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    Shakespeare to Hit the Road While Central Park Theater Is Closed

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    The Delacorte is being renovated, so this summer will instead bring a mobile production and then a filmed play to outdoor sites in the city’s five boroughs.Free Shakespeare in the Park, one of the longtime treasures of summer in New York City, will be smaller-scale and itinerant this year because a gut renovation of the program’s Central Park home is underway.The Public Theater, the nonprofit organization that presents the annual Shakespeare festival, announced Tuesday that, instead of its usual large-scale productions at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, this year it would send a smaller production of “The Comedy of Errors” to parks and plazas around the city between Memorial Day and the end of June, followed by outdoor screenings of a filmed production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in July, August and early September.The production of “The Comedy of Errors” is a 90-minute bilingual musical adaptation from the director Rebecca Martinez and the composer Julian Mesri that the Public staged last year at city parks and recreation centers as part of the theater’s mobile unit. This summer’s five-week touring production will have a slightly larger company, and will visit some larger venues than last year’s production. It will start in Manhattan, with a week on a plaza in front of the New York Public Library’s flagship building in Bryant Park, followed by a series of dates at Hudson Yards and other locations in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island. All performances will be free.“It’s not a replacement for the Delacorte — it’s not intended to be a replacement — but my hope is that it will be successful enough as an experiment that this expanded version of what the mobile unit does can keep going indefinitely,” Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, said in an interview.The filmed production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” directed by Kenny Leon and starring Danielle Brooks and Grantham Coleman, was shot during a run in Central Park in 2019; it will be screened outdoors, free, at sites in all five boroughs.“Much Ado About Nothing,” filmed for the PBS series Great Performances, will also be among four Shakespeare in the Park productions that can be streamed online during May and June. The others are a 2023 production of “Hamlet,” a 2022 production of “Richard III” and a 2021 production called “Merry Wives.” Streaming the Great Performances films will be free.The Delacorte has been closed since last fall for a $78 million renovation. A groundbreaking was held in October and the project is scheduled to finish sometime next year, and the summer of 2025 is expected to include Shakespeare back in Central Park. More

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      Review: In Central Park, ‘The Tempest’ Sings Farewell to Magic

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      A joyful, bumpy musical version of Shakespeare’s late romance closes the Delacorte Theater before an 18-month renovation.“The isle is full of noises,” sings Caliban, and on Tuesday night it certainly was. Helicopters, radios, sirens and birdsong were competing to be heard in the Manhattan air.Yet all of them melted away, as they usually do, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where the Public Theater’s new musical version of “The Tempest” was giving its opening-night performance. (It runs only through Sunday.) The seventh in the Public’s series of Public Works productions, it will also be the last for the time being; this fall, the Delacorte begins much-needed renovations that will put it out of commission until 2025.“The Tempest” makes for a fitting farewell, having opened the series, in a different adaptation, in 2013. That “Tempest” introduced the innovative Public Works idea: civic theater made for everyone, with members of local community organizations performing alongside professional actors. This new “Tempest,” adapted by Benjamin Velez (whose songs are tuneful and sweet) and Laurie Woolery (whose staging is bumpy but joyous), continues the tradition but emphasizes a new note: the pang of goodbyes.The goodbyes are generally the same ones Shakespeare plotted around 1610. Prospero, a sorcerer living for 12 years in exile on an enchanted island, must forswear the magic that has helped him survive and, with it, his fury over the betrayal that landed him there. He must also release from servitude his chief sprite, Ariel, and his monstrous slave, Caliban. And when his daughter, Miranda, having little experience of men, falls for one who washes up on shore, Prospero, deferring to love, must give her up too.“Am I not the liar/If I deny her?” he sings in the oddly named “Log Man,” a highlight of the nine-song score.Actually, make that “she sings,” because in this production, Prospero, played by Renée Elise Goldsberry in gorgeous voice, is a woman, and not gratuitously so. Her interactions with Miranda are specific to her gender. “Innocence flies like the last gasp of summer/Childhood dies in the arms of a lover/And no one tries to hold on like a mother,” she notes in a later verse of “Log Man,” getting a big laugh on the inevitability of that last word.Renée Elise Goldsberry, as Prospero, knows how to shape a moment for maximum impact, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least for the first half of the 100-minute show, the Shakespeare is effectively translated to musical theater — perhaps not so surprising given that musical theater is in many ways a translation of Shakespearean templates to begin with. (Songs and monologues often do similar structural work.) Here, Velez’s poppy melodies and gentle slant rhymes usually serve a second function, crystallizing the themes in quickly recognizable and memorable gestures, as the harsh economy of musicals requires.So Prospero’s opening number, “Cast a Spell,” sets up her conflict instantly: She must “finally be free of the tempest in me.” When Miranda (Naomi Pierre) meets Ferdinand (Jordan Best), the Disneyesque “Vibin’ on to You” characterizes their instinctual infatuation in its first funky measure. A merry operetta drinking song (“A Fool Can Be King”) gives Joel Perez, as the soused clown Stephano, a rousing production