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HOW ARE THINGS in Glocca Morra?” is a song from the 1947 musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” which is about, among other things, a leprechaun. Glocca Morra doesn’t exist, and if it did, it wouldn’t be in, say, Poland. The song is sung by a homesick Irish lass in the American South; like the show overall, it […] More
“Leopoldstadt,” which was named best play, and “Kimberly Akimbo,” which won best musical, saw considerable increases in ticket sales.“Leopoldstadt” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” the two shows that took home top Tony Awards last week, saw big bumps at the box office in the days following that ceremony.The increases for the award-winning shows, which far outpaced a slight rise in the box office overall, seemed to support the industry’s argument to Hollywood’s striking screenwriters that a Tony Awards telecast can play an important role in sustaining struggling shows. “Kimberly Akimbo,” in particular, needed the boost; despite strong reviews, it had been soft at the box office.“Leopoldstadt,” a heart-wrenching drama by Tom Stoppard about the effect of the Holocaust on a Jewish family in Vienna, had the biggest assist: The show won the Tony Award for best new play on June 11, and its grosses for the week that ended June 18 were up 42 percent over the prior week. The grosses were most likely boosted by the fast-approaching end of the show’s run on July 2.“Kimberly Akimbo,” a quirky show about a high school student with a life-threatening genetic condition and a comically dysfunctional home life, got a 32 percent boost at the box office after winning the prize for best new musical. The show, written by David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori, played to full houses through the week, which had not been the case previously.“After this won, I’m like, ‘I want to see this before I leave, just because it won a Tony,’” said Brad Steinmeyer, 30, who was visiting from Colorado and bought tickets to see the Tony Award winning-actors in “Kimberly Akimbo” on Saturday.Rhys Williams, 27, a theater actor from New York City, also said that watching the Tony Awards cemented his decision to buy a ticket for the show.“It made it something I didn’t want to miss,” he said.Overall, Broadway grosses were up 6 percent last week, reflecting some combination of recovery from the effects of the previous week’s wildfire smoke, the slow build of the summer tourism season, and heightened awareness of Broadway shows because of the awards ceremony and attendant media coverage.The other Tony-nominated musicals also saw improvement after their performances on the telecast, including “Shucked,” a corn-themed country-music show, which was up 23 percent; “& Juliet,” a revisionist take on “Romeo and Juliet” set to pop hits, which was up 18 percent; “New York, New York,” about two musicians making their way in the post-World War II city, which was up 17 percent; and “Some Like It Hot,” which was up 10 percent.“Parade,” which won the Tony Award for best musical revival, was also up 10 percent. The show is about the lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia in the early 20th century.Among plays, “Prima Facie” was up 17 percent after its lead actress, Jodie Comer, won a Tony; on Tuesday, the producers announced that the play had achieved the rare feat of recouping its capitalization cost, which was $4.1 million and means it will now begin generating profits in the days before it closes on July 2. But “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” a madcap comedy that had no presence on the Tony Awards, was up even more — 22 percent — serving as a reminder of the capriciousness of grosses.Simply performing on the Tony Awards did not pay off for “A Beautiful Noise,” the Neil Diamond musical, which was not nominated for any prizes, and suffered an 11 percent box office drop after its cast performed a singalong version of “Sweet Caroline” on the telecast.Meanwhile, “Life of Pi,” adapted from the best-selling novel that had also been developed into a film, announced Tuesday that it would end its run on July 23. The play arrived from London after winning the Olivier Award there for best new play, and it received generally positive reviews upon opening on March 30 in New York, but never caught on with audiences. It picked up three Tony Awards for design, but was not nominated in the best play category; a North American tour is planned. More
The writing is on the wall: With or without writers, the Broadway awards are a strangely bland and canned way to celebrate a thrillingly live medium.No writers’ names crawled up the screen at the end of Sunday night’s telecast of the Tony Awards, and though the writers might not like to hear it, their absence made little difference. The names of the show’s producers and director were the same as always, and in television as in the theater, they call the game.Naturally, the strike by the Writers Guild of America against film and television conglomerates — including Paramount, which presented the event on its various platforms — had no effect on what was produced on Broadway during the 2022-23 season honored by these Tonys, nor on who won.Mostly those things bore out the predictions, and many people’s predilections too. “Kimberly Akimbo,” the sweet, intimate, tragicomic “nerdical” by Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire, won the most musical prizes, including one for its star, Victoria Clark, and one for the show itself. “Some Like It Hot” followed with a reasonable haul, and though “Parade” picked up just two, they were good ones: best direction of a musical and best musical revival.Producers and members of the cast and crew of “Kimberly Akimbo,” which took home the prize for best musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAmong the plays, “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s semi-autobiographical Holocaust drama, took the top awards, almost a foregone conclusion with that author and that subject — a subject he strangely did not mention in his acceptance. “Life of Pi,” a spectacular staging of the adventure novel by Yann Martel, fittingly won three technical awards, though I wish its astonishing tiger puppet had picked up one of the medallions in person, and perhaps eaten someone.Failing that, the only surprise, Sean Hayes’s win over Stephen McKinley Henderson in the leading actor category for plays, was not really that surprising, if a little disappointing.But since a little disappointment is normal, and probably desirable, all was comfy on the prize front. Perhaps too comfy. The pleasant predictability of the outcomes (and most of the performances) made the telecast, though once again divided awkwardly into two segments on separate Paramount platforms, seem canned, which is one thing we don’t want the Tonys to be. Leave that to programs that honor recorded performance, like the Oscars and the Emmys. The theater, a live medium, wants spontaneity and weirdness and even a taste of tackiness on its big night out.J. Harrison Ghee, the first out nonbinary performer to win a Tony for best lead actor in a musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlex Newell, the first out nonbinary performer to win a Tony for best featured actor in a musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs it happens, outness was a big theme, with J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell becoming the first openly nonbinary performers to win Tonys in acting categories. They were among the many winners and presenters who used their brief platforms to express support for diversity of all kinds: gender, orientation, race, religion, body type, ability, looks. But though heartening, that too was mostly dignified and predictable, except when the director Michael Arden turned a gay slur into a vector of vengeance upon winning for his staging of “Parade” and when the actress Denée Benton, introducing the education award to a teacher in Plantation, Fla., referred to Ron