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      Tagging Along With The New York Times’s Chief Theater Critic

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      At a recent performance of “Gutenberg! The Musical!” on Broadway, Jesse Green gave us an inside look at his review process.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.At 7:40 on a humid Friday night in early October, Jesse Green, wearing a plaid suit coat and carrying a green laptop bag, arrived at the James Earl Jones Theater in Manhattan. The show he was there to see, “Gutenberg! The Musical!,” was starting in 20 minutes, but he was in no rush to enter the theater. As the chief theater critic for The New York Times, he knows Broadway performances usually begin about eight minutes late.“Good evening,” Green said as he approached a press representative for the show. He retrieved a white envelope with two tickets tucked inside, one for Green and the other for his husband, Andrew Mirer.It was the second press performance of “Gutenberg!,” a two-man comedy about aspiring musical theater writers who decide to write a show about Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, without knowing much about him. The show reunites Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad, who co-starred as hapless missionaries in “The Book of Mormon” in 2011.“Gutenberg!” was one of more than 100 shows that Green, who reviews almost every new Broadway production and many Off Broadway shows and regional productions, would see this year. He had attended a performance of “Merrily We Roll Along,” the starry new revival of the 1981 Stephen Sondheim musical, the previous night.Green, who has been a theater critic for The Times since 2017, was, proudly, a theater geek in high school. After graduating from Yale with a double major in English and theater, he moved to New York City and began working as a gofer, or errand runner, for Broadway shows, working his way up to musical coordinator positions. At one point, he apprenticed for Hal Prince, who produced or directed many of the most enduring musicals in theater history, including “West Side Story,” “Sweeney Todd” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”His time with Prince not only honed his taste, but also taught him how important it is for a show to forge a connection with an audience.“I approach theater criticism as a form of reporting,” said Green, who has reviewed nearly 1,000 shows over his decade-long career as a critic. His reporting reflects his feelings — his connection with the show being staged in front of him.“That’s the fun of reviewing,” he told me.Critics generally attend one of a few press performances, which occur before a show’s official opening night. Green sees the first one he can so that he has ample time to write his review, which usually comes out on opening night. “Gutenberg!” was opening the following Thursday, Oct. 12.At 8 p.m., he walked through a metal detector and handed his ticket to an usher. A bell chimed.“Let’s go, guys, step right in,” a man yelled. “The show is about to start.”An usher led Green and Mirer to aisle seats in Row F of the orchestra section. (“Press seats are almost always in the middle of the orchestra,” Green said. “But when I buy them myself, I like to sit in the front row of the mezzanine.”)He pulled out a five-by-eight-inch red spiral notepad, slipped on a pair of dark blue glasses, and wrote the show’s name and the date at the top of the page. It would be the most legible thing he would write all evening.“The first thing I do after a show is transcribe my notes,” Green told me. “They’re unreadable half the time, but they’re still helpful to jog my memory.”When the show began, Mirer leaned over, signaling to his watch — 8:04. Though shows post their run time on their websites, it is not always precise; Green ensures readers have accurate information.During the first act, which featured Gad and Rannells dancing in a kickline and performing a farcical song about biscuits, Green jotted down notes often. His expression remained inscrutable, except for an occasional smile or a chuckle.“I’m looking for a number of things,” he told me later. “Lines that help me understand what the play wants to do and how it seems to be succeeding or failing.” He considers moments and design choices that will help readers understand what it feels like to experience the show. Occasionally, he admits, he finds himself writing “Help” or “Will this ever end?”The first act of “Gutenberg!” provoked a continual stream of laughter from the audience and selective applause from Green — he tries not to show too much emotion during a performance. When the house lights came on for intermission, a woman seated nearby turned to her seatmate. “That’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” she said.Green stood up. “I don’t want anyone else’s influence,” he said. To avoid inadvertent eavesdropping, he goes for a walk during intermission, even if it’s just up the aisle.Act 2 began at 9:15, which Green dutifully recorded in his notebook. He took fewer notes during the second act, which, he said afterward, is not always the case. He explained it this way: “As a rule, the better the show, the fewer notes I take, because I get too caught up.”When Gad and Rannells took their bows at 10:08, most of the audience stood and applauded. But Green perched on the tipped-up edge of his seat, craning his neck to watch. Times critics do not typically stand at the end of shows, a practice Green said was not a formal policy but an unwritten code among critics.