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    Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now?

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    Theater about current events — both literally and abstractly — is changing the conversation between playwrights, directors and their audiences.IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theater requires you to leave your home and participate in the creation of an ad hoc collective, albeit frequently with the irritation that proximity to strangers can engender. And during periods when the people in charge belong to a party that, for instance, evinces loathing for the funding of art and artists, choosing to go to the theater can feel like a political act in itself. That’s all the truer if the experience challenges you to assess where you stand (or sit) in relation not only to whatever is being said or done onstage but to all of the reactions bursting forth around you.The people who create theater sometimes describe it, with what can seem like sanctimony or sentimentality, as a church. But more often, when it’s good, it’s like a community board hearing, not worshipful but prickly and pugnacious. That applies whether you’re in a 60-seat black box watching an Off Off Broadway play or in orchestra seats at … well, here’s where it easily can turn into a parlor game. “Hamilton”? Yes, obviously “Hamilton” is political. OK, what about “Death Becomes Her”? Of course — politics are inherent in a production about gender double standards regarding attractiveness and aging. “The Outsiders”? Class war with songs. The “Great Gatsby” musical? An indictment of kleptocracy, plus some dancing. And so on.Right now, though, the idea that all theater is political is less a rhetorical exercise than an irrefutable reality. It’s no surprise that the current New York season has foregrounded work like the blistering comedy “Eureka Day,” in which a series of steering committee meetings at a crunchy, liberal private school in Berkeley, Calif., turn into gladiatorial bouts pitting pro-vaccine parents against anti-vaxxers; Jonathan Spector’s play was topical when it was first produced on the West Coast in 2018 and is even more so now. Or that Sanaz Toossi’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner “English,” a poignant comedy-drama about four people in Iran studying English in an adult-education class, feels as if it were written in response to President Donald Trump’s first week of executive orders this past January rather than, as is actually the case, in response to the travel ban he imposed eight years ago. These plays may be even more resonant than their authors imagined they would be when they started to write them but, from the outset, their impetus was to find the frustrating, the bewildering, the nuanced and the human in our contemporary political landscape.What’s jolting at this moment, though, is how little those works seem like outliers. In the past year, we’ve had revivals that felt explicitly framed to reflect current concerns, like Amy Herzog’s reconception of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 “An Enemy of the People” as a battle between principled health activism and rapacious capitalism, and the recent deconstruction “Show/Boat: A River,” which reshaped the 1927 musical into a kind of staged essay on the subject of its own racism. We’ve had revivals that read as political because of umbrage taken at their casting: What does it mean to have Audra McDonald play a Black Madam Rose in “Gypsy,” originally staged in 1959, and what does it mean if you insist that that choice, of all choices, violates the supposed principle of realism in musicals? And we’ve had new plays in which politics are baked into their very authorship: What does it mean to have the nonbinary artist Cole Escola create a star turn for themselves as Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!”? (Only good things.) A revival of a show that was never not political, the eve-of-the-Nazis musical “Cabaret” (1966) feels intensified in its implications in 2025, in part because Rebecca Frecknall’s immersive staging, more than past revivals, casts us, the audience, in the role of shamefully oblivious revelers, drinking and making merry in a Berlin nightclub as a world of darkness looms outside and onstage. Even “Wicked,” 22 years into a Broadway run that will apparently outlast us all, has, in the wake of its hit movie adaptation, been rebranded as an anti-authoritarian cri de coeur.The counterargument to all this is essentially that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and that plenty of options remain for theatergoers who just want to have a good time (a notion that is always invoked as if work that engages with the world must be the opposite of that). So sure, if that’s your thing, go ahead: Enjoy the stripped-down version of the 1993 musical “Sunset Boulevard” — no, wait, damn it, there’s that impossible-standards-of-beauty-and-aging thing again — or the upcoming musical “Real Women Have Curves,” which … nope, that won’t work either. It’s hard not to conclude either that there are an awful lot of nails out there right now or that, this season, we’ve all become hammers.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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      7 Days in the Cultural Life of a Broadway Stage Manager

