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    ‘Real Women Have Curves’ Musical Plans Broadway Bow Next Year

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    The show, adapted from the play and movie, was first staged last winter at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.A musical adaptation of “Real Women Have Curves,” Josefina López’s exploration of immigrant experiences through the story of a group of Latina women working at a Los Angeles garment factory, will run on Broadway next year, the show’s producers said Thursday.The story began its life as a play, which had an initial production in San Francisco in 1990, and has been staged many times since. In 2002, a film adaptation was released, starring America Ferrera.Directed and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo, the musical was first staged last December and January at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. It features music and lyrics by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez and a book by Lisa Loomer, with additional material by Nell Benjamin.The musical is set in 1987 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, and focuses on an 18-year-old woman who is torn between staying home to work at the family factory and relocating to New York to enroll at Columbia. In addition to its immigration theme, the show also deals with body image issues.The critic Don Aucoin, writing in The Boston Globe, called the show “outstanding,” but Laura Collins-Hughes, in The New York Times, was less impressed, deeming it “ungainly.”The Broadway run is being produced by Barry and Fran Weissler, the lead producers of the long-running Broadway “Chicago” revival, along with the actor Jack Noseworthy, who is married to Trujillo. In a news release, the producers said the play would open on Broadway in 2025; they did not specify whether it would be during the current Tony Awards eligibility season, which ends in April, or the following season, and a spokeswoman said no further information was available.The musical is being capitalized for $16.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. More

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      Two New Musicals Poke at the Seamy Underbelly of the American Dream

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      Kristin Chenoweth stars in “The Queen of Versailles” in Boston, while a new “Gatsby” musical in Cambridge takes Myrtle seriously.“It may surprise you,” Jackie Siegel says, “but we are not old money.”Surprise us? Probably not, but there were some context clues. Such as that she utters these words while dressed to the pink and sparkly nines, holding a tiny, fluffy dog and perched in the lap of her decades-older husband, David, whose capacious, ornately gilded chair suggests delusions of royalty.So does their home construction project: a 90,000-square-foot house modeled on the Palace of Versailles (because, you know how it is, their current 26,000 square feet are feeling cramped) and built, Jackie tells us, “in the most beautiful place in the entire world — Orlando, Florida.”The audience at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston got a good guffaw out of that on Thursday’s opening night of “The Queen of Versailles,” the surprising and frequently excellent new musical starring an utterly disarming Kristin Chenoweth and co-written by her “Wicked” composer-lyricist, Stephen Schwartz.Then again, it may be a sort of genius to stage the world premiere of this show, which has already announced a Broadway run next season, in a city that is fundamentally identified with the origins of this nation and constitutionally disposed to adore old money but turn its nose up at vulgar flash.Because “The Queen of Versailles,” based largely on Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary of the same name, is as much an exploration of the seamy underbelly of the American Dream as is the very different new musical “Gatsby,” wrapping up its own world premiere across the river in Cambridge. (More on that momentarily.) Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Jackie Siegel came from not much at all, left her humble roots behind and — with a husband (F. Murray Abraham, in terrific form) whose beginnings were similar — reinvented herself on a scale so over the top that strangers can’t help gawking.Chenoweth’s playfulness and charm endears her character to the audience, and F. Murray Abraham is in terrific form, our critic writes.Matthew MurphyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Real Women Have Curves’ and ‘Heart Sellers’: Snapshots of Immigrant Lives

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      A musical adaptation of “Curves” and a play about two Asian women becoming friends both look at immigrants’ experiences, with mixed results.Body positivity was not at all the cultural vibe in 1990, when Josefina López’s play “Real Women Have Curves” was new. There was a rebelliousness to its climactic strip-down scene, in which a group of Latinas sewing dresses in a roasting-hot Los Angeles factory peel off layers of their clothing and shed a bit of shame, reveling in their lived-in bodies.In the 2002 film adaptation starring America Ferrera, the scene is similarly feel-good — a refutation of everything the women know to hate about the way they look, because the world around them reinforces their self-loathing every day.In the new musical adaptation currently making