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      ‘In the Southern Breeze’ Review: A Dark Night of the Soul

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      In Mansa Ra’s heart-bruised new play, racism is a lethal force that menaces generations of Black American men.The script for Mansa Ra’s heart-bruised new play, “In the Southern Breeze,” at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, has two epigraphs — one from the Amiri Baraka poem “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” the other from Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”Those opposing impulses — despair and perseverance — duel over the course of this dramatic dark night of the soul, which opens with a nameless contemporary American (Allan K. Washington), named simply Man, arriving home and stripping off the smile he wears, of necessity, in the hostile world outside.It’s the expression he calculates, as a Black man, to signal that he’s both nonthreatening and educated enough not to be messed with. “The Obama Deluxe,” he calls it.That little slam gets a big laugh. Only a few minutes in, humor is already a tension release in a show that will talk of suicide, slavery and the lethal force of racism in Black men’s lives throughout United States history. And Ra, like this show’s excellent cast of five, proves adept at lightning-quick switches between the crushing and the comical.Tormented by anxiety, depression and panic attacks, the isolated Man is struggling to carry on. Submission to the unseen, ever-present noose that hangs over him — “Every Black man’s boogeyman,” he calls it — has begun to seem like a comfort.“Sometimes it beckons me,” he says toward the end of that first scene, which, hearkening back to Baraka’s poem, Ra titles Volume 19. Volume 20 is this play’s other bookend. The longest of the three scenes — the surreal and moving center, in which Man does not appear — is Volume 1.In a handsome production by Christopher D. Betts, all of it takes place on a grassy expanse stretching into the distance, with a spiritual, “Fare Ye Well,” as a solacing aural motif. (The set is by Emmie Finckel, the lighting by Emma Deane, the costumes by Jahise LeBouef and the sound by Kathy Ruvuna.)As the play shifts into Volume 1, the wary, eager Madison (Charles Browning) enters, looking for the caravan that will take him north to meet his wife. It is 1780, as far as he knows, and he is running from slavery, barefoot.But the first person he encounters is Lazarus (Victor Williams), a Tennessee sharecropper from 1892. Then a 1970s Black Panther named Hue (Biko Eisen-Martin) stumbles in, followed shortly after by Tony (Travis Raeburn), a young AIDS activist from the early 1990s. It takes most of them a while to figure out why they’re all gathered there, under that unseen noose, and how many eras have collided.“Hold the phone,” an incredulous Hue says to Madison. “You really a slave?”“Hold the what?” a baffled Madison replies.“In the Southern Breeze” pays tender tribute to previous generations of Black Americans and bears unblinking witness to the white violence that has marred and menaced them. Hearkening back to that quote by Dr. King, it also acknowledges the progress toward justice through the ages.This play is a more formally ambitious, far-reaching work than “Too Heavy for Your Pocket,” with which Ra made his New York debut in 2017, when he was known as Jiréh Breon Holder.What stumps him here, in Volume 20, is how to let his unnamed 21st-century Man reject existential exhaustion in a way that doesn’t seem pat. Like Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” rewritten for its recent Broadway run to allow more space for joy, this play wants to illuminate an uplifting path out of pain. But its final section turns muddled and didactic, its poeticism forced.Finding hope, it turns out, is the tricky part.In the Southern BreezeThrough Dec. 12, in person and streaming, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Manhattan; rattlestick.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Review: This Revival of Sondheim’s ‘Assassins’ Misses Its Mark

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      The production lacks the power to unsettle despite a fine cast of killers and wannabes who changed, or at least made, history gunning for presidents.The one reliably blood-chilling moment in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s “Assassins” comes courtesy of a killer who is, at best, a footnote in American history: Charles J. Guiteau, the lawyer who shot President James A. Garfield in 1881.Guiteau aims his gun at the audience, panning over us slowly, deliberately, in tension-filled silence. The music is stopped. The menace is visceral.“Facing the barrel of a gun, even when it’s just in a musical, is the kind of shock that can exist only in live theater,” Sondheim wrote in his 2011 book “Look, I Made a Hat,” in which he called this lingering, life-or-death moment in “Assassins” his favorite in a show rife with gun-waving murderers and murderers manqué.I’d wondered how that confrontation would land in John Doyle’s current revival at Classic Stage Company, not so much because of the state of our armed-to-the-teeth nation but because of the shooting last month on the set of the Alec Baldwin film “Rust,” where a real gun fired a real bullet that killed a real person, when it was all meant to be pretend.The surprising answer is that it doesn’t land at all, because Doyle has defanged the moment, speeding it up to a manic pace. His jittery Guiteau, played by a creepily unnerving Will Swenson, swings the gun left, right and center so fast that there’s no time for us to feel endangered, no