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    Review: In ‘(pray),’ Nourish Thyself With Song and Dance

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    An exploration of how faith intersects with Black womanhood, through a mix of music, movement, ritual and poetry.“Is this a church?,” a character wonders in nicHi douglas’s “(pray).”The Greenwich House Theater, where this production by Ars Nova and National Black Theater recently opened, certainly looks like a church, complete with (fake) stained-glass windows rrffand seating arranged like rows of pews.But it would be reductive to say “(pray)” is any one thing, because this transcendent, paradoxical work — what douglas calls “a sacred offering” — exists both within a Christian tradition and outside any religious institution. It’s a holy communion of musical interludes, movement, poems, rituals and critical theory investigating how faith intersects with Black womanhood.Upon entering the theater, audience members are asked to don disposable shoe covers as nine Black women alternate between shuffling down the aisles in matching powder-blue church ensembles and fanning themselves while sitting among the audience.They are all called Sister Anna Bertha, because they are variations on the stereotype of the sassy, overdressed Black church lady (playful costume design by DeShon Elem).Over 75 minutes, these women run through a 17-part liturgy accompanied by a pianist (Darnell White) and singer (S T A R R Busby, whose resonant voice leads the joyous gospel numbers). At one corner of this church stands a partially obscured forest. A silent spirit in white occasionally dances out from this surreal fantasy space (scenic design by dots), flitting around in fluid swells of movement. This is the Ancestor (Satori Folkes-Stone, magnetic), who also performs offstage rituals as part of the service. Another young woman, called Free (a less graceful Amara Granderson), is the one wondering whether this is a church, and if she even belongs here.Like “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” by Aleshea Harris, “(pray),” which douglas has nimbly written, choreographed and directed, is theater that demands the audience step into a shared experience of Blackness. In these experimental works, theater begins and ends in community.Thus, douglas’s script aims to make faith more accessible via coy translations: “ghost” becomes “most,” for example, and “hallelujah” is “yahleloo.” The similar sounding words with the music (composed by Busby and JJJJJerome Ellis) trick the ear into fluency, so that a prayer that says “O, abundance! May I meet you. May I know you,” feels as true and traditional as, say, the Apostles’ Creed.The Sisters deliver improvised gossip and judgmental comments, sometimes, hilariously, at the audience’s expense. The cohesiveness of their vocals and group movements (a stunning mélange of styles, including hip-hop and Afro-Cuban) recalls the deft cast of performers in Ars Nova’s 2022 hit by Heather Christian, “Oratorio for Living Things.” Each Sister sings with her own textured affect, so the psalms they perform feel creased, pleated or smoothed over like fabric. Tina Fabrique’s elastic bellows electrify “A Song (For to Ease My Troubled Mind).” Another Sister Anna (Ariel Kayla Blackwood) spits Noname lyrics atop a muscular beat. (Mikaal Sulaiman’s ethereal sound design lifts the voices higher.)A whole syllabus of thinkers and artists have inspired (and are referenced in) douglas’s script, including the poets Tyehimba Jess and Raych Jackson. But douglas’s writing sometimes pales in comparison, lacking the same polish and panache. And there are some missed notes: “(pray)” feels more anchored within the distant and recent past, lacking firmer context in the present, and despite the production’s inclusive language around gender, queerness is only occasionally alluded to. The history of race-based attacks on Black churches, like the 1963 Birmingham bombing and the 2015 Charleston shooting, is artfully hinted at with the haunting sound of a helicopter overhead, but feels like a footnote.So the question remains: Is this a church? Well, “(pray)” offers a congregation of believers in God but, more essentially, in the sanctity of Black women. So, let’s call this a house of song and praise — yahleloo.(pray)Through Oct. 28 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan. arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      They Invited Shakespeare to the Cookout. They Got ‘Fat Ham.’

