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      Disney’s Thomas Schumacher Takes on New Broadway Role

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      The longtime head of the company’s theater operations is becoming the division’s chief creative officer, relinquishing his role overseeing its business operations.Thomas Schumacher, the longtime head of Disney’s theatrical arm, a key force behind “The Lion King,” and one of the most powerful people on Broadway, is relinquishing his role overseeing the division’s business operations and stepping into a purely creative role.Schumacher, who is 65 and currently holds the titles of president and producer of Disney Theatrical Group, told his staff on Thursday morning that he will take on a new role as the division’s chief creative officer. His two closest deputies, Andrew Flatt and Anne Quart, will now jointly run the unit as executive vice presidents.Disney has for three decades been the biggest corporate player on Broadway, and it remains an enormously significant factor in the industry. “The Lion King,” which has been running on Broadway for 25 years, regularly outsells its competitors — last week it was, as it often has been, the top-grossing show.Schumacher’s portfolio has included not only Disney’s Broadway shows — “The Lion King” and “Aladdin” at the moment — but also its many touring productions as well as Disney on Ice. His first Broadway credit was in 1997 (as a producer of Disney’s “King David”) and he has since become an important figure in the Broadway community, at one point serving as chairman of the Broadway League, which is the trade organization of producers and theater owners.The move comes at a time when many of Disney’s divisions have been struggling. The theatrical group is small by Disney standards, and although it has had its share of disappointments, its current shows are selling strongly even while most other Broadway shows are not.According to a memo Schumacher sent to his staff, Flatt will have the additional title of managing director, and will oversee strategy and business operations. Quart’s portfolio will include producing and development; she will serve as executive producer of all shows.Disney has not brought a new show to Broadway since 2018, when “Frozen” arrived to chilly reviews. Since that time, Disney acquired 21st Century Fox assets, which gave the company access to a vast new trove of titles.One possible next Disney musical appears to be a stage adaptation of “The Greatest Showman” — the company held a workshop for the show earlier this year, but that production is still relatively early in its development process. Disney has also been continuing to work on its stage adaptation of “Hercules” — after productions directed by Lear deBessonet in Central Park, as part of the Public Theater’s Public Works program, and at the Paper Mill Playhouse, the company is planning a new version in Germany directed by Casey Nicholaw next spring. More

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      ‘Purlie Victorious’ Review: Leslie Odom Jr. Shines in Revival

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      Ossie Davis’s 1961 play is no period piece, as a blazing and hilarious revival starring Leslie Odom Jr. testifies.Two years before he made his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. attended the 100th performance of “Purlie Victorious” at the Cort Theater on Broadway. He knew the playwright, Ossie Davis, and his wife, Ruby Dee, from their work in the civil rights movement.Now the couple were starring in Davis’s raucous comedy about a stem-winding Black preacher from Georgia. It would not have been lost on the stem-winding King, likewise from Georgia, that he and “Purlie Victorious” had something in common. They were, after all, in the same fight against racism — in the play’s case by laughing it to death.And yet, did it die? If it did, why are we still laughing?The “Purlie Victorious” that opened on Wednesday at the Music Box — unaccountably its first Broadway revival — is every bit as scathingly funny as the 1961 reviews said it was. (In The New York Times, Howard Taubman called it “exhilarating,” “uninhibited” and “uproarious,” all in the first three paragraphs.) But even though times have surely changed — for one thing, the Cort Theater is now the James Earl Jones — everything dark in the play is still dark, and the lightness no less necessary. There’s a reason the setting, however old-timey it may appear on the surface, is still called “the recent past.”Kenny Leon’s thrillingly broad and warp-speed production aims to keep us in both time zones at once. To do so he begins on a note of contemporary welcome as the actors walk onstage companionably to don the jackets and aprons they’ll wear in the play, as if they’d just come from the street. Among them, Leslie Odom Jr. instantly stands out, not just for the spiffy suit he’s wearing (the terrific costumes are by Emilio Sosa) but also for his wolfish impatience to get going. His Purlie, we sense, will be more than a preacher: He will be a prosecutor.Two thefts are in his sights. One is perhaps a petty larceny: The $500 left to Purlie’s Aunt Henrietta by the white woman in whose home she worked has not come rightfully into his hands. Instead, with Henrietta and her daughter, Cousin Bee, both dead, the sum has been waylaid by Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee, the owner of the cotton plantation on which Purlie grew up with his brother, Gitlow (Billy Eugene Jones). Though a pittance to the rich Ol’ Cap’n (Jay O. Sanders), the $500 is a