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      ‘New York, New York’ Review: The Big Apple, Without Bite

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      Based loosely on the 1977 film, a show about performers making it in the big city comes to St. James Theater with the sharper edges of its source material sanded off.There’s a big new Broadway musical called “New York, New York,” and it’s based on the Martin Scorsese film bearing the same title.Sort of.Both the movie and the show have lead characters named Jimmy Doyle and Francine Evans, both are set immediately following World War II and both prominently feature a certain anthem by John Kander and Fred Ebb. You know, the one whose first five notes, plunked on a piano, are enough to automatically prompt the brain to fill in the rest.And it is that title song alone, rather than the movie, that is the true inspiration for the sprawling, unwieldy, surprisingly dull show that opened on Wednesday night at the St. James Theater.Extrapolating from its lyrics, “New York, New York,” directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, is about the people wearing those “vagabond shoes,” the ones who “want to wake up in the city that doesn’t sleep.” Jimmy (Colton Ryan) and Francine (Anna Uzele) now rub elbows with characters dreamed up by the book writer David Thompson with Sharon Washington. They are musicians and singers, strivers and dreamers. And sadly, none make much of an impression, mired as they are in a syrupy muck of good sentiments and grating civic cheerleading.As the various story lines move toward their inevitable intersection, any sign of wrinkle or kink has been smoothed out. The most prominent victims are the reimagined Jimmy and Francine, who have been flattened into cardboard figures. The film’s Jimmy, portrayed by Robert De Niro, was an obnoxious, abusive, narcissistic jerk of a sax player who fell for Liza Minnelli’s Francine, a passionate singer who worked her way up from canary in big bands to solo star; their volatile relationship would not pass the smell test with 2023 audiences.The new Jimmy is merely a minor irritant who has graduated from good saxophonist to brilliant multi-instrumentalist equally at ease playing jazz with the African American trumpeter Jesse (John Clay III) and Latin grooves with the Cuban percussionist Mateo (Angel Sigala), whose own stories are delineated in broad strokes. That Jimmy ends up as a human bridge between the musical styles of Harlem and Spanish Harlem is quite a feat for a white-bread Irish kid. (A Jewish violinist played by Oliver Prose mostly exists on the sideline.)Meanwhile, Francine comes across as a spunky, empowered free spirit plugged into a 21st-century outlet. A Black woman, she overcomes the treacherous waters of the music scene with relative ease, and setbacks seem to glide off her.Ryan (“Girl From the North Country,” Connor in the film of “Dear Evan Hansen”) and Uzele (“Once on This Island,” Catherine Parr in “Six”) are technically fine, but they don’t fill characters drawn as sketches. They never find the ache that drives both Francine and Jimmy, nor the sexual attraction between them.This creates a central void that further restrains the overly polished book — friction feeds fiction.And if anybody knows that, it’s John Kander. An effective mix of louche syncopation, unabashed romanticism and biting sarcasm long set Kander and Ebb apart on Broadway, from “Cabaret” to “Chicago” to their brilliant earlier collaboration with Stroman, “The Scottsboro Boys.”The score for “New York, New York” juxtaposes new songs Kander wrote with Lin-Manuel Miranda, like the propulsive “Music, Money, Love,” with older ones set to lyrics by Ebb. Of those, the best known (you-know-what and “But the World Goes ’Round”) were pulled from the Scorsese movie, while others were repurposed, such as “A Quiet Thing” from the 1965 show “Flora the Red Menace,” and “Marry Me” from “The Rink” (1984).But no matter when or who they were written with, too many of the songs lack Kander and Ebb’s signature serrated edge. Partly this has to do with Sam Davis’s arrangements and music direction, which have a deficit of oomph, and thus further reinforce the show’s sexlessness — there is no pulse when there is no swing. (Kander and Ebb were capable of that more than most Broadway creators: Just listen to, say, the fantastically driving “Gimme Love” from “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”)Francine, who comes across as an empowered free spirit, seems to overcome the treacherous waters of the music scene and racial animosities of the 1940s with relative ease, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe new show’s rah-rah tone eventually becomes numbing. This is all the more frustrating because ambivalence is baked into the title song, which alludes to the city’s mercurial temperament. “If I can make it there/I’d make it anywhere” — we’re in a tough town — is followed by “It’s up to you/New York, New York,” which deprives the singer of agency. But the show follows the triumphant template set by Frank Sinatra rather than the more ambiguous one imparted by Minnelli. In this rose-colored vision, trials are temporary, everybody gets along, and nobody runs up against New York’s bad side.Stroman has a rare affinity for classic Broadway showmanship, as illustrated by her work on “Crazy for You” and “The Producers,” but she can also veer into radical stylization, as in “The Scottsboro Boys.”Here, the flashes of inspiration are few and far between. A highlight is a tap number staged on high beams, with a couple inscribed with “JK 3181927” and “FE 481928” — Kander and Ebb’s birth dates, and two of the Easter eggs lurking in Beowulf Boritt’s vibrant set, dominated by towering fire escapes. The magical moment known as Manhattanhenge is evoked with a terrific assist from the lighting designer Ken Billington. And there is, as always, the visceral thrill of watching a big band rise up to the stage, when Jimmy’s combo kicks off the title song at the end.It is not much to remember from a show that clocks in at nearly three hours and had such formidable potential. “You can be anyone here,” Jesse says at one point, “do anything here.”If only “New York, New York” had interpreted that line not as a reassurance, but as a challenge to dare.New York, New YorkAt the St. James Theater, Manhattan; newyorknewyorkbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Summer, 1976’ Review: The Path to Freedom Starts With a Friendship

