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      Rita Gardner, an Original ‘Fantasticks’ Star, Is Dead at 87

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      In 1960 she originated the lone female role in an Off Broadway show that became part of theater history thanks to a record-setting run.Rita Gardner, who in a long cabaret and theater career earned an enduring place in stage history in 1960, when she originated the role of Luisa in the musical “The Fantasticks,” the longest-running musical in theatrical history, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 87.Claire-Frances Sullivan, her personal assistant and caretaker, said the cause was leukemia.Ms. Gardner was in her mid-20s and not particularly well known when she responded to an audition notice for “The Fantasticks,” a romantic fable with a book and lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt. She had called Lore Noto, the show’s producer, before attending the audition, and he told her that though the creative team already had another actress in mind for the part, she should audition anyway.“I didn’t know Tom or Harvey or anybody,” she said in an interview for the book “The Amazing Story of ‘The Fantasticks’” (1991), by Donald C. Farber and Robert Viagas. “I came in, essentially, off the street. They didn’t know me either.”She sang the song she had once used to win an “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” contest, “Over the Rainbow.” Mr. Schmidt heard a quality he liked.“With a lot of singers you can tell when they go from head to chest voice; it’s two different voices,” he said in an interview for the same book. “With Rita it was all one voice. Rita was like a pop singer, yet she could do these obbligato things, and it didn’t seem strange.”She got the part of Luisa (also sometimes called simply “the Girl”), the only female role in the piece. The show, whose signature number, “Try to Remember,” became a standard, opened in May 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. Tickets were $3.75.In The Daily News, Charles McHarry pronounced the show “recommended without reservation.” But in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson, while having kind words for the actors, thought the story lost steam. “Although it is ungrateful to say so,” he wrote, “two acts are one too many.”In a 2000 interview with The Associated Press, Ms. Gardner recalled that keeping the show open was touch and go until that August, when the production took time off amid the New York City summer and played in East Hampton, N.Y., for a week.“All the posh people saw it and told their friends,” she said. “Audiences started to grow.”Ms. Gardner with the other members of the original cast of “The Fantasticks,” including, top row center, Jerry Orbach.PhotofestThe show ran for 42 years, closing in 2002 after more than 17,000 performances, and then reopened in 2006 and ran until 2017. Ms. Gardner stayed only until the end of 1960. (Jerry Orbach, who was also in the original cast, left at about the same time.) But she was with the show long enough to record the original cast album.In a 2001 interview with The Bradenton Herald of Florida, Ms. Gardner recalled that, about 10 years earlier, she had attended a production of “The Fantasticks” for the first time as an audience member.“I didn’t know I had been in something so good,” she said.She was in Bradenton performing a revue she had assembled called “Try to Remember: A Look at Off Broadway,” in which she sang songs from “The Fantasticks” and other shows and told stories. A few months earlier she had staged the show at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, the same theater where she had originated the “Fantasticks” role 40 years earlier. There, her performance started at 10 p.m. — because “The Fantasticks” was still running in the theater’s main evening slot.Rita Schier was born on Oct. 23, 1934, in Brooklyn to Nathan and Tillie (Hack) Schier. She studied opera and dance and sang in a close-harmony group called the Honeybees; in the late 1950s she appeared in a revue called “Nightcap,” which featured songs by the then unknown Jerry Herman. In 1957 she married the playwright Herb Gardner, who would become known for “A Thousand Clowns.” Their marriage ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Peter Cereghetti. At her death she was married to Robert Sevra, who is her only immediate survivor.Ms. Gardner left “The Fantasticks” to appear in a movie called “One Plus One” (1961), and she had small parts in other movies over the years. She also appeared on television, including in several episodes of “Law & Order,” the show that helped make Mr. Orbach an instantly recognizable star. She appeared on Broadway in “A Family Affair” (1962) as well as in the 1963 revival of “Pal Joey,” among other shows.She performed frequently on the cabaret circuit, where she employed not only her fine singing voice but also her droll sense of humor. In her show “Try to Remember,” she talked about life beyond Broadway’s bright lights.“Off Broadway is not just a location, it’s a definition,” she said. “The Actors Equity definition is a theater that has less than 300 seats, but my definition growing up Off Broadway was a little different. It was a theater that had less than 300 seats, most of them broken.” More

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      ‘Bold Enough to Go Full-Tilt’: Gabby Beans Is Playing to the Balcony

