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      In a Land of Primary Colors, Home Is Where the Bounce House Is

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      As part of Under the Radar, Nile Harris resurrects his play that weaves together text, sound, minstrelsy and dance to explore the American experience.What makes a house a home? And what constitutes an American home? Planted dead center on the stage in “This House Is Not a Home,” a slippery, ever-shifting work by Nile Harris, is a house — a bounce house. But it’s more than an inflatable plaything.It is at the heart of a web of ideas that touch on national politics, arts funding and a local New York scene — the tiny slice of Lower Manhattan known as Dimes Square. You get a sense of where Harris stands on that bit of geography: In “This House,” there is a fight. Over a vape.Beginning Saturday as part of the Under the Radar festival, “This House” — sad and boisterous, dark yet at times blisteringly funny — will be reprised at Abrons Arts Center, where it was first presented with Ping Chong and Company last summer. (Harris is a member of Ping Chong’s artistic leadership team.)A provocative look at politics and race, “This House” is a critique of the American experience that explores the intersections of modern-day liberalism, the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and well-meaning nonprofit arts institutions. It gets raucous. Will the bounce house survive this insurrection? The idea for what became the work began in the summer of 2020 when Harris, 28, and his friend, the interdisciplinary artist Trevor Bazile, started to fantasize about a bounce house. It reminded them of the Capitol Building, Harris said, but it could also represent any institution — and then morph back into “a preadolescent meme.”Harris started to envision a series of happenings that might incorporate a bounce house: “Should we pull up to a George Floyd protest with a bounce castle,” he said of one idea, “and have people jump for Black lives?”The bounce house idea was placed on the back burner until 2021, when Bazile became the director of New People’s Cinema Club, a New York film festival funded in part by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a financial supporter of Trump-aligned candidates. “Trevor had a very clear point of view around, like, it doesn’t matter the hand that feeds you — it’s all bad,” Harris recalled. “There’s no clean money.”“With this Peter Thiel money,” he added, “we bought a bounce castle because that was on our forever list to do.”Throughout “This House,” Harris appears in disguises, including Woody from “Toy Story” and a gingerbread minstrel character he calls Timmy.Elias Williams for The New York TimesAs part of the film festival that year, Harris and Bazile hosted a party featuring a bounce house in a Dimes Square loft. But just two days after the festival closed, Bazile, who was 25, died suddenly. (Harris declined to specify a cause.) While “This House” is a running commentary — sonic, spoken, choreographic — on many subjects, it is, at its core, a meditation on grief.It’s also an extension of a manifesto, released by Harris and Bazile as a Google document, about a fictional board meeting. The manifesto, a labyrinth of hyperlinks, poses questions like: “Do you like Black voices or just the voices that say what you want to hear?” “Will you wear your Telfar bag to the race war?”Throughout “This House,” Harris appears in disguises, including Woody from “Toy Story” and a gingerbread minstrel character he calls Timmy, whose face is fixed in a smile. “Maybe there’s some comment there about Blackness and Black life, but it’s a smiling face,” he said. “It’s approachable.”Dyer Rhoads, the production’s dramaturg and set designer, has created a vibrant set that brings to life a universe of primary colors, where paintings, plastic and, of course, the bounce house, function as a larger-than-life diorama. But because “This House” reacts to the events of the moment, it will not be the same show it was last summer.“I always say it’s 60 percent set and 40 percent improvised,” Harris said of the show, which is informed by world events and uses improvisation, including audience interactions. “It responds to current affairs, it responds to the conditions that it’s put in. And we are in a very different state in the world than we were six months ago.”Improvisation means everything to Harris, who added, “How I understand being a moving and performing body is responding to what is presently happening in the room.”“This House” features the performance artist Crackhead Barney employing her daring crowd work; and the dancer Malcolm-x Betts, whose unfurling, out-of-body improvisations lend a vivid vulnerability to an increasingly fractious stage world. To Harris, the work is a play. But the “the play,” he said, “is the people. The play is about me, Malcolm and Barney and our thoughts on the world.”Harris, born and raised in Miami, was a serious theater student growing up. He attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, along with Rhoads, and graduated with a B.F.A. in acting. “I’m an actor for better or worse,” he said. “I don’t know what I am.”Actually, you get the feeling that he does know — or at least that through making art, he’s figuring it out. Harris has created shows since his teenage years; after moving to New York in 2017, he discovered the experimental downtown dance world and took a formative workshop with the choreographer Sidra Bell. “It really cracked open my brain,” he said of her improvisatory approach. “If I have any dance education, that is a point of reference.”