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    Morgan Jenness, Whose Artistic Vision Influenced American Theater, Dies at 72

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    A beloved figure in the theatrical community, she redefined the role of dramaturg, influencing playwrights like David Adjmi and David Henry Hwang.Morgan Jenness, a dramaturg, teacher and theatrical agent who nurtured the work of countless playwrights — including Taylor Mac, David Adjmi, David Henry Hwang, Larry Kramer and Maria Irene Fornés — died on Nov. 12. Ms. Jenness, who in recent years began using the pronouns they/them and she interchangeably, was 72.Mx. Mac confirmed the death. “In Act 3 of her life, she was exploring her gender identity,” said Mx. Mac, who went to Ms. Jenness’s apartment in the East Village of Manhattan with two friends after she failed to show up for a class she taught at Columbia University and discovered her body. The cause of death had not yet been determined.Ms. Jenness was a revered and beloved figure in the theater community — particularly the downtown theater community. (In many ways, she was its embodiment.) She had a deep moral seriousness, colleagues said, as well as a fierce artistic integrity and a passion for subversive work that had depth charges in all the right places. She also had “a complete indifference to material success,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, where Ms. Jenness began her career. “She was frankly repelled by it.”The play was the thing.“She would ask writers, ‘What do you want to inject into the bloodstream of the American theater?’” recalled Beth Blickers, a theatrical agent.“If you said, ‘I just want to tell good stories,’ she would turn to me and say, ‘That was a terrible answer,’” Ms. Blickers continued. “She wanted someone to say, ‘I have a passion for this community or this idea.’ To tell good stories wasn’t enough.”A dramaturg has been defined as a sort of literary and theatrical adviser who helps the actors and director understand the play they’re presenting. “But that was the European model, focused primarily on the classics,” Mr. Eustis said. “Morgan was one of the first generation of people who were defining what a new play dramaturg was: the midwife and support system of a playwright.”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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      Francis Jue Takes a Victory Lap in ‘Yellow Face’

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      Seventeen years after he first appeared in “Yellow Face,” the veteran actor Francis Jue has returned with a nuanced performance as a blustery patriarch.It’s a well-worn bit of audition advice for actors: Don’t telegraph that you really want the part you are up for — just do your thing. A corollary: The creative freedom you gain when you have relinquished your thirst for a role may spur you to make fearless choices that can seal the deal.Francis Jue has borne out this wisdom over a long and lauded career, which has reached a new height with his bittersweet turn as the blustery patriarch in David Henry Hwang’s hall-of-mirrors comedy “Yellow Face,” now on Broadway. Critics have rained superlatives on his performance: In his review for The New York Times, Jesse Green called it “masterly”; others have hailed it as both “a comic jolt” (Variety) and “heart-busting” (Time Out New York).The ability to wring laughs as well as tears from audiences is a superpower that has made Jue a go-to actor not only for Hwang (with roles in his shows “Soft Power” and “Kung Fu”), but also for “multiple generations of Asian American playwrights,” said Mike Lew, who cast him in his play “Tiger Style!”Lew called Jue “puckish yet rooted, razor-sharp-witted, yet equally gifted with physical comedy.”Remarkably, his victory lap in “Yellow Face” is a return to a role he first performed in the play’s New York premiere at the Public Theater in 2007. Still more remarkably, it is a part he was never seriously considered for — until he showed what he could do with it.Francis Jue, left, and Daniel Dae Kim in the play “Yellow Face” at the Todd Haimes Theater.Sara Krulwich/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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      Review: ‘Ainadamar’ Fills the Met Opera Stage With Flamenco

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      Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang’s opera, inspired by the life of Federico García Lorca, arrived at the Met with a dizzying blend of styles.It took nearly 20 years, but the music of Osvaldo Golijov has arrived at the Metropolitan Opera. And it’s not the work that he originally expected.In 2006, Peter Gelb, before taking over as the company’s general manager, announced that Golijov, celebrated at the time for his jubilantly multicultural hit “La Pasión Según San Marcos,” had been commissioned to write a new opera for the Met. The company later said it would be based on Euripides’ “Iphigenia in Aulis,” with a premiere set for the 2018-19 season.Then, in 2016, during a dry spell for the composer, who had developed a reputation for missed deadlines, the project was called off.There was another Golijov opera readily available for the Met to program, though: “Ainadamar,” a fantasia about the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. It’s a seemingly sure bet, so frequently performed since its 2003 premiere that it has appeared in New York multiple times already.So Golijov finally got to take his bow on the house’s stage, with the opening of a new production of “Ainadamar” on Tuesday. A fluidly staged dream heavy on flamenco spectacle, it was assured in its movement, but not in its musical performance. After all these years, the Met still doesn’t appear quite ready for Golijov.The production, directed by Deborah Colker, has constant flamenco choreography by Colker and Antonio Najarro.Sara Krulwich/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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      Osvaldo Golijov’s ‘Ainadamar’ Opera Makes Its Met Debut

