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      ‘Just for Us’ Review: A Jew and 16 ‘Nerf Nazis’ Meet Cute

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      Is it a stand-up act or a morality play? Either way, Alex Edelman’s look at race, religion and the limits of empathy is at home on Broadway.It may be too much to ask a human hummingbird like Alex Edelman to try to stick to the subject. In “Just for Us,” his three-jokes-per-minute one-man show, he zooms from punchline to punchline almost as fast as he caroms around the stage of the Hudson Theater. (At 34, he’s part of what he calls the overmedicated ADHD generation.) If you haven’t read about his act coming to Broadway, you might assume from his introduction — in which he describes his usual style as “benign silliness” and says this “isn’t Ibsen” — that you are in for a cheerful evening of laughs.And even though he’s telling a story about white supremacy, you are.That’s the glory and also the slight hitch of “Just for Us,” which opened on Monday after runs in London, Edinburgh, Washington and Off Broadway. No, it’s not Ibsen, a dramatist rarely noted for zingy one-liners. But it’s not silliness either. Despite its rabbi-on-Ritalin aesthetic, and its desperation to be liked at all costs, the show is so thoughtful and high-minded it comes with a mission statement. Edelman wants to open a conversation about the place of Jews on the “spectrum of whiteness,” he recently told my colleague Jason Zinoman, “without having a conversation about victimhood.”He’s well placed to draw the distinction. Growing up a “proudly and emphatically” Orthodox Jew in “this really racist part of Boston called Boston,” he clocked the wariness between races but also within them. And though he admits to experiencing “quite a bit of white privilege,” he was so alienated from mainstream culture that he didn’t know what Christmas was until his mother observed it one year when a gentile friend was in mourning.Oy, the tsouris it caused at his yeshiva!Hilarious as the ensuing story is, you have the feeling that “Just for Us” might have been little more than a millennial update on Jackie Mason-style Jewish humor were it not for that millennial accelerant, social media. “An avalanche of antisemitism” on Twitter, in response to some comments he’d posted, supercharged Edelman’s thinking about identity-based hatred and led him, one evening in 2017, to infiltrate a white supremacist get-together in Queens.“A Jew walks into a bar,” the joke might start, though it wasn’t a bar, as Edelman had expected, but a private apartment. There he took a chair among 16 strangers with predictably pan-bigoted opinions. By marrying Prince Harry, Meghan Markle would be “degrading” one of Europe’s oldest families. Diversity initiatives constitute “a plan to slowly genocide white people.” Jews, the root of the weed of that genocide, “are sneaky and everywhere.”The comedian is making his Broadway debut with “Just for Us.” The set at the Hudson Theater, by David Korins, consists of little more than a miniature proscenium to rescale expectations, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat we rarely feel the horror or even the unpleasantness of Edelman’s encounter is partly deliberate; he portions his spinach with plenty of candied yams. Defanging the “sneaky and everywhere” comment, he admits that he was in no position, sitting there incognito, to disprove the point. Then he wheels sharply into a seemingly unrelated 10-minute story about vaccine denialists. Likewise, the racist disparagement of Meghan Markle is immediately interrupted by a bit about Harry snorting cocaine through a rolled-up “picture of his grandmother.”The indirection is not purposeless; Edelman is building the service roads to his main argument. But that argument surfaces far less than the jokes do, taking up only about 35 minutes of the 85-minute show — a proportion that betrays its origins in stand-up. The set, by David Korins, betrays those origins too, consisting of little more than a miniature proscenium to rescale expectations and a black stool straight from your local Komedy Korner.The real giveaway, though, is the compulsive ingratiation. Though it produces much laughter, including too many giggles from the comic himself, the doggy overeagerness could stand to be toned down, and probably would have been if Edelman’s longtime director, Adam Brace, had been able to complete his work on the production. (He died in March, at 43, after a stroke.) Alex Timbers, credited as the creative consultant, helped guide the show to Broadway, handsomely.And yet, the ingratiation, however distracting, is also strategic. The show wouldn’t work without its contrast between storytelling and joke plugging. By going “dumb and small” about such a serious subject — Edelman describes the arrangement of chairs at the meeting as an “antisemicircle” — he lays the groundwork for a denouement in which he turns the critique on himself as he turns to the bigger issues at hand.For as he promised, “Just for Us” is not about Jewish victimhood, or anyone’s victimhood, except perhaps that of the aggrieved supremacists, who are too puny and whiny to constitute a real threat. He calls them Nerf Nazis. Nor is “Just for Us” (which is how the supremacists ultimately describe their territory) really about the spectrum of whiteness. What’s at stake instead is the idea of empathy, a central value in Edelman’s vision of Judaism. How far does it extend? Is it unconditional? Do even the hateful deserve it? And, especially relevant to Edelman in this case: Is it vitiated by bad motives?Because, check it out, there’s a cute woman at the meeting who seems to be into him. Could he be the guy who “fixes” her? Who fixes the whole group? They too have been ingratiated: “I came as an observer,” he says. “I might leave as, like, the youth outreach officer.”This is moral vanity, Edelman admits: a professional charmer’s eagerness to flatter other people’s self-regard as a way of buttressing his own. That’s what makes “Just for Us” more than a Catskills club act washed ashore on Broadway like Mason’s. For all the dumb jokes (but yes, I laughed at every one) it winds up as a critique of both dumbness and jokes.If that’s a highly indirect route to insight, it’s a highly effective one too, taking us through the process by which a Jew, or anyone, may learn once again that the cost of being liked at all costs is too high.Just for UsThrough Aug. 19 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; justforusshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      Brooklyn Academy of Music Lays Off 13 Percent of Its Staff

