Arden, Michael (1982- )

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    Unscripted or Not, the Tonys Were Mostly Predictable

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    The writing is on the wall: With or without writers, the Broadway awards are a strangely bland and canned way to celebrate a thrillingly live medium.No writers’ names crawled up the screen at the end of Sunday night’s telecast of the Tony Awards, and though the writers might not like to hear it, their absence made little difference. The names of the show’s producers and director were the same as always, and in television as in the theater, they call the game.Naturally, the strike by the Writers Guild of America against film and television conglomerates — including Paramount, which presented the event on its various platforms — had no effect on what was produced on Broadway during the 2022-23 season honored by these Tonys, nor on who won.Mostly those things bore out the predictions, and many people’s predilections too. “Kimberly Akimbo,” the sweet, intimate, tragicomic “nerdical” by Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire, won the most musical prizes, including one for its star, Victoria Clark, and one for the show itself. “Some Like It Hot” followed with a reasonable haul, and though “Parade” picked up just two, they were good ones: best direction of a musical and best musical revival.Producers and members of the cast and crew of “Kimberly Akimbo,” which took home the prize for best musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAmong the plays, “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s semi-autobiographical Holocaust drama, took the top awards, almost a foregone conclusion with that author and that subject — a subject he strangely did not mention in his acceptance. “Life of Pi,” a spectacular staging of the adventure novel by Yann Martel, fittingly won three technical awards, though I wish its astonishing tiger puppet had picked up one of the medallions in person, and perhaps eaten someone.Failing that, the only surprise, Sean Hayes’s win over Stephen McKinley Henderson in the leading actor category for plays, was not really that surprising, if a little disappointing.But since a little disappointment is normal, and probably desirable, all was comfy on the prize front. Perhaps too comfy. The pleasant predictability of the outcomes (and most of the performances) made the telecast, though once again divided awkwardly into two segments on separate Paramount platforms, seem canned, which is one thing we don’t want the Tonys to be. Leave that to programs that honor recorded performance, like the Oscars and the Emmys. The theater, a live medium, wants spontaneity and weirdness and even a taste of tackiness on its big night out.J. Harrison Ghee, the first out nonbinary performer to win a Tony for best lead actor in a musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlex Newell, the first out nonbinary performer to win a Tony for best featured actor in a musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs it happens, outness was a big theme, with J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell becoming the first openly nonbinary performers to win Tonys in acting categories. They were among the many winners and presenters who used their brief platforms to express support for diversity of all kinds: gender, orientation, race, religion, body type, ability, looks. But though heartening, that too was mostly dignified and predictable, except when the director Michael Arden turned a gay slur into a vector of vengeance upon winning for his staging of “Parade” and when the actress Denée Benton, introducing the education award to a teacher in Plantation, Fla., referred to Ron DeSantis as “the current Grand Wizard — I’m sorry, excuse me, governor” of her home state.For me, such vivid moments were striking exceptions in an even-tempered evening, if only for the brazenness of making political sentiments regardless of the risk of alienating some part of the audience that does not share them.Otherwise, the unscriptedness was a wash. Some performers offered banter that was just as inane as what writers usually provide. At one point, Julianne Hough, who with Skylar Astin hosted the first 90 minutes, on Pluto TV, ad-libbed, apropos of nothing, “When in doubt, shake it out.”Ariana DeBose, center, was the host of the main show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn the other hand, the sententious segues and gassed-up encomiums to whatever B-list star was arriving onstage were eliminated. Near the evening’s end, the host of the main show, Ariana DeBose, seemed unable to read notes she had scribbled on her arm. “Please welcome whoever walks out on stage next,” she said.And the luck of her being a dancer meant that the lack of a purpose-written opening number could be finessed. Instead she performed a wordless choreographed sequence that also functioned as a tour of the spectacular United Palace theater in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood.Not that I saw DeBose do it. Paramount did not win any allies in the strike standoff by offering what felt like a deliberately confusing menu for streaming the