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      ‘Like a Romance’: Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht’s Spring Fling Onstage

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      In David Auburn’s new play, “Summer, 1976,” the actresses play unlikely friends whose relationship has the intensity of a love affair.Alice and Diana don’t like each other very much. Not at first. Diana, a teacher at the University of Ohio, considers Alice an intellectual lightweight and flaky. Alice, a faculty wife, finds Diana condescending.“They are unlikely friends,” Laura Linney, who plays Diana, said with understatement.And yet forced together for a few sticky Midwestern months by their young daughters, a relationship burgeons over kiddie pools and popsicles. Their friendship, which will eventually burn with the blue-flame intensity of a love affair, will profoundly alter each woman’s life.This is the substance of David Auburn’s memory play “Summer, 1976,” a febrile two-hander directed by Daniel Sullivan and starring Linney and Jessica Hecht (Alice) as women in their 50s recalling a pivotal time in their 20s. The Manhattan Theater Club production, mostly composed of daisy-chained monologues, is scheduled to open April 25 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Linney, left, and Hecht in David Auburn’s new play, “Summer, 1976,” at Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan. The two-hander opens on April 25.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesOn a recent weekday morning, the two women met in an otherwise empty rehearsal room at M.T.C.’s Midtown offices. This was a fraught moment in the process. “Week three in rehearsal for me is always a disaster, I’m so frustrated,” Linney said. And Hecht was still starring in another show, Sarah Ruhl’s “Letters From Max” at the Signature Theater. But the co-stars, dressed in drapey clothing, seemed relaxed enough.Both are stage and screen veterans who have worked with Sullivan — Hecht long ago in “The Heidi Chronicles,” Linney most recently in “The Little Foxes” — but never together. They were learning the play by listening, raptly, to each other.“It’s like being in a romance of sorts,” Hecht said.Over midmorning coffee — “Sometimes there’s god, so quickly,” Linney said, quoting Tennessee Williams, when the drinks arrived — the two women discussed the play, the process and why they keep returning to the theater. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“It’s always exciting to see where the intersection is between the actor and the character,” Linney said of watching other actors and their process. “Like, where do they find their way in?”Thea Traff for The New York TimesWhat do you remember about 1976?JESSICA HECHT My mother’s divorce and her consciousness raising group.LAURA LINNEY I can remember wearing Corkys and feeling very cool with my Lip Smackers and my shampoo that smelled like wheat germ.What attracted you to these characters?LINNEY I wasn’t attracted to the character at first. I have no idea of who a character is until I’ve been working for several weeks. So for me, it was really the combination of people. If Dan Sullivan whispers my name, I’ll show up. Honestly, I will do anything that man wants me to do. And I so wanted to do it with Jess, because she is so amazing. Also, hurray for a new play!HECHT I never told you, but before they had officially asked me to do the play, I saw Dan on the corner of 93rd and Broadway. And he said, “Have you worked with Laura?” And I said, “No, I haven’t worked with her.” And he said, “She’s the real deal.” And it is true, because you have a clarity of purpose. We share that. For me, I’m interested in plays that talk about intimacy.LINNEY This was a time before cellphones, before the internet. Friendships were very deep. The effort that you would happily make to continue a relationship or a friendship! And the romance that went with not being able to have access to someone immediately.So once you’d signed on, what work has gone into building these characters?HECHT My approach is kind of internal. It’s really based on the language and how the story is working. It’s quite annoying.LINNEY No, not at all.HECHT I always worry that my technique annoys the other actors. Do you ever get that feeling? That this must be frustrating to the other person?LINNEY I love watching someone else’s process. How do you do this crazy thing that we do? Because we are all so different, it’s always exciting to see where the intersection is between the actor and the character. What is it that’s letting them in, bringing blood to the character? Like, where do they find their way in?I’m the daughter of a playwright. So I tend to be text-based. I try to listen to what the play is telling me to do. I work on it and work on it and work on it. Then there comes a period of time where it literally lifts up off the page and it becomes a three-dimensional living thing. Then it starts to work on me. It doesn’t always happen. But it’s exciting when it does.So who are these women? Who is Alice?HECHT Alice has a kind of impulsivity about relating to people and an attraction to different people. That excites me. I definitely was that person.And who’s Diana?HECHT She’s such a mystery. She’s so complicated.LINNEY There’s the question of who is she really and who does she think she is. There’s a big difference between the two. She wants to be an artist. It’s important to her. It’s more than a vocation. It’s a sacred pact. And she suffers terribly for it. She is uncompromising, she is opinionated. She is astute and perceptive and diagnostic. She also doesn’t really know who she is or what she needs or what she wants.Why is this friendship so intense?HECHT They both really feel that need to have somebody as a partner. With Alice, Diana teaches her so much.LINNEY They’re attracted to the qualities that they don’t have, but that the other person has in abundance. And there’s a sense of belonging to each other. There’s a sense of family, there’s a sense of chemistry. When you click with someone, it’s really powerful.HECHT Being friends with Diana is almost like having an affair, it changes Alice’s whole metabolism.LINNEY You’re chemically altered. And you’re spiritually rearranged.You’re about four weeks into rehearsal, what have you learned about the play?HECHT Yesterday we did our first run of the play without our books in hand. And it was so scary, but we got through.LINNEY We’re learning a lot. I don’t think any of us have pretensions that we have all the answers. Maybe that’s the one thing that shows how long we’ve been doing this. If you’re too knowing, there’s no room for growth.What’s the joy and terror of a two-hander, of having to rely so much on each other?LINNEY The joy is the intimacy and the bond and that you’re not alone up there. There’s a total interdependence. The biggest fear is that I won’t be able to help her if she gets into trouble.HECHT Yeah, that we would let the other person down.LINNEY The language is very difficult. We never stop talking. We’re going to mess up. We’re human beings. There’s just the fear that we will mess up in a way that derails the show.You both have spent a lot of your career on television. What keeps you returning to the theater?HECHT I feel very, very committed to our community. Being part of this community is definitely the biggest accomplishment of my professional life. I feel a tremendous amount of energy and human connection to the people I act with and the people I act for. Nothing else replicates that.LINNEY It’s a family profession. I have a history with it that goes beyond me. I also strongly believe that it is a part of public good. Theater provides a nourishment, intellectually and emotionally and spiritually, to audiences. And I love the ritual. There is a connection to the work that’s much deeper than anything you can do on television and film. Because we are doing it from beginning to end, eight shows a week.HECHT It is a religion. Someone said to me the other day, “Oh, that is my religion. Being in the theater.”LINNEY People ask me, “What church did you grow up in?” I’m like, “The theater.” Everything that’s important about life I’ve learned in the theater. More

