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      ‘Wicked’ Alumnae Class Notes: What They Learned at Shiz University

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      The graduates of Shiz University are making their alma mater proud.In the 21 years since “Wicked” opened in New York, 43 women have starred full-time as Elphaba or Glinda — frenemies who meet as Shiz undergrads — and many more have taken on the vocally taxing roles in productions across the United States and around the world.Shiz has taught them well. After leaving the show, many have gone on to glittering careers, on Broadway and beyond. Three former Elphabas were nominated for Tony Awards this year, while four former Glindas have appeared in principal roles.As a smash-hit Hollywood adaptation introduces millions more to this revisionist history of Oz, we checked in with alumnae of the stage show to ask what they learned there. These are edited excerpts from our conversations.GlindaKristin ChenowethSara KrulwichChenoweth, who won a Tony Award in 1999 for “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” originated Glinda on Broadway in 2003. She is now one of Broadway’s most-loved stars and is planning to return next season in a musical adaptation of “The Queen of Versailles.”How did you first get involved with “Wicked”?I was called by [the composer] Stephen Schwartz himself, and he said, “Look, I’ve got this part I want you to do.” I didn’t know if I could work out the dates, but I went over to his apartment, and listened to “Popular.” I thought it was really cute and I could have some fun with it, so I was involved in a workshop in L.A., and that’s how it started. I remember the producer Marc Platt going, “Kristin, every once in a while a part comes along — maybe once in a lifetime — that is like a hand to a glove, and this is your part.” Glinda was very much the side character, but they started seeing how Idina and I were working together, and it evolved into a much bigger role. That first night we opened in San Francisco, for our out-of-town tryout, I told Idina, “It’s not going to matter what the critics say. There’s something very special here.” I just knew it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Catherine Russell, of ‘Perfect Crime,’ Spends Her Sundays

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      Ms. Russell, who hasn’t missed a performance of her Off Broadway show in nearly 30 years, fills her day with pets, church, teaching and two shows.For most of the last four decades, Catherine Russell has maybe — possibly — murdered someone eight times a week.She has played a wealthy psychiatrist in the Off Broadway murder-mystery thriller “Perfect Crime” for 37 years. Choose any comparison you like — the “Cal Ripken of Broadway,” the “Ironwoman of the Theater District” — but Ms. Russell, 69, has missed only four performances, early in the run, for her siblings’ weddings.She is celebrating 15,000 performances of the show, which began in 1987 and is New York City’s longest-running play. She is powered by coffee and Snickers bars — “I have a terrible diet,” Ms. Russell says — but can also do 180 Marine push-ups without stopping.“I’m a Christian Scientist, so I don’t smoke or drink,” she said. “Maybe that helps.”Ms. Russell is also the general manager of the Theater Center in Times Square, which hosts “Perfect Crime” and three other Off Broadway shows, and teaches college English and acting classes six days a week.She has an adult stepdaughter and lives in a Hell’s Kitchen brownstone with three rescue dogs — Riley, Zoe and Jip — and three rescue cats, Winston, Zaza and Boots.Her late husband, Patrick Robustelli, died in 2019. They were together for 24 years. “He was the great love of my life,” Ms. Russell said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Avett Brothers Musical ‘Swept Away’ to Close on Broadway After Short Run

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      The new musical, about a shipwreck and its aftermath, opened Nov. 19 at the Longacre Theater.“Swept Away,” a darkly elegiac musical featuring the songs of the Avett Brothers, will end its Broadway run Dec. 15, less than a month after opening.The musical, about a 19th-century shipwreck and its aftermath, explores the lengths to which human beings will go in order to survive. Although set in fictional circumstances, it is based on a real 19th-century tragedy that led to an important legal case in Britain.“Swept Away” began previews Oct. 29 and opened Nov. 19 at the Longacre Theater. At the time of its closing it will have played 20 previews and 32 regular performances.The show cost up to $14.5 million to capitalize, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and that money has not been recouped. The weekly grosses were consistently well below what it cost to run, which is unsustainable.“Swept Away” is the second new musical of this season to close shortly after opening, following “Tammy Faye,” at a time when new musicals face an ever-more-challenging path on Broadway.The Avett Brothers have a devoted fan base, and “Swept Away” was praised by the New York Times’s chief theater critic, Jesse Green, who described it as “really about the gravest decisions humans can make, the depths of souls that are darker than the sea’s.”But other reviews were mixed, and the musical, like the actual history that inspired it, includes cannibalism, which, although not featured prominently in marketing materials or press coverage, may have been a turnoff for some potential ticket buyers. Broadway is also packed with shows, many of which feature more familiar titles or performers, and “Swept Away” was unable to break through in that crowded marketplace.Many of the show’s songs were featured on the Avett Brothers album “Mignonette,” and a cast recording is scheduled to be released in February. John Logan, the Tony-winning author of “Red,” wrote the musical’s book, and it was directed by Michael Mayer, a Tony winner for “Spring Awakening.”The 90-minute show centers on four men stranded on a lifeboat — the only survivors of the shipwreck. They are played by John Gallagher Jr., a Tony winner for “Spring Awakening,” as well as Stark Sands (“Kinky Boots”), Adrian Blake Enscoe and Wayne Duvall.The lead producers of “Swept Away” are Matthew Masten, Sean Hudock and Madison Wells Live (founded by Gigi Pritzker). Before arriving on Broadway, the musical had runs at Berkeley Repertory Theater in California in 2022 and at Arena Stage in Washington in late 2023 and early 2024. More

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      ‘Let’s Make a Dance.’ At Nature Theater, the Body Rules.

