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      At a Rejuvenated Stratford, Second Chances for Plays and Theaters

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      A smash, a romp, a mess and a mystery are part of this Ontario festival’s 12-play repertoire after two seasons of retrenchment.It’s a joyful thing when a great play that seemed to be lost is found. How much more so when its greatness is confirmed and the play takes root in the soil of a new time.That was my experience seeing Alice Childress’s “Wedding Band” this summer at the Stratford Festival, in Ontario. Written in 1962, and first produced in New York by the Public Theater, in 1972, it had all but disappeared for 50 years when Theater for a New Audience, in Brooklyn, revived it in the spring of 2022. A revelation then, it is even more so now, not because Stratford’s production is better but because, by being excellent in a different way, it confirms the play’s vitality.Second comings are crucial to the restocking and refreshing of the dramatic repertoire; a work may be praised at its premiere or when unearthed as a novelty but must be produced a second time before it can be produced 100 times. Helping new and rediscovered work through that bottleneck is one of the things the noncommercial theater does best.During the week I spent at Stratford last month I saw four plays (and two musicals, which I’ve written about already) that encompass the idea in various ways and to various ends. Two of the plays — “Wedding Band” and a rollicking “Much Ado About Nothing” — were revelations. Another, a “Richard II” set in the disco era, was a mixed-metaphor mess. And one, “Grand Magic,” a 1948 morsel of the Italian absurd, was a stylish mystification.At the same time, returning to the festival for my fifth visit in seven years — it and I were mostly shut down for the two worst Covid seasons — I was heartened by the second coming of the festival itself, and of its recently rebuilt theater, the Tom Patterson.“Wedding Band,” “Richard II” and “Grand Magic” all played at the Patterson, the only one of Stratford’s four theaters with an elongated thrust stage. That made it ideal for the claustrophobic intimacy of Childress’s play, in which a Black woman in South Carolina in 1918 (Antonette Rudder) and the white man who is her husband in all but the law (Cyrus Lane) find the world in which they can share their lives shrinking, eventually to nothing.It was always a tragedy for the couple and, by implication, the country, whose attempts to encompass all races in a loving union have been notably fitful and remain unfinished. But the director Sam White’s production unexpectedly adds another layer of tragedy. Her staging emphasizes the hard-won pleasures of the central relationship, so that something valuable is felt to be lost when the world intervenes. But distinctively it also suggests the tragedy of the white characters — especially the man’s mother and sister — who are nominally the villains.When I saw the play in Brooklyn, those women were brilliantly rendered grotesques. As played here by Lucy Peacock and Maev Beaty, they are no longer monsters though their behavior remains monstrous; we see how the tragedy of racism makes victims of everyone.The production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” with Maev Beaty as Beatrice and Graham Abbey as Benedick, preserves its original 16-century setting but puts the play in an overtly feminist frame.David HouIt is a pleasure of the repertory system, nearly extinct elsewhere in North America, that Beaty, so twisted and tortured in “Wedding Band,” was a witty and emotional Beatrice in “Much Ado” the night before. To my mind the best of Shakespeare’s comedies in balancing insight with laughs, “Much Ado” is frequently updated in various ways. Most recently in New York City, Kenny Leon set it in an upper-class Black suburb of Atlanta during a hypothetical Stacey Abrams campaign for president.At Stratford, the director Chris Abraham has left the original setting pretty much alone, though his version of 16th-century Sicily has a stronger than usual commedia dell’arte accent. (The pratfalls never stop.) Beaty’s Beatrice is notably more heartful than most, not so guarded about the love she feels for Benedick (Graham Abbey) despite their professed mutual disaffection. And Abbey’s Benedick, though sharp-tongued, is a superbly rendered goofball, an overgrown bro who doesn’t know how to get serious about what he wants.Purists shouldn’t mind any of that, but they will surely yelp about the addition of material, by the Canadian playwright Erin Shields, that puts the play in an overtly feminist frame. A new prologue, spoken by Beatrice in a reasonably supple pentameter, tells us, among other things, that in Elizabethan London, “nothing” was slang for “vagina,” thus altering the thrust of the play’s title. And in a revamped final scene, Shields bears down on the harm done to women by male paranoia, the cure for which must be liberation.Since that theme already underlies the play, it hardly needs the underlining; Abraham’s production gets to the same point quite handily on its own. Still, I found Shields’s additions droll, and possibly useful as a kind of welcome, for those not expecting such rutting from Shakespeare, to the three hours of frank sex talk, or at least sex puns, that have always been hiding there in plain sight.Stephen Jackman-Torkoff as Richard II in a production that transports the king to Studio 54-era New York for a celebration of what a program note calls queer Black “divinity.”David HouWhat’s hiding in Stratford’s “Richard II” is, alas, the play itself, so baroquely reframed you can no longer see it. As conceived and directed by Jillian Keiley — with interpolations from “Troilus and Cressida,” “Coriolanus,” “Much Ado” and the sonnets — the tragedy of the 14th-century English king has been phantasmagorically transported to Studio 54-era New York as a celebration of what a program note calls queer Black “divinity.” So Hotspur is a coked-up club kid and, yes, there’s oral sex in a hot tub. AIDS gets what seems to me to be a gratuitous cameo.The problem certainly isn’t the queer part of the mission statement. Many productions have explored the suggestion in the text that Richard (Stephen Jackman-Torkoff) and his cousin Aumerle (Emilio Vieira) were lovers, and that their connection helped lead to the king’s downfall in a court that would have seen that relationship as a sign of his unfitness. And surely in the age of “Bridgerton” we’re excited rather than scandalized by the casting of Black actors in roles previously played only by white ones.The problem is the cultural metaphor that Keiley and Brad Fraser, who did the adaptation, have chosen to superimpose on a history play. The first of a tetralogy telling the “sad stories of the death of kings,” “Richard II” is fundamentally about personal flaws that become political disasters. Celebrating those flaws as fabulousness confuses the issue whichever way you look at it. Was Richard a martyr to a movement in the future? Does the ecstasy of gayness make for bad governance?It did not help, on the Patterson’s extraordinarily long and narrow thrust, with audiences banked closely on three sides, that the actors were staged so densely and busily you often could not grasp what was going on.Geraint Wyn Davies as a washed-up magician, with Sarah Orenstein, in the premiere of a new translation of “Grand Magic.”David HouThat wasn’t a problem for Antoni Cimolino, the festival’s artistic director and a primary force behind the building of the new theater. His production of Eduardo de Filippo’s “Grand Magic,” on the same stage as “Richard II,” is flat-out gorgeous — sets, costumes, music, everything — and