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Review: In ‘Only Gold,’ Each Move Is Worth 1,000 Words
The new Kate Nash dance musical, choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler, is spectacular as long as you pay no attention to what it’s saying.The cutesy Frenchness of “Only Gold,” a dance-musical hybrid directed and choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler, begins even before the lights go up. (The preshow announcement is winkingly bilingual.) But it really moves into overdrive when Kate Nash, the English singer-songwriter who provided the music and lyrics, arrives onstage and says: “Paris. 1928. A time when rules were ready to be broken.” A show that starts that way should come with a content warning: These clichés may hurt your teeth.The upside of “Only Gold,” which opened on Monday at MCC Theater, is that it is so pretty to look at, and so musically dreamy, you can mostly tune out the words. Nash’s are hard to decipher anyway; because rhyme and scansion aren’t her thing, the ear gets no help. In the song “Misery,” for instance, the line “I will never leave you behind” is repeatedly misaccented to make the last word sound like a synonym for “derrière.” It’s an odd sentiment that way.As for the spoken words — the book is by Blankenbuehler and Ted Malawer — they have the skeletal feebleness of a fable, except when occasionally larded with triple-crème tropes like “listening to your heart,” Paris “working her charm” and “magic in the cobblestones.”Because “Only Gold” is in fact a fable — its title apparently drawn from the Tennyson line “love is the only gold” — you may not mind that. What sort of language would you suggest for a story about the arrival in Paris of the royal family of Cosimo? To that inevitable city King Belenus (Terrence Mann) drags Queen Roksana (Karine Plantadit) to prepare for the wedding of their daughter, Tooba, pronounced like the brass instrument and portrayed by Gaby Diaz. I believe the characters’ names were generated by a malfunctioning anagram app.In any case, the parents’ marriage has turned cold over the years, and Tooba’s incipient one to a douchey count (Tyler Hanes) might as well come with a sign saying “Not Gonna Happen.” Within minutes of Tooba’s arrival, she’s out on the town in her underwear, buying out Cartier and Chanel and locating a bellhop (Ryan Steele) who will make a suitably inappropriate substitute fiancé.Hannah Cruz, standing at center; Plantadit and Terrence Mann, seated foreground; and Kate Nash, right.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTiresomely, each of these characters has a lesson to learn. (Well, not the douche; he’s the disposable kind.) Belenus’s is to stop being such a royal pain, especially to Roksana, whom he has hurt in some way we are not privileged to learn. To rekindle their love, he commissions a humble watchmaker (Ryan VanDenBoom) to create a bejeweled peace necklace; Roksana’s lesson is to accept it. And when the watchmaker’s fame as a royal provisioner drives a wedge between him and his frustrated wife (Hannah Cruz), even they must learn something — I’m not sure what, but it involves a piano.At least Tooba’s assignment is clear: to stand up for herself as a woman wearing dainties in public. No man will tell her what to do! — except Blankenbuehler, who has given her some terrific dances. In one of them, to the song “Mouthwash” from Nash’s 2007 debut album, she stomps out her feelings of thwarted privilege better than anything the book itself can muster, while the bellhop alternately supports her ferocity and waits out her tantrum. Diaz and Steele are thrilling.But then all the dancing is thrilling; perhaps it’s the magic in the cobblestones. And if it comes as no surprise that Blankenbuehler, the choreographer of “Hamilton,” can assemble eye-catching sequences into long narrative arcs, it’s nice to see him working with a full cast of dancers, not just an ensemble. Well, maybe not a full cast. Nash mostly just walks around or sits at the piano, singing tartly while others push it around like a tea cart; Mann doesn’t dance much, either, but his posture tells his story.The sensational Plantadit more than compensates. Showing off her line and power with every move she makes, she reminds you of the shows she did with Twyla Tharp: “Movin’ Out,” in 2002, and “Come Fly Away,” in 2010. “Only Gold” sometimes achieves their kind of thrust and physical splendor.It’s also splendid to look at, with the Art Nouveau swirls of David Korins’s set lit in rich purples and pinks by Jeff Croiter. Anita Yavich’s costumes, nodding to the period but also shredding it, are spectacular. The cast sings prettily, too.Ryan Steele and Gaby Diaz, with Kate Nash at the piano, are thrilling in the show, our critic writes.