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      Shauneille Perry Ryder, Pioneering Theater Director, Dies at 92

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      As a Black woman, she blazed a path Off Broadway with an intuitive grasp of “how a story should be told, particularly a Black story,” Giancarlo Esposito said.Shauneille Perry Ryder, an actress, playwright and educator who was one of the first Black women to direct plays Off Broadway, most notably for the New Federal Theater, died on June 9 at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 92.Her daughter Lorraine Ryder confirmed the death.Ms. Perry Ryder, who was known professionally as Shauneille (pronounced shaw-NELL) Perry, directed 17 plays at the New Federal Theater from 1971 to 2006, each a part of the company’s mission to integrate artists of color and women into mainstream American theater. The theater, founded in 1970 by Woodie King Jr. in Lower Manhattan and now housed on West 42nd Street, has been a mecca for Black actors and directors.“She was personable with actors, but she put her foot down,” Mr. King said in a phone interview, referring to her attention to detail. “I’m so glad she worked with New Federal. She gave us a great reputation. In our first 10 years, we had a hit each year, and at least three or four were directed by Shauneille Perry.”In 1982, she directed Rob Penny’s “Who Loves the Dancer,” about a young Black man (played by Giancarlo Esposito) growing up in 1950s Philadelphia who dreams of becoming a dancer but who is trapped by his mother’s expectations, his environment and racism.In The New York Times, the critic Mel Gussow wrote that the play “has an inherent honesty, and in Shauneille Perry’s production, the evening is filled with conviction.”Mr. Esposito, who had been directed earlier that year by Ms. Perry Ryder in another play, “Keyboard,” at the New Federal, recalled her “very intuitive expression of how a story should be told, particularly a Black story.”“I was a young, green actor who had chops,” he added, in a phone interview, “but she taught me that acting is physical. The explosion that comes out of me in the second act came together under her direction.”Ms. Perry Ryder also directed Phillip Hayes Dean’s “Paul Robeson,” which traces the life of the titular singer and social crusader; “Jamimma,” by Martie Evans-Charles, about a young woman who changes her name because of its connection to servility and who is devoted to a man who she is told will never do much more than “wear rags or play instruments”; and “Black Girl,” by J.E. Franklin, about three generations of Black women, including a teenager who yearns to dance.“If you’re Black, you know about these people in any city,” Ms. Perry Ryder told The Times in 1971, referring to the characters in “Black Girl.” “We are all a part of each other.”She won at least two Audelco Awards from the Audience Development Committee, which honors Black theater and artists, and in 2019 received the Lloyd Richards Director’s Award from the National Black Theater Festival, in Winston-Salem, N.C., named after the Tony-winning director of many of August Wilson’s plays.Shauneille Gantt Perry was born on July 26, 1929, in Chicago. Her father, Graham, was one of the first Black assistant attorneys general in Illinois; her mother, Pearl (Gantt) Perry, was a pioneering Black court reporter in Chicago. Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote “A Raisin the Sun,” was one of Shauneille’s cousins.While attending Howard University — where she received a bachelor’s degree in drama in 1950 — Ms. Ryder Perry belonged to a student theater group, the Howard Players, which performed Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” on a tour of Scandinavia at the invitation of the Norwegian government. “We were the only Black company to tour those marvelous countries,” she told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1971.She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1952 at the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago (now a part of DePaul University). As a Fulbright scholar in 1954, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Dissatisfied with the curriculum, however (“they were always doing ‘Cleopatra,’” she said), she transferred to the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art.Back in Chicago she began acting — she was in a summer stock play, “Mamba’s Daughters,” with Ethel Waters — while also writing for the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender. In 1959, while on a trip to Paris that she had won through an Ebony magazine essay contest, she met the author Richard Wright, who, she recalled, asked her, “They still lynching people back in the States?”“I remember telling him, ‘They do it a little differently there today,’” she told The Times in 1971. But the next day she read about a Black man who had been accused of rape and taken forcibly to a jail cell; his body was later found floating in a river. “I kept wondering to myself,” she said, “‘What is that man saying about my analysis of things?’”And she wondered what she would do when she got home.At first she continued acting. She appeared in various Off Broadway plays, including Josh Greenfeld’s “Clandestine on the Morning Line” (1961), with James Earl Jones, in which a pregnant young woman (Ms. Perry Ryder) from Alabama strolls into a restaurant looking for the father of her child.Edith Oliver, reviewing the play in The New Yorker, praised Ms. Perry Ryder’s “lovely performance,” writing that she gave her role “such quiet, innocent strength and apparent unawareness of the character’s pathos that we almost forget it, too.”Frustrated with the roles she was offered, Ms. Perry Ryder turned to directing, first at the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, with a workshop production of Ms. Franklin’s “Mau Mau Room.”