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      Review: ‘La Cage aux Folles’ Brightens Up Berlin

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      The vivid characters and the infectious melodies of the 1983 musical prove remarkably durable in Barrie Kosky’s madcap production at Komische Oper Berlin.BERLIN — In Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s “La Cage aux Folles,” the habitués of the show’s titular nightclub are enumerated as a “girl who needs a shave,” “both the riffraff and the royalty,” “eccentric couples” and “a nun with a Marine.” That description seemed to fit the fashionable and eclectic opening night audience of the Komische Oper Berlin’s new production of the Tony Award-winning 1983 musical.Barrie Kosky’s decade-long reign running the Komische, one of this city’s three world-class opera companies, was a near breathless succession of musical and theatrical high jinks. When Kosky stepped down from his role as the Komische’s artistic director over the summer, his parting gift to the house was a glitzy and unexpectedly moving Yiddish revue. “La Cage,” Kosky’s first production as guest director, premiered on Saturday night and remains in repertory through June 9.Although Kosky has already directed several musicals at the house, this production did mark something of a departure for the company. The “La Cage” score is on the weaker end of the house’s musical theater repertory, which includes “Kiss Me, Kate,” “West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” Even so, it was a thrill to hear Herman’s old-fashioned Broadway songs, tunes that swing between razzle-dazzle and sentimentality, performed by a full orchestra. (The most recent Broadway revival of “La Cage,” from 2010, was rescored for eight musicians.) The chameleon-like Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin (the same week as the “La Cage” premiere they also performed works by Mozart, Dvorak and Prokofiev) played with polish and panache for the conductor Koen Schoots.Stefan Kurt, right, as Zaza. Kurt’s mix of elegant wit, dramatic flair and emotional vulnerability was never less than captivating.Monika RittershausHerman and Fierstein’s musical is based on Jean Poiret’s 1973 farce about a gay owner of a nightclub and his lover, a drag queen and the revue’s star, whose (heterosexual) son brings his fiancée’s ultraconservative parents for dinner. The production has incredible staying power. Even if the musical no longer feels as revolutionary as it did when it was first performed nearly 40 years ago — the original production is widely considered a milestone in gay theater history — the show’s premise, the vivid characters and the infectious melodies are remarkably durable, or, at least, proved so in Kosky’s madcap production.This energetically choreographed, outrageously costumed and boldly designed staging gave full evidence of Kosky’s shrewd theatrical instincts. One of the first things we see onstage, during the overture, are a number of large silver cages occupied with extras decked-out in colorful plumes and wearing bird masks. The 13-strong “Cagelles,” as the nightclub dancers are called, spend most of the evening energetically twirling, tapping, can-canning and step-dancing clad in pink feathers, fake gold brocade, lace stockings or sparkly underwear. (I’d like to petition the Tonys to consider the choreographer Otto Pichler, assisted here by Mariana Souza, and the costume designer Klaus Bruns as overseas awards candidates.)In contrast to the plumage on display, Rufus Didwiszus’ sets are comparatively simple, even minimal at times, with one notable exception: the gay couple’s apartment. The flamboyant room boasts a sexually explicit illustration by Tom of Finland, large white porcelain vases and couches that are shaped like male genitalia. In addition, there’s an outdoor bistro under a starry set and a series of eclectic curtains with large, neon images of hummingbirds, flamingos and cockatoos that provide trippy backdrops to the kinetic dance numbers.Images of birds and plants provide colorful backdrops to the kinetic dance numbers.Monika RittershausBut “La Cage” requires more than theatrical pizazz. For the piece to work, the camp needs to be counterbalanced by heart, and the cast Kosky has assembled bring both to the stage. The Swiss actor Stefan Kurt, best-known here for his work with Robert Wilson, was captivating as Albin, the drag queen who performs as Zaza. Kurt played him with a touch of Quentin Crisp and a dash of Norma Desmond, but made the role his own by refusing to copy what other actors have done with it. Kurt is not a classical trained singer, and his vocal performance was not as polished as many of the others. But his mix of elegant wit, dramatic flair and emotional vulnerability was never less than captivating.Peter Renz, a former tenor engaged at the Komische, returned to play the dilemma-stricken Georges, the nightclub owner whose loyalty is divided between his lover and his son. He sang with warmth and beauty and acted with the brittle sang-froid of someone trying to maintain sanity in a madhouse. As the couple’s assistant, Jacob, Daniel Daniela Yrureta Ojeda, a Venezuelan dancer who has appeared here in several other Kosky productions, brought impressive physical antics and impeccable comic timing to a wonderfully scene-chewing role. Nicky Wuchinger was comparatively stiff as Georges’ son Jean-Michel, a fairly colorless role, although he crooned and harmonized well with Maria-Danaé Bansen, another young Berliner who lithely danced her way through the production as his fiancée Anne.Helmut Baumann, a local musical theater legend who originated the role of Zaza in “La Cage’s” German premiere in 1985, was cast here as the restaurateur Jacqueline. His entrance won applause from the opening night crowd, which was one of many times throughout the evening that the performance was punctuated by the audience’s vocal enthusiasm. One couldn’t really blame them. With this production, Kosky has turned his former opera house into an inviting place to perch for an evening. It’s the giddiest, most thrilling, most fabulous show in town.La Cage aux FollesThrough June 9. Komische Oper Berlin; komische-oper-berlin.de. More

