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    Can’t Make It to Broadway? Book and Movie Ideas for Theater Lovers.

    There are plenty of novels, memoirs, documentaries and livestreaming options sure to satiate fans of theater.A trip to the theater isn’t always possible, especially during the busy — and pricey — holiday season. When a craving for stage drama hits, fear not, there are options. In the world of literature, long-awaited memoirs by Barbra Streisand and Chita Rivera arrived this year, as did the first major biography of the playwright August Wilson. Whether you prefer a live capture of a popular Broadway show like “Waitress,” or a film adaptation of, say, “Dicks: The Musical,” an Upright Citizens Brigade sketch, there is an abundance of musical theater films. (And if all else fails, you can listen to our critics discuss two recent musical-theater highlights or hear the story of the success of “Wicked” from our theater reporter.) Here is a small selection of notable works of theater-related memoir, fiction and film.To ReadViking PressHarperOne‘My Name Is Barbra’Barbra Streisand’s memoir spans 970 pages of print and 48 hours via audiobook. But for an icon of her stature, whose personal life — her Brooklyn upbringing, her celeb lovers, her underdog charm, that famous nose — is almost as mythic as her career, a page count exceeding that of “Ulysses” could be considered restraint. While it’s filled with chatty, personable retellings of stories that may be familiar to Streisand fans, there are plenty of fresh anecdotes too. Alexandra Jacobs called it “a banquet of a book” in her review in The New York Times and advised that “you might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh.” Read the review.‘CHITA: A Memoir’The Broadway legend Chita Rivera wants to share the spotlight with her successors, and so, though her book is a memoir, Rivera kept the next generation in mind while writing it with the arts journalist Patrick Pacheco. In a conversation with Juan A. Ramírez in The Times, she said, “It’s not as much of a memoir as it is an opportunity for kids to realize that if they want this, they can have it — but they have to work hard.” That endless striving earned her three Tony Awards and led to her collaborations with the likes of John Kander and Fred Ebb, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse. Her drive shines in this book along with glimpses of snark from her “fire-breathing alter ego, Dolores.”‘August Wilson: A Life’If the seminal American playwright August Wilson were to read his own life story, written by the former Boston Globe theater critic Patti Hartigan, he would most likely do so in the back of a seedy diner, drinking coffee and chain smoking, as he often did. In the first major biography of the playwright, Hartigan chronicles Wilson’s prolific career — including his Pulitzer Prize-winning plays “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson” — and his immeasurable influence on capturing the experiences of Black Americans in the 20th century.‘The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race’In the scholar Farah Karim-Cooper’s book about Shakespeare and racism, she posits that “love demands that we reconcile ourselves with flaws and limitations.” Karim-Cooper, a director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater and a professor at King’s College London, applies this philosophy to the great playwright, scrutinizing his relationship with race and interrogating how his works shaped harmful Renaissance ideals — while still professing admiration. Pick it up for an expert perspective on a thorny theater subject, or to share a reading list with the prominent Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson, who reviewed the book for The Times.Tom LakeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Review: In ‘How to Dance in Ohio,’ Making Autism Sing