“I got the feeling that maybe there’s a place for me,” she told The Times.Two years later, she directed “The Sty of the Blind Pig” for the Negro Ensemble Company. In the drama, a blind street singer in 1950s Chicago goes to a house on the South Side looking for a woman he once knew.Emory Lewis wrote in his review in The Record that Ms. Perry Ryder “had marshaled her actors with loving attention to period detail and nuance.”Ms. Perry Ryder, left, in 1971 while directing “Black Girl,” a play by J. E. Franklin, right, about three generations of Black women. Produced by the New Federal Theater, it was staged at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street in Lower Manhattan. Bert Andrews Her theater work continued for more than 40 years, including writing and directing “Things of the Heart: Marian Anderson’s Story,” about the brilliant Black contralto; directing and rewriting the book for a 1999 revival of “In Dahomey,” the first Broadway musical, originally staged in 1903, written by African Americans; and writing a soap opera for a Black radio station in New York City.In 1986, Ms. Perry Ryder joined the faculty of Lehman College in the Bronx, where she taught theater and ran the drama program. At Lehman, she staged “Looking Back: The Music of Micki Grant,” a revue based on Ms. Grant’s theatrical works, which include “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope.” She retired in 2001.In addition to Lorraine Ryder, Ms. Perry Ryder is survived by two other daughters, Gail Perry-Ryder Tigere and Natalie Ryder Redcross, and four grandchildren. Her husband, Donald Ryder, an architect, died in 2021. More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Wins Best Musical as Tonys Celebrate Broadway’s Return

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      “A Strange Loop,” a scalding story about a gay, Black theater artist confronting self-doubt and societal disapproval, won the Tony Award for best new musical Sunday night, giving another huge accolade to a challenging contemporary production that had already won a Pulitzer Prize.The soul-baring show, nurtured by nonprofits and developed over many years, triumphed over two flashy pop musicals, “MJ,” a jukebox musical about the entertainer Michael Jackson, and “Six,” an irreverent reconsideration of Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives, in a six-way race.“A Strange Loop” garnered widespread praise from critics; on Sunday night, Michael R. Jackson, the writer who spent nearly two decades working on it, acknowledged how personal the project was as he collected his first Tony Award, for best book of a musical.“I wrote it at a time when I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” he said. “I didn’t know how I was going to move forward. I felt unseen. I felt unheard. I felt misunderstood, and I just wanted to create a little bit of a life raft for myself as a Black gay man.”The ceremony — the 75th Tony Awards presentation — provided an opportunity for Broadway to celebrate its return and its perseverance, hoping that a dash of razzle-dazzle, a dollop of contemporary creativity and a sprinkling of nostalgia will help lure theatergoers back to a pandemic-scarred industry now in full swing but still craving more customers.The season that just ended was a tough one: It started late (most theaters remained closed until September), and was repeatedly disrupted (coronavirus cases obliterated its old show-must-go-on ethos, prompting cancellations and performer absences). With tourism still down, it was also short on audience.Patti LuPone won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for “Company.” It was her third Tony.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Our industry has been through so much,” Marianne Elliott, who won a Tony Award for directing a gender-reversed revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical comedy “Company,” said in her acceptance speech. “It felt at times that live theater was endangered.”But in the glittering ceremony at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, a parade of performers celebrated all that went well: Theaters reopened, long-running shows returned, and an unusually diverse array of plays and musicals arrived to entertain, provoke and inspire theatergoers.The best play Tony went to “The Lehman Trilogy,” a sweeping saga about the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers banking business. Using three shape-shifting actors, contained within a spinning glass box of a set, the play journeyed all the way from the Wall Street giant’s humble origins in 1844 to its ignominious collapse in 2008. The show, written by Stefano Massini and Ben Power, picked up not only the Tony for best play, but also for the play’s director, Sam Mendes; its set designer, Es Devlin; and the great British actor, Simon Russell Beale, who thanked audiences for showing up, despite pandemic protocols and public health concerns.“You trusted us,” he said. “You came with open arms. It wasn’t easy at that point to come to the theater because of all those regulations. But you welcomed us.”“The Lehman Trilogy” won out against four other contenders, “Clyde’s,” “Hangmen,” “The Minutes” and “Skeleton Crew.”“Take Me Out” emerged victorious in the best play revival category, a particularly strong field that included productions of “American Buffalo,” “How I Learned to Drive,” “Trouble in Mind” and “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”Written by Richard Greenberg, “Take Me Out” first ran on Broadway in 2003 and won the best play Tony that year; this year’s revival, presented by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater, was directed by Scott Ellis. It is about what happens when a baseball player, portrayed in this production by Jesse Williams, comes out as gay; Jesse Tyler Ferguson picked up his first Tony for his portrayal of the player’s investment adviser, who is also gay.