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      Review: Despite the Primping, ‘The Cotillion’ Is Far From Flawless

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      Colette Robert’s play takes aim at antiquated rites of passage, and how they can promote classism, colorism and retrograde gender politics.The enterprising president of the Harriet Holland Social Club just wants the cotillion to be successful. The floral centerpieces are in place, a band is onstage, and the draperies are neatly tucked in and tied. The debutantes are primped and primed. By night’s end, she hopes, these young women will set off into their bright futures.Presented by New Georges and the Movement Theater Company at A.R.T./New York Theaters, “The Harriet Holland Social Club Presents the 84th Annual Star-Burst Cotillion in the Grand Ballroom of the Renaissance Hotel,” written and directed by Colette Robert, mimics the proceedings of debutante balls. There’s the introduction of the debutantes, the father-daughter dance and a multicourse dinner, but this cotillion — and the production — is far from flawless.Madam President (Akyiaa Wilson), a 2-D villain, encourages the debutantes (Claire Fort, Caturah Brown, Starr Kirkland, Aigner Mizzelle, Monique St. Cyr, Portland Thomas) to prioritize appearances and wealth, hurling critiques with no regard for them as individuals. The more enlightened vice president (a hilarious Jehan O. Young, with priceless passive-aggressive expressions and line reads) pushes for more substance, like community outreach, and less of the superficial focus on style and status.The script clearly has something to say about these antiquated rites of passage. But Robert doesn’t go beyond the obvious: Instead of being a source of uplift and empowerment, the script says, Black debutante balls often promote classism, colorism and retrograde gender politics, like the objectification of Black women’s bodies. And yet, cotillions aren’t the source of the problem; they’re a symptom of a more nuanced social and cultural infrastructure. The play’s lack of deeper inquiry and character-building leaves us feeling unsated — even as the debutantes begin to question the whole affair.Structurally, the play never finds its footing. It mostly takes place in real time, but sometimes it veers off into a kind of choreopoem, with the girls speaking from the future, posing as if on an auction block or tearing off their dresses. And the uneven direction results in scenes in which the actors’ delivery is stilted — full of anticipatory pauses, not the naturalistic flow of conversation.More graceful is Teresa L. Williams’s set design, transforming the theater into a ballroom, and Stacey Derosier’s snazzy lighting, which creates a party atmosphere. And the fabulous Harriet Holland Social Club singers (Kayla Coleman, Cherrye J. Davis, Cristina Pitter, Montria Walker) give Marvelettes and Ronettes vibes, with their shimmery dresses (fantastic all-around costume design by Mika Eubanks) and choreography (nicHi douglas). The music (Dionne McClain-Freeney) expounds on the show’s themes via clever lyrics and a catchy score, played by the band on piano, upright bass and drums.It seems as if “The Cotillion” is trying to replicate what the writer Jocelyn Bioh did so well in “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play,” which didn’t critique beauty pageants as much as the culture that created them.Robert’s show did inspire me to ask my mother about her cotillion. I was expecting embarrassment. “I enjoyed it,” she said. Her experience didn’t change her life for better or for worse. “The Cotillion” forgets: This is also just a party.The Harriet Holland Social Club Presents the 84th Annual Star-Burst Cotillion in the Grand Ballroom of the Renaissance HotelThrough May 27 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; newgeorges.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘The Beautiful Lady’ Review: A Cabaret for the New Order

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      Artists and dreamers sing of revolution in a musical set on the cusp of the birth of the Soviet Union.A few minutes into “The Beautiful Lady,” you might find yourself thinking the show owes a little something to “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”: After all, here are, again, a bunch of exalted Russians in a cabaret, singing of life, loss, hope and love.But “The Beautiful Lady,” a musical by Elizabeth Swados from 1984, is actually the artistic forebear of Dave Malloy’s “Great Comet,” even though it is only just now getting a New York premiere at La MaMa, under Anne Bogart’s evocative direction.Swados is best remembered for her 1978 show “Runaways” (briefly revived by Encores! Off-Center in 2016, a few months after her death); “The Beautiful Lady” adds to the mounting evidence that she was among the most idiosyncratic and creative composer-lyricists of her generation. (A few years ago Malloy joined the likes of Michael R. Jackson, Taylor Mac and Shaina Taub on the tribute album “The Liz Swados Project.”)More of a song cycle than a