time for the threat to lodge inside us and turn to fear.Granted, maybe we’re all too freaked out right now anyway to have a prop gun pointed at us. But I wish that Doyle had plastered the lobby with unmissable posters explaining, as the digital program does, that the show’s guns “are replicas that were provided, checked, and rendered inoperable” by a weapons specialist. I wish he’d had leaflets printed with the same message, and handed to each person on the way in.I wish he’d kept that long, scary moment. Because racing through it undermines the potency of the show, Classic Stage’s first since the shutdown.Even with a powerhouse cast, this stripped down, off-balance production — originally slated for spring 2020 as part of the Sondheim 90th-birthday festivities — never does find a way to make the audience feel the stakes of its characters’ actions. That’s true whether we view the assassins purely as historical figures or also as metaphors for an aggressive strain of lethal discontent as American as Old Glory.From left: Tavi Gevinson, Kuhn, Will Swenson, Uranowitz, Andy Grotelueschen, Adam Chanler-Berat, Wesley Taylor and Pasquale.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show’s vaudevillian patchwork of stories about volatile 19th- and 20th-century misfits who murdered a president, or tried to, makes us laugh and leaves us humming. But we are ultimately unperturbed.And maybe that, too, is a sign of the times: that we have lately lived through such virulent, brutal threats to our democracy that this motley bunch (John Wilkes Booth! Lee Harvey Oswald! Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme!) hardly seems ominous. What risk they posed, what damage they did, is past.But there are also plenty of parallels to the present in Sondheim’s sharp-eyed song cycle of the ostensibly dispossessed and in Weidman’s often casually violent dialogue. Doyle, a Sondheim veteran who staged the 2017 revival of the Sondheim-Weidman “Pacific Overtures,” infers one contemporary correlation outright with his final stage image, which I will not spoil.“No one can be put in jail for his dreams,” Booth — the alpha assassin, played by Steven Pasquale as a smooth Southern shark — sings to the others in the delusion-packed opening number, “Everybody’s Got the Right.”Gathered at a fairground shooting gallery, they are encouraged to kill a president to win a prize. On Doyle’s set, above a bare thrust stage painted with the Stars and Stripes, a giant round target flashes with projections (by Steve Channon) of the various presidents’ faces.That same screen, bordered with lights that shine red, blue and — peculiarly — not white but pale yellow, is pretty much all the scenery the show gets, which is in keeping with Doyle’s pared-back aesthetic. But the storytelling would have benefited from more visual cues. Many projections are too coldly literal and too far removed from the action to aid it properly.When Giuseppe Zangara (Wesley Taylor), the would-be assassin of Franklin D. Roosevelt, is executed, an image of an electric chair is projected above him. When Guiteau ascends to the gallows for his hanging while singing, with increasing franticness, “I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad,” Swenson has no stairs to dance on; there’s merely a distant projection of an empty noose.From left, Swenson, Rob Morrison (rear) and Ethan Slater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSimilarly, when Booth is in hiding, having shot Lincoln, there is no visual indication that he himself is injured, his leg broken. Pasquale is darkly charismatic, though: singing softly, beguilingly of “blood on the clover” from the Civil War in “The Ballad of Booth,” before the mask of romance slips and he spits a racist slur about Lincoln at venomous volume.The three-piece orchestra, led by Greg Jarrett, is supplemented in trademark Doyle style by some of the cast, notably Ethan Slater as the appealing Balladeer, who strolls the stage in a blue jumpsuit, playing an acoustic guitar. (Costumes are by Ann Hould-Ward.) Later he transforms into Oswald, a despondent young man with a powerful gun that — like many things here — comes wrapped in the flag.Heretical as it sounds, comic dialogue, not song, is this production’s strongest suit. But aside from a curiously underwhelming rendition of “Unworthy of Your Love,” the pretty, poppy duet between Fromme (Tavi Gevinson) and John Hinckley Jr. (Adam Chanler-Berat, who is suitably skin-crawling as the man who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981), it’s not that the musical performances are lacking.It’s that the lighter book scenes really shine, especially the hilariously mercurial ramblings of the wannabe Richard Nixon killer Samuel Byck (Andy Grotelueschen) and the terrifically lively scenes between Gerald Ford’s foiled assassins, Fromme and Sara Jane Moore (Judy Kuhn, handily transcending the role’s scatterbrained-broad stereotype).“Assassins” has been faulted since its premiere three decades ago for a supposed failure to make its disparate parts cohere. It’s also proved many times that they can, yet Doyle’s staging never manages to harness that cumulative power. Faithful though it is to the show’s sung and spoken text, it’s missing some vital connective tissue.Of course, the same could be said of the country. This is a musical with a deep, warning sense of something frighteningly wrong in the fabric of the United States — a nation where, as the song goes, “Something just broke.”You can still hear that alarm in this production. But don’t expect to feel it more than distantly.AssassinsThrough Jan. 29 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Porgy and Bess’ Returns to a New Opera Landscape

