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      Review: For Jews, an Unanswered ‘Prayer for the French Republic’

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      In Joshua Harmon’s play about the legacies of antisemitism, a Parisian family must decide when it’s time to get out.Such is the sadness of our world that plays about antisemitism, however historical, cannot help but be prescient. Take “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s sprawling family drama about the Salomons, Jews who have “been in France more than a thousand years,” as one of them puts it, still sounding provisional. With violent incidents on the rise, and a fascistic, Nazi-adjacent party gaining in the polls, should they finally seek safety elsewhere?When it ran Off Broadway in 2022, “Prayer for the French Republic” already seemed painfully timely, with the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, the murder of a Holocaust survivor in Paris and other antisemitic atrocities barely in the rearview mirror. Two years later, with so much more awfulness to choose from, Harmon, revising his script for Broadway, has cut references to those events. What is too much for the world is way too much for the play.And the play, for all its urgency, is already way too much. Running just over three hours, “Prayer for the French Republic,” which opened on Tuesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is still not long enough to do justice to the multiple histories it wants to tell. In the manner of prestige television series, but compressed for the stage to the point of confusion, it tries to dramatize the largest and most intractable world issues within the microcosm of a single family, creating an impossible burden on both.The play also revisits an earlier time, alternating scenes set in the mid-1940s with, from left, Daniel Oreskes, Nancy Robinette, Ethan Haberfield and Ari Brand.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat this Manhattan Theater Club production, directed by David Cromer, remains mostly riveting is the result of the richness of Harmon’s novelistic detail — and the exceptional skill of the principal actors in realizing it. Chief among them is Betsy Aidem, as Marcelle Salomon Benhamou, a psychiatrist living in Paris in 2016 who seems to need a psychiatrist herself. Overprotective and yet hypercritical of her two children, she loses control when one of them, Daniel (Aria Shahghasemi), is beaten up by antisemitic thugs near the school where he teaches.Marcelle’s frenzied response creates a fissure in the family that the play then proceeds to pry wide open. Her husband, Charles Benhamou (Nael Nacer), a physician who emigrated to France from Algeria when conditions became impossible for Jews in the early 1960s, eventually concludes that, like his native country then, his adopted one now is profoundly unsafe. Familiar with sudden uprootings, he wants to move as soon as possible — to Israel.Pointing out that Israel is no one’s idea of a safe haven, Marcelle is at first inalterably opposed to the idea. But it is less her fear of the Middle East than her connection to France that compels her to stay. Her elderly father, Pierre (Richard Masur), runs the last of the piano stores that the Salomons built into a national brand, with 22 stores, over five generations starting in 1855. A gorgeous, amber-colored grand, with “Salomon” spelled in gold on the fallboard, is the first and last thing we see in the show.There are few pieces of furniture harder to pack than a grand piano, which here becomes symbolic of the gift Jews have made to French culture and the expectation of permanent welcome the gift would seem to have earned them. That it hasn’t is the story’s heartbreak.But France is hardly the whole story, as Harmon shows us in alternating scenes set in the mid-1940s. Somehow left untouched by the German occupation of Paris, Marcelle’s great-grandparents Irma and Adolphe Salomon (Nancy Robinette and Daniel Oreskes) await word of the fate of their family at the end of the war. Soon, their son Lucien (Ari Brand) returns with his son, Pierre (Ethan Haberfield) — the old man of the later scenes but then just 15. Both father and son are obviously traumatized by their time in Auschwitz. And where is everyone else?You can probably guess. But if the scenes from the earlier period lend pathos to the later one, with which they frequently interpenetrate, little flows back from the later to the earlier. The 1940s material is sad but dutiful. Similarly, three characters who take up a lot of the play’s energy in the 2010s do not actually contribute much to its central conflict. One is Marcelle’s brother, Patrick (Anthony Edwards): aggressively atheistic, disdainful of Sabbaths and seders, nasty without apparent cause except to provide cover for his otherwise contextless presence as the narrator.Ranson, left, and Benhamou clash over their opposing views about Israel.