DeSantis as “the current Grand Wizard — I’m sorry, excuse me, governor” of her home state.For me, such vivid moments were striking exceptions in an even-tempered evening, if only for the brazenness of making political sentiments regardless of the risk of alienating some part of the audience that does not share them.Otherwise, the unscriptedness was a wash. Some performers offered banter that was just as inane as what writers usually provide. At one point, Julianne Hough, who with Skylar Astin hosted the first 90 minutes, on Pluto TV, ad-libbed, apropos of nothing, “When in doubt, shake it out.”Ariana DeBose, center, was the host of the main show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn the other hand, the sententious segues and gassed-up encomiums to whatever B-list star was arriving onstage were eliminated. Near the evening’s end, the host of the main show, Ariana DeBose, seemed unable to read notes she had scribbled on her arm. “Please welcome whoever walks out on stage next,” she said.And the luck of her being a dancer meant that the lack of a purpose-written opening number could be finessed. Instead she performed a wordless choreographed sequence that also functioned as a tour of the spectacular United Palace theater in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood.Not that I saw DeBose do it. Paramount did not win any allies in the strike standoff by offering what felt like a deliberately confusing menu for streaming the evening’s events online. During the switchover from Pluto TV, on which I saw the first part, to Paramount+, on which I saw the second, I found myself (along with many others, who tweeted about it) misled into watching the 2022 awards show — also hosted by DeBose — for several minutes instead of this year’s.That it took so long for me to realize the problem says almost too much about the blandness and sameness of the Tonys under any circumstances. Even when writers aren’t striking, the tone is set by the people at the top of the credits crawl, who since 2003 have been Glenn Weiss and Ricky Kirshner of White Cherry Entertainment. (They also directed and produced the Oscars in March.) However competent they are at television, they do a mediocre job of presenting the excitement of live theater — and especially its excellence.When in doubt, shake it out. More
“Kimberly Akimbo,” a small-scale, big-hearted show about a teenage girl coping with a life-shortening genetic condition and a comically dysfunctional family, won the coveted Tony Award for best musical Sunday night.The award came at the close of an unusual Tony Awards ceremony that almost didn’t happen because of the ongoing screenwriters’ strike. Only an intervention by a group of playwrights who also work in film and television saved the show: they persuaded the Writers Guild of America that it would be a mistake to make the struggling theater industry collateral damage in a Hollywood-centered dispute, and in the end the telecast aired without pickets, without scripted banter and without a hitch.“I’m live and unscripted,” the ceremony’s returning host, Ariana DeBose said at the start of the show, after an opening number that began with her backstage, paging through a binder labeled “Script” filled with blank pages, and then dancing wordlessly through the theater and onto the stage. She then pointed out the absence of teleprompters, offered her support for the strikers’ cause, and declared, “To anyone who thought last year was a bit unhinged, to them I say, ‘Darlings, buckle up!’”Ariana DeBose, center, hosted the awards show without a script, relying largely on movement.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt one point, she looked at words scrawled on her forearm, and said, “I don’t know what these notes stand for, so please welcome whoever walks out onstage next.”The basic elements of the awards show — acceptance speeches by prize winners and songs performed by the casts of Broadway musicals — remained more or less intact. But the introductions to the shows and performances were mostly sleekly shot videos, rather than descriptions by celebrities; presenters kept their comments extremely spare, which left more time for unusually well-filmed production numbers.The ceremony featured a pair of milestone wins: J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell became the first out nonbinary performers to win Tony Awards in acting categories, Ghee as a musician on the lam in “Some Like It Hot,” and Newell as a whiskey distiller in the musical comedy “Shucked.” “For every trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming human, whoever was told you couldn’t be, you couldn’t be seen, this is for you,” said Ghee. Newell expressed a similar sentiment, saying, “Thank you for seeing me, Broadway.”“Theater is the great cure,” said Suzan-Lori Parks, whose “Topdog/Underdog” won the Tony for best play revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLast fall’s production of “Topdog/Underdog,” Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2001 tour de force about two Black brothers weighted down by history and circumstance, won the Tony Award for best play revival. The play had won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 but no Tony Awards; Parks, in accepting this year’s Tony, praised actors Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins for “living large in a world that often does not want the likes of us living at all” and added, “Theater is the great cure.”There was star power, too. Jodie Comer, best known for playing an assassin on television’s “Killing Eve,” won the best actress in a play award for her first stage role, a grueling, tour-de-force performance as a defense attorney who becomes a victim of sexual assault in “Prima Facie.” And Sean Hayes, best known for “Will and Grace,” won for playing the depressive raconteur-pianist Oscar Levant in “Good Night, Oscar.”The night served as a reminder of the growing concern about antisemitism in America and around the world, as “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s wrenching drama following a family of Viennese Jews through the first half of the 20th century, won the prize for best play, and a new production of “Parade,” a 1998 show based on the early 20th-century lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia, won the prize for best musical revival.Sonia Friedman and Tom Stoppard accepted the Tony for best play for “Leopoldstadt,” which also won several other awards on Sunday.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Leopoldstadt,” which bested three Pulitzer-winning dramas to win the Tony, also won several other prizes Sunday night, including for its director, Patrick Marber, and for Brandon Uranowitz, who won as best featured actor in a play, and who noted the personal nature of the production for its predominantly Jewish cast in his speech, saying “my ancestors, many of whom did not make it out of Poland, also thank you.”The win by “Parade” cemented a remarkable rebirth for that show, which was not successful when it first opened on Broadway in 1998, but which is shaping up to be a hit this time, thanks to strong word-of-mouth and the popularity of its leading man, Ben Platt. The success of “Parade” is also a significant milestone for the musical’s composer, Jason Robert Brown, who is widely admired within the theater community but whose Broadway productions have struggled commercially. Brown wrote the music and lyrics for “Parade,” and the book is by Alfred Uhry; both men won Tonys for their work on the show in 1999.Michael Arden, who won a Tony for directing the “Parade” revival, said in his acceptance speech, “we must come together,” adding, “or else we are doomed to repeat the horrors of our history.” Arden went on to recall how he had been called a homophobic slur — “the F-word,” many times as a child, and he drew raucous cheers as he reclaimed the slur. “Keep raising your voices,” he said.Michael Arden, who directed the Tony-winning revival of “Parade,” drew cheers when he reclaimed a homophobic slur in his acceptance speech.