fortune to Purlie, who plans to use it to buy and restore Big Bethel church, where his grandfather once preached. He wants his inheritance in both senses, the cash and the pulpit.Odom carries the play’s weight as it shifts genres, revealing further layers of character, while Young proves to be a daring comedian unafraid to go as far as the part takes her, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe other theft, at the heart of the play’s power and yet also its comedy, is much larger: the theft of the freedom of generations of Black Americans.It was a practical yet risky choice to weld the outrage over one to the farce of the other. And make no mistake, starting with the subtitle (“A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch”), Davis’s farce is full-throttle, blending lowbrow physical humor straight out of vaudeville with traditions of Black satire and classic social comedy like “Pygmalion.” So when Purlie recruits “a common scullion” named Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins to impersonate the college-educated Bee and claim the inheritance, you know something will go vastly wrong. Indeed, bedazzled by the preacher’s attention and overwhelmed by the job, Lutiebelle starts to improvise, leading the plan cartoonishly awry.Originally played by Dee, and now by Kara Young, Lutiebelle is a rich creation, sweet and hungry, down-home and dirty. Young, a two-time Tony nominee known mostly for dramatic roles (“Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven,” “The New Englanders,” “All the Natalie Portmans”), is also a daring comedian, finding in Lutiebelle a cross between Lucille Ball and Moms Mabley. That she is not afraid to go as far as the part can take her — with a gawky pigeon-toed gait and hilariously lustful line readings in a taffy-pulled Southern accent — is a sign of the freedom the play gives her (and everyone else) to represent a character instead of a race.As a result, some touchy old stereotypes, appropriated by whites and perverted as minstrelsy, are reclaimed and reframed. Gitlow’s shucking and jiving is, in Jones’s performance, very clearly a performance itself: a way of getting around the obtuseness of overlords. His wife, Missy, played by Heather Alicia Simms, turns classic one-dimensional stage sass into complicated warmth. Vanessa Bell Calloway’s Idella, a cook who works for Ol’ Cap’n and might in other contexts be framed as a Mammy figure, here has a freedom fighter’s acuity. And even Ol’ Cap’n himself, the snarling villain of the piece, is taken down gently: “Put kindness in your fingers,” Purlie instructs a pallbearer. “He was a man — despite his own example.”But it’s Odom who carries the play’s weight as it shifts from genre to genre and reveals further layers of character. Part of the freedom Davis took for himself, and that Leon emphasizes in his staging, is the right to be many things at once, not all of them reputable.Odom, with the angry intensity of his Burr from “Hamilton,” does not shy from Purlie’s scoundrelly side, his willingness to lie, even to loved ones, as a means of putting down a marker on eventual truth. And yet when it comes time to preach, watch out. The way he winds speeches into sermons and sermons nearly into songs makes it seem natural that “Purlie Victorious,” written partly in blank verse, would be turned into a musical. It nearly was one already.Was it also a loving dig at the great orator himself? Davis disagreed with King about nonviolence but could hardly dispute his silver-tongued leadership. And in “Purlie” he seemed to give Kingism a chance. After mercilessly mocking the trope of the Great White Savior, he allows Charlie Cotchipee, the weakling son of Ol’ Cap’n — a role played by Alan Alda in 1961 and Noah Robbins now — to save the day and redeem his race.“We still need togetherness; we still need each otherness,” Purlie preaches in the final, forgiving moments of this necessary revival, as Derek McLane’s set undergoes a miraculous transformation from shack to temple. And then Purlie adds, “Do what you can for the white folks.”Speaking as one, they did.Purlie VictoriousThrough Jan. 7 at the Music Box, Manhattan; purlievictorious.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Juilliard’s Top-Tier Graduate Acting Program Is Going Tuition-Free

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      Starting with the next academic year, the drama school will eliminate an “unrealistic burden” for graduate acting students.The Juilliard School, one of the world’s most elite conservatories, is making its top-notch graduate acting program tuition-free.School officials said they hoped that the move would make the drama division accessible to a broader array of students, and that it would make it easier for graduates to pursue careers in the arts because they will have less debt.“There’s a mythology around a place with a name like Juilliard, and I know too many people who didn’t apply because they thought, ‘I couldn’t afford it,’” said Damian Woetzel, the school’s president. “We recognize that talent is so much greater than opportunity.”Juilliard’s drama division, in which undergraduate and graduate acting students train together, was (once again) declared the best in the nation by The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. The school’s alumni have included Robin Williams, Jessica Chastain, Adam Driver and Viola Davis.The acting program’s Master of Fine Arts track, established in 2012, is relatively new; previously, postgraduate acting students received a credential called simply a diploma. The master’s degree program, which currently has 35 students, is a four-year program — one year longer than most — and the fourth year has always been tuition-free to keep Juilliard competitive with three-year programs elsewhere.Juilliard’s tuition, for both undergraduates and graduates, is $53,300 per year. About 90 percent of undergraduate students receive some financial aid.