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      A French Festival Focuses (Timidly) on English

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      The Avignon Festival’s new director wants to spotlight drama in a different language each year. This year’s first installment had some conventional choices.As soon as the Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues took over at the Avignon Festival, France’s biggest theater event, he announced a symbolic move: Under his direction, there would be a special focus on a different language every year, starting, this summer, with English.There was wincing from some quarters: To many in France, English is already far too culturally dominant. In the end, they needn’t have worried. Of several dozen productions in the official lineup of this year’s festival, which runs through July 25, only six plays are predominantly in English.As a result, Avignon, which has long welcomed shows from a wide range of cultures, hasn’t felt much different this year. If anything, Rodrigues’s Anglo-Saxon choices seem a tad timid. Focusing on a language, rather than a country, could have opened the door to Anglophone theater from underrepresented regions. Instead, five productions came from British directors, two of whom, Tim Etchells and Alexander Zeldin, are already well-established in France.A few novelties are still to come, including work from London’s Royal Court Theater, which is largely unknown across the Channel. So far, however, the most intriguing discovery has been the sole American entry, “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” from Elevator Repair Service. This verbatim recreation of a 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., about race in the United States, is spare and meticulous. From tables on opposite sides of the stage, Greig Sargeant (Baldwin) and Ben Williams (Buckley) spar with effective solemnity.The fact that Elevator Repair Service is widely described as “experimental” in its home country may amuse some French festivalgoers: “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” is fairly buttoned-up by local standards. Only the short final scene, which sees Sargeant and April Matthis, as the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, break character and touch on racial dynamics in the making of a previous Elevator Repair Service production, feels truly biting.Catherine Dagenais-Savard in “Marguerite: The Fire,” which pays tribute to Marguerite Duplessis, who, in 1740, was one of the first enslaved people to be heard by a Canadian court.Christophe Raynaud de LageAnother North American production at Avignon is performed in French: “Marguerite: The Fire,” by the Québec-based Indigenous writer and director Émilie Monnet. It, too, touched on the history of racism by way of a little-known historical figure, Marguerite Duplessis. In 1740, Duplessis was one of the first enslaved people to be heard by a Canadian court, after she claimed she had been born a free woman.Together with three other performers, Monnet pays tribute to Duplessis in a production that has high points — including evocative choral and dance numbers — but feels overly linear, its text well-meaning yet monotonous. Like “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” “Marguerite: The Fire” also unwittingly plays into a French national sport: deploring North American racism while struggling to recognize it closer to home.In the French portion of the lineup, meanwhile, some directors also got involved in the Anglo-Saxon focus by adapting the work of English-speaking authors. Pauline Bayle, a rising star who was appointed to lead the Montreuil Theater last year, boldly took on Virginia Woolf. Unfortunately, the result, “Writing Life,” is strangely shapeless.The cast awkwardly veer between peppy contemporary digressions and bits and pieces lifted from Woolf’s works. One minute, they mention the threat of an imminent, pandemic-style lockdown, and engage in slightly forced interactions with three rows of audience members. The next, they grapple with Woolf’s intricate style, which comes across as bombastic by contrast.“Writing Life” at least came with English surtitles for non-French speakers — a welcome development for the Avignon Festival. While select productions already came with an English translation under the previous director, Olivier Py, Rodrigues has made it the default to appeal to more international visitors.The cast of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is wheeled into the venue, a former quarry, by bus.Christophe Raynaud de LageThere were a handful of exceptions, not least Philippe Quesne’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” accessible only to French speakers. It’s a shame, because the production marked the reopening of a legendary Avignon venue: the Boulbon quarry, a majestic natural spot outside the city. It was last used in 2016, not least because of its eye-watering running costs: Fire safety precautions alone ended up costing 600,000 euros, or $670,000, this year.“The Garden of Earthly Delights” proved a loving reintroduction to Boulbon. In it, members of an eccentric, hippie-adjacent community are wheeled into the quarry by bus. They carefully lay a giant egg down in the middle of the vast space, and perform amusingly absurd rituals around it. Some recreate poses from paintings by Hieronymus Bosch; others deliver wacky poems or monologues. Even if you spoke the language, it didn’t fully make sense, but it felt at home against Boulbon’s arid, otherworldly backdrop.For English-speaking visitors, however, one major part of Avignon remains difficult to access: the Fringe, known as “le Off.” With nearly 1,500 shows on offer in small and big venues all around the city, it dwarves the official lineup, but very few productions offer English versions or surtitles.If you look closely enough, though, there are some opportunities to hang with the French crowds at “le Off.” A handful of venues offer surtitles on select days, like the Théâtre des Doms with “Méduse.s,” a well-crafted feminist reinterpretation of the mythical figure of Medusa by the Belgian company La Gang.Some performers find other ways to bridge the gap with English speakers. On Mondays during the festival, the French writer and performer Maïmouna Coulibaly, who currently lives in Berlin, performs her one-woman show “Maïmouna – HPS” in English at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint Michel. It’s a no-holds-barred exploration of her relationship to her body, including her traumatic circumcision as a child and her adult sex life. The back-and-forth between the two experiences induces a little whiplash, but Coulibaly brings galvanizing energy to the stage.Charlotte Avias and Camille Timmerman in “Punk.e.s,” which tells the story of the first all-female punk band, the Slits.Arnaud DufauAnd some French shows barely need translating. Justine Heynemann and Rachel Arditi’s “Punk.e.s,” at La Scala Provence, dives into the story of the first major all-female punk band, the Slits, with such chutzpah that, by the final musical number at a recent performance, quite a few audience members were on their feet.Charlotte Avias, especially, gives a manic pixie punk performance to remember as the Slits’ lead vocalist Ari Up, and Kim Verschueren, a powerful singer, finds shadowy nuance in the role of Tessa Pollitt. The set list — which cycles through the Beatles, the Clash and the Velvet Underground — could have used even more Slits songs, but “Punk.e.s” is a reminder that French artists have long taken inspiration from their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.There’s a way to go to before language differences don’t prove a barrier for theater. Still, the Avignon Festival is increasingly doing its part. More