evening’s events online. During the switchover from Pluto TV, on which I saw the first part, to Paramount+, on which I saw the second, I found myself (along with many others, who tweeted about it) misled into watching the 2022 awards show — also hosted by DeBose — for several minutes instead of this year’s.That it took so long for me to realize the problem says almost too much about the blandness and sameness of the Tonys under any circumstances. Even when writers aren’t striking, the tone is set by the people at the top of the credits crawl, who since 2003 have been Glenn Weiss and Ricky Kirshner of White Cherry Entertainment. (They also directed and produced the Oscars in March.) However competent they are at television, they do a mediocre job of presenting the excitement of live theater — and especially its excellence.When in doubt, shake it out. More

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      Review: A Pageant of Love and Antisemitism, in ‘Parade’

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      Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond star in a timely and gorgeously sung Broadway revival of the 1998 musical about the Leo Frank case.You do not expect the star of a musical about a man lynched by an antisemitic mob to be his wife. Especially when that man, Leo Frank, who was murdered in Georgia in 1915, is played, with his usual intensity and vocal drama, by Ben Platt.Yet in the riveting Broadway revival of the musical “Parade” that opened on Thursday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, it’s Micaela Diamond, as Lucille Frank, you watch most closely and who breaks your heart. With no affectation whatsoever, and a voice directly wired to her emotions, she makes Lucille our way into a story we might rather turn away from.True, this alters the balance of the show as originally staged by Harold Prince in 1998, further tipping it toward the marriage instead of the miscarriage of justice. Also toward the rapturous score by Jason Robert Brown, which won a Tony Award in 1999. But since the legal procedural was never the best part or even the point of “Parade,” the enhanced emphasis on a love story tested by tragedy and set to song is a big net gain.It’s strange, of course, to talk about net gains in relation to such a horrible tale. But “Parade” has always been strange anyway, seeking to make commercial entertainment out of a violent history and, because he’s a victim, a hero of a nebbish.As Alfred Uhry’s book — also a Tony winner — relates, Leo, the manager of a pencil factory owned by Lucille’s uncle, is a misfit in Atlanta: a New York Jew but also a cold fish. In Platt’s highly physical interpretation, he is scrunched and sickly looking, as if literally oppressed by the gentile society around him. That Lucille’s family, longtime Southerners, seems warmly assimilated into that society makes their marriage, at the start, a curdling of cream and vinegar.Michael Arden’s staging, imported with a slightly different cast from the City Center gala he directed in November, rightly relishes such contrasts. He signals the primacy of the love story by starting, in the 1860s, with sex: a young Confederate soldier bidding goodbye to his girl. A foreboding Dixie anthem called “The Old Red Hills of Home” leaps 50 years forward to connect the white Christian bigotry that fueled the Civil War to the war against Leo as well.His troubles begin with the murder of Mary Phagan (Erin Rose Doyle), a 13-year-old white employee who works, for 10 cents an hour, fastening erasers to pencil caps. Lacking conclusive evidence and in dire need of a conviction, the district attorney, Hugh Dorsey (Paul Alexander Nolan), railroads Leo by suborning testimony from many sources: friends of Phagan, a cleaner at the factory (Alex Joseph Grayson) and even Minnie, the Franks’s maid (Danielle Lee Greaves). After a sensational trial that cynically pits Jewish Atlantans against Black ones, Leo is sentenced to hang.The minimal set by Dane Laffrey is essentially a high platform on a low one, suggesting a witness box, a cell and a scaffold, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen the first act ends on that awful note, we still do not know Leo well. His first song, usually in musicals a moment for ingratiation, is instead a bitter snit called “How Can I Call This Home?” His last before the verdict is “It’s Hard to Speak My Heart.” Whatever that heart really holds is further blurred by Uhry’s device of having Leo enact the false testimony of other characters, so we see him as a rake and a maniac before we’ve grasped him as a man.Arden begins to correct for that during the intermission, which Leo, now imprisoned, spends sitting onstage with his head in his hands. In Act II, as he recognizes his growing dependence on Lucille, she finally becomes real to him and thus he to us.It’s too bad that some of this enlightenment is achieved through huge elisions and license in relating what is still a contested history. Though it’s true that Georgia’s governor (Sean Allan Krill) opened an inquiry that led to the commutation of Leo’s death sentence — but only to life in prison — it’s doubtful he did so as a result of Lucille’s buttonholing him