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      The actress, a Tony nominee for “The Skin of Our Teeth,” is bringing her sharp eye for comedy to Atlantic Theater Company’s production of “I’m Revolting.”Onstage in Lincoln Center Theater’s maximalist revival of “The Skin of Our Teeth” last spring were a giant brontosaurus puppet, a full-scale amusement park slide and a stage-spanning verdant field in full bloom. But it was the towering performance from a 5-foot-3 force of nature named Gabby Beans that made the production a must-see.Taking on the role of Sabina in this messy epic by Thornton Wilder, nebulously set between prehistory and the end of the world, is a hard enough task for any actor. And though Tallulah Bankhead, who originated the role in 1942, left big shoes to fill, Beans, in her Broadway debut, stuffed them with a gargantuan presence and a knowingly ridiculous voice, picking up a Tony nomination for lead actress in a play. (Alexis Soloski, in her review for The Times, described Beans as a “ferocious actress” whose “ample” comic gifts “come beribonned and frilled.”)While growing up, Beans said her mother, a fan of classic Hollywood actresses, would call her “Tallulah Bashula” and, because of her early comedic flashes, liken her to Lucille Ball — apt comparisons for anyone who saw Beans darting around the stage in Lileana Blain-Cruz’s production, pausing to flash her expressive eyes and deliver a big, vaudevillian one-liner.Beans, with James Vincent Meredith, in “The Skin of Our Teeth.” In her review, the critic Alexis Soloski called Beans “a ferocious actress” whose ample comic gifts “come beribboned and frilled.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesShe later added Eartha Kitt to that list of brassy acting inspirations during an interview at a coffee shop in Chelsea a few weeks ago, before a dress rehearsal of Gracie Gardner’s “I’m Revolting.” (The Atlantic Theater Company production, currently in previews and scheduled to open Oct. 5, is Beans’s first show since “The Skin of Our Teeth” closed in May.) “She is the brightest star in my artistic constellation,” Beans said of Kitt. “She had a way of relating to the audience, and it’s really special to see someone hold everyone’s attention with their presence.”The operative word is “presence,” which Beans has plenty of. Seemingly unafraid to make bold choices, and bolstered by pure charisma and a sharp eye for comedy, hers is a type of performance that hearkens back to when theater was the only way to see personality writ large.One of her “I’m Revolting” co-stars, Patrick Vaill, put it this way: “The acting style of the time we’re in is rooted in doing less; a glance, a shift in physicality. We don’t have actors playing to the balcony, so when someone does that, it’s invigorating.”In Gardner’s dark comedy, about patients at a skin cancer clinic, Beans’s comedic chops are tighter, this time blended with the forceful compassion of the type-A older sister she plays.Beans, left, and Alicia Pilgrim as her sister in Gracie Gardner’s dark comedy “I’m Revolting,” which opens Oct. 5 at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“She understands the tone of storytelling very well and can throw herself into that, whatever it is,” the director, Knud Adams, said. “With confidence comes that transformational fearlessness where she knows what needs to be served and dives in headfirst.”Both collaborators referenced Beans’s presence, onstage and off, with Vaill noting that “the performance is happening before you even realize it’s a performance,” and Adams, who said the role was hers as soon as she expressed interest, praising Beans as seeming “boundless in what she can take on.”That limitlessness is a trait that also comes through in conversation, even if Beans is unaware of it, half-joking that she was grateful that she’d had no faith in herself for her “Skin of Our Teeth” audition.“I got the audition through Lileana, because we’d worked together quite a bit, and she’s a friend,” explained Beans, who has appeared in several Off Broadway productions directed by Blain-Cruz, including “Anatomy of a Suicide” and “Marys Seacole.” “I read the play and, I’m going to be honest with you, thought, ‘OK, this play is weird, but this part! How are they going to cast someone who’s not famous?’ It made me go into the audition with a lot of freedom, so I did the craziest version I possibly could. It empowered me to make really big choices, and I felt free in a way I’d never felt before as an actor.”Blain-Cruz said she first starting “keeping tabs” on Beans after seeing her in a non-equity showcase production of Sam Shepard’s “Curse of the Starving Class” at Williamstown Theater Festival in 2017, and has since cast her in four productions.“I was excited, but not sure, about Gabby for ‘Skin,’ because it is such a particular role,” Blain-Cruz said. “But she came in and blew it out of the water. Her alacrity with language is stunning, and her moving the character between an exhausted lady-of-the-stage into this zany character voice revealed somebody who is willing and bold enough to go full-tilt.”The director noted that, along with the other productions on which they’ve collaborated (including “Girls” at Yale Repertory Theater), Beans has excelled at “existing in different realities and times.” Blain-Cruz commended her as a “dramaturgically intelligent actor” who has become her muse, and whose “humor and intensity” she believes would perfectly suit a Yorgos Lanthimos film like “The Lobster.”But before Gabby Beans became a performer, she was Gabby Beans, Army brat. Born in Georgia to