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSlightly more integrated, and much more entertaining, is Marcelle and Charles’s daughter, Elodie (Frances Benhamou), a frequently pajamafied, hilariously logorrheic, self-involved know-it-all riding out the tail end of a two-year manic-depressive episode. (If you saw Harmon’s 2012 play, “Bad Jews,” she’ll remind you of Daphna Feygenbaum, an early version of the type.) Her punching bag is Molly (Molly Ranson), a distant cousin who visits Paris during her college year abroad. Both Marcelle and Elodie lay into Molly constantly, as if her naïveté, which they attribute to her being a pampered American, were a crime against Judaism.Though Ranson makes as good a case on Molly’s behalf as the script will allow — she played the object of Daphna’s fury in “Bad Jews,” so she knows the territory — her conflict with the Benhamou women, like her budding romance with dreamy Daniel, is a loose end and a diversion: a season-two development in a one-season story. She is, at least, more likable than the Parisians. Marcelle’s frenzies and Elodie’s diatribes (one lasts a withering 17 minutes) tip the tone into psychiatric cabaret, leaving the antisemitic trauma to jostle for dramatic space with the garden-variety antisocial kind, eventually to be overwhelmed by it.Is it Harmon’s point that “bad” Jews like the Salomons in the 2010s, perhaps made neurotic in the first place by antisemitism, have as much right to the protection of their homeland as unimpeachably “good” ones, like their forebears in the 1940s? In any case, a right to our attention is a different matter, especially as the characters’ fiercely defended opinions grow repetitive and perseverative — and then flip radically, without apparent motivation. By the third act, the arguments have stripped their gears completely, and the play ends in sentimental exhaustion.That exhaustion is one of the few elements of naturalism (to be a Jew is to be morally exhausted) in a mostly expressionistic production. Like many Cromer stagings, “Prayer for the French Republic” is richly and darkly lit (in this case by Amith Chandrashaker) and moves among periods and locations with exquisite smoothness on tracks and turntables (sets by Takeshi Kata). The original music, by Daniel Kluger, sounds like Jewish memory, led by the cheerful-baleful tang of a clarinet.But like Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” “Prayer for the French Republic” (its title the name of a blessing recited in French synagogues for 200 years) gets lost in its central question: How can Jews know if it’s time to leave yet another home, in a history of hundreds, where they think they are safe but may soon find out otherwise? The prayer that they might not have to leave at all — the prayer for the end of antisemitism itself — has not been answered yet.Prayer for the French RepublicThrough Feb. 18 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes. More

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      Roundabout to Stage ‘Pirates of Penzance’ and ‘Yellow Face’ on Broadway

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      Roundabout Theater Company, the biggest nonprofit on Broadway, said it would produce the three shows next season.Roundabout Theater Company, the biggest nonprofit operating on Broadway, is planning to stage a jazz-inflected production of “The Pirates of Penzance,” Gilbert and Sullivan’s famed 19th-century comic operetta, in the spring of 2025, the organization said Tuesday.Next season it also plans to stage the first Broadway productions of two plays: “English,” Sanaz Toossi’s work about a group of Iranians trying to learn English, which won last year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama, and “Yellow Face,” David Henry Hwang’s semi-autobiographical play sparked by the controversy over the casting of a white performer as a Eurasian character in the original production of “Miss Saigon.”All three shows will be staged at the Todd Haimes Theater, which is currently called the American Airlines but is about to be renamed for the Roundabout chief executive and artistic director who died last year after four decades with the organization.The announcement, which also includes plans for two Off Broadway plays and the promise of an Off Off Broadway work, indicates that Roundabout is planning its most robust season since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, a financially devastating period that, for Roundabout, has been followed by fewer productions and smaller casts. Although revivals of classic musicals were once Roundabout’s bread and butter, “The Pirates of Penzance” will be the first musical production to begin at Roundabout in six years.“We’re here, and we’re producing, and we’re producing some exciting stuff,” said Scott Ellis, a longtime Haimes collaborator who is serving as Roundabout’s interim artistic director, and who is expected to stay in that role for at least two years. “It felt important to say that we’re committed to producing as many shows as we used to.”