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      The playwright James Ijames and the director Saheem Ali built a “Hamlet”-inspired play, opening in April on Broadway, around their artistic friendship.When James Ijames and Saheem Ali, the playwright and director of the Broadway-bound Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fat Ham,” talk about their projects, they do so in the kind of shorthand of longtime friends: incomplete sentences, phrases punctuated with laughs and a whole vocabulary of glances.It’s a frigid February day, and they have settled into a booth at the Library restaurant at the Public Theater. Ijames is a bit guarded — speaking carefully, his posture showing a certain reserve. Ali radiates energy — beaming as he listens to Ijames, occasionally tapping him on the arm in excitement.“We’re always, always, always ideating, always brainstorming,” Ali said. “It’s kind of wonderful.”Ijames gently contradicts Ali: “Yeah, I am not thinking about anything else.”“You just sent me a new draft —” Ali starts.“That was a while ago!” Ijames protests.“It was like two weeks ago!” Ali insists. Both of them crack up.The back-and-forth is a hallmark of the creative partnership that now finds them preparing to make their Broadway debuts with “Fat Ham,” a co-production of the National Black Theater and the Public Theater. When the show opens at the American Airlines Theater on April 12, it will be the first National Black Theater production to appear on Broadway and the only work by a Black playwright on Broadway this spring.“I remember we announced that we’re coming and then the climate really kind of shifted after that,” said Ali, 44, acutely aware of the commercial pressures that have left new stories by Black playwrights struggling to find staying power on Broadway. “What are we walking into?”A riff on “Hamlet” in the form of a Black family gathering in North Carolina, the story follows a college student named Juicy, who is stuck at a barbecue that doubles as a wedding celebration for his mother, Tedra, and her new husband, Rev, a pit master and the brother of Tedra’s recently deceased ex-husband. Juicy’s the sullen outcast; he’s gay, emotionally aware, intellectual and not the embodiment of Black manhood that Rev expects him to be. When the ghost of Juicy’s father appears, demanding Juicy avenge his wrongful killing at his brother’s hand, the “Hamlet” story commences.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The show’s world premiere, a filmed production for the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, was streamed digitally in 2021, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The play then had a critically acclaimed Off Broadway run in 2022 at the Public Theater. Just weeks before opening, it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Ijames, 42, who grew up in North Carolina and lives in Philadelphia, where he is the co-artistic director of the Wilma, is known for his examinations of Blackness and how it has been shaped by our nation’s prejudices. He strikes right at the foundations, often drawing on what are now viewed as the hypocrisies of the heroes of U.S. history like Thomas Jefferson (in “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever”) and George and Martha Washington (in “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington”).Ijames’s first play for the National Black Theater, 2017’s “Kill Move Paradise,” imagines a waiting room in the afterlife where four young Black men are trying to understand their deaths.“He’s helping create a visible space for us to bear witness to the trauma, the pain, the amount of lost bodies, but also the amount of hope,” said Jonathan McCrory, the National Black Theater’s executive artistic director. “We needed that. We needed someone to help us rethink and re-articulate the space in which our grief was amalgamating.”It was also the show that brought Ijames and Ali together. Ali, who has since directed Jocelyn Bioh’s “Merry Wives” and a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s classic “Fires in the Mirror,” had attended a table read in 2016. Ijames remembers being drawn to how Ali spoke about the text and interacted with the actors.They didn’t have much face time beyond that first meeting, though Ijames and Ali texted and called each other. (“This was before Zoom” became popular, Ijames noted.) Opening night was the first time Ijames saw Ali’s staging of his work. He loved it, but decided that in the future he didn’t want to miss the chemistry that occurs when the playwright is actually in the room for the rehearsal process.When they decided to collaborate again, Ali and Ijames gravitated toward Shakespeare. Both had developed an interest in the flexibility of the text at an early age; each cited “Romeo and Juliet” as the play that un-ruffed and de-frilled Shakespeare for them, allowing them to see the different language, lives and cultural experiences that could be welcomed into the text. For Ali, it started with performing Shakespeare with his peers in Kenya, where he was born and raised. “It was malleable. It was playable. It was completely adaptable,” he said. “Coming to the States, Shakespeare is this other thing: mostly white people, very few people of color, and they speak a certain way.”He began inviting playwrights to work on Shakespeare adaptations with him. “I was like, ‘I want someone whose profession it is to work on the language. And I can talk about the world and the concept.’”Ijames had already been drafting something along those lines, working on what would become “Fat Ham” in 2017. He had picked his favorite Shakespeare play, “Hamlet,” forming the idea from King Claudius and Queen Gertrude’s wedding celebration in the second scene of the first act.Set at a North Carolina backyard barbecue, “Fat Ham” unpacks themes of homophobia and toxic masculinity in a blend of colloquial language and Shakespearean English.