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      ‘A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela’ Review: A Performer Drugs Herself

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      In an ethically murky show at the Avignon Festival, the Brazilian performer Carolina Bianchi opens up about how she was drugged and abused, then knocks herself out with a spiked cocktail.A decade ago, the Brazilian performer and director Carolina Bianchi was drugged and assaulted. In “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” (“A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela”), her new stage production at the Avignon Festival in France, she doesn’t merely open up about that experience. She relives part of it, night after night.Bianchi slips a similar drug into a colorful cocktail and drinks it, with a sinister “Cheers.” She talks to the audience about art and trauma, waiting for the effects to kick in, then spends the rest of the show unconscious.This all-too-real performance single-handedly jolted Avignon alive over the first week of the festival, turning Bianchi — an unknown, Amsterdam-based artist — into a sensation at the event. On the night I attended, one woman broke down in sobs on the way out. I felt nauseated at several points, as if “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” had tapped into my own fight-or-flight instinct.The show starts innocuously enough. Bianchi enters in a stylish white ensemble, and proceeds to deliver a lecture from a heavy stack of notes. From a desk, she examines sexual violence against women through the lens of art history, weaving in contemporary cases — chief among them the 2008 rape and murder of Pippa Bacca, a performance artist, as she hitchhiked in Turkey in a wedding dress as part of an artistic project.“The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” may be a much safer form of performance art, but it doesn’t feel that way. Twenty minutes in, Bianchi starts drinking her cocktail. Before long, she is slurring her words and hunches over, then lies down on the table and loses consciousness.For a few minutes, time stands still. We know nothing unplanned is likely to happen: According to the French news agency Agence France-Presse, Bianchi takes a mix of tranquilizers, rather than an actual date rape drug (known in Portuguese as a “Goodnight Cinderella”), and medics are on hand. Yet her vulnerability is scarily palpable.After Bianchi is unconscious, the performance takes on a club-like atmosphere, with slinky choreography leading to sexual encounters that never look fully consensual.Christophe Raynaud de LageThen, for the next hour and a half, eight young members from Bianchi’s collective, Cara de Cavalo, take over. The backdrop rises to reveal another set, dotted with what appear to be bodies in various states of decomposition. The performers lie Bianchi down on a mattress next to them, and the atmosphere turns trippy, with loud distorted club music. Slinky choreography leads to sexual encounters that never look fully consensual.Throughout, on screens above them, Bianchi’s words continue to roll. Her narrative isn’t one of healing: She repeatedly compares her need to revisit the assault to Dante’s journey into hell. “How dare they say that surviving is revenge?” the text reads at one point. “No act of catharsis overcomes the damage.”The cast exercise real care toward the unconscious Bianchi. The group’s women are tasked with most of the physical manipulation, and their actions never mimic her assault. Yet one scene near the end would probably be too much to present in many countries. (In Avignon, viewers under 18 were “strongly discouraged” from attending.) Cast members spread Bianchi’s legs and insert a speculum and a small camera into her vagina, with a live video feed and in full view of the audience, as if to simulate a post-rape forensic examination.Is this ethical? Your mileage may vary: As a director, Bianchi is in charge, even as she relinquishes physical control. Yet it is deeply unnerving to experience this scene, knowing that the main protagonist will have little to no memory of it, even as it lives on in the heads of hundreds of audience members. Her inability to remember her own assault, Bianchi explains earlier, haunts her to this day.I hesitate to say “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” should tour widely, because that means Bianchi, who wakes up looking dazed in the final few minutes, will keep putting herself through this ordeal. Still, the production, billed as the first chapter of a trilogy, is already scheduled to visit Belgium, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. And love it or hate it, it doesn’t flinch from an uncomfortable truth: Sometimes there is no safe space to be found from trauma. More

