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      What to Do With an Absent Father? Cast Him as a Character Onstage.

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      The experimental theater maker Aya Ogawa ponders her distant father as well as failure and forgiveness in “The Nosebleed” at Lincoln Center Theater.The Brooklyn-based experimental theater maker Aya Ogawa hadn’t thought about her father in 10 years. When that fact occurred to her, in 2017 — a decade after his death, which she and her mother had chosen not to mark with a funeral, or even an obituary in the local newspaper in his California town — she didn’t feel guilty about it.It seemed indicative of the remoteness of their relationship, and how painful it had been for her. Yet Ogawa, then in the midst of creating a show called “Failure Sandwich,” did think she had failed somehow as a daughter to him.“He would have wanted to be memorialized,” Ogawa, 48, said one afternoon last week, sitting casually barefoot on the floor of a rehearsal studio upstairs at Lincoln Center Theater. “He would have wanted to be celebrated and acknowledged and all that stuff.”It was too late for her to do anything about the absence that her father had been in her life, even when they shared the same house. The bond they’d never forged would never be. But she could use the tools of her art to imagine an alternate ending to their relationship — a gesture of forgiveness to him, “for not being able to be any other way,” she said, and a gesture of forgiveness to herself as well.And so “Failure Sandwich,” a piece she had been building out of other people’s stories of failure, evolved into her acclaimed play “The Nosebleed,” a kind of mourning ritual in dramatic form, with comedy. After a brief run last fall at Japan Society, it’s back through Aug. 28 at the Claire Tow Theater at LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater’s stage for new works.In “The Nosebleed,” Ogawa portrays her father at various ages as well as her younger son.Julieta Cervantes“The Nosebleed” contemplates what Ogawa describes to the audience as “one of the greatest failures of my life.” That’s not something she had been eager to dissect publicly.“I never wanted to write autobiography,” said Ogawa, who grew up in Japan and the United States and graduated from Columbia University. “I never thought I would be writing about my father. It presents really vulnerable aspects of my life, and, you know, it’s very scary to do that.”With Ogawa portraying her father at various ages and her younger son at age 5, four other actors play prismatic versions of their playwright-director.“It’s a mind trip, you know?” said Drae Campbell, who has worked with Ogawa for 20 years, considers her “like family” and plays the character Aya 4.Ogawa’s unsentimental play eschews bitterness in favor of kindness, humor and emotional complexity. It invites but does not compel audience participation, primarily by asking for a show of hands at questions like “Who here has a father who has died?,” “Who here hates their father?” and — more lightheartedly — “Who here has watched the reality shows ‘The Bachelor’ or ‘The Bachelorette?’”There is also a Japanese Buddhist funeral ritual for Ogawa’s father, in which some spectators may choose to take part, using chopsticks to pick ersatz bone fragments out of his imaginary ashes. The playwright, who watches that scene in character as her father, said it has become for her, unexpectedly, “this incredible, profound, spiritual practice.”“I am seeing the remains of my body come out before me,” she said, “and I’m seeing strangers come up and help me put that body to rest.”To Evan Cabnet, LCT3’s artistic director, Ogawa’s compassion and vulnerability are part of what marks her as “a real outlier” among experimental theater makers.“There are a lot of artists who work in formally experimental modes, and the end result of that work is very often cerebral or intellectual or clever,” he said. “Aya’s work is all of those things, but primarily it leads from the heart. And, I think, from a sense of opening, and from a sense of softness and care.”That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but only if the ideal is tough-guy theater. Which for Ogawa — who uses she/they pronouns and is developing a play about motherhood called “Meat Suit” — it is decidedly not.A major catalyst for “The Nosebleed” was a pan of Ogawa’s 2015 play, “Ludic Proxy,” by the critic Helen Shaw in Time Out New York — a brisk 600-plus words, three of which were fails, failure and failing. To Ogawa, the review was a devastating dismissal that lodged the notion of failure inside her, demanding that she examine it.From left, Haruna Lee, Akiko Aizawa, Eddy Toru Ohno and Dawn Akemi Saito in “Suicide Forest.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat same year, the experimental playwright Haruna Lee, who uses they/them pronouns, was just out of graduate school at Brooklyn College and seeking a director for their play “Suicide Forest,” which no one who read it seemed to understand. Then they sent it to Ogawa, whom Lee knew only from a distance as “this badass Japanese American director with an asymmetrical haircut and double nose piercings.”Ogawa, who has a considerable track record, too, as a supple translator of Japanese plays, responded with “like 50 questions,” Lee said, and an immediate comprehension of how Japanese and American cultures were “mixing in a very raw way in that play.” The script is also in part autobiographical, about a parent-child relationship.Lee was afraid to perform the central role of a teenage girl, but Ogawa pushed them to do it anyway. Lee acquiesced out of trust, embarking on an exploration that eventually led to Lee coming out as nonbinary. When Ogawa directed the play at the Bushwick Starr in 2019, it was a hit.By then, Lee was also playing one of the Ayas in “The Nosebleed” — something they aren’t doing at Lincoln Center only because it conflicted with joining the writers’ room for Season 2 of the Apple TV+ drama “Pachinko.”Ogawa thinks of “Suicide Forest” and “The Nosebleed” as works that “were kind of percolating in the same brain swamp,” with Lee’s play giving her the courage she needed for her own.Aya Ogawa thinks of “Suicide Forest” and “The Nosebleed” as works that “were kind of percolating in the same brain swamp,” she said.Shina Peng for The New York TimesThe title of “The Nosebleed” comes from Ogawa’s then 5-year-old son, Kenya, waking up in the middle of the night with a bloody nose on a family trip to Japan in 2017. His big brother, Kai, had accidentally punched Kenya in his sleep. But the reason for the title is the metaphor of the child’s blood — the lineage that links Ogawa’s son to her, and to her father. (As a parent, Ogawa’s husband is a stark contrast to her own father: engaged, invested and emotionally present with their children, she said.)She finds it easier to play her child, but not difficult to slip into her father. “I don’t know how to describe what is happening to me,” she said, “except that it kind of does feel like a channeling. And dropping into him somehow, or like my body becomes a vessel for the image that I have of him.”And like every actor who has had to find sympathy for a character in order to play that person, she has had to find a way to understand her father.Her sons are 10 and 12 now, both born after their grandfather died. But on opening night at Lincoln Center last week, she wanted them to take part in the play’s funeral ritual — to be first in line for it, as the closest kin would be in a real funeral.And so they were. Onstage in front of the symbolic cremated remains of their grandfather, they took chopsticks and together helped lay his body to rest.Their mother, in character as an enfeebled old man, watched and felt release — felt absolution. More

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      An ‘Impossible Dream’ Comes True, Again, for Marylouise Burke in ‘Epiphany’

