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      ‘New York, New York’ Will End Its Broadway Run

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      The big-budget musical that tried to position itself as a nostalgic love letter to the city will close after a summer of dropping sales.“New York, New York,” a big-budget musical that tried to position itself as a nostalgic love letter to the city, will close on July 30 after underwhelming critics and failing to find a sufficient audience to sustain a Broadway run.The musical was the costliest swing of the last theater season, with a $25 million capitalization, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped. The show’s budget was bigger than that of other musicals currently arriving Broadway, although costs have been rising, and the musicals with the largest companies and the most stage spectacle are increasingly costing more than $20 million.“New York, New York” started off respectably at the box office, with weekly grosses initially hovering around $1 million. But the musical has been expensive to run, with a large cast and a sizable orchestra, and its sales have been dropping problematically this summer. During the week that ended July 16, “New York, New York” grossed $692,051 and played to houses that were only 68 percent full, according to the most recent figures released by the Broadway League.At the time of its closing, “New York, New York” will have played 33 preview and 110 regular performances.Very loosely based on Martin Scorsese’s 1977 film of the same title, the musical tells the story of a young couple — he a musician, and she a singer — trying to find work and love in the city just after World War II. The book is by David Thompson and Sharon Washington.The show features songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb, some of which also appeared in the film. The title song, which is the musical’s closing number, has become a standard. Ebb died in 2004; for the stage musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda contributed lyrics, working with Kander, who is now 96 and who won this year’s Tony Award for lifetime achievement.The musical, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, opened on April 26 and faced mixed to negative reviews. In The New York Times, the critic Elisabeth Vincentelli called it “sprawling, unwieldy, surprisingly dull.”The show was nominated for nine Tony Awards, and it won one, for Beowulf Boritt’s scenic design.Sonia Friedman and Tom Kirdahy are the musical’s lead producers. In May they announced plans for a national tour of the musical starting in January 2025, but on Sunday evening, when they announced the closing date, they said only that “discussions are underway for a North American tour.”The closing announcement comes amid a tough stretch for Broadway shows, many of which have struggled as the industry rebuilds following the lengthy closing of theaters at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. On Sunday, three shows played their final performances: a musical revival of “Camelot,” a stage adaptation of “Life of Pi” and the comedy “Peter Pan Goes Wrong.” More

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      Review: Dancing With Dictators in David Byrne’s ‘Here Lies Love’

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      A new Broadway musical tells the disturbing story of Imelda Marcos by putting her, and the audience, in a disco.It’s the applause — including my own — I find troubling.Not that there isn’t plenty to praise in “Here Lies Love,” the immersive disco-bio-musical about Imelda Marcos that opened on Thursday at the Broadway Theater. The infernally catchy songs by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, performed by a tireless and inspired all-Filipino cast, will have you clapping whether you want to or not. Their chunky beats, abetted by insistent dance motivators, may even prompt you to bop at your seat — if you have one.Because the real star of this show is the astonishing architectural transformation of the theater itself, by the set designer David Korins. Opened in 1924 as a movie palace, more lately the home of “King Kong” and “West Side Story,” the Broadway has now been substantially gutted, its nearly 1,800 seats reduced to about 800, with standing room for another 300 in the former orchestra section and a 42-inch disco ball dead center.The folks upstairs, if not the mostly younger standees below, will surely recognize the visual reference to Studio 54, the celebrity nightclub where Marcos, the first lady of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, danced away the last decade of her reign while impoverishing her people. That she would probably adore the