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    Who Needs a Shave? ‘Sweeney Todd’ Is Back.

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    “Less is more” was famously one of the composer Stephen Sondheim’s aesthetic credos. But in the case of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” the bloody, quasi-operatic 1979 revenge tragedy that many consider his masterpiece, Sondheim went big in a way he seldom had before and never did again: in the size of the orchestra and performing ensemble, in the sheer quantity of music written for the score, and in the dramatic freight (and body count) borne by the tale of a murderous Victorian-era barber.“Sweeney Todd” has accordingly joined the repertoire of many opera companies, where it holds its own with such 20th-century titans as the Gershwins’ “Porgy and Bess” and Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw.” But in the theater, “Sweeney” has found notable success by getting a haircut. Since the original Broadway production closed in 1980 — an artistic success, winning the Tony Award for best musical, but a financial disappointment, recouping just shy of 60 percent of its costs — its two Broadway revivals were trimmed-down renditions. The first, staged in the round at Circle in the Square in 1989, earned the nickname “Teeny Todd” for its small ensemble and two-piano reduction of the score, while John Doyle’s 2005 production memorably stripped the show down to a 10-member company of actor-musicians.The property’s biggest commercial success was Off Broadway: The Tooting Arts Club’s immersive pie-shop staging at the 133-seat Barrow Street Theater in 2017 became the longest-running “Sweeney,” recouping its investment in 24 weeks, then continuing for a year after that.So the stakes are high for the new Broadway revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, now in previews at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where it is scheduled to open on March 26. With a capitalization of $13.5 million, a company of 25 actors and an orchestra of 26 players, this is “Sweeney” as it hasn’t been seen or heard in New York for 43 years. We’re used to “Sweeney Todd” deconstructed. Can it be reconstructed?And is there a plentiful paying audience, not only for the show’s stars, who include Gaten Matarazzo and Jordan Fisher, but also for Sondheim himself? His death in 2021 led to fresh encomiums for his unparalleled legacy, but that season’s “Company” revival lost money, and last year’s popular “Into the Woods,” now on a national tour, has not announced whether it has recouped.Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Sweeney” (and “Hamilton”), recently acknowledged that the revival constituted a “large risk,” adding that he’s encouraged by strong ticket sales. He did initially wonder, he said, “Does New York need or want another ‘Sweeney Todd,’ only four or five years after the pie shop? And the answer was: Maybe, if we give them something they haven’t seen in 40 years, a full-scale production with a full ensemble and a full orchestra.”Rehearsals of the show at Open Jar Studios in Manhattan. The new production’s larger scale also means the return of the trick barber’s chair and blood packs. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesGaten Matarazzo during rehearsals.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe idea of the revival germinated with Groban, a pop-classical singer who made his Broadway debut in 2016 in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” He approached Thomas Kail, the Tony-winning director of “Hamilton,” about tackling “Sweeney” with a full orchestra, and Kail enlisted Alex Lacamoire, the “Hamilton” music director, and the choreographer Steven Hoggett (“A Beautiful Noise”).During a phone interview two days before previews began, Groban said Sweeney had been on his wish list since he was in junior high and first saw a mid-1990s production by Los Angeles’s East West Players, with Orville Mendoza in the lead. It was also his introduction to the work of Sondheim, who teamed with Hugh Wheeler, the show’s writer.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.“It was a kind of secret language that I just got,” Groban recalled of his early explorations of Sondheim’s musicals. “Even at a young age, when I still needed to grow into so many of the themes he was writing about, I just seemed to understand it on a weird unspoken level.”While Groban’s lush baritone is undoubtedly a good fit for the music, does he perhaps seem a bit too genial and easygoing to play a serial killer whose quest for revenge swells into a sociopathic death wish?“That’s actually one of the reasons I was attracted to doing it,” Groban insisted. He said he figured that “the way to earn a connection with the audience that’s frightening on a deeper level than, ‘Hey, that’s the monster in the room,’ is to find whatever humanity there is between that guy and whoever’s sitting in the audience.”For his part, Kail said he’s leaning into the show’s strains of longing, not only those of the embittered Sweeney but also from his helpmate and desultory romantic partner, the pie-shop proprietor Mrs. Lovett, played by Ashford.