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      The 81-year-old actress stars as an eccentric dinner party host. When she was a teenager, though, wanting to act was a secret she didn’t dare tell.The staircase in Brian Watkins’s play “Epiphany,” at Lincoln Center Theater, goes up and up. Tall and imposing, it’s the kind of centerpiece to a set that makes you wonder, when you arrive for a performance, who is going to be climbing and descending it.The actor Marylouise Burke, for one, spends considerable time dashing up and down those steps, which she knew from the script would be in the show. So when her agent got a call asking her to play the lead role of Morkan, the warmly eccentric host of a dinner party fueled by existential desperation and touched with spiritual longing, she asked him to inquire: Was it going to be “a normal staircase or a crazy staircase?”Not that she wasn’t tempted by the part, with which she had felt immediately simpatico since performing it in a prepandemic reading. But Burke, who is 81, diminutive and a longtime favorite of the playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, shattered both wrists and her left kneecap two years ago when she tripped on a pothole in front of the West Village building where she has lived in a studio apartment since 1977.And sometimes, she said the other afternoon, sitting a bit shyly for an interview in the theater’s glass-walled lobby, “you have a designer who decides that the floor is going to be absurd because the script is absurd or something like that. I just knew I needed it to be even steps going up. You know, they can’t all be different heights, or tilted.”Burke, seated at center left, with her fellow castmates at the dinner party table in the Lincoln Center Theater production of “Epiphany.”Jeremy DanielIn John Lee Beatty’s design, they are neither. Burke is on perfectly solid ground, which leaves her free to do the destabilizing. That is something of a specialty of hers: luring an audience in with a portrayal that on its surface is so instantly fascinating that we never think to expect that there’s more underneath. And there is always, always more underneath — comic, tragic or very possibly both.To Tyne Rafaeli, the director of “Epiphany,” Burke’s “particular brand of humor” and “ability to mask a simmering fragility” made her the ideal match for Morkan, a character who draws even new acquaintances toward her and elicits from them the impulse to help her.“Marylouise is that,” Rafaeli said. “She has that effect on other artists. People who are around Marylouise, they want to collaborate with her. They want to lean toward her. She just has that kind of energetic pull. So the line between her and the character is very thin, obviously.”Morkan is for Burke a rare starring part. Another was Kimberly, the teenager with the rapid-aging disease in Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo,” a role she originated in 2001, long before the play morphed into a musical. A character actor, Burke has been performing on New York stages since she arrived in the city in 1973, when she was 32 and eager “to have more opportunities to act for free,” she said, kidding but not. “It never occurred to me that I would ever in my whole life get paid to act.”Burke with John Gallagher Jr. in David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 play “Kimberly Akimbo” at City Center’s Stage I.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt was another eight years before she got her Actors’ Equity card, in a tiny part in an Off Broadway production of Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Broken Pitcher,” starring Larry Pine. By now she has amassed nearly 50 years of New York theater credits — many in the strange downtown productions she loves, among them the title role in the Mabou Mines-Trick Saddle show “Imagining the Imaginary Invalid,” at La MaMa in 2016.Her screen credits include movies like “Sideways,” in which she played the sprightly broken mother to Paul Giamatti’s middle-aged wreck, and television series like Netflix’s “Ozark,” in which she had a darkly delightful, Season 3 arc as the marriage therapist to Laura Linney and Jason Bateman’s extremely crimey central couple.“I actually knew probably from the time I was 13 or 14 that I wanted to act,” Burke said from behind a white KN95 mask that engulfed her lower face. “But it seemed like such an impossible dream. And I never admitted that to anybody.”She spent her childhood in Steelton, Pa., a Bethlehem Steel company town where her father owned a grocery store and her mother was a homemaker with comic timing that Burke inherited. The town was proud of its high school football team, and she played fight songs on clarinet in the school band at their games. But she didn’t know anyone who acted.Her adolescence coincided with the cookie-cutter conservative age of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and her family’s expectation — “once they found out that I was smart” — was that she would become a teacher. Off at college, though, in what she called “a major rebellion,” she swiftly changed her major from education to English, with a philosophy minor, and started acting in school plays.“I just always felt better when I was in a play,” she said, wrapping her arms protectively around her body, making herself even smaller. “I just always felt more who I was.”Hang on, what is that arm-wrapping gesture about? Burke hesitated, considered. Then: “I’d like to be nice to that girl back there,” she said, meaning her young self, the one with the “incongruous dream.”Burke at Lincoln Center. When it comes to acting in his new play “Epiphany,” the playwright Brian Watkins said her “level of specificity is just a gift to a writer.”Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesAfter college she earned a master’s degree in English literature, and discovered as a teaching assistant that she hated getting up in front of a class to speak. Floundering after a brief marriage in her mid-20s, she found herself living with a sympathetic aunt in suburban Philadelphia, holding down day jobs and taking classes at night at the nearby Hedgerow Theater Company.For years after she moved to New York, office jobs — copy editing, proofreading, word processing — kept her afloat. When “Kimberly Akimbo” opened Off Broadway in 2003, she said, five of her ex-bosses came to see it with their wives.She first worked with Lindsay-Abaire on his play “A Devil Inside” at Soho Rep in 1997; his “Fuddy Meers,” two years later at Manhattan Theater Club, was a career turning point, because casting directors started to notice her.When Watkins asked Lindsay-Abaire about casting Burke for “Epiphany,” Lindsay-Abaire thought it would make perfect sense. While their plays are very different, he said, “there is that dual tone of funny grief that runs under both of our works.”He told Watkins of Burke’s extraordinary devotion to playwrights, which Watkins marveled at nonetheless when she questioned him closely on the pronunciation he intended for the exclamation “Agh,” which appears repeatedly in her lines.“That level of specificity is just a gift to a writer,” he said.Even more strikingly, Burke was fighting through brain fog and physical fatigue to learn her lines, having had Covid just before rehearsals started.But Morkan is in her bones now — and Burke does, as Lindsay-Abaire said, come “bounding down those stairs like she was a 14-year-old.”At a time when, she said, theater is still “not the same” as it was prepandemic, she feels grateful for Lincoln Center Theater’s caution about Covid protocols, and grateful that its audience is masked. She is also happy to be back onstage, alongside eight fellow actors, telling her character’s story.“It’s very precious to be going out there,” she said. “Going out there together.” More

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      ‘Epiphany’ Review: A Holiday Party, but What Are We Celebrating?

