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      Jeff Weiss, an Unconventional Theatrical Force, Dies at 82

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      Downtown, he was known for sprawling works and vivid performances, but later in his career he drew praise as an actor in mainstream productions, too.Jeff Weiss, a playwright and actor known for innovative, offbeat shows in out-of-the-way New York theaters as well as for roles in mainstream productions, including more than a dozen on Broadway, died on Sept. 18 in Macungie, Pa., near Allentown. He was 82.His brother, Steve, said the cause was metastasized prostate cancer.Mr. Weiss was an important figure in the experimental theater scene in New York, beginning in the 1960s. His plays were seen at Caffe Cino in the West Village, La MaMa on the Lower East Side and other Manhattan spots known for the provocative and the outlandish. Those include his own Good Medicine and Company, a Lower East Side storefront theater that he ran with his partner in theater and in life, Carlos Ricardo Martinez. His plays were also sometimes staged in Allentown, where he grew up.The works he wrote were impossible to classify and did not lend themselves to conventional plot description. In “F.O.B.” (1972), Mr. Weiss spent much of his onstage time immersed in a bathtub full of cold water. “Hot Keys” (1992), Mr. Weiss’s response to the AIDS crisis, was a late-night serial about a serial killer.Some of his performances lasted four hours, five hours, even eight hours. His best-known and most ambitious work could be said to have lasted decades. It was called “… And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid.” Part I was first staged in 1966. Part IV appeared in 1984.In some of his works, including “… And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid, Part III,” Mr. Weiss played all the characters — and there could be a lot. In others, he made roles for other actors and could place extraordinary demands on them. “… And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid, Part IV,” for instance, consisted of dozens of scenes, with more added as the run went along, and they could be presented in any order.“Jeff would post the order for a particular evening an hour before the show,” Nicky Paraiso, an actor and musician who worked with him for decades, said by phone.The actress Kate Valk was part of the grueling adventure that was “Part IV,” which was subtitled “The Confessions of Conrad Gehrhardt,” with Mr. Weiss playing the title character.“Was Conrad a maniac?,” Ms. Valk said by email. “Or an actor who played a maniac? That was the edge Jeff walked in his work. It always felt a little dangerous.”“To perform onstage with him,” she added, “was to be right there inside his glorious mania, virile and vibrant.”A 1966 poster for “…And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid,” Mr. Weiss’s best-known and most ambitious work.La Mama ArchivesMr. Weiss performing in “…And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid” at La MaMa on the Lower East Side in 1966.La MaMa ArchivesThe goings-on could be tough sledding for anyone expecting a conventional play. In 1982, when Charles Richter, then the chairman of the theater department at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, brought to the school a Weiss play called “Last Gasps,” he was blunt in describing its appeal to The Morning Call, the Allentown newspaper.“I wouldn’t consider the play avant-garde,” he said. “I think it defies categorization. It’s part vaudeville, part intellectual, part blatant sensationalism. I think a large part of the audience won’t get it.”Yet enough people got Mr. Weiss that he developed a following, one that stretched beyond the experimental theater world. Part IV of his “Rent” opus drew a favorable notice from Mel Gussow in The New York Times during a production with members of the Wooster Group in SoHo in the summer of 1984.“As the play entered its fourth hour in the un-air-conditioned Performing Garage,” Mr. Gussow wrote, “one had long ago accepted discomfort as a way of Weiss life. Though the evening had its excesses, it also had a visceral investiture of theatrical imagination.”One whose attention Mr. Weiss caught was the actor Kevin Kline, who became a fan and friend and in 1986 was preparing to play Hamlet for Joseph Papp’s Public Theater.“During the casting process I was trying to think what actor could play the Player King,” Mr. Kline said by email, “one who could both inspire and confound Hamlet, someone as humane as he was unabashedly histrionic. To me Jeff was the man.”He left a note at Mr. Weiss’s theater asking if he’d consider auditioning, though that prospect seemed unlikely; some years earlier, Mr. Weiss had been cast in a Public show but had withdrawn, unable to handle the demands of conventional theater.“To my surprise, he responded favorably,” Mr. Kline said. “He came in and auditioned for the director, Liviu Ciulei, who was so knocked out that he asked him to play not only the Player King but also the ghost of Hamlet’s father, as well as Osric. He couldn’t get enough of him.”Mr. Weiss acknowledged that casting him was a risk.“They took bets at the theater on whether I would show up for rehearsal, and how long I would last,” he told The Times in 1986. “I do have a reputation for fleeing in the face of possible success.”Succeed he did.