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      The organization, which made Brooklyn a destination for pathbreaking performances, is reducing programming next season as it seeks to rebound from the pandemic.The Brooklyn Academy of Music, one of the most important cultural organizations in New York, has laid off 13 percent of its staff members and reduced its programming as it seeks to plug a “sizable structural deficit” during a challenging time for the arts, officials confirmed on Monday.BAM moved last week to eliminate 26 positions, according to a letter sent to staff members by the organization’s president, Gina Duncan.In the letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times, Ms. Duncan said that the changes were necessary in part to help BAM to “weather the downturn in charitable giving for the arts, and address an outdated business model that heavily relies on a shrinking donor base.” She said that the organization faced a “sizable structural deficit” each year.“This is us putting on our oxygen mask so that we can continue to fulfill our promise to be a home for adventurous artists, audiences, and ideas,” she wrote in the email.Ms. Duncan noted that the academy had already pared down its Next Wave Festival scheduled for this fall and added that programming for next season as a whole would be reduced. (The festival, often a highlight of the city’s cultural year, will feature seven programs this year, down from 13 last year.)“These difficult decisions were made after a rigorous organizational review process,” Ms. Duncan wrote in the memo.“We cannot spend our way out of a deficit, and we cannot present programming beyond what we can afford,” she added.The year before the pandemic, in April 2019, BAM obtained a $2.8 million loan from Bank of America, according to its financial papers. The papers said that the balance, more than $2.4 million, would come due next June.Megan Grann, a union representative of Local 2110, which represents technical, office and professional workers, said that 17 of the people who lost jobs had been in the union. She said that at least three had been offered “possible new positions” within the arts institution.“We are really just not happy with this development, to say the least,” she said. “Our primary goal right now is to try to mitigate the damage as much as possible.”The layoffs come as BAM, which began presenting work in 1861, finds itself having to navigate the post-pandemic challenges that many arts organizations around the country are facing. Earlier this month the Center Theater Group, a flagship of the Los Angeles theater world, laid off 10 percent of its work force and halted productions at one of its three stages, the Mark Taper Forum.But BAM is facing those difficulties while also experiencing significant leadership turnover after many years of relative stability.David Binder, the institution’s artistic director, is expected to step down next month after roughly four years at the helm. His two predecessors, Joseph V. Melillo and Harvey Lichtenstein, each spent more than three decades at the institution.On the executive side, Ms. Duncan took over as president in 2022, after the departure of Katy Clark, who held the job for five years (and was permitted to keep an apartment that BAM helped her purchase). Clark had succeeded Karen Brooks Hopkins, who spent 36 years at the institution, including 16 as president.Nora Ann Wallace took over as chair of BAM’s board in 2020, after the death of its previous board chair, Adam Max.Like other arts organizations, BAM has also had to contend with headwinds generated by the pandemic, which shuttered live performance for months. While many organizations survived the shutdown with the help of federal aid, once they reopened many found that it had become more difficult to attract audiences and donors alike.When Mr. Binder announced this year that he was leaving, the institution had 222 full-time staff positions, down from 256 before the pandemic. Most recently, the number of such positions had dwindled to around 200, and the latest round of cuts are expected to move the number below that threshold. More

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      ‘Invisible’ Review: Brown and British

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      As part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, Nikhil Parmar’s solo play is a drama-tinged satire that morphs into a grisly revenge parable.In the world of Nikhil Parmar’s funny, fantastical solo play “Invisible,” the mind-set of Britain has undergone a significant shift. One of the West’s favorite boogeymen — the Islamic fundamentalist — has vanished from the public imagination. Chinese terrorists are the designated bad guys now.For brown British actors like Zayan Prakash (Parmar), that is both good news and bad. On the one hand, strangers no longer look at him and assume that he’s a threat. On the other, that means the Muslim terrorist roles that were once so prolific have disappeared. So what’s left for him to play? Just “doctors, cabdrivers and corner shop owners.” He’s lucky if those characters get names.“Invisible,” at 59E59 Theaters as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, is a drama-tinged satire that morphs into a grisly revenge parable, before shape-shifting into something close to reality. But first this play, directed by Georgia Green for London’s Bush Theater, is a sharp and lively comedy in which the charismatic Zayan recalls answering his door to find his ex-girlfriend, Ella, the mother of his toddler daughter, standing there.