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    Climate Protesters Disrupt Broadway Play Starring Jeremy Strong

    A performance of a new production of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” was interrupted by protesters who shouted “no theater on a dead planet.”A trio of climate change protesters disrupted a performance of “An Enemy of the People,” starring Jeremy Strong, on Broadway Thursday night, shouting “no theater on a dead planet” as they were escorted out.The show they disrupted is selling quite well, thanks to audience interest in Strong, who is riding a wave of fame stemming from his portrayal of Kendall Roy in the HBO drama “Succession.” Strong stars in the play as a physician who becomes a pariah after discovering that his town’s spa baths are contaminated with bacteria; revealing that information could protect public health, but endanger the local economy.The protest, before a sold-out crowd at the 828-seat Circle in the Square theater, confused some attendees, who initially thought it was part of the play. It was staged during the second half, during a town hall scene in which some audience members were seated onstage and some actors were seated among the audience members. Although the play was written by Henrik Ibsen in the 19th century, this new version, by Amy Herzog, has occasionally been described as having thematic echoes of the climate change crisis.Strong remained in character through the protest, even at one point saying that a protester should be allowed to continue to speak, said Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, who was among many journalists and critics who were in the audience for a press preview night. “I thought it was all scripted,” Green said. “The timing was perfect to fit into the town meeting onstage, and the subject was related.”The protest was staged by a group called Extinction Rebellion NYC, which last year disrupted a performance at the Met Opera and a match at the U.S. Open semifinals. Other climate protesters around the world have taken to defacing works of art hanging in museums, but a spokesman for the New York group said that it had not engaged in that particular protest tactic.A spokesman for Extinction Rebellion NYC, Miles Grant, explained the targeting of popular events by saying, “We want to disrupt the things that we love, because we’re at risk of genuinely losing everything the way things are going.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Melissa Etheridge: My Window’ Review: Musings on Life and Music

    On Broadway, this rock concert spliced with memoir has gained a striking intimacy.In 1979, when Melissa Etheridge was an aspiring rock star getting ready to leave Leavenworth, Kan., for music school in Boston, she got a 12-string guitar. Her father made a macramé strap for it — a sturdy, intricate piece of knot work that was a portable souvenir of his love.“And this is it,” his Grammy Award-winning daughter said during her Broadway show, turning around to give everyone a view of the strap that held up her instrument.It was a charming moment, and in our high-definition, multi-screen world, refreshingly analog: just Etheridge, life-size and in three dimensions, sharing the room with us.Share it she does, superbly, in “Melissa Etheridge: My Window,” which opened Thursday at Circle in the Square Theater, just one block east of where an earlier version of the show ran Off Broadway last fall. On Broadway, this rock concert spliced with memoir has gained a striking intimacy, as if Etheridge had shrunk an arena to fit in the palm of her hand.A stage stretches across one end of the space, floor seats and a center aisle are where the theater’s thrust stage would usually be, and a tiny satellite stage sits behind them. Circle in the Square never struck me as a warm, embracing theater, but Etheridge makes it one, paying graceful, diligent attention to every section of the 726-seat audience, and occasionally coming down off the stage to sing and stroll.Written by Etheridge with her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge, and directed once again by Amy Tinkham, this musically gorgeous, narratively bumpy show starts with Etheridge’s hit “Like the Way I Do,” ends with “Come to My Window” and fits 15 husky-voiced songs in between, including a trippily comical “Twisted Off to Paradise,” an arrestingly beautiful “Talking to My Angel” and a winking ode to her current gig, “On Broadway.” (Sound design is by Shannon Slaton.)On a set by Bruce Rodgers whose spareness serves the complexity of Olivia Sebesky’s projections, this is a visually slick production, with abundant jewel tones in Abigail Rosen Holmes’s saturated rock-show lighting, and Etheridge looking glamorous in costumes by Andrea Lauer.The show is shorter, more polished and more assured than it was Off Broadway — though Etheridge still seems undefended when she doesn’t have a guitar strapped across her or a piano in front of her. She also doesn’t speak memorized lines but rather tells versions of stories mapped out in the script. It’s a valid approach that sometimes leaves her fumbling for words.Kate Owens plays the small, clowning role of the Roadie, a character whom the audience loves but who I wish would desist from upstaging Etheridge with antics.Etheridge herself is very funny, and she knows how to handle a crowd. Such as when she got to the point in her life story when she fell for a woman who was married to a movie star — “a for real, for real movie star,” she added, for emphasis.