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    Momma Rose’s Many Faces, From Ethel Merman to Audra McDonald

    To those who worship at the church of the American musical, it was a holy night. For on a Thursday in late November in the city of New York, the faithful had assembled to witness what might be described as the Sixth Coming.Momma Rose was being reborn once again.The occasion was the first preview of the fifth Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” directed by George C. Wolfe at the newly restored Majestic Theater, which had last been the home of the longest-running musical on Broadway, “The Phantom of the Opera.” Rose was being played — deep breath, please — by the record-breaking, six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald. The house was packed, the crowd aflutter, and expectations stratospheric.For the uninitiated, let me explain that Momma Rose — as she is somehow commonly known, though she is never called that in the show — is widely perceived by theater cognoscenti as the greatest character ever to inhabit a musical comedy. First portrayed by Ethel Merman, she is to that genre’s actresses what Hamlet and Lear are to Shakespearean actors, a sky-scraping, Himalayan peak. As Arthur Laurents, who wrote the show’s book, described her, she is “a larger-than-life mother, a mythic mesmerizing mother, a monster of a mother sweetly named Rose.”The title character of this 1959 musical is in fact the stripper deluxe Gypsy Rose Lee. But it’s her mother, Rose, who is the show’s very (very) dominating central figure, a human bulldozer who drags her two young daughters through the shabby vaudeville circuit of the Great Depression in the hope of making one of them a star. Written by the sacred trinity of Laurents, Jule Styne (music) and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), “Gypsy” is regarded by many (including me) as the great book musical and the most probing musical about performing itself. For all its surface brightness and buoyancy, “Gypsy” thrums darkly with the ravenous hunger for attention that lies in the deepest heart of showbiz.McDonald with Joy Woods and Danny Burstein in the new production, directed by George C. Wolfe.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Alicia Keys, LaChanze and Billy Porter Celebrate Black Theater

    The stage stars were among more than 600 people who turned out for an evening of dinner and performances to benefit Black Theater United.LaChanze was in the mood to celebrate.“I am so ready to party,” the actress, wearing a sequined red gown with a bold red lip, said on the red carpet before the second annual Black Theater United gala at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan on Monday night.LaChanze is the president and a founding member of Black Theater United, a nonprofit that aims to combat racism in the theater community. She was one of more than 600 people — including the singer Alicia Keys, the actor Billy Porter, the actress Kristin Chenoweth and the pop-classical musician Josh Groban — who gathered at the grand event space for a live auction, dinner and performance on a night when most Broadway shows were dark.The gala raised money for the nonprofit founded by an all-star team of Black theater artists, including the Tony Award winners Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Phylicia Rashad and LaChanze in the summer of 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis.Mr. Mitchell remembered a call at the time with Ms. McDonald, the director Schele Williams and LaChanze. “They just started saying, ‘We’ve got to do something,’” he said.The organization now offers programs for aspiring young Black theater artists including student internships, a panel and discussion series, a musical theater scholarship and a program that aims to educate artists of color about designing for the theater.From left: Nichelle Lewis, Stephanie Mills and Sydney Terry performing “Home” from “The Wiz.” Ms. Mills was the original Dorothy in the 1975 production of the musical, a retelling of the classic “Wizard of Oz” story.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Audra McDonald to Star in ‘Gypsy’ Revival on Broadway This Fall

    The six-time Tony-winning actress will play musical theater’s most famous stage mother in a production directed by George C. Wolfe.Audra McDonald has been dreaming of “Gypsy” since she was a 10-year-old in Fresno, Calif., with a small part in a dinner theater production of the musical. She played one of the children in a vaudeville act called “Uncle Jocko’s Kiddie Show,” and ever since, she said, “Gypsy” has remained “very much alive in my brain.”McDonald, who has won more competitive Tony Awards than any other performer in history, has for years been thinking about the show’s main character, a domineering stage mother named Rose. She has even sung from the musical’s score at some of her concerts.Now, McDonald, 53, will play Rose in a Broadway revival of “Gypsy” opening later this year.“It’s one of the great roles in musical theater, and I’ve always thought maybe some day I could try it,” McDonald said in an interview. “It scares me to death, but I certainly feel old enough now, and having experienced motherhood, perhaps I have what is needed to dive in and explore her and all that she is.”The production, directed by George C. Wolfe and choreographed by Camille A. Brown, is to begin previews on Nov. 21 and open Dec. 19 at the Majestic Theater, which has been under renovation since last year’s closing of “The Phantom of the Opera.” (That show ran there for 35 years.)“Gypsy,” first staged on Broadway in 1959, is inspired by the memoir of Gypsy Rose Lee, a stripper who reflects on her relationship with her mother. The musical’s Rose is ravenously hungry for fame for her daughters, or maybe for herself. The role was originated by Ethel Merman, and has since been played on Broadway by Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Linda Lavin, Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone, on film by Rosalind Russell and on television by Bette Midler.McDonald said she sees “Gypsy,” which features music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Arthur Laurents, as “a perfect musical” and called Rose a “deeply flawed and brilliantly alive character.” She recalled that in a 1989 review in The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote, “‘Gypsy’ is nothing if not Broadway’s own brassy, unlikely answer to ‘King Lear.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Chita Rivera Tributes Pour in From Rita Moreno, the Cast of ‘Chicago’ and More

