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      Farewell to ‘Stomp,’ a Show at the Beating Heart of New York

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      The stage has no curtain. The set is littered with highway signs and mass transit insignia. And then there are the gigantic oil drums, ominous and puzzling. It could be a storage facility. Or the site of an industrial warehouse party. But then the sweepers start to trickle in, swooshing across in balletic punk pageantry.Since its debut at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village in 1994, “Stomp,” the wordless percussion spectacle of twirling, tapping, sweeping, banging, clanging and yes, stomping, has gone from a scrappy neighborhood attraction to a mainstay of the culture of New York City.In honor of the show’s 10th anniversary in 2004, a mayoral proclamation declared March 14, 2004, as “Stomp Day.” For its 20th birthday in 2014, the Empire State Building shone in red light in its honor. That year, the production was also the centerpiece of the city’s “Stomp Out Litter” campaign, shot across the five boroughs; and in 2015, the show’s performers participated in a collaboration with another city cultural institution, the Harlem Globetrotters. The city once even temporarily renamed Second Avenue between Seventh and Eighth Streets “Stomp Avenue.”In its history, only three occasions have disrupted the continuity of the New York run: Sept. 11, a gas explosion on Second Avenue and the Covid pandemic. Even as commercial stores booted out local businesses, rents shot up and students and artists moved farther downtown, the show hung on in an ever-shifting neighborhood.The Orpheum Theater, which has been home to “Stomp” since the ’90s.Zack DeZon for The New York TimesIn the world of “Stomp,” anything can be used to create rhythm: garbage cans, radiator hoses, match boxes.Margaret Norton/NBC, via Getty ImagesBut after 29 years, the production will close for good on Jan. 8 because of declining ticket sales.“Say it ain’t so!” said the music producer Lou George, who is widely known as Bowlegged Lou. A “Stomp” super fan, he said he had seen the show 225 times and planned to see it once more before the cast takes its final bows.“I’m having withdrawals,” he said. “‘Stomp’ was such a fixture in New York.”Part drum line, part step team, part ensemble of city buskers, “Stomp” is a show in which timing is everything. The cast of eight perform with repurposed household objects and urban detritus, creating rhythm out of garbage cans, suitcases, radiator hoses and precision choreography, all while threading in humor through one-upping showdowns and zany mishaps. Anything can become music: fingernails scratching against match boxes; basketballs passed back and forth with a thud.“Stomp” has had unusually global reach. It has been spoofed on “The Simpsons,” included as an answer on “Jeopardy!” and performed in 45 countries — including at the Acropolis and the 2012 London Olympics closing ceremony.A Farewell to ‘Stomp’After nearly 29 years onstage, the percussion and dance spectacle will close in New York on Jan. 8.Sound of the City: Part drum line, part step team, part ensemble of city buskers, “Stomp” became part of the fabric and culture of New York.Memories: We asked our critics and Times readers to share what the show has meant to them. This is what they told us.10 Things: There’s more to the show than banging on a can. Here are 10 things you might not know about the Off Broadway institution.1994 Review: The wordless show “speaks so directly to one of the most basic human impulses, the urge to make rhythmic noise,” our critic wrote when “Stomp” opened in New York.Still, it remained a symbol of the cultural landscape of New York. But it wasn’t born here.The 1997 cast of “Stomp,” which included one of its creators, Luke Cresswell, fourth from left.Lois GreenfieldIt was conceived by two Britons — the creators and directors Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, who met as street performers in Brighton, England, in the early ’80s. Together they formed musical groups that mixed percussion, vocals and comedy, and after experimenting with one-off performances using only brooms and garbage bins, they premiered “Stomp” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1991.“We concentrated on the rhythmic elements,” McNicholas said, “but I think we remained aware of the inherent absurdity of the concept of using everyday objects as instruments, so the humor was there from the start.”When the show arrived in New York in the early ’90s, the East Village was home to Blue Man Group, CBGB and the indie-rock club Brownies. Cresswell and McNicholas found the punk downtown — far from the bright lights of Broadway — a perfect fit for their deadpan show.“Stomp” has been spoofed on “The Simpsons,” featured as an answer on “Jeopardy!” and performed in 45 countries.Rachel Papo for The New York Times“It’s not glamour; it’s not cute sets,” Cresswell said. “It’s a small, funky little theater with people doing it really close to you. You feel and smell the sweat.”Cresswell and McNicholas weren’t sure if the show would make it through its original four-month run, yet it has outlasted much of the neighborhood’s arts ecosystem from those early days.Brownies went dark in 2002, CBGB in 2006; and Blue Man Group was acquired by Cirque du Soleil in 2017. And one by one, many of the “Stomp” cast and creators’ go-to East Village locales shut their doors: the adjacent luncheonette Stage Restaurant, the corner bar and bistro Virage, and Gem Spa, the nearly 100-year-old bodega across the street, which closed in 2020.Still, “Stomp” endured for nearly three decades, rivaling “The Phantom of the Opera,” which is set to close this year after 35 years onstage. Throughout the show’s touring and Orpheum Theater productions, Cresswell and McNicholas retained artistic control and directorship.Jackie Green, the publicist for “Stomp,” said that flagging international tourism after pandemic lockdowns was a factor in deciding to close, but she declined to share financial figures. (The North American and European touring shows will continue to run.)McNicholas said that he felt for the New York performers, who in the last year were performing for “tiny” houses, though neither the energy onstage nor the enthusiasm in the audience had let up, he said.“It’s a small, funky little theater with people doing it really close to you. You feel and smell the sweat,” Cresswell said.Rachel Papo for The New York Times“I’m a little bit sad, because I feel like we were part of the East Village,” McNicholas said. “We were part of the landscape of the Village, and it’s a shame to say goodbye to that.”“Playing on objects to create music has been around forever,” said Alan Asuncion, a member of the final New York “Stomp” cast who has been performing at the Orpheum since 2007. “But the creators brilliantly put it into a piece of theater that has become a household name. And that legacy will live on.”Because the show is wordless, save for a few gibberish sounds and some good-natured grunting, its cadence and comedy are accessible to a wide variety of audiences.At a recent performance, children bubbled over with delight, adults clapped their hands and stomped their feet wildly in a packed house. The audience was carried by the pulse of drums and call-and-response cues.In any other setting, seeing a group of muscled men and women in work boots wielding yellow rubber gloves and industrial sinks around their necks might be cause for alarm. At “Stomp,” it’s a moment of giddy anticipation. The audience can sense something big is coming. There’s a collective prolonged inhale. And then the Stompers started rocking. As they swayed their bodies, so did the giant sinks. Water sloshed from side to side creating a swishy melody, before the performers began to heave their bodies to and fro, banging on the sinks and pipes.“I’m going to miss the audience interaction, being able to look out and see the audience look back at you,” Asuncion said. After 15 years, “it surprisingly doesn’t get old.” More