    A musical about seven autistic young adults, played by seven autistic young actors, breaks new ground on Broadway.It would have been enough of a first for a Broadway musical to tell a respectful or even vaguely authentic story about autistic people. On the rare occasions we have seen such characters represented in commercial productions, they have mostly been objects of pity, mockery or fear.So it is a welcome change that the seven autistic characters in “How to Dance in Ohio” are presented, without condescension, as young adults a lot like most others, albeit with unusual gifts and challenges. That they are also played by autistic performers makes the feel-good show, which opened on Sunday at the Belasco Theater, more than a first: It’s a milestone.With all that groundbreaking, perhaps it is no surprise that the production is otherwise very conventional, sometimes dispiritingly so. Just as the characters struggle to conform to the expectations of a neurotypical world, you feel the musical doing a similar thing, looking to traditional models (like “The Prom”) instead of offbeat ones (like “Kimberly Akimbo”) that would be a better fit. And though the result is sometimes uplifting, the uplift comes at the expense of the depth and complexity the show might have achieved were it not so intent on cheerful persuasion.Certainly in its brightness it is nothing like its source material, a 2015 documentary also called “How to Dance in Ohio.” Set at Amigo Family Counseling, a real Columbus mental health center for autistic people, the film, by Alexandra Shiva, highlights the experiences of several clients preparing for a spring formal. Over about 16 weeks, they practice specific applications of the life skills Dr. Emilio Amigo and his staff have been teaching them more generally, whether those skills are social (how to ask for a date), emotional (how to deal with rejection) or physical (how to do the Wobble).The documentary’s tone is objective and thus often dour. Not all its stories are happy: We see some clients struggle to speak, let alone dance. Even for the others, the excitement of the event is countered by fear — both theirs and their parents’, whose faces have been worn by years of worry. By not making the obstacles seem easily surmountable, the movie respects everyone’s hard work, regardless of success.The musical, directed by Sammi Cannold, features a cast of young actors who are all making their Broadway debuts.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo replicate that approach, however truthful, would be a big downer — and, for a commercial show, a fool’s errand. So the musical, directed by Sammi Cannold, instead starts from an assumption of ability and excellence. The young actors, all making their Broadway debuts, are highly skilled, sparkly cute and perfectly comfortable holding the stage.That makes their characters seem perfectly comfortable too. When best friends Caroline (Amelia Fei) and Jessica (Ashley Wool) go to Macy’s with their mothers to buy twirly gowns, you feel that they don’t need, as in the movie, constant assistance and reassurance — just a credit card. And though Tommy, a superhero fan preparing for his driving test, tells us he has “trouble making facial expressions,” the evidence of Conor Tague’s performance says otherwise. His facial expressions, like those of any good actor, would be legible from the back of the Belasco.Lacking the movie’s fundamental contrast of hopes and abilities, the show, by Rebekah Greer Melocik (book and lyrics) and Jacob Yandura (music), focuses on flimsier conflicts. Jessica doesn’t like Caroline’s (unseen) boyfriend, who’s too possessive. Remy (Desmond Luis Edwards) gets some hostile comments on his YouTube cosplay channel. Drew (Liam Pearce) is concerned about attending the prominent university that accepts him. (He’s an engineering savant.) Mel (Imani Russell) has trouble handling criticism once promoted to Head of Reptiles at the local Paws and Claws.Only Marideth (Madison Kopec) retains some of the complexity of the real character she’s based on, at least as seen in the film. When upset by social situations she cannot handle, she may freeze in fear or race out of the room, often into the comfort of the alternative universes she visits on her computer or the real-world facts she collects compulsively. (“You have more bones in your feet than in the rest of your body combined.”) This outlook is beautifully established in “Unlikely Animals,” a number that, like many of the show’s songs, has a thoughtful and poetic (and on-the-nose) hook. “Australia is a lesson,” she sings, “in what isolation and distance can do.”Even so, “How to Dance in Ohio” does not permit much doubt that Marideth and the others will have fun at the formal and achieve at least moderate independence beyond it. To take up the slack, the authors have displaced the story’s crisis onto Dr. Amigo (Caesar Samayoa) himself. An anodyne and often peripheral figure in the movie, he here makes a series of peremptory and bizarre missteps that, in the doldrums of the second act, alienate him from his clients, their parents and, for good measure, his own daughter, Ashley (Cristina Sastre), who works at the clinic and likewise blunders in her dealings with Mel. We are meant to understand that it’s not the autistic characters who need to change but the neurotypical ones.Foreground from left: Wool as Jessica, Desmond Luis Edwards as Remy and Caesar Samayoa as Dr. Emilio Amigo (Caesar Samayoa), who runs a mental health center for autistic people.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFair enough, but that story, warmly acted if clumsily executed in a series of impossible hairpin turns, isn’t as distinctive or compelling as the one the movie tells.This being a musical, the compensation is meant to be in the songs, and there is much about Yandura’s music and Melocik’s lyrics to admire. The opening, “Today Is,” in which we meet the clients as they build their lives from bits of memorized routines, is cleverly set to scale-like phrases reminiscent of piano exercises. The expected number at Macy’s turns out to be not for Caroline and Jessica but for their mothers, with the touching refrain “I want to see a picture of my daughter getting ready for the dance.” Throughout, the phrase “how to,” sung by almost everyone as they stumble their way forward — “how to set clear boundaries,” “how to manage long-term grief” — suggests that people have more in common than their different kinds of wiring might suggest.But stepping too hard on the dramatic accelerator, the book strips its gears as it goes along, often resorting to advocacy jargon (“nothing about us without us”) and flat-out cheerleading. Nor can the minimal production do much to deliver the oomph it clearly wants as the story reaches for a Broadway ending.Perhaps it’s enough that “How to Dance in Ohio” offers solace and encouragement in a mild, conventional package. (There are cool-down spaces for those who need them, as one of the actors explains in welcoming the audience.) Doing sweet, reparative work for any part of humanity means doing sweet, reparative work for it all.How to Dance in OhioAt the Belasco Theater, Manhattan; howtodanceinohiomusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More

