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      When Theater Installations Aim to Make Room for Drama

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      These worthy and adventurous lockdown experiments too often give short shrift to the relationship between a script and how an audience takes it in.For the last year and a half, I’ve imagined shuttered theaters as shrines to live performance — the empty seats, the leftover sets, the lone ghost lights lit like memorial candles.While performances eventually moved online and outside, and in the last few months, thanks to mask mandates and vaccines, back inside, some companies and artists have chosen a different route: offering theater-adjacent installations that allow audiences to engage more directly with the spaces.In these shows, we are often asked to walk through the venues and explore, freely or with the help of a guide, not merely sit and watch. And with small clusters of bodies in motion, they may be (or at least feel) safer than the typical experience of being locked down in your seat.Unfortunately, most of the theatrical installations I’ve seen — which include “A Dozen Dreams,” “Seven Deadly Sins,” “The Watering Hole,” and, most recently, “Definition” and “Semblance” — have struggled to successfully integrate content and location. Most of these works, which, with the exception of “Seven Deadly Sins,” did not use any live actors, were an inventive approach to theater in a time when it was unsafe to sit and gather in these spaces. But they have yet to realize the full potential of these hybrid forms as more than a stopgap on the way back to pre-pandemic theater.“Semblance,” written and directed by Whitney White for New York Theater Workshop, is a set of lyrical monologues about how Black women are perceived and stereotyped. Socially distant groupings of white director’s chairs situated on an Astroturf floor in front of two colossal TV screens set side by side.On them we see Nikiya Mathis, playing Black women of different classes, from a bus driver to a politician. Her image often confronts itself, emphasizing the tension already present in the writing. And Mathis makes a feast out of these monologues, transforming her intonation and inflections. But the ultimate experience is far from immersive; in fact, it is little more than a dressed-up screening of a short film. The space is forgettable.Audience members watched videos at their own pace at Whitney White’s other recent installation, entitled “Definition.”Maya SharpeAnother White installation, “Definition,” presented by the Bushwick Starr at the performance space Mercury Store in July, had a clear understanding of its space but couldn’t make it cohere with the piece’s myriad elements. The first portion was designed like a museum; the stark white walls and starkly modern architecture of the space lent themselves to the curated selection of paintings and photographs that hung on the walls.Likewise, a selection of short videos by a handful of artists, which played on a projection screen on a mezzanine level that opened up to a bleacher-like flight of stairs, were comfortably showcased. This part of the production had a free-floating style; the audience members were left to wander at will, and were free to sit and watch the videos but could also stand or continue to browse.Guides then appeared, leading us to a room where we were given headphones. The rest of the experience, an audio-only musical with each act taking place in a separate designated space, lacked clarity. Gauzy curtains divided up the theater, but there was little to distinguish each subspace beyond the different seating arrangements.To lead an audience through a space should be to create a new narrative out of that movement: How do we change in moving from one room to another? How does our understanding of the text change? What do we see differently in one room that another couldn’t offer?One of the structures created for “A Dozen Dreams” at Brookfield Place.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe beauty of En Garde Arts’s “A Dozen Dreams,” a sumptuously designed installation of 12 rooms that served as stages for audio monologues by female playwrights, was that each location had its own identity. The labyrinthine setup at Brookfield Place, with interlinked rooms divided by curtains, recalled the odd way we move through dreams — stories bleed into one another, scenes change suddenly. The experience of venturing from one piece to the next was essential.But even with such a luscious experience, I questioned the installation’s awkward relationship with Brookfield, a high-end mall. Mundanely expensive shops were juxtaposed with a uniquely surreal visual journey — art placed in a home for consumerism. Surely there’s a disconnect there?Similarly, “Seven Deadly Sins,” performed in empty storefronts in the meatpacking district, was an eye-catching spectacle but didn’t fully connect the text to the environs.The neighborhood’s history (slaughterhouses and sex clubs, and now pricey shops) was ostensibly reflected in seven short plays that focused on the vices of its title. But mostly we got guides mentioning tidbits about the neighborhood in passing, as they led the audience from one storefront to another.Audience members write notes as part of the Signature Theater’s “The Watering Hole.