at a tea dance. Nor that she accompanied him like a lay detective as he reinterviewed witnesses and obtained their recantations.Even if true, it’s unconvincing here, presented almost as a series of Nancy Drew skits. Still, Diamond maintains her dignity, allowing the final phase of the tragedy — in which Leo, after two years of appeals that are summarized in one line, is kidnapped from his cell and hanged — to commence with the drama righted.It is never wronged as long as Brown’s music plays. In this, his first Broadway show, he demonstrates the astonishing knack for dirty pastiche that has informed such follow-ups as “The Last Five Years,” “13” and “The Bridges of Madison County.” “Pastiche” because of his inerrant ear for just the right genre to fit any situation, in this case including Sousa-style marches, work songs, blues, swing ditties for the factory girls, a dainty waltz for the governor’s party. “Dirty” because he roughs them up with post-Sondheim technique, scraping the surface to bring up the blood.Douglas Lyons and Courtnee Carter sing the mordant “A Rumblin’ and A Rollin’” as hysteria about the case grows.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd as one of the few musical theater composers to write his own lyrics successfully, he gives singing actors something to act. He also manages to achieve in a rhyme what would otherwise take a scene of dialogue. As the politicians and journalists foment local hysteria and national media interest in the case, he gives two Black workers in the governor’s mansion a mordant triplet in the song “A Rumblin’ and a Rollin’”: “I can tell you this as a matter of fact/that the local hotels wouldn’t be so packed/if a little Black girl had been attacked.”That the Black workers (Douglas Lyons and Courtnee Carter) are otherwise barely characterized is one of the more obvious signs that the show’s book was written in the 20th century. (Uhry has made some revisions for this production.) Arden addresses this by keeping the ensemble as particular as possible, never letting it devolve into vague masses making generic gestures. And in minimizing the visual elements — the set (by Dane Laffrey) is essentially a high platform on a low one, suggesting a witness box, a cell and a scaffold — he keeps our attention on the people and what they sing.If actual history plays second fiddle to that — by the way, there’s a terrific orchestra of 17 players, just two shy of the plush original — current history steps in as a pretty good substitute. Not just in the guise of revitalized antisemitism, though the show’s first preview, on Feb. 21, was greeted by a small gaggle of neo-Nazi demonstrators.What struck me even more vividly in this well-judged and timely revival is the quick path hysteria has always burned through the American spirit if fanned by media, politicians and prejudice of any kind. When a chorus of white Georgians chants “hang ’im, hang ’im, make him pay,” the words can’t help but echo uncomfortably in the post-Jan. 6 air. And another song, a prayer for a return of the day when “the Southland was free,” sounds a lot like current talk of a second secession.Our historical wounds never really heal over. Though Frank’s death sentence was commuted, he was killed anyway and, as “Parade” points out, never exonerated. That case is ongoing.ParadeThrough Aug. 6 at the Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; paradebroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Ben Platt to Lead ‘Parade’ Revival on Broadway This Season

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      The musical’s exploration of antisemitism is timely, with rising concern about the issue in the United States and beyond.Ben Platt, the Tony-winning star of “Dear Evan Hansen,” will return to Broadway next month to lead the cast in a revival of “Parade,” a musical about an early-20th-century lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia.The revival, directed by Michael Arden (a two-time Tony nominee, for revivals of “Once on This Island” and “Spring Awakening”), had a seven-performance run at New York City Center last fall. Platt plays Leo Frank, a factory boss convicted of killing a young girl in a case tainted by antisemitism; Micaela Diamond, who previously played the youngest version of the title character in “The Cher Show” on Broadway, will co-star as Frank’s wife, Lucille.The show, with songs by Jason Robert Brown and a book by Alfred Uhry and co-conceived by Hal Prince, had a brief run on Broadway that opened in 1998; it was commercially unsuccessful, but won Tony Awards for both book and score. The history it depicts is real: Frank was convicted in 1913, lynched in 1915 (at age 31), and in 1986 he was posthumously pardoned.The musical’s exploration of antisemitism has made it more timely now, when there is rising concern about the issue in the United States and beyond. The City Center production garnered uniformly strong reviews: in The New York Times, Juan A. Ramírez called it “the best-sung musical in many a New York season.”The “Parade” revival will begin previews Feb. 21 and open March 16 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, where the musical “Almost Famous” closed on Sunday. The “Parade” production is planning a short run, to Aug. 6.The revival is being produced by Seaview, a company created by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea that previously produced “Slave Play” and “POTUS,” and Ambassador Theater Group, a large British theater company that operates two Broadway houses (the Hudson and the Lyric) and also produces shows. More

