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      Laura Pels, Devoted Supporter of Nonprofit Theater, Dies at 92

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      She led a foundation that underwrote productions for numerous theater groups, as well as playwrights like Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller.Laura Pels, a leading benefactor of nonprofit theater through the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater, which has helped a multitude of companies stage plays in New York City and beyond, died on Wednesday at a hospital near her home in Manhattan. She was 92.The cause was complications of Covid-19, her daughter Juliette J. Meeus said.Ms. Pels took control of the foundation that now bears her name in a divorce settlement with the media executive Donald A. Pels.“I decided that I was going to do exactly what I wanted with it: help the theater,” she told Playbill in 1995.She did just that, diligently guiding the foundation from the 1990s until recently.“She was incredibly involved and ‘hands on,’” Hal Witt, the foundation’s former executive director and a member of the board, wrote in an email, adding that Ms. Pels had “read all of the scripts that were submitted for funding.”There were rules: Productions had to be run by accredited nonprofit theaters; a full script, along with a 500-word statement, had to be submitted; and musicals need not apply.Ms. Pels forged relationships with leading playwrights like Arthur Miller, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter, Mr. Witt said, and with artistic directors like André Bishop at Lincoln Center Theater, James Houghton at Signature Theater and Todd Haimes at the Roundabout Theater Company.Mr. Haimes, who saved the Roundabout from bankruptcy (and who died last month at 66), said in 1995 that “as traditional sources of funding are drying up, a person like Laura who will sponsor productions makes a huge difference to nonprofit theaters like ours.”He added, “The fact that Laura is a creative person who can come up with her own projects and yet doesn’t tell us how to run the company is the nicest combination one could ask for in a supporter.”Jack Brister, the foundation’s treasurer, said in an email that during his 20 years with the foundation it had granted more than $5 million to nonprofit theaters in the United States.Josette Jeanne Bernard was born on May 1, 1931, in Saint-Vivien-de-Monségur, a village near Bordeaux, France. Her parents, Raymond and Jeanne Yvette (Dauvignac) Bernard, were schoolteachers.She grew up near Bordeaux and then studied mime and acting in Paris, before she decided that the stage was not for her. (Her daughter Juliette said her mother changed her name to Laura in her 20s because she disliked Josette.)At 25, she moved to London to study English and met Adolphe Meeus, a translator for the United Nations. They married in 1956.After living for a time in Ethiopia, the couple moved to New York City and divorced in the mid-1960s.She married Mr. Pels in 1965. A communications executive, he took control of Lin Broadcasting in 1969 and served as its chairman and president for the next 20 years.Starting in the early 1980s, Mr. Pels invested heavily in cellular communications, buying up licenses from the Federal Communications Commission that became increasingly valuable as cellphone use spread. In 1989, McCaw Cellular bought a controlling interest in Lin in a deal valued at more than $3 billion. Mr. Pels’s personal profit was estimated at nearly $175 million (more than $420 million in today’s money).Not long after, The New Yorker reported that Ms. Pels and her husband had donated more than $1 million to help the actor Tony Randall start the National Actors Theater, originally out of the Belasco Theater on Broadway, to present affordable shows by playwrights like Ibsen, Chekhov and Miller.The Pelses filed for divorce in 1993, and Ms. Pels became the foundation’s leader. (Mr. Pels died in 2014.)The foundation also funded Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. And it provided educational grants to up-and-coming artists at institutions like the Juilliard School and the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.For many years Ms. Pels owned an apartment in Paris and Le Théâtre de L’Atelier in the city’s Montmartre neighborhood, which she ran with her daughter Juliette. In New York, she endowed an annual $10,000 cash prize for midcareer American playwrights for PEN America.In addition to Juliette, she is survived by another daughter, Valerie A. Pels; a son, Laurence, who is on the foundation’s board; and four grandchildren.In 1995, Roundabout staged a production of Mr. Pinter’s “Moonlight” at a newly opened 399-seat venue on West 46th Street, the Laura Pels Theater.“I thought it was an honor I didn’t deserve,” Ms. Pels said at the time. “But I realized that giving up a little anonymity could have a positive impact on the work I want to do.” More

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      Review: In ‘Dimanche,’ a Climate Emergency Comes to Stay

