Theater

Wait a minute. A lyric from a Broadway show is part of the most heated political discourse of the moment? Something from a musical has actually been appended to a major national talking point?It was revealed on Monday that the title of John Bolton’s new memoir — a book that could possibly change the direction of the Trump impeachment investigation — is “The Room Where It Happened.” On Sunday, in a television interview with ABC’s “The Week,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, discussing the need for calling witnesses in the Senate investigation, said the show should “talk about the people who were in the room where it happened.”The exact title of the song from “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster show, is “The Room Where It Happens.” One of the many elements that make “Hamilton” so exciting is its urgency, a sense of past events occurring in the here and now. In any case, that number is sung with passion and fathomless envy by Aaron Burr, the archrival of the man for whom the musical is named, Alexander Hamilton.And yes, that is also the man whom Burr subsequently killed in a duel, propelled by the same combustible competitiveness that informs this song. Burr (Leslie Odom Jr. won a Tony in the original Broadway production) delivers this number while Hamilton, Jefferson and James Madison reach a compromise over dinner that will determine both the location of the nation’s capital and a federal tax system.In other words, momentous events are happening, which will change the course of history, and the precise nature of them will forever be known only by those at the dinner table tonight. (This would have been more likely in the relatively surveillance-free United States of that era.) And it is killing Aaron Burr not to be there, and may well be in part what drives him to kill as well.That the song title has now been appropriated by politicians suggests just how much “Hamilton” has become part of the American cultural oxygen supply. And it goes beyond not only the rarefied realm of musical theater obsessives, but also partisan use. (Don’t forget that “Hamilton” was firmly associated with the Obama White House, so much so that the Off Broadway spoof of the musical called “Spamilton” began by drawing parallels between the Obamas’ affection for “Hamilton” with that of the Kennedys’ for “Camelot.”)In any case, it’s refreshing to have a Broadway show being part of mainstream conversation again, a rarity during my tenure as theater critic. The last time I can recall anything similar happening? Well, that would have been just after Donald J. Trump had been elected president in 2016, and his vice president-elect, Mike Pence, showed up at a Broadway performance of — yep, the same — “Hamilton.”The actor Brandon Victor Dixon (who was playing Burr) stepped out at the curtain call to address Pence from the stage and asked him to keep his mind open to the breadth and value of American diversity. This in turn occasioned a tweet from the president that escalated into … Well, it was among of the first of many such dramas played out on social media.There is much in “Hamilton” that addresses contemporary concerns and values in flux. (Insert quote in Latin about unchanging human nature.) But such a perspective coexists without all-darkening cynicism. Yes, “Hamilton” (based on Ron Chernow’s biography) understands that anyone who aspires to national office is going to require an immense ego and a hunger to rule. His heroes aren’t pure.But, a couple of centuries after the facts, Miranda is able to find the present-tense electricity in a candle-lighted world. Somehow, hearing lyrics of his quoted by Bolton, the former national security adviser, and Senator Klobuchar seems to put a romanticizing distance around events that usually have my stomach churning. It’s a sensation that lasts about 30 seconds, but I’m grateful for it. More