    Onstage and off, she was celebrated as a pathbreaking triple-threat who left a huge legacy in musical theater and dance.Chita Rivera created several memorable Broadway characters that are now considered part of the canon, including the role of Velma Kelly in the original production of “Chicago.” So when the cast of the long-running Broadway revival took to the stage of the Ambassador Theater in New York on Tuesday night just a few hours after her death was announced, it was only natural that they would pay tribute to her.After the performance the cast assembled onstage as Amra-Faye Wright, who plays Kelly now, recalled Rivera as a “Broadway giant,” who championed other dancers.“I feel still an impostor in the role because it belonged to Chita Rivera,” Wright said, as cast members dabbed their eyes. “She created it. She starred in the original production of ‘Chicago’ and she lives on constantly in our hearts, on this stage, in every performance. We love you, Chita.”Rivera’s death on Tuesday at the age of 91 inspired an outpouring of testimonials from fans and colleagues, elected officials and stars of stage and screen, who recalled her as a pathbreaking triple-threat who left a huge legacy in musical theater and dance.The audience at “Chicago” listened as Rivera was recalled as a “Broadway giant.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn Instagram, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer, writer and actor, described Rivera as “The trailblazer for 🇵🇷 on Broadway,” using an emoji of the Puerto Rican flag, and called her “an absolute original.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Audra McDonald Makes History With 10th Tony Award Nomination

    Audra McDonald has been here before.And before. And before. And before. And before. And before. And before. And before. And before.The actress earned her 10th acting Tony Award nomination on Tuesday, for best leading actress in a play, for her role as the writer Suzanne Alexander in Adrienne Kennedy’s 1991 play “Ohio State Murders,” the 91-year-old Kennedy’s Broadway debut. The feat ties her with Chita Rivera and Julie Harris as the most nominated individual performers in the 76-year history of the awards.“It’s an honor,” said McDonald, who has won six Tony Awards, the most of any performer. “But the work is the true joy.”McDonald, 52, previously won four featured actress Tonys in the play and musical categories for her roles in “Carousel” (1994), “Master Class” (1996), “Ragtime” (1998) and “A Raisin in the Sun” (2004). She won leading actress Tonys for her performance as the strongheaded Bess in the musical “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” in 2012 and her turn as the famed jazz singer Billie Holiday in the play “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” in 2014. She is the only person to win in all four acting categories.In his review of “Ohio State Murders,” which he called a “piercing production,” the New York Times critic Jesse Green praised McDonald’s performance, “ripped from her gallery of harrowing women,” and noted that it builds to “a shattering catharsis.”In an interview during her lunch break from a workshop in Manhattan on Tuesday, McDonald discussed her milestone achievement, why it still feels special to be recognized for this particular production and what she hopes people took away from her performance. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.This is your 10th nomination, and you’ve already secured the record for the winningest performer, with six Tonys. Is it still special?It’s incredibly special. Being able to be a part of Adrienne Kennedy having her Broadway debut and getting her work seen by a larger audience was something that was very important to me. Even if I hadn’t gotten a nomination, I’d still feel very proud of the work. I was honored that she trusted our vision and what we wanted to do with the play.The older and younger versions of Suzanne Alexander are usually played by two different actors, but you played both. Why?Because Suzanne is going back in time to remember these things, I thought being able to actually step into those memories and feel them in her body would inform even more when she stepped back out of them to a narrative, reflective place. So I asked Adrienne for permission for that and she said, “Sure, that’s great, let’s see what happens.”What spoke to you about the show?How often do we have plays that really center a Black woman’s experience? This is a chance for the character Suzanne — and it’s semi-autobiographical, so Adrienne, to an extent — to be able to speak her experience. Being able to play this incredibly brilliant, wounded and, in some ways — at the end of the play — triumphant woman was very appealing, even though it was very, very difficult. And it was an indictment that needs to be delivered in terms of what systemic racism does to people, and how it destroys.In his review, Jesse Green praised your “astonishing access to tragic feeling.” Where did you go to find that?When you’re playing a role you have to be that character’s advocate at all times, even when you’re playing a villain. Part of being an advocate for Suzanne is trying to find the empathy for the pain and the terror and the tragedy and the trauma that she experienced. The powerful question in acting is, “What if that were to happen to me?” What would I be thinking? What would I be feeling?How did your performance evolve over the course of the run?Because the play is so incredibly dense and the language is so full and poetic, for me the evolution came in becoming more at ease with Adrienne’s language, which I don’t think I had at the beginning of the run.Your character’s babies are represented, not with dolls, but as slips of pink fabric. Why?That was the brilliance of Kenny Leon, who’s an incredible director. We knew that once you bring babies onstage, even if they’re dolls — which was one thought at one point — it was going to be very difficult to set them aside for times when the focus isn’t necessarily on them. We wanted to make sure the audience wasn’t distracted by them.What do you hope people took away from the show?I hope they had a broader understanding of the destructive power of racism. I also hope that people who are not Black could see that we are not a monolith. This is a woman, as a character, who is not always represented onstage, and I wanted this very educated and smart and brilliant, yet wounded, woman out there telling her story and centering her story and demanding that it be heard.What did Kennedy tell you after seeing it?She was very moved. I still speak with her. I got an email from her a couple of days ago, actually, and I’m going to go visit her in a couple of weeks. She was very happy that we had done it. She’s had a lot of people play the role and I think loved all the interpretations of it.How does it feel to have been able to bring a lesser-seen work to the stage?Plenty of people have known who Adrienne Kennedy was for years, but there was a younger generation that was introduced to Adrienne Kennedy with that production, and that makes me happy. More

