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    How Directors Are Reimagining Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Shows

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    The closing of “The Phantom of the Opera” last spring left a chandelier-sized hole in New York. And as of this summer, for the first time in 44 years, there is no Andrew Lloyd Webber musical running on Broadway.But now comes an unexpected new chapter in the career of one of musical theater’s most successful, if not always appreciated, composers: Several adventurous contemporary directors are declaring they love his work and want to put their stamp on it.Ivo van Hove, the Belgian director known for his profuse use of video and viscous fluids, is tackling “Jesus Christ Superstar” in Amsterdam, while Jamie Lloyd, the British auteur with a penchant for Pinter and an aversion to scenery, is sharpening “Sunset Boulevard” in London. Meanwhile, in the United States, Sammi Cannold is putting a feminist stamp on “Evita,” while Bill Rauch and Zhailon Levingston are humanizing “Cats.”The shows, and Lloyd Webber himself, occupy a paradoxical place in the theatrical canon.Critics have sometimes dismissed his work as overwrought. This newspaper’s reviewers, in particular, have often been underwhelmed, initially declaring that “Jesus Christ Superstar” had “minimal artistic value,” and also deriding “Evita” (“like reading endless footnotes from which the text has disappeared”), “Cats” (“if you blink, you’ll miss the plot”) and “Sunset Boulevard” (“lurid”).But “Evita,” “Cats” and “Sunset Boulevard” won best musical Tony Awards, and all four shows are widely staged and enormously popular. These new productions, reflecting contemporary trends, are emphasizing psychology and politics over spectacle and sentiment.Lloyd Webber, 75, said in an interview that there is no grand strategy at work here — that the directors individually sought permission to stage the shows. But he also said he believes that it is healthy to allow others to explore older material in new ways.“When we were approached, we just thought, ‘Well, great! Why not?’” he said. “You can’t just sit on these things.”Even “Starlight Express,” one of his zanier musicals, which involves actors on roller skates pretending to be trains, is getting a reboot: Luke Sheppard, the “& Juliet” director, is reimagining it for a run scheduled to begin next summer in London.The productions come after a rough patch for Lloyd Webber. His latest musical, “Bad Cinderella,” bombed on Broadway last spring, shortly after the “Phantom” closing. But he is undeterred: In August he signed with Creative Artists Agency, the powerhouse talent representatives, and in September he named a new chief executive for Really Useful Group, the company he owns that licenses and manages his shows.“I really must concentrate, in the latter days of my composing life, on creating and writing,” Lloyd Webber said. “It’s exciting to me that there are so many directors now coming forward, who actually are the directors who everybody is going to at the moment. And it’s very interesting to me to hear new minds and see new ideas — some of them I’m going to like and some of them not. But why not? I can’t see any possible reason.”Here is a look at four upcoming reinventions.London‘Sunset Boulevard’Forget the staircase and the turban. Jamie Lloyd is bringing an intense interest in psychological exploration to “Sunset Boulevard” — “putting the emphasis,” he says, “on people and their emotional journey.”With that aim, he asked Lloyd Webber to rework some aspects of the score “to lean into the darkness and peculiarity of certain moments that are dreamlike or nightmarish.” And, to his surprise, Lloyd Webber agreed. “He’s been so open,” Lloyd said, “which is kind of crazy.”The production, which is now running at London’s Savoy Theater, ends with a rush of blood and integrates live camera work in a nod to the Hollywood milieu of “Sunset Boulevard.” Lloyd called it “a hybrid between theater and cinema.”Lloyd, 42, didn’t grow up seeing theater. But his father, a truck driver, liked listening to show tunes, and that’s how Lloyd first encountered Lloyd Webber’s songs.The original Broadway production of “Sunset Boulevard,” which opened in 1994, starred Glenn Close, above with Andrew Lloyd Webber.Associated PressSoon he had his own cassette of the composer’s greatest hits, and he would “force my cousins to do performances in the living room.”“It was kind of the soundtrack of my youth,” he said.Fast forward to the summer of 2019. Lloyd, by then an acclaimed experimental director, had moved on from his Lloyd Webber fixation, or at least so he thought. But when he was invited to stage a musical outdoors, in Regent’s Park, one show came to mind: “Evita.”His sneakers-and-spray-paint production of that show was a hit, and he made a mental note of Lloyd Webber’s openness to “radical reappraisal.” Then, idled at home during the pandemic, he found himself imagining what he could do with “Sunset Boulevard.”