a physician mother and a father who was in the military, she “kind of grew up in Northern Virginia,” also living in Louisiana and Hawaii before settling in a German ski town in the Bavarian Alps, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, for high school. She was accepted to Columbia University, which brought her back stateside to study neuroscience and theater.After three years of working at a neonatal intensive care unit and doing student plays at Columbia, she decided against medical school, instead opting for a master’s degree in classical acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, a city she fell in love with while growing up in Europe. She credits seeing Fiona Shaw in a 2009 production of “Mother Courage” at the National Theater, and Kristin Scott Thomas in the Old Vic’s 2014 production of “Electra,” as formative theatrical experiences.The actress, who opts for “a monastic life” whenever she’s working, has a passion for the city’s house and techno music scene.Desmond Picotte for The New York Times“It’s really nurturing as a young actor to be in a country whose most famous writer is a playwright,” she said. “There’s just a different sensibility around theater, an awareness of and value for the work of actors that I think is not quite true here unless you’re incredibly famous.”Though she has a deep knowledge of actors past and present, it becomes clear, listening to Beans discuss her other interests, that she has a life beyond the stage. She loves the structure and discipline required of acting — a holdover from her upbringing, she said she opts for “a monastic life” whenever working — but she lights up with an insider’s passion when describing her love for New York City’s house and techno scene.“I’m into the beep-beep-boop music,” she said, smiling. “I grew up in Germany, so how could I not be?”Back in Bavaria, she and her friends would travel to Munich for its “debaucherous” club scene. Here, it’s electronic music hot spots like Elsewhere and Nowadays in her Bushwick neighborhood, where she’s lived since 2016. What first drew her to the scene was footwork, a type of electronic music out of Chicago that she’d hear in grungy Brooklyn warehouses. But she hasn’t kept up with that scene lately, she said, because of the pandemic, her busy schedule and the effects of gentrification.“A lot of my favorite parties went away,” Beans said. “The small record labels throwing them were priced out of the spaces. There used to be all these D.I.Y. venues on Kent Avenue before they turned into the Vice offices. That was my scene: fast-paced Black electronic music in a warehouse, where the bar would be a cart table with a handle of Everclear and a bottle of Sprite. Once those places went away, I wasn’t as present in the clubs.”Warehouse parties, acting, Eartha Kitt adoration, her recent turn toward writing and directing short films with a magical realism bent: “It’s all the same, all just about being alive and feeling free,” she said. “It’s all me.” More

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      ‘Sesame Street: The Musical’ Review: Everything’s A-OK

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      Jonathan Rockefeller’s Off Broadway production blends the charm and wit of the show’s early days with more modern characters.Bert has stage fright, Ernie has wandered off to take a bath, and a certain blue gourmand has already eaten the first two letters of his alphabet song. (They appear to be made of chocolate chip cookie, what was the prop master thinking?) But everything is just as it ought to be at “Sesame Street: The Musical,” a playful and captivating on-ramp to a love of show business, now running Off Broadway at Theater Row.Though the cuddly oddballs of “Sesame Street” have been amusing and educating children on TV for more than 50 years, on a Saturday morning at the theater, the pint-size fans are a discerning and unruly bunch, liable to throw their hands up and start wailing at any moment. (The show is recommended for ages 3 and above.) They are not afraid to ask the tough questions. (“Hey, where’s Elmo going?” one eager voice appealed.) And they have an instinctual appreciation for the shiny things in life. (“Look, bubbles!”)The new stage production, written, directed and produced by Jonathan Rockefeller, in collaboration with Sesame Workshop, delivers a meta look behind the scenes at the art of putting on a musical. A headset-clad lamb, defying the typical all-black stage manager’s uniform in favor of its natural coat, is running the show. (“Quiet ba-a-a-ackstage!”) The dramatic crisis, quickly resolved, arrives early: Somehow, the gang forgot to book a special guest. Stephen Fala, posing as a stray patron, ambles onstage and finds his big break. And with dimples like that, it’s no wonder.Pinnacles of the indelible “Sesame Street” song catalog are mixed into the musical, and Elmo is able to show off his moves.