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA lost sense of communal gathering was one of the themes of the installation “The Watering Hole,” a mixed-media project created and conceived by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon that ran at the Pershing Square Signature Center last month. Seventeen artists collaborated with Nottage and Haymon on the installation, which lacked coherency. Piles of sand and deflated beach balls in one corner, handwritten signs on the walls: this disjointed odyssey did no justice to the space as a watering hole for thought or a beloved home for several theaters. Even with talented creators, the magic of a theater can be flattened by a misuse of space.The irony is that I fondly remember the Signature Center as a safe haven. In my busy pre-pandemic days I knew I could take a break in the second floor cafe. I’ve waited there between a Saturday matinee and an evening show. I’ve ducked in to get out of the rain.These moments — along with what appeared on the Signature’s stages — were stolen away by the pandemic.Installations have offered reasonable ways to keep theater going during the pandemic. But they can’t just be backdrops. Real theater needs a space to breathe.SemblanceThrough Aug. 29 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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      Review: Unearthing the Late Curiosities of Tennessee Williams

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      “Hilton Als Presents,” from New York Theater Workshop, features three of the playwright’s overlooked and often disparaged works.Once mortals become immortal, it’s easy to forget how precariously they stumbled through life. That is certainly true of Tennessee Williams, who ensured his place in the pantheon of American playwriting with his early hits “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” but spent his last two decades — after “The Night of the Iguana,” in 1961 — in what Hilton Als calls “a kind of critical purgatory.”But critics at their most vital aren’t a baying wolf pack chasing weakened prey. They’re champions of the overlooked, the underpraised, the misunderstood. In that spirit, Als, a writer for The New Yorker who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017, is asking for a reconsideration of some late Williams works.In “Selections From Tennessee Williams,” the second episode of the two-part New York Theater Workshop podcast “Hilton Als Presents,” he plucks excerpts from three plays dismissed in their own time: “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,” from 1969; “The Red Devil Battery Sign,” which succumbed in 1975 en route to Broadway; and “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” Williams’s final Broadway premiere in his lifetime. It opened in 1980 on his 69th birthday and was met with such a pile-on of viciously mocking reviews that it closed after just two weeks.These plays are not exceptional in Williams’s oeuvre as considerations of masculinity, sexuality or the divided self — though, as Als notes, each includes a male artist character.Directed by Als, and with skillful audio production and editing by Alex Barron, the podcast does not always succeed in conveying, with voice and stage directions, what we need to envision.The scene from “The Red Devil Battery Sign,” starring Raúl Castillo as a band leader and Marin Ireland as a sexually rapacious belle, feels too untethered from context to add up to anything. But each of the other plays is memorable for a standout performance and for glimmers of beauty in the text.The longest excerpt, from “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,” at first seems an airless exercise: an encounter between a brittle yet lascivious American woman (Nadine Malouf) and the Japanese barman (James Yaegashi) she is harassing. It comes to life only belatedly, with the entrance of Reed Birney as her husband, Mark, an exceedingly drunken painter struggling to maintain his dignity and harness his artistry. It is an utterly lived-in performance, edged with terror and mirth. (John Lahr, in his biography of Williams, calls this play “a fascinating dissection of the perversity of his psyche,” and he is correct.)“In the beginning,” Mark says, his hands shaky, paint all over his suit, “a new style of work can be stronger than you, but you learn to control it. It has to be controlled.”Williams, at that point, was not doing so well at controlling his art, his addictions or his emotional frailty.The other magnetic turn is by Michelle Williams in “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” which the playwright labeled “a ghost play,” about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As Zelda — a role originated by Geraldine Page on Broadway — Williams evades the traps that lie in wait in Tennessee Williams’s women: the masks and artifices of gender and class that made him famous for writing diva roles, and that often expose those characters to ridicule. Against the odds, Michelle Williams locates a human being.“Are you certain, Scott, that I fit the classification of dreamy young Southern lady?” Zelda asks her husband (played by André Holland). “Damn it, Scott. Sorry, wrong size, it pinches! Can’t wear that shoe, too confining.”Tennessee Williams, too, felt pinched and confined by expectations. He was forever in competition with his younger self.Als’s production doesn’t persuasively argue for these late plays. But it does accomplish what a critic is meant to do when elevation is in order — to urge close examination of something that might otherwise escape our gaze.Perhaps, taking Als’s cue, some brilliant director will see a way.Hilton Als Presents: Selections From Tennessee WilliamsThrough July 31; nytw.org. At anchor.fm/nytw79 and major podcast platforms. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. More

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      New York Theater Workshop Plans a Summer Reopening