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      Review: ‘Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era’ Stages a Disaster in Reverse

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      The Under the Radar festival kicks off with an allegory about climate destruction by the Belgian provocateurs Ontroerend Goed.Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A woman. A man. A tree. An apple. So begins “Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era,” a performance piece by the Belgian provocateurs Ontroerend Goed, presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in association with the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival. In the show’s first minutes, an apple is plucked and eaten, a paradise destroyed. Then the story changes.For nearly three decades, this collective (its name is a Flemish pun that translates loosely to “feel estate”) has goaded theatergoers, sometimes gently and sometimes (“The Smile Off Your Face,” “A Game of You”) less gently. “Are We Not Drawn,” directed by Alexander Devriendt, falls on the milder end of that spectrum, even as it functions as an allegory about climate destruction.After the apple is devoured, the tree that held it is torn apart by one of the six actors. Not everything in the show is entirely real; the tree very much is. On opening night on Wednesday at BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space, audience members groaned as he ripped branch after branch. If I’m honest I groaned, too — that poor defenseless sapling — even though there’s currently a Christmas tree in the corner of my apartment slowly turning into tinder. Soon a rainbow of plastic grocery bags, the kind that have recently been outlawed in New York, litters the stage. (OK, fine, I have a few of those in my apartment, too.) Then the smoke begins to billow.This first half-hour, which ends with the stage strewn with trash and filled with smoke is ugly, deliberately, and just a little unintelligible. There’s sparse dialogue throughout, rendered without supertitles. The non-Belgians in the theater will probably assume that it is Flemish. (I did.) It is not. This is one more show in which the troupe toys with its audience, though here it displays better than usual sportsmanship. To say more would ruin the show’s central surprise. But remember that its title is a palindrome, a type of wordplay in which a word or phrase reads the same backward and forward. So after advancing, the show must then reverse. “Are we not drawn” is a parable of disaster, but run the tape backward and it instead promises repair. Paradise, it suggests, can be regained.But if the ideas are wobbly, the craftsmanship is astonishingly sturdy. The ensemble works with incredible precision, selling gestures and movements that might otherwise seem bizarre or arbitrary. Nothing here is arbitrary. Each step, each syllable has purpose. And each is set to William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops,” a composition that is designed to deteriorate.Maybe it doesn’t pay to think too hard about the show. Unless you’re a fervent believer in carbon capture and probably even then, the odds that humans can remediate the ecological harm they have done seems slim. The show acknowledges this, winkingly, as brute realism gives way to something closer to magic. (There are a few other winks, too. At one point, sparks fly, literally, courtesy of what looks like a mini circular saw.) I’m ultimately not sure if “Are we not drawn” is hopeful or hopeless, a hymn to human endeavor or futility. Certainly it celebrates what a committed group of artists can achieve. Isn’t that enough?Are We Not Drawn Onward to New EraThrough Sunday at BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 75 minutes. More

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      ‘Ohio State Murders,’ Starring Audra McDonald, to Close on Broadway