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPinnacles of the indelible “Sesame Street” song catalog, like “Rubber Duckie” and “C Is for Cookie,” are mixed in with numbers meant to teach the human newbie in their midst, a clear audience surrogate, how to save the show. Never carried a tune? Be Rosita’s echo in “Sing After Me.” Can’t dance? The Count can teach you “The Batty Bat,” though you may prefer to take after Elmo, who at least has legs to demonstrate that he’s got the moves. A few new songs by Tom Kitt, Helen Park and Nate Edmondson touch on the power of imagination and dressing up as a vehicle for self-affirming play.Naturally, all that sounds like a reeking load of garbage to Oscar the Grouch, who assumes the part of a critic at large for this paper — subtly rebranded “The New Yuck Times” — with a review that decries the show as, “Stinky! Rotten! Trash!” (Respectfully, I disagree.) “You better not enjoy yourselves,” he warns. “Or I’ll have nothing to write about!” What’s an introduction to theater without a proper critic’s roast?Unfortunately for Oscar, who growls his signature ode “I Love Trash” with sour panache, the musical he knocks is far from rubbish, though it’s largely and lovingly fashioned from recycled material. A classic count-to-12 ditty harks back to the program’s 1970s roots, as do a pair of hares whose accordion limbs stretch like taffy in a funky dance break.Rockefeller’s production nicely blends the charm and wit of the early days of “Sesame Street” with both old-school and more modern characters, all courtesy of Jim Henson’s creature shop. Gabrielle, who sports Afro puffs, and Rosita, who speaks Spanish, are markers of its continued attention to social values like inclusion and understanding.Though its rich-hued aesthetics and loose structure are smartly designed to hold the attention of the young and restless, “Sesame Street: The Musical” rewards adults with the wonders of nostalgia and a few knowing ribs about life behind the footlights. It’s a beguiling place to play pretend — and to learn a thing or two about how to grow up in the real world.Sesame Street: The MusicalThrough Nov. 27 at Theater Row, Manhattan; sesamestreetmusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      New Musical From ‘Strange Loop’ Writer to Run Off Broadway

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      “White Girl in Danger,” a soap opera satire by Michael R. Jackson, will be staged in New York next spring by Second Stage and Vineyard theaters.As a child, Michael R. Jackson would religiously watch soap operas with his great-aunt. “Days of Our Lives.” “Another World.” “Santa Barbara.” “The Young and the Restless.”He kept watching through high school. He interned at “All My Children” in college. And then he moved to New York, hoping to become a soap opera writer.Instead, he became a dramatist, and an acclaimed one at that: His first musical, “A Strange Loop,” a meta take on a Broadway usher writing his own musical, won both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best musical, and it’s now running on Broadway.Next spring, his sophomore musical will arrive Off Broadway. It’s called “White Girl in Danger,” and it’s a race-conscious sendup of the soap opera genre.“White Girl in Danger” imagines a soap opera set in a town called Allwhite, with a group of Black characters, called Blackgrounds, who are featured only in story lines about slavery and policing. One of those characters, Keesha, seeks to break that pattern by seizing a central story line from a trio of white protagonists, Meagan, Maegan and Megan, but in so doing she also risks running afoul of an Allwhite killer.“There’s a lot of genre elements coming from the soap opera, Lifetime movie, melodrama world,” Jackson said. “The idea for the show was going to be a broad satire, but then these conversations around representation, diversity, equity, inclusion started to happen in the theater world, and I started to think about those issues, and suddenly one molecule attached itself to another.”Jackson has been developing the musical since 2017, and last summer the incubator New York Stage and Film presented a two-day, concert-style reading of it in the Hudson Valley.The musical, with a 12-person cast, will be jointly produced by two New York nonprofits, Vineyard Theater and Second Stage Theater, and will be staged next spring at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater. The show, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz and choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly, is scheduled to start previews on March 15 and open April 10. More

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      Robert LuPone, Actor Who Became a Behind-the-Scenes Force, Dies at 76

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      After playing a critical Broadway role in “A Chorus Line,” he helped start the vibrant Off Broadway MCC Theater. TV watchers knew him from “The Sopranos” and “Law and Order.”Robert LuPone, an actor and dancer who originated the role of the driven director-choreographer in the musical “A Chorus Line” on Broadway and later helped run a vibrant Off Broadway theater company known for thought-provoking new works, died on Saturday in Albany, N.Y. He was 76.His wife, Virginia (Robinson) LuPone, confirmed the death, at a hospice near his home in Athens, N.Y. She said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Mr. LuPone was familiar to television audiences from his roles on “The Sopranos” and the “Law & Order” franchise. But his first love, like that of his sister, Patti LuPone, was the theater.By 1975, when Mr. LuPone auditioned for “A Chorus Line,” he had been dancing since childhood and had been in a few Broadway shows. Initially cast as Al, one of the dancers vying for a spot in the chorus line of a Broadway musical, Mr. LuPone persuaded Michael Bennett, who conceived and directed the show, that he could play the director, Zach, after Barry Bostwick, who had been cast in the part, left the show during the workshop phase.