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut the night belonged to “Kimberly Akimbo,” the smallest, and lowest-grossing, of the five nominees in the best musical category, but also by far the best reviewed, with virtually unanimous acclaim from critics. (Nodding to the show’s anagram-loving subplot, the New York Times critic Jesse Green presciently suggested one of his own last fall: “sublime cast = best musical.”)The show, set in 1999 in Bergen County, New Jersey, stars the 63-year-old Victoria Clark as Kimberly, a 15-going-on-16-year-old girl who has a rare condition that makes her age prematurely. Kimberly’s home life is a mess — dad’s a drunk, mom’s a hypochondriac, and aunt is a gleeful grifter — and her school life is complicated by her medical condition, but she learns to find joy where she can. Clark won a Tony for her performance as Kimberly, and Bonnie Milligan won a Tony for her performance as the aunt.“Kimberly Akimbo,” which was directed by Jessica Stone, began its life with an Off Broadway production at the nonprofit Atlantic Theater Company in the fall of 2021 and opened at the Booth Theater in November. It was written by the playwright David Lindsay-Abaire and the composer Jeanine Tesori, based on a play Lindsay-Abaire had written in 2003. Lindsay-Abaire and Tesori both won Tony Awards for their work Sunday night.The musical, with just nine characters, was capitalized for up to $7 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that’s a low budget for a musical on Broadway these days, when a growing number of shows are costing more than $20 million to stage. The lead producer is David Stone, who, as a lead producer of “Wicked,” is one of Broadway’s most successful figures; this is the first time he has won a Tony Award for best musical, and he was also the lead producer of the Tony-winning “Topdog” revival.The award for best musical is considered the most economically beneficial Tony, generally leading to a boost in ticket sales. In winning the prize, “Kimberly Akimbo” beat out four other nominated shows: “& Juliet,” “New York, New York,” “Shucked” and “Some Like It Hot.” None of the five nominated musicals is a runaway hit, and four, including “Kimberly Akimbo,” have been losing money most weeks.The ceremony featured performances from all nine nominated new musicals and musical revivals, as well as a performance of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” by Lea Michele from “Funny Girl.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe 2022-23 season, which ended last month, was a tough one for new musicals: Broadway audiences were still down about 17 percent below prepandemic levels, and those who did buy tickets gravitated toward established titles (like “The Phantom of the Opera,” which sold strongly in the final months of its 35-year-run) and big stars (especially Hugh Jackman in “The Music Man,” Sara Bareilles in “Into the Woods,” Lea Michele in “Funny Girl” and Josh Groban in “Sweeney Todd”). So this year’s Tonys ceremony took on even more importance than usual, with the industry’s leaders hoping that a nationally televised spotlight on theater would boost box office sales.The ceremony featured not only musical performances by all nine nominated new musicals and musical revivals, but also a barn-burning performance of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” by Michele, a “Sweet Caroline” singalong led by the cast of the Neil Diamond musical “A Beautiful Noise,” and, as part of the In Memoriam segment, a song from “The Phantom of the Opera” sung by Joaquina Kalukango to acknowledge the show’s closing in April .The Tonys, presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing and named for Antoinette Perry, gave lifetime achievement awards to two beloved nonagenarians: the actor Joel Grey, 91, who remains best known for playing the master of ceremonies in both the Broadway and film versions of “Cabaret,” and the composer John Kander, 96, who wrote music for “Cabaret” as well as “Chicago” and “New York, New York.” “I’m grateful for music,” Kander said after being introduced by Lin-Manuel Miranda as “the kindest man in show business.” Grey was introduced by his daughter, the actress Jennifer Grey; he sang a few words from the opening number of “Cabaret.”“Oh my God, I love the applause,” he said, to a round of applause.Sarah Bahr More
Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” centers on an Austrian-Jewish family riven by the Holocaust.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe musical “Parade” tells the tragedy of Leo Frank, the Jewish pencil factory manager who was lynched by a mob in 1915.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Leopoldstadt” and “Parade,” two productions about the horrors of antisemitism, took major awards on Sunday, making the topic a central theme of the night.Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” which centers on the destructive toll of antisemitism on a family of Viennese Jews and was inspired by Stoppard’s belated reckoning with his Jewish roots, won best play. Earlier in the night, the play’s director, Patrick Marber, won for best direction of a play, and Brandon Uranowitz, one of the central actors in the ensemble cast, won a featured actor award.“Thank you Tom Stoppard for writing a play about Jewish identity and antisemitism and the false promise of assimilation with the nuances and the complexities and the contradictions that they deserve,” Uranowitz said in his acceptance speech. “My ancestors, many of whom did not make it out of Poland, also thank you.” “Parade,” a musical that tells the tragedy of Leo Frank, the Jewish pencil factory manager who was murdered by a mob in 1915, won best musical revival. Its director, Michael Arden, won the award for best direction of a musical, urging the audience to battle antisemitism, white supremacy and other forms of hate.“We must come together, we must battle this,” Arden said, “or else we are doomed to repeat the horrors of our history.” More
Our theater reporter talked to one-fifth of the Tony voters ahead of Sunday’s ceremony. Here’s hoping they steered him right.What do you get when you toss together a brassy grifter, an Elvish-speaking anagrammist, a show choir and, oh yes, a teenager with a life-threatening genetic condition? This year, it seems, you get a Tony-winning musical.“Kimberly Akimbo,” a small show with a huge heart, is likely to win the most coveted prize at the 76th Tony Awards ceremony on Sunday, according to my annual survey of Tony voters.Over the last week, I have connected, by email or telephone, with 158 voters who generously agreed to discuss their picks (and, often, their concerns about, and hopes for, the theater business); they are distributing their votes widely among the nominees after a season with few consensus favorites.There are a total of 769 Tony voters, and they are mostly industry insiders — producers, investors, actors, writers, directors, designers, and many others with theater-connected lives and livelihoods. Although in recent years, voters have been allowed to cast ballots only in categories in which they had seen all nominees, this year, because health and economic disruptions (and, over the last few days, wildfire smoke) made it hard for some voters to catch some shows, there is more leeway: Voters can cast ballots in any category in which they have seen all but one nominee.This is not a scientific poll, but in past years this exercise has provided a reliable forecast of the ultimate winners in key categories. For the actual results (and the songs!) tune in on Sunday for the telecast at 8 p.m. Eastern on CBS and Paramount+ (and, if you want to see the awards for design and other creative categories, stream the preshow at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on Pluto TV).Until then, here’s what I am hearing:‘Leopoldstadt’ leads in the race for best play.In each of the last four Tony Awards, voters have chosen as best play an epic production imported from London. Last year was “The Lehman Trilogy,” and before that were “The Inheritance,” “The Ferryman” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”This year, that trend seems certain to continue. By a significant margin, voters are favoring “Leopoldstadt,” a play by Tom Stoppard about how the Holocaust affected an assimilated and affluent Jewish family in Austria.The play proved inadvertently timely: Although written several years ago, it arrived on Broadway last September, just as concern about resurgent antisemitism was rising in the United States and beyond.