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    New York Theater Workshop Announces New Artistic Director’s First Season

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    The Off Broadway nonprofit will embrace risk, said Patricia McGregor, its leader, favoring fresh over established works.For New York Theater Workshop’s first season programmed after the departure of its longtime artistic director, the Off Broadway fixture plans to produce an intergenerational saga centered on a Black family in Illinois, a lesbian farce set on a naval base, a story about a mysterious album of Nazi-era photographs, and a play with an unusual star: a Microsoft text-to-speech tool.The slate of shows, announced on Friday, has been curated by Patricia McGregor, who replaced James C. Nicola as artistic director last year. The organization has a track record of producing influential work, including its biggest hit, “Rent,” as well as celebrated productions such as “Hadestown,” “Once,” “Slave Play” and “What the Constitution Means to Me.”The 2023-24 season includes three world premieres and one work that debuted last year, favoring fresh over recognizable work. (The most recent season featured the Broadway-bound “Merrily We Roll Along,” starring Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez.) McGregor said that while there is certainly a place for those kinds of entrenched works at New York Theater Workshop, her inaugural season is focused on embracing risk and supporting artists whose work could be lost if the theater world becomes overly focused on name recognition, trusted forms and trying to ensure commercial success.“We’re more of a laboratory than a factory,” McGregor said. “Part of what the workshop wants to be is a testing ground.”This fall, McGregor will direct “The Refuge Plays” by Nathan Alan Davis, whose play “Nat Turner in Jerusalem” was staged at New York Theater Workshop in 2016. Produced with and staged at Roundabout Theater Company, the work is about four generations of a Black family who live in a home that they built themselves in a forest. An earlier version of the production was scheduled to start rehearsing in 2020 and was delayed by the pandemic.Later in the year, the nonprofit will stage “Merry Me,” a new work by the South Korean playwright and director Hansol Jung (“Wolf Play”). In “Merry Me,” which will be directed by Leigh Silverman (who directed last year’s voting-rights musical “Suffs”), a restless lieutenant seeks to pleasure other women on the base — including the general’s wife — during a blackout.“I love you so much I could die,” slated for winter 2024 and directed by Lucas Hnath, employs a Microsoft text-to-speech product for the monologues, in between songs performed by the playwright, Mona Pirnot. (The Microsoft-fueled actor is funny and strange, McGregor said, but it also comes off as surprisingly human.)Next spring, the company will produce Tectonic Theater Project’s “Here There Are Blueberries,” a play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich about a collection of Nazi-era photographs that is delivered to the desk of an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, making the news and setting a German businessman out on a journey of discovery about his family. Kaufman, who was behind “The Laramie Project,” will also direct the play, which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in California and is currently onstage at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C. More

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      Bidding Farewell to His Theatrical Flock

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      In a 34-year run at New York Theater Workshop, James C. Nicola held that directors and writers are equal partners — and helped send “Rent” and “Hadestown” to Broadway.The Tony Awards ceremony had just wrapped up at Radio City Music Hall, and it was time for the parties. But for one honoree, James C. Nicola, the longtime artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, there would be no stop-off for toasts at the Plaza Hotel or after-midnight carousing at Tavern on the Green.Instead, he headed to a nearby parking garage, and settled behind the wheel of a rental van for the 40-minute ride back to the dorms at Adelphi University on Long Island, where he’d be sleeping that night. As far as he was concerned, there was no other choice: He had pickup duty at 10 a.m. for a group of young artists arriving by train for one of the summer workshops that have been a hallmark of his 34-year tenure at one of Off Broadway’s most beloved theaters.It’s not those gatherings that led the Tony committee to give Nicola a special honor. Or at least not fully. It’s also that his 199-seat East Village theater spawned the Tony-winning best musicals “Rent,” “Once” and “Hadestown.” That the recent hot-button plays “What the Constitution Means to Me”and “Slave Play” ran there. And that the theater’s support made a crucial difference to the careers of such writers as Tony Kushner, Lisa Kron and Doug Wright; the directors Rachel Chavkin, Lileana Blain-Cruz and Sam Gold; and many others.Nicola, center, with fellow Tony honorees Eileen Rivera and Ashruf “Osh” Ghanimah at the Tony Honors cocktail party in early June.