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      York Theater Artistic Director Out After ‘Hurtful’ Diversity Comments

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      James Morgan, who has been with the small New York theater company for 50 years, blamed the effects of a stroke for his behavior.The longtime leader of the York Theater Company, a small New York nonprofit known for its emphasis on musical theater, is acknowledging making “hurtful” comments about diversity that he says prompted his abrupt departure from the organization.James Morgan, who has served as producing artistic director of the York since 1979, and who has been with the company for 50 years, issued a letter on Monday saying that he had suffered a stroke in 2022, and attributed his behavior to that medical incident.“During a recent staff meeting, I responded to a colleague’s concerns about the diversity of our audiences in a way that was inappropriate and hurtful,” Morgan wrote in the letter. “The words came out — at a raised volume that has been one of the side effects of the stroke — differently than I intended them.”The York is a niche company, founded in 1969, that operates out of a church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. During fiscal 2023, it had an annual budget of $2.2 million, according to a filing with the Internal Revenue Service; Morgan was paid a salary of $95,000.On Friday at 5 p.m., the company issued a news release saying that Morgan had “resigned from his duties, effective immediately.” Jim Kierstead, the board’s president, raised the diversity issue in his statement in the news release, saying, “We will soon be announcing plans for a future filled with diversity, talent, and musical theater in order to continue our long legacy of supporting artists of all backgrounds.”It quickly became clear that Morgan’s departure had been preceded by the resignation of Gerry McIntyre, the theater’s associate artistic director.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘The Counter,’ With Anthony Edwards, a Cup of Joe and a Side of Secrets

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      A diner patron asks a waitress for an extraordinary side dish in Meghan Kennedy’s sweet but shaggy new play.With their twirly stools, chipped mugs and napkin contraptions, old-fashioned diners are apparently dying out. But not onstage, where they solve a lot of playwriting problems.Getting strangers to talk to each other? Easy: Waitress, meet customer. Motivating random pop-ins and exits? Jingle the door and pay the bill. Signal “America” without having to say it? The Bunn-O-Matic might as well be a flag.All of those are ingredients in “The Counter,” a sweet but shaggy dramedy by Meghan Kennedy that opened Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater in Midtown Manhattan. The waitress is Katie (Susannah Flood): a big-city exile returning to her small-town home for reasons that emerge over the play’s 75 minutes. Her first customer, most days, is Paul (Anthony Edwards): a retired firefighter slumping onto his favorite stool for coffee and a lifeline of conversation.Kennedy’s dialogue is piquant and suggestive but mechanically avoidant. Needing to hold back the play’s big events, she lets her characters spend most of its first third dropping bread crumbs of information and noodling amusingly around the edges of not much. Paul has trouble sleeping and is a cinephile. Katie prefers Netflix. Both, it’s clear, if only by the impenetrable fog on the windows, are lost and lonely, in a way we are meant to understand as American.The banality of all that is undercut, in David Cromer’s typically thoughtful staging, by hints that the story will soon be heading sideways. That’s literally true of Walt Spangler’s set, which orients the title character — the counter — perpendicular to the audience, so we see the divide between Katie and Paul at all times. At some point, each also gets a private soliloquy, with lighting (by Stacey Derosier) and sound (by Christopher Darbassie) altered to indicate interiority.But these breaks in the production’s otherwise closely observed naturalism — including hoodies, plaids and puffers by Sarah Laux — come off as passing tics, especially in comparison to the plot’s wackadoodle bombshell, which distorts the rest of the play.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Wind and the Rain’ Review: How Sunny’s Bar Weathered the Storm