“Company,” a musical first staged in 1970 that wittily and sometimes bitterly examines married life, won the Tony for musical revival, besting a much-praised revival of “Caroline, or Change,” as well as a starry revival of “The Music Man” that, thanks to the appeal of leading man Hugh Jackman, has been the top-selling show on Broadway since it opened.The award for “Company” reflected not only admiration for the reimagined production but also respect for Sondheim, its composer and lyricist, who is revered as one of the most important figures in American musical theater, and who died in November. The “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was mentored by Sondheim, introduced a tribute to him, saying, “I stand here on behalf of generations of artists he took the time to encourage.”The ceremony was hosted by Ariana DeBose.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Tonys, hosted by Ariana DeBose and broadcast on CBS, honored not only shows, performers, writers and designers, but also the understudies who saved so many performances this season. And DeBose, who this year won an Academy Award as Anita in the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story,” paid tribute to the season’s extraordinary diversity, saying, “I feel like the phrase Great White Way is becoming more of a nickname as opposed to a how-to guide.”She noted the season’s high volume of work by Black writers, which came about as producers and theater owners scrambled to respond to demands for more representation and opportunity for Black artists after the national unrest over racism during the summer of 2020. This year’s class of Tony nominees featured a large number of Black artists, reflecting the fact that work by Black writers led to more jobs for Black performers, designers, directors, and more.The season being honored — the first since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close in March of 2020 — featured 56 productions, including 34 eligible for Tony Awards because they opened between Feb. 20, 2020 and May 4, 2022. (The others were returning productions, many of them long-running hits.)The Covid challenges were costly: 6.7 million people attended a Broadway show during the 2021-22 season, down from 14.8 million during the 2018-19 season, which was the last full season before the pandemic; total grosses were $845 million, down from $1.8 billion.The Tonys served as a chance for Broadway to try to entice television viewers to become Times Square visitors. But one challenge: Viewership for all televised awards shows has been steadily falling. The Tonys audience had a recent peak in 2016, at 8.7 million viewers, when “Hamilton” was a contender; in 2019, there were 5.4 million viewers, and last year, when the Tonys held a ceremony in September to coincide with the reopening of theaters, just 2.6 million tuned in.Michael R. Jackson won the Tony for best book of a musical for “A Strange Loop.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s winners featured some Broadway veterans, including Patti LuPone, picking up her third Tony Award for her ferocious turn as an alcohol-addled married friend of the chronically single protagonist in “Company”; and Phylicia Rashad, winning her second Tony for playing a factory worker in “Skeleton Crew.” Among the other performers who collected Tony Awards: Joaquina Kalukango, for her starring role as a 19th-century New York City tavern owner in “Paradise Square”; Matt Doyle, who played a groom with a zany case of wedding day jitters in “Company,” and Deirdre O’Connell, who won for her remarkable lip-synced performance as a kidnapping victim in the play “Dana H.”“I would love for this little prize to be a token for every person who is wondering, ‘Should I be trying to make something that could work on Broadway or that could win me a Tony Award, or should I be making the weird art that is haunting me, that frightens me, that I don’t know how to make, that I don’t know if anyone in the whole world will understand?’” O’Connell said. “Please let me, standing here, be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.”“A Strange Loop” tells the story of a Broadway usher, named Usher, who is trying to write a musical about a Broadway usher trying to write a musical; his thoughts, many of them self-critical, are portrayed by six performers, who each appear in multiple guises. The musical began its life Off Broadway, with a 2019 production at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions. After winning the Pulitzer, it had another pre-Broadway production at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C. It had support throughout those nonprofit runs from the producer Barbara Whitman, who is now the lead producer of the commercial run on Broadway; she was also a lead producer of the Tony-winning “Fun Home.”The Broadway production, which opened in April, has seen an uptick at the box office since being nominated for 11 Tony Awards (it won two), but has room for growth: During the week that ended June 5, it filled 89 percent of the 912 seats at the Lyceum Theater, grossing $685,772, with an average ticket price of $105.“Six” and “MJ,” although unsuccessful in the six-way race for best new musical, are doing substantially better at the box office, and did notch some big victories at the awards ceremony.“Six” picked up the Tony Award for best score during the first minutes of the ceremony. Its music and lyrics were written by two young British artists, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, who came up with the idea while undergraduates at Cambridge University, and who were discovered by a commercial producer following a buzz-building first run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The musical’s costume designer, Gabriella Slade, also won a Tony for her Tudor-style-meets-contemporary-clubwear outfits.