“We know we are being watched, and we don’t want to disclose too much,” he told me. And, he added, “I still believe that standing ovations are for truly extraordinary events.”As Green closed his notebook (he had filled four pages) and headed for the exit, he and his husband discussed the weather — rain was on the way — as well as their weekend plan to drive to a house they owned in the woods upstate, where Green would write. Not a word passed between them about the show. Even his husband is prohibited from sharing thoughts about a performance, at least until Green’s review runs.Green planned to read the script for the show on his phone on the train to their home in Brooklyn. He never reads the script for a new show before seeing it — he wants to experience it “as the playwright intended” — but he does afterward, to dig deeper into the meaning of the work, check whether any moments were improvised and confirm quotes.While he writes his review, he emails questions to the show’s press agents, asking how it has changed over its development, or, in the case of “Gutenberg!,” how many trucker hats the actors wore during the performance (99). He also checks facts that he is including in his review.What is clear after spending time with Green is that he feels being a critic is part of his identity, not just his job. Even when he is not reviewing a show, he is soaking in culture: He is an admirer and voracious reader of Walt Whitman and Jane Austen, for example, and a puzzle enthusiast.Green, it should be said, wants a show to succeed. He’s a theater geek, after all. Even if he does not enjoy a performance, he understands it may still have merit or add to a cultural conversation. But he will not hesitate to pan a show if he feels it deserves it. “If I have any value, it’s in having some consistency of taste and knowledge from many, many years of seeing plays and writing about them,” he said. “People who get used to reading my stuff may say, ‘Oh, I never agree with him,’ which is actually good. That way, when I dislike something, they know they’ll like it — and vice versa.”When he’s reviewing, Green is thinking through big-picture questions: What does this play want? How well does it achieve that? Is it worth achieving? And, of course, he’s doing it on deadline.“Even after a thousand reviews, staring down a deadline fills me with fear,” he said. “After all, you start with nothing but what’s in your head and a few nearly illegible scribbles in your notebook.”But writing, he said, should be a pleasure, not a curse. “It must grow from fear to enjoyment,” he said. “It remains an amazement to me that it so often does.” More

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      ‘Shucked’ to Play Final Performance at Broadway’s Nederlander Theater

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      The show said Thursday that it would play a final performance at the Nederlander Theater on Jan. 14, but did not rule out continuing elsewhere.“Shucked,” a musical comedy fueled by corn puns and country music, will end its run at Broadway’s Nederlander Theater on Jan. 14.The show’s lead producers, Mike Bosner and Jason Owen, are not calling the step a closing, apparently because they are hoping that they will find another theater at which the show might continue its run. But the current Broadway season is shaping up to be fairly robust, and it is unclear if there will be an empty theater available for it.“Shucked” is vacating its theater as its grosses have remained consistently middling. Theater owners make money both by charging rent to producers, and by getting a percentage of the box office, and if the Nederlander Organization can find a higher-grossing tenant, it will make more money. (A leading candidate to take over the theater: a revival of “Tommy” that was well-reviewed and sold strongly at Chicago’s Goodman Theater.)With a score by two successful Nashville-based songwriters, Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, “Shucked” began previews on March 8 and opened on April 4. It was nominated for nine Tony Awards, and won one, for Alex Newell as best featured actor in a musical.The musical, directed by Jack O’Brien and with a book by Robert Horn, was capitalized for up to $16 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; it has not yet recouped those costs. Its grosses have been modest for a musical — during the week that ended Oct. 8, it grossed $751,829, with 85 percent of its seats occupied. The country singer Reba McEntire voiced new advertising for the show and has been talking it up, and the show’s producing team believe that her support is helping to promote sales.A North American tour of “Shucked” was announced on Tuesday, with plans to kick off next fall in Providence, R.I. And on Thursday, the show’s producers said that they expect international productions to open in London in 2025 and in Sydney, Australia, in 2026. More

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      In Germany, ‘Hamilton’ Hangs Up Its Musket

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      After a year of less-than-stellar ticket sales, the German-language translation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stage hit is closing. But it has helped diversify German musicals.On Monday, the German-language version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster musical “Hamilton” won the prize for best production at the German Musical Theater Awards. But the timing of the honor was bittersweet. On Sunday, the show will play its final performance in Hamburg, after a yearlong run at the 1,400-seat Operettenhaus.The rise and fall of “Hamilton” in Hamburg is a tale of incredible determination, sky-high expectations, critical acclaim and an uneven box office.“Economically, it makes more sense for us to have a wonderful one-year run, instead of losing the money that you’ve made by prolonging it for too long,” said Stephan Jaekel, a spokesman for Stage Entertainment, the Amsterdam-based company that produced the show.Although sales were healthy overall, the show performed below expectations during the Christmas season, Jaekel said. Noting that tickets for musicals are “the number one German Christmas present,” he added that the holiday season box office was a “good indicator” of whether a show is “flying, whether it’s solid, whether it’s declining.” He added that even when sales were at their most brisk, “Hamilton” never sold out completely.When its closure was announced in March, the show had reported sales of over 200,000 tickets. Jaekel said that twice as many people will have seen it by the final performance on Sunday afternoon.