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    ‘How to Dance in Ohio’: A Story About Autism and Connection

    In a first for Broadway, openly autistic actors are playing the autistic characters in this new musical about a doctor helping neurodiverse clients.To get to Amigo Family Counseling, I walked down beige hallways on the first floor of a building in a ho-hum Columbus, Ohio, office park a short walk from a Bob Evans restaurant.The center’s clinical director, Dr. Emilio Amigo, waved at me once I got inside. Behind a closed door I heard the voices of his clients — autistic young adults from mostly working- and middle-class central Ohio families — boisterously chatting about their Friday night plans.I was there to talk about “How to Dance in Ohio,” a new Broadway musical that features Dr. Amigo and seven of his autistic clients as characters. The show — pop in score and sensibility — is based on Alexandra Shiva’s 2015 documentary, which follows Dr. Amigo and many more of his clients as they navigate life and eagerly, but anxiously, prepare for a spring formal. (The musical is in previews at the Belasco Theater in Manhattan, where it is scheduled to open on Dec. 10. The documentary is on Max.)In a room filled with board games and framed illustrations of rainbow-bright robots, I met Tommy Van Atta. I asked him to tell me what it was like to be in the documentary and now be a character in a musical adaptation. Van Atta, 28, who has the frame of a linebacker, paused for a few seconds, then spoke softly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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    ‘How to Dance in Ohio,’ a Musical, Plans a Fall Broadway Opening

    A teenage ritual takes on deeper significance as a setting where autistic young people can blossom — and exercise their social skills along the way.“How to Dance in Ohio,” a poignant new musical about a group of young autistic adults gearing up for a spring dance, will open on Broadway late this year, with a cast of seven autistic performers playing the central roles.The musical is based on a 2015 documentary from the filmmaker Alexandra Shiva that followed participants in a social skills therapy program for people on the autism spectrum; the musical is also set at a therapy program, and it tells the story of young adults preparing for a dance that they hope could help them confront some of the challenges they face in navigating social interactions.The musical had a previous run last year at Syracuse Stage in central New York; the production schedule was cut short when Covid cases arose among the cast and crew. The review of the show in The Post-Standard, a Syracuse newspaper, was headlined “The musical you’ll talk about for the rest of your life” and called it “exhilarating, groundbreaking, celebratory.”Casting is not yet complete, but will include several actors making their Broadway debuts: Desmond Edwards, Amelia Fei, Madison Kopec, Liam Pearce, Imani Russell, Conor Tague and Ashley Wool. Among the others on the bill so far are Haven Burton and Darlesia Cearcy.“How to Dance in Ohio” features a book and lyrics by Rebekah Greer Melocik and music by Jacob Yandura; it is directed by Sammi Cannold and choreographed by Mayte Natalio. The famed director and producer Hal Prince was initially attached to the project; he died in 2019.The musical is being produced by a company called P3 Productions, which is led by Ben Holtzman, Sammy Lopez and Fiona Howe Rudin, along with Level Forward, the production company co-founded by Abigail Disney. It is being capitalized for up to $15.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The show is to begin previews Nov. 15 and to open Dec. 10 at the Belasco Theater. More