“Leopoldstadt” is leading the second-place favorite, “Fat Ham,” two-to-one among the voters with whom I spoke, suggesting that it is all but certain to win. Three other nominated plays, “Ain’t No Mo’,” “Cost of Living” and “Between Riverside and Crazy,” are further behind.“Fat Ham,” now running on Broadway with, from left, Nikki Crawford, Marcel Spears and Billy Eugene Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize, but it looks likely to be the runner-up in the Tony race for best new play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStoppard, who is 85, is already the winningest playwright on Broadway: He has previously won the best play Tony four times, for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia.”“Leopoldstadt,” directed by Patrick Marber and featuring an ensemble cast of 38, is about a fictional family, but is inspired by Stoppard’s own life experience: He was born in what was then Czechoslovakia; his parents fled invading Nazis when he was a toddler; he has spent his life in Britain; and, like a character in “Leopoldstadt,” only late in life came to understand his family’s Jewishness and the impact of the Holocaust on his relatives.The play, which transferred to Broadway after winning the Olivier Award for best play in London, opened last October to strong reviews and healthy box office sales in New York. Its sales have softened considerably this year, and it is scheduled to close on July 2.Among new musicals, ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ is favored.“Kimberly Akimbo” is the smallest of the nominated new musicals, with just nine characters and a budget that is about one-third that of its splashiest competitors.But it is shaping up to be the little engine that could: It opened last fall to the strongest reviews of any of the season’s new musicals, and now a plurality of voters interviewed say they are voting for it as the season’s best new musical.Not all voters love “Kimberly Akimbo” — some are finding it extraordinarily moving, while others are left cold — but the show’s odds are good because those who are not voting for it are splitting their votes between two comedies: “Some Like It Hot,” adapted from the Billy Wilder film, and “Shucked,” a pun-filled and country-scored fable. The two other nominated musicals, “& Juliet” and “New York, New York,” lag considerably behind.J. Harrison Ghee, in the red dress, is heavily favored to win a Tony Award as best leading actor in a musical for “Some Like It Hot.” Ghee’s dancing partner, Kevin Del Aguila, is also a Tony nominee.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Kimberly Akimbo,” which opened in November, is about a high school student, 15 going on 16, whose life is threatened by a genetic disorder that causes her to age prematurely; that sounds sad, and it is, but the musical is also quite funny, as the protagonist navigates a dysfunctional home life, a gawky peer group, and the criminal aunt who connects those worlds. The show, directed by Jessica Stone, is adapted from a play by David Lindsay-Abaire; he wrote the musical’s book and lyrics, and Jeanine Tesori wrote the music.The revival categories are tougher to predict.This was, by all accounts, a good season for revivals, many of which were praised by critics and a number of which sold well at the box office. But that is making these categories tougher for voters, who liked so many of the offerings that they are torn over which to single out for prizes.Among play revivals, a production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog” appears to have a modest but real lead, and is likely to win the Tony Award. If it is upset, it would be by the revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” but there is enough support for revivals of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” and Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” to make it difficult for any of them to catch up.Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, left, and Corey Hawkins as the two brothers at the heart of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play “Topdog/Underdog.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Topdog/Underdog,” first staged Off Broadway in 2001, is about two Black brothers, portentously named Lincoln and Booth, living together in a one-room apartment, trying to get by in a world that makes their lives difficult. The play is an undisputed classic — it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2002, and in 2018 was named the best American play of the previous quarter century by New York Times critics. The revival, directed by Kenny Leon, ran from September 2022 to January.The musical revival category is even closer. A production of “Parade,” a 1998 musical written by Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown about the lynching of a Jewish man in early-20th-century Georgia, has a narrow lead among voters I spoke with, but there is also substantial support for revivals of two shows with songs by Stephen Sondheim: “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd.” Any of those three could win; a revival of “Camelot” is not a significant factor in the race. “Parade” opened in March and is scheduled to close in August; “Camelot” and “Sweeney Todd” are running indefinitely, while “Into the Woods” is wrapping up a national tour.Three of the top acting races are sewn up. One is not.J. Harrison Ghee, Jodie Comer and Victoria Clark can start writing their acceptance speeches. Each of them is almost certainly going to take home a Tony Award.The category of best leading actor in a play, on the other hand, is way, way, way too close to call, but has boiled down to two of the five contenders: Sean Hayes and Stephen McKinley Henderson.Sean Hayes, left, and Stephen McKinley Henderson, right, seem to be the front-runners in the very tight race for best leading actor in a play.Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGhee, who is nonbinary, is winning over voters with an empathetic, but also entertaining, portrayal of a musician whose gender identity is evolving in “Some Like It Hot.”Comer wowed voters with her physically and emotionally exhausting tour-de-force performance in “Prima Facie,” a one-woman play about a lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault until she becomes a victim herself. Amazingly, this is her first stage role.And Clark is heavily favored for her mind-bending star turn in “Kimberly Akimbo,” in which the 63-year-old actress plays an ailing adolescent with all the awkwardness, resilience and premature wisdom that such a role requires. Clark previously won a Tony Award in 2005 for “The Light in the Piazza.”As for that race for best leading actor in a play: A little less than a third of voters I spoke with chose Hayes, who in “Good Night, Oscar” portrays Oscar Levant, a pianist whose bitter humor made him a popular talk-show guest while he battled serious psychological problems. But nearly the same number of voters are supporting Henderson for his portrayal of a retired police officer trying to hang onto a rent-controlled apartment in “Between Riverside and Crazy.”Who will win? Check back on Sunday night. More