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWhether the prettiness outweighs the silliness will involve a personal calculus. For me, the hybridization of dance and musical theater is problematic, as it all but dares you to find one or the other set of genes defective in the resultant offspring. Had “Only Gold” been merely an evening of choreography set to songs, I would have gotten no less from it, even if Nash’s lyrics kept drawing my attention in the wrong direction. Some of the numbers, especially those from her back catalog, have an entirely mystifying relationship to the story, or to any story.But her music, with its funky accents and faux baroque curlicues on a girl-pop foundation, was evidently inspirational for Blankenbuehler. As he recently told Elisabeth Vincentelli in The Times, he thrives on syncopation and (in both senses of the word, I think) the offbeat.It’s a devil’s bargain: If you want the music, you’re pretty much forced to take the words. In “Movin’ Out” (with the words of Billy Joel) and “Come Fly Away” (with the words of Sinatra hits) that isn’t fatally awkward; the shows, essentially dance revues, use the lyrics for mood and just a suggestion of plot. Crucially, neither has much, if any, dialogue, because once you have dialogue you have a fight on your hands, or rather your feet. The two means of delivering information can’t help but squabble for primacy.When it’s a fair fight, so much the better — see “West Side Story,” or “Hamilton” for that matter. But in “Only Gold” the simplistic story and trite dialogue drag the dancing down. Perhaps the authors spent too much time listening to their hearts and not enough to organs higher and lower.Only GoldThrough Nov. 27 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More
- in Theater
‘My Broken Language’ Review: Piecing Together a Life of Many Dialects
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Review: In ‘Where the Mountain Meets the Sea,’ Missed Connections
A father and a son recall parallel journeys that reflect shared experiences of otherness in Jeff Augustin’s play, performed with music by the Bengsons.Migration doesn’t necessarily have a set endpoint. Looking for belonging in an unfamiliar place, and lingering over memories of what’s been left behind, can result in a perpetually itinerant state of mind. For the Haitian schoolteacher who legally gains passage to the United States in “Where the Mountain Meets the Sea,” that means giving up a fulfilling vocation to handle strangers’ baggage at the Miami airport while hoping to find love and start a family.It’s evident that Jean (played with an almost childlike wonder by Billy Eugene Jones) gets his wish, because he’s joined onstage by his son, Jonah (Chris Myers), who has moved across the country to study linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles — another act of flight toward the unknown. Set apart in time and place, father and son each carry a microphone and address the audience in alternating confessional monologues. In Jonah’s present, Jean is already dead, his ashes waiting to be retrieved and spread. Jonah intends to retrace in reverse a road trip his parents took from Florida to California when his mother was pregnant, to experience America as they did and perhaps understand something about his roots.Myers, foreground, with the Bengsons, far left, and Jones, far right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a bit of cross-pollination, that heritage includes folk music from the American South, or what Jean calls “mountain music,” which offered him echoes of Haiti and became a conduit for both the melancholy and joy of his adventures in displacement. This part-concert-style staging of Jeff Augustin’s play, a Manhattan Theater Club production that opened on Wednesday at New York City Center, is performed with music by Abigail and Shaun Bengson, a husband-and-wife duo known as the Bengsons whose musical setup on the blond-wood, semicircular set (by Arnulfo Maldonado) includes acoustic banjo and guitar. Their mournful, evocative songs — about longing, loss and unresolved feelings — are interspersed throughout the men’s recollections, punching up the emotional tenor.Father and son recall parallel journeys that reflect shared experiences of otherness and their psychic separation. Jean remarks on moments of alienation he experienced as a Black immigrant, and Jonah points to those he encounters as a Black gay man. Both relay their histories by way of past lovers, an illustration of mutual appetites. But the depth of their characterizations are unevenly balanced, and the play is considerably more insightful about the psychology of its immigrant father than of his queer son. While Jean’s talk of lost loves tends to reveal more about who he is and what he wants, Jonah’s descriptions of conquests linger on surface details — a ginger daddy’s Haitian-blue eyes, a Nigerian’s lean muscular arms — that tend to deflect attention away from their observer. In performance, too, Jones lends Jean a warm and wistful soul-searching quality, while Myers’s more mannered take keeps Jonah at a distance.Under the direction of Joshua Kahan Brody, “Where the Mountain Meets the Sea” feels like a kind of formal experiment, combining