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      The 75-minute memory play by Adrienne Kennedy had been scheduled to run until Feb. 12; it will close on Jan. 15.“Ohio State Murders,” a short, powerful and pointed play starring Audra McDonald as a writer recalling racism and violence the character encountered as an undergraduate, will close sooner than expected on Broadway after struggling to sell tickets.The play was the Broadway debut for its 91-year-old writer, Adrienne Kennedy, a much admired playwright whose surrealistic work has generally been presented on smaller stages and taught at universities.“Ohio State Murders” is one of her most accessible works — it is essentially a 75-minute memory play in which the protagonist tells a gripping story about her college years — but nonetheless proved a tough sell in the commercial arena, even with strong reviews and McDonald, who is one of Broadway’s best-loved performers, in the starring role.The production began previews Nov. 11 and opened Dec. 8 at the James Earl Jones Theater. It was scheduled to run until Feb. 12; instead it will close Jan. 15.The production has had a hard time finding an audience — last week, when Broadway was flush with tourists, “Ohio State Murders” filled only 49 percent of its seats, and many weeks had been worse. It grossed $311,893 for nine performances last week; that was the high-water mark for the run thus far.Produced by Jeffrey Richards, the play was capitalized for up to $5.1 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped.Broadway is always a financially risky proposition — far more shows fail than succeed — and the climate has become more challenging since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, because costs have risen and attendance has fallen. Last week was the best week the industry has seen since late 2019, but the riches are not evenly distributed: “Ohio State Murders” follows “Walking With Ghosts,” “KPOP,” “Ain’t No Mo’” and “Almost Famous” in announcing an unexpectedly early closing this season. More

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      Broadway Bounces Back With ‘Best Week Since the Before Times’

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      Broadway shows grossed $51.9 million during the holiday week, the most since 2019, and “The Lion King” set a record for the most earned by any show in a single week.Broadway, still struggling to rebound from the lengthy pandemic shutdown, is starting the new year with a sign of hope: Last week was, by far, the best for the industry since the arrival of the coronavirus.The 33 shows running grossed $51.9 million, which is the most since the final week of 2019. And “The Lion King,” which last fall celebrated its 25th anniversary on Broadway, notched a remarkable milestone: It grossed $4.3 million, which is the most ever taken in by a show in a single week on Broadway.The boffo numbers — 21 shows grossed more than $1 million last week — come with caveats. Both Christmas and New Year’s days fell on Sundays, concentrating holiday travelers into a single week. Twenty shows added extra performances for the holiday week, giving nine instead of the usual eight. And ticket prices were high: The average Broadway seat went for $166, up from $128 just four weeks earlier.But the strong week sent a signal that under the right circumstances, Broadway can deliver. During the holiday week — the week that ended Jan. 1 — the 22 musicals and 11 plays running were, on average, 92 percent full. Overall attendance was 312,878, which is not a record (in fact, it was the 27th-best-attended week in history, according to the Broadway League), but is good (by comparison, attendance over Thanksgiving week was 259,298).The two final weeks of the year saw combined grosses of $86.7 million, which is up 115 percent over the previous year, but down 12 percent compared to those key holiday weeks in 2019.“What you see is that we’re continuing to build and maintain our audience,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, a trade association representing producers and theater owners. “We’re not back to where we were, but we’re doing very well at a time of uncertainty.”According to the League, last week was the third-highest-grossing in history. The highest was the week ending Dec. 30, 2018, when grosses were $57.8 million and attendance was 378,910; the second-highest was the week ending Dec. 29, 2019, when grosses were $55.8 million and attendance was 350,714.“The Lion King,” with a nine-performance week, toppled the previous record for the top-grossing week by a single show, which had been held by “Hamilton,” which grossed $4 million for eight performances during the week that ended Dec. 30, 2018. (The figures are not adjusted for inflation.)“The Lion King” earned $4.3 million last week, the most a single show has ever earned in one week. It resumed performances in September 2021.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesThe holidays are traditionally strong for Broadway, but in 2021 the final weeks of the year were a bloodbath because the Omicron variant led to cancellations of multiple shows. Now, despite the “tripledemic” of circulating respiratory illnesses, Broadway has largely figured out how to keep going: During the last three weeks, 12 scheduled performances were canceled, compared to 221 cancellations during the final three weeks of 2021.Throughout the industry, shows were trumpeting breaking records last week.“Chicago” had the highest-grossing week in its 26-year history, as well as its highest single-performance gross. The once-struggling “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which revived its fortunes after the shutdown by consolidating from two parts into one, was already the highest-grossing play in Broadway history, and last week set a record (nearly $2.7 million) for weekly gross by a play. And a starry revival of “The Piano Lesson” was on track to being the highest grossing play by August Wilson — the much-celebrated and oft-performed bard of 20th-century African American life — in Broadway history.Several shows set house records at the theaters where they are being performed, including the revival of “Funny Girl,” which had been floundering financially until its producers brought in Lea Michele to star. Also setting records were shows including “Beetlejuice,” which closes Jan. 8 after a bumpy ride; “Six,” the pop-concert-style reconsideration of the wives of Henry VIII; “& Juliet,” a new musical imagining an alternative history for Shakespeare’s famously star-crossed lover, and “MJ,” the Michael Jackson biomusical.“We had our best week since the before times,” said Victoria Bailey, the executive director of TDF, a nonprofit organization that runs the TKTS discount ticket booths, who said her staff is noticing increasing geographic diversity among ticket buyers.“We were seeing people from lots and lots of states and lots and lots of countries — it wasn’t the same folks making the numbers bigger, but it was folks from further away,” Bailey said. “I don’t have any reason to say we’re out of the woods, but I don’t think this was just a one-off. And if we get to a point where you periodically have good weeks, that will be helpful.”Bailey and St. Martin both noted that tourists from China have not yet returned in significant numbers as that nation battles surging coronavirus cases. But both said they were particularly heartened by returning domestic tourism.Broadway now enters a period of greater challenge: January and February have historically been weak months for the industry. There are 12 shows scheduled to close this month, which is at the high end of the normal range for January closings. But there are a raft of openings planned in March and April — it looks like the overall number of new shows this season will be within the typical range — and St. Martin said she is feeling good about the industry’s trajectory.“I am overwhelmingly optimistic about the spring,” she said. More