“A lot of how I understand my relationship to audience is through the notion of clowning,” Harris said. “There may be laughter, there may be costuming, there’s physicality.”Elias Williams for The New York TimesHe studied clowning, too: “A lot of how I understand my relationship to audience is through the notion of clowning,” he said. “There may be laughter, there may be costuming, there’s physicality.”Creating the physical approach for Betts’s movement in “This House” began when the pair spoke about childhood memories; Betts said that it was as if the bounce house represented the ghosts of children.Betts’s improvisations are rooted in his movement background — Black club house dancing, vogueing, West African dance. “The dancing is very physical,” he said. “The memories are moving through me, and memory can also trigger you to go into a space that you don’t expect to go. It’s triggering in a way that enables something new to unlock.”Even as Harris calls “This House” a play or even an opera — the sound design is an important component, especially the way that vocal amplification is incorporated — he thinks a lot about language in the body. He doesn’t consider himself a dancer, though he has performed as one, and dance is a continuing practice for him, he said, “inside of my greater theatrical concerns and convictions.”“I love dancers,” he said. “I hang out with dancers, I’m in that community of people. There’s just something about that community of artists that is really just moving. If you can commit to valuing impermeable things that barely exist and dedicating your whole heart to it? It’s so not shiny, it’s so not sexy. It’s just, like, that commitment is work. And that feels really important.”That also relates to something Rhoads, the dramaturg, said about “This House”: “In a lot of ways, it’s ended up being about the risks we take for art.”And Harris is open to risks. Big ones. “Do you want to know my dream?” he said. “I really want to create and direct a pop star concert. It’s not narrative — it’s associative, it’s sound based, it’s image based and it’s dancing.”He said he was thinking of a Doja Cat — someone who would get him, someone who would appreciate his affinity for creating interludes with weird little meme jokes. “I want to work with scale,” Harris said. “There’s no opportunities for emerging artists or an artist in New York to work with scale. By hell or high water, I will.” More

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      Vinie Burrows, Acclaimed Actress Who Became an Activist, Dies at 99

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      She got her start on Broadway at 15. But after finding a dearth of roles for Black women, she ultimately turned to one-woman shows that addressed racism and sexism.Vinie Burrows, a Harlem-born stage actress who made her mark on Broadway in the 1950s, but who grew frustrated by how few choice roles were available for Black women and turned her focus to one-woman shows exploring the legacies of racism and sexism, died on Dec. 25 in Queens. She was 99.Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by her son, Gregory Harrison.Ms. Burrows made the first Broadway appearance of her seven-decade career in 1950 alongside Helen Hayes and Ossie Davis in “The Wisteria Trees,” a reimagining of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” by the writer and director Joshua Logan that shifted the drama from an aristocratic Russian estate to a 19th-century Louisiana plantation.Ms. Burrows in a scene from “The Wisteria Trees” (1950), in which she made her Broadway debut, with Ossie Davis, who is sitting beside her, and Maurice Edwards.Martin Beck Theater, via Performing Arts Legacy ProjectHer Broadway career continued to blossom into the mid-1950s. Among the high-profile productions in which she appeared was a 1951 revival of “The Green Pastures,” Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1930 retelling of Old Testament stories from an African American perspective. In the early 1960s, she appeared with Moses Gunn and Louis Gossett Jr. in a New York production of “The Blacks,” a searing and surrealistic examination of racial stereotypes and Black identity by the subversive white French author and playwright Jean Genet.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Glynis Johns, a Tony Winner and Actress in ‘Mary Poppins,’ Dies at 100

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      In a trans-Atlantic career that endured for more than 60 years, she was also known for her role in the hit 1965 Disney movie “Mary Poppins.”Glynis Johns, the British actress who in a trans-Atlantic career that endured for more than 60 years won a Tony Award for her role in “A Little Night Music,” giving husky, emotion-rich voice to the show’s most memorable number, “Send In the Clowns,” and played an exuberant Edwardian suffragist in the Disney movie classic “Mary Poppins,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 100.The death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her manager, Mitch Clem.Ms. Johns was 49 and on the brink of her fourth divorce when the Stephen Sondheim musical “A Little Night Music” opened at the Shubert Theater in February 1973. The New York Times described her character, Desirée Armfeldt, as “a slightly world‐weary and extremely lovewise actress in turn‐of‐the‐century Sweden.”The critics adored her. To Clive Barnes of The Times, “the misty-voiced and glistening-eyed Glynis Johns was all tremulous understanding.”To Walter Kerr, also writing in The Times, she was “that cousin of bullfrogs and consort of weary gods”; she was “discreet, dangerous … and gratifyingly funny.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      At a Revamped Under the Radar, New York Greets a ‘Global Downtown’

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      No longer at the Public, the annual celebration of experimental theater disperses 17 productions across the city. About half are international works that are getting harder to import.The writer and performer Inua Ellams was born in Nigeria, is based in England and performs internationally. “As an immigrant, I’m most comfortable when I’m not at home,” he said during a recent conversation. “To go to another country and see if my concepts still stand the test of artistry, that’s what I love doing.”Ellams will take that test in early January, at Lincoln Center’s Clark Studio Theater, when he performs “Search Party,” during which the audience curates an evening of his poetry by shouting out words that Ellams enters into the search bar of an iPad already loaded with his works.