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    How Do You Measure a Season on Broadway? In Cast Albums.

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    From “A Strange Loop” to “Funny Girl,” most Broadway musicals of 2022 were recorded, offering listeners a chance to love or hate them again.Last year was a pretty good one for Broadway musicals, if by “pretty good” you mean “not as dreadful as usual.” Of the 15 that opened, just a handful were outright disasters both critically and financially. And though only six are still running, that’s not a bad number these days.Even better, most of last year’s shows made cast albums, so you can judge for yourself. True, you will not find “1776” or “The Little Prince” among them; they were not recorded. Nor was the original Broadway revival cast of “Funny Girl,” which instead opted to preserve its replacement cast, led by Lea Michele. (Following its November digital release, the CD goes on sale Friday.)Another absentee is “Paradise Square,” which, because of litigation between the show’s producer and its unions, is available only piecemeal — and only on its composer’s Instagram page. What I’ve heard of it there is better than what I saw of it onstage.That is often the case with the 2022 cast albums. Among the 10 I’ve played in their entirety (the remaining two — “KPOP” and “Almost Famous” — are scheduled to be released in the coming months), some improve on the shows they preserve merely by jettisoning most or mercifully all of the book. In other cases, you can actually hear what the authors had in mind, which you can’t always do amid overexcitable stagings.Even so, it remains generally true that the best and freshest musical theater recordings — omitting standout solo albums like Christine Ebersole’s “After the Ball” and Victoria Clark’s “December Songs” — arise from the best and freshest underlying material. That means that in my breakdown below, the quality tends to improve as you move from jukeboxes to revivals to originals.But not always. Another reason 2022 was a pretty good year for Broadway musicals is that, often enough, they were pretty surprising.Clockwise from top left: Myles Frost in “MJ the Musical”; Lorna Courtney in “& Juliet”; Billy Crystal in “Mr. Saturday Night”; and Joshua Henry, left, and Gavin Creel in “Into the Woods.”Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJukeboxesWhatever you think of jukebox musicals as a theatrical genre — and I generally don’t think much of them — they make exceedingly strange cast albums. The worst offenders are biographical jukeboxes, which purport to tell the story of the singer or songwriter (or record company) that owns the songs or made them famous. When those songs are stripped from their jimmied narratives and returned to their native format as recordings, they devolve into something peculiar: greatest hits tribute albums.That’s especially problematic with “MJ the Musical,” based on Michael Jackson’s life and catalog. Because the songs — and Jackson’s idiosyncratic original performances of them — are (like “Billie Jean”) so unforgettable, there’s little Myles Frost, in the title role, can do with just his voice to suggest something new. Instead we are stuck with a slick impersonation, accurate but wan. Why not just get the original?That problem is somewhat attenuated in “A Beautiful Noise,” the Neil Diamond bio-jukebox. For one thing, Will Swenson, as Diamond, does not aim for a carbon copy. Exaggerating some of the singer’s vocal qualities — the basso burr and steel-wool growls — he instead adds value while suggesting character. And when he is backed up by the show’s terrific ensemble in a joyful number like “Holly Holy,” you hear it in a new way, as an unexpected cover. Yes, some of these “covers” are a little too unexpected: When Diamond’s intensely interior musings are turned into duets and awkwardly refitted as plot numbers, it’s hard not to roll your ears.That problem is triply avoided in “& Juliet.” (1) It’s not a rumination but a romp. (2) It has no biography to be true (or false) to. (3) It’s built on hit songs, by Max Martin, that, having been written for many different singers, are generic enough to suit many situations. So when Lorna Courtney, as Juliet, wakes up by her tomb to sing Britney Spears’s “ … Baby One More Time,” or a song like Celine Dion’s “That’s the Way It Is” is repurposed as a feminist anthem, it’s additive, not subtractive. And it’s hard to be very critical when the Katy Perry hit “I Kissed a Girl” becomes a flirty wink to nonbinary attraction.RevivalsMusicals that have previously produced a superb recording pose a different problem. Other than bonus tracks and extended dance music sequences — the result of technology that offers almost limitless capacity — what new can a cast album offer?I’m afraid I didn’t find much of an answer in the revival cast recording of “The Music Man,” even though, or rather because, it’s an accurate rendering of the hit stage production. Is that because Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, avoiding comparison to Robert Preston and Barbara Cook, offered very different readings (and singings) of the roles? Both went darker — and Foster lower, dodging Cook’s high notes — resulting in a somewhat grim take on songs that once were joyous. (Passages of Jackman’s “Ya Got Trouble” are almost terrifying.) At least there’s joy to be had around the edges, especially in the funky chromaticism of the barbershop quartet, whose rendering of “Sincere” is like a roller coaster that keeps going up and up.If rethinking did not serve “The Music Man,” it certainly did “Into the Woods.” After several revivals and the 2014 movie, this Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical could almost seem too familiar, yet the stripped-down version directed by Lear deBessonet restored its warmth, humor and strangeness. Not all of that survives in the cast recording, especially in complicated ensemble numbers that mix dialogue and song at top speed. Yet in solos and duets — like the alternately hilarious and gorgeous “Agony,” sung by Gavin Creel and Joshua Henry, the score shines anew.As a record of raw Broadway talent, there may never be a greater cast album than the one on which Barbra Streisand, at 21, was captured in a state of wild, almost feral daredevilry. At 36, Lea Michele is past the feral stage, but she’s still a thrill on the revival cast album of “Funny Girl.” In some ways, it’s even more of a feat, as she gets thin support from the watered-down orchestrations, even juiced with three additional strings. And if her renditions of barnburners like “Don’t Rain on My Parade” owe more than a little to their originator, Michele brings her own banked fires to the ballads, especially “The Music That Makes Me Dance” and a triple crème “People.”OriginalsBy comparison, new musicals are too often skim milk. Whether it’s the overwhelming costs or the coolness of so many stories, they do not lend themselves to Golden Age butterfat. That’s fine, but the grooves on their cast albums can feel like ruts as a result, both emotionally and aurally. How nice to hear four that are so rich in varied craft and feeling!Even “Mr. Saturday Night,” a middling entertainment onstage, shines in its recording. Not that it isn’t cynical; the story of a washed-up borscht belt comic naturally evokes an acrid Rat Pack score (and matching orchestration) from the composer Jason Robert Brown. But Billy Crystal, in excellent voice, provides a nice balance in the title role, especially when highlighting the pathos behind the aggressive humor of Amanda Green’s lyrics, as in “A Little Joy.” “I’m gonna bring a little mirth/To celebrate our time on earth,” he hectors an unresponsive old age home audience. “Of course it helps to have a pulse.” This recording does.Oddly, it’s the cast album of “A Strange Loop,” a terrific musical — and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama — that has the pulse problem. Michael R. Jackson’s brilliant concept, in which unhelpful “thoughts” persecute a gay Black musical theater writer trying to write a gay Black musical, is so innately theatrical that, without Stephen Brackett’s staging, it’s hard to track its ups and downs through music alone. Still, with Tori Amos, Joni Mitchell and Liz Phair as his “Inner White Girl” inspirations, Jackson writes songs that sting, his lyrics merging poetry and perseveration.Kimberly Levaco doesn’t have time to perseverate; she’s aging at four times the normal speed and already looks 60-ish at 15. Her upbeat attitude in the face