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I was like, ‘What if you could spill all of ‘Hamlet’ into that party, that celebration, and tell the whole story there? What would change? What ultimately would these people find out and explore about each other in that pressure cooker of time?’” Ijames said.The tragedy of “Fat Ham” is multifaceted, rooted not in murder and intrigue but in themes of homophobia, self-hatred and toxic masculinity. Ijames unpacks it all in a chili-and-cornbread combo of colloquial language and Shakespearean English, with characters that reflect an authentic Black experience.“Black people of the diaspora, in America, on the continent, anywhere else in the world — we speak with music, we speak with meter,” Ijames said. IN SPEAKING ABOUT building the show, Ali and Ijames described how they complemented and trusted each other. Ijames mentioned Ali’s transformation of the karaoke scene in “Fat Ham,” staging it with an otherworldly theatricality. The lights shift, the characters’ movements slow down and Ali infuses the scene with what Ijames calls a “physical vocabulary” — an unexpected choreographed sequence that includes metal-style headbanging. Ali noted his admiration for the spaces Ijames provides in the script for the director to extend his imagination. He cited the stage directions at the end, which begin, “The play cracks open.” What the audience sees is what the story evoked in Ali’s mind — and it’s a joyous, glamorous break from what audiences may have come to expect. In other words, a party.“Any time I get to collaborate with him I’m happy, because I don’t have to explain things to him,” Ijames said. “He just understands.”The word “trust” surfaces frequently among the show’s producers and cast members. “Lord knows Black folks endure a lot of contorting to fit in spaces that were not made for ourselves,” said Sade Lythcott, chief executive of the National Black Theater. “So trust becomes almost like the alchemy or the catalyst for how we can communicate to each other and build something as beautiful as ‘Fat Ham.’”Marcel Spears, who portrayed Juicy Off Broadway and is returning to the role, describes an almost psychic “synchronicity” between Ijames and Ali in the rehearsal room. “It’s like mom and dad,” he said.This will also be Spears’s first time on Broadway, and four other cast members are making their Broadway debuts as well. “Everybody’s walking into it with a sense of urgency and pride and joy,” he said.Still, “Fat Ham” faces a commercial environment that is challenging for new productions — especially plays by and about people of color. In the 2021-22 season, Broadway made history with the premiere of seven plays by Black playwrights. Yet many suffered financial losses (though not unusual for Broadway plays, particularly damning for work by already underrepresented artists) and a couple closed early, exacerbated by the surge in Omicron cases.“I’m shaking in my boots! Your boy is nervous,” Spears said with an anxious laugh. He mentioned a good friend, Jordan E. Cooper, the playwright and star of “Ain’t No Mo’,” and the early closing last fall of that show, which had a mostly Black creative team. “I was disheartened because as a Black theater artist, I want our work to be seen as just as valuable and as important and as immediate to Broadway audiences as anything else.”Lythcott, reflecting on those closures, said: “I think the way commercial theaters look at diversifying their audiences and appealing to culturally specific demographics, it still sometimes feels like Black folks are an idea and not living, breathing people. That’s the magic of James’s piece that he wrote: People can identify Tedra and Juicy; those are people that we know.”For his part, Ijames said he hopes that “Fat Ham” will attract a diverse, “game” New York audience who will enjoy what’s happening onstage. His expectations are those of an artist shaped by a scrappier regional theater scene: “We make the thing and then hopefully people come and hopefully it enlivens the community in which we’re making the thing. And so I hope that it’s going to do that. I hope that little stretch of 42nd Street is a little more Southern, a little more country.” More

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      ‘Fat Ham,’ a Pulitzer-Winning Riff on ‘Hamlet,’ Is Broadway-Bound

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      The play, by James Ijames, will be at the American Airlines Theater starting March 21.“Fat Ham,” a comedic and contemporary riff on “Hamlet” set in a backyard in the American South, will transfer to Broadway next spring, one year after winning the Pulitzer Prize in drama.The play, by James Ijames, is about a family that, like the royal family in Shakespeare’s story, centers on a lonely young college student unsettled by his mother’s decision to marry her dead husband’s brother. But in this version, Ijames seeks to use comedy and his own plot twists to challenge the cycle of violence. (Also, in this version, the family is Black, and the young man is gay.)The Pulitzer board described “Fat Ham” as “a funny, poignant play that deftly transposes ‘Hamlet’ to a family barbecue in the American South to grapple with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility and honesty.”The play had an initial production online, at the height of the pandemic, filmed by the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, where Ijames is one of three artistic directors. Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called the show “hilarious yet profound” and said “it is the rare takeoff that actually takes off — and then flies in its own smart direction.”The play then had a run earlier this year at the Public Theater in New York, co-produced by the National Black Theater. Maya Phillips, a critic-at-large for The Times, also praised the work, writing, “For all that Ijames dismantles in Shakespeare’s original text, he builds it back up into something that’s more — more tragic but also more joyous, more comedic, more political, more contemporary.”The Broadway production will feature the same cast as at the Public, directed by Saheem Ali, who is an associate artistic director at the Public, and starring Marcel Spears as the Hamlet figure, Juicy. The production is scheduled to begin previews March 21 and to open April 12 at the American Airlines Theater.