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      Now Is the Winter of Broadway’s Discontent

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      Curtains are rising again after the Omicron surge caused widespread cancellations, but attendance has fallen steeply. Nine shows are closing, at least temporarily.The reopening of Broadway last summer, following the longest shutdown in history, provided a jolt of energy to a city ready for a rebound: Bruce Springsteen and block parties, eager audiences and enthusiastic actors.But the Omicron variant that has barreled into the city, sending coronavirus case counts soaring, is now battering Broadway, leaving the industry facing an unexpected and enormous setback on its road back from the pandemic.In December, so many theater workers tested positive for the coronavirus that, on some nights, half of all shows were canceled — in a few troublesome instances after audiences were already in their seats.Now, producers have figured out how to keep shows running, thanks mainly to a small army of replacement workers filling in for infected colleagues. Heroic stories abound: When the two girls who alternate as the young lioness Nala in “The Lion King” were both out one night, a 10-year-old boy who usually plays the cub Simba went on in the role, saving the performance.Broadway shows have been using social media to remind potential ticket-buyers that performances are still happening. The revival of “Company” is among many using the hashtag #BroadwayIsOpen.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesBut there’s a new problem: Audiences are vanishing.During the week that ended Jan. 9, just 62 percent of seats were occupied. That’s the lowest attendance has been since a week in 2003 when musicians went on strike, and it’s a precipitous drop from the January before the pandemic, when 94 percent of seats were filled during the first week after the holidays.The casualty list is growing. Over the last month, nine shows have decided to close their doors, at least temporarily. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a huge hit before the pandemic, announced last week that it would close until June; on Sunday “Ain’t Too Proud,” a successful jukebox musical about the Temptations, closed for good.Box-office grosses are falling off a cliff. The all-important Christmas and New Year’s weeks, which producers count on each year to fatten their coffers in anticipation of the lean weeks that follow, generated just $40 million this season, down from $99 million before the pandemic. Requests for ticket refunds are now so high that on some days some shows have negative wraps, meaning they are giving back more money than they are taking in.“This is the worst I have ever experienced,” said Jack Viertel, a longtime executive at Jujamcyn Theaters, which operates five Broadway houses.Over the long run, industry leaders say, there is every reason to remain bullish about Broadway. Until the pandemic, the industry had been enjoying a sustained boom, fueled by a rebound in the popularity of musicals and by New York’s gargantuan growth as a tourist destination. And this downturn might not last long: There is some evidence that the Omicron surge may be peaking, at least in some parts of the country, including New York.The musical “Ain’t Too Proud,” about the Temptations, was a hit before the pandemic, but decided to close after coronavirus cases forced the show to cancel multiple performances over the holidays.  An Rong Xu for The New York TimesBut before it eases, the slump will cost investors tens of millions of dollars, and will push theater workers back into unemployment, as dwindling attendance forces productions without abundant reserves to close. And the distress is not just financial: Artists spend years developing shows before they get to Broadway, so a premature closing is a crushing blow.“It’s harrowing, and there will be a lot of damage done,” Mr. Viertel said. “Some shows will be put out of business permanently, and this will be career ending for some individuals.”Dominique Morisseau, the playwright who wrote the book for “Ain’t Too Proud,” and whose new play, “Skeleton Crew,” is now in previews following two virus-related delays, called this moment “extremely painful.” “My play is about plants shutting down during the auto industry collapse, and factory workers wondering every day, ‘Is it shutting down?’” she said. “Now that’s how we’re coming to work.”The Broadway League, which represents producers, has asked labor unions to consider pay cuts to help shows survive this rough patch. At one point, in a step previously reported by The Daily Beast, the League asked workers to accept half-pay when Covid-19 forced performance cancellations; there have also been discussions about offering lower pay for scaled-back performance calendars.“We’re doing everything we can to keep as many shows open as possible,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, citing safety protocols and marketing efforts as well as labor discussions.The talks stalled as unions sought more financial information.A revival of “The Music Man” canceled multiple performances just days after starting previews when both of its stars tested positive for the coronavirus, but it is now up and running again.An Rong Xu for The New York Times“It’s fair to say that all the unions recognize that shows remaining open is important — that represents jobs for actors and stage managers and everyone else who makes a living in the live theater,” said Kate Shindle, the president of Actors’ Equity. But Ms. Shindle noted that Broadway shows had received tens of millions of dollars in federal aid last year, and that the industry is no longer even disclosing weekly box-office grosses for individual shows, as it did before the pandemic. “Pretty universally, the unions’ response has been that if you want us to make financial concessions, we need financial transparency,” she said.Meanwhile, shows are collapsing. There are always closings in January, a soft time of year for Broadway, but this season a crush of announcements started in December, usually one of the most lucrative months. The musicals “Ain’t Too Proud,” “Diana,” “Flying Over Sunset,” “Jagged Little Pill” and “Waitress,” as well as the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” all decided to close earlier than planned after Omicron hit. And three other shows, including “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Girl From the North Country” as well as “Mockingbird,” said they would close for a few months and then attempt to reopen.“If it means that shows get to come back, hooray,” said Jenn Gambatese, the lead actress in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” “The alternative was, run another week and buh-bye.”More and more theaters are now dark. By next Sunday, there will be only 19 shows running in the 41 Broadway theaters. Cast and crew members from shuttered productions are trying to figure out whether they even worked enough weeks to qualify for unemployment; those who do will get less assistance than they did earlier in the pandemic, because the maximum weekly benefit in New York is now $504, down from $1,104 when the federal government was offering a supplement.This is a good time for bargain hunters: Discounts are available for many shows at the TKTS booth, and NYC & Company’s annual Broadway Week, which offers 2-for-1 tickets to most shows, has been extended to 27 days. An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThe surviving shows seem to have figured out how to avert the cancellations that bedeviled the industry last month.One reason: So many workers have already tested positive, and are now back at work (and, notably, no performers are known to have been hospitalized during this latest round). More important: Productions have trained and hired additional replacement workers, including for crew members.Playbills are regularly stuffed with cast-change inserts. One night, Keenan Scott II, the playwright of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” kept his show afloat by going on to replace an actor who tested positive. “Come From Away” saved a performance by deploying eight swings, including alumni and a touring performer who had never worked on Broadway. At “Wicked,” a longtime understudy who had left Broadway to become a software engineer in Chicago returned and performed as Elphaba.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

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      Bridget Everett Shows Off Her Softer Side in 'Somebody Somewhere'