“MJ” also landed key prizes, including for the lead performance by Myles Frost, a 22-year-old in his first professional stage role, and for the crowd-pleasing choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, who also directed the musical.The other contenders, “Girl From the North Country,” featuring the songs of Bob Dylan; “Mr. Saturday Night,” starring Billy Crystal as a washed-up comedian; and “Paradise Square,” about race relations in Civil War-era New York, appeared to be less of a factor in the competition.Simon Russell Beale won the Tony Award for best actor for his work in “The Lehman Trilogy,” which won best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat first hour of the awards ceremony, viewable only on the streaming channel Paramount+, was hosted by Darren Criss and Julianne Hough, both of whom are currently starring in Broadway plays — he in a revival of “American Buffalo,” and she in a new farce called “POTUS.” They began the evening with a Broadway-is-back tribute, written by Criss, extolling the virtues and challenges of theater (the song included a plea for no slapping, in a dig at the Oscars).A lifetime achievement award was given to Angela Lansbury, a beloved star of stage, film and television who was also a five-time host of the Tony Awards, more than any other person. Lansbury, who is 96, was not able to attend in person, or even to accept by video; instead the actor Len Cariou, who starred with Lansbury in the original production of “Sweeney Todd,” for which they both won Tony Awards, paid tribute to her and introduced a video of career highlights. Then the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus performed the title song from “Mame,” which was the show in which she won the first of her five competitive Tony Awards.The Tony Awards, named for actress Antoinette Perry, are presented by the Broadway League, a trade association that represents theater owners and producers, and the American Theater Wing, a theater advocacy organization. The awards have been presented since 1947; there was no ceremony in 2020, and last year’s September ceremony honored shows from the truncated prepandemic season.This year’s awards were spread among 11 shows, with none coming anywhere near the record 12 prizes picked up by “The Producers” in 2001. The biggest hauls went to “Company” and “The Lehman Trilogy,” each of which won five awards; “MJ” won four, and “A Strange Loop,” “Dana H.,” “Six” and “Take Me Out” each won two. Taking home one prize each were “Girl From the North Country,” “Paradise Square,” “Skeleton Crew” and “The Skin of Our Teeth.” More

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      ‘Come From Away’ to Close, the Latest Broadway Show to End Run

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      “Come From Away,” the inspirational musical about a remote Canadian community that rallied to support thousands of stranded air travelers after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, will end its run on Broadway in October.The musical, which has been a hit on Broadway and has been successfully staged around the world, is the third show to announce a plan to close in the last two days, as it becomes clear that with New York City still attracting fewer tourists than it did before the pandemic, there are not enough patrons to support all the productions now running.On Tuesday “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Tina,” two musicals that had been selling strongly before the pandemic, both announced that they would close late this summer.“Come From Away” will close on Oct. 2. It began performances Feb. 18, 2017, and opened March 12, 2017; at the time of its closing it will have had 25 preview performances and 1,670 regular performances at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.The musical continues to tour in North America and Australia and to run in London. A filmed version of the stage production is streaming on Apple TV+.The show was an unlikely hit — before it arrived in New York, the conventional wisdom was that locals would never embrace a musical about Sept. 11 because the subject was too potentially upsetting. The producers, seeking to build word-of-mouth first, took a roundabout path to Broadway, staging it in San Diego, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Toronto before coming to New York.But the show, arriving early in the Trump administration, quickly became a success, seen as a parable about welcoming strangers and building community.The musical, which won a Tony Award for Christopher Ashley’s direction, is based on true events that took place in Gander, Newfoundland, where 38 commercial planes were diverted. The musical’s writers, a married couple named Irene Sankoff and David Hein, went to Gander a decade after Sept. 11 to interview locals, and created the musical based on those interviews; the show was first staged at Sheridan College in Ontario, where a school dean, Michael Rubinoff, had been trying to persuade someone that the subject would make a good musical.The show’s original star, Jenn Colella, who portrayed an airline pilot, will rejoin the cast from June 21 to Aug. 7.“Come From Away” is produced by Junkyard Dog Productions, which is led by Randy Adams, Marleen and Kenny Alhadeff, and Sue Frost, who spotted an early workshop of the show at a festival held by the National Alliance for Musical Theater.The show’s grosses have dropped significantly since the pandemic shutdown of theaters. Last week it grossed $461,760; during a comparable early June week in 2019 it grossed $897,186.On Tuesday, “Tina” said it would close Aug. 14, and “Dear Evan Hansen” said it would close Sept. 18. More