always legible.If only the play itself were. The world premiere translation (by John Murrell and Donato Santeramo) is clean and colloquial, but the story of a washed-up magician (Geraint Wyn Davies) working scams on customers at a Neapolitan resort is nevertheless as hard to follow as one of his tricks. Like “Much Ado,” it turns on a husband’s overweening jealousy, and his wife’s need to liberate herself, in this case with the help of a disappearing act.Yet the play finally isn’t very interested in its story or even its characters except as vehicles for big ideas about identity and illusion. Playgoers drawn in by the captivating mise-en-scène may soon feel hoodwinked by the flood of abstractions. As a play, it’s its own disappearing act.I don’t know what will happen to “Grand Magic” next; I barely know what happened during it. But sorting work for the future can sometimes mean letting it go. Re-creation is a constant winnowing, but also, more happily, a constant expansion. “Wedding Band” — and Stratford itself, nearly back to its prepandemic capacity — will both be part of that.Stratford FestivalIn repertory, with staggered closing dates through Oct. 27, at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca. More

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      Hitting Theater Hard: The Loss of Subscribers Who Went to Everything

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      The subscription model, in which theatergoers buy a season’s worth of shows at a time, had long been waning, but it fell off a cliff during the pandemic.As a group of stagehands assembled train cars for the set of “Murder on the Orient Express,” Ken Martin looked grimly at his email. His first year as artistic director at the Clarence Brown Theater in Knoxville, Tenn., was coming to an end, and the theater had missed its income goals by several hundred thousand dollars, largely because it had lost about half its subscribers since the start of the pandemic.“I’ve already had to tear up one show, because of a combination of cost and I don’t think it’s going to sell,” he said. “I’m in the same boat as a lot of theater companies: How do I get the audience back, and once I get them in the door, how do I keep them for the next show?”The nonprofit theater world’s industrywide crisis, which has led to closings, layoffs and a reduction in the number of shows being staged, is being exacerbated by a steep drop in the number of people who buy theater subscriptions, in which they pay upfront to see most or all of a season’s shows. The once-lucrative subscription model had been waning for years, but it has fallen off a cliff since the pandemic struck.It is happening across the nation. Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theater had 13,566 subscribers last season, down from 19,770 before the pandemic. In Atlanta, the Alliance Theater ended last season with 3,208, down from a prepandemic 5,086, while Northlight Theater, in Skokie, Ill., is at about 3,200, down from 5,700.Theaters are losing people like Joanne Guerriero, 61, who dropped her subscription to Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., after realizing she only liked some of the productions there, and would rather be more selective about when and where she saw shows.“We haven’t missed it,” she said, “which is unfortunate, I suppose, for them.”Subscribers were long the lifeblood of many performing arts organizations — a reliable income stream, and a guarantee that many seats would be filled. The pandemic hastened their disappearance for a number of reasons, according to interviews with theater executives around the country and theatergoers who let their subscriptions lapse. Many longtime subscribers simply got out of the habit while theaters were closed. Others grew to appreciate the ease and flexibility of streamed entertainment at home. Some found the recent programming too didactic. And the slow return to offices meant fewer people were commuting into the downtown areas where regional theaters are often located.Facing a precipitous post-pandemic drop in subscriptions, the Clarence Brown Theater is trying to appeal to new subscribers with a populist lineup of shows this season.Jessica Tezak for The New York TimesMany artistic leaders believe the change is permanent.“The strategic conversation is no longer ‘What version of a membership brochure is going to bring in more members,’ but how do we replace that revenue, and replenish the relationship with audiences,” said Jeremy Blocker, the executive director of New York Theater Workshop, an Off Broadway nonprofit that has seen its average number of members (its term for subscribers) drop by 50 percent since before the pandemic.Why do subscribers matter?“No. 1, it reduces your cost of marketing hugely — you’re selling three or five tickets for the cost of one,” said Michael M. Kaiser, the chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. “No. 2, you get the cash up front, which helps fund the rehearsal period and the producing period. And No. 3, subscriptions give you artistic flexibility — if people are willing to buy all the shows, some subset of the total can be less familiar and more challenging, but if you don’t have subscribers, every production is sold on its own merits, and that makes taking artistic risk much more difficult.”There’s also a strong connection between subscriptions and contributions. “Most donors are subscribers,” said Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill, the producing artistic director of Capital Repertory Theater in Albany, N.Y., “so there’s a cycle here.”Theaters are simultaneously trying to retain — or reclaim — subscribers, and also reduce their dependence on them. Many are experimenting with ways to make subscriptions more flexible, or more attractive, but also seeing an upside in the need to find new patrons.“For some theaters, a reliance on an existing homogeneous group of patrons has really shaped the work they’re doing,” said Erica Ezold, managing director of People’s Light, a nonprofit theater in Malvern, Pa. “Ultimately it’s going to be really positive to be not as reliant on subscriber income and have greater diversity in our audiences.”“I’m in the same boat as a lot of theater companies: How do I get the audience back, and once I get them in the door, how do I keep them for the next show?” said Ken Martin, artistic director of the Clarence Brown Theater.Jessica Tezak for The New York TimesProgramming is clearly on the mind of lapsed subscribers around the country. Even as subscriptions have fallen sharply at regional nonprofits whose mission is to develop new voices and present noncommercial work, they have remained steadier at venues that present touring Broadway shows with highly recognizable titles.