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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      Review: In Bob Fosse’s ‘Dancin’,’ a Wiggle Is Worth a Thousand Words

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      A revival of the 1978 dancical has been substantially revamped to argue for Bob Fosse’s pure dance cred. It’s a joy anyway.Right from the start, we’re advised that “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’,” which opened on Sunday at the Music Box Theater, will be “almost plotless” and include “no messages.”Is that a challenge or an apology?In the often-thrilling, often-frustrating revival of the 1978 dancical, which reincarnates the spirit and choreography of Bob Fosse, the two possibilities are much the same. Substantially revamped and restaged by Wayne Cilento, a standout in the original production, this “Dancin’” argues that Fosse’s genius was constrained by the pedestrian storytelling of musical theater, with its “villains,” “baritone heroes” and “Christmas trees.” True Fosseism, it seems, can fully thrive only in the abstract, Olympian realms of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.The dichotomy is false, and the insistence a little embarrassing; when judged only as a brief for that point, “Dancin’” stumbles. Particularly in a long concluding section drawn from his final musical, “Big Deal,” the new material meant to bolster Fosse’s reputation doesn’t. And the periodic intrusion of ax-grinding Fosse avatars, quoting him at his most maudlin, suggests an inferiority complex not only about his talent but also about the kind of storytelling, in shows like “Chicago,” and movies like “Cabaret,” for which he was best known and deeply admired.But in the spirit of plotlessness and nonmessaging, let me not argue that too much. The show is a joy every time it puts down its ax. In any case, its 16 dancers, representing a wider range by age, ethnicity, body type and gender presentation than you typically see in a Fosse cast, make a much better case for the pure dance qualities of his style than the text does. (Kirsten Childs, herself a former Fosse dancer, provided the additional material.) A wiggle is worth a thousand words.In the sublime “Dancin’ Man,” our critic writes, the dancers synchronize blissfully with the music and with one another.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat wiggle — of the fingers, of the hips — joins the familiar Fosse vocabulary here: the isolated shoulder rotations, the off-center jumps, the pelvic contractions that look as if the dancer is being hit in the stomach with a cannonball. But in a context mostly stripped of overt story, the movements feel more extreme, and even overexuberant, as if let loose from jail: not just high kicks but kicks so high the shins bang the face.The first number after the opening sequence, a holdover from 1978, is in fact set in jail. “Recollections of an Old Dancer,” built on the Jerry Jeff Walker tune “Mr. Bojangles,” seems to be about the foundational legacy of Black dance in American culture, as the spirit of Bill Robinson shares his moves with a prisoner. I say “seems” because the effort to reframe numbers like this one as plotless when they clearly aren’t sometimes renders them merely murky, no matter how good the dancing. (It’s excellent.)The persistence of story is even more noticeable in the sequences that are new, newish or substantially altered. They make up perhaps half of the revival’s 14 numbers.“Big City Mime,” the 21-minute centerpiece of Act I, is one of the newish ones. Cut in Boston in 1978, it has been recreated from Fosse’s written scenario and snippets of his choreography for other works. The scenario is an exaggerated Fosse autobiography in dance, depositing a wide-eyed rube — the curly haired, lean-lined Peter John Chursin — in a modern-day Sodom. After encounters with prostitutes, masseuses and a naughty bookstore clerk, he emerges from his urban initiation ready to embrace the lessons of the body.Those lessons reach a sublime climax in the Act I finale, “Dancin’ Man,” the first time (and, until the curtain call, the last time) we see a unison number for the full ensemble. Dressed identically in pale blue suits, bow ties and straw hats, the dancers synchronize blissfully with the music (a soft-shoe tune by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer) and with one another.Ron Todorowski is among the eclectic cast of 16 dancers and six understudies. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut Act II, even leaving aside the “Big Deal” letdown, is a bumpier ride once you get past its astonishing opening: “Sing, Sing, Sing,” built on the Louis Prima number made famous by Benny Goodman. “The Female Star Spot,” a weak feminist comedy sketch in which singers question the woman-as-doormat lyrics of the 1977 Dolly Parton hit “Here You Come Again,” immediately lets the dance energy out of the room.A bit later, a long sequence set to a medley of patriotic songs, updated to include quotes from the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Amanda Gorman — and to remove the objectionable “Dixie,” which was part of the original — suffers from the grim feeling that it’s stepping around land mines.Though many of the interstitial numbers are entirely successful — and the hot arrangements by Jim Abbott for a 14-person band are ceaselessly exciting — they cannot always compensate for the larger missteps. The drama doesn’t accumulate, as it does in a musical, making “Dancin’” more like a variety show with guest stars. The design, too, is deliberately more presentational than theatrical, with arena lighting (by David Grill), a 49-by-28-foot LED wall (video design by Finn Ross) and four three-story towers (by Robert Brill) engaged in a kind of choreography themselves.But it’s the costumes, by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, a team known mostly for its work with ballet companies, that slip the leash of narrative most successfully. Strappy crop tops with strategic cutouts and peekaboo panels are perhaps to be expected in a Fosse show. But did I really see bumblebees, beekeepers, knights in body-baring armor, a sexy chicken with backup roosters and clowns with chartreuse polka-dot pussy bows?Happily, even airy whimsy cannot suppress the dancers’ specificity. If we do not know the story, they certainly do. Your favorites may depend on the night you see it (six understudies are part of the company as well) but of the 16 I saw on Friday I can highlight, aside from Chursin, Dylis Croman for her humor, Yeman Brown for his poetry, Jacob Guzman for his ferocity, Ron Todorowski for his athleticism, Manuel Herrera for his poignancy and Kolton Krouse for, well, their everything. (Krouse is the one with the face-slapping kicks.)Face-slapping kick: Kolton Krouse during the Act II opener set to “Sing, Sing, Sing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf that list seems male dominated, so is “Dancin’,” despite its new sprinkling of gay, lesbian and nonbinary content. Fosse, after all, was creating in his own image, whether rendering himself as a satyr, a sot or a snake. Absent a text that makes a woman the star, he makes himself one, over and over. He was an interesting guy, so it’s an interesting story.Ah, but there’s that word “story” again. To me it seems that Fosse, however limited he may have felt by the specificities of musical theater, was best when working at the place where pure movement is pulled down from Olympus to meet real people, with lit cigarettes dangling from their lips. It’s there (and in so much of “Dancin’”) that he reliably finds what passes, despite all warnings, for a message: the necessity of sharing the body’s expressiveness and its endless capacity for pleasure.Bob Fosse’s Dancin’At the Music Box Theater, Manhattan; dancinbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      In Rehearsal One Minute, Laid Off the Next: The Fate of Broadway’s ‘Room’

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      Actors were two weeks into rehearsals when the show, which was set to star the Tony-winning actress Adrienne Warren, was postponed indefinitely.Two weeks into Broadway rehearsals for “Room,” a show about a mother held captive with her young son, the first act had been fully blocked. Tickets were on sale. Critics had been invited.It was 18 days until the first preview performance, and on Thursday, actors were continuing to work through Act II. But then, inside the rehearsal studio on 42nd Street, a lead producer gathered members of the cast and crew to announce that a financial shortfall meant the show would be postponed indefinitely.“It just became pin-drop silent,” said Michael Genet, one of the show’s actors.The churn of Broadway machinery had ground to a halt. The producer, Hunter Arnold, explained to those present — including the star, the Tony-winning actress Adrienne Warren — that an attempt to save the show through dozens of phone calls to potential investors had been unsuccessful.“I said, very truthfully, that this is the most painful thing I’ve ever had to do in my professional life,” Arnold said in an interview on Friday. “We had spent the last few days doing everything in our combined power to try to save something that we believe is really beautiful, and failed.”Genet, who has been acting on Broadway since 1989, said he had experienced plenty of turbulence in the industry: One musical he was in, “Lestat,” shuttered in 2006 after 39 performances.“But I had never had the rug pulled out in the middle of rehearsal,” he said.“Room” had been scheduled to start performances on April 3 and run through mid-September.