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      Osvaldo Golijov’s opera about Federico García Lorca makes its Met debut in a dance-heavy production, directed by the choreographer Deborah Colker.Rippling scales of Spanish guitar, the howls of a raspy-voiced singer, thunderous clapping and stamping — the sounds could have been coming from a tavern in Andalusia, home of flamenco. But this was the Metropolitan Opera House during a recent rehearsal for its new production of “Ainadamar.”A one-act opera by the Argentine-born composer Osvaldo Golijov, “Ainadamar” has its Met debut on Tuesday. And it wasn’t just the sounds of flamenco that were unusual for the opera house. There were two choreographers in the room, one of whom, Deborah Colker, was the production’s director.Since its premiere at the Tanglewood Music Center in 2003, “Ainadamar”— an 85-minute work about the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca — has had many productions, including in a Golijov festival at Lincoln Center in 2006. But this one, which played at the Scottish Opera and Detroit Opera before coming to New York, has by far the most dance in it.“What Deborah has done blew me away,” Golijov said in a phone interview. “She revealed to me something I had not thought about”: that the opera “can be danced throughout.”Colker is known for her dance company in Brazil, as well as her choreography for Cirque du Soleil and the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. She had a musical education, seriously studying classical piano as a child, but “Ainadamar” is the first opera she has directed.“I direct like a choreographer,” she said after the rehearsal, noting that her theatrical approach to the opera was simple: gestures, movement, dance. “This is my language, yes, but this is also what the music is asking for.”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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      Review: Daniel Dae Kim as a Playwright Unmasked in ‘Yellow Face’

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      David Henry Hwang’s 2007 play, now in a fine Broadway revival, is a pointed critique of identity, masquerading as a mockumentary.To write yourself into your own play is to put on a very curious mask. If it’s flattering, is it honest? If it’s honest, why bother?Those questions, both as artistic choices and as problems of social identity, are powerfully and hilariously engaged in the revival of David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” that opened on Tuesday at the Todd Haimes Theater. The answers are deliberately equivocal. On one hand, this Roundabout production, directed (as was the 2007 original) by Leigh Silverman, stars the exceedingly likable and handsome Daniel Dae Kim as Hwang’s stand-in, called DHH. On the other, this DHH is a worm.So too is the sinuous story, which requires a ton of exposition to get on its way. DHH, exactly like Hwang, won a 1988 Tony Award for his Broadway debut, “M. Butterfly.” His 1993 follow-up, “Face Value,” won only notoriety. Closing before its official New York opening, it earned the nickname “M. Turkey.”From left, Kevin Del Aguila, Kim, Shannon Tyo and Marinda Anderson. The supporting cast, mismatched to roles without regard to gender or race, are all wonderfully inventive, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Face Value” was Hwang’s theatrical response to the “Miss Saigon” controversy, in which the producer Cameron Mackintosh, importing that megamusical from London in 1991, sought to import its star, Jonathan Pryce, as well. But because Pryce is white, and his character is Eurasian, protests against the casting ensued. Nevertheless, the show went on — and on and on — with Mackintosh dismissing the dispute as “a storm in an Oriental teacup.”Hence “Face Value”: a broad farce, set in part at the “Imperialist Theater,” about the casting of a white actor in the title role of a musical called “The Real Fu Manchu.”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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      Daniel Dae Kim Isn’t Afraid to Fail

