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      New Ohio Theater Announces It Will Close After Three Decades

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      Robert Lyons, the founding artistic director, said it was time for a new generation to take over the West Village stage.At a time when theaters are struggling to reach prepandemic audience levels, the New Ohio Theater, a staple for artists and independent theater companies for 30 years, announced it would present its final Manhattan performance in August.The shifting theater landscape and increased financial pressures led to the decision, said the founding artistic director, Robert Lyons, who is also a playwright and director. “It’s just a good time to step aside and pass the baton,” he added, explaining that he envisioned a new generation taking on the space.The closing will end programs like the Ice Factory, Now in Process, Theater for Young Minds, New Ohio Presents and New Ohio Hosts. The Archive Residency program will conclude in the spring of 2024.The theater, originally known as the Ohio Theater and located off Wooster Street in SoHo, was founded as a nonprofit in 1993, and before that provided a shared space for independent companies and artists to brainstorm and perform. In 2011, the company moved to 154 Christopher Street in the West Village as the New Ohio Theater, and continued to operate as a hub for independent theater. Over time, New Ohio oversaw a renovation project at the theater that included the installation of a new sprung stage, new risers, an HVAC system and a bathroom in the dressing room.For 16 years, Edward Einhorn, the artistic director of the Untitled Theater Company No. 61, has collaborated with the theater; he plans to present his absurdist dark comedy “The Shylock and the Shakespeareans” there in June. Einhorn said theaters like the New Ohio have been essential to the development of indie performance works since the late ’90s.“I’m slowly losing my homes,” Einhorn said. “There are a few left, but it’s a hard time still, hard to get audiences, hard to know what to do next.”The “Moulin Rouge!” director Alex Timbers and the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin are among those who worked at the theater early in their careers.Kristin Marting, the founding artistic director of HERE Arts Center, who was part of a company that booked a season at the theater when she was 21, said it was the first theater she worked in. Marting said it greenlighted less conventional works, like an immersive “Alice in Wonderland” she directed in the late ’80s, and served as a sanctuary for generations of emerging theater makers.The plan is to reserve the 74-seat space for use by nonprofit companies. The building’s landlord, Rockrose Development, will accept proposals from theater companies looking for a home beginning Wednesday.Marting said the New Ohio would be sorely missed.“I hope that the new entity that comes in embraces the same level of experimentation and inclusion and invites a broad spectrum of the community to make work,” she said. More

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      Book Review: ‘Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?” by Craig Seligman

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      WHO DOES THAT BITCH THINK SHE IS? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag, by Craig SeligmanFrom wee-hours cabaret to prime-time reality TV to fiercely contended children’s story hour at the local library, the American drag queen’s journey has been a long and bumpy one.For Doris Fish, alter ego of Philip Clargo Mills, it began not in America but Manly Vale, an apt-sounding suburb of Sydney, Australia,and ended in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco, 1991 — with resurrection, one source maintains, as a ghost composed variously of golden sparks and Evian water.I had not known of Fish before reading the journalist Craig Seligman’s minutely observed new biography of him (though some friends used the female pronoun, “he never wanted to be a woman — he never even wanted to seem like a woman,” the author writes). I finished it persuaded this was a life well worth examining, if only because his peers are so often celebrated, or excoriated, in aggregate.Most of Fish’s performances are unrecoverable, but those that can be scratched up are indelible. Best known, in a limited way, is probably “Vegas in Space,” a posthumously released and deeply weird 1991 sci-fi comedy about male earthlings who undergo sex-change operations so they can travel to a female-only planet (something about recovering stolen jewels…).Promoting the movie during its production period on a Pittsburgh morning show in 1986, Fish gamely endures being treated like a talking zoo animal by the gawking hosts and awkwardly grinning housewives. There’s also a choppy video out there of his swan song, “This Is My Life,” fervidly performed in a caftan and satin gloves at the benefit from which the book takes its name. He was months from death.Born in 1952, Philip was the middle child of six in a tolerant Catholic family that permitted a marijuana plant on the premises. He played a high-kicking chorus girl under a priest’s tutelage at his all-boy school’s year-end musical with more enthusiasm than most of his classmates. Remarkably indifferent to the prospect of arrest or social censure, he joined a local troupe called Sylvia and the Synthetics whose outré antics had me scrawling exclamation points in the margins.One female impersonator’s considerable male member was tucked through his legs to simulate a tail. Another pinned back her hair with swastikas. Another bit into a dripping sheep’s heart to punctuate a lovelorn ballad, blood dripping onto her ball gown like one of the less tasteful Valentine’s Day bitmojis. There were flash mobs of Marilyn Monroe impersonators and teetering pyramids of performers on quaaludes. “Everything was permitted,” Seligman writes dryly, “including ineptitude.”After working for the Florence Broadhurst wallpaper factory, from which he filched metallic powders for his cosmetics, Philip/Doris moved to San Francisco, money sewn into his pockets by his loving mother, Mildred, and found his true calling. Mostly this was what was then called prostitution, though in Fish’s hands it seems more like a kind of sexual nursing. He specialized in relations with those society often rejected, the obese or infirm. (There was a green-card marriage to a lesbian, one of the few survivors of his circle who declined to be interviewed here.)He acted as “comedy model” for a greeting-card company called West Graphic, portraits that Seligman compares to the work of Cindy Sherman. He wrote a popular column for The San Francisco Sentinel, then an essential gay weekly. And he performed in a group called Sluts a-Go-Go, emulating faded stars of the ’30s and ’40s while occasionally brushing up against rising ones of the period (Robin Williams, Lynda Carter). The Sluts and their associates were equal-opportunity offenders, doing racial as well as gender impressions, spewing double entendre and sometimes seeming to positively assault their audiences with sensory overload, exaggerated glamour and flagrant disregard for safety codes.Though revolutionary in his in-your-faceness, Fish was not particularly political; the sincerity such activity requires was anathema. One of the more intriguing aspects of his foreshortened life was an attitude described here as Romantic Cruelism: a pose of complete indifference or dark humor even in the face of tragedy.Fish displays it when his parents divorce; when a younger sister dies after a mysterious illness; and when one Synthetic, who had been a childhood friend, perishes in a fire: “Burnt to a cinder in a room full of exotic drag. All they found was a tooth,” as Spurt!, a local punk zine, callously memorialized. “The young don’t know what to do with endings,” Seligman writes, and there were so many more to come.“Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?” revisits and draws from a 1986 profile of Fish that Seligman wrote for skittish editors at Image magazine, a weekend section of The San Francisco Examiner. Aside from overuse of the words “notoriety” and “notorious,” it is confidently written, wistful and quite personal; Seligman’s now-husband, Silvana Nova, was part of Fish’s scene.The author of a previous book comparing Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag, Seligman diverts here and there to Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp,’” but spends most of his time simply retracing Fish’s footsteps. At times these seem akin to the old Hans Christian Andersen version of “The Little Mermaid,” whose heroine is granted the power to walk out of the water, but only with the pain of swords going through her. (In one parade, Fish’s elaborate costume included fiberglass “legs” that drew blood from his own, covering the stains with black tights.)Seligman’s own stance is mostly one of wary wonderment, that drag queens have gone from “totally beyond the pale” to mainstream acknowledgment, “from feared freak into object of fascination,” from the shaky spotlight to — however contentiously — the kindergarten rug. He piles a lot of historical weight on Fish’s shoulders, but his subject carries it like Joan Crawford in a padded Adrian frock.WHO DOES THAT BITCH THINK SHE IS? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag | By Craig Seligman | Illustrated | 352 pp. | PublicAffairs | $29 More

