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      How They Staged a Little Girl’s Inner Universe

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      “Fish in a Tree” at New York City Children’s Theater pulls viewers into the mind of an 8-year-old girl with dyslexia, using projections and immersive sound design.At Theater Row in Manhattan, a gigantic notebook, filled with lines of type, stands open onstage. As the audience gazes at the pages, the letters refuse to stay still. They push together and pull apart, all the while bobbing like drowning swimmers.Rubbing your eyes won’t help. This moment from “Fish in a Tree,” a world premiere from New York City Children’s Theater, reveals the way a social studies textbook appears to Ally Nickerson, the play’s 8-year-old heroine. Although Ally doesn’t know it yet, she has dyslexia, a learning disability that, according to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity, affects 20 percent of the population.The goal was “to give our audience a real picture of what it’s like,” said Barbara Zinn Krieger, the company’s artistic director, who consulted more than a dozen experts on dyslexia while writing the show. Adapted from a 2015 best seller of the same title by Lynda Mullaly Hunt, “Fish in a Tree” relies on digital technology more than any other production in the company’s more than 25-year history. It focuses on Ally’s life both at home, where her brother has a secret of his own, and at school, where Ally, who has become a troublemaker to hide her disability, faces bullying from two girls.Although Ally is a sixth grader in the book, Krieger wanted her to be younger onstage, “especially when I discovered that the earlier you discover somebody has dyslexia, the better off the child is,” she said.Throughout the show, which opens on Saturday, Kylee Loera, the creative team’s video designer, uses the onstage notebook’s surface as a screen on which to show both still and animated images of Ally’s outer and inner lives: not only the pages she struggles to read, but also her family’s kitchen, her school, and her fantastical daydreams, or “mind movies.”But most of all, the notebook, which Ally calls her Sketchbook of Impossible Things, is the home for her artwork. (One of its blank pages is also outlined on the floor of Ann Beyersdorfer’s set.) In the sketchbook, which Ally carries with her, she draws fanciful creatures and encounters, which take shape onscreen overhead as the audience watches. And as Ally, portrayed by Lily Lipman, changes over the hourlong action — acquiring a diagnosis, a mentor and self-esteem — her art changes, too, shifting from black-and-white to color.As Ally changes over the hourlong action, her art changes, too, shifting from black and white to color.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn devising an onstage gateway to Ally’s imagination, “We were like, what if the portal is actually her notebook?” said Sammy Lopez, the show’s co-director. “And what if we gave the audience the opportunity to jump into the notebook with Ally? And so that kind of inspired the ways in which we built out the physical life of the show.”Ally’s sketches, which she often draws during class, are by the illustrator Ben Diskant, who is dyslexic himself. He based some of the images on references in the novel, like boxing lobsters and a small fish with wings. (The work’s title comes from a quotation attributed, probably falsely, to Einstein: “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”) Diskant, however, also contributed his own ideas, sketching animals because, he said, he has always found their lack of language comforting.Drawing “has set me free creatively from having to explain myself in any written form or any verbal form,” he said, adding, “and so I really relate to Ally in that way.”Loera designed the imagery for Ally’s “mind movies.” As these adventures unfurl onscreen, or, in one case, as shadow puppetry, the show’s young adult performers, who also play Ally’s third-grade classmates, teacher and brother, simultaneously act them out. For instance, Ally sees herself being jailed in her imaginary film “The Prisoner.” As her schoolhouse morphs into a prison in the projection, Louis Baglio, in the role of Ally’s new teacher, Mr. Daniels, adopts clothing and props to become a Wild West sheriff. (This all occurs comically to the strains of the theme from the 1966 western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”)“We have to teach our young audience that, during this play, you’re going to see the players create, you’re going to see them step into Ally’s mind,” said Melissa Jessel, the production’s other co-director. Music, she added, “really helps to engage.”From left, Sadie Veach, Fernando Mercado, Lipman, Louis Baglio and Madison B. Harris. The actors who play Ally’s classmates and teacher also double as characters in the imaginary sequences Ally creates.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn addition to film-score excerpts and a musical theme that serves as a bridge between Ally’s reality and her imaginings, Glenn Potter-Takata, the production’s sound designer, uses a buzzing noise to accompany Ally’s dyslexia-associated headaches. Occasional voice-overs — “Why, why, why can’t I read like everyone else?” — further disclose her thoughts.The show’s creators also added detail and texture to the novel’s explanation of the condition. A dyslexic teacher Krieger consulted described it as like trying to extract information from mental filing cabinets, but selecting it in the wrong order. That analogy went into the script.So did up-to-date tools for dyslexic students, which the show’s dramaturge, Taylor Janney-Rovin, an educator who instructs dyslexic children at Valence College Prep, in Queens, suggested. Mr. Daniels, whose help Ally finally agrees to accept, introduces Ally — and the audience — to multisensory techniques for children with learning disabilities. These include skywriting — writing letters large in the air — and drawing words in shaving cream.Krieger continued to modify her script drafts in response to internal feedback. (In the cast, creative team, company management and staff, there are seven people with disabilities.) She had invented an encouraging statement from Ally’s grandfather, “Anything is possible if you try hard enough.” Lipman, who is on the autism spectrum and has an auditory processing disorder, objected to this wording for its implied burden on those in similar circumstances. Krieger rewrote the line as “Many things are possible if you believe in yourself.”Lipman approved the revision. “The biggest moment for me is when Ally’s like, ‘So there’s a reason why I can’t read,’” she said. Her character realizes that her classmates have an advantage, Lipman added, and “it’s just that I didn’t get that piece that they all got.”The play, however, is not intended just for young people with disabilities. Its examination of bullying, friendship and sibling bonds is geared toward a larger audience, as is its wide embrace of creativity.The company’s hope, Jessel said, is that “children walk away from the story interested to explore their own imaginations.”Fish in a TreeThrough April 9 at Theater Row, Manhattan; nycchildrenstheater.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      ‘Camelot,’ Beloved but Befuddling, Gets the Aaron Sorkin Treatment