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      Sometimes Bridget Everett, the actress, comedian and self-proclaimed “cabaret wildebeest,” wonders what would have happened if she had never left Kansas. She has a pretty good idea.“I’d probably live in Kansas City, or Lawrence,” she said. “I would probably work in a restaurant and have two D.U.I.s and sit on the couch a lot in my underwear.”This was on a Monday afternoon in mid-December at John Brown BBQ, a purveyor of Kansas City-style barbecue in Queens, which is to say the closest that a person can get to Kansas within the New York City limits. (Not very close, as it turns out, though Everett said that the sides were delicious.) She was joined by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, the creators of “Somebody Somewhere,” a wistful Kansas-set half-hour comedy that arrives Sunday on HBO.Everett, 49, stars as Sam, a woman whose biography parallels her own, to a point. After years of bartending in a big city, Sam has returned to her hometown. She has a soul-eating job at an educational testing center and various family obligations — a father (Mike Hagerty) with a struggling farm, a mother (Jane Brody) with addiction issues, and a sister (Mary Catherine Garrison) with a wobbly marriage and an Instagrammable approach to evangelical Christianity. Sam sits on the couch a lot in her underwear.Then she meets Joel (Jeff Hiller), another testing center employee, who remembers her from her high school-choir glory days. He introduces her to a band of outsiders and misfits who meet weekly for what they call “choir practice,” a louche and joyful open mic night in an abandoned mall. And slowly, like some late-season wildflower who rips open her T-shirt after an impassioned version of “Piece of My Heart,” Sam begins to bloom.Danny McCarthy and Everett in “Somebody Somewhere.” The series is set in Everett’s hometown of Manhattan, Kan.HBOFor those who have experienced Everett onstage — in plunging, nipple-freeing dresses and with an approach to crowd work that violates most decency clauses — her presence as Sam will come as a surprise. She sings in only some of the episodes. Her wardrobe leans toward flannel. She sits on no one’s face.“If you’re used to seeing the wildebeest onstage, you’re going to be like, ‘Where is she?’” Everett said of her work on the show. “But I hope that people can settle into the sort of softer side of Bridget.”“I also think they’re going to be shocked to see me in a bra,” she added. “That’s really going to rattle some people.”Unhurried in its pacing, gentle in its tone and generally sympathetic to the vagaries of human behavior, “Somebody Somewhere” is not necessarily the show you might expect from pairing Everett with Bos and Thureen, founders of the avant-garde theater collective the Debate Society.But each has strong roots in the Midwest — Everett in Manhattan, Kan., where the show is set; Bos in Evanston, Ill.; Thureen in East Grand Forks, Minn. Which may explain why the producer Carolyn Strauss, who had first worked with Everett on “Love You More,” a pilot for Amazon, connected them.“That’s how she found us,” Thureen joked. “She was like, ‘Oh, they’re Midwestern.’”Strauss, a former top executive at HBO, had helped to arrange Everett’s deal with the network. She wanted a project that traded on more than Everett’s outrageousness, that also acknowledged the shyer, more guarded woman that she is in her offstage life.The creators Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen loosely based the series on Everett’s life.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“There’s many different sides to her,” said Strauss, an executive producer on the series. “There’s just something about Bridget that really connects to all the parts of people — the good parts, the bad parts, the wounded parts, the healed-over parts.”With this prompt, Bos and Thureen, writing partners who have worked on “High Maintenance” and “Mozart in the Jungle,” pitched a show that drew on Everett’s real life — Kansas upbringing, unholy pipes, a mother who drinks, a sister who died young — and then imagined how this woman might express herself in a place that didn’t seem to welcome her heart or her gifts.“They threw in the dead sister, and I was sold,” Everett said.There are plenty of stories about small-town kids who come to the city with a dollar and a dream, and make good. There are plenty more about big-city transplants finding happiness only when they return home. That first story is more or less Everett’s, though it took decades of restaurant work and a lot of sozzled karaoke nights before she had anything that could be called a career. The second one is arguably Sam’s, though its comedy of chosen family is tinged with heartbreak. The show’s bittersweet message is that it’s never too late to find yourself, whenever and wherever you are.“We didn’t want to do a snarky show,” Everett said. “We wanted to do a nice show. Like a hug, you know?”HBO approved a pilot late in 2018. Everett and Jay Duplass, a director and executive producer on the show, took a research trip to Manhattan, Kan., so Duplass could meet her family, walk its not-so-mean streets and soak up what Everett suggested were its passive-aggressive vibes. Bos and Thureen wrote the script, interpolating some of Everett’s real experiences and a few verbatim quotes.Murray Hill, left, and Jeff Hiller are among the New York theater veterans in “Somebody Somewhere.” “It is a show that I hadn’t ever seen before,” Hiller said.HBODuplass — a creator of HBO’s “Togetherness” and a star of Amazon’s “Transparent” — shot the pilot in October 2019, mostly in Lockport, Ill., a city just southwest of Chicago. He aimed for a kind of documentary realism, he said. “How we could have done this wrong,” he said, “was to make everybody just jack up their quirkiness and undermine the underlying tragedy that’s also going on with each of these people.”But isn’t the show supposed to be a comedy? “In our mind, we are making a drama that happens to be funny,” he said.A seven-episode series was greenlit early in 2020, then paused when the pandemic began. Plans were made to resume shooting in September, but as case numbers rose, the producers pushed production again. The cast and crew arrived in Lockport this spring and shot as quickly as they could, sometimes locking down a scene in only two or three takes.Most of the cast, Everett included, had never played roles this substantial. Hagerty, who recurred on “Friends,” has perhaps the most credits, but no one is what you would call famous. So the shoot was late-bloomer central. “That made the set really fun,” Bos said. “It was a set for people who really wanted to be there.”In the past, film and TV shoots had unnerved Everett, often to the point of intestinal discomfort. But here she finally felt at ease. “It’s because I lived with the project for so long,” she said. “And we built it together — I knew I couldn’t get fired. That’s the main thing: Like, what were they going to do? Replace me with Kathy Bates?”Other actors felt this comfort, too. Hiller has often played small roles on TV, mostly waiters and, as he put it, “mean gay customer service representatives.” No show had ever wanted so much of him.“It is a show that I hadn’t ever seen before,” he said, speaking by telephone. “You don’t have to be gorgeous and perfect; you can be imperfect and queer and weird and too large. It’s nice.”Everett describes her stage persona as a “cabaret wildebeest.” For “Somebody Somewhere,” she said, “I hope that people can settle into the sort of softer side of Bridget.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDuring the shoot, he lived with Everett and the cabaret legend Murray Hill in a rented house that Hill, who plays a soil scientist named Fred Rococo, described as “this ridiculous, Russian supper club, drug den of a mansion.” Hiller would sometimes count the number of pride flags in town: one.“There were times when we would be in the grocery store and get some looks,” Hiller said. “There’s a certain muting one has to do when one goes into slightly less benevolent spaces for the cabaret queers of the world.”But that was OK, because the cabaret queers had each other. Speaking by telephone, Hill, a drag king superstar, recalled growing up within a conservative New England community and feeling a sense of belonging only once he moved to New York and discovered cabaret. “Chosen family,” he said. “That’s how I’ve survived. That’s how Bridget’s survived. So a lot of those themes are in the show.”For Everett, success has always felt like an accident, albeit an accident resulting from years of survival jobs, very late nights and hard work. “Somebody Somewhere” suggests that even if this accident hadn’t happened, even if she had never made it in New York, she would have made a life for herself anyway. Which is a kind of consolation. Starring in an HBO show at 49? That’s consolation, too. And she is glad, she said, that it didn’t happen earlier.“If I had been successful in my 20s, I’d be in prison,” she said. “There’s no question. For some people, it takes a little longer to step into your stride. I feel like it makes it sweeter, in a way. And if it doesn’t work out, then I know I’m going to be OK.” More