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    ‘Ohio State Murders,’ Starring Audra McDonald, to Close on Broadway

    The 75-minute memory play by Adrienne Kennedy had been scheduled to run until Feb. 12; it will close on Jan. 15.“Ohio State Murders,” a short, powerful and pointed play starring Audra McDonald as a writer recalling racism and violence the character encountered as an undergraduate, will close sooner than expected on Broadway after struggling to sell tickets.The play was the Broadway debut for its 91-year-old writer, Adrienne Kennedy, a much admired playwright whose surrealistic work has generally been presented on smaller stages and taught at universities.“Ohio State Murders” is one of her most accessible works — it is essentially a 75-minute memory play in which the protagonist tells a gripping story about her college years — but nonetheless proved a tough sell in the commercial arena, even with strong reviews and McDonald, who is one of Broadway’s best-loved performers, in the starring role.The production began previews Nov. 11 and opened Dec. 8 at the James Earl Jones Theater. It was scheduled to run until Feb. 12; instead it will close Jan. 15.The production has had a hard time finding an audience — last week, when Broadway was flush with tourists, “Ohio State Murders” filled only 49 percent of its seats, and many weeks had been worse. It grossed $311,893 for nine performances last week; that was the high-water mark for the run thus far.Produced by Jeffrey Richards, the play was capitalized for up to $5.1 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped.Broadway is always a financially risky proposition — far more shows fail than succeed — and the climate has become more challenging since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, because costs have risen and attendance has fallen. Last week was the best week the industry has seen since late 2019, but the riches are not evenly distributed: “Ohio State Murders” follows “Walking With Ghosts,” “KPOP,” “Ain’t No Mo’” and “Almost Famous” in announcing an unexpectedly early closing this season. More

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    Review: Who Committed the ‘Ohio State Murders’? Who Didn’t?