“The Pirates of Penzance,” a comedy about an indentured pirate apprentice who falls in love with a military officer’s daughter, was once a staple of American theater, and it has been staged a whopping 26 times on Broadway, starting in 1879. But the last Broadway revival was in 1981.This new production, directed by Ellis, features a reconceived book, score and setting — it is to be set in New Orleans, with a framing device imagining that Gilbert and Sullivan staged “The Pirates of Penzance” there. The script has been adapted and updated (the female characters are more capable than in historic productions, for example) by Rupert Holmes, who has also written some new lyrics; the score has been reorchestrated with jazz stylings by Joseph Joubert and Daryl Waters.The show is to star Ramin Karimloo, last seen on Broadway in a 2022 revival of “Funny Girl,” and David Hyde Pierce, best known for the television show “Frasier” and now featured Off Broadway, at the Shed, in Stephen Sondheim’s posthumous musical, “Here We Are.” Karimloo will play the Pirate King, while Pierce will play Major General Stanley as well as Gilbert, who is now a character explaining to the audience the adaptation’s conceit. The two test-drove the roles at a one-night Roundabout benefit concert in 2022.The production of “Yellow Face,” which is to start performances in September, will star Daniel Dae Kim, who in 2016 played the King of Siam in a Broadway revival of “The King and I” and is an alumnus of the television shows “Lost” and the “Hawaii Five-0” reboot. The play is to be directed by Leigh Silverman, who in 2007 directed productions of it in Los Angeles (at the Mark Taper Forum) and New York (at the Public Theater). Kim recently recorded an audio version of the play for Audible, also directed by Silverman.“It feels more relevant now than it did even when it was originally produced, so we made a big push to give the play its due,” Kim said in an interview. “Representation has been a big issue in my career and my life, and this play’s subject matter is really the issue of representation. In some sense it’s a time capsule, but it’s also a barometer for where we are today. And it’s also very funny and entertaining, because no one goes to theater to be taught a lesson — we go to theater to be entertained.”The production of “English,” which is to start performances in December, is to be directed by Knud Adams, who also directed the Off Broadway production in 2022 at Atlantic Theater Company.Roundabout is also planning to stage two new plays Off Broadway next season: “The Counter,” about a friendship between a waitress and a customer at a small-town diner, written by Meghan Kennedy and directed by David Cromer, and “Liberation,” about a friendship among six Ohio women, written by Bess Wohl and directed by Whitney White. And the company said it would stage an Off Off Broadway production in its underground space, but that it has not yet chosen that show. More

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      Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ Is Becoming a Musical

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      Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is lined up to write the book, and Lileana Blain-Cruz will direct.“Purple Rain,” Prince’s breakout rise-of-a-rock-star film, is being adapted into a stage musical featuring some of the pop musician’s best-loved songs.Orin Wolf, the producer who previously shepherded the Tony-winning adaptation of “The Band’s Visit” to the stage, and who is currently backing the theatrical adaptation of another music industry movie, “Buena Vista Social Club,” announced on Monday that he is developing the musical, based on the 1984 film.The stage adaptation will feature a book by the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner whose family drama, “Appropriate,” is now running on Broadway. The director is Lileana Blain-Cruz, whose revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” (with new material contributed by Jacobs-Jenkins) had a short run on Broadway in 2022.“Purple Rain” is about an ambitious musician, called the Kid, facing strife with his parents, his love interest, and his fellow musicians. The film won an Academy Award for best original song score.Wolf did not announce any other details, including when or where there might be an initial production (most musicals have runs either Off Broadway or outside New York before braving the high costs and intense glare of Broadway). Prince died in 2016; representatives of the rightsholders to his music were quoted in a news release describing themselves as supportive of the production. More

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      Ani DiFranco Learned (and Cried) a Lot During Her First Year in N.Y.C.