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      With Cheers and Tears, ‘Phantom of the Opera’ Ends Record Broadway Run

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      The show’s record-breaking 35-year Broadway run came to an end on Sunday night. Its famous chandelier got a bow, and its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, spoke after its emotional final performance.“The Phantom of the Opera” concluded the longest run in Broadway history Sunday night with a glittery final performance at which even the production’s signature chandelier, which had just crashed onto the stage of the Majestic Theater for the 13,981st time, got its own curtain call.The invitation-only crowd was filled with Broadway lovers, including actors who had performed in the show over its 35-year run, as well as numerous other artists (including Lin-Manuel Miranda and Glenn Close) and fans who won a special ticket lottery. Some dressed in Phantom regalia; one man came dressed in the character’s sumptuous Red Death costume.The final performance, which ran from 5:22 to 7:56 p.m., was interrupted repeatedly by applause, not only for the main actors, but also for beloved props, including a monkey music box, and scenic elements such as a gondola being rowed through a candelabra-adorned underground lake. After the final curtain, the stagehands who made the show’s elaborate spectacle happen night after night, were invited onstage for a resounding round of applause.“It’s just amazing, really, what has happened,” the composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote the show’s soaring score, said after the final curtain, as he dedicated the performance to his son Nicholas, who died three weeks ago.Lloyd Webber spoke alongside his longtime collaborator and the show’s lead producer, Cameron Mackintosh. They invited alumni of the original Broadway production to join them onstage, and projected onto the theater’s back wall pictures of deceased members of the original creative team, including its director, Hal Prince, as well as every actor who played the two lead roles (the Phantom as well as Christine, the young soprano who is his obsession).Andrew Lloyd Webber, center left, with Cameron Mackintosh during the curtain speech at the Majestic Theater after the final performance of the musical “Phantom of the Opera.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesToward the end of the evening, Mackintosh acknowledged the one-ton chandelier, which was lowered from the ceiling to a round of applause, and the crowd was showered with gold and silver metallic confetti, some of which dangled in ribbons from the chandelier.Hours before the curtain, fans gathered across the street, waving and taking pictures and hoping somehow to score a spare ticket. Among them was Lexie Luhrs, 25, of Washington, in a Phantom get-up: black cape, homemade mask, plus fedora, vest and bow tie, as well as mask earrings and a mask necklace. “I’m here to celebrate the show that means so much to us,” Luhrs said.On Broadway “Phantom” was, obviously, enormously successful, playing to 20 million people and grossing $1.36 billion since its opening in January 1988. And the show has become an international phenomenon, playing in 17 languages in 45 countries and grossing more than $6 billion globally. But the Broadway run ultimately succumbed to the twin effects of inflation and dwindled tourism following the coronavirus pandemic shutdown.Carlton Moe, obscured, hugs Raquel Suarez Groen before they go on the red carpet. They are both cast members in the musicalSara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt closed on an unexpectedly high note — and not just the high E that Christine sings in the title song. As soon as the closing was announced last September, sales spiked, as those who already loved the musical flocked to see it, and procrastinators realized it could be their last chance; the original February closing date was delayed by two months to accommodate demand, and the show has once again become the highest-grossing on Broadway, playing to exuberant audiences, enjoying a burnished reputation, and bringing in more than $3 million a week.“For a show to go out this triumphantly is almost unheard-of,” said Mackintosh.Jaime Samson at the theater in a Red Death costume he made himself.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAfter the final performance, the show’s company and its alumni gathered for an invitation-only celebration at the Metropolitan Club, with the show’s iconic mask projected onto a wall next to a marble staircase.The show, with music by Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Charles Hart, is still running in London, where the orchestra size was cut and the set was altered during the pandemic shutdown to reduce running costs, and it is also currently running in the Czech Republic, Japan, South Korea and Sweden. New productions are scheduled to open in China next month, in Italy in July and in Spain in October.And will it ever return to New York? “Of course, at some point,” Mackintosh said in an interview. “But it is time for the show to have a rest.” More

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      ‘Phantom of the Opera’ Fans Mourn the Record-Breaking Show’s End

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      “The Phantom of the Opera,” the longest running show in Broadway history, will give its final performance on Sunday, bringing its glittering chandelier crashing down on the stage of the Majestic Theater for the 13,981st and final time.Its success was powered by all kinds of engines, perhaps none more striking than the group of die-hard patrons who call themselves Phans. They come from all over the world, drawn by its soaring Andrew Lloyd Webber score and Gothic love story, and have devoted themselves to the show, seeing it as often as possible, of course, but also collecting memorabilia, dressing up as characters, and conversing about it online.Frank Radice, a Long Island call center operator, proposed to his wife at a “Phantom” installation inside a Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, and Tracy O’Neill of Connecticut used the show’s “All I Ask of You” as her wedding song. Elizabeth Dellario, a New York City tech worker, named her cats Christine and Erik after characters in the show. Erin Castro, a Los Angeles office assistant, makes Lego figurines of the cast. Katie Yelinek, a Pennsylvania librarian who has seen it 69 times, said, “I can honestly say I’ve shaped my adult life around going to see Phantom.”So many Phans. Meet six:Body ArtAlice DychesAlice Dyches, a singer-songwriter who fell for “Phantom” while growing up in South Carolina, expresses her love for the show with tattoos. Lucia Buricelli for The New York TimesPlenty of Phans have “Phantom” tattoos, but Alice Dyches has gotten specific with hers. Inked on her wrist are the first three notes of “Think of Me,” a beloved song in the show, and her midriff shows an address for the Majestic Theater: “245 W 44th.”Growing up in South Carolina, she fell in love with the music by watching the film; when she was six, she saw it for the first time on Broadway, on a trip with her grandparents.