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      James Rado, Co-Creator of the Musical ‘Hair,’ Is Dead at 90

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      Working with his fellow writer and actor Gerome Ragni and the composer Galt MacDermot, he jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius.James Rado, who jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius as a co-creator of “Hair,” the show, billed as an “American tribal love-rock musical,” that transfigured musical theater tradition with radical ’60s iconoclasm and rock ’n’ roll, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 90.The publicist Merle Frimark, a longtime friend, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was cardio-respiratory arrest.So much of the power of “Hair” resided in its seeming raw spontaneity, yet Mr. Rado (pronounced RAY-doe) labored over it for years with his collaborator Gerome Ragni to perfect that affect. Contrary to theatrical lore, he and Mr. Ragni were not out-of-work actors who wrote “Hair” to generate roles they could themselves play, but rather New York stage regulars with growing résumés.They met as cast members in an Off Broadway revue called “Hang Down Your Head and Die,” a London transfer that closed after one performance in October 1964. Mr. Rado bonded with Mr. Ragni and was soon talking to him about collaborating on a musical that would capture the exuberant, increasingly anti-establishment youth culture rising all around them in the streets of Lower Manhattan — a musical about hippies before hippies had a name.A musician before he’d become an actor, Mr. Rado began writing songs with Mr. Ragni, which they sometimes sang in what were then beatnik coffee houses in Greenwich Village.Moving to an apartment in Hoboken, N.J., where rents were even cheaper than in downtown Manhattan, they borrowed a typewriter from their landlord and went to work writing their musical in earnest, transcribing into song the sexual liberation, racial integration, pharmacological experimentation and opposition to the escalating Vietnam War that was galvanizing their young street archetypes. In solidarity, Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni let their short hair grow long.A museum stroll in mid-1965 brought them face to face with a painting of a tuft of hair by the Pop artist Jim Dine. Its title was “Hair.”“I called it to Jerry’s attention, and we were both knocked out,” Mr. Rado later recalled. Their nascent musical now had a name.A moment from the original production of “Hair,” at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 1967.DagmarWhat happened next would become the stuff of Broadway legend, albeit in fits and starts. In October 1966, on a train platform in New Haven, Conn., Mr. Ragni recognized Joseph Papp, impresario of the then-itinerant New York Shakespeare Festival, and handed him a bound script of “Hair.” Mr. Papp took it, read it and resolved to consider making “Hair” the opening production at his Public Theater, just nearing completion in what had been the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street in the East Village.Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni, meanwhile, had decided that their lyrics needed better melodies than the ones they had written, and embarked on a search for a legitimate composer to improve the songs. The search yielded the Canadian-born Galt MacDermot, a most unlikely choice: He was slightly older than his colleagues and a straight arrow with an eclectic musical background but scant Broadway experience. Mr. MacDermot wrote the melody for versions of “Aquarius” and several other songs, on spec, in less than 36 hours. It instantly became clear that he was the ideal choice for setting Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni’s lyric ruminations to rocking show music.A demonstration soon ensued in Mr. Papp’s office, with Mr. MacDermot singing and playing the trio’s new songs. Impressed, Mr. Papp announced that he would open the Public with “Hair.”Yet, second-guessing himself, he soon rescinded his offer, only to reconsider after a return office audition, this time with Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni doing the singing. “Hair” did, in fact, open the Public Theater on Oct. 17, 1967, with the 32-year-old Mr. Ragni leading the cast as George Berger — a hippie tribe’s nominal leader — but without the 35-year-old Mr. Rado, who was deemed too old by the show’s director, Gerald Freedman, to play the doomed protagonist, Claude Hooper Bukowski, even though the character was based almost entirely on Mr. Rado himself.“Hair” — an impressionistic near-fairy tale of a flock of flower children on the streets of New York taking LSD, burning draft cards, shocking tourists and making love before losing their conflicted comrade, Claude, to the Vietnam War — ran for eight weeks at the Public’s brand-new Anspacher Theater, generating ecstatic word of mouth and reviews that ranged from perplexed to appreciative.A wealthy young Midwesterner with political ambitions and strong antiwar politics named Michael Butler stepped in to move the show, first to Cheetah, a nightclub on West 53rd Street, and then — much rewritten by Mr. Rado and his collaborators, and with a visionary new director, Tom O’Horgan, now in charge — on to Broadway, where Mr. Rado was restored to the cast as Claude.Mr. Rado, second from left, with, from left, the actor Paul Nicholas, Mr. Ragni, the actor Oliver Tobias and the director Tom O’Horgan in London shortly after “Hair” opened there in 1968.Getty“Hair” was a Broadway sensation, hailed for its irresistible rock- and soul-driven score, its young cast of utter unknowns, its often-searing topicality and its must-see 20-second nude scene. It ran for 1,750 performances after opening at the Biltmore Theatre, on West 47th Street, on April 29, 1968. (It is now the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.)