“The expense of being educated these days is an unrealistic burden, particularly for young artists,” the actress Laura Linney, who is a Juilliard alumna and the vice chairwoman of the school’s board of trustees, said in an interview. “Members of my class were paying debt into their 40s. That doesn’t encourage young people to go into the arts.”Tuition for all graduate acting students will be free starting with the next academic year. To eliminate tuition, the school said it had raised $15 million, with key gifts from the commercial theater producers Stephanie P. McClelland and John Gore.McClelland, a Juilliard trustee, has been credited as a producer on 87 Broadway shows over the last two decades; she donated with her husband, Carter McClelland, a longtime Wall Street executive. Gore is a British producer whose many ventures include the touring behemoth Broadway Across America and the website Broadway.com. Other gifts, and existing scholarship funds, were combined to permanently replace tuition revenue.“Many of our M.F.A. students come in with significant undergraduate debt, and some have maxed out the federal loans they can take,” said Evan Yionoulis, the dean of Juilliard’s drama division. This will “allow them to be here without that financial weight on their shoulders, and allow them the freedom, when they graduate, to make choices to build their craft and to have the patience it takes to build their career.”Juilliard’s move comes two years after Yale University made its drama school, which is also top-ranked and is larger than Juilliard’s, tuition-free with a $150 million gift from David Geffen. James Bundy, the dean of what is now called the David Geffen School of Drama, said the waiving of tuition had already had a significant impact at Yale.“We’ve seen a rise in applications — we’ve had the two highest years in the school’s history, which tells me that a great many more people saw the school as financially accessible,” Bundy said. “We’ve had a substantial increase in the portion of the applicant pool that identified as Black, Indigenous, or people of color. And taking tuition out of the equation has enabled us to increase stipends for living expenses for students with need, which has the long-term impact of driving down indebtedness.”Juilliard already has several other tuition-free programs, including the drama division’s two-year playwriting program, which currently has eight students, as well as several specialized music programs. Once the graduate acting program goes tuition-free, 26 percent of all Juilliard students will pay no tuition to attend.But many music and dance students, as well as drama undergraduates, will continue to have some tuition obligations; the graduate acting program is going tuition-free now because there were donors who stepped forward to make that possible.“My aim is to make the school tuition-free — the ultimate artistic education deserves that access,” Woetzel said. “Wouldn’t that be something?” More

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      Stephen Sondheim’s Final Musical is Opening. How Complete Was It?

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      Sondheim said days before his death in 2021 that he did not know when it would be finished, but the musical, now called “Here We Are,” begins performances Thursday.Stephen Sondheim, asked days before his death if he had any sense of when his final musical would be finished, offered a simple answer: “No.”The great composer and lyricist, who was 91 at the time, in late 2021, had been working on and off for years on the show, which was adapted from two Luis Buñuel films. He had written songs for the first act but was struggling with the second. “I’m a procrastinator,” he told me then. “I need a collaborator who pushes me, who gets impatient.”Now, two years after his death, the show, which Sondheim had been calling “Square One” but which was later renamed “Here We Are,” is being presented for the first time, in a 526-seat theater at the Shed, a nonprofit cultural center in Hudson Yards on the Far West Side of Manhattan. Performances of the show, which is based on Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel” and billed as “the final musical by composer Stephen Sondheim,” are set to begin Thursday and to run until January,So what changed? How did a show that Team Sondheim suggested was incomplete at the time of his death get to a point where it was ready for public consumption?The show’s creative and producing team say that two months before Sondheim’s death, he had agreed to let the show go forward, following a successful reading of the material that existed at that point. They had come up with a rationale for a second act that is light on songs. And they note that, following that reading, Sondheim had appeared on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show and had said, “We had a reading of it last week and we were encouraged. So we’re going to go ahead with it, and with any luck we’re going to get it on next season.”So is the show being staged a finished musical? “Who would consider a musical ‘finished’ until it has gone through a full preview process?” the show’s producing and creative team said in written responses to questions for this article. “What