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      in Movies

      Sylvia Syms, Versatile British Actress, Is Dead at 89

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      In a career that began in the 1950s, she had roles that ranged from the lead in the movie “Teenage Bad Girl” to Margaret Thatcher and the Queen Mother.Sylvia Syms, a British actress whose many roles in a career of more than 60 years included Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Queen Mother, died on Friday in London. She was 89.Her death, at Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors and entertainers, was announced by her family.Sylvia May Laura Syms was born in London on Jan. 6, 1934, to Edwin and Daisy (Hale) Syms. She was educated at convent schools and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began her acting career onstage in the George Bernard Shaw play “The Apple Cart” in 1953.She became a stalwart of the British cinema soon after she played the title role in the 1956 movie “Teenage Bad Girl.” Among the many films in which she appeared in the late 1950s were the World War II adventure “Ice Cold in Alex” (1958), starring John Mills, in which she played an army nurse, and “Expresso Bongo” (1959), a satire of the music business. In that movie she portrayed the stripper girlfriend of a sleazy talent manager played by Laurence Harvey.In 1961 she was the wife of a closeted lawyer played by Dirk Bogarde — a role several other actresses had turned down — in the thriller “Victim,” the first British film to deal openly with homosexuality.Ms. Syms never achieved the level of stardom that some had predicted for her. One reason is that she rarely worked in Hollywood (although she did have a prominent role in Blake Edwards’s 1974 Cold War drama “The Tamarind Seed”). Another, according to The Daily Telegraph, is that her ability to disappear into the roles she played kept her from being, in her words, “instantly recognizable as me.” But she remained busy well into her 80s.Her notable later roles included Margaret Thatcher — in the 1991 television film “Thatcher: The Final Days” and later on both TV and stage in “Margaret Thatcher: Half the Picture” — and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in Stephen Frears’s Academy Award-winning 2006 film “The Queen.” In that movie Helen Mirren played her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II.The next year, Ms. Syms was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire by the real Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.From 2007 to 2010, Ms. Syms had a recurring role as a dressmaker on the long-running BBC soap opera “EastEnders.” Her last role was in an episode of the historical drama series “Gentleman Jack,” a BBC-HBO co-production, in 2019.Ms. Syms’ marriage to Alan Edney ended in divorce in 1989 after 33 years. She is survived by her daughter, the actress Beatie Edney, and her son, Ben Edney.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      ‘The Smuggler’ Review: A Barman’s Rambling Yarn

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      The one-man show means to draw the audience into a moral quandary pitting immigrants and the American poor against each other.“I am/An Amerikan,” says Tim Finnegan, the Irish bartender-cum-storyteller in Ronán Noone’s “The Smuggler: A Thriller in Verse.” “Worked hard to be/A citizan,” he continues in a Dublin accent, the words purposely misspelled in the script. He cheekily punches the last syllables, emphasizing what the play’s subtitle already warned us about: We’re seeing a thriller in rhyme.This is the tone that this unkempt play, produced by the Irish Repertory Theater, strikes throughout: pat, masquerading as playful.It’s 2023, in a bar in an affluent Massachusetts community. Tim’s serving up drinks while telling us his story. He needed money for his family: his ever-exasperated wife and their ill toddler. Desperate, Tim found an untapped market to exploit: the homes of undocumented immigrants, many of whom are involved with lucrative illegal enterprises like human smuggling. Defending himself with weak arguments about moral subjectivity and telling us he’s just a good guy in tough circumstances, perhaps even a kind of Robin Hood, Tim says he robbed the immigrants for the down payment on a new home.Some other things happen: a car crash, a toppled tree, a beating, a murder, though many serve as diversions that needlessly overextend the storytelling. (A bonkers basement battle with a herculean rat, however, is the most suspenseful, and comical, portion of the play, in part because it’s so random.)