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

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

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      Tony Awards Predictions: ‘Strange Loop’ and ‘Lehman’ Look Strong

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      We surveyed voters ahead of this year’s ceremony on Sunday. They are strikingly split in the races for leading musical performers.After a strange year on Broadway, it looks as if it could be a “Strange” night at the Tony Awards.Our annual survey of Tony voters — well, it was annual, until the coronavirus pandemic disrupted everything — suggests that Michael R. Jackson’s meta-musical “A Strange Loop” is favored to win the all-important race for best new musical at this year’s Tony Awards, which will take place on Sunday night. If there is an upset, it will come from “MJ,” the biographical musical about Michael Jackson.Over the past few days, I have connected with 181 of the approximately 650 Tony voters to talk about their choices in eight key categories. This is not a scientific poll — voting continues through Friday; the voting pool is distorted, and diminished, by coronavirus cancellations that left many ineligible to vote in some categories; and numerous voters have been scrambling to catch up with missed shows while hoping to vote at the last minute. To see actual statuettes handed out, you’ll have to tune in to the award show Sunday, which starts with a one-hour streaming segment on Paramount+ at 7 p.m. Eastern, and then continues at 8 p.m. with a three-hour segment broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.But interviews with a large subset of voters make clear which races are locked up, and which are insanely close.The race for best play is all sewn up.The best play Tony Award seems certain to go to “The Lehman Trilogy,” a riveting history lesson that chronicles the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers financial empire. The play was originally written by an Italian playwright, Stefano Massini, and then adapted by a British writer, Ben Power.The survey suggests that “Lehman” will win easily — a supermajority of voters believe that it was the best play of the season, and those who do not support it are splitting their votes among the other four contenders, making any other outcome improbable.A plurality of voters also favor one of the “Lehman” stars, the great English actor Simon Russell Beale, in the unusual seven-nominee race for best leading actor in a play. Beale’s career has been spent mostly on the British stage, and this would be his first Tony Award.Simon Russell Beale, center, with Adam Godley, left, and Adrian Lester in “The Lehman Trilogy.” All three are competing for a best actor Tony Award.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhy is “Lehman” winning? The show, with a meaty subject that both explicates and implicitly critiques New York City’s hugely important financial industry, was a showcase for its three main actors, each of whom played many roles, and it had a showpiece set, designed by Es Devlin, that contained the action within a rotating glass box.Directed by Sam Mendes, it arrived on Broadway with a lot of buzz. After productions in Europe, it had been staged Off Broadway, at the Park Avenue Armory, in 2019, and that production was the talk of the town, becoming a best seller for the nonprofit, with some seats reselling for several thousand dollars.The road to Broadway was bumpy: “The Lehman Trilogy” began previews at the Nederlander Theater less than a week before theaters shut down in March 2020; it then resumed previews 18 months later and finally opened last October. The run sold well, particularly given that much of it overlapped with the pandemic surge associated with the Omicron variant, and it ended Jan. 2 before the production moved to Los Angeles for another brief run.Read More About the 2022 Tony AwardsHosting Duties: Ariana DeBose, who will host the ceremony, vows that this edition will celebrate the often unsung actors who have stepped in during the pandemic.Ruth Negga: The actress, who is nominated for her role as Lady Macbeth in Sam Gold’s staging of the play, infuses the character with intensity, urgency and vitality.Hugh Jackman: The actor may potentially win his third Tony Award for his role in “The Music Man.” He shared some thoughts on his life between film and theater.Choreography: Musicals like “MJ” and “Paradise Square” take on dances of the past but miss some opportunities to elevate the dancing; “For Colored Girls” effectively weaves language and motion.The play faced some criticism from those who felt that it soft-pedaled the relationship between the Lehmans’ early business practices and slavery; the production sharpened its references to race via script revisions made during the theater shutdown.Among new musicals, ‘A Strange Loop’ is the favorite.“A Strange Loop” also arrived on Broadway with a big head of steam: During the pandemic, it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, based on an Off Broadway production staged by Playwrights Horizons and Page 73 Productions in 2019.The musical is about a young aspiring musical theater writer who is Black and gay, and who is haunted by a mostly self-critical inner dialogue that springs to life in the show.The musical, written by Michael R. Jackson and directed by Stephen Brackett, garnered the strongest reviews of the season, and picked up 11 Tony nominations, more than any other show.Voters praised the show’s originality and its raw honesty. As is true with every show, this one also has its skeptics — some voters find the songs unmemorable, or the explicitness off-putting — but in the Tony race, it is benefiting from the fact that there is no consensus about any of the other nominees.Some industry veterans have suggested that Tony voters who live outside New York might be reluctant to support “A Strange Loop” because its sexual content could make it challenging to produce on tour. But that does not appear to be a decisive factor: “A Strange Loop” is favored by half of the voters I spoke with; about one-fifth are supporting “MJ,” the musical about Michael Jackson, which they uniformly praised as entertaining, and the other contenders have less support.“Six,” the fan favorite that was all the rage in 2020, when it came within a few hours of opening before theaters shut down, seems to have lost some heat among voters who no longer think of it as a new show because its run began before the pandemic. But shed no tears for “Six”: it is proving to be hugely successful, with strong box office grosses and a thriving touring market.Several acting races are down to the wire.Voters are remarkably divided in the races for best leading musical performers.In the race for lead actor in a musical, the voters are evenly split between two young actors, Myles Frost, 22, and Jaquel Spivey, 23, each of whom is making his professional stage debut this season. Frost is nominated for his convincing depiction of a driven Michael Jackson in “MJ,” and Spivey is nominated for his soul-baring performance as the self-doubting protagonist in “A Strange Loop”; both have wowed audiences, in very different ways. Each of them has support from about one-third of voters.In the race for lead actress in a musical, the voters are torn between Sharon D Clarke, who played the pained but powerful maid at the heart of a revival of “Caroline, or Change,” and Joaquina Kalukango, who plays a determined tavern owner in the new musical “Paradise Square.”Joaquina Kalukango, left, of “Paradise Square” and Sharon D Clarke of “Caroline, or Change” are in a tight race for lead actress in a musical.Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the race for best actress in a play, Deirdre O’Connell, who uncannily lip-synced recorded interviews with a kidnapping victim in “Dana H.,” has a modest edge among the voters I talked to. But the margin was not big enough to predict what will happen with any confidence; the other leading contenders appear to be LaChanze, for her performance as a truth-telling actress in “Trouble in Mind,” and Mary-Louise Parker, for her performance as a woman abused by her uncle in “How I Learned to Drive.”‘Company’ leads in the musical revival category, but the best play revival is harder to predict.The death of the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, one of the most important writers in musical theater history, was among the biggest theater stories of the last season, and it appears that Tony voters are now inclined to honor the final Broadway production that he worked on with the prize for best musical revival.About half of voters say they are choosing the gender-reversed revival of “Company,” which Sondheim strongly supported before his death. The show, first produced in 1970, previously centered on a man contemplating his single life as he turns 35; this version, directed by Marianne Elliott, puts a woman in the same predicament.The revival of “Company” appears to be the leading contender in the best musical revival category.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Company” appears to have twice as much support as its nearest competitor, the revival of “Caroline, or Change.”Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Nominated for 11 Tonys as Broadway Lauds Comeback

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      “The Lehman Trilogy,” as well as revivals of “Company” and “For Colored Girls,” led in their respective categories as the industry tries to recover from the long pandemic shutdown.A musical about making art and a play about making money dominated the Tony Awards nominations Monday, as Broadway sought to celebrate its best work and revive its fortunes after the lengthy and damaging coronavirus shutdown.The race for best musical — traditionally the most financially beneficial prize — turned into an unexpectedly broad six-way contest because the nominators were so closely divided they had to expand the number of nominees.Out of the gate, the front-runner is “A Strange Loop,” a meta-musical in which a composer who is Black and gay battles demons and doubts while trying to write a show. Even before arriving on Broadway, the show, written by Michael R. Jackson, had won the Pulitzer Prize in drama after an Off Broadway production at Playwrights Horizons; it opened on Broadway late last month to some of the strongest reviews for any new musical this season, and on Monday it picked up 11 Tony nominations, the most for any show.“I feel really grateful, and I feel validated for putting in all the years and all the hours,” Jackson said after learning the news. “It feels amazing to know better things are possible.”“MJ,” a jukebox musical about Michael Jackson, was nominated for 10 Tonys. Myles Frost, center, was nominated for best actor in a musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesScoring the most nominations is not always predictive of winning the prize, and “A Strange Loop,” which is adventurous in form and content, will face tough competition from “MJ,” a biographical jukebox musical about Michael Jackson; “Six,” a fan favorite about the wives of Henry VIII; “Girl From the North Country,” which combines the songs of Bob Dylan with a fictional story about a boardinghouse in the Minnesota city where Dylan was born; “Mr. Saturday Night,” about a washed-up comedian hungering for a comeback; and “Paradise Square,” about a turning point in race relations in 19th-century New York.Both “Paradise Square,” which picked up 10 nominations, and “Girl From the North Country,” with seven, have struggled at the box office, and will now hope that their multiple Tony nominations will help reverse their financial fortunes. For “MJ,” its 10 nods are a form of vindication after several influential reviewers criticized the show for sidestepping sexual abuse allegations against the pop star.“The Lehman Trilogy,” which arrived on Broadway with an enormous — albeit pandemic-delayed — head of steam following rapturously reviewed productions in London and Off Broadway, picked up eight nominations to dominate the best play category. The play, which follows the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers, was written by Stefano Massini and Ben Power, and featured a dazzling production centered on a rotating glass box designed by Es Devlin. All three of its leads — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester — were nominated for best actor.“The Lehman Trilogy” was nominated for 8 Tonys, including best play. All three of its leads — from left, Adam Godley, Simon Russell Beale and Adrian Lester — were nominated for best actor in a play.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Lehman Trilogy” vies with four other dramas for best play. Among them are two dark comedies — “Clyde’s,” by Lynn Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer winner who was also nominated for writing the book for “MJ,” and “Hangmen,” by Martin McDonagh, an acclaimed British-Irish playwright who has now been nominated five times but has yet to win. The other contenders are “Skeleton Crew,” Dominique Morisseau’s play about factory workers at an automotive plant facing shutdown, and “The Minutes,” Tracy Letts’s look at the unsettling secrets of a small-town governing body.The Tony Awards, which honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway, are an annual celebration for American theater, but they are particularly important now as a potential marketing tool for an industry that is still grossing less, and selling fewer tickets, than it was before the pandemic forced theaters to close for a year and a half. The awards are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing.“This Tony Awards will mean so much more than honoring the performances and the artistic work that’s been done this season — it’s also celebrating the resilience of the community, and that this much work is being done and being seen,” said Rob McClure, an actor who scored a Tony nomination (his second) for his comedic and chameleonic performance in the title role of “Mrs. Doubtfire.”Billy Crystal was nominated for best actor in a musical for his performance in “Mr. Saturday Night,” based on his 1992 film. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWell known performers scoring nominations included Uzo Aduba, Billy Crystal, Rachel Dratch, Hugh Jackman, Ruth Negga, Mary-Louise Parker, Patti LuPone, Phylicia Rashad and Sam Rockwell. But several other big stars now working on Broadway were overlooked by nominators, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Laurence Fishburne and Daniel Craig, as well as Beanie Feldstein, starring in “Funny Girl” but unable to escape the long shadow of Barbra Streisand.This season saw an unusually large number of works by Black writers, and that created more opportunity for Black performers, directors, and designers, some of whom were nominated for Tonys. Among them are two performers new to Broadway, Jaquel Spivey, the star of “A Strange Loop,” and Myles Frost, the star of “MJ,” now facing off against Crystal, Jackman and McClure in the leading actor in a musical category.