number, and the song that introduces Sebastian (Tristan André) and Antonio (Anthony Chatmon II) might as well have “comic villain specialty” stamped on it.Of course, those villains aren’t so comic in the Shakespeare, where their threats recall the culture of deceit and violence bred by greed and politics. But that’s one of the trade-offs of Public Works. You do get to see charming nonprofessionals like Pierre (from the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, Brooklyn) work side-by-side with Broadway talent like Jo Lampert (who makes an acid-queen Ariel) and Theo Stockman (a piteous Caliban). But you’re not likely to see any of them get the chance to dig terribly deep.The production’s rushed second half shows why, as the late-night subway schedule bears down and the plot gets ruthlessly trimmed to beat it. We don’t miss the cut scenes so much as the connective tissue that might hold up what’s left. Also missed: the rich language that creates emotional context for a story that, with its spirits and spells, can otherwise seem almost inhuman.And though there’s a lovely finale called “A Thousand Blessings” — with members of Oyu Oro, an Afro-Cuban experimental dance ensemble, flooding the stage — the songs now come too close together to represent peaks of feeling. A landscape with only peaks is flat.Woolery, who leads Public Works and directed its terrific “As You Like It” in 2017, too often exacerbates that problem. With as many as 88 people moving about, plus five musicians in a tipped-over house remaindered from this summer’s “Hamlet” (the sets are by Alexis Distler), the stage can sometimes look like a busy airport instead of a nearly deserted island. And the clown scenes, so dependent on imaginative physical comedy, exceptional timing and an understanding of pathos, are not reliably funny.But one of the nice things about watching nonprofessionals in the limelight, especially the children, is that they don’t cover their excitement, which is funny (and moving) in itself. And one of the nice things about watching professionals in the limelight is that they know how to shape a moment for maximum impact.This is something Goldsberry does over and over, no more so than near the end, when Prospero must act on her insight that “the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.” As she breaks her magic staff in two, several feelings — fear, wonder, resolve — seem to scud across her face. Has she done right in making that choice?Has Public Works done right in making a similar one? Producing work that by traditional measures lacks polish, it has prioritized the virtue of engagement with actual people, and lots of them, over the secret magic known only to a few.As a critic, I feel obliged to ponder the trade-off. But as a citizen I have no doubts. Even in its lesser outings, Public Works makes its own kind of magic: a communitarian charm sorely missed these furious days. We need the series back in the park as soon as possible — albeit with better seats, more accessible bathrooms and raccoonless backstage facilities — to keep making beautiful music for our beleaguered isle of noises.The TempestThrough Sept. 3 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Ato Blankson-Wood on Playing a Hamlet Who ‘Leads With Love’

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      The actor is starring in a modern-dress production of the play through Aug. 6 at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.As a veteran of the Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in the Park productions, Ato Blankson-Wood is used to contending with the elements. “The bugs, the helicopters flying overhead: There’s an intense focus that is necessary,” he said.But for this summer’s production of “Hamlet,” he has had to dig deeper: Not only is he feeling the weight of the title role, but, as he put it, “the world is on fire” and air-quality issues have forced the cancellation of four “Hamlet” performances so far.Still, Blankson-Wood is undeterred.“I remember that there’s a person in that audience who is maybe seeing a play for the first time, or who was very excited to come see a show,” he said during a recent interview at a cafe in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. “That’s what I’m focused on. This is not about my experience, it’s for them, and for my scene partners.”This alfresco staging of “Hamlet,” directed by Kenny Leon, is Blankson-Wood’s fifth production at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. His first, “Hair,” in 2008, was also his New York professional stage debut. Then he played the narcissistic Orsino in “Twelfth Night” in 2018, and Orlando in “As You Like It,” in 2017 and 2022. He’s also had notable turns in more hospitable environments on Broadway and off, including his Tony-nominated run in “Slave Play.”The actor as Hamlet this summer at the Delacorte Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd as Gary, a man questioning his interracial relationship (with Dustin, played by James Cusati-Moyer, left) in “Slave Play” at Broadway’s Golden Theater in 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn Leon’s modern-dress production of “Hamlet,” Blankson-Wood opted for a contemporary take on the tragic prince: a sad boy dressed in military fatigues, flowy white shirts and a dark hoodie that he said the show’s costume designer, Jessica Jahn, created after learning of his inspiration.“I had this thought that our most Hamletian modern figure is Kanye West,” he said. “We witnessed him losing a parent in the public eye, he’s been called a genius, and he has behaved in ways where people are like, ‘Is he OK?’ I think it’s exciting to imagine his moments of uncertainty, what his soliloquies might be.”The actor, 38, said West’s recent controversies, are less interesting to him. Which is not surprising. In speaking with Blankson-Wood, the sense emerges of an artist with little time for psychic clutter. Each morning, he recites daily affirmations (one he goes back to, borrowed from his “Slave Play” character, is, in part, “I am the prize”) and makes sure to engage his body (workouts at the gym), mind (post-workout podcasts, like “Spark & Fire” or Oprah Winfrey’s “Super Soul Sunday”), and spirit (“morning meditation, in a section of my room where I have a little cushion, altar, and a remembrance of my grandmother”).