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      “Camelot” opened on Broadway 63 years ago, an eagerly anticipated new musical from the makers of “My Fair Lady.” But happily-ever-aftering took a while.Out-of-town, while trying to trim the overlong production, one writer was hospitalized with an ulcer, and the director collapsed of a heart attack. In New York, despite starring Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, “Camelot” took months to find its footing, and only did so following a televised segment on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”Today the musical, written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, is remembered as one of the last of Broadway’s Golden Age shows, but its traditional narrative — Arthurian legend with all of its romance, politics, swordplay and sorcery — has never quite clicked.“Unfortunately, ‘Camelot’ is weighed down by the burden of its book,” the New York Times critic Howard Taubman wrote of the opening. That assessment has persisted. “It has one of the great scores of all time,” said Theodore S. Chapin, the former president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, “but the plot starts to go haywire.”On April 13, a new version of “Camelot” is scheduled to open on Broadway, with its book rewritten by Aaron Sorkin. The Hollywood screenwriter is familiar to many as the creator of the television series “The West Wing,” and he won an Oscar for writing the movie “The Social Network.” He is also an accomplished playwright, whose first Broadway drama, “A Few Good Men,” became a hit film, and whose most recent Broadway outing, an adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was a critical and commercial success.Clockwise from top left: Aaron Sorkin, Phillipa Soo, Jordan Donica and Andrew Burnap.But musicals have not been part of his repertoire, until now. He earned a B.F.A. in musical theater from Syracuse University, but this, in his slightly overstated words, is “the first time I’m putting it to use.” (He tried writing a musical once before, partnering with Stephen Schwartz on a show about Houdini. It didn’t work out.)This rewritten “Camelot,” starring Phillipa Soo of “Hamilton” fame as Guenevere, alongside Andrew Burnap (“The Inheritance”) as Arthur and Jordan Donica (“My Fair Lady”) as Lancelot, is now in previews at Lincoln Center Theater. By contemporary standards, it’s a large production, with a 27-person cast and a 30-piece orchestra.Sorkin is not the first to revise the musical — even Lerner and Loewe reworked it post-opening, and others have tried, too — but his deft hand with witty, fast-paced dialogue and audience nostalgia for “Camelot,” which is adapted from T.H. White’s fantasy novel, “The Once and Future King,” has made the production one of the most anticipated on Broadway this year, with theater mavens eager to see how Sorkin puts his stamp on it.“People think the show is about a love triangle, which of course it is,” said Alan Paul, the artistic director of Barrington Stage Company and director of his own production of “Camelot” a few years back, “but I really think it’s about the birth of democracy, and when you look back at ‘The West Wing,’ which is one of my favorite shows, that is a TV show that believes government can work for the people.”‘You’re supposed to be dead.’Just getting to this point is an unexpected relief for Sorkin.In November, two months before rehearsals were set to begin, he woke in the middle of the night and noticed that, while walking to the kitchen, he was crashing into walls and corners. He thought nothing of it until the next morning, when the orange juice he was carrying to his home office kept spilling.Sorkin called his doctor, who told him to come in immediately; his blood pressure was so high, Sorkin said, “You’re supposed to be dead.” The diagnosis: Sorkin, 61, had had a stroke.For about a month afterward, he was slurring words. He had trouble typing; he was discouraged from flying for a few weeks; and until recently, he couldn’t sign his name (he has just discovered, thanks to “Camelot” autograph seekers, that that’s improving). Those issues are now behind him, and the main lingering effect is that he still can’t really taste food.“Mostly it was a loud wake-up call,” he said during one of several interviews for this article. “I thought I was one of those people who could eat whatever he wanted, smoke as much as he wanted, and it’s not going to affect me. Boy, was I wrong.”Sorkin had been a heavy smoker since high school — two packs a day of Merits — and the habit had long been inextricable from his writing process. “It was just part of it, the way a pen was part of it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it too much, because I’ll start to salivate.”After the stroke, he quit cold turkey, cleaned up his diet and started working out twice a day. And, he said, “I take a lot of medicine. You can hear the pills rattling around in me.”“If you write the book to a musical with a score written by Lerner and Loewe, and they have this cast, and Bart Sher is directing it, and it doesn’t work, it was definitely your fault,” Sorkin said.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesSorkin told me about the stroke almost in passing, when we were having a get-acquainted cup of tea in a hotel lobby (he loves writing in hotels) earlier this year. Trying to understand his creative process, I asked whether he prefers to write longhand or on a device. That’s when he said writing by hand had become difficult.At first he told me about his stroke only off the record; we agreed we’d revisit the subject the next time we met, so he could think through the implications of going public. By then, he had decided he was ready to describe what he had been through, in the hopes that his experience might be a cautionary tale. “If it’ll get one person to stop smoking,” he said, “then it’ll be helpful.”He is aware how lucky he is to have recovered, and to be able to continue to do the work he loves. “There was a minute when I was concerned that I was never going to be able to write again,” he said, “and I was concerned in the short-term that I wasn’t going to be able to continue writing ‘Camelot.’”Now he’s commuting between Los Angeles, where he lives, and New York, where he’s trimming the script, offering pointers to actors, refining word choices that don’t strike him quite right. “Let me make this very, very clear,” he said. “I’m fine. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I can’t work. I’m fine.”‘Now with no magic!’For many people, “Camelot” is more familiar as a metaphor than as a musical — it depicts a noble effort to create a just society, often associated with the Kennedy administration, because Jacqueline Kennedy, in an interview shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, mentioned her husband’s fondness for the show, and quoted a final lyric: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”Four years ago, Lincoln Center Theater, which is a nonprofit, staged a fund-raising concert performance of the show, starring Lin-Manuel Miranda as Arthur. It went so well that the creative team began talking about a full-scale production.“The music is so good, and it’s incredibly fun, and I don’t know of any other pieces set in the Middle Ages with knights,” said Bartlett Sher, a veteran of Golden Age revivals (“South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “My Fair Lady”) who directed the concert and is now directing this revival. “I realized how extraordinary the score was,” he said, “and how complicated the experience of the book was.”Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, center, starred in the 1960 production of “Camelot.”Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock PhotoSher was debriefing with Miranda when Sorkin’s name came up. “I knew Sorkin was a fan of ‘Camelot,’ because he quotes it in ‘The West Wing’,” said Miranda, who grew up hearing songs from the musical, a favorite of his mother’s, and memorized them while a passenger in her car.Sher and Sorkin already knew each other because they had collaborated on “Mockingbird,” and they were eager to work together again.