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      Review: In This Solo ‘Christmas Carol,’ the Night Is Never Silent

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      Jefferson Mays stars in a Broadway adaptation of the Dickens classic, a one-man production that was originally live-captured for streaming.Has Jefferson Mays ever met a role — or a root vegetable — that he hesitated to take on? In the noisy, excitable one-man version of “A Christmas Carol” on Broadway, in a production that opened Monday at the Nederlander Theater, Mays stars as Ebenezer Scrooge, spirits of Christmas, assorted Cratchits, street folk, partygoers. He even plays a boiling potato, straining against a pot lid. At the festive board, Mays is side dish, main course, everything.Creepy and antic, gloomy and giddy, Michael Arden’s production capitalizes on every trick in Dickens’s story and then pulls a few new ones out of Scrooge’s top hat. Peace on earth? Mercy mild? Please. There are moments when you would swear that Mays couldn’t possibly be unaccompanied, so raucous is this “Carol.” But he is, more or less. (Danny Gardner briefly joins as a wordless specter.) Happily, Mays — who has also triumphed in multiple roles in “I Am My Own Wife,” for which he won a Tony Award, and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” — is a master of manifold parts. If he were left alone, without lights, sound, projections or Dane Laffrey’s curving, swerving set, he might put across this fable even more convincingly.Dickens’s story was last seen on Broadway in 2019, in a production that had originated in London at the Old Vic. That version wasn’t perfect. (Jack Thorne wrote a script freighted with his usual psychologizing.) But under Matthew Warchus’s direction, that version emphasized community, how we might all join together — actors, audience members, even the people in the cheap seats — to furnish the holiday table. The show emphasized giving and receiving, literalizing the story’s message of generosity and care.This “Carol,” adapted by Mays, Arden and Mays’s wife, the actress Susan Lyons, and live-captured for streaming two years ago, is a lonelier affair. The script hews closely to the version that Dickens himself toured, with passages of prose narration that cut the goose-fat sentimentality with keen wit and gimlet detail. The broad outlines remain familiar: On Christmas Eve, Scrooge, an ungenerous money lender, is visited by several spirits who help him to understand the boy he was, the man he became and the ways in which his miserliness may reverberate into the future. It’s a kind of spectral exposure therapy. And fast-acting, too. A lone night cures him. In place of a communal gathering, we have one man’s journey toward self-actualization. Scrooge, at last, becomes an integrated person.Mays has always been a performer of incandescence and originality, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCan we say the same of Mays, a man who makes multiple personalities seem like a boon rather than a disorder? He has always been a performer of incandescence and originality. His red-cheeked flame typically burns too bright for realism, though he does sometimes adapt to a slightly lower voltage, as in the fact-based political drama “Oslo.” With his wide forehead and a broad, elastic face, he is an actor of unusual precision, but there’s a vein of waywardness to him, too, a wildness only barely contained. He can sketch a character lightly, with only a half turn and a flutter of his lashes, or debauch himself in orgies of gesture and expression. Rarely can he leave the set or props alone. Cutlery, curtains, the belt of his dressing gown: He makes exuberant use of them all.The production, conceived by Arden and Laffrey, magnifies that exuberance. Reviewing the 2020 streaming version, Jesse Green described it as “vastly effective as spooky entertainment.” And it is. But in person rather than onscreen, the eerie production elements often overwhelm. It begins with a fog-shrouded coffin and then a thunderclap — an abrupt sound effect that set many in the audience laughing. It also frightened a baby that some parent had unwisely brought. (This is not that kind of “A Christmas Carol.” Leave the babies and the under-12s at home.) The baby screamed so lustily that I missed a lot of the first scene and then had to race to catch up, so swiftly did Mays move through the text, sometimes narrating, sometimes embodying.And yet the design outpaces him. Ben Stanton’s lighting, flashy and subdued, bathes the stage in crepuscular tones. Joshua D. Reid’s sound design, some of it effective, much of it redundant, rarely ceases. Lucy Mackinnon supplies both highly original production design, like a flash of a ghostly horse, and superfluous embellishments, like a video of party guests glimpsed through a window. (The hair, wig