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      For Sutton Foster, Crochet Is a Survival Tactic

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      Sutton Foster is finishing up a 15-week run at the Barbican as Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” a role for which she won a Tony a decade ago, and she is preparing to return to Broadway later this year to co-star with Hugh Jackman in “The Music Man.”But before we got into all that, she wanted to show off a washcloth.“They didn’t have any washcloths here in the flat,” Foster said during a video interview from London last month, “so I was like, ‘Well, I’ll make some!’” She plans to give them as Christmas presents.When she isn’t performing onstage or onscreen (recently as one of the stars of the television series “Younger”), there is a decent chance that Foster is crocheting, cross-stitching, baking, drawing or gardening, hobbies she explores in her new essay collection, “Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life,” which Grand Central will release on Tuesday.The chapters are craft-themed, but this book is not all about Mod Podge and Jo-Ann Fabrics. Foster, 46, writes about how keeping her hands busy has helped her cope with the stress and pressure of her career and the ups and downs of a life in which she didn’t always get what she needed from her family, loved ones or colleagues.“Hooked” is out on Oct. 12.“Anxiety runs in my family — in me,” she writes. “I am the daughter of an agoraphobic mother. I make a living as a performer. It’s complicated. And yet, if I’m feeling anxious or overwhelmed, I crochet, or collage, or cross-stitch. These hobbies have literally preserved my sanity through some of the darkest periods of my life.”There are light moments, like when we learn that Foster crocheted an octopus toilet-paper-roll cover as a wedding gift for her “Younger” co-star Hilary Duff. But these are balanced with heavier revelations, such as when Foster writes about the baskets she cross-stitched for her mother as a means of escaping toxic cast dynamics early in her career.She opens up about snowman-shaped holiday cookies she baked with the family of her first husband, Christian Borle, and the floral blanket she pieced together, one “granny square” at a time, when that marriage ended. She describes drawing interconnected circles with paint pens while undergoing fertility treatments, and the striped baby blanket she crocheted while waiting for her daughter’s birth mother to go into labor.Foster taught herself how to crochet when she was 19, and estimates that she has eight to 10 projects going at a time. She has a yarn dealer who shipped three boxes of Lion Brand supplies to London, then flew over to see “Anything Goes.” (You know what a big deal this is if you’ve ever been a novice in a certain kind of a yarn store, where customers tend to be sorted into varsity, junior varsity and invisible.) Sometimes Foster works from a book or consults YouTube for assistance, but she also creates her own designs.Foster said she has crafted many evenings of song, so she brought the same approach to writing her book: “You’re taking a reader on a journey, like taking an audience on a journey.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesGrowing up in Georgia and, later, Michigan, Foster got her start, like many thespians of her generation, in a community production of “Annie.” After performing in national tours of “Grease” and “Les Misérables,” she appeared in Broadway productions of both shows, as well as “Annie” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” In 2002, she won her first Tony for “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”Like her perennially cheerful “Younger” character, Liza Miller, Foster was a bundle of can-do energy and enthusiasm, until our conversation turned to her mother. Then she spoke slowly, eyes closed, choosing each word painstakingly.Helen Foster’s health began to decline when Sutton and her brother, Hunter, were teenagers. She had a fraught relationship with Sutton and stopped speaking to Hunter for close to a decade; the siblings’ connection with their father suffered as a result. Since Helen Foster’s death in 2013, Sutton and Hunter have enjoyed a new chapter with the man known as Papa Bob, and “Hooked” includes his tips for growing the perfect tomato. (No. 9: “Pick the tomatoes when they’re near ripe but not quite ripe, so others can grow.”)