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      Ford and Mellon Foundations Name 2024 Disability Futures Fellows

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      The 20 recipients, including a Broadway composer, a Marvel video game voice actress and a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, are the initiative’s final cohort.The Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations on Wednesday named the 2024 Disability Futures Fellows — the latest class of disabled writers, filmmakers, musicians and other creative artists who will receive unrestricted $50,000 awards.This year’s recipients include Gaelynn Lea, a folk artist and disability rights activist; Natasha Ofili, an actress and writer who in 2020 became one of the first Black deaf actors to portray a video game character — Hailey Cooper — in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales; Warren Snipe, a.k.a. Wawa, a deaf rapper and actor who performed in sign language at the 2022 Super Bowl; and Kay Ulanday Barrett, a three-time Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and essayist whose work focuses on queer, transgender people of color.Lea said she almost missed an email telling her she got the award. “Because the email said, ‘We’re excited to offer you $50,000,’ it went to my spam,” Lea, 40, said in an interview. (She later received a follow-up email.)“It’s very validating that I’m doing this stuff I really care about, and now it’s being recognized,” added Lea, who won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016, and composed and performed original music for a Broadway production of “Macbeth” starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga. Lea plans to use the award to fund the writing of a memoir to be published next year.The initiative, which is administered by United States Artists, named its inaugural class of fellows in 2020, with the goal of increasing the visibility of disabled artists and elevating their voices. (About one in four adults in the United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) The second class was announced in 2022, and this is the last cohort in the program. The fellowship supports people at all stages of their careers.Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Mellon Foundation, said in a statement that the program reflected the foundation’s support of the “work, experiences and visions of disabled artists — both in their individual practices and in the collective power they wield in the arts at large.”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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      ‘Ain’t Done Bad’ Review: Jakob Karr’s Dance to Orville Peck Songs

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      Jakob Karr, from “So You Think You Can Dance?,” has conceived and choreographed a show set to songs by the country musician Orville Peck.The tale is familiar: A young gay man, rejected by his father, leaves home and finds love and acceptance elsewhere. But “Ain’t Done Bad” packages this story in a new form: as a 90-minute narrative dance set to recordings by the out-and-proud country musician Orville Peck.“Ain’t Done Bad” — which, unusually for dance, is getting an eight-week run at Pershing Square Signature Theater — is conceived, directed and choreographed by Jakob Karr, an impressive dancer who also stars as the son. This is Karr’s first such effort, and like many first novels, the show suggests autobiography. Mostly clear and engaging in its storytelling, it’s earnest, sometimes sexy and fundamentally sweet.We meet the son with his family. There’s the mother (Megumi Iwama), who lets him play with her makeup. There’s the brother (Ian Spring), who knocks him down in roughhousing but also picks him back up. And there’s the father (the explosive, effectively creepy Adrian Lee), who is angry and disapproving.The son also has friends (the perky Jordan Lombardi and Yusaku Komori). They draw him out into playful, line-dance flamboyance and initiate him with a sparkly-fringed denim jacket. Karr skillfully contrasts this liberating joy with the table-slapping arguments of the son’s family.Escaping into the wider world, the son discovers a gay club and experiences some steamy, ankle-on-shoulder duets. (Is it just economy or is there a psychological subtext to the double casting of Spring and Lee, brother and father, as lovers?) After intermission, the son finds someone he wants to bring home (Josh Escover, who’s good looking, great at turning and a bit of a blank).Peck’s music, with his Elvis croon drifting through a spaghetti western sonic landscape, is inherently dramatic. It supports both the story and the dancing well, supplying heartache and homoeroticism, galloping horsepower and pedal-steel romance. The choreography moves in parallel to the lyrics that don’t directly apply and underlines plenty of those that do, like “the love that you need will never be found at home.”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 a Killer Onstage and a Body Part in the Back, the Show Went On