of early mortality gives “Kimberly Akimbo” (due out Feb. 14, though two songs are now available for streaming) its tragic undertow but also its uncanny, uncloying delight. The songs by Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire, especially as sung by Victoria Clark and Bonnie Milligan, rarely waste time stating the obvious, thus allowing us to experience both dawning rapture (“Anagram”) and hilarious sociopathy (“Better”) without condescension. As the cast album moves from high to high with no explanations, you may wonder where that lump in your throat came from.How much story a cast album needs to tell has from the start of the format been a defining question. The first recordings of Broadway shows were essentially glorified singles, with no context at all. (There was no room.) But even with dialogue and liner notes, new musicals today, in which songs are narrowly tailored to narratives, can leave you perplexed if you haven’t seen them live. That will not be a problem for the cast album of “Some Like It Hot” (due out on March 24); it’s designed, like so many Golden Age musicals, to give pleasure both within and without the story. As they did in “Hairspray,” Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman write numbers — including the ear-wormy title song — that find the sweet spot between generic pop and overspecificity: songs that can sound like just one character’s blues, or anyone’s. More

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      Tony Nominees for Choreography Put the Past in Motion

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      Musicals like “MJ” and “Paradise Square” take on dance of the past — with some missed opportunities. But the dance in “For Colored Girls” helps us to “remember what cannot be said.”A Black dancer and an Irish one face off in a dance contest in 19th-century New York. They take turns, each trying to top the other with steps and rhythms that are unique and unbeatable. It’s adversarial but also collegial, since the premise both assumes and encourages commonality, the kind of back-and-forth that breeds hybrids. This is a primal scene of American dance, and a version of it is on Broadway now.Whether in revivals, jukebox musicals or reimaginings of more distant history, a lot of the dance on Broadway these days is dance of the past. It’s theater, so the aim is less historical fidelity than persuasiveness. The choreography has to represent how people used to move in a way that makes sense to people today. But that constraint contains a possibility: In watching performers of the present embody the dance of the former times, we might feel, in our own bodies, how the present and the past are connected.That possibility was live for all five shows nominated for Tony Awards in choreography this year. The subject of each is, in some sense, historical. But the one that addresses dance history most directly is “Paradise Square.” It’s a musical about the Black and Irish denizens of the Five Points district in the 1860s. In the decades before, this neighborhood was a crucial site of interracial exchange and invention, a nursery not just for tap dance but for American theatrical dance in general — the kind that would long characterize Broadway musicals.“Paradise Square,” with choreography by Bill T. Jones and others, makes dance central and consequential.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMainly set in the kind of tavern where much cultural exchange occurred, the story seems to make dance central and consequential. No one knows exactly what the dancing in the Five Points looked or sounded like, so Bill T. Jones, leading a team of choreographers, is free to juxtapose some ideas of the Black and African side (Juba dance, shout) with some ideas of the Irish (the fast stepping familiar from “Riverdance”). But this choreography is subtle and inventive only compared to the absence of those qualities in the score and book. It doesn’t persuade.The Irish dance, credited to Jason Oremus and Garrett Coleman, is served somewhat better, partly because the Irish clichés in the music support it. Two of what the program calls “Irish Dancers” (Coleman and Colin Barkell), with little role in the plot, get to be briefly impressive in bursts of footwork. But even as the story builds to that Black vs. Irish dance-off, the dancing doesn’t make us feel how and why Black and Irish dance mixed, the similarities and differences that attracted the cultures to each other.It’s a missed opportunity. “Paradise Square” might have staged a shocking, thrilling return to sources, especially the Black ones. Instead, in a deeply flawed show, it offers the sort of choreography that inspires comments like “But wasn’t the dancing good?” Not good enough.Hugh Jackman in “The Music Man,” with choreography by Warren Carlyle.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA revival of “The Music Man,” a tried-and-true classic, is a much simpler choreographic assignment. Warren Carlyle does the job just fine. He has an adequate, nostalgic grasp of the period flavor, the “new steps” of the 1910s. The origins of these moves — in places like the Five Points before spreading to places like Iowa, the musical’s setting, and to the white stages of Broadway — isn’t part of the story. So Carlyle can focus on arranging a large cast of skilled dancers. If it’s all a little cautious and underwhelming, so is the rest of the production.Carlyle offers a professional, if uninspired, take on Broadway choreography as it used to be. “Six” is much more current, despite being about the wives of Henry VIII. The conceit of the show is to give them voice by casting them as contemporary pop divas, inspired by Beyoncé, Rihanna and the like. It’s a singing contest, and we expect to see certain kinds of dancing. These are dancing singers, and as each queen takes her turn, the others serve as the backup that every pop diva commands in concert.This is dance of the present, and Carrie-Anne Ingrouille, the choreographer, is up to speed in the genre and its variations — the ratios of sass and sex and empowerment moves, even the requisite absence of dance in Adele-style heartache. She keeps the action both tight and fluid, letting the performers save enough breath for all their belting. Like the clever, catchy pastiche songs, the choreography identifies its sources without quoting directly. It gives the pleasure of finding what we already know in a context where we might not expect it.Present tense: The cast of “Six” doing Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s moves.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA show about Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, and one of the great dancing singers, might seem to call for a similar approach. But “MJ,” as in so many other ways, is a different beast. It’s a jukebox musical, so the whole point is to hear the songs you know and love. But many of these songs already have choreography inextricably attached: that of Jackson’s hugely influential music videos of the 1980s. This isn’t just a period style that can be reproduced in general. Plenty of people who know the words and melodies also know all the steps.What is Christopher Wheeldon, the choreographer of “MJ,” to do? For the parts of the show covering Jackson’s early life, the Motown and Soul Train years, Wheeldon can work idiomatically, borrowing the styles to tell the story. When the timeline reaches the advent of MTV, though, he balks, having dancers tease some of the zombie boogie from “Thriller” at the back of the stage, facing away.It’s true that the second act begins with a close-to-verbatim reproduction of Jackson’s epochal “Motown 25” performance of “Billie Jean.” And Myles Frost, who plays the adult Jackson, is an astonishing mimic. (He dances that “Billie Jean” a little better than Jackson did.) But elsewhere, Wheeldon keeps replacing the original choreography with his own, and I kept feeling my heart sink, both as a lifelong Jackson fan and a dance critic.An effective replacement would have to be an improvement. And while Wheeldon is expert at crowd control and transitions (and an extremely accomplished choreographer of ballet), he has little feel for what Jackson in the show calls “smelly jelly” — funk, swing or whatever the dancers of the real Five Points called it. Despite help from Rich and Tone Talauega, who worked with Jackson, Wheeldon keeps swerving from that core, straightening away the rhythmic complexity of Jackson’s dancing along with its strangeness.Myles Frost as Michael Jackson in “MJ,” which was directed by Christopher Wheeldon, who was also the lead choreographer.