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      In this heady Lincoln Center Theater production, Brian Watkins finds laughs and shivers in a pensive gathering of old friends.I could describe Brian Watkins’s “Epiphany,” which opened Thursday night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, as an existential dinner-party play. Or a satire of academics, armchair psychologists and the general intelligentsia, always trying to find a common language for our ways of living in the world. It could be called a critique of our modern society of self-interest. A statement on grief. Or a ghost story.I could even call it a kind of poem, making music out of abstractions while traversing the past and the present, the real and the surreal. That this heady work, in a Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Tyne Rafaeli, evades any one definition is a testament to its grand ambitions. In one hour and 50 minutes, “Epiphany” astutely captures a wide swath of ideas without losing its grasp on the hilarious and heartbreaking experience of being a person in the world.On a January evening in a secluded old house in the middle of nowhere, Morkan (Marylouise Burke, perfect as a jittery sexagenarian) hastily prepares for the holiday known as Epiphany, her itinerary packed with drinks, speeches, poems, songs, dancing and a goose feast. Which would be fine if anyone had read the full dossier Morkan sent along beforehand — or if anyone, Morkan included, actually understood what this archaic, forgotten ritual is.Thankfully Gabriel — Morkan’s beloved nephew, a revered writer and public intellectual, and the guest of honor — will be arriving to lead the festivities, and also to explain them. When Gabriel fails to show, instead sending Aran (an ethereal Carmen Zilles) in his place, a night of awkward exchanges, misunderstandings and spirited debates evolves into a dreamlike meditation on mortality.Also attending this vaguely defined soiree are Loren (Colby Minifie, currently in the Amazon series “The Boys”), a sober, vegan 20-something, helping with the preparations; Freddy (C.J. Wilson), a middle-aged alcoholic teacher; Kelly (Heather Burns), a pretentious pianist; Charlie (Francois Battiste), a smartly dressed, self-important lawyer; Sam (Omar Metwally), a pedantic psychiatrist with many opinions; Taylor (David Ryan Smith), his comically snide and heavy-drinking husband; and Ames (the reliably dry-witted Jonathan Hadary), an old friend of Morkan’s and her conspicuously absent sister Julia’s.In a rapid series of processions and introductions, we hear the characters before we see them; they ascend from an unseen lower level and appear in the parlor room of an old house.John Lee Beatty’s antique set design, with the main flight of stairs leading up into an ominous darkness, establishes an unsettling mood, strangely removed from the present day. And Isabella Byrd’s ghostly lighting summons an eerie “Fall of the House of Usher” vibe before illuminating a stunning surprise backdrop: We are watching an evening gathering during a January flurry, snow fitfully descending past the gnarled fingers of tree branches outside the towering windows.Members of the company on the “Epiphany” set, designed by John Lee Beatty with lighting by Isabella Byrd.Jeremy DanielThere’s not much action in “Epiphany,” so the play’s dynamism is all in the controlled chaos of the dialogue: interruptions, overlapping voices, heavy pauses. Watkins (whose plays include “Wyoming” and who created the recent time-loop western series “Outer Range”) effortlessly extracts the humor from the partygoers’ pretensions and posturing, which are just a cover for the insecurities they feel in the modern world — and in their own lives.Absurd developments offer punctuation: One character makes inappropriate bathroom jokes, another performs a “purposefully untitled” piano composition, and after one of the guests suffers a dinnertime injury, the others debate which alcohol to use to sterilize the wound.While Watkins leans into scorn for the insufferable urbanites one-upping one another, he seems to treasure the more introspective figures of Morkan and Ames. And there is plenty of beauty in the play’s abstractions; at its heart “Epiphany” is a love letter to the indefinable and unnameable.“As soon as you try and define love as an empirical thing you’ve suddenly lost the essence of love itself,” Aran says at one point in the night. “It’s bigger than our connotations.” And in a rare moment of drunken insight, Freddy recalls how he heard a poet once explain how the creative process is an act of “creating time … that the space between seconds and minutes actually like widens and deepens … as if eternity was inhabiting you.”Empiricism, existentialism, solipsism — “Epiphany” sends a lot of -isms into space, just to laugh at the volley. (“Well now we’re just saying words,” Ames points out.) Occasionally the play seems to fall down the rabbit hole of its own philosophical musings, but “Epiphany” never remains there too long; the humor, which works at several different registers, from barbed irony to tragicomic lampoonery to wacky physical comedy, reins in the play’s haughtier inclinations.Speaking of haughty — audiences may or may not catch the specter of another work within “Epiphany,” James Joyce’s “The Dead,” from his collection “Dubliners.” “Epiphany,” which first premiered in Ireland in 2019, in a production from the renowned Druid Theater Company, replicates some of the characters’ relationships and exchanges in “The Dead,” uses many of the same character names and echoes the general existential theme.References and snippets of the original text may fly right past anyone unfamiliar with “The Dead,” or anyone who hasn’t picked up “Dubliners” since college. No matter. There’s more than enough in “Epiphany” for it to stand on its own. See it and ruminate; this is a play “bigger than our connotations.”EpiphanyThrough July 24 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Intimate Apparel,’ Letting the Seamstress Sing