“The characters he chooses to write about are weird and otherworldly, often with tormented minds, and the scores take these big leaps which are good to explore,” Lloyd said. “They are like fever dreams, and they respond well to a more experimental, less traditional approach.”WASHINGTON‘Evita’Sammi Cannold has long been obsessed with “Evita.” At 29, she is 16 years younger than the musical, but she still remembers hearing the songs as a kid in New York, seeing the revival that starred Ricky Martin, and, as an aspiring director, proclaiming it her “dream project.”She has been nothing if not determined: She directed a production while an undergrad at Stanford; she visited Argentina three times to do research; and then she pitched an “Evita” revival to New York City Center.In 1979, Patti LuPone (above with Bob Gunton) took on the role of Eva Perón for the show’s Broadway premiere.Martha Swope/New York Public LibrarySo in 2019, there was Cannold, directing a 12-day gala run of the Lloyd Webber classic. The production was eye-catching, starting with Evita’s iconic white ball gown hovering like a ghost over a flower-bedecked stage. This year, Cannold was able to develop it fully, staging it first at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and now (through Oct. 15) at Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, where the Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks called the show “gorgeously reinvigorated.”Cannold’s take is informed by feminism — “I think she’s a victim and a survivor who learned to use her sexuality as armor,” she said of Perón — but also by the regime’s authoritarianism. “When I first started working on it, I was head over heels in love with Eva — I was so obsessed with her and her history, and I couldn’t really hear any of the criticism,” she said. “I’ve gone on a whole journey, and land in a different place.”AMSTERDAM‘Jesus Christ Superstar’Even in Belgium, where Ivo van Hove grew up, “Jesus Christ Superstar” was a big deal. The concept album was released in 1970, when van Hove was young, and the music has lived in his head ever since.“At the time that I was an adolescent, this was huge — not the musical, but the album — the album was something that everybody bought,” said van Hove, who at 64 has never seen a stage production of the show. “Nobody could believe that ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ could be a rock thing.”Van Hove, whose production of “Dead Man Walking” is this season’s Metropolitan Opera opener, said he has wanted for years to direct “Jesus Christ Superstar.” “Some projects live in me for a long time,” he said.Jeff Fenholt in the title role of “Jesus Christ Superstar” on Broadway in 1971. Bettmann, via Getty ImagesNow he’s getting his chance, directing an English-language production that is set to begin performances in January at DeLaMar in Amsterdam.“I can tell you what interests me,” he said. “First, it’s a story of a group of friends who became friends because they believed in one mission: to take care of the poor. Second, these friends become a threat to political and religious leaders. And third are the geopolitical tensions, in this case with Rome.”“These things,” he added, “feel like very contemporary themes.”How contemporary? Let’s just say that in van Hove’s production, the cast will begin the show wearing hoodies. And, he said, some members of the audience will be seated onstage, because he wants to create a “pressure-cooker” environment.What is van Hove’s theory about why Lloyd Webber is drawing inventive directors now? “It’s not for nothing that these musicals became so important for so many people for such a long time,” he said. “There’s something very human there, even when it’s about cats.”NEW YORK‘Cats’The production of “Cats” planned for next June at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center is, at least at first blush, the most outlandish of this latest round of Lloyd Webber productions. Whereas the original concerned a group of cats (obviously) and was set in a junkyard, the characters in this production will be human beings, and it will be set in the Ballroom scene, a dance subculture closely associated with Black and Latino drag queens.“We are reimagining ‘Cats’ as a queer ball competition,” said Zhailon Levingston, one of the production’s two directors. Old Deuteronomy, an astute and admired character, will be head judge.The idea was the brainchild of the Perelman Center’s artistic director, Bill Rauch, who, by his own description, has been “obsessed with reinventing classics my whole career,” and who had previously directed a “queer ‘Oklahoma’” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. “Over the course of that process, I was thinking a lot about ‘Cats,’ and I just kept thinking about the song ‘Memory’ being done in a queer context,” Rauch said. “And I just found it very moving.”The cast of “Cats” in 1997; the show ran on Broadway from 1982 to 2000.Carol RoseggRauch, 61, saw the original Broadway production — albeit late in its long run, when he decided “it felt important to check that off on my cultural bucket list.” Levingston, 29, had a different point of entry: a direct-to-video film from 1998.“I’d be at the day care center, watching ‘Barney,’ and they kept showing the trailer for ‘Cats,’ and I didn’t know what they were doing — people were dressed provocatively, and it seemed like maybe we shouldn’t be watching, and one day my mom and I were at Blockbuster, and I saw the black box with the yellow eyes, and said, ‘We have to get that,’” he recalled. “For two years of my life, I would just watch ‘Cats.’”At one point, Levingston said, he even performed his own one-man (well, one-child) version of the show for his babysitters.Now Rauch and Levingston have hired choreographers with a connection to the Ballroom scene, and a gender consultant to help them navigate the complexities of a gender-nonconforming cast.“The more time we spend with the material,” Rauch said, “the deeper my respect grows for it.” More