“I like to engage with the spiritual world,” he said. “It’s a part of my understanding of life on this planet, so I have to touch that every day to center myself.” Since “Hamlet,” he’s added a nightly bubble bath.He came to the production after participating in a collaborative online reading of the play’s “To be or not to be” speech, which was performed by Black actors, and released in 2020 by the Public to coincide with the Juneteenth holiday that year. Leon, a consultant on the piece, said he was struck by the strength and softness of Blankson-Wood’s performance.“I get to purge emotionally every night,” Blankson-Wood said of playing a Hamlet who is begging to be understood. “I can take bits of my day and pour it in there to release, if I need to.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“When it came time to cast Hamlet, I wanted to tell it through the eyes of the young people who felt hurt, betrayed, and unloved in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder,” Leon said in a phone call. “Like Ato, this Hamlet leads with love, and is begging to be understood. We talked a lot about the mental health issues that young people are dealing with, because I wanted this production to have some hope, small as it is, by the end.”Leon made a deal with the cast: Once the Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro completed his edits, the actors would be allowed to add lines back in — though they would need to give up some of their own in exchange. The approach helped trim the five-hour play to two hours and 45 minutes, excising the military and royal aspects to focus on the family dynamics.“We’ve been talking a lot about how Shakespeare is often cut by academics, and sometimes I wonder if there would be a benefit to it being cut by artists; seeing what’s really necessary from an actor’s standpoint,” Blankson-Wood said. “I have my issues with this cut. A lot of the meta-theatricality is gone, and that’s one of the things I love about the character, like his line about holding a mirror up to nature. I did fight to get some things back.”The actor added that Leon’s “fiery” technique, on and off the page, took some getting used to, but credited Leon with pushing him further than he thought he could go. (In his review for The Times, the theater critic Jesse Green credited his performance with bringing “a vivid anger to the role.”)“I get to purge emotionally every night,” he continued. “I can take bits of my day and pour it in there to release, if I need to, and I knew this production would be good for that.”His love of theater, and his drive to define his relationship to it, extends to his childhood.Born the middle of five siblings in Silver Spring, Md., to two Ghanaian immigrants, Blankson-Wood grew up watching movie musicals with his mother. While his home was “culturally, very traditionally Ghanaian,” he said musicals created a cultural bridge to his American interests, which led to acting.He studied acting at New York University and was soon cast as a member of the tribe in a production of “Hair” at the Delacorte — which, coincidentally, shared the 2008 summer season with another “Hamlet,” starring Michael Stuhlbarg. He remained with “Hair” when it transferred to Broadway and then London’s West End but, following a run in the 2011 musical “Lysistrata Jones,” the actor said he felt a gap, “between the work I was doing and what I felt I was capable of.”“The ethos and energy behind commercial musical theater feels like it is really about the product,” he explained. “I don’t think that’s good or bad, but I do think my interests are always in process and craft, which I feel are more valued in plays. That’s where the impulse to go to grad school came from.”“I now really understand what it means to take ownership of my process,” the actor said, “and have found my voice in that way.”Elias Williams for The New York TimesHe enrolled in the Yale School of Drama, where he became friends with James Cusati-Moyer (who would later be his “Slave Play” scene partner). The two became “like a traveling act: this duo that everyone knew of,” Cusati-Moyer said. “And then we started doing drag together.”In 2013, they performed in Yale Cabaret’s inaugural “Yale School of Drag” show as well as a drag play written by their classmates — titled “We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun” — which later had a 2016 presentation in Brooklyn. Blankson-Wood couldn’t reprise his role; he was giving what Charles Isherwood described as a breakout performance in “The Total Bent” at the Public. His replacement? An incoming Yalie named Jeremy O. Harris.The three became friends, and Harris took inspiration from the friendship of the other two as he developed the characters of Gary and Dustin, one of three interracial couples undergoing dubious sex therapy in “Slave Play.”“We had to navigate very difficult territory, as these characters were inspired by us, but were specifically not Ato and I,” Cusati-Moyer said. “But there’s no one else I can imagine doing that role with. He brings every corner of his heart, and that comes with an innate care and appreciation for his own work, as well as the work of those around him.”The show opened on Broadway in 2019 and garnered 12 Tony nominations, including nods for both actors; Harris; and the director Robert O’Hara, who later directed Blankson-Wood in a 2022 Covid-era adaptation of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” at the Minetta Lane Theater.“I’m not necessarily drawn to these internal, isolating roles, but something happened when I went to grad school where it felt like a faucet turned on, and emotional availability became my go-to,” Blankson-Wood said.After “Slave Play,” he continued, “I was very aware of my inherent value, because that’s the journey my character was on. I now really understand what it means to take ownership of my process, and have found my voice in that way.“After that, and ‘Long Day’s,’ and this, I’m ready for something that has levity and is heart-forward.” More

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      Review: This ‘Hamlet’ Under the Stars Is No Walk in the Park

