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    ‘N/A’ Review: For Nancy Pelosi and A.O.C., It’s a House Divided

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    Is moral leadership possible without parliamentary power? Two very familiar congresswomen battle it out onstage.The publicity for “N/A,” a two-hander that opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Thursday, has been careful to point out that, despite all appearances, the N in the title is not Nancy Pelosi, and the A is not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Rather, the playwright, Mario Correa, argues in a program note that “N/A” is about a battle of “ideas and ideals,” which are “bigger than any one person (or even two).”I vote nay on that proposition.The play’s ideas and ideals are fine, and modestly if repetitively dramatized, but what makes this swift summer trifle so diverting is the embodiment of the women themselves. N and A are perfect incarnations of their congressional doppelgängers, down to Pelosi’s golden Mace of the United States House of Representatives brooch and A.O.C.’s signature “Beso” red lipstick. The gimmick also gives Holland Taylor (as N) and Ana Villafañe (as A) tasty roles and a meaty conflict to sink their teeth into.Correa frames that conflict as ideological, not personal. In five scenes starting with the 2018 midterms (when the Democrats win control of the House) and ending with the 2022 midterms (when they lose it), he broadly traces their seesawing power.At first the seesaw is profoundly unbalanced. We meet A just after her surprise primary victory against a machine Democrat and N’s handpicked successor. (In real life, that would be Joseph Crowley.) Though still a savvy street fighter, A is awed and a little cowed by the Washington she discovers. “So, yeah, we are not in Kansas anymore,” she tells her Instagram Live followers, invoking a surprising image of fragility.By then, N has been in Congress for 31 years. Having lost the House speakership when “that man” was elected, she intends to reclaim it. Her favorite number — the only one that counts for a parliamentarian — is 218, the number of votes needed to get work done. Anything shy of that is zero.So even though she and A find that they agree on many policy goals, especially ending the inhumane treatment of migrants at the southern border, they are irreconcilably opposed about how to achieve them. N wheedles, calls in chits, holds her nose and plays footsie with lobbyists, and if she doesn’t have the votes to pass a bill, she doesn’t waste her political capital trying. Naturally, A wants to blow that all up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Broadway’s ‘1776’ Revival, the Drama Is Offstage

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      A cast member criticized the consciously progressive revival for its handling of race in rehearsals, saying there had been “harm done.” She later apologized for her comments.The current Broadway revival of “1776” was hoping to spark a conversation about power and representation. And it has, if not quite in the way it intended.It assembled a diverse cast of women, nonbinary and transgender actors to play the white men who signed the Declaration of Independence, as a way of highlighting those whose perspectives were not considered.The show, which has been in the works for several years, made adjustments after the police murder of George Floyd prompted intense debates over race, justice and hierarchy in the theater business. A new co-director, Jeffrey L. Page, who is Black, was added to shape the work alongside its original director, Diane Paulus, who is Asian American.But now, just two weeks after opening on Broadway to mixed reviews and soft sales, “1776” has become the talk of the industry — not because of its contemporary dramaturgy, but because of a cast member’s criticisms.One of the show’s standout performers, Sara Porkalob, who is making her Broadway debut, was quoted in an interview with Vulture on Friday saying “there was harm done” during the rehearsal process, and calling some of the staging decisions “cringey.”She was referring to her big second-act number, “Molasses to Rum,” in which her character, a South Carolina delegate named Edward Rutledge, calls out the “hypocrisy” of Northern delegates who criticized slavery while their states profited from it.Porkalob, who is Filipino American, told Vulture that during the rehearsal process the directors had sought “consent from the Black folks in the play” to carry out its vision for the staging, which includes an evocation of a slave auction — but not from the rest of the cast, including the non-Black actors of color. This decision, she said, using an acronym for people of color, “unconsciously held up a false narrative by assimilating non-Black POC folks into whiteness.”Porkalob said that while she liked her fellow cast members, the experience was artistically unsatisfying, and that she was giving the show “75 percent.”“The social aspect and the salary aspect are fulfilling,” she said. “The creative aspect, not so much.”The interview quickly drew attention on social media, where some hailed Porkalob for speaking her truth while others denounced her for undermining her own collaborators.Page, who is the show’s choreographer as well as one of its directors, posted an apparent rejoinder on Facebook, which he addressed to a “nameless person” whom he called “fake-woke” and “rotten to the core.”“You are ungrateful and unwise,” Page wrote in the post, which was later taken down. “You claim that you want to dismantle white supremacist ideology … I think that you are the very example of the thing that you claim to be most interested in dismantling.”Page, Paulus and Porkalob all declined to comment. But over the weekend, Porkalob emailed an apology to the show’s company, writing that she was “reaching out in an attempt to repair harm I’ve caused.”“I see how my opinions and the tone of the article have hurt, offended and upset some of the folks internal to this process,” she wrote in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times. “I’m sorry for that.”In the email she apologized for violating what she described as the “‘What’s said in the room, stays in the room’ agreement.”“My intention was to share an important moment of learning I had in the piece, specifically how I was proud to be a part of an ensemble that was able to deftly handle these complex issues, rather than not saying anything and pretending things didn’t happen,” she wrote. “But it is clear that the impact was me breaking the above community agreement and I’m sorry.”Reviving “1776,” with its dated humor and all-white cast of historical characters, was always going to be a delicate task, even before the 2020 racial justice protests. (The show is a joint production of two nonprofits, New York’s Roundabout Theater Company and the American Repertory Theater of Cambridge, Mass.)In an interview with The Times in August, Paulus said one of the things that drew her to the 1969 show was the startling bluntness of “Molasses to Rum,” which might surprise anyone who assumed the musical (by Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone) was a whitewashed Bicentennial-era relic.Performing that song is emotionally taxing, particularly for Black cast members, even after the show’s team created a Black “affinity space” to help guide the show’s explorations of race.