we are putting on stage now is as finished as any production about to play its first preview. It’s ready for audiences, and very much the musical Steve envisioned.”The creative team said that all of the show’s songs, and all of its lyrics, were written by Sondheim, and that “as is the case with every musical, the orchestrator and arranger take the composer’s melodies and motifs and use them to arrange and orchestrate the instrumental interstitial music.”The musical will be based in part on Luis Buñuel’s 1972 film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” Rialto Pictures“There isn’t a note in this score that wasn’t born out of Steve’s compositions, as will be abundantly clear to audiences,” they said.The book, on the other hand, has been revised since Sondheim’s death by its writer, David Ives, and director, Joe Mantello. But the team said that “the three collaborators agreed after the informal reading that took place on Sept. 8, 2021, that Steve’s songwriting for both acts was complete.”There is a long history of work in various stages of completion being released after the death of an artist. Mozart’s Requiem, Puccini’s “Turandot” and Berg’s “Lulu” were all left unfinished when their composers died and are now considered classics.“The work that David and Stephen did should absolutely be seen,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which was working with Sondheim to develop the show until a few years ago. “It’s a jewel, it’s small, it’s incomplete, but it’s absolutely delightful and smart and gorgeous, and it would be a crime for it not to be seen. So I’m entirely in favor of the work being shown in public.”James Lapine, who as a librettist collaborated with Sondheim on shows including “Into the Woods” and “Sunday in the Park With George,” agreed. “I really trust David and Joe, and don’t think they would be putting up something they didn’t feel was finished — not on this scale,” he said. “They’re smart cookies, and if they wanted to do a workshop because it wasn’t finished, they could. But they see it as finished, and Steve gave his blessing, so it’s going to be an addition to the canon.”The show, in Sondheim’s pithy description in that last interview, has a “so-called plot” in which “the first act is a group of people trying to find a place to have dinner, and they run into all kinds of strange and surreal things, and in the second act, they find a place to have dinner, but they can’t get out.”When Sondheim seemed stymied by the second act, Ives and Mantello suggested that perhaps, once the characters are trapped, they can no longer sing.“Hopefully it won’t feel unfinished,” said the actor Nathan Lane, who took part in the 2021 reading. “It makes sense that these characters, once they’re trapped, they can’t sing any more.”“Here We Are,” like many new musicals, has had a complicated developmental journey.Long before he appeared on Colbert’s show, Sondheim had made suggestions that a production could be imminent. In 2014, during an appearance at the New York Film Festival, Sondheim said that he and Ives had just finished a first draft. In 2016, the producer Scott Rudin, who had been consulting with Sondheim about the show, told the “Fresh Air” interviewer Terry Gross that he hoped it would be staged in 2017. Two months later Sondheim, speaking at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., said he also hoped the show would be staged in 2017, “if I can finish the score in time.”Sondheim had been working on the project off and on for years. Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesThere was a reading and three workshops before the pandemic — all led by the Public Theater — but no productions.“My impression was that Steve hadn’t finished it in his mind to where he wanted it to be exactly, but an unfinished Sondheim song still sounds like a pretty amazing song,” said Michael Cerveris, an actor who took part in two readings at the Public.At one point Sondheim set aside work on the musical; he and Ives returned to another project, called “All Together Now,” and the Public’s rights to the Buñuel films lapsed.Then Mantello and Ives pulled together the 2021 reading, with a starry cast led by Lane and Bernadette Peters. The reading was a one-afternoon event, with no singing — the assembled actors read the words of the script and the song.“It was two acts, and the lyrics were witty and clever, unsurprisingly,” Lane said. Sondheim, he said, “had written an act and the beginning of the second act, and there was some material in the script that was suggesting perhaps he might turn some long monologue into a song — I wasn’t privy to those conversations.”There is uncertainty among some Sondheim biographers about how to view this show.“I’m both eager and apprehensive,” said Daniel Okrent, who is writing a book about Sondheim. “I’m eager because I so admire his work, and I’m apprehensive because of his public statements that suggested he wasn’t very happy with what he had done, or that he didn’t think it was complete.”Several people who spoke with Sondheim in his final years said they were surprised by the turn of events. “He thought it was never going to happen,” said the director Ivo van Hove, who spent time with Sondheim while directing a 2020 Broadway revival of “West Side Story,” “but it’s happening now.”Others would like more transparency from the creative team about how they have pulled this show together, a process partly described by Frank Rich in New York magazine.