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      Two mothers make a life-altering connection during a play date in this production for the Manhattan Theater Club.Holly and Gretchen. Those are the little girls’ names, so dissimilar in the way they hit the ear: one soft, warm and breathy; the other sharp-edged and cramped. Just like their mothers.The children are 5, maybe 6, when they first play together and hit it off, instant pals suddenly eager to see each other every day. In “Summer, 1976” — David Auburn’s bittersweet, comic memory play — that means their mothers, diametric opposites, will be hanging out a lot, too.This is a fortunate thing for us, the audience. Because in Daniel Sullivan’s sun-dappled Broadway production for Manhattan Theater Club, Laura Linney plays the austere, censorious Diana to Jessica Hecht’s vastly chiller Alice — or, as Diana describes this fresh acquaintance, a “sleepy-eyed little hippie with her shorts and her coconut oil.”“I sort of immediately hated her,” Alice tells us in narrator mode, which she and Diana slip in and out of as they recall the time when they were new to each other.But when Alice reaches into her macramé purse and retrieves a joint (“I only took it out because it was the only way I could imagine getting through the next 10 minutes,” she says), Diana tokes prodigiously to prove she’s not a square. On John Lee Beatty’s lyrically midcentury modern set, summer-lit by Japhy Weideman at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, the two women get the munchies and have a feast. Nearly by chance, a life-changing friendship takes root.They are a gorgeous duo, these friends: bickering lifelines for each other, vulnerable and too proud. In one narrated stretch, with Hana S. Kim’s projection design aiding our imaginations, Diana and Alice embark on a cross-country road trip, terminating in San Francisco — which seems ideal, not least because it brings to mind Linney’s ’70s heroine Mary Ann Singleton in the mini-series “Tales of the City.”Auburn, a 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for “Proof,” another richly female-centered drama directed by Sullivan in its premiere, isn’t breaking any ground with theatrical form here. And the white, college-educated, Midwestern young women at the center of this play are a very particular slice of the culture. Stretching from 1976 to 2003, this is a story of profound connection and awakening disquiet, which Sullivan directs with his customary unostentatious lucidity.If “Summer, 1976” feels too comfortable to be fashionable, it’s sharply observant, too, and subtly, insistently feminist — more than the wisp of a two-hander that it might first appear to be. Auburn, who at 53 was about Holly and Gretchen’s age during the Bicentennial, has once again sown a script with riches for actors. Linney and Hecht mine them for all they’re worth.A frustrated artist who teaches at Ohio State University, Diana is a single mother — the kind with family money as a cushion and a rule against Gretchen watching any TV shows that aren’t on PBS. An inveterate snob who judges the worth of her fellow humans by their design choices and the books they read, Diana is harder to like than Alice is — though in Linney’s hands, no less funny or affecting. The second line out of her mouth gets a laugh with its withering disdain for Alice’s daughter.“I didn’t like her child, actually,” Diana says.Diana’s off-puttingness is partially strategic; it keeps her safe from the harm that other people might cause by getting close. But her brittle-perfectionist facade conceals a deep well of insecurity and loneliness, and a reserve of compassion that’s more capacious than we’d guess.Alice, in her flowing peasant dress (costumes are by Linda Cho), is the kind of fluttery, gentle-voiced woman who is routinely underestimated. She’s smarter and more resilient than she lets on, though, and, like Hecht’s terrific performance, admirably sly. A stay-at-home mother with almost zero interest in cooking, cleaning or decorating, Alice is married to Doug, an economist who’s up for tenure at the university and spends the summer buried frantically in his papers. Invested in believing that she’s happy, and that her marriage is, too, Alice looks after Holly, sunbathes in the yard of their modest house and indulges in best-selling paperbacks.One of those novels, Robin Cook’s “Coma,” not published until 1977, is a slight, seemingly calculated cheat on Auburn’s part in a show that’s otherwise meticulous about period accuracy. (See, for glorious example, Diana’s impeccably turquoise-shadowed eyelids — as well as her hair, styled by Annemarie Bradley, and Alice’s, styled by Jasmine Burnside.)A medical thriller, “Coma” is also about a woman who enters an overwhelmingly male professional world and faces sexist pushback. Not that the play gets into this; it’s just a signal that’s there for picking up.But both Alice and Diana, who meet through a campus child care co-op designed by Doug as an economic model, have seen their creative and career ambitions derailed. They belong to a generation of women who came of age in time for the sexual revolution and took advantage of that freedom pre-Roe v. Wade. Still, there remained the practical matter of how pregnancy could permanently rearrange their lives, and the entrenched expectation that a married woman puts her husband’s career first.Diana got pregnant in art school during a fling with a glassblower; Alice dropped out of graduate school to marry Doug, then had Holly. Columbus — a staid heartland city named for that avatar of heedless white male adventuring — was never the aim for either of them.“Great things were promised me, Alice,” Diana says. “I promised them to myself.”In that red, white and blue summer, they question what’s gone wrong with their American dreams. And they start, with poignant imperfection, to put things right.Summer, 1976Through June 10 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘The Shark Is Broken,’ a ‘Jaws’ Comedy, Plans Broadway Run