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      The Metropolitan Opera’s revival boasts strong performances but raises difficult questions about race and American music.George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” is both easy and impossible to love.Its contradictions may have been captured best in Truman Capote’s “The Muses Are Heard,” his 1956 dispatch from a touring company’s historic stop in the Soviet Union. “Porgy,” he wrote, was like an allergen to Russian officials — its characters erotic, God-fearing and superstitious.But its reflection of America was a different story. “An exploited race at the mercy of Southern whites, poverty-pinched and segregated in the ghetto of Catfish Row,” Capote said, “could not be more agreeably imagined if the Ministry of Culture had assigned one of their own writers to the job.”“Porgy” — which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday after two years, its performances still exhilarating but its staging still blandly naturalistic — keeps raising questions over its three hours. And after a long pandemic closure, during which the Met, like the rest of the country, took a fresh look at racial inequities, those questions are increasingly difficult to sit with.Just a couple: Does “Porgy,” a leading contender for the Great American Opera, fulfill Antonin Dvorak’s prophecy that this country’s homegrown music would be founded on Black melodies? If so, did the work’s all-white creative team achieve that by exploiting stereotypes?Opera is rife with troubled histories and receptions. Of two works now playing at the Met, Puccini’s “Turandot” is set in a fairy-tale China out of late Romantic Orientalism; Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” ends with a startling paean to German nationalism. Classics like those tend to be defended with a logic that some have applied to “Porgy”: This is an art form that deals in broad strokes and the mythic. Who, then, are Porgy and Bess if not just another pair of star-crossed lovers?The soprano Angel Blue, left, as Bess and the bass-baritone Alfred Walker as a mighty and menacing Crown.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut that argument is on shakier ground with “Porgy” than “Turandot”; Gershwin’s work inevitably carries the baggage of American history. And its characters, mythic or not, can feel like cartoons of Black pain, violence and poverty. Black artists have had vastly divergent responses to the piece, but what James Baldwin called “a white man’s vision of Negro life” has remained ensconced in the repertory, held up by the same institutions that have long overlooked the work of Black composers.There’s no clear resolution to any of the problems that have dogged “Porgy” since its premiere, in 1935. But it is here to stay — a discomfort to be experienced, pondered and managed, not removed. It’s no coincidence that the Met accompanied this production’s debut two years ago with face-saving initiatives like talks, an album celebrating Black artists of its past and an exhibition to match, and the announcement that it would present its first opera by a Black composer. (That work, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” opened the season in September.)If “Porgy” is the Great American Opera, it is more for its score — an innovative and seamless blend of grand opera, Broadway, and invented spirituals and folk melodies — than for its subject matter. (For that, we have the melting pot milieu of Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene,” the original sin of American greed in Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina” or stateside verismo in William Grant Still’s “Highway 1, U.S.A.,” to name just a few.)And at the Met, James Robinson’s production — a mostly timid, literal presentation of the libretto, by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin — undercuts the defense of “Porgy” as timelessly mythic with its realistic direction and designs (by Michael Yeargan and Catherine Zuber). Even the preshow curtain, a towering photograph of Catfish Row, suggests something documentary. At odds with all this is the stylized and thoroughly modern choreography of Camille A. Brown.Much of the 2019 cast remains intact, including, from left: Latonia Moore as Serena, Eric Owens as Porgy and Denyce Graves as Maria.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the pit, the conductor David Robertson made an argument for the triumphs of Gershwin’s score, with stylistic shifts fluid and distinctly articulated. “Porgy” is also one of the great operatic portraits of a community; as such, its true stars are the chorus singers, matching the instrumentalists with vigor and richly textured delivery.As Porgy, the bass-baritone Eric Owens sang with limited power, but imbued each line with dramatic consideration. The soprano Angel Blue’s Bess was one of tragic juxtapositions: luminous in “Oh, the train is at the station” and shattering in the conflicted Act III reprise of “Summertime.” (That standard was first heard, lush and stylishly ornamented, at the start of the opera, sung by Janai Brugger as Clara).Much of the cast remains intact from 2019: Denyce Graves’s caring and comical Maria; Ryan Speedo Green’s mighty Jake; Alfred Walker’s similarly mighty but menacing Crown; Frederick Ballentine’s flamboyant Sportin’ Life; and Latonia Moore’s Serena, this production’s finest pairing of artist and aria in the showstopping “My man’s gone now,” and a commanding comfort in the later “Oh, Doctor Jesus.”Moore, Green and Blue — all Met regulars — come to this revival fresh from “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” As recently as last year, the idea of two operas with exclusively Black ensembles running at the company in the same month would have been fantastical. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case.Porgy and BessThrough Dec. 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      in Movies

