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    A Night Out in New York With Sabrina Fuentes of the Band Pretty Sick

    Hitting New York’s East Village with Sabrina Fuentes, the 24-year-old frontwoman of the band Pretty Sick.It was a Tuesday night in June, and Sabrina Fuentes, the frontwoman of the band Pretty Sick, was about to make her usual Tuesday night rounds in Lower Manhattan. That meant hitting a bar or two with the idea of ending up at Studio 151, a sushi restaurant above the nightclub Nublu.As the night got started in earnest, Ms. Fuentes, 24, was having a glass of orange wine at a sidewalk table outside Time Again, a bar on Canal Street co-owned by the Queens rapper Despot, né Alec Reinstein. Ms. Fuentes was wearing low-cut Issey Miyake jeans, a black tank top and Repetto ballet flats. On her right shoulder was a temporary tattoo featuring a butterfly and the words “Bite me.”The actor Reza Nader joined her at the table. He mentioned that he had recently filmed a scene for an episode of “Law & Order: SVU.” Then he asked her for some advice on a problem he was having in his romantic life.Mr. Reinstein stopped by to ask Ms. Fuentes if she needed anything before turning his attention to the rapper Lil Yachty, who had arrived with a group of friends in a compact SUV.Ms. Fuentes is a lifelong Manhattan resident who lives with her parents on the Upper East Side. She formed Pretty Sick when she was a teenager, and its first album, “Makes Me Sick, Makes Me Smile,” came out in 2022. Pitchfork had nice things to say about it, though it took a slight dig at Ms. Fuentes for doing very little to disguise her musical influences (Nirvana, Hole, the Breeders, Blondie and Iggy Pop, among others).This month Pretty Sick is releasing an EP, “Streetwise.” At the same time Ms. Fuentes will put out a limited line of clothing, P.S. by Pretty Sick, to be sold on a website and in several Heaven by Marc Jacobs stores.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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    James Chance, No Wave and Punk-Funk Pioneer, Dies at 71

    With the Contortions and James White and the Blacks, the songwriter and saxophonist set out to challenge musicians and stir up audiences.James Chance, the singer, saxophonist and composer who melded punk, funk and free jazz into bristling dance music as the leader of the Contortions, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 71.His brother, David Siegfried, said Mr. Chance had been in declining health for years and succumbed to complications of gastrointestinal disease at the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in East Harlem.During the late 1970s explosion of punk culture in New York City, the Contortions were at the forefront of a style called no wave — music that set out to be as confrontational and radical in sound and performance as punk’s fashion and attitude were visually.Contortions songs like “I Can’t Stand Myself” and “Throw Me Away” filled the rhythmic structures of James Brown’s funk with angular, dissonant riffs, to be topped by Mr. Chance’s yelping, blurting, screaming vocals and his trilling, squawking alto saxophone. He was a live wire onstage, with his own twitchy versions of moves adapted from Brown, Mick Jagger and his punk contemporaries.Although the Contortions often performed in suits and ties, their music and stage presence were proudly abrasive. In the band’s early days, Mr. Chance was so determined to get a reaction from arty, detached spectators that he would jump into the audience and slap or kiss someone. Audience members often fought back.“I got a big kick out of provoking people, I don’t deny that,” Mr. Chance said in a 2003 interview with Pitchfork.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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    Summerworks Festival Opens With “Work Hard Have Fun Make History”

    Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival opener, written by ruth tang, rages against the machines and examines human alienation.Like a dog nosing around in the background, a robot vacuum cleaner is a guaranteed scene stealer. Late in the new play “Work Hard Have Fun Make History,” the unfailingly compelling actor Susannah Perkins shares the stage with one: a whirring black disk busily roaming the industrial carpet, bumbling into walls yet never toppling over edges, at least not the night I saw the show.Perkins plays a phone service representative named Annie, on a call with a frantic customer whose new android assistant, an iWhip 2.0, has turned menacing.“What’s the command to make it go away?” the caller pleads.“‘Blades down, iWhip,’” Annie instructs.Perkins gives the line a perfect comic spin, but our eyes are on Annie’s own insensate labor saver. Unleash a robot and havoc may follow. Wouldn’t that be entertaining?