over-emphatic atmosphere of “Here Lies Love” — with its lurid lighting by Justin Townsend, skittering projections by Peter Nigrini and earsplitting sound by M.L. Dogg and Cody Spencer — is, however, equivocal praise.For here we are, at the place where irony and meta-messaging form a theatrical-historical knot that can’t be picked apart. Which is why, as you clap, you should probably wonder what for.Is it for Imelda (Arielle Jacobs), the beauty queen who rose from “hand-me-downs and scraps” to become the fashion-plate wife of the Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos? Is it for the ruthless Ferdinand himself (Jose Llana)? (His landslide election in 1965 elicited some Pavlovian cheers the night I saw the show.) Or is it for Ninoy Aquino (Conrad Ricamora), the opposition leader who was Imelda’s former beau? (Having spurned her in their youth, he was later assassinated by forces thought to be close to Ferdinand’s regime.) All get equivalent star treatment here.Seating at the Broadway Theater was reduced from 1,800 to about 800, with standing room for another 300, to create a Studio 54-like atmosphere, complete with a 42-inch disco ball in the center of the house.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe confusion of sympathies is just where Byrne and the director Alex Timbers want us. Avoiding the near-hagiography of “Evita” and yet unwilling to bank a commercial production on a totally hateful character, they aim for a middle ground that doesn’t exist, yet mostly hit it anyway. Their Imelda is a victim of poverty and mistreatment, dim despite her cunning and innocent by reason of inanity. When Filipinos fully turn against her during the People Power revolution of 1986, she is more mystified than crushed. “Why don’t you love me?” she sings.We know the answer: The string of her outrages, even apart from her husband’s, seems literally endless. She did not retire from public office until 2019, and her son, Bongbong, is now president.But “Here Lies Love” — the title taken from an epitaph she proposed for herself — tempers the atrocities with the pleasure of its songs. Jacobs, a Broadway Jasmine in “Aladdin,” gets the catchiest ones, and delivers them well, if without the emotional nuance Ruthie Ann Miles brought to the role a decade earlier when the show had a developmental run at the Public Theater.To be fair, the material steers as far from emotion as possible, no matter how many times the word “love” is used. Byrne’s characteristic idiom — which feeds disco, folk and pop through an art rock filter — is too cool for that, and his lyrics, perhaps because they are based on public utterances of the real-life figures, reject psychology almost entirely. They are often thus too banal to serve the usual purpose of songs in musicals; instead of developing character internally they suggest it externally with a torrent of catchphrases. “It takes a woman to do a man’s job,” Imelda sings blankly upon assuming power from the sickly Ferdinand.Without a vivid inner life to inflect such clichés, it’s hard to wring anything from them except a cringe. The beamish Ricamora and the scowling Llana, returning from the earlier production, get around the problem with their charisma, and Lea Salonga, in the cameo role of Aquino’s mother, turns “Just Ask the Flowers,” sung at Ninoy’s funeral, into a powerful if perplexing anthem through sheer vocal bravura.Conrad Ricamora, center, as Ninoy Aquino, performing on an array of moving platforms that transport the action to various parts of the theater while sweeping the audience into new configurations.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, a musical not centered on feelings is a strange thing. Where another show might attempt to squeeze the relationship between Imelda and Ninoy for drama, it is merely a lump of undigested fact here. And Imelda’s infamous collection of state-financed shoes goes unmentioned, which is like mounting “Evita” without the Dior dress.To compensate, or double down, Timbers emphasizes pure pageantry in his staging. The actors often perform on an array of moving platforms that transport the action to various parts of the theater while incidentally sweeping the standees into new configurations. (Guides in pink jumpsuits with airport-style light wands keep them from getting mowed down.) You are left to draw your own conclusions about how crowds, whether in Manila or Manhattan, respond to being pushed around for too long and for apparently arbitrary reasons. There’s a reason affiliations and uprisings are often called movements.No surprise then that the most expressive element in “Here Lies Love” (along with Clint Ramos’s costumes, which also move beautifully) is the choreography by Annie-B Parson. Based on small hand gestures and large traffic patterns, it suggests a fuller spectrum of human engagement than the otherwise narrowly focused and sometimes mechanical production achieves.Is it wrong to seek that engagement more fully? (Or as Imelda sings: “Is it a sin to love too much?”) For most of its 90 intermission-less minutes, “Here Lies Love” finesses the question, preferring to be treated as anything — an art object, a dance party — besides what it is. In that way, it recalls Byrne’s Broadway concert “American Utopia,” on which Timbers and Parson also collaborated. But that show, which had no story, needed only to be sleek and enjoyable to score its points.