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe most telling moment is the scene of the dancers who inspired Jackson. The representations of the Nicholas Brothers and Fred Astaire show no understanding of what Jackson saw in them (rhythm and attack that extend back to the Five Points), and thus the production can’t fully communicate how this great imitator forged a style that has been endlessly imitated. The only predecessor that “MJ” comprehends is Bob Fosse, whose own easy-to-imitate style defines the boundaries of Broadway dance inside which “MJ” keeps retreating.A good director might have pointed this out. But the director of “MJ” is Wheeldon (who, granted, had many other Jackson-related problems to deal with). There’s a strong Broadway precedent for combining those roles, one established by Jerome Robbins. But among this year’s Tony nominees, the best example of how that can benefit a show isn’t Wheeldon.It’s Camille A. Brown. “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” is what its dancing-poet author, Ntozake Shange, called a “choreopoem.” Although the show was a Broadway hit in 1976, the form didn’t become common, even as the text became canonical. Directing and choreographing this revival, Brown becomes one of exceedingly few Black women ever to take both roles for a Broadway show. (The last that comes to my mind is Katherine Dunham, in 1955.) That fact matters, but so does how she uses the combined power: She restores the work as an expression of a culture in which dance is central.The seven women of the cast recite poems, and they’re always dancing, in sadness and joy. They dance in girls’ games that become adult play, part of Shange’s original conception. But Brown adds American Sign Language, making the weaving of language and motion even more visible. Like the cast of “Six,” these women back each other up in dance. But in Brown’s vision, you can also sense their connections in the way that an exposing monologue by one, about abortion or abuse or self-discovery, reverberates in the silent bodies of the others.This isn’t what we know and expect of Broadway choreography. But unlike “Paradise Square,” it is a powerful return to a source. Dance, Shange once wrote, “is how we remember what cannot be said.” Brown reminds us. More

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      ‘MJ’: Dancing the Pain, and Dancing the Pain Away

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      What is the role of choreography on Broadway? Two musicals, “MJ” and “A Strange Loop,” shed light on the dancing body.Don’t get me wrong: The musical “MJ” is a misfire on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin. “Thriller” looks like a scene out of “Cats.” The segment showing Michael Jackson’s dance influences — the Nicholas Brothers, Fred Astaire, Bob Fosse — is so poor in terms of skill level that I felt sorry for dance, the art form. Irritatingly, yet predictably, the show, directed by the ballet choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, has been nominated for 10 Tony Awards. It will run for ages. Michael Jackson — for all his flaws — is still Michael Jackson.But the production does have something to show about Jackson’s dancing body in all of its articulate anxiety. It made me think: What happened to that body when the boy became a man? How did his dancing change? Was something of his internal landscape exposed in his dancing for all to see? Did we ever really see it?When he was alive and building his pop canon of music and dance, it wasn’t always so easy to grasp how, beyond the nervous twitches of the choreography, his spirit was reflected in his dancing. So much about him was wrapped up in the fashion of the moment that you could forget about his body. (You couldn’t, after all, ignore the ever-morphing features of his face.) There were so many distractions along the way — the skin, the plastic surgery, the allegations of molestation against him.He was always hiding. His costumes were armor, masking his body, his interior life and even, for all of his extraordinary prowess, his physicality. In a sense, he made it possible for his impersonators to exist by crafting and perpetuating a Michael Jackson that anyone could borrow and put on. Like a rhinestone glove. Or a moonwalk.The Broadway musical tries its best to focus on Jackson, the perfectionist artist, MJ, as the adult Jackson is listed in the Playbill. By contrast, the role of Little Michael makes the adult seem more fragile and more bizarre. (There’s a third Michael, too, in between them in age; he makes less of an impression.) You can’t help but notice the dramatic, drastic changes that his dancing body displayed over time. From his childhood as the youngest brother in the Jackson 5 to the final rehearsals for his Dangerous tour of 1992, the moment that frames the show, we see the way turmoil ripples through his body. For Little Michael, tormented by his father, dance is an escape; for the older MJ, it’s a way for his body to scream in ways he couldn’t with words. His voice, high and whispery, never had the same emphatic force.Christian Wilson, front, as Little Michael in “MJ.” Wilson’s “ease, his winning blend of naïveté and wisdom,” bring the musical to life, our critic says.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe older MJ, in the show, fights for rigid precision — movement phrases are knotty, spiky, full of angles, while Little Michael is smooth and enviably relaxed. (Obviously, dance styles changed drastically during that time, but the contrast seems as emotional as it is physical.) Two young boys alternate as Little Michael, Walter Russell III and Christian Wilson. I can only speak for Wilson, whose performance I saw, but it was his dancing that repeatedly snapped me back to attention.The 2022 Tony AwardsThis year’s awards, the first to recognize shows that opened after a long Broadway shutdown during the pandemic, will be given out on June 12.Lifetime Achievement: Angela Lansbury, an acclaimed and beloved star, will be honored with a special award during this year’s ceremony.Hugh Jackman: The actor may potentially win his third Tony Award for his role in “The Music Man.” He shared some thoughts on his life between film and theater.A New Star: Myles Frost is drawing ovations nightly on Broadway with his performance in “MJ,” a musical about Michael Jackson’s creative process.Feinstein’s/54 Below: The beloved basement club, which bills itself as “Broadway’s living room,” will receive an honor at the Tony Awards for excellence in the theater.As a musical, “MJ” can feel as distant and as inaccessible as a music video. Wilson’s presence — his ease, his winning blend of naïveté and wisdom — brought it to life. Even during the curtain calls, his hips kept flowing, perhaps more quietly, more internally than when he was in character, but he never lost hold of his gentle yet powerful groove.That unselfconscious fluidity throws into relief the rigidity and the constraint of MJ, as played by Myles Frost. Frost’s dancing accuracy is extraordinary; it reveals a body turning in on itself and hardening — lonely, brittle, concave. The tipped hat and rounded shoulders weren’t just about Jackson imitating one of his idols, Bob Fosse. Weren’t they also a way to hide (and guard) himself from the world?Jackson’s music was pop, but the way he used his body had such a hard edge that to watch footage of his actual Dangerous tour is to see something related to punk — not in sound, but in angst and speed, anger and attack. The tone is confident and clipped, but beyond the gleaming exterior, you sense pain. Did he even want to move in front of people? I can’t decide. At the start of a performance in Bucharest, he stands still, in profile, with his arms tense at his sides, for what seems like ages while the camera pans to a crowd on the brink of hysteria.Wait for it: Michael Jackson in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on the Dangerous tour.Alain Benainous/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesIt’s impossible to know who Jackson really was. “MJ” delivers yet another impersonation of the man we saw onstage and in videos. Often a dancing body reveals a certain truth about a person, but in Jackson’s case dancing might have been one more thing to hide behind, like another costume; it was a place he could control his body. He could be himself or the person he wanted to be: strong, powerful, sexy. Maybe the dancing body was the man, or his fantasy of himself.I don’t want to honor the choreographic approach in “MJ,” which is mostly cartoonish. But watching the dancing left me thinking about Jackson and what dancing became for him — something he was chained to, rather than a way to break free of the box he found himself in.Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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      Myles Frost Stars as Michael Jackson in ‘MJ’ on Broadway