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      The play stars Ian Shaw, whose father, Robert Shaw, played a shark hunter in the movie.“The Shark Is Broken,” a comedy about the making of “Jaws” that stars the son of one of the film’s main actors, will open on Broadway this summer.The play is the brainchild of Ian Shaw, whose father, Robert Shaw, played Quint, the psychotic shark hunter, in the film. Its film set was plagued by problems, some exacerbated by Robert Shaw’s drinking, and the play depicts the fraught relationship between him and his co-stars, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider.In the play, set in 1974, the three men are trapped together on a boat, managing bad weather, (fake) shark troubles and alcohol.The play began its life at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019, opened in London’s West End in 2021 after a pandemic-related delay, and had a production in Toronto last fall. The Broadway run is to begin previews on July 25 and to open on Aug. 10 at the Golden Theater.The play received a number of strong reviews in London, including from The Evening Standard, which said Ian Shaw “gives what is undoubtedly one of the best theatrical performances of the year.” (The Guardian was more restrained, saying that “too much of the humor hinges on 21st-century hindsight” but also praising Ian Shaw’s “loving and eerily evocative portrayal of his own father.”)Ian Shaw wrote the play with Joseph Nixon; the production is being directed by Guy Masterson and produced by Sonia Friedman and Scott Landis.The play joins what is shaping up to be an unusually busy summer on Broadway. There is already horror (“Grey House”) and farce (“The Cottage”) represented, along with three big musicals (“Once Upon a One More Time,” “Here Lies Love,” “Back to the Future”) and a solo comedy (Alex Edelman’s “Just for Us”). More

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      ‘Good Night, Oscar’ Review: Sean Hayes With Demerol and Cadenzas

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      The “Will & Grace” star is unrecognizable in a Broadway biography of Oscar Levant: wit, pianist and “Eeyore in a cheap suit.”Oscar Levant, the troubled midcentury musician and wag, often said he’d erased “the fine line between genius and insanity.”He says it again, or a version of it, in “Good Night, Oscar,” the unconvincing biographical fantasia that opened Monday at the Belasco Theater. But on the evidence of the character as written, and especially as impersonated by Sean Hayes in a gloomy if accurate performance, Levant doesn’t erase the line so much as fudge it.Certainly the play, by Doug Wright, fails to make much of a case for the genius part of the joke. Instead, it offers a spray of Levant’s most famous quips, like the one about Elizabeth Taylor: “Always a bride, never a bridesmaid.” And instead of dramatizing how marvelous Levant was, it just says so repeatedly. “America’s greatest wit.” “A goddamn lion.” A Horowitz at the piano “with a grace and an ease that even Chopin might envy.”Fulsome praise, but what we see in the director Lisa Peterson’s production is a far cry from any of it. Mostly it’s just a cry; Levant doesn’t seem brilliant but ill.Pathos not being much of a dramatic engine, Wright works very hard, if fictionally, to crank up the stakes. It’s 1958, on the day during sweeps week when “The Tonight Show,” with its host, Jack Paar, will make its West Coast debut. Paar’s marquee guest, leading a lineup that also includes the sex symbol Jayne Mansfield and the ventriloquist Señor Wences, is Levant, who two hours before showtime hasn’t arrived. NBC’s president, Robert Sarnoff, threatens to replace him with the popular bandleader Xavier Cugat.But where Sarnoff (Peter Grosz) sees Levant as unreliably neurotic, and thus unappealing to the network and the audience, Paar (Ben Rappaport) sees him as an artist whose unreliability and neurosis are exactly his strengths. He’s the national id: the man Americans hope they’ll catch “saying something on television they know damn well that you can’t say on television.” He’s good for ratings; no wonder Paar calls him his favorite mental patient.That line is no joke. It is only thanks to the machinations of Levant’s wife, June (Emily Bergl, excellent), that Oscar has been sprung on a four-hour pass from the institution he currently calls home. When he finally arrives at the studio, with a miffed orderly (Marchánt Davis) in tow, he’s strung out, rumpled and morose. June calls him “Eeyore in a cheap suit.”Hayes and Emily Bergl as Levant’s wife, June.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHayes, no longer the adorable sprite from “Will and Grace,” has clearly made a careful study of Levant’s mannerisms, many of them the result of a longtime addiction to painkillers. The work is startling, but the performance is less an inhabitation of character than a nonstop loop of perfectly rendered facial tics, trembling hands and compulsive gestures. His speech is pressured, his mood explosive, his target anything that crosses his path — including himself. Past this stockade of behavior, little of an inner life can get out.To address the built-in problem of revealing such a locked-down soul, and in the manner of period psychiatric melodramas like “Now Voyager” and “Bigger Than Life,” Wright gives Levant occasional reality breaks and hallucinations. Most involve George Gershwin: Levant’s friend, benefactor and bête noire, dead 20 years yet still a kind of Oedipal rival. “I’m scared to death of failure,” Gershwin’s glamorous ghost (John Zdrojeski) says. “But you? You don’t mind it.”Whether or not Levant minded it, it’s true that by Gershwin standards he failed; few people today remember him. Huge swathes of dramaturgically suspicious exposition must thus be rolled out to cover the gaps. “I know the critics all say your greatest performance was in ‘An American in