“Here Lies Love” bets that glamour can make up for narrative — or, rather, that in a show about the dangers of political demagogy, glamour itself is the narrative. It’s a case of form follows function into the fire. We are drawn to cultural and political excitement in much the same, often dangerous way.Perhaps the irony of making a musical about that is more viscerally appreciable down on the dance floor. It was for me at the Public, where almost everyone had to stand and be part of the story, not observers of it. (There were only 42 seats.) And perhaps, 10 years later, with our own politics looking a lot more like the Marcoses’, no one can afford to keep a distance.In any case, on Broadway, it’s not until the gorgeous last song, “God Draws Straight,” that the material matches the movement in a way that reaches the balcony. Led by Moses Villarama, and based on comments by eyewitnesses to the peaceful 1986 revolution, it acknowledges the moral superiority of its real heroes — the Philippine people — in the only way a musical can: by giving it beautiful voice. Finally, it’s OK to applaud.Here Lies LoveAt the Broadway Theater, Manhattan; herelieslovebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Carlin Glynn, Actress Whose Comeback Brought Her a Tony, Dies at 83

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      After putting her career on hold to raise children, she won the part of the madam in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” — and then a statuette hailing her performance.Carlin Glynn, a stage actress who, after a long hiatus spent raising a family, stepped back into the footlights, sang onstage for the first time and walked away with a Tony Award for her performance as the madam in the 1978 hit “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” died on July 13 at her home in upstate New York, in the Hudson Valley. She was 83.Her daughter Mary Stuart Masterson, the actress, said the cause was lung cancer.Ms. Glynn’s breakout performance, at 38, came about almost by accident. Her husband, the actor and director Peter Masterson, had read a 1974 article in Playboy by Larry L. King about the closing of a Texas bordello and saw the ingredients for a musical. He and Mr. King began working on a script and brought in Carol Hall to create the music.For the early readings, Ms. Glynn, though she had been largely out of the acting business for at least a dozen years, covered the role of Mona Stangley, the strong-minded but sensitive madam at the center of the story. She was still holding down the role in a workshop production mounted by Mr. Masterson and his collaborators at the Actors Studio in 1977. And when the musical opened Off Broadway in April 1978. And when it moved to Broadway that June.“I initially worked on the play only to help out,” Ms. Glynn told The New York Times in July 1978. “Peter was hesitant to force his wife on his collaborators. Finally, all four of the organizations who wanted to take the show to Broadway wanted me to stay in the part. So then I stopped worrying about nepotism.”It was her Broadway debut, and she won the Tony for best featured actress in a musical. She played the role for almost two years on Broadway and for another six months in a production in London. Michael Billington of The Guardian, reviewing her there, wrote, “Carlin Glynn endows the madam with the refined good breeding and slight romantic forlornness of the head of a very classy, fee-paying American girls’ school.”Although “Best Little Whorehouse” was Ms. Glynn’s only Broadway appearance, her acting career continued for decades. She appeared in productions by Second Stage and Signature Theater Company in Manhattan, Hartford Stage in Connecticut, the Alley Theater in Houston, the Goodman Theater in Chicago and more. She also landed roles in more than 20 television series and films, including “Continental Divide” (1981), “Sixteen Candles” (1984), “The Trip to Bountiful” (1985, directed by Mr. Masterson) and “Judy Berlin” (1999).The Tony Award, she told The Times in 1979, was a game changer for her.