“What we’re really keen to explore,” said Kail, “is can you make something thrilling, something entertaining, something hilarious, something scary — and can we also break your heart?”Ashford, who played Dot in the 2017 revival of Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George” (which did recoup its investment), is on a similar wavelength.“I’ve always thought of it as a great love story, though maybe one-sided,” she said. Without ignoring Lovett’s depravity — it is she, after all, who suggests grinding Sweeney’s victims into meat pies, in the tour de force duet “A Little Priest” — Ashford said she is keying in on Mrs. Lovett’s unrequited passion for Sweeney as well as her maternal affection for the orphan Toby (Matarazzo).Not to mention finding connections to the role’s originator, Angela Lansbury. “You feel her breath and her warmth and her humor all over the piece,” Ashford said.The production aims to “find beauty in the underbelly and in the grotesque,” said Kail, above right, with Ashford and Groban.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIndeed, the imprint of the original production, memorialized in a telefilm recording of a 1980 tour stop in Los Angeles, is unavoidable. That’s particularly the case for a production that’s returning to Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestrations, and boasts a towering set by Mimi Lien that, like Eugene Lee’s original set, employs a working crane and moving pieces ringed with cast-iron staircases.But Kail, who was friendly with Harold Prince, the director of the show’s original production, is intent on marking out his own territory.“That production was influenced by Brecht; it was about alienation, distancing,” Kail said. “That approach was enormously effective for them, and it is quite different from what we’re going to try to do.”Whereas Prince found his hook in the grime and tumult of the Industrial Revolution, Kail and his team, which also includes the costume designer Emilio Sosa and the lighting designer Natasha Katz, are looking to “find beauty in the underbelly and in the grotesque,” Kail said. Inspired by the play’s stark dichotomy between “those above” and “those below,” they are trying to embody its levels and hierarchies.Lien, whose scenic designs for shows like “Great Comet” and “An Octoroon” are typically characterized by surprising use of three-dimensional space, was struck by the show’s references to “the great black pit, the hole in the ground, the vermin — this kind of characterization of that underclass population of Victorian London as being like sewer rats, living underground.”In addition to the gantry crane and mechanized set pieces, Lien’s set is framed by a brick archway and an iron bridge that could serve in a production of “Oliver!”Sosa’s costumes, too, are stressing both beauty and division.“If you look historically at the clothing, the cuts and silhouettes are very similar between those of less means and more affluent people,” Sosa noted. “Everyone has a top hat. It’s the condition of your hat that’s variable, that sets where you stand in the scheme of economics.”The new production’s larger scale also means the return of the trick chair and blood packs. (Some past revivals artfully stylized the show’s onstage murders and finessed the mechanics of Sweeney’s purpose-built chair.) Its blood effects are being created by Jeremy Chernick, who helped Elsa’s world transform to ice in “Frozen” and stocked the blood cannons for “American Psycho.”And when I spoke to Hoggett about the show’s movements and transitions he told me, “I spent all day yesterday being slid down the chair into a pit, so I could show all the actors how not to bang your chin and where the floor is. It was great; we were offering $5 rides.”Atop the table, from left, Gaten Matarazzo and Annaleigh Ashford in the revival of “Sweeney Todd” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGroban as the murderous barber Sweeney Todd and Ashford as the pie-shop proprietor Mrs. Lovett in the new production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe extent to which “Sweeney Todd” is itself a kind of thrill ride, a brilliant machine for delivering scares and laughs, remains a question. Sondheim was clear about his inspiration: When he saw Christopher Bond’s blank-verse play in London in 1973, itself adapted from a hoary English legend, the composer saw an opportunity to indulge his intersecting affinities for Gothic horror, melodrama and Grand Guignol. And in later years he was on record as savoring intimate versions of “Sweeney,” not least because they hewed closer to his original vision.But there’s something else in the show’s DNA that may account for its endurance, and may explain why, despite Sondheim’s expressed preference for smaller stagings, he was apparently eager to see Kail’s production. (He died just days before he had been scheduled to attend a reading of the show.)When Sondheim enlisted Prince — who was initially ambivalent about the show’s melodrama and horror until he sparked to its larger social themes — the composer was inexorably drawn into writing something with more epic heft than he might have originally imagined.As Ashford put it: “Every time you work on a great piece, you are exploring an author’s work from that moment in their life. I always thought ‘Sunday in the Park’ was an extension of Steve at a time in his life when he was really examining himself as an artist and what art meant to him.