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      Mbongeni Ngema, Playwright Best Known for ‘Sarafina!,’ Dies at 68

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      Before the fall of apartheid, his plays, which also included “Woza Albert!” and “Asinamali,” challenged the South African government’s racial policies.Mbongeni Ngema, a South African playwright, lyricist and director whose stage works, including the Tony-nominated musical “Sarafina!,” challenged and mocked his homeland’s longtime policy of racial apartheid, died on Wednesday in a hospital in Mbizana, South Africa, after a car accident. He was 68.Mr. Ngema was a passenger in a car that was struck head on when he was returning from a funeral in Lusikisiki, in Eastern Cape Province, according to a family statement cited in the South African news media.“His masterfully creative narration of our liberation struggle honored the humanity of oppressed South Africans and exposed the inhumanity of an oppressive regime,” President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said in a post on X after Mr. Ngema’s death.In the decade before the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid in the early ’90s, the South African system of institutionalized racism was an overwhelming concern to Mr. Ngema. During that decade he cocreated the play “Woza Albert!,” wrote and directed the play “Asinamali!” and wrote the script and collaborated on the music for “Sarafina!”“Sarafina!” evolved out of a conversation he had in the 1980s with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a prominent anti-apartheid activist who was then married to Mandela.“I was sitting with Mama Winnie Mandela, and I started thinking, ‘This country is in flames,’” he told the South African television show “The Insider SA” in 2022. “So I asked a question. I said, ‘Mama, what do you think is finally going to happen to this country?’“Mama looked at me, and she said, ‘I wish I had a big blanket to cover the faces of the little ones so they do not see that bitter end.’”Mr. Ngema soon began to envision young people, running and singing “Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow,” a song that he would write for “Sarafina!,” a musical that follows Black high school students in the township of Soweto in 1976 during the uprising against the government’s imposition of Afrikaans, rather than Zulu, as the official language in schools.Mr. Ngema wrote the book and collaborated with the trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela on the score.Mr. Ngema, left, with former President Nelson Mandela in 2002.Lewis Moon/Agence France-Presse“Sarafina!” opened in Johannesburg in 1987. It moved that fall to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center and then, in early 1988, to Broadway, at the Cort Theater, where it played 597 performances.In his review of the production at the Newhouse, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Ngema had “brought forth a musical that transmutes the oppression of Black townships into liberating singing and dancing that nearly raises the theater’s roof.”The score, he added, “evokes the cacophony of life in a Black society both oppressed and defiant, at once sentenced to hard labor and ignited by dreams of social justice.”“Sarafina!” received five Tony nominations, including three for Mr. Ngema: for best direction of a musical (won by Harold Prince for “The Phantom of the Opera”), best original score (won by Stephen Sondheim for “Into the Woods”) and best choreography, which he shared with Ndaba Mhlongo (won by Michael Smuin for “Anything Goes”).“Sarafina!” was also nominated for best musical and best featured actress in a musical.It was adapted as a film in 1992, starring Leleti Khumalo, who had starred in the South African and Broadway productions, with Whoopi Goldberg as an inspirational teacher and the singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba as Sarafina’s mother.Mbongeni Ngema (pronounced mmm-bon-GEN-i nnn-GAY-ma) was born on June 1, 1955, in Verulam, a town north of Durban.According to his official biography for the film “Sarafina!,” he was separated from his parents at 11, then lived for a time with extended family in Zululand and later on his own in the poor neighborhoods around Durban. From age 12, he taught himself to play guitar.“When I grew up all I wanted to be was a musician, and I was influenced greatly by the Beatles,” he said on “The Insider SA.”Working in a fertilizer factory in the mid-1970s, a fellow worker asked him to play guitar to accompany a play he had written.