      The NY Cat and Dog Film Festivals Return After Pandemic Hiatus

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      After a pandemic-induced hiatus, these celebrations of human-animal bonds are screening in Manhattan and beyond.Two annual cinematic celebrations invariably attract impassioned ticket buyers, even though they lack car chases, explosions, alien invasions or Daniel Craig as a pouty James Bond.What they do have: whiskers, wildness and no small amount of wit.They’re the NY Cat Film Festival and the NY Dog Film Festival, which are returning to Manhattan after a pandemic-induced hiatus. The cat festival, screening at noon on Saturday — Global Cat Day — at the Village East by Angelika theater, comprises 21 short works that run for a total of around 90 minutes. The nearly two-hour dog festival, which arrives at the same theater on Oct. 24, features 20 short films. (Animal lovers outside New York can see the festivals, too: They will tour for several months, both nationwide and in Canada.)“I think it’s the highest-quality year, possibly, for both,” said Tracie Hotchner, an author and radio host in Vermont who founded the dog festival in 2015 and the cat edition two years later. In a telephone interview, she explained that in the early days of lockdown in 2020, “people couldn’t find toilet paper, but they were making beautiful movies.”Not surprisingly, the pandemic is featured in both festivals. In “Will You Be My Quarantine?,” a feline comedy, the actress and director Susku Ekim Kaya shows herself and her pet, Lady Leia, in split screen, engaged in typically obsessive lockdown activities like grooming, TV watching, cellphone scrolling and FaceTime calling. They lead harmonious parallel lives, whereas the feline protagonists of Jasmin Scuteri-Young’s “Quarantine Diary” and Asali Echols’s “House Cats” complain of their owners’ constant presence in human-supplied voice-overs.The dog festival’s subjects, on the other hand, never seem to long for social distancing. “You don’t believe in personal space,” Kyle Scoble says tenderly to Darla, his Labrador retriever-pointer mix, in “The Second Time I Got to Know My Dog,” a documentary that acts as a tribute to how Darla got him through 2020.But cats may have a reason for their apparently aloof attitudes. “If it’s an indoor cat, it’s enduring a perpetual state of lockdown,” Kim Best, a director from Durham, N.C., said in a phone conversation.That observation fuels Best’s “The Great Escape,” in which a cat named Monkey makes concerted attempts to exit the household, even consulting the digital assistant Alexa, which he bats around and meows at. In Best’s other festival entry, “Cat Capitalization,” her pet, Nube, turns to the internet to market his artistic talent, pretentiously thanking — in thought bubbles — mentors like the artists Mark Rothko and Vincent van Gogh. (Nube is missing a bit of one ear.)Best said she aimed for “a satire of not only capitalism but also of academia.”Such humor is very much a theme of the cat festival, in which films like Nevada Caldwell’s “Feline Noir” and Priscilla Dean’s “Catfight at the O’Kay Corral” parody old Hollywood clichés.But while the canine film slate is not without laughs — David Coole’s animated “Go Fetch” is a pointed two-minute revenge comedy — it has far more of the in-depth examinations of the human-animal bond that characterized both festivals previously.“Affection in the Streets,” for instance, a Brazilian documentary by Thiago Köche, captures the lives of Pôrto Alegre’s homeless, who often take better care of their dogs than themselves. The loyal pets also attract concern from passers-by, who frequently ignore the suffering of the animals’ owners.“People who love dogs just look right past the humans,” Hotchner said. “I would love more movies about that, because I think it’s the thing we don’t want to look at.”“The Comfort Dogs” also shows the power of pet ownership. Made by Matthew Salleh and Rose Tucker, an Australian couple who live and work together in Brooklyn, the film is an excerpt from their feature documentary “We Don’t Deserve Dogs.” The segment focuses on the Comfort Dog Project, which provides pets to young people who were forced to become child soldiers in Uganda’s civil war.With the dogs at their side, the former soldiers can share “quite harrowing” experiences, Salleh said in a joint phone call. “The dogs almost become part of the storytelling method itself.”Another documentary, Zach Putnam’s “Nicola,” illustrates how its subject, a yellow Lab from Canine Companions, a service program for people with disabilities, transformed not only the life of the college student who received her. She also delivered a strong lesson in trust and sacrifice to the student who devotedly trained her but ultimately, tearfully, had to give her up.Both festivals, however, remind viewers that these animals need people as much as people need them. Hotchner, who organizes the programs as a labor of love — tickets to each are $20 — always contributes part of each screening’s sales to a related local charity. The cat festival in New York will help support Bideawee’s Feral Cat Initiative, while this year, all dog festival showings will benefit the nonprofits associated with Saving Senior Dogs Week (Oct. 25-31).