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      Lynn Nottage’s play about a Black woman in 1905 becomes an opera, with music by Ricky Ian Gordon, that forefronts voices ignored by history.We begin with joyful ragtime, that musical theater fallback for telling Black stories of the early 20th century.But the sound is muffled, distorted. The party is elsewhere in the boardinghouse where our heroine, Esther, a shy, plain woman of 35, sits in her room sewing corsets and camisoles for socialites and streetwalkers. She is too serious and too ambitious to descend to the parlor and cakewalk with the revelers.So is “Intimate Apparel.” In musicalizing Lynn Nottage’s play of the same title, Ricky Ian Gordon, working with a text by Nottage herself, wants more for Esther than a quick dance and a slick tune. A woman so bent on betterment in an age that makes it almost impossible deserves the most serious and ambitious musical treatment available — and gets it in the knockout Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, that opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Monday.That the play was excellent to begin with was no guarantee of a viable libretto. But looking back on its 2004 Roundabout Theater Company premiere, starring Viola Davis as Esther, you can see that “Intimate Apparel” already had the necessary ingredients for a powerful opera: spine, scope and poetry.The spine remains neatly articulated. The first scene quickly establishes that Esther (Kearstin Piper Brown) has the discipline and drive to make a career of her handiwork; with the savings she sews into the lining of her crazy quilt she plans one day to open a beauty salon. The scene also establishes her pride, as she rejects the last-chance men who come to the parties given by her landlady, Mrs. Dickson.“Pride’ll leave you lonely,” Mrs. Dickson (Adrienne Danrich) warns.We next meet two of her clients, whose lives express in contrasting ways the limitations Esther hopes to escape. Mrs. Van Buren (Naomi Louisa O’Connell) has every luxury a white woman of privilege could want, including the pink silk crepe de chine corset that Esther brings to her boudoir for a fitting. But Mrs. Van Buren, trained only to be a wealthy man’s wife, has no options when her husband loses interest.Though poor and Black, Mayme (Krysty Swann) is likewise at men’s mercy for her few luxuries — which, amusingly, include the same corset as Mrs. Van Buren’s. (“What she got, you want,/What you got, she want,” Esther comments.) Instead of an absent husband Mayme has johns who are often vile or violent, yet she is closer to Mrs. Van Buren than either might like to think.Brown and Arnold Livingston Geis as Mr. Marks, a fabric salesman, in the opera at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEsther’s friendship with the women is more than professional but nevertheless circumscribed by class and race. (She has never entered Mrs. Van Buren’s house through the front door, and presumably never entered a brothel at all.) Her third professional friendship is even more delicate. Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis) sells fabric on Orchard Street, saving the most beautiful bolts for her. Though he is the only man ever to recognize and encourage her gift, he is literally untouchable: an Orthodox Jew.But he is not the only man to flirt with her. Esther is surprised — and then, almost against her will, gratified — to receive a letter from a Barbadian laborer working on the Panama Canal. It seems that George Armstrong (Justin Austin) is looking for a pen pal to counter, with beautiful words, the filth and harshness of his job. As Esther can neither read nor write, she depends on Mrs. Dickson to tell her what George is saying; and then on Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme to forge suitably Cyrano-like replies.I will say no more about the plot except that at the end of Act I Armstrong arrives in New York to marry Esther, who wears an exquisite dress made with fabric she bought from Mr. Marks. If she is not what might have been expected from their correspondence, neither, she gradually realizes, is he. In Act II we learn why.Many plays sewn so tightly unravel completely as they stretch toward their crisis. Not “Intimate Apparel”; with its eye on the big picture, it maintains both its integrity and its tension to the end. Never stinting on detail — or, apparently, period research — Nottage forces the audience to keep sight of the larger pressures pushing all her characters into situations they must eventually escape more explosively.I focus on the story because it is usually the problem with opera, as books are with musicals. Nottage has cut perhaps half of her play to make room for Gordon’s music, and in doing so has made the smart if painful choice to retain only what is most narrowly tailored to the plot and yet most allusive. What we call poetry in opera is not really the verse (though Nottage’s libretto is lightly rhymed where necessary) but the rich texture of everything doing double duty.Courtship by mail: Brown and Justin Austin as George Armstrong.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSo too with Gordon’s lush yet intricate score, which soars into the timeless atmosphere of operatic writing (though he calls his hybrid works “operacals”) while always regrounding us in the specifics of period and character. In numbers like “No One Does It for Us,” repeated choruses do more than ram home lovely melodies; they underline the similarities between Esther and Mayme, who sing it. And it is not for nothing that George’s letter arias from Panama are typically accompanied by a ghostly chorus of other men, as if to question their strange intimacy.None of these smart choices would matter if the performers could not make hay of them, but Sher has assembled and tuned an unusually fine cast of opera singers who can actually act. Brown is especially heartbreaking as Esther — and astonishingly tireless in a huge role. (Chabrelle Williams takes over for the Wednesday and Sunday matinees.) Her scenes with Geis as Mr. Marks are so gentle and rich in subtext you don’t want them to end. But all six leads are terrific, and the ensemble of eight other singers performs dozens of roles, each quickly and perfectly etched.Sher’s staging in the 299-seat Newhouse, on a simple turntable set by Michael Yeargan, is a marvel of constant movement that never feels busy, and the costumes by Catherine Zuber are exquisite even when plain. As always, it is a joy to hear an opera in an intimate space with acoustics so clear and natural — the sound is by Marc Salzberg — that the captions projected on the walls of the set are rarely needed. And though the voices are prioritized in Gordon’s orchestration for two pianos, the presence of the instruments, on platforms above the stage, is not incidental. As played on Friday evening by Nathaniel LaNasa and Brent Funderburk, they seemed to have dramatic roles of their own, representing not only the need of women, especially Black women, for emotional independence, but also the world of 1905 that forbids it.In that sense “Intimate Apparel” — even more as an opera than as a play — is an act of rescue. When Esther tells Mrs. Van Buren, as they write the first letter to George, “My life ain’t really worthy of words,” she means that she isn’t special enough to be made permanent on paper. That isn’t true; as Nottage and now Gordon have shown, she is worthy of even more. She is worthy of music that is finally worthy of her.Intimate ApparelThrough March 6 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      One Opera Opening Would Make Any Composer Happy. He Has Two.