“Search Party” is among the works included in this year’s Under the Radar Festival, a celebration of experimental performance. Having lost its longtime space at the Public Theater owing to the Public’s budget cuts, the 2024 festival will disperse 17 full productions (as well as symposia and a disco) across more than a dozen partner venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn.Of those full productions, about half of them are created by artists based outside the United States. In a year in which the festival, with its budget halved, had to scramble for new partners and new spaces, and considering the rising costs and difficulties of artists’ visas, a roster of local artists might have been an easier sell. But that would undercut the ethos of Under the Radar, which has always mingled international artists with local ones in pursuit of what the festival’s founder, Mark Russell, refers to as “the global downtown.”“I want for our artists to see these other artists from around the world and understand that they’re all part of a larger community,” Russell said.To bring an international show to New York is a process that must begin many months (or ideally, years) in advance. The work has to be scouted and deemed appropriate for an American, English-speaking audience and not so bulky — in terms of both cast size and production design — that the cost of importing it becomes prohibitive.Within these criteria, Ellams’s “Search Party” is especially attractive. It requires only Ellams, who had already received a visa as an individual of extraordinary ability, and his iPad. (“Of all the shows that I’ve had performed across the world, this is probably the most eco-friendly,” Ellams said.) The two other shows that Lincoln Center has brought over, “Queens of Sheba” and Pan Pan’s “The First Bad Man,” are also traveling without scenery, a deliberate simplicity.“International artists are getting smarter,” Jon Nakagawa, Lincoln Center’s director of contemporary programming, said.Funding for these shows must be secured, typically a collaboration between the sponsor theater and the international artists, who can apply in their home countries for government and private grants, which can be used to cover airfare and hotel costs. Visas have to be obtained, typically either a P-3, for an artist or entertainer traveling with a work of unique cultural significance, or an O-1 visa, like the one Ellams travels under, granted to individuals of extraordinary abilities. Each type requires both a stateside approval and an in-person interview, typically in the applicant’s country of origin. As wait times for visa approvals have grown exponentially, many arts institutions now work with law firms to expedite the process.Even so, there can be surprises, usually not welcome ones. The Japan Society, which has long imported experimental Japanese performance, ran into a hitch with “Hamlet/Toilet,” an absurdist, pop culture-inflected work from the playwright and director Yu Murai and Theater Company Kaimaku Pennant Race. As the work is based in part on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Yoko Shioya, the Japan Society’s artistic director, had to argue what made this work culturally unique to Japan. Asked by the consular official to submit further evidence, she focused on the production’s toilets. (Murai is also the author of “Romeo & Toilet.” Toilets are a recurring motif.)“Everybody who first goes to Japan, their jaws drop at the toilets,” she said. The official approved the application.The Japan Society will host “Hamlet/Toilet,” a work from the playwright and director Yu Murai and Theater Company Kaimaku Pennant Race.Takashi IkemuraOther productions have had to rely on U.S. senators and foreign officials to arrange timely appointments at American embassies. When none can be found, artists have been flown to other countries whose embassies are less backlogged. This year, the vice mayor of Milan helped to schedule an expedited appointment for a member of the Italian performance troupe Motus, which will perform “Of the Nightingale I Envy the Fate,” adapted from “The Oresteia,” at La MaMa. A cinematographer with Sister Sylvester’s “The Eagle and the Tortoise,” a work about the history of the aerial view that will play at BRIC, wasn’t so lucky. That colleague couldn’t secure an appointment until 2025 and won’t join the production.“It’s becoming more and more risky and more and more expensive,” Denise Greber, La MaMa’s director of artistic operations, said of importing international work. She noted that the cost of visa applications has nearly doubled in recent years. And she had just received word that the cost of one form was set to increase further. “But we still try. It’s important for people in New York City to have an opportunity to see work from other countries. It’s just really important to have cultural exchange.”It isn’t only New York City residents who benefit. Under the Radar, like other January events such as the Exponential Festival, Prototype and The Fire This Time, is in part a showcase that coincides with the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals. Those professionals can reward artists with lucrative touring contracts, and artists can profit in other ways, too.Ellams was looking forward to the conversations among local and international artists, perpetuating his belief in what he called “the global village.”“New York is the concrete jungle of the world,” he said. “It’s where a lot of the world’s conversations begin.” More

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      New Year, New Show: An Original ‘& Juliet’ Star Heads Home

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      Melanie La Barrie thought she would make it through her last performance of “& Juliet” without succumbing to tears.She was mistaken — though contributing factors include that it was the end of a nine-show holiday week; that she originated the role of Angélique, Juliet’s nurse, in this British jukebox-musical riff on “Romeo and Juliet” in 2019; and that she made her Broadway debut in it, at 48, in October 2022.On Saturday night at the Stephen Sondheim Theater, where “& Juliet” is one of Broadway’s poppiest hits, La Barrie sailed through her comic Act I duet with Paulo Szot, who plays Angélique’s long-lost love. But her poignant Act II solo, sung to Juliet (Lorna Courtney), undid her. Embracing Courtney at the finish, La Barrie kept her eyes shut tight against the audience’s ovation, needing to stay rooted in the show.Paulo Szot, who plays Angélique’s long-lost love, gave La Barrie an eloquent onstage tribute.Emily Soto for The New York TimesA Trinidadian Londoner whose West End credits include Mrs. Phelps in the original production of “Matilda,” La Barrie is about to play Hermes in the West End premiere of “Hadestown,” whose first week of rehearsal, in December, she attended on a vacation from “& Juliet.” During her Broadway sojourn, her partner of 15 years, Martin Phillips, a translator, was more often the one traveling back and forth.After La Barrie’s final bow in “& Juliet,” which Szot marked with an eloquent onstage tribute, thanking her “for giving life to the adorable Angélique,” she changed out of her costume and put on a Hermes pendant: a gift from Jeannie Naughton, her “& Juliet” dresser.La Barrie sat for photos, communed with fans at the stage door, declined offers of Jell-O shots from her young colleagues. Then she returned to her dressing room to talk, packing a bit as she did, because she had a New Year’s Eve flight to London the next day. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.“The thing that was the most important to me was for people to know how much I loved Juliet,” La Barrie said.Emily Soto for The New York TimesHow are you doing?I feel so satisfied. I’ve been with this show for such a long time. I did the first workshop of it in December 2017, in London. It was right after Liverpool, where I had played the Nurse in “Romeo and Juliet.” [The director Luke Sheppard] said, “Will you come and read something for me? I can’t really explain what it is, but it’s kind of top secret.”Jeannie Naughton, La Barrie’s “& Juliet” dresser, gave her a Hermes pendant in a nod to the role she is about to play in “Hadestown.”Emily Soto for The New York TimesHow did having played the Nurse affect your approach to Angélique?The thing that was the most important to me was for people to know how much I loved Juliet. They had to know that my entire being was to be an adjunct to Juliet’s wishes. To facilitate them, even reluctantly. Which is Shakespeare’s intention, you know. Everything I do is for Juliet. But this one then veers off and gives me my own story. Which is quite something.It’s a fizzy, funny, midlife romance. Tell me how you made that work so beautifully.Grown-ups don’t get love stories. They say to me at the stage door all the time — it’s always the mamas — they go, “Can my kid have a picture, and then can I have one?” A new love, or a re-sparked love in older people, they eat it up because they say, “I don’t know this. I don’t know this in the context of a jukebox musical or in the context of any musical at all.” I think that is the first thing: the audience’s desire for that. You put me with somebody that I love as deeply as I love Paulo Szot ——“The way that I tell stories comes from a deeply cultural place,” said La Barrie, a Trinidadian Londoner.Emily Soto for The New York TimesWhom you had never met before this show.Never met before. And when I came, I was so clear that I didn’t want to bring any of my experience of the [dynamic from the] London production. It would be very unfair, I thought, to come here and try to make Tony Award-winning Paulo Szot do what Broadway debutante Melanie La Barrie wanted to do. So why don’t we make it anew? He’s an acclaimed opera singer. He runs in serious circles. But he lives in a spirit of collaboration.When I first moved here, Paulo took me out. He took me to see a Brazilian symphony at Carnegie Hall. Then we went to Birdland afterwards, to watch some jazz. It was the best date — [laughs] sorry, Martin — one of the best friend dates that I have ever been on. And he knew that I had never been here before.You had never been here before?I probably, maybe, had a layover once or spent one day.And then you just moved here for over a year.I know. Isn’t that fun?“Grown-ups don’t get love stories,” La Barrie said. “They say to me at the stage door all the time — it’s always the mamas — they go, ‘Can my kid have a picture, and then can I have one?’” Emily Soto for The New York TimesIn March, when “Hadestown” tweeted that it was going back to London, you tweeted, “I am available.”I’d never even seen the show.Had you heard it?No, not really. But I knew that it was amazing.How much freedom do you have to make Hermes your own?One, I’m using my own accent. That brings its own music and its own sensibilities. And the way that I tell stories comes from a deeply cultural place. There’s a [Trinidadian] music called rapso. It’s social commentary, all in rhyme, in time to music. That’s the thing that informed me when I did my audition.We have taken the gender out of Hermes. Hermes is now just Hermes. It was something that I felt very, very deeply about. When I went in to audition, I just dropped all the “Mister” and “Missus.” I didn’t say it. I put in other words. Because I was like, I don’t feel like a Missus Hermes. I just feel like Hermes. And they’re so game for this kind of genderless god from the Caribbean. [laughs]“I love Broadway, and I love New York,” La Barrie said. “That’s also now a part of me, that’s like another lobe of my heart.”Emily Soto for The New York TimesWhat of your “& Juliet” experience will you take with you?This show and this part has changed my life. I probably never would have gotten Hermes if I didn’t play Angélique. People regard me differently. I had to wait until I was nearly 50 years old for that to happen. I think people would have still just had me in those smaller supporting roles if I hadn’t done this, and if I hadn’t done this on Broadway. Which then jumped it up a few pegs in the hierarchy of things.Will Broadway see you again?I hope so. I love Broadway, and I love New York. That’s also now a part of me, that’s like another lobe of my heart. I didn’t expect when I was growing up in Trinidad to ever be given anything like this. It’s like, not miraculous, because I have done the work. But still it’s wondrous. That wonder has been given to me. And that is why I am satisfied. More

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      Murder Most Unromantic in a New ‘Carmen’ at the Metropolitan Opera