“Hello. Why do you look weird?” Ella asks, and Zayan — who’s looking weird because he’s just heard on the news about the demise of “brown terrorism” — pivots to the audience with a cliché-killing aside that won my heart: “I was going to do her bit in a really high-pitched voice but, (a), it sounded pretty offensive and, (b), she actually has a properly deep voice, so.”Ella has come to tell Zayan that she has a live-in boyfriend, Terrence, an old classmate of theirs from drama school whose career is flourishing; he’s Korean and playing a terrorist in a prestige drama, now that “East Asian fundamentalism” is supposedly a menace. Zayan can’t stand Terrence, but their ensuing rivalry makes for laughs, even as it drives home a point about jostling for position inside a white-supremacist system.The magnetic Parmar slips in and out of Zayan and the crowd of characters around him, each distinct. Though the play’s narrative becomes somewhat tangled and unruly, there is method in its muchness.What torments Zayan is a creeping sense of his own invisibility: Now that he isn’t perceived as a terrorist, he fails to register at all. Yet over the show’s 60-minute running time, we see Zayan for the multitude that he is: underemployed actor, reluctant cater waiter, incompetent weed dealer, doting father, inattentive son. He is also a grieving brother haunted by the ghost of his dead little sister, the person who looked at him and saw someone central to her story.It is disorienting, and infuriating, to be hampered by a culture’s — and an industry’s — blinkered perception of what a whole group of people is capable of. “Invisible” is a thoughtfully provocative, witheringly knowing response to that noxiousness.InvisibleThrough July 2 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      Sheldon Harnick, Musical Theater’s Great Marriage Broker

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      In lyrics of rare humor, elegance and compassion, the man who put words to “Fiddler on the Roof” and “She Loves Me” explored the complex emotional architecture of love.The twilight golden years of the Golden Age of musical theater, which archaeologists date from about 1959 to 1981, produced three great lyricists. One, of course, was Stephen Sondheim, setting words to his own music with a neurotic complexity that defined that time and ours. Another was Fred Ebb, the longtime songwriting partner of John Kander, who if poppier in outlook was a genius at prosody, shooting off syllables (“one day it’s kicks, then it’s kicks in the shins”) that never failed to bruise.Sheldon Harnick, who died on Friday at 99, was the third, though only one of his musicals, “Fiddler on the Roof,” written with the composer Jerry Bock, was widely known outside the world of theater lovers. But within that world, his subtle craft and character insight were universally acknowledged. Sondheim called his lyrics “impeccable.”As models of humor, elegance and compassion, they could stand to be more widely studied and imitated. That they aren’t is partly the result of the strange bifurcation of Harnick’s career into Bock and post-Bock eras. Though Harnick kept writing well for four decades after the team broke up at the height of its powers in 1970, he never again met with the kind of success that greeted the earlier work. And Bock fell almost completely silent.What a loss! And yet what a success it had been. By the time of the split, Harnick had written the lyrics not just for the worldwide hit “Fiddler” (1964) but also for two smaller yet equally admired scores: “Fiorello!” (1959) and “She Loves Me” (1963). Another handful of his shows with Bock (“The Apple Tree,” “The Rothschilds,” “Tenderloin”) are just as pleasurable, if less profound.I use the word “profound” to describe those shows, and Harnick’s best lyrics, not because they offer earth-shattering insights but because they are perfect expressions of ordinary ones. A jaunty waltz like “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” from “Fiddler,” could not, after all, be more conventional in its framing: Two poor young sisters dream of being fixed up with perfect husbands.But notice how the agenda-like structuring of their wish list, along with the click-lock rhymes, captures in a few lines what “perfect” means to several people involved:For Papa, make him a scholarFor Mama, make him rich as a king.For me, well, I wouldn’t hollerIf he were as handsome as anything.By song’s end, though, alerted to the dangers of overreaching, the girls have turned the image inside out:Maybe I’ve learned:Playing with matchesA girl can get burned.What neither the sisters nor the audience yet know, but Harnick suggests, is how broadly the idea applies. While initiating the marriage plot so central to “Fiddler,” the lyric also introduces a warning about a world soon to go up in flames.Once heard, Harnick’s lyrics seem like the last word on their subjects. In part that’s because of their concision — he typically writes short lines and never too many — and in part because they build an almost impenetrably tight argument through structure and sound. The important words all land on the right beat; the grammar is never distorted to squeeze over a melody. With so little space, every syllable does at least double duty.Double duty is a nice way of looking as well at his main theme, marriage. (Harnick was briefly married to Elaine May; he wed Margery Gray, who survives him, in 1965.) Like most musicals, his and Bock’s keep circling the subject, but with a slyer view of the rage and redemption that go into it.That combo is brilliantly expressed in “Fiorello!” — the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical about Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City from 1934 through 1945. In “The Very Next Man,” the mayor’s long-suffering secretary, Marie, after years of frustrated love, vows to marry whoever shows up.Again, an ordinary setup, yet Harnick captures Marie’s compulsive preoccupation in a neat chain of repeated words, a few perfect rhymes (some of them hidden) and a heartbeat of recurring long o’s:I’m through with mopingMoping from all this pointless hopingHoping he’ll notice me and open his heartTime now to break away and make a new start.That stanza is actually a rewrite; apparently, in 1959, the original version (“And if he likes me/Who cares how frequently he strikes me?”) was considered acceptable and got a big laugh.There’s some justice in the rewrite being better crafted than the original; Harnick’s dramatic sweet spot was letting characters tie themselves in knots to convince themselves of ideas they know are not right. Also a Harnick sweet spot: forcefully untying the knots later. So even though Marie insists at the end of “The Very Next Man” that she’s finished with romance forever —New York papers, take note!Here’s a statement that you can quote:Waiting for ships that never come inA girl is likely to miss the boat.