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      ‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’ Review: Revenge of the Broadway Nerds

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      The history of movable type is a terrible idea for a show. Which is why it’s so on brand for this satire of theater and its eternal hopefuls.I know we could all use a good laugh nowadays. But would you settle for a thousand chuckles?Because that’s what “Gutenberg! The Musical!” is offering. In the two-man, 20-character skit of a show that opened Thursday evening on Broadway, the jokes are abundant, interchangeable and lightweight: comedy as packing peanuts.If that suggests an inconsequential payload, well, perhaps consequential was not what the writers, Scott Brown and Anthony King, and the director, Alex Timbers, were after. Silliness crossed with satire seems to be their target, and with the help of two expert farceurs, Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, they do hit the silliness bull’s-eye. The satire, I’m not so sure.But let’s enjoy what we can. Gad plays Bud Davenport and Rannells is Doug Simon, loserish 40-something co-workers at a nursing home in New Jersey. Bitten by the Broadway bug, they decide to collaborate on a musical, despite a rudimentary knowledge of the genre and an advanced lack of talent. When Bud, the sweaty, impulsive one, inherits money from an uncle who recently started (and then suddenly stopped) hang gliding, they get their chance: They rent the James Earl Jones Theater for a bare-bones reading in hopes of acquiring a backer. Doug, the button-down one with the toggle-switch smile, chips in by selling his parents’ house.What we see on the stage of the Jones is the deliberately horrible result. Bud has written the music and Doug the book (and both of them the lyrics) for a show about the 15th-century German inventor who gives the show its title. Having discovered from a Google search that reliable information about Gutenberg is “scant,” Bud and Doug are relieved of the responsibility to historical truth that is apparently so burdensome to the creators of most biomusicals. About the inventor of movable type, they can make everything — not just most of it — up.So their Gutenberg is, counterfactually, a “wine presser” in the nonexistent town of Schlimmer; his wine press is what inspires his printing press. (“I’m gonna take the grapes out and put letters in,” he sings. “Put letters where them grapes have been.”) But a mad monk who is not a fan of literacy denounces the new technology and leads the townsfolk to burn its inventor at the stake. A familiar moral is drawn from that fake history: “Gutenberg’s death did not stop his dream,” a laborer steps out of time to tell us.Or rather, Doug does, because he and Bud, having spent all their money on the rental of the theater, were unable to afford a cast. Instead, with the help of 99 custom-printed trucker hats to identify the dramatis personae, and another 25 that become a kind of puppet chorus line, they narrate the show and play all the characters in it. These include Dead Baby, Beef Fat Trimmer, Feces, Two Drunks, Antisemitic Flower Girl and of course the printer’s love interest, a wench named Helvetica. Her big number (sung by Bud, petting his imaginary tresses) is “I Can’t Read.”Rannells and Gad are expert farceurs, but the show’s silliness eventually wears itself out.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGad and Rannells, a Mutt and Jeff team since they starred in “The Book of Mormon” in 2011, couldn’t be better. Gad’s weird combination of bluster and insecurity (he twitches a lot) makes Bud almost two-dimensional; Rannells, with his golden retriever gloss and whirring-computer energy, takes Doug most of the way from conceit to character. Together they land every joke.But with more than two hours of can-you-bottom-this yucks, it’s exhausting work — for them and for us. As a distraction, Timbers provides innumerable bits of clever stage business, seldom involving anything fancier than mime, sound effects and simple props. At one point the two men, just by switching hats and poses, somehow perform a four-part chorale. At another, Gutenberg’s big moment of inspiration is capped with the firing of what you might call a confetti popper, except that “confetti” implies plural. Here there is approximately one confett.Even so, the nifty bits soon start to seem compensatory. (When in doubt, hit the big red “Fog” button.) Even the hats wear out their welcome as we wait for a turn in the story that will have some meaningful effect on the cheery, woebegone souls who wear them.That turn never comes. Despite the arrival of a third character played at most performances by a guest star — Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Groff and F. Murray Abraham so far among them — Bud and Doug are still the same sad sacks at the end as they were at the beginning. Perhaps that wouldn’t be a problem if the show were just 45 minutes long, as it was in its original one-act incarnation, at the Upright Citizens Brigade in 2003. (By 2006, when it ran for a few months Off Broadway, it had grown a second act.) Pythonesque sketch comedy thrives in a tight, humble frame.Without it, the silliness wears itself out. And since the printing press story was never more than a beaten-to-death MacGuffin, that leaves “Gutenberg! The Musical!” as just another satire of musical theater and its eternal hopefuls. Here the problem is not excess but triteness; the tropes of sincere incompetence and pathetic ambition are too familiar, if expertly carried out. They have been flogged so much — and often more wittily, in musicals like “[title of show]” — that they do not respond much to the whip anymore.This problem partly stems from what may have been a deliberate form-fails-function choice to put nothing onstage that would seem more skillful than what Bud and Doug could have written themselves. So the songs, accompanied by a trio called the Middlesex Six, are never more than the dittyish retreads you might expect from an untrained doodler like Bud. And aside from the jokes, which exist only outside of the “Gutenberg” story, and at the expense of the two men within it, this Broadway musical’s book might as well be Doug’s.For better or worse, that’s the writers’ premise — “We tried to come up with, like, what’s a terrible idea for a musical?” King told Alexis Soloski in The New York Times. And you can’t say that premise isn’t maintained with discipline from top to bottom: the dollar-store stage set by Scott Pask, the clumsy high school movement by Nancy Renee Braun and especially the on-the-nose costumes by Emily Rebholz. Gad in a dad tie and Rannells with his argyle sweater vest tucked into his cuffed pants are somehow funny without further elaboration.Alas, everything else does get elaborated: “We fell in love with our own dumb stuff,” King also told The Times.Fair enough, but two hours is a tad long for lovemaking. If I cannot therefore give “Gutenberg! The Musical!” my heart, I’ll at least give it a confett.Gutenberg! The Musical!Through Jan. 28 at the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan; gutenbergbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. More