“In this piece, where he was in his life — I can’t speak for him, but it feels like he and Hal Prince were setting the world on fire. And he was like, ‘Here’s everything I got, I can’t wait to show it to you.’”There may be something even more personal at the show’s bloody core that speaks to its emotional size, if not its physical scale. When Sondheim played a bit of the score for Judy Prince, Hal’s wife, she was startled, and told him, “Steve, it’s the story of your life.”I once asked Sondheim what she might have meant, and he replied by drawing an analogy between Sweeney’s vengeful murders and works of art inspired by a sense of having been wronged as a young man. (Sondheim had an infamously stormy childhood.)The clues can be read in the music. The harmonic palette of the “Sweeney” score was influenced by the film music of Bernard Herrmann, a German neo-Romantic who brought utter emotional conviction to his work, whether he was accompanying dueling skeletons or the capering psychodramas of Alfred Hitchcock. The yearning and anguish Sondheim poured into the music of “Sweeney Todd” may finally be as telling as any of the bloody action in the script.Tunick, who said his original orchestrations “leaned on the film music masters heavily,” knew Sondheim well. Whether “Sweeney Todd” expressed something darkly personal about his colleague, Tunick couldn’t say. But he did note significantly: “All of his other shows were brought to him by somebody else, whether it was Hal Prince or James Lapine or whoever. This is the only one of Sondheim’s shows that was his idea.” More

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      5 Broadway Veterans on Race and Representation in Theater Design

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      “Theater traffics in unconscious symbolism.” Set designers, lighting designers and a sound designer talk about skin tones, aesthetics and more.Design for live performance can cast a surreptitious spell, shaping an audience’s perceptions with stimuli we might not even notice consciously: a change of light, a snatch of sound, a detail of costume or décor. It’s encoded language, and we respond to it viscerally.To the lighting designer Jane Cox, the Broadway veteran who directs the theater program at Princeton University, that dynamic makes design ripe for interrogation in the context of antiracism. A course that she and the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins taught, about race and lighting design, was one of the seeds of a multidisciplinary symposium, “Sound & Color — The Future of Race in Design,” taking place Saturday and Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory. Organized by Cox and Tavia Nyong’o, a curator at the Armory, it will include commissioned installations by young designers of color.Cox and four other Broadway designers participating in the symposium spoke recently by phone about race and culture in design. These interviews have been edited and condensed.Mimi Lien, Set DesignerMimi Lien won a Tony Award in 2017 for the set design of “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.”Emma PratteDesigners for live performance create and curate an experience, right, by juxtaposing visual, sonic, tactile, spatial elements within a time-based structure. All of these chosen elements carry so much cultural meaning and emotion. The job of designers is to handpick those elements and create a design vocabulary that communicates narrative or a particular emotion. With that comes so much responsibility, because our landscape is constructed with the goal of telling a particular story or reaching a particular audience with really calibrated visual and sensory cues.There is a lot of talk about representation right now. But for me, the real interest of this symposium is the aesthetic question. Like, why do people have certain associations with certain colors, and with darkness versus light? That is a huge cultural, media, anthropological question. And I’m really interested in how the two things intersect: What is the intersection between representation and aesthetics?Jane Cox, Lighting DesignerJane Cox was a Tony Award nominee in 2022 for her work on “Macbeth.”Evan AlexanderBranden says, “Racism is a visual ism.” And he’s right. Racism is perpetrated or understood through how we see other people. How we hear other people. And that happens through the way people are dressed, through the spaces they inhabit, through the way they move, through sounds. When they’re depicted in an image or on a stage or