“Hair” quickly conquered the culture at large — though there were naysayers, who found its nudity, flagrant four-letter words and flouting of the American flag objectionable. It played all across America and ultimately the world, engendering a 1979 film adaptation directed by Milos Forman — which was disavowed by Mr. Rado — and a Tony Award-winning Broadway revival in 2009 that Mr. Rado helped guide. The original cast album won a Grammy Award and was the No. 1 album in the country for 13 straight weeks in 1969. (It was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2019.)The score generated ubiquitous cover versions. In 1969 alone, the Fifth Dimension’s medley of “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (it went on to win the Grammy Award for record of the year), while the Cowsills’ version of the title song reached No. 2, Oliver’s “Good Morning Starshine” hit No. 3 and Three Dog Night’s “Easy to Be Hard” got as high as No. 4. Among the many others who recorded songs from the “Hair” score was Nina Simone.“From the start, I envisioned that the score of ‘Hair’ would be something new for Broadway,” Mr. Rado later reflected, “a kind of pop-rock/show tune hybrid.”“We did have the desire to make something wonderful and spectacular for the moment,” he added. “We thought we’d stumbled on a great idea, and something that potentially could be a hit on Broadway, never thinking of the distant future.”James Alexander Radomski was born on Jan. 23, 1932, in Los Angeles to Alexander and Blanche (Bukowski) Radomski. His father was a sociologist who taught at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. Mr. Rado grew up in a Rochester suburb, Irondequoit, and then in Washington. He graduated from the University of Maryland, where he majored in speech and drama. A lover of Broadway musicals since childhood, he began writing songs in college and co-wrote two musicals that were produced on campus, “Interlude” and “Interlude II.”After serving two years in the Navy, he returned to pursue graduate theater studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, writing both music and lyrics for a revue there called “Cross Your Fingers.” After moving to New York, he wrote pop songs; recorded with his band, James Alexander and the Argyles; performed in summer stock; and did office work while studying method acting with Lee Strasberg.He landed his first Broadway job in 1963 in the ensemble of “Marathon ’33,” written by the actress June Havoc and produced by the Actors Studio. Following their initial encounter in 1964, he and Mr. Ragni were cast by Mike Nichols in his 1965 Chicago production of Ann Jellicoe’s comedy “The Knack.”In 1966, Mr. Rado appeared on Broadway in James Goldman’s “The Lion in Winter,” originating the role of Richard Lionheart, the oldest son of Henry II of England. His mainstream theatrical focus, however, was being redirected to the downtown avant-garde by Mr. Ragni, who, through his involvement with the Open Theater and Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa E.T.C., introduced Mr. Rado to the experimental aesthetic that became central to the experience of “Hair” onstage.“The truth is, we unlocked each other,” Mr. Rado wrote in a foreword to the book “Hair: The Story of the Show That Defined a Generation” (2010), by Eric Grode. “He was my creative catalyst, I probably his. We were great friends. It was a passionate kind of relationship that we directed into creativity, into writing, into creating this piece. We put the drama between us onstage.”Mr. Rado in 2017 at a Jazz at Lincoln Center celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Off Broadway opening of “Hair.”Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesIn the immediate aftermath of “Hair,” Mr. Rado’s fellowship with Mr. Ragni fractured. “We couldn’t be in a room together, we would burst into an argument,” he recalled. Mr. Rado wrote the music, lyrics and book (with his brother, Ted) for a “Hair” sequel he called “The Rainbow Rainbeam Radio Roadshow,” which ran Off Broadway in 1972, just as Mr. Ragni and Mr. MacDermot were suffering an ignominious Broadway flop with their post-“Hair” musical, “Dude.” Mr. Rado then reunited with Mr. Ragni to write “Sun (Audio Movie),” an environmental musical, with the composer Steve Margoshes, and “Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom,” also with Mr. Margoshes.Mr. Ragni died in 1991. Mr. MacDermot died in 2018.In 2008, Mr. Rado confirmed in an interview with The Advocate what had long been an open secret among his “Hair” castmates and collaborators: that he and Mr. Ragni had been lovers.“It was a deep, lifelong friendship and a love of my life,” Mr. Rado stated simply. “Looking back,” he later elaborated about “Hair,” “what was really underlying the whole thing was the new way men were relating to each other. They were very openly embracing each other as brothers. It wasn’t gay; it wasn’t repressed… We suddenly realized this was a musical about love in the larger sense.”Mr. Rado, whose brother is his only immediate survivor, never married and did not identify as gay, but rather as “omnisexual.” Asked before the 2009 “Hair” revival opened if the show was based on his relationship with Mr. Ragni, Mr. Rado answered yes.“We were in a love mode,” he said, “and this whole love movement started happening around us, so the show got it. ‘Hair’ was our baby in a way, which is pretty cool.”Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Raisin in the Sun’ and ‘The Harder They Come’ Part of Public Theater Season

