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    The Surprising Presence in ‘The Gospel at Colonus’

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    Little Island’s revival of “The Gospel at Colonus” brings together a powerhouse ensemble of Black artists to tell a story of shame, exile and grace. At its center: the gospel singer and pastor Kim Burrell, who came under fire nine years ago after a sermon surfaced online in which she condemned homosexuality. Now, in her traditional theatrical debut, Burrell joins a production that asks whether redemption is possible.“The Gospel at Colonus,” directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, is a joyous fusion of Greek tragedy and gospel music. This is the show’s first New York production not led by its writers, the composer Bob Telson and Lee Breuer, a founder of the experimental theater group Mabou Mines. The musical, first produced at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983 and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, uses the melodic language of a Black Pentecostal church service to retell the story of Oedipus, the king of Thebes who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, then gouged out his eyes in shame.The jazz musician Frank Senior, left, and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines. “The Gospel at Colonus,” directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, is a joyous fusion of Greek tragedy and gospel music.Yuvraj Khanna for The New York TimesThe original production starred Morgan Freeman as the pastor who tells Oedipus’ story and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama as the singers who give voice to his pain. Now, Chowdhury has assembled a multitalented cast: the R&B singer-songwriter serpentwithfeet; the actors and singers Stephanie Berry, Ayana George Jackson and Jon-Michael Reese; and, sharing Oedipus’s singing parts, the operatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines and the jazz musician Frank Senior. Burrell appears as Theseus, the king who offers Oedipus refuge at the end of his life.Chowdhury, a Pulitzer-nominated playwright, studied and later taught about spirituals and other religious music at Stanford. He said he assembled this cast because of their voices. “There’s enormous sonic diversity under the umbrella of Black sacred music,” he wrote in an email, “and in gathering together a team for this production, I wanted to highlight that range of sounds and textures.”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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      in Theater

      In Three Off Broadway Shows, They’re Coming Out and Out and Out

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      Several recent productions have featured a range of L.G.B.T.Q. stories, from strained familial relationships to self-discovery via Disney cosplay.For decades, describing a boy or a man as “artistic” was a way to imply they did not fit the accepted heterosexual mold. Of course the expression’s double meaning could be literal, as illustrated by recent coming-of-age shows in which the narrators are both gay and, well, artistic. (As for lesbians, they have long been called “handy” — bring on the tool belts.)Douglas Lyons and Ethan D. Pakchar’s “Beau the Musical” follows many of the conventional signposts of the “growing up different” genre. As a 27-year-old, Ace (Matt Rodin) revisits his middle and then high school years, when he navigated an affair with his bully, Ferris (Cory Jeacoma); figured out how to better understand his mother, Raven (Amelia Cormack); and reconnected with a once-estranged grandfather, Beau (Chris Blisset), who had secrets of his own.Josh Rhodes’s production for Out of the Box Theatrics, through July 27 at Theater 154 in Manhattan, goes how you’d expect a story involving same-sex attraction in Tennessee to go: clandestine trysts, self-loathing, violent encounters, art (in this case music) as an outlet and escape. This is well-trod terrain, but Lyons has a flair for recycling tropes, as he did in his popular comedy “Chicken and Biscuits.” And Rodin, who played a gay teacher in the musical “All the World’s a Stage” this spring, gives a warm portrayal of someone trying to find his place through music-making.The bulk of “Beau the Musical” takes place over the late 1990s and early 2000s, while Rob Madge’s autobiographical “My Son’s a Queer (but What Can You Do?)” largely looks back at events from the 2000s and 2010s, when Madge, who identifies as nonbinary, was growing up. The shows’ time frames overlap somewhat, but the experiences they depict are starkly different.A British production that had a five-performance run at New York City Center in June, “My Son’s a Queer” is a portrait of a child who was unconditionally loved and accepted, even when bossing their father around in a D.I.Y. Disney tribute — which we see because the Madges were fond of making home videos. Everybody in the family supported young Rob’s artistic-ness, both literal and euphemistic: Granny Grimble made them a Maleficent costume, and when problems erupted at school (“not the best of times,” the adult Rob says in a rare display of understatement), their mother took a job as a “lunch lady” to keep watch.Madge revisits those years with unflagging, if solipsistic, brightness — the young Rob often asks their parents, “Are you filming?” and a robust ego seems to have been a constant. The downside is that the City Center performance I saw did not always bear out Madge’s confidence in their talent, with performances of original songs (written with Pippa Cleary) that rarely rose above adequate.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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      in Theater