“There’s not a night where it doesn’t hit me,” Crystal Lucas-Perry, who plays John Adams, told The Times before the production opened. (Lucas-Perry is leaving the show on Sunday to join the cast of the new Broadway play “Ain’t No Mo’.”)Porkalob is a fixture of the Seattle theater scene, known for “Dragon Cycle,” her trilogy about three generations of her family. Paulus, who won a Tony Award directing the 2013 revival of “Pippin,” saw Porkalob in a production of one of the installments at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, where Paulus is artistic director, and cast her in “1776.” Porkalob chose the role of Rutledge, a baddie with a big number.In the interview with Vulture, Porkalob described the in-between position of actors of color who are not Black. “I have certain privileges that Black folks don’t have, but I’m also not white, so I don’t have certain privileges that other people have,” she said.But she criticized the directors’ “binary” approach to race, which she said caused harm.After the show’s initial run in Cambridge, she said, there had been an affinity group for the non-Black performers of color “to talk more about what that harm felt like, and to give our consent to the enactment.”Porkalob, who uses she/they pronouns, also said the directors had paid insufficient attention to gender identity, considering it secondary to questions of race. “When we were all in the room together, there wasn’t any conversation about how we marry our queer identities with these characters, which is disappointing,” she said.The interview drew strong criticism, including from some Black performers and writers. Among those who responded to her on Twitter was the playwright Douglas Lyons, whose “Chicken & Biscuits” was staged on Broadway last year. He asked to talk with Porkalob, saying: “BIPOC artists were hurt by that article. Harm has now inflicted harm. But we can heal.”Ashley Blanchet, an actor whose Broadway credits include “Frozen,” “Beautiful” and “Memphis,” also said Porkalob had harmed colleagues. “Being a person of color does not excuse you from arrogance,” she wrote on Twitter. Porkalob, she suggested, was “messing with the livelihood of your peers to get ur 15 minutes of fame.”In a Twitter thread early Monday morning, Porkalob publicly apologized for “the pain I’ve caused my team.”But Porkalob also stood by the substance of her comments. “I’m not afraid of the great White Way,” she wrote. “I’d be sad to lose the job but my termination would only be further proof of this industry’s inability to adapt & change for the better. The work I care about can be done on Broadway or off.” More

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      Review: ‘1776,’ When All Men, and Only Men, Were Created Equal

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      A revival of the musical about the Declaration of Independence underlines the gender imbalance among the Founding Fathers — and everything else.A transformation that’s either wondrous or scandalous, depending on your taste, occurs less than a minute into the Roundabout Theater Company’s otherwise disappointing Broadway revival of “1776.”Barely a line has been uttered or a note sung when the performers, who identify as female, transgender and nonbinary, and are wearing more-or-less contemporary streetwear, hike up their black tights and white socks to simulate breeches, don buckle shoes in place of clunky boots, step into frock coats of various colonial cuts and become (thanks to Emilio Sosa’s outstanding costume design) our Founding Fathers. That includes Elizabeth A. Davis, who makes a very visibly pregnant Thomas Jefferson.Though some will see the casting — which is diverse not just in gender but also in race and ethnicity — as a stunt and a travesty, I’m in the wondrous camp. Neither the 1969 musical nor (as “Hamilton” has proved) history itself is so frail as to crumple under new ways of looking at our theatrical and national past. Anyway, if you prefer, you can simply ignore the fact that these fathers aren’t men, and focus — or try to — on the plot, which encompasses nothing less than the months of negotiations and maneuverings that led, just barely, to the Declaration of Independence.But if you are willing to allow yourself a double vision, as the directors Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus clearly hope, you can take independence a step further. The white maleness of the characters becomes a semi-translucent screen through which we see the many other people, including people like the cast, whom the Declaration never even considered.Sara Porkalob, center, as the pro-slavery Edward Rutledge, who dissects John Adams’s hypocrisy in the song “Molasses to Rum.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor me, that double vision is the best thing about the production, which opened on Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. In theory, it deepens the ideas being batted about in the hot, fetid, fly-infested Philadelphia summer. So the “obnoxious and disliked” John Adams, as played by Crystal Lucas-Perry, who is Black, is not just an abolitionist on principle but in essence. And when Sara Porkalob, as the pro-slavery Edward Rutledge, dissects Adams’s hypocrisy in the song “Molasses to Rum” — showing how the North benefits from the slave trade as well as the South — the fact that she is Filipino American both intensifies and complicates the argument.If that sort of complication were itself great theater and not just a promising premise, this “1776” might be amazing. That the production is instead so overpumped and overplayed as to be hardly comprehensible is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the musical, which is plenty complicated as written — if not so much in its few and often trite songs, by Sherman Edwards, then at least in Peter Stone’s book, a masterpiece of condensation without diminishment.At first dismissed as Bicentennial-era pageantry, “1776” has survived all the ensuing upheavals of American history precisely because it is, within the confines of the genre, remarkably sophisticated about the forces at play in forging a nation from colonies harboring antithetical philosophies — and in forging a musical from similarly unlikely and conflicting raw materials. An Encores! production in 2016, which featured a racially diverse cast but the usual gender assignments, showed it could be modern and yet thoughtful and moving.But the current revival seems interested in the cast’s experience at the expense of the audience’s. I can understand that impulse, especially when creating space on a major stage