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      “The lessons that New York has for you around every corner — it was a big part of my young adulthood, this city,” said the singer-songwriter, who will make her Broadway debut in “Hadestown.”Ani DiFranco calls herself the fairy godmother of “Hadestown,” the 2019 Tony winner for best musical. Anaïs Mitchell, its composer and librettist, calls her this too, as DiFranco discovered during a recent publicity event.“I said, ‘OK, it’s settled,’” DiFranco recalled. “Certainly many more people have put in much more time and contributed hugely along the way, but I sort of helped get it from zero to one.”DiFranco had already released a couple of Mitchell’s records on her label, Righteous Babe, when, some 15 years ago, Mitchell revealed that she had a play based on Greek mythology that she wanted to turn into an album. And so they did, with DiFranco singing the part of Persephone. Now DiFranco, 53, will make her Broadway debut in that same role in February.“I couldn’t say no,” she said in a discussion that touched on the importance of the acoustic guitar, punk and “gifts of nature.” “It was too thrilling at this point in my life and career, and at my age, to try something new and be out of my comfort zone and be challenged and grow and learn. I just knew it was a deep, resounding yes.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Abstract ExpressionismIn my late teens I was exposed to the genre of the painting culture known as Abstract Expressionism. It was so inspiring and validating because it was this form of visual representation which was not about meticulously reproducing reality. It was about having a canvas be a window into a moment, and you can feel the sweep of the arm and the energy behind it and the torque and the velocity and the ferocity and the emotion.2Acoustic GuitarHaving an instrument that I — over 10,000 hours and then some — became one with has been like having another limb. Sometimes when there’s nowhere else to turn and nobody, it’s there for me. Sometimes when my own voice is failing me, my guitar can say it for me.3New York CityI moved here when I was 18 or 19 from Buffalo. I cried my way through the first year for every reason that you can imagine. I had experiences that were terrifying, that were life-threatening but also just life-changing and beautiful and culturally mind-blowing. The lessons that New York has for you around every corner — it was a big part of my young adulthood, this city.4PunkYou could be a performer without being a beauty queen. You didn’t have to be a buttoned-up, coordinated, put-together, choreographed, polished, perfected thing. There was something about the punk ethos that just really allowed that in me.5JazzMusic that has improvisation at its epicenter is so profound and essential because that’s what music-making is: watching somebody figure it out and solve the problems and face the adversities that exist on any given night, and inventing a new path to go with your fellow performers.6Feminist LiteratureIn the late ’80s and early ’90s, I started reading Audre Lorde and Alice Walker and Judy Grahn and bell hooks and Adrienne Rich and Lucille Clifton. These poets and philosophers and writers seismically unlocked me to myself. I grew up in a man’s world, and I was taught everything through a man’s eyes in a man’s words. It wasn’t until I read these women that I realized, “Oh, there’s more.”7World MusicWhen I started getting legit gigs at folk and roots music festivals, they would throw you onstage with other performers. There might be a singer from Guam, some Tuvan throat singers, some African dudes with guitars and an Eastern European choir. We didn’t share a verbal language, but we could talk to each other through music and become friends in this way.8New OrleansThe first time I played Jazz Fest, I thought, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” Every time I was not on tour, I would go to New Orleans, because I wanted to go where I felt inspired. Then I started renting an apartment, then I fell in love with a local, and he was my reason to stay and make a home. I’ve been there about 20 years, and the shine has not worn off one bit.9Marijuana and PsilocybinI’ve smoked a lot of pot in my day, and I know it to be a really instrumental element of my awakening. I haven’t engaged in mushrooms as much, but I feel like it is also fundamental to human evolution. Whole genres of music and artistic movements have evolved and moved forward hand in hand with these gifts of nature.10ReadingWhen I moved to New York, I was at the New School studying, and I found myself reading books and talking about them. It’s like, Oh my God, this is really important stuff. The format of a book, it’s a road deeply into another person’s mind and life, to a whole other way of being, to whole other worlds, that I don’t find paralleled in any other genre of art. More