“There’s so much going on with the ‘ought-to-see-this-because-you’re-going-to-be-taught-a-lesson’ stuff, and I’m OK with that, but part of me thinks we’re going a little overboard, and I need to have some fun,” said Melissa Ortuno, 61, of Queens. She describes herself as a frequent theatergoer — she has already seen 17 shows this year — but finds herself now preferring to purchase tickets for individual shows, rather than subscriptions. “I want to take a shot, but I don’t want to be dictated to. And this way I can buy what I want.”But there are other reasons subscribers have stepped away, including age. “We’re all old, that’s the problem,” said Happy Shipley, 77, of Erwinna, Pa., who decided to renew her subscription at the Bucks County Playhouse, but sees others making a different choice. “Many of them don’t stay up late anymore; they’re anxious about parking, walking, crime, public transportation, increased need of restrooms, you name it.”Arts administrators say that many people who were previously frequent theatergoers remain fans of the art form, but now attend less frequently, a phenomenon confirmed in interviews with supersubscribers — culture vultures who had multiple subscriptions — who say they are scaling back.Lisa-Karyn Davidoff, 63, of Manhattan, subscribed to 10 theaters before the pandemic; now she is far more choosy, citing a combination of health concerns and reassessed priorities. “If there’s a great cast or something I can’t miss,” she said, “I will go.” Rena Tobey, a 64-year-old New Yorker, had at least 12 theater subscriptions before the pandemic, and now has none, citing an ongoing concern about catching Covid in crowds, a new appreciation for television and streaming, and a sense that theaters are programming shows for people other than her. “For many years, I’ve pushed my boundaries, and I’m just at a point where I don’t want to do it anymore.”And Jeanne Ryan Wolfson, a 67-year-old from Rockville, Md., who had four performing arts subscriptions prepandemic, is just finding she likes an à la carte approach to ticket purchasing; she kept two of her previous subscriptions, dropped two, and added a new one. “I was paying a lot of money for the subscriptions, and some of the productions within those packages were a bit disappointing or might not have the wow factor I was looking for,” she said. “I think what I want to do is pick and choose.”Martin said the Knoxville theater’s staff has spent much of the summer discussing the drop in subscriber numbers — the theater had about 3,000 before the pandemic, but 1,500 last season — and hired a marketing firm to study the situation.Now he is picking productions carefully. He has set aside his dream of staging William Congreve’s “The Way of the World,” worried that the Restoration comedy wouldn’t find an audience. This season he’s starting with “Murder on the Orient Express,” which should do well, followed by a war horse — the annual production of “A Christmas Carol” — and “The Giver,” which Martin hopes will appeal to younger audiences because it was adapted from a popular young adult novel.The Clarence Brown Theater, like about a dozen other professional theaters around the country, is affiliated with a university (the University of Tennessee) which provides it with some financial support.Jessica Tezak for The New York TimesThen comes “Kinky Boots,” the kind of uplifting musical comedy many of today’s audiences seem to want. (“Kinky Boots,” with a plot that involves drag queens, also makes a statement for a theater in Tennessee, where lawmakers have attempted to restrict drag shows.) There will be more adventurous productions, but in a smaller theater: “The Moors” by Jen Silverman, and “Anon(ymous)” by Naomi Iizuka.But selling tickets show by show, instead of as a package, is challenging and expensive.“It takes three times as much money, time and effort to bring in someone new,” said Tom Cervone, the theater’s managing director. He said the theater is trying everything it can — print advertising, public radio sponsorships, social media posts, plus appearances at local street fairs and festivals where the theater’s staff will hand out brochures and swag (branded train whistles to promote “Murder on the Orient Express,” for example) while trying to persuade passers-by to come see a show.The theater, which is on the flagship campus of the University of Tennessee, is less dependent than some on ticket revenue, because, like a number of other regional nonprofits, it is affiliated with a university that subsidizes its operations. Still, the money it earns from ticket sales is essential to balancing the budget.“It’s been scary some days,” Cervone said, “like, where is everybody?” More

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      Léa Garcia, Who Raised Black Actors’ Profile in Brazil, Dies at 90

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      Best known internationally for her breakout performance in the 1959 film “Black Orpheus,” she challenged racial stereotypes over a seven-decade career.Léa Garcia, a pioneering actress who brought new visibility and respect to Black actors in Brazil after her breakout performance in the Academy Award-winning 1959 film “Black Orpheus,” died on Aug. 15 in Gramado, a mountain resort town in southern Brazil. She was 90.Her death, of cardiac complications, was confirmed by her family on her Instagram account. At her death, in a hospital, she was in Gramado to receive a lifetime achievement award at that town’s film festival. Her son Marcelo Garcia, who was also her manager, accepted the honor in her place.Over a prolific career that began in the 1950s, Ms. Garcia amassed more than 100 credits in theater, film and television, from her early years with an experimental Black theater group to her later prominence on television productions, like the popular 1976 telenovela “Escrava Isaura” (“Isaura: Slave Girl”), based on an 1875 novel by the abolitionist writer Bernardo Guimarães; it was seen in more than 80 countries.Recounting her career in a 2022 interview with the Brazilian magazine Ela, Ms. Garcia said she felt blessed by her success. “I often say that the gods embraced me,” she said. “Things always arrived for me without me running after them.”Still, laboring to change racial perceptions in the world of film and television involved tremendous perseverance and discipline. “Much more was demanded of us,” she told Ela. “We had to arrive with the text on the tip of our tongue, always smelling good and elegant. Others could be wrong. We could not. We could play subservient characters, but we needed to show that we ourselves were not.”Léa Lucas Garcia de Aguiar was born on March 11, 1933, in Rio de Janeiro. Growing up, she was drawn to literature and aspired to be a writer. That changed one day in 1950.“I was on my way to pick up my grandmother to take her to the movies,” she recalled, “when someone came up to me and asked, ‘Would you like to work in theater?’”The voice belonged to Abdias do Nascimento, the writer, artist and Pan-Africanist activist who created Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN), a Rio-based group that aimed to promote the appreciation of Afro-Brazilian culture. (The two would become a couple and had two children together.) Ms. Garcia made her stage debut in 1952 in Mr. Nascimento’s play “Rapsódia Negra” (“Black Rhapsody”).As the decade drew to a close, she took her career to a new level of international recognition when she was cast in the French director Marcel Camus’s “Black Orpheus,” a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice adapted to the frenzy of Rio’s carnival and featuring music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá. It won the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 1960.With its lush exuberance, the film was anything but classical in feel. “It really is not the two lovers that are the focus of interest in this film; it is the music, the movement, the storm of color,” Bosley Crowther wrote in a review in The New York Times.Even in her 80s, Ms. Garcia remained productive. Adriano DamasEven in a supporting role, Ms. Garcia showed an ability to beguile. “Léa Garcia,” Mr. Crowther wrote, “is especially provoking as the loose-limbed cousin of the soft Eurydice.”Among her other notable films was “Ganga Zumba,” the debut feature by Carlos Diegues, a pioneer in Brazil’s reformist Cinema Novo movement, which was made in 1963 but not released until 1972. She brought power and complexity to the character of Cipriana, the lover of the title character, who escapes a sugar plantation in the 17th century to lead Quilombo dos Palmares, a haven for other fugitives from slavery.“It’s not shameful to be a slave,” Ms. Garcia often said, according to family members. “It’s shameful to be a colonizer.”The pace of her career scarcely slowed over the years; she spent decades as a staple of Brazilian soap operas like “O Clone” (“The Clone”), “Anjo Mau” (“Evil Angel”), “Xica da Silva” and “Marina,” and was seen on other TV series as well.Even in her 80s, Ms. Garcia remained productive. She starred in the drama series “Baile de Máscaras” in 2019 and returned to the stage in 2022 in the play “A Vida Não é Justa” (“Life Is Not Fair”), in which she played three characters and explored themes of diversity, equality, justice and relationships.Complete information on her survivors was not immediately available.In the Ela interview, Ms. Garcia discussed her hopes for her great-great-granddaughter, who was 7 months old at the time. “I hope for a fair and egalitarian country that respects diversities,” she said. “That’s what I want, and much more.”Julia Vargas Jones contributed reporting from São Paulo, Brazil More