“Crafting was the way I could tell my mother’s story that felt most authentic to me,” Foster said. “A way to weave, pun intended, all the facets of my life together in a way that felt true to me today.”In the book, she takes readers inside the squalid house in Florida where her mother spent her final years. “I flipped on the light and gasped,” she writes. “All of her windows had been blacked out with black garbage bags, secured to the walls with duct tape.” Her mother had been bedridden for months, refusing to seek medical treatment: “That explained the bedpan and pee pads on the floor next to her bed.”In “Younger,” Foster plays a 40-year-old empty-nester who lands an entry-level publishing job — and a whole new life — by pretending to be a millennial.Nicole Rivelli/CBS“It was mental illness that was never treated, never dealt with,” Hunter Foster said in a phone interview. After mentioning that he spends as much time as possible outside, he added, “I don’t allow myself to sleep past a certain time because my mom stayed in bed half the day.”His and his sister’s relationship with their mother is likely to surprise some readers, Sutton Foster said. “It’s a part of our story that people don’t know. It’s this underbelly: my mother’s illness and protecting her and being afraid of her. No one talked about it, and there’s this freedom now.”Behind her on the wall was a framed poster that said “Breathe.”Foster wrote “Hooked” with Liz Welch, who has collaborated on best sellers by Malala Yousafzai, Elaine Welteroth and Shaun King. “Sutton is a Broadway musical actress, my mother was a Broadway musical actress. Sutton’s an adoptive mother, I’m an adoptive mother. Honestly, I think we’d be friends anyway,” Welch said. “Crochet was the perfect metaphor for holding oneself together, taking all these different threads of her incredibly interesting, not-what-you’d-expect life.”Suzanne O’Neill, a vice president and executive editor at Grand Central, said: “One thing that’s very hard for people who are writing memoirs to do is to excavate their stories, and Sutton was game for it, even if there were moments that were hard. She wanted the book to be excellent. She dove into it. It was a piece of art for her, and she worked really hard to make it the book it is.”In “Hooked,” Foster recalls being 16, mesmerized as her idol, Patti LuPone, belted out “Being Alive” on TV. “There was something simultaneously terrifying and thrilling about her confidence,” she writes. Her mother, who had recently stopped driving and grocery-shopping, said, “You can do that.”Foster, center, won a Tony for her performance in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe later met LuPone, who also played Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” and LuPone inspired one of Foster’s favorite collages: a colorful confection of craft paper on plywood, spelling out BADASS.“She’s a beautiful creature,” LuPone said of Foster. “She exudes a very positive light. We’re drawn to tortured souls, just to find out why they’re tortured. And we’re also drawn to the light, and the light is much more nourishing. You see somebody onstage that makes you feel better. That’s Sutton.”Foster is set to open “The Music Man” in December, playing Marian Paroo opposite Jackman as Harold Hill. But before she embarks on more soul-soothing craft projects backstage at the Winter Garden Theater, she will have time to settle into the Orange County farmhouse she moved into last spring with her husband, Ted Griffin, a screenwriter, and their 4-year-old daughter, Emily.She plans to bring at least one piece of her past into this next phase of life: a cross-stitched scene depicting baskets of various shapes and sizes that she made for her mother. For years, the piece hung in the front hallway of her parents’ house and was a stabilizing presence during difficult visits.Foster recently collected the baskets from her father’s basement. “I have them now,” she said. “They’ll go in the new house.” More

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      in Theater

      Come to the Cabaret, Old Chum. Or at Least Stream It.