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      Two new works by Suzan-Lori Parks will be included in a season that delves into “relationships between Black and white America.”The Public Theater’s 2022-23 season will feature a mix of works rooted in history and new pieces that speak to current cultural shifts — toward racial justice, equity and disability rights. The season kicks off with a production of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a Black family’s bid to move into a house in a white neighborhood of Chicago, directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play,” “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”). Performances are scheduled to begin Sept. 27.This is not O’Hara’s first interpretation of the classic: He also directed a version in 2019, starring S. Epatha Merkerson, at the Williamstown Theater Festival. (The Public Theater said this will be a new production, not a remounting of the Williamstown staging.) He is also a playwright (“Barbecue,” “Bootycandy”), and in 2010 he wrote his own sequel to Hansberry’s play, “The Etiquette of Vigilance.”The season will also include the New York premiere of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” — conceived by Greig Sargeant, and developed it as member of Elevator Repair Service, and directed by John Collins — starting Sept. 24. The play re-enacts a 1965 debate between the writer and civil rights advocate James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and an architect of the 20th-century conservative movement, for which they were asked if “the American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” The show had its premiere last fall at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, said he wants to help put Hansberry and Baldwin “back at the center of our dramatic tradition.” Baldwin, a towering literary figure, found less success as a dramatist, partly because of the mostly white cultural gatekeepers of the ’60s and ’70s. Hansberry became the first Black woman to be produced on Broadway when “A Raisin in the Sun,” premiered there in 1959, but died just a few years later in 1965.“It’s absolutely vital for our understanding of this current moment, particularly in terms of relationships between Black and white America,” Eustis said in an interview. “It’s also saying, ‘Hey, Shakespeare isn’t the only classic voice that matters.’”The upcoming slate of shows balances lessons from the past with insights into the future of theater. The New York premiere of “Where We Belong,” by Madeline Sayet, a member of the Mohegan tribe, grapples with the legacy of Shakespeare and colonization. Mei Ann Teo will direct the show, which is being produced with Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in association with the Folger Shakespeare Library. Performances are set to begin Oct. 28.For Eustis, Sayet’s solo piece fits well into the current cultural movement. “It’s a wave that has picked us up and thrown us forward, and said, ‘It is time to really deal with the legacy of slavery,’” Eustis said. “‘It is time to really turn and fundamentally alter race relations in this country.’”Artists who have previously had works staged at the Public — like Suzan-Lori Parks, the theater’s writer in residence; James Ijames; and Erika Dickerson-Despenza — will return this season with new plays.Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” which will be staged in November, began as a collection of plays that the playwright wrote each day from March 2020 to April 2021. It will be followed by “The Harder They Come,” featuring Jimmy Cliff’s songs and a book by Parks, in the winter of 2023. The work is a new musical adaptation of the 1972 Perry Henzell film, about a young singer (played by Cliff) in Jamaica eager to become a star only to become an outlaw after being pushed to desperate circumstances. Tony Taccone will direct, with codirection by Sergio Trujillo, and choreography is by Edgar Godineaux.“That longevity of a relationship with a major artist is hugely important, not only to Suzan-Lori, but to making a statement to the field that it’s possible to spend a life in the theater,” Eustis said. “You can actually keep your feet in the theater and ground your whole career.”“Good Bones,” written by Ijames (who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for drama for “Fat Ham,” which is currently onstage at the Public in its New York premiere), will have its world premiere in the spring of 2023. The play, directed by Saheem Ali, explores gentrification and the growing price of the American dream. “Shadow/Land,” by Dickerson-Despenza (who won the Blackburn Prize for her play “Cullud Wattah”) and directed by Candis C. Jones, is the first installment of a 10-play cycle about the Hurricane Katrina diaspora. The Public produced it as an audio play during the pandemic. Performances also begin in spring 2023.Ryan J. Haddad will make his Off Broadway playwriting debut with “Dark Disabled Stories,” about strangers he encounters while navigating a city not built for cerebral palsy, in the winter of 2023. Jordan Fein is directing the play, produced by the Bushwick Starr and presented by the Public. It probes discrimination in favor of able-bodied people. More

