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    Lincoln Center Theater Chooses Lear deBessonet as Artistic Director

    DeBessonet, currently the artistic director of Encores!, will work alongside Bartlett Sher, who will serve as executive producer.Lincoln Center Theater, a leading nonprofit theater with a long track record of producing luxe Broadway musical revivals as well as contemporary plays, has chosen new leadership for the first time in more than three decades.The theater’s next artistic director will be Lear deBessonet, 44, a stage director who specializes in musical revivals as the artistic director of the Encores! program at New York City Center. DeBessonet will succeed André Bishop, who has led Lincoln Center Theater since 1992, most recently with the title of producing artistic director; he is retiring in June.DeBessonet will work with Bartlett Sher, 65, a Tony-winning director who is a resident director at the organization, and who will now assume the title of executive producer. DeBessonet will select and oversee the theater’s shows and its day-to-day operations; Sher will focus on strategic planning, fund-raising and global partnerships. They will both report to the board’s chairman, Kewsong Lee.In an interview, DeBessonet said that “there is no greater job I can imagine” than running Lincoln Center Theater. “The American theater is the great passion of my life,” she said. “I’ve wanted to be a director and to run a theater since I was a 5-year-old in Baton Rouge.”The changes come amid a tidal wave of turnover throughout the American theater, prompted by a variety of factors, including the retirements of many regional and Off Broadway theater pioneers, as well as the ousters of some leaders who lost support. Across the industry, leaders are facing a new reality: These jobs have become increasingly challenging as nonprofits face rising costs, dwindled audiences, pressures to feature programming that advances social justice but also sells tickets, and changing entertainment consumption habits.Bartlett Sher, who has been directing at Lincoln Center Theater for two decades, will become the nonprofit’s executive producer. Cindy Ord/Getty Images For Tony Awards ProWe 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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    Sutton Foster and Michael Urie Reunite in the Zany ‘Once Upon a Mattress’

    The hit Encores! production has transferred to Broadway, with a cast fiercely dedicated to entertaining its audience.Princess Winnifred and Prince Dauntless are goofy and playful characters. In most musicals, they would provide comic relief from the main story line. But in “Once Upon a Mattress,” it’s the funny people who rule, both literally and figuratively.All the more so since Winnifred and Dauntless are played by Sutton Foster and Michael Urie in symbiotic performances that are highly controlled and precise while maintaining the appearance of off-the-cuff abandon.And with the rest of the cast mostly following suit, it is refreshing to see actors so actively dedicating themselves to entertaining their audience. This kind of unabashed reveling in the joys of strutting your stuff appears to be in demand, too, judging by the recent success of “Oh, Mary!” and “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.”The family-friendly “Once Upon a Mattress,” which premiered in 1959, is a good fit for the Encores! series — which stages shows that are rarely revived and presented this one in January. Now the production has transferred, with some changes in the supporting cast, to the Hudson Theater on Broadway.Like many Encores! entries, Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer’s variation on the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Princess and the Pea” would probably struggle to crack anybody but a tween’s Top 10 list of the best musicals ever.Also like many of those entries, “Once Upon a Mattress” turns out to be surprisingly sturdy in the right hands. Rodgers’s music is zingy and Barer’s lyrics often deploy sneakily enjoyable wordplay (“I lack a lass; alas! Alack!”). Just as important, the book by Barer, Jay Thompson and Dean Fuller is engineered to let gifted comic actors run loose — it is no coincidence that Carol Burnett originated the role of Winnifred.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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    The Five Women Who Started a Secret Theater Society

    It was their own secret society. Five women who worked together at the Public Theater, bonding over drinks and aspirations, sharing frustrations and ideas, commiserating and brainstorming and laughing.They gave their alliance a nickname: Women and Ambition — cheeky because, as they saw it, “ambitious” remained such a loaded adjective for young women. Their convergence at the Public in the mid-2010s would resonate as far more than happy memories: Now each of them has become a Woman With Power, in a beleaguered field in vital need of new inspiration.“These women have helped change the trajectory of my life,” said one of the women, Maria Goyanes, who is now the artistic director of Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington.Lear deBessonet, who oversees the long-running Encores! series at New York City Center, recalled the prevailing spirit: “There was a sense of like, ‘I see you, girl. I see you. You’ve got to run things now.’”And now they do.Before deBessonet officially took over the Encores! series in 2021, she ran Public Works, the community-oriented program that stages a musical adaptation of a classic story each summer. Once at Encores!, which gives rarely revived shows short-running productions, she got off to a shaky start during the pandemic. But she’s since had a number of buzzy productions, including a starry “Into the Woods,” which went to Broadway. This summer, her acclaimed production of “Once Upon a Mattress,” with Sutton Foster, is Broadway-bound as well.Shanta Thake.Ye Fan for The New York TimesWe 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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    Sutton Foster to Star in ‘Once Upon a Mattress’ on Broadway