its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., under the direction of Sergio Trujillo, the scene becomes a skivvies-clad, song-and-dance display of female empowerment. A dressmaker’s dummy, tiled with mirrors, is lowered like a disco ball, and the show’s title figures in the lyrics. It’s an upbeat crowd-pleaser of a number.Yet in a musical that pushes body image to the periphery, bursting into defiant song about it feels oddly out of place. With a book by Lisa Loomer, music and lyrics by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez, and additional material by Nell Benjamin, this ungainly iteration of “Real Women Have Curves” is primarily interested in the tensions and vulnerabilities of immigrant life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Robert Brustein, Passionate Force in Nonprofit Theater, Dies at 96

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      A critic and dramatist himself, he started repertory companies at Yale and Harvard and fiercely defended the art form, even if it meant feuding with playwrights.Robert Brustein, an erudite and contentious advocate for profit-indifferent theater, in the service of which he wore many hats — critic, teacher, producer, director, playwright and even actor — died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his wife, Doreen Beinart.Mr. Brustein was dean of the drama school at Yale and founded and ran the Yale Repertory Theater and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, producing well over 100 plays and securing them in the regional theater firmament. He also taught at Yale as well as at Harvard.A prolific writer with the zeal of an environmentalist and the moral certainty of a martyr, he reviewed stage productions for The New Republic for more than 50 years. In many books and in countless newspaper and magazine articles, he argued for brave theater, intellectual theater, nonpandering theater, and worried that the art form was being attenuated by the profit motive.Mr. Brustein was a passionate defender of the resident, nonprofit theaters whose ranks expanded across the United States in the last decades of the 20th century, and as such he was perpetually concerned that they not be corrupted by commercial interests. The Broadway megahit “A Chorus Line,” in one instance — originally produced in 1975 by the Public Theater in New York — had made it clear that a hit show could funnel many years of economic fuel back to the source.“The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990. “The basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.”A public intellectual and supporter of the arts, Mr. Brustein delivered opinions that were often respectfully received but that just as often incited exasperation or outrage. Theater people, after all, are not especially fond of being called sellouts. When Frank Rich left his post as chief drama critic for The Times in 1994, his valedictory essay singled out Mr. Brustein:“I rarely had ugly confrontations with anyone in the theater, and my mail from theater people, even at its angriest, was civilized,” Mr. Rich wrote. “In 13 years the few significant exceptions invariably involved Robert Brustein.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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       ’1776’ Musical Returns to Broadway With a Diverse Twist

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      A revival of the classic musical offers a fresh twist on the founding for the post-“Hamilton” era.“Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves,” Crystal Lucas-Perry said of the Broadway revival of “1776,” and its cast of female, nonbinary and trans actors. Clockwise from top left: Sav Souza, Lucas-Perry, Elizabeth A. Davis, Carolee Carmello, Patrena Murray and Oneika Phillips.Camila Falquez for The New York TimesHow do you solve a problem like America?For the creators of the musical “1776,” the answer was to wrap it in jaunty tunes, 18th-century double entendres and enough twisty dialogue to make a dramatization of the debate over the Declaration of Independence feel like a thriller.Premiering on Broadway in 1969, the musical ran for 1,217 performances, won the Tony Award for best musical and, over the last 50-plus years, has left more than a few critics scratching their heads over how such a resolutely square show won over Vietnam-era America.But 1776 isn’t what it used to be. In 2022, a touchstone of national identity has become a culture-war hot potato. And “1776,” which arrives this month on Broadway in a new revival for Roundabout Theater Company, isn’t the same either.The revival, directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus, has the familiar rousing melodies (in new, rock-infused arrangements), star-spangled color scheme and corny dad jokes. But they’re delivered by a racially diverse cast of women, nonbinary and trans actors, whose embodiment, Paulus said, wakes the language up.“I want the audience to hold that dual reality, of what the founders were, but also a company of actors in 2022, who never would have been allowed inside Independence Hall,” Paulus said in a video interview last month, after the show concluded its pre-Broadway run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where she is artistic director.The idea, she said, using a phrase that has become something of a mantra for the show, “is to hold history as a predicament, rather than an affirming myth.”Announced in 2019, the revival may initially have seemed to be riding the post-“Hamilton” vogue for all things Founders, while doing that show’s inclusive casting one better. But the two-year pandemic delay — which saw nationwide racial-justice protests, a bitterly contested presidential election and the Jan. 6 insurrection — have only heightened the stakes.