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      in Television

      Actress Dagmara Dominczyk Burns Bright in ‘Succession’ and 'The Lost Daughter'

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      The Polish actress also stars in “The Lost Daughter,” directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal.Evening Leather? Too leathery. Bahama Mama? Too beachy. Peaches and Cream? Out of season. Sweet Kitty? No.On the Sunday before Christmas, in a windowless basement under a braiding salon in Downtown Brooklyn, the actress and novelist Dagmara Dominczyk searched for the perfect aroma. A candle devotee since her undergraduate days at Carnegie Mellon University (“I burn them morning to night,” she said), she had arrived for a “Sip & Smell Experience”: a free two-hour workshop hosted by Kately’s Candles that she had found on Eventbrite.Upon arriving, Kevin Pierre-Louis, the organizer, seated her on a greige vinyl sofa and presented her with a caddy of about 50 small bottles with hand-printed labels. His assistant handed her a glass of sparkling rosé, which she sipped with care.“I’m a spiller,” she said. “I spill. I stain.”“You’re too pretty,” Mr. Pierre-Louis said. “I don’t see you spilling.”“I’m pretty because I did my makeup,” Ms. Dominczyk, 45, replied.He brought her more bottles and she sniffed them, rejecting most. “Not Mistletoe,” she said. “I used to like candles that smelled like a Christmas tree, now it’s too much.” She reached for another bottle and read the label out loud. “Creamy Nutmeg — that’s what they used to call me in high school,” she said jokingly.Ms. Domińczyk sniffs scents for her candle.OK McCausland for The New York TimesEarthy and elegant, Ms. Dominczyk, the eldest of three daughters, immigrated to the United States from Poland when she was 6. (Her father, active in the trade unions movement, had become a persona non grata.) Encouraged by a friend, she auditioned for the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where she blossomed as an actress. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, she booked the female lead in a lush 2002 film adaptation of “The Count of Monte Cristo.”Her career seemed assured.Instead, she spent the next few years staying out, sleeping in, eating Polish food and working only sporadically — a movie here, a television episode there. She dated the actor Patrick Wilson (they briefly overlapped at college), married him the next year, had their first son the year after, and a second son three years later. They live in Montclair, N.J.Work remained occasional. Her body had new curves. When her husband appeared in a 2013 episode of “Girls” as Lena Dunham’s sex interest, some online trolls suggested that a conventionally attractive man like Mr. Wilson would never have a tryst with someone like Ms. Dunham. Ms. Dominczyk snapped back on Twitter, saying: “Funny, his wife is a size 10, muffin top & all, & he does her just fine.”Casting directors — some of whom asked her if she could lose 20 pounds — didn’t know quite what to do with her silky surface, steelier interior and obvious intelligence.That changed in 2018, when she was cast as Karolina Novotney, the unflappable public relations executive on the HBO drama “Succession.” She was quickly upgraded from a recurring role to a series regular.She has asked the producers if Karolina could act out in ways that the Roy siblings do, but they have so far declined. “I want to play,” Ms. Dominczyk said. “I want to have sex with one of the brothers. Or Shiv? I don’t know. But the role is such that Karolina stays in her lane. She’s there to do the job.”Ms. Dominczyk, seen here with Jeremy Strong, plays an unflappable public relations executive in “Succession.”Craig Blankenhorn/HBOShe also stars in “The Lost Daughter,” a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal.NetflixMs. Dominczyk can also be seen as a waspish mother-to-be in the much-lauded Netflix film “The Lost Daughter,” directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. And she has recently wrapped the lead role in the HBO limited series “We Own This City,” in which she plays an F.B.I. agent investigating police corruption. “The more settled I became and the less apologetic for it, the less thinking I had to look a certain way or act a certain way, that was exciting for people,” she said.If she prefers complicated characters, her taste in fragrance skews simpler. “I’m much more of a sweet, cozy, pumpkin pie, fall candle person,” she said.A bottle labeled Dulce de Leche made the cut. And Pumpkin Patch and Pumpkin Rum Cake. Also Smoked Chestnut. (“Chestnut is a very Polish thing,” she said.) And Holiday Basket, though she joked that Mr. Pierre-Louis should have named it Holiday Basket Case. She sniffed the mixture with approval.“I want to down this like a shot,” she said.She brought her choices to the back of the room, where Mr. Pierre-Louis was melting coconut wax and castor oil in a cauldron set over a camping stove. He turned a spigot and the wax pooled into a pineapple shaped mold. Ms. Dominczyk measured out a spoonful of each chosen scent, then added burnt orange coloring and a smattering of dried flower petals.“I don’t cook,” she said. “This is the closest I’ve gotten to cooking all holiday season.”Ms. Dominczyk decorated her candle with flower petals and orange dye.  OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Pierre-Louis told her to name her scent and after a moment she settled on Smoked Dag. “That’s also the name of a sausage in Poland,” she said. “Just kidding.”While the wax set, she went back up the creaky wooden stairs and out onto a commercial stretch of Livingston Street to stretch her legs and vape a mint-flavored Juul. Was she ready for the holidays?She reached for her phone and pulled up a picture of her decorations — an orgy of lights, trees and tinsel. “It’s like Christmas vomited all over,” she said happily. That night she would meet friends and family for dinner, then she would help with a Feast of the Seven Fishes and a Christmas dinner that mixed Polish and American traditions.“Last year, we were like, Patrick has been in the family for 15 years — if he wants a Christmas ham, let’s give it to him,” she said, using an expletive.Back in the basement, the wax mostly set, Mr. Pierre-Louis presented her with a pair of scissors so that she could snip the wick. “Like an umbilical cord,” she said.Ms. Dominczyk sniffed, delighted. “Oh my God, it smells so good,” she said. “Bottle it. I don’t even need any commission.” More