On any other weekend, a gaggle of teenagers belting songs from “Hadestown” in the hallway of the New York Hilton Midtown would raise some eyebrows.But for three days that ended Sunday, they were in the right place. More than 5,000 others — including several Beetlejuices, a handful of Heathers and the rare Dolly — made the pilgrimage to New York for the fifth annual BroadwayCon, a haven for the most passionate musical theater fans.Some arrived in full character for the event, where attendees can meet and take photos with the stars of their favorite shows. Passes range from $80 for one day to $1,000 for a full weekend platinum pass with extra perks.When fans weren’t doing their own dramatic hallway renditions of musical numbers, here’s what they were up to.VideoKris Williams and Matt Whitaker as the title character from “Beetlejuice,” a show that drew many fan tributes.VideoDalton Glenn, Meaghan Cassidy and Grace Nobles as the trio from “Heathers.”CreditWhich witch will win?For Nyssa Sara Lee, dressing up as Ursula — the evil sea witch from “The Little Mermaid” — wasn’t just about putting on a costume. It was a test of endurance.What was it like to waltz through the convention in a 35-pound ensemble, hefting aloft a web of tentacles 15 1/2 feet wide?Two words: “It hurts.”“I almost passed out yesterday because I got super hot,” added the 26-year-old cosplayer from Salt Lake City. “If I’m running, or if I lift it up too much — I even have ice packs to put on my spine on the base of my neck, because it’s a workout.”But the four months she spent creating the costume, and the physical hurdles it took to wear it, were worth the effort, she said. Cosplay — dressing up in character, a big component of fan conventions like BroadwayCon and others — brings her joy. Wowing other admirers doesn’t hurt, either. Nyssa Sara Lee (a name she uses on everything but legal documents, she said) strapped on the tentacles both Saturday and Sunday and spent much of the weekend posing for photos.And Sunday afternoon was her chance to show it off on the main stage at the convention’s annual cosplay contest. The competition was tough: Nyssa Sara Lee was up against another Ursula, a tiny Angel Schunard from “Rent” and all four gods from “Once on this Island.”A Deer Evan Hansen was also in the running — a centaur-esque play on “Dear Evan Hansen,” with the title character’s signature blue polo for a torso and a rear end of the woodland animal.“I’m not in it to win it,” Nyssa Sara Lee said in an interview before the contest. “I would love the recognition. But my payout is literally just having people say, ‘Thank you for doing this.’”The judges, including Fredi Walker-Browne of the original “Rent” cast, agreed. Nyssa Sara Lee took first place, winning a pass for next year’s BroadwayCon.‘Six’ gets the royal treatmentVideoThe cast of “Six” leads an audience singalong.CreditVideoFans at the “Six” singalong.CreditThe screams at BroadwayCon’s “Six” singalong weren’t typical theater cheers. This wasn’t the raucous standing ovation a cast gets on opening night. These were full Beyoncé-at-Coachella screams. The screams you hear when a queen of pop — or six — steps onstage before several hundred superfans.“Six” doesn’t begin performances on Broadway for another month, but the girl-power British musical about the wives of Henry VIII had an outsize presence at the convention, including a dance workshop led by the show’s choreographer, Carrie-Anne Ingrouille.Tanya Heath, 31, arrived on Saturday as Catherine of Aragon, wearing a black and gold dress a friend lent her for New Year’s Eve and a spiked crown she made at 2 a.m. that morning.She was a royal army of one compared to the six high school seniors from New Jersey, who held a sleepover Friday night to finalize the outfits for their group cosplay. They became obsessed with the show thanks to its cast album.“They have the lovability of a jukebox musical,” said Rachael Mishkind, the group’s Jane Seymour, “but with the originality of a regular Broadway show.”Young women inspired by the show’s feminist message are at the heart of its fan base, but Aisling Kruger, the group’s Anna of Cleves, thinks the audience may be expanding.“My dad’s really into British history,” she said. “He’ll hear it and be like, ‘Oh! Jane Seymour!’ and get really into it.”VideoMatilda Doucet as Lydia from “Beetlejuice” at the Playbill trading meetup.CreditVideoMicaela Healy as Audrey from “Little Shop of Horrors.”CreditAll business at the swapJayda Lipstein, 15, knew she had a jewel in her hands, and she wasn’t going to part with it easily.She was holding court with fellow Playbill collectors in a small conference room on Saturday afternoon. And her 2008 “In the Heights” program, featuring the full original Broadway cast listed inside, was in high demand.One girl wanted to swap a “Come From Away” signed by the original cast. Another offered to throw in 20 bucks and a “Beetlejuice.” When that didn’t work, she upped the ante: How about her whole stack? A “Jersey Boys”? A “Mean Girls”?Lipstein stood firm. But around her, sentimentality reigned. Jarod Engle, 19, was on the lookout for special colorful editions of the Playbill for “Beetlejuice,” a show he