“I think we’d all like to know more about how the sausage was made, especially the second act sausage,” said D.T. Max, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Finale: Late Conversations With Stephen Sondheim.”Sondheim was known for revising many of his shows throughout the preview process, which makes this one unusual. (He wrote “Comedy Tonight,” the opener of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” and “Being Alive,” the 11 o’clock number in “Company,” after out-of-town pre-Broadway productions had begun.)“Steve going on Colbert and saying ‘we’re going to do a show’ and then being around for rehearsals and previews and developing and rewriting as always is one thing,” said David Benedict, a writer who is also at work on a Sondheim biography. “It’s a very different proposition when the composer-lyricist isn’t with you.”The show has a sizable budget for an Off Broadway production — the commercial producers who are financing the show (Tom Kirdahy, Sue Wagner, John Johnson and The Stephen Sondheim Trust) expect to raise between $7 million and $8 million, according to a spokesman for the production. The ticket prices are also steep for Off Broadway: Prime seats are being priced at $349.Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, said he had been thrilled when the Sondheim estate approached him last year about staging the musical.“We’re here to support artists who advance their fields,” he said. “I was literally doing back somersaults — for the most important and groundbreaking theater composer and lyricist to have his final work at the Shed is wonderful for us.” More

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      How Directors Are Reimagining Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Shows

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      The closing of “The Phantom of the Opera” last spring left a chandelier-sized hole in New York. And as of this summer, for the first time in 44 years, there is no Andrew Lloyd Webber musical running on Broadway.But now comes an unexpected new chapter in the career of one of musical theater’s most successful, if not always appreciated, composers: Several adventurous contemporary directors are declaring they love his work and want to put their stamp on it.Ivo van Hove, the Belgian director known for his profuse use of video and viscous fluids, is tackling “Jesus Christ Superstar” in Amsterdam, while Jamie Lloyd, the British auteur with a penchant for Pinter and an aversion to scenery, is sharpening “Sunset Boulevard” in London. Meanwhile, in the United States, Sammi Cannold is putting a feminist stamp on “Evita,” while Bill Rauch and Zhailon Levingston are humanizing “Cats.”The shows, and Lloyd Webber himself, occupy a paradoxical place in the theatrical canon.Critics have sometimes dismissed his work as overwrought. This newspaper’s reviewers, in particular, have often been underwhelmed, initially declaring that “Jesus Christ Superstar” had “minimal artistic value,” and also deriding “Evita” (“like reading endless footnotes from which the text has disappeared”), “Cats” (“if you blink, you’ll miss the plot”) and “Sunset Boulevard” (“lurid”).But “Evita,” “Cats” and “Sunset Boulevard” won best musical Tony Awards, and all four shows are widely staged and enormously popular. These new productions, reflecting contemporary trends, are emphasizing psychology and politics over spectacle and sentiment.Lloyd Webber, 75, said in an interview that there is no grand strategy at work here — that the directors individually sought permission to stage the shows. But he also said he believes that it is healthy to allow others to explore older material in new ways.“When we were approached, we just thought, ‘Well, great! Why not?’” he said. “You can’t just sit on these things.”Even “Starlight Express,” one of his zanier musicals, which involves actors on roller skates pretending to be trains, is getting a reboot: Luke Sheppard, the “& Juliet” director, is reimagining it for a run scheduled to begin next summer in London.The productions come after a rough patch for Lloyd Webber. His latest musical, “Bad Cinderella,” bombed on Broadway last spring, shortly after the “Phantom” closing. But he is undeterred: In August he signed with Creative Artists Agency, the powerhouse talent representatives, and in September he named a new chief executive for Really Useful Group, the company he owns that licenses and manages his shows.“I really must concentrate, in the latter days of my composing life, on creating and writing,” Lloyd Webber said. “It’s exciting to me that there are so many directors now coming forward, who actually are the directors who everybody is going to at the moment. And it’s very interesting to me to hear new minds and see new ideas — some of them I’m going to like and some of them not. But why not? I can’t see any possible reason.”Here is a look at four upcoming reinventions.London‘Sunset Boulevard’Forget the staircase and the turban. Jamie Lloyd is bringing an intense interest in psychological exploration to “Sunset Boulevard” — “putting the emphasis,” he says, “on people and their emotional journey.”With that aim, he asked Lloyd Webber to rework some aspects of the score “to lean into the darkness and peculiarity of certain moments that are dreamlike or nightmarish.” And, to his surprise, Lloyd Webber agreed. “He’s been so open,” Lloyd said, “which is kind of crazy.”The production, which is now running at London’s Savoy Theater, ends with a rush of blood and integrates live camera work in a nod to the Hollywood milieu of “Sunset Boulevard.” Lloyd called it “a hybrid between theater and cinema.”Lloyd, 42, didn’t grow up seeing theater. But his father, a truck driver, liked listening to show tunes, and that’s how Lloyd first encountered Lloyd Webber’s songs.The original Broadway production of “Sunset Boulevard,” which opened in 1994, starred Glenn Close, above with Andrew Lloyd Webber.Associated PressSoon he had his own cassette of the composer’s greatest hits, and he would “force my cousins to do performances in the living room.”