traditionally structured, plot-driven musical, “The Beautiful Lady” is set at the Stray Dog Café, a real-life St. Petersburg cabaret where the owner, Boris Pronin (Starr Busby), hosted such literary luminaries as Anna Akhmatova (Kate Fuglei), Osip Mandelstam (Henry Stram), Marina Tsvetaeva (Ashley Pérez Flanagan) and Alexander Blok (George Abud, from “The Band’s Visit”) in the years leading up to World War I. They’re high on ideas and ideals — and, for some of them, on each other — and dream of a political, sexual and artistic revolution.Swados and Paul Schmidt, who translated many of those writers’ poems (large chunks of which are incorporated into the show), wrote the book, which was revised by Jocelyn Clarke and serves mostly as a thread linking the songs. And, oh, what wonders those are: vibrant and funny, desperate and elegiac, with some so lovely they will shatter your heart.Bogart makes the most of La MaMa’s deep stage and creates striking tableaus with little more than a few chairs and tables (Andromache Chalfant did the scenic design) and bold lighting (designed by Brian H. Scott) that focuses on blue and red. The effect is powerfully stark and never overwhelms the humans at the heart of the story.When they change into gray jumpsuits about midway through, we are reminded how often dreams of revolution have ended in repressive regimes. In the musical’s dreamlike world, the Stray Dog remains open long enough that its denizens face that reality and must resort to gallows humor, telling each other jokes that mine the cruel absurdity of life under Stalinist rule, with its Orwellian Newspeak and thought crimes. (Some of those jokes have been repurposed for Putin; they still work.)“My lady made of silk and sighs,” Sergei Yesenin (Andrew Polec, a long way from “Bat Out of Hell”) sings in an ode to the American dancer Isadora Duncan, yearning and helpless as his world comes crashing down. “My lady full of laughs and goodbyes.” He might as well be describing — poetically, of course — the spirit of this show.The Beautiful LadyThrough May 28 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Jeremy Strong to Star in Broadway Revival of ‘An Enemy of the People’

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      The production, with a new script by Amy Herzog and directed by Sam Gold, will begin early next year.“Succession” is ending. So what’s next for Jeremy Strong? He’s returning to Broadway.Strong, whose celebrity has skyrocketed with his portrayal of the scheming Kendall Roy in HBO’s “Succession,” will star next year in a Broadway revival of the classic play “An Enemy of the People.” Strong will portray the title character, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a physician who becomes a pariah when he decides to reveal that the water in local spa baths is contaminated.The play was written in 1882 by Henrik Ibsen and has been staged on Broadway 10 times, most recently in 2012. There have been other New York productions, too; a socially distanced one-woman version of the show was staged at the Park Avenue Armory in 2021, while the coronavirus pandemic was raging.This new production will feature a script rewritten by the playwright Amy Herzog, who is no stranger to reimagining Ibsen: Her revised version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” is now on Broadway, with Jessica Chastain in the starring role.Strong, who won an Emmy award for his work on “Succession,” previously appeared on Broadway in a 2008 revival of “A Man for All Seasons.” He has also appeared in several Off Broadway productions.The “Enemy of the People” revival will be directed by Herzog’s husband, Sam Gold, who won a Tony Award for directing the musical “Fun Home,” and whose more recent Broadway ventures have been polarizing productions of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and “Macbeth.”“An Enemy of the People” is scheduled to run for 16 weeks in early 2024; an announcement on Friday did not specify the exact dates or the theater, and did not reveal any further casting. The producers are Seaview (Greg Nobile and Jana Shea) and Patrick Catullo, who previously collaborated on Mike Birbiglia’s one-man show “The Old Man & the Pool.” More

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      New York Theater Workshop Announces New Artistic Director’s First Season