hasn’t seen yet. Brianna Boucher, 17, sitting in the fluffy pink tulle of her “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” Veruca Salt costume, said she would trade anything for a “Bring It On,” a musical she loves but also never got to see.Back at Lipstein’s table, Claudia Emanuele, a 21-year-old writer from Connecticut, joked that she would “trade you my whole soul” for the “In the Heights.” She shares a name with the musical’s treasured abuela character — and when Emanuele saw the show, she said, it marked the first time she heard her name pronounced correctly onstage.In a room packed with fans who barter for nostalgia, Lipstein’s all-business mentality was an outlier.As other collectors learned, to their chagrin, she doesn’t even have any emotional connection to “In the Heights.” She acquired the program by pure luck, hidden in a box in her grandparents’ basement.“Everyone wants it,” she said, coolly appraising the room. She concluded that she might be better off just selling it to the highest bidder on eBay.VideoLuke Islam won the “BroadwayCon Star to Be” contest.CreditVideoJennifer Wilburn as Elphaba from one of the old reliables, “Wicked.”Credit‘Mary Paw-Pins’ and moreAmid the Playbill handbags, the crocheted Broadway character dolls, the paintings on sheet music and the pink-painted “Mean Girl” shoes, there was Melissa Crabtree, at a table lined with cats.Not “Cats,” the show, but images of her own gray-striped cat, Mabel, turned into souvenirs that commemorate a whole array of Broadway shows.It was Crabtree’s first time in New York, and her first time at BroadwayCon — where the maze of vendor booths stretched across two floors.At Crabtree’s table, there were stickers of cats dressed as characters from “Hamilton” and “Hadestown.” Enamel pins depicting stage manager cats with tiny feline headsets. Miniature buttons with frazzled cats announcing a dire warning: “It’s tech week.”Mabel “doesn’t let me dress her up,” Crabtree said. Instead, she started illustrating a round, cartoon Mabel, happily clad in Broadway costumes. Mabel appears as the wives of Henry VIII from “Six” and dons the flowery island garb of “Once on This Island.” There are even Lighting Crew Mabel and Sound Crew Mabel, who each sport an ensemble fit for running the show behind the scenes.Crabtree, a Chicago-based actor, started drawing theater-centric stickers three years ago to put in her planner, and the shop grew from there, her husband, Jon, said. While she interacted with customers, he sat nearby, using a button maker to quickly craft reinforcements.Every sticker set even has its own Mabel-inspired pun, from “Mary Paw-Pins” to “Licked” — pronounced, of course, with two syllables, like “Wicked.” More

PRINCETON — One day, I’d like to see a dinner party onstage where everyone is still on good terms by dessert. Or a tragedy where the soothsayer’s prophecy doesn’t come true. Or a work presentation that goes off hitchless, a cross-dressing disguise that fools no one, a gun that misses.Formulas work; that’s why they became formulas in the first place. But they still need subverting.“Goodnight Nobody,” Rachel Bonds’s restless, friable, finely acted play at the McCarter Theater here sometimes manages to distrupt old tropes, mostly because it feels like two shows carpentered together, with rough joints. It begins as a romantic tragedy, unfolds as a melancholy country-house comedy, then skitters back to tragedy again. I couldn’t always tell where the play was going, which was invigorating. But I wasn’t confident that Bonds, a nimble writer, and Tyne Rafaeli, her skilled director, knew either. It’s about old secrets, new motherhood, art-making, sex-having, nature, nurture and mental illness. Let’s put it this way: At one point, I had four of the five characters on suicide watch.Haunted by Chekhov’s “The Seagull” (consciously or otherwise), “Goodnight Nobody,” gathers a group of mostly artists at a lakeside retreat. Reggie (Nate Miller), a standup comedian in his 30s with substance abuse issues, has invited two old friends to an upstate farmhouse. Nandish (Saamer Usmani), who goes by Nan, is a painter with a troubled interior life and an apparent devotion to arm day at the gym. K (Ariel Woodiwiss) is a new mother with postpartum depression. (The script identifies her as a teacher, but the play never mentions her work, which seems odd or maybe telling.) They are joined by Mara (Dana Delany), Reggie’s art-star sculptor mother, and Bo (Ken Marks), her painter boyfriend. Some people might pack Pictionary or fishing tackle