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      ‘Patience’ Review: At the Top of His Game, and Lonely

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      Johnny G. Lloyd’s new play about a solitaire champion examines talent, ambition and the rising stakes of success when you’re Black.The most powerful line in “Patience,” Johnny G. Lloyd’s new play about Black excellence, comes not from the world-champion solitaire player at its center but rather from a teenage opponent quietly eyeing the champ’s crown, skilled and ferocious and determined to dethrone him.“I’m not going to apologize for wanting to dominate,” she says. “I’m not going to apologize for making myself lethal.” And then comes the vital bit, landing like a punch: “I’m not going to apologize for losing, because one day I will be winning and winning and winning.”That’s the thing about the path to success, isn’t it — that talented people need to be allowed to stumble sometimes, then continue their quest. “Patience” itself is a case in point. Part of the Second Stage Theater Uptown series dedicated to emerging playwrights and early-career artists, the show isn’t a win for Lloyd and his director, Zhailon Levingston, but it’s hardly a wipeout either.Daniel Bryant (Justiin Davis), the play’s 25-year-old Black superstar, hasn’t stumbled in a very long time. Two decades ago, he exhibited a talent for solitaire, and his mother (Mary E. Hodges), who is also his manager, has been nurturing it ever since. Undefeated for four years running, he is focused, famous and alone at the top.Solitaire is an obscure choice of game to graft onto those glittery circumstances, but Lloyd is thinking figuratively — about a competition in which one’s true opponent is oneself, and about the pressure and isolation of being an only.Daniel is so adept at flying solo in his cosseted life that his adorable fiancé, Jordan (the immensely likable and funny Jonathan Burke), has a very specific, not-unreasonable-sounding fear: that one day the phone will ring and on the other end will be someone who works for Daniel, calling to dump him on Daniel’s behalf. Though he and Jordan have just bought a fancy new house, their relationship feels less than solid, and anyway, Daniel is a living-in-the-moment kind of guy.“The future is terrifying,” he says.On the fence about what should come next, he is tempted to retire — until the 18-year-old up-and-comer Ella (Zainab Barry) appears on the scene, threatening his dominance with her own Black excellence. Daniel’s mother, understandably frightened that her career will collapse if he stops playing, encourages a match between them without mentioning a crucial fact: She has taken on Ella as a client, too.Does that seem like an implausible conflict of interest and egregious betrayal of trust? Yes. Are we meant to give Daniel’s mother (the character’s name is simply Mother) a pass? Apparently. It’s a distracting complication that seems manufactured, and not for any clear reason — not even after the play’s Venus-and-Serena theme becomes overt.You will be primed for that motif early on, when Daniel tells a class of high schoolers that he has “been called the Venus Williams of solitaire,” and you think: Venus, really? Not Serena? Then Daniel’s friend, Nikita (Nemuna Ceesay), mentions that same fact about him, unnecessarily.When Ella happens to have the same surname as Daniel, though they’re not related, it seems tailored to the Williams sisters metaphor, in which of course she is Serena. On the plus side, the coincidence of their both being Bryants does allow Ella to make a pointed observation.“Very popular name,” she says. “Could go into why, if we really wanted to. Probably something depressing. Or — colonial.”Competition approaches: Zainab Barry as Ella in the background, and Davis with Mary E. Hodges, who plays his mother-manager. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the McGinn/Cazale Theater on the Upper West Side, “Patience” has an across-the-board appealing cast, and the show is beautifully designed, except for an unpersuasive late scene involving the illusion of two Daniels. (Set by Lawrence E. Moten III, costumes by Avery Reed, lights by Adam Honoré, sound by Christopher Darbassie.)Ultimately, though, the play’s balance is off, as if it can’t decide whether Daniel anchors it, or if Daniel and Ella do, or if maybe the show wants to be an ensemble piece.Its heart, though, is invested in a future in which Black megatalents like Daniel and Ella — or Venus and Serena — don’t have to occupy the pinnacle of their field one at a time.“I will not be intimidated by the competition,” Ella vows. “I will welcome it, I will not try to crush it, I will encourage it, I will make room. I will make room and I will still win. Because I know there can be more than one.”PatienceThrough Aug. 28 at the McGinn/Cazale Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Chicken & Biscuits,’ a Sweet but Dated Comedic Recipe