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      Meet Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s Breakout Clown

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      Around 2 a.m. one recent Saturday, Julia Masli laughed as she glided up to an audience member in a sweaty basement room at Edinburgh’s Monkey Barrel comedy club.Wearing a ghostly outfit with dolls’ legs sticking from a black hat, she pointed a microphone at the panicked-looking man and asked a simple question: “Problem?”After a confused “Er,” he blurted out a genuine issue for most people in the basement. “I’m quite warm,” he said.Masli, looking concerned, led the man onstage and made him sit on a stool. Then she pulled a huge electric fan from a nearby cupboard and duct-taped him to it.As the audience laughed, the clown was already moving on. “Problem?” she said, pointing the microphone at another audience member.Masli, right, had planned for “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” to run only two weeks.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesMasli’s show “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” (running through Aug. 27) has become the surprise hit of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Britain’s largest arts and comedy festival. She considered it a work in progress and had planned for only two weeks of performances, but word-of-mouth enthusiasm and rave newspaper reviews quickly sold out the run, forcing Masli to extend it in the only available time slot: 1:30 a.m.On Wednesday, the show was nominated for the fringe’s main comedy award, and Masli announced a three-week London run next year.Viggo Venn, another clown and Masli’s partner, said the show had gripped audiences because “it feels so risky and exciting,” with little possibility of planning. “She just has to trust the comedy gods that something magical will happen,” Venn said. “And it does. Every day.”In one recent show, Venn recalled, a man said he had a strained relationship with his mother, so Masli called her at 2 a.m., leading to an emotional chat onstage. That wasn’t something you get from many comedy acts, Venn said.During a recent interview in an Edinburgh pub, Masli, 27, said she developed shows by coming up with games to play, “and then from those I find where the meat is.” Last year, she started a routine where she’d walk up to audience members and say “Ha” in increasingly silly ways, seeing how they responded. If they echoed her, she tinkled a bell. If they misplaced the phrasing, she screamed.Saying “Problem?”, Masli found, quickly made audience members share startling tales.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesOne night, she decided instead to say “Problem?” and see what happened. She found that audience members quickly shared startling tales. Working with Kim Noble, a performance artist, she said they realized: “This is it. The ‘Problem?’ is the show.”Performing “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” has changed Masli’s own perspective on the world, she said. At an early show, a man said he was overweight, so she began running around the venue with him to help him burn calories. “It was wild,” she recalled.But when another man said he too felt fat, she said, she concluded the problem lay not with the men, but with how society saw them. She asked other audience members if they felt the man looked overweight, then kicked out anyone who agreed.“Clown is really about connection,” Masli said in the interview when asked why she thought the show was a success. “Maybe right now everyone just wants to be connected.”The daughter of two lawyers, Masli grew up in Tallinn, Estonia, until age 12 when her parents sent her to a girls’ boarding school in England. Masli has said she spoke so little English at the time that she would mime to be understood.As a teenager, her heart was set on becoming an actor and performing the great tragedies on London stages. She auditioned for British drama schools, she said, “but got nowhere because I had this really strong accent.” So she moved to Étampes, France, to study under Philippe Gaulier, a clowning instructor whose past students include Sacha Baron Cohen.Masli uses a microphone taped to a golden mannequin leg as a reminder of her first Fringe show.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesFor nine weeks of a 10-week module, Masli said, she failed to make anyone laugh. In the final week, Gaulier told her to perform as a plumber. She came onstage, looked at the pipes and said, “Oh, God.” When everyone fell about, she couldn’t stop thinking about how to make it happen again.Venn, Masli’s partner, said there was something in Masli’s eyes — “this innocent but cheeky look” — that could make anyone laugh with a glance.After returning to London, Masli struggled to make it as a clown. At one point, she stopped performing for 18 months and became so depressed she couldn’t get out of bed. Things only changed in 2019, she said, when she took her first show, “Legs,” to the Fringe. Made with the Duncan Brothers, two other clowns, it featured skits such as Masli shaking hands with audience members using her feet.Only two people saw the first performance, Masli recalled, but the show won a prize for comic innovation. Masli now tries to highlight the appendage in all her shows. “‘Legs’ saved me,” she said. “It was the biggest ‘Keep going.’” Last year, she returned to Edinburgh with “Choosh!” a solo show about a migrant struggling to make it in the United States, for which The Daily Telegraph named her the Fringe’s “best sad clown.”Masli onstage. On Wednesday, her show was named as one of eight nominees for the Fringe’s main comedy award.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesBoth those shows featured some audience interaction, but nothing compared to what happens in “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.” During the recent Saturday performance, the problems ranged from the trivial (someone’s glasses were broken) to the seemingly insurmountable (a man said he was a hypochondriac). Masli tried to solve them all.She only seemed stumped once, when an audience member said that she was devastated after splitting up with her girlfriend. Masli empathized, but that didn’t seem to help. She solicited relationship advice from other audience members. That didn’t work, either. So Masli suggested something a little more left field: that the person crowd surf.Approaching 2:30 in the morning, the audience member leaped into the crowd, who then carried her from the front of the room to the back. Her heartbreak was far from solved, but for a minute, at least, she seemed to forget all about it. More

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      Review: Is William Finn’s ‘A New Brain’ a Stroke of Genius?