for actors who rarely get it.Still, the best interpretations are those that, regardless of the performer’s professional history, find feeling in the specific actions of the text rather than in their personal feelings of exclusion from it. The Broadway veteran Carolee Carmello thus creates the character of the Pennsylvania holdout John Dickinson mostly by holding back on the outrage and offering smiles and politesse in its place. And as Abigail Adams, the Broadway newcomer Allyson Kaye Daniel is gently firm and dryly touching, achieving a lovely, modest balance in those contradictions.Carolee Carmello, center, as the Pennsylvania holdout John Dickinson. She’s joined by, from left: Oneika Phillips, Gisella Adisa, Porkalob, Sushma Saha, Nancy Anderson and Eryn LeCroy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore often, though, the performances are so vastly histrionic and unchecked by the social situation (this is Congress, after all) that they seem inside-out. Adams jumps on tables to make points. Patrena Murray so emphasizes Benjamin Franklin’s winky sententiousness that he seems like a joke, not a brilliant tactician. Eryn LeCroy makes of “He Plays the Violin” — a dainty minuet in which Martha Jefferson sings of her love for Thomas — a full-on psychodrama.It does not help that the new arrangements and orchestrations, aiming to refresh the songs’ profiles in the way the casting is meant to refresh the story, merely make them muddy — and make many of the lyrics unintelligible.If that’s not always a great loss, it certainly detracts from the show’s most powerful number, “Momma, Look Sharp.” A simple minor-key air sung from the point of view of a dead young soldier, it is performed here (by Salome B. Smith) as a belty anthem, complete with a moaning and heaving ensemble and a figure apparently representing Momma. (She’s looking! She’s crying!) When performers mime the emotions we should be having, the storytelling contract has been broken.Nor do Page (who is also the show’s choreographer) and Paulus (who has directed Broadway revivals of “Pippin” and “Porgy and Bess”) show much interest in the show’s humor. As some of it is ribald and sexist — probably accurately so — they prefer to defuse it by winking as if to say: Don’t worry, we don’t mean any harm. What a wasted opportunity! In dealing with such material, a nonmale cast might mean harm in the best way, forcing us to think about the character of men in their time and ours, and providing the kind of added value a regendered revival seemed to promise.Instead we get subtracted value. I don’t mean for the cast, who deserve the opportunity, or even for the theater as an industry and an ecosystem. As the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar said in a New York Times round-table discussion about putting history onstage, there is merit in “moving people into the center of narratives who have never been there for the public to see.” I agree. And if those narratives sometimes fail, well, so do most others; we might as well be open to everything.But underlining one’s progressiveness a thousand times, as this “1776” does, will not actually convey it better; rather it turns characters into cutouts and distracts from the ideas it means to promote. The musical even shows us that. It’s only when Adams stops yelling and starts plotting that he begins to turn the tide toward ratification. Just so, theater makers should have enough faith in the principles of equity and diversity to let them speak for themselves. Are they not, as someone once put it, self-evident?1776Through Jan. 8 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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       ’1776’ Musical Returns to Broadway With a Diverse Twist

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      A revival of the classic musical offers a fresh twist on the founding for the post-“Hamilton” era.“Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves,” Crystal Lucas-Perry said of the Broadway revival of “1776,” and its cast of female, nonbinary and trans actors. Clockwise from top left: Sav Souza, Lucas-Perry, Elizabeth A. Davis, Carolee Carmello, Patrena Murray and Oneika Phillips.Camila Falquez for The New York TimesHow do you solve a problem like America?For the creators of the musical “1776,” the answer was to wrap it in jaunty tunes, 18th-century double entendres and enough twisty dialogue to make a dramatization of the debate over the Declaration of Independence feel like a thriller.Premiering on Broadway in 1969, the musical ran for 1,217 performances, won the Tony Award for best musical and, over the last 50-plus years, has left more than a few critics scratching their heads over how such a resolutely square show won over Vietnam-era America.But 1776 isn’t what it used to be. In 2022, a touchstone of national identity has become a culture-war hot potato. And “1776,” which arrives this month on Broadway in a new revival for Roundabout Theater Company, isn’t the same either.The revival, directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus, has the familiar rousing melodies (in new, rock-infused arrangements), star-spangled color scheme and corny dad jokes. But they’re delivered by a racially diverse cast of women, nonbinary and trans actors, whose embodiment, Paulus said, wakes the language up.“I want the audience to hold that dual reality, of what the founders were, but also a company of actors in 2022, who never would have been allowed inside Independence Hall,” Paulus said in a video interview last month, after the show concluded its pre-Broadway run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where she is artistic director.The idea, she said, using a phrase that has become something of a mantra for the show, “is to hold history as a predicament, rather than an affirming myth.”Announced in 2019, the revival may initially have seemed to be riding the post-“Hamilton” vogue for all things Founders, while doing that show’s inclusive casting one better. But the two-year pandemic delay — which saw nationwide racial-justice protests, a bitterly contested presidential election and the Jan. 6 insurrection — have only heightened the stakes.“The deeper you get into it, the more poetry, the more stuff, exists inside of it,” Page said, in a separate video interview.At bottom, “1776,” he said, is “about a clandestine meeting of people who desperately want to change the world.”Then again, “1776” was never the whitewashed retro-patriotic celebration it is often remembered as. For all its traditionalist guys-in-powdered-wigs look, the show — with songs by Sherman Edwards, a history teacher turned Brill Building tunesmith, and a book by the playwright Peter Stone — was as politically pointed in its time as “Hamilton” (and perhaps, some argue, more so).Written ahead of the Bicentennial, it was meant to humanize the founders — “Demigods? We’re men, no more, no less,” Benjamin Franklin declares — while also challenging what the authors described as the “jingoistic” history they had learned in school.Sara Porkalob, center left, Lucas-Perry and Davis in the production during its pre-Broadway run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.Evan Zimmerman for Murphy MadeThere was the bite of songs like “Momma, Look Sharp,” a denunciation of the carnage of war that might have been sung by a G.I. on Hamburger Hill. And there was “Molasses to Rum,” a chilling call-out of freedom-espousing New England’s complicity in the profits of slavery.The production even stirred its own mini-controversy: When cast members were invited to perform the show at the Nixon White House, they were asked to cut “Cool, Cool Considerate Men,” a satirical minuet of money-loving conservatives who move “ever to the right, never to the left.” (They refused.)