“It was kind of the soundtrack of my youth,” he said.Fast forward to the summer of 2019. Lloyd, by then an acclaimed experimental director, had moved on from his Lloyd Webber fixation, or at least so he thought. But when he was invited to stage a musical outdoors, in Regent’s Park, one show came to mind: “Evita.”His sneakers-and-spray-paint production of that show was a hit, and he made a mental note of Lloyd Webber’s openness to “radical reappraisal.” Then, idled at home during the pandemic, he found himself imagining what he could do with “Sunset Boulevard.”“The characters he chooses to write about are weird and otherworldly, often with tormented minds, and the scores take these big leaps which are good to explore,” Lloyd said. “They are like fever dreams, and they respond well to a more experimental, less traditional approach.”WASHINGTON‘Evita’Sammi Cannold has long been obsessed with “Evita.” At 29, she is 16 years younger than the musical, but she still remembers hearing the songs as a kid in New York, seeing the revival that starred Ricky Martin, and, as an aspiring director, proclaiming it her “dream project.”She has been nothing if not determined: She directed a production while an undergrad at Stanford; she visited Argentina three times to do research; and then she pitched an “Evita” revival to New York City Center.In 1979, Patti LuPone (above with Bob Gunton) took on the role of Eva Perón for the show’s Broadway premiere.Martha Swope/New York Public LibrarySo in 2019, there was Cannold, directing a 12-day gala run of the Lloyd Webber classic. The production was eye-catching, starting with Evita’s iconic white ball gown hovering like a ghost over a flower-bedecked stage. This year, Cannold was able to develop it fully, staging it first at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and now (through Oct. 15) at Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, where the Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks called the show “gorgeously reinvigorated.”Cannold’s take is informed by feminism — “I think she’s a victim and a survivor who learned to use her sexuality as armor,” she said of Perón — but also by the regime’s authoritarianism. “When I first started working on it, I was head over heels in love with Eva — I was so obsessed with her and her history, and I couldn’t really hear any of the criticism,” she said. “I’ve gone on a whole journey, and land in a different place.”AMSTERDAM‘Jesus Christ Superstar’Even in Belgium, where Ivo van Hove grew up, “Jesus Christ Superstar” was a big deal. The concept album was released in 1970, when van Hove was young, and the music has lived in his head ever since.“At the time that I was an adolescent, this was huge — not the musical, but the album — the album was something that everybody bought,” said van Hove, who at 64 has never seen a stage production of the show. “Nobody could believe that ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ could be a rock thing.”Van Hove, whose production of “Dead Man Walking” is this season’s Metropolitan Opera opener, said he has wanted for years to direct “Jesus Christ Superstar.” “Some projects live in me for a long time,” he said.Jeff Fenholt in the title role of “Jesus Christ Superstar” on Broadway in 1971. Bettmann, via Getty ImagesNow he’s getting his chance, directing an English-language production that is set to begin performances in January at DeLaMar in Amsterdam.“I can tell you what interests me,” he said. “First, it’s a story of a group of friends who became friends because they believed in one mission: to take care of the poor. Second, these friends become a threat to political and religious leaders. And third are the geopolitical tensions, in this case with Rome.”“These things,” he added, “feel like very contemporary themes.”How contemporary? Let’s just say that in van Hove’s production, the cast will begin the show wearing hoodies. And, he said, some members of the audience will be seated onstage, because he wants to create a “pressure-cooker” environment.What is van Hove’s theory about why Lloyd Webber is drawing inventive directors now? “It’s not for nothing that these musicals became so important for so many people for such a long time,” he said. “There’s something very human there, even when it’s about cats.”NEW YORK‘Cats’The production of “Cats” planned for next June at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center is, at least at first blush, the most outlandish of this latest round of Lloyd Webber productions. Whereas the original concerned a group of cats (obviously) and was set in a junkyard, the characters in this production will be human beings, and it will be set in the Ballroom scene, a dance subculture closely associated with Black and Latino drag queens.