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Tony came as a bonus after Nicola announced last year that he was stepping down, the first of the very long-serving artistic leaders of major nonprofit New York theaters to do so. And while he acknowledged that the theater-world reckoning over the whiteness of its leadership persuaded him it was time to leave, he departed on July 10 with what seems to be an unblemished record.At 72, his gait has slowed. But his ice-blue eyes still blaze when he gets animated about his affection for anagrams or who might star with Daniel Radcliffe later this year in “Merrily We Roll Along,” part of the last Workshop season he programmed. (The freelance director Patricia McGregor, a Black woman who has had an ongoing connection to the theater, is succeeding him in the top job.)Nicola spent five years working as a casting associate at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Public Theater). Comparisons with Papp and the far-larger Public are inevitably imprecise. But in his own less grandiose, more self-effacing way, Nicola is among the handful of artistic directors to make the biggest artistic impact on the New York theater world since — a magnet for iconoclastic talents who also helped develop a passel of shows with enormous commercial appeal.Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” was part of New York Theater Workshop’s 1995-96 season, a pivotal time for the theater. The cast included, from left: Jesse L. Martin, Adam Pascal, Wilson Heredia, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Rodney Hicks and Anthony Rapp.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNicola at the theater in 1997. A son of the 1960s, he once imagined he’d be a Baptist minister.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore personally, he is one of the last of his kind: a son of the ’60s who imagined he’d be a Baptist minister and made a brick-and-mortar building into a flock and a chosen family.In a video acceptance speech for the Tony, Nicola put it this way: “Our community has aspired to be a sanctuary for a certain species of artist — theatermakers who embrace their divinity, who understand their sacred obligation to lead and inspire us.”And in one of several recent conversations that included breaks between work-in-progress readings at Adelphi and lunch at a favorite Hell’s Kitchen diner, he stood firm in his conviction that idealism is the fuel that kept him going, and that bringing people together to be challenged is the goal.“Nothing makes me angrier than to be called a gatekeeper,” he said.He added: “Nothing makes me happier than to be mad when I leave the theater.”RACHEL CHAVKIN HAD BEEN inviting Nicola and his then-associate artistic director, Linda Chapman, to take in her work since she was an M.F.A. student at Columbia University. After seeing “Three Pianos,” a rambunctious reimagining of Franz Schubert as the center of a drunken posse of musicians and fans, Nicola asked Chavkin and Alec Duffy, one of her collaborators on the show, to his denlike office on the second floor of the East Village building that abuts the theater.“I think he opened by saying ‘I think that’s one of the best pieces of theater I’ve ever seen,’” she recalled in a recent phone call. “Our jaws dropped.”Programming “Three Pianos” into the Workshop’s 2010-11 season was a career-changer for Chavkin, who, while continuing to do avant-garde work with the troupe known as the TEAM, also helped to shape the boundary-busting Broadway musicals “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” and “Hadestown.” (She is co-directing at the Workshop again next season, while aiming another musical, “Lempicka,” for Broadway.)Like Chavkin, the now Tony-winning director Sam Gold earned his union card directing at the Workshop, in 2007. He still recalls Nicola’s support when he wanted to hire a scenic designer with opera-world credits to build what would be an ambitious set for Betty Shamieh’s play “The Black Eyed.”“It’s the kind of thing that a director on their first job doesn’t get to do,” Gold said. “Jim would say, ‘I don’t want to limit your imagination.’”And the commitment went beyond a single show — part of Nicola’s belief that directors are equal partners with playwrights in an American theater system that tends to privilege the latter.David Oyelowo, left, and Daniel Craig in Sam Gold’s 2016 production of “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Over the years,” Gold said, “I’ve had very few people genuinely see me as an artist — who can relate one show to another, as someone with a lifelong project.”Whitney White, who was Gold’s assistant on the 2016 Workshop production of “Othello” that starred Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo, speaks of Nicola as a presence in her life, not just a champion of her work. (White directed Aleshea Harris’s play “On Sugarland” at the Workshop this spring.)“I’ve spoken to him about men and love and theater and everything,” she said. “It’s a fully furnished table.”That’s not easy to find, even in nonprofit theaters that don’t have to obsess over the bottom line. “It’s a different style of artistic directorship — that you’re in community, in dialogue, not just a blip,” she added.NICOLA GREW UP OUTSIDE HARTFORD, Conn., gay and closeted, the oldest of four brothers in a middle-class family. In high school and then for a while at Tufts University, he took private singing lessons, imagining a career in opera or choral music. A year studying abroad took him to the Royal Court Theater in London, where he got interested in directing.Eventually, it helped lead him to the writing of the British experimentalist Caryl Churchill, a Royal Court favorite, whose work he helped champion at the New York Shakespeare Festival and at Arena Stage, in Washington, D.C., where he had a one-year directing fellowship that turned into seven more years as a producing associate.What became New York Theater Workshop had been presenting work around Manhattan for nearly a decade when Nicola raised his hand for the top job. In conversations with Stephen Graham, its founder and current board member, he learned that the theater, which was already funding fellowships for directors, was hungry to have a bigger public profile.