— she of course does marry La Guardia in the end.Harnick’s gift for expressing simply the complexity of emotional architecture finds perhaps its greatest expression in “She Loves Me,” a show essentially built on romantic delusion. In the song “I Don’t Know His Name,” Amalia concludes that her anonymous pen pal — even though he is, in fact, a co-worker she hates — must be an extremely kind and cultured man:When I undertook this correspondence,Little did I know I’d grow so fond;Little did I know our views would so correspond.But as that tight and high-minded stanza gives way to florid fantasizing —He writes his deepest thoughts to meOn Swift, Vermeer and Debussy.De Maupassant, Dumas, Dukas, Dufy, Dufay, Defoe.— we understand she is not yet ready to find love where it really exists. That will come later.In Sondheim’s lyrics, the double bind of attachment is often a source of agitation; in Ebb’s it is often a pummeling. But in Harnick’s word-world, attachment is a pleasant and relatively livable condition, once you get past the drama.Near the end of “Fiddler,” when in the song “Do You Love Me?” Tevye asks his wife that question, she replies, barely singing the words, “Do I what?” It’s a laugh line, defanging or absorbing what might otherwise seem sentimental. By the end of the gentle, forgiving and ruminative number, so typical of Harnick’s gentle, forgiving and ruminative art, you come willingly to the couple’s conclusion, sentimental or not:It doesn’t change a thingBut even soAfter twenty-five yearsIt’s nice to know. More

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      ‘One Woman Show’ Review: Unlikable for Laughs

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      Liz Kingsman plays a messy attention-seeker grasping at relevance in a sharp satire of the trend of female comics playing chaotic train wrecks.Liz Kingsman’s stupendously silly spoof “One Woman Show” arrives in New York with enough buzz for an apiary. The rare solo comedy that moved from small theaters to the West End in London, it has received gushing reviews, topped year-end best-of lists and inspired more than one profile proclaiming its star the “queen of comedy.”That its jokes seem modest and a bit familiar shouldn’t discourage fans of sharply observed satire. The main target appears to be “Fleabag,” another solo launching pad, but more broadly it takes aim at the trend of female comics portraying sexually candid, flamboyantly chaotic train wrecks.Kingsman, whose alert, expressive eyes anchor an easy charisma, walks onstage before you realize she’s there. Cameras are on each side of her. She’s playing an anxiety-ridden actor putting a show together in the hopes of getting it on television. Shifting back and forth between off and onscreen, she stumbles through, technical mishaps piling up. When things break down, the tension between her and the unseen technical staff is delightfully passive aggressive.Her character is a mockery of the nakedly ingratiating artist who disguises herself as a boldly feminist risk-taker. The show she’s performing, called “Wildfowl,” takes you through an ordinary day, where she punches a busker, then yells at him that female characters don’t have to be likable anymore. In another moment, she says, calculatedly blasé: “I guess I’m just relatable.”Like Leo Reich in “Literally Who Cares?!,” another solo show from Britain that played Greenwich House Theater, Kingsman strings together knowing jargon (“Adulting,” “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff”) to poke fun at a sweaty attempt at relevance. Her ear for cliché can be hilarious, including a running joke about the overdone subject of discovering the downsides of the internet. “I know, I know,” she says, with comic conviction. “Everyone says social media is great.”The best parts of this show, staged by Adam Brace with the rhythm of a tight pop song, are the slyly underplayed moments of cultural criticism.The American tradition of the kind of woman she’s satirizing precedes “Fleabag” (see: Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer), and the next generation of comic performers have integrated spoofs into their work. In “Kate,” Kate Berlant also made fun of pretentious character work while leaning on a similar meta-theatrical framing device. And even a stand-up like Catherine Cohen builds self-awareness into her messy comic persona.These performers have a comic intensity that this show doesn’t aim for. In casual overalls, Kingsman is wry and off-handed even when buffoonish. Instead of pushing the desperation of her character, she plays it flatly. Some of this is its own sharp satire, since one of the jokes of the show is how one-dimensional supporting characters (the boss, the friend) only matter in service of the central star. But this is a light gibe. Kingsman’s instincts are affectionate and writerly. She isn’t out for blood so much as a witty delight.One Woman ShowThrough Aug. 11 at Greenwich House Theater; Manhattan. onewomanshownyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Sheldon Harnick, ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Lyricist, Dies at 99

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      His collaborations with the composer Jerry Bock also included “Fiorello!” — which, like “Fiddler,” was a Tony winner — and “She Loves Me.”Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist who teamed up with the composer Jerry Bock to write some of Broadway’s most memorable musicals, including the Tony Award winners “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Fiorello!,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99. His death was announced by a spokesman, Sean Katz.Mr. Harnick’s lyrics could be broadly funny, slyly satirical, lushly romantic or poignantly moving. He gave voice to a broad range of characters, including starry-eyed young lovers, corrupt politicians, a quarreling Adam and Eve and, in “Fiddler on the Roof,” struggling Jews in early-20th-century Russia.When three unmarried sisters in “Fiddler” confront the village matchmaker, two of them hopeful and the third cynical, they all end up having second thoughts:Matchmaker, matchmaker, plan me no plansI’m in no rush, maybe I’ve learnedPlaying with matches a girl can get burned.So bring me no ring, groom me no groom,Find me no find, catch me no catch.Unless he’s a matchless match!When the leading man in “She Loves Me” is about to meet the woman with whom he’s been trading love letters for months, he practically sings himself into a nervous breakdown:I haven’t slept a wink, I only thinkOf our approaching tête-à-tête,Tonight at eight.I feel a combination of depression and elation;What a state!To waitTill eight.Maria Karnilova and Zero Mostel in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” for which Mr. Harnick and Jerry Bock wrote the score. The show, which opened in 1964, ran for more than 3,200 performances and became the longest-running musical in Broadway history.