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      Fourteen years ago in Orange County, Calif., Daniel Wozniak killed two people: Sam Herr, a 26-year-old Army veteran and neighbor, and Julie Kibuishi, a 23-year-old student and Herr’s close friend. Wozniak was convicted of the murders, received a death sentence and is serving time on death row, though California has a moratorium on executions.Those circumstances alone would be enough to adapt the case into a play in our true-crime-loving era. But additional details about the heinous murders shoot a cold dose of evil through that old theater maxim “The show must go on.”Wozniak performed twice in a community theater production of the musical “Nine” as Guido, the ladies-man lead, in the hours after the separate shootings of Kibuishi and Herr, whom he also dismembered and whose savings he wanted. Investigators found Herr’s torso inside the theater where Wozniak and his fiancée, Rachel Buffett, had performed in the show. Buffett was later convicted of lying to the police about the murders.What kind of person would gamely act between gruesome acts? That’s the question Ryan Spahn set out to explore in his darkly comic new play, “Inspired by True Events,” running through Aug. 4 at Theater 154 in the West Village, in an Out of the Box Theatrics production.Directed by Knud Adams, the show takes place inside a community theater’s intimate green room, where Mary (Dana Scurlock), a mama bear stage manager, helps the actors Colin (Jack DiFalco), Eileen (Mallory Portnoy) and Robert (Lou Liberatore) prepare for the play-within-the-play. The audience of 35 (seated on chairs inside the theater’s green room) watches the humdrum thrum of a dressing room: Mary makes coffee, Colin showers, Eileen puts on her wig, Robert steams his costume. That is until Robert finds a duffel bag that reeks of Colin’s gym clothes — and it’s no spoiler to say that what’s in the bag are not Colin’s gym clothes.Dana Scurlock, left, and Jack DiFalco in the Out of the Box Theatrics production.Thomas BrunotWe 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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      Test Your Knowledge of Shakespeare Film Adaptations

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      The works of William Shakespeare have inspired countless performances and interpretations over the centuries, but some films show their Shakepearean roots more clearly than others. The challenge here is to identify a handful of those movies in this week’s edition of Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books and stories that have gone on to find new life in the form of films, television shows, theatrical productions and other formats.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the plays and their screen adaptations.3 of 5“The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare’s controversial comedy about gender roles, has been adapted multiple times for the stage and screen, with the 1999 teen rom-com “10 Things I Hate About You,” the 1948 Broadway musical “Kiss Me, Kate” and the 1986 “Atomic Shakespeare” episode of the television series “Moonlighting” all tapping into the storyline of a volatile couple and their relationship. Which of these films is also based on the play? More

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      In ‘Life and Trust,’ the Details Are in the Devil

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      What’s the going rate for a soul these days? A little more than $200 on weekends, less on weekdays, handling fees included.That’s the ticket price for “Life and Trust,” the new show from Emursive, the producers of “Sleep No More,” and arguably an even more ambitious undertaking. A version of the Faust legend (well, several braided versions of the Faust legend), “Life and Trust,” which opens Aug. 1, occupies 100,000 square feet over six floors of a financial district skyscraper in New York that was once the home of the City Bank-Farmers Trust Company.In a brief introduction, which is set on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, a financier makes a deal with the devil: damnation in exchange for the chance to relive his youth. The show then ushers audiences back to 1894, plunging them into a Gilded Age delirium.“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a canvas of this size,” said Teddy Bergman, the director of “Life and Trust.” “It just keeps going.”Making this deal with the devil took space. And time. And quite a lot of money. How much money? The producers wouldn’t say, though Jonathan Hochwald, a producer at Emursive, said the final amount was comfortably in the millions.A company of performers, including Marla Phelan, above left, and Mia DiLena, plays 30 characters in 250 overlapping scenes, which loop twice each evening.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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      At Salzburg Festival, Ancient Greek Tragedy Gets Modern Context

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      At the Salzburg Festival, a new adaptation of “The Oresteia” will put a classic story of war, democracy and revenge into a modern context.Staging “The Oresteia,” Aeschylus’s epic Greek tragedy, is a daunting task for any theater company, especially if you add a dash of Sophocles and Euripides when portraying one of history’s most dysfunctional families.The Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany, will premiere its nearly four-hour production “Die Orestie” at the Salzburg Festival for eight performances Aug. 3-15 (and in Hamburg starting Oct. 30). It is adapted and directed by Nicolas Stemann, who has staged two plays at the festival: a nine-hour adaptation of Goethe’s “Faust” in 2011 and “Die Rauber” (“The Robbers”) by Friedrich Schiller in 2008.This production, which takes its name from the Aeschylus three-part epic and is to be performed in German with English supertitles, combines three playwrights’ versions of the tragedies that befall the fabled house of Atreus. In the Aeschylus play, first staged in 458 B.C., Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, returns from the Trojan War but is killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, to avenge the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia in an effort to win the war. Their son, Orestes, urged by the god Apollo, kills Clytemnestra, only to be pursued by the Furies, the goddesses of vengeance. Only when the goddess Athena intervenes is he granted justice and allowed to live.The Sophocles play “Electra” (its exact date is unknown, but most scholars put it around 420 to 414 or 416 B.C.) explores his sister’s revenge against their mother. And the Euripides play “Orestes,” first staged in 408 B.C., gives a more cynical take on his fate: Only after a bloody rampage and an intervention by Apollo are the condemned siblings allowed to live.In a video interview, Stemann discussed the challenge — and the excitement — of combining these nearly 2,500-year-old plays. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.Nicolas Stemann, who adapted and is the director of “Die Orestie” that will premiere at the Salzburg Festival in August.Diana PfammatWe 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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      Review: What Makes ‘Oh, Mary!” One of the Best Summer Comedies in Years