      Diana Oh, Passionate Voice for Queer Liberation in Theater, Dies at 38

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      Mx. Oh’s politically provocative and often playful works, including the Off Broadway production “{my lingerie play},” asserted the right to be oneself while having fun.Diana Oh, a glitter-dusted experimental artist-activist whose theater works intertwined political provocation with profound compassion in rituals of communion with audiences, died on June 17 at their home in Brooklyn. Mx. Oh, who used the pronouns they and them, was 38.The death was confirmed by Mx. Oh’s brother Han Bin Oh, who said the cause was suicide.A playwright, actor, singer-songwriter and musician, Mx. Oh created art that didn’t fit neatly into categories. Mx. Oh was best known for the outraged yet disarmingly gentle Off Broadway show “{my lingerie play},” a music-filled protest against male sexual violence; it was performed in a series of 10 installations around New York City.A concert-like play — with Mx. Oh singing at its center — “{my lingerie play}” percolated with an angry awareness of the ways restrictive gender norms and society’s policing of sexual desire can leave whole groups vulnerable. It was an emphatic and loving assertion of the right to be oneself without worrying about abuse.“I was born a woman, to immigrant parents,” Mx. Oh said in the show. “That’s when my body became political. That’s when I became an artist.”Mx. Oh’s Infinite Love Party, which the Bushwick Starr theater in Brooklyn produced in 2019, was not a show but rather a structured celebration with a sleepover option. It was a handmade experience, including music and aerial silks, designed to welcome queer people, people of color and their allies.Mx. Oh in The Infinite Love Party, which was not a show but rather a structured celebration with music.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMx. Oh in 2019 during The Infinite Love Party, which had a sleepover option.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Fight Back’ Recreates an Act Up Meeting From 1989

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      This immersive theater experiment enlists attendees to help recreate an AIDS activist meeting from 1989 as an exercise in empathy.On Monday evening at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, anyone entering Room 101 would step directly into March 13, 1989.Thirty-six years ago, the AIDS activist group Act Up New York had the space that night for its weekly meeting — an event that David Wise’s immersive theater experiment “Fight Back” seeks to recreate.Audience members are by definition participants, too. Each has been assigned the persona of someone who was involved with the organization early on. Act Up was in emergency mode then, trying desperately to get the culture to treat the catastrophic epidemic with greater urgency.Just days before the meeting, AIDS had killed Robert Mapplethorpe at 42. Within a year, it would claim Alvin Ailey at 58, Keith Haring at 31 and many thousands more. For the people in the room, death had become a far too frequent part of life.That is the cauldron in which the real meeting took place, and into which “Fight Back” means to drop its audience, as an exercise in empathy. As Wise, 47, explained by phone, he doesn’t expect people in 2025 to be able to access the breadth of emotions the activists felt in 1989.“But I do think that there’s something about inhabiting with your body,” he said, “and doing the actions that someone was doing, and saying the words that someone might have been saying, that is really effective, and affecting.”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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      in Music