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      Roberta Pereira to Lead New York Performing Arts Library

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      Roberta Pereira, the director of the Playwrights Realm, will lead the library, which is home to more than eight million items relating to music, theater and dance.Roberta Pereira has had a career-long goal to make the performing arts accessible for all.So when she saw a posting for an executive director position at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, one of the country’s leading repositories relating to music, theater and dance, she had an immediate thought: dream job.“I believe the arts are stronger when more people can participate,” said Pereira, 43, who will become the first Latino person to lead the institution, which is home to more than eight million items. “And the library’s mission is free access and knowledge for all.”Pereira, currently the executive director of the Playwrights Realm, an Off Broadway theater company devoted to early-career playwrights, will start the position in January. She succeeds Jennifer Schantz, who left the library in 2022 after two years. (Linda Murray, the curator of the Performing Arts Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division and the associate director of its collections and research services, filled in as interim director.)Brent Reidy, the New York Public Library’s director for the research libraries who led the search for Schantz’s replacement, said that the library had received dozens of applications, but that Pereira stood “head and shoulders” above the other candidates.She had a track record, he said, of innovation. During her eight years at the Playwrights Realm, the organization became a leader in the field of offering caretaker support to audiences and theater workers, which included matinees with free child care and stipends for employees with caretaking responsibilities of both children and adult dependents. She has produced nine Off Broadway premieres, including Sarah DeLappe’s play “The Wolves,” which was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for drama.In 2017, Pereira co-founded the Artists’ Anti-Racist Coalition, a grass-roots group working to make the theater industry more diverse.“It’s clear that she has dedicated her career in the performing arts to engaging the public, increasing access and focusing on how to make more people part of the theater community,” Reidy said.The performing arts library, located in Lincoln Center, is one of the New York Public Library’s four research divisions, with a collection that includes not only books, but also manuscripts, photographs, scores, sheet music, stage designs, costume designs, video and film.Among its collections are its expansive archive of recorded sound, which includes symphonic recordings, radio plays, political speeches, and its Theater on Film and Tape Archive, which includes more than 8,000 recordings of Broadway, Off Broadway and regional theater productions, such as a filmed performance by the original Broadway cast of “The Phantom of the Opera.” (The archive, which has led to similar efforts at other institutions, received a special Tony Award in 2001.)Pereira, who was born in Brazil, was a classmate of Lin-Manuel Miranda at Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Connecticut, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in theater. She later earned a master’s degree in theater management from the Yale School of Drama. She previously worked as a commercial theater producer, including on the Broadway premiere of “Grace,” which starred Paul Rudd, Michael Shannon and Ed Asner, in 2012, and the Olivier Award-winning revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” in the West End in 2013.She said she had made frequent use of the library’s holdings over the years. And now, she said, her goal is to tell others about the “undiscovered jewel” on the Upper West Side.“I want to show people that this incredible archive is open to all, not just researchers,” she said. More