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      A close observer might have noticed the flicker of menace that passed between the man and the woman: how his hand, which had just cupped her cheek, slid down and opened to encircle her throat. But though her body grew still for a moment, it didn’t show fear. Instead, she seemed to give as good as she got during their heated exchange of words that occurs in full view of a crowd — a crowd that appeared to freeze when he grabbed her arm and roughly shoved her, sending her flying to the ground.Domestic abuse is often considered a private problem that happens behind closed doors. On New Year’s Eve, it will take center stage at the Metropolitan Opera in a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” conducted by Daniele Rustioni. The opening run stars the Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina in the title role and the tenor Piotr Beczala as José, the soldier whose obsession with Carmen culminates in her murder. The modern-dress production, set near an unspecified border in America, includes scenes like this moment from Act II, rehearsed on a recent afternoon, that aim to shed light on society’s complicity in violence against women.The production’s director, Carrie Cracknell, said she wanted to question the view that Carmen’s death at the hands of José is a crime of passion, the result of her corrupting and discarding an innocent soldier. “We talk about domestic violence as these things which we understand to be a secret between a man and a woman,” she said. In the case of Carmen’s death, she added, “we’re trying to frame that as an outcome that feels as much about gender as about two individuals.”Akhmetshina rehearsing. The production is set not in Andalusia but at an unspecified American border.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe British Cracknell, 43, has made a name for herself in theater with acclaimed productions of works like Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and Euripides’ “Medea” — stories, she said, “about women who find themselves caged by patriarchal structures and cause chaos as a way of dealing with it.” With “Carmen,” her Met debut, she takes on a reliable box office hit, one whose title character — with her teasing, chromatic melodies — came to define operatic sex appeal for generations.But these days the opera also leaves many uncomfortable with its French colonialist fantasies played out in an Andalusia peopled by licentious women and lawless smugglers, a place that risks luring a good man away from duty, family and the churchgoing girl his mother wants him to marry. When José stabs Carmen at the same moment that her new lover triumphs inside the bullfighting arena, it feels as if Bizet is not only killing off a character but restoring the hierarchical order of his time.In recent years, productions have put new spins on this ending. In Cologne, the director Lydia Steier had Carmen wrest back enough agency to kill herself. At the Royal Opera House in London, Barrie Kosky’s androgynous Carmen rose up after her death with a shrug. In a 2018 production in Florence, directed by Leo Muscato, Carmen turned the gun on José and shot him. (That drew disapproving tweets from the future prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni.)The musicologist Susan McClary, who has been publishing studies on class, race and sex in classical music since the early 1990s, said in a video interview that while the tensions in “Carmen” lend themselves to modern interpretation, the music makes the audience complicit in craving the destruction of Carmen and what she represents.“The problem is that final chord, which seems to shout ‘hurrah!’” McClary said. Up until then, she argues, the slippery chromaticism of Carmen’s music has been pitted against the more stable lyricism that characterizes José and Micaëla, the childhood sweetheart sent by his mother to bring him to his senses. At the moment in which the bullfighter triumphs and José moves in for the kill, McClary said, “all of the dissonances that have led up to that in the confrontation between José and Carmen are suddenly resolved in that chord.”Cracknell said of Carmen’s death: “We’re trying to frame that as an outcome that feels as much about gender as about two individuals.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCracknell said that while it is inevitable that audiences feel pulled toward the dramatic resolution of the opera — which here is the death of a woman — she wants to “de-romanticize” Carmen’s death. When women are killed by their intimate partners, “the reality of these things is that they’re chaotic and messy and horrific and that they destroy lives,” she said. “So we’ve tried to replicate that rather than allowing it to feel like a kind of intimate, central moment of transition.”In Akhmetshina, who is making her highly anticipated Met debut, Cracknell has an interpreter who brings deep experience with the work to the stage. At 27, Akhmetshina has already sung the role in so many productions — this is her seventh, and she has plans to star in two more, at London’s Royal Opera House and at Glyndebourne — that she can rattle off a list of different takes on the death scene. In an interview in between rehearsals, she spoke of Carmen as a character who continues to be unsettling.“What is fascinating is that women hate Carmen and men hate Carmen,” Akhmetshina said, still wearing her costume of black leather trousers, a black cutout top and turquoise cowboy boots. “Women because they cannot have the same power, men because they cannot control her.” Even today, she said, “our world is not ready for Carmen. She’s absolutely honest and truthful.”In one production, she said, her character willed José to kill her to put an end to his killing men he was jealous of. In another, she committed suicide in a desperate search for intense feelings. Earlier this season at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, in a staging set among organ traffickers, she joked that she spent so much time “cutting people in pieces” that she was ready to kill Carmen herself. “I was like, ‘just murder her,’” she said, “that’s it. Get rid of her.”Akhmetshina said she identified with Carmen’s outsider perspective and love of freedom. She grew up in a village in Bashkortostan, the daughter of a single mother of three. “Until I moved to the city, I never thought that we were not OK,” she said. “We had a farm and everything was enough.” When she moved to a city, she encountered a different reality — of steep rents and airfares so high, her mother’s salary could barely cover the cost of a flight to Moscow. “The whole structure is built so that people from the small places stay in their place,” she said.A scene from Cracknell’s “Carmen” with Akhmetshina (in blue cowboy boots), who said she identified with Carmen’s outsider perspective and love of freedom.