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      In “No President,” Nature Theater of Oklahoma creates its version of a story ballet, one burpee at a time.It started with a dance. For Nature Theater of Oklahoma, that’s not unusual. Pavol Liska, who directs the company with his wife, Kelly Copper, said, “Dance becomes a kind of cell that contains the full DNA of everything.”In “No President,” set mainly to Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker,” the dance that Liska and Copper made is not performed in its entirety until the very end. It’s a distillation of the movement and gestural material seen throughout the work, its “vocabulary,” Liska said. “You steal from the dance.”There is no Land of the Sweets or Sugarplum Fairy in “No President,” which has its North American premiere at NYU Skirball on Thursday and runs through Saturday. But the show, subtitled “a story ballet of enlightenment in two immoral acts,” is choreographed — humorously, violently, roughly, tenderly — within an inch of its life. For Nature Theater, a capacious, playful experimental theater company in New York City that is known for its risk and rigor, dance serves a distinct purpose.“I’m always nervous,” Liska said. “I’m always anxious, and the best way for me to just relax myself into the process is to make a dance. Even if we teach a class, the first thing I say is, ‘OK, let’s make a dance.’”Copper said, “Dance is like a way of insisting that the heart of the thing will be a kind of pleasure, because it is a pleasure for us to work in dance. It’s the most fun we have.”A scene from “No President”: “Dance becomes a kind of cell that contains the full DNA of everything,” Liska said.Heinrich Brinkmöller-BeckerWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘How Did I Get Here?’: 7 Days in the Life of a Busy Arts Programmer

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      Jay Wegman runs from rehearsals to lunches to shows for his job at N.Y.U. Skirball, then home for a “What We Do in the Shadows” episode or two.Jay Wegman, the artistic director of the N.Y.U. Skirball performing-arts center, likes to say that he lives in three time zones: “the present, a year from now and two years from now.”As far as the present is concerned, he monitors Skirball’s programming, with shows that in November included the Civilians docu-play “Sex Variants of 1941 — A Study of Homosexual Patterns” and “No President,” a wild experiment by Nature Theater of Oklahoma set to “The Nutcracker.”At the same time, Wegman, who moved from the Abrons Art Center to the N.Y.U. position in 2016, works out logistics for the following months and plans for events much farther in the future — a lead time of two or three years is not uncommon when bringing over the international productions that have become one of Skirball’s calling cards.Wegman, 60, kept a diary of his cultural diet during a late October/early November week. These are edited excerpts from phone and email interviews.Wegman joined Skirball as artistic director in 2016 from the Abron Arts Center.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesMonday: The 2 Best Shows on TV?I spent most of the day on emails. We were trying to nail down travel plans for Isabelle Huppert, who is doing “Mary Said What She Said” in February. I went out to dinner with her and Robert Wilson in May, and it freaked me out because I was so aware that I was sitting there with those people. It just was like, “How did I get here?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jason Laks Named President of Broadway League

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      The Broadway League, an industry trade organization, named Jason Laks as its new president. “I think our mission has to be more than to make it 2019 again,” Laks said.The Broadway League, the trade organization that represents commercial theater producers and the industry’s powerful theater owners, has chosen Jason Laks, a longtime official at the organization, to be its next president at a time when the sector is still struggling to recover its prepandemic financial strength.Laks, 52, is a lawyer who has been with the League off and on since 2012, primarily as the director of labor relations in charge of negotiating contracts with 14 unions representing the Broadway work force. Laks has been serving as the League’s interim president since February, when its longtime leader, Charlotte St. Martin, stepped down.The League’s most well-known role is as a co-presenter, alongside the American Theater Wing, of the annual Tony Awards, which honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway. The organization represents commercial producers in labor negotiations, handles government relations for the industry, works with organizations seeking to diversify the American theater and oversees the Jimmy Awards, a national high school musical theater competition.The League’s board of governors voted on Monday to approve Laks’s appointment.The organization, with a $12 million annual budget and a 33-person staff, has 830 members who include not only the owners and operators of the 41 Broadway houses, but also presenters of touring Broadway shows around the country, as well as general managers, vendors and suppliers.Broadway, which had been booming in the years preceding the coronavirus pandemic, has not fully recovered from a roughly 18-month shutdown; pre-Thanksgiving audiences this season were about 5 percent below prepandemic levels. Even as domestic and international tourism is rebounding, there has been a decline in theater attendance by New York-area suburbanites that is associated with the rise of hybrid work, a shift toward home-based entertainment consumption and concerns about costs, crime and congestion.“I think we are doing a remarkable job of coming back postpandemic, but it’s an important moment for the industry — we’re not back to where we were in 2019, but I think our mission has to be more than to make it 2019 again,” Laks said. “We need to continue to work to grow and diversify our audiences and get people into the city to see our shows.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ One Look Wasn’t Enough