“I feel really proud, and excited that it’s going to reach a larger audience,” Ijames said in an interview. “This play is for people who are looking for a new path, people who are trying to figure out how to talk to their family about difficult things, queer people who want to see their reflection, Black people who want to see their reflection, people who love Shakespeare and folks who have never seen a Shakespeare play. It’s for everyone.”Ijames said he has made some minor changes to the script for Broadway, but the more significant changes will be to the staging, as it shifts from an amphitheater-like setup at the Public to the more traditional proscenium theater at the American Airlines. Ali said he would seek to preserve the show’s sense of a communal gathering, as well as its elements of supernatural magic, as it moves to the larger venue.The show will be the first National Black Theater production to transfer to Broadway, and only the third play to transfer to Broadway from any Black theater, according to a news release.The show will also be the first produced by Public Theater Productions, which is a for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit Public Theater. Under that structure, the Public could make money if “Fat Ham” turns a profit, but the nonprofit has no liability if the show loses money, and no donor funds are involved. A similar financing structure has in the past been used by the Manhattan Theater Club, another prominent New York nonprofit.Also producing the show are Rashad V. Chambers, a talent manager who has previous producing credits on a number of Broadway shows, including “Topdog/Underdog,” and No Guarantees, which is the production company led by Christine Schwarzman, an intellectual-property lawyer who has also been actively investing in Broadway for several years. Although the American Airlines Theater is operated by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company, “Fat Ham” is a commercial production; Roundabout will offer the show to its subscribers, but is not among the show’s producers.One unusual bit of trivia: “Fat Ham” will be the sixth Pulitzer Prize-winning play to open on Broadway this season, following “Cost of Living,” “Death of a Salesman,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Topdog/Underdog” and “Between Riverside and Crazy.” (Additionally, two Pulitzer-winning musicals that opened during previous seasons are currently running on Broadway: “Hamilton” and “A Strange Loop.”) More

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      ‘Dreaming Zenzile’ Review: A Tribute to Mama Africa

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      The musical is Somi Kakoma’s thank-you note, written across generations, to the South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba.If you want to see a performer in full command of her instrument and her powers, take the F train to Second Avenue and walk the few blocks to New York Theater Workshop to savor Somi Kakoma in “Dreaming Zenzile,” her tribute to the South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba, born Zenzile Miriam Makeba.Makeba, a star from the 1960s through her death in 2008, pioneered the form broadly known as world music. Singing in Xhosa, Swahili, Sotho, Zulu and English, Makeba popularized African songwriting among American and European audiences, earning the nickname Mama Africa. Throughout her life, she lent her voice to social justice causes, particularly that of Black South Africans living under apartheid. Onstage, at New York Theater Workshop, in collaboration with the National Black Theater, Kakoma, in a marigold dress, with a voice like a sunrise, plays her through 76 years of her eventful life.Makeba was a vocal shapeshifter who could triumph in practically any genre — folk, jazz, American songbook, Afropop. Vocally, Kakoma has that chameleonlike quality, too, varying her big, bright voice with husky breaths, vivid ululation and the Xhosa clicks for which Makeba was famous. Her singing seems as effortless as it is varied, as easy as it is virtuosic. “Dreaming Zenzile,” directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz with music direction by Hervé Samb, is best understood and enjoyed as Kakoma’s gift of love and dignity, across generations, from one artist to another.The set, by Riccardo Hernández, suggests a concert stage, illuminated by Yi Zhao’s vibrant lights.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut as a work of theater, “Dreaming Zenzile” struggles among the competing forms of recital, dream play, memory play and biography. The bare set, by Riccardo Hernández, suggests a concert stage, illuminated by Yi Zhao’s vibrant lights and backed, less helpfully by Hannah Wasileski’s banal projections of waves, flowers and rainbow abstractions. Is this an auditorium or some astral way station? Is it the afterlife? Lacking the style and thematic force that defines Blain-Cruz’s best work, the show feels less like a narrative than a tone poem, which can make time hang heavy in the first half; it takes an hour just to bring young Miriam to her professional debut.Amplified by a four-person chorus (Aaron Marcellus, Naledi Masilo, Phumzile Sojola and Phindi Wilson) and a four-person band, the music feels electric, often joyful, a sharp shock of pleasure that Marjani Forté-Saunders’s supple, elegant choreography enhances. But the interplay between book passages and Makeba’s songs, which are not subtitled, rarely feels essential. Why these songs, in these moments? By contrast, Kakoma’s emotion-heavy, jazz-inflected songs are too on the button. Really, they’re all button. Those who arrive without a working chronology may feel lost.Though it touches briefly on some central themes — exile, responsibility — and limns, however elliptically, most of the major life events of its subject, “Dreaming Zenzile” withholds what most of us desire from a work of this kind: a greater understanding of how a performer’s life shapes and impacts her art, the relationship between experience and oeuvre. This desire isn’t necessarily fair or sensible. Sometimes that relationship doesn’t exist. Sometimes it is too oblique to parse. But because “Dreaming Zenzile” too often favors symbol and abstraction, the audience is denied this connection.Only in its closing moments, which occur shortly before Makeba’s death, does the show achieve a kind of cohesion and vigor. Throughout, Makeba has taken up the burden of activism with sturdiness and poise, freeing her voice in the hope that others might be made free. Finally, she announces the cost.