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      N.Y.U. Names New Performance Space After Nation’s First Black Theater

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      The university is commemorating the African Grove Theater, part of a new building opening in 2023.A new performance space at New York University will be named “The African Grove Theater” in honor of the African Theater, a historic New York production company and venue widely considered to be the first Black theater in the United States, the university announced on Wednesday.Supported by a $1 million donation, the theater is on the fourth floor of a new multipurpose educational building at 181 Mercer Street that will open in spring 2023. It also will house the graduate acting and design programs for stage and film of the university’s Tisch School of the Arts.Where there was once merely a plaque with a brief history of the theater, there will be space to host theatrical performances, lobby displays, educational seminars and an annual symposium on the history of Black theater and culture.“This theater wasn’t ‘somewhere downtown’; it was on our campus,” said Laurence Maslon, an arts professor at N.Y.U. Tisch School of the Arts who is also a theater historian and co-chair of a university Committee to Commemorate the African Grove. “It has been part of our DNA for over 200 years.”“Felicitous is the word I keep coming back to,” he added.The original African Theater was started in 1816 by William Alexander Brown, a retired ship steward who started hosting music, poetry and short plays for Black New Yorkers in his backyard at 38 Thomas Street. The entertainment “tea garden” became known as the African Grove, one of the few spaces where Black patrons could enjoy leisure arts.In 1821, the theater moved to Bleecker and Mercer Streets — where the new performance space will stand next spring — expanding to a 300-seat venue known for staging operas, ballets and Shakespearean classics alongside original work, initially performed by Black performers for Black audiences and, later, integrated audiences. The original venture was not entirely peaceful. The theater faced harassment from white rivals and police raids. A yellow fever epidemic further ravaged the theater, which closed two years later. The last known playbill for an African Theater production was dated June 1823.The new theater will be a “space where we celebrate another tradition in the culture of New York City that has often been disregarded and overlooked and not understood,” said Michael Dinwiddie, an associate professor at N.Y.U.’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, who is also a theater historian and co-chair of the Committee to Commemorate the African Grove. “This was a theater that in its early time, was really creating a model for what the American theater could be. And that’s what we want the modern African Grove Theater to be.”Dinwiddie said he was excited “to see what happens culturally” for students who learn about the theater and understand that they are performing in a place that is “historic and sacred and new, at the same time.” More

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      Broadway’s Beloved Basement Club, Feinstein’s/54 Below, Turns 10

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      The venue beneath what was once Studio 54 will pick up a Tony Award for excellence in the theater as it marks its anniversary with a pair of concerts.On June 5, 2012, shortly after noon, a bevy of cabaret and theater artists and insiders gathered in a space beneath what had been the storied West 54th Street nightclub Studio 54. The occasion was a dress rehearsal for a show that evening that would open a new venue called, reasonably enough, 54 Below. Patti LuPone was the featured act, with other Broadway and nightlife luminaries, including Ben Vereen and Justin Vivian Bond, slated to appear soon afterward.Joe Iconis, a young composer, lyricist and performer who was part of that initial lineup, recalled the event as “a coming out for the room itself.” The bar was separated from the stage and dining tables by a curtain, which was later opened, “so there was this dramatic reveal of the room, to the people who would soon be playing it.”It was a fittingly theatrical debut for a spot that, 10 years later, still bills itself as “Broadway’s living room.” (The venue is now known as Feinstein’s/54 Below, acknowledging a creative partnership with the veteran performer and American songbook champion Michael Feinstein that began in 2015.) On June 12, it will receive an honor at the Tony Awards for excellence in the theater.“To me, Feinstein’s is not only about the American songbook; in some ways it’s become a sensibility, a lifestyle brand,” Michael Feinstein said.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesAt the time of 54 Below’s start, the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room, one of New York’s most established cabaret venues, had just announced its closure; Feinstein’s own namesake at the Regency Hotel shut down not long after. Don’t Tell Mama and the West Bank Cafe’s Laurie Beechman Theater still offered show tunes and standards, as did the jazz club Birdland. But as Richard Frankel, one of the four Broadway producers who started and still own 54 Below, remembered, “There was nothing geared towards the huge resource of the Broadway talent pool, and the continual renewal of new music that Broadway provided.”Today, 54 Below occupies a rare perch as a free-standing club offering just that. But it faces more competition. In 2017, the Green Room 42 arrived, which, like 54 Below, features name acts, rising stars and cult favorites alongside theme shows and special events. The following year, Birdland unveiled Birdland Theater, a space that has accommodated longer runs by Broadway performers and emerging jazz artists as well as freewheeling variety shows. Other venues have continued to pop up downtown, like the East Village spots Pangea and Club Cumming, where artists generally less associated with Broadway can wax theatrical in their own fashion.But Don’t Tell Mama’s longtime booking manager, the cabaret doyen Sidney Myer, conceded that 54 Below still “draws the best and the brightest” and called its team “creative and proactive.”