“Black playwrights have had an amazing presence this season, and I hope that continues,” said Camille A. Brown, who scored two nominations Monday, for directing and choreographing the revival of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf.” Reflecting on her own show, she said, “Having seven Black women on a Broadway stage has a lot of meaning, and speaks to the importance of sisterhood and love and Black women holding space for one another.”“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf” was nominated for seven Tonys, including for best revival of a play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe seven Tony nominations for “For Colored Girls” are a bittersweet triumph for a production that has been languishing at the box office and had already announced an early closing date. The revival picked up more nominations than any other show in the race for best play revival, a strong category in which many eligible shows won positive reviews.It will now face off against four others: “American Buffalo,” David Mamet’s drama about a trio of scheming junk-shop denizens and “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s look at homophobia in baseball, as well as two plays that had never previously made it to Broadway despite being considered important parts of the playwriting canon, “Trouble in Mind,” Alice Childress’s look at racism in theater; and “How I Learned to Drive,” Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer-winning drama about child sexual abuse.The competition for best musical revival is small, but strong. There were four eligible shows, and only three scored nods: “Company,” “Caroline, or Change,” and “The Music Man.” Excluded was the revival of “Funny Girl” which fared poorly with critics, but has been doing fine at the box office.“Company,” the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, was nominated for 9 Tony awards, including best revival of a musical. Patti LuPone, a nominee at left, performed with Katrina Lenk. Matthew Murphy/O & M Co./DKC, via Associated PressThe nine nods for “Company” pack an especially emotional punch because its composer and lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, died soon after attending the first post-shutdown preview. “The longer he’s not with us, the more I miss him,” said LuPone, who picked up her eighth Tony nomination — she’s won twice — for her work in the production.The nominations were chosen by a group of 29 people, most of whom work in the theater industry but are not financially connected to any of the eligible productions, who saw all eligible shows and voted last Friday. There were 34 eligible shows, 29 of which scored nominations; the five left out were all new plays.Up next: a group of 650 voters, including producers and performers and many others with an interest in the nominated productions, have until June 10 to vote for their favorites, and the winners will be announced at a ceremony on June 12. The ceremony, at Radio City Music Hall, is to be hosted by Ariana DeBose; the first hour will be streamed on Paramount+, followed by three hours broadcast by CBS.Broadway’s grosses are down in part because tourism remains down in New York City, and in part because of ongoing concerns about the coronavirus. Many of the nominees interviewed Monday said they hoped the spotlight of the Tony Awards would lure more patrons back to Broadway.“Anyone that’s doing theater right now has been hit really hard by the pandemic,” said Marianne Elliott, a two-time Tony-winning director who scored another nomination for “Company.” “It’s gratifying to see that Broadway is coming back. To have the Tony nominations for all of these shows is just a celebration of what we do, and it’s lovely to be here.” More

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      Tony Nomination Snubs and Surprises: Daniel Craig, ‘Funny Girl’ and ‘Paradise Square’

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      Tony nominations morning is always filled with joy for lots of performers, theater artists and producers who find themselves in contention for Broadway’s biggest recognition. But there are also always some who are overlooked, and others who are just gobsmacked.Here are some of the snubs, surprises and observations about Monday’s list:The nominators spread out their admiration quite widely: Of the 34 eligible shows, 29 got at least one nod, including the critically scorned “Diana.” But five new plays were completely overlooked. Most surprising: “Pass Over,” the well-reviewed and bracing drama by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, and also the first play to open after the pandemic lockdown. Also scoring no nominations: “Birthday Candles,” by Noah Haidle; “Chicken & Biscuits,” by Douglas Lyons; “Is This a Room,” by Tina Satter; and “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” by Keenan Scott II.The Civil War-era musical “Paradise Square” has had an especially tortuous road to Broadway, and so far ticket sales have been quite weak. But the show’s fortunes on Monday had to offer comfort and hope: It snagged an impressive 10 nominations, tying for the second most of any show. Joaquina Kalukango was always a sure thing in the lead actress in a musical category, but nominators also singled out two of her supporting co-stars, Sidney DuPont and A.J. Shively. The show drew attention in most of the major technical categories as well, including for Bill T. Jones’s choreography, but one key member of the creative team was left out: the director, Moisés Kaufman.Several major stars who are drawing big crowds to their shows failed to impress. Among them: the married couple Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, who are starring in a smash revival of “Plaza Suite” that scored just one nomination, for costume design, and Daniel Craig, who is playing the title role in a revival of “Macbeth.” (His co-star, Ruth Negga, did get nominated, and the production was also nominated for lighting and sound design.)Tony nominators followed the critics, raining on the parade for the highly anticipated revival of “Funny Girl.” While it was the beloved musical’s first time back on Broadway in nearly 60 years, it scored only one nomination, for the tap-dancing supporting actor Jared Grimes. And Beanie Feldstein, who drew tepid notices filling Barbra Streisand’s shoes as Fanny Brice, did not receive a best actress nomination.How to handle the many ensemble-driven shows was always going to be a challenge for the nominators. In the case of “The Lehman Trilogy,” they bestowed riches on everyone, nominating all three lead actors — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester — and expanding the category to make room for them all. For the musical “Six,” on the other hand, a cast twice the size proved hard to rank, and none of the actresses playing the six wives of Henry VIII were crowned.That Jesse Tyler Ferguson would be nominated for his role in “Take Me Out” seemed a sure bet. And the suave star power of Jesse Williams, as the baseball demigod Darren Lemming, vaulted him to a nomination as well. But the big surprise was a third nod in the supporting actor category for the far less well-known Michael Oberholtzer, whose wounded ferocity as a racist teammate put him in (friendly?) competition with his co-stars.Another show also struggling at the box office — a revival of the choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” — also did quite well on Monday. The production had announced an early closing date of May 22, and must now decide whether its seven nominations, plus a social-media-fueled pay-it-forward campaign to get tickets into the hands of those who might not otherwise be able to afford them, are enough to extend the run. More