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      Barrington Stage Company’s revival of the 1998 musical brings vocal luster and newfound relevance to the story of a songwriter’s near-death experience.First comes the piano, then the bed. In between, in Barrington Stage Company’s revival of “A New Brain,” a dejected man named Gordon Schwinn plunks out the first halting notes of a song he’s writing. It’s about a frog, and he hates it.In this musical, with songs by William Finn and a book by him and James Lapine, the prominence of the piano and the bed is no accident; they are the poles of Schwinn’s, or any artist’s, existence. To write? To sleep? It’s almost Hamletian.But add an endless stream of groany rhymes and a life-threatening crisis, and it becomes something distinctly Finnian: a musical both twittery and existential, with an annoying tickle and a profound smack.For “A New Brain,” first seen at Lincoln Center Theater in 1998, Finn shaped the givens of his idiosyncratic songwriting style and of the stroke that nearly killed him in 1992 into a show that somehow transcends both. If you could never mistake its silliness and sadness for anyone else’s work, you could never miss, in its intimations of mortality, how it inevitably speaks to everyone. After all, we must all decide how to balance the bed and the piano, or our versions of them: the thing that is our destination and the thing we do on the way there.The ragged yet nevertheless powerful revival that opened on Sunday in Pittsfield, Mass., succeeds best with the darker side of that chiaroscuro. As played by Adam Chanler-Berat, Schwinn, like his rhyme-sake Finn, is a songwriter who probably doesn’t need a near-death experience to confirm his morbidly anxious disposition. Being forced to write hideous ditties for a television character named Mr. Bungee (Andy Grotelueschen) is enough to stoke his neuroses.So when a previously undiagnosed arteriovenous malformation makes his brain “explode,” landing him in the hospital to await a risky procedure, he is already primed for a despairing review of his life, love, family and art. Joining him in these semi-hallucinatory retrospections are his best friend and work colleague Rhoda (Dorcas Leung), who tries to eke songs out of him; his indulgent lover, Roger (Darrell Purcell Jr.), who’s stuck on a sailboat; a homeless woman only tangentially related to the plot (Salome B. Smith); and various medical personnel including an absurdly alpha surgeon (Tally Sessions) who sometimes goes shirtless.And then there’s his mother, Mimi, a passive-aggressive tornado of Oedipal attachment and regret. (She cleans her son’s studio while he’s in the hospital by throwing away all his books.) Mary Testa, who in the original production played the homeless woman, deploys a lifetime of stage know-how (and intimacy with Finn’s style) to create a shattering portrait of manic optimism just barely outpacing fury at a world that has already cost her too much.In outline this might all seem grim, but in practice Finn’s songs, even ones called “Craniotomy” and “Poor, Unsuccessful and Fat,” are almost always too bubbly or buoyant to sink. The homeless woman’s big number, “A Really Lousy Day in the Universe,” is a barnburner for Smith despite its bleak message: that disaster is the normal state of affairs for most humans. “Anytime,” a ballad for Roger that was cut during rehearsals in 1998 has been restored; Purcell makes it a lush tear-jerker.Chanler-Berat’s Gordon Schwinn, in green, with his lover (Purcell), at left, his mother (Mary Testa) and his best friend (Dorcas Leung), at right. Daniel RaderHow Finn turns emotional and lyrical indulgence into a kind of discipline, following no known rules of song construction yet scoring points anyway, is something I’ve never understood. Bombarded by rhymes that favor sound over sense rather than the other way around — “Thackeray” and “whackery,” really? — I alternate between cringing at their illogic and tearing up over them.Part of the trick, as in Finn’s “Falsettos” diptych and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” is surely how many of them there are. (“A New Brain,” originally formatted as a revue, is almost entirely sung.) So if at times Joe Calarco’s staging is as becalmed as Roger’s sailboat, its physical life stunted and those revue roots showing, not to worry. A fair wind will turn up soon.The fair wind will often be vocal. That’s evident not just in the unusually well-sung big solos but in the tricky ensemble numbers. (The music direction is by Vadim Feichtner; the superb original vocal arrangements by Jason Robert Brown and Ted Sperling.) “Gordo’s Law of Genetics,” a song led by the surgeon and a hospital chaplain, crystallizes Jewish fatalism (“the bad trait will always predominate”) in wacky doo-wop style. And the finale, revising the opening frog song as a hymn to the human capacity for reawakening — “I feel so much spring within me” — is almost impossibly moving.That capacity for reawakening is particularly wanted now. News of the disastrous effects of the Covid pandemic on the theater keeps coming, with aftershocks that are often worse than the earthquake itself. Through some combination of careful husbandry and audience loyalty, Barrington Stage has kept steady, continuing to succeed with worthwhile productions of thoughtful plays and complex musicals.Not all its neighbors have been so fortunate. Indeed, this production, which runs through Sept. 10, is being presented in association with the Williamstown Theater Festival, 20 miles up Route 7; Williamstown, facing an existential crisis as serious as Schwinn’s, needs all the help it can get. It’s not beyond the brief of “A New Brain” to suggest that everyone’s survival, especially in the arts, is ultimately linked to everyone else’s.Luckily, as this ultimately uplifting revival demonstrates, Gordo’s law of genetics isn’t always right. Sometimes the good trait predominates.A New BrainThrough Sept. 10 at Barrington Stage Company, Pittsfield, Mass; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      After 122 Years, a Lost Edith Wharton Play Gets Its Debut

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      The Shaw Festival in Canada is staging the novelist’s 1901 script, discovered only a few years ago. But how to get its mix of satire and melodrama just right?Edith Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, “A Backward Glance,” glances a bit more carefully at some things than others. She gives her close friend and fellow literary lion Henry James a chapter, but names her husband of 28 years exactly once. (And that’s only because she quotes James referring to him.)One subject Wharton doesn’t mention at all? “The Shadow of a Doubt,” a full-length 1901 play that got close to a Broadway opening before foundering under murky circumstances. It was all but forgotten — which is perhaps what Wharton had intended — until two scholars unearthed a script in 2016.Mary Chinery, of Georgian Court University in New Jersey, and Laura Rattray, of the University of Glasgow, found the script in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. (Crucially, the play was filed not under the center’s well-combed-over Wharton holdings but rather in its collection of “Playscripts and Promptbooks.”)