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      in Television

      Dwayne Hickman, TV’s Lovelorn Dobie Gillis, Is Dead at 87

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      He went on to appear in movies and other TV shows and to work as a television executive, but the role of Dobie would dog him for decades.Dwayne Hickman, the affable, apple-cheeked actor whose starring role in the revered sitcom “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” would dog him for more than half a century, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 87. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, a spokesman for his family said. Broadcast on CBS from 1959 to 1963, “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” was an essential ingredient of adolescence for the postwar generation and remained popular in syndication for years. Mr. Hickman became one of TV’s first teenage idols for his portrayal of its lovelorn hero, and he remained indelibly identified with the character ever after, a fate he bore with genial resignation.“Dobie Gillis” followed the fortunes of its hero, his friends and family in Central City, a community whose precise location was never specified but that in all its wholesomeness seemed eminently Midwestern.Dobie, 17 when the show begins, is Everyteen. (Early in the series, Mr. Hickman’s brown hair was bleached blond to make him look as cornfed as possible, until the peroxide treatments began to make his hair fall out.) He pines ardently, in the words of the show’s jazzy theme song, for “a girl to call his own,” and just as ardently for the financial wherewithal to squire that girl around.For all its well-scrubbed chastity, the series marked a quietly subversive departure from the standard television fare of the day. It was among the first to place the topical subject of teenagerhood front and center by recounting the story from a teenager’s point of view. It broke the fourth wall weekly, opening with a monologue in which Mr. Hickman, seated in front of a replica of Rodin’s “Thinker,” gave viewers a guided tour of his gently angst-ridden soul.Many well-known actors received early exposure on the series, notably Bob Denver as Dobie’s best friend, Maynard G. Krebs, a scruffy junior beatnik who yelps “Work!” at the merest suggestion that he seek gainful employment. Mr. Denver would go on to star in “Gilligan’s Island.”Tuesday Weld was seen regularly as the beautiful, avaricious Thalia Menninger, the financially unattainable object of Dobie’s affections; Warren Beatty had a recurring role early in the run as a blue-blood classmate. Dobie’s cantankerous, tightfisted father and sweet, harebrained mother were played by the characters actors Frank Faylen and Florida Friebus. His deeply intellectual classmate Zelda, aflame with unrequited love for Dobie, was portrayed by Sheila James. (Under her full name, Sheila James Kuehl, she became, in 1994, the first openly gay person to be elected to the California state legislature.)Mr. Hickman had begun his screen career — reluctantly — some two decades earlier, trailing in the footsteps of his brother, Darryl, three years older and initially far better known. Darryl Hickman, whose fame was eventually eclipsed by Dwayne’s, would play Dobie’s big brother, Davey, in a few episodes of the show’s first season.Mr. Hickman, center, with Mr. Denver and Sheila James in a “Dobie Gillis” reunion special in the 1980s.CBSBy the time “Dobie Gillis” ran its course, Dwayne Hickman had become so closely identified with the title character that he had difficulty landing other roles. He was too old by then to play a teenager in any case: He had been 25 when “Dobie” began and was 29 when it ended.As a result, his career over the following decades wove in and out of Hollywood, embracing stints as the entertainment director for Howard Hughes’s Landmark Hotel in Las Vegas, an advertising man, a network programming executive and, in later years, a successful painter of realist landscapes.But for decades after his series ended, Mr. Hickman could scarcely walk down an American street without a stranger stopping, staring and joyfully calling out, “Hi, Dobie!” as if greeting a long-lost friend.Dwayne Bernard Hickman was born in Los Angeles on May 18, 1934. His father, Milton, was an insurance man; his mother, the former Louise Ostertag, had had designs on stardom herself, but, as Louise Lang, made it only as far as extra work in a few Hollywood pictures.As an adult, Mr. Hickman said that he had never planned on an acting career and had never particularly wanted one. He landed his first screen role by accident, when his mother brought him along to Darryl’s audition for “The Grapes of Wrath,” the 1940 Henry Fonda vehicle. Darryl won a part as one of the Joad children; Dwayne was cast as an extra, earning $21. Dwayne’s other childhood screen appearances included roles on the TV series “Public Defender,” “The Loretta Young Show” and “The Lone Ranger” and in the films “The Boy With Green Hair” (1948) and “Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys!” (1958), based on a novel by Max Shulman, the creator of “Dobie Gillis.” He received his broadest exposure yet when he was cast in “The Bob Cummings Show” (also called “Love That Bob”) as Chuck, the nephew of Mr. Cummings’s character; the series was broadcast variously on NBC and CBS from 1955 to 1959. While working on that show, he was also a full-time student at what is now Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Though the demands of his screen career caused him to leave before graduating, he later returned and completed a bachelor’s degree in economics there.Once Mr. Hickman became a nationwide heartthrob as Dobie — other actors considered for the role had included Tab Hunter and Michael Landon — his handlers attempted to cash in by turning him into a singing star. By his own ready admission Mr. Hickman could not sing. The two resulting albums, “School Dance” and “Dobie,” he later wrote, “didn’t exactly top the Billboard charts. ”Mr. Hickman in 1965.  Starting in 1977, he spent a decade as a program executive at CBS, and he later directed episodes of several TV shows, including “Charles in Charge” and “Designing Women.” Graphic House/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesHis post-“Dobie” credits include the film “Cat Ballou,” with Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin, but consist mostly of trifles like “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” (1965); two TV reunions, “Whatever Happened to Dobie Gillis?” (1977) and “Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis” (1988); and, in the 1990s, a recurring role on the series “Clueless.”Starting in 1977, Mr. Hickman spent a decade as a program executive at CBS, where he supervised the content and development of series including “Maude,” “Good Times,” “M*A*S*H” and “Alice.” He directed episodes of several TV shows, including “Charles in Charge” and “Designing Women.”Mr. Hickman’s first marriage, to Carol Christensen, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Joanne Papile. His survivors include his third wife, Joan Roberts Hickman; their son, Albert; and a son, John, from his first marriage.In his 1994 memoir, “Forever Dobie: The Many Lives of Dwayne Hickman,” written with Ms. Roberts Hickman, Mr. Hickman recounts what happened when he took her to the hospital to await the birth of their son. “When I walked into the labor room, a nurse was asking her questions as she filled out her chart,” he wrote. “When she finished, she looked up and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs. Gillis, I’ll be back in a few minutes.’’Mr. Hickman continued: “Joan grabbed my hand and said, ‘Promise that if anything happens to me you won’t name this boy Dobie!’ ” More