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      The Off Broadway institution unveiled a “superseason” of performances beginning in August, and continuing through 2022-23.One major Off Broadway institution announced its return to live performances on Tuesday when New York Theater Workshop unveiled its 2021-22 season, which will begin in August and overwhelmingly feature projects by women and people of color.Among the five productions announced is “Sanctuary City,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok, which was eight preview performances into its run last March before the pandemic brought live theater to a standstill. That play, about two teenage children of undocumented immigrants, will be directed by Rebecca Frecknall and is planned for September.New York Theater Workshop also said it had slated four shows so far for 2022-23, including a staging of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” that had originally been planned for 2020. Directed by Sam Gold and adapted by Clare Barron, its starry cast was set to include Greta Gerwig, Oscar Isaac, Steve Buscemi, Chris Messina, Lola Kirke and more. The new ensemble hasn’t been announced, but Jeremy Blocker, the theater’s managing director, said in an interview that “the goal is to keep that incredible company together.”Unveiling two seasons at once — a “superseason,” as James C. Nicola, the theater’s artistic director, coined it in an interview — is a way to both “make a big noise” about coming back to the stage and to honor commitments made to artists before the pandemic, he said. But perhaps most notably, it offers some breathing room for his successor when Nicola steps down in June 2022 after leading the theater for 34 years — a tenure that has included early runs of the acclaimed “Slave Play” and Tony Award-winning musicals like “Rent,” “Hadestown” and “Once.”“I realized how, having done it for 30-something-odd years now, how personal this is — how personal it is to be in a conversation about work that’s still in the state of being imagined by an artist,” Nicola said. “It’s going to be a really interesting challenge to not be a part of that for a while once I leave.”The 2021-22 season is set to open in August with Whitney White’s “Semblance,” which is being billed as a “filmed theatrical experience” on the perception of Black women, presented both virtually and as an immersive installation. White, who last year won an Obie Award for her direction of “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” will also direct the world premiere of “On Sugarland,” written by the fellow Obie winner Aleshea Harris, in early 2022.This fall, Kristina Wong will build on her streamed work “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord” for a new show about creating a homemade face-covering enterprise during the pandemic. It will be directed by Chay Yew. And closing out the season is the musical “Dreaming Zenzile” — a world premiere based on the life of the South African musician and activist Miriam Makeba — written and performed by the singer Somi Kakoma, and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz.“What is emerging to me in that season ahead is the nature of community — the necessity, the compulsion, that we have as a species to gather,” Nicola said. “To be a part of a family.”Following “Three Sisters” in 2022 is “american (tele)visions,” a multimedia memory play about an undocumented Mexican family, written by Victor I. Cazares — the theater’s playwright in residence — and directed by Rubén Polendo. Liliana Padilla’s “How to Defend Yourself,” about a group of college students channeling their emotions through a self-defense class after a fellow student is raped, will follow. Padilla is set to co-direct with Steph Paul and Rachel Chavkin, whose New York Theater Workshop credits include the Off Broadway run of “Hadestown.”That season’s final production, of those announced so far, is “The Half-God of Rainfall,” a contemporary myth, written by Inua Ellams (“Barber Shop Chronicles”), about a hero who is half Nigerian mortal and half Greek god.Coronavirus safety protocols might change, but for now the theater is planning to ask audience members for proof of vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test, and to require that masks be worn in the house.Performance schedules have not yet been announced, but when live shows return to New York Theater Workshop’s stage, employees in the industry who lost work during the pandemic will have one less financial worry: Their tickets will be free. More

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      ‘Taxilandia’ Review: The Mouth is Running, but Not the Meter

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      Modesto Jimenez, known as Flako, has turned cab theater into a genre, and his latest show takes place on a ride through Bushwick, Brooklyn.Cruising down Knickerbocker Avenue in the back of a vintage Lincoln Town Car on a sunny Friday afternoon, I was thrilled when the driver, Modesto Jimenez, played the Fabolous track “Brooklyn,” loudly. The song, the Lincoln’s smooth ride, life passing by on the busy streets — the combination hit like theatrical umami.If cab theater were a genre, Jimenez would have medallion-shaped awards. Seven years ago, he performed his play “Take Me Home” in a New York City cab for up to three people at a time. For his Oye Group company’s new “Taxilandia,” he drives around his central Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, regaling his tiny audience with stories and reminiscences, asides and historical tidbits, like the fact that in the 1970s and ’80s Bushwick was devastated by arson fires just as bad as the ones that laid waste to the Bronx.Jimenez, known as Flako, says the ride is not a tour, and discourages audience members from taking photos.