“It means I’ve been invited to hundreds of places by people who offer to send their cars to pick me up,” she said. “It also means I’m not just the girl who does the Texas madam in a musical; I’m someone who’s considered an actress.”Ms. Glynn with Henderson Forsythe holding their Tony Awards after she won as best featured actress in a musical and he as best featured actor in a musical, both for “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” Bettmann, via Getty ImagesCarlin Elizabeth Glynn was born on Feb. 19, 1940, in Cleveland to Guilford and Lois Wilkes Glynn. Her father worked at Union Carbide but, when Carlin was 9, moved the family to Texas, where he had bought a gas station in Centerville, north of Houston. Later the family moved to Houston, where, at Lamar High School, Ms. Glynn first met Tommy Tune, who years later would choreograph “Best Little Whorehouse” as well as direct it with Mr. Masterson.Ms. Glynn and Mr. Masterson met when both were apprenticing at the Alley Theater. They married in 1960 and settled in New York. Both became members of the Actors Studio, but Ms. Glynn spent much of her time taking care of their three children while Mr. Masterson built his career. She acted in the occasional television commercial, was co-host of a syndicated television program called “Today’s Health” in the mid-1970s and had a small role in the 1975 film “Three Days of the Condor.”A film version of “Best Little Whorehouse” was being planned when, in the 1978 Times interview, Ms. Glynn said she would love to play Mona onscreen, though she acknowledged, “I probably won’t be asked.” She was right; a bigger marquee name, Dolly Parton, got the part. The movie came out in 1982.Ms. Glynn, left, with Marsha Mason in 1998 in an Off Broadway production of “Amazing Grace,” a play by Michael Cristofer. Ms. Glynn continued to act for decades after her Broadway debut in “Best Little Whorehouse.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Masterson died in 2018. In addition to her daughter Mary Stuart, who starred in such films as “Some Kind of Wonderful” (1987) and “Fried Green Tomatoes” (1991), Ms. Glynn is survived by another daughter, Carlin Alexandra Masterson; a son, Peter Masterson; a brother, Philip Glynn; and six grandchildren.Mary Stuart Masterson recalled spending weekends backstage at “Best Little Whorehouse” watching her mother from the wings. One night Ms. Glynn started a song an octave too high but smoothly acknowledged the mistake mid-song, not only slipping in the impromptu lyric “I think I’m off key,” but also doing so in a spot where it rhymed.“The audience was in the palm of her hand after that,” Ms. Masterson said by email. “Well, they already were. She had a kind of authority onstage that you can’t learn. She always made everyone feel they were in good hands.” More

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      Union for Broadway Crew Members Reaches Tentative Deal, Averting Strike

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      The agreement would cover a subset of workers, including about 1,500 stagehands, hairdressers and other crew members on Broadway and in touring productions.The union representing a segment of Broadway crew members reached a tentative agreement for a new contract with theater owners just as its members were voting on whether to authorize a potential strike, the organizations announced Thursday.The deal involved a subset of Broadway workers who are covered by what is known as the “pink contract,” including roughly 1,500 stagehands, wardrobe personnel, makeup artists and hairdressers. A strike of those workers — who are involved in 45 theatrical shows, including touring productions, and 28 shows on Broadway — would have had the potential to shut down much of the industry, especially if other unionized theater workers joined in solidarity.The tentative agreement was announced in a joint statement between the union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and the Broadway League, a trade association representing theater owners and producers. Disney Theatrical, which is behind shows such as “Aladdin” and “The Lion King,” is also part of the deal. It covers crew members who carry a pink traveling card that shows that they’re able to do union work in different jurisdictions.“The strike has been averted,” Jonas Loeb, a union spokesman, said in a statement, “though the contract must be approved by the membership.”Loeb said that the union has been negotiating about two months, including a marathon 19-hour session this week, and that one of the major sticking points was minimum payment rates for Broadway crew members.A walkout by theater workers would have added to the labor unrest roiling the American entertainment industry, as Hollywood writers and actors continue their strikes. More