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      Ricky Ian Gordon’s “Intimate Apparel” and “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” are premiering in New York almost simultaneously.When the composer Ricky Ian Gordon saw Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” on Broadway in the early 1970s, it was unlike anything he’d watched on a stage.“He was creating this musical theater that felt like foreign film to me,” Gordon said in a recent interview. “And I wanted to make something in the theater that felt like foreign movies.”“That’s what ‘Follies’ was: a musical about broken lives and disappointment,” he continued, adding an expletive for emphasis. “I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”Gordon, now 65, did go on to create art inspired by those subjects — in the process becoming considerably better known in the world of opera than theater.In a coincidence caused by pandemic delays, not one but two of his operas are opening nearly simultaneously before this month is out, and both involve the darkness Gordon adored in “Follies.” “Intimate Apparel,” at Lincoln Center Theater, for which Lynn Nottage adapted her own play, deals with lies, deceptions and thwarted dreams in the story of a Black seamstress in 1905 New York. And “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” presented by New York City Opera, is based on a semi-autobiographical Giorgio Bassani novel about the fate of privileged members of the Jewish community in Ferrara, Italy, who were tragically blind to what awaited them during World War II.It’s a highly unusual situation for a living composer: To have two of your operas playing at once in New York, your name usually has to be something like Puccini, whose “Tosca” and “La Bohème” are both running this January at the Metropolitan Opera.“One new opera demands an enormous amount of attention, but two is downright invasive,” Gordon said. “It is incredibly stressful, no matter how often I meditate, but it is also enormously fulfilling, and thankfully, pride-building. It is also strange to be going back and forth between the Lower East Side in 1905 and Ferrara in 1945, but thank God for the IRT.”From left: Krysty Swann, Kearstin Piper Brown and Naomi Louisa O’Connell in “Intimate Apparel,” for which Lynn Nottage has adapted her play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo fully grasp Gordon’s career, it is important to travel back a little less far than that, to the years that bridged the turn of the 21st century, when it appeared as if he would be among a new generation of composers rejuvenating the American musical. Drawing inspiration from Ned Rorem and Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Scott Joplin, he was often lumped in a similarly arty cohort that included fellow composers Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa and Jason Robert Brown.Songs by all four were included on Audra McDonald’s debut solo album, “Way Back to Paradise,” a hybrid of musical theater, avant-pop and art song that came out in 1998 — and, in hindsight, announced a changing of the guard that ended up not happening, as more mainstream rock and pop styles conquered Broadway.Gordon’s subtly lyrical harmonies slowly worked their way into your subconscious, and he suggested emotion rather than hitting the listener with it. That was not what musical theater wanted.“They always called us ‘children of Sondheim,’ ” Gordon said. “He opened a door, but it wasn’t an open door — it was just the door for Sondheim to walk through.”“People started saying that we didn’t write melodies and beats,” he added, then shot out a joking expletive, as if responding to the charge. “Every one of us writes melodies and writes rhythm, but in the language we grew up on and that we evolved out of.”Born in 1956, Gordon was raised on Long Island; he was — as Donald Katz documented in “Home Fires,” a much-praised 1992 book about the Gordon family’s middle-class aspirations and frustrations — once in line to inherit his father’s electrical business. But he discovered opera when he was eight, stumbling onto The Victor Book of the Opera at a friend’s house.“My memory of it is like a Harry Potter moment, like there was smoke and light behind this book,” he said.He was also open to pop, and in his early teens became “transfixed, mesmerized, completely and overwhelmingly obsessed with Joni Mitchell,” as he put it in a story he wrote about her last year for Spin magazine. The story is drawn from a forthcoming memoir that grew out of a writing group Gordon started with some poets and novelists during the pandemic; self-examination is not new to him, and he is candid about his past struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction and eating disorders.He initially enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University as a pianist, but ended up a composer, obsessed with bringing words to musical life. “If I’m setting a poem to music, I memorize it and I let it marinate and live inside of me,” he said. “I love singers, so I want to give them something to act. Even if it’s a song, it should be like a little mini opera.”By the 1990s and early 2000s, he was straddling various forms and genres. He wrote the song cycle “Genius Child” for the soprano Harolyn Blackwell, and his first opera, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” a meditation informed by the AIDS epidemic, premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1996. But his work also appeared Off Broadway, including such musical-theater projects as “Dream True,” a collaboration with the writer and director Tina Landau, and the Proust-inspired show “My Life With Albertine,” which opened at Playwrights Horizons in 2003 with a then-unknown Kelli O’Hara in the title role.After being touted as part of a new generation of musical theater composers, Gordon found more of a home in the opera world.Sarah ShatzThat show, alas, did not go over well, even if Ben Brantley praised the score’s “lovely, intricately layered melodies” in his review for The New York Times.Gordon was proud of “My Life With Albertine” and its failure hurt him deeply. “I thought I needed to face facts: The musical theater right now is not where I am going to flower,” he said. “I had written to all these opera companies that I wanted to do opera, so the next thing I did was ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ with Minnesota Opera. Suddenly, I felt this was where I could do what I do. Now I’m at Lincoln Center, where musicals are usually done, but I’m doing my opera here.”Gordon was, indeed, happily chatting away in an empty room at Lincoln Center Theater, where “Intimate Apparel” — which was well into previews when the first pandemic lockdown came, and now opens Jan. 31 — had just wrapped up a rehearsal in the Mitzi E. Newhouse space.Suddenly, voices piped in from a monitor: A matinee of the musical “Flying Over Sunset” had begun at the Vivian Beaumont Theater above. Coincidentally, that show’s lyrics were written by Michael Korie, Gordon’s librettist on “The Grapes of Wrath” and now “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” which City Opera is presenting with the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, starting Jan. 27.Doing “Intimate Apparel” at Lincoln Center Theater was not a given. It is part of the company’s joint commissioning program with the Met, and the other works from that program that have reached the stage, like Nico Muhly’s “Two Boys” and the recent “Eurydice” by Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl, have been produced at the opera house.“It was really time for Lincoln Center Theater to get the benefit of one of these shows,” Paul Cremo, the Met’s dramaturg, said in an interview. “We thought that with the intimacy of the play, it would really benefit from that space, where some audience members are just six feet away from the characters. And Ricky wrote a beautiful orchestration for two pianos.”Gordon “was a really lovely guide through this process,” said Nottage, left, and the two are at work on other opera.