in a movie, design impacts enormously how you see people and how you feel about them. Who’s the center of focus, who’s not the center of focus. Theater traffics in unconscious symbolism, and so does racism.My great hope is to investigate more deeply the ways in which our imaginations are colonized by our specific cultures. Designers are people who believe in our senses. How does sensory input impact these questions of racism? The point of the weekend is to try to start to find a language to talk about these things.Justin Ellington, Sound DesignerJustin Ellington was a Tony nominee in 2020 for “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” and his work can be seen on Broadway in “Topdog/Underdog” and “Ohio State Murders.”Justin Ellington“Race.” [sighs] That word. The angle I’ll be coming from is more cultural than race. A lot of the work that we do, especially with the contemporary work, is very specific about certain communities. There are people that live in those communities, and then there are people that need to do research to understand what’s going on. Living in a place and then hearing about that place that you live in is often drastically different.I was part of a workshop recently and some of the dialogue that was given to the Black characters, I was like, “I don’t know those people, never heard of those people.” Definitely imagined Blackness. As a designer, we need to read scripts and not just say, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” Because you’ll find yourself in Act II like, “What?” It’s like, “That is a terrible misrepresentation of a people.” I’m a sound designer by title but I’m a storyteller first. Sometimes I feel like a cultural watchdog.Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, Lighting DesignerJeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s work can be seen on Broadway in “Kimberly Akimbo.”Hunter CanningThere’s no such thing as racially correct lighting. So in some ways I’m free of that burden. What I have as a burden is a conversation that always comes up, about skin tone — how to be able to represent performers in the best light. Lighting white skin is just as complicated as lighting other, nonwhite skin because everybody’s skin tone reflects a different kind of way. You do have to train your eye.Many years ago, I saw a show that had an Asian cast. There’s a certain idea of lighting design that we should always have a warm and a cool tone onstage. This lighting designer’s particular warm tone was very amber; amber gel has a lot of green in it. Literally the Asian people just looked like they had liver disease, warm and yellow because of the skin tone having more green in it.Adam Rigg, Set DesignerAdam Rigg was a Tony nominee in 2022 for “The Skin of Our Teeth.”Ian MaddoxWe’re taught rules. Especially in theater and opera, there are systems that we follow straight down to the architecture of the space. Which were mostly designed by white men. The future, for me, it’s not about wiping away that history. It’s about truly finding a way to find equity in the vocabulary.I don’t want to get myself in trouble, but I’ll just say it. “Ain’t No Mo’” was originally designed by a team of BIPOC designers [Black, Indigenous and people of color]. The work was shocking and exciting. Then it moved to Broadway with still some designers of color, but some white cis male designers incorporated into the team. You could feel the cleverness draining from it. It felt safer. If we’re really trying to broaden Broadway — which is what the end goal for most of us is, to able to make a living — that representation goes down to design as well. Who was in the room not saying, “Hey, ‘Ain’t No Mo’,’ it’s a really Black play.” Who was just like, “Let some white people design it”? More

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      ‘White on White’ Review: American Grotesque

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      Robert Quillen Camp’s play, about an antiracist discussion group, starts out naturalistically, but then pivots, with bloody abandon, to the absurd.“This orgy of white monstrosity must cease! Now! NOW!”Barked at maximum volume, the command is hard to ignore. And indeed, it puts a screechy brake on one of the most exhilaratingly bizarre scenes of the theatrical summer, if not year, toward the end of the new show “White on White.”The reprieve is temporary: The action revs up again, and at one point I could not help but gasp in horrified delight, or maybe it was delighted horror — the two are closely intertwined in Robert Quillen Camp’s absurdist, outrageous Grand Guignol, which recently opened at the Off Off Broadway space JACK in Brooklyn.As far as setups go, the one in this show, presented by the Hoi Polloi company (“Three Pianos”), is very familiar: A seemingly innocuous confab makes a hard turn into unexpected terrain. Fictional weddings, funerals, Thanksgivings and Christmases have long had a habit of going off the rails; in recent years the battlefield has moved away from those family-centric occasions to gatherings