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      Just five years after he performed as Michael Jackson at a high school talent show, Myles Frost is making his debut in a Broadway musical about the King of Pop.Myles Frost was a college junior in Maryland, studying audio engineering, when he got the call that would change his life. Five years earlier, he had performed “Billie Jean” at a high school talent show, and his mom had filmed the performance on her iPad. Now an embryonic Broadway musical about Michael Jackson had lost its star, and Frost’s new acting coach, who had stumbled across the video on YouTube, wanted to know: Could the 21-year-old still sing and dance like the King of Pop?The truth was, Frost hadn’t revisited the material since he was 16. His only stage experience was in a trio of high school musicals. But he’d wanted to be a star since he was a little boy, and he’s not a believer in self-doubt. “Why say I can’t?” he thought. “Maybe I can.”Frost pleaded for a day to prepare, and then he taped a video to send to the show’s producers. It was good enough that they asked him to come to New York so they could see him in person. They liked what they saw.Now Frost, at 22, is on Broadway, drawing ovations nightly in the title role of “MJ,” a biomusical exploring Jackson’s creative process by imagining the final days of rehearsals for the “Dangerous” concert tour. The effect is uncanny: Although Frost insists he is not doing an impersonation, audiences describe feeling as if they are at a Michael Jackson concert.“You feel the excitement of discovery — one of the reasons we go to the theater — as you watch the electrifying Broadway debut by Myles Frost as Jackson,” Don Aucoin, the Boston Globe critic, wrote.Adrienne Warren, who won a Tony last year for playing Tina Turner, said on Instagram, “I have never seen anything like that on a Broadway stage … and I know the COST of THAT performance.”That performance made Frost a Tony nominee this month in the best leading actor in a musical category. He’ll face off against a pair of megawatt stars, Hugh Jackman (“The Music Man”) and Billy Crystal (“Mr. Saturday Night”), as well as Rob McClure (“Mrs. Doubtfire”) and Jaquel Spivey (“A Strange Loop”). “It’s beyond insane,” Frost said, still marveling a few days after learning of his nomination.“Billie Jean” performed by Myles FrostListen to Myles Frost, the Tony-nominated star of the Broadway musical “MJ,” sing one of Michael Jackson’s biggest hits. Audio from “MJ the Musical Original Broadway Cast Recording” (Sony Music).The history of Broadway is replete with stories of stars who seem to appear out of nowhere. Still, Frost’s arrival is remarkable, given that Broadway wasn’t on his radar screen: He had never been in a professional stage production. He had only ever seen one Broadway show (“Cinderella,” when Keke Palmer and NeNe Leakes cycled in to the cast). And he was not aware that a Michael Jackson musical was in development.In a stroke of luck, or fate, or divine providence — choose your adventure — during the pandemic he signed up for online acting classes with Lelund Durond Thompson, who happens to be the life partner of Jason Michael Webb, the musical director for “MJ.” Thompson found the “Billie Jean” video, and urged Webb to take a look. “It was meant to be,” Thompson said.The 2022 Tony AwardsThis year’s awards, which will be given out on June 12, are the first to recognize shows that opened following the long pandemic shutdown of Broadway’s theaters. Season in Review: Thirty-four productions braved the pandemic to open under the most onerous conditions. Game of Survival: During a time unlike any other, productions showed their resourcefulness while learning how to live with Covid. A Tony Nominee: The actress LaChanze received her first nomination for best leading actress for her portrayal of Wiletta Mayer in “Trouble in Mind.” The Missing Category: This Covid-stalked Broadway season has made clear that a prize for best ensemble should be added, our critic writes.It was the spring of 2021, and the production was in a bind: Ephraim Sykes, the experienced actor who had led the cast through much of the grueling development process, had departed for a film opportunity.“After Ephraim left us, we were in a bit of a spiral, to be perfectly honest, because it was quite late, and casting a Michael Jackson is not a particularly easy gig,” said Christopher Wheeldon, the musical’s director and choreographer. “We were all a bit panicked, and we saw a few people, and no one was working out.”Then came Frost, invited to audition as the production widened its search. “He very sweetly walked up to the table and said, ‘My name is Myles Frost, and I’m auditioning for the role of Michael Jackson,’ which was so endearing because it seemed like something he wasn’t used to doing,” Wheeldon said. “And his résumé was very, very short. When you see that on the page, you don’t want to discount someone, but this was going to be a project, for sure.”Myles Frost, foreground, stars as Michael Jackson in “MJ,” a biomusical that imagines the final days of rehearsals for the “Dangerous” concert tour.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFrost slipped on a fedora — yes, he brought a fedora — to dance “Billie Jean,” and when the production accidentally started playing the wrong song (“Beat It”), Wheeldon watched as Frost waited, frozen, in the back of the studio.“He stayed absolutely still — didn’t move a muscle — and I thought, ‘This is going to be interesting. This kid’s in the zone,’” Wheeldon said. “Then we found the right music, and he started to dance. It was very baggy — it wasn’t crisp — but you could see that he had an innate groove, and a natural understanding of the Michael vocabulary. And then when he sang ‘Stranger in Moscow,’ there was so much pain and power and grit in his voice that we all, instantly, sat forward.”Frost remembers that day, too, mostly because it was shaping up badly. The day before, he had cut short a practice session with Thompson, citing an allergic reaction to dust in the studio; he took a Benadryl, a Zyrtec and a shower, and fell asleep. When he arrived for the audition, he let instinct take over.“I closed my eyes, got into myself a little bit more, and when the music started, I did the thing,” he said. “My body felt like it had done it before. That feeling — this is deeper than music, this is deeper than acting itself, this is deeper than the show. This is a type of energy and a type of magic that comes over you.”Wheeldon viewed Frost as a godsend but also a gamble. “There was so much raw gift — more gift than I’ve maybe ever seen in one human being in a first audition,” Wheeldon said. But, also, “along with that came all of our fears: What if he doesn’t put in the work? What if he can’t put in the work?”The production offered Frost the role. He accepted.“It’s one of those things where it just kind of feels like the stars align a little bit,” Frost said, “and you get that call and it’s in the palm of your hands to either take and embrace or to drop, and I decided to take it and embrace it.”“MJ,” of course, is not just any jukebox musical. It’s about one of the biggest pop artists in American history, but one whose legacy has been tarnished by allegations that he sexually abused children. The show, with a book by Lynn Nottage, the two-time Pulitzer-winning playwright, is set in 1992, before the allegations became public, and does not address that issue, which has prompted criticism from leading theater reviewers. But thus far, the show’s box office is healthy — in recent weeks “MJ” has been among the top-grossing productions on Broadway. It picked up 10 Tony nominations, including one for best musical, and its producers, who include the Michael Jackson Estate, are planning to add a North American tour next year.Frost, during a pair of conversations about the show, was patient with questions about the allegations, but also chose his words carefully — taking a deep breath before answering, pausing often between thoughts — and made it clear that he would not be baited or badgered into expressing a position on whether Jackson was an abuser.