“Next to Mr. Kline, the most intriguing acting comes from Jeff Weiss, an idiosyncratic actor and playwright in the experimental theater,” Mr. Gussow wrote in his review. Mr. Weiss, he wrote, “reveals a hitherto concealed talent for the classics.”That performance started a run of more conventional acting jobs for Mr. Weiss. Those included Broadway appearances in “Macbeth” in 1988 with Glenda Jackson and Christopher Plummer, an “Our Town” revival later that year, “Present Laughter” in 1996, “The Invention of Love” in 2001 and “Henry IV” in 2003, with a cast that included Mr. Kline.Mr. Weiss worked in high-profile Off Broadway productions as well, including as a drag queen in “Flesh and Blood,” Peter Gaitens’s stage adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel, at New York Theater Workshop in 2003. “Mr. Weiss is terrific,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times, “trilling the expected, crowd-pleasing notes while providing a darker, more intricate bass line.”Mr. Weiss found himself in demand elsewhere. He turned up as a judge in multiple episodes of the television series “Law & Order.” In 1990, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., he took on the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in the seasonal production of “A Christmas Carol,” to much acclaim. Francis X. Kuhn directed that production.“A professional actor with no headshot, Jeff was described to me as a downtown theater ‘outlaw,’” Mr. Kuhn said by email. “But he proved to be a generous and exhilarating collaborator.”“He was deeply and absolutely committed to exploring and sharing Scrooge’s spiritual journey,” Mr. Kuhn added. “That’s what he cared about, and what he made the audience care about.”Mr. Weiss and Cherry Jones in an Off Broadway production of “Flesh and Blood” in 2003. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJeffrey George Weiss was born on April 30, 1940, in Reading, Pa., and grew up in Allentown. His father, Benjamin, was an executive at a cement company, and his mother, Helen (Eagle) Weiss, was a homemaker.Mr. Weiss wrote his first plays before he was a teenager. Formal education, though, was not for him.“I was kicked out of school pretty regularly, because I was a cutup and kind of neurotic,” he told The Times in 1986, “so I left when I was 16.”Soon he was in New York and had met Mr. Martinez. Their Good Medicine and Company theater had 10 seats and, in the early years, no electricity.“People would learn to bring flashlights to a Jeff Weiss show,” using them to help illuminate the stage, said Mr. Paraiso, Mr. Weiss’s longtime collaborator.Ticket revenue was put to quick use — to buy the makings of dinner, to be served to the playgoers.“While I was performing,” Mr. Weiss told The Pittsburgh Press in 1988, “Carlos was upstairs cooking, so when the show was over, the food would be ready.”Mr. Weiss moved back to Allentown in 1997, though he continued to appear in New York productions. His brother said that Mr. Weiss had wanted to be near their aging mother. Mr. Martinez joined him, and when Mr. Martinez developed Parkinson’s disease, Mr. Weiss cared for him, Mr. Paraiso said.Mr. Martinez died in 2017. Mr. Weiss’s brother is his only survivor.Mr. Kline recalled a vibrant personality offstage as well as on.“Jeff loved to laugh,” he said. “Being with him, just like watching his plays, could make you giddy. There was no one like him.” More

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      ‘My Window’ Review: An Out-and-Proud Trailblazer Finds Her Way

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      Melissa Etheridge’s limited run at New World Stages is a celebration of its smoky-voiced 61-year-old star, and contains some confessions, along with her hits.Not long into the second act of Melissa Etheridge’s new Off Broadway show, she tells a funny, sexy, completely charming tale of falling in love with a married woman in the late 1980s, and pairs it, playfully, with a gorgeous version of her 1995 song “I Want to Come Over.”Discreetly — no names — she recalls what a blast she and that partner and their showbiz friends used to have together in 1990s Los Angeles, in the heady early days of Etheridge’s rock fame. Then she mentions cannabis, which she didn’t enjoy at the time.“It always made me feel like everyone knew I was hiding something, you know?” she said on Friday, the second night of a 12-performance run at New World Stages. “Like they could all see this sadness that I was hiding.”In an almost solo show that wants very much to be a good time for the audience, and a kind of celebration of its smoky-voiced 61-year-old star, suddenly here is a confession of personal vulnerability — spoken, not sung. It turns out to be valuable foreshadowing, because there is some deep, dark sadness in “Melissa Etheridge Off Broadway: My Window — A Journey Through Life.” And mostly, amid some staggeringly beautiful renditions of songs, that sadness is well camouflaged.Written by Etheridge with her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge, and directed by Amy Tinkham, the show recounts the story of Etheridge’s life in strict chronological order, from the day she was born in 1961 in Leavenworth, Kan. It’s a journey from midcentury, Midwestern conformity to a career as a Grammy Award-winning, out-and-proud trailblazer.Starting with darling black-and-white baby pictures shown huge on the upstage wall, the smart projections (by Olivia Sebesky) become