“Michael has trouble directing actors,” Mr. LuPone said in an interview on the website of the Muny, the musical theater in St. Louis, when it staged “A Chorus Line” in 2017. “No, let me put it this way: Michael has trouble directing egos. He has a tremendous ego. And I have a tremendous ego. Barry Bostwick obviously has a bigger ego than I do.”At the Public Theater, and then on Broadway, “A Chorus Line” was an enormous hit. When it opened at the Shubert Theater — where it would run for 15 years — Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Times that as Zach, Mr. LuPone “retires to a godlike perch at the rear of the auditorium and wheedles out of the brassy and the giggly, the pleading and the nonchalant, snippets of their pasts.”The show was nominated for 12 Tony Awards — Mr. LuPone received a nomination for best featured actor in a musical — and won nine, including best musical. That year, his sister was nominated for best featured actress in a musical, for “The Robber Bridegroom.”“A Chorus Line” proved pivotal for Mr. LuPone: His future was no longer in dancing.Ms. LuPone said that her brother had been an “extraordinary dancer,” and that his decision to give up dancing “haunts me.” In an email, she wrote, “I think he couldn’t take the dictatorial environment that choreographers at that time created.”Mr. LuPone said that dancing in musicals had become a “hollow experience.” In an oral history interview in 2018 with Primary Stages, an Off Broadway theater company, he said, “I wasn’t really able to speak, and the ideas were, for me, superficial.”That realization led him to study at the Actors Studio and perform with the Circle Repertory Company. He began teaching acting at New York University in 1981 and showed a very direct demeanor that his students at first found surprising.“Who was this guy from musical theater talking to us actors?” Bernie Telsey, one of those students, said in a phone interview. “He’d never taught before. But it became the best class ever.” Some students continued to study with him after they graduated.In 1986 Mr. LuPone and Mr. Telsey formed the Manhattan Class Company, which later became MCC Theater. Will Cantler soon joined them as associate artistic director and was named an artistic director in 2011.Over nearly 40 years, the company has sought to produce challenging, original plays and musicals, with a view to what Mr. LuPone called a “third act” — affecting audience members enough to keep them talking about the shows after they returned home.Three MCC productions transferred to Broadway and received Tony nominations for best play: “Frozen,” the story of the aftermath of a 10-year-old girl’s murder, which opened in 2004; “Reasons to Be Pretty” (2008), about people’s obsession with beauty; and “Hand to God” (2014), a dark comedy about a teenager and his profane, possibly demonic sock puppet. An Off Broadway MCC production of “Wit,” Margaret Edson’s play about a woman’s reflections on dying after she learns that she has ovarian cancer — which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Drama Desk Award for outstanding play in 1999 — also moved to Broadway.Mr. LuPone in the 1998 Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” He was also a familiar face on “The Sopranos” and “Law and Order.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRobert Francis LuPone was born on July 29, 1946, in Brooklyn and grew up in Northport, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Orlando Joseph LuPone, was an elementary school principal in Northport. His mother, Angela (Patti) LuPone, a homemaker, encouraged Robert and Patti’s show business ambitions, driving them to classes. Robert and Patti danced together as children, winning third prize at a Jones Beach talent contest.“I still have the trophy,” Ms. LuPone said. “It was a tango.”Robert took tap lessons after school before enrolling in the Martha Graham School, where as a teenager he studied modern dance with Graham, José Limón and Antony Tudor. He attended Adelphi University, on Long Island, but, spurred by meeting a dancer better than he was who had gone to the Juilliard School, he transferred there. He majored in ballet and minored in modern dance and graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree.By then he had been in the ensemble of a 1966 production of “The Pajama Game” at the Westbury Music Fair (now the NYCB Theater at Westbury) on Long Island. He made his Broadway debut as a dancer in 1968, in “Noël Coward’s Sweet Potato,” and danced in three more Broadway shows before his agent sent him to audition for “A Chorus Line.”Mr. LuPone worked steadily as an actor in theater, in movies and on television. He played the Apostle Paul in the film version of “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1973); was in six daytime soap operas (earning a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for his role on “All My Children”);was seen on series like “Gossip Girl,” “Ally McBeal” and “Billions”; and, between 1997 and 2001, was in Broadway productions of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” Sam Shepard’s “True West” and Herb Gardener’s “A Thousand Clowns.”In six episodes of “The Sopranos,” he played Bruce Cusamano, Tony Soprano’s neighbor and physician, who recommends that Tony see a psychiatrist.In addition to his wife and sister, Mr. LuPone is survived by his son, Orlando, and his twin brother, William.Mr. LuPone’s acting career was secondary to his work at MCC, where he not only developed, oversaw and produced four or five shows a year but also raised money for the theater’s permanent home, the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, on West 52nd Street in Manhattan, which opened in 2019.“Bob was fearless,” Mr. Telsey said, adding that playwrights often found it hard to accept the candid notes that Mr. LuPone would write them during previews. “They’d be so stressed, but three days later realized that Bobby was right. He pulled no punches.” More