“We are reimagining ‘Cats’ as a queer ball competition,” said Zhailon Levingston, one of the production’s two directors. Old Deuteronomy, an astute and admired character, will be head judge.The idea was the brainchild of the Perelman Center’s artistic director, Bill Rauch, who, by his own description, has been “obsessed with reinventing classics my whole career,” and who had previously directed a “queer ‘Oklahoma’” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. “Over the course of that process, I was thinking a lot about ‘Cats,’ and I just kept thinking about the song ‘Memory’ being done in a queer context,” Rauch said. “And I just found it very moving.”The cast of “Cats” in 1997; the show ran on Broadway from 1982 to 2000.Carol RoseggRauch, 61, saw the original Broadway production — albeit late in its long run, when he decided “it felt important to check that off on my cultural bucket list.” Levingston, 29, had a different point of entry: a direct-to-video film from 1998.“I’d be at the day care center, watching ‘Barney,’ and they kept showing the trailer for ‘Cats,’ and I didn’t know what they were doing — people were dressed provocatively, and it seemed like maybe we shouldn’t be watching, and one day my mom and I were at Blockbuster, and I saw the black box with the yellow eyes, and said, ‘We have to get that,’” he recalled. “For two years of my life, I would just watch ‘Cats.’”At one point, Levingston said, he even performed his own one-man (well, one-child) version of the show for his babysitters.Now Rauch and Levingston have hired choreographers with a connection to the Ballroom scene, and a gender consultant to help them navigate the complexities of a gender-nonconforming cast.“The more time we spend with the material,” Rauch said, “the deeper my respect grows for it.” More

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      ‘Mary Gets Hers’ Review: A Spiky Update of a Medieval Tale

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      Emma Horwitz makes her Off Broadway debut with an adventurous retelling of a devotional play from the 10th century.Disco balls were nowhere in evidence in 10th-century Germany, but it somehow makes sense when one materializes toward the end of Emma Horwitz’s “Mary Gets Hers” — a spiky and adventurous retelling of the medieval devotional play “Abraham, or the Rise and Repentance of Mary.”That’s because Mary (Haley Wong) is herself a multifaceted marvel of a heroine, metamorphosing before our eyes as if in a time-lapse video of a molting caterpillar. We meet her as an 8-year-old orphan plunged into grief after the plague-induced loss of her parents — “they dribbled to death” is her frank formulation. She is soon rescued by a hermit, Abraham, who helps raise his ward in the social equivalent of a Faraday bag, shielded completely from strangers and the “taint of sin.” After four uneventful, psalm-filled years, Mary is lured from her cloistered cell by a stranger, setting in motion a chain of religious and identity crises.Horwitz’s play, a Playwrights Realm production and her Off Broadway debut, wisely drops the didacticism in the original work, written in the 10th century by the Benedictine abbess Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, in favor of something less … deodorized. Smell, for Horwitz’s characters, is among the first things they notice about each other and the last they forget. “Back when they were alive my parents and I would kiss each other on the tops of our heads where we smell most like ourselves,” Mary reminisces in one scene. In another, she sniffs the head and armpit of a visiting soldier (Kai Heath). His signature scent? Spring onion. Moments like these showcase Horwitz’s sensuous touch in updating material cobwebbed with abstraction and moralizing.Josiah Davis, the director, coaxes lively and lucid performances from all the actors. Claire Siebers dashes through a daunting number of roles as Mary’s clueless lovers, and Mary, the character who departs most from the 10th-century play, progresses — with startling speed — from love-on-the-brain ingénue to cynic speaking in scare quotes.If the slapstick tone in some of Mary’s colloquies with men seems like a heretical departure from Hrotsvitha’s play, so much the better. Horwitz’s version pushes us right up against the pane of Mary’s inner life. Her addresses to God are not just a way of revealing her roiling thoughts about suitors, but seem, in Wong’s delivery, like a winking reference to Judy Blume’s Margaret. Certainly there’s enough teenage Sturm und Drang on display for a novel.Abraham (Susannah Perkins) and his fellow hermeneutic hermit, Ephraim (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), are also immensely entertaining. Dressed identically from their tonsures to their camouflage Crocs (Camilla Dely did the costumes), they parry about God and gruel in the droll manner of Vladimir and Estragon. That the cast consists of “women, nonbinary, trans, and gender-variant actors” adds another layer to the theme of transformations. Like a spinning disco ball, “Mary Gets Hers” bewitches the gaze.Mary Gets HersThrough Oct. 14 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      ‘Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors’ Review: An Equal-Opportunity Seducer