of various types — work meetings, recovery groups, political assemblies — that tend to end with people blowing a gasket and telling each other what’s what. (Tracy Letts’s “The Minutes,” currently on Broadway, is the latest example, about a small town’s City Council.)And so it is in “White on White,” which takes place during a meeting of an antiracist discussion group hosted by Hannah (Nisi Sturgis) in her suburban home — the participants are white so they can avoid “putting an undue burden on people of color,” as Hannah’s husband, Peter (Brandt Adams), puts it. Most of the audience members sit in a large circle, as if we, too, were in Hannah’s beige, characterless living room. (Mimi Lien is the scenic design consultant.)The first two-thirds of the show — directed by Alec Duffy, who also wrote the music, and Lori Elizabeth Parquet — focus on an exquisitely observed dissection of progressive mores and subtle class friction. Michelle (Rebecca Mozo), a blithely entitled type-A mom, pressures the mechanic O’Reilly (Peter Mills Weiss, “While You Were Partying”) into taking a look at her car, even though he is overworked. O’Reilly is the only one helping himself to the snacks.Peter is sitting in a meeting for the first time, and at first we discover the group through his eyes. Adams communicates Peter’s befuddlement through a seemingly blank face and almost imperceptibly widening eyes as the proceedings grow increasingly odd. The first obvious sign may be when the attendees start singing cryptic ditties with titles like “A Ship Doesn’t Capsize,” backed by Michelle’s partner, Riley (Dinah Berkeley), on an autoharp. When the group’s female members leave the room for a separate conversation, we are left with the men, including Peter, and an ominous pulse grows louder in the background — Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste’s sound design helps create a disquieting atmosphere as the cultish vibe that had been simmering gets closer to a boil.“White on White” appears to target the way some white people find comfort in rituals of performative expiation. Until, that is, they reach the point where self-analysis ends and self-interest begins.But instead of being yet another chatty, naturalistic couch play, the show throws itself into the grotesque, when the essence of whiteness manifests in a burst of body horror as surreal as it is funny. That over-the-top scene does not resolve anything for characters or viewers alike — Camp refrains from offering a cathartic ending — but its go-for-broke delirium is uncommonly satisfying.White on WhiteThrough July 16 at Jack, Brooklyn; jackny.org/white-on-white. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Suffs’ Review: Young, Scrappy and Hungry for the Right to Vote

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      Shaina Taub’s new musical at the Public Theater tells the story of the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment.I don’t remember my grade school history books dedicating more than a few sentences to the women’s suffrage movement. The nearly 100-year history of women fighting for the right to vote is often trimmed down to two main talking points — Susan B. Anthony and the 19th Amendment — and some dismissed the suffragists as self-serious rabble-rousers.In an effort to counter those notions of these revolutionary women and their fight, the new musical “Suffs” begins with the satirical vaudeville-inspired “Watch Out for the Suffragette!,” sung by the ensemble, made up of female and nonbinary actors. (The show was scheduled to open Wednesday at the Public Theater, but canceled because of positive coronavirus tests.) They’re dressed in drag — even mustaches — caricaturing their male detractors. We’re in for a tedious history lesson, these hypothetical skeptics predict in song; a dreaded feminist is “planning to scold you for three hours straight.”My first thought: Dear God, I hope not.“Suffs” has a hefty two-hour-and-45-minute running time, after all, and though the musical isn’t guilty of scolding, it is guilty of stifling an impressive — though exhausting — breadth of U.S. history through its contemporary lens.Shaina Taub, the Public Theater’s playwright in residence and creator of the musical, stars as Alice Paul, the headstrong young suffragist who assembles a group of women who lead protests, suffer abuse and incarceration, and march on Washington for their right to access the ballot box.Taub gives a steely performance as Paul, though her standby (Holly Gould) has stepped into the role, as Taub tested positive for the coronavirus just before the production’s scheduled opening.Hannah Cruz, center, in the satirical vaudeville-inspired number “Watch Out for the Suffragette!” in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPaul is joined in the metaphorical barracks by Lucy Burns (played by an understated Ally Bonino), her friend and fellow suffragist who helped Paul form the National Woman’s Party. There’s also Doris Stevens (Nadia Dandashi, teeming with earnestness), an eager young student and writer from