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      For Burt Bacharach, ‘Promises, Promises’ Was One Broadway Hit Too Many

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      The perfectionist composer was content with being a one-hit musical-theater wonder, calling the experience the hardest thing he had ever done.In the late 1960s, when Broadway show tunes and popular music were veering in opposite directions, the producer David Merrick, one of the most hidebound curmudgeons on Broadway, reached out to one of the most successful American pop composers of the time: Burt Bacharach.Bacharach (who died on Feb. 8 at age 94) already had more than a dozen international hits with his lyricist partner, Hal David, including “Walk on By,” “Alfie,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “The Look of Love.” That last song was introduced in the spy parody “Casino Royale,” and, in fact, Bacharach had met Merrick at that movie’s London premiere in 1967. They agreed to work together if the right project came along.Bacharach wasn’t exactly bedazzled by the bright lights of Broadway. “When I was getting successful with pop songs, and having hits, there wasn’t something burning inside me that said, “Boy, I need to write a Broadway show,’” he said in an interview for the 1985 book “Notes on Broadway.” “I was quite content being in the studio and making my records.”It just so happens that when Merrick eventually wrangled the playwright Neil Simon to adapt Billy Wilder’s 1960 Academy Award-winning film “The Apartment” as a musical, it was Simon who pushed for Bacharach and David, as he wanted to update the material and incorporate a sound that might reach contemporary audiences. “Promises, Promises,” as the show would be called, centered on a well-meaning milquetoast accountant in a New York insurance firm who essentially pimps out his apartment to his superiors in exchange — so he is promised — for a series of promotions. Merrick, a master of the Show for Tired Businessmen (“Do Re Mi,” “Hello, Dolly!,” “How Now, Dow Jones”), assembled the perfect team for a show about tired businessmen.The material was beautifully tailored for Bacharach and David’s sensibilities — urban, witty, rueful, alienated but passionate — and the songwriters were faithful to the tone of Simon’s book: a savvy mix of wisecracks, romantic heartbreak and contemporary satire.But one early aspect of this collaboration was telling: While Simon and David crafted the text together in New York, Bacharach remained deeply involved with other studio projects in Hollywood, setting his music to David’s lyrics from afar. He would not arrive in New York until September 1968, with the first Broadway preview just two months away.Orbach, background center, in one of the “Promises, Promises” production numbers. He won a Tony Award for playing the nebbish accountant, Chuck.Getty ImagesDespite the distance, Bacharach was already demonstrating how his command of the pop charts could pay dividends — even before the show went into rehearsals. “I thought it would be great if the music came out a couple of months before, so [theater audiences] would have some familiarity with the work,” he recounted in the liner notes to a 1989 three-CD set of his music. His eternal muse, Dionne Warwick, recorded two songs from the incipient score, while Bacharach worked his usual meticulous magic in the protected confines of the recording studio, getting his complicated rhythms just right. Warwick’s single of the “Promises, Promises” title number hit No. 19 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.“As musicals go, it couldn’t have been easier,” Bacharach recalled in “Notes on Broadway.” “The financing, getting it done, getting it in the theater — it just went with lightning speed.”Then came the November tryout in Boston, where Merrick’s usual boorish behavior was on display. He apparently demanded a hit song for the second act, so that the nebbish hero, Chuck, could connect romantically (however tenuously) with Fran, the elevator operator for whom he pines.Bacharach would have gladly obliged, but he was sent to Massachusetts General with pneumonia. Merrick stomped around and cursed the songwriters and supposedly threatened to hire Leonard Bernstein to replace them, but David beavered away and came up with wistful lyrics to a duet called “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” He even incorporated Bacharach’s malady: “What do you get when you kiss a guy?/You get enough germs to catch pneumonia./After you do/he’ll never phone ya.”When he was released from the hospital, Bacharach found the melody to match the malady: “Maybe because I was still not feeling all that well, I wrote the melody faster than I had ever written any song before in my life,” Bacharach wrote in his 2013 memoir, “Anyone Who Had a Heart.”Ahead of the New York opening, Bacharach wanted a sound more like what he was used to in a recording studio, so he brought in his frequent recording engineer Phil Ramone and had the Shubert Theater’s sound system redesigned. The orchestra was divided into small groupings (separated by fiberglass panels), each surrounding a microphone that would relay the sound to be mixed live at the back of the theater. And the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick (in one of his first Broadway jobs) added two guitars — one acoustic, one electric — and a quartet of female singers, billed as Orchestra Voices. The technical virtuosity of these innovations unnerved Merrick so much that, according to a New York Times article about the arrangements, he admonished Ramone and Bacharach: “I don’t want the audience walking out of the theater saying, ‘It’s a recording.’”But even Merrick fell in love again after “Promises, Promises” opened on Dec. 1, 1968, to rapturous reviews. On opening night, he told a reporter that Bacharach was “the first original American composer since Gershwin.” In an article in The Times, John S. Wilson wrote, “The tight Bacharachian rhythmic patterns keep bouncing around in your head as you walk into the night, songless but pulsing with a busy little beat.”Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises” at the Broadway Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut the experience didn’t make Broadway burn any brighter inside Bacharach. “Somehow I lived through it, and I’m still alive,” he told Rex Reed in a Times interview before the show opened. “But this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m wiped out by this show, man. I’ll be in Palm Springs on Wednesday.” And he was as good as his word — joining his wife, the actress Angie Dickinson, in a newly-rented desert home with a tennis court and a swimming pool.A week or so later, a phone call to Palm Springs from Merrick confirmed that there were limits to what Bacharach could control in a live production, eight times a week. “He called me and said ‘Eight subs [substitute players] in the orchestra last night, including the drummer’ and guess who was in the audience? Richard Rodgers! This great, great composer. Richard Rodgers!,” he recounted in “Notes on Broadway.” “It made me feel just terrible, because my music is not that easy to play. A song like ‘Promises, Promises’ changes time signature in almost every bar. And I’ve got … a drummer who’s sight-reading, who’s never played it before.”“Promises, Promises” was hardly an irreparable disappointment for Bacharach: The original Broadway production ran for 1,281 performances (and Jerry Orbach, who played the accountant, won a Tony Award for the role); there was a robust West End run; and a Broadway revival (sized and trimmed for contemporary tastes) in 2010 starred Kristin Chenoweth and Sean Hayes. And “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” would become a smash single for Warwick in 1970, hitting No. 1 on Billboard’s adult contemporary chart; it would also be the last time a song originating on Broadway reached the top spot on any of the Billboard charts.That was probably cold comfort to Bacharach. Looking back on his Broadway experience for the CD liner notes decades later, he was definitive: “If you’re doing a musical, it’s going to change every night,” he wrote. “If you’re doing something on record, it doesn’t get changed every night. So that’s what I prefer to do.”David, also quoted in the liner notes, said about his collaborator and the reality of Broadway: “If you’re a perfectionist, it can drive you crazy.”Sixteen months after “Promises” opened, Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” arrived on Broadway and the modernity of its sound would have been unthinkable without Bacharach’s innovations. Indeed, many of them were reintroduced by Tunick, the “Promises” orchestrator, when he took on the orchestrations for “Company.”“If I were hearing ‘Another Hundred People’ for the first time,” the music critic Will Friedwald said in an interview for this article, “I would have guessed it was Bacharach and not Sondheim.”Chenoweth with Bacharach, far right, and Simon, center, at the curtain call for the revival’s opening night performance in April 2010.Charles Sykes/Associated PressBacharach was initially philosophical about “Promises, Promises” — “If we knocked down a few doors with my rhythms or the new sound in the show, great,” he told Reed — but the theatrical magic he created for his only Broadway score is so apposite and hip and melancholy and sweet that it makes one ache for what might have been.Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at New York University. His latest book, “I’ll Drink to That! Broadway’s Legendary Stars, Classic Shows, and the Cocktails They Inspired,” will be published in May. More