Paris,’” a young production assistant (Alex Wyse) tells Levant, and us. “That musical sequence — the Concerto in F — it’s a showstopper!”When characters start informing other characters of what they would obviously already know, and (as often happens here as well) braying madly at mild jokes, something is wrong.What that is becomes clearer when, in the second half of the 100-minute play, Levant finally sits down for the live broadcast, after proving himself merely tiresome for the first half. The music starts, the curtain rises, the lights come up, and he’s still tiresome. Firing off one-liners, especially nasty ones, is no mark of special genius; thousands of comedians do it. Nor does the fact that the one-liners come from a man who is obviously deeply troubled make them especially funny. For me, watching Hayes as Levant — like watching kinescopes of Levant himself — is excruciatingly sad.The weight of shoring up the point of the play thus falls heavily on Levant’s pianism — and Hayes’s. Peterson, the director, has been building up to it from the beginning. The nested shoeboxes of Rachel Hauck’s handsome set, representing Paar’s office and, when that breaks away, Levant’s dressing room, now disappear entirely to reveal a fully padded television studio with a Steinway center stage. Hayes steps up to it and, after a last, mortifying fight with Gershwin’s ghost, proceeds to play a seven-minute excerpt from “Rhapsody in Blue.”The playwright illuminates Levant’s inner world with occasional hallucinations, most involving Levant’s long-dead friend and rival George Gershwin (John Zdrojeski).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s fine.Even if it had been mind-blowing, I don’t see how it would have given “Good Night, Oscar” a satisfying shape; issues raised in theatrical terms want to be resolved in them, too. Wright has followed that principle in “I Am My Own Wife,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2003 play, and in his book for the unconventional musical version of “Grey Gardens,” each of which uses the raw materials it was built from to fashion an organic conclusion.“Good Night, Oscar” can’t get there, but it understands the problem. A coda following the concerto may not tie up the larger themes of genius and insanity but does resolve some relationships in the way you would expect from a melodrama set in 1958. Selflessness and renunciation are involved. Jokes that were formerly just origami with words now become ways of slipping painful truths past the interpersonal censors.In those last few minutes only, you see into Levant’s soul. It is not a soul made for television, though that’s how most people of his time would have known him. Somehow they accepted him as he was, which may not have been a blessing. When asked, on a 1965 episode of “What’s My Line,” “Have you ever managed to make a great deal of use out of various illnesses that you’ve had?” he answered, “My health is the concern of the nation.” The blindfolded panel knew immediately who he was.I only wish after “Good Night, Oscar” we did.Good Night, OscarThrough Aug. 27 at the Belasco Theater, Manhattan; goodnightoscar.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. 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      Review: In ‘Prima Facie,’ Jodie Comer Makes the Case

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      The “Killing Eve” star has a spectacular Broadway debut in a play that puts sexual assault jurisprudence on trial.The neon image of a louche Lady Justice, in an electric blue robe and a hot pink mask, greets the audience at the Golden Theater as if the place were a strip joint for lawyers.In a way it is, at least while “Prima Facie,” which opened on Sunday, is playing there. Over the course of the one-woman, 100-minute play, we watch a barrister — the story takes place in England — remove every piece of psychological armor from the women she cross-examines in sexual assault cases, then see the same armor stripped from her when she becomes a victim herself.The play, by Suzie Miller, won all sorts of awards in Australia and Britain. It’s easy to see why. Its star, Jodie Comer, late of “Killing Eve,” gives a performance of tremendous skill and improbable stamina, especially considering it is her first stage appearance. The production, directed by Justin Martin, is chic and accessible, with design flourishes, by now de rigueur, to underline the idea that it is a Big Event. And the reform of sexual assault jurisprudence that the play advocates could hardly be more convincingly argued or worthy of our attention.But the underlining and the advocacy do something odd to the drama: They make it disappear.Not at first. When we meet Tessa Ensler she’s a complex and theatrical character, a “thoroughbred,” “primed for the race,” with “every muscle pumped.” She’s also, in Comer’s interpretation, funny, sexy and self-deflating, bloviating in bars and flirting with associates. She is not beneath the arrogance of pedigree: “Top law school, top city, top marks, top people.” When she bellows drunkenly that “innocent until proven guilty” is the bedrock of civilized society, you see that she also uses it as a free pass for her own dodgy behavior. At one point she throws a piece of trash into the audience.Thoroughbred she may be, but we soon meet a different incarnation of Tessa: a refugee from the working class, never able to return to it comfortably. Visiting her chilly mother in Liverpool, she becomes a girl in want of kindness and not getting much. (Her older brother is violent.) The posh accent she uses in court seems to erode before our ears, revealing the peculiar early-Beatles twang of her (and Comer’s) native Scouse dialect. (“Says” is not pronounced “sez” but “saze.”) She dashes back to London before she can get hurt.The dashing is not just Tessa’s M.O. but the production’s. With its expressionistic sound (lots of pumped-up heartbeats by Ben and Max Ringham) and sudden slashes of harsh light (by Natasha Chivers), Martin’s busy staging is at pains to help Comer fill the vast space alone. She doesn’t need it; she solves the one-actor problem with her own resourcefulness, handily playing all sides of conversations that sometimes involve several people. And when she must be both a third-person reporter of a remembered event and a first-person participant in it, she makes the echo meaningful by using it to specify the content. The laugh she lets out after saying “We laugh” is a very particular and complicated kind.Comer delivers a complex portrayal, our critic writes, going from a high-powered barrister to a defenseless victim.