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      in Music

      A Revival of ‘The Who’s Tommy’ Seeks a New Generation of Followers

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      In staging the storied rock opera in Chicago, its creators argue that the show’s exploration of celebrity worship and childhood trauma is more relevant than ever.Thirty years ago, when the Who’s 1969 concept album “Tommy” was transformed into a rock opera for Broadway, it was hailed as a triumph of the form — a production that had finally managed to authentically marry theater and rock ’n’ roll.Fueled by the spiritual exploration of a 23-year-old Pete Townshend, the Who guitarist and songwriter, the original production of “Tommy” drew crowds of baby boomers primed with adolescent nostalgia for the story of a boy who discovers a superhuman aptitude for pinball despite not being able to see, hear or speak.The Broadway show raked in a record number of ticket sales the day after opening night, ran for nearly 900 performances and won five Tony Awards, including one for its director, Des McAnuff.With its depictions of rebellion against authority and analogies to spiritual enlightenment, the show was firmly rooted in the youth culture of the 1960s. So why would McAnuff, for whom “Tommy” was a career-defining success, take the risk of reimagining the work for today’s audiences?“Sometimes you just don’t get things out of your system,” McAnuff said in an interview shortly after his new production of “The Who’s Tommy” opened last month at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. “I felt like it was time to make it contemporary.”In resurrecting “Tommy,” McAnuff and Townshend, who wrote the book together, sought to prove that the work was not simply of an era, but carried the promise of timelessness.In 2023, McAnuff argues, Tommy’s transformation from catatonic schoolboy to a kind of charismatic cult leader resonates even more strongly when considering the modern-day culture of celebrity worship. And the show’s exploration of trauma — including post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual abuse and bullying — is something that audiences now have a much deeper understanding of.The reimagining of “Tommy” is not so much in story but in style, with McAnuff opting for futuristic austerity over 1960s nostalgia. Tommy displays his skill not on a kitschy pinball machine but a spare set piece (designed by David Korins) in which the outline of a machine is represented by narrow panels of light. The personality cult that encircles Tommy feels more sinister than in the original production.A 1972 concert staging of “Tommy” at the Rainbow Theater in London brought together, from far left, Merry Clayton (whose back is to the camera), Peter Sellers, Sandy Denny, Graham Bell, Steve Winwood and Roger Daltrey.Getty ImagesThe production, which runs through Aug. 6, has received rave reviews in Chicago, with the critic Chris Jones of The Chicago Tribune calling it a “ready-for-prime-time stunner.” The Goodman says the show is on track to be its highest-grossing production ever, a boon for the organization during a time of high anxiety around regional theater’s post-pandemic return. The show’s commercial producer, Stephen Gabriel, said several options for the production’s future are being weighed, including a Broadway run.The story at the center of this production is much the same as the one the Who told when it played its new album at Woodstock in 1969.A 4-year-old Tommy watches as his father — a British Army captain believed to have died while on duty — shows up at the family’s home, ultimately killing the mother’s new lover during the ensuing fight. Tommy then loses his senses, becoming the victim of sexual abuse by his uncle, relentless bullying by his cousin and medical exploitation by an army of invasive doctors. After the world discovers his stunning talent for pinball, he becomes a messiah-like figure with a band of devoted followers.Whether “Tommy” can become a national phenomenon again, and not just a nostalgic tribute, depends, in part, on its ability to capture a new audience.McAnuff sees Ali Louis Bourzgui, the 23-year-old lead, as the show’s “doorway to Gen Z” — though not long out of college and largely unknown, he is viewed by the director as a natural star who will be appealing to a new generation of prospective “Tommy” fans.To Bourzgui, Tommy’s meteoric rise has parallels to the frenzy over certain social media influencers, artists or tech gurus.“He gets filled up by his followers,” Bourzgui said. “He keeps feeding off that, getting more gluttonous with power, until he realizes they’re following him because they want to feed off his trauma.”Bourzgui was born 30 years after the release of “Tommy” the album, but he has his own memory of his first listen — to the vinyl, in fact — in a friend’s apartment his freshman year. He remembers feeling moved by the music, if not a little bit befuddled by the plot. (McAnuff likes to call the story a “fable,” gesturing at the suspension of disbelief required to accept Tommy’s arc from silent child to pinball wizard to cult leader.)In preparation for the role, Bourzgui pored over performance videos of the Who on YouTube, finding himself in awe of the band’s magnetism. Wary of falling into mimicry, he hasn’t watched videos of the earlier production.“We’re not in the business of presenting museum pieces,” said Roche Schulfer, the Goodman’s executive director, who was approached about staging “Tommy” before the pandemic upended the theater world.Schulfer was persuaded by McAnuff and Townshend’s ideas for an update as well as their consideration of how certain themes and language might translate onstage today.The Who performing “Tommy” in Los Angeles in August 1989. Des McAnuff developed the show for the stage in the early 1990s.Ebet Roberts/Redferns, via Getty ImagesThe question is one that theater makers across the country are grappling with: Should revived works be altered to align with the worldviews and sensitivities of present-day audiences?In “Tommy,” McAnuff and Townshend’s answer was, largely, no.For example, the lyrics “deaf, dumb and blind” are central to some of the album’s hits, including its most famous: “Pinball Wizard.” When Townshend originally wrote “Tommy” in the 1960s, the word “dumb” was commonly used to refer to someone who was nonverbal, but it is now considered to be an offensive and archaic term. McAnuff said that he and Townshend did not seriously consider changing that language, viewing it as too much of a lyrical departure in foundational songs such as “Amazing Journey.”“‘Sensory impaired’ — I don’t think it would work,” McAnuff said. “I think it’s a song that has a certain amount of pedigree and dignity.”The story behind the concept, Townshend told an interviewer in the 1970s, came from his devotion in his early 20s to the writings of the Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba — also an inspiration for one of the Who’s biggest hits, “Baba O’Riley” — who taught, as he put it, that as humans, “there are whole chunks of life, including the whole concept of reality, which escapes us.”Over the years, Townshend has described the character of Tommy as autistic, explaining that his condition was a metaphor for humanity’s limited view of reality.Revivals over the years, including one by McAnuff a decade ago in Ontario, Canada, have given the book writers the opportunity to re-examine the show’s handling of sensitive issues. Around that time, Townshend acknowledged in an interview that the rock opera does not allow for explanation or discussion around serious issues such as sexual abuse, but that audiences can consider those topics themselves in a modern context.“We have to live with the rock opera version that we did 20 years ago,” Townshend said at the time. “We also have to live with the fact that ‘Tommy’ started as a rock opera in 1968, ’69. And yet times have changed. Attitudes have changed.”In the 1990s, McAnuff, who first developed the show at La Jolla Playhouse in California, staged the sexual abuse scene in such a way that had little need for alterations today. A revolving bed suggests the violation without any significant physical touch — an approach the director views as key to protecting the child actors involved in the show.After the Broadway debut, there were some complaints that the scene was less daring than the one in Ken Russell’s provocative 1975 film, to which McAnuff responded, “That’s a real little boy up there. Does anyone actually need me to abuse that child to get the idea across?”The most significant change in the Chicago production on the issue of abuse is the removal of a short song, “Tommy’s Holiday Camp,” that brings back the sexually abusive uncle in a way that no longer seemed necessary, McAnuff said. There is also some toned-down staging in “The Acid Queen,” the wailing barnburner — performed by Tina Turner in the film version — in which Tommy’s father takes him to a prostitute and con artist who promises to cure his condition with drugs.Without being too heavy handed in any moralistic messaging, McAnuff hopes the audience sees what the intent of the work has been since the beginning.“At the end of the day, we portray what happens to him not to condone it but to condemn it,” McAnuff said. “And I think that’s the point of view of the whole piece.” More