Ohio, and Ruza Wenclawska (a droll Hannah Cruz), the tough-as-nails Polish American factory worker and union organizer. Inez Milholland (Phillipa Soo), a labor lawyer and chic socialite, is their public face; as Inez, Soo, the beloved “Hamilton” alum, brings sugar, sass and style to the group, marching with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other.In the seven years that are covered in the musical — 1913 to 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally ratified — Paul butts heads with her sisters in the fight. She has a yearslong dispute with Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella), who, as the head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, thinks Paul’s moves are too radical. And there’s the journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James), who unsuccessfully tries to bring race into the movement, challenging Paul’s myopic vision for change.But her actual opponent is the president, Woodrow Wilson (Grace McLean), who noodles around the stage, step-kicking down stairs with a top hat and a cane while gaily singing misogynistic lyrics like “Men make the money/Ladies make the bread/Men make the rules/Ladies make the bed.” McLean’s jaunty performance introduces some of the few moments of levity in the musical; otherwise a general stiffness pervades the production.Nikki M. James, center, as Ida B. Wells and Cassondra James, right, as Mary Church Terrell in a subplot highlighting the tensions between two suffragists with differing ideas about how to elevate race in the movement.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMaybe that’s because the whole production feels so attuned to the gender politics and protests of today, so aware of possible critiques that it takes on its subject with an overabundance of caution. So a mere 20 minutes into the show, “Suffs” makes it clear it’s not framing Paul as the perfect warrior-saint of the movement. When Paul is dismissive of Wells she responds with the song “Wait My Turn” (“Do you not realize you’re not free until I’m free./Or do you refuse to see?”), establishing her role as the racial conscience of the musical, popping up every once in a while as a reminder of the pitfalls of white feminism. And all these women and stories of their activism are uncomfortably stuffed into a show too scared to miss anything that it becomes bloated with information.In many ways “Suffs” lands like a clunky heir of the Public’s other big historical musical, “Hamilton,” borrowing some of its approaches to structure while trying to avoid the criticisms about its politics around women and slavery. But that’s the risk that comes with recasting history with today’s sensibilities in mind. Even this feminist tale occasionally serves retorts to those funky founding fathers who met in “the room where it happens”; our suffragists sing about how no women got to witness the signing of the 19th Amendment themselves because “a man signed the paper behind a closed door in a room somewhere.”But the musical doesn’t need to try so hard to defend itself or prove its relevance, say, by showing the threats and taunts of men interjected into songs like “The March.” Neither does it need to fall back on preciousness, like when a Tennessee state senator’s mother, an “old farmer’s widow,” sings a banjo-heavy song pleading with her son to vote for suffrage with a promise of his favorite meatloaf in return. Or the pat pairing of some couples in the end, and the heavy-handed finale, “Never Over,” about the continuous march toward progress.The direction, by Leigh Silverman, feels as methodical as the text; the pacing is speedy, and the songs are dense with exposition like those of “Hamilton.” But “Suffs” turns out to be all work and mostly no play, and when it comes to the music itself nothing really pops. There are a few dry touches of vaudeville, and pop and some sugary songs like “If We Were Married,” a number that feels like a contemporary stab at Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s 1937 rendition of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” It’s a parody of such cutesy courtship numbers yet it delivers just that.Taub, left, as Alice Paul and Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Catt, who thinks Paul’s moves are too radical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe music is most interesting when it sheds the exposition and allows the characters space to express their hopes, frustrations and desires. Colella slays her performance in one such song, the prickly “This Girl.” Colella clips her words and sharpens her gestures, hitting her notes with the punch of a boxer in the ring. The harmonies, too, like those in the ensemble number “How Long,” which shifts from a tone of despair to one of resilience, also provide the music with much-needed dimension.The choreographer Raja Feather Kelly’s typically transgressive style (exhibited in shows like “A Strange Loop” and “Fairview”) feels defanged, ball-and-chained to its very literal interpretation of the material; there’s much marching and posing, syncopated stepping. Mimi Lien brings a similar austerity to her set design — the stately steps and columns of Congress, perhaps, or some institutional building — but the simplicity here works, allowing “Suffs” to focus on its diverse cast of history-makers. In the costume design, Toni-Leslie James strikes a satisfying balance between formal high-waisted skirts and black lace-up boots, and the splashy wide-brimmed hats have enough ribbons and feathers to make a Southern churchgoer swoon.