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, Martin has her constantly running about, moving tables, jumping on those tables to declaim in court, shouting over music, fiddling with her clothing and juggling props. Some of this stage business helps provide character insight that might go missing in the absence of other actors: When approached by a senior trial lawyer interested in offering her a job, Tessa tries to hide her Victoria’s Secret shopping bag. But much of it feels pro forma.In any case, the bustle comes to a halt halfway through. Now we meet a third Tessa, this one the victim of a rape she knows she will have trouble proving to the law’s satisfaction. She was drunk; she had previously consented to have sex with the man; she couldn’t shout no because he covered her mouth to the point that she could hardly breathe.She now enters the legal system as a complainant, not a defender: “Same court, no armor,” she says. Comer’s portrayal of that defenselessness is devastating: Mousy and short-circuited, the gloss gone from her hair, she looks small in her clothes and alone in the world. Her voice has shriveled. Even Miriam Buether’s set — sky-high shelves of case files — abandons her, rising into the flies.Yet this is also where the play abandons itself. Not its argument, of course. As Tessa suffers the same kind of cross-examination she has visited on other women in the name of “testing the case” impartially, it becomes painfully clear that finding truth, let alone justice, in such situations is all but impossible. More than that, the system of adjudicating consent is diabolical, a manmade trap to disable women from proving anything and thus, in effect, a second rape.Miriam Buether’s set features sky-high shelves of case files.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf only the play allowed us simply to feel this. But as Tessa speaks to the courtroom despite being warned by the judge to stop, Miller, the playwright, herself a former criminal defense lawyer, likewise breaks free from the dramatic frame to let her. The lights come up on the audience. The text, now delivered straight out, becomes an oration, a summation. For reasons that seem more wishful and political than characterological, Tessa gets her voice back.One-person, multicharacter stories often fail to develop suspense and momentum, but Miller has structured this one precisely. Details we learn casually in the first half return menacingly in the second. The abandonment of that structure in the play’s final third is likewise precise, and many will value the disruption prima facie — at first glance.But for me the change undid the previous work of emotional engagement in favor of flat-out persuasion on a subject with which few in the audience would be likely to disagree. As Tessa’s speech ran on, repeating ideas that had already been dramatized, I began to feel pummeled, as if by a politician.Enlightening and enraging theatergoers in the hope of changing the world is not, of course, a violation of dramatic policy. That Tessa’s last name honors Eve Ensler, now known as V, ought to have been a clue to Miller’s intentions. V’s 1996 play “The Vagina Monologues” broke with dramatic forms (which, after all, were formalized and popularized by men) to make a difference well beyond them. I also thought of Larry Kramer, whose plays were pleas: agitprop and artistry pulped into something new. Thinking of works like theirs, and a singular performance like Comer’s, I won’t belabor the compromises of “Prima Facie.” Especially if, in the long run, it wins its case.Prima FacieThrough June 18 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; primafacieplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Todd Haimes, 66, Who Rebuilt the Roundabout Theater Company, Dies

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      After rescuing the company from bankruptcy, he turned it into a major player on Broadway and one of the largest nonprofit theater companies in the country.Todd Haimes, who rescued New York’s Roundabout Theater Company from bankruptcy and built it into one of the largest nonprofit theaters in America, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 66.A spokesman, Matt Polk, said his death, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was caused by complications of osteosarcoma. Mr. Haimes had lived with the cancer since 2002, when he was diagnosed with sarcoma of the jaw.As the artistic director and chief executive at Roundabout, Mr. Haimes had an extraordinarily long and effective tenure. He led the nonprofit company for four decades, turning it into a major player on Broadway, where it now runs three of the 41 theaters.Roundabout has focused on classics and revivals but has also been a supporter of new work. Under Mr. Haimes’s leadership, it excelled on both fronts, winning 11 Tony Awards for plays and musicals it produced and nurturing the careers of contemporary American writers, including Stephen Karam, Joshua Harmon and Selina Fillinger.Among Roundabout’s biggest successes during his tenure was a 1998 revival of “Cabaret,” originally starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson, that survived a bumpy start (a construction accident interrupted performances for four weeks) and then ran for nearly six years. It returned a decade later for a one-year reprise.There were many other triumphs, including a 2020 revival of “A Soldier’s Play” that is now touring the country. Both productions won Tony Awards.Catalyzed by America’s social unrest over racial inequality in 2020, Mr. Haimes led Roundabout in an effort to unearth lost gems written by artists of color. One result was an acclaimed Broadway production