“Who?” a voice called out, not that the performance is meant to be interactive.“Look it up,” Etheridge said, shrugging it off.Unlike her recently published memoir “Talking to My Angels,” which opens with a recollection of “a heroic dose of cannabis” that changed her understanding of herself and the universe, “My Window” proceeds chronologically, starting with Etheridge’s birth. (Projections show baby Missy with fabulous hair.) So the talk of what Etheridge calls “plant medicine” comes later.This is a passion of hers, so it belongs in a show about her. But the performance devolves into speechifying every time it comes up, except when it morphs into an enactment of experiencing an altered state — which, despite some vividly kinetic projections, can be as tiresome to watch onstage as it would be off.Surprisingly, the most starkly powerful part of the show Off Broadway — Etheridge recounting the death of her son Beckett, at age 21, in 2020 — works less well on Broadway.I cannot fault Etheridge for her stiffness in that delicate section at the performance I saw, or for reaching for words — like her blunt assessment, “He was difficult” — to convey her memories. But this is where relying on the script’s gentler, more contextual language could assuage what must be a terrible vulnerability.Logistics also undercut that scene. While Etheridge speaks from the large stage and the auditorium is plunged in darkness, a guitar is placed on the satellite stage by a technician who crosses in front of many people. No distraction should break the connection between Etheridge and her audience in that moment.She is, throughout “My Window,” a marvel with that audience.Back when her fame was rising, she told us in Act II, she started playing arenas and stadiums.“Thousands and thousands of people,” she said, “and the funny thing is, the more people there were, the further away y’all got.”On Broadway, they’re near enough again for her to commune with. And so she does.Melissa Etheridge: My WindowThrough Nov. 19 at Circle in the Square Theater, Manhattan; melissaetheridge.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    Melissa Etheridge’s Autobiographical Show Is Coming to Broadway

    Combining stories from her life with her musical catalog, the singer’s show will open in September.The singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge’s theatrical memoir in which she weaves stories from her life will be staged on Broadway this fall, the production announced Sunday.Called “My Window,” a reference to one of her hit songs, Etheridge’s show recounts the arc of her life and career, from growing up in Kansas to reaching rock fame and coming out as a lesbian in the ’90s.The show, which had a brief Off Broadway run last fall, was written by Etheridge and her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge, a television producer and actor who helped create the TV series “Nurse Jackie” and worked on “That ’70s Show.” The production plans to begin previews at Circle in the Square Theater on Sept. 14, with opening night scheduled for Sept. 28.Etheridge, 62, has loved theater since childhood (“‘Godspell’ just set me on fire,” she said last week), and performed briefly in the rock musical “American Idiot” in 2011. She had long wanted to write for Broadway, she said, and so she was delighted to see the industry embrace Bruce Springsteen’s production, which she viewed as setting an example for productions by musicians that are part concert, part storytelling.“I’ve been in front of audiences for 40 years, and I like to talk,” Etheridge said. “I enjoy story and drama, and I’ve always brought that into my music.”Plus, she joked, “It saves on therapy.”The show, directed by Amy Tinkham, verges into deeply personal territory for Etheridge, including when she discusses the death of her 21-year-old son from opioid addiction.“It really helped me to just say it over and over,” Etheridge said. “I found it freeing, actually, to be very open about my life.”In between the recollections, Etheridge plays her hits, such as “Come to My Window” and “Bring Me Some Water,” as well as snatches of more obscure titles, including the first songs she wrote as a child. Currently, Etheridge is figuring out what to cut; the Off Broadway show was three hours, including an intermission, and the singer said the Broadway version will most likely be about a half-hour shorter.The production plans to run through Nov. 19. More

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    When Connie Converse, the ‘Female Bob Dylan,’ Lived in N.Y.C.