      Turning VHS Tapes of Gay Men’s Choruses Into a Powerful Celebration

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      Matthew Leifheit’s “No Time at All,” culled from recordings made at the height of the AIDS crisis, plays through speakers nestled in the New York City AIDS Memorial.On a recent sunny morning in Lower Manhattan, Matthew Leifheit heard applause.It wasn’t for a live performance, but for many old ones — the source material for “No Time at All,” his sound installation that continues through June 30 at the New York City AIDS Memorial in the West Village.Culled from 53 VHS tapes, the piece is a continuous mix of music and songs performed by gay men’s choruses from 1985 to 1995, complete with the distortions and degradations that occur when magnetic tape ages and deteriorates.The piece runs 65 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of silence, a quieting that tells as much of a story as the golden baritones. There are seven “recitals,” as Leifheit calls them, that play every day through June from speakers nestled within the memorial’s 18-foot white steel canopy.Leifheit, 37, said he deliberately included music from concerts that took place in the middle of the darkest early years of the AIDS crisis before the use of highly active antiretroviral treatments (HAART) in the United States. It was a decade, he said during an interview at the memorial, when many gay chorus members “were reckoning with what they were going through, through music.”Leifheit said the project’s title refers to how the passage of time might feel to people who remember going to so many funerals — and to the haste with which AIDS killed many of the men whose anonymous voices carry through the memorial.Documenting the loss, and musical joys, of those early AIDS years was his artistic attempt to “dramatize the absence” and honor chorus members who “are still with us and thriving.”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

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Broadway Dreams Were Dashed, Then Rob Madge Knocked on Some Doors

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      The British performer is bringing “My Son’s a Queer (but What Can You Do?)” to City Center this week, after an earlier run was canceled.“Everybody needs a good setback in their life and gosh, 2024 did that for me.”That was Rob Madge, speaking on video last month from their London home. A theater maker who identifies as nonbinary, Madge smiled wide into the camera and, wearing a crisp white guayabera-style shirt that was mostly buttoned, looked as if they were on their way to a “White Lotus” resort happy hour.But Madge wasn’t talking about cocktails and island intrigue. They were recalling dashed Broadway dreams.In February 2024, the Broadway run of Madge’s autobiographical show “My Son’s a Queer (but What Can You Do?)” was postponed just weeks before it was to begin preview performances at the Lyceum Theater. There was talk of opening on Broadway the following season, but that never materialized.In a statement last month, the show’s producers, Tom Smedes and Heather Shields, said “the heartbreaking decision” to call off a Broadway run was because “the risks of launching and sustaining the production were simply too great” for the show’s “long-term health.”The actor in the production, which incorporates projected scenes from the “living room shows” that Madge performed as a kid.Mark SeniorMadge, 28, said having Broadway fall through prompted them to consider difficult and dueling questions, the likes of which plague any theater artist putting work into the world.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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      in Movies

      For Pride, Stream These Queer Horror Movies

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      Standouts include a lesbian-coded vampire thriller and a Mexican folk-horror drama.In horror movies, to be queer is to be different, “which cinema has continually rewritten as a form of danger,” Peter Marra writes in his new book, “Queer Slashers.”Dangerous, queer, different: Sounds like my kind of horror movie. Here are some of my favorites.‘Dracula’s Daughter’ (1936)Rent or buy it on major platforms.“She Gives You That WEIRD FEELING!”: That’s how one poster advertised Lambert Hillyer’s lesbian-coded vampire thriller, a follow-up to “Dracula,” a hit for Universal Pictures in 1931. Hillyer’s movie centers on Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), a Dracula progeny who kidnaps a young woman in Transylvania. Holden’s performance is predatory but feminine, menacing but soft-eyed — a powerful example of how lesbian subtext in early Hollywood paved the way for future Sapphic vampires.‘The Seventh Victim’ (1943)Rent or buy it on major platforms.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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      in Theater

      Her Books and Movies Provoked France. Will Her Plays Do the Same?