“You would think we would have sat and talked for hours about the problems we had with the existing book, or what we were hoping for, but we didn’t,” Sorkin said. “I just got to work.”He made one key early decision that has guided his approach to the show: no supernatural elements. That means Merlyn, who in the original is a magician who can remember the future and can turn Arthur into a hawk, is now a wise tutor; Morgan Le Fey, who in the original can build invisible walls, is now a scientist; and the nymph Nimue is gone. Even Arthur’s sword-in-the-stone origin story is questioned.“It wasn’t that I don’t like magic — I do,” Sorkin said. “Nor were there commercial reasons — no producer wants to put on a marquee, ‘Now With No Magic!’ It was because I feel that this story, in particular, had a chance of landing more powerfully, more emotionally, if people felt real. If a problem can be solved by waving a magic wand, it doesn’t feel like much of a problem.”‘Musicals can get tangled with.’“Camelot,” like many older musicals, has its complications for a modern audience. “From a contemporary perspective, it’s very problematic,” said Stacy Wolf, director of the music theater program at Princeton University. “The musical is about heterosexual adultery ruining a visionary government, and the woman is ultimately blamed for it.”Nonetheless, Wolf is eager to see the revival. “The music that Lerner and Loewe wrote is just incredible,” she said, “and in the same way that Shakespeare gets tangled with, and operas get tangled with, musicals can get tangled with.”Sorkin quickly realized that two songs, in particular, posed problems: the sexist-sounding “How to Handle a Woman” and the classist-sounding “What Do the Simple Folk Do?”“When I first started writing it, I thought, there’s an easy way to solve this: Don’t sing the songs,” Sorkin said.But Sher asked Sorkin to reconsider, given fan fondness for the score. “There’s a reason we see ‘Camelot’,” Sorkin acknowledged, “and the reason isn’t me.”So he came up with an alternative solution: humor. The songs are back, preceded by dialogue in which Guenevere preemptively defuses their sting with Sorkin-esque wit.“When I joined, ‘How to a Handle a Woman’ wasn’t there in the script, but then one day it was,” Soo said. “But there was also a beautifully written scene — and this is another reason why Aaron Sorkin is brilliant at what he does — that explores the song in a new way.”The revival has been extensively nurtured — there were four developmental workshops along the way, and Sorkin estimates that he has written about 10 drafts of the script. Lancelot “went from being a buffoon, like Gaston in ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ to a three-dimensional person.” Arthur struggles to define his feelings for Guenevere, whom he marries as part of a peace treaty. And Guenevere is now a strategic helpmate, periodically outthinking her husband.“The ideas of democracy that are discussed in this show are the ones that are discussed in this country,” said Donica, left foreground, who plays Lancelot.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“There have been rewrites at each stage of workshop, and there are even more rewrites still going on,” said the actor Dakin Matthews, who is playing Merlyn and another character.A case study: Morgan Le Fey, who in the original is a sorceress with a sweet tooth, and a threat to Arthur’s reign. At first, Sorkin simply cut the character — as Lerner had done for some post-Broadway productions — but, Sorkin said, “she found her way in, and she got better.”In an early workshop, the actress Daphne Rubin-Vega (the original Mimi in “Rent”), read the role, when Le Fey was little more than a spurned ex-girlfriend. “She, in a very nice but direct way, said I could do better,” Sorkin said. “She was right.”He made Le Fey a scientist, an unmarried mother, and, for a time, an opium addict. (Sorkin has been clean for 23 years after battling his own addictions.) Now she makes and sells brandy. “People coming in and auditioning — they were just leaning into being high on opium, and it wasn’t working,” Sorkin said.Marilee Talkington, who plays Le Fey, has embraced the character’s evolution.“The old version of ‘Camelot’ felt distant, but also fun and entertaining,” she said. “This version is inviting the audience to ask themselves who they are, what they want, and where there’s hope.”How much “West Wing” is there in “Camelot”? Sorkin said the screenwriting device for which he is most famous — the so-called walk and talk, in which characters converse while in motion, is a.) “probably exaggerated” and b.) a screen technique that “has no implications for the stage.” Having said that: Arthur has his best ideas while pacing.One trick Sorkin did transfer from filmdom: He intercut three scenes together, as in a movie, held together with scoring, and challenged Sher to figure out the staging. “Give Bart something like that,” Sorkin said, “and he’s a happy guy.”And there are lines that can clearly be heard as allusions to our contemporary challenges.“All of his films are about game-changers, and ‘Camelot’ is no different, because Arthur is a game-changer,” said Donica, the actor playing Lancelot. “And the ideas of democracy that are discussed in this show are the ones that are discussed in this country.”‘I worry that if I stop worrying then I won’t do it.’I sat down with Sorkin the morning after the first preview performance, and he was obviously pleased. It struck me that this was the first time he had seemed happy with his work. “That’s not an illusion,” he said. “It’s the most positive I’ve been during the process. I feel ashamed I didn’t have more confidence in everybody.”There was still work to be done over the five-week preview period — the show was running too long (“I’m sure I’ll be called upon to make some cuts, and I’m not looking forward to that”), and Sorkin was still wrestling with various bits of language (Would it be exciting or distracting if he changed an “or” to a “like,” with the effect of implying that Guenevere might be agnostic?).But until that first performance before an audience, Sorkin had repeatedly fretted about what might go wrong, remembering that at one point he told a group of young librettists, “If you write the book to a musical with a score written by Lerner and Loewe, and they have this cast, and Bart Sher is directing it, and it doesn’t work, it was definitely your fault.”I found it hard to understand how someone as successful as Aaron Sorkin could be so worried, so I asked him about it.“I have had some success, and I’ve also had plenty of experience feeling anxiety about what I’m doing,” he said. “Am I going to have an idea? Am I going to be able to write this?”One startling example: “I wrote 86 episodes of ‘The West Wing,’ and every single time I finished one, I’d be happy for five minutes before it just meant that I haven’t started the next one yet, and I never thought I would be able to write the next one. Ever.”Is that kind of worrying a liability, or a strength, for an artist like Sorkin? “I hope it wasn’t a waste,” he said. “And I do think to myself, as I try to relax myself a little bit, I worry that if I stop worrying then I won’t do it. That it’s the worrying that’s driving me to do it.”Sorkin, who has already begun having meetings about possible next musicals, even while dreaming up a Jan. 6 movie he is contemplating writing and directing, said he has come to see “Camelot” as a narrative about narrative.“Ultimately, the show is a valentine to storytelling,” he said.“I like that Arthur thinks if we can just keep telling these stories, then people will be inspired and they’ll believe that we do have greatness in our grasp, and that you have to keep trying,” he added. “The greatest delivery system for an idea ever invented is a story.” More