    There’s a resurgence of interest in the pioneering singer-songwriter who disappeared when she was 50.Connie Converse was a pioneer of what’s become known as the singer-songwriter era, making music in the predawn of a movement that had its roots in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.But her songs, created a decade earlier, arrived just a moment too soon. They didn’t catch on. And by the time the sun had come up in the form of a young Bob Dylan, she was already gone. Not simply retired. She had vanished from New York City, as she eventually would from the world, along with her music and legacy.It wasn’t until 2004, when an N.Y.U. graduate student heard a 1954 bootleg recording of Ms. Converse on WNYC, that her music started to get any of the attention and respect that had evaded her some 50 years before.The student, Dan Dzula, and his friend, David Herman, were spellbound by what they heard. They dug up more archival recordings, and assembled the 2009 album, “How Sad, How Lovely,” a compilation of songs that sound as though they could have been written today. It has been streamed over 16 million times on Spotify.Young musicians like Angel Olsen and Greta Kline now cite Ms. Converse as an influence, and musical acts from Big Thief to Laurie Anderson to the opera singer Julia Bullock have covered her songs.“She was the female Bob Dylan,” Ellen Stekert, a singer, folk music scholar and song collector told me during my research for a book about Ms. Converse. “She was even better than him, as a lyricist and composer, but she didn’t have his showbiz savvy, and she wasn’t interested in writing protest songs.”Seventy-five years ago, Ms. Converse was just another young artist trying to make ends meet in the city, singing at dinner parties and private salons, and passing a hat for her performances.She knew that her songs did not jibe with the saccharine pop of the day. “This type of thing always curdles me like a dentist’s appointment,” she wrote to her brother before an audition at Frank Loesser’s music publishing company, where she predicted what executives would say of her songs: “lovely, but not commercial.”In January 1961, the same month that Dylan arrived from the Midwest, Ms. Converse left New York for Ann Arbor, Mich., where she reinvented herself as an editor, a scholar and an activist.In 1974, a week after her 50th birthday, she disappeared and was never seen again.Ms. Converse lived in New York from 1945 to 1960, and though she was intensely private, she kept a diary, scrapbooks and voluminous correspondence that were left behind after she drove away for good, offering clues about what the Manhattan chapter of her life was like. Here are some of the neighborhoods, venues and sites around the city that provided the musician with a backdrop for her short but trailblazing stint as a songwriter.The 1940s: Bohemians of the Upper West SideRiverside ParkIn 1944, after dropping out of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, Ms. Converse moved to New York. Her first job was at the American Institute of Pacific Relations, where she edited and wrote articles about international affairs. “I am struck by the breadth of the topics she covered,” said the contemporary international relations scholar Michael R. Anderson, who calls her writing and reporting “remarkable.”She lived on the Upper West Side. The image of her in Riverside Park, above, was found in an old filing cabinet that belonged to the photographer’s widow. It is one of the first known images of Ms. Converse in New York.The Lincoln ArcadeMs. Converse, left, plays for friends at the Lincoln Arcade.Lois AimeSome of Ms. Converse’s closest friends lived and hung around the bohemian enclave known as the Lincoln Arcade, a building on Broadway between West 65th and 66th Street. With a reputation as a haven for struggling artists, it had been home to the painters Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and George Bellows, the last of whom had lived there with the playwright Eugene O’Neill.The group was a hard-drinking lot, given to holding court late at night. One surviving member of that crew, Edwin Bock, told me that Ms. Converse would often be clattering away at a typewriter, at a remove from the rest, though sometimes she did things he found shocking, like climbing out the front window well past midnight to stand on a ledge, several stories above the street.The 1950s: Making Music in the Village and Beyond23 Grove StreetPhotographs from Ms. Converse’s scrapbook show her studio apartment at 23 Grove Street, where she wrote almost all of her “guitar song” catalog.The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCMs. Converse lost her job when the institute landed in the cross hairs of the anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee. Sometime late in 1950, she moved to the West Village and began a new phase of her life as an aspiring composer and performer.She bought a Crestwood 404 reel-to-reel tape recorder and began making demos of herself singing new songs as she wrote them. It was here, while living alone in a studio apartment at 23 Grove Street that Ms. Converse wrote almost all of her “guitar song” catalog (including everything on “How Sad, How Lovely”).The Village at that time “was the Left Bank of Manhattan,” the writer Gay Talese told me, and it had “whiffs of the future in it” in terms of its permissiveness about lifestyle choices. Nicholas Pileggi, a writer and producer, suggested that given her address, Ms. Converse, a loner, would have had no problem hanging out by herself at Chumley’s, a former speakeasy.The upstart book publisher Grove Press was also just down the block, and she was close to The Nut Club at Sheridan Square, where jazz musicians often played, as well as the more respectable Village Vanguard.Grand CentralPhotographs from Ms. Converse’s scrapbook show her first and only appearance on live television: The Morning Show, with Walter Cronkite. There is no recording of the live performance. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCHer first and only television appearance was in 1954, on the “The Morning Show” on CBS (hosted that year by Walter Cronkite), though how Ms. Converse secured the appearance and what she played and talked about may never be known (shows at this time were broadcast live; no archival footage exists). Because the program was staged in a studio above the main concourse at Grand Central and shown live on a big screen in the hall, everyone bustling through the station that morning could have looked up and caught the young musician’s one and only brush with success.Ms. Converse was extremely close to her younger brother, Phil. When he visited her in the city for the first time, Ms. Converse described the reunion in her irregularly kept diary, noting that the two “met like strangers at Grand Central, and fell to reminiscing over oysters.”Hamilton HeightsMs. Converse took a photograph of the street below her W. 138th St. apartment in 1958.The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCIn 1955, Ms. Converse took up residence at 605 West 138th Street, in Harlem, a block away from Strivers’ Row. There, she shared a three-bedroom flat with her older brother, Paul, his wife, Hyla, and their infant child, P. Bruce, a situation she called “a cost-saving measure.” The new apartment had an upright piano, which Ms. Converse used to compose an opera (now since lost), a series of settings for poems by writers like Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a song cycle based on the myth of Cassandra who, according to Greek mythology, was given the gift of prophesy and then cursed to be never understood.Circle in the SquareThe 1956 production of “The Iceman Cometh,” which Ms. Converse attended. Sam Falk/The New York TimesAn avid theatergoer, Ms. Converse attended Jose Quintero’s 1956 revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” which made Jason Robards a star and effectively launched the Off-Broadway movement. “Did I mention that I saw an in-the-round production of ‘The Iceman Cometh’ last month?” she wrote to Phil and his wife, Jean, that October. “Some four and a half hours of uncut O’Neill, but only the last 15 minutes found me squirming in my seat.”The Blue AngelAt this erstwhile nightclub on East 55th Street, unique at the time for being desegregated, Ms. Converse met the cabaret singer Annette Warren, who expressed interest in covering Ms. Converse’s songs, and who would make at least two of them, “The Playboy of The Western World” and “The Witch and the Wizard,” staples of her show for decades to come.1960: The Lost Tape; Goodbye, New YorkNational Recording StudiosNational Recording Studios, at 730 Fifth Avenue between West 56th and 57th Streets, had been open for only a year when Ms. Converse showed up in February 1960 to record an album. It was a solo session that, because she did just one or two takes of each tune, only took a few hours. The recording was a rumor until 2014, when Phil Converse unearthed a reel of it in his basement. An adman who was a fan of Ms. Converse’s music had procured the recording session for her for free. That album, the only one she made, remains unreleased.Upper West SideMs. Converse in her apartment on West 88th Street, her last known residence in New York. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCMs. Converse closed the circle of her peripatetic Manhattan existence by moving back to where she’d started: the Upper West Side. This time, she lived in a brownstone on West 88th Street, a half block from Central Park. This was her last known New York address; by 1961, she was gone.Her music, mostly made in isolation or at small gatherings, was nearly lost but for the efforts of her brother Phil, who archived what he could; David Garland, who played her music on WNYC in 2004 and 2009; and Dan Dzula and David Herman, the students who, decades later, introduced her work to a new generation.“The first time I played a Connie Converse song for a friend, she sat silently and cried,” Mr. Dzula said. “From that moment I knew Connie’s magic would reach at least a few more people in a deeply personal and special way.”He added: “Could I have envisioned her blowing up like this when we first put out the record? Absolutely not. But also, yeah, kind of!”Howard Fishman is the author of the new book “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.” More

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    Broadway’s ‘KPOP’ Will Close on Sunday

    The final performance, just two weeks after its opening, will include a panel discussion about Asian American and Pacific Islander representation.“KPOP,” a new Broadway musical both celebrating and exploring the wildly popular Korean music genre, will close on Sunday, just two weeks after opening.The producers had hoped that the large and youthful global fan base for K-pop music would lead to a strong audience for the show, but instead it faced anemic ticket sales that made it impossible to keep going.The show’s grosses were consistently well below what it costs to run a Broadway musical; during the week that ended Dec. 4, it grossed just $126,493, making it the lowest-grossing musical now running. Its average ticket price was $32.06, which is also unsustainably low; the industry average that week was $128.34.