“We often don’t have the complete picture, especially with women writers from that period,” Chinery said. “Their work is so spread out that there’s a lot we still don’t know about.”Audiences will finally be able to see for themselves at the Shaw Festival, in the bucolic Canadian hamlet Niagara-on-the-Lake, which presents works written by and in the spirit of George Bernard Shaw each summer. Nestled alongside works by Shaw, J.M. Synge and Noël Coward this year is the world premiere of “The Shadow of a Doubt,” which opened Aug. 20 at the Royal George Theater.From left, Gauthier, Patrick Galligan and Claire Jullien, whose face is projected onto the set.David CooperTim Carroll, the festival’s artistic director, said he was constantly on the lookout for new works to add to the festival’s repertory. “I have friends all over the world sending me links to articles about new discoveries,” he said. “And 95 times out of 100, you realize this is a forgotten play for a reason.”But he said “Shadow,” a somewhat lurid mash-up of Oscar Wilde’s drollery and Henrik Ibsen’s noose-tightening melodrama, “ticked three boxes”: It was by a well-known author, it was written during Shaw’s lifetime and it had never received a full staging. (There was a BBC Radio adaptation in 2018, and the Red Bull Theater staged a reading the following year.)Carroll felt Wharton’s play was in that 5 percent of discoveries worth unearthing. “It’s not perfect, but it’s jolly interesting,” he said.As it happens, Wharton’s interest in the theater went well beyond the occasional stage adaptations of her novels. Before she found success with “The House of Mirth” in 1905, Chinery said, Wharton had forged relationships with several New York theater professionals and worked on adaptations and brief works that she called “dialogues.”“Shadow,” the story of a nurse who marries uneasily into a wealthy family after her patient’s death, was poised to become Wharton’s big step forward. The play entered rehearsals in February 1901 with the impresario Charles Frohman and the noted leading lady Elsie de Wolfe on the bill. It was scheduled to be performed as a one-off matinee at the Empire Theater, then a Broadway venue, which was a common prelude to a longer run, but it never got that far.Wharton, circa 1905.Culture Club/Getty ImagesWhy? Accounts vary, with culprits ranging from the subject matter (assisted suicide) to a discontented Frohman to an unenthusiastic de Wolfe. Wharton reportedly planned to “strengthen some of the roles” during the announced postponement. But for whatever reason, the postponement became permanent and essentially marked the end of her playwriting days.Much of the play’s raw material would soon provide fodder for her 1907 novel “The Fruit of the Tree,” which served as a useful resource for the cast and crew of the Shaw Festival’s new production. This was especially valuable since the script raised some questions of its own. Katherine Gauthier, who stars as the upwardly mobile (and potentially sinister) Kate Derwent, said she identified several aspects that she believes would have been tweaked after the initial Empire Theater performance.“It had kind of a smorgasbord of genres,” Gauthier said of the original text. “Our challenge has been to put all of these people in the same world.”Gauthier is a playwright herself, as is the director, Peter Hinton-Davis, who described the initial script as “a bit like getting a rehearsal draft” — to the point where he felt almost queasy about taking it on.“We really don’t know why it didn’t get produced, and part of me wonders if Wharton even wanted it produced,” Hinton-Davis said. “We all have stuff at the bottoms of drawers.”“It had kind of a smorgasbord of genres,” Gauthier said of Wharton’s text. “Our challenge has been to put all of these people in the same world.”David CooperHe said the “Shadow” actors, eager to make a good first impression on behalf of the piece, felt more beholden to the original text than they would have for a better-known work. All of the words being performed are Wharton’s, but Hinton-Davis described the rehearsal process as “a constant navigation between the found text and the edited text that we used.” For one thing, he arrived at rehearsals with a considerably leaner version, only to reinsert certain witticisms and plot points along the way.Hinton-Davis also added some audiovisual components, including real-time close-ups courtesy of four onstage cameras, that might have sent de Wolfe to her fainting couch. “Some people will be divided on this production, no question,” said Carroll, who contrasted this approach to what he called the “archaeologically exact sort of staging” common to so many period pieces.Gauthier drew a different comparison from the perspective of Shaw Festival audiences. “I think some people are coming in primed to see another ‘Gaslight,’” she said, alluding to last year’s reboot of another woman-in-trouble drama that played in the same atmospheric theater. “But while a lot of plays come to you, this one asks you to lean forward and listen.”Those who do will hear a fledgling playwright take a tentative but intriguing step toward many of the themes that would animate her novels — the persistence of class, the fluidity of our personas and how they change from relationship to relationship. “Given her mastery of multiple genres, I think she would have done well had she stuck it out as a playwright,” Chinery said.That possibility remains unknowable (unless other plays also surface, including a missing title called “The Tightrope” that Wharton alluded to in her letters). Still, “Shadow” offers a titillating look at what she might have done with — and to — the prevailing theatrical styles of the time.“A lot of people think of realism as the antithesis to artifice, as opposed to melodrama or farce,” Hinton-Davis said. “But I think of realism as the antithesis to idealism, and Wharton excelled at that. I see her as a wonderful satirist.” More

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      At the Ruhrtrienniale, Industrial Ruins Become Stages

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      The best productions at the Ruhrtriennale festival created a sense of unity with their unique, often vast, settings.For six weeks each year, the Ruhrtriennale festival transforms the economically depressed Ruhr region of northwest of Germany into ground zero for cutting edge art and performance.Since 2002, this lavishly funded event, which puts on roughly 30 productions each summer, has lured artists and audiences to Germany’s rust belt with its robust and unexpected programming. And whereas many of Europe’s summer arts festivals can feel interchangeable, the Ruhrtriennale is devoted to works that can’t be experienced the same way anywhere else. Many have been created specifically for the postindustrial sites that dot the region.Earlier this month, the Ruhrtriennale’s artistic director Barbara Frey inaugurated her third and final festival program with her own staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” presented in the Kraftzentrale, the cavernous former power station of a disused steel and coal plant. It was the opening salvo in an interdisciplinary program, running through Sept. 23, that includes an immersive production of a Janacek opera and an art installation in a Brutalist church.The desolate set for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” designed by Martin Zehetgruber, features rusting cars half-sunken in the earth and sparse trees that suggest Shakespeare’s enchanted forest is on the verge of collapse. This is a gloomy “Midsummer,” both visually (thanks to Rainer Küng’s lighting) and atmospherically, and while it is enlivened by fine acting by a troupe of 10 performers, the production itself is oddly sterile and detached. Dorothee Hartinger’s wry and insouciant Puck and Oliver Nägele’s gruff and bittersweet Bottom are standouts. However, most of the time, the actors, drawn largely from the permanent ensemble at the Burgtheater, in Vienna, recite Shakespeare’s text with fine, crisp diction, but without truly inhabiting their characters.Cast members from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from left: Meike Droste, Marie-Luise Stockinger, Sabine Haupt, Markus Scheumann, Sylvie Rohrer, Gunther Eckes, Oliver Nägele and Langston Uibe.Matthias Horn/Ruhrtriennale 2023For a play that dances on the threshold between dream and waking, and art and reality, Frey’s production feels like a slow waltz. (The frequent music box-like tinkering by an onstage musician quickly grew tiring.) There is much to admire, but little to quicken the pulse.I missed the site specificity of the festival’s most memorable productions. When Florentina Holzinger staged “A Divine Comedy” at the Kraftzentrale, in 2021, she made fuller use of the space to create an infernal cabaret-variety show. Although I was not a fan of that production, I must admit that Holzinger’s spectacularly overstuffed staging, featuring joyriding motorcycles and cars, and even a grand piano suspended