“Do you know what it is to be the first?” she says, choking on the words. “Do you know the weight of that? The loneliness?”To ask one woman to stand in for an entire continent was always too great a burden. Mama Africa? It was impossible. That Makeba bore it for so long, and with such grace, is a wonder and a gift. At its best, “Dreaming Zenzile” is a thank-you note, written with deep and abiding gratitude.Dreaming ZenzileThrough June 26 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Fat Ham’ Review: Dismantling Shakespeare to Liberate a Gay Black ‘Hamlet’

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      James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, set at a Southern barbecue, gets its first in-person production at the Public Theater.I could begin with the ghost. Or the famous existential question.But I’m not reviewing another run-of-the-mill adaptation of “Hamlet”; “Fat Ham,” James Ijames’s outstanding transformation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into a play about Black masculinity and queerness, both echoes “Hamlet” and finds a language beyond it.So I’ll start with a scene that especially evokes this production’s charms: In the middle of a backyard barbecue, a group of family members and friends sitting around a table covered with plates of ribs, corn on the cob and biscuits is suddenly bathed in a blue spotlight. They break out into an impressionistic dance (choreographed by Darrell Grand Moultrie), curling forward and arching backward in slow motion, arms fanning out, then they slump down into their seats and begin headbanging. All the while, our hero, Juicy (Marcel Spears), whom Ijames characterizes in his script as “a kinda Hamlet,” mournfully croons along to Radiohead’s “Creep.”This is Ijames’s tongue-in-cheek style of wit: Of course the melancholy prince would have sung “Creep” had Thom Yorke and his band been around in 17th-century England. Without undermining its drama, “Fat Ham” pokes fun at the theatricality of Hamlet’s anguish.And Saheem Ali, the director of “Fat Ham,” which opened on Thursday at the Public Theater in a co-presentation with the National Black Theater, can sure throw a party. By adding in the lights and movement, the scene takes on an increased flair. But then again, having directed the similarly vivacious “Merry Wives” at the Delacorte Theater and “Nollywood Dreams” at MCC Theater last year, Ali is at his best when given an occasion to celebrate Blackness.Marcel Spears (singing from the porch) mournfully crooning along to Radiohead’s “Creep.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJuicy knows about trauma — after all, he’s a gay Black man in North Carolina. But his more immediate concern is this barbecue, which is a wedding celebration for his mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), and his uncle Rev (Billy Eugene Jones), who have married just a week after the murder of Juicy’s father, Pap (also played by Jones). When Pap returns in a spiffy spectral form — crisp porcelain-white suit and shoes — to tell him that Rev orchestrated his murder, Juicy must decide whether he’ll seek revenge. And all this in the midst of a party also attended by his family friends, the judgmental Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas) and her adult kids, Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) and Larry (Calvin Leon Smith).Just a few weeks ago “Fat Ham” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama despite having never had an in-person production. In April 2021 the Wilma Theater released a filmed version of the play that my colleague Jesse Green wrote was “hilarious yet profound.” But perhaps that’s no surprise given it’s from the playwright of such critically acclaimed works as “Kill Move Paradise” and “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington.”So many playwrights and directors try to find the spaces in Shakespeare’s texts that they can squeeze into, strong-arming their personal sensibilities and contemporary politics into some of Shakespeare’s best-known speeches and scenes. Ijames does the opposite in “Fat Ham”; he steals the bones of the original and sloughs off the excess like the fatty bits on a slab of meat. He crafts his own story and then within it makes space for Shakespeare again.That’s to say that there is actual Shakespeare here, with Juicy slipping into Hamlet’s original language now and then. (Spears, who’s no stranger to classic Shakespeare roles, pulls on the old English comfortably, like an old pair of jeans, his line-reading colloquial and unfussed.) In fact, Ijames keenly grants everyone a level of meta-awareness. The effect is stunning, making the play a living text, moving between “Hamlet,” the story happening on the stage and the world beyond the fourth wall.