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      At Under the Radar, Theater That Jumps Right Off the Page

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      Literary influences suffuse this year’s festival of avant-garde performance. Artists from six shows share the stories that inspired them.“A story,” the director Yngvild Aspeli said, “is something that makes us connect to each other, something that manages to go beyond time or cultural difference.”Theater, even in its more experimental corners, has long been in the business of telling stories. At this year’s Under the Radar festival, the Public Theater’s annual survey of avant-garde theater and performance in New York, some of these stories may seem familiar. Half a dozen of the main works are deliberately in dialogue with literary classics and ephemera, from sources as diverse as Mark Twain’s satirical monologues, James Joyce’s erotic letters, the Epic of Gilgamesh and “Antigone.”“I’m interested in the contemporary as the ancient comes through it,” Mark Russell, who founded and programs the festival, said. “And I was very moved by these primal theater impulses and primal texts.”Running through Jan. 22 at the Public and five partner venues, this is the first iteration of Under the Radar since 2020. The 2022 festival was canceled just weeks before opening because of an upsurge in Covid-19 cases. Though somewhat less international than in years past (an acknowledgment of the difficulty and expense of obtaining visas for artists), it still represents a substantial array of narrative, style and tone. Aspeli’s piece, for example, an adaptation of “Moby-Dick,” is performed by 50 puppets and an underwater orchestra.Annie Saunders and Jesse Saler in “Our Country.”Gema GalianaNot all of these projects were conceived during the pandemic, but even those dreamed up before it seem intent on finding language — textual and visual — to apply to this uncertain cultural moment. Much of that language happens to be literary, and it centers on themes of isolation and community. While several of the programmed works survey grief and loss, others offer alternatives, such as friendship and pleasure. Some do both.“Perhaps in a moment where we’re in crisis, we can use this past poetics to bring us joy and relief and connection,” said Rachel Mars, the creator of the performance piece “Your Sexts.” (The show has a longer title, but it is, like many sexts, unprintable.)The New York Times spoke to artists associated with six of this year’s shows about the literary works that inspired them and how the pages of the past speak to the present. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.‘Our Country’Inspiration: Sophocles’ “Antigone”Annie Saunders, co-creator and performer: As a person who struggles with self-belief, I’m interested in “Antigone,” in the idea of believing in yourself that much. The other thing that really interests me is the brother-sister dynamic, having a brother who you feel you have to save. My brother has a criminal history. He’s actually great now. But for many, many years, that was the dynamic. I spent a few days with my brother in the summer of 2016 and made about 10 hours of tape of us talking to each other about “Antigone,” our childhood, criminality, the law. That became a major part of the show.“Antigone” is an anchor. I always come back to that core story dealing with fundamental human themes about right and wrong, self-belief, familial obligation. These are core human experiences.‘Otto Frank’Inspiration: “The Diary of Anne Frank”Roger Guenveur Smith, creator and performer: I was invited to a theater festival in Amsterdam. I went to the Anne Frank House. I was very inspired and very moved. I’m always trying to bring the past into the present moment. The idea that Otto Frank should come to know his daughter through that diary, especially having lost her the way that he lost her, must have been an extraordinarily daunting exercise. I thought that would be something worth pursuing, because of this ongoing crisis that we’re still engaged in.The fundamental challenge is: How does a man reverse the natural order of things and create a memorial for his daughter? To simultaneously serve the living and the dead is the great challenge for Otto Frank and for many of us, who are in the current moment, dealing with loss.‘Your Sexts’Inspiration: The erotic letters of James Joyce, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, etc.Rachel Mars, creator and performer: I was on a residency. Brexit had just happened. It took the wind out of my sails creatively. Then Scott Sheppard [the writer and performer] was like, “I have something to cheer you up.” He read me this James Joyce 1909 letter. I was bowled over by the explicitness, the poetics, the imagery, how much it was all about butts. It was super life-affirming.I began this search for who else was writing these letters. I worked with two sexologists. It was obviously more difficult to find the women and the queer women, because history, but it was easier than I thought. There’s an illicitness to it, definitely. It does feel like opening a crack into people’s private lives. But there’s this sanctity to it, a kind of respect.‘KLII’Inspiration: Mark Twain’s “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” Patrice Lumumba’s independence speechKaneza Schaal, creator, co-director and performer: My practice is about remembering. Today, we look at a figure like Leopold [the Belgian king who presided over atrocities in his administration of the Congo Free State] with mock horror, his atrocities stun and outrage. But there are new Leopolds every day. For me, this was a way of exorcising this evil. I’m interested in looking inward and looking outward, exorcising these catastrophic figures and catastrophic events.Christopher Myers, co-director and designer: Mark Twain was interested in the Congo, and he understood the relationship between the oppression of Africans there and the oppression of Africans at home. This text of Mark Twain was in line with the internationalism and cross-cultural, cross-pollination that has inspired so many anticolonial causes. It’s about seeing not only the histories of these specific texts, but also how these texts bump up against each other. One of the things that theater does really well is allow you to rub a text against other texts.‘Moby Dick’Inspiration: Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick”Yngvild Aspeli, director and puppet maker: This story, even though it’s an old story, it touches on these things that go beyond time. Out on the sea hunting a whale with a harpoon, or lost in our cyber world, human beings are still tackling the same issues. We use this older story as a mirror, a prism.Our inner struggles are somehow always the same, the questions are the same: the complexity of being human, how we struggle with our inner demons, how we try to figure out our place in society, existential questions of life and death and everything that lies in between. The mysteries of life.‘King Gilgamesh & the Man of the Wild’Inspiration: the Epic of GilgameshAhmed Moneka, creator and performer: I’m from Iraq, born in Baghdad. I grew up with this myth. I was exiled. I ended up in Toronto. Jesse became my first friend in the theater scene. The parallel to that is the relationship between Gilgamesh and his best friend Enkidu.Jesse LaVercombe, creator and performer: We’re toggling between this contemporary story and this totally ancient, sometimes cartoonish, sometimes tragic epic.Seth Bockley, creator and director: I didn’t want to just riff on the themes. I wanted that story retold. There’s something sacred about that. We need each other to get through the world. That’s the Gilgamesh and Enkidu story. More