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      The Off Broadway nonprofit will embrace risk, said Patricia McGregor, its leader, favoring fresh over established works.For New York Theater Workshop’s first season programmed after the departure of its longtime artistic director, the Off Broadway fixture plans to produce an intergenerational saga centered on a Black family in Illinois, a lesbian farce set on a naval base, a story about a mysterious album of Nazi-era photographs, and a play with an unusual star: a Microsoft text-to-speech tool.The slate of shows, announced on Friday, has been curated by Patricia McGregor, who replaced James C. Nicola as artistic director last year. The organization has a track record of producing influential work, including its biggest hit, “Rent,” as well as celebrated productions such as “Hadestown,” “Once,” “Slave Play” and “What the Constitution Means to Me.”The 2023-24 season includes three world premieres and one work that debuted last year, favoring fresh over recognizable work. (The most recent season featured the Broadway-bound “Merrily We Roll Along,” starring Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez.) McGregor said that while there is certainly a place for those kinds of entrenched works at New York Theater Workshop, her inaugural season is focused on embracing risk and supporting artists whose work could be lost if the theater world becomes overly focused on name recognition, trusted forms and trying to ensure commercial success.“We’re more of a laboratory than a factory,” McGregor said. “Part of what the workshop wants to be is a testing ground.”This fall, McGregor will direct “The Refuge Plays” by Nathan Alan Davis, whose play “Nat Turner in Jerusalem” was staged at New York Theater Workshop in 2016. Produced with and staged at Roundabout Theater Company, the work is about four generations of a Black family who live in a home that they built themselves in a forest. An earlier version of the production was scheduled to start rehearsing in 2020 and was delayed by the pandemic.Later in the year, the nonprofit will stage “Merry Me,” a new work by the South Korean playwright and director Hansol Jung (“Wolf Play”). In “Merry Me,” which will be directed by Leigh Silverman (who directed last year’s voting-rights musical “Suffs”), a restless lieutenant seeks to pleasure other women on the base — including the general’s wife — during a blackout.“I love you so much I could die,” slated for winter 2024 and directed by Lucas Hnath, employs a Microsoft text-to-speech product for the monologues, in between songs performed by the playwright, Mona Pirnot. (The Microsoft-fueled actor is funny and strange, McGregor said, but it also comes off as surprisingly human.)Next spring, the company will produce Tectonic Theater Project’s “Here There Are Blueberries,” a play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich about a collection of Nazi-era photographs that is delivered to the desk of an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, making the news and setting a German businessman out on a journey of discovery about his family. Kaufman, who was behind “The Laramie Project,” will also direct the play, which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in California and is currently onstage at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C. More

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      ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Is Now a Play in London’s West End

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      Much has changed for L.G.B.T.Q. people since Annie Proulx’s short story was published in 1997. But a new theatrical version is a reminder that homophobia is far from over.In 2016, when the theater director Jonathan Butterell was considering a proposal to adapt Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story “Brokeback Mountain” for the stage, he wondered how to translate the prose’s vast landscape and insular emotions into a play.Last month, in a central London rehearsal studio, Butterell and Ashley Robinson, who wrote the play, tried to answer that question. To help the cast connect with Proulx’s story of a cowboy and a ranch hand falling in love against the wide-stretching landscapes of 1960s Wyoming, black-and-white photographs of American plains and mountain ranges were tacked to the walls during rehearsals.“The vastness has been there from the very beginning,” Butterell said in a recent interview. When it came to evoking the story’s emotional landscape, the director had stuck one sepia-toned photograph, of a lone cowboy in a snow-covered Wyoming, behind a pillar. The image “speaks to the bit of us that feels alone in the world,” Butterell said. “Maybe he’s at peace with this, maybe it’s the source of his agony.”Butterell’s “Brokeback Mountain” opened in previews May 10 at @sohoplace in London’s West End. It’s the first time the story has been adapted for theater — an opera by Charles Wuorinen premiered in Madrid in 2014 — and each version now follows in the footsteps of Proulx’s text and the film that popularized it: Ang Lee’s 2005 Academy Award-winning adaptation, which is often cited as one of the best L.G.B.T.Q. films of all time.Faist, left, and Hedges at @sohoplace. During rehearsals, black-and-white photographs of American plains and mountain ranges were tacked to the walls.