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      Tornadoes whoosh dinner from the table and a shark swims through a flooded living room in a clown show that brings the environmental crisis home.A clown show and a climate tragedy, “Dimanche,” a collaboration between the Belgian companies Focus and Chaliwaté, makes a comedy of the climate crisis. Absurd and nearly wordless, the brisk 75-minute show at BAM Fisher is composed of a series of vignettes. Each is a devastating example of the climate emergency, expressed playfully — with toys, puppetry, acrobatics and nifty practical effects. “Dimanche” succeeds, in its macabre, elliptical way, in bringing the issue home, with tornadoes whooshing dinner from the table and a shark swimming through a flooded living room. The catastrophe, it’s here, there, everywhere already.The play, written and directed by Julie Tenret, Sicaire Durieux and Sandrine Heyraud, who also star, begins somewhere in the Arctic Circle. As “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” plays, a three-person camera crew bump along in their van, eager to capture footage of a glacier calving. The shoot almost immediately goes awry and the crew shrinks to two. A similar disaster befalls an expertly puppeteered polar bear and her cub. (Although given that polar bears are prodigious swimmers, this sequence seems more melodramatic than likely.)In the third sequence, set in an ordinary home, the problem of warming has traveled south. A husband and wife and his mother (another remarkable puppet) swelter in their living room as several fans blow ineffectually. The heat then grows so terrible that the very furniture begins to melt, like the clocks in Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory,” imagery as disturbing as it is delightful. These moves between the camera crew, the natural world and the domestic space repeat as first a tornado and then a tsunami threaten. There are more Paul Simon songs, too. Our illusion of control over the environment, it’s slip sliding away.Simon’s lyrics aside, words are sparse in this production and entirely untranslated. (What spoken language there is, it’s in Bulgarian.) The title, the French word for Sunday, is never explained, though it suggests the late-in-the-day nature of the catastrophe. Gorgeously realized and sneakily terrifying, the play moves restively from the silly to the dreadful and back and forth again. I was told that “Dimanche” was appropriate for school-age children. This will depend on how much your children enjoy the violent, weather-related deaths that end most sequences.Is clowning, however ghastly, an appropriate response to the climate crisis? We are in our current predicament, with worse to come, because too few people have taken it seriously. But some of the current remedies (carbon offsets, tax breaks for corporations who dabble in green energy) can feel like a game, so a playful approach makes a kind of sense. I am someone who tries — recycling, composting, buying secondhand, buying less, turning off lights and appliances fanatically — even as I know how little any of my trying matters. Which can lead, on darker nights, to feelings of despair. “Dimanche” — ingenious, horrifying — suggests an alternative: Sometimes, you just have to laugh.DimancheThrough May 13 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘shadow/land’ Review: What the Storm Washes Away

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      In the play, at the Public Theater, a mother and daughter endure the devastation of Hurricane Katrina inside the bar that connects them to their pasts.There are mothers who will tell you, no matter the circumstance, exactly what’s what. Even as the sky crashes down, they’ll judge your evacuation outfit and then remind you who’s to thank that you’re still standing on two feet. In Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s “shadow/land,” which opened on Thursday at the Public Theater, that unfiltered candor is both a loving reflex and the lifeline for an endangered legacy.It’s 2005 and Hurricane Katrina is bearing down on Central City in New Orleans, but Magalee (Lizan Mitchell) has forgotten her purse inside the bar that’s belonged to her family for generations, where she and her daughter Ruth (Joniece Abbott-Pratt) dally just long enough to get trapped by the storm. Ruth is ready to cast off the club, named shadow/land, like an albatross; she wants “a bottomless, sweepin joy” that she’s not getting from tending bar, or from her husband, who’s already sheltering in the Superdome with their teenage daughter.As mother and daughter unknowingly await disaster, Magalee urges Ruth not to sell the club, though it’s a husk of what it was in its heyday. In half-lucid reveries, the 80-year-old Magalee recalls its geneology, reaching back to tenuous boom times for Black enterprise. Ruth knows the story well enough to join her mother’s refrain in a kind of call-and-response. “Learn how to desire what you already got,” Magalee bluntly says of her daughter’s hard-won inheritance.Of course, what they already have is about to be drowned in oil-black water. It’s a collision course that Dickerson-Despenza and the director Candis C. Jones render in 90 dread-filled, soul-seeking minutes, zooming in on the devastation of lives otherwise seen by outsiders only from a drone-footage distance. Behind the bar, a wall of black-and-white