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I needed space, I needed freedom,” Akhmetshina said. “I’m half Tatar, half Bashkir. If you look at the history of these small nations, we were constantly traveling around mountains, the forest, living in small communities that constantly moved around.” Her affinity with Carmen runs deeper than music, she said. “It’s kind of in my blood.”Ethnic difference is not a factor in Cracknell’s production, which instead highlights gender and class tensions. For the choreographer Ann Yee, this was an opportunity to develop dances free of castanets and flamenco clichés. She described Carmen’s allure as connecting more to psychological yearnings than to Orientalist fantasy. “We’ve hooked into this idea of liberation and wildness, about what is on the other side of the journey, the border,” she said in an interview. “It’s this wild appetite that exists in Carmen and which radiates through the people that she is a part of.”Yee said that removing “Carmen” from the Andalusian context also helped to sharpen its feminist message. “If you are looking too hard to situate it in one place, it becomes more difficult to realize that this could happen anywhere.” By the time Carmen meets her death, Yee suggested, “we can all hold ourselves accountable.”“Women are still killed by their partners on an enormous scale in most places in the world,” Cracknell said. “And we are obsessed with that narrative.” In her production, she emphasizes the number of witnesses who watch José’s jealousy turn progressively more menacing without intervening.In the Act III confrontation that results in Carmen being pushed to the floor, not one of her fellow smugglers steps in to help. Instead it is Micaëla, the character Bizet created as Carmen’s opposite and rival, sung here by the soprano Angel Blue, who offers a helping hand. Carmen accepts it, reluctantly, but lets go of it so quickly that she comes to her feet in an embarrassed stumble.Cracknell said it was Blue who had come up with the idea in rehearsal. “Angel just instinctively walked over and helped her up,” she said. “It became this incredible, simple moment of solidarity between these two stepping outside of the trope of two women being pitted against each other and fighting at all costs to win the man. And in that moment, Micaëla’s choice was to support another woman and to see her as a victim in her own right.” More

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      Mbongeni Ngema, Playwright Best Known for ‘Sarafina!,’ Dies at 68

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      Before the fall of apartheid, his plays, which also included “Woza Albert!” and “Asinamali,” challenged the South African government’s racial policies.Mbongeni Ngema, a South African playwright, lyricist and director whose stage works, including the Tony-nominated musical “Sarafina!,” challenged and mocked his homeland’s longtime policy of racial apartheid, died on Wednesday in a hospital in Mbizana, South Africa, after a car accident. He was 68.Mr. Ngema was a passenger in a car that was struck head on when he was returning from a funeral in Lusikisiki, in Eastern Cape Province, according to a family statement cited in the South African news media.“His masterfully creative narration of our liberation struggle honored the humanity of oppressed South Africans and exposed the inhumanity of an oppressive regime,” President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said in a post on X after Mr. Ngema’s death.In the decade before the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid in the early ’90s, the South African system of institutionalized racism was an overwhelming concern to Mr. Ngema. During that decade he cocreated the play “Woza Albert!,” wrote and directed the play “Asinamali!” and wrote the script and collaborated on the music for “Sarafina!”“Sarafina!” evolved out of a conversation he had in the 1980s with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a prominent anti-apartheid activist who was then married to Mandela.“I was sitting with Mama Winnie Mandela, and I started thinking, ‘This country is in flames,’” he told the South African television show “The Insider SA” in 2022. “So I asked a question. I said, ‘Mama, what do you think is finally going to happen to this country?’“Mama looked at me, and she said, ‘I wish I had a big blanket to cover the faces of the little ones so they do not see that bitter end.’”Mr. Ngema soon began to envision young people, running and singing “Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow,” a song that he would write for “Sarafina!,” a musical that follows Black high school students in the township of Soweto in 1976 during the uprising against the government’s imposition of Afrikaans, rather than Zulu, as the official language in schools.Mr. Ngema wrote the book and collaborated with the trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela on the score.Mr. Ngema, left, with former President Nelson Mandela in 2002.Lewis Moon/Agence France-Presse“Sarafina!” opened in Johannesburg in 1987. It moved that fall to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center and then, in early 1988, to Broadway, at the Cort Theater, where it played 597 performances.In his review of the production at the Newhouse, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Ngema had “brought forth a musical that transmutes the oppression of Black townships into liberating singing and dancing that nearly raises the theater’s roof.”The score, he added, “evokes the cacophony of life in a Black society both oppressed and defiant, at once sentenced to hard labor and ignited by dreams of social justice.”“Sarafina!” received five Tony nominations, including three for Mr. Ngema: for best direction of a musical (won by Harold Prince for “The Phantom of the Opera”), best original score (won by Stephen Sondheim for “Into the Woods”) and best choreography, which he shared with Ndaba Mhlongo (won by Michael Smuin for “Anything Goes”).