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJimenez, who goes by Flako, spent nine years driving a cab, and he handles the traffic with a calm confidence — which is reassuring because he also talks nearly nonstop, weaving between English and Spanish, scripted text and off-the-cuff exchanges with the passengers (a plexiglass barrier separates the front and back seats).As for Bushwick, he knows it inside and out. He was raised by his grandmother there after moving from the Dominican Republic as a child; his autobiographical show “¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn,” from 2018, supplied much of that back story.Jimenez prefaces “Taxilandia” by pointing out that it is not a tour (he discourages the fares/audience members from taking photos) but an experience. The car trip itself is just one part of a greater project that also includes the text-guided walk “Textilandia,” a 16-track playlist, storefront galleries, and virtual artists’ salons (now archived online).“Taxilandia” is a follow-up to Jimenez’s “Take Me Home,” a play he performed in cabs seven years ago.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs we slowly rolled down main thoroughfares and side streets, Jimenez sketched an impressionistic portrayal of an ever-changing neighborhood, stressing that Bushwick’s history is an ebb and flow of successive arrivals, of displacement and conflict but also of energy and reinvention. We passed the community institution El Puente, where he thrived as a kid, and the former Ridgewood Masonic Lodge, which is now — you have one guess — an apartment building.The large breweries created by the German beer barons of the 19th century are long gone; the new Bushwick prefers microbreweries anyway. We double parked so he could dissect layers of graffiti, “and right across the street,” Jimenez gestured, “the gentrification bar.” While the car is briefly in neutral, he himself is anything but.His take on change is nuanced, though, and as a Bennington-educated artist Jimenez bridges various constituencies — he has appeared in shows by the experimentalist Richard Maxwell and at the thriving Off Off Broadway theater the Bushwick Starr, which is presenting “Taxilandia” with New York Theater Workshop, in association with the Tank.A stop along the way near the former Ridgewood Masonic Lodge. The show is part of a larger project that includes a text-guided walk, a playlist and art.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Lincoln was on the move again. On the right was a pizzeria that Jimenez claimed is the best in Brooklyn. When we passed another with a nearly identical name a minute later, I asked which slice he preferred and he started waffling. Eventually we made our way to the trendier part of the neighborhood, where young folks dine on rather more expensive pizza, and he dropped me off near a subway stop. For Bushwick, the ride continues.TaxilandiaThrough May 30; taxilandia.com More

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      Head of New York Theater Workshop to Depart in 2022

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      James C. Nicola, who balanced provocative programming with shows aimed at Broadway, will have served 34 years as artistic director.As the New York theater world points toward reopening, one major force within its nonprofit sector — and a central figure in its often lucrative collaborations with Broadway — is preparing to walk away.James C. Nicola, the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, announced on Friday that he will step down in June 2022. At that point, he will have spent 34 years — nearly half his life — at the off-Broadway theater, which spawned the once-in-a-lifetime hit musical “Rent” and grew under his leadership into a steady home for provocative fare by the likes of Caryl Churchill, the Five Lesbian Brothers and the director Ivo van Hove.“I’ve been around long enough to see some of my colleagues carried out of their jobs in a pine box,” Nicola, 71, said on Thursday. “I didn’t want to go that route.”His announcement comes at a time when theaters in New York are grappling with numerous internal and external pressures. Besides the protracted closures related to Covid 19, which has wreaked havoc on theaters’ finances, several groups of theater artists who are Black, Indigenous or people of color have pointed out the overwhelmingly white and male demographics of their artistic leadership, most notably in the “We See You, White American Theater” manifesto that came out in July 2020.One of its demands was that theater leaders should view it as “an act of service to resign” if they have served in the role for more than 20 years — a benchmark that Nicola reached when George W. Bush was president. Nicola is the first prominent New York artistic director to announce his departure since then, and the process of replacing him will undoubtedly be closely watched.Asked about his replacement, Nicola said he would “love to see someone who has the trust and faith of all the constituencies of the community.”Unlike many artistic directors, Nicola was not primarily a stage director himself. He came to New York Theater Workshop in 1988 after stints in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s casting office and at Arena Stage in Washington.In recent years, the workshop has seen several works transfer to Broadway from its airy East Fourth Street theater, including the Tony Award-winning musicals “Once” and “Hadestown”; the acclaimed personal-meets-political memoir “What the Constitution Means to Me”; and “Slave Play,” which is currently nominated for 12 Tonys. (Another transfer, “Sing Street,” was two weeks away from its first preview on Broadway when the Covid-19 lockdown happened.)Nicola — who recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of “Rent,” the theater’s first Broadway transfer, with a starry online fund-raiser — says he is of two minds about the pipeline between commercial and nonprofit theater.“There are many wonderful people in the commercial Broadway world, but I think we’ve become too dependent on their enhancement money,” said Nicola, referring to the funds that commercial Broadway producers will invest in smaller productions with an eye toward larger subsequent productions.