“The Phantom was Hugh Panaro, and he terrified me, and I kept wanting to go back,” she said.Now Dyches, 22, is a singer-songwriter, living in New York and working at a cat sanctuary on the Lower East Side. Throughout the pandemic, she worried about whether “Phantom” would survive, but once it reopened, she felt reassured.“I’m real sad — I thought I had more time to see it,” she said. “I’ve not lived a life without ‘Phantom’ being on Broadway, and there’s always been the notion that if I’m having a really crap day, I can go.”And, with that address inscribed on her abdomen, she is wryly watching what happens next.“I hope something good goes into the Majestic,” she said, “because otherwise I’m going to be screwed.”Phan ArtWallace PhillipsWallace Phillips, who said he had seen “Phantom” 140 times, creates artworks inspired by the show, and dreams of making an animated film of the musical.Lucia Buricelli for The New York TimesWallace Phillips didn’t even know what “The Phantom of the Opera” was when he dressed as the Phantom one Halloween. He was 10 years old, growing up in Silver Spring, Md.; he just thought the costume was cool.His mother gave him a cast recording and then, in 2010, brought him and his sister to see the show on Broadway.“It was eye-opening, and awe-inspiring,” he said. “I was enthralled.”Phillips is now 27, living in New York City, where he moved to study animation at the School of Visual Arts. He’s making his way as a freelance filmmaker, while working as an usher at “Hamilton.”How much does he love “Phantom”? At last count, he had seen it 140 times.Phillips expresses his Phandom through his artistry — he hopes one day to make an animated film of the musical, and meanwhile, he does concept art and drawings, some of which he signs and gives to cast members.“Despite all the times I’ve seen it, I’m always surprised, every time I’m there,” he said. “That overture! That chandelier rising! The theater transforming! It keeps me awed every time.”The NamesakeChristine SmithChristine Smith, of Bountiful, Utah, was named after Christine Daaé, a character in “Phantom.”Taylor SmithShe became a Phan.Chrisitne SmithIn elementary school in Kaysville, Utah, Christine Smith had to write a paper about where her name came from. When she asked her mom, she learned that she had been named for Christine Daaé, the young soprano at the heart of “The Phantom of the Opera.”“I wrote that I was named after some dumb opera singer,” Smith recalled.Her father, who worked graveyard shifts stocking shelves in grocery stores, listened to “Phantom” to pass the time. She didn’t understand the appeal until she saw the movie.“I know it sounds silly, but I just could tell, that was going to be my life,” she said. “I really learned to love my name.”She picked up a cast album at Walmart, started performing in school shows, and dreamed of playing Christine. Her family couldn’t afford to travel to New York, but they made it to a production in Las Vegas, which she eventually saw six times.Smith, 31, who now lives in Bountiful, Utah, finally got to see it on Broadway — twice — after the show’s closing was announced. In October, she and her husband arranged a flight layover in New York so they could see “Phantom,” and then, in January, she won a contest to see its 35th anniversary performance.“It made my ‘Phantom’ heart so happy,” she said.The GlobetrotterAlessandro BertolottiAlessandro Bertolotti, who lives south of Milan, has seen “Phantom” all over the world.Alessandro BertolottiHe has programs in many languages.Alessandro BertolottiAlessandro Bertolotti, who lives in Codogno, a small town south of Milan, has seen “Phantom” roughly 100 times: not just on Broadway and in London’s West End, but also in Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Poland, Spain and Sweden.“The most memorable evenings are those where you feel an energy in the public — something created by a fusion between the audience and the cast,” he said. “And then there are shows, like the one in Sweden, where I really enjoyed seeing a completely new staging of ‘Phantom.’”Musical theater did not initially interest Bertolotti, 67. Opera was his thing — both as a fan and a director. But two decades ago, while in the United States to work on a production of “Otello,” Bertolotti saw “Phantom” on the recommendation of a colleague.“It was a revelation,” he said. “I was fascinated by the music, by the sets, and this vortex of costumes and fast scene changes.”He is planning this summer to see a version in Trieste — the first in his native Italy — that will star the Iranian-Canadian “Phantom” veteran Ramin Karimloo.“Among all the musicals I’ve seen, ‘Phantom’ will always be the most fascinating and the most engaging,” he said. “It’s part of me now.”Phandom FROM AFARYixuan WuYixuan Wu, who grew up in Changsha, China, watching a DVD of “Phantom,” has seen it on Broadway 61 times since she moved to New York in 2021. Lucia Buricelli for The New York TimesYixuan Wu was just 11 when she stumbled across a “Phantom” DVD in a video store. She was about as far from Broadway as can be — in her hometown, Changsha, China — but the packaging caught her eye, so she rented it.She watched it over and over, and nurtured her Phandom online, streaming bootleg recordings from around the world.“I just feel like this story was calling to me,” she said.Flash forward to 2021. Wu had finished art school in China, and moved to New York to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She bought a ticket at the TKTS booth in Times Square, and finally saw “Phantom” from the right rear orchestra.“I was amazed and surprised by all the colors onstage,” she said. “You have to see it with your own eyes.”Wu, 25, has now seen the show 61 times, sometimes with a $29 standing room ticket, sometimes by winning a lottery, and once in a while by springing for a full-price seat. She collects merch (including teddy bears from the Japanese production), writes fan fiction and makes fan art (illustrations of cast members, many of which she gives to them).“Every time I go into the Majestic,” she said, “I feel like I’m home.”CosplayingPatrick ComptonPatrick Compton had not heard the term “cosplay” when he first showed up at “Phantom” in a costume.Greg MillsHe performed a scene from “Phantom” for a fundraiser at his church in Frankfort, Ky.Charlie BaglanThe first time Patrick Compton dressed as the Phantom was at a church event. His congregation in his hometown, Frankfort, Ky., was raising money with an evening of scenes from Broadway shows, and he decided to sing something from the musical.Compton, a duty officer at Kentucky’s Division of Emergency Management, had loved “Phantom” since his parents took him to see it in Louisville, and this was his moment.In the years since, Compton, 47, has taken voice lessons, recorded his own versions of “Phantom” songs, taken a weeklong workshop with “Phantom” alums and auditioned for a number of shows. He has seen “Phantom” 20 times in New York, and five times on tour.He had never heard the word “cosplay” when he started showing up to the show wearing a mask, cape, vest and fedora — he just thought it was fun. Now he’s done it several times.“To this day I have yet to figure out how a show like that can just emotionally affect you — from the very first note of the overture, you get goose bumps, and your hair stands on end,” he said. “You can’t help it. It’s addictive.”Elisabetta Povoledo More