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      in Television

      Maggie Siff Stars in a Rare Revival of Williams’s ‘Orpheus Descending’

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      “Orpheus Descending,” a rarely revived play about the treatment of outsiders, has only become more meaningful for its star and its director.After Maggie Siff’s husband died of brain cancer in 2021, the last thing she wanted to do was a play about a woman with a husband dying of cancer.But then, after initially pondering whether to commit to the show in 2019, she reread the script — and reconsidered her hesitation.“I was like, ‘Oh, no, I have to do it,’” Siff, 49, said of starring in the Theater for a New Audience’s revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending.” Now in previews, the play is scheduled to open July 18 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn.Williams’s play — a modern retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, in which a man has the opportunity to get the woman he loves back if he can just follow one simple rule — is set at a small-town dry goods store in the Deep South. The writing was revelatory to Siff, especially after she had attended to her own sick spouse, Paul Ratliff, for a year.“It has that quality of living at the edge of what’s real and realistic, and what’s mysterious and beyond our comprehension,” she said.Siff, who is best known for her starring turn as the strong-willed psychiatrist Wendy Rhoades in the Showtime series “Billions,” plays Lady Torrance, a middle-aged storekeeper’s wife who becomes infatuated with a wandering young guitar player, Val, as her elderly, bigoted husband lays dying in a room upstairs. As the two lovers navigate their doomed tryst, they confront the ecstasies of reawakened passion, the racism of an insular community and the gradual erosion of sensuality into newfound resilience.“It’s like sitting at the deathbed of a loved one,” said the play’s director, Erica Schmidt, who directed a New Group production of “Cyrano” for the stage in 2019, and then for the screen in 2021, both of which starred her husband, the actor Peter Dinklage.Members of the cast rehearse “Orpheus Descending.” Pico Alexander, center, plays the roaming musician who attracts the attention of Lady Torrance.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesThe show, which is a rewrite of Williams’s 1940 play “Battle of Angels,” was first staged on Broadway in 1957. It was a flop, running for only 68 performances. (The New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson called it a “second-rate play” by Williams, though he praised the “lyric intensity” of its dialogue and “tender writing that recalls the delicacy of ‘The Glass Menagerie.’”)“Orpheus Descending” has rarely been revived, but Schmidt, who saw the 1989 Broadway revival and a 2019 production at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London as well as the 1959 film adaptation, “The Fugitive Kind,” said she was drawn to its exploration of how outsiders are treated in the United States. She felt the theme would resonate in 2020, when the play was originally set to be staged before the pandemic forced a postponement — even more so now, amid a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment nationwide.“That’s possibly why it hasn’t been so successful in the past,” Schmidt, 48, said at a rehearsal on a sweltering Wednesday last month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “It’s grappling with these issues that maybe we don’t want from our Williams.”In a conversation during their lunch break, Siff and Schmidt — unintentionally twinning in all black — discussed the play’s appeal, how it speaks to the modern moment and what has surprised them in their now years of wrestling with the work. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you want to do this play?ERICA SCHMIDT The play is shot through with desire; this need to really live life and to cling to what matters to you with both your hands until your fingers break, as Carol [an eccentric aristocrat character] says. It reminds me of when Thornton Wilder says in “Our Town,” “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”MAGGIE SIFF I was drawn to it because of the size of life and the dark, liminal space of the world. I was also incredibly scared of it. It felt like an undeniable piece of work that one would need to throw oneself into. And then a lot of life happened — my husband passed away, and I didn’t think I would be able to do this play, but I picked it up again, and these are people who are living right on that line. It’s heaven and hell, living and dying. Being alive but dead inside. And then being alive, but coming into life.What has surprised you about the text?SCHMIDT Williams is very prescriptive in his stage directions and his punctuation, but there is an emotional size or participation that is necessitated by this play in certain moments. The question is how you get there without just being dramatic for the sake of being dramatic.SIFF The thing about the play that always made me the most anxious was the hysteria. For the longest time, whenever I’d read it, the third act, I was just like, “I don’t know how this happens.” And the surprise to me in working on it is how organically it happens. While it’s very difficult to earn those states of being that are so heightened and so large, it’s really masterfully built into the play.The other surprise is that while the play is very grim, dark and tragic, there’s so much in it that is really life-affirming and joyful to perform.SCHMIDT The subtext of the play is live, live, live.After rehearsals at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the play has now begun previews at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesThe original was a flop. What are you doing differently in this production?SCHMIDT Williams talks a lot about the vast expanse of darkness outside the door. When you look at “Battle of Angels,” the hanging tree and cotton fields are described as being right outside the door. So this is the hell that Orpheus — Val — is descending into, Two Rivers County, Mississippi, this vast, racist, sexist 1950s hell. And so, working with the set designer, Amy Rubin, we decided to put the store in the