“KPOP,” rich with performance numbers in a mix of English and Korean, tells the story of a solo singer, as well as a boy band and a girl group, all preparing for a U.S. concert tour. They are contending not only with the rigors of the performance style, but also some tensions with their producer, a documentary filmmaker, and among themselves.The show received mixed reviews, including a largely negative one in The New York Times. (The producers complained that the Times review was racially insensitive; Times editors defended the review.)The show, produced by Tim Forbes and Joey Parnes, was capitalized for up to $14 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped. At the time of its closing, “KPOP” will have played 44 preview performances and 17 regular performances.“KPOP” features an original score, with songs by Helen Park and Max Vernon, and a book by Jason Kim. Directed by Teddy Bergman and choreographed by Jennifer Weber, “KPOP” was conceived by Kim and an immersive theater company called Woodshed Collective; its production life began with a fully immersive and more experimental nonprofit staging in 2017 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, produced by Ars Nova in association with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Woodshed Collective.The Broadway production, with a cast that included several alumni of K-pop groups, including the show’s star, Luna, began previews Oct. 13 and, after a string of absences, cancellations and postponements caused by Covid and other infections among the company, opened on Nov. 27 at Circle in the Square. That theater is among the smallest of the 41 Broadway houses; for KPOP, it is configured with 687 seats arranged on three sides of the stage.Overall sales on Broadway remain softer than they were before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, and that has made survival even harder in an industry always characterized by more failures than successes. This fall, Gabriel Byrne’s solo show, “Walking With Ghosts,” also cut short its run because of weak box office sales; only a handful of this season’s shows appear to be on a path to possible profitability.“KPOP” was a milestone for Broadway in several ways: The first Korean-centered show written by Korean Americans, the first with an Asian female composer, and one of only a handful of shows with a cast that is predominantly Asian and Asian American. The production said that its final performance would include a panel discussion about Asian American and Pacific Islander representation on Broadway.The show, like many musicals on Broadway, is planning to produce a cast album. It is scheduled to be released in February by Sony Masterworks Broadway. More

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    Review: In ‘KPOP,’ Korean Pop and Broadway Meet (Too) Cute

    The worldwide sensation and American-style musical theater form an awkward alliance onstage.“A lot of people come to these things and they don’t even understand the language,” says Harry, a filmmaker who passes for the villain in the noisy yet skimpy new musical “KPOP.” “So what are they watching for?”Good question.For the record, the answer provided by Tiny, a member of a Korean pop group called RTMIS, is delivered, unlike a lot of the show, in English: “Perfection, Mr. Harry. OK?”And it’s true that if you enjoy the precision-drilled dancing, meticulous melisma and auto-tuned sentiments that have turned K-pop into a worldwide sensation over the past 10 years, you are likely to be among those cheering the musical’s Broadway incarnation, which opened on Sunday at Circle in the Square.But those who aren’t hard-core fans of the genre or don’t understand Korean — let alone those who saw the radically different and far superior Off Broadway version in 2017 — will have a harder time enjoying this one. For them, the musical is less an eye-opener than an ear-pounder, assiduously drowning out any ambitions it may once have had to be more.It can’t be lost on the creative team that in adapting their Off Broadway hit for a bigger and more conventional audience they courted the same fate as their fictional counterparts. Both then and now, the book of “KPOP,” by Jason Kim, concerns the efforts of a Seoul hit factory to push its stable of custom-groomed artists into crossover success in the United States. To do so, they are willing to sacrifice almost anything.That theme was given edgy, immersive expression in Teddy Bergman’s 2017 staging, produced by the experimental theater incubator Ars Nova in association with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Woodshed Collective. It imagined the audience as members of an itinerant focus group who, serving as emissaries of American taste, were led in small packs from space to space and given glimpses of what those sacrifices might mean.If some seemed silly, others were trenchant; an especially disturbing encounter involved a plastic surgeon. But by the time everyone assembled in one last room for a concert-cum-party, the giddy fun of the bubble-gummy songs (by Helen Park and Max Vernon) felt earned — even if the reversal was dramatically perplexing. Were we now celebrating what the rest of the show had encouraged us to disparage?That problem remains, with new ones added. To begin with, Bergman, directing again, faced an overwhelming difficulty in the fact that no Broadway theater could accommodate the immersive concept. Gabriel Hainer Evansohn’s set provides a partial solution: Instead of the audience moving, a tongue-shaped stage does, sliding back and forth bearing performers. And video screens mounted everywhere (Peter Nigrini is the projection designer) allow us to eavesdrop on the backstage action captured when Harry the filmmaker (Aubie Merrylees) goes rogue.Instead of the audience moving, a tongue-shaped stage does, sliding back and forth with the performers. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe narrative frame was rebuilt less successfully. The audience, no longer a focus group, merely watches as a K-pop impresario named Ruby (Jully Lee) prepares for a concert that will introduce her stable of acts to America. There are three of them: the five-woman RTMIS (pronounced Artemis), the eight-man F8 (pronounced fate) and the solo diva MwE (pronounced mu-WEE) — an orphan Ruby has raised, Mama Rose-style, for stardom.MwE (played by the actual K-pop star Luna) has been reconfigured entirely. Her problem is no longer that she is aging out of pop credibility but that she wants creative freedom and a normal life with her boyfriend (Jinwoo Jung). Ruby ruthlessly tries to quash those dangerous ideas — love and creativity are not things a K-pop star can afford, she says — even as she complains about MwE’s failure to perform from the heart.This is familiar material, thinly delivered, and so is the dissatisfaction of the members of RTMIS, which is so vague and hastily resolved I barely caught what it was. Only among the members of F8 does the conflict feel fresh and worthy of exploration in song: Its seven longtime members resent the “new kid,” Brad, brought in to juice their American rollout. Biracial and Connecticut-raised, Brad (Zachary Noah Piser) is seen by the others as inauthentic; he isn’t even fluent in Korean.The songs, unfortunately, do not take up the challenge of investigating that issue, or any other. They are all diegetic — actual numbers performed by the characters — and are thus connected to the story, as in a jukebox musical, by only the feeblest of threads. When Brad tells the filmmaker that he grew up neither Korean enough for some nor American enough for others, and proceeds to sing a song called “Halfway,” we may expect an exploration of those feelings. But no, it’s a love ballad, addressed to a girl: “Can you meet me halfway, baby?”The same problem derails “Korean Man,” a song for F8 that you may think from the setup will express their assertion of national pride. As we learn from the parts of it that are performed in English, though, it’s mostly about having the “baddest swagger” and “bein’ a bad, bad boy.”Jully Lee, left, plays a K-pop impresario named Ruby, and the real-life K-pop star Luna plays MwE.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith their link to the drama severed, and the drama in any case attenuated, the songs cease to function as they normally do in musical theater and collapse into a concert. That’s true even before the final 20 minutes of the show, when the filmmaker plot is summarily abandoned and, with it, any pretense of plot.So that flashback scene in which Ruby tells MwE, at 13, that she’s a “disaster” with “tree trunk legs,” and a choreographer shouts that she’s shaming her parents? Forget about it. Come hear the band. (Actually, there are only three instrumentalists.)By then, if you are not a fan, you may feel worn out by the aggressive mimicry of the K-pop performance style, not just in the mostly electronic arrangements but also in the minutely detailed choreography by Jennifer Weber, the squint-inducing lighting by Jiyoun Chang and the hundreds of can-you-top-this costumes by Clint Ramos and Sophia Choi. In that environment it’s hard to say whether Brad’s “Halfway” and MwE’s “Mute Bird” — acoustic songs simply staged and feelingly delivered — are actually lovely or merely a relief.In its remaking for Broadway I wish “KPOP” had preserved more moments like that: moments that allow you to consider what the excitement of K-pop (for those who feel it) and the expressiveness of American musical theater (likewise) can profitably say to each other. Both have their fans and no doubt their glories, as well as their limitations. But it seems to me that in introducing the two, a good place to have met would have been, well, halfway. “KPOP” still has far to go to get there.KPOPAt Circle in the Square, Manhattan; kpopbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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    For ‘KPOP,’ a Broadway Transfer Is More Like a Reinvention

    The show’s creative team talks about revamping the immersive Off Broadway hit so that it moves “around the audience” at Circle in the Square Theater.Back in 2017, the musical “KPOP” had the kind of Off Broadway premiere that showbiz dreams are made of. The buzz around the production — which had the rare distinction of being about a specifically Asian pop-music style and having a largely Asian creative team — was so intense that desperate New Yorkers were pleading for tickets to its sold-out run at the small A.R.T./New York Theaters in Midtown Manhattan.Talk of a Broadway transfer started quickly thereafter, but, for a variety of reasons including the pandemic, it took five years for “KPOP” to finally make the jump. Now, at long last, the show is in previews, with an opening night set for Nov. 20.The musical Broadway audiences will see, however, is a very different beast from the one that opened in 2017: This is not so much a transfer as a reinvention.The original Ars Nova production, presented with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Woodshed Collective, was an immersive spectacle in which audience members followed a bunch of artists from room to room on two floors, and discovered how the Korean music industry relentlessly drills its stars (called idols) into poptastic precision.None of the 41 Broadway theaters could accommodate this sort of staging. But at least the one the show finally grabbed, Circle in the Square Theater, has a unique asset: It’s in the round.