As Broadway’s rebound from the pandemic shutdown picks up pace, Tony nominators showered much-sought attention on a wide variety of shows, from razzle-dazzle spectacles to quirky adventurous fare.“Some Like It Hot,” a musical based on the classic Billy Wilder film about two musicians who witness a gangland slaying and dress as women to escape the mob, scored the most nominations: 13. But it faces stiff competition in the race for best new musical — ticket buyers have not made any of the contenders a slam-dunk hit, and there does not appear to be a consensus among the industry insiders who make up the Tony voting pool.Three other musicals picked up nine nominations apiece: “& Juliet,” which combines pop songs with an alternative narrative arc for Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers; “New York, New York,” a dance-driven show about a pair of young musicians seeking success and love in a postwar city; and “Shucked,” a pun-laden country comedy about a rural community facing a corn crisis. “Kimberly Akimbo,” a critical favorite about a high school student with a life-altering genetic condition and a criminally dysfunctional family, picked up eight nominations.The Tony nominations also feature plenty of boldfaced names. Among the stars from the worlds of pop music, film and television who earned nods are Sara Bareilles, Jessica Chastain, Jodie Comer, Josh Groban, Sean Hayes, Samuel L. Jackson, Wendell Pierce and Ben Platt. Another went to one of Broadway’s most-admired stars: Audra McDonald, who, with nine previous nominations and six wins, has won the most competitive Tony Awards of any performer in history.The musical “Shucked,” the rare Broadway show about corn, got nine nominations. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s Tony Awards come at the end of the first full-length season since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close for about a year and a half. Given that tourism remains below prepandemic levels, many workers have not returned to Midtown offices, and inflation has made producing far more expensive, the season has been surprisingly robust, with a wide range of offerings.“Entertainment is like food — sometimes you’re in the mood for an organic small plate, and sometimes for a burger and fries, and the best thing about New York is we’ve got the variety,” said Victoria Clark, the Tony-nominated star of “Kimberly Akimbo.”Broadway shows this season had grossed $1.48 billion as of April 30, according to figures released Tuesday by the Broadway League. That’s nearly double the grosses at the same point last season — $751 million — but lower than the $1.72 billion at the same point in 2019, during the last full prepandemic season.Other key metrics are better, too: 11.5 million seats have been filled on Broadway this season, compared with 6 million at the same point last season, but still down from the 13.8 million that had been filled by this point in 2019.The Tony nominations, which were chosen by a panel of 40 theater industry experts who saw all 38 eligible shows and have no financial interest in any of them, are particularly important to shows that are still running, which try to use the vote of confidence to woo potential ticket buyers.“It’s all about what’s going to make a show run longer and create more jobs for more people,” said Casey Nicholaw, the director and choreographer of “Some Like It Hot.” “Hopefully we’ll sell more tickets, and the show will be more of a success.”The Tony nominations can also boost the employment prospects, and the compensation, of artists. And, of course, they are a tribute to excellence. “It means something when your peers and your colleagues see beauty in something you make,” said James Ijames, whose play “Fat Ham” was among the nominated productions.“Between Riverside and Crazy” was among the nominees for best new play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway is a complicated place, dominated by commercial producers but also with six theaters run by nonprofits, and the work this season, as is often the case, featured everything from experimental plays tackling challenging subjects to more mainstream fare that aims primarily to entertain.Among the five nominees for best new play, three have already won the Pulitzer Prize in drama, including “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s story of a retired police officer trying to hang onto his apartment; “Cost of Living,” Martyna Majok’s exploration of caregiving and disability; and “Fat Ham,” Ijames’s riff on “Hamlet,” set in the North Carolina backyard of a family that runs a barbecue restaurant.The two other Tony-nominated plays are each significant in their own ways: “Leopoldstadt” is Tom Stoppard’s autobiographically inspired drama about a European Jewish family before, during and after World War II, while “Ain’t No Mo’” is Jordan E. Cooper’s outlandish comedy imagining that the United States offers its Black residents one-way tickets to Africa.The nominations for “Ain’t No Mo’” were especially striking given that the show struggled to find an audience and closed early. “I’m just so elated, I can barely find the words,” said Cooper, who was nominated both as writer and actor. “There was a lot of turbulence, but we landed the plane.”Stoppard is already the winningest playwright in Broadway history, having won Tony Awards for four previous plays (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia”). He is now 85 years old, and “Leopoldstadt” is his 19th production on Broadway. Stoppard said he was proud of the nomination, but sorry the play had come to seem so timely at a moment of rising concern about antisemitism.“Nobody wants society to be divided,” he said in an interview, “and I like to think ‘Leopoldstadt’ works against a sense of human beings dividing up and confronting each other.”Jordan E. Cooper in his comedy “Ain’t No Mo’,” which was nominated for best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOf the 38 Tony-eligible plays and musicals this season, 27 scored at least one nomination, leaving 11 with no nods. Among the musicals snubbed by the nominators were “Bad Cinderella,” the critically drubbed new musical from one of the most successful musical theater composers of all time, Andrew Lloyd Webber, as well as a progressive rethink of “1776,” about the debate over the Declaration of Independence, which was revived with a cast of women, nonbinary and transgender performers.One of the musicals that did not score any nominations, a revival of “Dancin’,” quickly declared plans to close: A little more than nine hours after the Tony nominations were announced, the revue’s producers said its last performance would be May 14. Among the seven plays shut out was “The Thanksgiving Play,” which is thought to be the first work on Broadway by a female Native American playwright, Larissa FastHorse.The season featured shows examining a wide variety of diverse stories, and the nominations reflect that.At a time when gender identity issues have become increasingly politicized in the nation, nominations were earned by two gender nonconforming actors: J. Harrison Ghee, a star of “Some Like It Hot,” and Alex Newell, a supporting actor in “Shucked.”Helen Park, who is the first Asian American female composer on Broadway, was nominated in the best score category for the musical “KPOP.” “The more authentic we are to our respective cultures and stories,” she said, “the richer the Broadway soundscape and Broadway landscape will be.”Five plays by Black writers were nominated in either the best play or best play revival category, and four of the five nominees for leading actor in a play are Black.“I broke down in tears,” Pierce said about learning that he was among those nominees, for playing Willy Loman in a revival of “Death of a Salesman” in which the traditionally white Loman family is now African American. “I did not know how profoundly moving it would be. It was the culmination of years of hard work and a reflection on how much effort and toil went into the challenge of playing the role.”This was a strong season for musical revivals, and the nominated shows include two with scores by Stephen Sondheim — “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd” — as well as the Golden Age classic “Camelot” and “Parade,” which is a show about the early 20th-century lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia.“Into the Woods” was one of two Stephen Sondheim revivals to earn nominations.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“We’re so happy audiences are taking to it, and we hope that Sondheim would be happy this morning as well,” said Groban, starring as the title character in “Sweeney Todd.”The nominated play revivals are also a compelling bunch: a hypnotically minimalist version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” adapted by Amy Herzog and starring Chastain as a Norwegian debtor trapped in a sexist marriage; a bracing production of Suzan Lori-Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” about two brothers ominously named Lincoln and Booth; a rare staging of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” featuring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan; and a ghostly performance of “The Piano Lesson,” August Wilson’s classic drama about a family wrestling with the meaning, and monetary value, of an heirloom.The 769 Tony voters now have until early June to catch up on shows they have not yet seen before they cast their electronic ballots. The awards ceremony itself will be held on June 11 at the United Palace in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in a ceremony hosted by Ariana DeBose.Julia Jacobs More
In this unsettling moment, comedians, filmmakers, playwrights and others have been struggling against a long-ingrained American response to look away.Antisemitism has such a long, violent history that it seems absurd to claim it’s getting worse. Compared with when? And yet, there’s something about our current moment that feels different.Consider a recent Sunday. I woke up to news reports that two men were arrested at Penn Station with weapons, a swastika armband and a social media history of threats to attack a synagogue. After taking a shower, I opened my dresser to find my Kyrie Irving T-shirt. The Brooklyn Net was returning to the N.B.A. that evening after being suspended for tweeting a link to a documentary that cast doubt on the Holocaust.I didn’t expect getting dressed in the morning to turn into a test of loyalties between my favorite basketball team and my murdered ancestors, but here we are.That night, when I arrived at Barclays Center, scores of people belonging to what the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a hate group were handing out pamphlets with the blaring headline “The Truth About Antisemitism.” I opened Twitter and saw Elon Musk was making fun of the Anti-Defamation League and Ye was tweeting again. He had kicked off the recent cycle of discourse by leveling violent threats against Jews.Quantifying antisemitism right now by numbers of hate crimes is useful, but doesn’t capture the peculiar anguish and human complexities of its day-to-day pervasiveness. That’s a job better suited to artists, and more than any year in memory, some of our most accomplished ones have taken up the challenge, from the biggest names in comedy (Dave Chappelle, Amy Schumer) to the most celebrated storytellers in theater and film, like Tom Stoppard and Steven Spielberg. What resonates most in this impressive body of work are the Jewish artists exploring the challenge of antisemitism, and while they started these projects years ago, their hard-earned pessimism now seems uncomfortably prophetic.The thorniest recent work on these issues was the “Saturday Night Live” monologue by Dave Chappelle. He poked fun at Ye and Irving while speaking to the antisemitic idea of a Jewish conspiracy in Hollywood. In between myriad jokes, he shrugged off this stereotype as an understandable thought best not verbalized. One of the maddening traps of modern antisemitism is that it takes a source of pride — Jewish success in the arts, the rare field where we were welcome — and makes it seem sinister. This old tactic got a new hearing.There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, Chappelle observed mischievously, before undercutting the comment with a joke that called the trope that they control show business “a delusion.” Unlike the blunt social media posts of Ye and Irving, this set was a work of art, elusive and layered, displaying finesse and paradox. It’s a prickly kind of funny with corkscrew punch lines that tickled the mind and bothered the conscience. (“If they’re Black then it’s a gang, if they’re Italian it’s a mob, but if they’re Jewish it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.”)Dave Chappelle on “Saturday Night Live.” His monologue was a prickly kind of funny that bothered the conscience.Will Heath/NBCArt can be formally beautiful and morally ugly. Despite what you have heard, good comedy can be built on lies as easily as on the truth. This is what makes Chappelle’s set so slippery: His storytelling and gravitas are so magnetic that you can miss how far he goes in making the old slur of a Jewish conspiracy seem reasonable. He whitewashed Irving’s tolerance for Holocaust denial with one good line. With another, he says you can’t “blame Black people” for Jewish pain, erecting a straw man with deftness. To suggest, as he does, that it’s dangerous for him to say “the Jews” is tiresome hyperbole.For as much controversy as this set provoked, it was also predictable. How often have we seen Chappelle bring up celebrity transgression, and then defend, mitigate and complicate it, while inviting us to admire the feat? This is his move. There’s no wondering where he will come down on the latest scandal. We know.Antisemitism in AmericaAntisemitism is one of the longest-standing forms of prejudice, and those who monitor it say it is now on the rise across the country.Perilous Times: With online threats and incidents of harassment and violence rising nationwide, this fall has become increasingly worrisome for American Jews.Donald Trump: The former president had dinner with Nick Fuentes, a prominent antisemite, at Mar-a-Lago, causing some of Mr. Trump’s Jewish allies to speak out.Kanye West: The rapper and designer, who now goes by Ye, has been widely condemned for recent antisemitic comments. The fallout across industries has been swift.Kyrie Irving: The Nets lifted their suspension of the basketball player, who offered “deep apologies” for posting a link to an antisemitic film. His behavior appalled and frightened many of his Jewish fans.EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote about the Jewish tendency to turn antisemitism into comedy. But there’s another coping mechanism that we like to talk about less: looking the other way. When asked about Chappelle’s monologue, Jerry Seinfeld diplomatically told The Hollywood Reporter that “the subject matter calls for more conversation.” When asked about it as a guest on “The Late Show,” Jon Stewart only became earnest when he pleaded for free speech. What’s striking about these responses from star comics is that they seem to be more interested in calling for debate than engaging in it.Then again, I get it. I’ve stayed quiet when peers wrote things that seemed, if not indifferent to Jewish pain, then at least to be applying double standards to it. I gave them the benefit of the doubt or concluded that a call-out would be counterproductive. But saying nothing in the face of such moments exacts its own cost. It eats at you. Several Jewish artists have been making work that explores such decisions with a skeptical eye.In “The Patient,” a sly, suspenseful FX series from Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, creators of “The Americans,” a therapist played by Steve Carell awakens to find himself chained to the bed of a serial killer looking for help with his mental health. The title is a reference to this maniac as well as the way his therapist responds.The killer says he was looking for a therapist who is Jewish, a specific request that goes uncommented on. Small moments tip you off to a tolerated culture of antisemitism. In a flashback, the therapist, Alan, spots a swastika on a poster and, instead of making a fuss, keeps walking.Steve Carell as a therapist and Domhnall Gleeson as a serial killer in “The Patient,” which