“I believe everybody is entitled to their truth and to what they believe,” he said. “I don’t judge.”He said he believes the best thing he can do is focus on delivering the performance envisioned by the show’s creators. And what is that vision? “This show is about drive, this show is about understanding, this show is about faith,” he said, “and it’s about clinging on to the light at the end of the tunnel despite the darkness that’s surrounding you.”“I’m seeing the fruits of my labor, people saying, ‘I felt like I was watching Michael Jackson,’” Frost said. “That’s all I can ask for as an artist — that people leave with something warm and magical.”Donavon Smallwood for The New York Times“My responsibility, and my job, is to focus on the creative process of Michael,” he added. “People come here every day with different opinions and different feelings about Michael. It’s not my job to persuade or convince them of anything, but what I do want them to do is have a better understanding of the things that he had to go through — whether it’s financial or emotional — to put this tour together, because nobody can deny, and this is the bottom line, the impact that he has had on culture and on music.”In conversation, Frost is warm and gracious (he loves the words “humbled” and “blessed”), but also soft-spoken and measured, with a relentless positivity and an all-things-are-possible way of talking about his career. (“I want to be bigger than Michael Jackson,” he said. “Why not? Why would I limit myself?”)Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Nominated for 11 Tonys as Broadway Lauds Comeback

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      “The Lehman Trilogy,” as well as revivals of “Company” and “For Colored Girls,” led in their respective categories as the industry tries to recover from the long pandemic shutdown.A musical about making art and a play about making money dominated the Tony Awards nominations Monday, as Broadway sought to celebrate its best work and revive its fortunes after the lengthy and damaging coronavirus shutdown.The race for best musical — traditionally the most financially beneficial prize — turned into an unexpectedly broad six-way contest because the nominators were so closely divided they had to expand the number of nominees.Out of the gate, the front-runner is “A Strange Loop,” a meta-musical in which a composer who is Black and gay battles demons and doubts while trying to write a show. Even before arriving on Broadway, the show, written by Michael R. Jackson, had won the Pulitzer Prize in drama after an Off Broadway production at Playwrights Horizons; it opened on Broadway late last month to some of the strongest reviews for any new musical this season, and on Monday it picked up 11 Tony nominations, the most for any show.“I feel really grateful, and I feel validated for putting in all the years and all the hours,” Jackson said after learning the news. “It feels amazing to know better things are possible.”“MJ,” a jukebox musical about Michael Jackson, was nominated for 10 Tonys. Myles Frost, center, was nominated for best actor in a musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesScoring the most nominations is not always predictive of winning the prize, and “A Strange Loop,” which is adventurous in form and content, will face tough competition from “MJ,” a biographical jukebox musical about Michael Jackson; “Six,” a fan favorite about the wives of Henry VIII; “Girl From the North Country,” which combines the songs of Bob Dylan with a fictional story about a boardinghouse in the Minnesota city where Dylan was born; “Mr. Saturday Night,” about a washed-up comedian hungering for a comeback; and “Paradise Square,” about a turning point in race relations in 19th-century New York.Both “Paradise Square,” which picked up 10 nominations, and “Girl From the North Country,” with seven, have struggled at the box office, and will now hope that their multiple Tony nominations will help reverse their financial fortunes. For “MJ,” its 10 nods are a form of vindication after several influential reviewers criticized the show for sidestepping sexual abuse allegations against the pop star.“The Lehman Trilogy,” which arrived on Broadway with an enormous — albeit pandemic-delayed — head of steam following rapturously reviewed productions in London and Off Broadway, picked up eight nominations to dominate the best play category. The play, which follows the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers, was written by Stefano Massini and Ben Power, and featured a dazzling production centered on a rotating glass box designed by Es Devlin. All three of its leads — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester — were nominated for best actor.“The Lehman Trilogy” was nominated for 8 Tonys, including best play. All three of its leads — from left, Adam Godley, Simon Russell Beale and Adrian Lester — were nominated for best actor in a play.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Lehman Trilogy” vies with four other dramas for best play. Among them are two dark comedies — “Clyde’s,” by Lynn Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer winner who was also nominated for writing the book for “MJ,” and “Hangmen,” by Martin McDonagh, an acclaimed British-Irish playwright who has now been nominated five times but has yet to win. The other contenders are “Skeleton Crew,” Dominique Morisseau’s play about factory workers at an automotive plant facing shutdown, and “The Minutes,” Tracy Letts’s look at the unsettling secrets of a small-town governing body.The Tony Awards, which honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway, are an annual celebration for American theater, but they are particularly important now as a potential marketing tool for an industry that is still grossing less, and selling fewer tickets, than it was before the pandemic forced theaters to close for a year and a half. The awards are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing.“This Tony Awards will mean so much more than honoring the performances and the artistic work that’s been done this season — it’s also celebrating the resilience of the community, and that this much work is being done and being seen,” said Rob McClure, an actor who scored a Tony nomination (his second) for his comedic and chameleonic performance in the title role of “Mrs. Doubtfire.”Billy Crystal was nominated for best actor in a musical for his performance in “Mr. Saturday Night,” based on his 1992 film. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWell known performers scoring nominations included Uzo Aduba, Billy Crystal, Rachel Dratch, Hugh Jackman, Ruth Negga, Mary-Louise Parker, Patti LuPone, Phylicia Rashad and Sam Rockwell. But several other big stars now working on Broadway were overlooked by nominators, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Laurence Fishburne and Daniel Craig, as well as Beanie Feldstein, starring in “Funny Girl” but unable to escape the long shadow of Barbra Streisand.This season saw an unusually large number of works by Black writers, and that created more opportunity for Black performers, directors, and designers, some of whom were nominated for Tonys. Among them are two performers new to Broadway, Jaquel Spivey, the star of “A Strange Loop,” and Myles Frost, the star of “MJ,” now facing off against Crystal, Jackman and McClure in the leading actor in a musical category.“Black playwrights have had an amazing presence this season, and I hope that continues,” said Camille A. Brown, who scored two nominations Monday, for directing and choreographing the revival of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf.” Reflecting on her own show, she said, “Having seven Black women on a Broadway stage has a lot of meaning, and speaks to the importance of sisterhood and love and Black women holding space for one another.”