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      The Public Theater’s alfresco production has plenty to offer audiences who know the play already. But it may not be so easy for newcomers.For those who remember the 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Much Ado About Nothing” — as I do, fondly — the sight that awaits them at this summer’s “Hamlet” in the same location is disturbing.Entering the Delacorte Theater, you are immediately faced with what looks like a copy of the earlier show’s set, which depicted the handsome grounds of a grand home in a Black suburb of Atlanta. But now it is utterly ruined. The facade is atilt, the S.U.V. tipped nose-first in a puddle, the Stacey Abrams for President banner torn down and in tatters. The flagpole bearing the Stars and Stripes sticks out of the ground at a precipitous angle, like a javelin that made a bad landing.For the director Kenny Leon and the scenic designer Beowulf Boritt, both returning for this “Hamlet” — the Public Theater’s fifth in the park since 1964 and 13th overall — it’s a coup de théâtre, if an odd one. However smartly the setting provokes a shiver of dread in those who recognize it, and dread is certainly apt for a play in which nine of the main characters die, it can only produce a shrug from anyone else. An approach that had been designed to welcome audiences to a new way of looking at Shakespeare in 2019 now seems destined to exclude them.I’m afraid the same holds for the production overall: It is full of insight and echoes for those already in the know, and features lovely songs (by Jason Michael Webb) and a few fine performances that anyone can enjoy. (Ato Blankson-Wood brings a vivid anger to the title role.) But this “Hamlet” has been placed in a frame that doesn’t match what the production actually delivers, leaving me glad to have seen it but wishing for something more congruent.Part of the problem is that the frame — both Black and military as in Leon’s “Much Ado” — is so prominent at the start and irrelevant thereafter. Instead of beginning the play as written, with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Leon stages his funeral as a prologue, with Marine Corps pallbearers, a praise team singing settings of Bible verses and Ophelia (Solea Pfeiffer) channeling Beyoncé.Only after this welcoming opening do we get the awful scenes in which the dead king, appearing to Hamlet, urges revenge on the brother who murdered him and then married his wife. As his giant funeral portrait comes to life through psychedelic special effects, Hamlet confusingly lip-syncs his beyond-the-grave voice, provided by Samuel L. Jackson in Darth Vader mode.But don’t be misled by that martial tone, any more than by the set, the Marines and the military cut of Jessica Jahn’s costumes for the men. (For the women they are colorful and gorgeous.) The war story they seem to promise is not in fact told in this production, as almost all the material concerning Denmark’s beef with Norway, and the consequent need to assure the royal succession, has been cut.Well, something had to be. Uncut, “Hamlet,” the longest of Shakespeare’s plays, would likely run more than four hours without an intermission; here it’s two hours and 45 minutes with one. How different directors make the trims is, in effect, their interpretation. Is the play a dysfunctional family melodrama? A moral inquiry into suicide and murder? A satire of royal courts and courtiers? All are in there.Leon focuses on the interior drama of Hamlet himself, inevitable when you cherry-pick the famous soliloquies. Blankson-Wood delivers them well, if not yet with the easeful expression that turns them into free-flowing thoughts-as-actions instead of words, words, words to be worked on.Still, because the soliloquies follow each other so closely, giving the staging the herky-jerky feeling of a musical without enough book, we get a clear sense of his Hamlet as someone whose interiority and sullenness precede the excuse of his father’s murder. You are not surprised when he turns Bad Boyfriend on Ophelia after (accidentally) killing her father. Ophelia herself is hoist with the same petard. Her descent into insanity, never clearly delineated in the text, is even more sudden with the cuts taken.Something similar happens to many of the other characters, like the interchangeably bro-y Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who make a first impression then all but disappear. The Players are similarly reduced, their version of “The Mousetrap,” with which Hamlet intends to “catch the conscience of the king” now a mime show. And Horatio barely seems to show up in the first place, even though he’s the character Shakespeare leaves standing at the end: enjoined, as Hamlet says dying, to “tell my story.”The show recreates the set from the 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” which depicted the grounds of a home in a Black suburb of Atlanta, but now utterly ruined.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf that story is a bit foggy in this production, others are absolutely clear. As Claudius, John Douglas Thompson brings his usual grave authority to bear but also a fascinating note of insecurity that helps explain the character’s ruthlessness. Daniel Pearce makes of Polonius a hilariously pedantic desk jockey and bad idea bear. (The downside: You don’t mind when he gets knifed.) In Nick Rehberger’s rendering of Laertes, the character’s grief, fury and forgiveness all ring true, even though, as cut, they are nearly simultaneous.And Lorraine Toussaint is an exceptionally subtle, emotionally intelligent Gertrude, grieving her husband’s death but alert to the necessity of loving his killer. For me, she is the center of this production’s tragedy, giving fullest expression to Claudius’s observation that “When sorrows come, they come not single spies,/But in battalions.”That’s an unusual path to cut through the play, but having seen it so many times, I’m happy to go for a ride on its less-traveled roads. Throughout this production I heard arresting poetry I’d somehow missed before (“a pair of reechy kisses”) and saw old ideas revivified by bright new details. (When Polonius sends Laertes off with his tired advice, he also slips him an N95 mask, as other fathers might slip their child condoms.)Yet I worried that those less familiar with “Hamlet,” let alone those more invested in a traditional rendition, would be left unanchored on its heaving sea of meaning. Though performed, and often well, under the open sky of Central Park, its thoughts (as Claudius says) “never to heaven go.” They’re atilt like the house, and, like that javelin, too strangely angled.HamletThrough Aug. 6 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Alicia Keys Is Making a Musical. Her Own Life Inspired the Story.