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      Virginie Despentes is pivoting to theater. Playgoers “really show up, even for demanding or radical works,” she says.Over the past three decades, Virginie Despentes has cemented her place as one of the most admired — and argued over — feminist authors in France. “King Kong Theory,” her 2006 book about sex, gender and her own experience of rape, sparked conversations around sexual violence in the country; her award-winning “Vernon Subutex” trilogy of novels, released between 2015 and 2017, drew international attention for its vivid depiction of misfits adrift in French society. (The first volume made the Booker International Prize shortlist in 2018.)Yet recently, Despentes, 55, has been quietly pivoting from books toward writing and directing for the stage. In 2024, she wrote the play “Woke” with three other authors, Julien Delmaire, Anne Pauly and Paul B. Preciado; in it, they confronted France’s reaction to progressive ideas on race and gender.Despentes directed the production at the Théâtre du Nord in Lille, in northern France, and now she’s back with a follow-up: “Romancero Queer,” which had its premiere last week at Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris and runs through June 29. In “Romancero Queer,” she explores power imbalances in the making of a stage show: Behind the scenes of a new production of Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba,” a fictional group of actors struggle with their older male director for greater creative control.While Despentes has directed several movies, including “Baise-Moi” (2000) and a documentary about pro-sex feminists, “Mutantes (Féminisme Porno Punk)” (2009), she said in an interview in Paris that theater has turned out to be a better fit. Shortly after “Romancero Queer” had debuted, she spoke about the art forms that she has tried her hand at: literature, film and theater. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.What prompted your pivot to theater?I attend a lot of plays, and I realized that theater audiences are very curious. They really show up, even for demanding or radical works, which made me want to try it. I feel good when I’m in a theater auditorium — and these non-virtual moments feel important nowadays. I’m not at all technophobic — I spend quite a bit of time online — but I enjoy this kind of counter-rhythm, away from social media. During performances of “Romancero Queer,” I sit in the back, behind the audience, and I have yet to see anyone take out their phone.A rehearsal of “Romancero Queer,” the new play by Despentes.Teresa SuarezWe 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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      in Theater

      ‘We Are Gathered’ Promises to Love, Honor and Cherish

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      When JaDonna Harris and Marquian Harris married in 2015, they did it alone, before a justice of the peace. As their 10th anniversary approached, they contemplated a do-over that would include friends and family. But the cost was an issue, as was agreeing on a venue. Then JaDonna Harris received an email from Arena Stage. An upcoming play was looking for real couples interested in getting married or renewing their vows. She and her wife replied immediately.“We were like, this is kismet,” JaDonna Harris recalled.That play, “We Are Gathered,” is a new work by Tarell Alvin McCraney that began Friday, overlapping with Washington’s World Pride festivities. A celebration of love, each performance will culminate with what Arena Stage is calling “Love Takes Center Stage,” an immersive experience in which one or more couples will join the actors for a real marriage ceremony or vow renewal. One of the stars, Craig Wallace, has been ordained. Over the course of the show’s 30 scheduled performances, several dozen couples will participate. After each show, Arena Stage will hold a reception with cake, champagne and dancing.“We’re going to be discovering a great deal each night,” said the director Kent Gash, right, with the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney.Maansi Srivastava for The New York TimesThe Harrises can’t wait.“We are happy to celebrate queer love, to celebrate the love in general all over the world and everybody’s ability to find a person that they are attached to,” JaDonna Harris said. “That’s all that matters.”McCraney began to dream up “We Are Gathered” during World Pride in Sydney, Australia, in 2023. A theater there was staging a revival of his 2012 play “Choir Boy,” a drama about a young gay man at an all-Black preparatory school. McCraney admired the production, but he wished that the play, which deals with anti-gay prejudice, didn’t feel quite so relevant. He decided that by the time the next World Pride came around, two years later, he would offer actors a script that felt more playful, more joyful.In searching for a subject, McCraney, now 44 and the artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, kept returning to the idea of marriage. When he was growing up, marriage wasn’t available to gay men, but a 2015 Supreme Court decision had changed that. Now friends were asking him why he wasn’t married and he was beginning to ask that question of himself. Recent opposition to gay rights and transgender rights — including book bans and a Florida law nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” — had made that question feel more urgent. “Those things were happening pretty regularly and beginning to remind me there isn’t a lot of time and nothing is promised,” he said. “I decided, OK, I’m going to find out what this means to me.”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