of the Black playwright Alice Childress’s 1955 backstage drama, “Trouble in Mind.” It had never made it to Broadway because Ms. Childress had refused to soften the show’s ending to make it less challenging for white theatergoers.Mr. Haimes joined Roundabout in 1983 as managing director. He was just 26, and the company, founded in 1965 and saddled with debt, was operating in rented space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. At one particularly desperate point he used his own credit card to keep the company afloat. But a few weeks after he arrived, the board of directors voted to shut it down.A board member subsequently donated enough money to buy the company some time, and Mr. Haimes engineered a turnabout — cutting the staff, reducing expenses, improving marketing and, over time, expanding the audience with measures such as early weekday curtain times to attract an after-work crowd, special events for singles and gay theatergoers, and discounts for children. In 2016, he became the first presenter to allow the livestreaming of a performance of a Broadway show, a much-praised revival of “She Loves Me.”Mr. Haimes, right, with Gene Feist, Roundabout’s artistic director, in the theater in 1986. “I have no desire to be on stage, but I get a tingle just being around one,” he said.Jack Manning/The New York TimesBernard Todd Haimes was born on May 7, 1956, in Manhattan to Herman and Helaine Haimes. His father was a lawyer, his mother a homemaker.His onstage life was exceedingly brief: In elementary school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he wore a dress to play the title role in a production of “Mary Poppins.” He later claimed that he had landed the part because he was the only child who could pronounce “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. at Yale. Before arriving at Roundabout, he was general manager of the Hartman Theater Company in Stamford and managing director of the Westport Country Playhouse, both in Connecticut.“I had no desire to trade stocks and bonds, and making Nivea cream wouldn’t turn me on,” he told The New York Times in 1986. “I’ve loved the theater all my life. I have no desire to be onstage, but I get a tingle just being around one, ever since I worked on the stage crew for ‘How to Succeed in Business’ on Broadway when I was in 10th grade.”He became producing director of Roundabout in 1989 and added the title of chief executive in 2015.“The advantage of my background is that all of my artistic decisions are being informed by management concerns,” Mr. Haimes said in 2004. “No one’s ever going to accuse me of being a crazy artist. The disadvantage is the same: that perhaps there are brilliant things other people could accomplish that I just can’t.”He is survived by his wife, Jeanne-Marie (Christman) Haimes; two children, Dr. Hilary Haimes and Andrew Haimes; two stepdaughters, Julia and Kiki Baron; and four grandchildren. His first two marriages, to Dr. Alison Haimes and Tamar Climan, ended in divorce.Mr. Haimes led Roundabout’s move to Broadway in 1991, when he began presenting work in the Criterion Center, which no longer exists. The move was a turning point for the company. “Because of the Tony Award eligibility,” he said, “we will have a tremendous advantage when it comes to obtaining the rights to plays, securing directors and attracting distinguished actors.”In 2000, he moved the company into the renamed American Airlines Theater, which is now Roundabout’s flagship house. It has since also acquired the theater at Studio 54 and assumed operations of the theater now known as the Stephen Sondheim.Among the Tony-winning shows produced by Roundabout during Mr. Haimes’s tenure were revivals of the plays “Anna Christie” and “A View From the Bridge” and of the musicals “Nine,” “Assassins,” “The Pajama Game” and “Anything Goes.” Roundabout was also among the producers of Tony-winning productions of two new plays, “Side Man” and “The Humans.”The company now runs five theaters, all in Midtown Manhattan, including the three Broadway houses, an Off Broadway theater and an Off Off Broadway black-box space that it developed to give a platform to emerging playwrights.Over the years there have also been flops and budget deficits, and some critics have suggested that Roundabout was overextended. Its enormous real estate footprint became a financial challenge that the company addressed partly by renting out some of its Broadway venues to commercial producers. The company made a significant amount of money, for example, by renting out the Sondheim for five years to the producers of “Beautiful,” the Carole King biomusical.Mr. Haimes was one of a handful of leaders of nonprofit theater companies in New York whose decades-long tenures have raised eyebrows among those who want more turnover. He held onto the Roundabout job even when he took another one, as artistic director of the deeply troubled Toronto theater company Livent, in 1998; that company collapsed, and Mr. Haimes stayed at Roundabout.Roundabout’s size — 150 employees and a $50 million annual budget — has given it the ability to support significant endeavors offstage. It operates education and training programs, including school partnerships that serve more than 4,000 students each year and a partnership with the stagehands union to train theater technicians.But like many nonprofits, it has not yet fully rebounded from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Roundabout staged one show on Broadway this season, a revival of “1776.”Mr. Haimes, who was often content to remain in the background, was a well-liked and enthusiastic figure in the industry. He was active in both the Broadway and the Off Broadway communities, serving on numerous committees, and over the years he taught at Yale and Brooklyn College.But he remained a businessman and a booster at heart.“Basically I’m incredibly insecure and don’t take myself seriously as an artist,” he said in a 1998 interview. “But somehow my taste seems to match up with what the public wants.” More

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      Review: In ‘The Thanksgiving Play,’ Who Gets to Tell the Story?