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      Squabbling siblings, familiar stereotypes and a chorus of amens: A new play aims for the pleasures of Broadway’s traditional family sitcoms.“Why we gotta wear black, huh? We already Black!”So grouses Beverly, the kind of woman who features aquamarine hair and a peek-a-boo push-up bra at a funeral.To be specific: her father’s funeral. “We should be honoring my Daddy in style, color!” she proclaims. Certainly the deceased — the late pastor of a church in New Haven, Conn. — has complied; he’s heading to the Pearly Gates in a canary yellow tie.“Canary yellow was his favorite,” Beverly explains. “And he wore it like a pimp!”As I sat alternately laughing and cringing in the audience of “Chicken & Biscuits,” a play by Douglas Lyons that opened on Sunday at Circle in the Square Theater, I couldn’t help thinking that Beverly was voicing more than a personal, sartorial truth. In her impatience with tragedy, her gaudy antics and her beeline for fun, she was also delivering what may be the play’s mission statement. This family comedy, with its cheek and secrets and eulogies and amens, wants to offer audiences living in bad times an old-fashioned good one.Whether it succeeds for you will depend largely on your taste for Broadway comedies of a type that otherwise went out of style a few decades ago. These were supposedly heartwarming domestic stories in which “ethnic” families like the Italian American Geminianis in “Gemini” and the Jewish Chamberses in “Norman, Is That You?” aired dirty laundry (typically involving a gay son) while reaffirming the notion that love conquers all, among kin no less than country.Sidestepping the traffic of somber, formally inventive new plays about Black life, “Chicken & Biscuits” eagerly boards that rickety old bus. To start, there are the requisite squabbling siblings: Beverly (Ebony Marshall-Oliver) and her sister, Baneatta (Cleo King), representing opposite ends of the bawdy-to-churchy continuum. Beverly resents Baneatta’s attitude of superiority; Baneatta, whose tenured professorship seems to be in Disapproval Studies, scorns Beverly’s down-market outfits and outlook.Lewis plays a pastor hoping to prove himself, while also trying to help his wife, played by King, navigate her family’s complicated dynamics at a funeral.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTheirs is but one of the thin and mild conflicts that the production, directed by Zhailon Levingston, stirs mightily to bring to a boil. On the day of the funeral, Baneatta’s husband, Reginald, will be delivering the eulogy, hoping to prove himself a suitable successor to his father-in-law in the pulpit. (With Norm Lewis in the role, could there ever be any doubt?) Reginald is also hoping that family hysteria will not overtake family healing in the process.Apparently, he has not met his family, or even his own children: the tightly wound, high-achieving, 30-something Simone (Alana Raquel Bowers) and her younger brother, Kenny (Devere Rogers), a struggling actor and the de rigueur gay son. Each comes factory supplied with a pressing problem. Simone has recently been dumped by her fiancé, who took up with a white woman instead. Kenny’s problem is also white: Logan Leibowitz, the Jewish boyfriend (and fellow struggling actor) he has brought to the funeral unannounced.Though Simone repeatedly refers to the couple, with a smirk, as “thespians,” and Baneatta simply ignores the interloper, no one disapproves of Kenny’s gayness deeply enough to prevent a happy hug of an ending. All of the characters’ characteristics are red herrings, and usually stale ones at that. Beverly’s outrageousness recalls that of innumerable stock characters from Tyler Perry’s plays, Black sitcoms of the 1970s and Chitlin’ Circuit farces. Logan (Michael Urie) is a gay stereotype so flittery he cannot follow the service; as he flips madly through the Bible, he asks, “Where’s Corinthians? Is this in alphabetical order?”You will detect in Logan and Beverly — and in Beverly’s sarcastic Gen Z daughter, La’Trice (Aigner Mizzelle) — a kind of equal opportunity minstrelsy. In some ways, trotting out laughable stereotypes of a modern Black family and its white appendages seems almost daring on Broadway today. One of the highlights of Levingston’s production, which can otherwise feel bloated at two hours, comes when Simone, apologizing for her kneejerk hostility toward Logan, says, “Since the breakup, it’s been real hard for me not to see red when I see white people.” Levingston lets this moment sit a good long time, waiting for the (mostly white) audience to get the joke.In their performances, Marshall-Oliver, from left, Urie and Aigner Mizzelle evoke outrageous stock characters of the deep — and recent — past.