middle of the stage so we can create the vast expanse. And that’s not something I’ve seen in other stagings. Why is now the right moment to revive this?SCHMIDT The play demands that you pay attention to how complicit and complacent you are. Lady is essentially sleeping next to the man who wears a white hood in the night. And the legacy within the play of the Choctaw Indians who were driven from Mississippi in the Trail of Tears and the crimes of the slave trade and the legacy of all that blood on the ground. In our current cultural moment, it feels like only by looking at the past — by really looking at it — are we able to understand it and move forward, hopefully. We can’t pretend there isn’t blood on the ground.SIFF The play takes a mythic frame that it puts on top of a very political setup.SCHMIDT How we get out of hell?SIFF What is hell? What is the nature of heaven?SCHMIDT Can one person save another?SIFF Can people change? What does it mean to be corrupt in your soul? Is love redemptive?SCHMIDT Is love real?SIFF These are the questions that galvanize the play, and they’re questions we’ve been asking for centuries. And he’s not afraid to be like ‘Yes, I’m going to take these,’ and he throws all of those things at the wall. Maybe too many!“She’s lived through a lot to be in a place where she can come alive, which is, I think a feat,” Siff said of her character, Lady Torrance.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesMaggie, what do you admire about Lady Torrance? And what frustrates you about her?SIFF She reminds me of some of the women in my family. She’s such a survivor — I want to say tensile, is that the right word? It’s also the thing that’s her undoing — her pride.SCHMIDT [Reading from a dictionary app on her phone] Tensile, relating to tension, capable of being drawn out. A tensile rod.SIFF I think of it as like the thing that supports bridges, right? She’s lived through a lot to be in a place where she can come alive, which is, I think a feat.SCHMIDT Oh, it is a feat.She’s reminiscent of Williams’s other strong female characters who try to bring about change in a male-dominated society but fail. Or even your “Billions” character, Maggie, who’s similarly sharklike.SIFF She would be a mean — I don’t know, what would she be in this day and age?SCHMIDT The owner and proprietor of a really fancy club, like some kind of massively successful Italian wine garden.SIFF She might also be a singer.SCHMIDT Yeah, and a mandolin player.SIFF She’d be some kind of fabulous diva.What do you hope people walk out of the theater thinking?SIFF Like all great pieces of theater that have tragic endings, I hope an audience will be able to walk out and still feel somehow more expanded, rather than “Oh, why did I put myself through that for three and a half hours?”SCHMIDT Oh, no! It’s not three and a half. It’s going to be two and a half, with intermission. And it’s funny.SIFF There’s a lot in it that’s very life-affirming. More

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      in Theater

      Award-Winning ‘Cabaret’ Revival Plans Spring Broadway Bow

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      The production opened in London with Eddie Redmayne in a starring role; the New York cast has not yet been announced but he is expected to join it.Willkommen, bienvenue, Broadway!“Cabaret,” the ever-popular (and portentous) musical set in a Berlin nightclub on the eve of the Nazis’ rise to power, will return to Broadway in the spring in a new production that has already won raves in London.The producing team on Tuesday morning announced a plan to transfer the show to Broadway, and said it would open at the August Wilson Theater, where a revival of “Funny Girl” is scheduled to close Sept. 3.The “Cabaret” producers did not announce any other details, but it is widely expected that Eddie Redmayne, the film star who played the nightclub’s Master of Ceremonies when this revival opened in London, will reprise the role on Broadway. The show’s other big role, Sally Bowles, the nightclub’s star singer, was initially played in London by Jessie Buckley; that role has not yet been cast in New York.“Cabaret,” with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and a book by Joe Masteroff, originally opened on Broadway in 1966, and that production, directed by Hal Prince and starring Joel Grey, won eight Tony Awards, including for best musical, and ran for three years. Grey went on to star in a 1972 film adaptation that won eight Academy Awards, including one for Grey and one for his co-star, Liza Minnelli.The musical was revived on Broadway in 1987, again with Prince directing and Grey as the Emcee. Then in 1998, a new production directed by Sam Mendes and starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson, came to Broadway via the Roundabout Theater Company; that production closed in 2004 and then returned in 2014 for another year, opening with Michelle Williams opposite Cumming.This latest revival, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, opened in London in 2021, and won seven Olivier Awards, including one for best musical revival. Its run is continuing. The critic Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, called the production “nerve-shredding,” and said, “Frecknall pulls us into a hedonistic milieu, only to send us out nearly three hours later reminded of life’s horrors.”The lead producers are Ambassador Theater Group, a British company that owns and operates theaters around Europe and the United States and has become increasingly active in producing on Broadway, and Underbelly, a British company closely associated with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.“Cabaret” will join multiple shows on Broadway this season that deal with antisemitism, among them “Just for Us,” a one-man show from the comedian Alex Edelman, which is now running, as well as “Harmony,” a musical by Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman that is opening in the fall and “Prayer for the French Republic,” a play by Joshua Harmon, which is to open in the winter. Last season’s Tony-winning best play, “Leopoldstadt,” which closed earlier this month, and the winner of the Tony for best musical revival, “Parade,” which runs until Aug. 6, are also about antisemitism. More