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      in Movies

      Max Julien, Star of a Cult Blaxploitation Film, Dies at 88

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      Black audiences flocked to see him in “The Mack,” and generations of cinephiles have paid homage to his star turn, his smooth delivery and his extraordinary costumes.Max Julien, the sultry, soft-voiced actor and screenwriter who rose to pop-culture prominence with his starring role in “The Mack,” a 1973 film about the rise and fall of a pimp, died on Jan. 1 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 88.His wife, Arabella Chavers Julien, said the cause was cardiopulmonary arrest.“The Mack” is the story of Goldie, a young man who is framed and sent to jail, and who upon his release aims to make his fortune and his name by becoming a pimp. (The word “mack” is an Americanization of “maquereau,” French street slang for pimp.) It’s a hero’s journey, played out on the mean streets of Oakland, Calif., a real-life war zone in the early 1970s presided over by Black crime lords and Black militants, who battled each other for turf.Mr. Julien’s Goldie had a gentle gravitas and a kinetic sidekick, portrayed by Richard Pryor. Mr. Julien said that he and Mr. Pryor, working off a story written in prison by an actual convict, wrote much of the screenplay, though they did not receive credit onscreen.In the decades since its release, “The Mack” has accrued legions of devotees who can recite its lines verbatim. Artists like Snoop Dogg, Too Short and others have sampled its dialogue in their work. Quentin Tarantino paid homage to it in his script for the 1993 film “True Romance.” In 2013, when the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art held a screening in honor of the film’s 40th anniversary, Mr. Tarantino lent his vintage 35-millimeter print.“The film is a blaxploitation classic,” Todd Boyd, chair for the study of race and popular culture at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, said in an interview. Part of the film’s legend is that Oakland’s crime boss, Frank Ward, gave the filmmakers his protection so they could shoot there. (He has a cameo as himself, dispensing pimp wisdom in a barbershop scene as a barber tends to his kingly locks.) The movie’s vernacular and its rituals were authentic, and they still fascinate, as do the clothes.Goldie’s single-breasted white fur maxi-coat was a character in its own right. (Years later, Russell Simmons, the hip-hop mogul, would offer Mr. Julien $10,000 for it, Mr. Julien told The Los Angeles Times in 2004. It now lives in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.) Mr. Julien had a hand in the film’s costumes and made sure they were crafted by local Black clothing designers, he said in a 2002 documentary about the film.The white fur maxi-coat worn by Mr. Julien’s character in “The Mack” is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and CultureWhile the blaxploitation genre was problematic for some — Junius Griffin, then president of the Hollywood branch of the N.A.A.C.P., coined the term and described its themes as “just another form of cultural genocide” — urban Black audiences flocked to movies like “The Mack.” (The Los Angeles Times noted in 2013 that it was released in only 20-odd theaters in African American communities but quoted its director, Michael Campus, as saying it did better in those cities than “The Godfather” and “The Poseidon Adventure.”)Such movies “were critic-proof,” Dr. Boyd said. “People were not reading Pauline Kael reviews to determine if they should go see these films.”Melvin Van Peebles had set the tone with “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” his independently made 1971 box-office hit about a performer in a sex show turned revolutionary. Gordon Parks’s “Shaft,” less transgressive but still wildly popular, appeared the same year.By the late 1970s, the blaxploitation category had fizzled out. A decade later, young cinephiles and hip-hop artists would devour VHS tapes of “The Mack” and other gems from that era — a trove of movies with powerful Black imagery that also included “Super Fly” and “Black Caesar.”“Because of Hollywood’s racism,” Dr. Boyd said, “at the time there was just not that much else. And the tale of an underworld figure like Goldie, working outside the system, was enormously appealing to the young rising stars of a new musical genre, gangsta rap.”Mr. Julien worked as a screenwriter, too. “Cleopatra Jones” (1973), which he wrote, featured a different kind of hero, on the right side of the law. It starred the statuesque Tamara Dobson as a machine-gun-toting, martial-arts-swirling model and undercover agent on a mission to rid her community of drugs. (Shelley Winters played a drug lord named Mommy.)He also wrote “Thomasine & Bushrod,” a lightly feminist western, released in 1974, and starred in it with Vonetta McGee, his girlfriend at the time. The film brings to mind a sweeter and goofier version of the 1967 movie “Bonnie & Clyde.” Mr. Julien said he was inspired by the exploits of a great-grandfather, a bank robber named Bushrod, to turn his family history into a love story.Maxwell Julien Banks was born on July 12, 1933, in Washington. His father, Seldon Bushrod Banks, was an airline mechanic. His mother, Cora (Page) Banks, was a restaurant owner. She was murdered in her home in 1972, and Mr. Julien said that his grief over her death influenced his performance in “The Mack.”He won a basketball scholarship to Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., where he spent a year before transferring to Howard University. He joined the Air Force in 1955 and served as an air traffic controller before beginning his acting career. He took his middle name as his stage name because he felt it sounded more theatrical than Banks.Mr. Julien played a Black militant in “Getting Straight,” a much-panned 1970 drama about campus unrest starring Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen, and appeared in “Uptight,” a 1968 update of the 1935 movie “The Informer” written by Ruby Dee and directed by Jules Dassin. He also acted on television. He and Ms. Chavers Julien married in 1991. She is his only immediate survivor.As much as Mr. Julien enjoyed the accolades from generations of “The Mack” fans — he appeared as a suave, pimplike elder in the 1997 comedy “How To Be a Player” — he told Dr. Boyd that he often felt his Goldie character overshadowed his own persona.Mr. Julien and Vonetta McGee in the 1974 film “Thomasine & Bushrod,” for which he wrote the screenplay. He said he was inspired by the exploits of a great-grandfather who was a bank robber to turn his family history into a love story. Columbia Pictures, via PhotofestEarly on, he also disliked the term “blaxploitation,” which he felt diminished his work.“The average white audience has had opportunities to explore every facet of their existence by now,” he told The Atlanta Journal Constitution in 1974, the year “Thomasine & Bushrod” was released. “No one ever talks about white exploitation films. If ‘The Sting’ had been done by Ron O’Neal” — the star of “Super Fly” — “and Max Julien, everyone would have called it Black exploitation. A 10-year-old kid came up to us in Baltimore and thanked us for making the picture. He said he’d read about Black cowboys all his life, but didn’t believe it until he saw it on the screen.”He added: “Blacks didn’t want to see ‘Sounder’” — the 1972 film taken from the book of the same name about a poor Black boy, his dog and the grim travails of his sharecropping family in the 1930s. “That’s not the image they want. They’ve seen that image all their life.” More