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      It’s tough to see the resemblance.In the Broadway production of David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face,” starting previews at the Todd Haimes Theater on Sept. 13, Daniel Dae Kim will star as DHH, a fictionalized, none-too-sympathetic character based very loosely on the Tony-winning playwright.“Who wouldn’t want to have their doppelgänger be Daniel Dae Kim?,” said Hwang, whose play premiered Off Broadway in 2007 and who helped cast Kim in this Roundabout Theater Company revival.Who indeed? Since Kim first broke through in 2004 as the brooding, morally conflicted former enforcer on the hit ABC series “Lost,” and later as a tough, shotgun-blasting detective on the CBS reboot of “Hawaii Five-0,” he has become known for a certain type of character. Earnest. Serious. Enigmatic. Dignified.As the King of Siam, “Daniel stood in the middle of this enormous space and just held the entire audience in the palm of his hands,” said Maria Friedman, who performed alongside him in a 2009 staging of “The King and I” at London’s cavernous Royal Albert Hall. “There’s nothing slight about him.”Kim revisited the role in 2016, making his Broadway debut in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “The King and I,” where he was praised by Ben Brantley, a former chief critic of The New York Times, for his “astute comic timing” and his character’s “restive, self-delighted intelligence.”In “Yellow Face,” Daniel Dae Kim is lampooning a playwright who became an advocate for the Asian American community. “He’s trying to do all the right things,” Kim said, “but parts of his personality get in the way of making the right decisions.”Ricardo Nagaoka 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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      Can the Higgs Boson Become a Broadway Star?

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      A musical about particle physics is under development, with David Henry Hwang, the playwright behind “M. Butterfly.”On a recent Friday afternoon in a basement room in Midtown Manhattan, a dozen musicians and actors stood behind a line of microphones and broke into song about particle physics. Urged along by a piano in the corner, their voices blended at times in a heavenly lament about cosmic ignorance and the search for the Higgs boson, a fleck of energy thought to be key to understanding the evolution of the universe.If you think particle physics is an unpromising subject for a Broadway musical, you’re not alone. David Henry Hwang, the playwright of “M. Butterfly” fame, was unmoved when the idea was first pitched to him several years ago. “It was such an unlikely idea,” he said.But that was then.The basement performance, for a small crowd of Broadway insiders, investors and friends, was the first private reading of a new musical with a story by Mr. Hwang, and music and lyrics by Bear McCreary and Zoe Sarnak. The show recounts one of the biggest events in physics this century: the discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson and the people behind it.The production, still nascent, is based on “Particle Fever,” an award-winning documentary film in 2013 produced by David Kaplan, a film student turned physicist at Johns Hopkins University, and directed by Mark Levinson, a physicist turned filmmaker.The minireveal in June was an important first step for Megan Kingery and Annie Roney, the producers, who have spent the past decade trying to forge the unlikely material into what they hope will eventually become a Broadway musical.“It’s been a long time coming, and it has a long way to go,” Ms. Kingery said recently during a Zoom interview with Ms. Roney.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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      Review: The Tragic Story of ‘An American Soldier’ Comes Home

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      An opera about Danny Chen, an Army private who died by suicide after experiencing racist hazing while serving, was performed in New York, his hometown.Thirteen years have passed since Danny Chen, an Army private from New York, killed himself while serving in Afghanistan after experiencing brutal hazing and racist taunts from fellow soldiers. “An American Soldier,” the opera based on his story, has been seen in Washington, D.C., and St. Louis.But when the work had its run in Missouri, in 2018, Huang Ruo, its composer, and David Henry Hwang, its librettist, promised Private Chen’s family that they would try to bring it home to the city where he was born and raised. This week, they succeeded, as “An American Soldier” was produced at the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center — just a mile or so from Chinatown, where Private Chen grew up and where a stretch of Elizabeth Street was renamed Private Danny Chen Way in 2014.In Chay Yew’s clearheaded production, with an excellent cast, the touching opera had little trouble making its impact at the performance on Saturday evening. Huang and Hwang’s piece is a straightforward Chinese American family drama, but one with obvious, shameful resonances about the treatment of Asian people and other minorities in this country, and the limits on American ideals of the embrace of difference and easy assimilation.The piece opens on the court-martial of a brutal sergeant who was Private Chen’s chief antagonist. It then alternates between the courtroom and the chronological unfolding of Private Chen’s story, from the first glimmers of his idea to join the Army — an effort to prove that he was a “real American” — through the camaraderie of basic training, his endurance of racism at his next post and his nightmarish treatment once he reaches Afghanistan. His mother is a tender presence in her scenes at home with her beloved son, and a figure of fury and hurt during the court-martial, which resulted in the sergeant’s being found not guilty of the most serious charges.The version of “An American Soldier” that premiered at Washington National Opera in 2014 was a single act of just an hour. By 2018, at Opera Theater of Saint Louis, the piece had added an act and doubled in length, delving more deeply into Private Chen’s life beyond the account of the sergeant’s trial. With some tweaks, this is the work that was performed at the Perelman Center, in a version it commissioned with Boston Lyric Opera.Whether calmly undulating under an impassioned duet or anxiously sputtering as the plot darkens, Huang’s music tends to simmer out of the spotlight, allowing the storytelling to come to the fore. But there are some idiosyncratic touches in the score, like the almost ritualistic percussion hovering under some passages and the fractured trumpet — a kind of stifled fanfare — near the end, when there is an ironic choral paean to the American motto “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”).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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      Roundabout to Stage ‘Pirates of Penzance’ and ‘Yellow Face’ on Broadway