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 of stage, film and television, 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.Frankel and fellow owners Steven Baruch, Marc Routh and Tom Viertel — who have produced “The Producers,” “Hairspray” and the 2018 revival of “Angels in America” — recruited the Broadway mainstays John Lee Beatty, Ken Billington and Peter Hylenski to design the restaurant and its lighting and sound. Beatty even requested a story for inspiration; Viertel spun one about Jewish hustlers who, as Frankel relayed it, sold stolen car parts during World War I, “then started bootlegging when Prohibition came, and invited showgirls and opened a speakeasy. John said, ‘Fine—I’m good.’”On June 12, the venue will receive an honor at the Tony Awards for excellence in the theater.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesFor a pair of anniversary concerts on Sunday and Thursday, the club will spotlight young and emerging performers, composers and playwrights — among them the “Dear Evan Hansen” and “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” alumnus Andrew Barth Feldman, 20, who grew up “binging YouTube videos of people at 54 Below” before starting to visit the club in his early teens. (Minors are welcome but aren’t permitted at the bar without parental supervision.)When the coronavirus pandemic shut down live performances in March 2020, there was no guarantee the venue would make it to this milestone. Two rounds of government loans “really saved us from the abyss,” Frankel said, though he estimated that business was still down between 20 and 25 percent from 2019.54 Below inherited its first director of programming, Phil Geoffrey Bond, from the Beechman. When Jennifer Ashley Tepper joined the venue as creative and programming director a little less than nine years ago, she took a cue from Bond’s popular “Sondheim Unplugged” series. One of her first projects was “New Musicals at 54,” which has delivered concert versions of shows such as Iconis and Joe Tracz’s “Be More Chill” and Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize winner “A Strange Loop,” now up for 11 Tony Awards, both showcased before they were produced in New York. An eclectic assortment of additional series have come to include “New Writers at 54!” and “54 Sings …,” which mostly celebrates pop music. “A lot of these shows are done on the fly,” noted the composer Stephen Flaherty, whose musicals “My Favorite Year” and “Seussical” have been showcased at the club, which also features cast reunions and concerts of classic and underappreciated works. “You’ll have people dropping out and others replacing them, so you never know what you’re going to get, which is part of the excitement.”Slotting such vehicles and novelty acts alongside headliners like Chita Rivera, Ariana DeBose and Charles Busch into at least two shows per night, seven nights a week, can pose a challenge, Tepper says: “A big part of my job is making sure that the crowd is different at different performances.” 54 Below has drawn what the jazz singer Nicole Henry, one of several artists brought on board by Feinstein, calls “an informed, intelligent audience. They often know more about the music than I do.”Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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      Broadway Theaters Will Require Masks at Least Through June 30

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      Broadway theaters will continue to require ticketholders to wear masks at least through June 30, industry leaders said Friday.The Broadway League, a trade association representing theater owners and producers, said the owners and operators of all 41 theaters had agreed to the extension of the mask policy. The decision comes at a time when New York City has declared a “high Covid alert.”Earlier this week, city officials strongly recommended medical-grade masks in public indoor settings, but Mayor Eric Adams has rejected reimposing mask mandates. But a number of performing arts venues have opted to stick with more restrictive policies in an effort to limit the spread of the virus.“The safety and security of our cast, crew, and audience has been our top priority,” the League’s president, Charlotte St. Martin, said in a statement. “By maintaining our audience masking requirement through at least the month of June, we intend to continue that track record of safety for all, despite the Omicron subvariants.”Most Broadway theaters this month stopped checking whether patrons are vaccinated; only a handful of Broadway theaters operated by nonprofits are continuing to enforce a vaccine requirement for patrons.But mask requirements have been in place in Broadway theaters since they reopened last summer, and the industry has been renewing that requirement on a month-by-month basis. There have been occasional confrontations over the policy — earlier this month the actress Patti LuPone, who is starring in a revival of the musical “Company,” rebuked an attendee at a post-show talkback for the patron’s refusal to fully cover her mouth and nose with a mask. But for the most part, compliance has been high.There are 35 shows running on Broadway, and last week 246,003 people attended a performance. And if this year follows prepandemic patterns, attendance will pick up over the next few weeks with an increase in tourism after Memorial Day. More