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMr. Harnick met Mr. Bock in the late 1950s, and the two quickly realized they could work together despite their different temperaments. “I tend to approach things skeptically and pessimistically,” Mr. Harnick told The New York Times in 1990. “Jerry Bock is a bubbling, ebullient personality.”The team would break up after a dozen years over a dispute involving their musical “The Rothschilds.” But the combination worked extremely well while it lasted.The late 1950s was a challenging time for newcomers to the musical stage. The decade’s hit Broadway musicals had included “Guys and Dolls,” “The King and I,” “Wonderful Town,” “My Fair Lady” and “Candide.” “In those days,” Mr. Harnick recalled in a 2004 interview, “lyricists were consciously trying to be more sophisticated and literate. Now we’re in the Andrew Lloyd Webber vein, trying to hit bigger, broader audiences.”Mr. Harnick and Mr. Bock got off to a weak start in 1958 with “The Body Beautiful,” set in the world of prizefighting; it closed after a brief run. But they bounced back decisively the next year with “Fiorello!,” a breezy portrait of one of New York City’s most colorful politicians.“Fiorello!,” which had a book by George Abbott and Jerome Weidman and was directed by Mr. Abbott, starred Tom Bosley as Fiorello H. La Guardia, the reformer who was mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945. Its score evoked a time when political corruption was rife.The song “Little Tin Box,” for example, suggests how a crooked party boss (Howard Da Silva) might have responded when a judge asked him how he has managed to buy a yacht, given his modest salary. The boss replies:I am positive Your Honor must be joking.Any working man can do what I have done.For a month or two I simply gave up smokingAnd I put my extra pennies one by oneInto a little tin boxA little tin boxThat a little tin key unlocks.There is nothing unorthodoxAbout a little tin box.“Fiorello!” ran for nearly 800 performances and won three Tony Awards, including the prize for best musical, which it shared with “The Sound of Music.” It was also one of the few musicals to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Jerry Bock, left, with Mr. Harnick in 1970. Their collaboration produced some of Broadway’s most memorable musicals.Barton Silverman/The New York TimesBut the Bock-Harnick team’s biggest success — and one of Broadway’s — was yet to come: “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened in 1964 and ran for more than 3,200 performances. It became the longest-running musical in Broadway history, a record that stood for a decade.Directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with a book by Joseph Stein based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, “Fiddler on the Roof” told the story of a Jewish community facing expulsion from a village in the czarist Russian empire, with a focus on Tevye (Zero Mostel), the village milkman, and his family.In addition to “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” the score included a number of songs that would soon be regarded as classics, including “Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset” and Tevye’s humorously wistful lament “If I Were a Rich Man” (“There would be one long staircase just going up/ And one even longer coming down/ And one more leading nowhere, just for show”).“Fiddler on the Roof” was more than a hit show; it was a phenomenon. It won nine Tony Awards, including one for its score. It was made into a hit movie in 1971, has been performed all over the world, and has had five Broadway revivals, most recently in 2015. (A Yiddish-language production was an Off Broadway hit in 2019 and played a return engagement in late 2022.)Mr. Harnick, left, and Hal Prince, the producer of “Fiddler on the Roof,” in 2015.Damon Winter/The New York TimesAmong the Bock-Harnick team’s other noteworthy efforts was “She Loves Me” (1963), based on the same Hungarian play that was the basis for the movies “The Shop Around the Corner,” “In the Good Old Summertime” and “You’ve Got Mail.” The story of two workers at a perfume shop in Budapest (Barbara Cook and Daniel Massey) who finally realize that they have been trading romantic letters and that they are meant for each other, “She Loves Me” had no showstopping songs and was not initially a big success, closing after 301 performances. But it has grown in popularity after a series of revivals — although Broadway productions in 1993 and 2016 were equally brief.Their other shows included “The Apple Tree” (1966), three musical playlets (including one about Adam and Eve) directed by Mike Nichols, and “The Rothschilds” (1970), based on Frederic Morton’s biography of the Jewish family that rose from the ghetto to become a financial powerhouse.It was a dispute over who would direct “The Rothschilds” that ended the Bock-Harnick partnership. The show’s original director, Derek Goldby, was replaced by Michael Kidd at the urging of Mr. Harnick and others who wanted someone with more musical-theater experience. Mr. Bock was irate.“Jerry felt that Derek had gotten a raw deal,” Mr. Harnick recalled in 1990. “For a while, the feelings between us were very bad.” He added that “things changed for the better” when “Fiorello!” was revived in 1985 at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut and he and Mr. Bock met there to work on it. (It was revived again off Broadway in 2016.)Nonetheless, they never wrote another show together. Mr. Bock died at 81 in 2010.From left, Mr. Prince, Mr. Bock, Mr. Harnick, Fred Ebb and John Kander in 2004, when the Bock-Harnick and Kander-Ebb songwriting teams announced that they were giving their archives to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.Yoni Brook/The New York TimesSheldon Mayer Harnick was born on April 30, 1924, in Chicago to Harry and Esther Harnick. His father was a dentist, his mother a homemaker. He took violin lessons as a child, attended music school as a teenager and earned money playing in amateur theatricals. After serving in the Army, he enrolled at the Northwestern University School of Music. He graduated in 1949.He began writing songs while in Carl Schurz High School in Chicago and became