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      ‘How to Dance in Ohio,’ a Musical, Plans a Fall Broadway Opening

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      A teenage ritual takes on deeper significance as a setting where autistic young people can blossom — and exercise their social skills along the way.“How to Dance in Ohio,” a poignant new musical about a group of young autistic adults gearing up for a spring dance, will open on Broadway late this year, with a cast of seven autistic performers playing the central roles.The musical is based on a 2015 documentary from the filmmaker Alexandra Shiva that followed participants in a social skills therapy program for people on the autism spectrum; the musical is also set at a therapy program, and it tells the story of young adults preparing for a dance that they hope could help them confront some of the challenges they face in navigating social interactions.The musical had a previous run last year at Syracuse Stage in central New York; the production schedule was cut short when Covid cases arose among the cast and crew. The review of the show in The Post-Standard, a Syracuse newspaper, was headlined “The musical you’ll talk about for the rest of your life” and called it “exhilarating, groundbreaking, celebratory.”Casting is not yet complete, but will include several actors making their Broadway debuts: Desmond Edwards, Amelia Fei, Madison Kopec, Liam Pearce, Imani Russell, Conor Tague and Ashley Wool. Among the others on the bill so far are Haven Burton and Darlesia Cearcy.“How to Dance in Ohio” features a book and lyrics by Rebekah Greer Melocik and music by Jacob Yandura; it is directed by Sammi Cannold and choreographed by Mayte Natalio. The famed director and producer Hal Prince was initially attached to the project; he died in 2019.The musical is being produced by a company called P3 Productions, which is led by Ben Holtzman, Sammy Lopez and Fiona Howe Rudin, along with Level Forward, the production company co-founded by Abigail Disney. It is being capitalized for up to $15.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The show is to begin previews Nov. 15 and to open Dec. 10 at the Belasco Theater. More

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      Award-Winning ‘Cabaret’ Revival Plans Spring Broadway Bow

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      The production opened in London with Eddie Redmayne in a starring role; the New York cast has not yet been announced but he is expected to join it.Willkommen, bienvenue, Broadway!“Cabaret,” the ever-popular (and portentous) musical set in a Berlin nightclub on the eve of the Nazis’ rise to power, will return to Broadway in the spring in a new production that has already won raves in London.The producing team on Tuesday morning announced a plan to transfer the show to Broadway, and said it would open at the August Wilson Theater, where a revival of “Funny Girl” is scheduled to close Sept. 3.The “Cabaret” producers did not announce any other details, but it is widely expected that Eddie Redmayne, the film star who played the nightclub’s Master of Ceremonies when this revival opened in London, will reprise the role on Broadway. The show’s other big role, Sally Bowles, the nightclub’s star singer, was initially played in London by Jessie Buckley; that role has not yet been cast in New York.“Cabaret,” with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and a book by Joe Masteroff, originally opened on Broadway in 1966, and that production, directed by Hal Prince and starring Joel Grey, won eight Tony Awards, including for best musical, and ran for three years. Grey went on to star in a 1972 film adaptation that won eight Academy Awards, including one for Grey and one for his co-star, Liza Minnelli.The musical was revived on Broadway in 1987, again with Prince directing and Grey as the Emcee. Then in 1998, a new production directed by Sam Mendes and starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson, came to Broadway via the Roundabout Theater Company; that production closed in 2004 and then returned in 2014 for another year, opening with Michelle Williams opposite Cumming.This latest revival, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, opened in London in 2021, and won seven Olivier Awards, including one for best musical revival. Its run is continuing. The critic Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, called the production “nerve-shredding,” and said, “Frecknall pulls us into a hedonistic milieu, only to send us out nearly three hours later reminded of life’s horrors.”The lead producers are Ambassador Theater Group, a British company that owns and operates theaters around Europe and the United States and has become increasingly active in producing on Broadway, and Underbelly, a British company closely associated with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.