“They wanted to change the form,” Nicola said. “What better could I hear?”Under Nicola, the theater staged Churchill’s work eight times, more than any other writer. But no figure is more associated with his tenure than the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove. After seeing his work in Europe, Nicola brought him to direct in the United States for the first time, adapting Eugene O’Neill’s unfinished play “More Stately Mansions,” in 1997.Two years later, his deconstruction of the Tennessee Williams classic “A Streetcar Named Desire” — Blanche, Stanley and Stella each spend stage time in the bathtub — heralded the van Hove/Workshop alliance as one of the most exciting (and divisive) destinations in New York theater.During Nicola’s reign the theater presented eight van Hove productions, capped in 2015 with “Lazarus,” a rock musical with a book by Enda Walsh and songs, new and old, by David Bowie, who was secretly battling cancer during its creation and died during its run.Ivo van Hove has directed eight productions at the Workshop, including the 2015 production of David Bowie and Enda Walsh’s “Lazarus,” with Michael C. Hall and Sophia Anne Caruso.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe circumstances had echoes of “Rent” — a show the theater began developing four years into Nicola’s tenure that had its final dress rehearsal at the Workshop on Jan. 25, 1996. That night its creator, Jonathan Larson, suddenly died of an aortic aneurysm.The “Rent” story — 12 years on Broadway, the Pulitzer Prize, productions all over the world — is show business canon. Royalties from that and other Broadway transfers helped boost the theater’s annual budget from $400,000 to $10 million in the Nicola era. But as he talked about “Rent” and “Lazarus,” Nicola hinted at the ways they might have turned out had tragedy not struck, their creators wrested from the process of art-making too soon.“Lazarus,” which was sped into production and where only van Hove knew of Bowie’s precarious health, was among the most challenging experiences of Nicola’s time at the Workshop. But he pinpoints his darkest days to 2006, when a planned staging of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” a solo play about an American demonstrator for Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer, was pulled.Kushner and Harold Pinter, among others, accused the theater of capitulating to political pressure; the theater maintained it was only delaying the production, which originated at the Royal Court in London. Nicola had to return from Italy to defuse the situation, which he called a “misunderstanding that was threatening to the very heart of the institution.” (“Rachel Corrie” ended up running at another theater.)More recently, debates over representation in the theater world have encouraged in him a greater self-awareness. He pointed to Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” which was championed by his theater and by notable white male critics. He later came to learn that many Black women felt otherwise.“There are impulses that I have that feel like good and positive ones, and then learn that my response is not universal,” Nicola said.“It’s really good to think about the risks and possible outcomes,” he added, “but also not be intimidated by not being able to predict. To not retreat, not get cautious or conservative.”FINISH A 34-YEAR TERM running a major theater and the hosannas will come fast and furious.Besides the Tony, Nicola was celebrated at the Workshop’s annual gala, which had a diner theme in honor of his affection for humble food. There were speeches and a musical performance from some original “Rent” cast members, a drag queen and, for a finale, four veteran stage actresses enacting a “scene” from “The Golden Girls,” a Nicola favorite.“My gratitude to the theater was giving me a sense that the world was bigger,” Nicola said, reflecting on his career. Erik Tanner for The New York TimesWeeks later, several hundred friends and associates surprised him at the theater with a reading of Moss Hart’s backstage comedy “Light Up the Sky,” the last play he had directed at Arena Stage, with a cast that included the playwrights Lucas Hnath, Dael Orlandersmith and Kron; the performer Penny Arcade; and the producers Jeffrey Seller and Jordan Roth. (“I have lived this play my entire adult life,” a grateful Nicola said later.)Uptown and downtown, artful and kitschy — it’s an increasingly illusory divide that Nicola, who soaked up the work of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, has managed to happily bridge, personally and professionally.“He’ll be talking one minute about [the French director] Ariane Mnouchkine and the next he’ll be doing an Ethel Merman impression,” said Wright, whose Grand Guignol-ish Marquis de Sade play, “Quills,” was, along with “Rent,” in the 1995-96 season that brought a new level of starshine to the theater.Nicola proudly cops to being a musical-theater show queen, quoting “Funny Girl” in his gala acceptance speech and later pointing to a lyric from (shocking!) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” as explaining his mission: “We taught the world new ways to dream.”The “director in me” decided he needed a ritual way to bring closure to his time at the theater. So he and friends rode the Circle Line on the Fourth of July. “When I board the boat I will be leaving my old life and when I get off it, I will be entering my new life,” he said beforehand.As to what’s next, all he can propose is “opening myself up to new adventures.”In the meantime, he’s taken to writing letters of thanks, sending them into the world without knowing who will (or won’t) respond.One went to the theater department at Tufts.Another to the Little Theater of Manchester, Conn., where he appeared onstage as the Mock Turtle in “Alice in Wonderland,” and was first dazzled by the art of telling a story to an audience in public.“My gratitude to the theater was giving me a sense that the world was bigger — that there were many other possibilities,” he said. “To that 12- or 13-year-old boy, this is everything he aspired to. It happened.” More