“Suffs” ends with a passing of the torch from one generation of change-makers to the next, revisiting the latest clash of new politics versus old politics: What was once revolutionary becomes out of date. For all the work this show does to illuminate the successes — and failures — of the women’s rights movement, and the constantly evolving nature of our politics, it focuses so much energy on seeming as timely as possible. But, as the suffs learn, movements transform; our government leaders change, as do the demands of the people on the picket line. It’s a lesson the musical should take to heart: You can’t live in the past, present and future of our nation’s politics all at once — at least not without losing your way.SuffsThrough May 15 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      ‘Help’ Review: Blindfolds (and Kid Gloves) Off. Let’s Analyze Whiteness.

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      Claudia Rankine’s heady new play dares white audiences to deny the realities of their social advantages.In July 2019, The New York Times Magazine published an essay by the poet and author Claudia Rankine titled, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.” A first-person investigation of white dominance and its broad range of social consequences, Rankine’s essay prompted more than 2,000 online comments, including many defensive replies from white readers.The essay, and the responses it generated, form the basis of her heady and pointed new play, “Help,” which opened on Thursday night at the Shed (which commissioned the play). Part polemic, part documentary theater, “Help” does not so much dramatize Rankine’s argument as dissect it, coolly daring white audiences to deny the live presentation of empirical evidence.The Narrator, played by April Matthis, speaks into a microphone, introducing herself as “a representative of my category,” or what she says is the 8 percent of the United States population who identify as Black women. A glass wall separates Matthis from what looks like an airport waiting area, where nine white men and two white women are arranged in business attire (costumes are by Dede Ayite). We’re in what the Narrator calls a liminal space that people move through on their way from here to there, one full of imaginative possibilities.It was in first-class cabins and airport lounges where Rankine originally conducted her social experiment, trying to loosen the blindfold she often found white men wore to the realities of their social advantages. A few of those incidents are recreated here, including the men’s predictable knee-jerk reactions (“I’ve worked hard for everything I have,” “I don’t see color”), and Rankine’s incisive dressings-down, often left partially unspoken in the moment.From left: Charlotte Bydwell, O’Keefe and Nick Wyman in the play at the Shed.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut much of the play’s primary dialogue is between the narrator’s critical oration and the indignant responses Rankine received to her essay, which ensemble members recite directly to the audience. (In a 2020 interview, Rankine said that 90 percent of what’s said by white men in the play comes from these letters.)Rankine assumes the perspective of all Black women as a bold rhetorical gesture, to indict the presumed neutrality of whiteness and call out its ramifications. (“I, the Black woman, am just meant to get on with the program of accommodating white people,” Matthis tells the audience.) In doing so, the playwright also resists including herself as a character onstage, despite casting herself as its Narrator. The result is an exercise in performance more academic than it is dramatic.To illustrate and historicize her points, Rankine also includes actual remarks from public figures, from Martha Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s possible to read the play exclusively as a rebuttal to incendiary rants from the former president, adding to the sense that “Help” relitigates the past more than it confronts the present.Matthis, an invaluable asset to recent Off Broadway productions exploring Black lives and histories, including “Fairview” and “Toni Stone,” is an unwavering orator, both determined and persuasive as Rankine’s stand-in. But she has little emotion to play beyond simmering frustration. Even in conversation with her husband, who is white, the Narrator speaks almost entirely in ideas, forgoing an opportunity to complicate her argument with the illogic of desire. How does it feel to challenge white men in the public square when you have one living at home? And how might the playwright’s proximity to whiteness color the reception to her case?Matthis, right, with, from left: Nick Wyman, Scholl, Barbagallo and O’Keefe.