“Cabaret” will join multiple shows on Broadway this season that deal with antisemitism, among them “Just for Us,” a one-man show from the comedian Alex Edelman, which is now running, as well as “Harmony,” a musical by Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman that is opening in the fall and “Prayer for the French Republic,” a play by Joshua Harmon, which is to open in the winter. Last season’s Tony-winning best play, “Leopoldstadt,” which closed earlier this month, and the winner of the Tony for best musical revival, “Parade,” which runs until Aug. 6, are also about antisemitism. More

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      Jack Goldstein, a Savior of Broadway Theaters, Dies at 74

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      He helped secure landmark status for more than two dozen theaters in the 1980s, then initiated the design competition that led to a new TKTS booth.Jack Goldstein, a preservationist who in the 1980s reacted to the razing of several venerable Broadway theaters under a Times Square redevelopment plan by helping to organize a successful campaign to give landmark status to more than two dozen other theaters, died on June 16 in Cold Spring, N.Y., in Putnam County. He was 74.The cause was a heart attack, said Tom Miller, his executor.Over 30 years, Mr. Goldstein established himself as an effective behind-the-scenes player on Broadway.He was the executive director of the nonprofit Save the Theaters, which was formed to prevent the future destruction of playhouses. He was an executive at Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union, and with the Theater Development Fund, where he initiated the design competition that led to the creation of a new TKTS discount ticket booth in Duffy Square, topped with a dramatic cascade of 27 ruby-red structural glass steps that rises above West 47th Street.“Jack had a great artistic eye and a deep commitment to good government,” Gretchen Dykstra, the former president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, said in a phone interview.Mr. Goldstein arrived in Manhattan in the spring of 1982, during a difficult financial period for Broadway andaround the time of the wrenching demolition of the Helen Hayes and Morosco Theaters — the most distinctive of the five theaters between West 45th and 46th Streets on Broadway that were leveled to make way for the towering New York Marriott Marquis Hotel.The sites of the Hayes and Morosco Theaters had become the center of protests by actors, playwrights and others until the wrecking balls began swinging that March.The actor Jason Robards speaking at a rally in 1982 in an unsuccessful effort to preserve the Morosco Theater. Others on the platform included the actor Christopher Reeve, second from left. Mr. Goldstein joined the Broadway preservation effort that year. Marilyn K. Yee/The New York TimesMr. Goldstein told a conference at the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan in 2014, “The destruction in the center of Broadway of beloved, important and, from the actors’ point of view, irreplaceable instruments of their art form and communication, was an affront.”Mr. Goldstein, who had a background in historic preservation, was initially a volunteer with the Committee to Save the Theaters, which had been formed by Actors’ Equity. He soon shifted to join and then run its spinoff organization, Save the Theaters.“Since it was clear that the city no longer recognized the value of the Broadway theaters,” he told Metropolis, an architecture and design magazine, in 2004, “No. 1 on the agenda was to bring to bear whatever legal disincentives to demolition were available and apply them to the historic theaters.”For six years, Mr. Goldstein and other preservationists focused on getting protection for theaters from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.Part of the process was examining theaters’ interiors and exteriors to determine which might be designated landmarks. He brought actors to the commission’s hearings to impart their knowledge of the theaters. And he collaborated on a report with an architect, Hugh Hardy, that stressed the full geometry of the theaters — their shape, layout and acoustical properties — rather than just their decorative detail, as standards for landmark designation.Speaking to the Skyscraper conference, Mr. Goldstein cited, for example, the “spatial relationships and building techniques behind the walls” that allowed actors to speak without a microphone, or in a whisper, and be heard by 600 to 1,400 theatergoers.Workmen cutting away steel from the roof of the Helen Hayes Theater in 1982.