    The revival, which had an earlier run at New York City Center, is scheduled to open in August and close in November, followed by a run in Los Angeles.Sutton Foster, a classic Broadway triple threat beloved for her comedic skills and her big belt, will star this summer and fall in a Broadway revival of “Once Upon a Mattress.”The production had a brief and exuberantly received run earlier this year as part of the Encores! program at New York City Center, where the critic Elisabeth Vincentelli, writing for The New York Times, said Foster “makes a banquet of the material” and added that “Foster’s glee in taking possession of the stage creates an all-encompassing manic energy that both the audience and her scene partners feed off.”The musical, first staged in 1959, is loosely based on “The Princess and the Pea” fairy tale; Foster plays Princess Winnifred, a graceless minor royal who is a possible bride for a local prince. The role is a fun one for comedically gifted actresses — it was first played on Broadway by Carol Burnett, and then, in a 1996 revival, by Sarah Jessica Parker.The show features music by Mary Rodgers and lyrics by Marshall Barer. The original book was by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller and Barer; the current revival is a new adaptation by Amy Sherman-Palladino (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”).The revival is being directed by Lear deBessonet, who is the artistic director of the Encores! program. It is to begin previews July 31 and to open Aug. 12 at the Hudson Theater. The run is scheduled to end Nov. 30, and then to transfer to Los Angeles, where Foster will star in a four-week run, beginning Dec. 10, at Center Theater Group’s Ahmanson Theater.Foster, a two-time Tony Award winner, for “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and a revival of “Anything Goes,” just wrapped up a three-month run in a revival of “Sweeney Todd” that she began five days after ending her two-week City Center run in “Mattress.”The “Mattress” revival is being produced by Seaview (Greg Nobile and Jana Shea) and Creative Partners Productions (C. Graham Berwind III and Eleni Gianulis-Vermeer). More

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    ‘Once Upon a Mattress’ Review: Sutton Foster as a Perfectly Goofy Princess

    The Encores! series returns with a concert staging of the 1959 musical, which also stars the very funny Harriet Harris and Michael Urie.Some casting choices are blindingly obvious. That does not make them lazy; it makes them right.Such is the case with Sutton Foster as the eccentric Princess Winnifred in the Encores! revival of “Once Upon a Mattress,” which opened Wednesday at City Center. The central role in this broadly goofy musical was exuberantly, indelibly originated by Carol Burnett in 1959.While Foster has displayed range over the course of her musical-theater career — she’s stepping into Mrs. Lovett’s kitchen in “Sweeney Todd” on Feb. 9, five days after completing this show’s two-week run — many of Foster’s best roles, like Janet Van De Graaff in “The Drowsy Chaperone” and Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” are imprinted with an ebullient, joyful relish in the very act of performance. And Winnifred, described by another character as “a strangely energetic swamp girl,” is an ideal outlet for that sensibility.“Once Upon a Mattress” is nobody’s idea of a great musical, but it is many people’s idea of a fun one. Based on the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” this vaudevillian lark — which The New York Times described, possibly not in a good way, as “a child’s introduction to Broadway” in a review of a 1964 CBS telecast — is celebrated for helping to kick-start Burnett’s career and for being the composer Mary Rodgers’s sole Broadway hit.That last clearly represents a loss: Rodgers, paired with the lyricist Marshall Barer, demonstrates startling ease with musical-theater idioms and the late-1950s vernacular. (Winnifred’s “The Swamps of Home” works as both an earnest ballad and a sly spoof of the goopy nostalgic yearnings of some numbers by Richard Rodgers, Mary’s father, and Oscar Hammerstein II.)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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    Echoing Federal Theater Project, 18 Towns Plan Simultaneous Events