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      Ars Nova Introduces a Name Your Price Ticketing Model

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      For its upcoming season, audiences can pay what they wish. Tickets will start at $5 and increase in $5 increments up to $100 per ticket.The Off Broadway incubator Ars Nova will allow audience members to pay what they wish for theater tickets in a new initiative called “What’s Ars Is Yours: Name Your Price,” the company announced on Wednesday.“It’s not income based, it’s not age based, there’s no demographic basis,” said Renee Blinkwolt, the producing executive director of Ars Nova. “It’s just radically accessible — the doors are wide open to any and everyone to pay what they will.”Beginning on Oct. 6, theatergoers can choose their ticket price for any Ars Nova show at its base on West 54th Street in Hell’s Kitchen — as well as the company’s two productions at Greenwich House — for its 2022-23 season. Tickets will start at $5 and increase in $5 increments up to $100 per ticket.Ars Nova’s Off Broadway season includes the world premiere of “Hound Dog” (Oct. 6-Nov. 5), in which a young musician returns to her hometown, Ankara, Turkey, to look after her widowed father, and the world premiere of “(pray)” (March 9-April 15), a choreopoem that follows the form of a Sunday Baptist Church service while transporting audiences to an ancestral forest.Tickets to Ars Nova’s most recent production, “Oratorio for Living Things,” started at $35 and went up to $95 for premium seats. In a time of persistent drops in attendance, removing the financial barrier could be the extra incentive that gets people to the theater.Talks around a name-your-own price model started around this time last year, Blinkwolt said, knowing that audiences might feel nervous returning to in-person performances. After a year of planning and debating, the company is introducing the initiative for its 20th-anniversary season — and second in-person season since the start of the pandemic — during “a time of great change and transition,” Blinkwolt said.The pay-what-you-wish tickets idea is, of course, nothing new. For instance, in 2013, the Forum Theater in Silver Spring, Md., instituted “Forum for All,” under which patrons could attend performances for as little as 25 cents. And in 2017, the Off Broadway play “Afterglow” offered 10 pay-what-you-wish tickets to some performances at the Loft at the Davenport Theater.Still, having that ticketing for an entire season could signal a new standard in arts accessibility in New York City. Ars Nova says it will treat the effort as a learning experiment, with plans to assess the financial impact at the end of the year along with evaluating if the model succeeded in motivating attendance and diversifying the demographics of the audience.“My hope is that people are curious about it, they’re excited about it, and they build back that habit of getting together with friends, enjoying each other’s company in real time and space and taking in a show,” Blinkwolt said. More

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      Review: A Faithful ‘Kinky Boots,’ With All Its Pizazz and Pitfalls

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      The Cyndi Lauper and Harvey Fierstein musical, in which the drag queen Lola saves a provincial shoe factory, makes an Off Broadway return at the spacious Stage 42.You can’t keep a drag queen down, at least not for long. It was only April 2019 that the Cyndi Lauper and Harvey Fierstein musical “Kinky Boots” closed on Broadway after a six-year run, and already it’s back in town. The Britain-set show, in which the statuesque performer Lola saves a provincial shoe factory by inspiring a line of toweringly outré footwear, is now running Off Broadway.But unlike the comebacks of shows such as “Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages,” which both reopened at the underground theatrical mall New World Stages, “Kinky Boots” is at the spacious Stage 42, which stands on 42nd Street and is large enough to accommodate a 25-person company and a minimally downsized version of the director Jerry Mitchell’s va-va-voom production.But enough about real estate: How is Lola?This, after all, is the role for which Billy Porter won a Tony in 2013, and it is a textbook Fierstein creation — bold and brassy, with big hair, bright nail polish and quick-fire quips barely concealing the scars of pain and rejection. There are expectations.Happily, Callum Francis, who has played the part in Britain, Australia and, briefly, on Broadway, meets them. He is a delight not just as Lola but as her alter ego, Simon — it is hard to tell who the real person is, what real means in this context and whether it even matters. Unlike Porter, whose physical intensity often came across as combative swagger, Francis moves with a dancer’s grace, and Lola’s confidence has a slinky playfulness that is especially fun to watch in her early scenes with Charlie (Christian Douglas, whose performance is a little stiff).Charlie is the earnest bloke trying to save his late father’s failing shoe company because the jobs of people he has known since