“Work Hard Have Fun Make History,” whose title echoes an Amazon motto, is not at all on the side of the machines, but it is acutely unsettled by their rampancy in our increasingly fractionalized, disembodied culture. Written by ruth tang (who lowercases their name) and directed by Caitlin Sullivan, this is the first production in Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks festival, an annual showcase for off-kilter experimentation at the Wild Project in the East Village.There is, unfortunately, a nagging sense that a tumult of tenuously related ideas and a diffuse crowd of characters have overwhelmed this thought-provoking, plot-free comedy, which above all is about human alienation: from the body, from physical presence, from other people.It is about labor, both the kind that brings home paychecks and the kind that brings babies into the world, and about out-of-control greed disguised as genius; thus a couple of amusingly dim tech-bro characters called Jeff (Sagan Chen) and Elon (the performer who goes by b). It is about gender identity, and sex, and coupledom, and the pain of parental rejection. It is about climate change, and artificial intelligence that gets ever smarter while remaining, in elemental ways, extremely dumb. It is about containers — shipping boxes figure heavily — and the spilling over of that which cannot be contained.Which is a lot to fit into a 75-minute show. On a utilitarian set by the design collective dots, under warehouse-stark lighting by Isabella Byrd, “Work Hard” is told in a series of fragmentary scenes that aren’t always as taut as they might have been. Elon and Jeff, for example, ramble.With much doubling by the cast of three, and some dialogue in voice-over (sound design is by Lee Kinney), the show has a progression that can be cumulative, as with a grumpily funny baby (Chen) whom we first meet in utero and follow into life. But this sharply observant, sometimes poignant, grimly comic play is too scattershot to gather force as it goes on.Work Hard Have Fun Make HistoryThrough May 30 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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    Farewell to ‘Stomp,’ a Show at the Beating Heart of New York

    The stage has no curtain. The set is littered with highway signs and mass transit insignia. And then there are the gigantic oil drums, ominous and puzzling. It could be a storage facility. Or the site of an industrial warehouse party. But then the sweepers start to trickle in, swooshing across in balletic punk pageantry.Since its debut at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village in 1994, “Stomp,” the wordless percussion spectacle of twirling, tapping, sweeping, banging, clanging and yes, stomping, has gone from a scrappy neighborhood attraction to a mainstay of the culture of New York City.In honor of the show’s 10th anniversary in 2004, a mayoral proclamation declared March 14, 2004, as “Stomp Day.” For its 20th birthday in 2014, the Empire State Building shone in red light in its honor. That year, the production was also the centerpiece of the city’s “Stomp Out Litter” campaign, shot across the five boroughs; and in 2015, the show’s performers participated in a collaboration with another city cultural institution, the Harlem Globetrotters. The city once even temporarily renamed Second Avenue between Seventh and Eighth Streets “Stomp Avenue.”In its history, only three occasions have disrupted the continuity of the New York run: Sept. 11, a gas explosion on Second Avenue and the Covid pandemic. Even as commercial stores booted out local businesses, rents shot up and students and artists moved farther downtown, the show hung on in an ever-shifting neighborhood.The Orpheum Theater, which has been home to “Stomp” since the ’90s.Zack DeZon for The New York TimesIn the world of “Stomp,” anything can be used to create rhythm: garbage cans, radiator hoses, match boxes.Margaret Norton/NBC, via Getty ImagesBut after 29 years, the production will close for good on Jan. 8 because of declining ticket sales.“Say it ain’t so!” said the music producer Lou George, who is widely known as Bowlegged Lou. A “Stomp” super fan, he said he had seen the show 225 times and planned to see it once more before the cast takes its final bows.“I’m having withdrawals,” he said. “‘Stomp’ was such a fixture in New York.”Part drum line, part step team, part ensemble of city buskers, “Stomp” is a show in which timing is everything. The cast of eight perform with repurposed household objects and urban detritus, creating rhythm out of garbage cans, suitcases, radiator hoses and precision choreography, all while threading in humor through one-upping showdowns and zany mishaps. Anything can become music: fingernails scratching against match boxes; basketballs passed back and forth with a thud.“Stomp” has had unusually global reach. It has been spoofed on “The Simpsons,” included as an answer on “Jeopardy!” and performed in 45 countries — including at the Acropolis and the 2012 London Olympics closing ceremony.A Farewell to ‘Stomp’After nearly 29 years onstage, the percussion and dance spectacle will close in New York on Jan. 8.Sound of the City: Part drum line, part step team, part ensemble of city buskers, “Stomp” became part of the fabric and culture of New York.Memories: We asked our critics and Times readers to share what the show has meant to them. This is what they told us.10 Things: There’s more to the show than banging on a can. Here are 10 things you might not know about the Off Broadway institution.1994 Review: The wordless show “speaks so directly to one of the most basic human impulses, the urge to make rhythmic noise,” our critic wrote when “Stomp” opened in New York.Still, it remained a symbol of the cultural landscape of New York. But it wasn’t born here.The 1997 cast of “Stomp,” which included one of its creators, Luke Cresswell, fourth from left.Lois GreenfieldIt was conceived by two Britons — the creators and directors Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, who met as street performers in Brighton, England, in the early ’80s. Together they formed musical groups that mixed percussion, vocals and comedy, and after experimenting with one-off performances using only brooms and garbage bins, they premiered “Stomp” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1991.