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

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

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      ‘The Vagrant Trilogy’ Review: Palestinians in Exile, Yearning for Home

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      Mona Mansour’s rich trilogy, now at the Public Theater, follows a displaced Palestinian family.The matinee audience was filing out of the Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall the other afternoon when stagehands started dismantling the set — a rickety home in a refugee camp in Lebanon, where Mona Mansour’s border-crossing, alternate-realities epic “The Vagrant Trilogy” winds up.The scenery coming down before we’d left the room was a jolt: I’d wanted to stay in the show’s world for just a little longer. Which is saying something when a production stretches to three and a half hours, including two intermissions. And when, courtesy of the Covid pandemic, both lead roles are being performed by understudies.But Mansour’s rich trilogy about a displaced Palestinian family is captivating, and for all the protean theatricality of Mark Wing-Davey’s gorgeous production, watching it feels somehow like being engrossed in a novel, with that same luxuriant sense of immersion and transport. Woven of poetry and politics, threaded with comedy, it’s Stoppardian in its intellectualism and doesn’t shy from poignancy.Is it poor form to invoke a British dramatist when discussing a play that’s in no small part about the ravages of British colonialism? Quite possibly. But Mansour’s Palestinian characters are smitten in their own ways with touchstones of British culture. And Stoppard is, after all, a Czech-born immigrant.Nadine Malouf, left, and Rudy Roushdi, who play multiple roles in the trilogy of plays.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Hour of Feeling,” the trilogy’s first play, starts with a meet-cute on a hilltop near Ramallah in April 1967. Adham, a young scholar just back from Cairo and cultivating an expertise in the poetry of Wordsworth, is busy avoiding a party. Abir, a rebellious young woman raised on a nearby farm and modeling her personal style on the film star Julie Christie, has come up for a smoke. (There is much atmospheric smoking in these plays, which are spoken mainly in English and occasionally in Arabic, with English supertitles.)Abir and Adham’s attraction is instant. By June, when they fly to London for a lecture that he is giving, they are newlyweds. And when the Six-Day War breaks out during their trip, they face a choice: to remain abroad, in cosseted academia, or return home to upheaval.The rest of the trilogy explores each of those possibilities, proffering two different, incompatible realities that stem from 1967. The second play, “The Vagrant,” finds Abir and Adham in London in 1982, having decided to stay in a country that will always view them as other. In the third play, “Urge for Going,” set in the Lebanese refugee camp in 2003, home and family lured them back all those years ago, only to mire them in a different exile.“Palestine?” Abir’s brother says dryly to his niece, in the camp. “Your father’s homeland, thirty minutes away, depending on traffic.”Mansour has calibrated the narrative tension so expertly that in each reality we are deeply invested in the fates of her characters, among them Adham’s mother, Beder, embodied by Nadine Malouf as a funny, formidable, thoroughly unsentimental woman who has fought to give her brilliant boy the best possible chance in a hostile world. Her other son, Hamzi (Osh Ashruf), is a gentle, kindly man whom she left behind as a child, with his father, in that refugee camp, where he spends decades of his life.Caitlin Nasema Cassidy, as Abir, and Bassam Abdelfattah, as Adham, acquit themselves honorably. Yet maybe because they are understudies, they draw their characters in broader strokes than they might if they had more time to settle into such large roles. (Tala Ashe and Hadi Tabbal, both wonderful Off Broadway in “English” this spring, ordinarily play Abir and Adham.) They are surrounded by a solid company, even if some accents get slippery in the London scenes.Those scenes are often fun, though, especially the visuals; Allen Moyer’s sets, Dina El-Aziz’s costumes and Tom Watson’s wigs evoke the ’60s and ’80s to delightful effect. (Lighting by Reza Behjat; sound by Tye Hunt Fitzgerald and Sinan Refik Zafar; and video by Greg Emetaz are also excellent.) Malouf has comic magnetism as a flirtatious ’60s Londoner in fabulous orange slingbacks who can’t keep her hand off Adham’s thigh, while Ramsey Faragallah is eccentrically funny as a floppy-haired — and, it turns out, bigoted — ’80s professor who stirs his tea with the eraser end of his pencil.With Wordsworth’s poetry a motif throughout the trilogy, Mansour examines the sustaining psychic power of a beloved landscape — a home that one may leave but must be able to revisit. And through the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali’s “Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower,” a chunk of which makes an affecting monologue by Hamzi in the third play, Mansour suggests the quiet tragedy of the geopolitical bystander: “His God-given rights are a grain of salt tossed into the sea.”It’s in this final part of the trilogy that we meet the two tightly bonded characters most likely to smash our hearts: Abir and Adham’s teenage daughter, the ebulliently ambitious Jamila (Malouf, at her most splendid), and her vulnerable brother, Jul (Rudy Roushdi, tenderly lovely). As bookish as Adham, Jamila is studying to get into college and join the wider world.For now, though, she still sometimes pretends with Jul that he is a talk-show host and she a marvelously successful guest with a string of doctorates.“How did you get out of the refugee camp?” he asks.“Well, it’s a long story,” she says.The Vagrant TrilogyThrough May 15 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 3 hours 30 minutes. More