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      in Movies

      Sandra Seacat, Much Admired Acting Coach, Dies at 86

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      She helped Laura Dern, Marlo Thomas, Mickey Rourke and many others overcome fears, find their characters and discover “the joy of acting.”Sandra Seacat, who had a modest career as an actress and a formidable one as an acting coach, putting her own spin on techniques she had learned under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio to help Laura Dern, Marlo Thomas, Mickey Rourke and numerous other stars achieve some of their best performances, died on Jan. 17 in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 86.Her husband, Thurn Hoffman, said the cause was primary biliary cholangitis, an autoimmune disease.Ms. Seacat joined the Actors Studio in the early 1960s, when Mr. Strasberg was the artistic director and imparting the rehearsal and acting techniques often called simply the Method. Before long she began leading classes, and her reputation as an acting coach started to grow.By the early 1980s she was applying the psychiatrist Carl Jung’s theories about dreams and the unconscious to her coaching, helping students use their dreams to illuminate their own feelings and the characters they were developing, a technique called “dream work.”“The artist is a shaman, a wounded healer,” Ms. Seacat said in a 2015 video interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “We have wounds that we want to bring forth through the material. It’s joyful, it’s painful, but not painful in a bad way. And when you do that you also heal people in the audience.”Actors who worked with her echoed that sense.“The work was our bond,” Marlo Thomas, for whom Ms. Seacat was a coach, teacher and mentor for more than 40 years, said by email. “She taught me to seek the truth in myself, to heal my wounds and those of the audience. She changed me as a human being, teaching me to cast off my protective armor and see the world as a baby might see it, feeling and experiencing it for the first time.”Ms. Thomas’s career had for years been defined by her role in the 1960s sitcom “That Girl,” but Ms. Seacat helped her branch out, leading to more substantial parts and an Emmy Award for outstanding lead actress for her role as a woman who had spent years in a mental institution in the television movie “Nobody’s Child” (1986).Peggy Lipton had also achieved some 1960s TV fame, as one of the stars of the crime show “The Mod Squad,” but she then stepped away from acting for years to raise her children. By the late 1980s she was thinking about returning, but, she told The Los Angeles Times in 1993, “it was very scary.”She joined one of Ms. Seacat’s classes, nervous at first. “I used to sit under the table near the door,” she said, “so if she ever called on me I could get out.”But, she said, Ms. Seacat eventually helped her break through the fear. Ms. Lipton, who died in 2019, went on to accumulate dozens more TV and film credits, most memorably as the diner owner Norma Jennings on the trendy series “Twin Peaks” and its sequels.Mickey Rourke had done little acting — he had been an amateur boxer — before he arrived in New York in the 1970s and eventually began working with Ms. Seacat. He has often credited her with helping him to get serious about the craft of acting, leading to attention-getting roles in the 1980s in “Body Heat,” “Rumble Fish,” “Angel Heart” and other movies. She was responsible for “channeling all it was that was messing me up into something creative and challenging,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1984.Younger stars also benefited from her coaching, among them Andrew Garfield, who played the title character in “The Amazing Spider-Man” (2012) and its sequel and earned an Emmy nomination for his lead role in the mini-series “Under the Banner of Heaven” last year (in which Ms. Seacat played his character’s mother).“She was a revolutionary, a culture-changing teacher of acting and storytelling,” Mr. Garfield said in a statement. “She is a beacon for all of us of what a life of deep meaning and beauty can look like.”Ms. Seacat and the actress Laura Dern in an undated photo. “Sandra gave me the greatest gift an actor could ever ask for,” Ms. Dern said. “Sandra gave me the joy of acting.”Katie Jones/Variety, via Penske Media, via Getty ImagesSandra Diane Seacat was born on Oct. 2, 1936, in Greensburg, Kan., in the midst of the Dust Bowl, to Russell and Lois (Cronic) Seacat.After graduating from Northwestern University, Ms. Seacat moved to New York and began her acting career. In 1959 she married Arthur Kaufman, and some of her early credits are under the name Sandra Kaufman.Once she was admitted to the Actors Studio — she said she auditioned while pregnant — she appeared in various productions, including “Three Sisters” on Broadway in 1964, in which she had a small role. She had small roles in two other Broadway productions as well, “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1973 and “Sly Fox” in 1976.Ms. Seacat also took occasional roles on television and in films throughout her career. She directed one feature film, the 1990 comedy “In the Spirit,” which had a star-studded cast that included Ms. Thomas, Olympia Dukakis, Elaine May, Melanie Griffith and Peter Falk.“‘In the Spirit’ is a flat-out New York comedy, with all of the pluses and minuses that go with that territory,” Bob Strauss wrote in his review in The Los Angeles Daily News. “Director Sandra Seacat, one of the industry’s most respected acting coaches, lets her cast get away with Method murder. But the performers’ mannered joy is also infectious; even when the jokes don’t work, you smile along just to feel part of the party.”Ms. Seacat’s marriage to Mr. Kaufman ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Michael Ebert. She married Mr. Hoffman in 1982. In addition to him, she is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Greta, and a sister, Serena Seacat.The long list of other stars Ms. Seacat worked with includes Jessica Lange, Rachel Ward, Ryan Gosling and Laura Dern.“Sandra gave me the greatest gift an actor could ever ask for, which was beyond a method or a craft or anything anybody talks about,” Ms. Dern said in the 2015 Hollywood Reporter video. “Sandra gave me the joy of acting.” More

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      Jürgen Flimm, Director of Festivals and Opera Houses, Dies at 81