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      British Comedy ‘Peter Pan Goes Wrong’ Plans Spring Broadway Bow

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      The farce, by the team behind “The Play That Goes Wrong,” is about a bumbling theater company attempting to stage the popular children’s play.Six years ago, the Mischief Theater Company arrived on Broadway from Britain with “The Play That Goes Wrong,” a madcap comedy about a hapless amateur theater company attempting to stage a whodunit.That farce was a success, with outlandish physical comedy that led to a Tony Award for best set. A national tour was also successful, and a production has since been running Off Broadway.Now Mischief is planning a return to Broadway with “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” a sort of sequel in which the same theater company attempts to stage J.M. Barrie’s beloved play about a boy who doesn’t grow up.“Peter Pan Goes Wrong” is scheduled to start performances March 17 and to open April 19 at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater. The play is planning a limited run of 16.5 weeks (the unorthodox run length reflects the company’s off-kilter brand).The comedy has already had a rich production history — it opened at a small theater in London in 2013, toured Britain in 2014, ran in London’s West End over the Christmas seasons in 2015 and 2016, and was adapted for a BBC television special in 2016. The show’s North American journey began last year with productions in Edmonton and Vancouver, Canada. It has had generally positive reviews: The Vancouver Sun declared that the play “has absolutely no redeeming social value. But at its height it offers a gag about every 10 seconds, many of them hilarious.”The play’s creators are Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, who also wrote “The Play That Goes Wrong”; the three will again star in their production. “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” features the same slapstick sensibility as the earlier play, but has a bit more character development, and an even crazier set.“The fictional theater company is taking on a much more ambitious production, with flying, crocodiles and a revolving stage, and they put on the play with the same disastrous results,” Lewis said. “You get more behind the scenes into what’s going on with the characters, as well as all the farce and the madcap comedy.”The writer-performers said they are looking forward to returning to Broadway, and are mindful that the industry is in a very different place than it was when they were first there.“Before the pandemic, you could say that our work was very silly and not that important,” Sayer said. “Now I think this kind of work is very important — there’s something very profound in silliness right now, because that’s something everybody needs after what we’ve all been through.”The play is being produced by Kevin McCollum, Kenny Wax, Stage Presence and Catherine Schreiber. McCollum said he has been eager to transfer the show to Broadway for some time, believing that “people want to laugh.” More