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      Nicole Scherzinger is Captivating in ‘Sunset Boulevard’

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      A stripped-back revival in London, directed by Jamie Lloyd, brings the classic musical into the present day, and gives Scherzinger a career-defining performance.The 1993 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Sunset Boulevard” is about a former screen star’s descent into madness. So it seems appropriate that its bravura new West End revival should, in creative terms, itself be a bit mad: reckless and daring, stretching its source material to the limit and beyond.The production, starring the singer Nicole Scherzinger in a career-defining performance, opened Thursday at the Savoy Theater and runs through Jan. 6, 2024. I can’t imagine another London show generating comparable buzz this season.For that, credit the maverick director Jamie Lloyd, whose tightly focused, stripped-back aesthetic is on full view here. Purists may balk at a “Sunset Boulevard” without the visual splendor of Norma Desmond’s baroque Hollywood palazzo, as we have previously seen onstage and in the original 1950 feature film.But Lloyd’s streamlined approach has a power of its own. The cast as often as not wear contemporary street clothes — or sometimes not much at all — and rather than Norma preening in a turban and flowing garments, Scherzinger prowls the stage, barefoot and feline in a black slip. (Scherzinger’s sole previous London stage credit was Grizabella in a perfunctory 2014 revival of “Cats.”)Scherzinger finds a predatory allure in the character that is both captivating and chilling, and it is easy to see why the hapless young screenwriter Joe Gillis (an excellent Tom Francis) succumbs to Norma’s entreaties to help craft a screen comeback as Salome.Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) is the young screenwriter wooed by Scherzinger’s Norma.Marc BrennerOnce she has Joe in her grip and resident in her home, Norma can go in for the (literal) kill: a bloodstained finale of which Salome herself would approve. Keeping watchful eye on the pair are Joe’s girlfriend Betty (the sweet-faced Grace Hodgett Young) and Norma’s butler and ex-husband Max, whom the firm-voiced David Thaxton plays with a glowering mien that, you feel, the character learned from his former wife.The vocals throughout are impressive, and the lyrics’ cynical musings on Hollywood (“This stinking town”) are lushly served by the musical director Alan Williams’s orchestra. In keeping with the somber mood, more frivolous songs like “The Lady’s Paying” have been cut.Scherzinger nails Norma’s two showstoppers — one in each act — shedding sunglasses as she lifts the defiant “With One Look” to the rafters and beyond. That number’s second-act equivalent, “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” sung during a deluded Norma’s return to Paramount Pictures, begins plaintively, even tenderly, before building to a mighty roar. Scherzinger extends her long, sinuous arms in the direction of the audience like talons toward prey.The musical’s London premiere in 1993, and subsequent runs in Los Angeles and New York, were notable for a parade of Normas (Patti LuPone, Glenn Close and Betty Buckley, among them) and for a levitating set from the designer John Napier that was a remarkable engineering feat. Here, a different technology is at play, one suited to the Instagram era, in which everyone is always on show.Hand-held cameras spotlight characters at key moments, their faces projected on a huge screen that broadcasts every emotion (and facial pore). On Soutra Gilmour’s largely bare set, brilliantly lit by Jack Knowles, Scherzinger’s Norma is already impressive. But her image projected above us amplifies her sense of feral grandeur.The production includes handheld cameras that follow key characters around, and off, the stage.Marc BrennerNorma — who was 50 in Billy Wilder’s classic film — is now said to be 40, and was in her prime at 17. Showbiz discards personalities even earlier now, and Scherzinger, 45, who first came to prominence in the 2000s girl group the Pussycat Dolls, has a shivery command over a part that requires her to plunge headfirst into a psychic abyss.The restless cameras also zoom in on Joe, who is followed backstage and out the theater by a live feed as he sings the show’s sardonic title number before returning center-stage in precisely calibrated time for the resounding final note. Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom’s video design pulls off a real coup with this sequence, though followers of the Belgian director Ivo van Hove will recognize the technique of folding celluloid into the theater.The prevailing intensity extends to the choreographer Fabian Aloise’s tightly drilled ensemble, which suggests a writhing, restless mass of Hollywood wannabes. And Aloise is gifted, in Scherzinger, with a rare Norma who can really dance, and who joins Joe for some sizzling two-steps — even, at one point, doing the splits.There’s fun to be had amid the show’s atmosphere of fury. As the cameras roam backstage, we briefly glimpse a life-size cutout of Lloyd Webber, and a shot of Gloria Swanson, the film’s Norma, playing on TV. The Noël Coward song title “Mad about the boy” is written in lipstick on a mirror in Scherzinger’s dressing room — which is one way of describing our heroine.But for all its nods to the past, this “Sunset Boulevard” belongs to the here and now. There’s not a whiff of nostalgia to the production, which takes an established musical by the scruff of the neck and sends it careering into the modern day.Sunset BoulevardThrough Jan. 6 at the Savoy Theater in London; thesavoytheatre.com More