“If it’s a large project and it doesn’t have commercial enhancement, it’s probably not going to happen,” he said. “And I think that’s something we as an industry need to be really concerned about.”New York Theater Workshop still plans to present two works that were canceled last year, the Martyna Majok play “Sanctuary City” and a new adaptation of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” by Clare Barron.Until that is feasible, the theater has established an ambitious Artistic Instigators program, connecting traditional theater artists, filmmakers and digital artists on projects that subscribers can watch in their evolving states. As Nicola envisions a post-coronavirus theater landscape, he hopes theaters will learn from these innovations.“This year, we had 18,000 people view the ‘Rent 25’ gala from all over the globe,” he said. “Eighteen thousand. That kind of access — it’s hard to imagine not having the capacity to do that going forward. So maybe instead of doing eight shows a week, we do seven live shows and then stream a capture.”Members of the original “Rent” cast during the recent anniversary fundraiser.via New York Theater WorkshopBut those decisions will ultimately fall to his successor. Whoever it is, Nicola will be watching from the sidelines.“I want to absolutely stay out of it,” he said. “I think it’s completely inappropriate to be hovering or hanging out, both during the process and when that person comes in. They shouldn’t have to contend with the old guy.”He said he was at peace with what comes next.“As a child, my dad told me he thought he was going to die at 37,” Nicola said. “He didn’t, but I started thinking the same thing: Was I going to make it past 37? And oddly, I was 37 when I started at New York Theater Workshop. In a certain way, it was like the beginning of my life, not the end.” More

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      A ‘Rent’ Reunion Measures 25 Years of Love and Loss

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookA ‘Rent’ Reunion Measures 25 Years of Love and LossA fund-raiser, a tribute, a documentary — and a reminder that Jonathan Larson’s musical remains especially inspiring in hard times.Members of the original cast sing “No Day but Today” during New York Theater Workshop’s “25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love.”Credit…via New York Theater WorkshopMarch 3, 2021Is “Rent,” Jonathan Larson’s 25-year-old groundbreaking musical, somber or celebratory? When I was in high school, in the early throes of my “Rent” obsession, I made my aunt see the show. “That’s so depressing!” she wailed afterward. “No it isn’t!” I insisted. She looked at me like I was crazy.I often think of that exchange, now 14 years later. For me, the adjective “depressing” never fit this musical, which was about so much more than its tragedies: a generation fighting AIDS, poverty, gentrification and the everyday drama and griefs of those 525,600 minutes that make a year.On Tuesday night the New York Theater Workshop hosted “25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love,” a virtual fund-raiser commemorating the show, which premiered there in 1996 before going on to Broadway, Tony Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and international renown.It is well known that Larson died just before the musical’s first preview performance. So even though this was a tender, even intimate celebration, the “Rent” event, hosted by the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” contestant Olivia Lux, also embraced loss.Olivia Lux hosted the show, which was at once a documentary, a telethon and a tribute to the “Rent” composer Jonathan Larson.Credit…—-, via New York Theater Workshop“25 Years of Rent,” directed by Andy Señor, worked as a tribute to Larson, a contemporary telethon packed with stage celebs and, most touching, a documentary about the making of the beloved show. The theater summoned him back to life through archival images and footage — a broad-grinned waiter making milkshakes at the Moondance Diner; singing “Will I” on a cassette tape — as well as via recollections from friends, family, performers and the show’s director, Michael Greif.The names involved were impressive enough to light up a marquee: the original cast members Taye Diggs, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega, as well as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Annaleigh Ashford, Neil Patrick Harris, Ben Platt, Anaïs Mitchell, Telly Leung and so many more.Some teared up recalling Larson’s exuberance and talents, and described the burden of carrying on with a show whose success he would never see. Of course, this is part of the tragedy of “Rent.”The saying goes that for every death in the world there’s a birth. And as “Rent” was born and grew, so did the careers of the cast members, many of whom were unknowns at the time. Anthony Rapp described working at Starbucks and auditioning with an R.E.M. song, while Idina Menzel, before jumping over the moon or defying gravity, had made a living as a bar mitzvah singer.Fredi Walker-Browne, who played Joanne in the original production, described hearing the lyric to her song “Take Me or Leave Me” for the first time.Credit…via New York Theater WorkshopThe night was also about how Larson’s work helped open people up to themselves. Fredi Walker-Browne, the original Joanne, spoke about first hearing “Take Me or Leave Me,” which Larson wrote for her and Menzel, and feeling that he laced her personality into the lyrics: “I look before I leap/I like margins and discipline/I make lists in my sleep.”Others, like Lux, hailed the show for portraying queerness and drag at a time when many productions didn’t.Winners of Jonathan Larson Grants, awarded to promising early-career musical theater artists, spoke to his legacy. And theater notables who weren’t in “Rent” at its beginnings