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      As Broadway Returns, Shows Rethink and Restage Depictions of Race

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      “The Book of Mormon,” “The Lion King” and “Hamilton” are among those making changes as theaters reopen following the lengthy pandemic shutdown.“Hamilton” has restaged “What’d I Miss?,” the second act opener that introduces Thomas Jefferson, so that the dancer playing Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore him multiple children, can pointedly turn her back on him.In “The Lion King,” a pair of longstanding references to the shamanic Rafiki as a monkey — taxonomically correct, since the character is a mandrill — have been excised because of potential racial overtones, given that the role is played by a Black woman.“The Book of Mormon,” a musical comedy from the creators of “South Park” that gleefully teeters between outrageous and offensive, has gone even further. The show, about two wide-eyed white missionaries trying to save souls in a Ugandan village contending with AIDS and a warlord, faced calls from Black members of its own cast to take a fresh look, and wound up making a series of alterations that elevate the main Black female character and clarify the satire.Broadway is back. But as shows resume performance after the long pandemic shutdown, some of the biggest plays and musicals are making script and staging changes to reflect concerns that intensified after last year’s huge wave of protests against racism and police misconduct.At the “Mormon” workshop, actors and members of the creative team discussed the script and the staging. Here, from left to right, actor Derrick Williams talked with the musical’s director, Casey Nicholaw, while two of the show’s writers, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone, conferred in the background.Darren Cox“We’re in a new world,” said Arbender J. Robinson, who was among the actors who expressed their concerns in a letter to the “Mormon” creative team. “We have a responsibility to make sure we understand what we’re doing, and how it can be perceived.”Although classic shows are often updated to reflect shifting attitudes toward race and gender when they are brought back to the stage as revivals, what is happening today is different: an assortment of hit shows reconsidering their content midrun. They are responding to pressure from artists emboldened by last year’s protests, as well as a heated social media culture in which any form of criticism can easily be amplified, while taking advantage of an unexpected window of time in which rewriting was possible, and re-rehearsing was necessary, because of the lengthy Broadway shutdown.“To me this feels like nothing ever before in theater,” said Diane Paulus, the director of “Jagged Little Pill,” which just last month won the Tony Award for best book and has revisited its book to refine the references to race. “This is different. This is saying the world has changed, and how can we embrace that?”Some of the changes are readily apparent, and others subtle, likely to be noticed only by the most detail-oriented audience members. There has been little pushback so far, either from those who might see the revisions as insufficient, or from those who might see them as an overreaction.The changes, big or small, are significant to performers — especially Black performers, who have become increasingly willing to speak up about concerns on and offstage.The letter from the “Mormon” actors, some from the original cast and some from the current roster, was sent in July of 2020, four months after the pandemic had closed Broadway and two months after George Floyd was killed by the police in Minneapolis. They warned that “when the show returns, all of our work will be viewed through a new lens.”The musical has faced criticism for years over its depiction of Africans, but some cast members were prompted to reflect again when an actor unaffiliated with the show denounced it on Facebook as “racist.”“I never felt this show was racist — never — but then I started hearing some concern from people in the show, who don’t know the intentions, and are saying, ‘Oh my God, am I doing a racist show?’” said Derrick Williams, who has been in “Mormon” since 2014 and also signed the letter. “There’s a fine line between satire and being offensive, and you have to be on the right side of that.”Trey Parker, one of the writers of “The Book of Mormon,” talked with the cast and crew. Darren CoxThe creative team was unsettled. “There was a moment where we weren’t sure — we thought, ‘Maybe this show has run its course,’” said Robert Lopez, who wrote the show with Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of “South Park.” “But that’s not what anyone was asking for, so we braced for the hard work of what we would have to do.”So this summer, after a year of quiet conversations by phone and video, the original creative team gathered with the current cast — some meeting for the first time — and, for two straight weeks, went through the show scene by scene, clarifying their intent as they reviewed the plot, the comedy and the staging. The goal, Mr. Stone said: “Make sure everything works and everybody feels good.”Throughout the show, which will resume performances next month, moments were tweaked to sharpen the satire of Mormonism (already cringe-inducing for many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), and to give the Ugandan villagers more agency. A gag in which the villager Nabulungi tries to send a text using a typewriter is gone; now she has an iPad, and the joke is no longer about her lack of sophistication, but about the unreliability of social media. Also: toward the end of the show, it is Nabulungi, not a white missionary, who scares away a warlord.“It’s putting Uganda at the center,” said Kim Exum, the actress playing Nabulungi, “instead of the Mormon boys.”In “The Lion King,” references to the character Rafiki, who is a shamanic mandrill, as a monkey have been dropped to avoid any possible racial overtones. Tshidi Manye played the role the night “The Lion King” reopened last month.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDisney, which reopened “The Lion King” and “Aladdin” last month, not only replaced the references to Rafiki as a monkey (first used in the 1994 animated movie, when the character was not depicted by a live actor) but also made a few changes to “Aladdin.” Among them: the word “barbaric” has been deleted from the opening song, “Arabian Nights,” and replaced with “chaotic,” reflecting a change previously made for the 2019 live-action film.