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      Roundabout Theater Company, the biggest nonprofit on Broadway, said it would produce the three shows next season.Roundabout Theater Company, the biggest nonprofit operating on Broadway, is planning to stage a jazz-inflected production of “The Pirates of Penzance,” Gilbert and Sullivan’s famed 19th-century comic operetta, in the spring of 2025, the organization said Tuesday.Next season it also plans to stage the first Broadway productions of two plays: “English,” Sanaz Toossi’s work about a group of Iranians trying to learn English, which won last year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama, and “Yellow Face,” David Henry Hwang’s semi-autobiographical play sparked by the controversy over the casting of a white performer as a Eurasian character in the original production of “Miss Saigon.”All three shows will be staged at the Todd Haimes Theater, which is currently called the American Airlines but is about to be renamed for the Roundabout chief executive and artistic director who died last year after four decades with the organization.The announcement, which also includes plans for two Off Broadway plays and the promise of an Off Off Broadway work, indicates that Roundabout is planning its most robust season since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, a financially devastating period that, for Roundabout, has been followed by fewer productions and smaller casts. Although revivals of classic musicals were once Roundabout’s bread and butter, “The Pirates of Penzance” will be the first musical production to begin at Roundabout in six years.“We’re here, and we’re producing, and we’re producing some exciting stuff,” said Scott Ellis, a longtime Haimes collaborator who is serving as Roundabout’s interim artistic director, and who is expected to stay in that role for at least two years. “It felt important to say that we’re committed to producing as many shows as we used to.”“The Pirates of Penzance,” a comedy about an indentured pirate apprentice who falls in love with a military officer’s daughter, was once a staple of American theater, and it has been staged a whopping 26 times on Broadway, starting in 1879. But the last Broadway revival was in 1981.This new production, directed by Ellis, features a reconceived book, score and setting — it is to be set in New Orleans, with a framing device imagining that Gilbert and Sullivan staged “The Pirates of Penzance” there. The script has been adapted and updated (the female characters are more capable than in historic productions, for example) by Rupert Holmes, who has also written some new lyrics; the score has been reorchestrated with jazz stylings by Joseph Joubert and Daryl Waters.The show is to star Ramin Karimloo, last seen on Broadway in a 2022 revival of “Funny Girl,” and David Hyde Pierce, best known for the television show “Frasier” and now featured Off Broadway, at the Shed, in Stephen Sondheim’s posthumous musical, “Here We Are.” Karimloo will play the Pirate King, while Pierce will play Major General Stanley as well as Gilbert, who is now a character explaining to the audience the adaptation’s conceit. The two test-drove the roles at a one-night Roundabout benefit concert in 2022.The production of “Yellow Face,” which is to start performances in September, will star Daniel Dae Kim, who in 2016 played the King of Siam in a Broadway revival of “The King and I” and is an alumnus of the television shows “Lost” and the “Hawaii Five-0” reboot. The play is to be directed by Leigh Silverman, who in 2007 directed productions of it in Los Angeles (at the Mark Taper Forum) and New York (at the Public Theater). Kim recently recorded an audio version of the play for Audible, also directed by Silverman.“It feels more relevant now than it did even when it was originally produced, so we made a big push to give the play its due,” Kim said in an interview. “Representation has been a big issue in my career and my life, and this play’s subject matter is really the issue of representation. In some sense it’s a time capsule, but it’s also a barometer for where we are today. And it’s also very funny and entertaining, because no one goes to theater to be taught a lesson — we go to theater to be entertained.”The production of “English,” which is to start performances in December, is to be directed by Knud Adams, who also directed the Off Broadway production in 2022 at Atlantic Theater Company.Roundabout is also planning to stage two new plays Off Broadway next season: “The Counter,” about a friendship between a waitress and a customer at a small-town diner, written by Meghan Kennedy and directed by David Cromer, and “Liberation,” about a friendship among six Ohio women, written by Bess Wohl and directed by Whitney White. And the company said it would stage an Off Off Broadway production in its underground space, but that it has not yet chosen that show. More