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      ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Will End Its Broadway Run in April

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      The Tony winner for best musical, about a high school girl with a rare genetic disorder and a criminally dysfunctional family, will begin a national tour in September.“Kimberly Akimbo,” a quirky show that combined pathos and comedy to win last year’s Tony Award for best musical, will end its Broadway run in April, nearly 19 months after it began performances.The show’s final performance will be April 28, at which point it is expected to have played 32 previews and 612 regular performances on Broadway.Small and zany, “Kimberly Akimbo” was often overshadowed in a contemporary Broadway dominated by established titles, jukebox scores and celebrity performers. But it has outlasted most of the other productions from the 2022-23 season.Set in a New Jersey suburb in 1999, the musical is about a high school girl with a rare genetic disorder, a criminally dysfunctional family and an anagram-loving friend.Adapted from a play with the same title, “Kimberly Akimbo” opened in the fall of 2022 and is directed by Jessica Stone. It won five Tony Awards, including the prize for best book, by David Lindsay-Abaire (who also wrote the play); for best score, with music by Jeanine Tesori and lyrics by Lindsay-Abaire; for the leading performance by Victoria Clark, a 64-year-old actress who plays the adolescent protagonist; and for a featured performance by Bonnie Milligan, who plays an amoral aunt.The musical began its life in 2021 with an Off Broadway run at the Atlantic Theater Company. The show has just nine characters, and, unusually, they have been played by the same actors throughout its life; all the actors plan to stay until the closing.The show, with David Stone (“Wicked”) as its lead producer, was capitalized for $7 million, a modest budget for a Broadway musical today; it has not yet recouped those costs.The Broadway run is to be followed by a national tour that is scheduled to begin in September at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. More

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      Vinie Burrows, Acclaimed Actress Who Became an Activist, Dies at 99

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      She got her start on Broadway at 15. But after finding a dearth of roles for Black women, she ultimately turned to one-woman shows that addressed racism and sexism.Vinie Burrows, a Harlem-born stage actress who made her mark on Broadway in the 1950s, but who grew frustrated by how few choice roles were available for Black women and turned her focus to one-woman shows exploring the legacies of racism and sexism, died on Dec. 25 in Queens. She was 99.Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by her son, Gregory Harrison.Ms. Burrows made the first Broadway appearance of her seven-decade career in 1950 alongside Helen Hayes and Ossie Davis in “The Wisteria Trees,” a reimagining of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” by the writer and director Joshua Logan that shifted the drama from an aristocratic Russian estate to a 19th-century Louisiana plantation.Ms. Burrows in a scene from “The Wisteria Trees” (1950), in which she made her Broadway debut, with Ossie Davis, who is sitting beside her, and Maurice Edwards.Martin Beck Theater, via Performing Arts Legacy ProjectHer Broadway career continued to blossom into the mid-1950s. Among the high-profile productions in which she appeared was a 1951 revival of “The Green Pastures,” Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1930 retelling of Old Testament stories from an African American perspective. In the early 1960s, she appeared with Moses Gunn and Louis Gossett Jr. in a New York production of “The Blacks,” a searing and surrealistic examination of racial stereotypes and Black identity by the subversive white French author and playwright Jean Genet.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      New Year, New Show: An Original ‘& Juliet’ Star Heads Home