“The 18-month hiatus gave us a chance to take a fresh look at ‘Aladdin’ and ‘The Lion King’ and make surgical changes to the books,” Disney Theatrical Productions said in a statement for this story, “informed by all that’s occurred since we’d last performed these shows.”At “Hamilton,” which broke ground by casting people of color to play the nation’s founders but has faced criticism for what some historians see as its misleading depiction of the title character as an abolitionist, attention during preparations for its reopening last month focused on Jefferson.Jefferson has become an increasingly controversial figure — the New York City Council earlier this month voted to remove his statue from its chambers — and “Hamilton” director Thomas Kail said the cast and creative team concentrated its revisions on Jefferson’s big number because of “the shameful distance between the liberty he wrote about, and the life he lived as a slaveholder.”There was another factor, too: the song contains the only moment in the show when an enslaved person is named — Hemings. “When you invoke the name of an enslaved person, you have to give some kind of respect,” said James Monroe Iglehart, who plays Jefferson.Hemings has no lines, but is represented through dance when Jefferson, saying “Sally be a lamb,” asks her to bring him a letter from George Washington; the choreography, Mr. Kail said, is now “quite different,” with “a different tone — one that is more respectful to Sally’s point of view.”In “Hamilton,” the second act opening number has been restaged so ensemble members representing enslaved people can express more distance from slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, currently played by James Monroe Iglehart.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the prepandemic staging, Hemings would dance around Jefferson flirtatiously, performing a battement; in the new version, she still kicks her leg, but she faces away from him, arms forming a cradle as if to remind viewers of the children she bore him. “Rather than the playful, romantic energy that the previous version had, I’m now playing a person that had no claim over her own life and her own body,” said Justice Moore, who dances the Hemings role.There are changes for the ensemble, too. Gone are the white gloves and the pantomimed motions of slaves at work as Jefferson arrives at Monticello; now some members of the ensemble stand at a distance, and don’t even join in the singing. “The gloves automatically put you in a servant place, in a minstrel show sort of place, and the more we dug deeper, the more we asked why we need that weight on the story,” said Shonica Gooden, a member of the show’s ensemble.“To Kill a Mockingbird” has restaged its ending to ensure that audiences stay focused on the plight of Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of rape and then killed by prison guards. When the show opened in 2018, Robinson was played by Gbenga Akinnagbe, right, who is no longer in the cast; the role of Atticus Finch was played by Jeff Daniels, who has returned to play the role again this fall.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a stage adaptation of the classic novel about a white lawyer’s unsuccessful effort to defend a Black man falsely accused of rape and then killed by law enforcement officers, the final scene was restaged before this month’s resumption of performances. A specter of the accused man, Tom Robinson, now returns at the end. “My goal is to not lose track of Tom’s story,” said Bartlett Sher, the director, “and to keep the impact of what happens to Tom more present.”“The Lehman Trilogy,” about the rise and fall of a financial family, added new references to the businessmen’s relationship to slavery after earlier versions of the play were criticized for playing down that connection. “Everything that was built here was built on a crime,” a character now warns.Broadway is addressing concerns about race in a variety of ways as it reopens — the current season features a record number of plays by Black writers; many shows are creating new diversity-related staff positions; and industry leaders have pledged to create more opportunities for artists of color. But race, although the primary focus of the protests last year, is not the only subject being reconsidered.“Jagged Little Pill,” a musical adapted from the blockbuster Alanis Morissette album, has simultaneously tried to deepen its discussion of race (the show centers on a white family with an adopted Black daughter) and gender identity. The show had been criticized when a character who appeared to some to be nonbinary before “Jagged” reached Broadway was more clearly portrayed as female once it arrived. In response, the producers said last month that they had hired a new dramaturgical team, including nonbinary and transgender members, “to revisit and deepen the script.”The writer of the musical’s book, Diablo Cody, said that she welcomed the opportunity to take another look at the material: She works primarily as a screenwriter, and of course once a movie is done, it’s done. But during the shutdown, she was able to update the musical’s family argument about transracial adoption. “When I wrote this, it was 2017 to 2018,” Ms. Cody said, “and it just feels like there has been such a cultural sea change since then.”Are the changes enough? Maybe not — although “Lehman” opened this month to raves, some critics once again faulted the play’s treatment of slavery.And are the alterations finished? Again, maybe not, at least for long-running shows.“We used to say a show was frozen, but the show is never frozen now,” said Mr. Iglehart, the “Hamilton” actor. “The shows are evolving, and they will evolve as the world evolves.” More

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      Review: In ‘The Lehman Trilogy,’ a Vivid Tale of Profit and Pain

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      The play, tracing the rise and fall of the fabled financiers, finally opens on Broadway after successful runs in London and at the Park Avenue Armory.Much of what happens in “The Lehman Trilogy” is invisible to the eye, which is not the way prestige drama usually works onstage.Directed by Sam Mendes, this British import, which reaches across 164 years of American history to trace the family saga behind the fallen financial powerhouse Lehman Brothers, was a scalding-hot ticket during a brief prepandemic run at the Park Avenue Armory. Yet it offers almost nothing in the way of spectacle, and only the slightest of costume changes: a top hat here, a pair of glasses there.In the captivating production that opened on Thursday night at the Nederlander Theater, it relies largely on an unspoken agreement between actors and audience — to imagine together, and let fancy crowd out fact.Sort of the way that heedless investors looked right past all warning signs in the faith-based run-up to the stock market crash of 2008. Illusion is illusion, after all, and financial markets, like the theater, require a certain suspension of disbelief — though when the fantasy bursts in theater, the fallout is less ruinous. When investors halted their collective game of make-believe 13 years ago, mammoth financial firms like Lehman Brothers met their swift demise, and the world’s markets suffered the aftershocks.