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      He left his mark in Hamburg, Berlin, Salzburg and elsewhere. He also directed a memorable “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth.Jürgen Flimm, who led some of Europe’s most important theaters, opera houses and performing arts festivals over the last 40 years, died on Feb. 4 at his home in Wischhafen, Germany, northeast of Hamburg. He was 81.His death was announced by the Berlin State Opera, where he had been general manager from 2010 to 2018. His wife, the film producer Susanne Ottersbach Flimm, said the cause was heart failure following pneumonia.Mr. Flimm’s Berlin appointment was his last in a long career that also included directorships at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Ruhrtriennale festival in northwestern Germany and the Salzburg Festival in Austria. He also staged Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 2000.He directed acclaimed productions outside the German-speaking world as well, including at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.A dress rehearsal for Mr. Flimm’s 2000 production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” one critic wrote of the production, “but the shock was considerable.”Jürgen Flimm was born in Giessen, Germany, on July 17, 1941, to Werner and Ellen Flimm, who were both doctors. His family had fled there after bombs began falling on Cologne, where they had been living, and where they resettled after the war.In a 2011 interview with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mr. Flimm recalled his childhood. His father was a surgeon who, Mr. Flimm said, used the family’s apartment to see patients: “Every morning I put up my bed and our living room became a waiting room: patients everywhere.” His mother was a general practitioner, but like so many German women in the immediate postwar period, a time of general deprivation, she scrounged to bring home butter and meat. As a child, Jürgen sold old newspapers to fishmongers. While his older brother, Dieter, played drums in jazz bands around the city, Jürgen invented dialogue for his puppets in the attic. Dieter Flimm eventually founded an architecture studio and worked as a set designer and a musician. He died in 2002.Their father, who loved theater, would attend performances as a doctor on duty, and Jürgen often accompanied him. “I secretly hoped that an actor would get sick, so I’d be able to go backstage and see what went on there,” he said, although his father disapproved of his sons’ artistic proclivities and would have preferred for them to study medicine.Jürgen enrolled at the University of Cologne, where he studied theater, German literature and sociology. He abandoned his studies to become an assistant director at the Münchner Kammerspiele theater in Munich, where he worked from 1968 to 1972. He received an acting degree from the Theater der Keller in Cologne.In 1969 Mr. Flimm married the actress Inge Jansen, a colleague at the Kammerspiele. The marriage ended in divorce, but Mr. Flimm remained close to Ms. Jansen’s five children from her previous marriage, four of whom are still living. Ms. Jansen died in 2017.Mr. Flimm married Susanne Ottersbach. The couple lived in a two-story thatched house built in 1648. She is his only immediate survivor.He directed his first production at a theater in Wuppertal in 1971 and held positions at theaters in Mannheim and Hamburg in the 1970s, while also building up his résumé as director in Zurich, Munich and Berlin.He directed his first opera in 1978, the German premiere of Luigi Nono’s 1975 “Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore” in Frankfurt. The work remained dear to Mr. Flimm’s heart: Decades later, he programmed it, in an acclaimed production by the British director Katie Mitchell, in both Salzburg and Berlin.In 1979, Mr. Flimm returned to Cologne to lead the city’s main theater, the Schauspiel Köln. During his six years as artistic director there, he programmed works by the influential choreographer Pina Bausch and the fanciful French-Argentine director Jérôme Savary.He moved to Hamburg in 1985 to lead the Thalia Theater, which he is widely credited with putting in the international spotlight by inviting avant-garde artists like the American director Robert Wilson.From left, the director Robert Wilson, the author William S. Burroughs and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits at the premiere of their work “The Black Rider” at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. It was the most lauded production during Mr. Flimm’s tenure there.Frederika Hoffmann/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1990, Mr. Wilson’s “The Black Rider,” a collaboration with the singer and songwriter Tom Waits and the author William Burroughs, became the most lauded production of Mr. Flimm’s tenure in Hamburg. Despite some famously sour reviews (the German magazine Der Spiegel likened it to “a version of ‘Cats’ for intellectuals and snobs”), it was a hit and toured worldwide.Mr. Flimm left the Thalia in 2000. That summer, his “Ring” cycle had its premiere at Bayreuth.“It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker, “but the shock was considerable.” While praising some aspects of the cycle, Mr. Ross concluded that it ultimately left a very mixed impression.“The production felt unfinished,” he wrote, “and the flurry of painted curtains during the ‘Götterdämmerung’ apocalypse suggested that in the end it had simply run out of money.”Mr. Flimm made his Metropolitan Opera debut with Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” that October. This time Mr. Ross raved, concluding his review by saying that “Flimm is a smart director, and the Met should give him anything he wants.” The production was revived three times between 2002 and 2017.Mr. Flimm’s follow-up at the Met, a 2004 production of “Salome” that was a vehicle for the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, was more polarizing. In his review for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini noted that Mr. Flimm received some loud boos on opening night. But, he noted, “the bravos won out, and rightly so.”In 2005, Mr. Flimm became artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a multidisciplinary arts festival in the rust belt of Germany. He stayed an extra summer past his three-year contract after his designated successor, the German theater director Marie Zimmermann, took her life in April 2007.His time there dovetailed with the start of his artistic directorship at the Salzburg Festival, where he had previously served as head of drama from 2002 to 2004. During his first summer, he commissioned a new staging of “Jedermann,” the morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition, from the young Bavarian director Christian Stückl. The production was a hit and remained a festival mainstay for a dozen years.Mr. Flimm ascended to the festival’s leadership in 2007. It was a tumultuous time: Gerard Mortier had taken the festival in a radically new direction throughout the 1990s, and after his departure in 2001, it had struggled to hold on to an artistic director.The four seasons Mr. Flimm spent as Salzburg’s leader were regarded as successful artistically, but he made clear that he was not interested in staying for the long run. In 2008, he announced that he would step down at the end of his term to head the Berlin State Opera.In September 2010, shortly after Mr. Flimm arrived in Berlin, four steamers sailed down the river Spree, conveying 500 members of the opera company westward to the Schiller Theater, where it planned to spend three seasons during renovations to its historic home. Instead, the construction dragged on for seven years.Mr. Flimm imported a number of acclaimed productions to Berlin that had first been seen at Salzburg. One of his original productions in Berlin was a 2016 staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which featured an abstract set designed by Frank Gehry that reportedly cost 100,000 euros.In addition to his work in theater, Mr. Flimm taught at the University of Hamburg and was a guest lecturer at Harvard and New York University. Among his many honors was the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the German government’s highest, which he received in 2002. In a 2011 interview with the Bavarian radio station BR, Mr. Flimm was asked what accomplishments he was particularly proud of. Among those he mentioned was his 2000 “Fidelio.”“After the premiere,” he said, “I stood on the balcony of the Met, looked out into Manhattan and thought to myself, ‘Not bad, Jürgen!’” More

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      Eugene Lee, Set Designer for Broadway and ‘S.N.L.,’ Dies at 83