    The theme “No Place Like Home” will drive shows and festivals in both large cities and rural locales of this country on July 27, 2024.One night in the fall of 1936, with Fascism rising in Europe, theaters in 18 cities and towns across the United States staged productions of the dystopian play, “It Can’t Happen Here,” under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project, which was created to provide Depression-era artists with work.Now, inspired by that moment, organizations in 18 American cities and towns are planning a contemporary version of that endeavor: On a single day next summer, they will each present a participatory arts project responding to a more hopeful prompt, “No Place Like Home,” from the “Wizard of Oz.”Given the atomization of American culture, the communities will not present a single show — in fact, many of them are not staging shows at all — but they will each come up with ways to express something that connects notions of home with culture and with health on July 27, 2024. In Chicago, the city will establish artist apprenticeships at mental health clinics; in Tucson, Ariz., Borderlands Theater will create a “theatrical showcase” including a play about mental health and healing.The initiative is the brainchild of Lear deBessonet, a New York-based director who created Public Works, a program of the nonprofit Public Theater that develops musical adaptations of classic works and stages them with a combination of professional and amateur actors. The Public Works model has been adopted by theaters in other American cities, and in London.“Art, by necessity, must look different in every place, to reflect its own community,” deBessonet said. “Our projects are not exclusively theater, or even predominantly theater, but really are reflecting the unique voice and character of the people in each of these places — they are making things that only they could make because they’re making them in direct relation with the people of their place.”DeBessonet, who is now the artistic director of the Encores! program at City Center, is working with Nataki Garrett, who just wrapped up a fraught run as artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Clyde Valentin, who previously led Ignite/Arts Dallas at Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University. They are the artistic directors for a program called One Nation/One Project, and are calling the initiative “Arts for EveryBody.”“How do we solve these problems that are happening within these large-scale organizational structures that are not moving in the direction that we need them to move in?” Garrett asked. “One way that you do that is, you go meet the people at their source — you go where they are and you engage with them in the way that they have been engaging outside of our museums and theaters and other spaces.”The endeavor, which is inspired by a “Wizard of Oz”-based prompt, has been designed with a belief that participating in the arts can improve health outcomes.Silver Screen Collection/Getty ImagesThe program has set a goal of a $14 million budget. Unlike the Federal Theater Project, which was government-sponsored, as part of the Works Progress Administration, the current initiative is being supported primarily by contributions from foundations and individuals and is sponsored by the Tides Center, a nonprofit philanthropic organization that supports social change. Many of the projects are collaborations between arts groups, local governments and community health centers.The endeavor, working with the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida, has been designed in the belief that participation in the arts can improve health outcomes, and the organizers have commissioned studies to research that connection.The 18 communities chosen to take part are a mix of urban and rural, large and small, from Honolulu to the South Bronx; the National League of Cities helped with site selection and project design. Valentin said one priority was to “not have it be something that’s just in the coastal elite cities — geographically we think there’s profound diversity.”Three cities — Chicago, New York and Seattle — that were in the 1936 project are taking part. Some of the communities are planning work that will call attention to local challenges: Phillips County, Ark., will highlight issues with the local water supply; Oakland, Calif., will focus on housing costs; and Utica, Miss. is seeking to generate conversation about food insecurity associated with the lack of a local grocery store.“I think this is a much needed departure from the divisiveness we see,” said Carlton Turner, a co-founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production, which will be organizing a food and wellness festival, with lots of music, in the rural community of Utica. He added, “This opportunity to bring these 18 communities together is a way to heighten our commonalities, versus homing in on the things we disagree about.” More

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    Coming to City Center: ‘Pal Joey,’ ‘Titanic’ and the 20th Fall for Dance