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesDirected by Taibi Magar, the production has a clinical slickness that holds its subject — the fictions people create to distance themselves from one another — at a chilled remove. (The air travel aesthetic and metaphor eventually overstay their welcome.) Sitting in high-backed blue airplane seats, the white actors wheel themselves across the cold-gray floor and into various formations, frozen in tableau or starkly lit in jerky gesticulation (set design is by Mimi Lien and lighting by John Torres). Occasionally, they perform frenetic choreography by Shamel Pitts, curious fits of movement that make a play for expressiveness but feel disconnected from the rest of the production.“Help” was in early previews when theaters closed in March 2020, and a version of the play streamed online. Rankine has since revised the text to include references to the pandemic and the killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade and others precipitating the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s possible that white audience members who see Rankine’s play may be provoked by its tenets, on an intellectual, if not an emotional level. (More than one program note expressly states that “Help” is intended for white audiences.)But a treatise on the tyranny of white privilege and ignorance would have felt more prescient before the summer of 2020, when anti-racist books topped best seller lists — and white people at least promised to read them — as the United States witnessed one of the most widespread protest movements in its history.For audiences of any color without delusions about the fundamentals of racism and its pervasive, deadly constructs, Rankine’s lecture, however essential, may seem a redundant lesson. If theater has the potential to embody hard truths, “Help” spells them out in familiar black-and-white rather than lifting them off the page.HelpThrough April 10 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      A First Look at Lincoln Center’s Outdoor Spaces

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      A First Look at Lincoln Center’s Outdoor SpacesMichael PaulsonWaiting for summer in New York ☀️Michael Paulson/The New York TimesCapacity will be limited, and early demand has outstripped ticket supply (most stuff is free, via digital lottery). You can also expect poetry readings, sound installations, family programming and visual art — like this piece by the artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya. More

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      in Music

      Lincoln Center’s Plaza Is Going Green. Really.

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      Lincoln Center, whose theaters remain closed by the pandemic, will cover the plaza around its fountain with a synthetic lawn as it pivots to outdoor performances.Lincoln Center, which is holding a series of performances outdoors while its theaters remain closed by the pandemic, announced Tuesday that it would transform the plaza around its fountain into a parklike environment by blanketing it with a synthetic lawn.With the center using its outdoor spaces as stages this spring and summer, it turned to a set designer, Mimi Lien, to reimagine its campus. She came up with a plan to transform the plaza into something she calls “The GREEN” — adding a splash of color to a palette that is dominated by white travertine, and turning the space into a grassy-looking oasis that she hopes will invite New Yorkers in for performances and relaxation.“I wanted to make a place where you could lie on a grassy slope and read a book all afternoon,” Lien, the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, said in a statement. “Get a coffee and sit in the sun. Bring your babies and frolic in the grass. Have a picnic lunch with co-workers.”“Like a town green,” she added, “a place to gather.”The installation, which will open on May 10 and remain in place through September, will be the physical centerpiece of Restart Stages, an initiative Lincoln Center announced in February to use its outdoor spaces for live performances. The initiative began last week with a performance the New York Philharmonic gave for health care workers, and it has continued since then with a blood drive and other pop-up arts programming.The artificial turf will be green in another sense: Officials said it that it would be made of recyclable material with “a high soy content, fully sourced from U.S. farmers.” It will also feature a small snack bar, and have books available for borrowing. Events that will be held in the space will be announced in the coming weeks, officials said.The space will be open from 9 a.m. to midnight; face coverings, social distancing and other health and safety protocols will be required. The plaza will be cleaned regularly, officials said. More