spoken text, live music and, occasionally, freestyle movement to capture the nomadic experience of building a life without a homeland. The 80-minute show is most poignant when these elements work in concert rather than run alongside each other, as when Myers and Shaun Bengson (stepping in as a guy Jonah meets on the road) engage in a loose-limbed dance-off, or when Jones’s Jean sings a forlorn refrain. But at other times, the connective thread between the show’s different modes of performance feel tenuous and less than fully realized.That formal fragmentation, and the fact that Jean and Jonah don’t directly interact, highlights the ache and frustration of their estrangement. But at least some of that frustration may be passed along to the audience, particularly since Jonah’s interior life remains elusive even as he assumes a kind of dishy posture. The plainest glimpse we get into what he wants comes from sentiments that his father regrets leaving unspoken — that his son is smart, beautiful and enough — the kind of obvious wish fulfillment it would be tough to begrudge anyone, even a relative stranger.Where the Mountain Meets the SeaThrough Nov. 27 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More
- in Theater
How Her Ancestors Reignited Her Return to Theater
Quiara Alegría Hudes is back with a new work, an Off Broadway production of “My Broken Language,” adapted from her 2021 memoir.In 2018, the playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes announced that she would be taking a pause from the theater. The art form she loved so much had become a source of heartbreak: She was tired of the industry’s lack of cultural diversity, the disinterest those in power had in changing the status quo and the anxiety she felt leading up to opening night (the unexpected hiccups, the uncertainty of how a work would be received by critics and audience members).When it came to producing works by playwrights of color, she began to feel as if her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Water by the Spoonful,” about a Puerto Rican war veteran recently returned from Iraq, and “In the Heights,” her Tony-winning musical with Lin-Manuel Miranda, were exceptions more often than the rule. During the 2018-2019 season, for example, only three writers of color had their work produced on Broadway.In order to heal, Hudes went on an inner retreat. Turning to her memories, she sought out the people who taught her how to tend to her body and spirit. This soulful journey resulted in “My Broken Language,” an impressionistic coming-of-age memoir published in 2021 that detailed the shame she felt over being fluent in her Jewish father’s native English, but not her Puerto Rican mother’s Spanish. It was that same sense of incompleteness that led her to take a break from the theater.While recording the audiobook, Hudes noted her prose sometimes had the rhythm of a monologue. “It was the one-woman play,” she said. That realization, combined with her wanting to step up as a community leader, ignited her desire to return to theater — despite the heartbreak. “Let me get some real bodies and spirits on this,” she recalled thinking during our video chat. Now, Hudes’s stage adaptation of her book, also called “My Broken Language,” is running at Signature Theater through Nov. 27.From left, Samora la Perdida (seated), Zabryna Guevara, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Yani Marin and Marilyn Torres in “My Broken Language.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesOnstage, she is embodied by five people, including one of her frequent collaborators, Daphne Rubin-Vega, all of whom play different shades of the author. Hudes, now 45, had moments of not recognizing the person on the page. She made peace with it by realizing, “it was all the identities of mine, but it was also all the identities of all the women who raised me and who I love.” “My Broken Language,” in all its forms, is also partly a celebration of her ancestors, and how often unintentionally they inspired her to become a writer. “Our archive is in us and of us,” she wrote in the script for the play. On a practical level, in tune with changing what once made her turn away from the theater, Hudes wanted to ensure the production contributes to moving the industry forward in terms of representation in casting. In the script, she insists, “these are Philly Rican roles” for Latina actors.Born and raised in Philadelphia, Hudes comes from a long line of Puerto Rican women who excelled at building community and developing strong spiritual values. Her mother, Virginia Sanchez, who features prominently in the book and the play, is a renowned santera, who instilled love and respect for their Taína-Lukumí-Boricua legacy, as well as a fascination with words. One of Sanchez’s favorite possessions is a 19th-century Spanish dictionary that she uses to search for words people may have forgotten.