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      Puppetry So Lifelike, Even Their Deaths Look Real

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      Members of the puppetry team for “Life of Pi” discuss making the show’s animals seem all-too-real on a very crowded lifeboat.Fair warning: This article is riddled with spoilers about puppet deaths in “Life of Pi,” the stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s best-selling novel about a shipwrecked teenager adrift on the Pacific Ocean. He shares his lifeboat first with a menagerie of animals from his family’s zoo in India — large-scale puppets all, requiring a gaggle of puppeteers — and eventually just with a magnificent, ravenous Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker that takes three puppeteers to operate.Now in previews on Broadway, where it is slated to open on March 30 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, the play picked up five Olivier Awards in London last year. Puppetry design by the longtime collaborators Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell was included with Tim Hatley’s set in one award, and, unprecedentedly, a team of puppeteers won an acting Olivier for playing Richard Parker.Caldwell, who is also the production’s puppetry director, and two of those Olivier-winning puppeteers, Fred Davis and Scarlet Wilderink, sat down at the Schoenfeld one morning last week to talk about bringing the show’s puppets to life — and then, in several scenes, to vivid and often gruesome death. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Foreground, from left: Fred Davis, Scarlet Wilderink and Finn Caldwell. Behind the tiger, from left: Andrew Wilson and Rowan Ian Seamus.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt’s a very crowded lifeboat. Who all is in there, and how complex is that dance?SCARLET WILDERINK That is such a beautiful way to describe good puppetry. Because it is a synchronicity like dance that looks completely unchoreographed. Well, what have we got in there? We’ve got hyena. Rat for a short time.FRED DAVIS Zebra. Orangutan. Tiger. And Pi.FINN CALDWELL In the end of the first act, where we see the tiger’s about to kill the hyena, and the hyena’s killed the zebra and everything else — we call that section Megadeath. How many puppeteers do we use in Megadeath?WILDERINK Three, five, six, eight, 11.CALDWELL Eleven puppeteers. That’s the most puppeteers we’ve ever used on a show in one sequence.Richard Parker is such a cat. He seems plush and furry with padded paws, and he hogs the bed. How do you figure out animal movement?CALDWELL We look at anatomy. We look at pictures of skeletons of tigers, blow that up to a real tiger size and start marking on pieces of paper on the wall where the joints are all going to be. Because when we build on a framework, our armature, it wants to move like a tiger, because the limbs are all the right length. The joints want to move in the right way.Hiran Abeysekera, left, as Pi, with Richard Parker, eventually the last surviving passengers aboard a lifeboat stranded in the Pacific Ocean.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesDAVIS In terms of bringing it to life, we start off by looking at videos of tigers moving in different environments — when they’re relaxed, when they’re hunting, analyzing their foot patterns and how their weight shifts from one paw to another, how their tail flicks when they’re feeling a certain way. One thing that is always challenging for us to do is the noises. Because no human has the same lung capacity or vocal cords as a tiger.WILDERINK One of the most helpful tools for us is imagination. If the puppeteer is really seeing the thing, the audience will see the thing. The tiger’s fur, you know, he doesn’t have real fur. But if you imagine the softness of it, this sort of stretchiness of their skin, the weight — like if he collapses into Pi, how do you make him look like he’s soft in his lap? It’s part of the design because we’ve got all those bungees that tie all of the armature together, which makes him look like that. But the sensory stuff, I think, is in our minds.What is it that makes the audience believe?CALDWELL It’s you and I as 3-year-olds going, “There’s a doll. Should we agree that this is real and play a game together?” That’s the same offer that you make to the audience: “Here’s a tiger. Do you want to agree that it’s real with us?” That means that they then take part in the creation. Intellectually, we know it’s a puppet. But really quickly, most people want to buy into the game.Why is violence sustained by puppet animals so shocking and affecting?CALDWELL If it was the real animal, you’d be really worried about the situation. You’d be like, “Is that a real hyena?” With a puppet, no matter what it’s playing, all you have to worry about is what it’s telling you onstage. The puppets are only there to be themselves, so that when you start to wound them, all the audience is thinking is, well, (a), I’ve taken part in bringing this thing to life, and now you’re killing it in front of me, and (b), this is all that’s happening. All you’re getting is the pure story, the pure thing that’s happening, and so I think you get the straight emotional connection to it.The puppetry team also built and operated a hyena, a zebra, a goat and an orangutan.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAnd yet you really do not expect to hear a puppet’s neck crack.WILDERINK It is so rare that you get to do something so grisly with puppets. That’s why I love it so much. If the zebra is being attacked, the orangutan is being killed, the goat’s being killed, I love hearing the audience react to it and then be surprised by their own reaction. Because they don’t realize how invested they are until it happens. They feel the shock and the pain of the orangutan dying, and then they’re surprised by the fact that they believed it so much.DAVIS One of my favorite things that’s happened: The goat’s head came detached from the goat’s body. Something got broken in there. Through that last scene in the zoo in Pondicherry, where the goat gets brought on and shoved in the tiger cage, the puppeteer’s doing a dutiful job of keeping the body and the head attached. And then we get in there and the goat gets attacked by the tiger. As the tiger, you don’t know that the head’s come off the goat. So the neck breaks, and then you see that it’s actually disconnecting. What we decided in the moment, we left with the body, left the head on the stage. The tiger went away, came back, picked up the head and then left. We spoke to the actors afterward and they were like, “I was crying. I’m scarred from seeing that happen. Why did you do that?” I’m like, “Well, you know, it’s a tiger.”Seven puppeteers who operated from “Life of Pi” shared the Olivier Award for best supporting actor in 2022.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesI’m wondering: What did winning the Olivier mean to you?DAVIS It was really big. It’s also really validating, because I think when you’re involved with the puppetry that we’ve done over the last few years, we believe and invest in these puppet characters as much as anyone would a human character.It’s acting, yes?DAVIS It is acting. But I think a lot of the time, from an outside perspective, it cannot be considered acting or judged as harshly as acting. We want people to be looking at it and considering it worthy of criticism. That’s what was so heartening: that what we were doing was believable enough that people wanted to judge it.WILDERINK I had people from all over the world — puppeteers, puppet theater companies — contacting me on social media, saying how many waves it’s created in their communities. It felt very special on a global scale.CALDWELL It was just amazing that the industry sat up and took notice. It mainly just feels like a door opened — and an invitation to what we can do next. More