“What you tell them?” more than one character asks Juicy — “them” being the audience. The assumption being that Juicy may mislead us, as if we don’t already know some version of this story and how it ends. “Fat Ham” uses that to its advantage, challenging our expectations of, say, Tedra, who isn’t shy about defending herself against the trope of the weak, unfaithful wife and irresponsible mother. At one point, she says of the audience: “They done already made up they minds about what I’m worth. What I get to feel. What I get to do.”Ijames also opts out of the Hamlet-Ophelia romance, instead making several of the traditionally straight characters gay. And Opal is not the fragile love-stricken girl in so many other “Hamlet” adaptations but strong and tough enough to throw down in a street fight.What would normally be a story about revenge instead becomes one about the toxic masculinity and homophobia that plague the Black community. “You was soft,” Rev says to Juicy with a sneer. “And the men in our family ain’t soft. And I started to think — look at this little pocket of nothing.”Just as “Hamlet” is full of humor, so too is “Fat Ham,” from Juicy’s deadpan sarcasm to Rev’s elaborately singsong sermon of a mealtime prayer. And Chris Herbie Holland as Tio (that’s Horatio), Juicy’s kooky cousin and best friend, shakes up every scene he’s in with raucous comedy.Tensions mount between Jones, left, leading a prayer as Rev, and Spears’s sarcastic Juicy.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Fat Ham” truly sings in the ensemble scenes, and Ali’s direction crackles in the many instances when there are overlapping jokes, remarks and barbs. If the comedy’s not in the script, then it’s in the controlled chaos, because the cast is talented, though they shine best when the action of the 90-minute show picks up. The pacing in the first few scenes could slow so the beauty of the language and characters don’t get lost in a monotonous tread. And the actors’ mostly mic-less performance occasionally suffers from their attempts to both emote and project; the volume erases much of the tonal modulation and dialogue pauses.Dominique Fawn Hill’s costume design adds another layer of character development: Rabby’s loud Barney-purple ensemble, with its flouncy hat, for the church-loving gossip queen; Juicy’s gloomy all-black ensemble of overalls and a mesh shirt; Tio’s “Goosebumps” T-shirt and coral zebra-print button-down with acid-washed embroidered jeans; and one resplendent explosion of colorful fabrics and accessories that will catch audiences off-guard, in the best way, at the end of the show.Maruti Evans’s smart scenic design — a maroon-red back porch on a thrust stage covered with AstroTurf, in front of a backdrop of the house — is just as vivid as the costumes and the playful lighting (by Stacey Derosier).For all that Ijames dismantles in Shakespeare’s original text, he builds it back up into something that’s more — more tragic but also more joyous, more comedic, more political, more contemporary. It dons the attributes of Shakespeare that make it classic. “To be or not to be” becomes a different kind of existential query. It’s not a question of life or death, but of who we can decide to be in a world that tries to define that for us: Can you be soft? Can you be queer? Can you be brave? Can you be honest?Fat HamThrough July 3 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      National Black Theater Plans Next Act in a New Harlem High-Rise

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      The pathbreaking company plans to replace its Harlem home with a 21-story building with apartments, retail and a new theater.It was more than 50 years ago that Barbara Ann Teer rented space in a building at 125th Street and Fifth Avenue in Harlem that would serve as the home of a nascent organization called National Black Theater.The theater blossomed into an important cultural anchor, presenting productions by, and about, Black Americans when their stories rarely appeared on mainstream stages, and hosting artists including Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Nina Simone, Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou. When the building was destroyed in a fire in 1983, many feared that the theater was doomed, said Sade Lythcott, Teer’s daughter. But Teer had another idea: She decided to buy the damaged 64,000-square-foot building on Fifth Avenue, with a vision of revitalizing it and trying to use real estate to help pay for the theater’s work.Sade Lythcott, the theater’s chief executive, sees the development as a continuation of the plans that her mother, Barbara Ann Teer, made after founding the theater.Braylen Dion for The New York Times“She saw it as the next piece of this temple to Black liberation, which is ownership,” said Lythcott, the theater’s chief executive. “Ownership would allow the real estate to subsidize the art, which was a model that would disrupt the standard practice of nonprofit theater funding.”The move did not solve all their problems. There were struggles over the years, and a series of financial disputes that at one point left the theater on the brink of losing its home, but the work continued. Now National Black Theater is getting ready for its next act: It is replacing its longtime home with a 21-story building that will include a mix of housing, retail and, on floors three through five, a gleaming new home for the theater.Lythcott and other National Black Theater leaders see the $185 million project, and the partnership they are entering with developers, as a new chapter with the financial and institutional backing to allow them to live out the dream of Teer, who died in 2008: to nurture a space where Black artists can thrive, and the company can work to bring a deeper sense of racial justice to the American theater industry.