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      He won Tony Awards for “Wicked” and other shows while also overseeing the sets for the late-night franchise’s fast-paced sketch comedy.For decades it was possible for Saturday night theatergoers in New York to get a double dose of Eugene Lee’s work, though it’s likely that few would have realized they were doing so. They might have taken in “Sweeney Todd,” “Ragtime,” “Wicked” or other Broadway shows whose striking sets were designed by Mr. Lee, then could arrive home in time to tune into “Saturday Night Live” — a show for which he served as production designer when it began in 1975, and on which he was still working this season.Mr. Lee, an inventive and remarkably prolific set designer who was also known for his decades with Trinity Repertory Company, a respected regional theater in Providence, R.I., died on Monday in Providence. He was 83.His family announced the death, after a short illness that was not specified.Mr. Lee won or shared three Tony Awards for his Broadway sets — for “Candide” in 1974, “Sweeney Todd” in 1979 and “Wicked” in 2003 — and six Emmy Awards for “Saturday Night Live,” most recently in 2021.In theater, he was known for imaginative designs imbued with authenticity.“Eugene loved real objects, objects with history,” Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, who worked with Mr. Lee at Trinity Rep and elsewhere, said by email, “but he’d use them in utterly nonrealistic ways onstage.”He was known for reconfiguring entire theaters, as he did for “Candide,” the musical based on Voltaire, which was staged at the 180-seat Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn in 1973 before moving to the much larger Broadway Theater in Midtown Manhattan the next year. Mr. Lee, working with his partner at the time, Franne Lee, and the director Harold Prince, turned the Chelsea into “a ramped and runwayed circus midway,” The New York Times wrote, “surrounded by booths and mini-stages that could be changed, in a twinkling, from a corpse-littered battlefield to a vizier’s seraglio.”The “Saturday Night Live” stage crew at work in 2012. Mr. Lee created the basic stage look that has remained largely unchanged since the show began in 1975.Karsten Moran for The New York Times“The audience sat up, down and all around,” The Times said, “on stools, benches and ballpark-style ‘bleachers,’ between the ramps or along the runways or anywhere they wouldn’t be in the actors’ way.”Preserving that staging when the show transferred to Broadway took some effort, which included removing numerous seats, and for the first few performances some theatergoers asked for refunds because of problems with sight lines and other issues. But eventually the bugs were worked out.The show ran for almost two years and won five Tonys, including one for Mr. Lee and Franne Lee for scenic design. (Their relationship lasted for most of the 1970s but they were nevermarried, Patrick Lynch, Mr. Lee’s assistant and fellow designer, said by phone.)Five years later, for the Stephen Sondheim musical “Sweeney Todd” (which, like “Candide,” had a book by Hugh Wheeler and was directed by Mr. Prince), Mr. Lee brought pieces of an old iron foundry from Rhode Island and turned the Uris Theater into a stylized Industrial Age scene out of Victorian London.“The stagehands at the theater still remember how heavy the set was,” Mr. Lee told The Boston Globe in 2007. “You had to knock away bricks to support it. You can still see the scars all these years later.”Kristin Chenoweth left, and Idina Menzel in “Wicked,” for which Mr. Lee won a Tony.Sara KrulwichThe designs won him a second Tony Award, and a third came with “Wicked.” For that show, whose set featured an imposing dragon and a time motif, Mr. Lee drew inspiration in part from smashing apart old clocks in his Providence workshop and fiddling with the innards.Mr. Lee had more than two dozen Broadway credits, including “Agnes of God” (1982), “Show Boat” (1994), “Ragtime” (1998), “Glengarry Glen Ross” (2012) and, most recently, “Bright Star” (2016). While working on those projects and others, he oversaw the sets for “Saturday Night Live,” including creating the basic stage look that has remained largely unchanged since the show began in 1975.Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and executive producer, said in a phone interview that when he began formulating “S.N.L.,” he had recently seen “Candide” and was impressed with the look the Lees had created.“In those days, television was always on the floor,” he said — filmed on one level, with a polished sort of look — but Mr. Lee, still working with Franne Lee, had a different idea.“He said, ‘Well, I think we should probably build stages,” Mr. Michaels said. “And that meant we’d build a balcony, basically turn the studio into a theater.”