“The deeper you get into it, the more poetry, the more stuff, exists inside of it,” Page said, in a separate video interview.At bottom, “1776,” he said, is “about a clandestine meeting of people who desperately want to change the world.”Then again, “1776” was never the whitewashed retro-patriotic celebration it is often remembered as. For all its traditionalist guys-in-powdered-wigs look, the show — with songs by Sherman Edwards, a history teacher turned Brill Building tunesmith, and a book by the playwright Peter Stone — was as politically pointed in its time as “Hamilton” (and perhaps, some argue, more so).Written ahead of the Bicentennial, it was meant to humanize the founders — “Demigods? We’re men, no more, no less,” Benjamin Franklin declares — while also challenging what the authors described as the “jingoistic” history they had learned in school.Sara Porkalob, center left, Lucas-Perry and Davis in the production during its pre-Broadway run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.Evan Zimmerman for Murphy MadeThere was the bite of songs like “Momma, Look Sharp,” a denunciation of the carnage of war that might have been sung by a G.I. on Hamburger Hill. And there was “Molasses to Rum,” a chilling call-out of freedom-espousing New England’s complicity in the profits of slavery.The production even stirred its own mini-controversy: When cast members were invited to perform the show at the Nixon White House, they were asked to cut “Cool, Cool Considerate Men,” a satirical minuet of money-loving conservatives who move “ever to the right, never to the left.” (They refused.)“I continue to be surprised when I meet people who say, ‘Oh, 1776! It’s my favorite musical. It’s just what our country needs!” Paulus said. “I keep thinking, what are they talking about?”But then, when the touring production company NETworks first suggested the show to her in February 2019 as a possible revival, she knew little about it, except that it had beaten out “Hair” (which she had directed a Broadway revival of in 2009) for the Tony. “I had a vague assumption it was a kind of a celebratory look at American history,” she said.When she read the book, on a long plane ride, she said, she “almost fell out of the airplane.”In particular, she was struck by the dramatic climax: the debate over Thomas Jefferson’s fiery denunciation of the slave trade, which was ultimately cut from the Declaration, to secure unanimous approval.Even talking about it now, Paulus still sounds incredulous. “I was unaware of that crossing out,” she said. “How could I not know?”“That began my journey into the show,” she continued. “I had to reckon with my own experience of American history.”A 2016 Encores! concert staging in New York had already used some racially diverse casting. Paulus said she was told off the bat that the estate would be open to an all-female cast, but she emphasized that the production takes a less “binary” view of gender.There was a first reading in New York in August 2019, with the principal actors, including Crystal Lucas-Perry as the irascible and obstinate John Adams, leader of the “independency” faction. By early March 2020, the show was fully cast, with an opening in Cambridge set for that May, to be followed by a national tour and then a Broadway run.Instead, they retreated to Zoom, like the rest of American theater. Without the pressure to stage the show, Paulus said, they could go deep in American history, including meetings with various scholars like the political theorist Danielle Allen and the historians Vincent Brown, Jane Kamensky and Annette Gordon-Reed.With the approval of the creators’ estates, the show includes a (wordless) depiction of a 14-year-old Robert Hemings, Jefferson’s enslaved bodyservant (and brother to Sally Hemings), inspired by Gordon-Reed’s scholarship. It also adds a long excerpt from Abigail Adams’s famous letter advising John to “remember the ladies.”While the gender-flipped casting may be the show’s claim to “firstness,” the core of the production is a grappling with race.Even before the murder of George Floyd, Paulus said, discussions around race within the company were “very raw.” Then came the protests, and the roiling conversation on racism, representation and hierarchy in the theater set off by the “We See You, White American Theater” open letter.In September 2020, the American Repertory Theater announced a set of initial antiracism commitments. When it came to “1776,” she said, the conversations prompted by the protests “impacted everything about our process.”Paulus said she first met Page (whose long résumé as a choreographer includes extensive collaborations with Beyoncé) in 2017, when he was starting the M.F.A. program in directing at Columbia. He was initially hired as the show’s choreographer, in 2019. In the summer of 2020, he also became co-director.“I felt that the most powerful and honest reflection of our collaboration,” Paulus said, was to be “coequals.”Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus directed the production, which starts previews at the American Airlines Theater on Sept. 16 and opens Oct. 6.Matthew MurphyThe George Floyd moment, Page agreed, “changed everything” about the show. The team, including the set designer Scott Pask, had already started moving away from the original scenic designs, which Page described as attempting to land the show too much “in the world of realism.”