“The Smuggler,” a one-man show, means to draw the audience into a moral quandary about Tim’s actions and the unfair status of immigrants and the citizen have-nots of America. But the play never demonstrates enough of Tim’s character to make him an interesting figure. Nor does it indicate it has a nuanced political statement — just transparent generalizations meant to be wise aphorisms about the American dream. (“You do what you need to do/To become what you want/To be.”)Michael Mellamphy is affable enough as Tim, like a regular about town, but he’s neither as charming nor as menacing as his narration would have us believe. Under Conor Bagley’s awkward direction, Mellamphy especially struggles in the transitions between scenes and characters: the accents muddled, the gestures, postures and voices forced. His movements around the space — circling, pacing around the bar — are more choreographed than natural.The immersive set design, by Ann Beyersdorfer at the intimate W. Scott McLucas Studio Theater, provides color and detail. The walls of the theater are littered with quintessential Irish dive décor: ships, anchors, Irish flags. (“The Smuggler,” which won the 2019 best playwright award at New York’s 1st Irish Festival, was also staged in Washington, D.C., that year in an actual bar.)The play is loaded with “cheap” rhymes — as Noone himself describes them in his script — questionable metaphors, odd meter and endless nudge-and-winks to the form (“And maybe at this point/You’re getting bored/With the exposition”). Still, “The Smuggler” has more issues than how violently it strong-arms the word “hyperbole” into an exact rhyme with “today.” (And that’s very violently, by the way.) The play has several glaring blind spots: The few women mentioned are unlikable, often nags, and the various brown immigrants all seem to be criminals, primarily because the playwright has failed to engage with the deeper issues of gender or race.If “The Smuggler” aims to be about the price of the American dream and the moral cost of being a successful American citizen, it takes more than a few measures of doggerel from a black-market bartender to do so.The SmugglerThrough Feb. 26 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      Obies to Honor Off Broadway Work Made During and After Lockdown

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      An in-person ceremony next month will focus on celebrating New York’s resilient theater scene; most awards will be announced in advance.A long-delayed Obie Awards ceremony next month will celebrate the resilience of New York’s theater scene, even as it applauds plays and musicals staged beyond Broadway.The time-honored but freewheeling awards ceremony, created by the Village Voice in the 1950s and now run by the American Theater Wing, doles out prizes in ad hoc categories for work done Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway. This year’s ceremony will take place on Feb. 27, but many of the award recipients will be informed in advance, and their acceptance remarks will be recorded and posted to the Wing’s YouTube channel a few days before the ceremony, allowing the evening to focus on performances and partying rather than speeches.“The Obies has always been such an important recognition to Off and Off Off Broadway, and that community was very, very hurt by the pandemic,” said Heather A. Hitchens, the Wing’s president and chief executive.This year’s Obies will honor digital, audio and other virtual work, as well as productions staged in a more traditional fashion. Eligible shows must have opened between July 1, 2020, when theaters were still shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic, and Aug. 31, 2022, by which time theaters were open and in-person performance was again the main form of theater-making.A panel of judges, led by the director David Mendizábal and the critic Melissa Rose Bernardo, assessed about 400 shows; the group plans to bestow 37 awards, including one named for Michael Feingold, the longtime Village Voice critic who died last fall.“As artists had to adapt, it came down to us saying, ‘How do we acknowledge the ever-evolving landscape,’ and it was really important to a lot of the judges on the panel to be able to recognize works that maybe fell outside of the traditional theater experience,” Mendizábal said.The Obie administrators said they were aiming for a ceremony lasting between 90 minutes and two hours at Terminal 5, followed by an after-party. The ceremony will feature songs and monologues, as well as the live presentation of about 10 awards, including those for lifetime and sustained achievement.The last Obie Awards ceremony was a virtual one on July 14, 2020. The Wing had hoped to hold this one last November, but decided more time was needed to organize it. More

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      Everett Quinton, a Force in Downtown Theater, Dies at 71