“We concentrated on the rhythmic elements,” McNicholas said, “but I think we remained aware of the inherent absurdity of the concept of using everyday objects as instruments, so the humor was there from the start.”When the show arrived in New York in the early ’90s, the East Village was home to Blue Man Group, CBGB and the indie-rock club Brownies. Cresswell and McNicholas found the punk downtown — far from the bright lights of Broadway — a perfect fit for their deadpan show.“Stomp” has been spoofed on “The Simpsons,” featured as an answer on “Jeopardy!” and performed in 45 countries.Rachel Papo for The New York Times“It’s not glamour; it’s not cute sets,” Cresswell said. “It’s a small, funky little theater with people doing it really close to you. You feel and smell the sweat.”Cresswell and McNicholas weren’t sure if the show would make it through its original four-month run, yet it has outlasted much of the neighborhood’s arts ecosystem from those early days.Brownies went dark in 2002, CBGB in 2006; and Blue Man Group was acquired by Cirque du Soleil in 2017. And one by one, many of the “Stomp” cast and creators’ go-to East Village locales shut their doors: the adjacent luncheonette Stage Restaurant, the corner bar and bistro Virage, and Gem Spa, the nearly 100-year-old bodega across the street, which closed in 2020.Still, “Stomp” endured for nearly three decades, rivaling “The Phantom of the Opera,” which is set to close this year after 35 years onstage. Throughout the show’s touring and Orpheum Theater productions, Cresswell and McNicholas retained artistic control and directorship.Jackie Green, the publicist for “Stomp,” said that flagging international tourism after pandemic lockdowns was a factor in deciding to close, but she declined to share financial figures. (The North American and European touring shows will continue to run.)McNicholas said that he felt for the New York performers, who in the last year were performing for “tiny” houses, though neither the energy onstage nor the enthusiasm in the audience had let up, he said.“It’s a small, funky little theater with people doing it really close to you. You feel and smell the sweat,” Cresswell said.Rachel Papo for The New York Times“I’m a little bit sad, because I feel like we were part of the East Village,” McNicholas said. “We were part of the landscape of the Village, and it’s a shame to say goodbye to that.”“Playing on objects to create music has been around forever,” said Alan Asuncion, a member of the final New York “Stomp” cast who has been performing at the Orpheum since 2007. “But the creators brilliantly put it into a piece of theater that has become a household name. And that legacy will live on.”Because the show is wordless, save for a few gibberish sounds and some good-natured grunting, its cadence and comedy are accessible to a wide variety of audiences.At a recent performance, children bubbled over with delight, adults clapped their hands and stomped their feet wildly in a packed house. The audience was carried by the pulse of drums and call-and-response cues.In any other setting, seeing a group of muscled men and women in work boots wielding yellow rubber gloves and industrial sinks around their necks might be cause for alarm. At “Stomp,” it’s a moment of giddy anticipation. The audience can sense something big is coming. There’s a collective prolonged inhale. And then the Stompers started rocking. As they swayed their bodies, so did the giant sinks. Water sloshed from side to side creating a swishy melody, before the performers began to heave their bodies to and fro, banging on the sinks and pipes.“I’m going to miss the audience interaction, being able to look out and see the audience look back at you,” Asuncion said. After 15 years, “it surprisingly doesn’t get old.” More

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    Review: Retracing the Path From Middle School Nerd to Rock Goddess

    Best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” the enchanting singer-songwriter Jill Sobule is the star of a winsome and defiant autobiographical musical.It is an established fact of human development that most of the people who grew up to be cool and original were nerds for a while, way back when.Case in point: the enchanting Jill Sobule, best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” and currently starring in the winsome and defiant autobiographical musical “F*ck7thGrade.” Seventh grade being, as she tells it, the year when it all fell apart — when she no longer fit in with the other girls at her school in Colorado, and they weren’t shy about telling her so.“They thought I was weird because I had a Batman utility belt and a camera that turned into a 007 gun,” she says, and your heart kind of breaks even as you smile, because she must have been darling, right? Then, with an air of baffled wonder: “I was the only one who wanted to be a spy.”She also dreamed of being a rock star, and longed for the girl she had a secret crush on to reciprocate. But it was the early 1970s, and Sobule didn’t fit the template of sugar and spice and everything nice. The girls who had been her friends rejected her. One of them lobbed a homophobic slur her way.