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      Larissa FastHorse’s comedy of performative wokeness is also a brutal satire of American mythmaking.Rehearsal rooms are embarrassing places. Actors jockey, directors bloviate, writers fume at liberties taken.We see all of that in the rehearsal room where “The Thanksgiving Play” is set, even though what’s being rehearsed is just a holiday pageant for elementary school students. Yet not just any holiday pageant. Meant to “lift up” the Native American point of view despite including no Native Americans, this one twists the drama teacher who is creating it, along with her colleagues, into pretzels of performative wokeness so mortifying they induce a perma-cringe.If that setup makes “The Thanksgiving Play,” which opened on Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater, sound like a backstage farce akin to “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” which opened the day before, that’s true. In both plays, everyone behaves badly, tempers flare and nothing flies right.But for Larissa FastHorse, the author of “The Thanksgiving Play,” farce is not an end in itself. Rather, it is the hilarious envelope in which she delivers a brutal satire about mythmaking, and thus, in a way, about theater itself. The stories we create can do almost as much harm as the false histories they purport to commemorate, she shows. And well-meaning people can, too.The well-meaning people in this case include Logan (Katie Finneran) and Jaxton (Scott Foley): she an imperiled high school drama teacher (her production of “The Iceman Cometh” incited parents to seek her dismissal) and he an out-of-work actor (except for a gig at the farmers market). They have mastered the buzzwords of white progressivism and use them as protective amulets, holding space for others, acknowledging privilege, sharing pronouns without being asked. Jaxton brags that he even used “they” for a year.In short, these are ridiculous figures — and yet not so ridiculous as to be unrecognizable. Nor, in Rachel Chavkin’s cheerfully cutthroat production for Second Stage Theater, are they even unlikable. Turning Logan’s anxiety into a parade of comic tics and uncertain outbursts, Finneran is endearing and even sympathetic in her attempts at righteousness, no matter how wrong they go. And though Jaxton is an obvious skeeve, decentering his maleness only as a kind of tantric come-on, Foley does it so well that the character is somehow attractive.It’s less their bad traits than their good intentions that drive you mad. Logan has engaged a wide-eyed elementary school history teacher named Caden (Chris Sullivan) to serve as a factual backstop for the pageant, then mostly ignores him. (Sullivan does puppyish disappointment beautifully.) And her casting of Alicia (D’Arcy Carden) to represent the Native American experience — under the terms of a “Native American Heritage Month Awareness Through Art Grant” — turns out to be deeply flawed. A Los Angeles actor, a third understudy for Jasmine at Disneyland and a “super-flexible” ethnic type, Alicia is not, even a little bit, Native American.Foley and Finneran’s characters, who have mastered the buzzwords of white progressivism, are ridiculous figures yet not unrecognizable.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNevertheless, so clever is FastHorse’s setup, and so thorough her twisting of the knife of woke logic, that Alicia, if anyone, is our hero. In part, that’s because she alone is untroubled by her whiteness — or, really, by anything. (She defends her casting by pointing out that the actor who plays Lumière in “Beauty and the Beast” is not a real candlestick either.) Still, as the team proceeds to “devise” the pageant, she’s crafty enough to steer it toward her actual strengths. “I know how to make people stare at me and not look away,” she explains (and Carden convincingly demonstrates). She’s also good at crying.In mesmerizing moments like this, FastHorse neatly sets up the tension between identity and the performance of identity — a tension she doesn’t resolve but upgrades over the course of the play to a full-scale paradox. By the time she’s finished, Logan, Jaxton and Caden are left wriggling in agony as if under a moral microscope, reduced to saying things like, “We see color but we don’t speak for it.” Eventually they conclude that the only way to center Indigenous people is to erase them.Of course, they have been erased already — repeatedly. FastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota nation of South Dakota, gradually introduces the horrifying undertow of that fact with filmed segments screened briefly between the live scenes. Distressingly, these segments are based on Thanksgiving projects that real teachers have posted online. In one, adorable young children performing “The Nine Days of Thanksgiving” are made to list the many things, like “six Native teepees,” that Indians “gave” the Pilgrims. In another, fifth graders shooting turkeys with prop muskets sing a song with the lyric “One little Indian left all alone/He went out and hanged himself and then there were none.”In the play’s well-acted but somewhat diffuse premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2018, the film sequences were less awful and violent. For Broadway, they (and the production as a whole, including its set by Riccardo Hernandez) have been pumped up to emphasize the weight of indoctrination, among adults who should know better and children who can’t. Though this is crucial to the play’s project of undoing centuries of racist mythologizing, I was left a bit queasy thinking about the young performers. Weren’t they being indoctrinated too?Filmed segments screened between live scenes are based on Thanksgiving projects that real teachers have posted online.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut queasiness may be just what FastHorse is aiming for. She told the publication American Theater that she thinks a lot about “rhythm and release” in her writing. “You take your medicine, and then you get some sugar, then you take some medicine, you get some sugar.”Repeated several times over the course of 90 minutes, that cycle — enhanced by Chavkin’s pacing, which leaves you swallowing your laughter — can lead to an upset stomach. And the characters are sometimes so exaggerated for satire that they lose their grip on your emotions. Still, by the time the bloody tale of the Pequot massacre is enacted onstage, you may find yourself agreeing with Logan, of all people. Being a vegan, she already struggles with the “holiday of death”; I wanted to disown it entirely, from the turkeys all the way back to the Pilgrims.But “The Thanksgiving Play” is not primarily a brief for correcting American history. Like Tracy Letts’s “The Minutes,” which also uncovered a horrific massacre hiding in the clothing of civic pageantry, FastHorse is interested in how new information (new only to some people) might change the stories we tell in the future. The first step, to judge by the absurd crew onstage, will be to change the storytellers. FastHorse being the first Native American woman known to have a play produced on Broadway, maybe we’ve finally started.The Thanksgiving PlayThrough June 4 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: Flying High and Falling Hard in ‘Peter Pan Goes Wrong’