raises the urgent question of how to fight back.Suzanne Tenner/FXNow he has no such option. Imprisoned by a captor who wants something from him, he is faced with the urgent question of how to fight back. He chooses to use his skills in mental health to help his oppressor get better. The deeper he gets in dialogue, though, the more uncomfortable Alan grows, especially after he teaches the murderer the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and then sees it being used to mourn his latest victims.In many ways, the relationship at the center of “The Patient” is a metaphor for both the lengths Jews will go to extend empathy toward their oppressors and for the existential toll that takes. Playing a man wracked by guilt, grief and doubt, Carell is extremely subtle illustrating how accommodation can be justified and yet wear you down. We also see scenes in his head of him talking to a shrink (David Alan Grier) who asks why he doesn’t fight back, attack the killer. To which Alan replies: “I’m using what I have.” Grier, a figment of his imagination, flashes a look that suggests he doesn’t believe that.Similarly, “The Fabelmans” and “Armageddon Time,” two personal movies by Jewish directors dramatizing their own childhoods, grapple with the question of what weapons Jews have. In both, sensitive boys facing antisemitism at school struggle with how to stand up for themselves.“The Fabelmans” isn’t a movie about being Jewish so much as it is suffused with Jewishness. But when its young protagonist, Sammy Fabelman, moves to California in the 1960s, he’s confronted with Aryan boys who mock his religion and with gentile girls intrigued by it. He happily prays with one girl but puts up a fight with the bullies, who at first seem like the cartoon villains from early Spielberg movies. The most dramatic way Sammy pushes back is by putting his antagonists in a movie. After filming his classmates on a trip to the beach, the footage, shown to the whole school, makes one bully look ridiculous and another glamorous, bigger than life. Oddly, being romanticized by the Jewish kid he beat up rattles the bully more than any insult. His discontent in the face of this attention is the most baffling section in the movie, one that has the ring of a point being made. But what is the point?Is the antisemite feeling shame? If so, Spielberg is working hard to extend empathy. But this exchange also rattles Sammy. When the bigot demands to know why Sammy made him look like a star, the response sounds pained and unsure: “Maybe I did it to make the movie better?”It’s a shockingly unsentimental moment to find in a Spielberg movie, one in which the young version of himself learns that pleasing the crowd might require turning an antisemite into the hero. No one loves the movies more than Spielberg, and in this intimate, morally probing film, he shows how they can move, inspire and reveal the truth. But in these more hardheaded scenes, he also makes it clear that their impact can be unpredictable, and like comedy, they can deceive just as deftly.Chloe East as a classmate intrigued by the religion of the Steven Spielberg stand-in, played by Gabriel LaBelle.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, via Associated PressIn “Armageddon Time,” a humbler, realistic and affectingly bleak portrait of the struggles of a young Jewish kid, James Gray digs into his 1980s Queens upbringing in the story of an 11-year-old boy named Paul Graff whose grandfather is the son of a refugee who fled pogroms in Europe. The patriarch tells him that changing his name (from Grasserstein) will help him in life. This same man urges him to speak up when other students make racist comments to a peer. These are the competing messages he grows up with: assimilate or fight back.A friendship with a Black classmate also makes clear to Paul how not all inequities are the same, that his privilege protects him in a way that other minority groups don’t experience. In a time when Black and Jewish communities are pitted against each other by entertainers like Ye and others, this movie feels exceedingly topical and depressing. It painfully dramatizes how antisemitism can lead Jews to overlook other injustices, protect your tribe and harden your heart to the plight of others.As with Spielberg’s movie, the new play by Tom Stoppard, “Leopoldstadt,” is being described as his most personal as well as a reckoning with his Jewish identity, which in his case he didn’t understand until middle age. It’s also one of his worst plays: intellectually thin, overly familiar, blandly generic. If the way you tell the audience it’s the 1920s is by a woman dancing the Charleston, you’ve become too comfortable with cliché. And yet, this sprawling portrait of a half century in the life of a Jewish family from Vienna is drawing sold-out crowds of weeping audiences.I suspect the reason is the timely and heavy-handed portrait of Jewish complacency and denial. We see this most nakedly in the stand-in for the playwright, a comic writer born Leopold Rosenbaum who now goes by Leonard Chamberlin (a name that evokes the prime minister famous for appeasement). In 1955, Chamberlin is glibly naïve about the Holocaust, a patriotic fool set up for tears when remembering the horrors of the Nazis. The play ends with a roll call of the dead. Of course, the audience cries.TWO THINGS STAND OUT about these dramas, whether onscreen or onstage: The first is that none of the Jewish protagonists are exactly triumphant in the face of antisemitism. Therapy, the movies, assimilation — nothing saves them. These characters are ambivalent, morally compromised or far worse. When it comes to their ability to protest an antisemitic culture, pessimism reigns.The second is how much these works look to the past, exploring the current moment through a historical lens. (That includes Bess Wohl’s play “Camp Siegfried,” a drama about a 1938 Nazi youth camp on Long Island whose themes are clearly meant to echo with today.) Even the contemporary “The Patient” borrows its most blunt power from flashbacks to the moral simplicity of concentration camps. Looking at history can be a useful way to understand the present, but it can also be a way to evade it. One wonders what Stoppard would come up with if he dramatized the more subtle Jewish denial of the cultural world he came up in, where he flourished as a playwright whose religion never seemed to come up. Or how Spielberg or Gray would capture the conflicts of Jewish life now.As usual, comics are the artists taking the earliest and most direct approaches. David Baddiel, a British comic, is receiving glowing reviews this month for a BBC documentary version of his book “Jews Don’t Count” that castigates the double standards applied to prejudice against Jews in progressive spaces today. Marc Maron’s next special, which recently taped in New York, begins a series of jokes on the increased prominence of conspiracies about Jews by saying that in this polarized country, antisemitism is one thing that brings everyone together. At the Kennedy Center Honors, Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the antisemite Borat, skewered Ye and sang a brief parody version of U2’s “With or Without You,” switching the lyrics to “With or Without Jews.”Amy Schumer is one of the few sketch comics to dig into antisemitism today, lampooning the tentativeness our culture has for calling it out in the new season of “Inside Amy Schumer.” She imagines a workplace harassment seminar where everyone is hypersensitive to all kinds of slights except antisemitic ones. It’s a premise that not only counters the trope of a Jewish conspiracy but also taps into the paranoia of being gaslit by an entire culture. It hints at what a Jewish “Get Out” could look like.Part of the resilience of antisemitism is its resistance to critique. Jewish artists are obviously not going to end the lie that they control show business by making more movies, plays, TV shows or sketches about it. But they can illuminate its impact and capture the complex damage it does to the psyche. That matters. For a certain kind of Jew, art can be its own religion. And one lesson we keep learning and forgetting is that the greatest art is much better at portraying conflicted minds than changing them. More