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      Melanie La Barrie thought she would make it through her last performance of “& Juliet” without succumbing to tears.She was mistaken — though contributing factors include that it was the end of a nine-show holiday week; that she originated the role of Angélique, Juliet’s nurse, in this British jukebox-musical riff on “Romeo and Juliet” in 2019; and that she made her Broadway debut in it, at 48, in October 2022.On Saturday night at the Stephen Sondheim Theater, where “& Juliet” is one of Broadway’s poppiest hits, La Barrie sailed through her comic Act I duet with Paulo Szot, who plays Angélique’s long-lost love. But her poignant Act II solo, sung to Juliet (Lorna Courtney), undid her. Embracing Courtney at the finish, La Barrie kept her eyes shut tight against the audience’s ovation, needing to stay rooted in the show.Paulo Szot, who plays Angélique’s long-lost love, gave La Barrie an eloquent onstage tribute.Emily Soto for The New York TimesA Trinidadian Londoner whose West End credits include Mrs. Phelps in the original production of “Matilda,” La Barrie is about to play Hermes in the West End premiere of “Hadestown,” whose first week of rehearsal, in December, she attended on a vacation from “& Juliet.” During her Broadway sojourn, her partner of 15 years, Martin Phillips, a translator, was more often the one traveling back and forth.After La Barrie’s final bow in “& Juliet,” which Szot marked with an eloquent onstage tribute, thanking her “for giving life to the adorable Angélique,” she changed out of her costume and put on a Hermes pendant: a gift from Jeannie Naughton, her “& Juliet” dresser.La Barrie sat for photos, communed with fans at the stage door, declined offers of Jell-O shots from her young colleagues. Then she returned to her dressing room to talk, packing a bit as she did, because she had a New Year’s Eve flight to London the next day. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.“The thing that was the most important to me was for people to know how much I loved Juliet,” La Barrie said.Emily Soto for The New York TimesHow are you doing?I feel so satisfied. I’ve been with this show for such a long time. I did the first workshop of it in December 2017, in London. It was right after Liverpool, where I had played the Nurse in “Romeo and Juliet.” [The director Luke Sheppard] said, “Will you come and read something for me? I can’t really explain what it is, but it’s kind of top secret.”Jeannie Naughton, La Barrie’s “& Juliet” dresser, gave her a Hermes pendant in a nod to the role she is about to play in “Hadestown.”Emily Soto for The New York TimesHow did having played the Nurse affect your approach to Angélique?The thing that was the most important to me was for people to know how much I loved Juliet. They had to know that my entire being was to be an adjunct to Juliet’s wishes. To facilitate them, even reluctantly. Which is Shakespeare’s intention, you know. Everything I do is for Juliet. But this one then veers off and gives me my own story. Which is quite something.It’s a fizzy, funny, midlife romance. Tell me how you made that work so beautifully.Grown-ups don’t get love stories. They say to me at the stage door all the time — it’s always the mamas — they go, “Can my kid have a picture, and then can I have one?” A new love, or a re-sparked love in older people, they eat it up because they say, “I don’t know this. I don’t know this in the context of a jukebox musical or in the context of any musical at all.” I think that is the first thing: the audience’s desire for that. You put me with somebody that I love as deeply as I love Paulo Szot ——“The way that I tell stories comes from a deeply cultural place,” said La Barrie, a Trinidadian Londoner.Emily Soto for The New York TimesWhom you had never met before this show.Never met before. And when I came, I was so clear that I didn’t want to bring any of my experience of the [dynamic from the] London production. It would be very unfair, I thought, to come here and try to make Tony Award-winning Paulo Szot do what Broadway debutante Melanie La Barrie wanted to do. So why don’t we make it anew? He’s an acclaimed opera singer. He runs in serious circles. But he lives in a spirit of collaboration.When I first moved here, Paulo took me out. He took me to see a Brazilian symphony at Carnegie Hall. Then we went to Birdland afterwards, to watch some jazz. It was the best date — [laughs] sorry, Martin — one of the best friend dates that I have ever been on. And he knew that I had never been here before.You had never been here before?I probably, maybe, had a layover once or spent one day.And then you just moved here for over a year.I know. Isn’t that fun?“Grown-ups don’t get love stories,” La Barrie said. “They say to me at the stage door all the time — it’s always the mamas — they go, ‘Can my kid have a picture, and then can I have one?’” Emily Soto for The New York TimesIn March, when “Hadestown” tweeted that it was going back to London, you tweeted, “I am available.”I’d never even seen the show.Had you heard it?No, not really. But I knew that it was amazing.How much freedom do you have to make Hermes your own?One, I’m using my own accent. That brings its own music and its own sensibilities. And the way that I tell stories comes from a deeply cultural place. There’s a [Trinidadian] music called rapso. It’s social commentary, all in rhyme, in time to music. That’s the thing that informed me when I did my audition.We have