“There is a growing awareness,” Covid aside, “that senior dogs are delightful to adopt and the most quick to be put to sleep in a shelter,” Hotchner said. In Gary Tellalian’s “Legends of Comedy Share Love for Old Dogs,” you’ll hear this message in a public service announcement from celebrities who are seniors themselves: Carol Burnett, Bob Newhart and Lily Tomlin, along with Carl Reiner, who died last June at 98.The plight of dogs that aren’t cuddly puppies also surfaces in documentaries like “Not Broken: Freedom Ride,” by Krista Dillane, Emma Lao and Dylan Abad, about a long journey to transport 53 rescued dogs from Louisiana to a pet adoption fair in Rhode Island. In “Chino,” another excerpt from “We Don’t Deserve Dogs,” its aging subject, a street mutt in Santiago, Chile, survives simply because concerned residents provide care.“The street dog culture there is completely different,” Tucker said, adding that the animals are a way to “just bring an entire community together” — a goal for these festivals, too.NY Cat Film FestivalOct. 16 at the Village East by Angelika, Manhattan; catfilmfestival.com.NY Dog Film FestivalOct. 24 at the Village East by Angelika, Manhattan; dogfilmfestival.com. More

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      Review: ‘A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet’ Is Missing a Few Notes

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      In this new musical, a singer’s future hangs on one song, but entrusting it to an inexperienced songwriting team is not, perhaps, the shrewdest choice.Once upon a time, Regina Comet was a pop star who filled arenas. Now that her career desperately needs a reboot, she and her team have a brilliant idea: They will come out with a perfume — sorry, a fragrance, called Relevance — and peg her comeback to it. Because of course listeners will just follow that scent all the way to Regina’s big concert.Adding a thick frosting of improbability to this far-fetched cake, Regina hires a pair of young songwriters so unhip that they idolize Barry Manilow — in 2021 — to pen the song her future depends on, the jingle for the fragrance.The focus of the story is not, as you might expect, Regina Comet, but rather the untried tunesmiths who simply, coyly, are called Man 2 and Other Man, and are portrayed by the show’s creators, Ben Fankhauser and Alex Wyse. Starring roles notwithstanding, Bryonha Marie Parham plays the title character in “A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet” with tireless zest and good humor.“Jingle” is mostly set in the office of the writers, where the walls are lined with so many notes, papers and photos that you might think they are TV detectives tracking a criminal. (Wilson Chin did the scenic design, which appears to have been labor-intensive.) But the object of their obsessive hunt is even more elusive than the Zodiac Killer: They desperately want to write “One Hit Song.” This would be a realistic goal only in a universe in which the Billboard cast-album chart decisively influenced mainstream pop culture.Man 2 and Other Man invite Regina (who always wears a shapeless ’80s-style tracksuit) to brainstorm. She’s open to a samba, or maybe some bossa nova, but the resulting song, “Say Hello,” sounds like a show-tune-ized single from Backstreet Boys or ’NSync. It is the most enjoyable number of the evening, yet it also reflects the production’s uncertain tone: Are we meant to laugh with the ingenuity of the Men or at their ineptness?The most frustrating element of the show is that despite a last-minute sort-of plot twist, Regina mostly serves as an unwitting wedge between the rookies. Their relationship gets so tense that in one particularly brutal dispute they chuck their notebooks to the floor in disgust.The production, directed by Marshall Pailet, moves at a steady clip, and Fankhauser and Wyse throw so much at the wall that once in a while, a joke acquires a bizarre kind of sheen through sheer surrealism.“I read she has an honorary degree in astrophysics,” Man 2 says of Regina. “That makes sense,” Other Man replies, “because her voice is so … good.”In the role of Other Man, Wyse, looking like an overgrown summer camper in his neat shirt and shorts — another costume decision that’s hard to parse — excels at this kind of exchange. Add his character’s penchant for borscht belt humor (“Take my Grandma, for instance,” one line starts, “no really, take her —”) and you’re halfway to an actual comic role.“A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet,” an Off Broadway production, is the first new in-person musical to open since Covid-19 shut down theaters last year, and it feels like the first pancake to come out of the pan: It’s a little undercooked, a little misshapen, but we’ll eat it anyway because hey, it’s still a pancake.A Commercial Jingle for Regina CometThrough Nov. 14 at DR2 Theater, Manhattan; 800-447-7400, reginacomet.com. Running time: 80 minutes. More

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      in Television

      Micki Grant, Groundbreaking Broadway Composer, Dies at 92