photos chronicle Magalee and Ruth’s ancestors, as floodwaters gurgle up through the floor and leave their survivors stranded on the bar top (set design is by Jason Ardizzone-West).As in her play “Cullud Wattah,” which explores the fallout of the Flint, Mich., water crisis, Dickerson-Despenza dramatizes the consequences of environmental racism and its disproportionate impact on Black women. “shadow/land,” which the Public Theater produced as an audio play in 2021, is a poetic excavation of memory, tracing the ripple effects of triumphs and trauma through generations. Magalee also remembers, for example, when the authorities blew up a levy that flooded poor Black neighborhoods when she was a girl. Katrina’s wrath would also hit Black residents hardest, and its aftermath reverberated long after the water receded.Dickerson-Despenza’s language is rich in lyricism and figurative association, with annotated influences in the text that include Adrienne Rich and Zora Neale Hurston. And her dialogue calls attention to, among other things, colorism, queerness and the cultural imperialism of New Orleans tourism. It may be that the play tries to take on too much, feeling at times more like a treatise than a character-driven drama, but that’s partly because so much is in danger of being lost. (“shadow/land” is her first in a planned 10-play cycle about Katrina.)Of the expressive tools that “shadow/land” deploys, the cast is the most immediate and legible. A third character, known as the grand marshal, (Christine Shepard) haunts the show’s periphery, snapping limbs in tailored and shimmering Creole finery, interjecting verse that illuminates the allure of the city’s native eroticism and proximity to death. (The movement director is Jill M. Vallery and the costumes are by Azalea Fairley.)Abbott-Pratt and Mitchell are challenged with playing characters who are held captive not only by society, but by the script, which is somewhat weighed down by the exposition inherent to oral histories. But they embody the push and pull of a mother-daughter bond with captivating ease and grace. At once imperious and fragile, Mitchell’s Magalee may not remember what she ate for breakfast, but she will never let Ruth forget the importance of honoring their predecessors, the sacrifices they made and the gifts they left behind. Who else will share their stories when the evidence gets washed away?shadow/landThrough May 28 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Oliver!’ Review: Tunes, Glorious Tunes, in a Grimly Cheerful Revival

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      The Encores! production, directed by Lear deBessonet, looks to deepen and darken a musical that resists the change. But it’s still delightful.Though the orphan boys at the workhouse are beaten regularly and fed only gruel, the sign looming above them reads “God Is Love.”That grim irony, underlining the practice of child labor in the supposedly advanced society of 19th-century London, is echoed in the spooky sounds you hear as the Encores! production of “Oliver!” begins: brass murk, woodwind rasps and stringy insectlike buzzing. Has Lionel Bart’s musical, based on the Dickens novel “Oliver Twist” and first seen on Broadway in 1963, been turned into “Sweeney Todd”?The version that opened a two-week run at City Center on Wednesday, directed by Lear deBessonet, is certainly grimmer than any “Oliver!” I’ve seen, which isn’t many; it’s seldom done professionally, for both casting and structural reasons. But the underlying high spirits of Bart’s adaptation, stuffed with tunes that are merry even when they’re sad, cannot long lie dormant. Soon the boys — a wonderfully uncloying ensemble — are bursting with mirth as they sing and dance to “Food, Glorious Food,” a number so irrepressible (with choreography by Lorin Latarro) that even a heavy concept can’t weigh it down.Which is not to say a serious approach is unwarranted. Recall that Dickens, who was himself sent to work in a boot polish factory when he was 12, refers to Oliver in the first sentence of the novel as an “item of mortality” — more a death-in-progress than a life. And Bart, at least in his lyrics, does not stint on bleakness; even the bouncy title song is violent, proposing various ugly fates for the boy who dares to ask for more food.“What will he do when he’s turned black and blue?” Mr. Bumble, the workhouse beadle, asks gleefully, in six-eight rhythm.Foreground from left: Lilli Cooper, Raúl Esparza and Pajak deliver terrific turns in Lear deBessonet’s production, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut deBessonet’s entertaining and beautifully sung production, featuring terrific turns by Lilli Cooper as the proud doxy Nancy and Raúl Esparza as the criminal den leader Fagin — as well as a touching one by Benjamin Pajak in the title role — is at this point still too muddy to be convincing as sociology, let alone drama.Partly that’s the result of the extremely short Encores! rehearsal period, which compresses what probably needs months into 12 days. The staging is sloppy in places, and the violent bits involving Bill Sikes (Tam Mutu), which in a rethinking like this should be shocking, aren’t. Spoiler alert: It appears that Nancy’s