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      Bruce MacVittie, Ubiquitous Character Actor, Dies at 65

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      A co-founder of the Naked Angels troupe in New York, he was a familiar face in Off Broadway theater, in movies and on TV, often playing tough guys with tormented souls.Bruce MacVittie, one of New York City’s quintessential character actors, who made his Broadway debut in David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” opposite Al Pacino in 1983 and was a mainstay on Off Broadway stages for over 40 years, as well as a familiar face on television and in film, died on May 7 in Manhattan. He was 65.His wife, Carol Ochs, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but said the cause had not been determined.Mr. MacVittie excelled at playing tough guys with tormented souls, revealing a tenderness at the heart of his characterizations. His casting type was low-life and street-smart, but he himself ran in rarefied acting circles. In the mid-1980s, he helped found Naked Angels, a troupe of young film and theater hipsters (including Matthew Broderick and Marisa Tomei) who immediately dazzled New York with the celebrity wattage and social conscience of their theatrical endeavors.“Naked Angels was the club that was too cool to let me in,” the actress Edie Falco recalled in an interview. “I was just hanging around on the fringes, dying to get my foot in the door, but Bruce was already in. Bruce and I traveled through our actor travails together. We were young together and got less young together.”Mr. MacVittie in the thriller “Killer Among Us” (2021), one of his numerous film roles.Vertical EntertainmentMr. MacVittie’s career began in 1980 at Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan with a lead in Edward Allan Baker’s “What’s So Beautiful About a Sunset Over Prairie Avenue?”In 1988, after bit parts on the series “Barney Miller” and “Miami Vice,” he got his first big television job, partnering with Stanley Tucci in “The Street,” a vérité slice of blue-collar cop life set in the Newark Police Department. Claiming to be “the first television series shot entirely in New Jersey,” the show churned out 40 episodes in 40 days but lasted only a season. Still, it cast a stylistic shadow over future TV crime dramas.“Bruce’s background was working class, like me,” said Frances McDormand, another longtime friend. “There was something about celebrating this in our work that was important to both of us. Bruce had a pride about where he’d come from that he carried with him and was even cocky about. It was very charismatic.”Bruce James MacVittie was born in Providence, R.I., on Oct. 14, 1956. His father, John James MacVittie, was a worker at the Narragansett Electric Company; his mother Olive (Castergine) MacVittie, was a homemaker.Bruce grew up in Cranston, R.I., where he began to act in high school, and went on to graduate from Boston University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He moved to New York in 1979. Four years later, after understudying for the role of Bobby in the Pacino revival of “American Buffalo,” Mr. MacVittie took over the part on Broadway and ultimately performed it on a national tour and in the West End of London.“Bruce carried this currency, especially for young actors then, like me, that he’d worked onstage with Pacino,” recalled the actor Bobby Cannavale. “The fact that he’d elevated to that role as a ‘cover’ made it even more heroic.”In 2011, after over 75 film and television appearances, including 11 different roles on various “Law and Order” franchises, guest spots on “The Sopranos,” “Sex in the City” and “Homicide,” innumerable theatrical roles, like his acclaimed performance as a displaced Cuban immigrant in Eduardo Machado’s “Havana is Waiting,” 10 seasons at the Eugene O’Neill Center Playwrights Conference in Connecticut and an equal number of summers at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, Mr. MacVittie set aside his acting career to train as a nurse. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from Hunter College in Manhattan in 2013.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Sophia Oliva Ochs MacVittie. His first marriage ended in divorce. He lived in Manhattan.Mr. MacVittie returned to acting in his last years, including in a featured role on Ava DuVernay’s lauded Netflix series, “The Way They See Us.” He confined his nursing activities to the palliative care of friends in need.“I loved Bruce MacVittie,” Mr. Pacino said in an interview. “His performances were always glistening and crackling; a heart and a joy to watch. He was the embodiment of the struggling actor in New York City, and he made it work. We will miss him.” More

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      New York’s Dancehall Parties Are ‘A Different Type of Turn Up’