seriously interested in songwriting as a career after hearing a recording of Burton Lane and E.Y. Harburg’s hit 1947 musical, “Finian’s Rainbow.” At the urging of the actress Charlotte Rae, a fellow Northwestern student, he moved to New York in 1950.Mr. Harnick’s first song in a Broadway show was “The Boston Beguine,” which he wrote — music as well as lyrics — for the revue “Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952.” He wrote numbers for several other revues, including “Two’s Company” (1952), before teaming with Mr. Bock. (One of his compositions from those years, the darkly satirical and deceptively cheerful “The Merry Minuet,” was popularized by the folk music group the Kingston Trio.)Mr. Harnick’s first marriage, to Mary Boatner, was annulled. His second, to the comedian, writer and director Elaine May, ended in divorce. In 1965, he married Margery Gray, an actress whom he had met when she auditioned for his show “Tenderloin.” (She later became a photographer and an artist.) She survives him, as do a daughter, Beth Dorn; a son, Matthew Harnick; and four grandchildren.After his split with Mr. Bock, Mr. Harnick went on to collaborate with other composers. He worked with Mary Rodgers on a 1973 version of “Pinocchio” performed by the Bil Baird marionettes, and with her father, Richard Rodgers, on “Rex,” a musical about King Henry VIII of England that had a brief Broadway run in 1976, with Nicol Williamson in the title role. He also worked with Michel Legrand on two shows: an English-language stage version of the movie musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” produced off Broadway in 1979, and a new adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” staged in Stamford, Conn., in 1982. And he collaborated with Joe Raposo on “A Wonderful Life,” based on the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which has had a number of regional productions since 1986.Mr. Harnick in 2015. His lyrics could be broadly funny, slyly satirical, lushly romantic or poignantly moving. Chad Batka for The New York TimesMr. Harnick also became an accomplished opera translator, providing English librettos for classical works like Lehar’s “The Merry Widow,” Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” and Bizet’s “Carmen.”He wrote some original opera librettos as well, including “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines” (1975), with music by Jack Beeson, and “The Phantom Tollbooth” (1995), a collaboration with Norton Juster, the author of the children’s book on which it was based, and the composer Arnold Black. “Lady Bird: First Lady of the Land,” an opera about Lady Bird Johnson, for which he wrote the libretto and Henry Mollicone wrote the music, had its premiere in Texas in 2016 and has been performed in New York and elsewhere.In late 2015, shortly before the latest Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” opened, Mr. Harnick was in the studio making a demonstration record of songs from “Dragons,” an adaptation of a Russian play for which he wrote the book, music and lyrics, and which he had been working on for many years. In an interview with The Times, he said that he had no thoughts of retirement, and that he continued to attend every show on Broadway, as he had for many years. He added that he was working on a new show of his own.“I hope I live long enough to complete it,” he said. “I won’t tell you what idea I have, because you’ll steal it.”Robert Berkvist, a former New York Times arts editor, died in January. Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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      A Comic With Many Questions About Jews and Whiteness

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      Alex Edelman thrives on doubt in “Just for Us” on Broadway. It’s the result of years of revision and notes from Seinfeld, Birbiglia and the late Adam Brace.When Jerry Seinfeld talked to the comic Alex Edelman after seeing him perform “Just for Us,” his solo show that began previews on Broadway this week, he gave him one note: Don’t acknowledge the audience’s response to a joke onstage.Edelman, 34, took it, even though he has the kind of sensitive, hyperactive mind that can’t help but look past the fourth wall. In an interview recently at Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side, he kept peeking at my list of questions, inquiring why I was writing down “L’s” (I wasn’t) and periodically asking me how he was doing (very well). He seemed to answer questions while simultaneously imagining how they were playing, even in emotional moments like discussing his longtime friend, collaborator and director Adam Brace, who tragically died in April at 43 after a stroke.Brace had been critical at every stage of Edelman’s show from its inception in 2018 through hundreds of performances, and after almost all of them the British director gave him notes. “He looked after the flow of the show,” Edelman said, which is why the comic paused in our conversation as he considered a joke he had worked on at the Comedy Cellar the night before, his eyes watering as he said how much he missed having Brace as a sounding board. He then imagined how getting choked up would come off, writing the sentence out loud (“and his eyes fill up”) before quipping: “Don’t overdo it.”During the pandemic, “Just for Us,” a thoughtful, punchline-dense comedy, skipped past downtown hit into the rarefied air of cultural phenomenon. I knew it made the zeitgeist when friends not especially interested in comedy approached me wanting to talk about it. The autobiographical show benefits from a killer elevator pitch: Orthodox Jewish comic gets accidentally invited to a white supremacist meeting in Queens, attends and has a meet-cute flirtation with a racist.When “Just for Us” ran in Washington, D.C., it became the second-highest-grossing show in Woolly Mammoth Theater’s 43-year history. Asked about this success by phone, its artistic director, Maria Manuela Goyanes, recalled telling Jewish staff members: “Y’all show up.”But unlike current Broadway shows that explore antisemitism like “Parade” or “Leopoldstadt,” Edelman isn’t looking back at the past but toward the identity politics of the moment. One reason “Just for Us” has resonated with audiences is that it’s one of the few new shows to dig into the relationship between Jews and whiteness. “Growing up I always wanted to be white,” Edelman says in the show. This gets a laugh because he presents as white, but not all groups see him that way, which he called “almost a founding tension” of the show.After one performance, an audience member told Edelman he always thought Jews were white until he saw the show. Someone behind him responded that they always thought Jews weren’t white. Edelman looked pleased by this exchange. “It’s the induction of doubt,” he explained to me, adding that he told them: “You’re both right.”Edelman at the Comedy Cellar, where he continues to work out jokes.