“We came together and said, this doesn’t feel right anymore,” he said. “We started asking, when you break it all the way down to the core, what is this piece about?“These were men who were attempting to make a change inside the world,” he continued. “Who cares about the chair they sat in, and are we getting it right?”The production, with its spare, Brecht-influenced design, is set not in Independence Hall in 1776, but onstage in 2022, where it’s performed by a company of actors from the present who arrive in street clothes, with no fanfare, before putting on their 18th-century(ish) waistcoats and period-appropriate shoes.(One performer also puts on a beaded necklace — seemingly a nod at the fact, mentioned in Stone and Edward’s original authors note, that Native American leaders would often appear before the Continental Congress, as leaders of independent nations.)Page, whose other recent directing credits include this summer’s revival of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” at Barrington Stage Company, also cited the importance of an “affinity space” for Black cast members, which helped guide the show’s exploration of race.“With the other cast members, the main thing we communicated was, ‘You’re going to feel some things,’” Page said. “What the Black cast members asked was to leave your fragility at the door.”In a group interview with four of the show’s founding “fathers,” Elizabeth A. Davis, who plays Jefferson, recalled a video meeting in which cast members presented their family trees, as part of an exploration of how personal and national history intersect. She said she could still remember exactly where she was sitting — “in my grandmother’s old room, in the middle of Texas” — as Black colleagues described hitting the so-called slavery wall, beyond which ancestry can be hard to trace.“It was a profound moment for me,” she said. “It was understanding something not just intellectually, but viscerally and cellularly.”Lucas-Perry nodded. “I remember saying, ‘I feel a little without,’” she said.The 2020 protests, Lucas-Perry said, contributed to a “hyper-awareness” of the way the casting altered the meaning of the text, and the importance of a production using diverse bodies “just because it can.”“Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves,” she said. “We were looking for ways of taking advantage of moments where you can dig deeper into what it means to be other.”“Momma, Look Sharp” lands differently sung by a Black woman (the big-voiced Salome B. Smith, as a courier bringing news from the front) to another Black woman, after the founding “fathers” have left the room. (The courier’s piercing “Momma!,” Page said, echoes Floyd’s cry as he gasped for air.)But the show’s dark heart is the silky and sinister “Molasses to Rum.” Traditionally, it’s presented as a vocal tour de force (see John Cullum’s stentorian baritone in the 1972 movie), and critics have often paid more attention to the singing than the chilling substance of the song.In their staging of the song (sung by Sara Porkalob), Page and Paulus force the audience to consider the enslaved people who form one corner of the Triangle Trade not as abstractions, but as real bodies, massed in a wordless chorus that includes the Black actors who play Adams, Franklin and John Hancock. (The sometimes defiant choreography, Page said, reprises some gestures from “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men.”)Carolee Carmello, who is joining the Broadway production as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania (one of the cool, conservative men), played Abigail Adams in the 1997 Broadway revival, which had a white cast. She had heard “Molasses” hundreds of times, but wasn’t prepared for seeing it in the new production.“The understanding of what they’re actually arguing about is extremely powerful,” she said.Lucas-Perry said the song “feels like it goes on forever” — “and it did go on forever,” she added, referring to slavery. “I’m not going to lie,” she said of the scene. “There’s not a night where it doesn’t hit me.”“Hamilton” was fundamentally celebratory, reflective of the liberal optimism of Obama-era America, and the feeling that the arc of history was bending its way. Page and Paulus’s “1776,” for all its humor and exuberance, is darker and more uncertain.But neither show is the last word on the founding, or on the Declaration, a document that might be seen as the ultimate American classic: time-bound and flawed, but also profound and visionary — and requiring continual revival and reinterpretation, by a perpetually changing cast of Americans, to stay alive.Page summed up the heart of 1776, and “1776,” crisply: “How do we self-proclaim our presence in the world?” More

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      Andrei Belgrader, Director Who Influenced Future Stars, Dies at 75