“Four hundred thousand, to us, seems like a very good number of people to have been in touch with a new form of musical,” he said, “because the German musical audience is not as developed, is not as refined, not as used to variety as, say, the British or the American musical audiences are.”Daniel Dodd-Ellis, second from left, plays both Lafayette and Jefferson. He said the production was “a huge learning curve for German musical theater audiences.”Johan Persson“Hamilton” has become one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time since opening in 2015. It won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as 11 of the 16 Tony Awards for which it was nominated. A West End production has been running since 2017, and in addition to a North American tour, the show recently landed in Manila, and will head to Abu Dhabi early next year.Unlike Hamilton’s international tour, however, Hamburg’s was the first (and still the only) production not in the English language. Sera Finale and Kevin Schroeder spent nearly four years working through the show’s more than 20,000 rapid-fire words. Their German-language version has been widely praised as a masterpiece of translation.A little over a year ago, “Hamilton” in Hamburg celebrated a glitzy gala opening, with Miranda in attendance. It opened to strong reviews — but even the most positive critics wondered whether the show’s unique qualities might be lost in translation.“Can this American success story also work here?” wrote Judith Liere in the German newspaper Die Zeit. She applauded the translation, but complained that the story was unfamiliar and hard-to-follow. And though Liere praised the music and the energetic performances, she also asked: “Will that be enough to excite the average German musical audience, who are otherwise used to more accessible and effects-laden material?”At a recent weekend performance, the Operettenhaus was nearly full. I spotted young women decked out in “Hamilton” T-shirts and hoodies, as well as couples old and young and groups of 20-somethings, but relatively few young families, who are one of the main audiences for musicals in Hamburg.The crowd was fired up throughout the three-hour-long show, whooping and applauding as characters made their entrance (Lafayette! Washington! Jefferson! King George!) and the famous line “Einwanderer — we get the job done” was met with a mid-performance howl. The show was every bit as electrifying as it had been on opening night.In an interview afterward, Denise Obedekah, a director who worked on the production, said she still considered the Hamburg production a success. It “did start something in Germany,” she said: “an awareness that there are other musicals out there than just Disney shows.”From left, Ivy Quainoo, Chasity Crisp and Mae Ann Jorolan in the production.Johan PerssonShe added that a show with “Hamilton’s” level of sophistication was able to attract people who might previously have thought “musical theater is only for old people, or is something really kitschy.”Chasity Crisp, the actress who plays Angelica Schuyler, said that “Hamilton” in Germany had “kind of made musical theater cool.” Noting that the majority of the 34 cast members aren’t white, and hail from 13 countries, she added that it had contributed to the “ongoing development of inclusivity and diversity” in the country’s entertainment industry.The show also opened the door for “a new generation of musicals” in Germany, she said: Stage Entertainment is set to import German-language versions of “MJ: The Musical,” “& Juliet” and “Hercules” to Hamburg in versions either partially or fully translated into German.“Hamilton” may have struggled, partly, because it led this charge, said Daniel Dodd-Ellis, who plays Lafayette and Jefferson. Telling such a sophisticated and diverse story “was a huge learning curve for German musical theater audiences, for the German musical producers, and for marketing,” he added. The show’s promotion might have been too focused on the feat of translating “Hamilton,” rather than the merits of the show itself, he said.Although this “Hamilton” didn’t catch fire the same way it did in New York, it would be wrong to suggest, as some in the German press have, that the show was a flop. Revisiting the production a year after its opening, my admiration for the ingenious translation was undimmed (like the original English, the verbose songs reward multiple hearings) and I was transported anew by the raw energy of the production and the performances.Why didn’t local audiences thrill to “Hamilton?” Was the story too quintessentially American? Was its “brand visibility” too low compared to Disney and jukebox musicals? Whatever the reason, nearly half a million people here have discovered “Hamilton” auf Deutsch and that seems momentous. And there are lots of places where this show could find a new home: Vienna, Zurich, Stuttgart. This “Hamilton” hasn’t necessarily thrown away its shot. More

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      Under the Radar to Return, With New Partners

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      The festival of experimental work is planning a citywide event at multiple venues in January, after the Public Theater declined to fund the 2024 iteration.When the Public Theater announced in June that it had placed the Under the Radar festival on indefinite hiatus, its founder, Mark Russell, did not know if he would be able to find another home for it. The Public cited financial reasons for the decision; other institutions were facing similar struggles. But today Russell, in association with ArKtype, a production company specializing in new work, announced that Under the Radar, New York’s foremost festival of experimental performance, would return in January.In contrast to the central hub that the Public provided, this new iteration, which will run Jan. 5-21, will take place at 10 partner venues throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Some, like Japan Society, will present a single show, and others, such as Lincoln Center and La MaMa, will host two or three. The festival will also co-sponsor a symposium dedicated to the challenges facing arts presenters.To continue the festival, Russell contacted old friends and longtime funders. He approached several theaters and universities in the hopes that they could take it on. But none were able to do so, especially on such short notice. Still, plenty of theaters offered partnerships. Eventually, he and ArKtype settled on this decentralized model, with Russell ceding artistic control to these new collaborators.