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesWhile Gordon was working on a small scale, for just a couple of instruments, Nottage was tasked with expanding her play, which consists mostly of two-person interactions, into a libretto that would bring together larger groups of characters and make use of a chorus. (Bartlett Sher directs.)“I shared with Ricky what I was listening to and we spoke a lot about what the texture and the feel of the piece should be,” Nottage said. “He’s very deeply invested in Americana music and, in particular, ragtime. What he does really beautifully is weave all of these traditional forms together without it feeling like pastiche. He was a really lovely guide through this process.” (The pair got along so well that they are now at work on a commission from Opera Theater of St. Louis with Nottage’s daughter, Ruby Aiyo Gerber.)The musical style of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” draws from a different well. “It’s my Italian opera,” Gordon said. “I just thought of putting myself in the head of Puccini, Verdi, Bellini. It’s very different from ‘Intimate Apparel,’ which is very American.”Anthony Ciaramitaro and Rachel Blaustein in rehearsal for “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” about Jewish Italians on the cusp of World War II.Sarah ShatzOne major difference is size: The “Finzi-Continis” score has been arranged for a 15-piece orchestra for the City Opera run and can be expanded for larger ensembles, especially as there are tentative plans to produce it in Italy.“It’s absolutely, unabashedly melodic, just beautiful sweeping melodies,” said Michael Capasso, the general director of City Opera, who is staging the production with Richard Stafford.The two Gordon projects illustrate both the composer’s ecumenical tastes and his versatility. “Ricky sounds like Ricky,” Korie said in an interview, “but he’s not afraid to do what classical opera composers did, or what Rodgers and Hammerstein did for years, and what composers in theater still do, which is they allow themselves to immerse themselves in the sounds of other characters, other times, other places.”From left: Gordon with Michael Korie, the librettist of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” and Richard Stafford, who is staging the production with Michael Capasso.Sarah Shatz“Finzi-Continis” keeps with his early desire to make something in the theater that felt like foreign movies: Gordon has long been a fan of Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award-winning film version, from 1970. But rewatching it a few years ago hit him especially hard.“I think there was something about the juxtaposition of personal pain and universal pain — I suddenly saw what made that story so tragic,” he said. “I couldn’t even endure it.”So he called Korie to suggest they adapt Bassani’s book.It’s not a coincidence that both “Intimate Apparel” and “Finzi-Continis” are set in the past, because most of Gordon’s work is. “In some way I’m a memorialist,” he said. “I very often write from a place of grief.”Yet, asked by email what she thought was his signature style, Kelli O’Hara unexpectedly answered: “Joy. I don’t think the subject matters are always joyous, but the music-making is the healer. So yes. Joy.”And, indeed, Gordon chuckled when he said: “I’m lucky that I’m activated by my unhappiness rather than paralyzed. I’ve never been able to sit still because I never felt like I had done enough, I never felt important enough. It has caused me enormous pain but it made me never stop writing. And I’m glad I didn’t shut up.” More

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      Princess Diana and Michael Jackson Anchor New Biographical Musicals

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      In new musicals about Princess Diana, Cary Grant and Michael Jackson actors get a chance to embody icons while spotlighting their individual talents.Just before the pandemic I ambivalently attended a performance of “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.” I knew some Tina Turner songs, and I was vaguely aware of her marriage to the abusive Ike Turner. I was only barely acquainted with her global celebrity, and skeptical about the depth a biographical jukebox musical could offer.Though I had qualms about the show — particularly the depictions of violence — I left the theater feeling ebullient. I sneaked out near the end of what turned out to be essentially a postshow concert, but I hung on to the image of Adrienne Warren, as Turner, onstage.What resonated with me was her spectacular star power — what most people would call presence. This is always what draws me in to Broadway productions about iconic figures: how an actor’s impersonation can also be a way to showcase their own star quality.Whether or not the show can live up to the legend, however, is often a different story.With the resurrection of Broadway this fall will come another handful of impersonations to test the hypothesis. Starting Nov. 2, we will see Jeanna de Waal as the Princess of Wales in “Diana,” who, thanks to her style, charisma and, ultimately, tragic death, became a mythic figure.Diana is once again front and center in the cultural conversation, whether in “The Crown”; as a shadow figure in the royal drama between Buckingham Palace and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle; or in the forthcoming biopic “Spencer,” with Kristen Stewart in the title role. (Naomi Watts played the part too, in the 2013 film “Diana.”)Starting Nov. 2, Jeanna de Waal, above with Roe Hartrampf as Prince Charles, will star as the Princess of Wales in “Diana” at the  Longacre Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the musical’s initial run at La Jolla Playhouse, critics noted how de Waal nailed Diana’s coquettishness, though the character’s ballads (music and lyrics by the Tony Award winners David Bryan and Joe DiPietro) do lean toward an unrestrained earnestness. And despite de Waal’s performance, the show was criticized for zipping so quickly through so many moments of a shortened life that the emotional impact was dulled.Will “Diana” capture the audience’s hearts on Broadway? And what impact will the Netflix recording of the show, which will be available for streaming before the theatrical opening, have on the prospects of the live production? As someone who’s been eating up “The Crown” (especially Emma Corrin’s performance as the princess), I look forward to finding out.Also in November, Lincoln Center Theater’s “Flying Over Sunset” will bring the beloved Hollywood leading man Cary Grant to life in the tap-dancing person of Tony Yazbeck.The musical, with a score by Tom Kitt and Michael Korie, imagines Grant; the playwright and politician Clare Boothe Luce; and the novelist Aldous Huxley sharing an acid trip in 1950s California. (All three were public about experimenting with L.S.D., but their cosmic connection is a product of the writer-director James Lapine’s script.)“He was one of the most famous Hollywood movie stars of all time,” Yazbeck said of Grant in a video preview for the show. “When you get offered this, you have to rise to that level, but also put your own stamp on it.”He seems poised to pull it off, and turning Grant (a child acrobat) into a former tap dancer plays to his strengths. Yazbeck already exudes charm; a well-pressed suit, a classic side sweep and the chance to dance should allow him to do more than imitate the beloved film star.From left, Tony Yazbeck as Cary Grant, Harry Hadden-Paton as Aldous Huxley and Carmen Cusack as Clare Boothe Luce in “Flying Over Sunset.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThen it’s Michael Jackson’s turn.