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      This story is part of an occasional series exploring nightlife in New York.CJ Milan was racing around a yacht just after midnight on Sunday, handing out hundreds of foam glow sticks.“When the boat starts moving, we play soca music,” she said with a mischievous smile as she paused for a moment to watch the dance floor. “It gets everybody turned up.”Ms. Milan was running Yacht Fete, a 1,000-person reggae, dancehall, soca and afrobeats party that takes place monthly on the Hudson River.The yacht is just one of the venues that she uses to host her recurring Reggae Fest dance parties, which she started organizing in New York in 2015.The dance floor at Yacht Fete, a monthly party held on a yacht on the Hudson River.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesDancehall, a party-friendly byproduct of reggae music with faster tempos and the cadence of hip-hop, came out of Jamaica in the late 1970s.And New York’s dancehall parties, which are often thrown by and for the city’s large Caribbean communities, bring people together on flamboyant dance floors where they can whine, dagger, line dance and drop into full splits.Ms. Milan, who estimates that she has drawn more than 170,000 people to Reggae Fest events in New York over the last seven years, has since expanded the parties to Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Los Angeles.But even as she broadens her reach, she’s still figuring out how to keep picky New York crowds happy.“New York is a different type of turn up,” she said. “We just have so much more to cover music-wise because our city is so diverse.”Partygoers held up foam glowsticks as the yacht left Pier 40 in Lower Manhattan.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesShe said that at each of her parties, she tries to have a team of D.J.s ready to play whatever type of music the crowd is responding to most vividly that night.Marvin Smith, who’s known at Reggae Fest as D.J. Legend, said that he plays anything from reggaeton to dancehall to keep people moving.“When I see the hairdos sweated out, when I see people who are looking around like, ‘Where are my keys? Who has my phone?’” Mr. Smith said. “When we see that, we know it’s mission accomplished.”And Ms. Milan said they try to throw something in the mix for every kind of listener.“Dancehall has different levels — some of it is hardcore,” she said, which often appeals to a younger generation. “But then you get the older generation who want to hear Mr. Vegas or Sean Paul.”She added: “Then you got other ones that say, ‘I want that sexy stuff’ — they want to hear what the women have to say,” referring to artists like Spice.Sean Paul performed at Elsewhere, a venue in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, late last month.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesYet there are certain shows that bring out dancehall fans of all kinds. As Sean Paul performed at Elsewhere in Bushwick on April 25, the crowd reflected his fan base, spanning an international and intergenerational mix.Paul, 49, a mellow and singular figure who’s responsible for bringing dancehall to American radio stations in the early 2000s, said that his earliest memories of Jamaican dancehall parties are from when he was 14.He would sneak out with friends to a street party called Frontline, where they would often spot dancehall legends like Tiger and Shabba Ranks and dance under the open night sky.“That was the one thing I didn’t like about clubs here at first,” he said. “You can’t see the stars. You can’t feel the moon, there’s no island breeze blowing on your face while you’re listening to some real, authentic rumbling bass lines.”But when he started coming to New York in the late 1990s, he discovered a more “grimy” dancehall scene with audiences for every niche.One of his favorite spots in the early 2000s was a two-story warehouse in Brooklyn where the parquet floors moved “at least a foot” as people danced.Dancing by the bar to Sean Paul. “It’s the only city that I knew at the time where I was able to hit four clubs in one night,” he said of his early trips to New York.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times“It’s the only city that I knew at the time where I was able to hit four clubs in one night,” he said before rattling off a list of the places he would visit.“Two clubs in Jersey — one is a Jamaican club, and then one is a Guyanese club,” he said. “And then one in Brooklyn, which is a straight hardcore hip-hop type vibe, and the same thing back up in Manhattan.”But many of the clubs that Paul remembered are now long gone. And while smaller spaces that play Caribbean music are still sprinkled around the city, there are only a handful of parties and shows that consistently bring out thousands of people.Cathy Rodriguez, 25, who was at Ms. Milan’s yacht party last weekend, said that she’s been coming to Reggae Fest parties for years.Often traveling up from the Washington area, where she now lives, Ms. Rodriguez said that she’ll sometimes plan her trips around the parties.Tempest Williams, Aniquiana Kurtz, Christina Mejia, Cathy Rodriguez and Maria Traore posed for a photo on the top deck at Yacht Fete.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times“I will legit just go out of town for Reggae Fest,” she said. “Like, don’t get me wrong, I will go see my family, of course. But I will be like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to New York and we’re going to Reggae Fest.’”Ms. Rodriguez said that one of the main pulls of the event was the chance to hear her favorite music.“Dancehall will always be my first baby,” she said. “Growing up in New York City, particularly in the Bronx, dancehall has always been a huge part of my life. Like my mom listens to dancehall on Sunday morning when she’s cleaning.”And even beyond her favorite songs, what keeps Ms. Rodriguez showing up again and again is the lively dance floor.“In the Caribbean community, we say ‘stush’ a lot, and stush basically means like, standing still,” she said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a regular nightclub in New York City, but people are like standing still, smoking hookah — you know, they’re not really enjoying themselves to the music.”“CJ’s vision when it comes to Reggae Fest is like, ‘I want people to come, I want people to turn up, but I want people to dance,’” she continued. “That’s why I keep going to her events, because it’s guaranteed I’m going to dance my ass off the whole night.” More