“I love my programing, but I’ve had 18 years of that,” he said. “Now I have a dozen curators.” He has given himself a new title, festival director, in place of artistic director. “It’s bigger than me,” he said of the festival, which is supported by grants, private donations and contributions from partners. “So we made something bigger.”Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, is one new partner. St. Ann’s had hosted the first Under the Radar Festival, in 2005, and Feldman hurried to support this new version. She also had a work in mind: Luke Murphy’s “Volcano,” a challenging piece of dance theater, told in four 45-minute segments, that takes place inside a glass box.“We felt like the festival would be the right place for it,” she said in a recent phone interview.Julia Mounsey and her collaborator Peter Mills Weiss have presented work at three previous festivals. They were in rehearsals for a new piece last spring when they learned that Under the Radar might not take place. Mounsey had to go for a walk “because I was so upset,” she recalled during a recent phone interview. She said she felt profound relief about the festival’s rebirth. Mabou Mines and Performance Space New York will host Mounsey and Weiss’s new show, “Open Mic Night.”She will miss the centrality of the Public. “It was great for connecting with people and meeting people,” she said. “But there’s also something exciting about it being spread out.”Russell hasn’t given up on the idea of a festival hub. “If I could find a nice large bar in the center of all this, that would be great. But right now, it has to be what it has to be,” he said. “People are going to have to run all around the city, but they’ll be able to get the Under the Radar experience.” More

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      Review: In ‘(pray),’ Nourish Thyself With Song and Dance

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      An exploration of how faith intersects with Black womanhood, through a mix of music, movement, ritual and poetry.“Is this a church?,” a character wonders in nicHi douglas’s “(pray).”The Greenwich House Theater, where this production by Ars Nova and National Black Theater recently opened, certainly looks like a church, complete with (fake) stained-glass windows rrffand seating arranged like rows of pews.But it would be reductive to say “(pray)” is any one thing, because this transcendent, paradoxical work — what douglas calls “a sacred offering” — exists both within a Christian tradition and outside any religious institution. It’s a holy communion of musical interludes, movement, poems, rituals and critical theory investigating how faith intersects with Black womanhood.Upon entering the theater, audience members are asked to don disposable shoe covers as nine Black women alternate between shuffling down the aisles in matching powder-blue church ensembles and fanning themselves while sitting among the audience.They are all called Sister Anna Bertha, because they are variations on the stereotype of the sassy, overdressed Black church lady (playful costume design by DeShon Elem).Over 75 minutes, these women run through a 17-part liturgy accompanied by a pianist (Darnell White) and singer (S T A R R Busby, whose resonant voice leads the joyous gospel numbers). At one corner of this church stands a partially obscured forest. A silent spirit in white occasionally dances out from this surreal fantasy space (scenic design by dots), flitting around in fluid swells of movement. This is the Ancestor (Satori Folkes-Stone, magnetic), who also performs offstage rituals as part of the service. Another young woman, called Free (a less graceful Amara Granderson), is the one wondering whether this is a church, and if she even belongs here.Like “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” by Aleshea Harris, “(pray),” which douglas has nimbly written, choreographed and directed, is theater that demands the audience step into a shared experience of Blackness. In these experimental works, theater begins and ends in community.Thus, douglas’s script aims to make faith more accessible via coy translations: “ghost” becomes “most,” for example, and “hallelujah” is “yahleloo.” The similar sounding words with the music (composed by Busby and JJJJJerome Ellis) trick the ear into fluency, so that a prayer that says “O, abundance! May I meet you. May I know you,” feels as true and traditional as, say, the Apostles’ Creed.The Sisters deliver improvised gossip and judgmental comments, sometimes, hilariously, at the audience’s expense. The cohesiveness of their vocals and group movements (a stunning mélange of styles, including hip-hop and Afro-Cuban) recalls the deft cast of performers in Ars Nova’s 2022 hit by Heather Christian, “Oratorio for Living Things.” Each Sister sings with her own textured affect, so the psalms they perform feel creased, pleated or smoothed over like fabric. Tina Fabrique’s elastic bellows electrify “A Song (For to Ease My Troubled Mind).” Another Sister Anna (Ariel Kayla Blackwood) spits Noname lyrics atop a muscular beat. (Mikaal Sulaiman’s ethereal sound design lifts the voices higher.)A whole syllabus of thinkers and artists have inspired (and are referenced in) douglas’s script, including the poets Tyehimba Jess and Raych Jackson. But douglas’s writing sometimes pales in comparison, lacking the same polish and panache. And there are some missed notes: “(pray)” feels more anchored within the distant and recent past, lacking firmer context in the present, and despite the production’s inclusive language around gender, queerness is only occasionally alluded to. The history of race-based attacks on Black churches, like the 1963 Birmingham bombing and the 2015 Charleston shooting, is artfully hinted at with the haunting sound of a helicopter overhead, but feels like a footnote.So the question remains: Is this a church? Well, “(pray)” offers a congregation of believers in God but, more essentially, in the sanctity of Black women. So, let’s call this a house of song and praise — yahleloo.(pray)Through Oct. 28 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan. arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘The Refuge Plays’ Review: A Surreal Family Saga on the Homestead