“And then I fell in love with the part of the lead character in the play,” he told the magazine Africa Report in 1987. “When he was onstage, I would mimic him backstage — making the other musicians laugh.” One night, when the actor did not show up, he played the role.Mr. Ngema and the playwright began to collaborate, which led Mr. Ngema to start directing and writing his own small pieces. In 1979, he began working in Johannesburg with Gibson Kente, a playwright and composer, to understand the magic in his productions. After two years, he left and began working with the performer Percy Mtwa.He, Mr. Mtwa and Barney Simon created “Woza Albert!,” a satire that imagines the impact of the second coming of a Christ-like figure, Morena, who arrives in South Africa on a jumbo jet from Jerusalem, through the lives of ordinary people, vigorously played over the course of 80 minutes by Mr. Ngema and Mr. Mtwa.The white government tries to exploit Morena, then labels him a Communist and locks him up on Robben Island, where Mandela and other political prisoners were incarcerated.The play opened in South Africa in 1981 and was staged over the next three years in Europe, Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater and around the United States.In The Washington Post, the critic David Richards wrote in 1984 that “Woza Albert!” “tackles such harsh realities as injustice, poverty and apartheid in South Africa, but does so with far more spirit, humor and, yes, hope, than the subject generally inspires.” He added that “with only their wonderful, wide-eyed talent,” Mr. Mtwa and Mr. Ngema “can summon up a landscape, a society, a history.”The trumpeter Hugh Masekela, third from right, with members of the cast of “Sarafina!” during a rehearsal at Lincoln Center in 1987. Mr. Masekela and Mr. Ngema collaborated on the score for the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Ngema then wrote and directed “Asinamali!” (1983), in which five Black men in a single South African prison cell describe — through acting, dancing, singing and mime — why they were incarcerated and how they were victimized by racist laws, unemployment and police violence.The play’s name (which means “We have no money”) comes from the rallying cry of rent strikers in 1983 in the Lamontville township.Mr. Ngema said that “Asinamali!” was alarming enough to authorities in Duncan Village, in the Eastern Cape, that they arrested the audience for attending a performance.“They said it was an illegal political gathering,” Mr. Ngema said in an interview in 2017 on a South African podcast.He called “Asinamali!” a celebration of resistance.“It shows that no matter how bad things get, victory is inevitable,” he told The Times in 1986 during rehearsals before the play opened in Harlem at the New Heritage Repertory Theater. “The spirit of the people shall prevail.”Later that year, “Asinamali!” was part of a South African theater festival at Lincoln Center.Information on Mr. Ngema’s survivors was not immediately available. His marriage to Ms. Khumalo, the star of “Sarafina!,” ended in divorce. Mr. Ngema, who wrote several other plays, was involved in a controversy in 1996 when his sequel to “Sarafina!,” “Sarafina 2” — commissioned by the South African Health Department to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic — led to a government corruption investigation over accusations that its cost was an excessive “unauthorized expenditure” and that its message was inadequate.He defended the show’s price tag, saying it was necessary to bring Broadway-quality shows to Black townships.“People have said it’s a waste of government money,” Mr. Ngema told The Associated Press in 1996. “It think that’s a stupid criticism.” More

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      Mike Nussbaum, Celebrated Chicago Theater Actor, Dies at 99

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      He appeared memorably in “American Buffalo” and in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Glengarry Glen Ross,” but gave up a career on Broadway for one in Chicago.Mike Nussbaum, an actor known as the dean of Chicago theater who found success during his early association with David Mamet, the Chicago-born playwright, died on Dec. 23 at his home in Chicago. He was 99.His death was announced by his daughter Karen Nussbaum, a labor organizer.For the last decade, Mr. Nussbaum has also been known as the country’s oldest working actor, a distinction that mildly irritated him. (For admiring journalists, he gamely performed his daily regimen of 50 push-ups, a practice he kept up until he was 98.) He often said he would have preferred to have been recognized solely for his acting skills, not the age at which he was acting.Mr. Nussbaum came up in Chicago’s community theaters, notably Hull House, an incubator of talent in the 1960s, while also running a successful exterminating business. When he was 40, he was tackling a wasp nest when he fell off a roof, smashing a kneecap and breaking a wrist. While he stewed on the couch recuperating, he decided it was the right moment to pursue acting full time.A pivot point in his acting career came in 1975 when Mr. Mamet, then a fledgling playwright, cast him in the role of Teach in an early production of the celebrated play “American Buffalo,” about a trio of hapless, double-crossing hustlers. The pair had met at Hull House, where Mr. Mamet had worked as a gofer when he was a teenager.“It was, for those of us who saw it, kind of an overwhelming, definitive experience,” Robert Falls, the former artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theater, told Chicago magazine in 2014. “Over the years I’ve seen actors like Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall play that part, and no one has ever played it the way Mike Nussbaum did. There was a Chicago quality to it in its voice, in terms of attitude, a sense of pathos and danger that he brought to it that’s never been really equaled.”Mr. Nussbaum won a Drama Desk Award for his role as George Aaronow, a beaten-down salesman, in “Glengarry Glen Ross.”When Mr. Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” another tale of desperate hustlers, opened on Broadway in 1983, Mr. Nussbaum, along with fellow Chicagoan Joe Mantegna, were cast as two of the play’s striving, venal real estate agents. Mr. Mantegna earned a Tony for his role as the slick Ricky Roma; Mr. Nussbaum won a Drama Desk Award for his role as George Aaronow, a beaten-down salesman with a nascent conscience; and the play would win Mr. Mamet the Pulitzer Prize in drama.“There’s particular heroism in Mike Nussbaum, whose frightened eyes convey a lifetime of blasted dreams,” Frank Rich wrote in his review for The New York Times. “and in Joe Mantegna, as the company’s youngest, most dapper go-getter.”The pair had performed years earlier in Mr. Mamet’s “A Life in the Theater,” a slight but biting two-man play about a young actor and an older one, goading and guiding each other, ego to ego. Mel Gussow of The Times praised their performances as effortless. “As the cynical old poseur, Mr. Nussbaum is a Jack Gilford with a touch of John Barrymore,” he wrote.Mr. Mantegna, speaking by phone, said that Mr. Nussbaum was “the role model for what everyone considers the Chicago actor.”“He wasn’t doing it for the end game,” Mr. Mantegna said. “In New York, there’s an end game: Maybe I’ll get to Broadway, get a shot at TV. It’s an industry. L.A. is an industry. In Chicago it was never an industry, we were doing it for the love of doing it.”He recalled Broadway producers urging Mr. Mamet to cast “Glengarry Glen Ross” with stars, and Mr. Mamet pushing back. “He said, ‘I’m going to do it with my kind of guys.’ Then there we were, this pack of unknowns, doing what would ultimately win the Pulitzer Prize.”Then Mr. Nussbaum walked away from it all.B.J. Jones, artistic director of the renowned Northlight Theater, in Skokie, Ill., which Mr. Nussbaum helped found in the 1970s, phoned Mr. Nussbaum during his run on Broadway to ask him to play the lead in a work by the English playwright Simon Gray.Mr. Nussbaum called out to his wife at the time, Annette, for advice. “Do it,” she said. “I’m tired of New York.”“Mike left Broadway to perform in a play for which we probably paid him a few hundred bucks,” Mr. Jones continued. “And when he did, they were scalping tickets in the lobby to see him. He was a Broadway star but he came home.”As Mr. Mantegna said, “We were on the carousel, and there was the brass ring and he could have grabbed it, but he decided he liked the carousel.”A slight man with a bushy mustache, Mr. Nussbaum could seemingly play anybody: He was a fierce Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” and a bawdy witch in “Macbeth,” two of his many roles for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. He also worked steadily in film and television. He was a pompous school principal in “Field of Dreams,” the 1989 baseball fantasy starring Kevin Costner, and a chillingly gentle jewelry store owner in “Men in Black,” the 1997 sci-fi comedy with Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith.A scene from the film “Men In Black” (1997), in which Mr. Nussbaum played a chillingly gentle jeweler.Columbia Pictures, via Alamy“Mike was the consummate ensemble player,” Mr. Jones said. “And he had an inherent warmth that infused all his characters.”Mike Nussbaum was born Myron G. Nussbaum on Dec. 29, 1923, in New York City, and grew up in Chicago. His father, Philip Nussbaum, was a fur wholesaler; his mother, Bertha (Cohen) Nussbaum, was a homemaker. Mike was a skinny, unhappy child, beaten and demeaned by his father, “a man I did not admire,” he told Chicago magazine.He was 9 and at summer camp when he discovered acting,though he froze during his first performance and had to be carried off the stage. He attended the University of Wisconsin before dropping out and enlisting in the Army during World War II.He worked as a Teletype operator in France, first in Versailles and then Reims, and was on duty on May 7, 1945, the day of the German surrender. He sent out the announcement declaring the end of the war in Europe, signing it not with his initials, as was customary, but with his full surname. He kept a framed copy as a memento.He returned to Chicago in 1946 and married Annette Brenner, who later worked in public relations for the American Civil Liberties Union and elsewhere. He went into the exterminating business because he wanted a home, a family and a stable life, which he knew he couldn’t have as a professional actor. “I wanted the American dream,” he said. Mr. Nussbaum in 2019. “I’m lucky,” he once said of his long career. “Chicago has given me chances that I don’t think I would’ve gotten in New York.”Neil Steinberg/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressHis first wife died in 2003. In addition to his daughter Karen, Mr. Nussbaum is survived by his son, Jack, a writer and activist; his second wife, Julie (Brudlos) Nussbaum; seven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Susan, a playwright, novelist and disability activist, died last year.“I’m lucky: Chicago has given me chances that I don’t think I would have gotten in New York,” Mr. Nussbaum told Patrick Healy of The New York Times in 2014. “There’s no real fame here, not like in New York. And your salary doesn’t go up when you win a Jeff” — otherwise known as The Joseph Jefferson Award, an honor given to the theater arts in Chicago — “not like when you win a Tony. But I’ve gotten steady work, great work, and all I ever wanted to do was act.” More