“The book smells like our elders, it has its own soul,” Sanchez said over a video call, “it contains one of our identities.” In spite of her daughter’s “broken language,” Sanchez said she believes “Quiara always had a gift for words, she knows how to transform her experiences into a form of teaching.”Bill Heck and Liza Colón-Zayas in “Water by the Spoonful,” which had its New York premiere in 2013 at Second Stage Theater.Karli Cadel for The New York TimesLin-Manuel Miranda, center left, and Karen Olivo in the musical “In the Heights” at the Richard Rodgers Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIndeed, the playwright extracts wisdom from experiences she had growing up, such as seeing her mother possessed by a spirit. “To do that literally onstage would be vulgar,” Hudes explained. So she transformed her memories into words and then into physical movements that would make sense onstage with the help of the choreographer Ebony Williams. The goal is to create actions that evoke the feeling of being in between universes.The play also marks Hudes’s directorial debut. She describes the work of a director as one of “community care,” and compares it to a gardener choosing the seeds, planting them, and then nurturing them toward excellence. “Directing is the process,” she said.“Her rehearsal room feels like home,” said Samora la Perdida, who plays one of Hudes’ alter egos, describing “walls decorated with altars to our ancestors, tables with guava and cheese empanadas from her favorite spot in Washington Heights, a stereo blasting Frankie Ruiz.”Of Hudes, Rubin-Vega added, “She leads with openhearted professionalism.”Rethinking the meaning of community and how to affect it is what led Hudes to resume her theater work. After publishing her memoir, she discovered a new community in a world of readers who reacted emotionally to her stories and reminded her of her purpose.“Quiara is giving our community the opportunity to talk about the raw pain we’ve inherited, not only as women or immigrants but as people,” Sanchez said. “My daughter is a keeper of our lineage, a witness of our experience.”Although they work in different fields, Hudes said she believes she and her mother have overlapping journeys. “We break through the vines with our machetes, finding our own way, sharing strategies and celebrating triumphs,” Hudes added.“Quiara accepted her tongue for what it was in order to create a language of her own,” la Perdida said, “a language that shamelessly dances with both her Latina roots and Western canon influences. A language with the rhythms of Chopin and Juan Luis Guerra, inspired by the poetic prose of both Shakespeare and José Rivera.”After five years away, Hudes said she is enjoying the various pleasures that come with working in the theater again, like being in a room full of Latino artists, her community. She finds it to be utterly therapeutic. “I often crunch up in my seat, kind of like a ball, and then pop up, it’s so much fun to live all these old habits again,” she said. More
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‘Parade’ Review: The Trial and Tragedy of Leo Frank
City Center’s gala production delves further into America’s history of violence and delivers the best-sung musical in many a New York season.Just six months after its universally beloved Encores! revival of “Into the Woods,” New York City Center returns with another timely, excellent production about collective responsibility and loss. Smartly directed by Michael Arden, City Center’s gala presentation of “Parade,” which opened on Tuesday night and runs through Sunday, delves further into America’s history of violence and delivers the best-sung musical in many a New York season.The book writer Alfred Uhry’s dramatization of the 1913 trial of Leo Frank, and his subsequent imprisonment and 1915 lynching, gave the composer Jason Robert Brown a canvas to paint a complex, nourishing score that captures the entire weight of that fraught history. (Both men won Tonys for their work on the show, which premiered on Broadway in 1998.) Here, a first-rate orchestra, conducted by Brown, and under the music direction of Tom Murray, brings its pomp and pageantry to terrifying life.At the heart of the show is the rich-voiced Ben Platt, successfully transferring his lauded anxious energy from “Dear Evan Hansen” to the role of Leo Frank, a Brooklyn-born Jewish pencil factory manager uneasy in his Atlanta surroundings. His sense of regional superiority is matched by the naïve comfort of his wife, Lucille (a luminous Micaela Diamond), as she plans for a picnic on the day of the town’s annual Confederate Memorial Day parade. Diamond’s expressive face, with large eyes as expressive as those of a silent screen siren, carries the burden of resilience as Leo is wrongly jailed for the murder of a 13-year-old girl who worked at the factory.In an antisemitic kangaroo court under Judge Roan’s (John Dossett) uncaring eye, the prosecutor Hugh Dorsey (a remarkable Paul Alexander Nolan) presents a flimsy case. Adding fuel to the flames are a fundamentalist newspaper publisher (Manoel Felciano) and a sensationalist reporter (the superb Jay Armstrong Johnson, shining as he sings the score’s most fast-paced number, “Real Big News,” made doubly hectic by Cree Grant’s spin-heavy choreography here, which is otherwise lovely).A fully staged “Parade” hasn’t been seen in New York in nearly 25 years, and this revival recalls an era of big casts, big stories and big talent, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDespite Governor Slaton’s (Sean Allan Krill) belated efforts, Leo’s fate is sealed by false testimonies coaxed out of the murdered girl’s co-workers (Ashlyn Maddox, Sophia Manicone, Sofie Poliakoff) and the factory’s janitor Jim Conley (a phenomenally voiced Alex Joseph Grayson). The cast, which also includes Gaten Matarazzo as a teenager out for vengeance, is uniformly splendid — as adept in the work’s solo outings as in the electric group numbers.But the problems with the book, which lacks some dramatic immediacy, remain. Ben Brantley mentioned the “overriding feeling of disdain, a chilly indignation” in his original review; and, as Vincent Canby wrote shortly afterward, the musical “plays as if it were still a collection of notes.” There is no confusing good and evil here; never any question as to what anyone is thinking or about to do, their personalities and fates as predetermined as those of characters in a children’s Bible. The show, in that respect, is aptly titled.Arden wisely counteracts this by filling the production with deft flourishes that compound American hatred across centuries: A salute by Confederate soldiers’ is slowed down so that their outstretched arms resemble a Sieg Heil salute; Roan and Dorsey’s fishing rods in one scene whip down like switches; revelers crack open Bud Lights in their final celebration.Dane Laffrey’s resourceful set — a raised wooden platform flanked, courtroom-style, by simple chairs — effectively evokes a minstrel stage, soapbox and gallows at once. And the stage under the platform is adorned with stars-and-stripes buntings that hang over mounds of crimson earth — as much the hallowed “old red hills” of Georgia as bloodstained dirt thrown onto a coffin — and a small screen emphasizing the show’s procedural nature by displaying each scene’s time, date, and location, which matches historical photographs projected onto the back wall.Then again, considering Uhry and Brown’s text and lyrics, subtlety need not be the name of the game these days. This country’s ongoing procession of racism, antisemitism and “law-and-order”-screeching politicians comes awfully close to the hate-filled climate of the work’s setting, shedding any pretense of respectability. Arden here fights fire with fire, and his direction is sincere and unambiguous. But no one is let off the hook. I imagine the audience members laughing at the condescending jokes about Southern idiocy in the first act had to at least sit with the second act’s taunting of selective liberal compassion, sung with liveliness by Courtnee Carter and Douglas Lyons.A fully staged “Parade” hasn’t been seen in New York in nearly 25 years, and this revival recalls an era of big casts, big stories and big talent — a time when musicals actually felt like events. Platt and Diamond are fearless performers, and their duet “This Is Not Over Yet” is a powerhouse for the ages. Their commanding vocals are matched by a confident production that revives the best of the original while pointing at the possibility of growth, and hope.ParadeThrough Nov. 6 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More
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Review: Star-Crossed Lovers in Need of a Divine Assist
Andrew Rincón’s play about reigniting passions in the heavens and the bedroom is a jumble of genres at 59E59 Theaters.Tired of digesting all the world’s heartbreak, Cupid calls it quits in Andrew Rincón’s “I Wanna F*ck Like Romeo and Juliet.” The play, a New Light Theater Project production having its premiere at 59E59 Theaters, is experiencing a similar existential crisis. Despite appealing performances, smooth direction by Jesse Jou, and some touching moments, this cosmic look at the pains of love aims wobbly arrows at too many marks.Seeing his friend Cupid (Jacqueline Guillén), the goddess of love, so distraught, Saint Valentine (Greg Cuellar) tries to remind her of affection’s earthly charms by taking her to Hackensack, N.J., where a young couple in the middle of a breakup might provide the challenge she needs to get back in the spirit.That couple, Alejandro (a sturdy Juan Arturo) and Benny (Ashton Muñiz, a soothing presence with comedic chops), have decided to separate after six years together, but Valentine thinks the relationship is worth saving. Cupid and Valentine each pick one to take on a journey of self-discovery, with the goal of guiding them back to each other. These pilgrimages, however, lead to hastily mentioned histories of internalized shame and sexual abuse that overburden the play’s final 20 minutes.Rincón dabbles