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      in Theater

      Jack Goldstein, a Savior of Broadway Theaters, Dies at 74

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      He helped secure landmark status for more than two dozen theaters in the 1980s, then initiated the design competition that led to a new TKTS booth.Jack Goldstein, a preservationist who in the 1980s reacted to the razing of several venerable Broadway theaters under a Times Square redevelopment plan by helping to organize a successful campaign to give landmark status to more than two dozen other theaters, died on June 16 in Cold Spring, N.Y., in Putnam County. He was 74.The cause was a heart attack, said Tom Miller, his executor.Over 30 years, Mr. Goldstein established himself as an effective behind-the-scenes player on Broadway.He was the executive director of the nonprofit Save the Theaters, which was formed to prevent the future destruction of playhouses. He was an executive at Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union, and with the Theater Development Fund, where he initiated the design competition that led to the creation of a new TKTS discount ticket booth in Duffy Square, topped with a dramatic cascade of 27 ruby-red structural glass steps that rises above West 47th Street.“Jack had a great artistic eye and a deep commitment to good government,” Gretchen Dykstra, the former president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, said in a phone interview.Mr. Goldstein arrived in Manhattan in the spring of 1982, during a difficult financial period for Broadway andaround the time of the wrenching demolition of the Helen Hayes and Morosco Theaters — the most distinctive of the five theaters between West 45th and 46th Streets on Broadway that were leveled to make way for the towering New York Marriott Marquis Hotel.The sites of the Hayes and Morosco Theaters had become the center of protests by actors, playwrights and others until the wrecking balls began swinging that March.The actor Jason Robards speaking at a rally in 1982 in an unsuccessful effort to preserve the Morosco Theater. Others on the platform included the actor Christopher Reeve, second from left. Mr. Goldstein joined the Broadway preservation effort that year. Marilyn K. Yee/The New York TimesMr. Goldstein told a conference at the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan in 2014, “The destruction in the center of Broadway of beloved, important and, from the actors’ point of view, irreplaceable instruments of their art form and communication, was an affront.”Mr. Goldstein, who had a background in historic preservation, was initially a volunteer with the Committee to Save the Theaters, which had been formed by Actors’ Equity. He soon shifted to join and then run its spinoff organization, Save the Theaters.“Since it was clear that the city no longer recognized the value of the Broadway theaters,” he told Metropolis, an architecture and design magazine, in 2004, “No. 1 on the agenda was to bring to bear whatever legal disincentives to demolition were available and apply them to the historic theaters.”For six years, Mr. Goldstein and other preservationists focused on getting protection for theaters from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.Part of the process was examining theaters’ interiors and exteriors to determine which might be designated landmarks. He brought actors to the commission’s hearings to impart their knowledge of the theaters. And he collaborated on a report with an architect, Hugh Hardy, that stressed the full geometry of the theaters — their shape, layout and acoustical properties — rather than just their decorative detail, as standards for landmark designation.Speaking to the Skyscraper conference, Mr. Goldstein cited, for example, the “spatial relationships and building techniques behind the walls” that allowed actors to speak without a microphone, or in a whisper, and be heard by 600 to 1,400 theatergoers.Workmen cutting away steel from the roof of the Helen Hayes Theater in 1982.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“He was well spoken and enormously energetic,” Kent Barwick, a former chairman of the landmarks commission, said in an interview. “He was doing what needed to be done at the time. Was he always right in his judgment? No. Was he always fair? No. Was he dramatic? Of course — he was coming out of Actors’ Equity.”In 1987, the commission designated 28 theaters as landmarks — some for their exteriors, some for their interiors, some for both. (The sale of the Mark Hellinger Theater to a church in 1991 brought the group to 27.) The city’s Board of Estimate, a powerful governing body at the time, approved the designations in March 1988.Theater owners objected to the landmarking “as a confiscation of the value of the building because it limited its use to live theater,” Rocco Landesman, a former president of Jujamcyn Theaters, said by phone. He said of the buildings: “You couldn’t tear them down, and it was difficult to build above them if you didn’t have the rights. Value was taken without compensation.”The owners sued to overturn the landmarking of 22 of the theaters, but in 1992 the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case after the State Supreme Court and the Appellate Division had upheld the designations.Mr. Goldstein in 1997. Looking back with satisfaction in 2014, he said he thought he had made an impact on Broadway. “I feel, ‘job done,’” he said.TDFJack Lewis Goldstein was born on March 5, 1949, in Jersey City, N.J. His father, Joseph, was an Army officer and a physician whose work took him and his family to Maryland, Germany and other postings. His mother, Thelma (Ginsberg) Goldstein, was a homemaker, potter and political activist. The couple eventually divorced.Jack’s maternal grandmother took him to his first Broadway show, Lionel Bart’s musical “Oliver!,” which opened at the Imperial Theater in 1963.“‘Oliver!’ was the first time I experienced that suspension of disbelief,” Mr. Goldstein told Crain’s New York Business in 1998. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Goldstein graduated from George Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1972. He worked in Manhattan at the National Design Center, which exhibited home furnishings, before moving to Washington, where he was an assistant to the director of programs at the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a small federal agency that would play a role in persuading him to go to Broadway.While he was in Washington, the Interior Department, responding to a petition from preservationists, determined that the Morosco was eligible to be included on the National Register of Historic Places, and that if the developer of the Marriott Marquis wanted to tear it down, the company would need a waiver from the advisory council. Mr. Goldstein contended in an affidavit that Lyn Nofziger, an aide to President Ronald Reagan, had told the council to grant the waiver or lose its government funding — an assertion Mr. Nofziger denied.Frustrated, Mr. Goldstein soon left Washington to join the Broadway preservationists, whose efforts to save the Morosco were by then doomed to fail.After leaving Save the Theaters in 1988, Mr. Goldstein was a special assistant for government affairs to Ron Silver, the actor and president of Actors’ Equity, and the project director of the Broadway Initiatives Working Group, which was formed to evaluate Broadway’s future. He was the executive director of the nonprofit Theater Development Fund, which makes theater more affordable and accessible, from 1998 to 2001.When he announced the competition to design a new TKTS booth in 1999, Mr. Goldstein recognized how beloved and important the slapdash, pipe-and-canvas structure had become to theatergoers over 26 years. But, as he told The New York Times, “time and weather have taken their toll.”The new TKTS booth was not completed until 2008, a year before Mr. Goldstein returned to Actors’ Equity as its national director of governance policy and support.In 2012, he became an antiques dealer in Cold Spring. He previously owned a seasonal antiques store in Rehoboth, Del.He is survived by a brother, Leonard.Mr. Goldstein acknowledged that he had made an impact on Broadway.“I think I’ve made a contribution when I walk through Times Square and see theaters filled — many would have been swept away,” he told The Highlands Current of Cold Spring in 2014. “I feel, ‘job done.’” More