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      He took over the Ridiculous Theatrical Company after the death of his partner, Charles Ludlam, in 1987. His specialty was playing women, but his range was wide.Everett Quinton, a versatile mainstay of the downtown theater scene in New York as an actor, director and, for decades, leader of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, died on Monday in Brooklyn. He was 71.The cause was glioblastoma, a fast-moving cancer, Mr. Quinton’s friend Julia Campanelli said, speaking on behalf of his sister Mary Ann Quinton.Mr. Quinton was especially adept at playing women, including the nasty stepmother in “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” which toured the country early in this century. But he took on a range of roles male and female, onstage and occasionally on television or in films — in Oliver Stone’s prison drama “Natural Born Killers” (1994), he was an unpleasant deputy warden.It was a career he had not been expecting in 1975 when he met Charles Ludlam, a playwright, actor and director who had founded the Ridiculous company (one of several in the era that worked the campy, gender-bending genre known as Theater of the Ridiculous) in 1967 in Greenwich Village, and who was a dynamic part of the avant-garde theater world.“I was just cruising Christopher Street on a cold February night,” Mr. Quinton recalled in a 2001 interview with The New York Times. “He gave me his phone number but I lost it. I thought his name was Steven. Six months later, that August, I was back on Christopher Street and he walked out of a restaurant and said to me, ‘You do exist.’ From then on we were together.”The two became partners in life and in the theater, where Mr. Quinton designed costumes, served as assistant stage manager and, in a 1976 show called “Caprice,” took to the stage.“I was the ballerina who got kidnapped,” he told The Daily News of New York in 1993, remembering that first role. “I knew I’d found my niche.”Mr. Quinton, right, in 1986 with Charles Ludlam, his partner both onstage and off. Mr. Quinton took over the Ridiculous Theatrical Company after Mr. Ludlam died in 1987.Patrick McMullan/Getty ImagesHe played all sorts of roles in Ridiculous productions, including the title character in Mr. Ludlam’s “Beauty and the Beast”-like fairy tale “The Enchanted Pig,” which ran for months in 1979 at the Ridiculous theater on Sheridan Square.“Everett Quinton personates the oinker as a most sympathetic fellow,” Don Nelsen wrote in a review in The Daily News.The two had a sensational success in 1984 with Mr. Ludlam’s “The Mystery of Irma Vep” (the name is an anagram for “vampire”), a parody of Victorian penny dreadfuls in which they played all the roles, male and female, switching deftly and rapidly. (Mr. Quinton held down four — a maid, an aristocrat named Lord Edgar, a monster/vampire and a woman hidden in the manor house.)“Each character is such a complete, precise comic creation that it often takes one’s breath away to watch the actors move from one role to the next (and back again) with nary a pause,” Frank Rich wrote in his review in The Times. “In ‘Irma Vep,’ Mr. Ludlam and Mr. Quinton have raised the Ridiculous to the sublime.”Mr. Ludlam and Mr. Quinton performed the show more than 330 times. But it turned out to be the peak of Mr. Ludlam’s career — he died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. Mr. Quinton soldiered on with the Ridiculous theater, restaging some of Mr. Ludlam’s works while gradually expanding the offerings. By 1994, Mel Gussow, writing in The Times, found that Mr. Quinton had put his own stamp on the company.“While respecting the theatrical legacy of his mentor and longtime companion,” Mr. Gussow wrote, “Mr. Quinton has given the company his own irreverent signature: Ludlamania has been Quintonized.”He kept Ridiculous Theatrical going until 1997, by which time it had lost its Sheridan Square space and was, like other small theater companies, done in by high costs in an increasingly gentrifying part of town. Mr. Quinton, though, continued to direct and perform, including in “Drop Dead Perfect,” which played at the Theater at St. Clement’s in Manhattan in 2014 (and returned for an encore the next year).“In a sweet 1950s peach crocheted dress and matching bolero, Everett Quinton has never looked lovelier,” Anita Gates began her review in The Times.Sometimes Mr. Quinton would try roles first played by Mr. Ludlam. In 1998, at the West Side Theater in Midtown Manhattan, he directed a revival of “Irma Vep” and starred, this time taking the roles Mr. Ludlam had played (while Stephen DeRosa played the parts Mr. Quinton had originated). In 1990 he staged Mr. Ludlam’s “Camille,” a play loosely based on an Alexandre Dumas novel, taking on the role of Marguerite, which Mr. Ludlam had played in the 1973 premiere.Cheryl Reeves-Hayes was also part of the 1990 cast. “Whenever he was onstage as Marguerite,” she said by email, “I would hurry up and change so I could sit in the wings and watch him perform. He was mesmerizing to watch, and I learned so much from him as an actor.”Mr. Quinton during a dress rehearsal for the 1998 production of “The Mystery of Irma Vep.” Before Mr. Ludlam’s death, the two had performed a version of the show more than 330 times.James Estrin/The New York TimesRamona Ponce started designing costumes for Ridiculous productions in 1991. Her first assignment was for a 10-minute entertainment Mr. Quinton was staging for a trade council that was meeting at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. The audience was not appreciative.“As soon as they saw the men in drag onstage they started throwing rolls,” she said by email. “Right there in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel ballroom. Rolls!!