in the poetic, mixing the mortals’ sometimes self-help-sounding domestic discourse with grandiose statements of love everlasting from the divine duo, who are prone to endless arguments. (That said, it is Alejandro who speaks the childish title phrase, a romanticization of Shakespeare’s text not meant to read as satire.) The clash highlights the play’s confusion as to whether it wants to be a comedy about meddling powers, or a drama about a couple whose breakup undergoes divine intervention. Brittany Vasta’s two-level set, nicely split between the heavens and the bedroom, makes a stronger case for this duality.The same can’t be said for the script, which is untidy in its overuse of Spanglish. Aside from a great joke when a character is shocked to discover the love goddess is a Latina (“Did you really think Cupid could be anything but?”), the Spanish in the text, liberally sprinkled throughout, lacks cohesion because its significance hasn’t been established. When it is used to convey meaningful points, I wondered if non-speakers would be able to follow along, or what Hispanic viewers were supposed to gain. It’s maddening when another tongue is used as a crutch, a substitute for personality that winds up exoticizing the language it sets out to exalt, or “normalize.” If a sentiment lacks power when expressed without a show of bilingualism, it does not gain it through translation.At times it seems as if the play could have revolved around Betti (Elizabeth Ramos), a romantically inexperienced dental hygienist Benny befriends and starts dating, somewhat platonically. Ramos’s smallness during her first scene gives way to an explosive physical performance as Betti comes into her own and experiences first love (with Cupid, no less). Through sheer allure, the actress turns a character largely superfluous to the already jumbled story into the production’s most valuable, displaying the irresistibility of earnest hope in a work that too often dips into its bathos.I Wanna F*ck Like Romeo and JulietThrough Nov. 5 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More
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Ben Platt on the Unfortunate Timeliness of His ‘Parade’ Revival
When Ben Platt was a kid, listening to show tunes in the family car, he developed a fondness for “This Is Not Over Yet,” an optimistic and upbeat Jason Robert Brown song from the short-lived musical “Parade.”It was only years later, as Platt grew up, that he encountered the rest of the show, and realized what it was actually about — the 20th-century lynching of a Jewish Southerner, fueled by antisemitism.Now Platt is starring in a seven-performance revival of the 1998 musical at New York City Center, and says the timing is sadly perfect, given the antisemitism once again coursing through the nation’s culture. “It’s felt urgent,” he said, “in a way that is shocking to all of us.”The musical, which won Tony Awards both for Brown’s score and Alfred Uhry’s book, tells the story of Leo Frank, an Atlanta factory manager who was convicted in 1913 of murdering a 13-year-old girl. A public outcry over whether Frank was actually guilty prompted the Georgia governor to commute Frank’s death sentence, at which point Frank was lynched by a mob.Laura Dreyfuss with Ben Platt as Evan in “Dear Evan Hansen.” “It was my ultimate dream come true, to originate something,” he said in an interview, “and it inspired me to start looking inward and writing my own music.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe City Center revival, directed by Michael Arden, begins performances Tuesday and runs through Sunday; there is already talk of a possible Broadway transfer, but no firm plans.Platt, 29, vaulted to fame, and won a Tony, playing the title character in the 2016 musical “Dear Evan Hansen.” In the years since, he has been working onscreen, starring in “The Politician” for Netflix and a film adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen,” as well as the forthcoming “The People We Hate at the Wedding” for Amazon Prime Video and a movie called “Theater Camp,” which he wrote with a group of friends. He also created a new lane for himself as a performer: writing songs, recording albums and touring.In an interview, he talked about “Parade,” the ups and downs of “Dear Evan Hansen” (the stage version was a hit; the film adaptation was panned), and his decision to drop off Twitter. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me why you wanted to do “Parade.”This was a character I related to. I recognized this guy. And I realized how much modern application there is for it. It’s a lot harder to distance from than I was hoping it would be. This show is all about not only antisemitism, but the failure of the country to protect lots of marginalized groups, and we’re all feeling that really intensely right now.How do you connect to your character?The very obvious thing is that we’re both Jewish. He’s also, similar to other characters that I’ve played, not the best at expressing his emotions. Leo learns during his journey that vulnerability does not mean you’re any less strong, and I definitely relate to that journey. Being wrongly convicted of murder, I fortunately cannot relate to. I hope I never learn that.What does this show tell us about antisemitism?I don’t necessarily want to dictate what people feel when they come away from the show. There’s a lot of gray in the show. It doesn’t make any decisions for you. Hopefully, most of all, it shows how hatred is learned. With every character, you see how they got to where they are.