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      Frank Galati, Mainstay of Chicago Theater, Dies at 79

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      He brought his adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath” to Broadway and won Tony Awards. He also directed the long-running hit “Ragtime.”Frank Galati, a writer, director and actor whose work in Chicago, especially his celebrated adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath,” furthered that city’s international reputation in theater, and whose long résumé included directing the Broadway hit “Ragtime,” died on Monday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 79.His husband, Peter Amster, said the cause was complications of cancer.Mr. Galati was a towering figure in Chicago-area theater for decades, working with the Goodman and Steppenwolf theaters and other houses there and teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. He specialized in adaptations, and in 1988 his version of John Steinbeck’s dust-bowl epic, “The Grapes of Wrath,” was a hit for Steppenwolf.He both wrote and directed “The Grapes of Wrath,” though it took work to persuade Steinbeck’s widow, Elaine Steinbeck, to release the rights. She told The Chicago Tribune in 1988 that once she saw what Mr. Galati had done with the novel, she was glad she did.“I took the script to bed with me,” she said. “As soon as I started reading it, I sat bolt upright. I didn’t think it would be that good.”It was good enough to make the trip to Broadway, with Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney and Lois Smith leading the cast. When it opened at the Cort Theater in March 1990, Frank Rich reviewed it for The New York Times.“The production at the Cort,” he wrote, “an epic achievement for the director, Frank Galati, and the Chicago theater ensemble at his disposal, makes Steinbeck live for a new generation not by updating his book but by digging into its timeless heart.”The production earned Mr. Galati two Tony Awards, for best direction of a play and best play.Gary Sinise, left, and Terry Kinney in Mr. Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” The production’s run on Broadway in 1990 earned Mr. Galati Tony Awards for both writing and directing.Later in the 1990s Mr. Galati directed another high-profile show, the musical “Ragtime.” Based on the E.L. Doctorow novel and adapted by Terrence McNally, with music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, it opened in Toronto in December 1996 to acclaim, and in January 1998 it settled in for a two-year run on Broadway. Mr. Galati received a Tony nomination for best direction of a musical.Those were just two highlights from a career that stretched back to his college days at Northwestern, where, at the School of Communication, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965, a master’s in 1967 and a doctorate in 1971. For the Forum Theater in 1973, he adapted “Boss,” the Chicago columnist Mike Royko’s book about Richard J. Daley, the city’s longtime mayor, into a musical, for which he also wrote the lyrics; it won a Joseph Jefferson Award (Chicago’s version of the Tonys) for best new play. Other Jeffersons followed, with Mr. Galati winning for directing, writing and acting.Adaptations were a specialty — in addition to “The Grapes of Wrath,” the works he adapted included two books by Haruki Murakami, “Kafka on the Shore” and “after the quake” (Mr. Murakami’s only demand, Mr. Galati said, was that the title be rendered in lowercase letters), as well as William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and numerous others. He and Lawrence Kasdan even shared an Oscar nomination for adapting Anne Tyler’s novel “The Accidental Tourist” into the 1988 film of the same name.“Almost every novel conceals a drama,” Mr. Galati told Stay Thirsty magazine in 2014. “Some of those dramas are very hard to coax out, some jump out of the book and run up onto the stage. Of course, if the novelist creates scenes that play through brilliant dialogue, that’s half the battle. That’s very true of Steinbeck. The scenes in his books are completely stage worthy. Other writers, like Henry James, are much harder to adapt.”If he had success as an adapter, he told The New Haven Register in 2006, when “after the quake” was being staged at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., it was because he was “not afraid to keep much of the narrator’s voice.”