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      Review: In ‘Hang Time,’ Lynched Men Tell Finely Tuned Tales

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      Zora Howard’s new play at the Flea catches three men during a few moments of their breathless eternity.Walking into the Flea for Zora Howard’s “Hang Time” is like stepping into a horror film. Darkness pervades the black box theater, and cicadas carry on conversations in some unseen woods. A large obstruction — perhaps a statue? or installation? — interrupts the space. Then it becomes clear: Three Black men seemingly hanging from invisible ropes above an elevated round platform. Lights faintly illuminate their slumped heads and shoulders; their shadows are cast on the right wall, evoking Kara Walker’s silhouettes. You have to pass by them to get to your seat.Howard, who wrote and directed this production, certainly knows how to make an impression.In this hourlong premiere, produced by the Flea and WACO (Where Art Can Occur) Theater Center in Los Angeles in partnership with Butler Electronics, the three lynched men, named Bird (Dion Graham), Slim (Akron Watson) and Blood (Cecil Blutcher), have conversations about women, work, fatherhood and loss. The space is bare, and the play stops as suddenly as it starts — as if we’re catching just a few moments in a breathless eternity.Even though there are no visible signs of the men’s restraints, occasionally we hear the sound of ropes tightening, and the men jerk backward and stiffen into their signature pose. The limp lolls of their heads, the surfacing veins of an extended neck, even the synchronized eye movements: This dance of rigor mortis is a master work of small intricacies, even if it grows more gratuitous and less poignant with every reoccurrence.Bird, Blood and Slim are like three chapters in the life of a Black American man: Blood (as in “Young Blood”) is still coming into his own. Slim is the clown, who sings, jokes and brags about his machismo. Bird, the eldest, is the sanctimonious curmudgeon, who preaches a gospel of God, firm morals and hard work, but also has his own losses that have hardened him. Each of the perfectly cast actors manages to straddle the line between realism and the metaphorical space where “Hang Time” exists.Howard draws out every subtlety of her already fine-tuned dialogue, which renders innocuous expressions into brutal double entendres about the men’s hanging bodies (“Look at him getting all red in the face,” Slim jokes at Blood’s expense). But the men don’t just communicate with words; they also grunt, snort and chortle, and at times the wordless exclamations form their own harmony.To accentuate the emotional shifts, Megan Culley’s sound design — which brings the outside world into the space, from rustling leaves to the bellowing of a train — works in tandem with the portentous lighting (by Reza Behjat) and the script’s varied pacing and silences. And the jeans, sneakers and plaid button-down shirts (by Dominique Fawn Hill) worn by the men are discreetly shabby and tattered, so you may not notice the bullet holes and bloody tears until late.There are purposely unanswered questions, including how these men ended up here. Bird, Blood and Slim never mention their deaths; they seem only vaguely aware of their predicament. They repeat exchanges, never seem to grasp the time, and talk about the weather and their plans as if the future were someplace they could actually confront.In both this work and her captivating 2020 play “Stew,” a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, Howard writes her characters into a Möbius strip of trauma and injustice that is Black American history.And while “Hang Time” offers a work of theater that’s undoubtedly moving, it’s also too static to leave a more lasting impression. Even the absurdist purgatories and in-between spaces of Beckett, whose language has the same kind of circuitousness, take us someplace, even if we ultimately end up back where we started.“Hang Time” begins with a visual declaration of horror but, amid its chitter and chatter, never seems to finish the conversation.Hang TimeThrough April 3 at the Flea Theater, Manhattan; theflea.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      ‘Shucked’: A Broadway Musical That Doubles Down on the Corn

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      Shane McAnally’s boffo songwriting career got off to a slow start, but by 2013 he and his frequent writing partner Brandy Clark were finally having success. The Band Perry’s “Better Dig Two” and Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart,” both co-written by McAnally and Clark, reached No. 1 and No. 2 on the Billboard country chart.The songs were hits, sure, but they were also unique, especially in the vivid imagery of their lyrics, which found new ways to describe jealousy and heartache. People in Nashville took notice, including the singer Jake Owen, who offered his opinion of “Better Dig Two” and “Mama’s Broken Heart.”“He said to me, ‘Those sound like songs from musicals,’” McAnally recalled recently, sitting in a second-floor room of the Nederlander Theater in Manhattan. He viewed the comment as a backhanded compliment, and remembered thinking, “I wouldn’t even know how to write songs for a musical.”Fast forward 10 years, and McAnally and Clark are days away from the April 4 opening of their new Broadway musical at the Nederlander. The show, “Shucked,” is about a plucky small-town woman who leaves home in search of someone who can figure out why all the corn in the county keeps dying. She meets a big-city con man who’s pretending to be a podiatrist — “Corn doctor,” the sign outside his office says — who then concocts a plan to swindle the desperate farmers.The musicians Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, center row, with the director Jack O’Brien, top row, and the book writer Robert Horn. “They have the same sense of humor that I do,” Horn said of McAnally and Clark.Adam Powell for The New York TimesMcAnally and Clark, who composed the show’s music and wrote the lyrics, are two of Nashville’s most successful musicians. He’s co-written or produced 39 songs that reached No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, and she has 11 Grammy nominations. The New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica called them “two of the most in-demand and disruptive songwriters” in Nashville and “convention-tweakers in a town in thrall to its conventions.”They began writing songs about a decade ago for a different iteration of the musical, which the book writer Robert Horn had been working on since 2011. Horn, who won a Tony Award in 2019 for writing the stage adaptation of “Tootsie,” unabashedly filled “Shucked” with corn puns — the leading lady is named Maizy, she hails from Cob County, and that’s just the start of it. The show is both about corn, and corny in an audacious way.