“I continue to be surprised when I meet people who say, ‘Oh, 1776! It’s my favorite musical. It’s just what our country needs!” Paulus said. “I keep thinking, what are they talking about?”But then, when the touring production company NETworks first suggested the show to her in February 2019 as a possible revival, she knew little about it, except that it had beaten out “Hair” (which she had directed a Broadway revival of in 2009) for the Tony. “I had a vague assumption it was a kind of a celebratory look at American history,” she said.When she read the book, on a long plane ride, she said, she “almost fell out of the airplane.”In particular, she was struck by the dramatic climax: the debate over Thomas Jefferson’s fiery denunciation of the slave trade, which was ultimately cut from the Declaration, to secure unanimous approval.Even talking about it now, Paulus still sounds incredulous. “I was unaware of that crossing out,” she said. “How could I not know?”“That began my journey into the show,” she continued. “I had to reckon with my own experience of American history.”A 2016 Encores! concert staging in New York had already used some racially diverse casting. Paulus said she was told off the bat that the estate would be open to an all-female cast, but she emphasized that the production takes a less “binary” view of gender.There was a first reading in New York in August 2019, with the principal actors, including Crystal Lucas-Perry as the irascible and obstinate John Adams, leader of the “independency” faction. By early March 2020, the show was fully cast, with an opening in Cambridge set for that May, to be followed by a national tour and then a Broadway run.Instead, they retreated to Zoom, like the rest of American theater. Without the pressure to stage the show, Paulus said, they could go deep in American history, including meetings with various scholars like the political theorist Danielle Allen and the historians Vincent Brown, Jane Kamensky and Annette Gordon-Reed.With the approval of the creators’ estates, the show includes a (wordless) depiction of a 14-year-old Robert Hemings, Jefferson’s enslaved bodyservant (and brother to Sally Hemings), inspired by Gordon-Reed’s scholarship. It also adds a long excerpt from Abigail Adams’s famous letter advising John to “remember the ladies.”While the gender-flipped casting may be the show’s claim to “firstness,” the core of the production is a grappling with race.Even before the murder of George Floyd, Paulus said, discussions around race within the company were “very raw.” Then came the protests, and the roiling conversation on racism, representation and hierarchy in the theater set off by the “We See You, White American Theater” open letter.In September 2020, the American Repertory Theater announced a set of initial antiracism commitments. When it came to “1776,” she said, the conversations prompted by the protests “impacted everything about our process.”Paulus said she first met Page (whose long résumé as a choreographer includes extensive collaborations with Beyoncé) in 2017, when he was starting the M.F.A. program in directing at Columbia. He was initially hired as the show’s choreographer, in 2019. In the summer of 2020, he also became co-director.“I felt that the most powerful and honest reflection of our collaboration,” Paulus said, was to be “coequals.”Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus directed the production, which starts previews at the American Airlines Theater on Sept. 16 and opens Oct. 6.Matthew MurphyThe George Floyd moment, Page agreed, “changed everything” about the show. The team, including the set designer Scott Pask, had already started moving away from the original scenic designs, which Page described as attempting to land the show too much “in the world of realism.”“We came together and said, this doesn’t feel right anymore,” he said. “We started asking, when you break it all the way down to the core, what is this piece about?“These were men who were attempting to make a change inside the world,” he continued. “Who cares about the chair they sat in, and are we getting it right?”The production, with its spare, Brecht-influenced design, is set not in Independence Hall in 1776, but onstage in 2022, where it’s performed by a company of actors from the present who arrive in street clothes, with no fanfare, before putting on their 18th-century(ish) waistcoats and period-appropriate shoes.(One performer also puts on a beaded necklace — seemingly a nod at the fact, mentioned in Stone and Edward’s original authors note, that Native American leaders would often appear before the Continental Congress, as leaders of independent nations.)Page, whose other recent directing credits include this summer’s revival of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” at Barrington Stage Company, also cited the importance of an “affinity space” for Black cast members, which helped guide the show’s exploration of race.“With the other cast members, the main thing we communicated was, ‘You’re going to feel some things,’” Page said. “What the Black cast members asked was to leave your fragility at the door.”In a group interview with four of the show’s founding “fathers,” Elizabeth A. Davis, who plays Jefferson, recalled a video meeting in which cast members presented their family trees, as part of an exploration of how personal and national history intersect. She said she could still remember exactly where she was sitting — “in my grandmother’s old room, in the middle of Texas” — as Black colleagues described hitting the so-called slavery wall, beyond which ancestry can be hard to trace.“It was a profound moment for me,” she said. “It was understanding something not just intellectually, but viscerally and cellularly.”Lucas-Perry nodded. “I remember saying, ‘I feel a little without,’” she said.The 2020 protests, Lucas-Perry said, contributed to a “hyper-awareness” of the way the casting altered the meaning of the text, and the importance of a production using diverse bodies “just because it can.”“Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves,” she said. “We were looking for ways of taking advantage of moments where you can dig deeper into what it means to be other.”