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      When he’s not herding performers at “Once Upon a Mattress,” Cody Renard Richard is bowling, catching up with theater friends and, to his surprise, bumping into Beyoncé.Cody Renard Richard is backstage at the Hudson Theater eight performances a week, wrangling actors and calling cues at “Once Upon a Mattress.”When he has free time, he crams in as many fashion shows, museum visits, board meetings, teaching gigs and other cultural events as possible.“My entire journey in New York is about trying new things and expanding my reach,” Richard, 36, who grew up in Waller, Texas, said in a phone conversation on a Monday, the one day of the week he isn’t working on “Mattress.”Richard has been stage managing since his teenage years, when he was a self-described “troublemaker” before his high school’s theater director, Carrie Wood, encouraged him to channel that energy into a role backstage.Richard at the Hudson Theater, the current home of “Once Upon a Mattress.” “Sometimes people wonder if it gets boring working on the same show every night, but I never do,” he said.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesHe’s now managed nearly 50 television, opera and stage productions in New York, including the MTV Video Music Awards, the Broadway productions of “Lempicka” and “Sweeney Todd,” and “Ragtime” at New York City Center earlier this month. He’s next headed to Los Angeles, where he’ll oversee a monthlong “Mattress” run.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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      Review: A Vocally Splendid ‘Ragtime’ Raises the Roof

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      Joshua Henry stars in an exhilarating gala revival of the 1998 musical about nothing less than the harmony and discord of America.To say that a singer blows the roof off a theater, as Joshua Henry does in the revival of “Ragtime” that opened at New York City Center on Wednesday, is to understate what great musical performers do. It’s not a matter of so-called pyrotechnics, as if their vocal cords were dynamite sticks. Nor is it a matter of volume, so easily finessed these days. Also beside the point are ultrahigh notes and curlicue riffs, which are too often signs of not enough to sing.As it happens, Henry offers all those things almost incidentally in this exhilarating gala presentation directed by Lear deBessonet. But what makes his performance as the tragic Coalhouse Walker Jr. so heart-filling and eye-opening, even if you know the musical and have some issues with it, as I do, is the density of emotion he packs into each phrase. Well beyond absorbing the aspirations and travails of the character created by E.L. Doctorow for the 1975 novel on which the show is based, he seems to have become the novel itself. He’s a condensed classic; he blows the roof off your head.He is aided by songs that, though built from nuances of story, grow to the full scale of Broadway — not an easy act to pull off and not in fact pulled off consistently here. But especially in the first act, the music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, for whom “Ragtime” was a breakthrough hit in 1998, smartly express national themes in domestic contexts. Working with Terrence McNally, who shaped the unusually complex book from the highly eventful novel, they offer a boatload of songs in distinctive styles for the story’s three worlds, all intersecting in and around New York City during the first decade of the 20th century.From left: Matthew Lamb, Caissie Levy, Tabitha Lawing and Brandon Uranowitz in the revival, directed by Lear deBessonet. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf that’s programmatic, it’s also a useful tool and metaphor. An upper-middle-class white family in New Rochelle sings in a classical vein derived from Western European operetta. Immigrants arriving in Lower Manhattan by the thousands — and particularly a Jewish artist called Tateh — bring the sounds of the shtetl with them. Coalhouse, a pianist and composer, represents the aspirations of a Harlem-based Black population with a beguiling, sorrowful, assertive “new music”: ragtime.No wonder deBessonet begins the show with a spotlit piano: “Ragtime” is fundamentally about the shared dream of American harmony, even if reality delivers only discord. Fittingly then, this Encores!-adjacent production emphasizes the singing of the 33-person cast and 28-person orchestra, under the direction of James Moore, rather than the overblown hoopla of the 1998 production, which featured fireworks and a Model T Ford. The choral work — Flaherty wrote the vocal arrangements — is thrilling.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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      Lincoln Center Theater Chooses Lear deBessonet as Artistic Director

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      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’

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      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

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      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

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      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

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      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

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      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