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      On a barge in Brooklyn, the story of a beloved watering hole and a neighborhood’s recovery after Hurricane Sandy.How do we hold our shared history? Like a drink? Like a lover? Or does it slip through our fingers, like water from the bay? “The Wind and the Rain,” a new play by Sarah Gancher (“Russian Troll Farm”), which reclaims the recent past as pageant, offers one model.The play, which Jared Mezzocchi has staged on a barge that doubles as the Waterfront Museum and in the blocks of Red Hook, Brooklyn, just beyond, is ostensibly about Sunny’s, a bar that has occupied the ground floor of a brick building on Conover Street since 1907. Opened by Antonio Balzano and his wife, Angelina, each an immigrant from Italy, it survived world wars; prohibition; the building of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; urban blight; Hurricane Sandy, which sent the basin surging into the bar; and legal challenges. Now presided over by Tone Balzano Johansen, the bar remains a neighborhood stronghold. (Johansen is the widow of Antonio Balzano, an actor and painter named for his grandfather, and affectionately known as Sunny.) Every Saturday it hosts a bluegrass jam session. Johansen often sings.From a window of the barge, Sunny’s can almost be seen. Out another window, the Statue of Liberty beckons. The Vineyard Theater produced this show with En Garde Arts, a pioneer of site-specific and site-responsive performance. As the actors strut and a bluegrass combo strums and sings, the barge lurches underfoot. The play, performed by four actors on a narrow strip of stage in the barge’s center, is mostly Johansen’s story. Much of the text derives from interviews with her (Gancher is a Sunny’s regular) and she is played by Jen Tullock with lucid good sense. (Pete Simpson plays Sunny; Jennifer Regan and Paco Tolson fill out the other roles. Ample audience participation is also a feature.) Other vignettes are based on research, some are wholly invented. In a corner the band plays.The whole is affectionate, emotive, playful, but with a fuzziness around the edges — the way the world looks after one too many Manhattans. Instead of focusing only on Tone or on Sunny’s more generally, the play also offers a deep history of the neighborhood (from the British to the Dutch to the Lenape to the Laurentide ice sheet, all the way back to the Big Bang) and it lingers for a long time, too long, with the fraught love stories of Sunny’s grandparents and Romeo (Simpson again), a longtime bar employee.These discursions and the script’s fondness for philosophical postulates (“How do you make a play where everything past and future exists at once?” “How do you talk about time?”) tend to distract from the play’s core — the place of the bar within the greater community, the bar’s recovery after Sandy. The story of the bar is the story of the neighborhood, about a community coming together in the face of something as indomitable as a hurricane. It is a kind of living history, a collective memory in Christmas lights and scuffed wood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Big Gay Jamboree’ Review: A Golden-Age Fantasia on Steroids

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      The goofball spirit that made Marla Mindelle’s “Titaníque” a hit is missing from her equally campy new show drenched in pop-culture references.When “Titaníque” opened in a cramped basement space two years ago, few would have imagined that the show, a commingling of the James Cameron disaster movie and the Celine Dion songbook, would amount to more than a short-lived lark. Yet it is still running — in a proper, aboveground theater — and has spawned productions in Britain, Canada and Australia.Now Marla Mindelle, a writer of “Titaníque” who played the Dion role, is back with “The Big Gay Jamboree,” another raunchy, campy, hyperactive musical drenched in pop-culture references (though, this time, there is an original score). But whereas “Titaníque” had the casual flair of a tossed-off joke that somehow landed, “The Big Gay Jamboree” works itself into a tizzy with little to show for it. At least this time the production is starting off at a street-level venue, the Orpheum Theater, where it opened on Sunday.In “The Big Gay Jamboree,” Mindelle, who wrote the book with Jonathan Parks-Ramage and the score with Philip Drennen, takes on the juicy lead role of Stacey, an aspiring actress who, after a drunken blackout, finds herself transported to Bareback, Idaho, in 1945. Stacey may be awake, but she feels as if she is in a dream and a nightmare rolled into one. The dream part is that this hard-core show-tune fiend is not in a regular small town but in the musical-theater version of one. The nightmare is that she can’t leave. It’ll be familiar territory for fans of the TV series “Schmigadoon!,” in which a couple are marooned in a golden-age musical.As Stacey tries to figure out a way back to her regular life and her godawful millionaire boyfriend, Keith (Alex Moffat, a “Saturday Night Live” alumnus), she gets to know her new supporting cast, including the man-hungry Flora (Natalie Walker) and the man-hungry Bert (Constantine Rousouli, the “Titaníque” co-writer and co-star).It’s not long before Stacey realizes that life in a Broadway fantasy is not all it’s cracked up to be, and the good old days weren’t so great for men of a certain persuasion and women who enjoy a good time. Idaho in the 1940s probably wasn’t all too hot for Black men either, even if the town loves its music director, Clarence (Paris Nix), especially — only? — when he leads the gospel choir.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Time-Traveling Film ‘Safety Not Guaranteed’ Hits Some Bumps Onstage