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      With “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” she became the first woman to write the book, music and lyrics of a Broadway musical.Micki Grant, who in the early 1970s became the first woman to write the book, music and lyrics of a Broadway musical, “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” a soulful, spirited exploration of Black life, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 92.Her death, at Mount Sinai Morningside hospital, was announced by Joan Allen, a family spokeswoman.Ms. Grant, an actress, composer, playwright and musician, had developed “Don’t Bother Me” for two years with the director Vinnette Carroll, taking it to small theaters in New York, Philadelphia and Washington before opening on Broadway in April 1972.She would also be known for her work on another Broadway musical, “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” and for her seven years on the NBC soap opera “Another World.”Set in New York City, “Don’t Bother Me” explored topics like ghetto life, Black power, feminism and student protests with an all-Black cast performing songs — all by Ms. Grant — that drew from rock, jazz, funk, blues calypso and other musical genres.Ms. Grant recalled in 2018 that she and Ms. Carroll had wanted audiences of the musical to recognize the similarities among races, not the differences.“And I think that’s expressed when you find out in the end that the audience is willing to reach out and take someone’s hand,” she said in an interview with The New York Amsterdam News. “Some people in the audience never held the hand of a person of a different race before, and all of the sudden, they’re holding another person’s hand.”The musical got rave reviews, including one from Clive Barnes of The New York Times, who wrote: “It is the unexpected that is the most delightful. Last night at the Playhouse Theater a new musical came clapping, stomping and stamping in. It is fresh, fun and Black.”The show received Tony nominations for best musical, best original score, best book (also by Ms. Grant) and best direction. It won a Grammy for best musical theater album, making Ms. Grant the first female composer to win in that category.“Don’t Bother Me” was revived in 2016 as a concert performance by the York Theater Company in Manhattan and two years later by the Encores! Off-Center series at New York City Center, directed by Savion Glover.Amber Barbee Pickens, foreground, in the Encores! production of “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope” at New York City Center in 2018. One critic said of the original Broadway production: “A new musical came clapping, stomping and stamping in. It is fresh, fun and Black.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJames Morgan, York’s producing artistic director, said in a phone interview that Ms. Grant had “wanted a say in everything and would say, ‘No, that’s not how that goes.’ I’d tell her, ‘We want this to be your version of the show.’”He had been hoping to stage a full Off Broadway production of “Don’t Worry,” he said, but couldn’t raise the money. “I so wanted it for her, because there’s still a big audience for it,” he said.Ms. Grant was born Minnie Louise Perkins on June 30, 1929, in Chicago to Oscar and Gussie (Cobbins) Perkins. Her father was a barber and a self-taught pianist, her mother, a saleswoman for Stanley Home Products.Minnie was smitten by theater and music at a young age. At 8 she played the Spirit of Spring, touching flowers to bring them to life, in a community center production. She began taking piano and double-bass lessons at about the same age.And, she recalled in an interview with The Times in 1972: “I was busy writing poetry and walking around the house reciting it. My family always listened and said what nice poetry it was.”Ms. Grant began writing music at 14 or 15 and acting in community theater at 18. She studied at the Chicago School of Music and later attended the University of Illinois, Chicago.But one semester shy of graduating, she left to perform in Los Angeles, where, in 1961, she appeared in a musical revue, “Fly Blackbird,” a social satire about the evils of segregation. She moved with the show to its Off Broadway production in 1962.By then, she had changed her name to Micki.Ms. Grant made her Broadway debut a year later in a supporting role in “Tambourines to Glory,” a short-lived “gospel singing play” — written by the poet Langston Hughes with music by Jobe Huntley — about two female street preachers in Harlem. It also starred Robert Guillaume and Louis Gossett Jr. A year later she appeared in a revival of Marc Blitzstein’s musical play “The Cradle Will Rock,” set in 1937 during the Great Depression.She turned to television in 1965, beginning a seven-year run on “Another World” playing a secretary-turned-lawyer, Peggy Nolan. She is believed to have been the first Black contract player in soaps. She later had roles in the soap operas “Guiding Light,” “Edge of Night” and “All My Children.”Ms. Grant in the NBC soap opera “Another World” in 1968. She had a seven-year run on the show playing a secretary-turned-lawyer.Fred Hermansky/NBCCasey Childs, the founder of the Primary Stages Company in New York, recalled directing her in one soap opera episode. “She was an absolutely lovely actress, who understood the need on a soap to move quickly and make fast choices,” he said in an interview.During her long run on “Another World,” Ms. Grant was building a theatrical legacy with Ms. Carroll, who in 1967 founded the Urban Arts Corps to provide a showcase for Black and Puerto Rican performers.They put together the first production of “Don’t Bother Me” in 1970 at the company’s theater on West 20th Street in Manhattan. Ms. Grant also wrote the music and lyrics for a song and dance version of the Irwin Shaw novel “Bury the Dead” and for a children’s show called “Croesus and the Witch.”Working with Ms. Carroll, she said, was a “magical” experience.