“Momma, Look Sharp” lands differently sung by a Black woman (the big-voiced Salome B. Smith, as a courier bringing news from the front) to another Black woman, after the founding “fathers” have left the room. (The courier’s piercing “Momma!,” Page said, echoes Floyd’s cry as he gasped for air.)But the show’s dark heart is the silky and sinister “Molasses to Rum.” Traditionally, it’s presented as a vocal tour de force (see John Cullum’s stentorian baritone in the 1972 movie), and critics have often paid more attention to the singing than the chilling substance of the song.In their staging of the song (sung by Sara Porkalob), Page and Paulus force the audience to consider the enslaved people who form one corner of the Triangle Trade not as abstractions, but as real bodies, massed in a wordless chorus that includes the Black actors who play Adams, Franklin and John Hancock. (The sometimes defiant choreography, Page said, reprises some gestures from “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men.”)Carolee Carmello, who is joining the Broadway production as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania (one of the cool, conservative men), played Abigail Adams in the 1997 Broadway revival, which had a white cast. She had heard “Molasses” hundreds of times, but wasn’t prepared for seeing it in the new production.“The understanding of what they’re actually arguing about is extremely powerful,” she said.Lucas-Perry said the song “feels like it goes on forever” — “and it did go on forever,” she added, referring to slavery. “I’m not going to lie,” she said of the scene. “There’s not a night where it doesn’t hit me.”“Hamilton” was fundamentally celebratory, reflective of the liberal optimism of Obama-era America, and the feeling that the arc of history was bending its way. Page and Paulus’s “1776,” for all its humor and exuberance, is darker and more uncertain.But neither show is the last word on the founding, or on the Declaration, a document that might be seen as the ultimate American classic: time-bound and flawed, but also profound and visionary — and requiring continual revival and reinterpretation, by a perpetually changing cast of Americans, to stay alive.Page summed up the heart of 1776, and “1776,” crisply: “How do we self-proclaim our presence in the world?” More

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      Hitting the Right Notes When Setting History to Song

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      In the wake of “Hamilton”-mania, critics, creators and historians debate how stage musicals since balance the complexities of the past and the politics of the present. A lot of history is happening in American musical theater right now. (Sorry, last “Hamilton” joke, we promise.) On Broadway, “Paradise Square,” which was just nominated for 10 Tony Awards, tells the story of a mixed Irish and Black community in Lower Manhattan in the 1860s that’s torn apart by the Civil War draft riots. Downtown, at the Public Theater, the sold-out “Suffs” depicts the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment.And coming to Broadway in September (now in previews in Cambridge, Mass.), Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page’s revival of “1776” revisits the debate over the Declaration of Independence, with a cast of women, nonbinary and trans actors as the founding “fathers.”This is American history with a capital H — shows that aim to illuminate who we are, who we were, who we want to be. Those questions have only gotten more complicated in the years since 2015, when “Hamilton” took the culture by storm. We’ve been through two elections (and an insurrection), a pandemic, and a broad reckoning on race and racism, including in American theater. All this has changed how we see — and stage — the past.We asked The New York Times critics Jesse Green and Maya Phillips to discuss the phenomenon alongside Paulus, a 2013 Tony winner; Claire Bond Potter, a professor of history at the New School and co-editor of the essay collection “Historians on Hamilton”; and Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a professor of history at Rutgers University and a co-executive producer of HBO’s “The Gilded Age.” Jennifer Schuessler, who covers intellectual life for the Times (and wrote about the creation of “Suffs”), led the conversation. Edited excerpts follow.During its development, “Suffs” came to explore how Black women were marginalized in the movement for women’s suffrage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJENNIFER SCHUESSLER What strikes you all about the ways American history is being depicted and invoked onstage right now? Is something new happening?JESSE GREEN Theater, particularly musical theater, has often abetted the distortion and flat-out erasure of inconvenient histories. Now it’s trying to do a better job. That’s a good thing. But you can’t fix the past with broken shows. History may be dramatic but it isn’t necessarily theatrical — and that’s the pitfall. How do you make facts sing?MAYA PHILLIPS There is built-in tension: does one prioritize the narrative of the past or the politics of the present? I’m not saying these necessarily have to be in opposition, but it’s a delicate balance. You don’t want a show with a story that feels squeezed into the frame of our present in a way that’s too obvious or didactic, which was a problem with both “Suffs” and “Paradise Square.”DIANE PAULUS Artists, especially right now, are interested in shifting the gaze — looking to tell stories that need to be told, stories that have not had their due. I also think producers, and we can’t forget that it is the producers who determine what gets on stage, are looking to play their role in how to expand the stories that audiences are exposed to.SCHUESSLER OK, historians: Do you see this as an exciting moment? A frustrating one?CLARE BOND POTTER I think Americans are hungrier for historical explanations, in part because so many historically unprecedented things have occurred in the past 15 years. The first Black president, and the failure to elect the first woman president — twice! Then the Trump presidency, which exploded the idea of what politics is. Americans are digging into the past to find answers for questions about why politics seems to be both producing radically new dynamics — and reproducing old ones.ERICA ARMSTRONG DUNBAR It’s more than political — it’s creative and it responds to the feelings and needs of the public. It reminds me of the moment that [the television mini-series] “Roots” first aired, in 1977. The history wasn’t perfect, and it was overdramatized, but it was new and important and people, Black people in particular, were immediately invested in this new kind of storytelling. The same thing is happening with musical theater.GREEN The opportunities are huge and the stakes are high; popular history has a way of replacing the real kind. (Check out “The King and I,” a gorgeously crafted and hugely influential show that’s almost completely untrue.) Which is why representation