“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf” was nominated for seven Tonys, including for best revival of a play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe seven Tony nominations for “For Colored Girls” are a bittersweet triumph for a production that has been languishing at the box office and had already announced an early closing date. The revival picked up more nominations than any other show in the race for best play revival, a strong category in which many eligible shows won positive reviews.It will now face off against four others: “American Buffalo,” David Mamet’s drama about a trio of scheming junk-shop denizens and “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s look at homophobia in baseball, as well as two plays that had never previously made it to Broadway despite being considered important parts of the playwriting canon, “Trouble in Mind,” Alice Childress’s look at racism in theater; and “How I Learned to Drive,” Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer-winning drama about child sexual abuse.The competition for best musical revival is small, but strong. There were four eligible shows, and only three scored nods: “Company,” “Caroline, or Change,” and “The Music Man.” Excluded was the revival of “Funny Girl” which fared poorly with critics, but has been doing fine at the box office.“Company,” the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, was nominated for 9 Tony awards, including best revival of a musical. Patti LuPone, a nominee at left, performed with Katrina Lenk. Matthew Murphy/O & M Co./DKC, via Associated PressThe nine nods for “Company” pack an especially emotional punch because its composer and lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, died soon after attending the first post-shutdown preview. “The longer he’s not with us, the more I miss him,” said LuPone, who picked up her eighth Tony nomination — she’s won twice — for her work in the production.The nominations were chosen by a group of 29 people, most of whom work in the theater industry but are not financially connected to any of the eligible productions, who saw all eligible shows and voted last Friday. There were 34 eligible shows, 29 of which scored nominations; the five left out were all new plays.Up next: a group of 650 voters, including producers and performers and many others with an interest in the nominated productions, have until June 10 to vote for their favorites, and the winners will be announced at a ceremony on June 12. The ceremony, at Radio City Music Hall, is to be hosted by Ariana DeBose; the first hour will be streamed on Paramount+, followed by three hours broadcast by CBS.Broadway’s grosses are down in part because tourism remains down in New York City, and in part because of ongoing concerns about the coronavirus. Many of the nominees interviewed Monday said they hoped the spotlight of the Tony Awards would lure more patrons back to Broadway.“Anyone that’s doing theater right now has been hit really hard by the pandemic,” said Marianne Elliott, a two-time Tony-winning director who scored another nomination for “Company.” “It’s gratifying to see that Broadway is coming back. To have the Tony nominations for all of these shows is just a celebration of what we do, and it’s lovely to be here.” More

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      ‘MJ’ Review: Michael Jackson Musical Won’t Look in the Mirror

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      A new jukebox musical tells the story of Michael Jackson. Except for the big story.“There are a lot of strange stories making the rounds,” says a documentary filmmaker interviewing Michael Jackson.Understate much?Michael Jackson was such a magnet for strange stories that they nearly obliterated his gift. Yet in defensively brushing off the ones that don’t matter while pointedly ignoring the one that does, the new musical “MJ,” which opened on Tuesday at the Neil Simon Theater, may be the strangest Michael Jackson story yet.Not all strangeness is bad, of course, and within the confines of the biographical jukebox genre, “MJ,” with a book by Lynn Nottage, is actually pretty good — for a while. Directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, whose ballet background has found a natural outlet in dance musicals like “An American in Paris,” the show starts with confidence and verve in a natural setting: the rehearsal room. There, Jackson, along with his dancers, backup singers and band, is in the final stages of preparation for his 1992 Dangerous tour, a four-continent, 15-month marathon.That framing means that our first look at the musical’s version of Jackson is as a man at work, without the distraction of Bubbles the chimp, the Elephant Man bones, the hyperbaric chamber, the fading skin color, the disappearing nose — or the accusations of pedophilia that would begin to emerge a year later, at first in tabloids and then in lawsuits and eventually in police investigations.As such, we get the joy of discovery, both of Jackson before the fall and of Myles Frost, a real find in the role. Singing “Beat It” as he enters, Frost offers not just a willowy simulacrum of the star in perfect copies (by the designer Paul Tazewell) of his classic regalia — black jacket, gold brocade, tilted fedora, white socks scrunched to the ankles — but an eerie mimicry of his mannerisms. The breathy voice; the head-down, eyes-up gaze; the interjectory squeals and yelps: Frost has them down cold.Perhaps too cold. Absent any deeper revelation of the singer’s character, Frost’s performance of the songs — which include MTV-era chartbusters like “Bad,” “Billie Jean,” “Man in the Mirror” and “Thriller” as well as less-familiar numbers — soon begins to seem animatronic, as if he were created by Disney imagineers. It doesn’t help that there are so many of them; 37 titles are listed in the program, some barely one-verse samples.But Wheeldon’s choreography — performed by Frost along with a superb if amazingly jacked ensemble — remains compelling longer, offering a three-dimensional version of what most of us have seen only from distant arena seats or in dark videos on depthless screens. (The show’s “Michael Jackson movement” is credited to two additional choreographers, Rich + Tone Talauega.) The stage patterns are far more varied and expressive than in similar musicals, scoring points without words as they deliver the thrills and, following the biomusical road map, pave the way between present and past.Christian Wilson as the preteen Michael and Ayana George as his mother, Katherine, in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTake the sequence in which the Jackson 5 makes a smash appearance singing “ABC” at an Apollo Theater amateur night in 1969. Seamlessly Wheeldon swirls the giddy brothers from the stage to a scene of celebration in their hotel room, at least until their perfectionist father (Quentin Earl Darrington) demands, with the warmth of a cult leader, that despite their exhaustion they rehearse into the night. When the preteen Michael (Christian Wilson at the performance I saw) stands up to him and gets slapped so hard he falls to the floor, his mother (Ayana George) comforts him by singing “I’ll Be There” as he goes to bed.What Katherine Jackson’s responsibility might have been, besides providing a lullaby, is not considered; she is still alive. In any case, after all this, Wheeldon returns us to the 1992 rehearsal room with a trenchant gesture: The dancers pull the linens away to reveal the bed as a bunch of tour trunks.Jackson’s was undoubtedly a hard childhood. Though Nottage uses clichés from the jukebox playbook to dramatize that story — including an interviewer to prompt the reminiscences (Whitney Bashor) and three actors to divvy up the role at different ages (Tavon Olds-Sample is delightful as the teenage Michael) — she does so crisply and in a format that makes it seem almost natural. Having members of the 1992 entourage take all the supporting roles in the flashback scenes is both efficient and convincing.But the tale is mostly humorless, a problem not alleviated by Jackson’s occasional impish antics (he shoots a water pistol at his business manager) or the constant underlining of the emotional argument. (“You sang that song like you’ve been living with heartbreak all of your life,” Berry Gordy tells the preteen Michael after he performs “I Want You Back.”) As the joys of the early scenes begin to fade, “MJ” settles for baldly providing, in the relatively small space allotted to words, an avalanche of astonishing and sorrowful facts.Which is why the absence of the biggest one is so jarring.In agreeing to write what is essentially an authorized biography — the show has been produced “by special arrangement with the Michael Jackson estate” — Nottage apparently made a compromise: She would note his minor oddities while avoiding the most troubling accusations against him. Even so, there are pat explanations for every peccadillo, from the plastic surgeries (“This is Hollywood,” Jackson says. “Who hasn’t gotten a new nose?”) to the hyperbaric chamber (“I started that rumor. I thought it would be funny”). His father’s viciousness is likewise given a gloss coat of justification: “My hand ain’t nearly as heavy as the world’s gonna be on your Black ass if you step outta line,” he says.Frost, center, amid the zombies, in “Thriller.” Nearly 40 songs are listed in the program, including his biggest hits.