“The Lehman Trilogy,” though, is not actually a number-crunching play; reports that Jeff Bezos took in a recent performance should not cause you to infer otherwise.Written by Stefano Massini and adapted by Ben Power, it is a vividly human tale, nimbly performed by three of the finest actors around: Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester, who, in making his Broadway debut, has replaced the original cast’s Ben Miles. (I did not catch Beale, Godley and Miles at the Armory; it was too scarce a ticket, and too pricey.)Slipping in and out of myriad roles, the actors spend the bulk of their time narrating, standing outside their characters. We, in turn, spend most of our time envisioning the fleet-footed story they conjure with words over three-plus hours (including two intermissions) that feel nowhere near that long.Our eyes track these witchy actors as they move through Es Devlin’s revolving glass-and-metal office set, while our minds persuade us that the story is unfolding in a succession of disparate spaces that resemble it not at all.A peculiarly gentle interrogation of the American dream’s descent into many-tentacled nightmare, “The Lehman Trilogy” begins as so many stories of this nation do: with an intrepid immigrant’s arrival. A young man from Bavaria stands before us, suitcase in hand, freshly landed in New York Harbor and certain he is worldly after 45 days at sea.From left, Godley, Beale and Lester in the play. Their feats of storytelling are the primary reason to see “The Lehman Trilogy,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe year is 1844, he is Heyum Lehmann, and in a moment we will see him reborn as Henry Lehman — his Ellis Island moniker bestowed by a port official too obtuse to comprehend the newcomer’s real name.On first impression, Henry (Beale) is darling, funny and utterly sympathetic. When his younger brothers, Emanuel (Lester) and Mayer (Godley), follow him across the ocean, we feel a similar warmth toward them.This is where the mechanics of the play, with these deft and lovely actors breathing such life into the brothers, coax us into an ease at odds with moral logic as we watch their genteelly brutal acquisition and stockpiling of wealth.The brothers settle in antebellum Alabama, where even the earliest iteration of the family firm, a shop selling fabrics and clothing, relies on a local economy built on slavery. As the Lehmans grow more ambitious, they start buying and selling cotton from the plantations, making their first fortune on it.Seldom do we hear a voice of conscience — like the local physician who tells a dispirited Mayer, in the aftermath of the Civil War, that the collapse of the South’s economy should not have come as a surprise.“Everything that was built here was built on a crime,” the doctor says. “The roots run so deep you cannot see them, but the ground beneath our feet is poisoned. It had to end this way.”That is, of course, a warning that the pattern of reckless profit and resulting pain will repeat: in the 1929 crash, which Lehman Brothers managed to survive by morphing yet again, and in the 2008 crash, which it didn’t. It is also a signal that the founders of the firm — whose deaths, when they come, are meant to move us, and do — were not the ethical betters of their more vulgar descendants.With a subdued, filmic score by Nick Powell, played live by Candida Caldicot on an upright piano, “The Lehman Trilogy” is structured in three parts. It follows Emanuel and Mayer to New York, and their family through successive generations, whose principals we first meet in childhood.So here is Emanuel’s son Philip (Beale), a future shark, as a gape-mouthed tot prodded to parade his smarts for guests. Here is Philip’s son Bobby (Godley) as a buoyant 10-year-old, whose father mercilessly dismantles the boy’s love for horses as creatures rather than commodities.And most enchantingly, here is Mayer’s son Herbert (Lester), a future governor and senator, as a thumb-sucking 3-year-old playing with his father’s beard, and later as a fair-minded 9-year-old at Hebrew school, objecting to the divine massacre of the innocent children of Egypt.No matter how horrid some of the Lehmans become (not Herbert, though; never Herbert), knowing them young cushions our feelings toward them later. That’s human nature. What’s unsettling is which people in this saga of capitalism we see portrayed, which people the play helps us to imagine clearly and which people we are asked to imagine vaguely or not at all. Proximity shapes our sympathies.“The Lehman Trilogy” exists because of the cascading financial disaster that extinguished Lehman Brothers in 2008, yet its perspective is very much from the top of that deluge. Any harm bucketing down below is at best an abstraction, just as it is in 1929, when the play shows us suicides of despairing stockbrokers but none of the pain radiating through lower social strata. And slavery, the founder of the family’s feast, is kept in soft focus, off to the side.The primary reason to see “The Lehman Trilogy,” then, is to witness the superb Beale, Godley and Lester in their feats of storytelling — and to conspire with them in imagining the play’s tarnished, if not truly vanished, world.When intermission comes and the auditorium lights turn on, gaze up at that glass set. You’ll see an awfully comfortable-looking audience reflected there.The Lehman TrilogyThrough Jan. 2 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; thelehmantrilogy.com. Running time: 3 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Adrian Lester Finally Arrives on Broadway, via Wall Street

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      A few years ago, Adrian Lester saw “The Lehman Trilogy” in London. Not only did he love it, but he was also impressed on a purely technical level. He knew how demanding it was for just three actors to portray several different characters and to carry the intricately devised epic, which follows the rise of the Lehman brothers in the 19th century, then the fall of their company in the 2008 financial crisis.“I was happy to watch it, be amazed, and walk away and go ‘phew,’” the British actor said in a recent conversation. “I thought to myself, ‘How are you doing that?’”Now he really knows, because he’s currently testing his endurance on Broadway as one of those three actors.The National Theater’s production of Stefano Massini’s play, adapted by Ben Power and directed by Sam Mendes, premiered in 2018, and had a short run at New York’s Park Avenue Armory the next year. The cast — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles — reunited once again for a Broadway transfer in March 2020, but the pandemic put an end to it after a handful of previews.Undeterred, “The Lehman Trilogy” is back at the Nederlander Theater, with Lester stepping in for Miles (who left to play Thomas Cromwell in a stage version of Hilary Mantel’s “The Mirror and the Light”). Opening night is scheduled for Oct. 14.Small adjustments have been made to the script, Mendes said, to address the criticism that it had glossed over the Lehmans profiting from slave labor. “We wanted to acknowledge the family’s history in dealing with the slave owners of Alabama, when the three founding brothers first arrived from Germany,” Mendes said in an email.Lester with Adam Godley in “The Lehman Trilogy” at the Nederlander Theater, where it is scheduled to open Oct. 14.