“Everett was furious, humiliated, traumatized. He turned on his heel and stalked out through the kitchen, head held high, topped by a giant mobcap, in Victorian drag. After that we couldn’t even mention the show, or the name of the hotel, for a decade after. But the show was magical and strange and daring and fun, all the things I wanted in life.”Everett James Quinton Jr. was born on Dec. 18, 1951, in Brooklyn. His father was a postal worker, and his mother, Elizabeth Frances Reardon Quinton, was a homemaker.After serving in the Air Force in Thailand, Mr. Quinton attended Hunter College for two years, but he had no thought of a theater career.“My only experience with the theater was playing Rip Van Winkle in the Cub Scouts,” he told The Daily News in 1993.Meeting Mr. Ludlam introduced him to a whole new world of possibilities. “I ran away and joined the circus” was how he put it in the 2001 interview with The Times.Although the Ridiculous troupe was known for parodies, cross-dressing and the occasional pig costume, Mr. Quinton said he gradually learned that outlandishness didn’t preclude the need for finding a character and making her, him or it real.“Even grotesques have feelings,” he told The Times in 1994.After Mr. Ludlam’s death, Mr. Quinton, who lived in the West Village, had a long-term relationship with Michael Van Meter, a member of the Ridiculous company who died in 2007 of complications of AIDS. In addition to his sister Mary, he is survived by another sister, Elizabeth Frances Quinton, and four brothers, Matthew, John Paul, Thomas and Timothy.Ms. Ponce said Mr. Quinton was well versed in and wary of theatrical superstitions, including the one that forbids whistling in a theater and the one that warns against mentioning the play “Macbeth” for fear of incurring a curse — neither of which she was aware of before working for him.“When I started whistling backstage, he came flying out from the dressing room and demanded that I leave the theater, walk around the park outside and say a line from Shakespeare before I could come back in,” she said. “He didn’t wait for me to mention the Scottish play — he decided he’d better tell me about that one before something really bad happened.”Mr. Quinton’s friend William Engel, an artist, noted that Mr. Quinton had a deeply spiritual side. He said the two of them worked together on many pageants for Grace & St. Paul’s Church on the Upper West Side.“No one could be more welcoming at the Lord’s table than Everett Quinton,” he said by email. “Especially the L.G.B.T.Q. community.”Ms. Reeves-Hayes said Mr. Quinton introduced her to that same church. When they took their production of “Camille” to London in 1991, she said, “Ev would be my church buddy, and we visited a couple of churches in the city.”On other walkabouts, they indulged a different tradition. They both admired old cartoon and comic strip characters, especially Krazy Kat, who loved a mouse, Ignatz. The mouse would constantly hurl bricks at Krazy, which she interpreted as a sign of affection.“So,” Ms. Reeves-Hayes said, “whenever we would see a cute guy, one of us would ask, ‘Got a brick?’” More

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      For a Pioneering Artist, the Joy of Having Done the Work His Way

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      If you keep a musician friend for over 50 years, as the experimental director Ping Chong has done with Meredith Monk, just maybe at your retirement celebration, that friend will sing you a song. And so on Wednesday night at the performance space Chelsea Factory, a luminous Monk sat down at a keyboard, reminisced about Chong when she first knew him — as a pony-tailed student in her dance class, wearing bell-bottom jeans — and played “Gotham Lullaby.”At the front of the crowd, Chong stood listening, transported to his earliest days in theater, when he was a member of Monk’s company. At 76, he has long since become a force in his own right in downtown theater. As a documentary film crew glided through the room, emissaries from La MaMa and the Wooster Group were among the more than 250 guests toasting his nearly half century with Ping Chong and Company.Meredith Monk and Chong have been friends and collaborators for over 50 years. She sang “Gotham Lullaby” at his farewell celebration.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIt was an evening full of warmth and camaraderie, a world away from the loneliness that Chong says he felt when he was an only: toiling alone as an Asian American theater artist in New York. An Obie Award winner and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts — which he received from President Barack Obama in 2014, the same year as Sally Field, Stephen King and Monk, too — Chong formed his company in 1975 and carved out a niche with shows like “Collidescope” (2014), inspired by the killing of Trayvon Martin; the puppet piece “Kwaidan”(1998); and “Nuit Blanche” (1981), about Chong’s touchstone belief that, he said, “we’re all human beings, and we need to stop thinking that what’s on the superficial surface separates us.”Born in Toronto to parents who immigrated from China, he was four months old when his family relocated to New York City. He grew up in Chinatown, where his parents ran two restaurants and a cafe, and went to the High School of Art and Design in Midtown Manhattan. After two years at Pratt Institute (“The easel next to mine was Robert Mapplethorpe”), he studied film at the School of Visual Arts, graduating in 1969.Three years later he made his first independent theater piece, “Lazarus,” which he revisited last fall in a version titled “Lazarus 1972-2022,” his final show as artistic director. His current project is the latest installment in the company’s interview-based, social-justice series Undesirable Elements, about Ukraine, set to have its premiere in May.A Zhongkui puppet by Chinese Theater Works at the Chelsea Factory event.