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“He was well spoken and enormously energetic,” Kent Barwick, a former chairman of the landmarks commission, said in an interview. “He was doing what needed to be done at the time. Was he always right in his judgment? No. Was he always fair? No. Was he dramatic? Of course — he was coming out of Actors’ Equity.”In 1987, the commission designated 28 theaters as landmarks — some for their exteriors, some for their interiors, some for both. (The sale of the Mark Hellinger Theater to a church in 1991 brought the group to 27.) The city’s Board of Estimate, a powerful governing body at the time, approved the designations in March 1988.Theater owners objected to the landmarking “as a confiscation of the value of the building because it limited its use to live theater,” Rocco Landesman, a former president of Jujamcyn Theaters, said by phone. He said of the buildings: “You couldn’t tear them down, and it was difficult to build above them if you didn’t have the rights. Value was taken without compensation.”The owners sued to overturn the landmarking of 22 of the theaters, but in 1992 the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case after the State Supreme Court and the Appellate Division had upheld the designations.Mr. Goldstein in 1997. Looking back with satisfaction in 2014, he said he thought he had made an impact on Broadway. “I feel, ‘job done,’” he said.TDFJack Lewis Goldstein was born on March 5, 1949, in Jersey City, N.J. His father, Joseph, was an Army officer and a physician whose work took him and his family to Maryland, Germany and other postings. His mother, Thelma (Ginsberg) Goldstein, was a homemaker, potter and political activist. The couple eventually divorced.Jack’s maternal grandmother took him to his first Broadway show, Lionel Bart’s musical “Oliver!,” which opened at the Imperial Theater in 1963.“‘Oliver!’ was the first time I experienced that suspension of disbelief,” Mr. Goldstein told Crain’s New York Business in 1998. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Goldstein graduated from George Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1972. He worked in Manhattan at the National Design Center, which exhibited home furnishings, before moving to Washington, where he was an assistant to the director of programs at the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a small federal agency that would play a role in persuading him to go to Broadway.While he was in Washington, the Interior Department, responding to a petition from preservationists, determined that the Morosco was eligible to be included on the National Register of Historic Places, and that if the developer of the Marriott Marquis wanted to tear it down, the company would need a waiver from the advisory council. Mr. Goldstein contended in an affidavit that Lyn Nofziger, an aide to President Ronald Reagan, had told the council to grant the waiver or lose its government funding — an assertion Mr. Nofziger denied.Frustrated, Mr. Goldstein soon left Washington to join the Broadway preservationists, whose efforts to save the Morosco were by then doomed to fail.After leaving Save the Theaters in 1988, Mr. Goldstein was a special assistant for government affairs to Ron Silver, the actor and president of Actors’ Equity, and the project director of the Broadway Initiatives Working Group, which was formed to evaluate Broadway’s future. He was the executive director of the nonprofit Theater Development Fund, which makes theater more affordable and accessible, from 1998 to 2001.When he announced the competition to design a new TKTS booth in 1999, Mr. Goldstein recognized how beloved and important the slapdash, pipe-and-canvas structure had become to theatergoers over 26 years. But, as he told The New York Times, “time and weather have taken their toll.”The new TKTS booth was not completed until 2008, a year before Mr. Goldstein returned to Actors’ Equity as its national director of governance policy and support.In 2012, he became an antiques dealer in Cold Spring. He previously owned a seasonal antiques store in Rehoboth, Del.He is survived by a brother, Leonard.Mr. Goldstein acknowledged that he had made an impact on Broadway.“I think I’ve made a contribution when I walk through Times Square and see theaters filled — many would have been swept away,” he told The Highlands Current of Cold Spring in 2014. “I feel, ‘job done.’” More

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      ‘Here Lies Love’ Pairs Disco With a Dictator. It’s a Controversial Choice.