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      Adapted from the offbeat 2012 movie, this new musical about loneliness and the longing for do-overs is promising but still needs to find its shape.From all appearances, Kenneth Calloway is the kind of oddball you would want to steer well clear of. Wild-eyed and radiating a frenetic intensity, he wears a fleece-lined baby-blue earflap hat so oversize that he can’t help looking tiny underneath. Also, there is the matter of the classified newspaper ad he placed.“Wanted: someone to go back in time with me,” it reads. “This is not a joke. P.O. Box 91, Oceanview, Washington 99393. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before — safety not guaranteed.”Maybe he is a genius; more likely he is unhinged. Either way, as embodied by Taylor Trensch in “Safety Not Guaranteed,” the bumpy new musical comedy that opened on Thursday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he is riveting. Earnest, obsessive and vulnerable, he is soon so endearing that you may have the impulse, as I did, to keep him safe — from himself, and from the team of Seattle Magazine journalists who are pursuing an article about him.Directed by the Obie Award winner Lee Sunday Evans, the musical is adapted from the offbeat 2012 film of the same name written by Derek Connolly, which starred Mark Duplass as Kenneth and Aubrey Plaza as Darius, a young journalist who bonds with him.Like the movie, the stage version (book by Nick Blaemire, music and lyrics by Ryan Miller) is about loneliness, lost chances and the longing for do-overs. It has an appealingly indie Pacific Northwest sound and an elemental goofiness, but the show hasn’t yet found its shape. (Music direction is by Cynthia Meng, who leads an onstage five-piece band.)Darius (Nkeki Obi-Melekwe), the writer who spotted the ad, is joined on her reporting trip by Jeff (Pomme Koch), her shallow dirtbag of an editor, and Arnau (Rohan Kymal), a shy, brainy researcher. Once in Oceanview, the three operate unscrupulously in undercover mode, never disclosing to Kenneth who they really are or what they’re up to.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      3 Ambitious Song Cycles, but Only One Connects Mind and Heart

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      Todd Almond’s “I’m Almost There” is a work of wonder, while Gabriel Kahane’s “Book of Travelers” and “Magnificent Bird” are less effective.Days and months, but also mere minutes, acquire outsize, perhaps even life-altering significance, in three song cycles currently playing intimate venues in Manhattan.Todd Almond’s “I’m Almost There,” at the Minetta Lane Theater through Oct. 5, takes place over just a few minutes, while Gabriel Kahane’s “Book of Travelers” and “Magnificent Bird,” upstairs at Playwrights Horizons through Oct. 13, cover periods that feel like distinct parentheses in his life.Under its goofy exterior, Almond’s “I’m Almost There” is a sneakily, formally daring experiment in pared-down musical theater that connects with both mind and heart. This 75-minute Audible production, directed by David Cromer, unfurls over the time it takes for Todd (Almond) to walk down the stairs from his apartment to the street, where Guy, who has just rung his buzzer, awaits. The two met at a brunch the day before and ended up walking around together, until an abrupt parting. Now this possible love interest has unexpectedly turned up, bearing coffee.An accomplished composer and music director (he collaborated with Laura Benanti on her recent Audible show, “Nobody Cares”), Almond has created something that feels like an interior monologue with the jumbled, digressive quality of a fever dream: Time and space unfold following their own surreal logic and Todd experiences jump cuts from one location to another as the mayhem escalates. “This is exactly what happens when you let someone talk you into brunch,” he says while trying to escape a vampire’s fangs.An undercurrent of anxiety runs through the show — Todd has a fear of falling from something (like his building’s rooftop when sleepwalking) or for someone (like a certain nice man with whom he just clicks) — but it fuels a self-deprecating, antic energy that keeps the story from lapsing into neurotic solipsism.Flanked by Erin Hill on harp and vocals and Luke McCrosson on bass, Almond, whose acting credits include “Girl From the North Country,” brings to life a gallery of eccentric characters, but does quite well on his own, enlivening his serviceable vocals with a vividly comic presence. Letting people in is tough, but Todd eventually answers that bell and opens up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Disoriented in America: Two Political Plays Reflect a Changed Country