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      James Ijames on Winning a Pulitzer and Making ‘Hamlet’ a Comedy

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      The 41-year-old playwright’s show “Fat Ham,” set at a Southern barbecue, hasn’t even had an in-person production yet because of the pandemic.The play “Fat Ham,” a comedic riff on “Hamlet” set at a Southern barbecue, hasn’t even had an in-person production yet because of the coronavirus pandemic.But on Monday, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, based on its script and following a streaming production mounted last year by the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. And on Thursday, performances of the first production before live audiences are scheduled to begin Off Broadway at the Public Theater, in a coproduction with the National Black Theater.“Fat Ham” was written by James Ijames, 41, who grew up in Bessemer City, N.C., and was educated at Morehouse College and Temple University (he studied acting). He now lives in Philadelphia, where he is one of several co-artistic directors experimenting with a shared leadership model at the Wilma Theater; his other notable works include “Kill Move Paradise,” “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” and “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington.”About an hour after the Pulitzers were announced, I spoke to Ijames (his surname is pronounced “imes”) about the play and the award. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.From left, Kimberly S. Fairbanks, Brennen S. Malone and Lindsay Smiling in the Wilma Theater’s streaming production of “Fat Ham.”via The Wilma TheaterSo for those of our readers who have never heard of “Fat Ham,” what’s it about?“Fat Ham” is a very loose adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” that has been transported to the American South, and it takes place in the backyard of a family that owns a barbecue restaurant. At its core, the play is about how this Hamlet character, whose name is Juicy, is meeting and undermining his family’s cycles of trauma and violence. It’s really about how he brings the rest of his family with him to that realization that they don’t have to continue these cycles of abuse and violence, and that they can do something completely different with their lives. It’s a comedy in the end, so I take “Hamlet” and I essentially make it not tragic anymore.Where did the idea come from?I just have always loved “Hamlet.” When I was in college, I did a truncated production of it. And the scene when we first meet Hamlet, in the court, I did that scene, and it was just like, “This is such a great scene. I think the whole play could exist inside of this moment. All of the players are in the same room together, and what if everything just erupted in this court in this moment, so the whole sweep of Hamlet was in one scene?” And I wanted to take that and bring it a little closer to my experience by putting it in the mouths of people that look like me and sound like me, that have my rhythms and eat the kind of food that I grew up eating. And I think it illuminates something about the original.Obviously, we’ve been living through a pretty unusual period, and you have won this prize after a virtual production. Tell me about that.We basically got Airbnbs and put all of the cast and the crew in a bubble, and they filmed it over the course of a month. It turned out really beautifully, and we were all really proud of it. And I’m really thrilled for people to see an in-person performance of it.How do you think the in-person experience will be different from the streaming experience?The actors can feed off of the reactions from the audience that they hear. So I’m really excited about having that experience. I also did a few tweaks on the play because it’s moved from the digital format to the live format. So I’m curious to see how that meets audiences.Why are you a playwright?When I was about 13, my parents split up and I had a lot of anger and frustration, and one of the ways that my family tried to encourage me to work through that was to write. And so I started writing little skits and plays, and I just have been writing in dramatic form ever since. I think it’s a way for me to metabolize all the things that I’m thinking about or curious about.The 2022 Pulitzer PrizesCard 1 of 12The awards. More