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      Tagging Along With The New York Times’s Chief Theater Critic

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      At a recent performance of “Gutenberg! The Musical!” on Broadway, Jesse Green gave us an inside look at his review process.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.At 7:40 on a humid Friday night in early October, Jesse Green, wearing a plaid suit coat and carrying a green laptop bag, arrived at the James Earl Jones Theater in Manhattan. The show he was there to see, “Gutenberg! The Musical!,” was starting in 20 minutes, but he was in no rush to enter the theater. As the chief theater critic for The New York Times, he knows Broadway performances usually begin about eight minutes late.“Good evening,” Green said as he approached a press representative for the show. He retrieved a white envelope with two tickets tucked inside, one for Green and the other for his husband, Andrew Mirer.It was the second press performance of “Gutenberg!,” a two-man comedy about aspiring musical theater writers who decide to write a show about Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, without knowing much about him. The show reunites Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad, who co-starred as hapless missionaries in “The Book of Mormon” in 2011.“Gutenberg!” was one of more than 100 shows that Green, who reviews almost every new Broadway production and many Off Broadway shows and regional productions, would see this year. He had attended a performance of “Merrily We Roll Along,” the starry new revival of the 1981 Stephen Sondheim musical, the previous night.Green, who has been a theater critic for The Times since 2017, was, proudly, a theater geek in high school. After graduating from Yale with a double major in English and theater, he moved to New York City and began working as a gofer, or errand runner, for Broadway shows, working his way up to musical coordinator positions. At one point, he apprenticed for Hal Prince, who produced or directed many of the most enduring musicals in theater history, including “West Side Story,” “Sweeney Todd” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”His time with Prince not only honed his taste, but also taught him how important it is for a show to forge a connection with an audience.“I approach theater criticism as a form of reporting,” said Green, who has reviewed nearly 1,000 shows over his decade-long career as a critic. His reporting reflects his feelings — his connection with the show being staged in front of him.“That’s the fun of reviewing,” he told me.Critics generally attend one of a few press performances, which occur before a show’s official opening night. Green sees the first one he can so that he has ample time to write his review, which usually comes out on opening night. “Gutenberg!” was opening the following Thursday, Oct. 12.At 8 p.m., he walked through a metal detector and handed his ticket to an usher. A bell chimed.“Let’s go, guys, step right in,” a man yelled. “The show is about to start.”An usher led Green and Mirer to aisle seats in Row F of the orchestra section. (“Press seats are almost always in the middle of the orchestra,” Green said. “But when I buy them myself, I like to sit in the front row of the mezzanine.”)He pulled out a five-by-eight-inch red spiral notepad, slipped on a pair of dark blue glasses, and wrote the show’s name and the date at the top of the page. It would be the most legible thing he would write all evening.“The first thing I do after a show is transcribe my notes,” Green told me. “They’re unreadable half the time, but they’re still helpful to jog my memory.”When the show began, Mirer leaned over, signaling to his watch — 8:04. Though shows post their run time on their websites, it is not always precise; Green ensures readers have accurate information.During the first act, which featured Gad and Rannells dancing in a kickline and performing a farcical song about biscuits, Green jotted down notes often. His expression remained inscrutable, except for an occasional smile or a chuckle.“I’m looking for a number of things,” he told me later. “Lines that help me understand what the play wants to do and how it seems to be succeeding or failing.” He considers moments and design choices that will help readers understand what it feels like to experience the show. Occasionally, he admits, he finds himself writing “Help” or “Will this ever end?”The first act of “Gutenberg!” provoked a continual stream of laughter from the audience and selective applause from Green — he tries not to show too much emotion during a performance. When the house lights came on for intermission, a woman seated nearby turned to her seatmate. “That’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” she said.Green stood up. “I don’t want anyone else’s influence,” he said. To avoid inadvertent eavesdropping, he goes for a walk during intermission, even if it’s just up the aisle.Act 2 began at 9:15, which Green dutifully recorded in his notebook. He took fewer notes during the second act, which, he said afterward, is not always the case. He explained it this way: “As a rule, the better the show, the fewer notes I take, because I get too caught up.”When Gad and Rannells took their bows at 10:08, most of the audience stood and applauded. But Green perched on the tipped-up edge of his seat, craning his neck to watch. Times critics do not typically stand at the end of shows, a practice Green said was not a formal policy but an unwritten code among critics.“We know we are being watched, and we don’t want to disclose too much,” he told me. And, he added, “I still believe that standing ovations are for truly extraordinary events.”As Green closed his notebook (he had filled four pages) and headed for the exit, he and his husband discussed the weather — rain was on the way — as well as their weekend plan to drive to a house they owned in the woods upstate, where Green would write. Not a word passed between them about the show. Even his husband is prohibited from sharing thoughts about a performance, at least until Green’s review runs.Green planned to read the script for the show on his phone on the train to their home in Brooklyn. He never reads the script for a new show before seeing it — he wants to experience it “as the playwright intended” — but he does afterward, to dig deeper into the meaning of the work, check whether any moments were improvised and confirm quotes.While he writes his review, he emails questions to the show’s press agents, asking how it has changed over its development, or, in the case of “Gutenberg!,” how many trucker hats the actors wore during the performance (99). He also checks facts that he is including in his review.What is clear after spending time with Green is that he feels being a critic is part of his identity, not just his job. Even when he is not reviewing a show, he is soaking in culture: He is an admirer and voracious reader of Walt Whitman and Jane Austen, for example, and a puzzle enthusiast.Green, it should be said, wants a show to succeed. He’s a theater geek, after all. Even if he does not enjoy a performance, he understands it may still have merit or add to a cultural conversation. But he will not hesitate to pan a show if he feels it deserves it. “If I have any value, it’s in having some consistency of taste and knowledge from many, many years of seeing plays and writing about them,” he said. “People who get used to reading my stuff may say, ‘Oh, I never agree with him,’ which is actually good. That way, when I dislike something, they know they’ll like it — and vice versa.”When he’s reviewing, Green is thinking through big-picture questions: What does this play want? How well does it achieve that? Is it worth achieving? And, of course, he’s doing it on deadline.“Even after a thousand reviews, staring down a deadline fills me with fear,” he said. “After all, you start with nothing but what’s in your head and a few nearly illegible scribbles in your notebook.”But writing, he said, should be a pleasure, not a curse. “It must grow from fear to enjoyment,” he said. “It remains an amazement to me that it so often does.” More

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      ‘Shucked’ to Play Final Performance at Broadway’s Nederlander Theater