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      ‘The Phantom of the Opera’: Thinking of a Spectacle Fondly

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      As the longest-running musical in Broadway history closes, Times critics with a lasting affection for the show take stock of its legacy.With “The Phantom of the Opera” set to play its final performance on Sunday — yes, it’s actually happening — Broadway’s longest-running show, a spectacle in residence at the Majestic Theater since 1988, still resonates with fans. The closing date was delayed by eight weeks after a surge in ticket sales.Joshua Barone, the assistant classical music and dance editor and a contributing classical music critic, was joined by the critics Alexis Soloski and Elisabeth Vincentelli in a discussion about the show’s legacy. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.ALEXIS SOLOSKI I first saw “Phantom” in Los Angeles, at the Ahmanson Theater, sometime in the late ’80s during its first North American tour. My friends and I were obsessed. We wore the T-shirts, we wore out the cassettes, we watched every Michael Crawford movie. (He also did the “Phantom” tour.) When you’re a preteen girl just on the cusp of sexuality and sexuality seems a little scary, the idea of being in thrall to some powerful man is awfully compelling. That this genius is also a murderer with some very strong incel vibes didn’t occur to me till a lot later. It remains a foundational text for me — as a critic, as a woman — but one I’m wildly ambivalent about. I love it. I love the big feelings. I can sing (badly) every tortured line. But it’s rape apology with a fog machine.ELISABETH VINCENTELLI The first and only time I saw the show was on Broadway in May 2011. I had not paid much attention to it before but loved it so much that I seriously questioned my entire life before that: Why had it taken me so long, considering that the show checks a lot of my taste boxes — bombast, over-the-top melodrama, histrionics? What’s especially surprising about my late discovery is that I had actually read the 1910 novel it’s based on, by the French pulp-fiction auteur Gaston Leroux.JOSHUA BARONE I didn’t see “Phantom” until a high school trip to New York in the mid-2000s. By then, I had read the Leroux novel, heard the cast albums and seen the 2004 Joel Schumacher film adaptation. Unfortunately, I fell asleep at the show; I was tired from a long day of sightseeing. The spectacle didn’t quite reach me at the rear mezzanine, and I was asleep by the end of “The Music of the Night.” But I’ve since gone several times — with, for better or worse, increasing affection for it.SOLOSKI That’s the thing, right? It’s in terrible taste — histrionics all the way down — but it works.The chandelier in “Phantom” is emblematic of the mega-musicals that emerged in the same period, our critic writes: the “Miss Saigon” helicopter, the “Les Miz” revolve, the absolute commitment to spectacle.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times BARONE It works, I’d say, better than most shows of terrible taste and histrionics from its time. There is, for all its historical specificity — those synths! — timelessness in its subject matter and score. It’s solidly middlebrow, and that’s a large part of its appeal. Your best bet, should you find yourself in the audience, is to just sit back and surrender to it.SOLOSKI But that’s what the Phantom wants, Josh! Fight it!VINCENTELLI I was headbanging in my seat when I saw it. I distinctly remember cackling at the insanity of it all. I love when art throws any regard for logic, taste, story to the window and goes for broke. I was also stunned by the way the score integrates rock and electronics in a way that still feels bracing. The rock energy is indisputable.SOLOSKI It does have an undeniable pull. When I hear that synthesizer launch into that descending scale, I still get literal chills.VINCENTELLI Roger Waters of Pink Floyd thought Lloyd Webber had stolen from the 1971 Pink Floyd song “Echoes” and then dissed him in “It’s a Miracle”: “We cower in our shelters with our hands over our ears/Lloyd-Webber’s awful stuff runs for years and years and years.” I live for feuds like this.SOLOSKI That’s where the music lives, right? In some unholy space between prog rock and grand opera.BARONE That’s one of the reasons we get chills. “Phantom” is often derided as a product of the big-hair, Neo-Gilded Age days of Cameron Mackintosh’s Broadway, but I think it’s just as much an artifact of 1980s postmodernism. You hear Puccini’s lush orchestration and lyricism — literally, in the case of “The Music of the Night” quoting “La Fanciulla del West” — but also rock-pop, 18th-century opera buffa and what is clearly stylized melodrama.SOLOSKI And some really dumb ballads. “Think of Me.” Ugh.VINCENTELLI Lloyd Webber had approached Tom Stoppard and Jim Steinman as potential collaborators for “Phantom.” That says a lot. (I still want to see that show!)BARONE And don’t forget that Alan Jay Lerner, before he died, was on as the lyricist! Imagine that show — perhaps one in which the ballads wouldn’t have been as banal (“Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again,” yikes) as they are as written by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe.In the foreground, from left: the Broadway producer Cameron Mackintosh, Andrew Lloyd Webber and the director Hal Prince at the end of a 2006 performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSOLOSKI For me, the most perverse element is that Lloyd Webber began this show “because I was trying to write a major romantic story, and I had been trying to do that ever since I started my career. Then with the Phantom, it was there!” Let’s be clear: This. Is. Not. Romance. Even in the initial Times review, Frank Rich wrote that “Music of the Night” “proves as much a rape as a seduction.”BARONE One of the many dramaturgical question marks that hang over this show. But, strangely, that perversity is kind of what makes it an inheritor of the theatrical traditions it tries to emulate. And only because it is indebted to opera does it get away with as much as it does. Other composers — including him — have tried to copy the gothic romanticism of “Phantom,” but few have come close to his success. Opera is a medium that thrives in extremity, and Lloyd Webber follows that to a logical, undeniably entertaining degree. He found a cousin in “Sunset Boulevard,” in which he adopted a lavish Golden Age Hollywood sound in the score. But “The Woman in White”? The dead-on-arrival “Phantom” sequel “Love Never Dies”?VINCENTELLI Common wisdom has it that the show was trounced by critics when it opened, just like most mega-musicals are assumed to have been pilloried. But that’s not the case: Most of those shows have had at least mixed reviews, and most have earned tons of Tony Awards — regardless of what one thinks of the Tonys as critical arbiters, they do suggest a level of institutional and industry support. “Phantom” won seven