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      David Mamet Names the Books That Explain the Real Hollywood

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      What’s the last great book you read?“A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States,” by Frederick Law Olmsted. Also note: “The Life of George Brummell, Esq., Commonly Called Beau Brummell,” by Captain Jesse, and “A Diary in America,” by Frederick Marryat. Enjoy.Can a great book be badly written?If it were badly written how could it be a great book? Perhaps if it contained Great Ideas? According to whom? The writer? Who died and left him boss? In the estimation of the reader? If I am he, nope, for why should I credit any ideas of a lox who didn’t realize he couldn’t write? Reading great prose is one of my chiefest joys. When I find myself rewriting the book I’m reading, I not only throw it away, I do not recycle it. What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?“The Wallet of Kai Lung,” by Ernest Bramah.Which novels or novelists do you admire for their dialogue?George V. Higgins.Which books best capture Hollywood and the challenge of making movies?The best book about Hollywood is my “Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood.”Here please find its like:“A Girl Like I,” by Anita Loos. She was the first of the great Hollywood screenwriters, and in it from the days of the silents. Her “Lorelei” stories became “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” See also “The Honeycomb,” an autobiography of Adela Rogers St. Johns. She started in journalism before writing for silents, and wrote many of the great “women’s” pictures of early sound.Jim Tully was a “road kid,” riding the rails, and washed up in Hollywood, where he worked, in various capacities, for Chaplin, of whom he wrote a short unauthorized biography. Also please read his “Jarnegan,” a roman à clef about a thug and criminal who comes to Hollywood, and becomes a great director.Another must read is Ivor Montagu’s “With Eisenstein in Hollywood.” He and Sergei wandered in, in the 1930s. They were flogging a screenplay for “An American Tragedy” and a gold rush drama, “Sutter’s Gold.” They had a few drinks, and had their lunch handed to them, and went home.Bob Evans, once head of Paramount, wrote “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” which is a laugh a minute, but one must read between the lies (sic). Scotty Bowers, a fixer, wrote “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars” with Lionel Friedberg. Are his accounts true? He only “outed” the dead, which indicates his intelligence, but gives no clues to his veracity. Hollywood has always been about sex, until just recently. Now it is about Attack-Decency; and, as with anything, those who know don’t tell, and those who tell don’t know. A note to those who might buy my book. In it I recount a talk I had with my old friend Noma Copley. She worked for Disney in the late 1940s, and told me, at their first meeting, he invited her into his inner sanctum, which was covered with murals depicting his characters in an orgy, and said, “Call me Walt.”What book would you most like to see turned into a movie that hasn’t already been adapted?The only book not adapted to the screen is the phone book. I tried, but only got as far as the title: “Funny Names, No Plot.”What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?”The Berenstain Bears Get Cancer.”The last book that made you cry?“Bambi.”The last book that made you furious?“The Wealth of Nations.”Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?My wife once threw a book at me.You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?Great work is a mystery to us, and, as it’s mysterious, we have no vocabulary for discussing it, really, let alone discussing it with its creators. The fortunate ones are dead, so that, for example, we could not ask of Winslow Homer, “What induced you to put that shark there…?” The best thing I could say to a writer is the best thing he or she, or you, could say to me: “Pleased to meet you.” More

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      For a Times Critic on Deadline, a Dramatic Reversal

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      Stories evolve. But a recent review proved to a theater critic that people can change even more.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to do my job.That’s usually not a problem. As the chief theater critic for The Times, I enjoy the ritual of seeing plays during previews, thinking about them for a day or two and writing opening-night reviews.But after Second Stage Theater announced in June that it would produce a revival of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate,” I dithered for months about covering it. True, it would be the play’s Broadway debut — and the playwright’s. Both are important milestones for the paper to acknowledge with a thoughtful response.On the other hand, I’d seen “Appropriate” before, when it premiered Off Broadway in 2014. Other critics welcomed it as a serious play by a serious playwright.I hated it.That surprised me. The play’s subject — the legacy of racism in America — is something I care about deeply. And the plot is clever: Three white siblings bicker over the horrible souvenirs of slavery they find in their father’s plantation home. But the tone seemed too hectic and self-consciously outrageous to suit the subject.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?  More