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      Sidney Poitier, Who Paved the Way for Black Actors in Film, Dies at 94

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      The first Black performer to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” he once said he felt “as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made.”Sidney Poitier, whose portrayal of resolute heroes in films like “To Sir With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” established him as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. No cause was given.Sidney Poitier was the first Black actor to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry.Matt Sayles/Associated PressMr. Poitier, whose Academy Award for the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field” made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category, rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle.Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s.Mr. Poitier with, from left, Katharine Houghton, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967). He played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws.Columbia Pictures“It’s a choice, a clear choice,” Mr. Poitier said of his film parts in a 1967 interview. “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.”At the time, Mr. Poitier was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood and a top box-office draw, ranked fifth among male actors in Box Office magazine’s poll of theater owners and critics; he was behind only Richard Burton, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and John Wayne. Yet racial squeamishness would not allow Hollywood to cast him as a romantic lead, despite his good looks.“To think of the American Negro male in romantic social-sexual circumstances is difficult, you know,” he told an interviewer. “And the reasons why are legion and too many to go into.”Mr. Poitier often found himself in limiting, saintly roles that nevertheless represented an important advance on the demeaning parts offered by Hollywood in the past. In “No Way Out” (1950), his first substantial film role, he played a doctor persecuted by a racist patient, and in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1952), based on the Alan Paton novel about racism in South Africa, he appeared as a young priest. His character in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), a troubled student at a tough New York City public school, sees the light and eventually sides with Glenn Ford, the teacher who tries to reach him. In “The Defiant Ones” (1958), a racial fable that established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, he was a prisoner on the run, handcuffed to a fellow convict (and virulent racist) played by Tony Curtis. The best-actor award came in 1964 for his performance in the low-budget “Lilies of the Field,” as an itinerant handyman helping a group of German nuns build a church in the Southwestern desert. Mr. Poitier and Lilia Skala in “Lilies of the Field” (1963), for which Mr. Poitier won an Oscar. United ArtistsIn 1967 Mr. Poitier appeared in three of Hollywood’s top-grossing films, elevating him to the peak of his popularity. “In the Heat of Night” placed him opposite Rod Steiger, as an indolent, bigoted sheriff, with whom Virgil Tibbs, the Philadelphia detective played by Mr. Poitier, must work on a murder investigation in Mississippi. (In an indelible line, the detective insists on the sheriff’s respect when he declares, “They call me Mr. Tibbs!”) In “To Sir, With Love” he was a concerned teacher in a tough London high school, and in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a taboo-breaking film about an interracial couple, he played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Throughout his career, a heavy weight of racial significance bore down on Mr. Poitier and the characters he played. “I felt very much as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made,” he once wrote.Mr. Poitier grew up in the Bahamas, but he was born on Feb. 20, 1927, in Miami, where his parents traveled regularly to sell their tomato crop. The youngest of nine children, he wore clothes made from flour sacks and never saw a car, looked in a mirror or tasted ice cream until his father, Reginald, moved the family from Cat Island to Nassau in 1937 after Florida banned the import of Bahamian tomatoes.When he was 12, Mr. Poitier quit school and became a water boy for a crew of pick-and-shovel laborers. He also began getting into mischief, and his parents, worried that he was becoming a juvenile delinquent, sent him to Miami when he was 14 to live with a married brother, Cyril.Mr. Poitier played a Philadelphia detective and Rod Steiger played a bigoted Mississippi sheriff in “In the Heat of Night,” one of three hit films in which Mr. Poitier appeared in 1967.Mirisch/United Artists, The Kobal CollectionMr. Poitier had known nothing of segregation growing up on Cat Island, so the rules governing American Black people in the South came as a shock. “It was all over the place like barbed wire,” he later said of American racism. “And I kept running into it and lacerating myself.”In less than a year he fled Miami for New York, arriving with $3 and change in his pocket. He took jobs washing dishes and working as a ditch digger, waterfront laborer and delivery man in the garment district. Life was grim. During a race riot in Harlem, he was shot in the leg. He saved his nickels so that on cold nights he could sleep in pay toilets.In late 1943 Mr. Poitier lied about his age and enlisted in the Army, becoming an orderly with the 1267th Medical Detachment at a veterans hospital on Long Island. Feigning a mental disorder, he obtained a discharge in 1945 and returned to New York, where he read in The Amsterdam News that the American Negro Theater was looking for actors.His first audition was a flop. With only a few years of schooling, he read haltingly, in a heavy West Indian accent. Frederick O’Neal, a founder of the theater, showed him the door and advised him to get a job as a dishwasher.Undeterred, Mr. Poitier bought a radio and practiced speaking English as he heard it from a variety of staff announcers. A kindly fellow worker at the restaurant where he washed dishes helped him with his reading. Mr. Poitier finally won a place in the theater’s acting school, but only after he volunteered to work as a janitor without pay.His lucky break came when another actor at the theater, Harry Belafonte, did not show up for a rehearsal attended by a Broadway producer. Mr. Poitier took the stage instead and was given a part in an all-Black production of “Lysistrata” in 1946. Although panned by the critics, it led to a job with the road production of “Anna Lucasta.”“No Way Out” was followed by a sprinkling of film and television roles, but Mr. Poitier still bounced between acting jobs and menial work.In 1951 he married Juanita Marie Hardy, a dancer and model, whom he divorced in 1965. They had four daughters, Beverly, Pamela, Sherri and Gina. In 1976 he married Joanna Shimkus, his co-star in “The Lost Man” (1969), a film about a gang of Black militants plotting to rob a factory. They had two daughters, Anika and Sydney.Ms. Shimkus survives him. His daughter Gina Patrice Poitier Gouraige died in 2018. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Poitier with Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones” (1958), which established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.United ArtistsAfter breakout movies like “Blackboard Jungle” and “The Defiant Ones,” Mr. Poitier’s fate was tied to Hollywood, his purpose to expand the boundaries of racial tolerance. “The explanation for my career was that I was instrumental for those few filmmakers who had a social conscience,” he later wrote.In “The Defiant Ones” and “In the Heat of the Night,” racial politics coincided with meaty roles. Just as often, however, Mr. Poitier found himself playing virtuous messengers of racial harmony in mawkish films like “A Patch of Blue” (1965) or taking race-neutral roles in less than memorable films, like a newspaper reporter in the Cold War naval drama “The Bedford Incident” (1965), Simon of Cyrene in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965) or the former cavalry sergeant in “Duel at Diablo” (1966). “The Defiant Ones” remained one of Mr. Poitier’s favorite films, but to get the part he had to cross swords with Samuel Goldwyn, who was assembling a cast for “Porgy and Bess.” After Mr. Belafonte turned down the role of Porgy as demeaning, Mr. Goldwyn set his sights on Mr. Poitier, who also regarded the musical as an insult to Black people. As Mr. Poitier told it in his lively, unusually frank first memoir, “This Life” (1980), Mr. Goldwyn pulled strings to ensure that unless Mr. Poitier played Porgy, the director Stanley Kramer would not hire him for “The Defiant Ones.”Mr. Poitier, seething, bowed to the inevitable. “I didn’t enjoy doing it, and I have not yet completely forgiven myself,” he told The New York Times in 1967.The critics who would later accuse him of bowing and scraping before the white establishment seemed to dismiss Mr. Poitier’s longstanding, outspoken advocacy for racial justice and the civil rights movement, most visibly as part of a Hollywood contingent that took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Early in his career, his association with left-wing causes and his friendship with the radical singer and actor Paul Robeson made him a politically risky proposition for film and television producers.His style, however, remained low-key and nonconfrontational. “As for my part in all this,” he wrote, “all I can say is that there’s a place for people who are angry and defiant, and sometimes they serve a purpose, but that’s never been my role.”Mr. Poitier with Claudia McNeil in the 1959 Broadway production of “A Raisin in the Sun.” Reviewing his performance, Brooks Atkinson of The Times wrote, “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control.”Leo FriedmanIn 1959 Mr. Poitier made a triumphant return to Broadway in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” winning ecstatic reviews. “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times. “Cast as the restless son, he vividly communicates the tumult of a high-strung young man. He is as eloquent when he has nothing to say as when he has a pungent line to speak. He can convey devious processes of thought as graphically as he can clown and dance.” Mr. Poitier repeated the role in the 1961 film version of the play.With the rise of Black filmmakers like Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Poitier, now in his 40s, turned to directing and producing. He had proposed the idea for the romantic comedy “For Love of Ivy” (1968), in which he starred with Abbey Lincoln. After joining with Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand in 1969 to form a production company called First Artists, he directed the western “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), in which he acted opposite Mr. Belafonte, and a series of comedies, notably “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974) and “Let’s Do It Again” (1975), in which Mr. Poitier and Bill Cosby teamed up to play a pair of scheming ne’er-do-wells, and “Stir Crazy” (1980), with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.The critics thought little of Mr. Poitier’s directing talents, but enthusiastic audiences, Black and white, made all three films box-office hits. Neither audiences nor critics found much to like in subsequent directorial efforts, like the comedy “Hanky Panky” (1982), with Mr. Wilder and Gilda Radner, or “Ghost Dad” (1990), with Mr. Cosby as a dead father who refuses to leave his three children alone.President Barack Obama presented Mr. Poitier with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn his later years, Mr. Poitier turned in solid performances in forgettable action films and thrillers like “Shoot to Kill” (1988), “Little Nikita” (1988) and “Sneakers” (1992). It was television that provided him with two of his grandest roles.In 1991 he appeared in the lead role in the ABC drama “Separate but Equal,” a dramatization of the life of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. In 1997 he delivered a widely praised performance as Nelson Mandela in “Mandela and de Klerk,” a television movie focusing on the final years of Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment by the white-minority government in South Africa, with Michael Caine in the role of President F.W. de Klerk.“Sidney Poitier and Nelson Mandela merge with astonishing ease, like a double-exposure photograph in which one image is laid over the other with perfect symmetry,” Caryn James wrote in a review in The New York Times.In 2002, Mr. Poitier was given an honorary Oscar for his career’s work in motion picture. (At that same Oscar ceremony, Denzel Washington became the first Black actor since Mr. Poitier to win the best-actor award, for “Training Day.”) He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1995. And in 2009, President Barack Obama, citing his “relentless devotion to breaking down barriers,” awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Mr. Poitier was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974.Mr. Poitier’s memoir “This Life” was followed by a second, “The Measure of a Man,” in 2000. Subtitled “A Spiritual Autobiography,” it included Mr. Poitier’s thoughts on life, love, acting and racial politics. It generated a sequel, “Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter” (2008).Despite his role in changing American perceptions of race and opening the door to a new generation of Black actors, Mr. Poitier remained modest about his career. “History will pinpoint me as merely a minor element in an ongoing major event, a small if necessary energy,” he wrote. “But I am nonetheless gratified at having been chosen.” Neil Vigdor contributed reporting. More