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      A bare-bones revival of the Broadway musical grew on me with subsequent viewings, and the additional details I noticed bolstered my reporting.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Something I wish I had the chance to do more often as a reporter is to see shows multiple times, deeper into their runs — the “Notre Dame de Paris” musical, which I’ve seen seven times, and “The Phantom of the Opera,” which I’ve seen six times, come to mind.The first time I saw “Sunset Boulevard” in London last year, I was, to say the least, underwhelmed. Directed by Jamie Lloyd, the British minimalist, the revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical had no sets, all-black costumes and almost no props.I had seen neither the original 1993 musical, nor the 1950 black-and-white Billy Wilder film on which it is based. This is not an approach I would recommend for a Jamie Lloyd show; the experience was akin to watching a gender-swapped Shakespeare production with no concept of the original.But one thing did grab me: The outrageously ambitious title number, which is filmed live every night. In a six-minute sequence that begins backstage before spilling out onto the street, the screenwriter Joe Gillis (played by Tom Francis) contemplates the circumstances that led to him becoming the plaything of Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger).“There’s no way that’s live,” someone sitting next to me said, as the audience watched the street sequence unfold on a towering screen at the front of the stage.But the actor had grabbed an umbrella as he headed outside — it was raining that night in London, as it often does — which seemed to give it all away.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,’ by Richard Schoch

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      An incisive new book, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” examines the extraordinary career of the master of the musical.HOW SONDHEIM CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE, by Richard SchochIn the early 1980s, the librettist and director James Lapine asked the composer Stephen Sondheim what sort of musical he wanted to write. The pair were in the early stages of creating “Sunday in the Park With George,” their first collaboration of many, and the response given by the older to the younger man was very Sondheimish indeed. “Theme and variation,” said Sondheim, or as Richard Schoch puts it in his heartwarming essay collection, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” “not, then, a story to be told, but a perspective to be taken.”The Sondheim perspective is the subject of 11 essays by Schoch, a show-by-show analysis that seeks, at least notionally, to extract usable takeaways from the Sondheim canon. The chapter on “Merrily We Roll Along” is subtitled “How to Grow Up”; the one on “Sweeney Todd” promises to teach us “How (Not) to Deal With Injustice”; “Gypsy” unlocks “How to Be Who You Are,” and so on through the Sondheim playlist. This conceit of art as self-help is common enough — Jane Austen has come in for a lot of it, as have Shakespeare and the 19th-century Russian novelists — as to practically be a subgenre at this point, in which publishers take a subject they are nervous may be too nerdy or niche for a general audience and try to reframe it in more popular terms. It rarely works, trying to turn apples into bananas — there are lots of helpful things you can take from Sondheim, but they don’t map onto “life lessons” in quite the way the book suggests — but it doesn’t matter. Beyond the headings and the odd memoirish aside, the author largely ignores the premise of the title to quickly and mercifully move on to other things.Schoch is a professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast and a former New York theater director who approaches Sondheim from the inside out, that is, as someone who has wrestled with how to perform and direct him. And what a joy the author’s take on it all is. I was happy simply to be in Schoch’s company, wallowing in Sondheim trivia and enjoying a series of smart, close reads that sent me down at least one YouTube wormhole per chapter. Schoch reminds us that Sondheim wrote “Send In the Clowns” for Glynis Johns, who had “a modest octave and a bit in range” that required “short phrases firmly closed off with consonants.” This is why Judi Dench — not a singer, either — performed the number so piercingly in the National Theater’s 1995 revival of “A Little Night Music,” and why Catherine Zeta-Jones, in Trevor Nunn’s 2009 Broadway revival, did not. (On hearing the opening bars, I recall, Zeta-Jones assumed a stricken Torch Song expression as if something terrible was about to happen — which, of course, it was.)Laurence Guittard and Judi Dench in the 1995 London production of “A Little Night Music.”Donald Cooper/Alamy Stock PhotoStritch! Schoch writes about Elaine Stritch being sent home, abject, self-loathing, from the cast recording of “Company” after her ninth flubbed take of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” reminding us that Sondheim favored cranky, brilliant leading ladies who drove everyone mad until they hit their mark. He takes us on a tour of Sondheim’s major themes, writing in relation to Gypsy Rose Lee, “She possesses the truest talent of all: the talent of being yourself.” The use of artifice in the search for authenticity is a recurring theme of Sondheim’s, raising questions of where in his characters the composer resides. That Sondheim, a gay man who by his own account didn’t have his first serious relationship until he was 60, became one of the great chroniclers of straight marriage remains curious. But while Schoch uses the example of the Baker’s Wife in “Into the Woods” to write movingly of his own coming out in his 30s, he doesn’t get into Sondheim’s life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More