increasingly intricate and eye-popping throughout the evening, particularly when Etheridge’s memories turn psychedelic. (The minimal set is by Bruce Rodgers, the luscious lighting by Abigail Rosen Holmes.)Some Etheridge hits are, of course, among the two dozen or so songs and song fragments strung through the performance, including a fiery version of “Bring Me Some Water,” from her 1988 debut album, and a buoying, sing-along “Come to My Window,” the 1993 hit that gives the show its name. She also plays endearing obscurities, like the first songs she wrote as a child.For all its musical polish, though, the show is verbally shaggy; Etheridge isn’t reciting memorized text but rather improvising, storyteller-style, from an outline of the piece’s main points, which scroll by on her monitor. (You will notice the monitor only if it’s behind you and you cheat like I did and turn around and look for it.) The upside to that looseness is a sense of thoughts articulated in the moment. The downside is a certain lack of eloquence.The instant Etheridge gets a guitar to strap across her chest, her whole body relaxes.Richard Termine for The New York TimesClocking in at three hours, including an intermission, the performance is surprisingly light on songs for about the first 30 minutes, and pushes a little too hard with the comedy of a roadie character (Kate Owens), who comes on to swap out Etheridge’s many jackets and guitars. (Costumes are by Andrea Lauer.)Initially, Etheridge doesn’t even have the armor of an instrument as she roams the stage. The instant she gets a guitar to strap across her chest, her whole body relaxes. Similarly, she is most expressive when she has the rhythm and structure of music to hold onto. So the show’s chatter works best when it’s threaded around and through a song, as happens gracefully with “Juliet,” the companion to Etheridge’s reminiscence of her brief time at Berklee College of Music, and of finding lesbian community in Boston.A life is a delicate thing to parade onstage, even or maybe especially in front of an adoring audience — lots of women, many apparent baby boomers and more straight couples than you might expect. A theatrical autobiography that’s honest can’t be neat, because some roughnesses refuse to be smoothed. So it goes here with the discussion of family, both the one Etheridge was born into and the ones she formed with the two women who are the other mothers of her four children.Personal details are skated around, presumably for the usual reasons — privacy, or to spare someone’s feelings, or because humans are complex and there simply isn’t time. Her father, who chaperoned her at the gigs she played when she was underage and responded with love when she came out to him as a young adult, emerges as a sympathetic figure. Others, in some ways including Etheridge, come off less than well. It’s here that you sense the sadness, hidden until it’s not.There comes a point, near the end of the show, when the stage plunges into inky blackness and Etheridge tells the story of the death of her 21-year-old son, Beckett, in 2020. It is spare and searing, the words uttered from a pit of grief.And as she speaks of the healing power that performance has for her, you realize that this is part of what she’s doing here — that music and memories and the embrace of an ardent crowd might help, just maybe, to assuage the pain.Melissa Etheridge Off Broadway: My Window — A Journey Through LifeThrough Oct. 29 at New World Stages, Manhattan; melissaetheridge.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Dodi & Diana’ Review: Two Relationships, Linked in the Stars

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      A husband and wife who may be the “astrological doubles” of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed head toward a crisis in this new play by Kareem Fahmy.In an expensive hotel room touched with old-fashioned elegance, a husband and wife growing ever antsier in each other’s company keep the floor-length drapes drawn against the City of Light. It is the tail end of August 2022, they are New Yorkers spending just three days in Paris, but the astrologer who prescribed the trip has ordered them to remain inside.“Stay in the room with the curtains shut until Jupiter completes its transit,” he told them. “No communication with the outside world. No email. No phones. No TV.”Jason, an investment banker with a disciple’s faith in his planetary adviser, is anxiously eager to follow the instructions, though he makes an exception for chatting up the bellhop, who he’s hoping will bring him some drugs. Samira, Jason’s actor wife, is semi-willing to obey the rules, but not to the extent of ignoring her phone, which she uses on the sly, trading messages with her rep about a career-changing new screen role.She is understandably skeptical of the notion that she and Jason are “the astrological doubles of Diana Spencer and Dodi Fayed” — though that is apparently why they have been sent to the Ritz Paris, where they are awaiting a convergence in the 72 hours before the 25th anniversary of the Paris car crash that killed the Princess of Wales and her boyfriend, the son of the hotel’s owner.In “Dodi & Diana,” Kareem Fahmy’s new two-hander at Here, car crash is the rather crass operative metaphor — as in, Samira and Jason’s relationship of seven years is headed for a smashup. From the start, it’s evident that something is badly wrong with the would-be intimacy between them, and it becomes increasingly clear that they have very different dreams.For one thing, Jason (Peter Mark Kendall) wants loads of babies, and Samira (Rosaline Elbay) wants to keep building toward stardom while she’s still young enough to get the gigs. Already she’s reached the stage where she’s a little bit famous, and recently she and Jason endured an excruciating episode with the tabloids — a private horror involving him that made lurid headlines only because of her nascent celebrity.