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      in Theater

      On the Scene: Hillary Clinton at ‘Suffs’

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      On the Scene: Hillary Clinton at ‘Suffs’Jennifer Schuessler�� Reporting from the Public TheaterSara Krulwich/The New York Times“Suffs,” written by Shaina Taub, covers the final years of the fight for the 19th Amendment, which passed in 1920. As the lights dimmed, the cast, costumed as jeering men, filed onstage for “Watch Out for the Suffragette!,” a vaudeville-style number inspired by real anti-suffrage songs. More

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      in Music

      ‘Suffs’ Review: Young, Scrappy and Hungry for the Right to Vote

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      Shaina Taub’s new musical at the Public Theater tells the story of the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment.I don’t remember my grade school history books dedicating more than a few sentences to the women’s suffrage movement. The nearly 100-year history of women fighting for the right to vote is often trimmed down to two main talking points — Susan B. Anthony and the 19th Amendment — and some dismissed the suffragists as self-serious rabble-rousers.In an effort to counter those notions of these revolutionary women and their fight, the new musical “Suffs” begins with the satirical vaudeville-inspired “Watch Out for the Suffragette!,” sung by the ensemble, made up of female and nonbinary actors. (The show was scheduled to open Wednesday at the Public Theater, but canceled because of positive coronavirus tests.) They’re dressed in drag — even mustaches — caricaturing their male detractors. We’re in for a tedious history lesson, these hypothetical skeptics predict in song; a dreaded feminist is “planning to scold you for three hours straight.”My first thought: Dear God, I hope not.“Suffs” has a hefty two-hour-and-45-minute running time, after all, and though the musical isn’t guilty of scolding, it is guilty of stifling an impressive — though exhausting — breadth of U.S. history through its contemporary lens.Shaina Taub, the Public Theater’s playwright in residence and creator of the musical, stars as Alice Paul, the headstrong young suffragist who assembles a group of women who lead protests, suffer abuse and incarceration, and march on Washington for their right to access the ballot box.Taub gives a steely performance as Paul, though her standby (Holly Gould) has stepped into the role, as Taub tested positive for the coronavirus just before the production’s scheduled opening.Hannah Cruz, center, in the satirical vaudeville-inspired number “Watch Out for the Suffragette!” in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPaul is joined in the metaphorical barracks by Lucy Burns (played by an understated Ally Bonino), her friend and fellow suffragist who helped Paul form the National Woman’s Party. There’s also Doris Stevens (Nadia Dandashi, teeming with earnestness), an eager young student and writer from Ohio, and Ruza Wenclawska (a droll Hannah Cruz), the tough-as-nails Polish American factory worker and union organizer. Inez Milholland (Phillipa Soo), a labor lawyer and chic socialite, is their public face; as Inez, Soo, the beloved “Hamilton” alum, brings sugar, sass and style to the group, marching with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other.In the seven years that are covered in the musical — 1913 to 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally ratified — Paul butts heads with her sisters in the fight. She has a yearslong dispute with Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella), who, as the head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, thinks Paul’s moves are too radical. And there’s the journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James), who unsuccessfully tries to bring race into the movement, challenging Paul’s myopic vision for change.But her actual opponent is the president, Woodrow Wilson (Grace McLean), who noodles around the stage, step-kicking down stairs with a top hat and a cane while gaily singing misogynistic lyrics like “Men make the money/Ladies make the bread/Men make the rules/Ladies make the bed.” McLean’s jaunty performance introduces some of the few moments of levity in the musical; otherwise a general stiffness pervades the production.Nikki M. James, center, as Ida B. Wells and Cassondra James, right, as Mary Church Terrell in a subplot highlighting the tensions between two suffragists with differing ideas about how to elevate race in the movement.