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      Review: This ‘Night of the Iguana’ Is Williams Without the Excess

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      A new revival directed by Emily Mann and starring Tim Daly leans into its flailing characters’ confusions.While not his most elegant work, Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana,” about a group of lost souls at a coastal hotel in 1940s Mexico, is not without its misty pleasures. Even as his characters stumble tragically in search of meaning, their convictions carry the sharp-tongued certainty of soap opera idols. But a new revival from La Femme Theater at the Signature Center mires itself too deeply in its characters’ confusions to let the edges of his language shine.It’s an issue of confidence, with Emily Mann directing her cast away from Williams’s assured dialogue and toward their characters’ flailing. And this play, with a defrocked minister who now leads Baptist church ladies on unreliable bus tours at its center, already has plenty of flailing.Plagued by nervous breakdowns, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon (Tim Daly) is grasping at straws when he brings his ersatz flock to the cheap hotel run by his friend, the sultry Maxine (Daphne Rubin-Vega). Calling God a “senile delinquent” during a mid-sermon lapse in belief got him fired; his statutory rape of a 16-year-old on the trip could mean worse, and the girl’s chaperone (Lea DeLaria) is already rushing to phone the authorities.Like many of the playwright’s antiheroes, Shannon is disheartened by the world’s hypocrisy while also contributing to it. These contradictions are typically enlivened by the kind of fiery speechifying an actor can chew heartily, but “Iguana” is Williams in bold, underlined red ink: Shannon goes on about feeling hopeless and at the end of his rope, then later says as much about the panicking iguana caught and tied to a post by two hotel workers. No need for SparkNotes.His pleas need spirit, if only of desperation, and Daly, in a verbally stumbling performance, does not convey someone with the power to seduce with ease. This hesitation extends to most of the ensemble, who struggle with the cadence of Williams’s writing, except for the unflinching DeLaria and, as a hippie-ish painter named Hannah, Jean Lichty.Like Shannon, Hannah is a hustler with lofty spiritual ambitions, traversing the world trading watercolors and recitations for hotel rooms with her aging poet father (Austin Pendleton, whose adequacy with the play’s rhythms is undermined by the brevity of his time onstage). Shannon and Hannah’s near act-length conversation in the show’s second half, as she attempts to calm him down from the ledge, comes closest to achieving its intended discourse on freedom and redemption thanks to the surety with which Lichty imbues her character.It might be that, in trying to demystify Williams’s extravagance to get at its emotional core, Mann has thrown the priest out with the holy water. It’s possible to strip away the surfaces of the playwright’s worlds — a revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” last year did away with its Old South glamour and still got its point across — but not the excesses they need to reach their delicious boiling points.Traces of those remain, like Jeff Croiter’s tropical lighting, Beowulf Boritt’s stilted, shabby-chic set, and Rubin-Vega’s unshakable earthiness. But they don’t compensate for the play’s weaker elements, like two giddy German tourists (Alena Acker and Michael Leigh Cook) whose sporadic, Nazi-praising appearances are a thudding example of the duplicity Shannon rails against, in this case aimed at Maxine for renting them rooms.Williams wants it both ways in those moments, validating his protagonist’s gripes even as he condemns him. The gambit is not impossible, but is one that needs a production more convincing, more drunk on its own pretensions, to really win over a congregation.The Night of the IguanaThrough Feb. 25 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; iguanaplaynyc.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      Best Arts Photos of 2023

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      Peter Fisher for The New York Times2023 in Retrospect: 59 Photographs That Defined the Year in ArtsDeadheads, ballerinas and Mick Jagger: As 2023 winds down, revisit a memorable handful of the thousands of images commissioned by our photo editors that capture the year in culture.Marysa Greenawalt More

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      Sondheim Was a Critical Darling. Since His Death, He’s a Hitmaker, Too.