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Room,” adapted from a novel by Emma Donoghue, who later turned it into a film starring Brie Larson, had been preparing for its Broadway debut after premiering in London in 2017 and staging productions in Ireland, Scotland and Canada. Directed by Cora Bissett, the production, which was also slated to feature Ephraim Sykes and Kate Burton, was scheduled to start performances on April 3 and run through mid-September.Arnold, whose current shows include “Some Like It Hot” and “Leopoldstadt,” told the cast and crew — and soon after, the public — that a lead producer had decided not to “fulfill their obligations to the production” because of personal reasons.In an interview on Friday, Nathan Gehan, a Broadway producer and general manager, said he had decided to withdraw his producing company, ShowTown Productions, from being a general partner on “Room” because of a family crisis. As a general partner, Gehan’s company assumed the show’s financial liability, along with Arnold and the British producers who had shepherded the show from its overseas beginnings, Sam Julyan and James Yeoburn.Gehan said he had planned to continue to raise funds and do “boots on the ground” producing work despite announcing his intention to withdraw as a general partner on March 7. He said he believed that his company had enough financial commitments to “hold up our end of the bargain.” But in the days since, Gehan said, he and his producing partner, Jamison Scott, had been cut out of the process by the other producers; they learned of the postponement with the rest of the public.“To have to go through rehearsal and not have anything to show for it is just gut-wrenching,” he said.The show had been seeking to raise up to $7 million overall, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.In a statement, Arnold said that the exiting producer provided the remaining producers with a list of “interested parties” with regard to fund-raising, but that “it became quickly apparent that list was neither viable nor sufficient to close the economic gap we were facing.” They reached out to more than 200 contacts looking for potential investors, Arnold said, but could not find the necessary support.“We are still processing this turn of events and since this is ongoing, cannot speak to each statement made by Mr. Gehan,” he said. “Suffice to say, we do not entirely agree with his version of events.”The story told in “Room” is a particularly raw and emotional one, following a mother (played by Warren) who was kidnapped as a teenager and has been living in one room for seven years, raising a child she bore after being raped by her captor. Warren appeared to respond to the news about the show with a broken heart emoji on Twitter.The two child actors who play the young boy, Christopher Woodley and Aiden Mekhi Sierra — both of them anticipating their Broadway debuts — were told about the show’s postponement after their parents had arrived, Genet said. In the rehearsal room, some people cried and some hugged, but the conversation quickly turned toward ways they could get the show back on track.“People were hopping on calls trying to figure out who could help,” said Justin Ellington, the sound designer, who had been preparing to show the director the music and cues for the first act on Thursday. “It didn’t feel like people were like, ‘Oh, I’m missing out on all this money’ — that was not the talk. What I was feeling and hearing in the space was connected to the piece and telling this story.”Still, actors who had signed on for more than five months of work were suddenly looking at empty schedules. Arnold said he assured them they would receive their paychecks for the work they had done, though he cautioned that the checks could take a few days to clear because they were coming from an account at Signature Bank, which was recently seized by regulators as part of a larger banking crisis.A spokesman for the Actors’ Equity union said it was working to ensure that the production was following the terms of the collective bargaining agreement. Arnold added in a statement that union company members would be “fully compensated on the terms of their contracts.” Baseline Broadway contracts for actors and stage managers include a stipulation that if a show is discontinued, the workers must be paid for the rest of the rehearsal period, plus at least two more weeks.In his statement, Arnold said he was “committed to creating comparable compensation terms” for nonunion employees.Even as the actors and crew members hold out hope for a new investor to swoop in, the bubble of excitement around staging a new show with a major Broadway star had been punctured.“I’ll just do my taxes I guess?” Ellington said. “I really haven’t thought that far.” More

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      Review: A Pageant of Love and Antisemitism, in ‘Parade’