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      Aerial mishaps and half-wit actors turn a fantasy classic into a farce. But, like Peter, not all of the jokes land.Six years ago, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society brought its production of “The Murder at Haversham Manor” from its home base in England to Broadway. Mayhem ensued. Part of the manor collapsed. An actor was poisoned in a prop mix-up. After the leading lady was knocked unconscious by a door, she was replaced by the stage manager; when knocked unconscious as well, he was replaced by a sound technician and eventually, somehow, a grandfather clock.The company has grown up since then, or down, or perhaps just sideways. Rebranded as the Cornley Youth Theater, and for reasons of liability or just sheer embarrassment no longer associated with a polytechnic institute, it has returned to Broadway with its children’s version of J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan.” Many of the same disasters happen chez Darling as happened at Haversham Manor, or close variations on them. Let’s just say that Peter doesn’t fly so much as flail while airborne. He, too, is knocked unconscious.And so may you be, with laughter, especially if you did not see the earlier show, which despite its disguise of amateurism was a highly polished production called “The Play That Goes Wrong.” For the Cornley players (like the Cornley Theater) are of course fictitious, part of a tradition of farcical comedies featuring terrible actors that goes back at least to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” which opened Wednesday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, with a game Neil Patrick Harris in a guest role, the jokes and mishaps are still funny, if not quite as magical the second time around.For one thing, if you are already familiar with the Cornley modus maloperandi, you will spot some of the setups the moment you take your seat. That’s assuming the panicked performers, bickering in the auditorium preshow, let you sit.Onstage, the Darlings’ nursery looks as if it were built on a budget not greater than the cost of a ticket, with a rickety three-level bunk bed, a wobbly casement window and wiring that’s already sparking before the lights go down. The “flying operator” credit in the Cornley program inspires little confidence: “Not yet known.” And the turntable that will deliver the children to Neverland looks just as likely to deliver them to the emergency room.Perhaps 500 things go wrong in “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” some of them nearly fulfilling Peter’s prediction in the Barrie play: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” Peter spends much of the play upside down or in bandages. Nana, the Darlings’ Newfoundland-slash-nursemaid, gets trapped trying to squeeze through a dog door, and has to be chainsawed out. Nor is this the first time the actor playing Nana has faced an onstage disaster. In the Cornley production of “Oliver!” some years ago, he squashed the title character.Greg Tannahill as Peter Pan, who spends much of the play upside down or in bandages.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat Nana is haunted by the memory — and that each of the other actors has a pathetic trait as well — helps give texture to the relentless shenanigans. Still, as the formula seems to require, the “Goes Wrong” shows often get near and sometimes cross the line at which violence and mockery cease to be funny. That line moves over time, of course; if stuttering no longer seems amusing, it was a surefire laugh-getter not long ago.And though it’s always hilarious to see floorboards fly up and smack actors in the face, the professionalization of fake trauma may have outstripped the comedy of it. The difficulty of producing a stunt safely is not, after all, related to the amusement it provides; in fact, the difficulty, when too obvious, can get in the way. “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” directed by Adam Meggido, too often belabors the horseplay, making it feel mechanical.Milder but more endearing are the jokes that depend on miscues, amateur acting and erratic stagecraft. The chair that is meant to deliver the narrator (Harris) to and from the stage sometimes jerks him too suddenly into position and other times makes an excruciatingly slow exit. Harris, who will appear at most performances through April 30, is expert at consternation that turns into helplessness.And Dennis, the young Cornley actor playing John Darling and Mr. Smee, “who doesn’t know a single line,” must have his words provided through headphones; he repeats them verbatim, even when they’re clearly not meant to be spoken. “Dennis, you’re wearing the wrong costume,” he declaims proudly. “No, don’t say that, that is obviously not a line.”In such moments, “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” begins to achieve the dizzying liftoff of the best backstage farces, like Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off.” In the confusing atmosphere where real life, the play and the play within the play meet, you feel unmoored from the customary gravity of the theater. Words make very little sense, especially when, as happens blissfully once or twice, the dialogue slips out of alignment and one actor jumps ahead while another stays behind. (That also happened in “The Play That Goes Wrong.”) And when Mrs. Darling and her maid are declared to be “different in every way” though they are quite obviously played by the same flustered actor, disbelief is more than suspended. Wonderfully, it’s shattered.Matthew Cavendish, right, with Neil Patrick Harris, whose misbehaving narrator’s chair provides some of the production’s endearing jokes, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlas, the reprieve from the weight of meaning is only temporary. Too often, the belaboring rebounds and you crash back to earth as ungracefully as Peter Pan. Several bits depend on a setup too outlandish even for farce, which works best when the conditions are real but the responses extreme, instead of the other way around. When sound cues are somehow switched with recordings of offstage conversations and even audition tapes, it’s too far-fetched to amuse.Still, the cast makes even the dimmest jokes shine; you admire the polish. The play’s three authors, once drama school chums, have given themselves the best roles. Henry Shields, the choleric, John Cleese-like one, plays Mr. Darling and Captain Hook; Henry Lewis, the haunted teddy bear, is naturally Nana; and Jonathan Sayer is the headphoned idiot who barely belongs on a stage.They have all by now honed their shticks into weapons. “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” has been playing off and on since 2013, and the “Goes Wrong” brand has been incorporated as Mischief Worldwide. Perhaps that growth has now begun to drain some joy from the franchise, which is built not just on endangering amateurs but on loving them and even to some extent being them. Death may be a big adventure, but for bumblers, which is to say all of us, unvarnished life is adventure enough.Peter Pan Goes WrongThrough July 9 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; pangoeswrongbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. More