dress, not Nancy herself, is bludgeoned to death at the end.The other difficulty in reframing “Oliver!” for 2023 is built into the material. Like many musicals made from doorstop novels, it cherry-picks the plot so vigorously that what’s left can hardly support the songs. (The Encores! production uses a further abbreviated script.) Oliver’s transit from the workhouse to an undertaker’s establishment to Fagin’s hide-out, spread across eight chapters in the Dickens, takes what seems like a blink of an eye here. It becomes thin gruel indeed.And the songs themselves are problematic. Though there is barely a dud in the score, and many (like “I’d Do Anything” and “Oom-Pah-Pah”) are so hummable that the audience joins in almost subliminally, they are not so much dramatizations of the action as ditties vaguely suggested by it. “Consider Yourself,” the number in which Fagin’s pickpockets, led by the Artful Dodger (Julian Lerner), welcome Oliver to the gang, opens out illogically into a full-company number featuring buskers, laborers, flower girls and 20 extras — children from New York City schools — in a way that screams unreconstructed musical comedy.Julian Lerner, center left, as the Artful Dodger in a number with Pajak, other cast members and students.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou wouldn’t want to prevent that; there’s too much pleasure to be reaped. Bart was an untrained tune savant, a latter-day Irving Berlin; if the songs are so hummable it’s probably because his composition method was built on humming them to an amanuensis.For “Oliver!” that meant delightful numbers even where a modern musical would say none was needed. “I Shall Scream!,” served up with raucous good humor by Brad Oscar and Mary Testa as Mr. Bumble and Widow Corney, is utterly beside the point, as is “That’s Your Funeral,” a similarly bouncy number for Mr. Sowerberry and his wife (Thom Sesma and Rashidra Scott) even though they are funeral directors.However inapt as drama, and however much real estate they steal from the development of a richer plot, such songs serve an important function, like the witty prose of the novel. They make the darkness of the tale bearable, almost literally — bearing you through the story.Nor is it just the music that has that effect, though it’s always jaunty. (Except when, in songs like “Boy for Sale,” “Where Is Love?,” “Who Will Buy?” and “As Long as He Needs Me,” it’s show-stoppingly lovely.) The lyrics do similar uplifting work. Though deBessonet has referred to them as “harrowing,” that quality is often undermined by the intricate rhymes, many built on cockney pronunciations (uppity/cup o’ tea) that can’t help but produce a smile.That makes the project of darkening the show difficult. Though the busily atmospheric orchestrations by William David Brohn, created for a 1994 production at the London Palladium, expand the number of musicians to 21 from 12, I’m not sure that the originals, with more of a music-hall than a symphonic quality, didn’t match the material better. Likewise, the overlay of deBessonet’s vision sometimes obscures more than it reveals.But perhaps we do not need “Oliver!” to be a Gesamtkunstwerk. Dickens intended the tale, after all, as popular entertainment, serialized over the course of two years and highly indulgent of gaudy melodrama.Also, of course, in its presentation of Fagin, indulgent of antisemitism. Compulsively referred to as “the Jew” in the novel and often played with a prosthetic nose and a Yiddish accent in earlier productions, Fagin is an awful caricature even though Bart, born Lionel Begleiter, was Jewish.Esparza — sallow-eyed, greasy-haired and perpetually sniffly, but without prosthetics — dials that down almost to zero, though the music still bears traces of Fagin’s religion in the klezmerlike violin-and-clarinet accompaniment to the song “Reviewing the Situation” with which deBessonet thoughtfully ends this production.The song asks: “Can somebody change?” Fagin’s doubtful answer is “S’possible.”I too am doubtful about the possibility of change, at least for musicals like “Oliver!” (And keep in mind that in the Dickens, Fagin is eventually executed.) They can’t all be “Sweeney”; they don’t have the bones for it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reinvesting in what made them meaningful in the first place, if dividends of delight keep coming. For that, I’d do anything.Oliver!Through May 14 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Hong Kong Mississippi’ Review: The Bluesman Next Door