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      The Off Broadway plays “Fatherland” and “Blood of the Lamb” explore the grief, anger and fear of no longer recognizing the country you love.When, in the course of human events, the political bands that have connected a people appear to be dissolving rapidly, it’s fair to ask: Who in their right mind would want to revisit the chaos of Jan. 6, 2021, in the form of a play?I wouldn’t have thought that I did. That history is too recent, too fraught, too unresolved. Yet the theater has always been a place in which to search the dark corners of a nation’s soul, and to sit with grief.That emotion figures palpably in “Fatherland,” a finely calibrated, surprisingly affecting new work of verbatim theater at New York City Center Stage II. It tells the true story of Guy Wesley Reffitt, a middle-aged rioter from a Dallas suburb who was sent to prison for his role in the Capitol attack, and his son, Jackson, who was an 18-year-old high schooler when he turned his father in to the F.B.I., and just 19 when he testified against him.Conceived and directed by Stephen Sachs for the Los Angeles-based Fountain Theater, where the play was staged earlier this year, it is on one level about the profound grief of no longer recognizing a parent you love, or a child you raised. But like another new Off Broadway drama — Arlene Hutton’s “Blood of the Lamb,” more on which below — “Fatherland” is also about the grief and anger, the fear and disorientation, of no longer recognizing your own country.Using text from the transcript of the elder Reffitt’s 2022 trial, and other publicly available sources, the play calls its central characters simply Father (Ron Bottitta) and Son (an exquisitely restrained Patrick Keleher). Their clash, for all its 21st-century Americanness, is as primal as any parent-child conflict from ancient Greek drama, or from Shakespeare.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Titaníque’ Was Her Big Hit. Is ‘Big Gay Jamboree’ Really Her Swan Song?

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      Two years after debuting the “Titanic” parody, Marla Mindelle says her new show, with Margot Robbie as a producer, may be her last as an actor.There is a trail of trash cans plastered with Marla Mindelle’s face along the 10-minute walk from the Daryl Roth Theater in Union Square, where her musical “Titaníque” has been playing since 2022, to the Orpheum in the East Village, where her latest, “The Big Gay Jamboree,” is in previews.Her face on the poster advertises both shows, and she sees that advertising placement strategy as God (and the shows’ marketing teams) doing some light trolling: retribution for her style of satire. Mindelle, a writer and performer who struck gold with the Céline Dion jukebox parody, “Titaníque,” years after calling it quits on her small Broadway roles, slings the type of vulgar, musical-theater in-jokes only someone with a deep love of (and knowing frustration with) the industry can get away with.It’s that same sense of humor that lifted “Titaníque” from a basement theater in Chelsea into a commercial Off Broadway hit, and is now at work in “The Big Gay Jamboree,” Mindelle’s first musical with an original score.Unlike “Titaníque,” a purposely unpretentious spoof of the James Cameron blockbuster film, “Jamboree” is an elaborately staged show about wanting to leave the world of musicals and is being produced in part by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap company.Mindelle, 40, sees it as her performing swan song.At a cafe across from the theater where the new production will open on Sept. 30, she detailed what she views as a life of being comically at odds with her chosen profession.The cast of “The Big Gay Jamboree” at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village.James Estrin/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More