“Long narrative passages don’t scare me in performance,” he said.Countless actors knew of Mr. Galati’s touch as a director, and many issued tributes on learning of his death.“Every actor will know what I mean when I say Frank waited for me,” Molly Regan, a member of Steppenwolf, said in a statement. “He waited for me. He cast you, and then he trusted you. Sometimes he knew me as an actor better than I knew myself.”Last year, when Mr. Galati was inducted in the Theater Hall of Fame, he returned those kinds of compliments.“I’m honored, I’m humbled, I’m grateful,” he said in his acceptance speech, “but I cannot accept this honor for myself. Rather, I dedicate this honor to my students, and to every single actor I have been inspired by and learned from. The rehearsal hall is where I have spent the happiest hours of my life.”A scene from the Broadway production of “Ragtime.” Mr. Galati’s direction of the show earned him a Tony nomination.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFrank Joseph Galati was born on Nov. 29, 1943, in Highland Park, Ill., north of Chicago. His father, also named Frank, was a dog trainer and boarder, and his mother, Virginia (Cassel) Galati, was a saleswoman with Marshall Field, the department store.He grew up in Northbrook, Ill., and enrolled at Northwestern, where one of his earliest notices resulted from his appearance in a faculty and student talent show in 1964.“A born comic, Frank Galati of Northbrook, a junior in the school of speech, made eight appearances,” The Chicago Tribune wrote. “In one, he portrayed a professor who spent so much time telling his class how far behind it was that he never caught up with the class schedule.”Mr. Galati had a lifelong fascination with Gertrude Stein, which he incorporated into his theatrical life beginning in the mid-1970s, when he directed a reading of some of her works called “Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled.” — a title borrowed from a Stein work. In 1976, for the Chicago Opera Theater, he directed “The Mother of Us All,” the Virgil Thomson opera for which Ms. Stein wrote the libretto.In 1987, at the Goodman, he staged perhaps his most ambitious Stein-inspired piece, “She Always Said, Pablo,” featuring Ms. Stein’s words and Pablo Picasso’s works — the one a writer who expanded our view of language, the other an artist who changed our way of seeing. Richard Christiansen, reviewing it for The Tribune, called it “a high point of Galati’s work as an interpretive artist.” The production was later seen at the Kennedy Center in Washington.Mr. Galati said he found Ms. Stein’s texts mesmerizing.“They’re just beautiful to listen to,” he told The Tribune in 1987. “They gallop, leap, jump and tinkle in our ears.”Mr. Galati and Mr. Amster, who had been together for 52 years and married in 2017, relocated to Florida in the mid-2000s, about the time Mr. Galati took emeritus status at Northwestern. At his death they were dividing their time between homes in Sarasota and on Beaver Island in Michigan.Both have been active in the Asolo Repertory Theater of Sarasota. Mr. Amster is directing its production of “Ken Ludwig’s The Three Musketeers,” which opens Jan. 11. Last year Mr. Galati, reuniting with Ms. Ahrens and Mr. Flaherty, directed the premiere of a new musical there called “Knoxville,” based on James Agee’s autobiographical novel, “A Death in the Family.” Mr. Galati, of course, did the adaptation.In addition to Mr. Amster, he is survived by a sister, Franny Clarkson.At the Theater Hall of Fame induction, Mr. Galati was introduced by B.J. Jones, artistic director of Northlight, a Chicago-area theater for which Mr. Galati directed the inaugural production in 1975 when it was known as the Evanston Theater Company. Mr. Jones singled out a moment in Mr. Galati’s long career that, he said, showed “the depth of his humanity”: his insistence that Susan Nussbaum, a young actress who was in a wheelchair since being hit by a car a few years earlier, be cast in the role of Gertrude Stein in the premiere of “She Always Said, Pablo.”Ms. Nussbaum, who became a disabilities-rights advocate and died last year, often cited Mr. Galati’s support as pivotal to her post-accident life. In an interview in 1994, when she was playing the Stein role at the Kennedy Center, she credited him with “always going beyond the vision that other people have seen.” More