“She didn’t even know what that meant,” says Sobule, who is now 61. “But I did.”Directed by Lisa Peterson, the show — at the Wild Project in the East Village — is described in promotional materials as a “rock concert musical,” a slightly awkward term that is nonetheless exactly right. With a book by Liza Birkenmeier, it truly is a musical, backing Sobule with a three-piece band whose musicians — Nini Camps, Kristen Ellis-Henderson and Julie Wolf (also the music director) — play assorted characters throughout the 90-minute show.Still, the performance on this small stage does feel like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley. The name of Sobule’s three-piece band is Secrets of the Vatican — made up of all girls when it existed only in her childhood imagination, and of all women now, which even in 2022 is rare enough to make a statement.On a set by Rachel Hauck whose principal feature is a wall of lockers, Sobule speaks and sings a slender story of her life, starting with the exultant freedom of pre-adolescence and her rocking ode to the bike she cherished then, “Raleigh Blue Chopper.”“When I was 12, I was a fierce little rocker who wanted to be Jimi Hendrix,” she says with the same sly, sunny, quietly confiding air that the video for “I Kissed a Girl” captured 27 years ago. “I didn’t have to tell anyone what I was,” she adds. “I just was.”The performance on this small East Village stage feels like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley.Eric McNattBut the wider world of the late 20th century was not much more hospitable to ambitious female musicians — let alone lesbians — than seventh grade had been. Sobule remembers a conversation she overheard at her record label in the ’90s, about Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge and how glad the label was that Sobule was straight. Which she wasn’t, as they might have guessed from “I Kissed a Girl,” but she also wasn’t about to clue them in.“I wish I would have said to all of them: it’s a big ol’ gay gay song,” she says. “But I didn’t. I was too scared. I wanted to do the smart thing. I wanted to be arty and transgressive, but I wanted to sell records. The compromising got me nowhere. And then I couldn’t stand my own song.”Shorter, sharper and more theatrical than Etheridge’s current Off Broadway show, “My Window,” Sobule’s is much more intimate in scale — although each pays brief tribute to “Day by Day,” from “Godspell,” with which both musicians’ teen years coincided.“Strawberry Gloss,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Sold My Soul” and “Underdog Victorious” are among the songs Sobule sings from her own catalog. Eventually, so is “I Kissed a Girl.”This is a show for Sobule fans, and for a queer audience, but it’s also for the many nerds who grew up to be the cool people. It will give you flashbacks to middle school, no matter how popular you were; that’s pretty much guaranteed. But it will also give you the cheering company of Sobule and her extremely non-imaginary, rocking-out band.F*ck7thGradeThrough Nov. 8 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thewildproject.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Bidding Farewell to His Theatrical Flock

    In a 34-year run at New York Theater Workshop, James C. Nicola held that directors and writers are equal partners — and helped send “Rent” and “Hadestown” to Broadway.The Tony Awards ceremony had just wrapped up at Radio City Music Hall, and it was time for the parties. But for one honoree, James C. Nicola, the longtime artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, there would be no stop-off for toasts at the Plaza Hotel or after-midnight carousing at Tavern on the Green.Instead, he headed to a nearby parking garage, and settled behind the wheel of a rental van for the 40-minute ride back to the dorms at Adelphi University on Long Island, where he’d be sleeping that night. As far as he was concerned, there was no other choice: He had pickup duty at 10 a.m. for a group of young artists arriving by train for one of the summer workshops that have been a hallmark of his 34-year tenure at one of Off Broadway’s most beloved theaters.It’s not those gatherings that led the Tony committee to give Nicola a special honor. Or at least not fully. It’s also that his 199-seat East Village theater spawned the Tony-winning best musicals “Rent,” “Once” and “Hadestown.” That the recent hot-button plays “What the Constitution Means to Me”and “Slave Play” ran there. And that the theater’s support made a crucial difference to the careers of such writers as Tony Kushner, Lisa Kron and Doug Wright; the directors Rachel Chavkin, Lileana Blain-Cruz and Sam Gold; and many others.Nicola, center, with fellow Tony honorees Eileen Rivera and Ashruf “Osh” Ghanimah at the Tony Honors cocktail party in early June.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Tony came as a bonus after Nicola announced last year that he was stepping down, the first of the very long-serving artistic leaders of major nonprofit New York theaters to do so. And while he acknowledged that the theater-world reckoning over the whiteness of its leadership persuaded him it was time to leave, he departed on July 10 with what seems to be an unblemished record.At 72, his gait has slowed. But his ice-blue eyes still blaze when he gets animated about his affection for anagrams or who might star with Daniel Radcliffe later this year in “Merrily We Roll Along,” part of the last Workshop season he programmed. (The freelance director Patricia McGregor, a Black woman who has had an ongoing connection to the theater, is succeeding him in the top job.)Nicola spent five years working as a casting associate at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Public Theater). Comparisons with Papp and the far-larger Public are inevitably imprecise. But in his own less grandiose, more self-effacing way, Nicola is among the handful of artistic directors to make the biggest artistic impact on the New York theater world since — a magnet for iconoclastic talents who also helped develop a passel of shows with enormous commercial appeal.Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” was part of New York Theater Workshop’s 1995-96 season, a pivotal time for the theater. The cast included, from left: Jesse L. Martin, Adam Pascal, Wilson Heredia, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Rodney Hicks and Anthony Rapp.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNicola at the theater in 1997. A son of the 1960s, he once imagined he’d be a Baptist minister.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore personally, he is one of the last of his kind: a son of the ’60s who imagined he’d be a Baptist minister and made a brick-and-mortar building into a flock and a chosen family.In a video acceptance speech for the Tony, Nicola put it this way: “Our community has aspired to be a sanctuary for a certain species of artist — theatermakers who embrace their divinity, who understand their sacred obligation to lead and inspire us.”And in one of several recent conversations that included breaks between work-in-progress readings at Adelphi and lunch at a favorite Hell’s Kitchen diner, he stood firm in his conviction that idealism is the fuel that kept him going, and that bringing people together to be challenged is the goal.“Nothing makes me angrier than to be called a gatekeeper,” he said.He added: “Nothing makes me happier than to be mad when I leave the theater.”RACHEL CHAVKIN HAD BEEN inviting Nicola and his then-associate artistic director, Linda Chapman, to take in her work since she was an M.F.A. student at Columbia University. After seeing “Three Pianos,” a rambunctious reimagining of Franz Schubert as the center of a drunken posse of musicians and fans, Nicola asked Chavkin and Alec Duffy, one of her collaborators on the show, to his denlike office on the second floor of the East Village building that abuts the theater.“I think he opened by saying ‘I think that’s one of the best pieces of theater I’ve ever seen,’” she recalled in a recent phone call. “Our jaws dropped.”Programming “Three Pianos” into the Workshop’s 2010-11 season was a career-changer for Chavkin, who, while continuing to do avant-garde work with the troupe known as the TEAM, also helped to shape the boundary-busting Broadway musicals “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” and “Hadestown.” (She is co-directing at the Workshop again next season, while aiming another musical, “Lempicka,” for Broadway.)Like Chavkin, the now Tony-winning director Sam Gold earned his union card directing at the Workshop, in 2007. He still recalls Nicola’s support when he wanted to hire a scenic designer with opera-world credits to build what would be an ambitious set for Betty Shamieh’s play “The Black Eyed.”“It’s the kind of thing that a director on their first job doesn’t get to do,” Gold said. “Jim would say, ‘I don’t want to limit your imagination.’”And the commitment went beyond a single show — part of Nicola’s belief that directors are equal partners with playwrights in an American theater system that tends to privilege the latter.David Oyelowo, left, and Daniel Craig in Sam Gold’s 2016 production of “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Over the years,” Gold said, “I’ve had very few people genuinely see me as an artist — who can relate one show to another, as someone with a lifelong project.”Whitney White, who was Gold’s assistant on the 2016 Workshop production of “Othello” that starred Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo, speaks of Nicola as a presence in her life, not just a champion of her work. (White directed Aleshea Harris’s play “On Sugarland” at the Workshop this spring.)“I’ve spoken to him about men and love and theater and everything,” she said. “It’s a fully furnished table.”That’s not easy to find, even in nonprofit theaters that don’t have to obsess over the bottom line. “It’s a different style of artistic directorship — that you’re in community, in dialogue, not just a blip,” she added.NICOLA GREW UP OUTSIDE HARTFORD, Conn., gay and closeted, the oldest of four brothers in a middle-class family. In high school and then for a while at Tufts University, he took private singing lessons, imagining a career in opera or choral music. A year studying abroad took him to the Royal Court Theater in London, where he got interested in directing.Eventually, it helped lead him to the writing of the British experimentalist Caryl Churchill, a Royal Court favorite, whose work he helped champion at the New York Shakespeare Festival and at Arena Stage, in Washington, D.C., where he had a one-year directing fellowship that turned into seven more years as a producing associate.What became New York Theater Workshop had been presenting work around Manhattan for nearly a decade when Nicola raised his hand for the top job. In conversations with Stephen Graham, its founder and current board member, he learned that the theater, which was already funding fellowships for directors, was hungry to have a bigger public profile.