for the weekend. Bo brings an ax.Bonds has a talent for naturalism, and the chatter among the three friends crackles with lived experience and imaginative sympathy. As the mother of a preschooler, Bonds is beautifully specific about the isolation and occasional despair of young motherhood. (K describes herself as “a fragmented zombie milk-person with a baby who I love like an animal, but who makes me so, so tired, like a thick, leaden, gray tired I have never felt.”) But the revelation of acute mental illness feels stagy. And the conversations around visual art sound as empty as those conversations usually do. “It impacted my whole being,” Nan says of Mara’s work.Lines like that go over better when Woodiwiss, a wonder of decency and frazzle, and Usmani, steady in a difficult role, say them. Rafaeli has encouraged the actors, all adroit, to inhabit the roles rather than overplay them, while still allowing Delany her natural vivacity and grace. “Goodnight Nobody” exists most comfortably at its most casual — when it captures the ungainliness of friends and family straining to reconnect, and the chatty panic of characters who are too old for a quarter-life crisis yet too young for a midlife crisis having crises anyway.But Bonds and Rafaeli — as well as Kimie Nishikawa (sets) and Jen Schriever (lighting) — keep pushing toward a starker, more symbolist place, which doesn’t sit well with the ultrarealism of actual bacon frying and the clumsy susurration of K’s breast bump. The title comes from a whimsical page in Margaret Wise Brown’s picture book “Goodnight Moon.” The characters here find it deeply unnerving. (You want real trauma? Try “The Giving Tree.”) Which is to say that the darkness and the drive toward tragedy feel forced. Who brings an ax indoors?The play sometimes acknowledges this, as when Reggie says that while he had anticipated some awkwardness over the weekend, “I truly didn’t think it would be like Nan reciting insane prophecies about the age of our souls and my mom’s boyfriend crying into his s’mores.” Same, Reggie, same.Goodnight NobodyThrough Feb. 9 at the McCarter Theater Center, Princeton, N.J.; 609-258-2787, mccarter.org. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. More

Planets hang from the ceiling. Actors in oversize bobbleheads dance a quadrille. Puppets come in varying shapes and sizes. Then there are projections, a percolating marching band, a pulsing electronic beat: “The Transfiguration of Benjamin Banneker” is pretty trippy.Which is appropriate since the show is partly about the exploration of the cosmos as an instrument of self-assertion and liberation.Conceived, designed and directed by Theodora Skipitares, who has been active Off Off Broadway since the late 1970s, “Transfiguration” is theatrical time travel: to the 18th century of Benjamin Banneker, a self-taught African-American mathematician and astronomer, but also to the days — more recent but rapidly receding from memory — of a bohemian, avant-garde scene from the East Village that combined earnestness, engaged politics and wackadoo papier-mâché aesthetics.Skipitares’s singular approach — let’s call it docu-activist puppet theater, a term as unwieldy as her shows — may frustrate audiences who prefer a bit more polish. Yet it is also ambitious, concerned with political engagement and community-building, and even endearing. (This particular style of art-making has become rather rare outside of La MaMa in Manhattan, where “Transfiguration” is running.)Like Skipitares’s loose takes on Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author” and Lorca’s “Blood Wedding,” the new production deploys various storytelling devices and draws on a wide range of sources, using as a starting point the achievements of Banneker, a free black man who grew up on a Maryland farm and became a polymathic autodidact. His life is woven into a story about Ed Dwight, the first African-American pilot selected to be an astronaut trainee.Both men are represented by puppets, voiced by the narrator Reginald L. Barnes, standing at a lectern. Tom Walker, who voices the puppet of the astronaut Frank Borman, quotes the NASA instructor Chuck Yeager: “Kennedy is using this to make racial equality, so do not speak to Ed Dwight, do not socialize with him, do not drink with him, do not invite him over to your house, and in six months he’ll be gone.”Dwight, who never made it to the moon, ended up resigning from the Air Force.On a lighter note, Alexandria Joesica Smalls portrays the actress Nichelle Nichols, best known for playing