he was a child depend on it. Lola provides him with life coaching and the idea that will eventually reinvent the business — to create and build “tubular sex,” that is, boots that are simultaneously strong and sexy. Both characters have complicated relationships with their fathers, and Lola shows not just Charlie but everyone onstage that there are many ways to be a man. That thread was also in the 2005 movie that inspired the musical, but here, the message feels super-Fiersteinian.Simon’s wounded vulnerability is never too far underneath the glitter and takes center stage in the 11 o’clock power ballad “Hold Me in Your Heart.” The reveal of that song’s context hit harder in the original production because we had seen a little more of Lola’s back story — the roles of Young Simon and Young Charlie have been cut here. More subtle are tiny tweaks such as Lola’s welcome greeting, which has been expanded to “Ladies, gentlemen, theys, them and those who have yet to make up their minds!”But, overall, the show looks and feels like a slightly sized-down photocopy of the original. Danielle Hope, for example, is very funny as Lauren, an employee at the factory, and her big solo, “The History of Wrong Guys,” is perfectly calibrated, but the rendition faithfully duplicates Annaleigh Ashford’s, who originated the role on Broadway. It looks as if Hope might be capable of coming up with her own shtick, and it would have been interesting to see the supporting cast receive a little more agency. But don’t worry, the conveyor belts still turn into treadmills for the exhilarating “Everybody Say Yeah” — a sterling example of Mitchell’s showmanship.Considering this faithfulness to the original template, it is not surprising that the story’s less successful moments remain, too. Among them are the slightly preachy tone as well as Charlie’s sudden dark turn. According to Fierstein’s recent memoir, “I Was Better Last Night,” the show took nearly five years to complete, so you have to wonder how nobody could find an hour to refine this temporary personality transplant. The book also suggests an intriguing line of thought when Fierstein writes that the number “What a Woman Wants” expresses Lola’s “daring sexuality — as a cross-dressing heterosexual male.” You will have to stare extra-hard and perhaps do a bit of projecting to see that onstage, where Lola essentially manifests as a magical being. “The sex is in the heel,” as one song proclaims, but it would have been nice to transfer some from the boot to the character.One seemingly big change that turns out not to matter is the shrinking of the band to half of its Broadway size. But here it is perfectly fine to go big on synthesizers because Lauper’s songs, packed with hooks, and Stephen Oremus’s sharp arrangements and orchestrations always made terrific use of electronics. This is the only score in recent Broadway history that sounds as if it were written by people who had set foot in a nightclub within the past 40 years, and the hi-NRG finale, “Raise You Up/Just Be,” sounds like it’s booming out of a float at a Pride parade. That’s a compliment, of course.Kinky BootsAt Stage 42, Manhattan; kinkybootsthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More

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      What to Do With an Absent Father? Cast Him as a Character Onstage.

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      The experimental theater maker Aya Ogawa ponders her distant father as well as failure and forgiveness in “The Nosebleed” at Lincoln Center Theater.The Brooklyn-based experimental theater maker Aya Ogawa hadn’t thought about her father in 10 years. When that fact occurred to her, in 2017 — a decade after his death, which she and her mother had chosen not to mark with a funeral, or even an obituary in the local newspaper in his California town — she didn’t feel guilty about it.It seemed indicative of the remoteness of their relationship, and how painful it had been for her. Yet Ogawa, then in the midst of creating a show called “Failure Sandwich,” did think she had failed somehow as a daughter to him.“He would have wanted to be memorialized,” Ogawa, 48, said one afternoon last week, sitting casually barefoot on the floor of a rehearsal studio upstairs at Lincoln Center Theater. “He would have wanted to be celebrated and acknowledged and all that stuff.”It was too late for her to do anything about the absence that her father had been in her life, even when they shared the same house. The bond they’d never forged would never be. But she could use the tools of her art to imagine an alternate ending to their relationship — a gesture of forgiveness to him, “for not being able to be any other way,” she said, and a gesture of forgiveness to herself as well.And so “Failure Sandwich,” a piece she had been building out of other people’s stories of failure, evolved into her acclaimed play “The Nosebleed,” a kind of mourning ritual in dramatic form, with comedy. After a brief run last fall at Japan Society, it’s back through Aug. 28 at the Claire Tow Theater at LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater’s stage for new works.In “The Nosebleed,” Ogawa portrays her father at various ages as well as her younger son.Julieta Cervantes“The Nosebleed” contemplates what Ogawa describes to the audience as “one of the greatest failures of my life.” That’s not something she had been eager to dissect publicly.