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter that, Chong plans to take some time “to see what it feels like to be a civilian again,” while working on getting the rest of his archive to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts — a task he views, like cooperating with the makers of the documentary about him, as part of the responsibility to history that accompanies being an Asian American pioneer. With his retirement — and that of Bruce Allardice, Ping Chong and Company’s longtime executive director, who was also celebrated on Wednesday night — the company will continue under the artistic leadership of a four-person team.Last week, in a rehearsal studio on Great Jones Street in Greenwich Village, Chong sat down to talk about his career. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.What was your first experience of theater?My family’s in the Chinese opera, so it was Chinese opera. I didn’t see Western theater until I was in high school. My mom was a diva. My grandfather was a very famous Chinese opera director-librettist. My father was a director-librettist. My mother was performing in Vietnam in the late ’20s, and my father was directing in Singapore and Malaysia in the ’20s. But I hadn’t planned on being in theater at all. I thought I would be a painter.What drew you to theater making?An accident. I didn’t have that much confidence by the time I graduated from film school. I said, “There aren’t any Asian filmmakers.” I was interested in dance. So this young woman said, “You want to take Meredith Monk’s class?” I took the class, and Meredith invited me to take her personal workshop. If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be here now. At the end of it, Meredith said, “I’m doing a show at Connecticut College in the summer. Are you free to be part of it?” And I said, “I don’t know if I can do it because I’m thinking of going to India.” Sixties, right? I never got to India. I did get to Connecticut College. And my mind was blown because I’d never seen theater like that before. It was like a surrealistic dream. It was completely not realism. Chinese opera is not realism. So the connection was not so crazy for me. Then she invited me to be part of the company.Some of the table décor, highlighting Chong’s playful sense of humor.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesHow do you define theater?I almost don’t like the term theater. I prefer the term performance because it includes dance. My own work integrates dance and theater and visual arts and all these other things, you know? So I prefer a more generous definition.Do you have a philosophy of theater making?The stage cannot compete with cinema or television for realism. Why are we bothering? Theater has its own unique properties. So that means you need to go back to the Greeks. You need to go back to people like the Kabuki or these other theaters that recognize theater is not realism. Theater is a much more imaginative space.I don’t know why I’m asking this, except that it’s a part of having a long career. Were you ever tempted to —Chuck it?To chuck it, yes!The first time I wanted to chuck it was in 1991. That was the one time I wanted to chuck it, actually. I remember being in Portugal between jobs, lying on the floor, thinking, what else can I do? Nobody talks about how scary it is to create. Because you’re always afraid of failure. That’s the big fear. You always think it’s not going to work. I love what I do, but it’s stressful.More than 250 guests turned out to toast Chong’s half-century career and leadership with Ping Chong and Company.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWhat persuaded you not to quit?I couldn’t figure out what else I would do. After I had that little crisis, then I was fine. Once I decided to go on, that was the major flowering for me. Artistically. But I think the other thing that happened was in the late ’80s I went to Asia. I had gone to Asia when I was 17, to Japan and to Hong Kong and to Singapore. I never went back until ’86, when I went to this festival in Japan. It was kind of a shock to be in a place where I didn’t stand out because I was Asian, and that was a real revelation. Two years later I was in Hong Kong. I’m Cantonese. Hong Kong is Cantonese. And when I went to Hong Kong, I reconnected with my cultural roots. Up to that point, I was looking to Europe artistically. After that, I said, “Being approved by Europe is not important to me anymore. I’m just going to go my own way.”Do you remember when you were 17 having that sensation of “I don’t stand out here?” Because when you were 17 you would have been living in Chinatown, right? But also going to a high school that was looking to Europe for validation.Well, that process of leaving Chinatown and going into the high school — at that point, I was trying to learn how to belong to the new world that I was moving into. The alienation wasn’t happening so much yet because I was discovering a new world. The estrangement didn’t really start for me until college, because that’s when I hit the wall with European art, which I did not connect to. I did connect to surrealism.