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      New concerts from Sutton Foster, Jeremy Jordan and Marilyn Maye offer examples of what the most intimate art form can and can’t do.Cabaret is a magpie medium, plucking pieces from the world’s songbook and repurposing them to tell more-or-less personal stories.Whether the result is sublime or mortifying (or, more typically, in between) depends on how cleverly singers shape their material to fit the contours of the tales they’re telling. Vocal beauty is a secondary matter — as any number of old-school performers, like the swinging Sylvia Syms and the barking Elaine Stritch, proved by keeping the form alive even when they had almost no voice left.But the pandemic has nearly done the old bird in; the intimacy of most cabaret performance spaces, and the likelihood that a singer may spit in your chicken Kiev, have made live shows impossible. If there have nevertheless been some astounding virtual concerts in the tradition, including one Audra McDonald gave for a New York City Center gala, that doesn’t make the real thing any less valuable.Until live cabaret’s day, or rather its evening, returns, high-profile offerings from Sutton Foster, Jeremy Jordan and Marilyn Maye are here to entertain and instruct us. These three performers sing very well indeed, in very different styles and with very different material. But it’s their completely divergent uses of the form that make them stand out as examples of what cabaret can and can’t do best.One thing it can’t do at all is refuse to tell a story, even if that’s what a singer intends. Foster’s concert “Bring Me to Light,” also for City Center, tries hard anyway, deliberately defocusing its star and keeping psychology on a very short leash. The effect is so extreme that Foster seems more like the host of the occasion than the occasion itself, pushing her spotlight onto guests including Kelli O’Hara, Raúl Esparza and Joaquina Kalukango, who steals the show with “The Life of the Party,” from Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party.” Foster even gives a solo — “Here I Am,” from Disney’s “Camp Rock” — to Wren Rivera, a student of hers at Ball State University.In other words, despite having starred in seven Broadway shows and winning two Tony Awards, the first for “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 2002, Foster is a sharer, not a self-aggrandizer. Instead of filling gaps between songs with the de rigueur résumé-by-chitchat, she chipperly interviews her pals. And though the title of the show is taken from the finale of “Violet,” the Jeanine Tesori-Brian Crawley musical Foster led at City Center in 2013 and on Broadway in 2014, the tunestack of “Bring Me to Light” tends to avoid material strongly associated with its star. Mostly, it offers songs she is unlikely to be assigned onstage (“How to Handle a Woman”) or that come from other genres entirely. She and O’Hara make a lovely duet of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now.”This is all professionally rendered — as is the show itself. (The director is Leigh Silverman; the music director, Michael Rafter.) It looks fantastic in the plush if empty City Center auditorium. But at no point does it offer us the Sutton Foster who is so commanding when she plays a role that she can disappear into it before emerging transformed. Actually, at one point it does, when she bounces through the backstage hallways in jeans and then, in a nice jump cut, pops onto the stage in a sparkly gown. The song is the ambivalently titled “Hey, Look Me Over.”From Sutton Foster’s “Bring Me to Light,” at New York City Center.If Foster’s show tells the story of a star who avoids too much drama, “Jeremy Jordan: Carry On” heads in the opposite direction. It is bursting with drama, more than its little canoe of gorgeously sung songs can carry without tipping.The premise is both affecting and overwrought: that when he became a father in 2019, Jordan realized he had to unburden himself of unresolved conflicts from his own childhood before he could properly parent. Hence the pun in the show’s title, which is not just a command to keep going but also an actual piece of luggage filled with keepsakes that represent youthful traumas he must unpack.These are not the kind of traumas that are too piddling to earn a hearing; Jordan tells a brutal tale, involving abuse, drugs and a catastrophic car accident. The problem is that there aren’t many songs available to reflect and shape those traumas, so he must jury-rig existing ones (or, as in two cases, write new ones) to make a case for singing at all. Even so, as in a jukebox musical, they rarely fit, especially the ones associated with his own career, like “Broadway, Here I Come!” from “Smash,” and “Santa