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSuch insight and provocation is otherwise rare in “Chicken & Biscuits.” So is any real tension. Whether the family will accept Logan, whether the sisters will reconcile, whether the mystery guest at the funeral (NaTasha Yvette Williams) will be explained are barely even questions; they’re more like a packing list. In that sense, the play feels dramatically complacent and underdeveloped, suggesting that its trip to Broadway after a pandemic-foreshortened run at the Queens Theater in 2020 might have benefited from a stop along the way.Yet it’s at least a little unfair to look at a family comedy that way. Lyons, an actor himself before turning to playwriting — this is his Broadway debut as an author, and Levingston’s as a director — is operating here in a different tradition from most contemporary fare, which is built on ideas and argumentation.“Chicken & Biscuits” is built on sensation, more like a musical or even an opera. In the long scene of the funeral itself, the eulogies by several family members function as arias, delivered in the old-school park-and-bark style. They are not concerned with forwarding the action so much as bringing aural pleasure, and indeed Lewis’s satire of a preacherly stemwinder, with drawn out vowels and pounced-on syncopations, is more than halfway to song.In any case, Lyons is more interested in the family’s moment-by-moment byplay — its laugh track and tear track — than in drawing realistic character portraits or scoring sociological points. The cast, including five actors also making their Broadway debuts, for the most part fills in the characters’ outlines confidently. As for sociological points, you could hardly say more in a treatise than Dede Ayite does with the costumes and Nikiya Mathis with the wigs.So if “Chicken & Biscuits” isn’t a profound work, that doesn’t mean it’s pointless. Its gravy is just another name for schmaltz. Thinking back, as a Jew, on the Jewish families that Broadway audiences learned to love in not-very-sophisticated, high-cholesterol comedies, I have to admit that even as I alternately laughed and cringed at their caricatures, I felt relieved of the more pernicious problem of otherness.Representation matters. I see many great and necessary new works about the problem of Blackness in a racist society — or rather, the problem of whiteness. They are filled with anguish and unfunny funerals. What I rarely get to see are works about Black American life that are defiantly not problem plays. Their sunniness is just as necessary, however garish the aquamarine and pimped-out the corpse.Chicken & BiscuitsThrough Jan. 2 at Circle in the Square Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, chickenandbiscuitsbway.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      With New Show, a Broadway Rarity: Season Has 7 Plays by Black Writers

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      “Chicken & Biscuits,” a new comedy by Douglas Lyons, will star Norm Lewis and Michael Urie. Performances will begin on Sept. 23.Plays by Black writers have been few and far between on Broadway over the years. The coming season will feature at least seven.The latest entrant is “Chicken & Biscuits,” a new comedy that last year ran for two weeks at Queens Theater before the pandemic forced it to close.Much of the creative and producing team will be in leadership roles for the first time on Broadway — the playwright, Douglas Lyons, was previously in the ensemble of “Beautiful” and “The Book of Mormon,” while the director, Zhailon Levingston, is an assistant director of “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.”Onstage, there will be some familiar faces: Norm Lewis and Michael Urie, both well-known and well-liked by theater audiences. Lewis, a Tony nominee for “Porgy and Bess,” is best known as a singer, and this will be his first Broadway play; Urie is on more familiar ground as a comedic actor, and he was featured in a virtual reading of the play during the pandemic.Three of the show’s lead producers, Pamela Ross, E. Clayton Cornelious and Leah Michalos, are in that role for the first time. A fourth, Hunter Arnold, has producing credits on 29 shows, and is one of the lead producers of “Hadestown.”These plays arrive at a time of intensified attention on racial inequity in many corners of society, including the theater industry. Lyons founded the Next Wave Initiative, a scholarship program for Black theater artists; Lewis is a founding member of Black Theater United; and Levingston is the director of industry initiatives for the Broadway Advocacy Coalition. The coalition will be recognized with a special Tony Award this fall.“Chicken & Biscuits,” which is about a family that gathers for a funeral and is forced to reckon with a secret, is scheduled to start performances Sept. 23 and to open Oct. 10 at the Circle in the Square Theater. The play will be the first to move to Broadway from Queens Theater, a nonprofit performing arts center in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.“This show was the one that Covid-19 interrupted for us,” said the theater’s executive director, Taryn Sacramone. “To go from that moment — abrupt shutdown — to now seeing ‘Chicken & Biscuits’ move to Broadway in this moment of reopening for the city — this feels incredibly meaningful.”The other plays by Black writers scheduled to run next season are “Pass Over,” by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu; “Lackawanna Blues,” by Ruben Santiago-Hudson; “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” by Keenan Scott II; “Trouble in Mind,” by Alice Childress; “Clyde’s,” by Lynn Nottage; and “Skeleton Crew,” by Dominique Morisseau. More