“Sarafina!” was also nominated for best musical and best featured actress in a musical.It was adapted as a film in 1992, starring Leleti Khumalo, who had starred in the South African and Broadway productions, with Whoopi Goldberg as an inspirational teacher and the singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba as Sarafina’s mother.Mbongeni Ngema (pronounced mmm-bon-GEN-i nnn-GAY-ma) was born on June 1, 1955, in Verulam, a town north of Durban.According to his official biography for the film “Sarafina!,” he was separated from his parents at 11, then lived for a time with extended family in Zululand and later on his own in the poor neighborhoods around Durban. From age 12, he taught himself to play guitar.“When I grew up all I wanted to be was a musician, and I was influenced greatly by the Beatles,” he said on “The Insider SA.”Working in a fertilizer factory in the mid-1970s, a fellow worker asked him to play guitar to accompany a play he had written.“And then I fell in love with the part of the lead character in the play,” he told the magazine Africa Report in 1987. “When he was onstage, I would mimic him backstage — making the other musicians laugh.” One night, when the actor did not show up, he played the role.Mr. Ngema and the playwright began to collaborate, which led Mr. Ngema to start directing and writing his own small pieces. In 1979, he began working in Johannesburg with Gibson Kente, a playwright and composer, to understand the magic in his productions. After two years, he left and began working with the performer Percy Mtwa.He, Mr. Mtwa and Barney Simon created “Woza Albert!,” a satire that imagines the impact of the second coming of a Christ-like figure, Morena, who arrives in South Africa on a jumbo jet from Jerusalem, through the lives of ordinary people, vigorously played over the course of 80 minutes by Mr. Ngema and Mr. Mtwa.The white government tries to exploit Morena, then labels him a Communist and locks him up on Robben Island, where Mandela and other political prisoners were incarcerated.The play opened in South Africa in 1981 and was staged over the next three years in Europe, Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater and around the United States.In The Washington Post, the critic David Richards wrote in 1984 that “Woza Albert!” “tackles such harsh realities as injustice, poverty and apartheid in South Africa, but does so with far more spirit, humor and, yes, hope, than the subject generally inspires.” He added that “with only their wonderful, wide-eyed talent,” Mr. Mtwa and Mr. Ngema “can summon up a landscape, a society, a history.”The trumpeter Hugh Masekela, third from right, with members of the cast of “Sarafina!” during a rehearsal at Lincoln Center in 1987. Mr. Masekela and Mr. Ngema collaborated on the score for the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Ngema then wrote and directed “Asinamali!” (1983), in which five Black men in a single South African prison cell describe — through acting, dancing, singing and mime — why they were incarcerated and how they were victimized by racist laws, unemployment and police violence.The play’s name (which means “We have no money”) comes from the rallying cry of rent strikers in 1983 in the Lamontville township.Mr. Ngema said that “Asinamali!” was alarming enough to authorities in Duncan Village, in the Eastern Cape, that they arrested the audience for attending a performance.“They said it was an illegal political gathering,” Mr. Ngema said in an interview in 2017 on a South African podcast.He called “Asinamali!” a celebration of resistance.“It shows that no matter how bad things get, victory is inevitable,” he told The Times in 1986 during rehearsals before the play opened in Harlem at the New Heritage Repertory Theater. “The spirit of the people shall prevail.”Later that year, “Asinamali!” was part of a South African theater festival at Lincoln Center.Information on Mr. Ngema’s survivors was not immediately available. His marriage to Ms. Khumalo, the star of “Sarafina!,” ended in divorce. Mr. Ngema, who wrote several other plays, was involved in a controversy in 1996 when his sequel to “Sarafina!,” “Sarafina 2” — commissioned by the South African Health Department to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic — led to a government corruption investigation over accusations that its cost was an excessive “unauthorized expenditure” and that its message was inadequate.He defended the show’s price tag, saying it was necessary to bring Broadway-quality shows to Black townships.“People have said it’s a waste of government money,” Mr. Ngema told The Associated Press in 1996. “It think that’s a stupid criticism.” More

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      Mike Nussbaum, Celebrated Chicago Theater Actor, Dies at 99

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      He appeared memorably in “American Buffalo” and in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Glengarry Glen Ross,” but gave up a career on Broadway for one in Chicago.Mike Nussbaum, an actor known as the dean of Chicago theater who found success during his early association with David Mamet, the Chicago-born playwright, died on Dec. 23 at his home in Chicago. He was 99.His death was announced by his daughter Karen Nussbaum, a labor organizer.For the last decade, Mr. Nussbaum has also been known as the country’s oldest working actor, a distinction that mildly irritated him. (For admiring journalists, he gamely performed his daily regimen of 50 push-ups, a practice he kept up until he was 98.) He often said he would have preferred to have been recognized solely for his acting skills, not the age at which he was acting.Mr. Nussbaum came up in Chicago’s community theaters, notably Hull House, an incubator of talent in the 1960s, while also running a successful exterminating business. When he was 40, he was tackling a wasp nest when he fell off a roof, smashing a kneecap and breaking a wrist. While he stewed on the couch recuperating, he decided it was the right moment to pursue acting full time.A pivot point in his acting career came in 1975 when Mr. Mamet, then a fledgling playwright, cast him in the role of Teach in an early production of the celebrated play “American Buffalo,” about a trio of hapless, double-crossing hustlers. The pair had met at Hull House, where Mr. Mamet had worked as a gofer when he was a teenager.