“The whole ’70s was a time where I was grappling with identity,” Chong said. “At this point I’m comfortable with both things. Getting there was complicated.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOf course you did!Because it’s a much more stylized world, right? But I didn’t understand any of those things because I was young. I didn’t understand that leaving Chinatown meant being estranged from that and not really comfortable in this. So my early work all had to do with this sense of limbo. “Lazarus” is an example of where I was emotionally, and of feeling estranged. And “Lazarus” was ’72. The whole ’70s was a time where I was grappling with identity, like, where do I belong? At this point I’m comfortable with both things. Getting there was complicated, accepting these two aspects of myself. I actually went to China, to my father’s hometown. And when I left I said — I said to myself, because he was dead already — I said, “OK, I know where you’re from, but this is not where I’m from.” Because I’m from here. Like it or not.Theater is ephemeral. After 50 years, all those shows, what do you have?You have the joy of having done them. You have the joy of sharing them with people. It’s all ephemeral anyway. It’s not just theater that’s ephemeral. It’s all ephemeral. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Without You’ Review: Anthony Rapp’s Seasons of Love, and Loss

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      The actor, who starred in the original Broadway run of ‘Rent,’ reflects on the show’s early days and dealing with the grief of his mother’s death.Anthony Rapp’s show “Without You” is, in part, about the genesis of “Rent.” It is opening Off Broadway on a symbolic date: exactly 27 years after both that hit musical’s first public performance at New York Theater Workshop, and the death of its creator, Jonathan Larson. That’s 14,201,280 minutes gone by, 14 million moments so dear.As Rentheads will know, this number riffs on a famous lyric from “Seasons of Love,” the runaway anthem from “Rent” and now from “Without You.” That song pops up a few times over the course of the new show, and it still has the power to spur a Pavlovian lacrimal reaction, especially in the context in which Rapp (who originated the role of the aspiring filmmaker Mark) employs it here. Some of the moments he reminisces about are not so dear, because “Without You” is largely about death — brutally unexpected for Larson, and gruelingly protracted in the case of Rapp’s mother, Mary, who had cancer.For decades now, seeing “Rent” has been something of a coming-of-age rite, a gateway for young fans not just into the wondrous world of musical theater, but into adulthood — exposing them to gritty subject matter, helping them come to terms with who they are or might be. It played a similar role for Rapp, as he explained in “Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical ‘Rent,’ ” which came out in 2006. He turned the book into this play with music in 2008, performing it in other cities before finally making its way to New York, where it’s playing New World Stages, directed by Steven Maler.Before getting to the last two elements of the book’s subtitle, it’s worth noting that the theatrical version mostly skips the romantic side of the “love” part. The memoir did not offer much by way of introspection on the subject, but there were glimpses into a personality that appears more complicated, darker even, than the one we get onstage.It is clear that being cast in “Rent” was a turning point in Rapp’s career, even if he was not quite the bumbling beginner he suggests. Yes, he was a 22-year-old actor with a day job at Starbucks, but by the time the director Michael Greif cast him in the “Rent” workshop, he had already been in three Broadway shows and a few movies — one of the first things Larson told Rapp was that he’d liked him in “Dazed and Confused.”“Without You” opens Off Broadway exactly 27 years after the first public performance of “Rent” at New York Theater Workshop.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Without You” is at its most engaging when delivering a quasi-documentary look at the musical’s early days. Rapp performs the song he did for his audition, R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” and we hear a snippet from the demo cassette Larson gave Rapp so he could learn a number for his callback. Hearing the late composer’s own voice is quite affecting, and there is a surreal quality to the scene.Backstage stories have a built-in entertainment factor, and Rapp’s reminiscences have an in-the-room immediacy and enthusiasm. Add the very real artistic and commercial impact of “Rent,” and it’s easy to forgive him for overstating how edgy the show was for its time. After quoting a lyric from “La Vie Bohème” that reclaims slurs for gay men and lesbians, for example, Rapp quips we wouldn’t hear it from Andrew Lloyd Webber. Maybe not, but “Hair” was no slouch when it came to profanity, slurs, drugs and sexuality. And at least that show did not rhyme “curry vindaloo” with “Maya Angelou,” as Larson did.The composer’s abrupt death from an aortic aneurysm after the first dress rehearsal has entered musical-theater legend, and while Rapp was understandably devastated, “Without You” is, just as understandably, more poignant when he’s dealing with his mother’s yearslong decline. The actor recounts frequent trips to Joliet, Ill., where Mary lived, and re-enacts phone calls in which he plays both parts of the conversation (though in general he struggles to differentiate women’s voices, which all end up sounding the same). He also punctuates his mother’s side of the narrative with songs he co-wrote, mostly in an amiable indie-rock vein (the music director Daniel A. Weiss leads a punchy five-piece band from behind the keyboards). But it is hard to step away from the shadow “Rent” casts, then as now, on Rapp’s life: He circles back to that show with a rendition of the number “Without You” at his mother’s memorial. You would have to be made of stone to not be moved.Without YouThrough April 30 at New World Stages, Manhattan; withoutyoumusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Memorial’ Review: An American Story, Set in Stone