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMaybe that’s because the whole production feels so attuned to the gender politics and protests of today, so aware of possible critiques that it takes on its subject with an overabundance of caution. So a mere 20 minutes into the show, “Suffs” makes it clear it’s not framing Paul as the perfect warrior-saint of the movement. When Paul is dismissive of Wells she responds with the song “Wait My Turn” (“Do you not realize you’re not free until I’m free./Or do you refuse to see?”), establishing her role as the racial conscience of the musical, popping up every once in a while as a reminder of the pitfalls of white feminism. And all these women and stories of their activism are uncomfortably stuffed into a show too scared to miss anything that it becomes bloated with information.In many ways “Suffs” lands like a clunky heir of the Public’s other big historical musical, “Hamilton,” borrowing some of its approaches to structure while trying to avoid the criticisms about its politics around women and slavery. But that’s the risk that comes with recasting history with today’s sensibilities in mind. Even this feminist tale occasionally serves retorts to those funky founding fathers who met in “the room where it happens”; our suffragists sing about how no women got to witness the signing of the 19th Amendment themselves because “a man signed the paper behind a closed door in a room somewhere.”But the musical doesn’t need to try so hard to defend itself or prove its relevance, say, by showing the threats and taunts of men interjected into songs like “The March.” Neither does it need to fall back on preciousness, like when a Tennessee state senator’s mother, an “old farmer’s widow,” sings a banjo-heavy song pleading with her son to vote for suffrage with a promise of his favorite meatloaf in return. Or the pat pairing of some couples in the end, and the heavy-handed finale, “Never Over,” about the continuous march toward progress.The direction, by Leigh Silverman, feels as methodical as the text; the pacing is speedy, and the songs are dense with exposition like those of “Hamilton.” But “Suffs” turns out to be all work and mostly no play, and when it comes to the music itself nothing really pops. There are a few dry touches of vaudeville, and pop and some sugary songs like “If We Were Married,” a number that feels like a contemporary stab at Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s 1937 rendition of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” It’s a parody of such cutesy courtship numbers yet it delivers just that.Taub, left, as Alice Paul and Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Catt, who thinks Paul’s moves are too radical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe music is most interesting when it sheds the exposition and allows the characters space to express their hopes, frustrations and desires. Colella slays her performance in one such song, the prickly “This Girl.” Colella clips her words and sharpens her gestures, hitting her notes with the punch of a boxer in the ring. The harmonies, too, like those in the ensemble number “How Long,” which shifts from a tone of despair to one of resilience, also provide the music with much-needed dimension.The choreographer Raja Feather Kelly’s typically transgressive style (exhibited in shows like “A Strange Loop” and “Fairview”) feels defanged, ball-and-chained to its very literal interpretation of the material; there’s much marching and posing, syncopated stepping. Mimi Lien brings a similar austerity to her set design — the stately steps and columns of Congress, perhaps, or some institutional building — but the simplicity here works, allowing “Suffs” to focus on its diverse cast of history-makers. In the costume design, Toni-Leslie James strikes a satisfying balance between formal high-waisted skirts and black lace-up boots, and the splashy wide-brimmed hats have enough ribbons and feathers to make a Southern churchgoer swoon.“Suffs” ends with a passing of the torch from one generation of change-makers to the next, revisiting the latest clash of new politics versus old politics: What was once revolutionary becomes out of date. For all the work this show does to illuminate the successes — and failures — of the women’s rights movement, and the constantly evolving nature of our politics, it focuses so much energy on seeming as timely as possible. But, as the suffs learn, movements transform; our government leaders change, as do the demands of the people on the picket line. It’s a lesson the musical should take to heart: You can’t live in the past, present and future of our nation’s politics all at once — at least not without losing your way.SuffsThrough May 15 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More