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      The musical, the brainchild of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, dramatizes — and, some say, sanitizes — the life of the former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos.The Broadway musical “Here Lies Love” is a rollicking karaoke dance party with an immersive staging and, for the first time in Broadway history, organizers say, an all-Filipino cast.It’s a good time — until it’s not.At its center is the brutal regime of Ferdinand (played by Jose Llana) and Imelda Marcos (Arielle Jacobs), the former president and first lady of the Philippines who committed countless human rights abuses and violent crimes during his 21-year reign from 1965 to 1986.David Byrne, who wrote the music and lyrics for the show with the electronic dance musician Fatboy Slim, has said the musical, which focuses on the life of Imelda Marcos, interpolates karaoke as a means of replicating for audiences how it felt for Filipinos who lived through the Marcos regime.But, some argue, telling the story of the corrupt Marcos regime through disco does not work when the audience lacks the necessary context. The production, opening July 20, has faced accusations that it trivializes the suffering of thousands of Filipinos.Here’s what to know about Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, the People Power Revolution of 1986 and the controversies the show has faced.Who was Ferdinand Marcos?Ferdinand Marcos, the longest-serving president of the Philippines, was a dictator who placed the country under martial law from 1972 until 1981. In 1983 the opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. (played by Conrad Ricamora) was assassinated at the airport as he was returning from exile; an investigatory panel concluded that a military plot was responsible. The assassination led to a series of events that culminated with Aquino’s widow, Corazon, becoming president in 1986.With the election of Aquino, Marcos fled the Philippines for Hawaii, where he died in 1989 without ever facing trial in the United States on criminal charges that he plundered the Philippine Treasury of more than $100 million. (However, the following decade a jury in Hawaii awarded damages of almost $2 billion against his estate for the killings and tortures of almost 10,000 Filipinos. Collecting on that judgment has been difficult though, and despite ongoing efforts, victims have seen only a fraction of that amount.)Who is Imelda Marcos?Imelda Marcos, who married Ferdinand in 1954, became the face of the regime’s enormous wealth. A former teenage beauty queen known for her love of nightlife and disco music, she and her family raided government coffers to finance a lavish lifestyle while millions of Filipinos lived in poverty.A Philippine court convicted her on corruption charges in 2018 for creating private foundations to hide her wealth, but she appealed the case and is unlikely to see jail time because of her age. She is now 94.What was the People Power Revolution?The Marcos era ended in February 1986 after a series of nonviolent street marches. The People Power Revolution, with more than two million Filipinos participating, condemned the regime’s human rights violations and electoral fraud. The demonstrations ended with Ferdinand Marcos’s departure.Why has the show been controversial?A number of Filipinos have objected to what they argue is the show’s trivialization of the Marcos’s crimes and sympathy toward Imelda Marcos. The actress Sara Porkalob, who recently appeared on Broadway in “1776,” wrote in 2017 that the musical, then playing at the Seattle Repertory Theater, one of the show’s several regional and Off Broadway engagements since its premiere at New York’s Public Theater in 2013, “paints a glossy veneer over the Philippines’ national trauma and America’s role in it.”Those objections have become particularly salient for many now; Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was elected president of the Philippines last year.“David Byrne’s attempt to humanize Imelda Marcos insults the impoverished people she and her family stole from,” Ruben Carranza, a former government lawyer who prosecuted Imelda Marcos’s hidden wealth cases, wrote in a recent email. “And because it is playing at a time when the Marcoses have lied their way back to power, ‘Here Lies Love’ will only reinforce those lies and serve, intentionally or not, the larger Marcos agenda of denying truth and revising the history of their dictatorship.”Others, however, have praised the show’s approach, contending that it “mirrors Filipino complicity and American blindness through its disco-controlled experiment on its audience,” as the Filipino novelist Gina Apostol wrote in 2014 after seeing the show Off Broadway at the Public Theater.How has the production responded?In a statement released earlier this year after criticism resurfaced following the announcement of the Broadway transfer, producers wrote that “Here Lies Love” is “an anti-Marcos show” intended to combat disinformation with “a creative way of re-information.” The show has also hired a Filipino American actress, Giselle Töngi, known as G, as a cultural and community liaison.Why did Broadway musicians object to the show?Though producers have argued that using recorded instrumental tracks instead of a live band is central to the storytelling, a labor union representing musicians objected in May, arguing that its contract for the theater requires musicians to be used for musicals. In June they reached a compromise: The musical would employ 12 live musicians.What has Imelda Marcos said about the show?In 2010, after listening to part of Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s original concept album for the show at a mall food court in the Philippines during her campaign for the country’s House of Representatives, she told The New York Times reporter Norimitsu Onishi, “I’m flattered; I can’t believe it!”The show takes its title from the three-word phrase she has said she would like inscribed on her tombstone. More