“MJ the Musical,” with direction and choreography by Christopher Wheeldon and a book by Lynn Nottage, begins performances on Dec. 6.Like “Diana” and “Flying Over Sunset,” it was delayed by the pandemic. But this show faced further upheaval when Ephraim Sykes, the Tony-nominated star of “Ain’t Too Proud,” dropped out of the title role.The producers still promise 25 hits from the King of Pop, and you have to expect we’ll see that cherry red “Thriller” jacket and bedazzled glove. But now it’s up to the largely unknown Myles Frost to bring to life that instantly recognizable voice and dance genius.The musical as biography is a challenging form. How do you pair pop hits from an existing catalog to significant events in a life without undercutting the drama or underselling the songs?Michael Jackson’s life, of course, poses its own set of challenges. What will the script make of allegations of abuse on the part of this megastar, which dented his reputation without dulling the affection for his music?And will the qualities that make Myles Frost special be able to shine through when he is playing Michael Jackson? For “MJ” to succeed, the performer’s individual flair shouldn’t be swamped by the icon’s.There is no shortage of screen biopics — two about Aretha Franklin came out this year alone. But they don’t entice me the way the stage equivalents do.Adrienne Warren as Tina Turner in “Tina – The Tina Turner Musical” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater in 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe stage feels more upfront about its masquerade. No matter how accurately an actor playing Michael Jackson may moonwalk while singing “Billie Jean,” the very immediacy of your interaction with him in, say, a sold-out show on a Saturday night, forces you to sit in the uncanny valley: This isn’t the Michael you know, of course, but the real-time likeness — and unlikeness — both showcase the celebrity and reveal the talents of the performer.What emerges is a hybrid, an approximation of a person that takes into account the public image — the legend and mythos — reflected through the prism of an actor’s experience, understanding and, finally, ability.Here’s another way to think about it: I accompanied a friend to a locksmith kiosk recently where we were informed in advance that the keys being copied wouldn’t look exactly like the originals.When I consider the impersonators coming this fall, I think of her new set of keys — perfectly imperfect clones. Their look is different, their shape is different, but the mechanics still work. It’s all about the job well done. More

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      Theater to Stream: Stars Gather for ‘Miscast’ and More

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      Other highlights include a new show by Kristina Wong, Joshua Harmon’s “Bad Jews” and “Broadway by the Year.”“It is about access.” That, put plainly, is the main reason the Young Vic in London will continue to livestream shows even after in-person theater resumes. “Access is our driver,” Kwame Kwei-Armah, the theater’s artistic director, said in a recent interview. “And this is a way that we make that access just a little more here and now.”As Broadway and theaters around the United States prepare to return to live performances, there are still many questions around issues of ticket price, fairness and programming. Streaming is likely to remain part of those discussions since, as you can see in the selections below, it is more varied and, well, accessible than ever.‘Miscast21’Since 2001, the annual “Miscast” benefit for MCC Theater has created an alternate universe in which gender roles are not so much erased as gleefully subverted, with performers taking on numbers they would be unlikely to land in typical productions. This year will see the return of Gavin Creel and Aaron Tveit for another power duet after their take on “Take Me or Leave Me,” from “Rent,” became an instant classic five years ago. Other participants include Kelly Marie Tran, Annaleigh Ashford, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Cheyenne Jackson (welcome back!), LaChanze, Idina Menzel, Kelli O’Hara and Billy Porter. May 16-20; mcctheater.org.TheatertreffenWhat is mainstream theater to German eyes can be completely wild to American ones. So this annual event should blow a few minds. Like the Golden Mask Festival in Russia, Theatertreffen showcases exciting shows from diverse companies. This year’s productions — online, with subtitles — include revisited classics and new works, both livestreamed and on demand. Dive in. May 13-24; berlinerfestspiele.de/enKristina Wong in “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord.”via New York Theater Workshop‘Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord’The writer and performer Kristina Wong continues to use her own experiences to interrogate politics and civics with this follow-up to “Kristina Wong for Public Office” last year. In that monologue, Wong talked about her stint on the Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles. Now, she turns her attention to how she enrolled family and friends to make face coverings during the pandemic. May 14-16; nytw.org.Brian Bedford as Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of being Earnest” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘The Importance of Being Earnest’When Brian Bedford took on the role of Lady Bracknell in 2011, Charles Isherwood wrote in The New York Times that the formidable character had “perhaps never been more imperious, more indomitable — or more delectably entertaining.” Now L.A. Theater Works is making the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of Oscar Wilde’s best play available again. The ace supporting cast includes a rising Santino Fontana as Algernon Moncrieff. Through May 31; theatermania.stream.If one gender-reversed Lady Bracknell just isn’t enough, check out the L.A. Theater Works audio production starring Charles Busch. latw.org.Michael Zegen, left, and Tracee Chimo in “Bad Jews” Off Broadway in 2013.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis Jewish American LifeThe excellent Play-PerView series is rolling out a reading of Joshua Harmon’s lacerating “Bad Jews” with the original cast members Tracee Chimo Pallero, Philip Ettinger and Michael Zegen. Harmon went on to bigger things, including “Significant Other” on Broadway, but this show is arguably his sharpest — or at least his funniest — and was propelled by Chimo’s etched-in-acid portrayal of venomous self-righteousness. May 15-19; play-perview.com. ​Happily, Chimo also turns up in the Spotlight on Plays reading of Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Sisters Rosensweig” as Pfeni, the youngest of the title siblings (a role originated by Frances McDormand in the Off Broadway premiere, in 1992). There’s more: Lisa Edelstein will read Sara (Jane Alexander way back when) and Kathryn Hahn will be Gorgeous (once the great Madeline Kahn). May 20-24; stellartickets.com.Jassa Ahluwalia, left, and Sophie Melville in a rehearsal for “Herding Cats.”Danny Kaan‘Herding Cats’This livestreamed version of Lucinda Coxon’s twist-filled dark comedy about a pair of roommates will star Jassa Ahluwalia (“Unforgotten”) and Sophie Melville in Britain, with Greg Germann (“Grey’s Anatomy”) joining from the United States. Coxon is a fine writer, of the play “Happy Now?” and the film adaptation of “The Danish Girl,” and this trans-Atlantic setup should make for an interesting experiment. May 19-22; stellartickets.com.The cast of the opera adaptation of Lynn Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel,” whose premiere was delayed by the pandemic.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBackstage StoriesLet’s face it: Behind-the-scenes shenanigans are often more fun than what’s onstage. In the virtual benefit “Tales from the Wings: A Lincoln Center Theater Celebration,” stars including Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, Rosemary Harris, Paulo Szot and Ruthie Ann Miles will share what we hope will be juicy anecdotes, interspersed with footage from some classic productions as well as teasers for two shows that were postponed by the pandemic: the musical “Flying Over Sunset,” from James Lapine, Tom Kitt and Michael Korie; and Ricky Ian Gordon and Lynn Nottage’s operatic adaptation of her play “Intimate Apparel.” May 13-17; lct.org.In Britain, “For One Knight Only” gets an encore airing after its premiere in November. Kenneth Branagh hosts Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and Maggie Smith as they reminisce about their incredibly long careers — imagine a highbrow installment of the “Red” film series, except with stars firing off bons mots rather than guns. May 21-30; www.stream.theatre/season/116.