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn this, “MJ” is trying to have it both ways. It wants to blame everything sad and weird about Jackson on others (especially the press, who are equated with the zombies in “Thriller”) but credit him alone for his every good deed and success. Acknowledgment of the choreographers and songwriters he collaborated with is mostly saved for the program.This defensiveness, constantly asserting his genius as if it were in question, eventually becomes dulling, like any act of bad faith. And so as the show, anticipating its star’s trajectory, disintegrates in the second half, the pleasure that compensated for its inherent ickiness can no longer do the job. “MJ” becomes a grind of obfuscation, a case of willfully not looking at the man in the mirror.Would it have been possible to make this musical otherwise? Could you successfully market as a family-friendly Broadway extravaganza a show whose main character, though never convicted of a crime, settles two sexual abuse cases out of court and dies before two others are dismissed because the statute of limitations has run out?Unlikely — and perhaps you could argue that Broadway is not in any case the place to interrogate such questions. Musicals based on real people have always elided their worst traits. Even that fascist enabler Eva Perón was sugarcoated and sanctified. Of course, her estate did not have a “special arrangement” with the producers of “Evita.”Ultimately, the problem with “MJ” is not its ethical stance but the way that stance distorts its value as entertainment. Even the combined power of Jackson’s material and Wheeldon’s reanimation of it cannot make up for the emptiness at its center; we cannot understand or accept the main character if he’s deliberately kept from us.A line from “Man in the Mirror” applies here as well: “If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make a change.” What “MJ” needed was either a lot more time to pass before daring to mount it — or a different, deeper, more considered main character.MJAt the Neil Simon Theater, Manhattan; mjthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      After ‘Clyde’s,’ Lynn Nottage Just Has Two Shows Onstage. ‘Whew!’

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      With one play closed, Nottage can focus on “MJ” on Broadway and “Intimate Apparel” at Lincoln Center Theater. And maybe even catch her breath.It was just a flute of champagne after Sunday’s final Broadway performance of her play “Clyde’s,” but Lynn Nottage was genuinely happy to have it — not only to toast the end of the limited run with the rest of the company, upstairs at the Hayes Theater, but also to sneak a brief, rare moment of indulgence in a schedule that’s lately been too crammed for a glass of wine.Starring Uzo Aduba as the owner of a sandwich shop staffed with people who have served time, and Ron Cephas Jones as a culinary artist who leads the workers in a quest for the perfect sandwich, “Clyde’s” started a remarkable season for Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. For four days this month, until “Clyde’s” closed, she had three new shows onstage in New York; the others, still in previews, are the Broadway musical “MJ,” about Michael Jackson, and the opera “Intimate Apparel,” adapted from her play of the same name, at Lincoln Center Theater.For months she shuttled among them, dashing back to “Clyde’s” for talkbacks and to catch performances when understudies went on. All while teaching full time at Columbia University and, in October, releasing the short film “Takeover,” produced by her company Market Road Films, for the Op-Docs series of The New York Times.Nottage shares a toast with actors and staff after the final performance of “Clyde’s” at the Hayes Theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter the champagne toast on Sunday evening, Nottage came downstairs for an interview in a lounge at the theater to talk about her season and about “Clyde’s,” which she called “Floyd’s” when it had its premiere in Minneapolis in 2019, and renamed following the killing of George Floyd in 2020. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.So how are you?I’m very overworked. [laughs] I was just describing this particular moment as like making art in the eye of a hurricane.You’ve decided to make a lot of art in the eye of a hurricane.It’s a lot of art, yeah. It’s the moment in which I was invited to make art, but it’s also the most difficult, fraught, complicated moment in theater history. It would be stressful, you know, making three shows without the added element of Covid. But add that sort of special ingredient, and it’s very complicated.Are you getting the time to savor this?I started rehearsal in October for both shows, “MJ” and “Clyde’s.” From October to December, I was rehearsing and teching and seeing the shows at night, and teaching full time at Columbia. I did not have a single day off. And then in mid-December, we began rehearsals for “Intimate Apparel.” But strangely, in the Covid shutdown, when for 10 days we didn’t have “MJ” going, I suddenly had just a little bit of a pause. I could breathe.Is there joy in it?This is the dream. I feel immensely proud of all three of the works of art that I have created. They’re so different and they represent different aspects of who I am as an artist in different parts of my brain. Part of the joy of making all three of these pieces of art at the same time is that it allows me to leave one space and enter another completely different space and then, you know, leave that space and enter another one. And so I never get bored.A curtain call, from left, with Edmund Donovan, Ron Cephas Jones, Uzo Aduba, Kara Young and Reza Salazar.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Clyde’s” is a comedy.It is a comedy. It’s also a feel-good play. And particularly at this moment I think that audiences need something that is healing and soothing, and that allows them to open up their hearts and allow laughter in. And that’s what I was hoping to do.It was a long journey with this play, yes?It doesn’t seem like a super long journey to me. This journey was just interrupted because of world circumstances. We’ve been through a lot. The world changed in ways that now seem incomprehensible to me. I mean, I kind of can’t believe that we lived through it. I’ll be an old lady with my grandchildren, like: “Yes, let me tell you about Covid and Donald Trump.” [laughs] You know, it’s sort of similar when I think about my grandmother talking about the Depression and the war, and it just seemed like, “How did you survive?” Now I know.Did you think that when you finally got to do “Clyde’s,” we would be out of the pandemic?I think all of us thought that. There was a moment of incredible optimism. And still, when we began “Clyde’s,” we had all of the Covid protocols in place and the Covid officer, and we wore masks throughout rehearsals and the actors were permitted to take off the masks on the stage. And that felt like a victory, like, OK, we’re moving through this difficult moment. And audiences were coming back and you’d walk through this theater district and it felt vibrant and alive. And you know, there were sprinklings of tourists, and restaurants were packed. You couldn’t get reservations.I think that something like “Clyde’s” in any other climate would have been a hit, and it would have continued to run. We always had a limited run, and we ran through that period of time. But I think that any other time, we could have kept going. It just kind of breaks my heart to make something that I feel is connecting with audiences in a moment in which audiences feel reluctant to come to theater. But for us, I think one of the real positive notes is that we were able to simulcast.Nottage strolls with Kate Whoriskey, right, the director of “Clyde’s.