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      The musicals of Stephen Sondheim often struggled at the box office during his lifetime, but since his death several have become huge hits on Broadway.Stephen Sondheim, the great musical theater composer and lyricist, was widely acclaimed as a genius, but during his lifetime he had a bumpy track record at the box office, with many of his shows losing money.In death, however, his shows have flourished.A revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” — which was so unpopular when it debuted in 1981 that it closed 12 days after opening — is now the hottest ticket on Broadway. A lavish revival of “Sweeney Todd” that opened in March is already profitable, and at a time when almost everything new on Broadway is failing.Meanwhile, Sondheim’s unfinished and existentialist final work, “Here We Are,” is now the longest-running show in the brief history of the Shed, a performing arts center in Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s West Side, where luminaries like Steven Spielberg and Lin-Manuel Miranda signed up as producers to make sure no expense was spared on the Sondheim send-off.“There just seems to be an unbounded appetite for him,” said Alex Poots, the artistic director of the Shed.The posthumous Sondheim bump appears to have resulted from a confluence of factors.The big Broadway revivals feature fan-favorite talent — the “Merrily” cast includes Daniel Radcliffe of “Harry Potter” fame, while “Sweeney” is led by the celebrated baritone Josh Groban — reflecting a desire by top-tier entertainers to champion, and tackle, Sondheim’s tricky but rewarding work.The revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” with, from left, Lindsay Mendez, Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff, is one of the hottest tickets on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlso: The outpouring of praise for Sondheim upon his death, when he was hailed as a transformational creative force, seems to have spurred new interest in his work. And his shows, some of which felt challenging when they first appeared, are now more familiar, thanks to decades of stage productions and film adaptations. Plus, according to most critics, the current revivals are good.“Sondheim went from being too avant-garde to being a sure bet, like you’re doing ‘A Christmas Carol’,” said Danny Feldman, the producing artistic director of Pasadena Playhouse, a Southern California nonprofit that won this year’s Regional Theater Tony Award. The playhouse devoted the first half of 2023 to Sondheim: A production of “Sunday in the Park With George,” a show once seen as esoteric, became one its best-selling musicals ever, and a production of “A Little Night Music” was not far behind. “The interest was shocking,” Feldman said.One side effect of his popularity: Ticket prices are high. “Merrily” is facing strong demand from Sondheim lovers and Radcliffe fans, but its capacity is limited; it is playing in a theater with just 966 seats. That has made it the most expensive ticket on Broadway, with an average ticket price of $250 and a top ticket price of $649 during the week that ended Dec. 17. “Sweeney” is also pricey, with tickets that same week averaging $175 and topping out at $399. (Both shows offer lower-priced tickets, particularly after the holidays.)“We shouldn’t be criticized for being a hit and paying back investors who have taken a big punt in New York,” said the “Merrily” lead producer, Sonia Friedman. “Most shows right now are not working, and therefore when something comes along that does, let’s get the investors some money back.”In life, Sondheim was often seen as more of an artistic success than a commercial one — a critical darling with a passionate but finite fan base, leading to short runs for many of the shows whose scores he composed, especially during their first productions. A few shows, particularly “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” were hits from the start, but some musicals that are now viewed as masterpieces, including “Sweeney Todd” and “Sunday in the Park With George,” did not recoup their costs during their original productions.“It’s not like he fell out of favor and has been rediscovered. He’s always been revered and valued and prized by everybody who loves theater, but we also have to recognize that several of his shows, when they first premiered, were not understood and were not embraced,” said Jordan Roth, the producer who brought “Into the Woods” back to Broadway in the summer of 2022, seven months after Sondheim’s death. Now, Roth said, “The grip on our hearts seems to have tightened.”“Into the Woods,” a modestly scaled production, featured the pop singer Sara Bareilles and a troupe of Broadway stars. It recouped its costs and then had a five-month national tour.The original production of “Sweeney Todd” did not recoup its investment, but the current revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford is making a profit.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn February, seven weeks after “Into the Woods” concluded on Broadway, “Sweeney Todd” began previews. It’s a much bigger production — big cast, big orchestra — that was capitalized for up to $14.5 million. It has sold strongly from the get-go (during the week that ended Dec. 10, it grossed $1.8 million) and has already recouped its capitalization costs.“I’m sorry that I can’t call him and say look at these grosses. He definitely would have had a sarcastic statement in response, but he would have liked it secretly,” said the show’s lead producer, Jeffrey Seller. “Who doesn’t want to be affirmed by the audience?”Groban and his co-star Annaleigh Ashford are ending their runs in the show on Jan. 14; the show’s success has prompted the producers to extend the run, with Aaron Tveit and Sutton Foster taking over the lead roles on Feb. 9.