“They wanted to change the form,” Nicola said. “What better could I hear?”Under Nicola, the theater staged Churchill’s work eight times, more than any other writer. But no figure is more associated with his tenure than the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove. After seeing his work in Europe, Nicola brought him to direct in the United States for the first time, adapting Eugene O’Neill’s unfinished play “More Stately Mansions,” in 1997.Two years later, his deconstruction of the Tennessee Williams classic “A Streetcar Named Desire” — Blanche, Stanley and Stella each spend stage time in the bathtub — heralded the van Hove/Workshop alliance as one of the most exciting (and divisive) destinations in New York theater.During Nicola’s reign the theater presented eight van Hove productions, capped in 2015 with “Lazarus,” a rock musical with a book by Enda Walsh and songs, new and old, by David Bowie, who was secretly battling cancer during its creation and died during its run.Ivo van Hove has directed eight productions at the Workshop, including the 2015 production of David Bowie and Enda Walsh’s “Lazarus,” with Michael C. Hall and Sophia Anne Caruso.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe circumstances had echoes of “Rent” — a show the theater began developing four years into Nicola’s tenure that had its final dress rehearsal at the Workshop on Jan. 25, 1996. That night its creator, Jonathan Larson, suddenly died of an aortic aneurysm.The “Rent” story — 12 years on Broadway, the Pulitzer Prize, productions all over the world — is show business canon. Royalties from that and other Broadway transfers helped boost the theater’s annual budget from $400,000 to $10 million in the Nicola era. But as he talked about “Rent” and “Lazarus,” Nicola hinted at the ways they might have turned out had tragedy not struck, their creators wrested from the process of art-making too soon.“Lazarus,” which was sped into production and where only van Hove knew of Bowie’s precarious health, was among the most challenging experiences of Nicola’s time at the Workshop. But he pinpoints his darkest days to 2006, when a planned staging of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” a solo play about an American demonstrator for Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer, was pulled.Kushner and Harold Pinter, among others, accused the theater of capitulating to political pressure; the theater maintained it was only delaying the production, which originated at the Royal Court in London. Nicola had to return from Italy to defuse the situation, which he called a “misunderstanding that was threatening to the very heart of the institution.” (“Rachel Corrie” ended up running at another theater.)More recently, debates over representation in the theater world have encouraged in him a greater self-awareness. He pointed to Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” which was championed by his theater and by notable white male critics. He later came to learn that many Black women felt otherwise.“There are impulses that I have that feel like good and positive ones, and then learn that my response is not universal,” Nicola said.“It’s really good to think about the risks and possible outcomes,” he added, “but also not be intimidated by not being able to predict. To not retreat, not get cautious or conservative.”FINISH A 34-YEAR TERM running a major theater and the hosannas will come fast and furious.Besides the Tony, Nicola was celebrated at the Workshop’s annual gala, which had a diner theme in honor of his affection for humble food. There were speeches and a musical performance from some original “Rent” cast members, a drag queen and, for a finale, four veteran stage actresses enacting a “scene” from “The Golden Girls,” a Nicola favorite.“My gratitude to the theater was giving me a sense that the world was bigger,” Nicola said, reflecting on his career. Erik Tanner for The New York TimesWeeks later, several hundred friends and associates surprised him at the theater with a reading of Moss Hart’s backstage comedy “Light Up the Sky,” the last play he had directed at Arena Stage, with a cast that included the playwrights Lucas Hnath, Dael Orlandersmith and Kron; the performer Penny Arcade; and the producers Jeffrey Seller and Jordan Roth. (“I have lived this play my entire adult life,” a grateful Nicola said later.)Uptown and downtown, artful and kitschy — it’s an increasingly illusory divide that Nicola, who soaked up the work of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, has managed to happily bridge, personally and professionally.“He’ll be talking one minute about [the French director] Ariane Mnouchkine and the next he’ll be doing an Ethel Merman impression,” said Wright, whose Grand Guignol-ish Marquis de Sade play, “Quills,” was, along with “Rent,” in the 1995-96 season that brought a new level of starshine to the theater.Nicola proudly cops to being a musical-theater show queen, quoting “Funny Girl” in his gala acceptance speech and later pointing to a lyric from (shocking!) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” as explaining his mission: “We taught the world new ways to dream.”The “director in me” decided he needed a ritual way to bring closure to his time at the theater. So he and friends rode the Circle Line on the Fourth of July. “When I board the boat I will be leaving my old life and when I get off it, I will be entering my new life,” he said beforehand.As to what’s next, all he can propose is “opening myself up to new adventures.”In the meantime, he’s taken to writing letters of thanks, sending them into the world without knowing who will (or won’t) respond.One went to the theater department at Tufts.Another to the Little Theater of Manchester, Conn., where he appeared onstage as the Mock Turtle in “Alice in Wonderland,” and was first dazzled by the art of telling a story to an audience in public.“My gratitude to the theater was giving me a sense that the world was bigger — that there were many other possibilities,” he said. “To that 12- or 13-year-old boy, this is everything he aspired to. It happened.” More