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      The show is a highlight of the Public Theater’s new season, which will also include plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, Itamar Moses, Mary Kathryn Nagle and Ife Olujobi.For more than a decade, Alicia Keys has been quietly developing a musical inspired by her own turbulent adolescence growing up among artists in New York City. Now that musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” is almost ready for viewing: It will be staged this fall at the Public Theater, the downtown nonprofit where “A Chorus Line” and “Hamilton” were born.By any measure, the musical will be big: It has a cast of 20, the biggest budget of any show the Public has ever done, and, of course, music by Keys, an R&B and pop singer who has sold tens of millions of records. The show will feature some of Keys’s best known songs, as well as new material she has written for the musical.“This is my pride and joy,” she said in an interview. “This is a major, major turning point in my journey.”“Hell’s Kitchen” doesn’t precisely track the events of Keys’s own life, but there are strong parallels. Set in the 1990s, it takes place over a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali, who is being raised by a single mother in Manhattan Plaza, a large housing complex where many of the residents are performing artists; there is family tension, sexual exploration and musical discovery. (Ali, like Keys, is transformed by a passion for piano.)Keys has been deeply involved with the show’s development, and her own production company has the commercial rights to whatever life the show might have beyond the Public. “I’m never hands off,” Keys said. “There’s not one page, there’s not one sheet, there’s not one word, there’s not one song, there’s not one melody, there’s not anything that happens in this piece that moves without me completely immersed in it and ensuring its authenticity.”The musical was Keys’s idea, and in 2011 she selected the playwright Kristoffer Diaz (“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity”) to write its book; in 2018, the two asked Michael Greif (“Rent”) to join the project as director, and Greif then brought it to the Public.“It’s very much about a young woman testing boundaries,” Greif said. “It’s a story about a series of collisions she has with very important people in her life when she’s 17, and how those collisions affect the person she was to become.”“Hell’s Kitchen” is scheduled to begin previews Oct. 24 and to open Nov. 19. An emerging actor named Maleah Joi Moon will play Ali; her mother will be played by Shoshana Bean (“Wicked”), and her estranged father will be played by Brandon Victor Dixon (“Hamilton”); Camille A. Brown will choreograph.The Public is already planning to stage “Hamlet” this summer, directed by Kenny Leon and starring Ato Blankson-Wood, as its sole Free Shakespeare in the Park production, but now will follow that with a new Public Works adaptation of “The Tempest,” with songs by Benjamin Velez and directed by Laurie Woolery. The Public Works program, which stages musical adaptations of classics featuring a handful of professional actors and a large ensemble of amateur New York City performers, began in 2013 with a different adaptation of “The Tempest.”“The Tempest” will be the final production at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park until 2025; the Public is trying to figure out whether and where it might stage a production next summer while the Delacorte is being renovated.In October, the Public will partner with NYU Skirball to present three Seán O’Casey plays staged by Ireland’s Druid theater.Starting in November at its downtown theater, the Public plans to stage “Manahatta,” a play that connects Manhattan’s Native American history with its contemporary finance industry, written by Mary Kathryn Nagle and directed by Woolery. That will be followed in February by “The Ally,” written by Itamar Moses and directed by Lila Neugebauer, starring Josh Radnor as an atheistic Jew whose social justice commitments are complicated by Middle East politics. In March comes “Sally & Tom,” written by Suzan-Lori Parks and directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, about a contemporary theater company trying to do a play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. And in April is “Jordans,” written by Ife Olujobi and directed by Whitney White, a comedy about Blackness in an overwhelmingly white workplace.One thing the Public will not be doing: presenting its previously annual Under the Radar Festival of experimental work. “It’s entirely a financial decision,” said Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director. “This does not mean the Public is abandoning its relationship with downtown experimental artists, but we’re going to be looking for a new way of embodying that.” More

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      Shakespeare in the Park Will Stage ‘Hamlet’ This Summer

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      Ato Blankson-Wood will star as the aggrieved prince in a modern-dress production directed by Kenny Leon.Winter has just begun in New York, but already the Public Theater is looking toward summer: The nonprofit announced on Thursday that in June it would begin presenting an extended run of Shakespeare’s great tragedy “Hamlet” in Central Park.The production, which will be the fifth “Hamlet” in the 61 years of Free Shakespeare in the Park, will star Ato Blankson-Wood, a 38-year-old actor who was a member of the ensemble in a production of “Hair” in the park in 2008, and who has since starred there in musical adaptations of “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It.” In 2020, Blankson-Wood was nominated for a Tony Award for “Slave Play.”Kenny Leon, a much-in-demand director who this season directed revivals of “Topdog/Underdog” and “Ohio State Murders” on Broadway, will helm the production, returning to the park after winning plaudits for his direction of “Much Ado About Nothing” during the summer of 2019.“Hamlet” will be the only show in the park this summer — a reduction from the usual two-show schedule prompted by plans to renovate the Delacorte Theater, the open-air amphitheater where Free Shakespeare in the Park takes place. “Hamlet” will run for nine weeks, from June 8 to Aug. 6, after which the major renovation work is expected to begin; this winter, work in some ancillary areas is already underway.The Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said he had been so impressed by Leon’s work on “Much Ado” that he asked him to pick a play he wanted to do next, and they settled on “Hamlet.” “It’s the greatest play ever written,” Eustis said, “so let’s give him a crack at Everest.”Eustis also said he had high hopes for Blankson-Wood. “He’s a gorgeously charismatic performer, and the complexity of his inner life, and his ability to connect with an audience, is going to make him an extraordinary Hamlet,” he said. (Blankson-Wood has a background in musical theater, and the credits for this “Hamlet” include music composition by Jason Michael Webb. “I suspect his