is so important. Erica, you work on “The Gilded Age,” which I feel sure is providing, for white people anyway, the first we’ve really heard about the Black middle class of that era, a story somehow omitted from our education and consciousness. But I think you’re saying that it’s not just about “fixing” history but also about artists finding stories that compel them.DUNBAR Exactly! I don’t think any of us go to the theater for a history lesson. We want to be entertained, we want to fall in love, be angry, and learn a bit if we can.SCHUESSLER Wow, a historian saying we don’t go to the theater for a history lesson — you’re really playing against type, Erica!Diane, what you would say from the perspective of an artist? What appealed to you about reviving “1776” — a very familiar history with a very familiar set of (white, male) characters. And how do you see the show as speaking to the present?Crystal Lucas-Perry, center, as John Adams with castmates in a new revival of the musical “1776” that features women, trans and nonbinary actors.Evan Zimmerman for Murphy MadePAULUS I really agree that audiences are interested in looking back to our history to understand the present moment. The theater is uniquely positioned to do this in a way that taps into our imaginations, into empathy, and what I love about the theater is that it can only happen in the presence of an audience. In “1776,” I have been excited to build this production with my co-director and choreographer, Jeffrey L. Page, in a way that actively poses questions to the audience: How can we hold history as a predicament, versus an affirming myth?SCHUESSLER Can you say a little bit about your and Jeffrey’s broader intentions in doing this show with a diverse cast of women, nonbinary and trans actors? Why is that gender-flip interesting to you?PAULUS When taking on a revival, I am always interested in how to make the production speak to a contemporary audience, while respecting the authors’ original intentions. “1776” was written in the late ’60s, during the civil rights movement and at the height of the Vietnam War. There is a critique of our country built into the bones of this musical. Our casting bridges the realities of the past and the present, from who was excluded from Independence Hall to an aspirational vision of an inclusive society.The “1776” revival is co-directed by Diane Paulus, right, and Jeffrey L. Page, who is also the show’s choreographer.Matthew MurphySCHUESSLER This brings up the question of how to balance the historical record with the needs of the present. It’s different with a show like “1776,” where everyone already knows the basic story, versus shows like “Suffs” and “Paradise Square,” where many people will not know the history at all. How should shows confront the ugliest, messiest realities of the past, versus giving us a more uplifting version?POTTER It’s important to emphasize that theater — go back to Shakespeare — has never been historically accurate. It always speaks to questions of the moment. But when we say stories are not well known, I would say the story of the Draft Riots is well known to Black Americans. And the depiction in “Paradise Square” — which ends with a multiracial community coming back together — is emphatically not what occurred. True, “Paradise Square” also presents this moment as a “future yet to be realized” — a turning point where people have choices, and that is an important story to tell about racial division in this country. But Kaitlyn Greenidge’s recent novel “Libertie” frames this event differently, as a 19th century 9/11, where Black New Yorkers flee to Brooklyn, traumatized and covered with ash, and are taken in by the Black residents of Weeksville. Greenidge’s account is also fiction, but better history, in that it conveys what a catastrophe this was for African Americans in New York City.SCHUESSLER Erica, your scholarship has been about free Black women in the urban North before the Civil War. What do you think about the history in “Paradise Square”?Joaquina Kalukango, center, plays a bar owner with a key role in “Paradise Square,” a storytelling choice one historian praises as “powerful.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDUNBAR I think “Paradise Square” attempted to tell the story of trauma and resistance, and strength within the context of 19th century history. Was it completely accurate? Probably not, and I’m not sure that any show always gets the history right. But once again, it’s about more than facts and figures. It’s about moving people into the center of narratives who have never been there for the public to see. To center a story about the draft riots around a Black woman is fresh, and powerful.PAULUS I completely agree, Erica. In “1776,” some of the most moving parts of the musical are the scenes with the courier — not a founding father. Franklin, Jefferson and Adams are the famous historical characters. The courier, who delivers the dispatches from the battlefield to the Continental Congress, is literally nameless. But this character, who has the least power in the room, gets one of the most powerful songs — “Momma, Look Sharp.”SCHUESSLER Jesse, you were less than enthusiastic about “Paradise Square.” And Maya, I gather you felt similarly. How well do you think that recentering worked?GREEN As an approach, I’m all for what we’re calling recentering. The problem with “Paradise Square” isn’t the perspective from which it is told, but that in attempting to pile the whole history of a community (even the made-up parts) onto a few fictional figures who represent elements of the conflict, the authors created stick people who couldn’t bear the burden. This leaves you with the false impression, as musicals by nature tend to, that there’s one hero and one villain. Only because Joaquina Kalukango was so phenomenal in the leading role was anything richer conveyed. There’s history, and then there’s craft.PHILLIPS Well-put, Jesse. The question of scope is always a tricky one to navigate in these history shows — how large is our lens? In my review of “Suffs,” I argued that a show can’t be everything to everyone; an attempt to do that will end up sacrificing story and character.SCHUESSLER “Suffs” drew a lot of comparisons with “Hamilton,” but there was something fundamentally different about it, starting with its title. It was about a movement, not an individual — which may be truer to history, but also a lot harder to dramatize. Claire, what did you think of how “Suffs” handled the history?POTTER Much like “Hamilton,” “Suffs” tended to reduce both the successes and the flaws of the campaign for the 19th amendment to the personality of one person, Alice Paul. And while I appreciated the elevation of Paul, Ida B. Wells, and others to the status of male “founders,” the risk is simply refocusing on personalities rather than some of the movement’s broader themes: for example, its racist dynamics, tactical differences and generational divides.I also want to speak to Jesse’s point about the reductionism