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTell me about that.We became sort of the beta test for Broadway. Like, can this concept work? Can you do live theater that’s projected into people’s living rooms and people actually tune in and have an experience? And what we discovered is, yes. So many people who were either fearful to come to the theater, or had Covid and couldn’t come to the theater, bought tickets and had an experience that wasn’t live in the fact that their bodies were in the theater and they were exchanging energy with the actors, but it still had the kind of spontaneity, because they didn’t know what was going to happen. I think it’s going to be an interesting bonanza for theater.How different is your experience of this season from a normal season?Under normal circumstances, after shows you go out for drinks with people. There’s a real sense of community. You see people from other shows. You feel really very much part of a season. But here, every show is an island because of Covid. People do the show and they go home.Where did you get your work ethic?It’s fear. It’s fear that it may all go away. There was a moment in my life in which my father had an accident which didn’t permit him to work, and my mother, who was a schoolteacher, suddenly had to support the entire family. And I saw how hard she worked and I thought, Oh my God, that could happen to me. You know, that any moment your circumstances can change. And you find yourself in dire straits. And I thought, OK, I’m just not going to let that happen.How old were you then?I was maybe 11 or 12.By now, the fear can’t be about being in dire straits. Can it really?Yeah, I mean, it’s not rational. [laughs] It just is a fact.But I’ve always worked. This is why I think I write about working people — that’s what I do.Nottage leaves a message on the wall at the Hayes Theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSo now that you’ll be slacking with just two shows in previews —With just two shows, it’s like, whew! But teaching begins again next week. And they want us to teach remotely, and I have a class that’s not a remote class. It really is about being immersed in experiences. I’m like, what am I going to do?I have to figure it out, but I don’t have time to figure it out. I’m like, OK, tomorrow morning I will wake up and from 7 to 8:30, I’ll figure it out. More

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      Michael Jackson Musical Turns Down Volume on Abuse Allegations

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      The Broadway musical, “MJ,” with a book by Lynn Nottage and directed by Christopher Wheeldon, began previews Monday.A biographical Michael Jackson musical began previews on Broadway this week with a big budget, a huge fan base, and a looming question: How would the show grapple with allegations that the pop singer molested children?The answer: It doesn’t.The musical, for which Jackson’s estate is one of the lead producers, is set in 1992, the year before the singer was first publicly accused of abuse.The show, titled “MJ,” depicts Jackson at the top of his game — the King of Pop, with astonishing gifts as a singer and dancer — but also suggests that he was facing financial woes (mortgaging Neverland), was overly reliant on painkillers (he was prescribed Demerol after he was burned while filming a Pepsi ad), had considerable emotional baggage from his upbringing (his father is shown hitting him), and was besieged by reporters fixated on everything but his artistry (remember Bubbles, his pet chimpanzee?).The show, with a book by the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, and direction by the acclaimed choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, has a long preview period ahead: it isn’t scheduled to open until Feb. 1, and the creative team can continue to revise and refine the show until then.But Monday night’s sold-out first preview offered a glimpse of the show’s structure, and indicated that the team has opted to stick to its initial plan, hatched years ago, to focus on Jackson’s genius, and to showcase his hit-rich song catalog. The musical takes place over two days inside a Los Angeles rehearsal studio, where a driven Jackson is in the final stages of rehearsing for his “Dangerous” world tour.The show, capitalized for up to $22.5 million, offers context for Jackson’s creative choices through flashbacks to earlier chapters of his career, most of them prompted by questions from a documentary filmmaker who says she wants to observe Jackson’s process but turns out to be more interested in signs of trouble.Flashbacks to earlier chapters of Jackson’s career are prompted by questions from a documentary filmmaker played by Whitney Bashor, shown with Frost.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe musical was announced in the spring of 2018, with a projected arrival on Broadway in 2020. But seven months later, a documentary called “Leaving Neverland” premiered at Sundance, bringing renewed attention to allegations, denied by Jackson when he was alive and by his estate since his death, that Jackson had sexually abused children. (The men featured in the documentary declined, through a spokesman, to comment on the musical.)Shortly after the documentary was first aired, the production canceled a planned pre-Broadway run in Chicago, citing labor woes, and later the musical’s name was changed, from a potentially problematic “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” to the simpler “MJ.” When the Chicago run was scrapped, the producing team, led by Lia Vollack, announced a plan to bring it to Broadway in the summer of 2020, but then the coronavirus pandemic shut down Broadway. So the show is just getting underway now.In an interview in April 2019, a month after HBO released the documentary, Nottage and Wheeldon said they remained committed to the project, but were still processing their reactions to the documentary. Neither would say whether they believed Jackson was a child molester, and both said they did not see adjudicating that question as their role.“This is obviously challenging — it makes this not without its complications, for sure — but part of what we do as artists is we respond to complexity,” Wheeldon said. He added: “We’re sensitive to what’s going on and we’ll see whether it works into the show or not. But the primary focus of our show has always been focusing on Michael’s creative process.”Nottage said she aspired to craft “a musical that everyone can come to, regardless of how they feel about Michael Jackson.”“I see the artwork that we’re making as a way to more deeply understand Michael Jackson and process feelings,” she said, “and ultimately that’s what theater can do.”On Tuesday, asked about the show’s narrative choices, Rick Miramontez, a spokesman for the musical, noted that Jackson remains “a global cultural icon,” and said, “The producers hope the work, performance, and storytelling of the show’s talented Broadway creators, who have collaborated on this production since 2016, will make a valuable contribution to the continuing examination of the artistry, creativity and music of one of the most controversial and consequential artists of the modern era.”The musical, which currently features a whopping 37 songs (some performed in their entirety, and others as excerpts), has one reference to concerns about Jackson’s closeness to children, when one of the singer’s managers asks another employee “Who the hell is this family he wants to bring on tour?”And then, during a news conference, as reporters pelt Jackson with questions about his surgeries, his skin color, and so on, one asks “What do you have to say about the recent allegations that you —” without finishing the thought.The packed house — in the Neil Simon Theater, which seats 1,445 people — was rapturous, with audience members leaping to their feet after “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” and “Thriller” and loudly cheering for familiar songs as well as costume elements (the glove!).Some ticketholders were dressed in outfits made famous by Jackson — there were more than a few “Thriller” cosplayers — or in Jackson concert T-shirts; as the show ended, a toddler danced ecstatically in the orchestra aisle. Miramontez said the attendees came from as far as Hawaii, Croatia and parts of Asia to see the show.“I’ve loved Michael Jackson since I was a little girl — his music has always been so inspirational,” said Jerrell Sablan, a 38-year-old from Jersey City, who wore a shirtdress she had fashioned out of a 4XL men’s T-shirt featuring images of Jackson at various stages of his career.Her husband, Will Griffith, 43, was in a full-body candy-apple-red “Thriller” costume. “Like her, I grew up with the music. She saw one of the first ads on the subway, and we went home that day and bought tickets.” What about Jackson’s tarnished reputation? “I mean, it’s not great,” Griffith said. “But I can separate his music from the allegations.” More