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      Wesley Du explores complex intersections of identity in a coming-of-age story about a Chinese American boy who finds escape in Black music.Wesley Du knows that a gawky Asian kid isn’t who you’d expect to wind up playing the blues. Pinkie, the character written and performed by Du in “Hong Kong Mississippi,” now running at La MaMa, in Manhattan, is 11 years old when he first hears the likes of Son House and Elmore James through the walls of the grubby San Francisco apartment he shares with his mother. They run the Chinese restaurant downstairs, but Pinkie’s wistful, adolescent mind belongs to the tunes from the club next door, with their echoes of pain and promise.Pinkie’s gravitation toward the blues, a genre defined by Black artists and legacies of racial injustice, is partly a product of circumstance and osmosis. A Chinese takeout counter abutting a music hall is typical of the Tenderloin district in the 1990s, when Du was listening to Michael Jackson on the radio and absorbing style cues from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” But Pinkie also describes “a certain oddness in being raised Chinese American” that generates his organic affinity with Black artists as fellow outsiders and their vibrant means of expression.When it comes to wooing girls, for example, he comically borrows a touch of hip-hop swagger; and when a woman grinds down his spirit, he channels his pain into soulful music, guitar strings offering a kind of transcendence. That woman, Pinkie’s formative heartbreaker, is his mother, affectionately played by Du with a lilting accent. Pinkie reveres her as his only family, but she sours on her son and his impractical pursuit of music. Pinkie’s unlikely father figure is a gruff bluesman next door known as Cannonball, who at first tries to dismiss him in a flurry of racially modified expletives before eventually becoming his mentor (the play is titled after Pinkie’s stage name).Du — who writes in the program that he was expelled from a playwright program at the University of California, Los Angeles, and now works as a therapist — is a deft and intuitive storyteller, crafting a witty and tender coming-of-age story in concise, vivid detail. Du’s rapport with the audience, as he plays more than a dozen characters in 75 minutes, favors high-fives over confessional hand-wringing, in the manner of a neighborhood kid shooting the breeze. In his writing, Du traces complex intersections of identity with easy assurance, allowing psychological weight to accumulate rather than spelling it out for emphasis.The director Craig Belknap finds ingenuity in simplicity, as with a dishcloth that, at one point, is wadded up into a basketball then later flattened against the waist into a too-tight dress. Fluid, vibe-setting lighting (by Eric Norbury), in Chinese reds and jazz club blues, and cleverly expressive sound (by Bill Froggatt) make the small black box theater fantastically versatile. Like Pinkie’s own escape into the blues, “Hong Kong Mississippi” proves what artists can do with modest means but an abundance of passion, pluck and reasons to play.Hong Kong MississippiThrough May 14 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Robert Patrick, Early, and Prolific, Playwright of Gay Life, Dies at 85

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      He got his start at Caffe Cino, the birthplace of Off Off Broadway. His first of many, many plays, performed there in 1964, is a milestone of gay theater.Robert Patrick, a wildly prolific playwright who rendered gay (and straight) life with caustic wit, an open heart and fizzy camp, and whose 1964 play, “The Haunted Host,” became a touchstone of early gay theater, died on April 23 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.The cause was atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, said Jason Jenn, a friend.Mr. Patrick’s story is intertwined with that of Caffe Cino, the West Village coffee shop that was the accidental birthplace of Off Off Broadway theater. One day in 1961, a 24-year-old Mr. Patrick followed a cute boy with long hair into the place, where the playwrights John Guare, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson and, soon, Mr. Patrick, all got their starts; the cute boy was John P. Dodd, who went on to be a well-known lighting designer and die of AIDS in 1991.The cafe, run by a former dancer named Joe Cino, was scrappy, original and unpretentious, decorated with tinsel and silver stars that hung from the ceiling. Actors performed among the tables and chairs until they built a small stage. No one was paid, except the cops, because Mr. Cino was not just running an unlicensed cabaret but also a gay hangout, which was illegal in the early 1960s. Its young playwrights, particularly Mr. Patrick, churned out plays, playlets and monologues akin to TikToks, Don Shewey, the author and theater critic, said in a phone interview. As Mr. Patrick told Broadway World in 2004: “We wrote for each other, and it turned out there was an audience that, without knowing it, had been dying for personal, political, philosophical theater. And a few years after the Cino began doing original plays, there were over 300 Off Off Broadway theaters.”Actors performing at Caffe Cino in 1961. Mr. Patrick’s story is intertwined with that of that West Village coffee shop, the accidental birthplace of Off Off Broadway theater.Ben Martin/Getty ImagesMr. Patrick worked at the cafe as a doorman, a dishwasher and a waiter before writing his first play, “The Haunted Host.” It features Jay, a gay playwright who is haunted by the ghost of his lover, who died by suicide. Frank, a hustler who happens to be straight, wants help with a play and needs a place to spend the night.The dialogue is tart and snappy, as Jay rebuffs the young man and his work, razzes him about his sexuality — “Tell me, Frank, how long have you been heterosexual? Started as a kid, huh? Tsk-tsk” — and finally throws him out in the morning and in so doing exorcises the ghost.Early in the play, when Frank asks Jay how his lover died, Jay answers curtly, “Alone.”