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere is no editorializing, however. “We don’t cross that line of going, ‘Hey audience, this is horrible,’” Lester, 53, said. “We simply present it and allow them to make their judgment. I suppose my casting makes that process easier.”He added, “We’ve been very aware of what’s being said in the text, what we may have missed, what things need to be pulled out or put in.”With all due respect to Miles, the casting switcheroo is a special treat for New Yorkers, who have not seen Lester nearly enough over the course of his three-decade career on the stage and screen. It feels incredible that he is just now making his Broadway debut, though he has popped up on smaller local stages: as Rosalind in Cheek by Jowl’s “As You Like It” back in 1991 and 1994, as that moody Scandi prince in a Peter Brook production of “Hamlet” that transferred from London in 2001, or as the real-life 19th-century actor Ira Aldridge in “Red Velvet” (written by Lolita Chakrabarti, Lester’s wife).No matter how good those productions were, they did not turn him into a New York marquee name. Lester good-naturedly pointed out that when he is recognized here, it’s usually because of a pair of screen performances that go back 20 or so years: as a movie star dating Tracee Ellis Ross’s character in the TV series “Girlfriends” and as a presidential-campaign operative in the Mike Nichols film “Primary Colors.”It’s another story back home, where the Birmingham-born commander of the Order of the British Empire has had lauded turns as Henry V and Othello, and received an Olivier Award in 1996 for his performance as Bobby in “Company,” also directed by Mendes — because, yes, Lester can sing and dance, too.He has also done the requisite television work, spending, for example, seven seasons on the comic caper “Hustle” as Mickey Rocks, the charming leader of a merry band of con artists.That show’s creator, Tony Jordan, was looking for someone along the lines of George Clooney in “Ocean’s Eleven” to play Mickey. Those are tough designer shoes to fill, but Lester’s ability to embody nonchalant, beguiling poise turned out to a perfect fit for a smooth criminal.“Before creating the show I’d read 20 books on confidence tricks,” Jordan wrote in an email. “I should be the hardest person to con, but I know that if Adrian’s Mickey had tried to sell me shares in a recently discovered gold mine in Arizona, I’d have invested heavily.”For Lester, the part was catnip because it actually was many parts. “The reason why I stayed with this character is that every episode, he pretends to be someone else,” he said. “You knew who he was inside, but you watched him become something else in front of you. And that,” he said, snapping his fingers for emphasis, “was just gold dust for me. I loved it.”But beyond Mickey’s parade of disguises and tricks, Lester also grounded him.“Adrian brought a truth to the role,” Jordan said. “You believed him totally, and more importantly, he made you feel that he wasn’t on the screen, that he was sitting beside you. That he was your best friend.”Sitting in an impersonal conference room in between “Lehman” rehearsals, Lester was thoughtful and soft-spoken — he was barely audible above the HVAC system’s white noise. The immediate result was I leaned forward and focused. This magnetic pull translates to the stage as a mysterious kind of spell: Nicholas Hytner, who directed Lester in “Othello” and “Henry V,” wrote in an email that the actor “always seems to be nursing a secret. It’s what draws you in.”“In this industry, you’re not going to get promoted by just waiting for someone to promote you,” Lester said, “you have to promote yourself.”Kendall Bessent for The New York TimesPartly, it’s that Lester, who trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, has impeccable chops. But he also knows not to overuse them, which would transfer the attention from the character to the actor. “When I was in rehearsal in drama school, I would speak things in meter and then never do it again,” he said. “If you’re in front of an audience and your voice, your mannerism, your pattern of speech, your intellectual approach to the performance tells the audience that you’re acting, they will switch off. And so I’ve never wanted to do that in anything.”​​For Hytner, this translates into a great classical actor. “He is in total command of the way Shakespeare’s people think and speak,” Hytner said, “in long, perfectly weighted paragraphs that emerge as if spontaneous.”Onstage, Lester has an uncanny way to establish a connection with both his scene partners and the audience by expressing a lot with seemingly little. His Othello, for example, exuded a sense of natural authority without resorting to the usual manly signifiers of military toughness. This made the times when he upped the ante all the more impactful — the scene in which he kills Desdemona was even harder to watch than usual. (The production can be streamed on the National Theater’s website.)Lester’s creative ambitions are naturally leading him to try to wrest more autonomy in his career. He has been dabbling with directing — an episode of “Hustle” here, a couple of episodes of “Riviera” there — and he’s now preparing to step behind the camera for his first feature, with possibly a second one in the works as well.“If you want to be a part of creating these stories onstage, on television, on the film screen, it’s always a struggle,” he said. “If you want to have more of a say on how the story goes, you have to step behind the camera. In this industry, you’re not going to get promoted by just waiting for someone to promote you,” he continued, “you have to promote yourself. And the only way you do that is by saying no to the things you would have said yes to beforehand, and wait for the next thing to come. The only power you have as an actor is to say no.”In his case, it has also been to say yes to roles where his mere casting defied antiquated expectations of who can play what.“Every time I’ve played a role — every time — I’ve been hit by the same response of ‘Oh goodness, that’s interesting,’” he said, pointedly making exceptions for “Six Degrees of Separation” and “Red Velvet,” in which he portrayed Black men. “Every time I’ve played a character, a classical one especially, it’s been somewhat a departure from how people perceive that role to have been.”He paused, smiled. “I have to politely leave those people to their own thoughts.” More

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      Theater’s New Glass Menageries

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      Some of the most innovative set designers and directors are placing actors within transparent boxes, posing novel aesthetic questions in the process.IN A WORLD filtered through screens, a condition made even more acute during pandemic lockdown, the theater’s most anachronistic thrill would seem to be watching lives unfold before us. The actors may not literally be within our grasp, but the lack of a barrier between them and us, the illusion that we are, for once, actually in the room — the sound of the human voice in anguish or joy, a carafe of water crashing to the floor — has never seemed more stirring and essential.Or perhaps not. Even before Covid-19, many ambitious productions had been taking place not in the three-sided black boxes that defined the experimental zest and emerging punk of the late 1970s, or the crowd-pleasing theater-in-the-round pioneered in ancient Greece and Rome and revitalized in the mid-20th century, but in elaborately engineered glass cubes that evoke the International Style’s high Modernism and the minimalist penthouses of the contemporary metropolis. There would not seem to be a more flagrant violation of dramatic immediacy.Photograph by Kyoko Hamada. Set design by Todd KnopkeAnd yet the design is, as of late, ubiquitous. After a long Broadway hiatus, “The Lehman Trilogy,” directed by Sam Mendes, opens next month at the Nederlander Theater; during its nearly three-and-a-half-hour duration, three actors play a cavalcade of characters from the