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      A family in exile contends with its future, and its ghosts, in Nathan Alan Davis’s new Off Broadway play starring Nicole Ari Parker.The unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” retreats, after an alienating odyssey through the South and Harlem, to live in a secret cellar. Underground is both an escape from oppression and a sanctuary where he can see himself on his own terms.Ellison’s 1952 novel is like gospel to the eldest matriarch in “The Refuge Plays” by the playwright Nathan Alan Davis. “Gotta make your own world in this world,” says Early (Nicole Ari Parker), a great-grandmother homesteading with her family. She can still chop firewood and hunt squirrels with a hammer, but when we first meet Early in this keen but unwieldy family saga, opening Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater, her daily life has evolved beyond the need for such primal skills.Four generations of Early’s family are living together in the present-day Illinois wilderness, sharing a cabin built years ago by Early and her husband, Crazy Eddie (Daniel J. Watts). The too-small sofa and ratty armchair draped with quilts and crochet (the persuasively salvaged set is by Arnulfo Maldonado) indicate a modest home where her relatives choose to live out of kinship rather than necessity.Early’s great-grandson, Ha-Ha (J.J. Wynder), is the purest product of this social experiment: a 17-year-old who is deferential, bookish and comically naïve about girls. (Many of Davis’s character names are freighted with exaggerated symbolism.) Ha-Ha’s mother, Joy (Ngozi Anyanwu), tried striking out on her own when she was younger, but eventually returned. And Joy’s mother, Gail (Jessica Frances Dukes), the wife of Early’s deceased son, Walking Man, is the functional head of the household, though not for long: The spirit of Walking Man (Jon Michael Hill), a routine and welcome visitor, has just foretold her imminent death.Davis’s grand ambitions for “The Refuge Plays” are indicated by its running time — three hours and 20 minutes, with two intermissions — and by a title that suggests its three parts may not exactly cohere. The action rewinds to the past, revealing what drove Early into the woods, why others followed and what binds them together. (“If you don’t need me, leave me,” Early tells Walking Man.) Each act operates in a different mode: Sitcom conventions play out in the first (with Early as the armchair curmudgeon); surreal and Shakespearean elements dominate the second (with ghosts who incite an Oedipal revenge plot); and the third imagines a meet-cute in exile.Daniel J. Watts and Parker play a young couple who meet-cute in exile in an earlier section of the show.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis Roundabout Theater Company production, directed by Patricia McGregor and presented in association with New York Theater Workshop (where McGregor is the artistic director), benefits tremendously from bold interpretations of Davis’s characters. McGregor accentuates the humor Davis weaves throughout, and even mines more from between the lines, giving the production a sustained momentum. But the pace lags when Davis’s airy lyricism occasionally tips toward the sentimental, as in the heavy-handed second act. Early, for example, insists she has cried a nearby river with her tears.Parker (“And Just Like That …”) has an innate gentility that would seem an odd match for Early’s wild fate, but there is frisson in the juxtaposition and Parker lends Early a poised ferocity. Her flinty exterior is a formidable match for Eddie, the World War II vet who becomes her husband. Slightly sideways and nursing his own wounds, he’s a philosophical jester (Watts can land punchlines with the whites of his eyes) and proof that civilization inflicts violence in many forms.“The Refuge Plays” is populated with gifted storytellers, whose language is sticky with associations (like “if all your worries was ice cream” that melted at death’s door), and who can clearly see the ills of the outside world from the safe distance of their own. They conceive their identities in relation to one another, reflecting an organic sense of human responsibility, yet rib and curse one another like the members of any family would.Davis, whose speculative 2016 drama, “Nat Turner in Jerusalem,” was also produced by New York Theater Workshop, takes a sweeping view of Black life while isolating his characters from the social contexts and systems that would otherwise shape them. Some, like Early and Eddie, have their memories to contend with, while Walking Man, who was born in the woods, encounters human injustice from an absurd angle (beneath a heifer he tries to slaughter with a switchblade).In an attempt to imagine alternative ways of being, the playwright has smashed existing artistic forms and created new ones along the way. The result is provocative but messy: While the three acts interlock, they don’t propel each other forward, and Davis’s surfeit of ideas ultimately comes at the expense of a dramatic throughline. But cumbersome as it is, “The Refuge Plays” suggests the potential for stories to exceed the world’s limitations. Ellison would have to agree.The Refuge PlaysThrough Nov. 12 at Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 3 hours 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Stereophonic’ Finds Drama in a ’70s Rock Recording Booth