“It all came together so perfectly,” Ms. Grant told American Theater magazine in an interview this year. “It was a fortunate meeting between us: I needed somewhere to present my work, and she needed the new work to present because of who she was — having original works brought out her creativity, rather than trying to repeat something that was already done.”The two women also collaborated on “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” an acclaimed gospel-infused musical that opened on Broadway in 1976 and ran for 429 performances. Ms. Carroll wrote the book, and music and lyrics were by Alex Bradford, with additional songs by Ms. Grant.Two years later, Ms. Grant was one of the five songwriters behind the musical “Working,” which was based on the writer Studs Terkel’s book of interviews with everyday people about their jobs. The group was nominated for a Tony for best original score.In one of Ms. Grant’s songs in “Working,” a woman laments: “If I could’ve done what I could’ve done/I could’ve done big things./With some luck to do what I wanted to do/I would’ve done big things./Swam a few rivers/Climbed a few hills/Paid all my bills.”She returned to Broadway one last time, with a musical, “It’s So Nice to Be Civilized” (1980), which closed after eight performances.Her other credits include the English-language lyrics to songs in “Jacques Brel Blues,” which debuted in East Hampton, N.Y., in 1988, and “Don’t Underestimate a Nut,” a musical based on the life of George Washington Carver, the agricultural scientist who promoted the cultivation of peanuts. It was commissioned by a children’s theater in Omaha, Neb., in 1994.In the late 1990s, Ms. Grant spent two years with Lizan Mitchell on a tour of the United States and South Africa as they played the centenarian Delany sisters in “Having Our Say,” Emily Mann’s Tony Award-winning play.Ms. Grant had no immediate survivors. Her marriages to Milton Grant and Ray McCutcheon ended in divorce.When Encores! revived “Don’t Bother Me,” Ms. Grant, reflecting on its creation, said that her and Ms. Carroll’s goal had not been to produce an incendiary musical about the difficulties faced by Black people in America.“There was a lot of angry theater out there at the time, especially in the Black community — Bullins, Jones,” she said, referring to the playwrights Ed Bullins and LeRoi Jones, who became known as Amiri Baraka. “I wanted to come at it with a soft fist. I wanted to open eyes but not turn eyes away.” More

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      ‘How Do I Become Happy?’ Advice From a Professional Fool

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      Stanley Allan Sherman, one of the niche artisans of New York theater, makes leather masks for the stage. And the occasional pro wrestler.Everyone has a Sept. 11 story. The pages of Stanley Allan Sherman’s, a one-man show called “September,” sat propped on a music stand in his apartment the other day, amid a room full of leather masks. Something about the text was vexing him. “I’ve got to find a way to make it funny,” he said.Mr. Sherman, 70, is an Orthodox Jew, a professional clown and sometime playwright and director. But mainly, he is one of the small army of niche artisans who make New York’s theater world the anything-is-possible place it is. In a city that has everything, he is one of the few makers of custom leather masks of the sort used in commedia dell’arte, a form of theater that uses stock characters denoted by their masks. He also makes them for the occasional pro wrestler or rapper. It’s a living.He started writing the Sept. 11 monologue several years ago, with interest from Theater for the New City in the East Village. Then the pandemic happened, leaving the show orphaned — a meditation on resilience during one calamity, sidelined by another.For Mr. Sherman, it was just one more occasion for improv.Like many artists of his generation, he arrived in New York without a plan, and found a sweet spot in a post-’60s art world that was just taking shape. It was roughly 1973, after he’d spent a year on a kibbutz in Israel and a couple more in Paris, and his intention was to stay a couple of nights on his brother’s couch, in a fifth-floor walk-up on the edge of the Manhattan neighborhood now known as Chelsea.Mr. Sherman in the first mask he made, a trial-and-error process.via Stanley Allan ShermanBy then he had studied mime and the use of masks in the fabled Parisian school of Jacques Lecoq. Mr. Sherman’s brother was trying to peddle a documentary about the Cockettes, a San Francisco drag troupe; he was also broke. “Abbie Hoffman took a bath in that tub when he was on the run from the F.B.I.,” Mr. Sherman said, beginning a tour of the apartment, where he has lived ever since. Instead of leaving town as planned, Mr. Sherman grabbed a set of antique toilet plungers and headed downtown to Wall Street, to pass the hat as a sidewalk juggler and mime. It was a great way to learn about human psychology, he said. It also made him the apartment’s sole breadwinner.“I picked Wall Street and Nassau for a reason,” he said. “I felt, that’s the center of power, they need the humanity the most. This one fellow stopped me and said: ‘I watch you. I have all the money I want in the world. But I’m not happy. I see you perform, and you’re happy. How do I become happy?’”Mr. Sherman during his time as a mime and juggler.Jim R Moore/VaudevisualsSoon his brother took a real job on Wall Street and moved out of the apartment, leaving it to Stanley. The rent, stabilized, was about $350.Mr. Sherman graduated from the sidewalk gig to performing in the small, adventurous theaters that were beginning to open downtown. “If you stay too long in the street you get mean,” he said. “I was getting mean.” One day, the director of the Perry Street Theater, knowing of his training in commedia dell’arte, asked him to make a mask for the stock character Arlecchino, also called Harlequin.