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      The show said Thursday that it would play a final performance at the Nederlander Theater on Jan. 14, but did not rule out continuing elsewhere.“Shucked,” a musical comedy fueled by corn puns and country music, will end its run at Broadway’s Nederlander Theater on Jan. 14.The show’s lead producers, Mike Bosner and Jason Owen, are not calling the step a closing, apparently because they are hoping that they will find another theater at which the show might continue its run. But the current Broadway season is shaping up to be fairly robust, and it is unclear if there will be an empty theater available for it.“Shucked” is vacating its theater as its grosses have remained consistently middling. Theater owners make money both by charging rent to producers, and by getting a percentage of the box office, and if the Nederlander Organization can find a higher-grossing tenant, it will make more money. (A leading candidate to take over the theater: a revival of “Tommy” that was well-reviewed and sold strongly at Chicago’s Goodman Theater.)With a score by two successful Nashville-based songwriters, Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, “Shucked” began previews on March 8 and opened on April 4. It was nominated for nine Tony Awards, and won one, for Alex Newell as best featured actor in a musical.The musical, directed by Jack O’Brien and with a book by Robert Horn, was capitalized for up to $16 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; it has not yet recouped those costs. Its grosses have been modest for a musical — during the week that ended Oct. 8, it grossed $751,829, with 85 percent of its seats occupied. The country singer Reba McEntire voiced new advertising for the show and has been talking it up, and the show’s producing team believe that her support is helping to promote sales.A North American tour of “Shucked” was announced on Tuesday, with plans to kick off next fall in Providence, R.I. And on Thursday, the show’s producers said that they expect international productions to open in London in 2025 and in Sydney, Australia, in 2026. More

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      In Germany, ‘Hamilton’ Hangs Up Its Musket

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      After a year of less-than-stellar ticket sales, the German-language translation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stage hit is closing. But it has helped diversify German musicals.On Monday, the German-language version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster musical “Hamilton” won the prize for best production at the German Musical Theater Awards. But the timing of the honor was bittersweet. On Sunday, the show will play its final performance in Hamburg, after a yearlong run at the 1,400-seat Operettenhaus.The rise and fall of “Hamilton” in Hamburg is a tale of incredible determination, sky-high expectations, critical acclaim and an uneven box office.“Economically, it makes more sense for us to have a wonderful one-year run, instead of losing the money that you’ve made by prolonging it for too long,” said Stephan Jaekel, a spokesman for Stage Entertainment, the Amsterdam-based company that produced the show.Although sales were healthy overall, the show performed below expectations during the Christmas season, Jaekel said. Noting that tickets for musicals are “the number one German Christmas present,” he added that the holiday season box office was a “good indicator” of whether a show is “flying, whether it’s solid, whether it’s declining.” He added that even when sales were at their most brisk, “Hamilton” never sold out completely.When its closure was announced in March, the show had reported sales of over 200,000 tickets. Jaekel said that twice as many people will have seen it by the final performance on Sunday afternoon.