“The more famous you get,” he says, “the more our lives become a minefield.”Directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt for her company, Colt Coeur, “Dodi & Diana” is a sort of pre-mortem of a relationship — a much longer romance than the princess and Fayed enjoyed, yet with assorted elements in common: not just fame and wealth, seductive even at sub-stratospheric levels, but also race, bigotry and otherness. Fayed was born in Alexandria, Egypt; Samira in the United States, to Egyptian immigrant parents. She and Jason, who is white and Canadian, never have found a comfortable, trusting way to live with their racial and cultural differences.As characters, Diana and Dodi exist for most of the play in voice-over, between scenes, when lighting (by Eric Norbury) and sound design (by Hidenori Nakajo) evoke their visit to Paris in August 1997: the pop of flashbulbs, the sweep of headlights, the roar of engines going too fast.Eventually, Diana (Elbay) and Dodi (Kendall) materialize — glamorously, aside from a jarring clip in her hair — in the hotel room. (The set is by Alexander Woodward, the costumes by Dina El-Aziz.) It’s the high point of the play, partly because of a question that the persecuted Dodi asks Diana — about the paparazzi, or the British people, or both: “Do you intend to defend me to them?” Shades of Sussexes to come.Any parallel between the play’s two couples is forced, though. One relationship is intrinsically compelling, even in this imagined version of it, while the other has too little heft to hold our interest. Whether Samira and Jason stay together is a question without urgency.So the car-crash metaphor feels unseemly — borrowed from the horrific deaths of real people, but for what?Dodi & DianaThrough Oct. 29 at Here, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Two Soho Rep Directors to Leave at End of 2022-23 Season

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      Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, who have directed the company with Cynthia Flowers since 2019, will depart to focus more on their own creative output.Soho Rep, the 65-seat Off Off Broadway theater in Lower Manhattan that has long been a home for experimental, formally inventive work, will see a leadership change as Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, two of its three directors, step down at the end of the 2022-23 season.Both Benson and Peponides, who have led the theater alongside Cynthia Flowers since a shared directorship was put into place in 2019, said they were leaving Soho Rep in part to focus more on their own creative work. Benson said she wanted to do more directing, while Peponides said she planned to dedicate more time to Radical Evolution, a producing collective she co-founded in 2011 that focuses on exploring the complexities of the mixed-identity existence.“It came time to make a choice about where to devote my time and energy,” Peponides said. “Doing both was becoming trickier and trickier.”A search committee, led by Soho Rep’s board chair, Victoria Meakin, and the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, has been formed to appoint two new directors, Soho Rep said. Peponides and Benson will remain in their roles through the end of the season next summer.Benson, 44, has been with the theater for 15 years, serving as artistic director from 2007 until 2019, when Soho Rep adopted the shared leadership model. During her tenure, she directed the world premieres of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s searing comedy-drama “Fairview,” a co-commission by Soho Rep that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Jacobs-Jenkins’s formally inventive comedy “An Octoroon”; and Lucas Hnath’s black comedy “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney.”Peponides, 38, started at the theater as a producer in 2014, producing 18 new plays over her eight years and overseeing Soho Rep’s writer-director lab that is led by the playwrights William Burke and Drury.Under Benson, Peponides and Flowers’s leadership, Soho Rep has worked to improve pay equity through Project Number One, a job creation program developed early in the pandemic that brings artists into the organization each season as salaried staff members with benefits. Two of the three plays in the theater’s 2022-23 season, “Public Obscenities” by Shayok Misha Chowdhury and “The Whitney Album” by Jillian Walker, were written by artists who were in the first class of Project Number One.“We had three world premiere commissions in this year’s season,” Peponides said. “A huge part of the work Sarah and I have been seeding over the past several years is now coming to fruition, so this felt like the moment to step aside and hand it over while it was in great shape.” More

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      Kate Nash Keeps Getting Back Up. This Time, Off Broadway.