“I like to say it’s the world’s smallest arena — it’s a postage stamp of Madison Square Garden,” the director, Teddy Bergman, said. “For a show that traffics in pop, that collective energy and that collective effervescence felt like something we could capture like lightning in a bottle.”To preserve the sense that the audience is getting behind-the-scenes insights, the book writer, Jason Kim, altered the framing device: The show is now set up like a mockumentary about an upcoming American tour for a K-pop entertainment company’s roster — the boy band F8, the girl group RTMIS and the solo singer MwE.“At Ars Nova, the audience moved around and in this production we’re very much trying to move the piece around the audience,” Kim said. “I think the spirit of the show has been preserved, although it is a different format, and we are trying to engage the audience in very much a different way. We loved that the new theater casts an extra member, which is the audience.”The show is now set up like a mockumentary about a K-pop label’s roster, which includes the boy band F8, the girl group RTMIS and the solo singer MwEF8.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKevin Woo, center, in “KPOP,” now in previews at Circle in the Square Theater. There’s a “whole new appreciation and understanding and reception of this music in the States,” the show’s director said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother reason for the transformation is the fact that the moment “KPOP” originally aimed to capture has changed dramatically. In 2017, most Americans had no knowledge of K-pop, save perhaps for the song “Gangnam Style,” by Psy. Nowadays, Korean acts like Stray Kids routinely top the U.S. music charts and in May a K-pop artist, AleXa, won NBC’s “American Song Contest” on behalf of Oklahoma, where she was raised.Over the past five years, Bergman said, “BTS happened and ushered in a whole new appreciation and understanding and reception of this music in the States.”He added: “We wanted to focus on what is the journey, the cost, the joy, the exhilaration, the sacrifice of these pathbreakers who are journeying into new territories and spreading this music. I didn’t have to come from a position of having to explain much, or really anything to the audience. It really freed us up to be able to dig deeper psychologically, emotionally.” (The show’s close relationship with South Korea means the deadly crowd surge in Seoul was deeply felt; the Broadway production made a curtain speech last weekend and had a moment of silence, and posted a statement on social media.)One beneficiary of this change in focus has been the character of MwE, played Off Broadway by Ashley Park and now portrayed by Luna, a South Korea-based actress and former member of the K-pop girl group f(x).“What I’m very excited about in this version is the examination of the female characters,” said Helen Park, who wrote the bilingual score with Max Vernon, and orchestrated and produced it for Broadway. “They all have different ambitions, different journeys, different histories, different characteristics. As an Asian woman, that’s something so special.”While MwE, only in her mid-20s, is already a battle-hardened music-industry vet, the new character of Brad is at the start of his idol career and struggling because he is being shunned by his F8 bandmates. Not only was he the last to join the band, but his being mixed race becomes a factor as well. The role had resonance for the actor playing him, Zachary Noah Piser, who has Chinese and Jewish roots: This spring he became the first Asian American actor to play the title role of “Dear Evan Hansen” full time on Broadway.“Brad’s whole situation is very kind of meta because it was very me — I was a newcomer to the Broadway production of ‘KPOP’ and he is the Asian white boy from Connecticut who gets plucked up and placed in this group,” Piser said in a video chat. Brad acts as an entry point into issues centering on identity — which were already present in the first version, but have since been retooled.“When we first started writing, the main idea behind the show was ‘How could K-pop cross over in America?’ — it’s what these Korean artists have to sacrifice in their authenticity in order to be palatable to an American market,” Vernon said on the phone. “Obviously K-pop crossed over, so we asked different questions, like, ‘What’s going on in these artists’ mental state behind the scenes? What kind of pressure is that exerting on their psyche, on their relationships with other people in their band?’”Luna, who got her start in K-pop before turning to musical theater in South Korea (starring in shows like “Legally Blonde,” for example), pointed out that “KPOP” nails the genre’s emphasis on rigorous training.“There are such detailed scenes that are really rooted in the reality of that world,” Luna said via an interpreter in a video conversation. “I feel that people who are actually K-pop singers or who are trainees will really relate. It also gives a sense of consolation for the immense amount of effort and hard work put into creating K-pop.”From left: Park, Kim, Weber, Bergman and Vernon.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSUCH AN OVERHAUL of the show’s concept and characters also required a reshaping of the score, which The New York Times’s Ben Brantley described as being “as synthetically sweet and perversely addictive as the real thing” in his review. When asked about the balance between old and new songs, the creative team agreed that it was about half and half — “maybe more new than old,” Park said.She and Vernon also had to reflect the changes in the genre at large: The acts that were popular when they started working on the show, back in 2014, are different from the current ones, and fans were sure to notice dated references.