” Ms. McClure said, “But that’s the busker’s mentality: You go where the footfall is.”She threw the accordionist a coin, maintaining the recommended distance of two meters, or about six feet, she said. But the coin hit the ground and rolled straight back to her. “I thought, ‘This is awful! How do you actually give someone money without going in two meters?’”Ms. McClure said that she had considered busking online — performing on a livestream and asking for donations — but had felt that it would be difficult to drum up enough attention. Instead, she has started teaching herself violin in case she is forced to wear a face mask when she returns to busking. “I thought it might be easier to play instrumentals, than sing with a mask,” she said.She was optimistic, though, that the ban would not last long. Over recent weeks, Transport for London, which regulates busking on the subway, has sent its licensed buskers several emails telling them how to apply for emergency support from charities and saying that the service hoped to have them back soon, she said. Busking was also a vital component of the city, “a sign of it being happy and healthy,” she added.“It’s going to be really good for people to see buskers out again, just to take their mind off things,” she said. “That’s what we do: distract and cheer them up.”The MagicianNathan Earl had two tricks in his routine before lockdown.One was a staple of magic shows worldwide. He’d take solid silver rings and smash them into each other so that they suddenly linked. He liked to perform the trick with the help of a child from the audience drafted in to hold the ring, who would often look on with wonder at the feat.The other was a card trick, in which he would pull a spectator’s chosen card from a deck set in an animal trap. He’d grab the card just before the trap’s jaws slammed shut.Both tricks involved audience interaction, Mr. Earl, 24, said in a telephone interview. For the card trick, he’d stand alongside someone as they picked a card from the deck. “Obviously, people will be afraid of touching after the pandemic,” he said. “That’s what all street magicians are worried about.”Social distancing could also have an impact on his street shows in another way, he said. “Magic relies on being a spectacle. If people are standing apart, it just looks like a rubbish show, and people walk through the gaps as well.”“It’d be a mess,” he added.Mr. Earl was not alone in his concerns about social distancing, according to Jay Blanes of the Westminister Street Performers’ Association. Some performers feared for their livelihood if they were banned from gathering crowds or if fewer tourists visited the city. “I think some people are being too optimistic,” Mr. Blanes said in a telephone interview, though he expressed hope that things would improve.Mr. Earl said he hoped he could just get out on the streets as normal, and soon. He lived with his parents, he said, and was financially OK for now. “But if it goes on like this for a while, I’ll have to look at other options,” he said. He didn’t really want to contemplate stopping street magic, he added. He loved the freedom, he explained, and the feeling of community among the street magicians.“It’d be really sad to stop,” Mr. Earl said. “The streets would be quite sterile without performers.” More

A month ago, Jenna Worsham, a stage director, was on the phone with Catya McMullen, a playwright. “We were laughing at ourselves that in a time of crisis, we were kind of useless,” Worsham said. “We’re not firemen. We’re not nurses. We’re not doctors. We’re not government officials. We just write stories about those people. In the reality of a pandemic, our job is to stay home.”Tired of feeling inactive, Worsham and McMullen started to dream. What if they could help? They decided to convene playwrights and actors to raise money for No Kid Hungry, a national Share Our Strength campaign that works to end childhood hunger. Within 24 hours of the idea first being sparked, they were on the phone with Billy Shore, a founder and the executive chair of Share Our Strength.

The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has begun a special Covid-19 relief campaign. All proceeds will go to nonprofits that provide assistance to those facing economic hardship. Make a tax-deductible donation via GoFundMe.
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The resulting online theater initiative, The Homebound Project, will run for five weeks starting May 6 and feature three editions of new, short theater pieces that air for four days. Each edition consists of 10 short pieces (two to five minutes long) on the same theme — starting with “home” then moving to “sustenance.” Future themes are yet to be announced. View-at-home tickets start at $10 per edition, and all proceeds benefit No Kid Hungry.Participating actors in this all-volunteer effort include Uzo Aduba, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Betty Gilpin, Jessica Hecht, André Holland, Marin Ireland, Hari Nef, Ashley Park, Mary-Louise Parker, Alison Pill, Thomas Sadoski, Amanda Seyfried and Zachary Quinto. Participating playwrights include John Guare, Rajiv Joseph, Martyna Majok, Qui Nguyen, Sarah Ruhl and Anne Washburn.“Stories are one of the few things when we’re isolated that can help us stay human and can help take away the loneliness and isolation and fear,” Worsham said. “They give us an opportunity to be somewhere else, even if it’s only in our minds.” More

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.It was the actor Bruce Myers’s voice, above all, that people tended to remember. “His deep lion’s voice will resonate no more,” was how the French newspaper Le Monde opened its tribute to Mr. Myers, who died of the new coronavirus in Paris on April 15 at 78.A favorite of the great international director Peter Brook, with whom he worked for nearly 50 years, Mr. Myers, with his elegant diction and reverberant tones, inspired comparisons to the famously mellifluous John Gielgud.Writing about Mr. Myers’s performance in an evening of short works directed by Mr. Brook in 2011, Charles McNulty of The Los Angeles Times called him “a human Stradivarius,” with his “lush caress of vowels and precise choreography of consonants.”Bruce Myers was born on April 12, 1942, in Radcliffe, a town north of Manchester, England, to Maurice and Mitzi Myers. His father was a solicitor, his mother a secretary in her husband’s law firm. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, and studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.Mr. Myers met Mr. Brook in about 1970 and became one of the most enduring members of the Paris-based International Center for Theater Research, founded that year by Mr. Brook and the producer Micheline Rozan to stage productions but also to examine the purpose of theater. Mr. Myers toured the world, from cosmopolitan capitals to African villages, with many of its most celebrated productions.These included such signature Brook pieces as the nine-hour “The Mahabharata,” based on the epic Hindu poem, in which he played the deities Ganesha and Krishna; “The Man Who…,” inspired by a book by the neurologist Oliver Sacks; and “The Conference of the Birds,” based on the 12th-century Persian poem.Mr. Myers notably appeared in Shakespeare roles for the company, including the misanthropic Alcibiades in “Timon of Athens,” the piece with which Mr. Brook opened the renovated Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris in 1974; and as Polonius in a streamlined adaptation of “Hamlet,” seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2001.In addition to his stage work, Mr. Myers appeared in films, including Mr. Brook’s screen adaptations of “The Mahabharata” and “Hamlet,” and had supporting roles in more mainstream movie fare like “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Henry and June.” He also worked as a director and conducted acting workshops throughout the world.He is survived by his wife, Ivanka Polchenko, who confirmed the death; two daughters, Lea and Samia, from his previous marriage, to the actress Corinne Jaber; and three siblings. More