from the ceiling, was visually stunning. By contrast, Frey’s production, which will transfer to the Burgtheater in September, seems designed for any theater with a rotating stage.There was greater sense of unity between the production and the venue at the world premiere of Gisèle Vienne’s “Extra Life,” at the Salzlager, in the city of Essen.Two years ago Vienne, a distinctive French choreographer and director, was at the Ruhr with her clammy and hallucinatory chamber piece “L’Étang” (“The Pond”). While that previous work was insistently small-scale, with two actors playing 10 roles on a mostly bare set, “Extra Life” embraces the vastness of a former salt storage facility.From left: Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick and Adele Haenel in “Extra Life,” at the Ruhrtriennale in Essen, Germany.Katrin Ribbe/Ruhrtriennale 2023Like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Vienne’s latest creation is a nocturnal piece. In the vast, often fog-shrouded confines of the Salzlager, she unspools a simple yet enigmatic tale about two estranged siblings (Adèle Haenel and Theo Livesey), who reunite at a party and rekindle their relationship, sifting through a painful family history. A third character (Katia Petrowick), who emerges during their long night of the soul, might be a kindred spirit who follows them from the party into the woods. Or perhaps she is a composite of figures from the siblings’ past, or of unconscious wishes.This is a demanding and elliptical production, in which much is implied, but little is ever settled. Vienne and her fellow artists achieve uncanny and cathartic effects through pared-down dialogue, controlled slow-motion choreography and dazzling laser stage lighting (by Yves Godin) that suggests both being at a club and inside a video game. Immersed in the swirl of fog, lasers and a synthesizer score by Caterina Barbieri, the audience seems bathed in postindustrial electricity.With its disquieting blend of surreal and blandly quotidian elements, “Extra Life” can be an exasperating puzzle. It’s best to just surrender to its visual and sonic rhythms over the course of its unhurried 140 minutes. Over the coming months, the production will travel to Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and France.This is Frey’s last summer leading the Ruhrtriennale. Her time at the festival has widely been judged a success, especially next to the troubled reign of her predecessor, Stefanie Carp. But the creators Frey championed were often extreme, or obscure.From next year, the Belgian director Ivo van Hove will be in charge. Like his predecessors, he is sure to put his stamp on the festival, and there is no doubting that van Hove has a questing and disruptive bent. The Ruhrtriennale will give him his biggest canvas yet. I’m curious to see how he chooses to fill the Ruhr region’s majestic cathedrals of industry.RuhrtriennaleThrough Sept. 23 at various venues in northwestern Germany; ruhrtrienniale.de. More

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      Feminist Stories Are Being Set to a Pop Beat. But Are They Empowering?

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      Our critics debate how well shows like “Six,” “& Juliet” and “Once Upon a One More Time” engage with the inner worlds of women onstage.During the first act of “Once Upon a One More Time,” the Broadway jukebox musical that grooves to the Britney Spears oeuvre, a fairy godmother arrives with a present for Cinderella. A gown? No. Glass slippers? No. Cin has enough already. Instead, her godmother gifts her a copy of Betty Friedan’s 1963 best seller, “The Feminine Mystique.”It’s a clumsy gesture in the show, which plans to close next month. (Feminist thought has advanced in 60 years!) And arguably emblematic of a recent spate of Broadway musicals that set feminism to a pop beat, including “Six,” a zippy modern retelling of the lives of Henry VIII’s six wives; “& Juliet,” whose protagonist, miraculously alive, embarks on a girls’ trip of self-discovery; and “Bad Cinderella” (now closed), a chaotic rejiggering of the classic fairy tale. Aimed at girls and women (historically the majority of Broadway ticket buyers), these shows may be sincere attempts to engage with women’s issues — or they’re hollow efforts to capitalize on calls for change. Empty political gestures on Broadway? To quote a song used in two of these shows: “Oops! … I did it again.”On a recent morning, Laura Collins-Hughes, contributing theater critic and reporter; Salamishah Tillet, critic at large; and Lindsay Zoladz, pop music critic, gathered to debate facts and fairy tales. They discussed how narrowly these shows define empowerment, if they define it at all, and why Prince Charming gets the best song. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The recent musicals “Six,” “& Juliet,” “Bad Cinderella” and “Once Upon a One More Time” take female empowerment as their central theme. Are these shows actually empowering or legibly feminist?LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES I wouldn’t say any of them are feminist.SALAMISHAH TILLET Some are empowering, others are not. “Six” is partly feminist, because it shows the impact of King Henry VIII’s misogyny. With the exception of Anne Boleyn, most of his wives have been relegated to the margins. My 11-year-old daughter really loved that these women finally reclaimed their stories and did it with style! But I felt like I was at a fun pop concert rather than at a big Broadway musical.COLLINS-HUGHES “Six” drives me completely up the wall. It wants to have a good time in the neighborhood of spousal murder and abandonment, singing “I don’t need your love.” As if Henry’s love had anything to do with it. As if abuse is what a man’s love for a woman looks like.Lauren Zakrin, second from left, as Little Mermaid gets her voice back upon reading “The Feminine Mystique” in “Once Upon a One More Time.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLINDSAY ZOLADZ I like “Six,” but probably for the reason Salamishah doesn’t — it’s basically a pop concert. I do think the overarching problem with these musicals is the way they fail to define terms, presenting “empowerment” and “feminism” as given, unexamined virtues. Instead of the marriage proposal that supposedly leads to the happily ever after, it’s … empowerment ever after? “Once Upon a One More Time” provided the clearest distillation of the trend. Cinderella’s “feminist awakening” is spurred by her fairy godmother giving her “The Feminine Mystique.” Seriously. The book is treated like a magical talisman throughout the rest of the show, but its actual content is never engaged with. That seems beyond the show’s grasp. Though the book is on sale for $20 in the lobby gift shop.TILLET I gasped when she discovered the book.ZOLADZ Not in a good way, I’m guessing.Doesn’t Cinderella know that women’s studies syllabuses have moved on?TILLET Or that Friedan was heavily criticized for her bourgeois feminism back in the day? Is it weird that we are still locating the beginnings of feminism exclusively in the sexual liberation of straight, white, middle-class, stay-at-home 1950s wives? But that’s an ongoing problem, not just on Broadway.Why do you think we’re seeing these shows now? Is it a cynical attempt to appeal to female ticket buyers or something more organic?TILLET These shows, despite their best intentions, seem limited by their source material. There was a lot of Cinderella this year! The publicity appeal of anything Cinderella is obvious, so for Broadway theaters struggling to get audiences back into the theater, of course it is a ploy.From left: Justin David Sullivan, Melanie La Barrie, Lorna Courtney and Betsy Wolfe in “& Juliet.” With its thoughtful casting of a Black Juliet and the nonbinary character May, the show enables us to see Shakespeare differently, one critic said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCOLLINS-HUGHES “Bad Cinderella” could have been so much more than it was. It is a messy show, it’s always been a messy show, but in London it was actually fun. It had a bit of substance to it. And magic. The feminism, which was so clear and so dramatically