“It has morphed into being under the umbrella of an enormous and deserved celebration of Sondheim’s work and legacy and life,” Groban said. “All of a sudden there’s grief involved, and wanting to do him proud, and what-would-Steve-do feelings.”“Merrily,” which began previews in September, is the biggest turnabout, given that its original production is one of Broadway’s most storied flops. The current revival, capitalized for up to $13 million, has been selling out.“Of all the things he wanted, he wanted as many people as possible to be in the theater watching the shows, and he just missed it,” said Maria Friedman, the director of the “Merrily” revival and a longtime Sondheim collaborator.In November, 10 members of the company of the original ill-fated “Merrily” attended the revival and marveled at the reversal of fortunes.“It’s thrilling to see the show finally get its due,” said Gary Stevens, who was an 18-year-old in the original “Merrily” ensemble, and who is now 60 and works an executive at a chauffeuring company in Florida. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t say there was a sense of bittersweetness. We look at this revival’s success as, in some ways, our success, because the day after closing, even with how exhausted we were and how sad we were, we recorded a kick-ass album that kept that show alive, so that it became a legendary flop and cult classic that kept going and going, and now this.”Another member of the original “Merrily” cast, the actress and singer Liz Callaway, was nominated this year for a Grammy Award for a live album of Sondheim songs, one of two collections of Sondheim songs nominated in the 2024 Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album category. “I think a new generation is falling in love with Sondheim now,” she said.“Here We Are” is a little different. It is not expected to recoup its costs, or to transfer to Broadway, but both the leadership of the Shed and the commercial producer who raised money to finance the production proclaimed it a success.“It was always about honoring Steve’s legacy,” said the producer, Tom Kirdahy. “And we hope that it has another life, in London or on the road.”In London, there are also two Sondheim shows running. “Old Friends,” a revue of Sondheim songs with a cast led by Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, is in the West End. And at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a revival of Sondheim’s rarely staged “Pacific Overtures” opened earlier this month to critical praise.“For those of us who wanted to do right by him, this is a year I’ll never forget,” Groban said. “I just hope he’s smiling down.” More

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      The Great Experiment That Is ‘The Color Purple’

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      A new adaptation shows how rich Alice Walker’s novel is and how the source material can lend itself to unconventional storytelling.Last month, I saw something I hadn’t seen in two decades of moviegoing: three Black-directed films in one week.I watched Blitz Bazawule’s adaptation of “The Color Purple,” a musical about a female survivor overcoming sexual assault and domestic abuse; the concert film “Renaissance,” directed by and starring Beyoncé; and “Origin,” Ava DuVernay’s dramatization of Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling book “Caste.” Though each is starkly different in everything from story to aesthetic vision, my happenstance of seeing all three so close together revealed their shared interest in telling stories about African American history in new ways.Beyoncé remembers the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s; DuVernay recognizes early African American researchers of race relations, like Allison Davis, Elizabeth Stubbs Davis and Alfred L. Bright; and Bazawule looks at a 40-year period in the life of a Black woman living through Jim Crow and the Jazz Age.That chance week of movies also allowed me to reflect on the unprecedented journey and ultimate cinematic triumph of “The Color Purple.” Starting in rural Georgia in the early 20th century, the story follows Celie, an orphaned girl who is repeatedly violated and twice impregnated by her Pa, a man she considers her father. She is forced to leave her younger sister, Nettie, when Pa marries her off to a much older widow, Albert, whom she knows only as Mister.Beyoncé on a Toronto tour stop. “Renaissance,” which she also directed, arrives in an ecosystem partly created by the first adaptation of “The Color Purple.”The New York TimesCentered on Celie’s finding her voice, discovering her sexuality in her relationship with the blues singer, Shug Avery and journeying to forgiveness, selfhood and community with other women, like her daughter-in-law, Sofia, Walker’s novel earned her the National Book Award and made her the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The movie earned 11 Oscar nominations; then came a Tony Award for the 2005 Broadway show and two for the 2015 revival, making this one of the most prized narratives in American history.Nowadays, it is hard to believe that when Steven Spielberg released his adaptation in 1985, he and Walker had to cross a picket line of protesters to attend the premiere. But his drama was met with great controversy. While researching my book “In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece,” I discovered that many critics, the majority of whom were Black male writers or political leaders, had accused the filmmakers of reinforcing stereotypes of Black men as hyperviolent through the characterizations of Pa, Albert and Harpo (Albert’s oldest son) and the abuse they inflicted on Celie and Sofia. Other critics took umbrage at Celie’s lesbian relationship as undermining traditional Black family values.Led by Black organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., the Nation of Islam and the now defunct Coalition Against Black Exploitation, the campaign against that movie was bitter and divisive. In turn, its defenders, including many Black women who saw themselves in Walker’s characters, felt pitted against others in their own community. The pushback was so effective that the film won no Academy Awards. (It lost the top Oscar to “Out of Africa.”)