Fe” from “Newsies.”From Jeremy Jordan’s “Carry On,” at Feinstein’s/54 Below.Pop songs, including Billy Joel’s “Lullaby,” work better, but overall, the show is too heavy for a cabaret act and too skimpy and unvaried for a musical. (Aside from two medleys, there are only eight numbers.) Attempts to switch up the texture with asides, rueful jokes and painfully scripted banter with his pianist and music director, Benjamin Rauhala, only heighten the feeling that the material is as yet too raw for such a refined format.Perhaps “Carry On,” filmed without an audience at Feinstein’s/54 Below, would have been better off if Jordan hadn’t written, directed and performed it all himself. But learning to calibrate the emotional temperature of a room — and of one’s material — is a skill that comes only with experience. Jordan is 36; Foster, 46; together, they do not add up to Marilyn Maye’s 93 — an age that helps explain the distillation of her gifts and also her preference for classic material. “Broadway, the Maye Way,” another installment in the Feinstein’s/54 Below series that presented Jordan’s concert, consists mostly of show tunes, heavy on Jerry Herman, from musicals she’s been in, although never on Broadway itself.Maye, who started singing professionally in the 1940s, has run the gamut of outlets: radio, television, film, nightclubs, regional revivals, summer stock, concert halls and now cabaret. That is by no means a downward trajectory, but if anyone has the life experience to sing songs like “I’m Still Here,” from “Follies,” she does, with her “three cheers and dammit” verve. That would be enough in this repertoire, but Maye also brings to bear her wonderfully natural phrasing, her generous but not overstated swing and her big wallop of a voice in fantastic shape.From Marilyn Maye’s “Broadway, the Maye Way,” at Feinstein’s/54 Below.It’s hard to say whether she’s so good at singing optimistic Broadway barnburners like “I’m Still Here,” “Step to the Rear” and “Golden Rainbow” because they were written for voices like hers (she recorded the original hit version of “Cabaret” in 1966, and sings it again here) or because she has chosen them carefully to reflect what appears to be her actual personality.Probably, it’s both. The moto perpetuo arrangements by her musical director, Tedd Firth, certainly highlight her bubbliness and drive, but when she sings “Fifty Percent” from “Ballroom,” a number about a widow in love with a married man, the alteration in its effect is clearly coming from her. It’s no longer a torch song but a glass-half-full anthem.What Maye has mastered is the proportioning of restraint and release that allows the safe exchange of emotion between singer and audience. In a small room — and online, every room is small — that’s key. It’s how cabaret even under lockdown can remain an affecting art and not just a jukebox musical with sequins.Sutton Foster: Bring Me to LightThrough May 31; nycitycenter.orgJeremy Jordan: Carry OnThrough June 17; 54below.comMarilyn Maye: Broadway, the Maye WayThrough June 19; 54below.com More

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      in Theater

      Theater to Stream: A Musical Throwback and ‘The Normal Heart’

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      Highlights include concerts by Melissa Errico and Sutton Foster, and an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves.”In 2018, New Yorkers in the know were buzzing about a new musical at the tiny York Theater. That show, Mark Sonnenblick’s “Midnight at the Never Get,” was subtly daring and thought-provoking, underneath a conventional, even old-fashioned exterior. Thanks to a streaming production from the Signature Theater in Arlington, Va., it should reach the greater audience it richly deserves.Set in 1960s Manhattan, the intimate musical follows the wistful romance between a cabaret singer, Trevor, and a songwriter, Arthur, as they try to come up with a hit act while staying true to themselves. What, for example, should they do about the pronouns in their love songs? Sonnenblick’s original numbers, which brilliantly emulate a vintage sound, are perfectly executed pastiches that also stand on their own. Sam Bolen, who was in the York production and created the concept with Sonnenblick and Max Friedman, returns as Trevor. April 30-June 21; sigtheatre.org‘We Have to Hurry’Here’s an intriguing pairing: Elliott Gould and Kathleen Chalfant as flirting Florida retirees, in a new play by Dorothy Lyman. (Ever busy, Chalfant will appear in a live production of Karen Malpede’s “Blue Valiant” at a Pennsylvania art farm May 29 and 30.) Gould got his start in Broadway musicals, so with a bit of luck he’ll break into song. A girl can dream. May 1 and 2; broadwayondemand.comTaysha Marie Canales