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      His Yale Rep and American Repertory Theater productions included early work by Cherry Jones, Mark Linn-Baker and more, and he directed starry Off Broadway shows.Andrei Belgrader, who directed numerous high-profile stage productions off Broadway and in regional theaters and was an important influence in the careers of John Turturro, Cherry Jones, Tony Shalhoub and other respected actors, died on Feb. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 75.His wife, Caroline Hall, said the cause was lung cancer.Mr. Belgrader, who emigrated from his native Romania in the 1970s after chafing at the artistic censorship there, caught the eye of Robert Brustein, founder of the Yale Repertory Theater, who by the end of the 1970s had him directing there. When Mr. Brustein, who had also been dean of the Yale School of Drama, moved to Harvard University and founded the American Repertory Theater there in 1980, Mr. Belgrader began directing productions there as well.Both A.R.T. and Yale Rep were proving grounds for young actors, and Mr. Belgrader challenged them in ways that had a lasting effect.“He would make odd but incredibly imaginative requests of you as an actor and would be delighted when you could fulfill these requests,” Mark Linn-Baker, who was Touchstone in Mr. Belgrader’s 1979 “As You Like It” at Yale Rep while still a student at the Yale drama school, said by email.Four years later Mr. Linn-Baker, who would soon find television fame on the long-running ABC series “Perfect Strangers,” played Vladimir, one of the leads (John Bottoms was Estragon, the other of Beckett’s famous tramps), in “Waiting for Godot” at A.R.T. directed by Mr. Belgrader. Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe called the production “a perfect Beckettian vaudeville act on the precipitous edge of the void.” Also in that production, in the supporting role of Pozzo, was Mr. Shalhoub, now an Emmy and Tony Award winner.“One of his great skills was bringing people out of their comfort zones in terms of their performances,” Mr. Shalhoub, who two decades later would recruit Mr. Belgrader to direct episodes of his hit TV series, “Monk,” said in a phone interview. “He had a way of instilling courage and moments of abandon.”Mr. Belgrader, who was partial to Beckett, revisited “Godot” in 1998 at Classic Stage Company in Manhattan, with Mr. Shalhoub elevated to the role of Vladimir and playing opposite Mr. Turturro as Estragon, and Christopher Lloyd as Pozzo. Mr. Turturro, who had studied under Mr. Belgrader decades earlier at Yale, worked frequently with him over the years, including in an acclaimed staging of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at Classic Stage in 2011. Ben Brantley of The New York Times named it one of the 10 best productions of the year. “Andrei Belgrader’s funny, sad and freshly conceived interpretation opened the walls between Chekhov’s then and our now,” he wrote.Mr. Turturro, in a phone interview, said Mr. Belgrader excelled at helping actors mine playwrights like Beckett and Chekhov for the deepest meanings and emotions in their work. The key, he said, was that he gave the actors time to make the discoveries.“I remember many times in rehearsals you would think, ‘This is terrible,’ and he would just be very, very patient,” Mr. Turturro said.It was something Mr. Turturro experienced in 2008 in a Belgrader-directed production of Beckett’s “Endgame” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in which the character he played, Hamm, has a particularly difficult monologue.“He worked me to death in that monologue,” Mr. Turturro said. “He wasn’t unsatisfied, but he knew you could go further, and then one day you did.”John Turturro and Dianne Wiest in Mr. Belgrader’s 2011 staging of “The Cherry Orchard,” which Ben Brantley of The Times called one of the best productions of the year.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAndrei Belgrader was born on March 31, 1946, in Oravita, Romania. His father, Tiberiu, was an economist, and his mother, Magdalena (Gross) Belgrader, was a translator.He began training to be an engineer but didn’t like it and instead gained entry to the Institute of Theater and Film in Bucharest, where he began directing.“In Romania, theater was more important, I think, than in the West,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. “It was really the only form where, in a hidden way, things could be discussed.”Well, up to a point. Romania was under Communist rule, and Mr. Belgrader had his first run-ins with censors while still a student.“They banned almost everything, even Romanian comedies,” he said. “Our trick was to do classical plays, because it was hard to say Shakespeare was anti-Communist.”But battles with censors eventually wore him down, and in the late 1970s he left the country. Ms. Hall said he spent time in a refugee camp in Greece and eventually, with the help of a charity, was able to come to New York, where he stayed with other Romanians and drove a cab to improve his sparse English.“Cabbies in New York don’t speak English and they don’t know where they’re going,” he told The Chronicle. “I was one of them.”Somehow he managed to mount two small theater productions, Buchner’s “Woyzeck” and Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida.” The second is the one that caught Mr. Brustein’s eye.Mr. Belgrader was still not particularly fluent when he began directing at Yale Rep.“It was very peculiar,” Thomas Derrah, who was in the cast of the 1979 “As You Like It” with Mr. Linn-Baker, told The Globe in 1998. “He was trying to communicate what he wanted me to do, and there wasn’t a whole lot of English in there.”A year later, at A.R.T. in Cambridge, he mounted another production of the same play and essentially started the career of Ms. Jones, who had only recently graduated from the drama program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh when she was cast as Rosalind.