Lieutenant Uhura on “Star Trek.” She relays an anecdote about Martin Luther King Jr. confiding in her that he was as a Trekkie.It’s obvious that the show establishes a connection, for these African-Americans, between the study of astronomy and the exploration of space on one hand, and civil rights on the other — just don’t expect much in the way of linear plotting. At their best, the scenes have an appealing D.I.Y. inventivity, as when actors silhouetted behind a scrim interact with brief animated films (the first by Holly Adams, the second by Trevor Legeret and Klara Vertes).This being a Skipitares project, there are plenty of puppets, too. The Banneker figure is especially beautiful, a candle resting in its hollow torso, head and arms attached to a simple frame (Jane Catherine Shaw is credited with puppetry direction).The seven representatives of Soul Tigers Marching Band (which is based at Benjamin Banneker Academy in Brooklyn) considerably punch up LaFrae Sci’s score and often directly participate in the action: At one point, two of them engage in a drum battle while we hear excerpts from letters between Banneker and Thomas Jefferson, in which the first pointedly reminds the second that he once claimed all men are created equal, only to keep some in captivity.The show concludes with the musicians’ building to a cosmic trance. You can’t blame Skipitares for making the most of the Soul Tigers. Shakespeare’s stage directions probably didn’t include, “When in doubt, get a marching band,” but they should have.The Transfiguration of Benjamin BannekerThrough Feb. 2 at La MaMa, Manhattan; 212-352-3101, lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

A play that’s a smash on one side of the Atlantic is sometimes a flop on the other, and the reasons can be hard to pin down. But when London threw its arms around Robert Ardrey’s Broadway reject “Thunder Rock” in 1940, timing had a lot to do with it — that and a cast led by a young Michael Redgrave.Already at war, people there were in need of bucking up, and “Thunder Rock” provided that with its story of a wounded idealist who retreats from a world that is verging on self-destruction, only to have a band of ghosts reignite his spirit and send him back into the fray. Maybe Elia Kazan’s New York production, in late 1939, fizzled because Americans didn’t yet sense much danger.Might the play feel more urgent now, in these fever-pitch times? That perfectly reasonable possibility seems to be the catalyst for Alex Roe’s revival at Metropolitan Playhouse — a regrettably fitful, stilted staging that muffles most of the humor and humanity of this creaky, peculiar play.Ardrey’s themes are enduring enough, though: creeping nationalism, rising isolationism, the despair that descends when one is unable to see a way through current troubles to a better future, or any future at all.Such is the predicament of David Charleston (Jed Peterson), the hero of “Thunder Rock.” A journalist who once bestrode the world, he lost not only his objectivity but also his hope when he covered the Spanish Civil War.Back home, he has turned quasi-hermit, keeping a lighthouse on a tiny island in Lake Michigan, where he gets visitors once a month, when his pilot friend, Streeter (Jamahl Garrison-Lowe, in the role James Mason played in the movie), flies in supplies.“It’s a privilege, my boy, living in the world today,” Streeter tells Charleston, sardonically. “It’s a storybook, sheer stark drama. How’s everything going to come out?”Charleston wants not to care about the answer to that question, but his idealism isn’t dead, only dented. So he does what many of us do in dire times: He looks to history for solace, to see how humankind has survived thus far.A plaque on the wall of the lighthouse (the set is by Vincent Gunn) describes a shipwreck off the island 90 years before, and Charleston has found the list of drowned passengers — European immigrants in search of a safer, more prosperous existence. These are the ghosts he conjures to keep him company, and talk him back into relishing life.In a spotty cast that includes a fine Thomas Vorsteg as a disillusioned Spanish Civil War veteran, Peterson brings an appealing naturalness to Charleston, whose most vivid ghosts are the British women’s rights activist Miss Kirby (Teresa Kelsey) and the Viennese doctor Stefan Kurtz (Howard Pinhasik).“There is a time, I presume,” Kurtz says, “in every man’s life when the lights grow dim and the battle seems lost, and he needs all the dead men of history to arise, and to assure him with a single united voice that battles can be won.”That may be true, and certainly Ardrey meant his play to be a beacon in encroaching darkness. But the battle for “Thunder Rock” has been lost again this time around.Thunder RockThrough Feb. 9 at the Metropolitan Playhouse, 220 East 4th Street, Manhattan; 800-838-3006, metropolitanplayhouse.org. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More