Tonys, including best musical.SOLOSKI I think Rich was extremely fair-minded, acknowledging the deficits, and yet daring you not to enjoy it.BARONE Another favorite line from that review is, “If you don’t leave the theater humming the songs, you’ve got a hearing disability.”VINCENTELLI There was a really fascinating article in The Times in 1988 where people from the classical-music world weighed in on “Phantom.” William Bolcom, Frederica von Stade and Beverly Sills liked it a lot; Ned Rorem, not so much.BARONE Ned Rorem was witty as always, but I do think that to dismiss this music is to risk a kind of affected snobbery. It’s like saying Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky are too sentimental; in some ways that’s true, and you don’t see the same level of craft in their music as with some of their peers, but at the same time it has staying power simply because it continues to move audiences. SOLOSKI We’ve concentrated mostly on the music, but a lot of the power of “Phantom” is its visual splendor. I remember when we first saw it my mother sniffed that the Los Angeles audience applauded the set changes and chattered through the arias, but honestly, Maria Björnson’s sets and costumes are spectacular. Several of them were on display at the Museum of Broadway and the intricacy of the stitching and beading was glorious. I challenge anyone to watch “Masquerade” and not wallow in its excess.VINCENTELLI And at least they are genuinely exciting. I’ve seen people applaud massive, opulently appointed living-room sets at Manhattan Theater Club productions, and my reaction is “Oh, so we clap at Crate & Barrel showrooms now?” In his memoir, “Unmasked,” Lloyd Webber talks about how the sets actually are less grand than most people remember them. They are just very smartly designed.BARONE I was struck by this the last time I saw the show. The gilded proscenium masks — sorry to use that word — the fact that most of the scenic design is made from curtains. Draping black ones, ornately patterned ones with tassels, but curtains nevertheless.SOLOSKI Should we talk about the chandelier?BARONE Lot 666.SOLOSKI It falls … slowly, but it is definitive of the mega-musicals of this period, the “Miss Saigon” helicopter, the “Les Miz” revolve, the absolute commitment to spectacle. Spectacle gets a bad rap, but I wish more shows had the commitments and the budgets to deliver extravaganzas like these.Top 200 Broadway Shows by All-Time Sales More

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      Review: In a Sorkinized ‘Camelot,’ That’s How Conditions Are. Alas.

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      A revival of the 1960 musical with the famously great score and infamously bad book gets a gorgeous makeover that makes no difference.About 30 minutes into its 90-minute first act, the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “Camelot” finally wakes up, as if from a pleasant drowse. That’s when Jordan Donica, as Lancelot, who has arrived in England to join King Arthur’s Round Table, tears into the boastful “C’est Moi” like a lion ripping huge bites of dramatic flesh with his teeth.And then, apparently sated, the show, which opened Thursday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, goes back to sleep for another spell, as if this were “Brigadoon.”If only it were! But “Camelot,” the 1960 Lerner and Loewe musical based on T.H. White’s Arthurian tales, has what you might call a post-operetta problem. Neither content to be agreeable piffle nor ready to be Sondheimesque psychodrama, it aims for a middle path, welding Arthur’s romantic life with a free-spirited queen to his rethinking of governance with a recalcitrant gentry. Both fail, as does the show, in a way that “Brigadoon,” the team’s 1947 hit, aiming lower, does not.In “Camelot,” the clever, lightweight style of Lerner’s dialogue, and the show-off triple rhymes of his lyrics, clash with his ambition. They make Loewe’s profoundly polished music, in songs like “I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight?” and “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood,” which open the show, come off as charming tea party tunes. Only in flashes does the “serious” part recover, but by then it’s too late. After Lancelot finishes “C’est Moi,” the story goes back to bed for 40 minutes, at last reawakening to the clangs of a thrilling sword fight.Burnap, left, fighting Jordan Donica as Lancelot. Aaron Sorkin could not solve the riddle of the love triangle connecting Guenevere to the boyish Arthur on one side and the hunky Lancelot on the other, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s not a problem a rewrite could readily solve, or at any rate it’s not one that Aaron Sorkin did. His revisions for the director Bartlett Sher’s spare-no-expense production — visually and sonically gorgeous — do make some improvements. The silly supernatural subplots have been excised (along with a beautiful song, “Follow Me”) and Guenevere, Arthur’s involuntary queen, has been strengthened with snappy backtalk. She’s now a kind of medieval Katharine Hepburn.But Sorkin cannot solve the riddle of the love triangle connecting Guenevere (Phillipa Soo) to the boyish Arthur (Andrew Burnap) on one side and the hunky Lancelot on the other. The riddle is: When is a triangle a flat line? Because only by rigging up questions of fidelity that make everyone look silly does Lerner’s plot engine turn over at all. Is Arthur still in love with the sorceress Morgan Le Fey, a woman he hasn’t seen since he was 15? Does Guenevere desire Lancelot? Who doesn’t? And why, in any case, should we care?Sorkin tries to shore up Lerner’s droopy stories by rooting the personal conflict in the political and social experiments of the time — or of some time, anyway. The new book, which is set on “the eve of the Enlightenment,” even though that was about a millennium post-Arthur, is not fussy about period. Indeed, it winks at its muddled chronology: “The Middle Ages won’t end by itself,” Arthur says, as if he knew he were middling.The historical backfill is present in White’s and Lerner’s versions, too: The idea of changing a culture of violence to one of justice is at the heart of the story. (It’s the reason Arthur convenes his knights.) The problem is that the musical doesn’t musicalize that, which is why after an hour of brittleness you desperately need the sword fight. (The fight director, still full of surprises, is the great B.H. Barry.) Even the title number, which Sorkin has Guenevere call “that stupid song about the weather,” praises the Camelot revolution in purely sybaritic terms. “The rain may never fall till after sundown” sounds like a boast on Airbnb.Lacking songs to support them, Sorkin’s historical enhancements fall flat. Particularly unconvincing is his sidebar on the evolution of magic into science, with Merlyn (Dakin Matthews, excellent) now a sage, not a wizard, and Morgan (Marilee Talkington) some kind of chemist. (Let’s not even get into Mordred, the mortifying Plot Necessity played by Taylor Trensch.) Forced to maintain the Lerner framework, he can neither justify the romantic story on modern terms nor distract from it in ways that make musical sense.The romance at least gives the principals something to do besides spouting ideas, and gives the audience, especially with Lancelot, something to hear. (After “C’est Moi,” he sings the almost-too-rich “If Ever I Would Leave You” and “I Loved You Once in Silence.”) And though Guenevere mostly gets the tea party numbers, delivered creamily, and Arthur (perhaps in deference to the vocal talents of the role’s originator, Richard Burton) gets almost nothing, both are appealing and play the West Wing of the Castle banter beautifully.Not that there’s a castle. In this, his fifth Golden Age musical revival, and fourth for Lincoln Center Theater, Sher has changed his visual approach. Not so much the costumes, by Jennifer Moeller, which are just as stunning as ever; if you wear velvet gowns or quilted tabards, you’ll want to collect them all. But instead of scenic coups like the orchestra reveal in “South Pacific” and the 52-foot ship in “The King and I,” the set designer Michael Yeargan, the lighting designer Lap Chi Chu and the projection designers at 59 Productions have pared everything to a few basic elements: arches, screens, snow, branches, shadows and “Seventh Seal” silhouettes.From left, Danny Wolohan, Anthony Michael Lopez, Soo and Fergie Philippe. The costumes, by Jennifer Moeller, are just as stunning as ever.