“The only person I knew who made masks was in Italy, and he had died,” Mr. Sherman said. He called puppeteers he knew for advice about how to mold leather. Finally, through trial and error, he made a mask that looked nothing like Arlecchino, he said.The director was satisfied. Mr. Sherman had found a niche and a community, the unsung artisans who make or fix things that no one else wants to think about.A mask Mr. Sherman created as part of a 9/11 series.Stanley Allan Sherman“The community of people who do this in New York is very DIY, out of the mainstream, and you get deep collaborations,” said Seth Kane, who designs prostheses for stage and medical use and has worked with Mr. Sherman on masks for dancers, under the name Dr. Adventure.“The performer says, ‘I studied ballet for 20 years — I don’t know how to make this fire-breathing unicycle I’m about to ride.’” That’s where the artisans come in.For Mr. Sherman, it has been an odd sort of career. His best-known performing role was as a guest on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” where he appeared more than 40 times in the 1990s, usually in bits calling for a Hasidic Jew, with or without juggling.But his best-known mask appeared on the professional wrestler Mick Foley, in his character of Mankind, a wounded psychopath.“They basically wanted Arlecchino but didn’t know it,” Mr. Sherman said. “I knew it.”Mr. Sherman, left, with the professional wrestler Mick Foley.via Stanley Allan ShermanIt can take Mr. Sherman a few days or as long as a year to make a mask, using the apartment’s back room as a workshop. When he works, he said, he tries to become the character. “When you’re sculpting, you’re moving as the character, you’re joking around as the character, so you’re putting all the energy into it, and that’s transferred to the mold,” he said.The finished product, he said, should reveal the actor, rather than concealing him or her.He is now hoping to revive “September,” his one-man show, maybe take it on the road. On that September morning 20 years ago, Mr. Sherman was on his way home after morning prayers at the Chelsea Synagogue when he saw a plane flying low overhead. The horror that ensued is by now achingly familiar. But what stood out for Mr. Sherman was not just the devastation but also the spontaneous camaraderie that drove him and neighbors, who gathered supplies for the emergency medical workers.“One of the best things we did is we gave people a way to help, to participate,” Mr. Sherman said, dropping his voice to near a whisper. “Someone came with eight supermodels. There was an old couple with a giant pot of chicken soup that fed people for hours. All these beautiful things happened. Then seeing the line of refrigerator trucks on the West Side Highway was just disturbing. People in their 20s have no memory of this. They hear about Sept. 11, but they don’t know how the energy in the city was so amazing. It was a magical time.”Performing during the NYC Clown Theater Festival in 1985.Jim R Moore/VaudevisualsStill, he wondered whether the monologue was missing the element of humor that has connected his work from the Wall Street sidewalks to the present, a pathway for communicating inconvenient truths.“This is what fools do: They expose truths,” he said. It was an imperative that has guided him for half a century, and a filter through which to see the city he has made his own. “The reason late night comedy talk shows are so popular and so many people get their news from them, is because they’re speaking truth,” he said.“If it’s a lie, it’s not funny. Lies aren’t funny. Truth is funny.” More

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      Drama Book Shop, Backed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, to Open in June

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      The quirky bookstore, which sells scripts and other theater-related work, was acquired by a team of “Hamilton” alumni after years of struggle.The Drama Book Shop, a quirky 104-year-old Manhattan specialty store that has long been a haven for aspiring artists as well as a purveyor of scripts, will reopen next month with a new location, a new look, and a new team of starry owners.Those new owners — the “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as the show’s director, Thomas Kail, lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, and the theater owner James L. Nederlander — said Wednesday that the store will have its long-delayed reopening on June 10.The opening, at 266 West 39th Street, is a sign of the team’s confidence in Times Square, which has been largely theater-free since March 12, 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic forced Broadway to close. Broadway shows are not planning to resume performances until September, but the new store owners say they are ready for business.The “Hamilton” team bought the Drama Book Shop, most recently located on West 40th Street, in early 2019 after years in which the store had struggled to survive the challenges of Manhattan real estate, e-commerce, and even a damaging flood. Kail had a particular passion for the bookstore, where he had run a small theater company in his early years as a professional; Miranda joined him there to work on “In the Heights,” a musical Kail directed. “In the Heights” has now been adapted into a film which is being released on June 11, the day after the bookstore opens.The new owners had initially hoped to reopen the store in late 2019, and then in early 2020, but the project was delayed, first by the vicissitudes of construction, and then by the pandemic. The new shop has been designed by David Korins, the “Hamilton” scenic designer, and includes a cafe.The store is encouraging visitors to make reservations online; capacity will be limited. More