“Oh. Suicide?” Frank asks, to which Jay replies, “No, thanks, I just had one.”The play was not exactly a runaway hit in 1964, but it found new life in 1976, when it was revived in Boston with a very young Harvey Fierstein in the lead role. Mr. Fierstein reprised it again in 1991, at La MaMa in the East Village.“All these years later,” Howard Kissel wrote in his review for The Daily News, “‘Host’ has taken on a certain poignancy. It predates the gay rights movement and AIDS. It radiates an innocence no longer attainable.”Its significance was recognized in hindsight as an early example of a work with a gay person as the hero, and with themes that were universal: love, grief, self-respect.“It was so much before its time,” Mr. Fierstein said in a phone interview. “Here you have a play where the strange person, the bizarre person, the person who was the antagonist, was the heterosexual. The normal person, the one with real emotion and real love, was the gay character. We forget our history, and now we have people who want to erase our history. This is why Robert’s work is so important.”Harvey Fierstein, right, and Jason Workman in La MaMa’s 1991 revival of “The Haunted Host,” Mr. Patrick’s 1964 play that became a touchstone of gay theater. La MaMa archivesMr. Cino died by suicide in 1967, and Caffe Cino limped along for a year afterward. Mr. Patrick kept writing, and writing. Over the decades he wrote hundreds of plays as well as countless songs, poems and short stories, a memoir and at least one novel.“They just poured out of him,” Mr. Fierstein said.One work, many years in the making, was “Kennedy’s Children,” an affecting drama set in a bar on the Bowery one Valentine’s Day in the early 1970s. Five characters, including a disillusioned actor who was a proxy for Mr. Patrick, declaim their isolation and anomie in monologues that ruminate on the legacy of the ’60s — its failed promise and heartbreak.Mr. Patrick began working on the play in 1968. It was first produced in 1973 at Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan, but, as Mr. Patrick said, nobody came and nobody reviewed it. It then made its way to a tiny theater in London and had runs in similar small theaters around the world before returning to London and opening to great acclaim in the West End, followed by a Broadway production in 1975, for which the actress Shirley Knight won a Tony.“The wit is as hard as nails and as sharp,” Clive Barnes of The New York Times wrote in his review. “Mr. Patrick hears well and writes so colloquially, so idiomatically, that you could actually be eavesdropping on the drunken but revealing, paranoid but illuminating meanderings of the barstool set of bad cafe society.”Later work included “T-Shirts” (1980), which Mr. Shewey, in his review for The Soho News, described as a comic romp about the gay generation gap as well as “a schematic attack on the values of the gay male world, charging that money, youth and beauty have become as interchangeable as, well, T-shirts.”“Blue Is for Boys” (1987) is a nutty farce about an apartment converted into a dorm for gay male college students. “Camera Obscura,” a playlet about a boy and a girl who struggle to communicate, was first performed at Caffe Cino in 1966 and became a staple of high school drama festivals and regional theaters.For a while, Mr. Patrick was known, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, as the world’s most produced playwright, with his work performed at small theaters in Minneapolis, Toronto, Vienna, Brazil and New Zealand, often all at the same time. In 1978, The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported, “Certain works, such as ‘Kennedy’s Children’ and ‘Camera Obscura,’ are quite probably being done somewhere every day of the year.”For a while, Mr. Patrick was known, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, as the world’s most produced playwright. Becket LoganRobert Patrick O’Connor was born on Sept. 27, 1937, in Kilgore, in eastern Texas. His parents, Robert and Jo Adelle (Goodson) O’Conner, were itinerant workers who moved constantly throughout the Southwest. The family lived in tents, Mr. Patrick said, until he was 6. He recalled attending 12 schools in one year.He spent two years in college before joining the Air Force because he had fallen in love with a “flyboy,” he said. He was kicked out during basic training, however, when a love poem he had written to the airman was found in the man’s wallet. As Mr. Patrick told it, it was discovered during an Air Force sting operation in the restroom of a local hotel that gay servicemen were using as a rendezvous spot. Mr. Patrick’s love poem was for naught anyway; the man had already ditched him, he wrote, for a captain with a Cadillac.Mr. Patrick never stopped writing plays, but in later years he paid the rent by working as a ghost writer and as an usher for the Ford Theater in Los Angeles, where he moved in the 1990s; he also wrote reviews of pornographic movies. For the last decade or so, he performed a cabaret act at Planet Queer, a riotous variety show held weekly at a bar in Los Angeles.He is survived by his sister, Angela Patrice Musick.In 2014, Henrik Eger of The Seattle Gay News asked Mr. Patrick if there was anything he hadn’t yet done but wished he had.“True love,” he said. “And I would like to have the money to build or buy a theater in L.A. with enough ground space that I could call it Robert Patrick’s Free Parking Theater, because in L.A. the theater would fill up for every performance no matter what show was on, just because of the magic words ‘Free Parking.’ Then I could do whatever plays I liked.” More