in “No Child…”via Arden Theatre Company‘No Child …’Nilaja Sun wrote and performed in this solo play, from 2006, based in part on her eight years of teaching in the New York City public school system. Now, the Arden Theater Company in Philadelphia is staging it with Taysha Marie Canales, who handles all the characters — students, teachers, janitors and more — orbiting the fictional Malcolm X High School as they try to put on the Timberlake Wertenbaker play “Our Country’s Good.” April 27-May 9; ardentheatre.org‘50in50: Shattering the Glass Ceiling’For the fifth anniversary of its “50in50” monologue series, the Billie Holiday Theater in Brooklyn wrangled a stunning lineup for this anthology of stories read by Black actresses — Marsha Stephanie Blake, Marla Gibbs, Sanaa Lathan, Audra McDonald, Anika Noni Rose, Gabourey Sidibe, Wanda Sykes, Vanessa Williams and many, many others. May 6-9; thebillieholiday.org‘Il Parle, Elle Chante: Mystery’The performer Melissa Errico and Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker, conclude their collaboration at the French Institute Alliance Française with a livestreamed (then on-demand) concert dedicated to the dark universe of noir fiction, more specifically its back-and-forth between the United States and France. The songs, featuring Tedd Firth on piano, include David Raksin and Johnny Mercer’s “Laura” and the premiere of Gopnik and Peter Foley’s “We Live, We Love, We Lie, We Die.” The first two installments in Errico and Gopnik’s series, “Love” and “Desire,” are still available to stream. May 6; fiaf.org‘The Normal Heart’This one is by appointment only, so mark your calendar for the ONE Archives Foundation’s reading of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” with — deep breath — Sterling K. Brown, Jeremy Pope, Laverne Cox, Jake Borelli and Danielle Savre, among others. The foundation supports the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California libraries — said to be the largest of its kind in the world. Paris Barclay directs. May 8; onearchives.orgRaúl Esparza in “The Waves in Quarantine.”via Berkeley Repertory Theatre‘The Waves in Quarantine’When Lisa Peterson and David Bucknam’s adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel premiered in 1990, The New York Times wrote that the book, score and lyrics were “suffused with a Woolfian intensity and intoxication.” Now Peterson directs a revised, virtual version that she conceived with the actor Raúl Esparza, with additional music by Adam Gwon. In addition to Esparza, the cast includes Carmen Cusack, Nikki Renée Daniels, Darius de Haas, Manu Narayan and Alice Ripley. April 29-May 28; berkeleyrep.orgCabaretIn “Bring Me to Light,” Sutton Foster’s on-demand concert at New York City Center, she covers a decent amount of Broadway ground. A six-time Tony Award nominee and two-time winner, she will swing from golden oldies from “Camelot,” “Oklahoma!” and “South Pacific” to excerpts from lesser-known shows, including “Anyone Can Whistle,” “Violet” and Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party.” April 28-May 31; nycitycenter.orgThere’s no rest on the virtual cabaret stages this month. John Lloyd Young is letting fans choose the songs for his “By Request” concert at the Space in Las Vegas. There is a 99 percent chance that they will select something from “Jersey Boys,” for which Young won a Tony in 2006. May 1-9; thespacelv.comJeremy Jordan in “Carry On,” presented by Feinstein’s/54 Below.Jenny AndersonIn New York, Feinstein’s/54 Below is covering different bases and constituencies with Jeremy Jordan’s “Carry On” (May 6-June 17) and Marilyn Maye’s “Broadway, the Maye Way” (May 8-June 19). 54below.comAt the GoodmanThe Goodman Theater in Chicago is out with two productions staged by Robert Falls, its artistic director. First is “Measure for Measure,” from 2013, a tale of bad hypocrisy and even worse policing that might feel resonant these days (through May 9). Next, Falls tackles a livestreamed staging of Adam Rapp’s “The Sound Inside,” a two-hander — in this case Mary Beth Fisher and John Drea — that has turned into a pandemic staple thanks to its relatively simple logistical demands and suspenseful pace (May 13-16). goodmantheatre.org‘Eurobeat: The Pride of Europe’The Will Ferrell movie “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” introduced many Americans to the glories of the title’s Pan-European competition. If you want to warm up before this year’s edition, May 18-22, stream an update of a revival, which The Guardian called a “sparkly, spandex-clad, bad-taste extravaganza” when it ran in the West End in 2008. In the Eurovision context, this description amounts to high praise. And yes, viewers can vote for the outcome. April 30-May 10; stream.theatre More