beautiful singing voice will not be completely wasted,” Eustis said of Blankson-Wood.)Eustis said that the production would “have a contemporary feel,” but that the exact time and place where it will be set have not yet been determined. He said the cast would be diverse, but that it was “absolutely meaningful to Kenny and to me that our Hamlet is a young Black man who is torn between ideals of revenge and violence and ideals of forgiveness and understanding and even rationality, and in the pairing between those things is finding himself paralyzed.”Eustis said his thinking about “Hamlet” had been influenced by “Fat Ham,” the most recent Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, which is a riff on the Shakespeare play set in the American South, and which will be running on Broadway this spring, produced in part by the Public. “I’m sure hoping that we’re going to be running ‘Fat Ham’ and ‘Hamlet’ at the same time,” Eustis said, “because those two plays talk to each other in a most beautiful way.”In prepandemic years, the Shakespeare in the Park season was followed by a short-run Public Works production, usually on or around Labor Day weekend, which was a musical adaptation of a classic story employing a mix of professional and amateur actors. The last new Public Works production there was “Hercules,” in 2019, but Eustis said there were three in development. He said he expected there would be a Public Works production staged this summer, although he did not yet know when or where it would take place. More

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      Review: Finding Community in ‘As You Like It’

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      This shimmering Shakespeare adaptation at the Delacorte Theater retains the outline of the original, while making space for songs. You don’t have to sing along, though you may want to.The Forest of Arden is where you head when the city won’t hold you. When laws are unjust, when custom constricts, when institutions squeeze and shrink you, here, at last, is space to breathe and to be. Manhattan razed its woodlands long ago, of course. (A lone stand of trees, in Inwood Hill Park, remains.) But on a summer night, in Central Park, squint a little and you can imagine a forest here — the refuge, the bounty, the hush.You won’t have to squint hard at “As You Like It,” the shimmering Shakespeare adaptation at the Delacorte Theater, courtesy of Public Works. Adapted by Laurie Woolery, who directs, and the singer-songwriter Shaina Taub, who provides the music and lyrics, this easeful, intentional show bestows the pleasures typical of a Shakespeare comedy — adventure, disguise, multiple marriages, pentameter for days. And, in just 90 minutes, it unites its dozens of actors and its hundreds of audience members as citizens of the same joyful community.Taub and Woolery’s adaptation retains the outline of the original, while shortening and tightening the talkier bits, making space for songs. Rosalind (Rebecca Naomi Jones), the daughter of the exiled Duke Senior (Darius De Haas), falls instantly for Orlando (Ato Blankson-Wood), the younger son of a dead nobleman. Threatened by the current Duke (Eric Pierre), they flee, with friends and servants, to the Forest of Arden, where Duke Senior has formed an alternate, more egalitarian court.Taub has cast herself as Jaques, the emo philosopher, who opens the show with the limpid ballad, “All the World’s a Stage,” singing: “All the world’s a stage/And everybody’s in the show/Nobody’s a pro.”These lyrics do a lot of work, work that transcends paraphrase. “As You Like It” is a production of Public Works, a division of the Public Theater that partners with community groups. So the song serves as a kind of pre-emptive apology, an acknowledgment of amateurism. Yet the lines function as an invitation, too, an inducement to imagine yourself as part of the show, to join in its creation. A big ask? Maybe. On a breeze-soothed evening, with the city quieted and the lights aglow, it won’t feel that way. And for those who blench and tremble at the thought of audience participation, take a breath. You don’t even have to sing along, though you may want to.I first saw “As You Like It” during a short run at the Delacorte Theater in the summer of 2017, after the travel bans had been instituted, but before the widespread adoption of the Trump administration’s family separation policy. All scrolling felt like doom scrolling then; to open the morning paper was to start the day with some fresh horror. Things could — and did — get worse. I remember experiencing the show, profoundly and with some tears, as a temporary respite.From left, Idania Quezada, Christopher M. Ramirez and Rebecca Naomi Jones in the Public Works adaptation of “As You Like It” at the Delacorte Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo revisit it now, when disaster seems less immediate, is to relax into the brisk pleasure of the work. Jones, an actress with a voice of steel and sweetness, like a knife baked into a birthday cake, is a dynamic Rosalind. And if you admired Blankson-Wood in “Slave Play,” you will enjoy his playful turn here, as in the exuberant R&B number, “Will U Be My Bride.” But the show’s success owes less to any individual performer than to the generous and sociable whole. Taub’s lyrics are simple, but it takes effort to write lines that feel effortless. The same goes for Sonya Tayeh’s fluid choreography, restaged by Billy Griffin and achievable for all kinds of bodies, and Woolery’s insouciant use of stage space.The stage itself has an oddly flimsy set, by Myung Hee Cho, a turntable dotted with trees that don’t look a lot like trees. But Emilio Sosa’s costumes and Isabella Byrd’s lights provide happy splashes of color. James Ortiz designed the deer puppets; if they lack the emotional heft of the cow he designed for the current revival of “Into the Woods,” well, you can’t have everything. That “Into the Woods” revival is directed by Lear deBessonet, who inaugurated Public Works, which Woolery now leads. Small wonder then, but wonder all the same, that the two most joyous shows in New York right now, the two most engaged with questions of community and duty and care, have this shared maternity.If “As You Like It” succeeds as entertainment — and it does, fluently, enough to make you wonder if Shakespeare in the Park should stick to comedies and musicals and maybe the occasional romance — it articulates and answers graver concerns. There is a persistent fear in American politics that to grant freedom is to invite anarchy. “As You Like It” offers another possibility. There is no rule of law in the Forest of Arden. But rather than descend into riot, its inhabitants practice mutual aid. They live in harmony, figuratively and — when De Haas swoops over and around the melody — literally.This confirms Woolery and Taub’s adaptation as a kind of thought experiment: What might happen if a community were free to determine its own best principles and practices? Because “As You Like It” swells its cast with the members of partner organizations — Domestic Workers United, Military Resilience Foundation and Children’s Aid, among them — the show is also proof of concept. There is hierarchy here, of course. The direction is by Woolery alone and the folks with Equity cards occupy the prime roles. (To put the lie to Taub’s lyrics, somebody’s a pro.)But if the theater were really made welcoming and accessible to all, this is what it might manifest — a stage bursting with performers diverse in age, race, size, habit and circumstance, an audience distributed across a similar spectrum. “As You Like It” offers that rare thing — a New York theater that looks like the city itself and feels like a promise of what the city, at its best, could be.What a feat that is. And what a gift. So go ahead. Wait in line and then walk to the theater through the canopy of trees. Shelter here awhile.As You Like ItThrough Sept. 11 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      With ‘As You Like It,’ Public Works Aims for a Reflection of Humanity