‘A show about outliers’Maybe every Broadway show takes a Mr. Magoo path to opening night, but the back story to “Shucked” features more flat tires and head-on collisions than most.It began with a brand extension. Executives at the Opry Entertainment Group, which owns the rights to “Hee Haw,” thought that the TV show’s mix of music and cornpone comedy might adapt well to the stage. The person first tasked with creating the adaptation was Horn, who’d written and produced lots of television shows, as well as the book (with Dan Elish) for the Broadway musical “13.”After making progress with the story, Horn traveled to Nashville in 2013 to meet the city’s top songwriters, including McAnally and Clark. He’d prepared a lengthy outline, but they didn’t even read it. “We want to do this,” he recalled them saying.Clark, who moved to Nashville in 1997, was just starting a sterling career as a highly acclaimed solo artist. Growing up in Washington State, she was in a community production of “The Music Man,” another show about a slick con man trying to bilk small towners. (“We have some Harold Hill going on,” she acknowledged with a laugh.)“Writing a musical was always on my bucket list,” she explained. “But I thought you had to have a music pedigree to be a Broadway composer.”And McAnally had recently become a musical theater convert after seeing his first Broadway show, “The Book of Mormon.” “It blew my mind,” he said. “I said to my husband, ‘I want to do that. But I don’t know what it is or how you do it.’”When Horn met McAnally and Clark, “it was love at first sight,” Horn said in a phone interview. “They have the same sense of humor that I do. The fact that they were proud, gay, out country artists was appealing to me, because I knew I wanted this to be a show about outliers.”Mary Johnston Rutherford, the show’s wardrobe supervisor, working on Alex Newell’s costume during a fitting. Newell’s song “Independently Owned” has been getting standing ovations during preview performances.Adam Powell for The New York TimesHorn, who gets credit (or blame) for the randy puns and dad jokes in “Shucked,” comes to his comedy honestly. His mother was Ed Sullivan’s secretary, and his grandfather, a Bell Telephone engineer who in his off hours was a vaudeville dancer, introduced him to borscht belt comedy.When Horn was a baby, his father skipped town. His mother struggled with depression, and at the age of 9, he was sent to an orphanage, where he found that making jokes sometimes kept him from being beaten up.The first version of the show was called “Moonshine: That Hee Haw Musical,” and in 2015, it ventured to Dallas. A local critic called it “cartoonish,” and Variety predicted the musical-comedy would succeed only “far from the Great White Way.” “Moonshine” was foundering, “so we had to let it go,” Horn said.Rebuilding a showWhile making “Moonshine,” Horn had grown so close to the two songwriters that after his sister died, Clark called him and said, “I’m your sister now.” None of them were ready to give up on the idea of the show, so Horn got the band back together.The Opry Entertainment Group had bowed out, so they threw away the title and all but three songs. And there was a new addition to the team: the director Jack O’Brien, who fell in love with country music in the 1980s thanks to his then boyfriend. Catching the show on the rebound, O’Brien, the only person to win Tonys for directing “Henry IV” and “Hairspray,” knew “Shucked” needed some weight. “It’s so campy it would float away,” he said.He urged the songwriters to throw out their opening number, which they loved. He proposed a new song that celebrates corn, one in which the word corn sounded “like a foghorn,” Clark recalled, and the songwriters were delighted when they realized the giddy, tone-setting result was better.When it came time to see what audiences thought, the show’s producers booked the National Theater in Washington, D.C., with a plan to open there in late 2020. But then the pandemic arrived. “It was an ill wind, in the classic sense, that brought us some good,” O’Brien said.While the creative team continued to hone the show, some of the actors, with Broadway mostly shut down, had nothing to do.“This show is what pulled me through the pandemic,” said the Broadway veteran Andrew Durand, who plays Beau, the dim and stubborn male lead, and coincidentally, spent the first 10 years of his life in Cobb County, Ga. “This is what I had to look forward to, any time I got down.”For the second attempt at an out-of-town run, the producers picked the Pioneer Theater Company in Salt Lake City, Utah, though Horn feared red-state residents would flinch at his jokes. One local reviewer said the show delivered laughs “at a staggering clip,” though another critic warned that the jokes were “a little smutty.” The Salt Lake City audiences “had some difficulty with it,” O’Brien admitted. “They pursed their lips, but I’ve never heard an audience laugh longer.”Behind the scenes at the Nederlander Theater.Adam Powell for The New York TimesThe show, in previews now, is scheduled to open April 4.Adam Powell for The New York Times“Shucked” would not be as good, he added, if not for the delay. “We have sat, as colleagues and friends, with nothing to do for three years while we turned these tender leaves over and over in our hands, thinking, ‘Maybe we can do better than that.’ We found values that it’s worthwhile to put out there.”‘Key to Humanity’The good songs and jokes in “Shucked” are so plentiful that secondary characters all have a spotlight or two. During rehearsals last month, no one got more laughs than Storyteller 2 (Grey Henson, a Tony nominee for “Mean Girls”) and Beau’s brother Peanut (Kevin Cahoon, the cast’s lone holdover from “Moonshine”), whose punch lines are nearly Dada-esque.And the showstopping number “Independently Owned” isn’t sung by one of the two lead characters, but by Maizy’s cousin Lulu (Alex Newell of “Once on This Island” and TV’s “Glee”), who shows off a remarkable range while nailing multiple tricky modulations in the song. “Alex got a standing ovation last night,” McAnally said the day after the first preview performance.It’s no spoiler to say that in Cob County, the women are smarter than the men. (“True to life, really,” Durand quipped.) Maizy (played by Caroline Innerbichler, who is making her Broadway debut) is gullible but determined and openhearted, while the worldlier Lulu is skeptical about the big-city grifter Gordy (John Behlmann of “Tootsie”) whose arrival unsettles the equilibrium in Cob County.The story line in “Shucked” is partly a corollary to the real-life relationship between Horn’s Yankee family and his husband’s Southern kinfolk. Since they learned to love one another, he says, maybe others can too.In February, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia proposed a “national divorce” between red and blue states, O’Brien told the cast: “There has never been a more important moment for this show.”During a later interview, he got specific about the musical’s worthwhile values. “Laughter is God’s miracle,” he said. “You sit in the dark with people you don’t know, and don’t want to know, and you all voluntarily expel the air out of your lungs at the exact same time. If that isn’t the key to humanity, I don’t know what is.“We don’t have a lot to laugh about right now. Sometimes I cannot look at the news anymore. It breaks my heart. So if there is surcease from sorrow, and my name is attached to it, thank God.”Broadway musicals rise or fall mostly on the strength of jokes, songs, performances and stagecraft. Apart from one good joke at the expense of Christopher Columbus, the show’s politics are not overt.“People may see it as a funny little fable, but I hope it’s more than that,” Horn said. “I’m watching laws go into effect for the gay and trans community, my brethren, and watching anti-Semitism grow in this country.”A big part of the show’s message is tolerance and love on both sides of a divide, though it’s not a #bothsides play. He hopes audiences recognize that the show has “a message of unity,” he said. “Unless you can open your heart to people who are different than you, you will never grow.”Behind the rat-a-tat pace of the jokes, “Shucked” is the work of outliers who worry that the victories for tolerance they’ve seen in their lifetimes are being reversed.The trick to songwriting in Nashville, Clark said once, was “to find your group of misfit toys.” Even through their success, she and McAnally felt as if they were censoring themselves by removing jokes and political themes to blend in on country radio.In New York, the two best friends joined an enclave where misfit toys are the rule, not the exception.“Our songwriter friends say, ‘You’re going to be Broadway rich!’ Well, I’m already Broadway rich,” McAnally said with a laugh. The payoff wasn’t the pay, but the freedom to write songs without restrictions. “Why would we go back to Nashville?” he asked. More