“In June 1980 I was the last audition of the last day of auditions for Andrei’s ‘As You Like It’ at the A.R.T.,” Ms. Jones, now a multiple Emmy and Tony Award winner, said by email. “Andrei was unlike any director or man I’d ever seen. And with an accent I’d never heard. In an instant he transformed the trajectory of my life.”Stanley Tucci, Elaine Stritch, Oliver Platt, Dianne Wiest and Marisa Tomei are also on the long list of actors directed by Mr. Belgrader over the years. When he wasn’t directing, he was teaching — at Yale, Juilliard, the University of California at San Diego and, at his death, the University of Southern California.He gravitated toward challenging plays that had dark elements, but that also had humor.“He’s a great farceur,” Mr. Brustein once said of him. “He finds that area where farce and dreams meet.”In addition to his wife, whom he married in 2001, Mr. Belgrader is survived by a daughter, Grace, and a sister, Mariana Augustin. He lived in Los Angeles.On a 2005 episode of “Monk,” Mr. Belgrader showed that he could direct even the most inexperienced actors. In the episode, “Mr. Monk and the Kid,” a beloved one to fans of the series, Mr. Shalhoub’s obsessive-compulsive title character gets help solving a crime from a 22-month-old boy (played by 2-year-old twins, Preston and Trevor Shores). The toddler character had a lot of screen time, placing particular demands on Mr. Belgrader.“It was a tricky episode,” Mr. Shalhoub said, “and he knocked it out of the park.”Ms. Jones said that Mr. Belgrader liked to demonstrate that his dog, Hector, could sing along to Janis Joplin.“Before he put the recording on he told me not to laugh during Hector’s truly astonishing howls,” she recalled. “He said, ‘You must respect the artist.’ And he meant it. Whether a dog or an actor.” More

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      Review: ‘Wild: A Musical Becoming’ Is Finding Its Footing

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      Idina Menzel and a hummable pop score can’t camouflage the fact that this musical is half-baked. Still, it can make for an enjoyable evening, our critic writes.CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In the 13 years that Diane Paulus has been artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, she has used it as a laboratory for developing new musicals and re-envisioning old ones, then ushering them to Broadway success. “Waitress” and “Jagged Little Pill” had their premieres there; so did Paulus’s staging of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” and her revival of “Pippin,” which won her a Tony Award for directing.But at Thursday’s opening night performance of “Wild: A Musical Becoming,” a climate-change eco-fable starring the Tony winner Idina Menzel, Paulus began her preshow speech by ratcheting down the audience’s expectations of this latest premiere.“Musicals take years to develop,” she said. “But the subject matter of this story tonight was so pressing that we felt we could not wait to share it with you.”The actors would perform with scripts in hand, she added. Our imaginations would be required to fill in the blanks of what the A.R.T. is calling a concert production.All of which is fair enough. But the charismatic lead and hummable pop score of “Wild” can’t camouflage the fact that this musical is very much in the awkward phase of becoming whatever it ultimately might be.Still, it can make for an enjoyable evening, depending on your willingness to overlook the ungainly book by V, the playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler, and get over your disappointment in a show that includes Javier Muñoz — a.k.a. Broadway’s sexy Hamilton — but gives him far too little to do, and dresses him dowdily. Actually, you may have to get over the other actors’ costumes, too.Directed by Paulus at the Loeb Drama Center, the story takes place in a town called Outskirtzia. Hard up for cash, the local farmers get an offer from corporate outsiders called the Extractacals: $50,000 apiece in exchange for drilling on their land.The community’s adults are tempted; the teenagers are alarmed. That strife is the primary tension of a show that, for all its ecological advocacy, is also a parable about understanding between parents and children.Menzel plays Bea, a farmer struggling with her mortgage who could use the windfall from the Extractacals. But her adolescent daughter, Sophia (the mononymous musician-actor Yde), is so terrified of the destruction of the planet and outraged by the adults’ complicity in it that she falls into a catatonic state, then disappears into the forest and transforms into a sea horse.It may or may not be a spoiler to say that other children in the town follow suit, each manifesting as a different kind of animal, each determined to save the earth from their parents’ recklessness.With the grown-ups in danger of selling their souls, “Wild” is partly a morality play, gesturing in the direction of Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” — and also toward Brecht, Dr. Seuss and “Urinetown.” All of it in two dimensions.Which is unfortunate, because the cast is packed with talent. Menzel, a disarmingly sympathetic not-so-evil stepmother in Amazon’s recent “Cinderella,” brings an appealing ease and playfulness to Bea, and adds a touch of country music to the richness of her voice (Menzel’s run in the show ends Dec. 23). And Yde opens