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      The musical adaptation, part of Free Shakespeare in the Park, is a remounting of an acclaimed production that had a short run in 2017.Eric Pierre, a pastor who teaches fifth-grade English in the Bronx, has taken up an additional title this summer: royal duke. At least that’s the role he’s playing onstage in the Public Works production of “As You Like It.”He’s one of dozens of community members, ages 7 to 81 and from all five boroughs, performing alongside several professional actors in the 90-minute musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy. The show, now in previews, is set to open on Tuesday at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.Pierre plays the cruel Duke Frederick, who banishes his brother, among others, to the Forest of Arden in this tale of camouflage, love and self discovery.The role was not a natural fit for Pierre, who described the difficulty of channeling his nefarious character and trying to identify the pain associated with his quest for power. “We all have a Duke Fred inside of us,” said Pierre, 49, who, through his Public Works performances, has been able to join Equity, the professional actors’ union.The show’s composer and lyricist Shaina Taub, center, also stars as Jaques.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis production, a remounting of an acclaimed one that ran in 2017, is part of the Public Theater’s Public Works program, which has produced streamlined and musicalized versions of works — like “The Tempest” in 2013 and “Hercules” in 2019 — that feature amateur performers from eight partner groups, including the Fortune Society and Children’s Aid Society. These productions usually have a short run in September after the regular season of Shakespeare in the Park. But this one was scheduled to have a longer run during the summer of 2020, before being delayed by the pandemic. Now, it is finally onstage, through Sept. 11, as Public Works celebrates its 10th anniversary.Laurie Woolery, the director of the show and Public Works, called the diverse experiences and authenticity of the community cast members their secret sauce.“Theater is a reflection of humanity,” Woolery said, “and if we only reflect a portion of humanity, we aren’t doing our job as cultural workers and citizen artists. We need to be speaking to the world that we’re living in — and that includes everybody.”As the musical begins, families of twos and threes — made up of the community performers — walk on a stage filled with cherry blossom trees and a bridge illuminated by a violet-purple light. Shaina Taub, the show’s composer and lyricist, also appears onstage as an inquisitive yet cynical Jaques who provides a bird’s-eye view and additional context for audience members. As she sings “All the World’s a Stage,” her character contemplates the journeys of the young lovers Orlando and Rosalind (played by Ato Blankson-Wood and Rebecca Naomi Jones, well-known professional actors returning to the roles they played in the 2017 production) to their authentic selves as they shed their disguises.“A process of healing and growth is letting go of all those expectations of the role you’re supposed to play,” Taub said.Ato Blankson-Wood as Orlando, fighting a lion in the Forest of Arden.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe musical drives home themes of love and optimism, a message especially important amid social division, disease and unrest, Taub said.“Still, we’re going to get together and sing and dance on the stage of the Delacorte,” she added. “Still, we’re going to show up every day and tell the story and be kind to each other. It really feels like this beautiful act of resistance.”One of the other community performers, Lori Brown-Niang, who has also obtained an Equity card, has built a second family with Public Works over the last decade. She said she remembered feeling relieved when women from Domestic Workers United, a partner organization that uplifts and mobilizes domestic workers of color, watched over her young son, JonPaul Niang, as she rehearsed her speaking roles. In other instances, her son, whom she described as a “good mover,” worked with older cast members on the dance moves and continued rehearsals in their Bronx backyard.“Are we doing this?” Brown-Niang recalled having asked her son. “Yes, Mommy, we have to get used to singing and dancing outside.”In “As You Like It,” Brown-Niang and her son, now an 18-year-old Hostos Community College sophomore, are working together as puppeteers steering the head and front leg of a lion who challenges Orlando in the Forest of Arden.“It’s been a blessing to be able to raise my son, as a single mother, in this community,” she said.Nestor Eversley joined Public Works this year as a member of the Fortune Society, a partner organization that helps the formerly incarcerated re-enter society. Eversley, who was incarcerated for 17 years, became interested in the Public Works program after watching its 2019 production of “Hercules” and said he wondered what it would feel like to step onstage. (He admits underestimating the time commitment for rehearsals.)“In the streets, you have to be defensive, watch your back, all that kind of stuff,” Eversley said. “Here, it’s a different world.”In a pristine white suit, Eversley emerges as an older version of Orlando, marrying an older version of Rosalind. The two walk unified, showing off their defiant, timeless love, below a decorative arch.In the final number, the stage is bathed in a rainbow of colors, with cast members swaying while singing “Still I Will Love.” It’s a lively celebration and testament to the power of community strength and devotion.“Hopefully people leave the theater with their hearts a little more open,” Woolery said. More

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      Review: Danai Gurira Makes a Sleek Supervillain of Richard III