“It was, for those of us who saw it, kind of an overwhelming, definitive experience,” Robert Falls, the former artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theater, told Chicago magazine in 2014. “Over the years I’ve seen actors like Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall play that part, and no one has ever played it the way Mike Nussbaum did. There was a Chicago quality to it in its voice, in terms of attitude, a sense of pathos and danger that he brought to it that’s never been really equaled.”Mr. Nussbaum won a Drama Desk Award for his role as George Aaronow, a beaten-down salesman, in “Glengarry Glen Ross.”When Mr. Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” another tale of desperate hustlers, opened on Broadway in 1983, Mr. Nussbaum, along with fellow Chicagoan Joe Mantegna, were cast as two of the play’s striving, venal real estate agents. Mr. Mantegna earned a Tony for his role as the slick Ricky Roma; Mr. Nussbaum won a Drama Desk Award for his role as George Aaronow, a beaten-down salesman with a nascent conscience; and the play would win Mr. Mamet the Pulitzer Prize in drama.“There’s particular heroism in Mike Nussbaum, whose frightened eyes convey a lifetime of blasted dreams,” Frank Rich wrote in his review for The New York Times. “and in Joe Mantegna, as the company’s youngest, most dapper go-getter.”The pair had performed years earlier in Mr. Mamet’s “A Life in the Theater,” a slight but biting two-man play about a young actor and an older one, goading and guiding each other, ego to ego. Mel Gussow of The Times praised their performances as effortless. “As the cynical old poseur, Mr. Nussbaum is a Jack Gilford with a touch of John Barrymore,” he wrote.Mr. Mantegna, speaking by phone, said that Mr. Nussbaum was “the role model for what everyone considers the Chicago actor.”“He wasn’t doing it for the end game,” Mr. Mantegna said. “In New York, there’s an end game: Maybe I’ll get to Broadway, get a shot at TV. It’s an industry. L.A. is an industry. In Chicago it was never an industry, we were doing it for the love of doing it.”He recalled Broadway producers urging Mr. Mamet to cast “Glengarry Glen Ross” with stars, and Mr. Mamet pushing back. “He said, ‘I’m going to do it with my kind of guys.’ Then there we were, this pack of unknowns, doing what would ultimately win the Pulitzer Prize.”Then Mr. Nussbaum walked away from it all.B.J. Jones, artistic director of the renowned Northlight Theater, in Skokie, Ill., which Mr. Nussbaum helped found in the 1970s, phoned Mr. Nussbaum during his run on Broadway to ask him to play the lead in a work by the English playwright Simon Gray.Mr. Nussbaum called out to his wife at the time, Annette, for advice. “Do it,” she said. “I’m tired of New York.”“Mike left Broadway to perform in a play for which we probably paid him a few hundred bucks,” Mr. Jones continued. “And when he did, they were scalping tickets in the lobby to see him. He was a Broadway star but he came home.”As Mr. Mantegna said, “We were on the carousel, and there was the brass ring and he could have grabbed it, but he decided he liked the carousel.”A slight man with a bushy mustache, Mr. Nussbaum could seemingly play anybody: He was a fierce Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” and a bawdy witch in “Macbeth,” two of his many roles for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. He also worked steadily in film and television. He was a pompous school principal in “Field of Dreams,” the 1989 baseball fantasy starring Kevin Costner, and a chillingly gentle jewelry store owner in “Men in Black,” the 1997 sci-fi comedy with Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith.A scene from the film “Men In Black” (1997), in which Mr. Nussbaum played a chillingly gentle jeweler.Columbia Pictures, via Alamy“Mike was the consummate ensemble player,” Mr. Jones said. “And he had an inherent warmth that infused all his characters.”Mike Nussbaum was born Myron G. Nussbaum on Dec. 29, 1923, in New York City, and grew up in Chicago. His father, Philip Nussbaum, was a fur wholesaler; his mother, Bertha (Cohen) Nussbaum, was a homemaker. Mike was a skinny, unhappy child, beaten and demeaned by his father, “a man I did not admire,” he told Chicago magazine.He was 9 and at summer camp when he discovered acting,though he froze during his first performance and had to be carried off the stage. He attended the University of Wisconsin before dropping out and enlisting in the Army during World War II.He worked as a Teletype operator in France, first in Versailles and then Reims, and was on duty on May 7, 1945, the day of the German surrender. He sent out the announcement declaring the end of the war in Europe, signing it not with his initials, as was customary, but with his full surname. He kept a framed copy as a memento.He returned to Chicago in 1946 and married Annette Brenner, who later worked in public relations for the American Civil Liberties Union and elsewhere. He went into the exterminating business because he wanted a home, a family and a stable life, which he knew he couldn’t have as a professional actor. “I wanted the American dream,” he said. Mr. Nussbaum in 2019. “I’m lucky,” he once said of his long career. “Chicago has given me chances that I don’t think I would’ve gotten in New York.”Neil Steinberg/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressHis first wife died in 2003. In addition to his daughter Karen, Mr. Nussbaum is survived by his son, Jack, a writer and activist; his second wife, Julie (Brudlos) Nussbaum; seven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Susan, a playwright, novelist and disability activist, died last year.“I’m lucky: Chicago has given me chances that I don’t think I would have gotten in New York,” Mr. Nussbaum told Patrick Healy of The New York Times in 2014. “There’s no real fame here, not like in New York. And your salary doesn’t go up when you win a Jeff” — otherwise known as The Joseph Jefferson Award, an honor given to the theater arts in Chicago — “not like when you win a Tony. But I’ve gotten steady work, great work, and all I ever wanted to do was act.” More