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      New York Theater Workshop Names Patricia McGregor as Artistic Director

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      The freelance director will succeed James Nicola, who has led the Off Broadway nonprofit since 1988.Patricia McGregor, a freelance director who has worked Off Broadway and around the country, has been named the next artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, a midsize nonprofit with an outsize track record of producing important work.McGregor, 44, will succeed James C. Nicola, who has served as the theater’s artistic director since 1988. Nicola, 71, announced last year that he would step down this summer; he is being honored next month with a special Tony Award in recognition of his successful tenure.New York Theater Workshop, founded in 1979 and located in the East Village, has a long track record of discovering, developing and supporting new plays and musicals, but it will forever be known as the birthplace of one huge hit, “Rent,” which opened there in 1996 and, after transferring to Broadway, spun off royalties for years that helped the theater flourish.The theater has had several other notable Broadway transfers, including the Tony-winning musicals “Once” and “Hadestown,” as well as the acclaimed plays “Slave Play” and “What the Constitution Means to Me.” It has also staged a large volume of adventurous work that has remained downtown; among the artists who have worked there often are the writers Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill and Mfoniso Udofia and the directors Ivo van Hove, Sam Gold, Lileana Blain-Cruz and Rachel Chavkin. (Chavkin was one of two leaders of the artistic director search committee.)McGregor has been affiliated with New York Theater Workshop as a “usual suspect,” which is the theater’s term for artists with whom it maintains an ongoing connection. She plans to assume the artistic director position in August; Nicola has programmed next season, including revivals of “Merrily We Roll Along” starring Daniel Radcliffe and “Three Sisters” starring Greta Gerwig and Oscar Isaac. McGregor will choose the programming starting in the fall of 2023.And what will her programming look like? “Visceral, relevant, challenging, joyful, delightful,” she said. “And really looking at fusions of form.”Her directing career has focused on new American plays, but she said she also has an affection for classics (she directed a mobile unit production of “Hamlet” for the Public Theater in 2016) and musicals (she worked as an associate director of “Fela!” on Broadway). Among her New York credits was a 2012 production of Katori Hall’s “Hurt Village” at Signature Theater; she is currently finishing work on three projects, including an oratorio about gentrification, called “Place,” at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Old Globe in San Diego, and her first feature film, “1660 Vine,” about social media influencers.McGregor was born in St. Croix, the largest of the United States Virgin Islands, and moved frequently as a child, living in Hawaii, California, Illinois and Florida. Her father, who is from St. Croix, is a fisherman and engineer who served in the Navy, and her mother, born in England, is an artist, teacher and union organizer; when she assumes her new role McGregor will become one of only a handful of Black women serving as artistic directors of nonprofit theaters in New York City.“I have a pretty broad range of lived experiences racially, economically and geographically,” she said. “I think a lot about the Workshop being both hyperlocal in its roots and international in its reach, and that feels very aligned with my lived experience and appetite to know about and engage with the world.”McGregor said she embraced theater as a middle school student in Florida, where she first encountered Shakespeare in a theater class. “I loved it,” she said. “I had seen a production of ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in this terrible-acoustics auditorium, and there was something both athletic and magical. I said, ‘I can tap into this.’”She studied theater at Southern Methodist University in Texas, and then studied directing at the Yale School of Drama. She lived in New York off and on for 16 years; she has spent the last seven years in California, and now lives in San Diego, where her husband, Freedome Bradley-Ballentine, is an associate artistic director at the Old Globe; they have two young children.Working with her sister, Paloma, she co-founded an organization called Angela’s Pulse to produce performance work that highlights stories about Black people. She has also worked with Arts in the Armed Forces, an organization founded by the actors Adam Driver and Joanne Tucker.“My mom said, ‘What tools do you have to build the world that you want?’” she said in an interview. “And the tool that I have is being an artist and being a community builder through art.”New York Theater Workshop has a staff of about 45 people and an annual budget projected at $10 million next year. The organization has three buildings on East 4th Street, including a 199-seat mainstage theater and a smaller venue that can accommodate up to 74 patrons.McGregor said she views the leadership transition as a “baton pass,” noting that she already knows many people who work at the organization. She said among her priorities will be broadening the theater’s audience. “If there’s one thing I want to revolutionize, it’s that point of accessibility and welcoming,” she said. “It’s not a quick ‘We send you a flier and you come to the show.’ It’s a long-term process.” 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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      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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      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