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      Cole Escola’s dragtastic White House farce asks the immortal question: Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?Like so many before them, members of the “Oh, Mary!” creative team are proudly reclaiming an insulting epithet as a badge of honor.I don’t mean “queer”; they’re way past that. I mean “stupid.”“Oh, Mary!” is “the stupidest play,” Cole Escola, its author and star, tells anyone who will listen.“I have a huge hunger for deep stupidity,” Sam Pinkleton, its director, chimes in.They protest too much. “Oh, Mary!” may be silly, campy, even pointless, but “stupid,” I think not. Rather, the play, which opened on Thursday at the Lyceum Theater, is one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years. Which is a surprise on many levels, and on each level a gift.To start with, we don’t get a lot of comedies these days, not the kind you can feel good laughing at. Most contemporary examples of the genre — say “Bootycandy” by Robert O’Hara and “Clybourne Park” by Bruce Norris — use the form the way doctors use an emetic: They want you to gag on the gags. But the totally unserious “Oh, Mary!” is not medicinal in that sense. It merely wants you to lose your breath guffawing, especially with a series of switchback shocks at the end, so cleverly conceived and executed they’re hilarious.But the premise is already a joke. How else would you describe a back story in which Mary Todd Lincoln (Escola in a hoop skirt the size of a yurt) longs to return to her first love, cabaret, with its “madcap medleys” and built-in excuses for diva behavior?Escola and James Scully in the play, which is on Broadway at the Lyceum Theater after debuting Off Broadway this past winter.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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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      ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Review: Sprinkling Magic Under a Night Sky

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      Fun is the main point of Carl Cofield’s stylish outdoor staging of Shakespeare’s comic fantasy for the Classical Theater of Harlem.“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare’s sylvan comic fantasy about mischief-making fairies and enchanted lovers, is such gossamer entertainment that it’s always a jolt to be reminded, near the start of the play, why the smitten young couple Hermia and Lysander flee to the forest in the first place.It’s because Hermia’s father, Egeus, one of Shakespeare’s many dreadful patriarchs, forbids her to marry Lysander. He insists that she wed Demetrius, a suitor whom she does not love.“As she is mine,” Egeus says in Carl Cofield’s stylish production for the Classical Theater of Harlem, “I may dispose of her: which shall be either with this gentleman” — Demetrius, that is — “or, according to our law, unto her death.”During Sunday’s opening-night performance, the mention of a death sentence for Hermia drew a gasp from the crowd: Ancient barbarism had intruded on a scene glittering with Harlem Renaissance elegance. (The set is by Christopher and Justin Swader, costumes by Mika Eubanks.)But that father-daughter moment is about as serious as Cofield’s staging gets. In the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater at Marcus Garvey Park, fun is the main point. And if this free “Midsummer” doesn’t deliver as much across-the-board delight as you may expect from the Classical Theater of Harlem, it does have a charismatic drama stirrer in Mykal Kilgore’s Puck, sprinkling magic for the fairy king, Oberon (a sympathetic Victor Williams).There is also a giggle-inducing gaggle of rude mechanicals, who put on the adorable show within the show. The comedian Russell Peters is billed as the star of “Midsummer,” playing one of them: Nick Bottom, the weaver whom Puck transfigures into an ass, and with whom the ensorcelled fairy queen, Titania (Jesmille Darbouze, not given enough to do), falls in love. Peters, however, is scheduled to be absent from much of the run.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