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      What stuck out at a recent rehearsal of the new musical “Only Gold” was how little Kate Nash stuck out.It wasn’t just that her hair was not its signature fiery red anymore, but a shade of auburn. Nash, who wrote the score and plays the narrator, quietly melded with the rest of the cast, as the director-choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, of “Hamilton” fame, fine-tuned a couple of numbers. When not actively participating in a section, she tended to stand against a wall, her eyes intently tracking the dancers.The London-born singer-songwriter spent a decade and a half releasing records and touring the world — in 2007, her debut single, “Foundations,” was No. 2 in Britain while her debut album, “Made of Bricks,” hit the top spot of the charts there — and she also acted in the Netflix wrestling comedy “GLOW.” But despite “Only Gold” being her first experience in theater, Nash was at ease, maybe even at peace.“Being here, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, this feels like home for my music,’” she said happily, sitting in the empty mezzanine of MCC Theater, where the show is currently in previews before opening on Nov. 7.The show is, as Nash put it, “about having the courage to follow your heart. And we’re telling that story through Paris in the 1920s and the royal family from Cosimo.” (She is referring to a kingdom invented for “Only Gold.”)The period musical, which involves a king trying to marry off his daughter, may sound like a stretch for an artist known for an incisive, personal style anchored in the here and now. But Blankenbuehler, a three-time Tony Award winner and longtime fan of Nash’s, grasped early on that her sensibility and craftsmanship would fit the story he’d dreamed up and arranged a meeting in 2010. “The thing I liked about Kate’s lyrics were that I found them to be poetic and funky and weird, but at the same time rhythmic in a way that really catered to my choreography, because I like to be offbeat all the time and syncopated all the time,” he said. “I also liked that there was equal parts of low and high — like, she would write really high, quirky stuff and really low, nasty, badass stuff.”Nash, center, at an “Only Gold” rehearsal at MCC Theater.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesBut it didn’t just take clicking her heels together three times to find that artistic home. Nash’s life and career had taken a few turns since she burst onto the pop scene in 2007, fully formed at just 20. Since that early success, Nash has been through a personal and professional wringer that could have easily derailed her.Born in a middle-class family (her father worked in information technology, her mother was a nurse), Nash was barely out of the BRIT School, a London arts institution whose alums include Adele and Amy Winehouse, and working at a sandwich shop when her Myspace page caught the attention of record executives. When “Foundations” came out, its prickly, evocatively personal storytelling established her as a bracing new voice. In 2008, she won the BRIT Award for best British female solo artist and began touring extensively around the world. But in 2012, her record label unceremoniously dropped her. This barely slowed down the singer, who released her third album independently the following year.Then, in 2015, bad news came: Nash, then living in Los Angeles, discovered that her manager had been defrauding her. She was pretty much bankrupt.“I was selling all my clothes and having to move out of my apartment because I had no money,” she said. “I packed up all my things, I sold everything, I moved home to England and I was like, ‘What am I going to do?’ And then I got this audition for ‘GLOW.’”She was eventually cast as the street-smart Rhonda, a struggling model who becomes a wrestler with the nom de ring Britannica. The opportunity was a lifeline as well as a dream coming true for Nash, who had long dreamed of being an actress.In a joint video chat, the “GLOW” creators and showrunners Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch zeroed in on Nash’s team spirit and doggedness. To win them over during the casting process, she filmed herself performing guerrilla-style moves, “being like, ‘I’m auditioning! I’m coming! Don’t forget about me!,’” Mensch said. “She entered one of the most perfectly bonkers tapes.”“I was selling all my clothes and having to move out of my apartment because I had no money,” said Nash, second from left. “And then I got this audition for ‘GLOW.’”Erica Parise/Netflix“There’s something kind of gonzo about her,” Flahive added, admiringly. “Even as a musician, she has a real kind of punk-rock spirit and has been doing her own thing outside of the system for so long, and you get that feeling from her.”In the documentary “Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl” (2018), Nash’s indomitable grit is plain to see. “She just keeps getting up every time she gets knocked down,” said Amy Goldstein, the documentary’s director. (The two met through their mutual hairdresser in 2014.) “That is why I made the movie: to see a woman who just won’t fall down.”Netflix canceled “GLOW” in 2020, after three seasons. But “Only Gold,” which had been in the works on and off for a decade, was finally ready to taxi to the runway.Initially, Blankenbuehler, who wrote the show’s book with Ted Malawer, had wanted to retrofit existing songs to fit the concept of a period fantasy involving three couples with relationship troubles. “I was just kind of like, you want to make a musical with my music, knock yourself out. Have fun,” Nash said.It quickly became obvious that this approach had creative limits, so they both agreed that she would write original material. (Beloved oldies do appear in the show, like “Mouthwash,” from “Made of Bricks.”)