Margo Lion, a theater producer who was largely responsible for bringing “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Hairspray” to Broadway and played a major role in other important shows, including “Angels in America,” died on Friday in Manhattan. She was 75.Her son, Matthew Nemeth, said the cause was a brain aneurysm. She had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, one of several causes she supported, and had a lung transplant in 2018.In an era when big-budget theater was an increasingly corporate affair, bankrolled by companies like Disney Theatrical Productions, Ms. Lion was an independent producer, putting up her own money and recruiting other investors to get a show mounted.“She was passionate,” the producer Rocco Landesman, who worked with her on “Angels in America” and other shows, said in a telephone interview, “and she was always all-in.”Unlike some producers, who commit to a show only after it has proved itself in workshops or out-of-town trial runs, she was known for getting on board early — often initiating a project, as she did with “Jelly’s Last Jam” (1992) and “Hairspray” (2002). And she stuck with shows she believed in despite the considerable risk of losing money, as most Broadway productions do. She often put up her West Side apartment as collateral in support of a project.“People think I’m nuts,” Ms. Lion told The New York Times in 2002. “But once you get going on these shows, you have so much invested in them emotionally, you have to believe completely in the purpose of what you’re doing, so you risk the farm.”People who worked on her productions knew her to be interested more in the art than in the bottom line. One admirer was Susan Birkenhead, the lyricist for “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a show about the jazz pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton that Ms. Lion began developing in the mid-1980s. Where other producers might be cautious, Ms. Birkenhead found Ms. Lion to be encouraging and open.“It was a nurturing I’d never experienced in a producer,” Ms. Birkenhead told The Baltimore Sun in 1993. “She allowed us to fail, and she allowed us to experiment, and the more innovative and dangerous it became, the more willing she was.”Margo Allison Lion was born on Oct. 13, 1944, in Baltimore to Albert and Gloria (Amburgh) Lion. Her father was chairman of Lion Brothers, a company that made embroidered emblems, and her parents were supporters of arts institutions in Baltimore. Both were killed in a plane crash in Egypt in 1963 when Margo was finishing her freshman year at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.Ms. Lion transferred to George Washington University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history and politics before going to work on Capitol Hill for Senator Daniel B. Brewster, Democrat of Maryland, and then for Senator Robert F. Kennedy in his New York office. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, “I just said I never wanted to do politics again,” she said.She became a teacher at the Town School in Manhattan, but when her husband at the time, Ted Nemeth, enrolled in the playwriting division of the Iowa Writers Workshop, she followed him there and rediscovered a love of theater she had nursed in school productions as a girl.“I loved hanging out with the playwrights, the theater world,” she said.She and her husband soon separated and later divorced, and, back in New York, she grew more serious about theater.“I really thought I would have three kids, four dogs and be the woman behind the man,” she said. “But I found when Ted and I separated that I had all of this energy and this passion to do something.”A second cousin, the choreographer Martha Clarke, introduced her to Lyn Austin, who had founded the nonprofit Music-Theater Group, which produced idiosyncratic performance works. Ms. Austin brought Ms. Lion aboard. She eventually became a producing director alongside Ms. Austin.