took on pieces of the score in their own styles. Christopher Jackson’s hymnlike “One Song Glory,” Eva Noblezada’s coquettish “Out Tonight” and Billy Porter’s explosively baroque “I’ll Cover You” were standouts.Among the performers inspired by “Rent” was Billy Porter, who sang “I’ll Cover You.”Credit…via New York Theater WorkshopIf Larson’s death is one side of some karmic exchange, another side is the audiences who used — and continue to use — “Rent” to excavate some hidden part of themselves, and to inspire their own art.So much of this last year has been marked by things unmade: the people unmade by a pandemic, the innocent Black lives unmade by brutality, the planet unmade by a changing climate. My own tiny bubble of a life has gotten smaller, without the chance to see some of my closest friends and where the outside world seems newly and inexplicably dangerous.And yet in recalling the making (and remaking) of “Rent,” the event helped quiet the grief that creeps up on me every day. In the chat box next to the stream, which reached over 6,000 viewers, “Rent” fans confessed to crying; a final group rendition of “Seasons of Love” seemed to push many beyond comforting.It took me a few viewings before I could watch “Rent” without bursting into head-aching, snot-falling ugly crying, but eventually the show became my joy, my comfort. As much as Roger and Mark, a songwriter and filmmaker, hoped to make something of themselves through their art, so did I make myself — in whatever facile way — through “Rent,” using it to shape myself as an artist and an outcast and a New Yorker.At the end of “Rent,” Angel has died but the rest of the bohemians live, and Mark has finally finished his movie. You can read the signature lyric “No day but today” as fatalistic, as the characters’ existential cry, as Larson’s prescience about his sudden death.But I’ve always read “No day but today” — which gets woven into “Seasons of Love” in the show’s finale, and was this event’s final heart-rending hurrah — as a promise: Today I wake up to a new version of myself. I will be magnificent. I account for the losses of yesterday, but today? Today is alive. There’s no tragedy in that.25 Years of Rent: Measured in LoveThrough March 6; nytw.orgAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Birth of ‘Rent,’ Its Creator’s Death and the 25 Years Since

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Birth of ‘Rent,’ Its Creator’s Death and the 25 Years SinceWith a virtual performance marking the Broadway musical’s anniversary, original cast and creative team members talk about losing Jonathan Larson and carrying on his legacy.Jonathan Larson, left, who wrote the music, lyrics and book of “Rent,” with the play’s director, Michael Greif, in 1996.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 25, 2021Updated 3:04 p.m. ETWhat’s 525,600 times 25?It has been 25 years — or, to use a memorable “Seasons of Love” calculation, 13.14 million minutes — since “Rent” upended Broadway’s sense of what musical theater could be. Jonathan Larson’s rock-infused reboot of “La Bohème” had already generated positive chatter during its Off Broadway rehearsals at New York Theater Workshop. But then came full-throated shouts of disbelief and anguish on Jan. 25, 1996, when, hours after the final dress rehearsal, Larson was found dead in his apartment from an aortic aneurysm. He was 35 years old.His shocking death came right before the start of previews, when a creative team typically makes changes based on audience reactions. After briefly considering whether to bring in a script doctor, the team decided instead to streamline Larson’s music and lyrics as needed.The move paid off. Within weeks, “Rent” had achieved a level of hype that would not be rivaled on Broadway until “Hamilton” almost 20 years later: earning rave reviews (The New York Times’s Ben Brantley said it “shimmers with hope for the future of the American musical”); a Pulitzer Prize for Drama; and a frantic transfer to Broadway, where it ran for 12 years and won four Tony Awards.Members of the original Broadway cast in “25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love,” which will stream on Tuesday.Credit…via New York Theater WorkshopOn Tuesday, New York Theater Workshop will use its annual fund-raising gala to commemorate the show’s silver anniversary with “25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love.” The largely prerecorded virtual performance, available to stream through March 6, will feature most of the original cast, who still communicate regularly in a group chat, along with high-profile “Rent”-heads like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Platt, Billy Porter and Ali Stroker.Members of the original production’s cast and creative team discussed the stratospheric heights and ghastly lows of 1996, remembering the gifted young writer who would have been 61 years old today. Here are the lightly edited excerpts.‘We had to do it for Jonathan’NANCY KASSAK DIEKMANN, former managing director of New York Theater Workshop: Jonathan had the kind of health insurance where he could only go to the emergency room, and he had already been once. They told him it was food poisoning or something, and they sent him home. On the day of the final dress rehearsal, he wasn’t feeling well, and he called to say he was going to take a nap. I said to him, “Jon, why don’t you let me make you an appointment and pay for you to see my doctor?” I always wonder what would have happened if he had gone.JAMES C. NICOLA, artistic director of New York Theater Workshop: Everyone felt a degree of ownership and responsibility to do their absolute best on his behalf. It ceased being a job and became a calling.Anthony Rapp, left, and Adam Pascal in rehearsal at the New York Theater Workshop in 1996.