“What we’re building today really has been informed in all ways by this blueprint that Dr. Teer put into place starting in 1968,” Lythcott said. “It feels like what our community of Black artists and the community of Harlem deserve.”To realize the development project, National Black Theater has partnered with a new real estate firm, Ray, which was founded by Dasha Zhukova, a Russian-American art collector and philanthropist. Also joining the project are the subsidized housing developer L + M, the architect Frida Escobedo, the firm Handel Architects, and the design firms working on National Black Theater’s space, Marvel, Charcoalblue, and Studio & Projects.The planning for the new development has come at a turning point in the theater world. With theaters closed for more than a year because of the pandemic, many institutions have been called on to turn inward and interrogate their own histories of racism and inequity, with many prominent voices calling for change when theaters reopen. It is the kind of discussion National Black Theater has been involved in for decades. This year Lythcott has advised Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on reopening the arts and, as chair for the Coalition of Theaters of Color, has spoken up about racial justice in arts budget negotiations.Before they decided to work together, Lythcott and Zhukova had to have a frank conversation early on about a high-profile misstep in Zhukova’s past.On Martin Luther King’s Birthday in 2014, an online fashion magazine published a photo of Zhukova sitting on a chair — designed by the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard — that was constructed from a cushion arranged atop a sculpture of a partially clothed Black woman laying on her back, in some sort of bondage. Zhukova apologized for the photo, saying that using this artwork in a photo shoot was regrettable, “as it took the artwork totally out of its intended context.”Lythcott learned of this photo just before she met Zhukova for dinner for the first time — in fact she was Googling Zhukova on her phone at the restaurant before they met to discuss the development project. At the dinner, Zhukova brought up the incident first, Lythcott said, explaining that she would understand if the episode cast too much of a shadow on the project. But Lythcott wasn’t fazed by it, she said, because it was clear all that Zhukova had learned from the incident.“Perhaps that chair was the best thing that ever happened to Dasha,” Lythcott said, “because it was catalytic in expanding the lens by which she sees the world.”In an email, Zhukova said that she was “deeply sorry” for the photo and said that it had started her on a “journey of continued learning and education.”“I am so grateful that Sade sees the person I am trying to be on my continued journey toward personal growth,” she wrote.Barbara Ann Teer, center foreground, founder of National Black Theater, with the cast of one of her productions in 1970.via National Black Theater ArchivesThe new building being planned, for 2033 Fifth Avenue, is slated to include 222 units of housing, an event space and a communal living room where people might eat, work and hang out; a news release says “amenities will include health and wellness programming.”The development project is more than a decade in the making, with several false starts. Lythcott and her brother — Michael Lythcott, who is the chair of the National Black Theater’s board — see it as a realization of their mother’s dream, while recognizing that she might not have taken some of the paths they chose.“She never would have partnered with someone like Ray; she never would have had financing from Goldman Sachs,” Michael Lythcott said, noting that Teer had wanted full control over the building, and preferred to keep involvement limited to those inside the community.But it is all a means to an end that their mother energetically championed throughout her life: an “ecosystem by which Black people in particular are full-throated, full-voiced, fully rooted in their own liberation,” Sade Lythcott said.By the time construction starts this fall, theater in New York is likely to be back in full force. While the new building is going up, National Black Theater will use the Apollo Theater’s office space and two of its performance spaces. And by the time construction is slated to end, in spring 2024, National Black Theater leaders hope that the space will become a place to convene, both for art and the kind of community interaction that was sorely missed over the past year.“In the wake of this pandemic,” said Jonathan McCrory, National Black Theater’s executive artistic director, “there’s going to be a kind of psychic grief that is going to need to have a healing center.” More

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      New York to Allow Limited Live Performances to Resume in April

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNew York to Allow Limited Live Performances to Resume in AprilThe state will allow plays, concerts and other performances to start again April 2 for audiences of up to 100 people indoors, or 200 outdoors.New York State is relaxing coronavirus restrictions and allowing venues to reopen next month to limited audiences. The musicians Jon Batiste and Endea Owens performed at a pop-up concert last month at the Javits Center.Credit…Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMarch 3, 2021Updated 5:32 p.m. ETPlays, concerts and other performances can resume in New York starting next month — but with sharply reduced capacity limits — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Wednesday.Mr. Cuomo, speaking at a news conference in Albany, said that arts, entertainment and events venues can reopen April 2 at 33 percent capacity, with a limit of 100 people indoors or 200 people outdoors, and a requirement that all attendees wear masks and be socially distanced. Those limits would be increased — to 150 people indoors or 500 people outdoors — if all attendees test negative before entering.A handful of venues immediately said they would begin holding live performances, which, with a handful of exceptions, have not taken place in New York since Broadway shut down last March 12.The producers Scott Rudin and Jane Rosenthal said they expected some of the earliest performances would take place with pop-up programs inside Broadway theaters, as well as with programming at nonprofit venues that have flexible spaces, including the Apollo Theater, the Park Avenue Armory, St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Shed, Harlem Stage, La MaMa and the National Black Theater.