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      Danny and Lucy DeVito Head to Broadway With Roundabout Theater Company’s New Season

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      The actors will play a father and daughter in “I Need That,” a comedy written by Theresa Rebeck.Danny DeVito and his daughter, Lucy, will co-star in a new Theresa Rebeck play on Broadway this fall, presented by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company, which announced its 2023-2024 season on Tuesday.Roundabout said that its Broadway season would include two three-hander plays: “I Need That,” the new Rebeck play, as well as a revival of “Home,” a 1979 play by Samm-Art Williams.“I Need That” is a comedy about a widower, played by DeVito, struggling to let go of clutter after the death of his wife. Lucy DeVito will play the character’s daughter, and Ray Anthony Thomas will play his friend; the production, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, will begin performances in October at the American Airlines Theater. Von Stuelpnagel also directed Rebeck’s last Broadway play, “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” in 2018; that show was also produced by Roundabout.Danny DeVito previously starred on Broadway in “The Price,” another Roundabout production, in 2017.“I had such a great time the last time I was there, and we’re chomping at the bit to do this one,” Danny DeVito said in a joint interview with his daughter.In 2021, when many theaters were still closed, Danny and Lucy DeVito collaborated on an audio play, “I Think It’s Worth Pointing out That I’ve Been Very Serious Throughout This Entire Discussion or, Julia and Dave Are Stuck in a Tree,” by Mallory Jane Weiss, for Playing on Air. That show was directed by Von Stuelpnagel, and led to this new venture: The DeVitos said they’d be open to working with Von Stuelpnagel again, at which point he mentioned their interest to Rebeck, who wrote the new play for them. They workshopped it with a staged reading at the Dorset Theater Festival in Vermont in 2022.“It’s a very humanistic, character-driven, slice-of-life story,” Lucy DeVito said. “The themes speak to loneliness and love, and the hardships you experience with your family while getting older.”“I Need That” will be her Broadway debut.Danny and Lucy DeVito have worked together on a variety of projects: Among them, last year’s “Little Demon,” an FXX animated comedy, as well as “Curmudgeons,” a short comedic film in 2016.“Home,” which Roundabout plans to stage on Broadway next spring, is about a North Carolina farmer who is imprisoned as a draft dodger during Vietnam, and then has a series of adventures in a big city as he tries to put his life back together. The play was first staged Off Broadway by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1979 and then transferred to Broadway in 1980.“The play itself is a freshet of good will, a celebration of the indomitability of man, a call to return to the earth,” the critic Mel Gussow wrote in the Times in 1979. “In all respects — writing, direction and performance — this is one of the happiest theatrical events of the season.”The revival will be directed by Kenny Leon, one of the most prolific directors on the New York stage and a Tony Award winner for directing the 2014 revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.”Roundabout, which only staged one show on Broadway this season (a revival of “1776” that ran for three months), said it hopes to stage three next season; the third has not yet been announced.Roundabout also announced Tuesday plans to stage two plays Off Broadway next season: “The Refuge Plays,” an intergenerational family drama written by Nathan Alan Davis (“Nat Turner in Jerusalem”), and directed by Patricia McGregor (she is the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, and that theater is also associated with the production), next fall, and “Jonah,” a boarding school coming-of-age story written by Rachel Bonds (“The Lonely Few”) and directed by Danya Taymor (“Pass Over”), next spring. And it said it would produce “Covenant,” about a blues musician who may or may not have made a deal with the devil, written by York Walker and directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene and staged in its Off Off Broadway underground black box space in the fall. More

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      ‘Drinking in America’ Review: Men in a Cracked Mirror

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      After 15 years away from the stage, Andre Royo of ‘The Wire’ goes all in with an evening of Eric Bogosian monologues at the Minetta Lane Theater.Andre Royo practically glows with pleasure as he walks onstage at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. That’s the first surprise at “Drinking in America,” an evening of Eric Bogosian monologues peopled with misfits, screwups and creeps.We’re not expecting Royo’s shy smile, either, or what seems like genuinely warm feeling when he opens by telling the audience how good it is to be home, meaning both back in New York and back onstage. It has been 15 long years since this actor, a Bronx native best known for portraying the heroin addict Bubbles on the HBO series “The Wire,” has done a play.Yet it takes him just a couple of minutes of patter to forge an easy, sure connection with the crowd. And once he slips into the monologues, you can sense how attuned he is to our presence, even while he stays firmly in character. Royo understands deeply the symbiosis of theater, and it is beautiful to watch him tap into it.“Drinking in America” had its premiere in 1986, when Bogosian’s name was synonymous with provocatively hip, hetero-masculine theater. These dozen monologues are a cracked mirror held up to American men of that wealth-obsessed era, variously pursuing, embracing and rejecting the American dream. If it’s not a flattering look for them — several of Bogosian’s guys are outright Neanderthals with women — it still makes good theater, because of Bogosian’s observational acuity, and because of the fireworks that ensue when an actor is all in.Royo is all in, from the first monologue, “Journal,” a mini-comedy about the jejune reflections of a young guy on an acid trip, to the last, “Fried-Egg Deal,” about an alcoholic panhandler whose flattery of a prosperous passer-by turns to truth-telling.