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      Watch Sidney Poitier’s 1964 Oscar Speech for His Historic Best Actor Win

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      Sidney Poitier made history in 1964 as the first Black performer to win an Oscar in the best-actor category, for Ralph Nelson’s comedy-drama “Lilies of the Field,” in which Mr. Poitier played Homer Smith, an itinerant worker who helps a group of nuns build a chapel in rural Arizona.“Because it is a long journey to this moment, I am naturally indebted to countless numbers of people,” he said in his acceptance speech, in which he thanked the creative team behind the film, his agent, and the members of the Academy. “For all of them, all I can say is a very special thank you.”Anne Bancroft, who had won the best actress Oscar in 1963 for her role as Anne Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker,” presented Mr. Poitier with the award. He was competing against Albert Finney (“Tom Jones”), Richard Harris (“This Sporting Life”), Rex Harrison (“Cleopatra”) and Paul Newman (“Hud”).When Mr. Poitier accepted an honorary Academy Award in 2002, he took a similar tack, thanking the “handful of visionary American filmmakers, directors, writers and producers” he said made his career possible by going against the odds.“Without them, this most memorable moment would not have come to pass and the many excellent young actors who have followed in admirable fashion might not have come as they have to enrich the tradition of American filmmaking as they have,” Mr. Poitier said. More