propulsive in the London version, was wiped away for Broadway.I took my daughter to “Bad Cinderella” and afterward we had a conversation about the show’s messaging, which was confused at best. Is it asking too much of a musical to also have great messages?COLLINS-HUGHES This question makes me think we all live in fear of that riposte that often greets girls and women who won’t laugh along at a joke that’s not funny: “Where’s your sense of humor?” It’s perfectly legitimate to recoil from a show whose message bugs you, and all the more if it’s at odds with its girl-power, you-be-you marketing.And yet if a show is successful enough in other ways, the messaging may not matter. That was my delighted experience of “& Juliet.”TILLET This was definitely my favorite pop feminist musical of the year. I was genuinely intrigued by the conceit of what happens if Juliet doesn’t die. What life does she make for herself beyond the formula prescribed for her? The musical opens up possibilities for her as a protagonist. And with its thoughtful casting of Lorna Courtney as a Black Juliet and Justin David Sullivan as the nonbinary character, May, it enables us to see Shakespeare differently, too.COLLINS-HUGHES When it has a top-notch cast, “& Juliet” is a blast. But I am baffled that people perceive it as feminist. It really is not.ZOLADZ Say more!COLLINS-HUGHES I don’t mean that it’s anti-feminist, but I don’t think it’s particularly female-centered — not on Juliet, nor on Anne Hathaway [Shakespeare’s wife], who gets one of the subplots.“Bad Cinderella,” starring Linedy Genao, had a brief run this spring. “The feminism, which was so clear and so dramatically propulsive in the London version, was wiped away for Broadway,” one critic said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith the exception of “Six,” these shows are largely created by men. Does that explain anything?COLLINS-HUGHES Of course. It’s not that men can’t and don’t write women well or can’t imagine women’s lives. And it’s certainly not that artists should stick to writing only about people just like them. But they are writing from the outside. That can come with a lot of blind spots and a lot of misapprehensions.All of these musicals use a pop vernacular, “Bad Cinderella” somewhat less so. Is pop, particularly pop written and produced by men, a useful form for feminist discourse?ZOLADZ Something I’ve been thinking about regarding “Once Upon a One More Time” and especially “& Juliet,” which uses the songs of the massive millennial hitmaker Max Martin, is the lyrical limitation of a lot of modern pop music. Martin and the generation of pop architects who followed him treat lyrics almost as an afterthought. Martin has referred to his method of songwriting as “melodic math.” “& Juliet” was fun and more cleverly written than “Once Upon a One More Time,” but a lot of that had to do with the ironic distance between the lyrics themselves and the winking, metatextual way the characters employed them — like when “I Want It That Way,” by the Backstreet Boys, becomes not so much a love song as a narration of an argument between Shakespeare and his wife, who have conflicting opinions about how his latest play should end.TILLET I hated a lot of those pop songs and found them anti-feminist when they originally came out, but when I sang along with the “& Juliet” audience and my tween daughter, I found that they aged better than I had expected. Or maybe, because I’m now middle-age, I’m mistaking nostalgia for progress.COLLINS-HUGHES Inattention to lyrics is a limitation of jukebox musicals, but it doesn’t hold for original pop songs, which can be whatever the writer makes them. It would help, though, if more of the songwriters getting musicals produced were women.ZOLADZ I generally pay more attention to pop music than Broadway musicals, so I found the sound of these shows to be quite striking. Modern pop’s influence is everywhere, especially in a show like “Six,” which is full of electronic beats, hip-hop cadences and direct nods to artists like Beyoncé and Ariana Grande. Is that a trend you have observed over time? And given that this is such a golden age for female pop stars, do you think that crossover appeal has something to do with the rise of these empowerment musicals?COLLINS-HUGHES Musically, “Hamilton” changed Broadway, but it is very much a guy story. Having proved the hunger for modern pop musicals, it left a lot of room for female artists to fill.Do these shows do that filling?COLLINS-HUGHES Musically? Sometimes. But in terms of storytelling, generally no. There are such blinders on imagination, and there’s such an aversion to nuance. It’s a question of whom you’re trying to please. The perception of risk is about displeasing men, not the women and girls who might want to see smart, muscular new musicals.Megan Hilty, left, and Shoshana Bean in “Wicked,” which is partly about a girl learning to harness the power of her outrage to fight against injustice in the world.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDoes the success of the Barbie movie, directed and co-written by a woman, with its several song and dance numbers, point a way forward?COLLINS-HUGHES Absolutely, if the idea is to give the best numbers to the guys.ZOLADZ And the charisma! That’s what ultimately sank “Once Upon a One More Time” for me: Cinderella was often the least compelling character onstage. Juliet didn’t fare much better. I don’t know if blandly “empowered” female characters are the answer. Too often it just feels like a shortcut. Writing flawed, idiosyncratic and more interesting female characters seems like a worthier goal, but most of these shows don’t want to take the risk.TILLET If song choice in a musical is any indication of narrative priorities, “Once Upon a One More Time” had difficulty sustaining its attention on Cinderella and her awakening. Prince Charming got “Oops! … I Did It Again” and her stepmother had “Toxic.” When I watched “Barbie,” I realized how seductive patriarchy is onscreen or onstage, even when we say we are trying to smash it. Why do the Kens get that massive and amazing dance scene?COLLINS-HUGHES A story about or aimed at women is so seldom deemed interesting enough on its own. But Hollywood, like commercial theater, is often in the business of blandification. And who’s blander than Ken? I’d like to think audiences want more than that.These recent shows define empowerment narrowly, restricting it to questions of romantic and sexual relationships with men rather than any broader political awakenings. Why can’t these stories dream bigger or attempt something more intersectional?TILLET I do think a lot of these producers feel that they are being intersectional, simply through casting. But while I appreciate so much more diversity onstage, it is still not enough. The musicals would really have to try to dismantle various forms of oppression at once. That takes nuance, patience and a really radical imagination. An older musical, “The Color Purple,” was successful at this, which brings us back to the strength of the source material, Alice Walker’s novel, and then a sizable female team behind its Broadway staging. It is an understatement to say that the evolution of Celie, who endured such abuse and trauma, is far more compelling than Cinderella’s!ZOLADZ What I find missing from a lot of contemporary art about female empowerment is the way it focuses on the attainment of power and then stops there. What about stories about how easily power can corrupt those who have it? Yes, even women!COLLINS-HUGHES This is a thing that “Wicked” imagines. And two decades on, it’s still packing houses and making loads of money. That show is partly about a girl learning to harness the power of her outrage to fight against injustice in the world.TILLET I’ve seen “Wicked” twice recently. The depth of the storytelling — when the villain and heroine aren’t what they seem — it is just so good. Is it feminist? Maybe. Does it reveal the power and heartbreak of female friendship as the ultimate love story? Very much so. For that alone, it provides a wonderful model for how to really revel in the inner worlds of women onstage. More