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      Review: In ‘Malvolio,’ Hope (and a Title Role) for a Damaged Heart

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      The Classical Theater of Harlem follows up last year’s winning “Twelfth Night” with a sequel that feels like a sweet summer frolic.Poor old Malvolio. Amid the comic romance of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” he is the imperious steward who gets cruelly pranked for sport, duped by a band of smart alecks who forge a love letter seemingly addressed to him.Believing that the missive is from the countess he adores, and thinking he is following her wishes, he dresses garishly in yellow stockings with cross-garters and behaves as if he’s come unhinged. Then he is locked away in darkness, where his tormentors continue to mess with his mind.It’s a rancid kind of meanness, but the playwright Betty Shamieh has turned it into a hero’s origin story with her clever, winking new play “Malvolio.” And the Classical Theater of Harlem, whose “Twelfth Night” last July was an effervescent delight, has fashioned this sequel into a sweet summer frolic, with the sympathetic Allen Gilmore reprising what is now the title role.Twenty years after the end of “Twelfth Night,” Malvolio is long gone from the island of Illyria. A respected military general in a stubborn war, he is the leader of the Legion of the Cross-Gartered. (Fabulous name, that; fun uniforms, too, by Celeste Jennings.) But his past mistreatment festers in him.“My humiliation made me reckless,” he says. “Reckless men make great soldiers.”The fleet-footed production, featuring a very funny John-Andrew Morrison, center, as a bored king, is now at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park.Richard TermineIn Ian Belknap and Ty Jones’s fleet-footed production at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park, most of the old gang from “Twelfth Night” is still back on Illyria, living not so happily ever after. The marriage of Viola (Perri Gaffney) and Orsino (René Thornton Jr.) totters on despite his infidelity — and his preference for seeing her disguised as a boy, as she was when he fell in love with her.It’s Volina (Kineta Kunutu), their strong-minded daughter, who takes up the mantle of romance and adventure. Betrothed against her wishes to Prince Furtado (J.D. Mollison) — a misogynistic nitwit and sole heir to the uber-bored King Chadlio (John-Andrew Morrison, so funny that you will root for the king to survive various attempts on his life) — Volina slips out of Illyria and meets Malvolio by chance. She falls instantly, persuasively in love with him.Critical of war, skeptical of marriage and astute about the warping effect of defining oneself through trauma, “Malvolio” regards its characters from a distinctly female point of view. Paying close attention to the women, Shamieh has fun with callbacks to assorted Shakespeare plays; Volina’s nurse (Marjorie Johnson) was once Juliet’s.With a color palette that pops, and choreography (by Dell Howlett) that does, too, this is a visually and aurally enticing production. (The set is by Christopher and Justin Swader, lighting by Alan C. Edwards, video by Zavier Augustus Lee Taylor and music by Frederick Kennedy.) If the characters’ tangled relationships are a bit complex for the uninitiated, that’s also true in “Twelfth Night.” The big picture here is perfectly clear.Does Malvolio have enough hope in his damaged heart to risk loving Volina back? Will she even be free to choose him if he does? Well, it is a comedy — with last-minute reveals that are entirely in the spirit of Shakespeare, and utterly charming.It’s free, by the way. Treat yourself.MalvolioThrough July 29 at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park, Manhattan; cthnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: Ted Hearne’s ‘Farming’ Is a Sweet, Sad American Elegy