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesANTHONY RAPP, who played Mark: From that last dress rehearsal until mid-July, no one missed a performance. It seemed impossible. No one could. I don’t say that to brag. I just think it showed our level of commitment. We had to do it for Jonathan.MICHAEL GREIF, director: One terrible advantage of being in your mid-30s working on “Rent” was that you had a decade of experience of loss. Jonathan’s death made him part of the community he was honoring.ADAM PASCAL, who played Roger: People are often surprised to hear this, but I only knew Jonathan for about four weeks. I was cast in December, and he died in January. I grieved the loss on behalf of his family, who we got to know afterward. But I personally miss him the way the public misses him. I miss the music that never got written.‘We did a lot of cutting’NICOLA: Four of us met the day after Jonathan died — me, Michael Greif, Tim Weil and Lynn Thomson [the dramaturge]. And one thing that came up was, “Should we bring in another composer/writer to finish the job? Is that the choice that has integrity?” But we quickly decided against it.TIM WEIL, musical supervisor: Our idea was, “Let’s do what Jonathan wanted us to do,” even if we couldn’t know exactly what that was.GREIF: We did a lot of cutting. We cut things that we felt Jonathan would agree to or even advocate cutting.RAPP: I think Jonathan was raring to go for the preview process. It would have been very discombobulating and weird for morale to have a foreigner — I mean that artistically, not xenophobically — come in at that point.DIEKMANN: Tim had to step up on the musical side, and he did. He and Michael knew what Jonathan wanted — because, God knows, he was there all the time.WEIL: I still continue to make little bitty changes for new productions, since it has always been tailored to specific performers. I think I’m the only one who has that kind of license.‘Everything was just coming at us’WILSON JERMAINE HEREDIA, who played Angel: Everything was just coming at us, and there was a part of me that was on automatic pilot. The only thing that felt safe and constant was going back on that stage every night. The most stable thing was that it was happening to all of us.DAPHNE RUBIN-VEGA, who played Mimi: Today is 12 weeks out from a partial knee replacement for me. And part of me is like, “How did I get here?” But I know exactly how I got here: by playing Mimi eight times a week.RAPP: I have weird little nagging injuries that still bother me from carrying around that video camera for two hours straight.Daphne Rubin-Vega, who played Mimi in the original cast, with Adam Pascal, who played Rodger. Credit…via New York Theater Workshop‘Representation really matters’GREIF: The idealism and openheartedness of the piece, which I was very wary of at the time and found myself guarding against, has had a profound impact on very, very young people. I’m talking 12- and 13-year-olds. And in many ways, “Rent” opened the door to the possibility of the musicals I went on to direct, musicals like “Next to Normal” and “Dear Evan Hansen.”RUBIN-VEGA: Representation really matters, and it was important for a woman who looks like me to be thrust into that ingénue role.PASCAL: It is something that I’m clearly forever connected to. And it is something that is still literally paying the rent. Do you know about Cameo? Earlier today, I did five Cameos where I sang “Rent” songs.NICOLA: I am just now able to hear these songs without any baggage or context — just hear them as musical theater songs. And I’m thinking, “These are really good songs.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Theater to Stream: Revisiting ‘Rent’ and ‘Angels in America’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater to Stream: Revisiting ‘Rent’ and ‘Angels in America’Presentations include the 30th anniversary of George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum”; Andréa Burns in “Bad Dates”; and a solo show by Riz Ahmed.From left, Adam Pascal, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Anthony Rapp in “Rent,” whose anniversary is being celebrated with a reunion presented by New York Theater Workshop.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 17, 2021A pair of game-changing shows are celebrating big anniversaries, so now is a good time to revisit them and their legacies.George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum,” an anthology of sketches about Black culture (called exhibits), felt like a bolt of lighting when it premiered in 1986. At its heart, as Frank Rich said in his New York Times review, was the question “How do American Black men and women at once honor and escape the legacy of suffering that is the baggage of their past?”From left, Reggie Montgomery, Vickilyn Reynolds, Tommy Hollis and Suzzanne Douglas in the streaming production of “The Colored Museum,” filmed in 1991.Credit…Nancy LevineThanks to Crossroads Theater Company — where the show originated before moving to the Public Theater, and which is streaming the “Great Performances” capture from 1991 — we can confirm that while a few details have aged, “The Colored Museum” retains much of its satirical charge.It’s fascinating, now, to see how playlets in the show — such as “Git on Board” (about welcoming guests on a “celebrity slaveship”) and “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play” (a blistering take on “A Raisin in the Sun” — have influenced contemporary works like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon” and Jordan E. Cooper’s “Ain’t No Mo.’” Through Feb. 28; crossroadstheatrecompany.comWhen Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” opened at New York Theater Workshop in 1996, its young, often queer and racially diverse characters felt new in musicals; it also dealt with the HIV/AIDS crisis, one of the biggest issues of the day. The show immediately found a passionate audience, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and transferred to Broadway, where it remained for over 12 years. Hindsight makes it clear that “Rent” has endured because a fairly conventional heart beats under its edgy demeanor, and that this “rock” musical is built out of zhuzhed-up show tunes; those are solid bones.New York Theater Workshop is revisiting the phenomenon with the tribute “25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love,” in which Eva Noblezada, Ben Platt, Billy Porter and Ali Stroker join original cast members, including Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Idina Menzel, Adam Pascal, Anthony Rapp and Daphne Rubin-Vega. March 2-6; nytw.orgNathan Lane in the National Theater’s production of “Angels in America” on Broadway.