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      The playwright David Adjmi explores the in-studio creation process in a play with new songs by the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler.A decade ago, the playwright David Adjmi was listening to music on a flight to Boston when Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” came on. The tune was familiar — he used to overhear his brother play it in his room — but he really listened to it that day, and became mesmerized by Robert Plant’s scorching vocals.“I was like, ‘God, this must have been so crazy in the studio because it’s so electric and so Dionysian and all over the map, emotionally, and raw,’” Adjmi said. “I saw the studio, I saw the whole thing in my head. Then I started thinking about the theatrical opportunities for setting a play in a studio, and how to play with sound.”That seed of an idea turned into “Stereophonic,” which is now in previews at Playwrights Horizons and is his first New York production since “Marie Antoinette” in 2013.The play’s action takes place in a recording studio, and the actors play their own instruments and sing.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesAs Adjmi (“Elective Affinities,” “3C”) envisioned on that plane, the action unfolds in a recording studio, where a rock band’s protracted work on an album straddles a year from 1976-77. “It really is like the process and the play are blurring because these people are in a studio forever,” Adjmi, 50, said. “And we’ve been doing this — we almost talk about it like it’s a cult, because we just kept doing this over and over for years.” (In a 2020 interview, he mentioned talks for a Broadway run; they did not pan out.)Adjmi was taking a lunch break between rehearsals at the theater, sitting with the director Daniel Aukin (“Fool for Love”) and the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler, who wrote several songs for the play’s fictional quintet. The idea was enough for them to sign on, and Butler, who now leads Will Butler + Sister Squares, had to wait years for the script to be completed before he could begin the songs. “The music is all reverse-engineered,” he said. “It was like, ‘Here’s a space that people are arguing about — how do you fill it so that the details of what they’re arguing about is accurate?’ It’s a very puzzle-piece way to compose the music.”Since the band is meant to be entering stardom (its previous album is hitting a belated stride in the play), its material has to sound as if it could top the Billboard charts, which put extra pressure on Butler, 41. “What a stupid idea to have them play the song,” he said, as his collaborators cracked up. “You’re not supposed to have them play the song, you idiot!”At this point it should be emphasized that “Stereophonic” is a play with music rather than a musical, making it somewhat of an oddity in an American theatrical landscape that has not much milked the rock scene’s dramatic potential. Adjmi said he thinks that’s “because we are the originator of the Broadway musical and there’s a very kind of calcified idea of what musicals are and how music should feel in the theater.” He added, “And I have an allergy to a lot of it. Not all of it, but a lot of it, because I can’t relate.”Sarah Pidgeon and Tom Pecinka as one of the band’s couples, partners and rivals in love and songwriting.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesThe musicals he did praise are backstage classics — “A Chorus Line,” “Dreamgirls,” “42nd Street” — and, perhaps not coincidentally, “Stereophonic” is a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creation. Its unnamed band includes two couples. The steady, no-nonsense keyboard player and singer, Holly (Juliana Canfield, who played Kendall Roy’s assistant Jess on “Succession”), and the substance-abusing bassist, Reg (Will Brill), both British expats, are separated at the start of the show. The singer Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) and the guitarist-producer, Peter (Tom Pecinka), both Americans, are partners and rivals in love and songwriting. As for the British drummer, Simon (Chris Stack), he makes the most of his wife’s absence.All of this and a mid-70s California setting might evoke the rather popular band famous for “Rhiannon” and “Go Your Own Way,” but “Stereophonic” is not a play à clef about Fleetwood Mac. “There’s something about the mythos behind various bands that is in the culture,” Aukin said. “It’s almost using snippets from various bands’ histories and the histories of making some of these famous albums and using it as a sort of distant echo. We talked about many bands but we never talked about one.”In a phone interview, Canfield, 31, recalled that when she asked Adjmi for reference material, he recommended Keith Richards’s memoir, “Life,” and “Original Cast Album: Company,” the D.A. Pennebaker documentary about the fraught, stressful recording that preserved Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1970 musical for posterity.That film closely tracked the “Company” actors as they painstakingly performed take after take or made tiny pronunciation changes, while members of the producing team and Sondheim himself watched, gave notes and rolled their eyes. “Stereophonic” also plunges us into the middle of the action as David Zinn’s set features the mixing table in the foreground and the recording booth in the back. A pair of engineers (Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler, no relation to Will) take in both the personal clashes and the mix of inspiration and drudgery involved in art-making — all of which, of course, constantly feed off one another.In real life, arguments about adjusting levels or when to use a click track might make even a Steely Dan fan’s eyes glaze over. But the show does not sweep the grind of creation under the rug, especially as Peter evolves into an obsessive taskmaster. “God is in the details, but the details are boring in themselves,” Adjmi said. “So I took that as a challenge, like, ‘OK, let me see if I can turn this into something dramatically exciting.’ So much of it, the banality of the process, is part of what’s so beautiful about it, the granularity of it.”Adjmi said he sought to “reveal myself vis-à-vis these characters by creating real dimension and real nuance, and give actors really juicy roles.” The play opens on Oct. 29.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesFor the technical elements, Adjmi and Aukin consulted experts like their show’s sound designer, Ryan Rumery, and the longtime Steve Reich collaborator John Kilgore. Butler himself proved to be a ready source about interpersonal relationships among musicians. “My last band was with my brother and his wife and my new band is with my wife and her sister,” he said. “I’ve only ever been in bands with married people so I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. This feels real.’”That naturalism is different stylistic territory for Adjmi, whose previous plays tended to be arch in a manner he described as “expressionist.” The new show has more of a fly-on-the-wall quality. “That was an experiment for me: Can I reveal myself vis-à-vis these characters by creating real dimension and real nuance, and give actors really juicy roles,” Adjmi said. “ I wanted to do something that would be more fun for them.”Perhaps, but his writing remains dense, with challenging, precisely timed overlaps in the dialogue. “I don’t think it’s an accident that the play is about music and about the cooperation of a group of people making it together, because the play itself, excluding the music, feels very scored,” Canfield said.As if that weren’t enough, the cast members who are in the band also have to play their own instruments and sing as well as convey the excesses that the 1970s were famous for. “I have a couple of scenes where I go from being really emotionally devastated and quite inebriated to walking into the music room and playing something very precise on the bass,” said Brill, whose credits include Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!” and Jack Serio’s “Uncle Vanya” in a loft. “To keep the emotional and interpersonal dynamics running, and keep the verisimilitude of a drunk person, while executing something technically perfectly is a real challenge. It’s a delightful challenge, too,” he continued.“I’ve only ever been in bands with married people so I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. This feels real,’” Butler said.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesFor the production to work, the actors must feel like a believably tight unit. “We’re trying to make a band here — it’s not like, ‘Open your score to Page 6,’” Butler said. “We’re trying to figure out people’s strengths and weaknesses, because that’s what a band is. When they start playing music together, there is some connection.”Fortunately, the actors said, they all clicked. “When all of us get in the room together, the sounds of the voices blend incredibly well and there’s a real sense of camaraderie amongst us,” said Brill, 37, who played guitar in another fictional band a decade ago, in the David Chase film “Not Fade Away.” Canfield recalls that one day the show’s music director, Justin Craig, overheard her, Pecinka and Pidgeon bickering about their harmonies, and joked that they were now a real band because they were arguing about the music.As realistic as that episode must have felt, it pales when compared to the toughest credibility test the would-be rockers have had so far. Last month, Butler asked the “Stereophonic” band to open for him at his record-release gig in Brooklyn. Canfield, dreading what she called “an ego death” fiasco, balked, and Brill had to joke-taunt her into it.“He said ‘Yeah, Juliana, it’s going to be such a good story in 20 years, when we tell people that we almost opened for Will Butler’s band but we didn’t because we were scared that we would be bad,’” she said. “And I was like, OK, screw you, I guess we’re doing it.” Now that’s rock ’n’ roll. More

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      Review: ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ Finally Found in the Dark

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      Jonathan Groff, supported by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, is thrillingly fierce in the first convincing revival of the cult flop Sondheim musical.To be a fan of the work of Stephen Sondheim, as Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, is “to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” He meant not only that Sondheim’s songs are so often crushingly poignant but that the experience of loving them can feel unrequited. The shows they are in — he was reviewing the original production of “Merrily We Roll Along” — don’t always love you back.That was in 1981, when “Merrily,” with a problematic book by George Furth, suffered an ignominious Broadway debut of just 16 performances after 44 previews. No matter that Sondheim, responding to the story of a songwriter, had written his most conspicuously tuneful score to date, prompting pop recordings by Frank Sinatra (“Good Thing Going”) and Barbra Streisand (“Not a Day Goes By”). It was universally deemed a debacle.The debacle ended the working relationship between Sondheim and the director Harold Prince, whose five shows together in the 1970s — “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures” and “Sweeney Todd” — had redefined the American musical. With “Merrily,” they thought they were taking the form even further, with a complicated backward chronology and a cast of mostly inexperienced actors who played 40-ish adults at the start and grew into themselves at the end.After the show’s death by a thousand pans, Sondheim, saying he’d rather make video games, threatened to leave the theater entirely. Luckily, that didn’t happen — and “Merrily,” too, refused to give up, instead undergoing a