“It looked like the city,” Mr. Michaels added of the look Mr. Lee created. “Something about it rang true.”Over the decades — taking a break only when Mr. Michaels did for five years in the 1980s — Mr. Lee would travel from his home in Providence to oversee the show’s design each week, whether it included a living room, a fake Oval Office or a special setting for the musical guest.In his work on “S.N.L.” Mr. Lee encountered many up-and-coming comedians, and he helped some of them branch out, working on the Broadway shows of Gilda Radner (“Live From New York,” 1979), Colin Quinn (“An Irish Wake,” 1998) and Will Ferrell (“You’re Welcome, America,” 2009). He also became production designer for “The Tonight Show” when Jimmy Fallon took it over in 2014.“When we were discussing the ‘Tonight Show’ set, he just had such a clear vision on the look and the stage and the curtain and the color of the wood,” Mr. Fallon said by email. “Every inch of it had meaning.”Whoever was in the “S.N.L.” cast in a given year, Mr. Michaels said, owed a debt to Mr. Lee.“He built this place for us to play in and do the show,” he said, “and it feels whole when we’re in it.”For “Sweeney Todd,” Mr. Lee turned the Uris Theater into a stylized Industrial Age scene out of Victorian London.Martha Swope/The New York Public LibraryEugene Edward Lee was born on March 9, 1939, in Beloit, Wis. His father, also named Eugene, was an engineer, and his mother, Elizabeth (Gates) Lee, was a pediatric nurse.His academic history was a patchwork.“I don’t think I have a degree from any place,” he told American Theater magazine in 1984. “Maybe I have a degree from Yale; I can’t remember.”He started out studying at the University of Wisconsin.“Then I saw Helen Hayes talking on television about Carnegie Tech and the stage,” he told The Times in 2000, referring to what is now Carnegie Mellon University. “So I got in my Volkswagen, which my grandmother had given me, and I arrived at the front door and said, ‘I’m here.’”He had a similarly casual approach to the Yale School of Drama, where he arrived in 1966 and studied for a time, although he did not finish his degree. (Some two decades later, the school granted him a master’s degree — “a real degree, not even an honorary one,” he told Yale Alumni Magazine in 2017.)With or without degrees, by the second half of the 1960s he was getting plenty of design work, including at Trinity Rep, where Adrian Hall, the founding artistic director, brought him in as resident designer. (Mr. Hall died on Feb. 4 in Van, Texas.) When Mr. Hall added the job of artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center in 1983, Mr. Lee worked with him there as well.Wherever he was working, Mr. Lee favored the genuine over the artificial.“Once you start painting, it has a painted look,” he told American Theater. “What please me are real textures used in the way nature left them. There’s nothing like a real piece of rusted tin — really rusted — put up on the stage. I don’t care how heavy it is, how dirty it is.”Mr. Eustis recalled one production — “Hope of the Heart” in 1990 — on which Mr. Lee’s enthusiasm for the realistic had to be reigned in.“Eugene could be risky, even reckless,” he said. “When I first worked with him at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, he insisted that the actors should use live ammunition (mercifully, only BBs) in the course of the show. We had to do a full-scale test, with a dozen of us wearing goggles, to prove to him that BBs would fly all over the auditorium and blind the audience if we used them. Reluctantly, he agreed to abandon the idea.”A model by Mr. Lee, later revised, of a proposed set for “The Tonight Show.” Mr. Lee became the show’s production designer when Jimmy Fallon took over as host in 2014. Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMr. Lee married Brooke Lutz in 1981. She survives him, along with his twin brother, Thomas; a son from his relationship with Franne Lee, Willie; a son from his marriage, Ted; and two grandchildren.Mr. Lee was known as a man of few words, and a man who loved the water. Mr. Eustis recalled that Mr. Lee took him out on Narragansett Bay on his sailboat when they were working on Trinity’s production of “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 1995.“We spent a couple hours on the water, talking but not referring to the play, and then he said, ‘It would be too bad if they actually left the stage when they say they are leaving,’” Mr. Eustis recalled. “That was our whole conversation. He delivered one of the most brilliant and beautiful designs I’d ever seen.”Iris Fanger, reviewing the production in The Boston Herald, described that set as a series of rooms “that seem to stretch back into eternity.” More