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      As Broadway Rebounds, ‘Some Like It Hot’ Gets 13 Tony Nominations

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      As Broadway’s rebound from the pandemic shutdown picks up pace, Tony nominators showered much-sought attention on a wide variety of shows, from razzle-dazzle spectacles to quirky adventurous fare.“Some Like It Hot,” a musical based on the classic Billy Wilder film about two musicians who witness a gangland slaying and dress as women to escape the mob, scored the most nominations: 13. But it faces stiff competition in the race for best new musical — ticket buyers have not made any of the contenders a slam-dunk hit, and there does not appear to be a consensus among the industry insiders who make up the Tony voting pool.Three other musicals picked up nine nominations apiece: “& Juliet,” which combines pop songs with an alternative narrative arc for Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers; “New York, New York,” a dance-driven show about a pair of young musicians seeking success and love in a postwar city; and “Shucked,” a pun-laden country comedy about a rural community facing a corn crisis. “Kimberly Akimbo,” a critical favorite about a high school student with a life-altering genetic condition and a criminally dysfunctional family, picked up eight nominations.The Tony nominations also feature plenty of boldfaced names. Among the stars from the worlds of pop music, film and television who earned nods are Sara Bareilles, Jessica Chastain, Jodie Comer, Josh Groban, Sean Hayes, Samuel L. Jackson, Wendell Pierce and Ben Platt. Another went to one of Broadway’s most-admired stars: Audra McDonald, who, with nine previous nominations and six wins, has won the most competitive Tony Awards of any performer in history.The musical “Shucked,” the rare Broadway show about corn, got nine nominations. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s Tony Awards come at the end of the first full-length season since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close for about a year and a half. Given that tourism remains below prepandemic levels, many workers have not returned to Midtown offices, and inflation has made producing far more expensive, the season has been surprisingly robust, with a wide range of offerings.“Entertainment is like food — sometimes you’re in the mood for an organic small plate, and sometimes for a burger and fries, and the best thing about New York is we’ve got the variety,” said Victoria Clark, the Tony-nominated star of “Kimberly Akimbo.”Broadway shows this season had grossed $1.48 billion as of April 30, according to figures released Tuesday by the Broadway League. That’s nearly double the grosses at the same point last season — $751 million — but lower than the $1.72 billion at the same point in 2019, during the last full prepandemic season.Other key metrics are better, too: 11.5 million seats have been filled on Broadway this season, compared with 6 million at the same point last season, but still down from the 13.8 million that had been filled by this point in 2019.The Tony nominations, which were chosen by a panel of 40 theater industry experts who saw all 38 eligible shows and have no financial interest in any of them, are particularly important to shows that are still running, which try to use the vote of confidence to woo potential ticket buyers.“It’s all about what’s going to make a show run longer and create more jobs for more people,” said Casey Nicholaw, the director and choreographer of “Some Like It Hot.” “Hopefully we’ll sell more tickets, and the show will be more of a success.”The Tony nominations can also boost the employment prospects, and the compensation, of artists. And, of course, they are a tribute to excellence. “It means something when your peers and your colleagues see beauty in something you make,” said James Ijames, whose play “Fat Ham” was among the nominated productions.