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesButterell said he was aware of his audience having expectations based on the film. “They’re inevitable,” he said, “but I don’t mind that.”This theatrical version also has some Hollywood clout. Its lead characters, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, are played by the BAFTA-nominated actor Mike Faist and the Oscar-nominated actor Lucas Hedges.In late 2016, Robinson first wrote a treatment for what he called a “memory play” based on the short story, after speaking with the composer Dan Gillespie Sells and Butterell. Robinson’s script stated that the Wyoming setting should not be conveyed “in a purely literal sense,” and his story is set in 2013, with an older version of del Mar reflecting on the years he spent with Twist between 1963 and 1983.Proulx approved of Robinson’s vision. She has “high hopes for the play,” she said in a recent email interview. “When I read Ashley’s script several years ago, I thought he had done a fine job.”In Proulx’s story, del Mar and Twist’s interior worlds are conveyed by an omniscient narrator. In the stage adaptation, music does much of that work.“These two men can’t sing,” Gillespie Sells said, because “they don’t have an emotional dialogue.” Instead, a character called The Balladeer — played by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader — sings with an onstage country and western band. “She takes us through time,” Butterell said. “Sometimes it’s from night to day. Sometimes it’s 10 years.”“Brokeback Mountain” will be the first time its two lead actors have appeared onstage in five years. Faist, who plays Twist, originated the role of Connor Murphy in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway, and has had more recent success in film, including Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of “West Side Story.”Hedges “hadn’t acted in a while” when he was sent the script, he said, having been focusing on writing instead. The “Brokeback” offer and playing del Mar changed that. “There wasn’t an angle I didn’t love about this,” he said.“As terrifying and frustrating as it is, I really am having the time of my life,” Faist, left, said of the production.Shona LouiseAs the project entered its final week of rehearsals, both actors were grappling with the process in different ways. Hedges said he was experiencing “tragic and triumphant ups and downs” about his own work. “I have a day where I think I’ve figured it all out, and then a day when it all disappears,” he said. The “collective experience” of theater was daunting compared to working in film, he said, adding that onstage, “I can’t use tricks to make it through.”Faist concurred: “It’s a challenge, and it’s terrifying,” mainly because of the expectations of having to match the source material and 2005 film, he said. “But as terrifying and frustrating as it is, I really am having the time of my life,” he added.Butterell said that Faist and Hedges were “as men, as actors, very different creatures.” Faist, he said, had “a sense of life and vivacity,” while Hedges “has this deeply complex interior landscape that’s very much of Ennis.”Neither Hedges, Faist nor Butterell had revisited Lee’s film since they were approached for the project. “The truth of the matter is, no matter what, he’s not Heath Ledger and I’m not Jake Gyllenhaal,” Faist said of the film’s two lead stars, who both earned Oscar nominations for their performances. He and Hedges, Faist added, would both bring their “own weird things” to the roles.The production has forced Faist to confront his “traumas,” he said. “We can take those traumas, turn them around,” he added, and, he hopes, make the audience “think deeply about their own lives.”Following the success of the “Brokeback Mountain” film, Proulx said fans of her text sent her fan fiction that rewrote the ending of her short story, claiming the original was too sad. She told the The Paris Review that those fans had “misunderstood” the story and stated that it was, most importantly, about “homophobia.”Jonathan Butterell, the play’s director, said his two lead actors had different strengths: Faist, left, has “a sense of life and vivacity,” while Lucas, right, “has this deeply complex interior landscape that’s very much of Ennis.”Suzie Howell for The New York TimesThis is the first adaptation of “Brokeback” to be released since the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal in all 50 U.S. states. Robinson — who lives in Brooklyn but was raised in the tiny town of Lockhart, S.C. — said he wrote it to remind audiences that gay trauma still exists.“These stories aren’t necessarily being told anymore because of a trend to put onstage what we want the world to be,” he said, referring to the theater community. “That’s a wonderful thing to do, but we shouldn’t cancel out all of the opportunities to talk about what’s going on underneath it.”Butterell added that the fight against homophobia was “not over” in Britain either, citing a recent spike in the number of attacks on L.G.B.T.Q. people.“This is a tragedy,” Butterell said of the play. “Of course love exists — I don’t want it to be solemn — but the tragedy of this piece is that fear wins.” More

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      Review: At ‘Tartuffe’ in the Park, Hypocrisy Is No Picnic