“That communion of audience and performer, which we’ve craved for a year, we can finally realize,” said Alex Poots, the artistic director and chief executive of the Shed, which plans to begin indoor performances for limited-capacity audiences in early April.The new rules will not affect commercial productions of Broadway plays and musicals, which are still most likely to open after Labor Day, according to Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League.“For a traditional Broadway show, the financial model just doesn’t work,” she said. “How do we know that? Because shows that get that kind of attendance close.”Mr. Cuomo announced his plan to ease restrictions as New York, along with New Jersey, has been adding new coronavirus cases at the highest rates in the country over the last week: both reported 38 new cases per 100,000 people. (The nation as a whole is averaging 20 per 100,000 people.) And New York City is currently adding cases at a per capita rate roughly three times higher than that of Los Angeles County.The labor union Actors’ Equity responded by calling on Mr. Cuomo to “prioritize getting members of the arts sector vaccinated.”Many nonprofit leaders welcomed the new rules as a sign of hope and a first step toward recovery. “We have suffered immense loss and there’s a way to go,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, “but this policy change signals that we are turning a corner on the worst crisis the American theater has ever experienced.”Lincoln Center and the Glimmerglass Festival have already announced plans to perform outdoors this year, and the new rules clarify how many people can attend.“We welcome the new guidelines and want to serve as many people on our campus as is safe,” said Isabel Sinistore, a spokeswoman for Lincoln Center, which is planning to open 10 outdoor performance and rehearsal spaces on April 7.For many New York music venues, operating at 33 percent capacity still may not be enough to make reopening economically feasible, give the costs of running the venues and paying performers.“It doesn’t make financial sense for the Blue Note to open with only 66 seats for shows,” said Steven Bensusan, the president of the Blue Note Entertainment Group, whose flagship jazz club is in Greenwich Village.Smaller music venues, which are among the eligible recipients of $15 billion in federal aid, have been anxiously awaiting permission to reopen. But even with growing vaccination numbers and New York’s latest rule change, it may still take months for the touring industry to resume, and even then venues say they will need help.The Blue Note, along with some other jazz spots that serve food, had reopened last fall for dinner performances, allowing them to put on some shows without running afoul of state regulations that had banned anything but “incidental” music. (Some venues, and musicians, had filed lawsuits challenging those rules.) Then the city shut down indoor dining again, and some clubs did not reopen when it was allowed to resume last month.Michael Swier, the owner of the Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge, two of New York’s best-known rock clubs, said that the state’s order that venues require social distancing and mask-wearing means that the true capacity at many spaces may be much lower.“Given that social distancing is still part of the metric, it brings us back down to an approximate 20 percent capacity, which is untenable,” Mr. Swier said.Several promoters and venue operators said they were holding out to reopen at 100 percent capacity, which many hope can happen this summer.But some small nonprofits immediately expressed interest. At the Tank, a Midtown Manhattan arts venue with a 98-seat theater, Meghan Finn, its artistic director, said that within hours of the governor’s announcement she started hearing from comedians eager to resume indoor performance.“Having the ability to use our space is not something we will pass up,” Ms. Finn said.The Joyce Theater in Manhattan had been expecting to bring audiences back to see live dance in September, but Linda Shelton, its executive director, said that she and her team had “hard work” to do in the coming days, as they assess whether staging a performance in the near term makes financial sense and can be done safely.“We’ve got a few things that we could present pretty quickly,” she said.Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, home to the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in Annandale-on-Hudson, the site of a respected music festival each summer, called the moves a “welcome first step.”“One hundred is a good beginning number,” Mr. Botstein said. “That’s April’s number. Let’s hope June’s number is larger.”A variety of nonprofit theaters said they found the news encouraging.Paige Evans, the artistic director of Signature Theater, said that she had already commissioned the playwright Lynn Nottage and the director Miranda Haymon to create a multimedia performance installation in the theater’s capacious lobby this summer, and that the new rules should allow for audiences to attend.Rebecca Robertson, the founding president and executive producer of the Park Avenue Armory, said she, too, is eager to welcome people back. “To have live audiences responding to the work is going to be thrilling,” she said.Other organizations said the relaxed rules would allow them to imagine new programming. El Museo del Barrio said it would seek to develop outdoor work for parks, on streets, or in borrowed spaces.“Finally,” said Leonard Jacobs, interim executive director of the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning in southeast Queens, “we have good guidance from the state to help us take the first steps back to normal life.”Ben Sisario and Matt Stevens contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More