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      Prototype, an Essential New York Opera Festival, Turns 10

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      “There are all these unbelievable artists who are creating work that’s really hard to define,” Beth Morrison, a music theater impresario, said during a recent interview. “It’s the work that falls between disciplines, that is beautiful and strange and challenging, and there’s so little space for that in New York right now.”Morrison, the leader of Beth Morrison Projects, produces exactly those types of works — operas and other pieces that can approach cabaret, concert or musical forms but defy categorization — with white-hot fervor, particularly as one of the founders of the Prototype Festival, which started 10 years ago and returns on Thursday with seven shows as idiosyncratic and fearlessly strange as ever.The niche that Prototype occupies on the New York performing arts calendar — something of a purely musical cousin to the Under the Radar theater festival, also this month — has become increasingly essential as Lincoln Center moves away from presenting festivals that would have hosted chamber and avant-garde operas, for example, or as small theaters nurture new works with an eye toward Broadway.Things weren’t much better when Prototype, created by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, took shape with the help of a Mellon Foundation grant. “There wasn’t much,” said Kim Whitener, a founding director (and formerly of HERE), who is now an independent producer. “There didn’t seem to be a space for this really important work.”Over the years, Prototype has put on black box productions and works in progress, and expanded to theaters across the city as its operas grew in scale, like “Dog Days” and “Breaking the Waves.” During the pandemic, it commissioned streaming projects. And last year, when the Omicron variant’s spread led to the festival’s cancellation mere days before its start, it adapted yet again, finding ways to salvage much of its programming.Du Yun and Royce Vavrek’s “Angel’s Bone” (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. This year, Du Yun has a new chamber opera, written for and starring the baritone Nathan Gunn.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesA scene from Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “Prism,” another Pulitzer winner.Maria BaranovaAlong the way, it has been an early supporter of artists like Taylor Mac and Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte — the Lithuanian trio that went on to global recognition, and critical adoration, with its opera “Sun and Sea.” Two Prototype shows, the Du Yun and Royce Vavrek opera “Angel’s Bone,” and Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “Prism,” have won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.Du Yun is back this year with the chamber opera “In Our Daughter’s Eyes,” written for and starring the baritone Nathan Gunn; other productions include Emma O’Halloran’s double bill “Trade/Mary Motorhead,” the vocalist Gelsey Bell’s “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning],” Silvana Estrada’s “Marchita,” David Lang’s “note to a friend,” the streaming opera “Undine” and the 10th anniversary celebration “The All Sing ‘Here Lies Joy.’”Morrison and Whitener — along with Kristin Marting, HERE’s artistic director, who was among Prototypes founders and leads it with Morrison today, and Jecca Barry, a former director who was on the 2023 edition’s curatorial team — discussed Prototype’s past and present in a group video call. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Over the past decade, what kind of influence have you observed Prototype having on the industry?JECCA BARRY We’ve seen, across the country, other opera companies that have started their own festivals or explored the idea of second stages — other venues, like black box theaters. The first partnership show that we did with Los Angeles Opera was “Dog Days,” and that was at Redcat [a 200-seat theater]. L.A. Opera told us that 70 percent of the audience that came to see that had never set foot in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion [the company’s much-larger home]. It’s actually about creating a totally different audience, and really, that’s so important for opera companies these days.KRISTIN MARTING That’s about both form and content. I feel like the festival spans this spectrum of work. There’s a crossover thing that’s happening, and that’s because so many of the artists that we’re working with are not trying to stay within the lines. Then the second thing about content: I just feel like what we’re really interested in is socially relevant work that resonates with people — a whole range of people, told by a whole ranges of voices. I think that’s also something that the industry has been incorporating, happily, after so long of it being monochromatic.How would you say the New York cultural landscape changed during Prototype’s history, and what has that meant for the festival’s mission?BETH MORRISON It’s almost impossible right now to get opera programs at any of the venues in town. With Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera is doing new work, finally, but there’s a whole host of work that is being created for smaller stages and other kinds of stages that the big presenters aren’t doing here. And for a company like us, that doesn’t have a performing space, it’s freaking hard. Our stuff used to be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that’s completely shifted. Lincoln Center is not doing opera. The Shed’s not doing it. That means we can only get our stuff done in our festival when we self-present it, and I think that’s a real shame.BARRY The creative impulses are there. I mean, it’s incredible how many young composers want to write their first opera right out of the gate.KIM WHITENER They’re finding their niches elsewhere. I just think that we’re in a time of such great sea change; it’s really more that what we’re talking about with the loss of New York is the sense of a real footprint, you know, for opera theater in the way we used to have.Thinking about the pandemic, changing audience habits and new ways of presenting opera, how has the festival adapted?MORRISON We were really proud of what we did in ’21 with the commissions to composers to create work in a digital space, and making sure that we had a presence and an impact in our community’s lives at a time when we were all so locked down. Last year really sucked, though — to have the festival canceled a week before we opened was completely devastating. We lost a couple hundred thousand dollars because we paid all the artists. We managed to do three of the shows later in the year and then moved other things to this January. But I think that this year’s festival has come together really beautifully as a result.What effect, if any, has the festival’s success with awards like the Pulitzer Prize had on how it operates?MARTING I think we’re taking the same risks.MORRISON What we’re committed to is letting the artists lead and sort of walking hand-in-hand and bringing their visions to the fore. That recognition’s incredible, and I think we’re all thrilled that we were able to produce and present that work.BARRY But I think it’s also a testament to flexibility. So many companies that are developing new work, especially big institutions, are very rigid in their structures of what that looks like and what that timeline is, and that is not the way any producer on this screen works. Both of the pieces that won the Pulitzer took more time than we originally thought they were going to and got rescheduled and rescheduled.There’s this wonderful point when an artist says, “Can I really do that?” And to be able to say, “Yes, you can try that idea,” and then, on the flip side, to have the audience come in and say, “I didn’t know you could do that with opera.” Being able to empower artists to take those risks and then being able to see the audience, it’s so satisfying.MORRISON With “Dog Days” in particular, and with what Jecca just said — it reminds me of the phone call that I got from David T. Little when he was writing it, saying: “I don’t think the last 20 minutes has any words. Is that OK?” I love that phone call. That’s the best phone call ever, because they want the permission to go in a completely boundary-pushing direction, and that’s what we want.WHITENER When you really trust the artist, they in turn trust you. They’re putting this really raw, alien thing in your hands and trusting you to see it through.BARRY And from that, we then trust the audiences. We are putting that work out there and trusting audiences to come on that ride with us, and we certainly have no expectation that everybody who shows up to every Prototype show every year is going to love it all.There are a lot of world premieres at the festival this year. But we’re still dealing with Covid and flu outbreaks. How confident are you that Prototype is truly back?BARRY We have community agreements that we’re asking everyone to adhere to to keep themselves as safe as possible. We do daily testing. We do PCR weekly. Anyone who is not performing is masked in rehearsal. So, we take a lot of precautions. Our fingers are crossed that we’ll be able to offer all the performances that we want to offer audiences this January.WHITENER The opening night kind of thing — the big gathering of all the artists, getting together and partying — that’s definitely not happening right now. As a field, we are missing that a lot. You hear everybody saying that: how much they miss the community. More