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith so little furniture onstage, Sher, incapable of not making pretty pictures, keeps everyone moving busily; if the story refuses to make a triangle, he’ll compensate with dozens in his blocking. However fascinating that is to watch, the result feels abstract and analytical, of a piece with Byron Easley’s dainty choreography and, not to harp on them, Lerner’s lyrics. For “My Fair Lady” Lerner was able to find words that expressed character and period; in “Camelot” (with no underlying Shaw play to assist) he finds words that mostly express himself, on the bubble of the 1960s, sophisticated and dry.That is not, however, what you hear coming from the pit, where, under Kimberly Grigsby’s baton, 30 musicians play the original orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett and Philip J. Lang. Their superb characterization of the story in pure sound makes you feel what the show onstage doesn’t.It may also make you feel a bit sad. What’s to be done with such beautiful work, wedded to such intractable problems? How many more Golden Age musicals can Sher and Lincoln Center Theater lavish their love on before the project turns into Encores! with elephantiasis? Is Kelli O’Hara in “Flahooley” next?Well, to be honest, I’d be there for that. But “Camelot” is a show promoted above its station because of its music and Kennedy-era associations. Neither, it seems, is sufficient today. When Arthur reports, in “How to Handle a Woman,” that the answer is simply to “love her, love her, love her,” you can’t help thinking Lerner is not in his wheelhouse. (He married eight times.) Love, with both people and musicals, isn’t enough when the differences are irreconcilable.CamelotAt the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      Review: Skewering Masculinity, in a Hot and Sizzling ‘Fat Ham’

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      A modern gloss on “Hamlet” set at a backyard barbecue remakes the tragedy as a comedy, and as a challenge for today.What might life be like if we chose pleasure over harm?So a young man wonders near the end of “Fat Ham,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by James Ijames that opened on Broadway on Wednesday, at the American Airlines Theater. Keep in mind that the young man, Tio, is stoned to the gills when he dreams this philosophy.Still, in his world as in our own, the question of harm, and self-harm, is a serious one. You might even say it’s a classic, having found its most famous expression four centuries ago in “Hamlet,” without benefit (as far as we know) of weed.If Tio is a gloss on that play’s Horatio — a loyal, hearty friend to the main character — he’s also a transformation of the template for today: laid-back and open to anything. In his dream, he says, he’s been pleasured by a gingerbread man, even though he usually prefers the “gingerbread ladies.”In the same way, “Fat Ham” is a gloss on “Hamlet” — and the best kind of challenge to it, asking the same questions but coming up with different answers. That it is a raucous domestic comedy instead of a palace blood bath (and in Saheem Ali’s production, a nonstop pleasure in itself) means that despite the enduring belligerence of mankind, and especially of men, it sees a way out.That way out is softness. The Hamlet figure, Juicy (Marcel Spears), is a “thicc” Black mama’s boy ambivalently mourning the murder of his father and suffering from what Tio (Chris Herbie Holland) diagnoses as inherited trauma. “Your Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail and what’s before that?” he asks. “Slavery.”But Juicy’s melancholy has a more immediate source. Within a week of the death of his father, called Pap, his mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), has remarried — and to no less a bully than Pap’s brother, Rev. On the day of the wedding, Pap’s ghost arrives, under a gingham tablecloth, to pin the crime on Rev and spur Juicy to revenge. (Both Pap and Rev are played by Billy Eugene Jones.) Yet whether considering murder or suicide, Juicy, like Hamlet, waffles.You don’t need to make any of those “Hamlet” connections to enjoy “Fat Ham,” because the parallels are not as telling as the divergences.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKilling is not news to this crowd: Pap was in jail for shanking a cook at the family’s barbecue restaurant. And Rev struts his dominance during a backyard party at which the play’s action takes place by stoking the smoker with fresh hunks of pig. He doesn’t treat his nephew, now stepson, much better. “You pansy,” he calls Juicy, who thinks of himself as an empath. “Girly ass puddle of spit.” He then makes Tedra explain how they’ve spent his online-college tuition on a bathroom makeover.“Fat Ham” is certainly clever in its parallels with “Hamlet”: The barbecue is a neat translation of the “funeral baked meats” with which Gertrude and her new husband “did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” The melancholy prince’s ploy to prove Rev’s guilt is no longer a play wherein to “catch the conscience of the king” but a game of charades. Sententious Polonius is now a church lady, Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas); her children are Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) and Larry (Calvin Leon Smith) instead of Ophelia and Laertes.But you don’t need to make any of those “Hamlet” connections to enjoy “Fat Ham,” because the parallels are not as telling as the divergences. It is in the relationship between Larry and Juicy that Ijames most directly and movingly addresses the cycles of male violence, seeing in the damage done to individuals the disasters of the world.In that sense, it’s telling that Larry is a Marine, living at attention, possibly suffering from post-traumatic stress. His dialogue is mostly obedient monosyllables until it flowers with feeling when talking to Juicy. Though their scenes of aching tenderness do lead to a physical confrontation — “Fat Ham” is based on a tragedy, after all — it is no fatal sword fight; they both discover that confrontation can be a means of breaking open, not just breaking.And so it goes with Juicy and Tedra, Opal and Rabby, Tio and the gingerbread man. All must learn to accept love as offered, not as imagined, and to reject love, like Rev’s, that is not really love.That “Fat Ham” achieves its happy, even joyful, ending