“We were responding to Exo, 2NE1, Girls’ Generation, Psy, Big Bang, but K-pop music changes every three to four years so it would be like doing a show called ‘Pop’ and all the music sounds like Britney rather than Billie Eilish or whatever the great artists are that you’re listening to right now,” Vernon said on the phone. “Sometimes by the time musicals are on Broadway, it feels like they’re lagging 15 years behind the culture — we did not want that.”Similarly, the choreographer Jennifer Weber, who is also handling the Max Martin jukebox musical “& Juliet,” had to work within the specific parameters of K-pop dancing. Key elements are point moves, which are the visual answers to the songs’ hooks (one of the most famous remains Psy’s horse-riding gimmick in “Gangnam Style”).And because members of a group trade vocal lines at a quick pace, careful integration is needed to make the choreography work. “You have to almost break it down mathematically about who’s singing at what time,” Weber said on the phone. “You need to constantly be revealing who’s singing, so that person needs to pop out of the formation for their line — and that line could be as little as two bars.”Another way to assure that the show recreates the wondrous, kinetic excitement the best K-pop acts generate was to hire performers who had spent time in the trenches and could share their experience: In addition to Luna, the cast includes BoHyung, a former member of the girl group Spica; Min, formerly of Miss A; and Kevin Woo, once in U-KISS.“A lot of my questions in the first weeks were like, ‘How do you breathe? How do you execute this incredibly intricate choreography?’” Piser said. “The biggest response I got from the K-pop idols in our show was, ‘You’ve got to be patient, you’ve got to be good to yourself and you’ve got to trust the process.’”With “KPOP” now on Broadway, its creators are aware that the show is not just going up against other musicals but against actual K-pop artists — and this time again, the intimacy of Circle in the Square could come through.“We’re competing with Blackpink and BTS,” Bergman said, laughing, “but I don’t know where else you’re going to see BTS with 600 other people. Unless you’re Jeff Bezos or something.” More

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    On Broadway, One Show Decides to Keep Masks. No, It’s Not ‘Phantom.’

    Three days after the Broadway League announced that all 41 theaters would make masks optional starting July 1, one of those theaters has decided to stick with mandatory face coverings.The producers of a starry revival of “American Buffalo,” which is a 1975 drama by David Mamet about three schemers in a junk shop, announced Friday that they would continue to require masks through the scheduled end of the show’s run at Circle in the Square Theater on July 10.That’s only 10 days beyond when Broadway plans to drop its industrywide masking requirement, and it’s just one show, but it suggests that the unanimity among producers and theater owners may not be rock solid.There are several factors that make the “American Buffalo” situation unusual.The play, starring Sam Rockwell, Laurence Fishburne and Darren Criss, is being staged at Broadway’s only theater-in-the-round (it’s actually almost-in-the-round, because the seating doesn’t entirely encircle the stage), which means there are more patrons seated within spitting distance of actors than at other theaters.Also, Circle in the Square, with 751 seats as it is currently configured, is the only remaining Broadway theater that is not operated by a large company or a nonprofit organization, so its decisions are not tied to those of a bigger entity.Rockwell expressed concerns about the end of the masking policy in an interview this week with the New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante.The show announced the change in policy in a news release, saying that it was “due to the close proximity of the audience to the actors as a result of the intimate size of the theater and the staging in the round.” The production and theater owner did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, said of the “American Buffalo” decision, “As the optional mask policy takes effect in July, there may be unique situations which would require the audience, or some of the audience, to be masked.”It is not clear whether the decision will affect other Broadway shows. The vast majority take place in theaters operated by a handful of big landlords who endorsed the mask-optional decision. Broadway’s four nonprofit theater operators, who have been more Covid-cautious, do not have any shows this summer. And summer fare on Broadway is dominated by big musicals, where the audience tends to skew toward tourists, many of whom come from places where masks are long gone; older New York playgoers are scarcer at this time of year (and the volume of shows is lower, too: there are only 27 shows now running on Broadway).After “American Buffalo” closes next month, Circle in the Square is scheduled to be vacant until October, when a new musical called “KPOP” begins previews.Actors’ Equity, the union representing performers and stage managers, has declined to comment on the audience safety protocols, but this week sent an email to its members, previously reported by Deadline, saying, “This decision was made unilaterally, without input from your union or any other, and the unions were only given advance notice a couple of hours before the announcement.”Although the decision was announced by the Broadway League, it was made by theater owners and operators, and they plan to reconsider the protocols monthly. More