of “Paradise Square.” He’s right, but then the musical also, in a way, addresses the question of contemporary populism: are poor white people entirely to blame when they lash out at women, people of color and the state? How are anti-democratic dynamics promoted and provoked by others — in the case of “Paradise Square,” a Copperhead politician [as those northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War and supported a negotiated peace with the South were called]?SCHUESSLER Suggesting the draft riots (or the Civil War itself!) were driven mainly by the machinations of elite capital is … a strange interpretation. But I think it also connects with the show’s efforts to resonate with today’s politics (and the way people view America’s recent wars). More broadly, do these shows fall into a trap of trying to provide a comfortable, “relatable” place for the audience (especially the white audience)? That was one of the criticisms of “Hamilton” from historians, including some who were huge fans: that by exaggerating (some might say inventing) his credentials as an abolitionist, the show gave us a founding father it was “safe” to like.GREEN The audience can handle the dissonance! It’s white authors’ comfort that seems to be at stake. They come off as terrified of failing to check off every box on the sensitivity list. That’s no way to make a musical.SCHUESSLER When I interviewed the creators of “Suffs,” they talked about how the events of 2020 — the George Floyd protests, and the roiling conversation around the We See You White American Theater letter — prompted a big conversation among the company. They ended up expanding the role of Ida B. Wells, along with other changes. Diane, was there a similar conversation among the “1776” team?PAULUS The process of making theater feels very different to me now. We are centering antiracism as a core value, we make community agreements as a collective across the entire company for how we want to exist together. All of this is a process we are learning from every day.SCHUESSLER Erica, you started working on “The Gilded Age” back in 2019. How has the summer of 2020 affected things?Louisa Jacobson and Denee Benton, right, in the HBO series “The Gilded Age,” which includes a storyline about the Black middle class.Alison Cohen Rosa/HBODUNBAR I’d like to circle back quickly to Jesse’s comment. Jesse mentioned “terrified white authors” or something like that — and how fear has pushed creatives to think more about sensitivity. Well, fear can be a great motivator! And sometimes, it’s for the best. When I began consulting with “The Gilded Age” I was working with an entirely white creative team. A great team, but entirely white and male. There must be diversity in the creative process to produce authentic and powerful entertainment. While there were conversations before the summer of 2020, I believe that moment moved the needle. While I am infuriated that it takes the murder of Black people to move the needle, well, that’s what happened. Because of the changes and additions, we produced a better show.POTTER I’d like to return to the topic of flattering the audience: It is something theater producers must do, to some extent, and it’s something good historians can’t do — and look at the outcomes when we don’t! The massive attack on the 1619 Project is in part a massive refusal of a past that challenges both progressive and patriotic narratives held dear by many white Americans.What even flawed shows like “Suffs” and “Paradise Square” can do, much like historical fiction, is get people interested enough to do their own research and reading. History is a series of choices. People are self-interested, stubborn, brilliant, irritating — they don’t always make the right ones. And that is an important historical dynamic to understand.GREEN True sensitivity comes from deep knowledge and empathy. It welcomes the audience to accept complexity so that characters aren’t just saints or signposts. I’m thinking especially of Arthur Scott, the hard-to-like father of the Black heroine in “The Gilded Age.” What I find unhelpful is signaling one’s sensitivity so vividly that it’s the only thing the audience can see. In a way it defeats the purpose of recentering the narrative.DUNBAR Ultimately, this is about authentic storytelling (which if it’s a period piece must rely on accurate history). When done correctly, it doesn’t feel two-dimensional and we are able to see the complexity of characters.SCHUESSLER I wonder if this isn’t easier in long-form television, or even in straight plays, than in musicals. Maya, you mentioned the other day that you thought “Wedding Band,” the new (old!) play by Alice Childress that recently ended a run in New York, may be a better depiction of history than some of these capital-H History shows. Can you say more?PHILLIPS Writing in the early 1960s, Childress uses a few fictional relationships to tell the story of race in America at the time. It’s an interracial love story that takes place in 1918 South Carolina, and we find Black people — especially Black women — of different means and situations. It’s not just about the rift between whites and Blacks but also the class divides among Blacks. The play isn’t trying to be a history lesson; history is simply happening in and around the story and the characters. And the play doesn’t need to prove to us that it’s relevant. We can read our present racial politics into it.SCHUESSLER “History is happening around the story”: I love that. We talk about “living through history” when something big happens, but we’re always living through history.Maya’s recommendation of “Wedding Band” leads me to ask all of you to speak to a moment of dramatized history — either a show/movie/whatever — that you really loved?POTTER I am practically the only person I know who is digging Showtime’s “The First Lady.”SCHUESSLER OMG! You are canceled.DUNBAR Ha!POTTER I know! But I think it demonstrates the limits and possibilities of gender at different moments in time, but also the ways that First Ladies stretched the limits of what it meant to be a woman in politics at each moment.DUNBAR I’m going to be very liberal with the term dramatized history — meaning history is something that happened yesterday. Sooo …. I think one of the most incredible shows on television right now is “Atlanta.” While it is a show that takes place today (or for this answer, yesterday) it is fresh, brave, and really creative in the ways that it engages everyday life for Black people.PAULUS I recently rewatched [the 2018 film] “The Favourite,” which I think did a brilliant job of taking Queen Anne’s reign and making that history feel raw and immediate. For more recent “history,” I thought [the Hulu mini-series] “Dopesick” was devastating in its examination of the opioid crisis.GREEN The musical that best reframed history for modern audiences this season was “Six” — the “Tudors Got Talent” competition about the women who were married to Henry VIII. The facts were right enough, the characters were hilariously contemporized and, perhaps most important, the tunes were catchy. A song always cuts deeper than a sermon. More