‘Crave’In the United States, it’s hard to fathom how wildly popular the playwright Sarah Kane is on European stages: Her uncompromisingly bleak “Crave” hits a raw nerve and responds to a malaise that is often hard to pinpoint. Now, the Chichester Festival Theater in England is again making available its acclaimed production of this “throat punch of a play,” from November. May 19-29; cft.org.uk.‘Grey Matters’The company Colt Coeur may be small, but it has an impressive track record unearthing intriguing shows, so we’re ready to gamble on this play about an interracial marriage in 1970s and ’80s Brooklyn, by Eden Marryshow. Steve H. Broadnax III, of Katori Hall’s “The Hot Wing King” and the coming “Thoughts of a Colored Man” on Broadway, directs. May 22-26; coltcoeur.org.‘Broadway by the Year’As this cabaret series’ name suggests, it usually focuses on musicals that opened in a given year, but this spring the attention is shifting to songwriters. Start off with “The Kander & Ebb Years” (through May 12), in which Beth Leavel, Ute Lemper and Tony Yazbeck tackle material from “Chicago” and “Cabaret,” but also “Flora, the Red Menace.” Next, Max von Essen, Liz Callaway and Ethan Slater help celebrate everybody’s favorite pandemic hero with “The Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber Years” (May 24-26). So, “Love Never Dies”: yea or nay? thetownhall.org. More

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      Theater to Stream: Lincoln Center Theater Joins the Fray

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      Presentations include a star-studded reading of “The Thanksgiving Play,” musicals crossing the Atlantic and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.Theater has faced many battles in the past year, and one of them has been the hurdles in streaming archived productions online. Now, two major American institutions have joined the fray, and are sharing some of their stash.The first offering in Lincoln Center Theater’s Private Reels series is the Off Broadway production of Christopher Durang’s comedy “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” which went on to win a Tony Award for its Broadway run. Led by David Hyde Pierce, Kristine Nielsen and Sigourney Weaver, the cast is firing on all cylinders and makes the most of Durang’s riff on Chekhov transplanted to Bucks County, Pa. March 18-April 11; lct.orgIn Chicago, the Goodman Theater’s archival streaming program, called Encore, kicks off with Christina Anderson’s “How to Catch Creation,” which toggles between decades as it looks at the elusive, fraught and, in this case, broadly defined creative process (through March 28). That will be followed by a stage adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s magical-realist novel “Pedro Páramo” by the playwright Raquel Carrió and the director Flora Lauten, of the Cuban company Teatro Buendía. March 29-April 11; goodmantheatre.org‘The Thanksgiving Play’Dream cast alert! As part of the Spotlight on Plays series, Keanu Reeves, Heidi Schreck, Bobby Cannavale and Alia Shawkat have signed up for a livestreamed reading of Larissa FastHorse’s satire, in which a well-meaning drama teacher decides to put on a culturally sensitive Thanksgiving pageant — except she can’t seem to find any Native Americans to participate. March 25-29; broadwaysbestshows.comDerbhle Crotty, left, and Garrett Lombard in the Druid Theater Company’s production of “The Cherry Orchard.”Photo credit: Robbie Jack, via Druid TheaterClassics RevisitedThe Irish director Garry Hynes is particularly at ease with quietly insightful productions of classics. Her take on “The Cherry Orchard,” for the Druid Theater Company in Galway, Ireland, and adapted by the playwright Tom Murphy, is boosted by a sterling company that includes Derbhle Crotty as Madame Ranevskaya. It’s part of Culture Ireland’s online festival. March 19-21; druid.ieAnother formidable European actor is Hans Kesting, a regular in productions by Ivo van Hove. Thanks to the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam’s putting some of its shows online, we can watch him as the title character in Robert Icke’s take on “Oedipus” — here a 21st-century politician on election night. In Dutch with subtitles. March 21; ita.nl.enFrom left, Kevin Anderson, Eden Espinosa and Ramona Keller in “Brooklyn the Musical” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAmerican Musicals Across the AtlanticSome of us remember the olden days of 2004, when Mark Schoenfeld and Barri McPherson’s “BKLYN the Musical” was known as “Brooklyn the Musical” during its Broadway run. Does everything need a cool abbreviation? NVM. Still, it’s hard not to root for a show that ends in a sing-off pitting someone named Brooklyn (Emma Kingston) against someone named Paradice (Marisha Wallace). This new production was recorded in London. March 22-April 4; stream.theatreIn a completely different vein, the staging of John Caird and Paul Gordon’s lovely musical “Daddy Long Legs” by Boulevard Productions is now streaming, and it’s a low-key charmer. The story is told in letters between an orphan (Roisin Sullivan) and her benefactor (Eoin Cannon), and it’s a testament to Gordon’s catchy score (just try getting “Like Other Girls” out of your head) that this potentially stilted format actually works. Through March 21; stream.theatre‘Protec/Attac’A few years ago, Julia Mounsey and Peter Mills Weiss created waves with their brilliant and deeply unsettling “[50/50] old school animation.” So expectations are high for the duo’s new piece, “Protec/Attac,” which is getting a developmental stream as part of a mini-festival of four new works presented on consecutive evenings by the experiment-happy Brick Theater in Brooklyn. From March 26; bricktheater.com‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’Before writing the book for the musical adaptation of “Beetlejuice,” Scott Brown and Anthony King created this very wacky and very funny musical about two writers who perform their show about the inventor of the printing press in a backers’ audition. Now, Bobby Conte Thornton and Alex Prakken take on this rollicking goofball comedy in a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. March 18-21; broadwaycares.orgFrom left, Elizabeth Chinn Molloy, A.J. Baldwin and Nathan Tubbs in “Theater: A Love Story.”via The Know Theater‘Theater: A Love Story’Know Theater in Cincinnati did not take the easy way with a new effort from the playwright Caridad Svich, which interrogates the nature of theater and what makes a play a play. Theater about theater can get precious and self-congratulatory, but this show, which mixes drama and movement, avoids that trap. While it is admittedly a little long, the production rewards attention. Through March 27; knowtheatre.comStephen Michael Spencer, center, in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Julius Caesar.”Jenny Graham, via Oregon Shakespeare FestivalOregon Shakespeare FestivalThis beloved company in Ashland, Ore., has kept busy during the past year with streams that currently include its 2017 production of “Julius Caesar” (through March 27). But it is also a longtime champion of new American plays, such as Mary Kathryn Nagle’s “Manahatta,” a drama that juxtaposes the cutthroat world of New York City finance in the 21st century with the Dutch acquisition (to put it politely) of Manhattan from the Lenape nation 400 years earlier. March 29-April 24; osfashland.orgWomen’s Solo TurnsFrank Kuhn’s play “Let It Shine: A Visit with Fannie Lou Hamer,” about the Mississippi voting rights activist, is straightforward and educational — and that is its strength. Sharon Miles stars in this production from the New Stage Theater in Jackson, Miss., and it’s easy to see how Hamer paved the way for the likes of Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Through March 21; newstagetheatre.comThe tone is lighter in two solo comedies from Latinas, courtesy of the IAMA Theater Company in Los Angeles. Sheila Carrasco portrays a gallery of characters in “Anyone But Me,” while Anna LaMadrid’s “The Oxy Complex” checks in on a certain Viviana during a pandemic that just keeps going and going. (The title refers to oxytocin, a hormone released during childbirth, so there might be hope.) March 21-April 18; iamatheatre.com More