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      The 17th-century play, staged by the theater company Molière in the Park, skewers those who preach morality yet practice anything but.I like to think that Molière, the great French playwright who died in 1673, would have really enjoyed the flagrant hypocrisy of our current political moment. Each month seems to bring new duplicities and new scandals, lies big and small — the résumés embroidered like Rococo tapestries, the lawmakers endorsing conspiracy theories to boost their careers. A devotee of prevarication and double-dealing, Molière would have made the most, in three acts, of stories like these. In some ways and in multiple plays, he already has. More than 350 years dead, he can seem effortlessly, wickedly contemporary.But a current production of “Tartuffe,” presented by the theater company Molière in the Park, drawing from the playwright’s original version, takes a different approach. A cause célèbre in 1664 when it was written, the play was quickly banned by an archbishop with a limited sense of humor. It skewers not only those who preach morality while practicing alternatives, but also the toadies and dupes who keep people like that in power. Sounds pertinent, doesn’t it? This slick, streamlined production, however, staged outdoors in Prospect Park by the director Lucie Tiberghien, is so busy stomping around its small stage that it never reaches out into the present.The English-language premiere, which credits Maya Slater as its translator, has simplified the original, reducing the number of characters and mostly dispensing with the third act. When “Tartuffe or The Hypocrite” begins, Tartuffe (Matthew Rauch, oilier than a perfect New York slice), a priestly figure, is already installed in the home of Orgon (Yonatan Gebeyehu), a wealthy man. Orgon’s wife, Elmire (Michelle Veintimilla), and his son and brother-in-law all see through Tartuffe, but Orgon and his mother refuse to believe ill of him. Eventually, Tartuffe propositions Elmire. But even this doesn’t sway Orgon. He would rather disinherit his own family than believe his own wife.Molière in the Park first staged “Tartuffe” nearly three years ago, with a different cast and using a different translation. That was a pioneering work of Zoom theater, presented back when most of us were still figuring out how to use the mute button. (A live version, with a somewhat changed cast, followed a year later.) In his New York Times review, Jesse Green called the streamed show “full of delight for our undelightful time” and praised the production’s allusions to the Trump White House and Black Lives Matter. So how strange that this production, despite its modern dress, resists contemporary allusion entirely, reducing “Tartuffe” to a pedestrian domestic farce.Under Tiberghien’s direction, the play begins in high energy and high dudgeon, with most of the characters racing around the stage — a square set atop another square — and speaking couplets speedily, long before the audience has any understanding of what’s what and who’s who. That stage is plopped into the middle of a circular plaza at the park’s LeFrak Center, which serves as an ice-skating rink in the winter and a splash pad in the summer. The play, which is relentlessly interior, seems disconnected from this environment.And at the matinee I saw, it failed to connect with its audience — or at least the several dozen middle school students in attendance, who napped, whispered, fidgeted and surreptitiously checked phones. Teenagers are, like Molière, keen to discover and condemn adult duplicity. But barring a slow-motion sequence at the play’s end, they found little to divert or engage them. As both teenagers and headline readers know, we are in a moment of pervasive political and religious insincerity. Someone should tell this “Tartuffe.”Tartuffe or The HypocriteThrough May 27 at the Prospect Park LeFrak Center, Brooklyn; moliereinthepark.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Onstage in Brooklyn, ‘Monsoon Wedding’ Tries to Capture the Film’s Spirit

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      The director Mira Nair was standing inside St. Ann’s Warehouse last week, pointing at a marigold-covered archway that was being assembled near the entrance. Conscious of the wedding photo shoots that often happen just outside the space, she was talking about the musical adaptation of her 2001 film, “Monsoon Wedding,” at the theater, which, situated along the Dumbo waterfront and a stone’s throw from where the East and Hudson Rivers merge. “That’s what our show is about,” she said. “Confluence.”Like the film, the show centers on an arranged marriage that brings together two vastly different Indian families, wedding planners and domestic workers. In the musical, the joyfully chaotic nuptials form a mosaic of questions of genuine attraction (the bride must deal with a scorned secret lover), diaspora (the party, notably the New Jersey-born groom, assembles from all over the world) and relationships across castes and religions.First staged in 2017 at Berkeley Repertory Theater, where it received mixed reviews, the show has made a “beautiful odyssey” to New York, as Nair put it. (It’s actually a return of sorts: Rehearsals for that first staging took place in Manhattan — Anisha Nagarajan reprises her principal role as the bride’s maid, along with Palomi Ghosh as an auntie.) Since then, “Monsoon Wedding” has been retooled, with new choreography, movement direction and scenic design. An additional writer was brought in to help work on the book, and the show was workshopped for friends and family in New Delhi in 2019, where Gagan Dev Riar joined as the bride’s father. Although plans for performances in Britain in 2020 were canceled because of the pandemic, it was staged in Doha last year as part of the cultural programming for the World Cup in Qatar.