and makeup design are by Cookie Jordan, but as with Laffrey’s costumes, they are barely visible in the murk.) Laffrey’s set is a whirling turntable. Several turntables? Beds, banquets, staircases and cemeteries swing in and out of view — Victoriana at a gallop and a risk for anyone inclined toward motion sickness.This “Carol” is a breathless entertainment. Is breathing such a bad thing? It might have been nice to have had more respite to appreciate Mays’s closefisted Scrooge, his liberal Cratchit and sweet Fan. But even at this velocity — Mays must run miles each show — he manages to particularize each of the Cratchit children and most of the guests at the Christmas party of Fred, Scrooge’s nephew. At the curtain call, Mays appears spent, but also deeply contented. Like Scrooge, he has had his catharsis and a workout besides. He can rest merry. The rest of us can escape to the relative quiet of Times Square.A Christmas CarolThrough Jan. 1 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; achristmascarollive.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Parade’ Review: The Trial and Tragedy of Leo Frank

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      City Center’s gala production delves further into America’s history of violence and delivers the best-sung musical in many a New York season.Just six months after its universally beloved Encores! revival of “Into the Woods,” New York City Center returns with another timely, excellent production about collective responsibility and loss. Smartly directed by Michael Arden, City Center’s gala presentation of “Parade,” which opened on Tuesday night and runs through Sunday, delves further into America’s history of violence and delivers the best-sung musical in many a New York season.The book writer Alfred Uhry’s dramatization of the 1913 trial of Leo Frank, and his subsequent imprisonment and 1915 lynching, gave the composer Jason Robert Brown a canvas to paint a complex, nourishing score that captures the entire weight of that fraught history. (Both men won Tonys for their work on the show, which premiered on Broadway in 1998.) Here, a first-rate orchestra, conducted by Brown, and under the music direction of Tom Murray, brings its pomp and pageantry to terrifying life.At the heart of the show is the rich-voiced Ben Platt, successfully transferring his lauded anxious energy from “Dear Evan Hansen” to the role of Leo Frank, a Brooklyn-born Jewish pencil factory manager uneasy in his Atlanta surroundings. His sense of regional superiority is matched by the naïve comfort of his wife, Lucille (a luminous Micaela Diamond), as she plans for a picnic on the day of the town’s annual Confederate Memorial Day parade. Diamond’s expressive face, with large eyes as expressive as those of a silent screen siren, carries the burden of resilience as Leo is wrongly jailed for the murder of a 13-year-old girl who worked at the factory.In an antisemitic kangaroo court under Judge Roan’s (John Dossett) uncaring eye, the prosecutor Hugh Dorsey (a remarkable Paul Alexander Nolan) presents a flimsy case. Adding fuel to the flames are a fundamentalist newspaper publisher (Manoel Felciano) and a sensationalist reporter (the superb Jay Armstrong Johnson, shining as he sings the score’s most fast-paced number, “Real Big News,” made doubly hectic by Cree Grant’s spin-heavy choreography here, which is otherwise lovely).A fully staged “Parade” hasn’t been seen in New York in nearly 25 years, and this revival recalls an era of big casts, big stories and big talent, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDespite Governor Slaton’s (Sean Allan Krill) belated efforts, Leo’s fate is sealed by false testimonies coaxed out of the murdered girl’s co-workers (Ashlyn Maddox, Sophia Manicone, Sofie Poliakoff) and the factory’s janitor Jim Conley (a phenomenally voiced Alex Joseph Grayson). The cast, which also includes Gaten Matarazzo as a teenager out for vengeance, is uniformly splendid — as adept in the work’s solo outings as in the electric group numbers.But the problems with the book, which lacks some dramatic immediacy, remain. Ben Brantley mentioned the “overriding feeling of disdain, a chilly indignation” in his original review; and, as Vincent Canby wrote shortly afterward, the musical “plays as if it were still a collection of notes.” There is no confusing good and evil here; never any question as to what anyone is thinking or about to do, their personalities and fates as predetermined as those of characters in a children’s Bible. The show, in that respect, is aptly titled.Arden wisely counteracts this by filling the production with deft flourishes that compound American hatred across centuries: A salute by Confederate soldiers’ is slowed down so that their outstretched arms resemble a Sieg Heil salute; Roan and Dorsey’s fishing rods in one scene whip down like switches; revelers crack open Bud Lights in their final celebration.Dane Laffrey’s resourceful set — a raised wooden platform flanked, courtroom-style, by simple chairs — effectively evokes a minstrel stage, soapbox and gallows at once. And the stage under the platform is adorned with stars-and-stripes buntings that hang over mounds of crimson