taken the gender out of Hermes. Hermes is now just Hermes. It was something that I felt very, very deeply about. When I went in to audition, I just dropped all the “Mister” and “Missus.” I didn’t say it. I put in other words. Because I was like, I don’t feel like a Missus Hermes. I just feel like Hermes. And they’re so game for this kind of genderless god from the Caribbean. [laughs]“I love Broadway, and I love New York,” La Barrie said. “That’s also now a part of me, that’s like another lobe of my heart.”Emily Soto for The New York TimesWhat of your “& Juliet” experience will you take with you?This show and this part has changed my life. I probably never would have gotten Hermes if I didn’t play Angélique. People regard me differently. I had to wait until I was nearly 50 years old for that to happen. I think people would have still just had me in those smaller supporting roles if I hadn’t done this, and if I hadn’t done this on Broadway. Which then jumped it up a few pegs in the hierarchy of things.Will Broadway see you again?I hope so. I love Broadway, and I love New York. That’s also now a part of me, that’s like another lobe of my heart. I didn’t expect when I was growing up in Trinidad to ever be given anything like this. It’s like, not miraculous, because I have done the work. But still it’s wondrous. That wonder has been given to me. And that is why I am satisfied. More

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      Mbongeni Ngema, Playwright Best Known for ‘Sarafina!,’ Dies at 68

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      Before the fall of apartheid, his plays, which also included “Woza Albert!” and “Asinamali,” challenged the South African government’s racial policies.Mbongeni Ngema, a South African playwright, lyricist and director whose stage works, including the Tony-nominated musical “Sarafina!,” challenged and mocked his homeland’s longtime policy of racial apartheid, died on Wednesday in a hospital in Mbizana, South Africa, after a car accident. He was 68.Mr. Ngema was a passenger in a car that was struck head on when he was returning from a funeral in Lusikisiki, in Eastern Cape Province, according to a family statement cited in the South African news media.“His masterfully creative narration of our liberation struggle honored the humanity of oppressed South Africans and exposed the inhumanity of an oppressive regime,” President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said in a post on X after Mr. Ngema’s death.In the decade before the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid in the early ’90s, the South African system of institutionalized racism was an overwhelming concern to Mr. Ngema. During that decade he cocreated the play “Woza Albert!,” wrote and directed the play “Asinamali!” and wrote the script and collaborated on the music for “Sarafina!”“Sarafina!” evolved out of a conversation he had in the 1980s with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a prominent anti-apartheid activist who was then married to Mandela.“I was sitting with Mama Winnie Mandela, and I started thinking, ‘This country is in flames,’” he told the South African television show “The Insider SA” in 2022. “So I asked a question. I said, ‘Mama, what do you think is finally going to happen to this country?’“Mama looked at me, and she said, ‘I wish I had a big blanket to cover the faces of the little ones so they do not see that bitter end.’”Mr. Ngema soon began to envision young people, running and singing “Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow,” a song that he would write for “Sarafina!,” a musical that follows Black high school students in the township of Soweto in 1976 during the uprising against the government’s imposition of Afrikaans, rather than Zulu, as the official language in schools.Mr. Ngema wrote the book and collaborated with the trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela on the score.Mr. Ngema, left, with former President Nelson Mandela in 2002.Lewis Moon/Agence France-Presse“Sarafina!” opened in Johannesburg in 1987. It moved that fall to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center and then, in early 1988, to Broadway, at the Cort Theater, where it played 597 performances.In his review of the production at the Newhouse, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Ngema had “brought forth a musical that transmutes the oppression of Black townships into liberating singing and dancing that nearly raises the theater’s roof.”The score, he added, “evokes the cacophony of life in a Black society both oppressed and defiant, at once sentenced to hard labor and ignited by dreams of social justice.”“Sarafina!” received five Tony nominations, including three for Mr. Ngema: for best direction of a musical (won by Harold Prince for “The Phantom of the Opera”), best original score (won by Stephen Sondheim for “Into the Woods”) and best choreography, which he shared with Ndaba Mhlongo (won by Michael Smuin for “Anything Goes”).