a window to Sophia’s soul with a couple of striking solos, “Dear Everything” and “Human.”With music principally by the pop songwriters Justin Tranter and Caroline Pennell, and lyrics principally by Tranter, Pennell and V, “Wild” is a slickly produced work in progress. Rock-show lighting by the excellent Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew is remarkably effective in revving up the crowd during the more anthemic numbers.The cast of 10 is backed by a three-piece band (the music director is David Freeman Coleman) and members of the Boston Children’s Chorus, who add vocal depth and, by their presence, enhance the sense of a generation demanding action.But the show comes across as more pageant than musical, with politics paramount. Too often, the text bonks us over the head with its messaging, as when Sophia’s friend Forte (Paravi Das) explains that “all living things are now being seriously jeopardized by us humans — well, non-Indigenous humans, of course.”And does a debate over pronouns really need to erupt — around Possible (the very funny Luke Ferrari), a nonbinary teenager, and their unaccepting father, Mr. Custom (Muñoz) — during the crisis over Sophia’s disappearance? Might there be a more organic moment to make the same point?The only actor who briefly lucks into dialogue that lets whole characters emerge is Josh Lamon, as the excitable Minister Muddle and the ultra-tranquil therapist Dr. Projection.“Your children were traumatized by learning about the consequences of you leasing your lands,” Dr. Projection tells the parents of Outskirtzia. “Then you told them you didn’t care what they thought or felt. You made them feel unimportant and unseen.”Somehow, from Dr. Projection, this lesson doesn’t feel like a lesson — a rare sensation in “Wild.” The show’s creators frequently seem under the impression that virtue excuses lapses in artistry, as when a program note highlights the eco-consciousness of its costume construction.The designers, SiiGii, Roy Caires and Tommy Cole, write that they used “exclusively second hand, recycled and repurposed materials.” Yet the outfits, in nonsensical patchworks of denim and plaid, are unflattering — “Hee Haw” meets the apocalypse — in a way that seems condescending, as if being poor and rural meant having no sense of style.The show’s successful reuse of scenic elements from earlier this season — the set of the A.R.T.’s “Macbeth In Stride” (by Dan Soule), augmented with luxuriantly leafy sculptures (by Daniel Callahan) from its “The Arboretum Experience” — makes a worthier point: that recycled materials don’t need to feel penitential.“Wild” is meeting the world before it’s ready, but there is something ultimately affecting in it about parents and teenagers, and something commendable, too, about theater that tries to respond to the urgent concerns of the day.“We want you to panic, we want you to act,” the children sing, indicting their elders. “You stole our future, and we want it back.” However clumsily, “Wild” is on the side of the kids — an offering of respect and contrition from the grown-ups, while there’s still time.Wild: A Musical BecomingThrough Jan. 2 at the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, Mass.; americanrepertorytheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Theater to Stream: ‘Broadway Backwards’ and Starry Readings

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      Among the offerings are a well-matched double bill, Ute Lemper’s tribute to Marlene Dietrich and a virtual revival of Michel Legrand’s musical “Amour.”Theater audiences have become more like movie fans and television bingers: They can settle in for a double bill. Before the pandemic, they might have scheduled a matinee and evening performance back to back, but there were those pesky hours to kill in between. Now it’s possible to simply queue up a couple of streaming shows and hit play.A natural pairing this month combines two engaging autobiographical shows written by gifted actors looking back on their childhoods. Round House Theater of Bethesda, Md., is presenting Colman Domingo’s “A Boy and His Soul,” which played Off Broadway in 2009. Domingo, who portrayed the bandleader Cutler in the film adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” looks back at his connection to music and family while growing up gay in the 1970s and ’80s in Philadelphia. This new production is the first major one in which he himself does not appear, with Ro Boddie taking on the role. Through Apr. 18; roundhousetheatre.orgAcross the Potomac River, in Arlington, Va., Signature Theater is presenting “Daniel J. Watts’ The Jam: Only Child.” Under Lileana Blain-Cruz’s direction, Watts (who played Ike Turner in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” on Broadway) recalls growing up with his single mother in the 1980s and ’90s. The title refers to fruit spread, but sound and music energize the show, with DJ Duggz spinning onstage and acting as Watts’s occasional sidekick. Through May 7; sigtheatre.org‘Broadway Backwards’Along the lines of MCC Theater’s beloved “Miscast,” in which stars perform songs they would never get to sing in real shows, this Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS annual fund-raising series features gender-reversed performances. This year’s concert mixes new numbers — hold on to your hats during the opener with Stephanie J. Block, Deborah Cox and Lea Salonga — with ones from previous editions, featuring the usual array of starry