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      Review: ‘Wild: A Musical Becoming’ Is Finding Its Footing

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      Idina Menzel and a hummable pop score can’t camouflage the fact that this musical is half-baked. Still, it can make for an enjoyable evening, our critic writes.CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In the 13 years that Diane Paulus has been artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, she has used it as a laboratory for developing new musicals and re-envisioning old ones, then ushering them to Broadway success. “Waitress” and “Jagged Little Pill” had their premieres there; so did Paulus’s staging of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” and her revival of “Pippin,” which won her a Tony Award for directing.But at Thursday’s opening night performance of “Wild: A Musical Becoming,” a climate-change eco-fable starring the Tony winner Idina Menzel, Paulus began her preshow speech by ratcheting down the audience’s expectations of this latest premiere.“Musicals take years to develop,” she said. “But the subject matter of this story tonight was so pressing that we felt we could not wait to share it with you.”The actors would perform with scripts in hand, she added. Our imaginations would be required to fill in the blanks of what the A.R.T. is calling a concert production.All of which is fair enough. But the charismatic lead and hummable pop score of “Wild” can’t camouflage the fact that this musical is very much in the awkward phase of becoming whatever it ultimately might be.Still, it can make for an enjoyable evening, depending on your willingness to overlook the ungainly book by V, the playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler, and get over your disappointment in a show that includes Javier Muñoz — a.k.a. Broadway’s sexy Hamilton — but gives him far too little to do, and dresses him dowdily. Actually, you may have to get over the other actors’ costumes, too.Directed by Paulus at the Loeb Drama Center, the story takes place in a town called Outskirtzia. Hard up for cash, the local farmers get an offer from corporate outsiders called the Extractacals: $50,000 apiece in exchange for drilling on their land.The community’s adults are tempted; the teenagers are alarmed. That strife is the primary tension of a show that, for all its ecological advocacy, is also a parable about understanding between parents and children.Menzel plays Bea, a farmer struggling with her mortgage who could use the windfall from the Extractacals. But her adolescent daughter, Sophia (the mononymous musician-actor Yde), is so terrified of the destruction of the planet and outraged by the adults’ complicity in it that she falls into a catatonic state, then disappears into the forest and transforms into a sea horse.It may or may not be a spoiler to say that other children in the town follow suit, each manifesting as a different kind of animal, each determined to save the earth from their parents’ recklessness.With the grown-ups in danger of selling their souls, “Wild” is partly a morality play, gesturing in the direction of Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” — and also toward Brecht, Dr. Seuss and “Urinetown.” All of it in two dimensions.Which is unfortunate, because the cast is packed with talent. Menzel, a disarmingly sympathetic not-so-evil stepmother in Amazon’s recent “Cinderella,” brings an appealing ease and playfulness to Bea, and adds a touch of country music to the richness of her voice (Menzel’s run in the show ends Dec. 23). And Yde opens a window to Sophia’s soul with a couple of striking solos, “Dear Everything” and “Human.”With music principally by the pop songwriters Justin Tranter and Caroline Pennell, and lyrics principally by Tranter, Pennell and V, “Wild” is a slickly produced work in progress. Rock-show lighting by the excellent Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew is remarkably effective in revving up the crowd during the more anthemic numbers.The cast of 10 is backed by a three-piece band (the music director is David Freeman Coleman) and members of the Boston Children’s Chorus, who add vocal depth and, by their presence, enhance the sense of a generation demanding action.But the show comes across as more pageant than musical, with politics paramount. Too often, the text bonks us over the head with its messaging, as when Sophia’s friend Forte (Paravi Das) explains that “all living things are now being seriously jeopardized by us humans — well, non-Indigenous humans, of course.”And does a debate over pronouns really need to erupt — around Possible (the very funny Luke Ferrari), a nonbinary teenager, and their unaccepting father, Mr. Custom (Muñoz) — during the crisis over Sophia’s disappearance? Might there be a more organic moment to make the same point?The only actor who briefly lucks into dialogue that lets whole characters emerge is Josh Lamon, as the excitable Minister Muddle and the ultra-tranquil therapist Dr. Projection.“Your children were traumatized by learning about the consequences of you leasing your lands,” Dr. Projection tells the parents of Outskirtzia. “Then you told them you didn’t care what they thought or felt. You made them feel unimportant and unseen.”Somehow, from Dr. Projection, this lesson doesn’t feel like a lesson — a rare sensation in “Wild.” The show’s creators frequently seem under the impression that virtue excuses lapses in artistry, as when a program note highlights the eco-consciousness of its costume construction.The designers, SiiGii, Roy Caires and Tommy Cole, write that they used “exclusively second hand, recycled and repurposed materials.” Yet the outfits, in nonsensical patchworks of denim and plaid, are unflattering — “Hee Haw” meets the apocalypse — in a way that seems condescending, as if being poor and rural meant having no sense of style.The show’s successful reuse of scenic elements from earlier this season — the set of the A.R.T.’s “Macbeth In Stride” (by Dan Soule), augmented with luxuriantly leafy sculptures (by Daniel Callahan) from its “The Arboretum Experience” — makes a worthier point: that recycled materials don’t need to feel penitential.“Wild” is meeting the world before it’s ready, but there is something ultimately affecting in it about parents and teenagers, and something commendable, too, about theater that tries to respond to the urgent concerns of the day.“We want you to panic, we want you to act,” the children sing, indicting their elders. “You stole our future, and we want it back.” However clumsily, “Wild” is on the side of the kids — an offering of respect and contrition from the grown-ups, while there’s still time.Wild: A Musical BecomingThrough Jan. 2 at the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, Mass.; americanrepertorytheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More