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      A Season to Savor a Cherished Musical Again and Again (and Again)

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      Our critic didn’t set out to see “Caroline, or Change” seven times, but amid so much uncertainty the show turned out to be just what she needed.Settling into my seat at Studio 54, I let the sound design begin to transport me like a musical overture — the chittering of creatures and the bubbling of water, echoing from tall grasses and low haze on the edge of a Southern swamp.At each performance of “Caroline, or Change,” I look forward to this calming bit of preshow acclimation, even as a Confederate statue stands imposingly at center stage. And I keep my eyes peeled for the theater’s Covid safety enforcer patrolling the orchestra, arms crossed, scanning the audience for any unmasked faces. Spotting him calms me, too.When the lights dim, the statue is wheeled off, and in its place when they come up again is Caroline Thibodeaux, in the person of the astonishing British actor Sharon D Clarke, doing laundry in a Louisiana basement in 1963.I didn’t set out to see this musical masterpiece by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori seven times this season, but I have. For the record, I’d been scared to see it even once — scared the way you get when you cherish a work of art so fiercely that you don’t want to risk finding it diminished.It didn’t matter to my brain that theater’s habit of reinvention is one of the things I love about the form, or that this Broadway revival got rave reviews in London. “Caroline” is my favorite musical, and I was protective of my memory of it. I’d been mad since 2004 that George C. Wolfe’s original Broadway production ran only a few months. (Hold a grudge much? Yeah, I know.)Yet Michael Longhurst’s gorgeous iteration, for Roundabout Theater Company, turned out to be just what I’ve needed: a work of intricate beauty to savor again and again in this strange, uncertain season. After catching the first preview in October, I started telling people that I would see it three times a week if I could.Sounded like I was exaggerating. I was not.Inspired by Kushner’s own Louisiana childhood, “Caroline” is the fictional story of a divorced Black maid working for a Jewish family mired in grief and paying her what they know is too little to get by on. Comedy and fantasy leaven the ugliness and pain, but the music, the lyrics, the characters are complex. It’s not a show to be absorbed in one swoop.If this production had opened as planned in what was to have been the busy spring of 2020, there’s no way I would have seen it as many times as I have. Repeated viewing at any scale is a rare luxury for me, and the chance to do it to such an extent with “Caroline” is a direct effect of the pandemic. In an unsettled season with a cascade of postponements and cancellations, lower ticket demand and fewer productions mean bargain prices and, if you’re a theater journalist like I am, a lot more free evenings.So I have been taking advantage — which I feel guilty admitting, because of course I could have spent that same time seeing deserving new work that I missed completely. Instead I’ve been giving one show a closer, longer look than usual, watching extraordinary cast members deepen their performances so far beyond that thrilling first preview that I can’t honestly regret it.Domhnall Gleeson, with Aoife Duffin in the background, in Enda Walsh’s “Medicine” at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesCritics tend to see multiple productions of the same play — especially in seasons when there seem to be 47 stagings of “King Lear” or 18 of “The Tempest” — but not multiple performances of a single production, unless it transfers somewhere, usually to Broadway from Off Broadway or an out-of-town tryout. Even then, we only see the beginning of each run, while the production keeps changing after that.In theater — unlike films and TV shows, which stay frozen no matter how many times you watch them — the ritual of repetition coexists with change. As in other kinds of live performance, exact duplication is impossible, and also not the point. Evolution is the hope, which I’ve seen realized in “Caroline.”It has been quite frankly exhilarating to watch the company get tighter and tighter, especially at a time when public perception is that Broadway in particular and theater in general are a pandemic shambles. At the matinee just this Wednesday — the matinee! — Clarke gave a shattering performance, as alive to the text and the moment as any other I’d seen, but with elements new to me: an inflection, a movement, a vocal fillip at the end of a song. Such are the many layers of her character.“I love dissecting it. I love it,” Clarke exulted to me in an interview in October, the day after the first preview.Three months on, with the musical’s limited run set to close this weekend, it feels like she is still investigating.The other show I revisited this fall was Enda Walsh’s “Medicine,” but that wasn’t because I’d been wild about it initially. Walsh’s plays sometimes land with me and sometimes don’t. This one — chaotic, often funny, with Domhnall Gleeson’s understated performance at its heart — did not.I first saw it in November at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Six days later, in an interview, Gleeson told me that he had only just figured out how the show, which the company had performed elsewhere, worked in the St. Ann’s space. I gave it another shot because of that — and because his passion for another Walsh play, “The Walworth Farce,” prompted me to read it, an experience that left me wide awake when I finished it after 1 a.m., my every nerve ending taut.The second time I saw “Medicine,” in December, I watched it more deliberately, and it absolutely landed. Outside afterward, I walked through a patch of park and stood staring out at the East River, shaken. If the play had stayed in town longer, I’d have gone again.But when I see a show repeatedly in the same run — as I did with two of the plays in Phyllida Lloyd’s Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare trilogy, also at St. Ann’s — I tend to top out at three viewings.Zawe Ashton, from left, Charlie Cox and Tom Hiddleston in the 2019 Broadway production of “Betrayal” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s what happened with the Broadway productions of “The Cher Show” (where seeing Stephanie J. Block’s understudy at one performance made me realize Block’s particular power) and “Sea Wall/A Life” (where I listened ferociously to figure out what was sound design and what was sound bleed from outside). My curiosity about both was professional, though; going more than once was about reporting.Jamie Lloyd’s 2019 revival of “Betrayal,” starring Tom Hiddleston, was different. Its first preview blindsided me: a Pinter play that could make me cry? I became fascinated with the geometry of emotion in the production — with where Lloyd placed the characters on the set, and how their isolation signified. Determined to watch the staging from different angles in the house, I went five times in all.When I told Lloyd about that, during an interview toward the end of the show’s run, he inquired about the actors: “And have you noticed variations in their performances?” I still wonder which answer he might have been looking for: reassurance that the show had stayed lively or that it hadn’t flown off the rails.I would be a little heartbroken if “Caroline” had gone off the rails — always my worry when a production runs for a while. As it is, when it gives its final performance on Sunday, I plan to be there, seeing it for the eighth time.After that, I expect I’ll be in the market for a new obsession. I’m thinking maybe “Company.” More