“She was the perfect person for me to learn from,” Ms. Lion said. “She was a gambler.”After five years there she struck out on her own, and by 1984 she was working on a musical tentatively titled “Mr. Jelly Lord.” The show, retitled “Jelly’s Last Jam,” didn’t make it to Broadway until eight years later — a measure of how long it can take before a new musical reaches the stage. Gregory Hines played Jelly Roll Morton; his wife at the time, Pamela Koslow, was Ms. Lion’s co-producer.To keep the show afloat during its development, Ms. Lion put up as collateral a Matisse sculpture she had inherited from her parents.“She put that in hock to meet the payroll on ‘Jelly,’” Mr. Landesman recalled, and it wasn’t the last time. “She must’ve pawned it half a dozen times. If she was determined to do something, she did it and worried about how later.”The show ran for 569 performances. It was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won three, although it lost out on the prize for best musical to “Crazy for You.”By then Ms. Lion already had three Broadway credits, as associate producer on two shows and a producer on one, “I Hate Hamlet” (1991). Her Broadway credit after “Jelly’s Last Jam” was atypical, in that it was not a project she had been with from the beginning; it had been developed in productions in San Francisco, London and Los Angeles.The show was Tony Kushner’s two-part work about AIDS and homosexuality, “Angels in America.” Mr. Landesman’s company, Jujamcyn Theaters, had won the competition to bring it to New York, and Ms. Lion bought in, becoming a significant voice in the still-evolving work as it headed to Broadway.“She really loved discussion,” Mr. Kushner said in a phone interview. “And she would have ideas and make suggestions, but they were done with the utmost respect, and always with the preface of, ‘I don’t know if you’re going to want to do this, but here’s what I’m thinking.’”Perhaps her biggest contribution to “Angels” was to help recruit George C. Wolfe — the young director she had used on “Jelly’s Last Jam” — to direct the New York production. He had been nominated for the best-director Tony for “Jelly,” his first Broadway credit, and he went on to win the award for each of the two parts of “Angels in America.”“Because of Margo, I had my first Broadway show,” Mr. Wolfe said by email. “She was the first person to suggest I direct ‘Angels in America.’ I was on President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities because of her. The list goes on and on. She was a true friend, protective, caring, loving, loyal.”Ms. Lion had her share of failures, perhaps none bigger than “Triumph of Love,” a musical that died on Broadway 85 performances after opening in 1997. But it wouldn’t be long before she was struck by the brainstorm that would become her biggest hit.Ms. Lion had seen the movie “Hairspray” (1988), directed by her fellow Baltimorean John Waters, soon after it came out, but admitted that she didn’t embrace it initially.“To be candid,” she told The Sun in 2002, “I think I wasn’t sophisticated enough when I first saw ‘Hairspray’ to appreciate its many virtues.”But in 1998 she rented the video and watched the movie again while recovering from a cold.“Halfway through,” she recalled in the 2002 interview with The Times, “I literally said: ‘Yes, this is it. I found it.’”She had not yet met Mr. Waters. By the time she did, she had acquired the rights and had sent him the first few songs for the musical, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. When they finally did meet, Mr. Waters said in a phone interview, she promised him that she would make sure that the musical, about a chubby Baltimore teenager who wins a spot on a local television dance show, stayed true to his voice and vision.“She stuck to her word,” he said, “and we were lucky. It went right, right from the beginning. She honored everything about the original intentions of the movie.”The musical version of the Waters movie, with a book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, opened on Broadway on Aug. 15, 2002, and ran for almost six and a half years, a total of 2,642 performances. It won eight Tony Awards, including best musical.Ms. Lion’s other Broadway producing credits included the August Wilson plays “Seven Guitars” (1996) and “Radio Golf” (2007), as well as “Elaine Stritch at Liberty” (2002), “Caroline, or Change” (2004), “The Wedding Singer” (2006) and “Catch Me if You Can” (2011).Ms. Lion was an early supporter of Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy. In 2009 he named her to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.In addition to her son, she is survived by two grandchildren.In a 1997 interview with The Associated Press, Ms. Lion described what drew her to producing despite the long odds of making money.“There is something that is very compelling about the live theater,” she said. “It’s a family. You create this very warm community within the production. And, of course, you have the satisfaction of actually making something that may last.”Mr. Kushner commended both her nuts-and-bolts knowledge and her passion.“She was one of those people who really knows how to get things done,” he said. “A fantastic practical mind married to a great love.” More