“Hopefully, most of all,” Platt said of the show, “it shows how hatred is learned. With every character, you see how they got to where they are.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWhat’s it like being back onstage after five years away?It’s just the best. I spent my whole life doing it, pretty much nonstop, from 6 years old to 24. It just feels like a homecoming.I never fully understand why actors want to do these short-run shows. You put in all this time for a few nights.Two reasons. One is the unselfish reason, which is it’s just a story worth telling, especially right now. The selfish reason is that I carry ulterior hopes that maybe we’ll have a longer opportunity in the future.You spent so many years working on “Dear Evan Hansen.” How are you feeling about that experience?I’m feeling really grateful for it. It was my ultimate dream come true, to originate something, and it inspired me to start looking inward and writing my own music. It will always be a piece of me. I feel a simultaneous constant pride and desire to keep it in my heart at all times, but also a real readiness and excitement at having moved forward and embracing my adulthood and playing characters that live in different worlds than that. I got to live in that world for a very long time, and it was not the easiest world to live in. So I look at it fondly but I’m also happy to be moving ahead.Your boyfriend is your successor in the role, Noah Galvin. Is that weird?I don’t think about him in that way, because I knew him for three or four years before we even had that experience. There’s this lore that that’s how we met, but it’s not. But it’s nice to have that detail of him understanding deeply what that experience was. And I feel very lucky to be with him — he’s changed my perspective, and made things, in a very positive way, feel a bit smaller and more manageable.You’ve been working on a film version of “Merrily We Roll Along,” to be shot over 20 years. What’s that like?There are so many variables. The only way I’ve found to approach it is that you have to treat [each shoot] like short films, let it go, and move on and live your life, and as the next one rolls around, find your way back into it. If I constantly have it in the back of my head, it just feels so unimaginable to get to the end, that I get scared about it in a way that’s not productive. So I’m just taking each of the little gifts along the way and hoping we make it to the end of the road.Platt in “Dear Evan Hansen.” After the film version of the musical was criticized, he left Twitter. “I wasn’t getting anything positive,” he said, “and it’s been really nice to be away.”Erika Doss/Universal PicturesOne of your closest friends, Beanie Feldstein, who is also starring with you in “Merrily,” had a bumpy ride with “Funny Girl” on Broadway. I wonder what you make of how her experience went.I know more than anything, she just wants everybody to move on. So I’ll just say that I love her and I admire her strength.You had your own rough ride with the film version of “Dear Evan Hansen.”It was definitely a disappointing experience, and difficult, and it definitely opened my eyes to the internet and how horrific it can be. You’d think, after doing “Dear Evan Hansen” onstage for four years, I would have already known that. I try my best to focus on people who tell me it was moving to them and they really felt seen by it. It is very easy for the good to get drowned out by the bad.I don’t know if this is connected, but I noticed that you’re no longer on Twitter. What’s that about?I find that Twitter is almost exclusively for tearing people down. I wasn’t getting anything positive, and it’s been really nice to be away.Since “Evan Hansen” you’ve become a pop performer, recording and touring.It’s a whole different animal because it’s been the only avenue in which to express my perspective. I find that in everything else — film and TV and especially theater — as much as you’re giving of yourself, you’re also doing your best to disappear, to serve somebody else’s mission or tell somebody else’s story. I love that experience, being a cog in a larger wheel. But I also think that being afforded the opportunity to do the opposite is a very liberating and freeing experience. One makes me really appreciate the other.Do you see yourself back on Broadway?I would love to, yes. I’m very much so hoping, whether it’s this or something else, to get back there as soon as I can. More