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      At Shakespeare in the Park, athletic stamina and action-hero charisma muddy the meaning of a play about disability.Richard of Gloucester may be the killingest character in Shakespeare, personally knocking off or precipitating the deaths of more than a dozen people who get in his way. To be fair, he does so over the course of three plays, while top competitors like Macbeth and Titus Andronicus have just one.Still, lacking a prophecy, a particular vengeance or a bloody-minded wife to flesh out his motives, Richard remains the most mysterious in his evil; to make a success of the fabulous mess that is “Richard III,” you must decide what to do about that.The tonally wobbly and workmanlike revival that opened on Sunday at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park doesn’t decide. Whether Richard chooses his evil in reaction to the world’s revulsion — a “lump of foul deformity” is one of the nicer descriptions of him — or whether he was merely born to be bad is a question the Public Theater production, starring the tireless Danai Gurira as Richard, does not reach. We never learn what Richard means by the word “determined” when, in his first speech, he says that “since I cannot prove a lover/I am determined to prove a villain.” Is he bent on villainy, or was he pre-bent?Actually, in Robert O’Hara’s staging, that speech no longer comes first. In a sign that he will focus on action and not psychology, O’Hara instead opens with the gruesome final scene of “Henry VI, Part III,” the immediately preceding play in Shakespeare’s chronicle of 15th-century royal intrigue. In O’Hara’s characteristically droll take on awfulness, Richard coolly stabs King Henry to death, for good measure stuffing the corpse’s mouth with the royal pennant and wiping his knife on it too.As a means of showing us that Richard intends to replace the Lancasters on the throne with the Yorks — including, as soon as possible, himself — this is highly effective. And Gurira, the fierce General Okoye of the “Black Panther” films, certainly never disappoints as an action hero. Looking like a supervillain in black knee-high boots and stretch denim trousers, with her hair shaved into heraldic patterns, she is unflaggingly energetic, vocally thrilling and, as events become more hectic, more and more convincing.But for much of the play, the flash and fury of her performance, with its surface swagger and glary stares, too often feel like decoys. As Richard schemes his way from the sidelines to the throne, dispatching two young princes along the way, we get his gall but not his emotion, even as his words tell us that he understands the monstrousness of his methods. “Was ever woman in this humor wooed?” he asks after proposing marriage to Lady Anne, whose husband he has just murdered. As staged by O’Hara, the seduction is humorous in the comic sense too, involving a trick knife, a humongous ring, and a moment when Richard, sitting on the corner of the bier, brushes some part of the inconvenient body aside as if it were a crumb.From left, Richard’s aggrieved mother, the Duchess of York (Monique Holt), with Anne (Ali Stroker) and the ensemble member Thaddeus S. Fitzpatrick in “Richard III.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd bodies, not just body counts, are crucial in “Richard III.” It’s worth noting that Ali Stroker, this production’s Anne, uses a wheelchair. Richard’s aggrieved mother, the Duchess of York (Monique Holt), uses sign language. So does one of the assassins, played by Maleni Chaitoo. Gregg Mozgala, in two important roles — Edward IV, who succeeds the dead Henry, and Richmond, the play’s hero, who eventually kills Richard — has cerebral palsy.Though they all have excellent moments, the admirably diverse casting only underlines for me the problem of a Richard who is not disabled. For centuries, of course, that has been the norm; mostly the role has been played by actors sporting more-or-less absurd humps, lumps, prostheses and braces to simulate the “bunch-back’d toad” described in the text. When Arthur Hughes, an actor with radial dysplasia, took the role at the Royal Shakespeare Company this summer, he was thought to be the first disabled person ever to do so at that theater.It is nice to dream of a time when disabled actors are employed so frequently, and in so many kinds of roles, that we need not discourage others from playing this one. And it’s true that the historical Richard probably suffered from nothing more than scoliosis, as an analysis of his recently discovered skeleton suggests. Shakespeare, I’ve said before, was a poet, not an osteopath.But what was once the norm can now seem a kind of ableist mummery, which this production attempts to sidestep by offering a Richard with no physical impairments at all. When other characters, and even the man himself, scorn his disabilities and mock his ugliness, we are forced by the evidence of our senses to treat the derision metaphorically. (Richard, we tell ourselves, is morally toadlike, not physically so.) And though I usually enjoy being asked to see familiar characters in unfamiliar skins, in this case the sidestep blocks access to the deepest elements of the drama.Those elements are what keep the otherwise ragged “Richard III” in the repertory. The verse is extraordinarily pungent and the questions obviously eternal. When a production has us asking to what extent Richard’s evil is the product of people’s hatred of him, as opposed to his prior hatred of himself, it forces us to ask the same of our own leaders. In this season of our discontent, the scene in which Richard cynically holds up a Bible as a ginned-up crowd clamors to make him king is one you may find familiar.Though we don’t get to ask those profound questions in this production, there are nevertheless compensations. The staging itself is lovely, with Myung Hee Cho’s revolving circles of gothic arches speeding the action and suggesting the inexorability of Richard’s rise and fall. (The arches are lit in beautiful pinks and purples by Alex Jainchill.) Dede Ayite’s witty mixed-period costumes score sociological points at a glance, from Anne’s tacky trophy-wife regalia to the doomed young princes’ spangly gold sneakers.Glistening too are some of the performers in secondary roles, which, in this play, means all roles but Richard. Sanjit De Silva turns Buckingham, the king’s chief enabler, into a hopped-up hype man, high on the fumes of ambient amorality. Paul Niebanck makes a powerful impression as Richard’s brother George, who incorrectly believes he can talk his way out of anything. And as Queen Margaret, the widow of Henry, Sharon Washington demonstrates with brutal efficiency how specific hatred can soon become general, blistering everyone, even herself, in its path.But these coherently interpreted characters do not add up to a coherent interpretation of the play, which wobbles between shouty polemics and a kind of Tudor snark. It may be that “Richard III” is in that sense uninterpretable; written to flatter Shakespeare’s royal sponsors, who were descendants of the victorious Richmond, its brilliance has always borne the sour odor of propaganda. That sourness is not sweetened by the fact that, to modern noses, the good guys smell a lot like the bad ones. If history plays cannot untangle for us what history itself leaves a jumble, they should at least help us figure out why.Richard IIIThrough July 17 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More