“Kate’s the kind of person who — and this is a compliment — writes what she wants to write,” Blankenbuehler said. “If she’s feeling it, she writes it, so she’s always in her own music. To be in somebody else’s story was hard for her because she’s not those personalities. One thing she’s worked really hard at is wearing the character’s clothes, writing the song from the inside of the character.”Nash found that particular experience liberating rather than constraining. “Oh, my God, writing for male characters — it was euphoric,” she said. “I understand how rappers feel now, because it feels amazing: Big yourself up and talk about masculinity and power. It was really fun to start writing for characters. It was just another string to my bow.”“I naïvely thought I was just going to do music on the show,” Nash said. “Until I got my contract and it said ‘actor’ and I was like, wait, why does it say ‘actor’ on my contract?”Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesNow she can do more of that in other mediums: Earlier this year, she released the irresistibly catchy “Imperfect,” which she wrote for the Netflix series “The Baby-Sitters Club.” “I think that I’m able to dive fully into things like that because of ‘Only Gold,’” Nash said. “I was like, ‘OK, teenage girl, pop power, scene in their bedroom during a fashion show about embracing imperfections — give me five minutes!’ How I would express that for myself as a 35-year-old woman wouldn’t be ‘Imperfect,’ but now I can write and enjoy that and not worry about it.”In the musical, coming up with a batch of new songs for, well, a king (played by the Broadway veteran Terrence Mann) was only part of what awaited Nash, she discovered fairly late in the process. “Even our first workshop, I naïvely thought I was just going to do music on the show,” she said. “Until I got my contract and it said ‘actor’ and I was like, wait, why does it say ‘actor’ on my contract? And I suddenly got so scared.”For Blankenbuehler, having Nash in the musical was a no-brainer. “I felt like the mechanism of the show was the beat, the music,” he said, “and so it only made sense to me that this quirky voice — and nobody sounds like her — should narrate the show.”Her experience learning to wrestle for “GLOW” made figuring out choreography less daunting. Another point of entry was finding an unexpected connection with the other cast members, many of whom were trained dancers.“Someone in a workshop once told me, ‘Every dancer knows who you are because of “Nicest Thing,” because every girl performs it at dance competitions across the U.S.A.,’” Nash said, mentioning a track from her first album. “I wrote that in my living room on an acoustic guitar when I was 18, pining over wanting love,” she added, chuckling.Those days feel remote now, as Nash settles into her new life on the New York stage. “Every time I see the opening sequence, it brings me to tears,” she said, then laughed. “There’s going to be times when I’m going to have to really clench my jaw and not cry.” More

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      Robert Kalfin, Founder of an Adventurous Theater, Dies at 89

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      For two decades, his Chelsea Theater Center was on the cutting edge with productions that could be challenging, baffling or, sometimes, Broadway bound.Robert Kalfin, the driving force behind the Chelsea Theater Center, which for two decades beginning in 1965 presented adventurous plays that were sometimes too innovative for the theatergoing public and sometimes successful enough that they transferred to Broadway, died on Sept. 20 at a hospice center in Quiogue, a hamlet in Southampton, N.Y. He was 89.Philip Himberg, a longtime friend, said the cause was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Kalfin directed countless plays in a career that began in his mid-20s and continued into his 80s. In 1965, he started the nonprofit Chelsea Theater Center and became its founding artistic director, with David Long as managing director and George Bari as production manager.They set up shop in St. Peter’s Church in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, though a strip dance in one of its early offerings got the group tossed out of that church and forced it to move to another. Those were two of several locations it would use over the years, only some of which were in Chelsea.Mr. Kalfin thought the commercial theaters of the day were limited and unimaginative, and he strove to broaden the theatrical landscape.“The mission statement, which I came up with, which was very useful, was ‘We will do whatever nobody else is doing and what we think people ought to see,’” he said in an interview in 2014 for the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project. “That gave me great leeway.”The Chelsea achieved particular prominence once it moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1968. Its productions there were attention-getting, to say the least. A 1969 staging of “Slave Ship,” written by Amiri Baraka (who was then known as LeRoi Jones) and directed by Gilbert Moses, took on racism, leaving Clive Barnes of The New York Times rattled.“The play is set in the hold of a ship and the conscience of a nation,” Mr. Barnes wrote in his review.“The play ends with the symbolic destruction of white America,” he added. “Whitey is got — Black Panther banners are unfurled. This scared and horrified me. I am whitey.”In 1971, The Times wrote an article about Mr. Kalfin’s troupe that carried the headline “America’s Most Exciting New Theater?” Its productions for the rest of that decade cemented its stature as one of the scene’s leading innovators.In 1973, the Chelsea revived the Leonard Bernstein operetta “Candide,” which had failed on Broadway in the 1950s, and gave it a new book, by Hugh Wheeler. Harold Prince directed, and the result was a smash in Brooklyn that became the group’s first transfer to Broadway, where it ran for almost two years.Another great success was “Strider,” Mark Rozovsky’s play with music based on a Tolstoy story about a piebald horse that is tormented because of its appearance. Mr. Kalfin first saw it in Leningrad, and in 1979 he staged an English-language version at the Westside Theater on West 43rd Street. It drew a strong review from Mel Gussow in The Times.