“Four hundred thousand, to us, seems like a very good number of people to have been in touch with a new form of musical,” he said, “because the German musical audience is not as developed, is not as refined, not as used to variety as, say, the British or the American musical audiences are.”Daniel Dodd-Ellis, second from left, plays both Lafayette and Jefferson. He said the production was “a huge learning curve for German musical theater audiences.”Johan Persson“Hamilton” has become one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time since opening in 2015. It won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as 11 of the 16 Tony Awards for which it was nominated. A West End production has been running since 2017, and in addition to a North American tour, the show recently landed in Manila, and will head to Abu Dhabi early next year.Unlike Hamilton’s international tour, however, Hamburg’s was the first (and still the only) production not in the English language. Sera Finale and Kevin Schroeder spent nearly four years working through the show’s more than 20,000 rapid-fire words. Their German-language version has been widely praised as a masterpiece of translation.A little over a year ago, “Hamilton” in Hamburg celebrated a glitzy gala opening, with Miranda in attendance. It opened to strong reviews — but even the most positive critics wondered whether the show’s unique qualities might be lost in translation.“Can this American success story also work here?” wrote Judith Liere in the German newspaper Die Zeit. She applauded the translation, but complained that the story was unfamiliar and hard-to-follow. And though Liere praised the music and the energetic performances, she also asked: “Will that be enough to excite the average German musical audience, who are otherwise used to more accessible and effects-laden material?”At a recent weekend performance, the Operettenhaus was nearly full. I spotted young women decked out in “Hamilton” T-shirts and hoodies, as well as couples old and young and groups of 20-somethings, but relatively few young families, who are one of the main audiences for musicals in Hamburg.The crowd was fired up throughout the three-hour-long show, whooping and applauding as characters made their entrance (Lafayette! Washington! Jefferson! King George!) and the famous line “Einwanderer — we get the job done” was met with a mid-performance howl. The show was every bit as electrifying as it had been on opening night.In an interview afterward, Denise Obedekah, a director who worked on the production, said she still considered the Hamburg production a success. It “did start something in Germany,” she said: “an awareness that there are other musicals out there than just Disney shows.”From left, Ivy Quainoo, Chasity Crisp and Mae Ann Jorolan in the production.Johan PerssonShe added that a show with “Hamilton’s” level of sophistication was able to attract people who might previously have thought “musical theater is only for old people, or is something really kitschy.”Chasity Crisp, the actress who plays Angelica Schuyler, said that “Hamilton” in Germany had “kind of made musical theater cool.” Noting that the majority of the 34 cast members aren’t white, and hail from 13 countries, she added that it had contributed to the “ongoing development of inclusivity and diversity” in the country’s entertainment industry.The show also opened the door for “a new generation of musicals” in Germany, she said: Stage Entertainment is set to import German-language versions of “MJ: The Musical,” “& Juliet” and “Hercules” to Hamburg in versions either partially or fully translated into German.“Hamilton” may have struggled, partly, because it led this charge, said Daniel Dodd-Ellis, who plays Lafayette and Jefferson. Telling such a sophisticated and diverse story “was a huge learning curve for German musical theater audiences, for the German musical producers, and for marketing,” he added. The show’s promotion might have been too focused on the feat of translating “Hamilton,” rather than the merits of the show itself, he said.Although this “Hamilton” didn’t catch fire the same way it did in New York, it would be wrong to suggest, as some in the German press have, that the show was a flop. Revisiting the production a year after its opening, my admiration for the ingenious translation was undimmed (like the original English, the verbose songs reward multiple hearings) and I was transported anew by the raw energy of the production and the performances.Why didn’t local audiences thrill to “Hamilton?” Was the story too quintessentially American? Was its “brand visibility” too low compared to Disney and jukebox musicals? Whatever the reason, nearly half a million people here have discovered “Hamilton” auf Deutsch and that seems momentous. And there are lots of places where this show could find a new home: Vienna, Zurich, Stuttgart. This “Hamilton” hasn’t necessarily thrown away its shot. More