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      The national controversy surrounding Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam War Memorial is the subject of Livian Yeh’s nimble, process-driven play.Maya Lin was still a college student when her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was selected through an open-submission process. Built in 1982 on the National Mall in Washington, the memorial features a wide-angle pair of black granite walls engraved with the names of lost soldiers, and it descends below ground like a tomb. Opponents called it a monument to shame and defeat.The controversy surrounding its construction — veterans decrying Lin and her design, the congressional hearings that followed and the addition of a statue nearby depicting three soldiers as a compromise — is the subject of “Memorial,” a nimbly drawn and elegantly executed new play by Livian Yeh that opened on Sunday at the Mezzanine at A.R.T./New York Theaters.The winning design, a scrawl of black pastel that resembles a bat, represents a stark contrast from the Washington and Lincoln Monuments that dominate the National Mall, massive, gleaming-white shrines to America’s founding ideals. When Maya (Angel Lin) shares her proposed memorial with committee members, she describes it as a wound cut into the meadow between the two monuments, one that’s intended to inspire reflection — a fraught idea in those days, given that the subject of contemplation is the Vietnam War.Yeh’s retelling is fictionalized but includes some of the young artist’s real-life supporters as characters: Wolf Von Eckardt (Robert Meksin), an architecture critic who defends her in the press, and Hideo Sasaki (Glenn Kubota), a Japanese American architect, interned during World War II, who becomes a mentor to Maya, particularly after detractors start attacking her race (Ross Perot, a donor on the project, once called Lin an “egg roll”).In “Memorial,” Maya’s opposition takes the form of Colonel Becker (James Patrick Nelson), who spearheads funding for the project but eventually turns against her, and whom Yeh notes is an amalgam of veterans with objections to Lin’s design. Becker asks about Maya’s background upfront, ostensibly to ensure she can withstand national scrutiny. Though she tells him her parents fled Communist China and have no affiliation to the party, her heritage nonetheless becomes a target for racist backlash.Yeh imagines Maya as a headstrong idealist, committed above all to the purity of her design. And Angel Lin’s assured and anchoring performance toes a delicate line, presenting Maya as neither a babe in the woods nor a wunderkind fully prepared for the magnitude of her mission. There’s admirable strength to Maya’s convictions, and philosophical intrigue to her aesthetic arguments. But while the colonel’s side of their conflict is rooted in trauma and memory, Maya’s is purely theoretical. (It’s Maya’s mother, played by a wonderfully flinty Rachel Lu, whose back story illustrates the idea that a memorial ought to feel inclusive, recalling her sister’s — Maya’s aunt’s — design for a shrine to Communist China.)That Maya’s argument for her blueprint is conceptual instead of personal can make her seem as if she’s no more than the sum of her artistic principles, and less sympathetic than the colonel in making her case. Nor is there much talk of the social or political debates over the Vietnam War itself, which might have helped trace a throughline to the present, when U.S. military operations are more often addressed in public discourse with the kind of moral ambiguity Lin’s design confronts. Still, Yeh covers an extraordinary amount of ground in the 95-minute show, and has a draftsman’s keen eye for concision.The director Jeff Liu’s graceful staging, for the Pan Asian Repertory Theater, reflects Yeh’s focus on the rich potential of quietly expressive architecture. The sloped white panels of Sheryl Liu’s set suggest both a venerated graveyard and a row of blank canvases, and serve as a backdrop for evocative projections by Gregory Casparian and lighting by Victor En Yu Tan. The production’s attention to detail, including the impressively subtle 1980s costumes by Karen Boyer and scene-setting sound by Da Xu, lend texture and dimension to the largely process-driven plot.How a country chooses to remember is a clear indication of its values. So what does it say that Lin’s distinctly American success story isn’t more widely known? “Memorial” does for Lin’s legacy what she has striven to do in her work — invite people to consider uncomfortable truths.MemorialThrough Feb. 19 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; panasianrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More