“We are transported by the ingenuousness and the originality of the show,” he wrote. “Looking closely, we even notice a grittiness that might have been appreciated by Brecht and Weill. The play works on two levels, as a kind of Tolstoyan ‘Black Beauty’ — downbeat but finally inspirational — and as a valid commentary on the injustices of civilization.”That show, directed by Mr. Kalfin and Lynne Gannaway, transferred to Broadway and ran there for six months.By then Mr. Kalfin was seeing a change in theater audiences, one that his company had helped bring about.“There’s a whole new generation of theatergoers, and they have become elitist in a very positive way,” he told The Times that November as “Strider” was beginning its Broadway run. “I think they’re bored to death with television, and they’re more demanding of theater now because they’re so hungry for nourishment.”A scene from the Chelsea Theater Center’s production of Amiri Baraka’s “Slave Ship” in 1969. The play’s ending, the Times critic Clive Barnes wrote, “scared and horrified me.”Deidi von Schaewen, via BAM Hamm ArchivesRobert Zangwill Kalfin was born on April 22, 1933, in the Bronx. His father, Alfred, was a real estate developer, and his mother, Hilda Shulman Kalfin, was a teacher.His childhood memories were of being taken not to the theater but to the Metropolitan Opera, where he and his parents generally ended up in the cheap seats, high up and off to the side.“My father would hold onto the back of my pants while I leaned over trying to see center stage,” he said in the oral history.He studied music at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and Performing Arts). As a theater major at Alfred University in central New York, he became part of an ambitious department that was staging Bertolt Brecht and other European writers and experimenting with unusual settings — he was in a production of “Androcles and the Lion” that was staged in a gymnasium transformed to look like a Roman arena.He earned his master’s degree in 1957 at the Yale School of Drama and settled into odd jobs in New York, working for a time in the shipping department at WOR-TV and as a production assistant on a children’s television show in Newark, N.J., that starred a chimpanzee.He directed his first Off Broadway production, “The Golem,” in 1959, at St. Mark’s Playhouse. His other early efforts included “The Good Soldier Schweik” in 1963, which didn’t go well — a producer interfered so intrusively that Mr. Kalfin withdrew before opening night and sought unsuccessfully to stop the production from opening. When it did, William Glover of The Associated Press called it “one of the season’s worst plays.”Mr. Kalfin, right, with Michael David, left, the executive director of the Chelsea Theater Center, and Burl Hash, the production director, in 1973.Manuel Guevaza Jr.At the Chelsea, Mr. Kalfin sometimes left audiences and critics scratching their heads. That was the case with a 1970 musical called “Tarot,” which he staged in Brooklyn. As the credits read, it was conceived by The Rubber Duck and directed jointly by “Mr. Duck” (as The Times called him, tongue in cheek) and Mr. Kalfin.Mr. Barnes hated it. “Pretentiousness is rioting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,” his review began. Yet the Chelsea was respected enough by then that even in that pan, Mr. Barnes felt compelled to note that the group was facing one of its frequent financial crises at the time, and that “it simply must not be allowed to die.”The group did peter out in the mid-1980s, swamped with debt. Before it did, its other notable successes included “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer story of a Jewish girl who passes as a boy; Mr. Kalfin had it adapted for the stage by Leah Napolin and directed it. It opened in Brooklyn in December 1974.It was a tough road to opening night. Mr. Kalfin clashed with Tovah Feldshuh, who played the title character, and withstood complaints from Orthodox Jewish leaders; he also had to strike a deal with Barbra Streisand, who owned the rights to the Singer story, which she would turn into a film in 1983. But the play moved to Broadway, where it ran for 223 performances.Mr. Bari, Mr. Kalfin’s life partner, died in 2013. Mr. Kalfin, who had lived in East Hampton, N.Y., leaves no immediate survivors.After the Chelsea gave up the ghost, Mr. Kalfin continued to direct in New York and in regional houses; he was still working until recently. One of his post-Chelsea projects in New York was directing a Yiddish version of “Yentl” produced by the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater in 2002. Eleanor Reissa played the title role.“Even though he’d directed maybe a hundred shows, every time was like the first,” Ms. Reissa, who had worked with Mr. Kalfin on other shows as well, said by email. “Wide eyed and wide hearted always, infectious joyfulness.” More

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      ‘Complicity’ Review: A Muddled #MeToo Drama