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      Review: How to Shoot Your Parents, in ‘Pictures From Home’

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      In a stage adaptation of Larry Sultan’s photo memoir, Nathan Lane stars as the father everyone’s aiming at.Several weekends a month, from 1982 to 1992, the photographer Larry Sultan visited his parents in Southern California in search of a story. Was it a mark of his failure or his overachievement that, instead of one, he found many?In any case, in “Pictures From Home,” the 1992 photo memoir that resulted, Sultan created a classic of visual polyphony. Whatever he believed the work to be — a family portrait, a marital inquest, a takedown of Reagan-era masculinity — it was so much more by being all of them at once.But a book of staged photographs, home movie stills and discrepant first-person narratives was also, by the nature of the medium, flat: the better to ponder its mille-feuille of contradictions. The camera, after all, stops time.That would seem to make Sultan’s “Pictures From Home,” however brilliant, an unlikely source for stage adaptation, the stage being where time can never stand still. And indeed, the play by Sharr White that opened on Thursday at Studio 54, in a production directed by Bartlett Sher, has not made it all the way from two dimensions to three. Though honorable, thoughtful and wonderful to look at, with crafty performances by Danny Burstein, Zoë Wanamaker and especially Nathan Lane, it caulks so many of the book’s expressive cracks that the best thing about it — its mystery — is sealed out.Part of that is inevitable insofar as actors must have something concrete to act. To provide it, White has developed scenes from tiny cues in Sultan’s text, turning the subterranean Oedipal conflict between father and son, and to a lesser extent the conjugal one between husband and wife, into obvious rhubarbs, skits and lectures.For actors like these, such carvings are raw meat, no matter that the carcass gets stripped. Burstein has a field day with Larry, who begins the play by announcing to the audience that “this project will become one of my hallmark achievements.” As his chest puffs out, Burstein puffs it back in: “I know that’s not a modest thing to say.”It’s a peculiar choice to write Larry as a nervous pedant, proud yet endlessly defensive. But what he’s defending himself against immediately becomes clear upon Lane’s entrance as the father. “Are you still here?” is his first line.Burstein has a field day with Larry, our critic writes, and Lane’s peerless verbal and physical clarity make for an entertaining impression of Larry’s father, Irving.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the book, Irving Sultan is a glamorous remnant of the cocktails-at-lunch era of American business; at the peak of his career, he was a vice president at Schick. But having been put out to pasture some years before the photos were taken, his silver fox suaveness is mottled with flop sweat.As in his earlier plays — including “The Other Place” (a haunting Laurie Metcalf vehicle) and “The True” (catnip for Edie Falco) — White prioritizes playability over subtlety. Here he pulls at the threads of Irving’s vanity and petulance, unwinding them from his other qualities to provide the lurid outlines of a personality. That’s sufficient for Lane, of course, whose peerless verbal and physical clarity make for an entertaining if somewhat black-and-white impression. Each argumentative thrust and deflection is as sharp as an actor can render it, and anything faintly funny is primped into a generous laugh.That’s good news for the audience but less so for the real Irving, who was already skeptical about how his son would portray him, without having imagined how a playwright and Nathan Lane would. (Irving died in 2009 — as did Larry.) That the book’s tough bird winds up onstage a lovable bellyacher is one of the mysteries to be filed under “lost in translation.”Translation is even unkinder to Larry’s mother, Jean Sultan, whom Wanamaker plays with pinpoint sociological precision. (The costumes by Jennifer Moeller and the wigs by Tommy Kurzman help immensely.) What Wanamaker cannot do, because the script does not permit it, is restore dignity to a woman who deserves it. After raising Larry and his two brothers, then watching her husband short-circuit his career, she took up her own because somebody had to; in her first year as an independent real estate agent, she sold $18 million in property.Some of the book’s most trenchant photographs trace that transformation. (Projected at huge scale by 59 Productions against the back wall of Michael Yeargan’s slope-roofed, garishly green trompe l’oeil set, they look fantastic.) In them we see Jean, in late middle age, emerging from her housewifey past to become a serious breadwinner, with all the attendant anxieties. How this threatens Irving’s sense of privilege and primacy is clear enough on paper.The triple portrait of the Sultans in the play deviates from what is presented in the memoir, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet in the play Jean is reduced to third banana and comic relief. She floats in and out of the men’s arguments and dithers in search of lost To Do lists. In one particularly unfortunate bit, elaborated from an innocuous sentence in the book, she is made to perform schtick like a bawdy 1960s comedienne about the size of the zucchini Irving grows in a garden. “He’s so proud of how huge it is,” she brays.For all I know, Jean, who died in 2004, really talked like that; White has said he had “many conversations” with Kelly Sultan — the artist’s widow — about her husband’s process and “the many complexities of Irv and Jean.” But even if accurate to life as lived, the triple portrait of the Sultans in the play feels inaccurate to life as recorded in the memoir. For one thing, Larry himself is made, if sympathetic, insufferable. As he gassed on fatuously about image and illusion, I too found myself impatiently asking, “Are you still here?”At just 1 hour and 45 minutes, with no intermission, a play should not feel padded, but it does. Still, it is hardly without its pleasures: It’s funnier than expected, and Sher’s poetic naturalism as he creates stage pictures is always moving to watch. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting reminds me of her superb work for dance.Nor does “Pictures From Home” lack for pathos — less so when it jerks the audience’s tears, at the end, than when it lets the questions of a son’s need for his parents, even well into their old age, sit patiently in frame. Stopping time with his camera, Larry tells us, was a way of not letting them die. How odd that a living thing like a play does the opposite.Pictures From HomeThrough April 30 at Studio 54, Manhattan; picturesfromhomebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      ‘Lucy’ Review: There’s Something About the Babysitter