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCatching up with British productionsThe National Theater’s streaming arm, National Theater at Home, has just made available its acclaimed production of “Angels in America,” which stars Andrew Garfield, Nathan Lane and Denise Gough Some of us in the United States were lucky enough to see it when the production traveled from London to Broadway three years ago. Perhaps even more exciting, then, is the opportunity to discover older shows that didn’t come to New York, like “Antigone” starring Christopher Eccleston and Jodie Whittaker; “Medea,” with a pre-“I May Destroy You” Michaela Coel as the nurse; and Lucy Kirkwood’s “Mosquitoes,” in which Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams play sisters. ntathome.comAndréa Burns in Theresa Rebeck’s “Bad Dates.”Credit…via George Street Playhouse‘Bad Dates’A good rule of thumb: Whenever the wonderful Andréa Burns (“In the Heights,” “On Your Feet!”) pops up in something, just check it out. In this case it’s Theresa Rebeck’s one-woman play “Bad Dates,” presented by the George Street Playhouse in New Jersey, which should provide good opportunities for Burns to flex her considerable comic muscles as a divorced woman looking for love. Feb. 23-March 14; georgestreetplayhouse.orgMichael Guagno stars in the Kafka-inspired “Letter to My Father.”Credit…Eileen Meny‘Letter to My Father’In 1919, a 36-year-old Franz Kafka penned, but did not send, a long missive to his father, Hermann. The text (published in English as “Letter to His Father”) was an impassioned of indictment of a domestic tyrant, the now-grown son still possessed by fear, his wounds still fresh. The M-34 company, captures the live show with multiple cameras, offering various perspectives to the audience. The show is directed by James Rutherford, and performed by Michael Guagno. Feb. 19-March 28; m-34.orgRiz Ahmed in his solo show “The Long Goodbye.”Credit…Kelly Mason‘The Long Goodbye’The British actor Riz Ahmed, whose performance in “Sound of Metal” recently earned him a Golden Globe nomination, is also a rapper. A solo show expanding on themes explored on his album of the same name, “The Long Goodbye” was livestreamed in December and is now available on demand from the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Manchester International Festival, which jointly commissioned it. Recording himself on a cellphone, the charismatic Ahmed prowls the empty Great American Music Hall in San Francisco while blending hip-hop and spoken word, autobiographical accounts and pointed insights. Through March 1; bam.orgTelling someone else’s storyTwo of the most storied performers you could dream of seeing are appearing in a solo biographical shows they also wrote. First, Lillias White, a Tony Award winner for “The Life,” pays tribute to the jazz great Sarah Vaughan in “Divine Sass” (Feb. 18-20). Then André De Shields, who stole the show every night in “Hadestown,” portrays an abolitionist and social reformer in “Frederick Douglass: Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” (Feb. 26-28). Both will be presented on Flushing Town Hall’s virtual stage, flushingtownhall.orgWendell Pierce, left, and Charlie Robinson in “Some Old Black Man.”Credit…Doug Coombe‘Some Old Black Man’One of the greatest actors of his generation, Wendell Pierce (“The Wire,” “Treme”) is fiercely committed to theater. In 2018, he starred in the James Anthony Tyler two-hander “Some Old Black Man” in New York; last fall, he quarantined in Ann Arbor, Mich., to participate in a virtual, fully staged version of that play for the University of Michigan’s University Musical Society. Pierce plays a middle-aged college professor who reconnects with his father (Charlie Robinson) as the two men confront their experiences with racism. March 1-12; ums.org‘The Past Is the Past’Manhattan Theater Club revisits some of its past productions in Curtain Call, a new reading series. Ron Cephas Jones — a captivating stage actor despite being most famous for the series “This Is Us” — and Jovan Adepo (“Watchmen”) lead Richard Wesley’s “The Past Is the Past.” The New York Times called the play “a poignant evocation of families and generations in conflict” when the company presented it in 1975, a year after its premiere at the Billie Holiday Theater in Brooklyn (Feb. 18-28). Head over to Manhattan Theater Club’s YouTube channel to watch the playwright John Patrick Shanley and Timothée Chalamet discuss the 2016 production of “Prodigal Son” — with generous excerpts from the show, which just predated Chalamet’s stardom. manhattantheatreclub.com‘48Hours in … El Bronx’For this year’s digital edition of Harlem9 and Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater’s “48Hours in …” festival, the playwrights Julissa Contreras, Nelson Diaz-Marcano, Alisha Espinosa, Andres Osorio, Alejandra Ramos Riera and Andrew Rincon looked to the work of photographers from the South Bronx collective Seis del Sur to create six 10-minute plays. Feb. 18-22; harlem9.veeps.comAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More