    Audra McDonald stars in Adrienne Kennedy’s 1991 play about the worst imaginable crime and the world that made it inevitable.Two 91-year-old titans made belated Broadway debuts this fall.In the case of the actor James Earl Jones, it was not in a play but on a marquee. In September, the Cort Theater, on West 48th Street, where he’d first performed in 1958, was renamed in his honor.And on Thursday, with the opening of a revival of “Ohio State Murders” on the same stage, Adrienne Kennedy finally had one of her works appear in what is, for better or worse, the center of American theatrical culture.Why it took so long in either case is a question you can answer in one word or many. In “Ohio State Murders,” Kennedy, an avant-gardist who deserves a place among our most honored and produced playwrights, does it in many, each of them a bullet.Not that the 75-minute play, first performed in 1991, is coldblooded or didactic. Rather, in Kenny Leon’s piercing production, starring Audra McDonald in another performance ripped from her gallery of harrowing women, it is painful both in the story it tells and in the immense effort expended to tell it properly.Or, better, improperly: “Ohio State Murders” is rigorously unconventional. The mystery suggested by its title is largely resolved in the first five minutes, when the crime and the criminal are almost casually (if incompletely) revealed. A middle-aged writer named Suzanne Alexander, who has come to Columbus in the play’s present tense to speak about the violent imagery in her work, quickly locates its source in the abduction and drowning of one of her infant twin daughters in 1952, when she was an unmarried undergraduate there.“That was later,” she says immediately after the out-of-sequence revelation, as if there was something yet more important to get back to.There is; Kennedy, who was herself an undergraduate at Ohio State in the early 1950s, uses the time that her tangled structure has bought her to assemble, collagelike, the atmosphere of dread and discrimination faced by Black students of the period. A white classmate accuses Sue, as the protagonist was then called, of stealing a watch, though Sue herself “owned beautiful possessions and jewelry that my parents had given me.” The English department will not allow her, or any other Black student, to declare that major without special consent, generally not forthcoming: “It was thought that we were not able to master the program.”McDonald as a college student and Bryce Pinkham as her professor in the play. It’s a lesson in itself to watch McDonald shift between her older and younger characters, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe older and younger characters are usually split between two actors, but Kennedy has given McDonald permission to play both. It’s a lesson in itself to watch her shift between them. Sue is innocent and trusting, until circumstances teach her not to be; she drinks in the literature she is reading as if with an endless thirst. Suzanne, though she has survived tragedy and fashioned a solid career for herself, is anxious and brittle, laughing inappropriately at times, reverting to a private language while furiously seeking the right words to convey the intensity of the forces at play.In neither role does McDonald have the support of ordinary dramaturgy. There is virtually no dialogue in “Ohio State Murders,” because what happened to Sue is less important than how Suzanne tries, as you feel she has tried for decades, to understand it. That the father of the babies was her white English professor (Bryce Pinkham) is merely a biological and later a forensic fact; that he admires her essays and teaches her to love Hardy (especially and relevantly “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”) are more salient pieces of the psychological puzzle.In a conventional drama, we might see the professor wooing or comforting or ultimately dismissing Sue; here we experience him only in small fragments, reading and lecturing and saying a few words in her general direction. The same technique keeps her roommate (Abigail Stephenson), aunt (Lizan Mitchell) and even her boyfriend (Mister Fitzgerald) at a distance, with Suzanne describing their interactions rather than Sue engaging in them.Kennedy, it seems, aims to forbid us the ease and release of a traditional scene, just as she has prescribed a conceptual set that in Beowulf Boritt’s rather stiff interpretation represents all locations and furniture as a tumble of library shelves full of law tomes. But McDonald is incapable of nonemotion; her performance builds to a shattering catharsis that may in some ways be unauthorized.Leon, too, works smartly against the grain of the play. In thoughtfully mimed vignettes, he shows us that the other characters, beautifully enacted if with little to say, are not just puppets of Suzanne’s memory but living creatures with their own struggles. They are lit (by Allen Lee Hughes) and costumed (by Dede Ayite) less forbiddingly than the script might lead you to expect, and accompanied by sound and music (by Justin Ellington and Dwight Andrews) that admits other emotions to the horror. Even the babies are touchingly represented: slips of pink fabric, delicate as scarves and as easily lost.In a demanding double role, McDonald conveys astonishing access to tragic feeling, our critic writes. Sara Krulwich/The New York. TimesThese warming, even sentimental additions do not detract from the intellectual integrity of Kennedy’s conception any more than McDonald’s astonishing access to tragic feeling diminishes the prickly oddness of the characters. To my mind these are instead enhancements, forcing us to experience the play’s central themes as internal conflicts and not just social ones.Not that society is in any way let off the hook. The racism at the heart of the murder mystery is also at the heart of everything else, making it unclear which is the cause and which the effect. So when Suzanne describes the white sorority houses as “columned mansions” sitting “like a citadel” off Columbus’s High Street, it’s impossible not to think of plantation architecture — a point that Sue, reading from a book about symbols, drives home at once:“A city should have a sacred geography,” she recites, “never arbitrary but planned in strict accord with the dictates of a doctrine that the society upholds.” In other words, Suzanne’s experiences of exclusion are no accident of racism, they are its goals.Just so with theaters — and what we see within them. If the balance is at last beginning to tip, both on the marquee and the title page, it’s not just luck, though we are lucky to get to experience it. It’s because our greatest artists, Kennedy, Jones and McDonald among them, have been using their artistry to argue the case for years.Ohio State MurdersThrough Feb. 12 at the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan; ohiostatemurdersbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More