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      Under the Radar to Return, With New Partners

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      The festival of experimental work is planning a citywide event at multiple venues in January, after the Public Theater declined to fund the 2024 iteration.When the Public Theater announced in June that it had placed the Under the Radar festival on indefinite hiatus, its founder, Mark Russell, did not know if he would be able to find another home for it. The Public cited financial reasons for the decision; other institutions were facing similar struggles. But today Russell, in association with ArKtype, a production company specializing in new work, announced that Under the Radar, New York’s foremost festival of experimental performance, would return in January.In contrast to the central hub that the Public provided, this new iteration, which will run Jan. 5-21, will take place at 10 partner venues throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Some, like Japan Society, will present a single show, and others, such as Lincoln Center and La MaMa, will host two or three. The festival will also co-sponsor a symposium dedicated to the challenges facing arts presenters.To continue the festival, Russell contacted old friends and longtime funders. He approached several theaters and universities in the hopes that they could take it on. But none were able to do so, especially on such short notice. Still, plenty of theaters offered partnerships. Eventually, he and ArKtype settled on this decentralized model, with Russell ceding artistic control to these new collaborators.“I love my programing, but I’ve had 18 years of that,” he said. “Now I have a dozen curators.” He has given himself a new title, festival director, in place of artistic director. “It’s bigger than me,” he said of the festival, which is supported by grants, private donations and contributions from partners. “So we made something bigger.”Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, is one new partner. St. Ann’s had hosted the first Under the Radar Festival, in 2005, and Feldman hurried to support this new version. She also had a work in mind: Luke Murphy’s “Volcano,” a challenging piece of dance theater, told in four 45-minute segments, that takes place inside a glass box.“We felt like the festival would be the right place for it,” she said in a recent phone interview.Julia Mounsey and her collaborator Peter Mills Weiss have presented work at three previous festivals. They were in rehearsals for a new piece last spring when they learned that Under the Radar might not take place. Mounsey had to go for a walk “because I was so upset,” she recalled during a recent phone interview. She said she felt profound relief about the festival’s rebirth. Mabou Mines and Performance Space New York will host Mounsey and Weiss’s new show, “Open Mic Night.”She will miss the centrality of the Public. “It was great for connecting with people and meeting people,” she said. “But there’s also something exciting about it being spread out.”Russell hasn’t given up on the idea of a festival hub. “If I could find a nice large bar in the center of all this, that would be great. But right now, it has to be what it has to be,” he said. “People are going to have to run all around the city, but they’ll be able to get the Under the Radar experience.” More