    Also among next season’s highlights: Encores! revivals of “Once Upon a Mattress” and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” and dance works from Pam Tanowitz and Lyon Opera Ballet.Concert re-stagings of “Titanic,” “Once Upon a Mattress” and “Jelly’s Last Jam”; the unveiling of a previously announced rewrite of the Rodgers and Hart musical “Pal Joey”; and dance works by Lyon Opera Ballet and Pam Tanowitz: New York City Center has announced plans for an ambitious 2023-24 season, one in which it will celebrate its 30th Encores! series and the 20th Fall for Dance festival.“It’s a season that’s equal parts hilarity, innovation and operatic scale,” Lear deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores!, a concert series that revives classic and rare musicals, said on Wednesday in a news release.A highlight will be City Center’s gala presentation: an adaptation of the 1940 musical “Pal Joey” (Nov. 1-5), now set in a Black community — the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s — starring Ephraim Sykes as Joey Evans, a jazz singer who refuses to compromise his craft in the face of racism, and Jennifer Holliday (a Tony winner for “Dreamgirls”) as a nightclub owner. The production, directed by Tony Goldwyn and Savion Glover with a new book by Richard LaGravenese and Daniel Beaty, will also feature Aisha Jackson (“Once Upon a One More Time”) and Elizabeth Stanley (“Jagged Little Pill”).Frank Sinatra with Rita Hayworth, left, and Kim Novak in the 1957 film adaptation of “Pal Joey.”Columbia Pictures, via AlamyThis is a new direction for “Pal Joey,” which originally featured white characters; in 2021, the producer Jeffrey Richards said he would bring this re-conceived version to Broadway during the 2022-23 season, which just ended without the show. Now the delayed production will have a City Center run instead — and after that, who knows? Two of this season’s Tony-nominated musical revivals, “Into the Woods” and “Parade,” started at City Center.City Center’s season will kick off with its 20th Fall for Dance festival (Sept. 27-Oct. 8), which will include a collaboration between Sara Mearns of City Ballet, the choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, co‐presented with Vail Dance Festival; as well as the premiere of an original work by the street dance artist Ephrat Asherie and the tap dancer Michelle Dorrance. The two-week festival will also include performances by Birmingham Royal Ballet, led by the director Carlos Acosta, and by Bijayini Satpathy, an interpreter of the classical Indian dance form Odissi.In January, the main Encores! series begins with “Once Upon a Mattress,” the 1959 musical comedy adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” with music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Barer, and a book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller and Barer. Sutton Foster (“Anything Goes,” “The Music Man”) stars as the brassy, lovable Princess Winnifred the Woebegone, the part that made Carol Burnett a star in 1959. DeBessonet will direct a new concert adaptation (Jan. 24-28) by Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of the television series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”It will be followed by “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the 1992 Broadway musical about the life of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, with a book by George C. Wolfe, lyrics by Susan Birkenhead and music by Morton and Luther Henderson (Feb. 21-25). The original production won three Tony Awards, including best lead actor for Gregory Hines and best featured actress for Tonya Pinkins. It will be directed by Robert O’Hara, with casting to be announced.The series will conclude with a revival of Peter Stone and Maury Yeston’s 1997 musical “Titanic,” which recounts the 20th century’s most famous maritime disaster (June 12-16). The original production (no connection to James Cameron’s epic film) won five Tony Awards, including best musical, but has never received a Broadway revival. It will be directed by Anne Kauffman, with casting to be announced.City Center’s 2023-24 lineup also includes over a dozen dance offerings, among them Lyon Opera Ballet in “Dance,” the choreographer Lucinda Childs’s 1979 collaboration with the composer Philip Glass and the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (Oct. 19-21); as well as the choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s “Song of Songs,” which fuses David Lang’s choral settings of the biblical poem with movement inspired by Jewish folk dance (Nov. 9-11).To close out the year, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the center’s resident dance company, will celebrate its 65th anniversary with a season (Nov. 29-Dec. 31) that includes Ronald K. Brown’s “Dancing Spirit,” a 2009 work that mixes African diaspora and American modern dance styles. More

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    ‘Oliver!’ Review: Tunes, Glorious Tunes, in a Grimly Cheerful Revival