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      A new play by Diane Davis at the New Ohio Theater addresses the topic head-on, but clumsily, our critic writes.It has been about five years since the rise of the #MeToo movement. Debate remains on the cultural shifts it has wrought and whether these shifts will last.More laws are on the books now, more men have been jailed or fined. Others have been swiftly canceled. And then uncanceled almost as quickly. But what of the people who enabled these men?This is the subject of “Complicity,” a new play by Diane Davis at the New Ohio Theater in Greenwich Village, which addresses the topic head-on, but very clumsily, as in mismatched heels. The drama concerns, though never shows, Harry Wickstone, a legendary producer, and the hold he maintains over the women and men unlucky enough to orbit him. Two of them are Tig (Katie Broad), a naïve ingénue, and Lilia (Christian Paxton), her more seasoned co-star. Five terrible minutes in a luxury hotel room send these two women on radically different paths before the play forces them back together and then tragically apart.This brief description renders “Complicity” as a more coherent work than it truly is. Its story arcs need smoothing, its characters clarifying, even in their basic details. Tig has a sister, Sima (Nadia Sepsenwol), equally inexperienced, who somehow acts as her agent. What official role does Nigel (Zach Wegner), Harry’s fixer, play at the studio and what does he want of Lilia? (Tonia E. Anderson plays a television host: Christian Prins Coen and Ben Faigus appear in several small roles.) Davis struggles to illustrate how Hollywood works, how people work. But it’s less of a struggle than a slap fight, without clear winners.Katie Broad, left, and Nadia Sepsenwol, as sisters. The play is less of a struggle than a slap fight, without clear winners.Ashley Garrett PhotographyUnder Illana Stein’s direction, little gels. Some scenes, like a talk show sequence, are played for realism. Some, like the women’s various breakdowns, are played with an embarrassing expressionist bent. Rarely do these scenes convince. Overacting is rampant, presumably with Stein’s encouragement. Even when the actors aren’t speaking, they cycle through various expressions. At times the actors seem to be in entirely different productions — one playing a scene sincerely, one archly.It is an unhappy irony that in a play about collusion they could not collude on a house style. The design is more coherent, but only in the slapdash sense that the producers seem to have skimped on budget and time. Scenes are underlit, projections of time and place appear and disappear before they can be read. The cheap costumes are a puzzle with few satisfying solutions, the sets wincingly flimsy.Here is one more irony. Five years on, amid the noisy and bad-faith hand-wringing of whether the movement has gone too far or not far enough, the producer Harvey Weinstein’s case stands firm. So many women came forward and their stories were presented with such lucidity and compassion by journalists — New York Times journalists among them — that his guilt was substantiated, despite his great power.Women, finally, were believed. Punishment was meted out. As stories like these go, this stands as the surest, plainest, least ambiguous story imaginable. And even so, “Complicity” blunders so much in its telling.ComplicityThrough Oct. 15 at the New Ohio Theater, Manhattan; newohiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan to Star in Hansberry Revival

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      “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a rarely revived play by Lorraine Hansberry, will be presented at BAM starting in February.Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan will star in a rare revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” starting in February at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.The play, about a pair of bohemian artists struggling to preserve their marriage at a time of political upheaval, was first staged on Broadway in 1964, five years after the arrival of Hansberry’s far better known work, “A Raisin in the Sun.” In 2018, writing in The New York Times Book Review, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins called “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” “a shattering study of liberal self-delusion and whiteness as an existential crisis” and declared the play “criminally neglected.”The revival, which is scheduled to begin performances Feb. 4 and to open Feb. 23, will be directed by Anne Kauffman, who previously directed it in 2016 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Reviewing that production for The Chicago Tribune, the critic Chris Jones called the play “a masterpiece lost in plain sight” and “a drama so infused with emotional intelligence, linguistic treasures and the human conditions of dread and longing that it keeps you bolt-upright in your seat for nearly three hours.”The artistic director of BAM, David Binder, said he read “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” while he was working as the lead producer of a 2004 Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” He and Kauffman have been talking about mounting a New York production ever since.Isaac and Brosnahan are best known for their work onscreen — he for “Star Wars” sequels (he played Poe Dameron) and she for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (she plays the title character). But both have stage credits as well; Isaac played Hamlet at the Public Theater in 2017, and Brosnahan played Desdemona in a production of “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop in 2016.Before the pandemic, Isaac had been planning to appear in a new production of “Three Sisters,” directed by Sam Gold at New York Theater Workshop. That production, which has been repeatedly postponed, now appears on the theater’s website as part of the current season, but with no date, and the note, “We are working hard to confirm the cast for the 2023 production of ‘Three Sisters’ and we hope that the full original cast will be available to continue on with the production.” (Representatives for Isaac and New York Theater Workshop offered no further details.)Hansberry died in 1965, at the age of 34, and in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in her life and work, with productions and books, a documentary and even a sculpture that is touring the country. A new revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara, is now in previews at the Public Theater. More