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    Overlooked No More: Klaus Nomi, Singer With an Otherworldly Persona

    His sound and look influenced everyone from Anohni to Lady Gaga. He also sang backup vocals for David Bowie.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A wide range of musical genres fueled New York’s nightclubs in the late 1970s and early ’80s, including new wave, no wave, punk and post punk. Klaus Nomi, who performed during that era, defied being categorized under any of them.“I wouldn’t give it a label,” Nomi said of his sound in a Belgian television interview. “Maybe the only label is my own label: It’s Nomi style.”His music combined opera, infectious melodies, disco beats, German-accented countertenor vocals and undeniable grandeur. He influenced everyone from the singer-songwriter Anohni to Lady Gaga; in 2009, when Morrissey was asked to select eight essential records for the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs,” Nomi’s version of Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum” made the list.Nomi’s stage look was equally eclectic, and inseparable from his sound. The gender-fluid mix included dark, dramatically-applied lipstick as well as nail polish, the occasional women’s garment and often a giant structured tuxedo top that suggested Dada as much as sci-fi. His style influenced the fashion world as well, in collections by designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and Riccardo Tisci.Nomi’s look was indisputably nonbinary, and a bit otherworldly. “He still comes across as an outrageously expressive and strange figure,” Tim Lawrence, author of the 2016 book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983,” said in a phone interview.“There was something about his entire being, which seemed to be queer, around makeup and voice and music and dress,” Lawrence said.Nomi — or Klaus Sperber, the name he was born with — moved to New York City from his native Germany in the early 1970s. He fell in with a group of creative friends and in late 1978 joined many of them to perform at New Wave Vaudeville, a series of quirky variety shows. The bill included a stripper, a singing dog and a performance artist dressed as a sadistic nun.Nomi, in the background at center, at the Mudd Club in Manhattan in 1979, the year he met David Bowie there.Alan KleinbergAs the closing act, Nomi sang an aria from Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” while wearing a transparent raincoat over a shiny, fitted top and pants along with dramatic eye makeup and lipstick.“He really blew people’s minds,” Ann Magnuson, who directed the shows, said in an interview. “He had all these snarky punk rockers out there who were speechless.”With the performances came a new name, inspired by the name of a magazine focused on outer space, Omni.“Klaus said, ‘I can’t go out as Klaus Sperber,’” his friend Joey Arias, the singer and performance artist, recalled by phone. “‘That’s not a star’s name.’”Soon he was performing as Klaus Nomi at tastemaker Manhattan clubs like Max’s Kansas City and Hurrah, with a set list created with the help of Kristian Hoffman, a musician who served for a time as his musical director. The material included edgy originals and unconventional takes on well-known hits. Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” became an enraged dirge, for example; the chorus of “Lightnin’ Strikes” morphed into an aria. The thought was that pop songs would “catch the ear of an audience who isn’t ready for opera,” Hoffman said in an interview.As The New York Times put it in a review of one of his performances, Nomi’s music was “positively catchy, in a strange sort of way.”One night in late 1979, Nomi and Arias were at the Mudd Club, in TriBeCa, when they met David Bowie there. Nomi called him later — Bowie had asked him to, scribbling his phone number with a friend’s eyeliner — and Nomi and Arias were recruited to be Bowie’s backup singers for an appearance that December as the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”For the show’s three songs, they wore clinging women’s Thierry Mugler dresses, purchased at Henri Bendel. The look was extremely provocative at the time, especially on national television. Throughout, the TV cameras’ focus seemed to be as much on them as on Bowie.“It legitimized everything, because it had been sort of a private scene, and all of a sudden there it is, right in front of you on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said Katy Kattelman, a designer who is known professionally as Katy K and who was a friend of Nomi’s.Soon after, Nomi signed a record deal with RCA France. His debut album, titled simply “Klaus Nomi,” was released in Europe in 1981; a second album, “A Simple Man,” came out the next year. The records sold well — “Klaus Nomi” earned gold-record status in France — and he performed abroad to packed venues.Nomi returned to New York toward the end of 1982, excited by the prospect of possible American tours and releases. But he arrived gaunt and exhausted — he had contracted AIDS. He died of complications of the illness on Aug. 6, 1983. He was 39.A scene from the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song” showing Nomi getting ready for a performance.Palm PicturesNomi at Hurrah, one of many nightclubs he performed at in New York City.Harvey WangKlaus Sperber was born on Jan. 24, 1944, in Immenstadt, a town in what was then West Germany. He was raised by his mother, Bettina, who worked odd jobs. A fling with a soldier, whom Klaus never met, resulted in his birth. When he was a child, he and his mother moved to the city of Essen, about 400 miles away. Opera music was often playing in their house, and it set Klaus on his path.