New stagings in Germany and Austria, including Tom Stoppard’s latest play, explore the themes of social integration and tolerance that animated the “Jewish question.”MUNICH — “My grandfather wore a caftan, my father went to the opera in a top hat, and I have the singers to dinner,” boasts a character in Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” summing up the rapid trajectory from piety to cultural assimilation that was common among Vienna’s Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Stoppard’s play, which is running through March at the Longacre Theater in New York, is one of the season’s most discussed productions. In it, the veteran dramatist, veering into explicitly Jewish territory for the first time in his long and decorated career, explores the themes of social integration and the limits of tolerance that made the “Jewish question” one of the flash points of modernity.Seventy years before Stoppard’s fictional Merz family graced the stage, Gabriele Tergit published “The Effingers,” a 900-page novel that traces the fortunes of a Jewish family in Germany over four generations, from 1878 to 1948. Tergit, a German Jewish writer and journalist whose long life spanned much of the 20th century (she died in 1982, in London, at age 88), has undergone a reappraisal recently. When “The Effingers” was reissued in 2019, it became a literary event in Germany; the book was compared to Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” and even won praise from the country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. (An English translation, by Sophie Duvernoy, is coming from New York Review Books.)The Münchner Kammerspiele, whose recent programming has highlighted works by unsung female artists, has lost no time in bringing “The Effingers” to the stage. Jan Bosse’s nearly four-hour production is dramatically fluid and visually striking. Aside from the historically accurate costumes, whose changing styles help us keep track of the passage of time, Bosse and his stage designer, Stéphane Laimé, serve us a sleek and spare production that incorporates written and projected dates, historical photographs, family trees and, in one particularly amusing sequence, a car ride in a model manufactured by the Effinger family (brought to life with a green screen).The dozen actors who play the family members, and their friends and enemies, are largely plucked from the Kammerspiele’s permanent ensemble. Among the best are Katharina Bach as the beautiful, artistically talented and doomed Sofie Oppner: Bach invests the character with a blend of charisma, flamboyance and mental instability. Zeynep Bozbay is warm and convincing as Marianne Effinger, who rejects her arriviste family’s lavish lifestyle by devoting herself to charity. She waits in vain for a marriage proposal from one of her brother’s friends; when they meet again, decades later, he has become a convinced antisemite.Yet despite the fine acting and the bold staging, “The Effingers” rarely ignites onstage. Unlike the book, the performing version by Bosse and dramaturge Viola Hasselberg ends before World War II, perhaps to avoid suggesting a sense of tragic inevitability for a family of affluent Berliners who just happen to be Jewish. Though the production teems with life, it also lacks focus and narrative direction. Keeping up with the large, at times chaotic, Effinger clan over a half-century is not consistently rewarding. Perhaps a more judicious selection of scenes would have yielded a more dramatically and emotionally satisfying play. Or maybe a slimmed-down cast (such as in the three-actor tour de force that is “The Lehman Trilogy,” another Jewish family saga) would have resulted in a less cluttered and more absorbing production.From left, Johannes Nussbaum, Lisa Stiegler, Valentino Dalle Mura and Thiemo Strutzenberger in “The Tower,” directed by Nora Schlocker at the Residenztheater in Munich.Birgit Hupfeld“The Effingers,” an epic literary adaptation, is unusual repertoire for the Kammerspiele, where more experimental, chamber-like productions dominate these days. Large casts and extra-long running times, by contrast, are common features down the block at the Residenztheater, which boasts the largest acting ensemble in Germany. This season, dramatic epics like “Angels in America” and “The Inheritance” share the program with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “The Tower.” The Austrian Jewish Hofmannsthal, a leading literary figure in fin-de-siècle Vienna, is also one of Stoppard’s touchstones for recreating that period in “Leopoldstadt,” and comes in for high praise in a monologue extolling how Viennese Jews worship culture. “A new writer, if he’s a great poet like Hofmannsthal, walks among us like a demigod,” Stoppard has a character say.Nora Schlocker’s grim, aesthetically distinctive but dramatically stilted production of “The Tower” illustrates some of the difficulties of bringing Hofmannsthal’s work to the stage nowadays. An allegory about political power and the fall of empires, “The Tower” was written in the aftermath of World War I, although Hofmannsthal continued to work on it for nearly a decade. It’s a long play, modeled on an earlier work by the Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón, about a king who keeps the son who has been prophesied to overthrow him locked up in a tower.Schlocker has radically shortened the play, and the actors (joined onstage by three musicians) play multiple roles, except for Lisa Stiegler, who gives a bloodcurdling, affecting and acrobatic performance as the imprisoned prince, Sigismund. Sumptuous as the play’s language is, it’s a difficult work to make tick dramatically. Schlocker’s deep cuts speed things up (the show clocks in at a mere 100 minutes), though it feels disjointed at times. But the grotesque, ghoulish aesthetic she devises, while effective in places, can seem just baffling and quirky in others.Claus Peymann’s production of Thomas Bernhard’s “The German Lunch Table” at the Josefstadt Theater in Vienna. Philine HofmannFor a shocking and refreshing dose of eccentricity, turn to Claus Peymann’s delirious production of Thomas Bernhard’s equally insane play, “The German Lunch Table,” at the Josefstadt Theater in Vienna. Bernhard, who died in 1989, was the bad boy of postwar Austrian literature, and he loved to thumb his nose at his compatriots for maintaining that they were Hitler’s first victims. For this production of Bernhard’s 1988 play, a vaudeville-like series of seven sketches, Peymann has teamed up with Achim Freyer, who designed the colorful, eye-popping sets and projections.The Josefstadt Theater is known for conventional (and conservative) dramatic fare, but this bonkers staging of a play that seems hellbent on offending its audience is anything but. Bernhard’s sketches all deal with Nazism surfacing in quotidian interactions and with society’s failure to work through the past. In one, politicians who are contestants on a TV quiz show brag about being “National Socialists at heart.” In another, elderly couples gather to celebrate the acquittal of a friend who was on trial for crimes against humanity committed at a Nazi concentration camp.As luck would have it, “The German Lunch Table” is in repertoire at the theater along with the first German-language production of “Leopoldstadt.” That Stoppard’s haunting ode to the vanished Viennese Jewish world should play alongside Bernhard’s incendiary indictment of postwar Austrian repression and hypocrisy feels appropriate, in a sly and mischievous way.Effingers. Directed by Jan Bosse. Through Feb. 3 at the Münchner Kammerspiele.Der Turm. Directed by Nora Schlocker. Through Jan. 18 at the Residenztheater Munich.Der deutsche Mittagstisch. Directed by Claus Peymann. Through March 27 at the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna. More