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      A workplace comedy set at home, this cleverly detailed production explores child care as both labor and primal instinct.Hiring a babysitter is a high-stakes leap of faith. How well can you really know someone before trusting them with your kids? And what’s going to happen when you’re not at home? Maybe she won’t quite be Mary Poppins, but let’s hope the glint in her eye doesn’t remind you of the unassuming villain in a psychological thriller.With her Pre-Raphaelite curls, plinking bangles and wide-eyed smile, the candidate who sweeps through the door in “Lucy,” which opened at the Minetta Lane Theater Monday night, appears closer to the former ideal. Ashling (she’s distantly Irish) calls herself a career nanny with 40 years of experience, despite seeming not quite as old herself. Played with a sly incandescence by Lynn Collins, Ashling colors her speech with generous emphasis, insisting that child care keeps her young and that she considers her role on par with a co-parent.The client, Mary, looks like she could give birth at any minute, and has let her search for help come down to the wire. Played with delicate, white-knuckled composure by Brooke Bloom, Mary is an overworked radiologist and single mother with a 6-year-old daughter (Lucy, for whom the play is named) and a son on the way. She is the sort of tightly wound person motherhood has only somewhat unraveled; when she offers Ashling the job, it comes with a stack of guidelines as thick as a novella.Written and directed by Erica Schmidt, “Lucy” is seamlessly layered, extraordinarily entertaining and tricky to classify. A cleverly detailed exploration of child care as both a kind of labor and a primal instinct, it is a workplace comedy set at home, where boundaries are porous and personal stakes are exceedingly high. When Mary discovers, for example, that she can smell Ashling’s perfume on her infant son at night, it feels like an intimate intrusion. But when Mary awkwardly confronts her, Ashling is breezily evasive.“Lucy” is also an irresistible, engrossing slow burn, as tension between the two builds under pressure. Laughs increasingly double as sighs of relief as the suspense of discovery escalates through the show’s taut two-hour running time. Mary is undoubtedly a micromanager. Ashling, meanwhile, relishes her freedom, reminding Mary of what she has sacrificed to become a mother. And though Ashling’s strangeness is undeniable, it’s also slippery to pin down. The most telling clues may come from Lucy (Charlotte Surak, adorable), but how reliable can a young child be?Schmidt, who recently adapted “Cyrano” into a stage musical and whose play “Mac Beth” recast Shakespearean tragedy among vicious high schoolers, has a way of uncovering and magnifying the profundity simmering underneath everyday conflict. On the surface, “Lucy” is a tug-of-war between opposing personalities. At its core, it confronts questions of power, possibility and human nature.Schmidt’s staging, produced by Audible, is a crisply orchestrated slice of Manhattan life, impeccably designed to reveal her precisely drawn characters. The tasteful austerity of Mary’s open-plan kitchen-living room aptly reflects her strict minimalism, as does her understated, mostly black wardrobe (the set is by Amy Rubin and costumes by Kaye Voyce). Cha See’s dynamic lighting underscores the play’s subtly eerie shifts in mood, and there’s unexpected humor in the music from sound designer Justin Ellington (perhaps a nod to the play’s future release as an audio play).“Lucy” is also a kind of inventory of the roles women are expected to play, whether they become mothers or not, and the systems that assign value to them accordingly. That draws even more attention to the fact that Bloom and Collins hardly seem to be playing roles at all; the actors are so thoroughly committed and convincing that any hint that things may not be as they seem feels all the more destabilizing. It’s the sort of feeling that might arise after trusting your life to someone else’s hands and then realizing they’re a total stranger.LucyThrough Feb. 25 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; lucytheplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More