honestly, without denying the weight of forces that make “Hamlet” feel just as honest, is a sign of how capacious and original the writing is, growing the skin of its own necessity instead of merely burrowing into Shakespeare’s. It’s also a sign of how beautifully the cast brings the writing to life.It is in the relationship between Larry and Juicy that Ijames most directly addresses the cycles of male violence, seeing in the damage done to individuals the disasters of the world, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEveryone is excellent, and Thomas’s loud-lady-in-the-pew-behind-you routine is flat-out hilarious. But Spears, with his minute calibrations of feyness and fierceness, holds the whole thing together. In his scenes with Crawford, especially one in which Tedra pleads with Juicy to hold it together — “you don’t get to go crazy” — he lets us see how a character creates and re-creates himself in real time.Despite its wit and speed, Ali’s beautifully contoured staging leaves plenty of room for such quiet, profound moments. It’s a wider-spectrum account and bigger, too, than the film version produced by the Wilma Theater in 2021 and the stage premiere at the Public Theater last year.By bigger I don’t just mean Maruti Evans’s Broadway-size set, with its Broadway-size surprises, or the — really, must we? — confetti cannon at the end. (At least what it shoots is the opposite of artillery.) The performances, too, are bigger, their frank acknowledgment of the audience more sustained and more integral.For we are also part of this story. Not just when Juicy soliloquizes across the proscenium or Tedra casts us some side-eye. It takes more than seven fictional characters to choose pleasure over harm in a way that’s meaningful beyond a play — though it helps that no one in “Fat Ham” dies an unnatural death. (In “Hamlet,” almost everyone does.) If we’re to rethink masculinity after centuries of experiencing it as a call to arms, we need to witness what that might look like.For me, seeing “Fat Ham,” even multiple times, thus remains a revelation and a balm. It does one of the most important things we ask of theater: to rehearse, as many times as necessary, better ways to be — instead of choosing not to.Fat HamThrough Aug. 6 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; fathambroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Ariana DeBose to Return as Tony Awards Host This Year

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      The annual ceremony, honoring Broadway plays and musicals, is to take place June 11 at the United Palace in Washington Heights.Ariana DeBose, whose exuberant embrace of song and dance enlivened last year’s Tony Awards, will return to host the annual ceremony this spring.DeBose, who in 2022 won an Academy Award for her performance in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” remake, appeared in six Broadway shows between 2012 and 2018, and was nominated for a Tony Award as one of three actresses playing Donna Summer in the jukebox musical “Summer.” She is currently featured in “Schmigadoon!,” a streaming musical comedy series on Apple TV+, and she has several upcoming films.Earlier this year, she sang the opening number at the BAFTA Awards, and a rapped section paying tribute to female movie stars was mocked and memed for a hot second. DeBose, who is 32, seems to have taken it in stride — in London earlier this month, she turned the kerfuffle into merch that raised money for charity, and last weekend she performed at Lincoln Center.This year’s awards ceremony will for the first time take place at the United Palace, a large theater in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. The ceremony, which is presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, honors plays and musicals staged on Broadway; it is scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, June 11, and to be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.This season’s Tony nominees are to be announced on May 2. More

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      In ‘Prima Facie,’ Jodie Comer Finds Her Light

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      The one-woman show, coming to Broadway, is the “Killing Eve” star’s first stage role. She dared herself to do it.Until last year, the actress Jodie Comer had never performed onstage. Comer, 30, a native of Liverpool, England, who began her career as a teenager, hadn’t gone to drama school. She hadn’t studied voice or movement. Her comfort was in the close-up, the medium shot. She knew how to make her face still and her voice quiet, and to let the camera do the rest. The theater directors she auditioned for didn’t trust that she could fill a stage.“It kind of felt unattainable,” she said.But she is filling one now. On Broadway, at the John Golden Theater on West 45th Street, her face is emblazoned above the marquee, twice. The art for the Olivier Award-winning “Prima Facie” — an intimate and harrowing monodrama about a woman contending with the fallout of a sexual assault — shows Comer bathed in pink tones, serene, in a barrister’s wig, her eyes closed; it also shows her washed in blue, screaming. Opening on April 23, the play, which Comer first performed in London last year, runs 100 minutes. She is alone onstage for all of them. It’s the theatrical equivalent of being shoved down a mountain the first time you put on skis, or off a high dive before you have even learned to swim.Comer put it a little differently. “I pushed myself,” she said.This was on a Sunday morning in late March, at an out-of-the way table at a West Village cafe. Comer, buoyed by the London-to-New York time change, had arrived early, chipper and casual in jeans and a fisherman’s sweater. (Casual, but not entirely anonymous: The reservation was in my name, yet a waiter had already brought a plate of complimentary pastries.) A plastic clip held her hair away from her face.About that face: Comer has wide-set eyes, full lips and an impossible milk-and-roses complexion. She looks like a Botticelli goddess who has stepped out of the canvas and into some cute ankle boots. And yet, if you have seen her previous work — the action comedy “Free Guy,” the action drama “The Last Duel,” the crusading BBC film “Help” and, most significantly, the queer assassin fever dream “Killing Eve” — you will know that her beauty is usually the least interesting thing about her. That prettiness is a mask she can remove at will, exposing something weirder, spikier, wilder beneath.A theatrical debut and an endurance test: Comer is alone onstage for the full 100-minute run of “Prima Facie.”Helen Murray“It’s like Jodie didn’t get the memo that she is staggeringly beautiful,” Shawn Levy, who directed “Free Guy,” told me. “Jodie is uninterested in relying on her physical appearance.”Unlike many beautiful actresses, Comer has mostly avoided wife, girlfriend and love-interest parts — and their inherent limitations. “From early on, my characters were quite nuanced or multifaceted,” she said. “I was probably very lucky that that’s where I started. Once people see you in that light, they latch on to that.”At the cafe, the morning sun showed her as friendly, unassuming almost, until she began to speak about her work. Then, behind those wide eyes, something like lightning flashed.