    The Encores! production, directed by Lear deBessonet, looks to deepen and darken a musical that resists the change. But it’s still delightful.Though the orphan boys at the workhouse are beaten regularly and fed only gruel, the sign looming above them reads “God Is Love.”That grim irony, underlining the practice of child labor in the supposedly advanced society of 19th-century London, is echoed in the spooky sounds you hear as the Encores! production of “Oliver!” begins: brass murk, woodwind rasps and stringy insectlike buzzing. Has Lionel Bart’s musical, based on the Dickens novel “Oliver Twist” and first seen on Broadway in 1963, been turned into “Sweeney Todd”?The version that opened a two-week run at City Center on Wednesday, directed by Lear deBessonet, is certainly grimmer than any “Oliver!” I’ve seen, which isn’t many; it’s seldom done professionally, for both casting and structural reasons. But the underlying high spirits of Bart’s adaptation, stuffed with tunes that are merry even when they’re sad, cannot long lie dormant. Soon the boys — a wonderfully uncloying ensemble — are bursting with mirth as they sing and dance to “Food, Glorious Food,” a number so irrepressible (with choreography by Lorin Latarro) that even a heavy concept can’t weigh it down.Which is not to say a serious approach is unwarranted. Recall that Dickens, who was himself sent to work in a boot polish factory when he was 12, refers to Oliver in the first sentence of the novel as an “item of mortality” — more a death-in-progress than a life. And Bart, at least in his lyrics, does not stint on bleakness; even the bouncy title song is violent, proposing various ugly fates for the boy who dares to ask for more food.“What will he do when he’s turned black and blue?” Mr. Bumble, the workhouse beadle, asks gleefully, in six-eight rhythm.Foreground from left: Lilli Cooper, Raúl Esparza and Pajak deliver terrific turns in Lear deBessonet’s production, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut deBessonet’s entertaining and beautifully sung production, featuring terrific turns by Lilli Cooper as the proud doxy Nancy and Raúl Esparza as the criminal den leader Fagin — as well as a touching one by Benjamin Pajak in the title role — is at this point still too muddy to be convincing as sociology, let alone drama.Partly that’s the result of the extremely short Encores! rehearsal period, which compresses what probably needs months into 12 days. The staging is sloppy in places, and the violent bits involving Bill Sikes (Tam Mutu), which in a rethinking like this should be shocking, aren’t. Spoiler alert: It appears that Nancy’s dress, not Nancy herself, is bludgeoned to death at the end.The other difficulty in reframing “Oliver!” for 2023 is built into the material. Like many musicals made from doorstop novels, it cherry-picks the plot so vigorously that what’s left can hardly support the songs. (The Encores! production uses a further abbreviated script.) Oliver’s transit from the workhouse to an undertaker’s establishment to Fagin’s hide-out, spread across eight chapters in the Dickens, takes what seems like a blink of an eye here. It becomes thin gruel indeed.And the songs themselves are problematic. Though there is barely a dud in the score, and many (like “I’d Do Anything” and “Oom-Pah-Pah”) are so hummable that the audience joins in almost subliminally, they are not so much dramatizations of the action as ditties vaguely suggested by it. “Consider Yourself,” the number in which Fagin’s pickpockets, led by the Artful Dodger (Julian Lerner), welcome Oliver to the gang, opens out illogically into a full-company number featuring buskers, laborers, flower girls and 20 extras — children from New York City schools — in a way that screams unreconstructed musical comedy.Julian Lerner, center left, as the Artful Dodger in a number with Pajak, other cast members and students.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou wouldn’t want to prevent that; there’s too much pleasure to be reaped. Bart was an untrained tune savant, a latter-day Irving Berlin; if the songs are so hummable it’s probably because his composition method was built on humming them to an amanuensis.For “Oliver!” that meant delightful numbers even where a modern musical would say none was needed. “I Shall Scream!,” served up with raucous good humor by Brad Oscar and Mary Testa as Mr. Bumble and Widow Corney, is utterly beside the point, as is “That’s Your Funeral,” a similarly bouncy number for Mr. Sowerberry and his wife (Thom Sesma and Rashidra Scott) even though they are funeral directors.However inapt as drama, and however much real estate they steal from the development of a richer plot, such songs serve an important function, like the witty prose of the novel. They make the darkness of the tale bearable, almost literally — bearing you through the story.Nor is it just the music that has that effect, though it’s always jaunty. (Except when, in songs like “Boy for Sale,” “Where Is Love?,” “Who Will Buy?” and “As Long as He Needs Me,” it’s show-stoppingly lovely.) The lyrics do similar uplifting work. Though deBessonet has referred to them as “harrowing,” that quality is often undermined by the intricate rhymes, many built on cockney pronunciations (uppity/cup o’ tea) that can’t help but produce a smile.That makes the project of darkening the show difficult. Though the busily atmospheric orchestrations by William David Brohn, created for a 1994 production at the London Palladium, expand the number of musicians to 21 from 12, I’m not sure that the originals, with more of a music-hall than a symphonic quality, didn’t match the material better. Likewise, the overlay of deBessonet’s vision sometimes obscures more than it reveals.But perhaps we do not need “Oliver!” to be a Gesamtkunstwerk. Dickens intended the tale, after all, as popular entertainment, serialized over the course of two years and highly indulgent of gaudy melodrama.Also, of course, in its presentation of Fagin, indulgent of antisemitism. Compulsively referred to as “the Jew” in the novel and often played with a prosthetic nose and a Yiddish accent in earlier productions, Fagin is an awful caricature even though Bart, born Lionel Begleiter, was Jewish.Esparza — sallow-eyed, greasy-haired and perpetually sniffly, but without prosthetics — dials that down almost to zero, though the music still bears traces of Fagin’s religion in the klezmerlike violin-and-clarinet accompaniment to the song “Reviewing the Situation” with which deBessonet thoughtfully ends this production.The song asks: “Can somebody change?” Fagin’s doubtful answer is “S’possible.”I too am doubtful about the possibility of change, at least for musicals like “Oliver!” (And keep in mind that in the Dickens, Fagin is eventually executed.) They can’t all be “Sweeney”; they don’t have the bones for it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reinvesting in what made them meaningful in the first place, if dividends of delight keep coming. For that, I’d do anything.Oliver!Through May 14 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More