“The first time I heard an opera singer on the radio I said, ‘My God, I want to sing just like that,’” he said in interview footage that is included in the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song.” As a teenager, he became equally fond of Elvis Presley.He moved to West Berlin and worked as an usher at Deutsche Oper, where he sometimes sang for colleagues after the audience had left. But he aspired to sing professionally, and, Arias said, “he felt like he was at a dead end.”“He wanted to come to New York because he felt like it would change his life,” Arias added.Nomi settled in Manhattan’s East Village. He worked for a while in the kitchen of the Upper East Side cafe and celebrity hangout Serendipity 3 and started a baking business with Kattelman called Tarts, Inc., supplying restaurants with desserts made in Nomi’s St. Marks Place apartment.Nomi was known to frequent after-hours clubs, like the Anvil and Mineshaft, where casual sex was commonplace. There were sexual encounters at home as well — Arias said he once arrived at Nomi’s apartment to find a naked Jean-Michel Basquiat toweling off.To get a green card, he married a woman, Melissa Moon, a U.S. citizen, in 1980.“I don’t think he was in any way being anything that wasn’t himself, which was pretty gay as far as I knew,” said the artist Kenny Scharf. “When you’re creating your persona, the sexuality part is obviously part of the persona. It was all part of his sense of style and him being an artist in every way.” More

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    Review: In ‘Chasing Andy Warhol,’ Street Theater Goes Pop

    From Bated Breath Theater Company, the antics of this show, which winds through the East Village, offer little insight into Andy Warhol or his work.It’s so easy. A Breton shirt, a silver wig, sunglasses with acetate frames — and there, suddenly, is Andy Warhol. There on a Citi Bike and there again on roller skates. Playing chess, striking a ballet pose, scooting through the drizzle. In “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a slapdash work of street performance by Bated Breath Theater Company, the pop artist, who died in 1987, has repopulated select blocks of Manhattan’s East Village.Bated Breath’s previous show, “Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec,” a louche tribute to the French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, made its flâneur’s way through the West Village in the pandemic’s first winter, earning mostly favorable reviews. So maybe blame pandemic fatigue, the wet spring weather or Warhol’s distinct ability — in life, in art — to elude attempts to pin him down, but the antics of “Chasing Andy Warhol” register as mostly empty space, blank canvases that offer little insight into the man or his work.Created and directed by Mara Lieberman, the show, which lasts just an hour, begins in Astor Place. A jean-jacketed tour guide (Fé Torres at the performance I attended) buckles himself into a daffodil-yellow airplane seat. From behind his seat emerges Andy Warhol (Kyle Starling, one of many Warhols). Warhol then leads the guide — and ticketed spectators — across streets, through plazas, into the window of a gym. Throughout, Torres offers tidbits of biography, which are almost entirely obscure if you are unfamiliar with Warhol’s history (“Was that Charles? Was that before you went to Hawaii? I thought you didn’t fall in love until later.”) and unilluminating if you are.The text would matter less if the visuals were more dynamic. But, despite a few witty touches, like the framing of the Empire State Building, in homage to Warhol’s durational film “Empire,” the staging and the design feel shambolic and the choreography, by Rachel Leigh Dolan, rarely inspired. The vibe is cheerful, unrigorous and pointedly amateur, as in one scene when the actress playing Edie Sedgwick falls to the sidewalk. Edie has just died of an overdose; the actress is very clearly still breathing.Just a moment later, an older man walking by noticed the commotion. “I knew Andy,” he said, sounding bemused. “I mean it.” Then he walked on.“Chasing Andy Warhol” joins recent works, like the immersive Van Gogh exhibits, which reimagine modern art into contemporary experience. It’s the refrigerator magnetization of genius, which Warhol, who had a hearty appreciation and talent for the commercial, would have perhaps enjoyed. There’s a reason Warhol’s work is again in vogue (though, arguably, it never fell out of vogue) in a moment in which the categories of art, entertainment and business feel particularly confused. The show could be in conversation with these ideas. Mostly, it seems in conversation with itself.Just about everyone knows Warhol’s adage, which today reads a lot more like a prophecy, that “in the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” Watching “Chasing Andy Warhol,” I was reminded of another axiom, from Warhol’s friend Marshall McLuhan: “Art is anything you can get away with.”Chasing Andy WarholThrough June 12 at Bated Breath Theater Company, Manhattan; batedbreaththeatre.org. Running time: 1 hour. More