“Jodie is extraordinarily powerful,” Shannon Murphy, a director who worked closely with her on “Killing Eve,” told me. “People aren’t just going to cast her as the girl next door. Because it’s a waste.”And yet, the role that Comer plays in “Prima Facie” is very much a girl next door, which lends the show much of its heartbreak and force. Written by Suzie Miller, an Australian attorney turned playwright, and directed by Justin Martin (“The Jungle”), also Australian, “Prima Facie” centers on Tessa Ensler, a promising barrister who has transcended her working-class origins and accent. When she finds herself the victim of a sexual assault, a crime whose accused perpetrators she had often defended, Tessa’s poise and selfhood collapse. In this play, the reality and violence of the assault is never in doubt. That it should happen to a woman like Comer’s Tessa — so pretty, so assertive, so canny — means that it could happen to anyone.“Prima Facie” debuted in Sydney in 2019, starring the Australian actress Sheridan Harbridge. When Miller and Martin knew that they wanted to take it to London, they began throwing around the names of English actresses. Martin suggested Comer. Miller said no. She had seen Comer on “Killing Eve,” as the mercurial assassin Villanelle, who is Russian-born and Russian-accented. Comer’s Emmy Award-winning command of the role was so absolute that Miller assumed that Comer was actually Russian. Once Martin gently corrected her, a script was sent.It reached Comer early in Britain’s lockdown, in Liverpool, where she was living with her parents. It spoke to her directly, and at volume. She had several friends who had undergone versions of Tessa’s experience. And the professional challenge was as serious as it was undeniable.“I was so fearful of it. I knew if I said no to it, it would be purely because of that,” Comer said. “But there was a part of myself deep down that believed I could do it, and I was interested in how I was going to get to that point.”That fear powered her initial approach to the role. “She gets scared,” Martin said. “But her way of dealing with it is to throw herself into it.”Comer as the assassin Villanelle with Sandra Oh in BBC’s “Killing Eve.” “People aren’t just going to cast her as the girl next door,” said Shannon Murphy, a director who worked closely with Comer on the show.BBC AmericaComer discovered theater in her teens. “I got into it because I enjoyed it. It made me happy. I don’t think that’s ever changed,” she said. A teacher put her forward for a radio drama, which led to an agent and to occasional television appearances. After graduation, she worked at a supermarket checkout and at a bar to make ends meet. Her idea of luxury was being able to make a living from acting only. Her first major break came seven years ago, when she was cast as the lead in “Thirteen,” a BBC drama about a woman who escapes from long captivity. Even then, Comer couldn’t land a stage role.But the recognition that “Killing Eve” brought changed all that. For Martin and for James Bierman, lead producer on “Prima Facie,” her lack of theater experience was never a problem. They offered her the resources — voice lessons, movement sessions — and the rehearsal time that she would need.Comer has always been an intuitive actor. The challenge, she found, was to take that intuition and extend it outward so that it reached the last row of the balcony. “Like, how do I emote from the top of my head to the tip of my toes?” she said.Rehearsals, which began early in 2022, were rigorous, as was Comer’s research. She spoke to barristers, to police officers, to a high-court judge. She visited a police station and attended a hearing. She had herself fitted for a wig. What would a woman like Tessa wear, she wanted to know. What would she eat? How would she sit, stand and speak? In watching some of the women barristers at work, Comer felt an immediate connection.“There were elements of it that felt like theater: the costumes, the cues, the rehearsal of the lines,” she said.The challenge in translating her instincts for TV acting, Comer found, was to extend them outward so that they reached the last row of the balcony. “Like, how do I emote from the top of my head to the tip of my toes?” she said.Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesTelevision and film sets provide elaborate, realistic environments. Especially if the projects are shot on location. Theater is a more symbolic space, a conjuration of lights and plywood, which offered Comer a kind of freedom. In that glow, she could experiment, she could play. “What theater really sparked in me was that curiosity and sense of imagination,” she said with all the eagerness of a recent convert. Onstage there was no armor, no safety, no ability to stop and take it again, particularly in the scene in which Comer, alone on the floor of the stage, depicts the assault.Miller was convinced, even during rehearsals. “She is magnificent onstage; she’s a theater animal,” she said of Comer on a recent video call. “She’s the character. She’s there.”But after years of performing on television and film, Comer hadn’t known how a live audience would respond. Her anxiety remained up until the first curtain and perhaps even after. “I was actually quite consumed by fear,” she said. “I didn’t really come up for air.”She recalled that, toward the end of the first preview in London, she heard a woman in the orchestra crying. “It was the most guttural cry,” Comer said. “It spread around the theater. It was like the audience were giving each other this unspoken permission to feel whatever was coming up for them.”Stephen Graham, an actor who worked with a teenage Comer on “Good Cop” and then again on “Help,” saw “Prima Facie” in London and wept through it, admiring “the beauty and the subtlety and the nuance and the craftsmanship that went into that performance,” he said.I didn’t see it in London, but I watched it a few weeks ago, on video, via a National Theater Live performance capture. Her craftsmanship was apparent from the first few minutes. Look at Comer in a robe, I thought to myself. Look how good she is. Then the character seemed to take her over. Absorbed in the story, I forgot about Comer, forgot about her beauty, and thought only of Tessa.Miller had noticed this, too. “You don’t look at her and go, ‘There’s a beautiful woman crying.’ You go, ‘There’s a devastated woman crying,’” she said.Over breakfast, Comer had said that despite her leading lady facade, she understands herself as a character actress, someone who wants to disappear into a part, even though or especially because she can’t even disappear into a Village cafe. “I’d love to get to a point where I play a role where I don’t recognize myself,” she said.“Prima Facie” began as a personal challenge, a dare almost. Could she manage alone onstage for all that time? Could she pull off the scene changes and the radical shifts in emotion? But it has become about something more.Women waited for her at the stage door every night in London, telling her that their experiences mirrored Tessa’s or that they were considering careers in law to support women like her. By vanishing into Tessa, she has given these women a way to recognize themselves. That image near the marquee? It’s her face, doubly exposed, but it’s also a mosaic composed of photos of women who submitted their pictures and stories. That’s what Comer wants: to feel part of something bigger than herself, to feel some greater purpose is working through her.“It’s those moments where you step out of your way when you feel the most fulfilled,” she said. More