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesHis instinct is to question, not answer, to air strong opinions but not settle into them too securely. When Kanye West comes up in our conversation, Edelman described a Jewish friend who resented the expectation that he should be outraged by the rapper’s trafficking in Jewish stereotypes, describing it as “taking our turn on the victim wheel.” In our talk, Edelman articulated this position with passion but didn’t go so far as to agree. His point is that his show aims to “have the conversation about Jews in their place on that spectrum of whiteness without having a conversation about victimhood.”Growing up in Boston, the child of a professor of biomedical engineering and a real estate lawyer, Edelman, who has a slight build and floppy hair, has been doing stand-up since he was a teenager. (He has had long-term romantic relationships with the female comics Katherine Ryan and more recently, Hannah Einbinder, though they broke up a month ago.) He describes his early influences as “not great,” explaining that “if I’m being honest, I saw a lot of racist comedy, self-congratulatory and smug.” He described discovering his voice when he went to London during college, and recalled one key turning point when the British comic Josie Long took him aside and said, “What you’re doing is getting laughs but it’s not who you are.”Even more important, at 23, he met Brace at Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s birthday party. They talked comedy and Brace later asked him if he could give him notes. Brace was especially alert to the dramaturgy of a show, insisting on cutting jokes that worked if they weren’t worth the lost momentum. If Edelman riffed too much, Brace told him: You’re on the jazz tonight. Their running conversations continued over the next decade.In early June, I accompanied Edelman to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to watch old recordings of Broadway performances by artists like Billy Crystal (who also gave him a note after a show) and Eric Bogosian. When a man at the desk told him that he could see “The Producers” only with the approval of its director, Susan Stroman, and she was in London, Edelman looked down at his phone, shot off a text and within a minute had her approval. The man at the desk looked surprised, then added that he also needed the approval of Robin Wagner, the show’s set designer, and he had died the previous week. After a pregnant pause, Edelman deadpanned: “That’s beyond my ability.”When asked about how he seems to know everyone, Edelman said these were all people he approached because he was genuinely curious about them. “The thing everyone says but maybe doesn’t internalize is: You just have to show up,” he explained, before adding that there is privilege in knowing you are able to do so.The previous month, when in Boston, he knocked on the door of the 94-year-old comedy legend Tom Lehrer, whom he did not know, just to talk. “I told him I was a comedian,” Edelman reported. “And he said, ‘What problem do you need solving?’”In a more critical example of showing up, Edelman approached Mike Birbiglia in 2019. “We had an older brother, younger brother relationship,” Birbiglia said by phone. “He’d ask to pick my brain and I’d say I’m very busy.”This time, however, when Edelman described “Just for Us,” Birbiglia heard a surprising, relatable story that had more potential. He told Edelman to keep working on it. After producing one performance, Birbiglia, who is not Jewish, encouraged him to strengthen its spine. With a chuckle, he recalled that one note was to make it more Jewish.Edelman returned to London and he and Brace rebuilt the show as controversy raged in the Labour Party there over its leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attitudes toward Jews, which Edelman said informed the writing. After opening Off Broadway in 2021 to rave reviews, “Just for Us” became a hit.With Brace gone, Edelman said he had leaned on Birbiglia more, both for notes and emotional support. When I asked Birbiglia what Edelman was good at besides comedy, he said with a small snort: “Newspaper interviews.” Later that night, he texted me that “one of Alex’s remarkable talents is he’s willing to continue to rewrite and experiment on a show that had already reviewed well” at festivals like the Edinburgh Fringe. “That’s a very rare quality,” the text continued, “and I think it bodes well for whatever he chooses to do next.”That has been on Edelman’s mind. He had planned to make his follow-up about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject he has been fascinated by since he was a kid, but doing so without Brace seemed daunting.And yet, there was something about the cantankerous impossibility of this dispute that clearly appeals to him. One of the first things Edelman told me in our interview was: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”He thought it was from the playwright George Bernard Shaw, but reconsidered, brow furrowed, then looked it up on his phone and realized it was from the poet William Butler Yeats. “I have so much doubt,” he said, “which is why I have so much patience for both sides of the argument.” More

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      ‘Once Upon a One More Time’ Review: Liberation Set to Britney Spears