seemingly endless series of unsatisfactory “improvements” that only seemed to confirm the hopelessness of making it matter.But with the opening of its first Broadway revival, after 42 years in the wilderness and the death of Sondheim in 2021, “Merrily” is no longer lost. Maria Friedman’s unsparing direction and a thrillingly fierce central performance by Jonathan Groff have given the show the hard shell it lacked. Now heartbreaking in the poignant sense only, “Merrily” has been found in the dark.When we meet him after the uplift of the gleaming overture, Groff, as the composer Franklin Shepard, is alone in an empty and unappealing liminal space. (The deliberately ugly sets, perhaps uglier than necessary, are by Soutra Gilmour.) He is wearing, and will throughout the show, a solemn undertaker’s outfit — black pants, black tie, white shirt. Even as everyone else changes with the times, in vivid costumes (also by Gilmour) that mark each notch on the timeline from 1976 to 1957, Frank always remains what he was: a one-man show. “Merrily” is the funeral he throws for his own ideals.Groff, right, with Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe as friends whose relationship sours in the Sondheim-Furth musical, which is getting its first Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe contrast between the pleasures that music can provide and the damage obvious in Frank’s demeanor immediately frames what follows as a solo psychodrama. Yes, Charley Kringas, who writes the words, and their friend Mary Flynn, a novelist turned theater critic, are there throughout, trying to encourage his better angels and corral his worse ones. But despite high-wattage, laser-focused performances by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, they have no effect on him; they are clearly Frank’s pawns, willing or otherwise.How he destroys Mary, and nearly Charley as well, not without their assistance, is revealed as the musical’s formerly absent spine. In the first scene, a 1976 party for “Darkness Before Dawn,” a hack hit movie Frank has produced now that he no longer writes music, Mary is dispatched with barely a blink, or drunkenly dispatches herself.In the next scene, as Charley enumerates Frank’s misplaced priorities in a 1973 television interview — Radcliffe handles the song “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” superbly — Groff’s coldblooded rage is terrifying. Collateral damage along the way includes Frank’s first wife, Beth (Katie Rose Clarke); his second, Gussie (Krystal Joy Brown); his probable third, Meg (Talia Simone Robinson); his producer, Joe (Reg Rogers); and even his adorable young son. Who but a monster would betray such a punim?“Merrily” is thus no longer, as it seemed in 1981, the story of the gradual, almost inevitable dimming of youth’s sweet illusions but rather the story of their falsity in the first place. Frank is only devoted to Mary and Charley when he doesn’t have access to anyone more useful. To think he turned into that monster is a mistake: He always was one, as Sondheim clearly understood. “That’s what everyone does,” Mary sings once the three-way friendship has collapsed. “Blames the way it is/on the way it was/On the way it never ever was.”Friedman has thrown in her lot with the coruscating insight of the songs, making a tactical decision — successful but not without consequences — to deprioritize everything else, including the score’s brassy élan. “Merrily” Kremlinologists will want to know that the version onstage at the Hudson Theater, though slightly bigger than the Off Broadway version that opened at New York Theater Workshop in December 2022, is still somewhat underscaled for Broadway. It has a cast of 19 instead of 17 and an orchestra of 13 instead of nine.In Maria Friedman’s unsparing production, our critic writes, the trajectories for the secondary characters at last make some sense.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt takes more than even those larger numbers to deliver the Golden Age thrill that is, after all, the show’s milieu. (The original orchestra had 20 players.) Other than the costumes, the minimal design is more practical than inspiring; the sound of the band (playing new orchestrations by Sondheim’s longtime collaborator Jonathan Tunick) is especially unbalanced. The choreography by Tim Jackson too often seems charades-like. Some of the solo singing could be more effective, technically and thus emotionally.And then there is, as always, the book. Friedman has apparently made her peace with Furth’s final Frankensteined version; though its pieces are coarsely sutured and don’t quite line up, at least the thing walks. If in seeking to sweeten the main story it still leans too heavily on thin satire for laughs — morning news shows, Hollywood sycophancy — the trajectories for the secondary characters, especially Beth and Gussie, who are now more than cannon fodder, at last make some sense.In this production, though, it wouldn’t matter much if they didn’t. Radcliffe’s wit and modesty, combined with Mendez’s zing and luster, provide perfect settings for what is now (as it has never been previously) the inarguably central performance. Groff, always a compelling actor, here steps up to an unmissable one. With his immense charisma turned in on itself, he seems to sweat emotion: ambition, disappointment and, most frighteningly, a terrible frozen disgust.I don’t know whether that’s what Furth intended, but Sondheim is brutally clear about the insidiousness of great talent. In Frank, it eats everything it can find, eventually including itself. “Who says ‘Lonely at the top’?” he sings amid the end-stage cynicism of his loveless Bel Air party. “I say, ‘Let it never stop.’”What a strange and daring thing for the great and greatly missed Sondheim to dramatize, and for Friedman to forefront. I’d call it heartbreaking if the result weren’t finally such a palpable hit.Merrily We Roll AlongThrough March 24 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; merrilyonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More