Campus comedies are not all that common at the theater, so it’s a rare treat to spend quality time with a pair of humorously mismatched college roommates in the new Off Broadway show “La Breve y Maravillosa Vida de Oscar Wao.”Oscar and Yunior have been thrown together by the Rutgers University housing gods and the imagination of Junot Díaz, whose novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” inspired this Repertorio Español production. They are both Dominican and members of the class of 1992, and both are aspiring writers. The similarities end there; the young men embody radically different visions of Dominican masculinity, one boldly self-assured and the other emphatically feeble.Oscar (the terrific Jesús E. Martínez) is a chubby, bespectacled uber-nerd obsessed with comics books, anime, science fiction and video games. Since this takes place before those genres’ stranglehold on pop culture, he is an alienated weirdo rather than a social-media influencer or Hollywood wunderkind. Oscar is also a virgin with little prospect that will change any time soon, though he is resigned to his fate rather than resentful about it.Yunior (Mario Peguero, casually confident), on the other hand, is a cocky ladies’ man with worldly tastes — he likes to “partake in a little smoke,” for example. At first, he is stunned by his new roommate’s commitment to his passions. “You talking Elvish from ‘Lord of the Rings,’” an incredulous Yunior tells Oscar, who promptly corrects him: “Actually, it’s Sindarin.” (The production is in Spanish, with English supertitles.)Yunior is the novel’s narrator, so we tend to see Oscar through his eyes. But the adapter and director Marco Antonio Rodríguez abandoned that storytelling approach for a more straightforward, third-person one. He also simplified Díaz’s dense, flowery writing, which is filled with long digressions ranging from footnotes to entire chapters.The play’s streamlined style is most effective in the first act (entirely focused on the college scenes) and less in the second, which suffers from awkward tonal shifts and attempts to pack a lot of emotional load into a short amount of time. Yunior falls for Oscar’s activist sister, Lola (Altagracia “ANova” Nova). She is less than enthusiastic at first, but eventually she relents and instructs Yunior to look after Oscar, who is also smitten — with a goth named Jenni (Belange Rodríguez). Lola is afraid he’s going to get hurt. And he does.The book breathlessly weaves in and out of timelines as it fills us in on the tragic history of Oscar’s family, burdened through generations by a kind of bad juju our hero calls fukú. Marco Antonio Rodríguez’s decision to get rid of most of those elements is understandable from practical and dramatic standpoints (the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, whose presence looms over the entire novel, is pretty much gone, for instance).But while the pared-down show moves at an energetic clip, it often does so at the expense of the female characters: Lola’s rich story has vanished; Oscar’s cancer-stricken mother, Beli (Maite Bonilla), appears only in Act 2; and his abuela, La Inca (Arisleyda Lombert), loses her quasi-mythical aura.The key relationship between Oscar and Ybón (Rodríguez again), a prostitute he meets on a visit to Santo Domingo, also feels undernourished. His sexual awakening flies by too quickly, and the impact of his passion for her does not quite register — and it needs to in order for the title’s deterministic reference to Oscar’s brief life to be fully realized.What keeps the production together is its focus on the friendship between Oscar and Yunior, bolstered by a stage rapport between Martínez and Peguero that feels earned. Their spiky banter is Díaz at his best, a shrewd exploration of male mores under often hilarious Ping-Pong dialogue. Poor Oscar: Becoming the man he thought he wanted to be is exactly what took him down.La Breve y Maravillosa Vida de Oscar WaoAt Repertorio Español, Manhattan; repertorio.nyc. Running time: 2 hours. More