more than 160-year history of Lehman Brothers, the infamous investment house, encased in a revolving transparent box conceived by the British designer Es Devlin. The 2016 Young Vic production of Federico García Lorca’s “Yerma” (1934), directed by the then-31-year-old Australian Simon Stone, was restaged in 2018 at New York’s cavernous Park Avenue Armory in what was essentially a giant terrarium. That same year, the German designer Miriam Buether built a glassed-in room with a huge tilting mirror as the back wall for a revival of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” (1991), directed by Joe Mantello on Broadway. And for his 2017 National Theater adaptation of the film “Network” (1976), which came to Broadway the following year, the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove put his stage manager in a large glass box, casting him as a character who ran both the actual play and the mythical television broadcast at the center of the plot.Photograph by Kyoko Hamada. Set design by Todd KnopkeA thoroughly contemporary material, glass creates what Buether calls “an ultimate filmic quality, like looking through a lens.” Even before fear of infection drove us behind protective plexiglass shields and reduced most human interaction to Zoom, theater audiences had come to appreciate the trippy perceptual effects of multimedia innovations — video projections have become commonplace onstage, particularly as pioneered by van Hove and others. Such effects are now part of the theatrical experience, a way to warp audience expectations. Once, updating a classic with, say, modern dress or gender-blind casting was provocative and transformational, allowing us to see the text anew; now, the stage itself has become the terra nova that jolts us, a glass cage making literal these works’ themes of isolation and vulnerability.FOR THE VIEWER looking at something through it, glass offers both a subtle shift and a seismic one; it alters everything while visually changing very little. “You know that what you’re watching is different, but you can’t quite tell why,” says Buether, 52, who, for the second act of “Three Tall Women,” created two rooms — mirror images of each other — separated by a wall of plexiglass, and then placed a mirrored wall behind them, creating multiple images of the characters and echoing the play’s notions of identity and time. “It’s like making the fourth wall tangible, as though peering into a display case. You adjust to it quickly — I mean, it’s transparent — but it never really disappears.”For Stone, who has set shows behind glass a half dozen times, beginning with his 2011 production of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” (1885) at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theater, the conceit works best with a particular part of the canon: intimate plays “that plumb the dark night of the soul,” he says. A specialist in reviving the works of domestic naturalism that distinguished European theater in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he believes that using glass, often in near-bare environments, has enabled him to reinvent these plays for a new generation. Back when Ibsen was writing, Stone notes, it was radical to set works in bourgeois living rooms instead of castles and fields, but such environments now seem banal. “I thought to myself: ‘What would happen if you actually put the glass between the action and audience?’” he says. “‘What if you make it an obstacle that has to be overcome, that the audience has to lean into?’” A production of “The Wild Duck” from Sydney’s Belvoir St Theater, at the Barbican Theater’s International Ibsen Festival, 2014.Theatrepix/Alamy For “Yerma,” he wanted the title character’s descent into madness after she’s unable to bear a child to seem inescapable; for “The Wild Duck,” he was seeking to add a clinical aspect to a plot that culminates in a young girl unexpectedly shooting herself in the chest: “I was very conscious of not turning it into suicide porn,” he says. He used a series of revolving stacked glass boxes — roughly evocative of a Modernist chalet — for his 2017 Theater Basel production of Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” published in 1901, “because it made the realities of their lives even more brutal and confined.” Paradoxically, actors thrive in the glass box, he adds: “Sometimes being fully exposed can inhibit them. You have too close a connection to the audience; you are too aware. The illusion that they are in a private room makes them feel safe.”The Young Vic’s production of “Yerma” at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, 2018.Stephanie BergerStill, working behind glass is not without its unique technical challenges. If you put your cast in a box, especially one with a lid, you cut off all possibility of acoustical naturalism. Many plays these days are miked, but the amplification is designed to be undetectable, creating the illusion of proximity; once there is a closed cube, verisimilitude becomes more complex. “Yes, you lose the sound of the natural voice,” says Stone, “but you gain extreme aural intimacy.”Devlin, 50, who has designed tour sets for Billie Eilish and Beyoncé, as well as for operas, is also accustomed to the trade-offs of a glass box. For her and Mendes, who began as a theater director before moving to film, this kind of spare set provides a juxtaposition to an epic historical work like “Lehman.” The boardroom, as well as the other office spaces in which the play unspools, “conveys both claustrophobia and expanse, intruding on the audience’s domain,” she says, and winks at the glassed-in conference spaces that have become corporate America’s heavy-handed attempt at conveying “transparency.” Inside, the box is divided into three chambers with internal glass partitions on which the actors scrawl the names of the Civil War dead and the price of commodities. The rectangle’s perimeter is formed by glass panels between which are open gaps, which improve the acoustics and act like apertures, allowing the action to move from wide screen to close up. That the box also revolves creates the equivalent of a Hollywood tracking shot: “Sam loves that, of course,” Devlin says.A revolving glass box returns to Broadway in “The Lehman Trilogy.”By Nicholas CalcottBut cramming the action into a single room also has a deeper significance. When Devlin worked with the director Trevor Nunn on the 1998 London revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” (1978), which took place in a deconstructed facsimile of a domicile in which the windows were mere outlines on the walls, she referenced the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 “House,” a ghostly, solid cast-concrete replica of a rowhouse, which stood on an East London street for three months. Together, the sculpture and the production reminded viewers how the confines of home can be both solid and ephemeral. For “Lehman,” Devlin was also inspired by “Tango,” a semi-animated eight-minute 1981 short by the Polish director Zbigniew Rybczynski, in which dozens of people seem to simultaneously inhabit a small front parlor, their elaborate dance compacting time and space. “There’s a message embedded in a single room,” says Devlin, “that architecture itself is the vessel through which history — whether intimate or monumental — is enacted. Glass helps you make that message explicit: A room is more than just a passive container. It remembers life.”Set design: Todd Knopke More