“Between Riverside and Crazy” was among the nominees for best new play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway is a complicated place, dominated by commercial producers but also with six theaters run by nonprofits, and the work this season, as is often the case, featured everything from experimental plays tackling challenging subjects to more mainstream fare that aims primarily to entertain.Among the five nominees for best new play, three have already won the Pulitzer Prize in drama, including “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s story of a retired police officer trying to hang onto his apartment; “Cost of Living,” Martyna Majok’s exploration of caregiving and disability; and “Fat Ham,” Ijames’s riff on “Hamlet,” set in the North Carolina backyard of a family that runs a barbecue restaurant.The two other Tony-nominated plays are each significant in their own ways: “Leopoldstadt” is Tom Stoppard’s autobiographically inspired drama about a European Jewish family before, during and after World War II, while “Ain’t No Mo’” is Jordan E. Cooper’s outlandish comedy imagining that the United States offers its Black residents one-way tickets to Africa.The nominations for “Ain’t No Mo’” were especially striking given that the show struggled to find an audience and closed early. “I’m just so elated, I can barely find the words,” said Cooper, who was nominated both as writer and actor. “There was a lot of turbulence, but we landed the plane.”Stoppard is already the winningest playwright in Broadway history, having won Tony Awards for four previous plays (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia”). He is now 85 years old, and “Leopoldstadt” is his 19th production on Broadway. Stoppard said he was proud of the nomination, but sorry the play had come to seem so timely at a moment of rising concern about antisemitism.“Nobody wants society to be divided,” he said in an interview, “and I like to think ‘Leopoldstadt’ works against a sense of human beings dividing up and confronting each other.”Jordan E. Cooper in his comedy “Ain’t No Mo’,” which was nominated for best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOf the 38 Tony-eligible plays and musicals this season, 27 scored at least one nomination, leaving 11 with no nods. Among the musicals snubbed by the nominators were “Bad Cinderella,” the critically drubbed new musical from one of the most successful musical theater composers of all time, Andrew Lloyd Webber, as well as a progressive rethink of “1776,” about the debate over the Declaration of Independence, which was revived with a cast of women, nonbinary and transgender performers.One of the musicals that did not score any nominations, a revival of “Dancin’,” quickly declared plans to close: A little more than nine hours after the Tony nominations were announced, the revue’s producers said its last performance would be May 14. Among the seven plays shut out was “The Thanksgiving Play,” which is thought to be the first work on Broadway by a female Native American playwright, Larissa FastHorse.The season featured shows examining a wide variety of diverse stories, and the nominations reflect that.At a time when gender identity issues have become increasingly politicized in the nation, nominations were earned by two gender nonconforming actors: J. Harrison Ghee, a star of “Some Like It Hot,” and Alex Newell, a supporting actor in “Shucked.”Helen Park, who is the first Asian American female composer on Broadway, was nominated in the best score category for the musical “KPOP.” “The more authentic we are to our respective cultures and stories,” she said, “the richer the Broadway soundscape and Broadway landscape will be.”Five plays by Black writers were nominated in either the best play or best play revival category, and four of the five nominees for leading actor in a play are Black.“I broke down in tears,” Pierce said about learning that he was among those nominees, for playing Willy Loman in a revival of “Death of a Salesman” in which the traditionally white Loman family is now African American. “I did not know how profoundly moving it would be. It was the culmination of years of hard work and a reflection on how much effort and toil went into the challenge of playing the role.”This was a strong season for musical revivals, and the nominated shows include two with scores by Stephen Sondheim — “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd” — as well as the Golden Age classic “Camelot” and “Parade,” which is a show about the early 20th-century lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia.“Into the Woods” was one of two Stephen Sondheim revivals to earn nominations.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“We’re so happy audiences are taking to it, and we hope that Sondheim would be happy this morning as well,” said Groban, starring as the title character in “Sweeney Todd.”The nominated play revivals are also a compelling bunch: a hypnotically minimalist version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” adapted by Amy Herzog and starring Chastain as a Norwegian debtor trapped in a sexist marriage; a bracing production of Suzan Lori-Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” about two brothers ominously named Lincoln and Booth; a rare staging of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” featuring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan; and a ghostly performance of “The Piano Lesson,” August Wilson’s classic drama about a family wrestling with the meaning, and monetary value, of an heirloom.The 769 Tony voters now have until early June to catch up on shows they have not yet seen before they cast their electronic ballots. The awards ceremony itself will be held on June 11 at the United Palace in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in a ceremony hosted by Ariana DeBose.Julia Jacobs More