“Without a doubt the controversy is the reason we didn’t take home a single award that night,” Oprah Winfrey, who starred as Sofia in the original and later served as a producer of both the stage and movie musicals, told me in an interview in 2018. “I was puzzled and frustrated by the N.A.A.C.P.”And yet the film was groundbreaking, changing our understanding of what was possible for Black actors and stories in Hollywood. Ultimately, it paved the way for these new works by Beyoncé, DuVernay and Bazawule. And unlike its predecessor, Bazawule’s musical version, opening in theaters on Christmas Day, premieres alongside other films with predominantly Black casts, and so his “Color Purple” is free to reimagine and experiment with form and conventional musical conceit.Through Celie’s vivid inner life, the dynamic songs and choreography, and playful cinematic references, this version honors its literary, Broadway and Hollywood forerunners while successfully updating how we see Alice Walker’s characters and, even more surprisingly, innovating how we can experience the movie musical genre itself.Arriving in a different feminist moment, Bazawule is not bedeviled by the sexist and homophobic concerns that plagued the first movie. And yet, his most memorable scenes subtly take on those past critiques while adding new cinematic layers to Celie’s story. Early in the film, Celie’s active imagination — depicted in the novel through her letter-writing — is shown as both a coping mechanism and a surrealistic narrative detour. When the teenage Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) discovers that her children are alive after Pa convinced her that they had died, she dreams of avoiding the drudgery of her life.In the number “She Be Mine,” Celie imagines that she has left Pa’s store and walks through a Southern landscape that is paradoxically lush and marred by the exploitation of Black laborers. As she passes a group of Black men working on a chain gang and Black laundry women washing clothes by a waterfall, we recognize that her escape is limited and illusory and that she is as oppressed in her home as they are in their work.But when adult Celie (Fantasia Barrino-Taylor) tends to the bodacious blues singer Shug (Taraji P. Henson), her interiority takes over even more. As Shug falls asleep in the bathtub while listening to a record, Celie suddenly imagines a gramophone that’s larger than life, and standing on a spinning vinyl album that doubles as a concert stage, she belts an empowering song.Later, Bazawule expands his surreal aesthetic when Celie and Shug go to the movies. Sitting in the segregated balcony section as they watch “The Flying Ace,” Richard E. Norman’s 1926 silent with an all-Black cast, Celie imagines them in a different movie — one in color in which they are dressed in ball gowns and singing to each other in front a Duke Ellington-like jazz band. When we return to the present, they kiss, cementing their relationship and finally enabling Celie’s fantasy to come true. In 1985, that kiss was brief and the cause of much public debate. With access to her inner thoughts in 2023, Celie’s hopes and desires become our own: We recognize that her intimacy with Shug is long-awaited and fulfilling.Taraji P. Henson and Barrino-Taylor working on “The Color Purple” with Blitz Bazawule. Eli Ade/Warner Bros. PicturesAs Celie finds her voice, rejects the abuse from Albert and gains more and more agency, her flights of fancy seem to disappear. But, by the time we reach the showstopper “Miss Celie’s Pants,” in which she, Shug and other women celebrate Celie’s separation from Albert and her newfound entrepreneurialism, the bold color palette, uplifting music and lively dancing associated with her dreamlike sequences dominate.Unlike other movie musicals in which the songs distract from the dramatic action, the numbers and the composer Kris Bowers’s score are woven together in a way that makes the soundscape feel like the film’s true setting. This might be because Bazawule was one of several filmmakers who collaborated with Beyoncé on “Black Is King,” the visual companion to the soundtrack for the live-action “Lion King” (2021); he understands how to make an entire film sing rather than string together a series of scenes.And yet the original song Bazawule co-wrote for the movie, “Workin’,” for Celie’s stepson, Harpo (Corey Hawkins), stands apart for giving this man more multidimensionality than he had in the previous adaptations.In this scene, Harpo rejects Albert’s authority by building his own house, and it’s a harbinger of his evolution. He goes from being a sensitive young adult to an abusive husband to a man who finally breaks his family’s intergenerational cycle of violence against women. Walker’s novel partly shows this metamorphosis, but Bazawule fully realizes it here, nullifying any lingering controversies about Harpo’s fate or flaws in his representation.Growth, I suspect, was always the point. It took a while for Winfrey and Scott Sanders to convince their fellow producer Spielberg that the Broadway musical could lead to a new adaptation. “I didn’t really know if ‘Color Purple’ had another movie in it,” he told Variety. That Bazawule breathes new life into these characters reminds us of what a masterpiece Celie’s story remains for us today. More