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      “Farming,” a choral work that had its New York premiere at Caramoor, is a chaotically ambitious reflection on colonization, consumption and marketing.Google search results broke my heart this weekend.Which was strange, because they didn’t include anything overtly emotional. They were lines like: “Yes, we are open. Call our consultants today.” And: “Reliable, seasonal work force.” The kind of thing you get when you look up “H-2A visa program,” which grants temporary admission to the United States for agricultural workers.But set to soulful, almost retro, doo-wop-honeyed music by Ted Hearne in “Farming,” these bland fragments seemed to touch the very core of our country: its rapacious economy, its broken immigration system, its corroded politics.Performed at Caramoor in Westchester on Sunday by the 24 vocalists of the Crossing, the precise and luminous new-music choir led by Donald Nally, it was the sweetest, saddest song.A suggestive, chaotically ambitious, often poignant reflection on colonization, consumption, marketing, entrepreneurship — you name it! — “Farming” reaches well beyond that Google search. Its quilt-like libretto encompasses 17th-century letters by William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, and 21st-century musings by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, as well as absurdist out-of-context bits from UberEats’s Twitter feed and the Farmer’s Fridge customer loyalty program. (“Green are the Farmer’s Fridge reward currency,” the singers intone with maniacal severity.)As he has in superb works like “The Source” (based on the Afghanistan war logs leaked by Chelsea Manning) and “Sound From the Bench” (which set excerpts from Supreme Court proceedings), Hearne takes these found-text nuggets and gives them music that moves from lushly meditative to frenetic and obsessively repetitive — a visceral translation into sound of the information overload that is contemporary life.The singing is sometimes pure and sometimes processed into exaggeratedly AutoTuned “Alvin and the Chipmunks” automation. On guitars, keyboards, percussion and electronics, the six instrumentalists also veer from moody industrial rock and elegiac synth drones to jittery, hypersaccharine pop. (Occasionally resting, as in “Search,” that Google section, somewhere in between.)Not quite an hour long, the nine-part “Farming” is Hearne’s latest collaboration with the Philadelphia-based Crossing, which premiered it a few weeks ago in Bucks County, Pa., and already toured it to the Netherlands before this performance at Caramoor, its first in New York. The threat of rain on Sunday forced a move inside and an adaptation of the staging and complex sound design.“Farming,” with a patchwork text that includes the words of William Penn and Jeff Bezos, was sung by the 24 vocalists of the Crossing.James Estrin/The New York TimesGiven the circumstances, the production and the sound were impressively polished. A QR code included with the program linked listeners’ phones to the libretto; accessing it also involved signing onto Caramoor’s Wi-Fi, and it seemed that many in the audience weren’t doing it.Without following the words, it would be nearly impossible to have any idea what was going on in this non-narrative but intensely text-focused work. I’m no fan of wasting paper, but this was an appropriate occasion to print out the libretto for everyone — and future iterations might want to experiment with supertitles.And Ashley Tata’s perkily surreal corporate-parody staging, which put the performers in bright orange, magenta and white uniform-type costumes, felt like a complexity too many in a piece already full of them. The attempt to tie together the work’s many thematic strands by enacting onstage what Hearne’s program note called “a new corporation, powered by quasi-religious fervor,” was confusing — though maybe things were clearer in the original, outdoor conception.While this piece is less scattered than Hearne’s most recent major work, “Place,” a deeply personal reflection on gentrification, “Farming,” too, feels like a grab bag into which there’s always assumed to be room for yet one more idea. The central pairing of Penn and Bezos, the two pioneers — their vast differences, their essential similarities — would probably have been a more than sufficient subject here.The Penn quotations conjure some of the fundamental, irreconcilable tension of our country’s founding: his efforts to maintain good relations with the Indigenous population, on the one hand, and the commercial interests he wanted to expand, on the other.To what extent are Bezos’s manipulative doublespeak and high-minded invocations of empowerment through selling a break with Penn’s colonial promises? To what degree are they merely a continuation of what were sour lies to begin with?These are the kind of huge, unanswerable questions that Hearne’s works have presented so enigmatically yet powerfully over the past decade, fired by his passionate, resourceful music. I found other parts here — the Farmer’s Fridge, the Twitter fragments, the staging — a distraction from that burning central point.Yet I would have hated to lose “Search.” And Hearne’s earnest too-muchness, his eagerness to stuff as much as possible into each piece, has become such a central feature of his artistry that it’s hard to think of it as a weakness. It’s who he is.‘Farming’Performed on Sunday at Caramoor. More