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      Review: In ‘(pray),’ Nourish Thyself With Song and Dance

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      An exploration of how faith intersects with Black womanhood, through a mix of music, movement, ritual and poetry.“Is this a church?,” a character wonders in nicHi douglas’s “(pray).”The Greenwich House Theater, where this production by Ars Nova and National Black Theater recently opened, certainly looks like a church, complete with (fake) stained-glass windows rrffand seating arranged like rows of pews.But it would be reductive to say “(pray)” is any one thing, because this transcendent, paradoxical work — what douglas calls “a sacred offering” — exists both within a Christian tradition and outside any religious institution. It’s a holy communion of musical interludes, movement, poems, rituals and critical theory investigating how faith intersects with Black womanhood.Upon entering the theater, audience members are asked to don disposable shoe covers as nine Black women alternate between shuffling down the aisles in matching powder-blue church ensembles and fanning themselves while sitting among the audience.They are all called Sister Anna Bertha, because they are variations on the stereotype of the sassy, overdressed Black church lady (playful costume design by DeShon Elem).Over 75 minutes, these women run through a 17-part liturgy accompanied by a pianist (Darnell White) and singer (S T A R R Busby, whose resonant voice leads the joyous gospel numbers). At one corner of this church stands a partially obscured forest. A silent spirit in white occasionally dances out from this surreal fantasy space (scenic design by dots), flitting around in fluid swells of movement. This is the Ancestor (Satori Folkes-Stone, magnetic), who also performs offstage rituals as part of the service. Another young woman, called Free (a less graceful Amara Granderson), is the one wondering whether this is a church, and if she even belongs here.Like “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” by Aleshea Harris, “(pray),” which douglas has nimbly written, choreographed and directed, is theater that demands the audience step into a shared experience of Blackness. In these experimental works, theater begins and ends in community.Thus, douglas’s script aims to make faith more accessible via coy translations: “ghost” becomes “most,” for example, and “hallelujah” is “yahleloo.” The similar sounding words with the music (composed by Busby and JJJJJerome Ellis) trick the ear into fluency, so that a prayer that says “O, abundance! May I meet you. May I know you,” feels as true and traditional as, say, the Apostles’ Creed.The Sisters deliver improvised gossip and judgmental comments, sometimes, hilariously, at the audience’s expense. The cohesiveness of their vocals and group movements (a stunning mélange of styles, including hip-hop and Afro-Cuban) recalls the deft cast of performers in Ars Nova’s 2022 hit by Heather Christian, “Oratorio for Living Things.” Each Sister sings with her own textured affect, so the psalms they perform feel creased, pleated or smoothed over like fabric. Tina Fabrique’s elastic bellows electrify “A Song (For to Ease My Troubled Mind).” Another Sister Anna (Ariel Kayla Blackwood) spits Noname lyrics atop a muscular beat. (Mikaal Sulaiman’s ethereal sound design lifts the voices higher.)A whole syllabus of thinkers and artists have inspired (and are referenced in) douglas’s script, including the poets Tyehimba Jess and Raych Jackson. But douglas’s writing sometimes pales in comparison, lacking the same polish and panache. And there are some missed notes: “(pray)” feels more anchored within the distant and recent past, lacking firmer context in the present, and despite the production’s inclusive language around gender, queerness is only occasionally alluded to. The history of race-based attacks on Black churches, like the 1963 Birmingham bombing and the 2015 Charleston shooting, is artfully hinted at with the haunting sound of a helicopter overhead, but feels like a footnote.So the question remains: Is this a church? Well, “(pray)” offers a congregation of believers in God but, more essentially, in the sanctity of Black women. So, let’s call this a house of song and praise — yahleloo.(pray)Through Oct. 28 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan. arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More