“If I wasn’t where I was, you couldn’t be where you was,” the panhandler says. “’Cause, you know, ’cause you can’t have a top without a bottom.”The pièce de résistance, though, is “Our Gang,” a wild ride of a comic tale about an out-of-control, drug-fueled night that spirals into rampant violence and destruction. Like characters in plays by Stephen Adly Guirgis and Mark O’Rowe, both of whom owe something to Bogosian, Royo’s narrator views it all through the lens of hilarity, and regales us accordingly.Directed by Mark Armstrong, this handsomely designed revival leans into the ’80s-ness of the script, which is peppered with boldface names of that decade. (The set is by Kristen Robinson, costumes by Sarita Fellows, lighting by Jeff Croiter, sound by John Gromada.) But Bogosian has made a few subtle changes for this Audible Theater production.In “Wired,” Royo plays a Hollywood wheeler-dealer, the kind of guy who snorts a line of cocaine and downs a generous shot of bourbon to get going in the morning. On the phone with someone who wants a big star for a project, he explains that an unnamed actor is out of the running because he has a broken hand.“He couldn’t punch out Ricky Schroder today,” the wheeler-dealer says, referring to the child star of the ’80s sitcom “Silver Spoons,” who in more recent years has made headlines as an anti-vaxxer.Schroder wasn’t the original celebrity named in that bit of dialogue, but the tweak is perfect — for practicality and snark.Other monologues are chilling. In “The Law,” a preacher rails against “satanic abortion clinics” and cultural enemies who have been brought down by gunfire and “only understand the discipline of the bullet.” In “Godhead,” a heroin addict insists he doesn’t want any part of the American dream, merely his fix.“Just let me have my taste,” he says. “Have my peace.”Throughout, Royo’s performance crackles with liveness — the kind of lightning in a bottle that Audible intends to capture on audio for wide release. You could wait for the recording. Far better, you could get yourself to the Minetta Lane and experience this show in the moment, in all of its dimensions.Drinking in AmericaThrough April 8 at Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; drinkinginamericaplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Catching Up With Hillary Clinton at “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’”

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      The former secretary of state celebrated the opening on Broadway and shared her thoughts on those drag show bans.On Sunday night, Hillary Clinton, fresh from attending the opening night of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” on Broadway at the Music Box Theater, swept into the Rosevale Cocktail Room at the Civilian Hotel on West 48th Street.As candles flickered on tables, with miniature models from productions like “Hadestown” and “Dear Evan Hansen” displayed on a back wall, a few dozen guests at the private after-party sipped glasses of white wine from the bar. Mrs. Clinton mingled among guests including David Rockwell, the architect and Tony Award-winning show designer who designed the hotel; the actress Jane Krakowski; Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s longtime aide; and the “Dancin’” director, Wayne Cilento.“I loved it,” she told Mr. Cilento, who also danced in the original 1978 production of the show. “The dancers were so charismatic and magnetic. That energy was so needed.”Mrs. Clinton had attended the opening at the invitation of Rob Russo, a co-producer on the show who has worked with her in some capacity for nearly two decades. He hardly had to twist her arm, though: Mrs. Clinton, a noted Broadway superfan, has seen numerous shows in the past few months, including “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” in July, “The Phantom of the Opera” in December and, last week, the new revival of “Some Like It Hot.”From left: Jamie DuMont, Nicole Fosse and Rob Russo. Mr. Russo, a co-producer of the show and a longtime associate of Mrs. Clinton’s, was the one to invite the former secretary of state to the show’s opening.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesSo when asked to consider the idea that a touring production of the latter show, in which two men dress as women to escape the mob, could be banned from playing in a state like Tennessee, which recently passed a law limiting “cabaret” shows, part of a wave of legislation across the country by conservative lawmakers against drag performances, Mrs. Clinton’s reaction was clear.“It’s a very sad commentary on what people think is important in our country,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I hope that it goes the way of the dinosaur because people will recognize that it’s just a political stunt.”The range of shows that could potentially be banned under such legislation — such as Shakespeare plays, in which a number of characters cross-dress; “Hairspray,” the popular musical in which the protagonist’s mother is usually played by a man in a dress; and “1776,” whose current touring company features an all-female, trans and nonbinary cast, was, she said, “absurd.”“I guess they’re going to shut the state borders to anything that is Shakespearean?” she said. “Are we going to stop exporting any kind of entertainment?”Ms. Fosse, far left, the daughter of the director-choreographer Bob Fosse, talked to a dancer in the show, Yeman Brown.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesAt around 9:10 p.m., Mrs. Clinton departed the party. Some guests followed her lead, while others moved upstairs to the Starchild Rooftop Bar & Lounge on the 27th floor, where Nicole Fosse — the daughter of the director-choreographer Bob Fosse and the actress Gwen Verdon — and Mr. Cilento, the director, were hosting a second party for the show’s creative team and cast of 22 dancers.The dancer Karli Dinardo wore a sleeveless silver gown with cutouts by the Australian designer Portia and Scarlett, while Yeman Brown donned a green Who Decides War cathedral sweatshirt with cutouts across the front. They sipped “Dancin’ Man” mocktails — roots divino bianco, cucumber, pink peppercorn and lemon-lime soda — and munched on “Fosse’s Breakfast” (granola) and shrimp cocktails furnished by waiters on silver platters. (For those with less highbrow tastes, there were also bags of M&M’s by the bar with the dancers’ names printed on them.)Karli Dinardo, a dancer in the show.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesKolton Krouse, who leads the number “Spring Chicken.”Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesKolton Krouse, a nonbinary dancer in the production whose face-slapping kicks earned a shout-out from the New York Times critic Jesse Green in his review, wore an asymmetrical black dress, gold heels, glittering gold eye shadow and bright red lipstick.“I wanted to do a modern take on Ann Reinking’s original trumpet solo dress,” they said of their sparkling one-shoulder gown.Mx. Krouse, who is among a cast of dancers that is noticeably more diverse in age, ethnicity, body type and gender presentation than a typical Fosse cast, said the best part of the new production was that “we can all be ourselves while we’re doing it.”Mr. Cilento said he purposefully sought a more diverse cast for the revival.“I did a very eclectic, really exciting group of dancers because I felt like you had to embrace the whole culture and not just make it, you know, white bread,” he said.Mx. Krouse, who leads the number “Spring Chicken” in the show, said: “It’s weird doing a show where I can be me, and it’s OK.”M&M’s celebrating the show’s opening night featured dancers’ names.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesQuick Question is a collection of dispatches from red carpets, gala dinners and other events that coax celebrities out of hiding. More