earth — as much the hallowed “old red hills” of Georgia as bloodstained dirt thrown onto a coffin — and a small screen emphasizing the show’s procedural nature by displaying each scene’s time, date, and location, which matches historical photographs projected onto the back wall.Then again, considering Uhry and Brown’s text and lyrics, subtlety need not be the name of the game these days. This country’s ongoing procession of racism, antisemitism and “law-and-order”-screeching politicians comes awfully close to the hate-filled climate of the work’s setting, shedding any pretense of respectability. Arden here fights fire with fire, and his direction is sincere and unambiguous. But no one is let off the hook. I imagine the audience members laughing at the condescending jokes about Southern idiocy in the first act had to at least sit with the second act’s taunting of selective liberal compassion, sung with liveliness by Courtnee Carter and Douglas Lyons.A fully staged “Parade” hasn’t been seen in New York in nearly 25 years, and this revival recalls an era of big casts, big stories and big talent — a time when musicals actually felt like events. Platt and Diamond are fearless performers, and their duet “This Is Not Over Yet” is a powerhouse for the ages. Their commanding vocals are matched by a confident production that revives the best of the original while pointing at the possibility of growth, and hope.ParadeThrough Nov. 6 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      A New ‘Christmas Carol’ for Broadway

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      Jefferson Mays will bring his adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic to the Nederlander Theater starting in November.A virtuosic one-man production of “A Christmas Carol,” in which a single actor plays more than 50 roles, including a potato, will be staged on Broadway during the coming holiday season.The actor is Jefferson Mays, a Tony Award winner with a lifelong passion for the Charles Dickens story (like many) who has been honing this production for years. In 2018, he first performed it at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles; in 2020, when the pandemic precluded in-person performances, he made a filmed version shot at the United Palace in Upper Manhattan.Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called Mays’s performance in the film “astonishing” and said the adaptation was “an opportunity to make what was already a classic story feel new, while also making it feel as if it should matter forever.”The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on Nov. 8 and to open on Nov. 21 at the Nederlander Theater; the shelf-life of “Christmas Carol” productions tends to be short, and this one is slated to close on Jan. 1.Mays is a gifted shape-shifter — in 2004 he won a Tony Award for playing 35 characters in the solo show “I Am My Own Wife,” and in 2014 he was nominated for another Tony Award for playing eight roles, in the musical comedy “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.” (He was nominated again in 2017, for playing a Norwegian diplomat in a political drama, “Oslo.”)Mays is now on Broadway playing Mayor Shinn in a lavish revival of “The Music Man”; he will leave that production some time this fall to prepare for “A Christmas Carol.”The Dickens novella, with memorable characters including Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim and four ghosts (don’t forget Jacob Marley!), is a widely staged, and frequently adapted, redemption story; the last version on Broadway was in 2019.The new version was adapted by Mays and his wife, the actor Susan Lyons, along with Michael Arden, who is directing the production. The idea was conceived by Arden and Dane Laffrey, who is the production’s scenic and costume designer; the producers are Hunter Arnold and Kayla Greenspan. More

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      Williamstown Theater Festival Tries to Weather the Storms

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      The annual summer festival in Massachusetts has tried to adapt amid the pandemic and calls for more diversity onstage.I hate getting caught in the rain. But lately, with the mercurial weather and my new dog-walking schedule, I’ve found myself caught in bright sun showers, swampy mists and downright tempests. In my humble opinion, rain is nothing to sing about — Gene Kelly be damned.After a sunny bus ride to Williamstown, Mass., walking with a pup, a tote and a backpack, I was caught again — soaked down to the soles of my Converse. Roughly 15 minutes later the skies settled as suddenly as they had erupted. It’s a problem the Williamstown Theater Festival, which I was attending for the first time, has had to contend with all summer. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the usually indoor festival has tried to adapt with three outdoor productions. But the area has received an above-average amount of rainfall this season, disrupting these plans and leading the festival not to open its shows for reviews from critics.Adaptation, how the festival has successfully or unsuccessfully readjusted to the climate and the politico-cultural climate (namely the pandemic and the protests), was the theme of my weekend.One of the first sights I saw on my damp walk from the bus to the hotel was of a Black woman on a stage: delightful. This was an outdoor rehearsal for one of three 30-minute plays curated by the playwright-director Robert O’Hara for “Celebrating the Black Radical Imagination: Nine Solo Plays.” In “The Master’s Tools,” cleverly written by Zora Howard (“Stew”), a Black enslaved woman named Tituba (a wonderfully devilish Rosalyn Coleman), like the victimized slave from Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” recounts a treacherous storm that led to her mother’s decapitation. A storm is a “great equalizer,” she says, describing how nature howls “like it’s in heat” and how the trees shake “as though possessed.”It made me glance up to the sky again from my seat on the front lawn of the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance, where the production was presented. A clamshell arched over the stage where Tituba told her story. Just a few minutes before she stepped onstage, ushers had handed out rain ponchos to the audience; the forecast had predicted afternoon rain.Rosalyn Coleman in Zora Howard’s “The Master’s Tools.”Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisThe rain never came. But by that point the audience, who sat on the lawn without any covering, had already been exposed to the vicious midday sun for an hour while watching the two other short solos, all directed by Candis C. Jones, that were being featured in the last week of the anthology production’s run: “Mark It Down” by Charly Evon Simpson, and “The Last……(A Work in Progress),” by Ngozi Anyanwu.In “The Last,” a queer Black man (Ronald Peet) reflects on a relationship, reeling from his isolation — a literal quarantine — and sense of loss. And in “Mark It Down,” a Black woman (Naomi Lorrain) takes account of her grief over her grandmother’s death during the pandemic.These works by Black playwrights were another way the festival reacted to the moment — not to the coronavirus, but to the recent calls for more diversity onstage. But when the plays were taken within the context of the community where they were being staged, there was a disconnect. My mother, who had joined me, and I barely saw any Black people in town all weekend, with the exception of the festival’s Black cast members. What’s the point of producing new work about Blackness in America if there’s not a more concerted effort to attract Black audiences to receive it?I asked the same question when I attended the experimental “Alien/Nation,” from the director Michael Arden and his company, the Forest of Arden. An immersive experience, “Alien/Nation,” written and devised by Eric Berryman and Jen Silverman, begins as a walking tour through the Williams College campus. (There’s also a version by car.) The audience is split into groups of about eight, and each group is led, via an app, along a path dotted with performers who act out bite-size, dance-heavy scenes about real events that happened in Western Massachusetts and beyond in 1969.Not only does this first act — mostly about Black student protests at Williams College — ring out as particularly relevant right now, but so does the second, which takes place at a Covid-19 vaccination center. The third, which includes an odd but beautiful reproduction of the moon landing and a planetary fashion show, makes a sloppy effort to tie the ending back into the racial themes of the beginning.“Alien/Nation” is an immersive theatrical experience that takes audiences on a walking tour through Williamstown, Mass.Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisWhile some parts of the production connect (the site-specific format, the wondrously fluid synchronized choreography of Jeff Kuperman and Eamon Foley), others show how the festival’s attempts to adjust to an innovative, pandemic-friendly experience failed. The complicated tech — audience members need to download an app, and must forfeit their driver’s licenses in exchange for earbuds — was prohibitive to many, myself included. The app didn’t work well, the tour ate up more than half my data, and my audio kept going in and out. And the first part of the lengthy production, which one of the company members described, understatedly, as “a little bit of a walk,” wasn’t very accessible, especially given the ample hills of the Williams campus. (“This is too much for someone my age,” my 56-year-old mother testily complained to a company member. “Especially for someone who had a hip replacement.”)And, again, when looking at the makeup of the audience, my mother and I appeared to be the only Black people attending a play about Black civil rights and political action.It was my final show of the weekend, however, that best captured the festival’s attempts to adapt theater in unpredictable circumstances. With a book by Daniel Goldstein and music and lyrics by Dawn Landes, “Row,” directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is staged on wooden platforms in the beautiful reflecting pool at the Clark Art Institute.This musical was inspired by Tori Murden McClure’s memoir “A Pearl in the Storm,” about her effort to become the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic. By presenting “Row” outside at the Clark, the festival uses a local setting (the gorgeous views) to present a tale of resiliency. Led by Grace McLean as Tori with a soaring voice (best showcased in the cascading bellows of the classic-rock-inspired “Drowning”), the show intercuts Tori’s narrative account of her journey with scenes from her past. Her story — acting out, growing up in a difficult home, then finding herself in a fight against nature — hits many familiar notes but is still novel, if only for the site-specific setup and the fact that her quest really happened a mere 22 years ago.Grace McLean as the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic in “Row” at the Clark Art Institute.Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisBut the show has also been plagued by the poor weather, and some of the sound crew walked off the job one night, complaining of unsafe and unsatisfactory working conditions in the rain. In switching gears to deliver outdoor theater, the festival has been able to step up during a challenging time for the performing arts, but it has struggled to manage the logistics.“Bad weather’s on the way,” Tori says at one point in the show. During her long, treacherous time at sea, she constantly has to acclimate to the conditions in order to survive.The same could be said of theater during the pandemic; easier said than done.The morning after I returned from Williamstown, I got caught in the rain yet again. I’ve started wearing my rain boots, I just got a new raincoat, and at Williamstown I bought a blue rain poncho just in case. I’d rather be prepared for any bad weather on the way — not just run for cover.RowThrough Aug. 15 at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours.Alien/NationThrough Aug. 15 in Williamstown, Mass; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours and 25 minutes. More

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      Williamstown Festival Will Take the Shows Outside

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      After a lost live 2020, the theater will stage a musical at a museum’s reflecting pool and an immersive show, all over town, based on real events.The Williamstown Theater Festival, which was forced by the pandemic to convert its 2020 season into a series of audio plays, will present live performances again this summer, though not in its indoor venues.Instead, the festival announced on Wednesday three shows that will be staged outdoors throughout the festival’s college-town home. Alongside new plans for scaled-down seasons at Tanglewood and at the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival, it marks a tentative step toward business as usual for the culture-rich region of Massachusetts.The Williamstown season will open on July 6 with “Outside on Main: Nine Solo Plays by Black Playwrights,” to be staged on the front lawn of its main venue. The series, curated by the writer and director Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), includes short works by the writers Ngozi Anyanwu, Charly Evon Simpson, Ike Holter and Zora Howard, among others.The world premiere of the musical “Row,” with songs by Dawn Landes and a book by Daniel Goldstein, will be staged at the reflecting pool of the nearby Clark Art Institute starting July 13. The show, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is about a woman who intends to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean.Initially slated to be produced last summer, “Row” was recorded as part of the festival’s deal with Audible, and will be released April 8 on that platform.The third show, “Alien/Nation,” is a world premiere immersive production that asks audiences to journey through Williamstown by foot or car and “plunge themselves into the center of stories inspired by real events that took place in Western Massachusetts in 1969,” according to a news release.Scheduled to run from July 20 to Aug. 8, it is the brainchild of the Tony Award-nominated director Michael Arden and a company called the Forest of Arden, who devised it along with the playwrights Jen Silverman and Eric Berryman. Early last summer, Arden and some of his collaborators created a similar, experimental piece called “American Dream Study” in New York’s Hudson Valley.The festival typically presents seven shows per summer; according to a publicist, digital-only productions are still to be announced.The Berkshires ended up a national center of attention last summer when Berkshire Theater Festival’s “Godspell,” staged outdoors in a tent next to its main venue, became the first musical production in the country to get approval by the leading actors’ union since the theater shutdown.This summer Berkshire Theater Festival has announced outdoor productions of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “Nina Simone: Four Women,” while Shakespeare & Company will open its season with Christopher Lloyd in the title role of “King Lear.”Barrington Stage Company, another notable theater in the region, promises a seven-show season that features a Gershwin revue and the comedy “Boca” outdoors and four shows indoors, including two world premieres and a solo play about Eleanor Roosevelt. More