“I never wanted to write autobiography,” said Ogawa, who grew up in Japan and the United States and graduated from Columbia University. “I never thought I would be writing about my father. It presents really vulnerable aspects of my life, and, you know, it’s very scary to do that.”With Ogawa portraying her father at various ages and her younger son at age 5, four other actors play prismatic versions of their playwright-director.“It’s a mind trip, you know?” said Drae Campbell, who has worked with Ogawa for 20 years, considers her “like family” and plays the character Aya 4.Ogawa’s unsentimental play eschews bitterness in favor of kindness, humor and emotional complexity. It invites but does not compel audience participation, primarily by asking for a show of hands at questions like “Who here has a father who has died?,” “Who here hates their father?” and — more lightheartedly — “Who here has watched the reality shows ‘The Bachelor’ or ‘The Bachelorette?’”There is also a Japanese Buddhist funeral ritual for Ogawa’s father, in which some spectators may choose to take part, using chopsticks to pick ersatz bone fragments out of his imaginary ashes. The playwright, who watches that scene in character as her father, said it has become for her, unexpectedly, “this incredible, profound, spiritual practice.”“I am seeing the remains of my body come out before me,” she said, “and I’m seeing strangers come up and help me put that body to rest.”To Evan Cabnet, LCT3’s artistic director, Ogawa’s compassion and vulnerability are part of what marks her as “a real outlier” among experimental theater makers.“There are a lot of artists who work in formally experimental modes, and the end result of that work is very often cerebral or intellectual or clever,” he said. “Aya’s work is all of those things, but primarily it leads from the heart. And, I think, from a sense of opening, and from a sense of softness and care.”That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but only if the ideal is tough-guy theater. Which for Ogawa — who uses she/they pronouns and is developing a play about motherhood called “Meat Suit” — it is decidedly not.A major catalyst for “The Nosebleed” was a pan of Ogawa’s 2015 play, “Ludic Proxy,” by the critic Helen Shaw in Time Out New York — a brisk 600-plus words, three of which were fails, failure and failing. To Ogawa, the review was a devastating dismissal that lodged the notion of failure inside her, demanding that she examine it.From left, Haruna Lee, Akiko Aizawa, Eddy Toru Ohno and Dawn Akemi Saito in “Suicide Forest.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat same year, the experimental playwright Haruna Lee, who uses they/them pronouns, was just out of graduate school at Brooklyn College and seeking a director for their play “Suicide Forest,” which no one who read it seemed to understand. Then they sent it to Ogawa, whom Lee knew only from a distance as “this badass Japanese American director with an asymmetrical haircut and double nose piercings.”Ogawa, who has a considerable track record, too, as a supple translator of Japanese plays, responded with “like 50 questions,” Lee said, and an immediate comprehension of how Japanese and American cultures were “mixing in a very raw way in that play.” The script is also in part autobiographical, about a parent-child relationship.Lee was afraid to perform the central role of a teenage girl, but Ogawa pushed them to do it anyway. Lee acquiesced out of trust, embarking on an exploration that eventually led to Lee coming out as nonbinary. When Ogawa directed the play at the Bushwick Starr in 2019, it was a hit.By then, Lee was also playing one of the Ayas in “The Nosebleed” — something they aren’t doing at Lincoln Center only because it conflicted with joining the writers’ room for Season 2 of the Apple TV+ drama “Pachinko.”Ogawa thinks of “Suicide Forest” and “The Nosebleed” as works that “were kind of percolating in the same brain swamp,” with Lee’s play giving her the courage she needed for her own.Aya Ogawa thinks of “Suicide Forest” and “The Nosebleed” as works that “were kind of percolating in the same brain swamp,” she said.Shina Peng for The New York TimesThe title of “The Nosebleed” comes from Ogawa’s then 5-year-old son, Kenya, waking up in the middle of the night with a bloody nose on a family trip to Japan in 2017. His big brother, Kai, had accidentally punched Kenya in his sleep. But the reason for the title is the metaphor of the child’s blood — the lineage that links Ogawa’s son to her, and to her father. (As a parent, Ogawa’s husband is a stark contrast to her own father: engaged, invested and emotionally present with their children, she said.)She finds it easier to play her child, but not difficult to slip into her father. “I don’t know how to describe what is happening to me,” she said, “except that it kind of does feel like a channeling. And dropping into him somehow, or like my body becomes a vessel for the image that I have of him.”And like every actor who has had to find sympathy for a character in order to play that person, she has had to find a way to understand her father.Her sons are 10 and 12 now, both born after their grandfather died. But on opening night at Lincoln Center last week, she wanted them to take part in the play’s funeral ritual — to be first in line for it, as the closest kin would be in a real funeral.And so they were. Onstage in front of the symbolic cremated remains of their grandfather, they took chopsticks and together helped lay his body to rest.Their mother, in character as an enfeebled old man, watched and felt release — felt absolution. More