participants. Through April 3; broadwaycares.org‘Inside the GPO’The GPO of this docudrama title refers to the General Post Office in Dublin, which was central to the 1916 Easter Rising of Irish Republicans against British rule. Created as a centennial commemoration, Fishamble’s production takes place at the actual GPO, which in 1916 had been occupied by the rebels for several days. The company is now streaming a remastered digital version in partnership with various Irish organizations around the world, including the New York Irish Center. April 1-5; newyorkirishcenter.org‘What the ___ Just Happened?’The monologuist Mike Daisey returns to the stage in a new piece livestreamed from the Kraine Theater in New York — in front of an in-person, fully vaccinated audience. The title (you can guess which word was omitted) neatly encapsulates many people’s stunned take on the past year. April 2; frigid.nycClockwise, from top left: Debbie Allen, Heather Alicia Simms, Alicia Stith and Phylicia Rashad in “Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous.”via Spotlight on Plays‘Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous’The Spotlight on Plays series has pulled off a fun feat with its latest reading, the first time the sisters Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad have acted together since the PBS movie “The Old Settler” 20 years ago. Rashad plays a grande dame of the stage, and Allen is her friend and director, in this 2019 comedy by Pearl Cleage (“Blues for an Alabama Sky”). April 8-12; broadwaysbestshows.comOne Year of Play-PerViewWhen many theatrical institutions curled up into the equivalent of a fetal position in March 2020, some people got to work. Among them was the enterprising reading series Play-PerView, which is celebrating its one-year anniversary with a mix of new and old works. In the first category is “Babette in Retreat” by Justin Sayre, who in the past year has been cultivating a high-camp sensibility in a steady stream of comedies like “Drowsenberg,” “When Sunny Went Blue” and “The Ducks.” There should be some choice bon mots and slapstick for Becca Blackwell, Nathan Lee Graham (as the title character), Randy Harrison (“Queer as Folk”), Bradford Louryk and Mary Testa. April 10-14; play-perview.comRandy Harrison, left, and Scott Parkinson in “Cockfight Play.”via Studio Theater‘Cockfight Play’Randy Harrison also takes on the lead role of John in Studio Theater’s fully staged digital production of Mike Bartlett’s “Cockfight Play.” (The actual title is just one word, so use your deductive skills). John is in a relationship with M (Scott Parkinson) when he falls in love with W (Kathryn Tkel). “Love?” a startled M says. “She?” Bartlett’s deceivingly simple premise explores the vagaries of romantic attraction, and the director David Muse makes good use of a split screen to overcome the actors’ need to maintain their distance. Through Apr. 18; studiotheatre.orgThe cast of an online revival of Michel Legrand’s musical “Amour,” presented by Art Lab and ShowTown Productions.via Art Lab‘Amour’Michel Legrand’s only Broadway musical was a flop, running for only 48 performances in 2002 — which is a shame because the poetic, surrealistic “Amour,” in which a civil servant realizes he can walk through walls, has plenty of the gorgeous melodies you’d expect from the French composer. Now, Art Lab and ShowTown Productions are presenting a revival starring Derrick Baskin (a Tony Award nominee for “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations”), Drew Gehling (“Waitress”), Kara Lindsay, Adam Pascal, Christiani Pitts and Rachel York. It is high time “Amour” gets some love. April 2-4; stellartickets.com‘Period Piece’Don’t expect costumes of yesteryear. This project, conceived by Susan Cinoman, has enrolled an impressive roster of playwrights — among them, Ngozi Anyanwu, Bekah Brunstetter, Lisa D’Amour, Kirsten Greenidge, Lauren Gunderson, Theresa Rebeck, Sarah Ruhl and Caridad Svich — to create monologues about periods. The works, directed by Karen Carpenter (“Love, Loss, and What I Wore”), are spread over three evenings, and each has a unique cast; participants include Geneva Carr, Judy Gold, Julie Halston, Jessica Hecht, Mia Katigbak, Beth Leavel, Lauren Patten and Julie White. April 12, 19 and 26; periodpieceplay.com‘Hype Man: a break beat play’This play with music by Idris Goodwin revolves around the relationship between a white M.C. (Michael Knowlton) and his Black hype man (Kadahj Bennett). Their friendship goes from complicated to adversarial as they react differently to a case of police brutality, while their beatmaker (Rachel Cognata) is stuck in the middle. The show ran in New York in 2018, but Company One’s version, presented by the American Repertory Theater, is freshly urgent, considering the past year’s debates around policing and the appropriation of historically Black art forms. April 8-May 8; americanrepertorytheater.orgUte Lemper in “Rendezvous With Marlene.”Russ Rowland‘Ute Lemper: Rendezvous With Marlene’One night in 1988, Marlene, as in Marlene Dietrich, phoned her fellow German chanteuse Ute Lemper, then starring in a production of “Cabaret” in Paris. The two women chatted for hours. Three decades later, Lemper wrote and starred in a cabaret tribute that dives into Dietrich’s life and songs. The York Theater, which hosted the show in 2019, is presenting a virtual version that was filmed at the beloved East Village boîte Club Cumming. April 8-10; yorktheatre.org More