“It’s about our families, but so deeply universal; it’s an essential story of understanding a whole society,” the director Mira Nair said.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesAt St. Ann’s last Thursday, just two days before the musical was to begin previews, Susan Feldman, the theater’s artistic director, walked by at one point. Minding her step amid sections of a yet-assembled wedding tent, she chimed in that the production “has pushed the Warehouse farther than it’s ever been.”A visual validation of that claim might be Jason Ardizzone-West’s imposing Brutalist set, which runs the length of the large performance space. “It’s a holistic design in the way that the audience relates to the scenery,” Ardizzone-West said during a video call earlier that day. Inspired by the domestic courtyards found in India, he added, the set is a mix of “ancient stepwell structures and modernist architecture, specifically inspired by Le Corbusier, who has a lot of buildings in India.”Nair explained that she always wanted audience members to feel like guests at the wedding, calling the new scenic design “the fruition of many a dream.”From left, Sargam Ipshita Bali, Gagan Dev Riar and Palomi Ghosh in the production. “In India, when you have a wedding in a home, it spills out into courtyards,” Nair said, adding that Jason Ardizzone-West’s imposing Brutalist set conveys that sentiment.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“In India, when you have a wedding in a home, it spills out into courtyards, in canopies, under tents,” she said. “It’s an open door for the community to come celebrate this wedding, and that was the feeling I wanted.”The concrete stateliness of the set, which audience members must cross to get to their seats, is balanced by Arjun Bhasin’s colorful, culturally specific costumes. (“India is like Japan,” Nair quipped, “everything is coded.”) The men’s turbans are a particular shade of lilac, for example and, following tradition, the bride is never seen alone the night before the wedding. Bhasin, who worked on the film and thus considers himself “one of the oldest members of the production,” said the key to preserving its DNA was preserving its focus on character.Nair, left, with one of the show’s book writers, Arpita Mukherjee, center, and its costume designer, Arjun Bhasin, during rehearsals.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“When you eliminate the close-up and get to these tableaus, it becomes about people,” Bhasin explained. “The show is about the interactions of these people together; the upstairs versus the downstairs, the bride’s family versus the groom’s family, all these different love stories.”Work on the adaptation began in 2006, with Nair and the film’s screenwriter, Sabrina Dhawan, collaborating with the composer Vishal Bhardwaj and the lyricist Susan Birkenhead. Nair said she’d been inspired by the 2004 Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” a show built around cultural traditions adapting to survive. The film, like the musical, touches upon the fallout of India’s 1947 partition, brought to life in the characters’ religious, social and economic differences.“We’d made a movie that was our version, in a sense,” Nair said. “It’s about our families, but so deeply universal — this essential story of understanding a whole society and movement through a very personal story.”Marigold tapestry: The flowers are popular decorations at Hindu weddings.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesMarigolds, umbrellas and suitcases backstage at the theater.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesThat specificity meant weaving into the adaptation the concept of jugalbandi performance, a type of Indian duet. This is felt, not only in the score, which now also features lyrics by Masi Asare (a Tony nominee last year for “Paradise Square,” which similarly dealt with cultural cross-pollination), but in the placement of the band on the sides of the stage.“I think of it as a call-and-response between the music and the actors, and that has shaped it very deeply,” Nair said. “That is why the musicians are on par with the actors, and you see the sitar player and the trombone. It’s a real combination of a brass band and the big full heft of an Indian wedding sound, distilled and very exquisite.”Arpita Mukherjee, the book’s co-writer, was Nair’s assistant before being promoted to associate director and dramaturg during the Berkeley run. She moved to the United States from Delhi when she was 12 and brings an understanding of the emigrant experience to Dhawan’s updated book, which reconfigures the groom’s family as second-generation Indian American.The sitar player Soumitra Thakur at a rehearsal. Nair said she wanted “a real combination of a brass band and the big full heft of an Indian wedding sound.”Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“At the time the film came out, there were still some really antiquated notions about what India was, and no understanding of what a globalized India looked like,” Mukherjee said on a video call. “There’s a great story here about what home, and belonging, means.” She continued: “The really exciting thing is all these different types of brown people who have very different experiences of brownness because of class, or upbringing.”Nair’s work has never shied away from examining cultural distinctions, as in “Mississippi Masala,” an interracial romance between an Black man and Indian American woman, or exploring her native India’s underexposed aspects, like “Salaam Bombay!,” a drama about children living in the slums.For the musical, this quest to reflect the times meant revising one of the film’s subplots about a relative’s grooming and sexual abuse of two younger family members. Where the film’s family grants the wealthy patriarch some degree of amnesty, the musical condemns.The show has new choreography by Shampa Gopikrishna, and Carrie-Anne Ingrouille is the movement director.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“We’ve made a concerted effort to have the women question the patriarchy and speak up,” Nair said. “Other characters who are afflicted by this don’t shove it under the rug; they make decisions in their own lives that reflect that they will not accept this behavior, which we didn’t have before.”Mukherjee echoed that sentiment, calling the women “the stewards of a new way of thinking and being.”“They all have a voice in the show, which is looking at what the musical form can do to capture the spirit of the film, but go deeper,” she added. “Music is at the core of that; who gets to sing, who gets to have a voice? There’s a great theme of wanting things to be different from generations before, and it’s all led by women.” More

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      ‘Bad Cinderella’ to Close on Broadway, Ending Lloyd Webber’s Streak

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      When it concludes on June 4, an unbroken string of Andrew Lloyd Webber shows since 1979 will come to an end. His latest opened only in March.“Bad Cinderella,” a revisionist riff on the classic fairy tale, will close on June 4, bringing to an end, at least for the time being, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 43-year-long streak of shows on Broadway.The latest musical, which opened March 23, was not the pinnacle of that career — it was greeted on Broadway by hostile reviews, garnered zero Tony nominations and struggled at the box office. Last week it played to houses that were only 54 percent full and grossed just $326,303, which made it the lowest-grossing musical on Broadway.It had fared slightly better in London, and not just because “bad” was not part of the title there — critics had looked on it more favorably when it opened in the West End after multiple pandemic-related delays, but it had only a modest run and a closing clouded by the way the cast was informed and some of the words Lloyd Webber used to describe the turn of events.The musical is, like most Cinderella stories, about a shabbily treated young woman whose fortunes change when she meets a prince. The twists, in this production, are that the protagonist is rebellious, Prince Charming is gay, and beauty standards are oppressive.In addition to music by Lloyd Webber, who is best known as the wildly successful composer of hit musicals like “Cats,” “Evita” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” the musical features a book created by Emerald Fennell (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Promising Young Woman”) and then adapted by the playwright Alexis Scheer (“Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”), and lyrics by David Zippel (who won a Tony years ago for writing the lyrics for “City of Angels”). “Bad Cinderella” is directed by Laurence Connor, who previously enjoyed more success directing Lloyd Webber’s 2015 musical, “School of Rock.”“Bad Cinderella” was capitalized for up to $19 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped. The musical’s lead producer is Christine Schwarzman, a lawyer; together she and her husband, the Blackstone billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman, are major players in New York financial and philanthropic circles. Christine Schwarzman has become increasingly active as a producer on Broadway through her production company, No Guarantees; she is also a lead producer of “Fat Ham,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama and is nominated for the best play Tony Award.At the time of its closing, “Bad Cinderella” will have played 33 preview performances and 85 regular performances. More