“Sarafina!” was also nominated for best musical and best featured actress in a musical.It was adapted as a film in 1992, starring Leleti Khumalo, who had starred in the South African and Broadway productions, with Whoopi Goldberg as an inspirational teacher and the singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba as Sarafina’s mother.Mbongeni Ngema (pronounced mmm-bon-GEN-i nnn-GAY-ma) was born on June 1, 1955, in Verulam, a town north of Durban.According to his official biography for the film “Sarafina!,” he was separated from his parents at 11, then lived for a time with extended family in Zululand and later on his own in the poor neighborhoods around Durban. From age 12, he taught himself to play guitar.“When I grew up all I wanted to be was a musician, and I was influenced greatly by the Beatles,” he said on “The Insider SA.”Working in a fertilizer factory in the mid-1970s, a fellow worker asked him to play guitar to accompany a play he had written.“And then I fell in love with the part of the lead character in the play,” he told the magazine Africa Report in 1987. “When he was onstage, I would mimic him backstage — making the other musicians laugh.” One night, when the actor did not show up, he played the role.Mr. Ngema and the playwright began to collaborate, which led Mr. Ngema to start directing and writing his own small pieces. In 1979, he began working in Johannesburg with Gibson Kente, a playwright and composer, to understand the magic in his productions. After two years, he left and began working with the performer Percy Mtwa.He, Mr. Mtwa and Barney Simon created “Woza Albert!,” a satire that imagines the impact of the second coming of a Christ-like figure, Morena, who arrives in South Africa on a jumbo jet from Jerusalem, through the lives of ordinary people, vigorously played over the course of 80 minutes by Mr. Ngema and Mr. Mtwa.The white government tries to exploit Morena, then labels him a Communist and locks him up on Robben Island, where Mandela and other political prisoners were incarcerated.The play opened in South Africa in 1981 and was staged over the next three years in Europe, Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater and around the United States.In The Washington Post, the critic David Richards wrote in 1984 that “Woza Albert!” “tackles such harsh realities as injustice, poverty and apartheid in South Africa, but does so with far more spirit, humor and, yes, hope, than the subject generally inspires.” He added that “with only their wonderful, wide-eyed talent,” Mr. Mtwa and Mr. Ngema “can summon up a landscape, a society, a history.”The trumpeter Hugh Masekela, third from right, with members of the cast of “Sarafina!” during a rehearsal at Lincoln Center in 1987. Mr. Masekela and Mr. Ngema collaborated on the score for the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Ngema then wrote and directed “Asinamali!” (1983), in which five Black men in a single South African prison cell describe — through acting, dancing, singing and mime — why they were incarcerated and how they were victimized by racist laws, unemployment and police violence.The play’s name (which means “We have no money”) comes from the rallying cry of rent strikers in 1983 in the Lamontville township.Mr. Ngema said that “Asinamali!” was alarming enough to authorities in Duncan Village, in the Eastern Cape, that they arrested the audience for attending a performance.“They said it was an illegal political gathering,” Mr. Ngema said in an interview in 2017 on a South African podcast.He called “Asinamali!” a celebration of resistance.“It shows that no matter how bad things get, victory is inevitable,” he told The Times in 1986 during rehearsals before the play opened in Harlem at the New Heritage Repertory Theater. “The spirit of the people shall prevail.”Later that year, “Asinamali!” was part of a South African theater festival at Lincoln Center.Information on Mr. Ngema’s survivors was not immediately available. His marriage to Ms. Khumalo, the star of “Sarafina!,” ended in divorce. Mr. Ngema, who wrote several other plays, was involved in a controversy in 1996 when his sequel to “Sarafina!,” “Sarafina 2” — commissioned by the South African Health Department to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic — led to a government corruption investigation over accusations that its cost was an excessive “unauthorized expenditure” and that its message was inadequate.He defended the show’s price tag, saying it was necessary to bring Broadway-quality shows to Black townships.“People have said it’s a waste of government money,” Mr. Ngema told The Associated Press in 1996. “It think that’s a stupid criticism.” More