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      A gender-bending play at New World Stages filters well-known characters through influences like “The Rocky Horror Show” and “Young Frankenstein.”You don’t need to have been to Transylvania to know that one way to kill vampires is with a stake through the heart. In “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors,” a gender-bending play at New World Stages, Dr. Van Helsing calls for a “shtick” to slay her greatest foe. Or at least that’s what “stake” sounds like after it’s been mauled by Arnie Burton’s German-accented, female Van Helsing.That Van Helsing deploys (a) shtick to slay her opponent sums up the mode of this “Dracula,” which actually aims to be funny. It’s a refreshing change from all the stage bloodsuckers that have unintentionally made us laugh over the decades, whether they attempted to sing (“Dance of the Vampires,” “Lestat”) or not (cheap props and woeful ponytails made an Off Broadway “Dracula” from 2011 one of the most hilariously inept spectacles I have ever been lucky enough to catch at a supposedly professional theater).Even better is that this production — not quite enough, but often — fulfills its mission.Boatman and Burton. The staging constantly draws attention to farcical, fourth-wall-breaking devices. Matthew MurphyThe play, by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen and directed by Greenberg, had a starry audio version in 2020, processing the well-known gallery of characters through influences like “The Rocky Horror Show” and “Young Frankenstein.” Dracula (James Daly) is now a Frank-N-Furter-like equal-opportunity seducer whose manly chest is encased in what looks like a black see-through doily. (Tristan Raines did the costume design.) Naturally, the vampire proceeds to help the meek real estate broker Jonathan Harker (Andrew Keenan-Bolger) and his fiancée, Lucy (Jordan Boatman), shake off their Victorian hangups — strong Brad and Janet vibes there.As if this setup weren’t enough indication that the play pays no mind to the “terrors” part of its title, Greenberg’s staging constantly draws attention to farcical, fourth-wall-breaking devices. The sound designer, Victoria Deiorio, for example, is called upon to deploy effects shamelessly (clip-clopping horses never get old), and except for Daly, who shticks to Dracula, the other cast members constantly switch roles, regardless of the character’s gender.The most adept at this exercise is Burton, an expert ham who portrays both Van Helsing and Lucy’s sex-starved sister, Mina (“I got all the recessive genes”), as if they had escaped from a Ridiculous Theatrical Company production. A close second is Ellen Harvey as Dracula’s little helper, Renfield, and the siblings’ father, Dr. Wallace Westfeldt. At the performance I attended, Harvey landed the single biggest laugh when she shifted from one character to another in a single scream.For the show to really work, it needs more moments like that one: simple, goofy and fast. That last quality is important in farce, but unfortunately, in this case, the second half of the evening drags a bit. Some scenes even slow down enough to suggest … emotions? In this context, that’s just like garlic to a vampire.Dracula, a Comedy of TerrorsThrough Jan. 7 at New World Stages, Manhattan; draculacomedy.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Actors’ Equity Seeks to Unionize Broadway Production Assistants

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      The position is one of the few nonunion segments of the theater industry’s work force.Actors’ Equity, the labor union representing American stage performers and stage managers, is seeking to unionize Broadway production assistants, one of the few nonunion segments of the industry work force.The campaign comes at a moment when labor unions in the United States have become increasingly restive; there are organizing efforts in many sectors of the economy, and Hollywood’s writers and actors have been on strike for months.Broadway production assistants work with stage managers in entry-level positions that are usually filled only during rehearsal and preview periods. Equity described them as “doing everything from preparing rehearsal materials to ensuring decisions made during rehearsals are recorded to being extra sets of hands and eyes during complicated technical rehearsals to efficiently running errands that keep the rehearsal productive.”Many of the workers are young and are paid minimum wage, according to the union.Late on Thursday, Equity asked the Broadway League, a trade association representing producers, to voluntarily recognize Actors’ Equity Association as the bargaining representative for production assistants working on commercial productions on Broadway and in sit-down productions, which are extended non-touring engagements produced by members of the Broadway League outside New York.If the League does not agree, Equity said it would ask the National Labor Relations Board to oversee an election.“Broadway is an extremely heavily unionized workplace, and these are some of the only folks without union contracts in these rooms,” said Erin Maureen Koster, an Equity vice president who represents stage managers. Koster said that without union membership, production assistants have less protection should they be injured or harassed or have other concerns.Equity said that there were only about a half-dozen people working in the job category on Broadway and in sit-down productions at any one time, but that about 100 people have worked in the position over the past two years. The union said the position was an important rung on the career ladder for people aspiring to work as stage managers on Broadway; even some people who have worked as stage managers Off Broadway or in regional theaters take temporary jobs as Broadway production assistants as a way to break into the industry.“As shows are getting more complicated, they are hiring more production assistants, and hiring qualified stage mangers into these roles,” Stefanie Frey, Equity’s director of organizing and mobilization, said. “It’s time.”The Broadway League said in a statement that it was considering the union’s request and looked forward to discussing it further. “The Broadway League and our members support the right of employees to lawfully choose a bargaining representative,” the statement said. More