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      The Britney Spears jukebox musical, about fairy tale princesses fighting for their emancipation, comes up short as a narrative of feminist awakening.The Britney Spears jukebox musical “Once Upon a One More Time” is not a bio-show recounting the singer’s life. Rather, it retrofits two dozen of her songs — including “Oops! … I Did It Again,” “Womanizer,” “Toxic,” “Gimme More” and, of course, “ … Baby One More Time” — to tell the story of a fair-haired princess who, realizing she has been played by a handsome rogue and controlled by an omnipresent father figure, rises up and fights for her emancipation.Hmm, maybe the (fully authorized) apple does not fall far from the tree.But this big, splashy show, which is quite entertaining at times, is hampered by a shambolic jumble of sisterhood 101 messaging and defanged fantasy revisionism. Rewriting classic yarns with a pop-feminist spin has become big business, with Disney updating its operating system one property at a time, and princesses and fairy tales calcifying into common tropes of empowerment pep on Broadway — think “Frozen,” “Aladdin,” “Bad Cinderella” or, for an artistically successful example, “Head Over Heels.”“Once Upon a One More Time” banks on a familiar figure, Cinderella (Briga Heelan), who here is starting to feel vaguely antsy about her life. She and her fellow storybook heroines — Snow White (Aisha Jackson), Princess Pea (Morgan Whitley), Rapunzel (Gabrielle Beckford), Sleeping Beauty (Ashley Chiu) and Little Mermaid (Lauren Zakrin) — are bossed around by an imperious Narrator (Adam Godley, for whom this must feel like a vacation after “The Lehman Trilogy”). He is basically a domineering stage manager acting on behalf of the patriarchy.Although Cinderella is supposed to be content in the happy-ever-after, her loneliness just might be killing her. But shush, pretty lady, push these thoughts out of your lovely head: As her prince (Justin Guarini) soothingly informs her, “You’re paid to be pretty, and I’m paid to be charming.”“What do you mean, paid?” Cinderella replies. “I don’t get paid.”So he tries to put her off the scent by singing “Make Me,” as one does.At Scroll Club, the princesses read their own stories: From left, Aisha Jackson as Snow White, Morgan Whitley as Princess Pea, Ashley Chiu as Sleeping Beauty, Gabrielle Beckford as Rapunzel and Lauren Zakrin as Ariel.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesLuckily, Cinderella gets a fortuitous visit from the Notorious O.F.G. (Original Fairy Godmother, played by Brooke Dillman), who gives her the key to understanding her existential malaise: Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique.” (It’s a choice that will puzzle those who have moved on to more recent feminist waves; then again, Jon Hartmere’s book also includes a Howard Stern joke, so insert shrug emoji.)But before Cinderella has a chance to really dig in, the Stepmother (Jennifer Simard, last seen in “Company”) seizes the book. To retrieve it and ultimately become her own woman, our heroine enrolls her similarly shackled princess buddies from Scroll Club, where they read their own stories, for some consciousness raising.Much of the excitement here is generated by the choreography of Keone and Mari Madrid, who also directed the production (with an assist from David Leveaux, credited as the creative consultant). The couple, who created the Off Broadway hip-hop dance drama “Beyond Babel” in 2020, got their break in music videos, which may be why the large ensemble numbers shine brightest: tight formation extravaganzas that heavily rely on popping and locking, and incorporate elaborate hand movement. An occasional wink to Spears’s video oeuvre doesn’t hurt, either.And though the numbers for “ … Baby One More Time,” “Circus” and “Crazy” look fantastic, the one-size-fits-most staging can become repetitive, and is not as effective in those moments when a less in-your-face approach is needed.Adam Godley and Simard during a slowed-down “Toxic” number.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWorse, the songs often barely suit the story, even with some tweaked lyrics. Exceptions include Cinderella’s stepsisters (Ryann Redmond and Tess Soltau) commanding her to “Work Bitch.” The Max Martin jukebox musical “& Juliet,” which is playing a thousand feet away and features five Spears hits, integrates book and songs with less visible seams and more wit.Fully embracing arena-pop aesthetics (with flashy lighting by Kenneth Posner and scenic design by Anna Fleischle that relies on elements that can easily be dropped down or wheeled in and out), “Once Upon a One More Time” almost always falls back on supersizing. Half the numbers end with a subwoofer boom that will rattle your insides. And the jokes come in three flavors: broad, broader and annoying. A running gag, for example, has Snow White comically misspelling the simplest words, even though she is part of Scroll Club so one assumes that she can at least read.Two of the actors have embraced opposite ways of adjusting to this heightened reality. Simard delivers the single most original performance: She barely changes her expression, her face frozen in a heavily made-up mask of disdain, and her Stepmother feels as if Moira Rose from “Schitt’s Creek” and Norma Desmond had spawned a villainess crooning a slowed-down “Toxic.”Guarini banks on expansiveness as a prince generously sharing his charms, and displays a gift for slapstick, our critic writes.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesGuarini, on the other hand, banks on expansiveness as a prince generously sharing his charms with a bevy of women. He displays a gift for slapstick — watch the way he elastically climbs onto a platform two stairs at a time — and spares no effort, whether in solo songs or leading big numbers.It is actually surprising that his character has so many songs while most of the princesses are reduced to extras without distinctive personalities. (A gay couple even barges in during the “million princess march.”) Snow White rises above the fray, thanks to Jackson’s humor, vocal chops and high-energy charisma, and Whitley’s tart delivery helps sell Pea’s few lines, but Heelan’s Cinderella feels a little bland. Making matters worse, the sound localization is so bad that you can’t distinguish the women’s voices in their ensemble numbers. (The sound design is by Andrew Keister, costumes and hair by Loren Elstein.)Incongruously, Cin and Snow, as they like to call each other, share an intense duet, “Brightest Morning Star” (was “I’m a Slave 4 U” just too much?), but it’s a gratuitous throwaway with no follow-up. I guess nobody talks about what happens after Scroll Club.This timidity is but one example of the ways in which the show comes up short, both as a feminist text and as a tribute to Spears’s songbook — and, yes, her life. The last thing her fans might have expected from a Britney Spears musical is dutiful conventionality.Once Upon a One More TimeAt the Marquis Theater, Manhattan; onemoretimemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More