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      Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond star in a timely and gorgeously sung Broadway revival of the 1998 musical about the Leo Frank case.You do not expect the star of a musical about a man lynched by an antisemitic mob to be his wife. Especially when that man, Leo Frank, who was murdered in Georgia in 1915, is played, with his usual intensity and vocal drama, by Ben Platt.Yet in the riveting Broadway revival of the musical “Parade” that opened on Thursday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, it’s Micaela Diamond, as Lucille Frank, you watch most closely and who breaks your heart. With no affectation whatsoever, and a voice directly wired to her emotions, she makes Lucille our way into a story we might rather turn away from.True, this alters the balance of the show as originally staged by Harold Prince in 1998, further tipping it toward the marriage instead of the miscarriage of justice. Also toward the rapturous score by Jason Robert Brown, which won a Tony Award in 1999. But since the legal procedural was never the best part or even the point of “Parade,” the enhanced emphasis on a love story tested by tragedy and set to song is a big net gain.It’s strange, of course, to talk about net gains in relation to such a horrible tale. But “Parade” has always been strange anyway, seeking to make commercial entertainment out of a violent history and, because he’s a victim, a hero of a nebbish.As Alfred Uhry’s book — also a Tony winner — relates, Leo, the manager of a pencil factory owned by Lucille’s uncle, is a misfit in Atlanta: a New York Jew but also a cold fish. In Platt’s highly physical interpretation, he is scrunched and sickly looking, as if literally oppressed by the gentile society around him. That Lucille’s family, longtime Southerners, seems warmly assimilated into that society makes their marriage, at the start, a curdling of cream and vinegar.Michael Arden’s staging, imported with a slightly different cast from the City Center gala he directed in November, rightly relishes such contrasts. He signals the primacy of the love story by starting, in the 1860s, with sex: a young Confederate soldier bidding goodbye to his girl. A foreboding Dixie anthem called “The Old Red Hills of Home” leaps 50 years forward to connect the white Christian bigotry that fueled the Civil War to the war against Leo as well.His troubles begin with the murder of Mary Phagan (Erin Rose Doyle), a 13-year-old white employee who works, for 10 cents an hour, fastening erasers to pencil caps. Lacking conclusive evidence and in dire need of a conviction, the district attorney, Hugh Dorsey (Paul Alexander Nolan), railroads Leo by suborning testimony from many sources: friends of Phagan, a cleaner at the factory (Alex Joseph Grayson) and even Minnie, the Franks’s maid (Danielle Lee Greaves). After a sensational trial that cynically pits Jewish Atlantans against Black ones, Leo is sentenced to hang.The minimal set by Dane Laffrey is essentially a high platform on a low one, suggesting a witness box, a cell and a scaffold, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen the first act ends on that awful note, we still do not know Leo well. His first song, usually in musicals a moment for ingratiation, is instead a bitter snit called “How Can I Call This Home?” His last before the verdict is “It’s Hard to Speak My Heart.” Whatever that heart really holds is further blurred by Uhry’s device of having Leo enact the false testimony of other characters, so we see him as a rake and a maniac before we’ve grasped him as a man.Arden begins to correct for that during the intermission, which Leo, now imprisoned, spends sitting onstage with his head in his hands. In Act II, as he recognizes his growing dependence on Lucille, she finally becomes real to him and thus he to us.It’s too bad that some of this enlightenment is achieved through huge elisions and license in relating what is still a contested history. Though it’s true that Georgia’s governor (Sean Allan Krill) opened an inquiry that led to the commutation of Leo’s death sentence — but only to life in prison — it’s doubtful he did so as a result of Lucille’s buttonholing him at a tea dance. Nor that she accompanied him like a lay detective as he reinterviewed witnesses and obtained their recantations.Even if true, it’s unconvincing here, presented almost as a series of Nancy Drew skits. Still, Diamond maintains her dignity, allowing the final phase of the tragedy — in which Leo, after two years of appeals that are summarized in one line, is kidnapped from his cell and hanged — to commence with the drama righted.It is never wronged as long as Brown’s music plays. In this, his first Broadway show, he demonstrates the astonishing knack for dirty pastiche that has informed such follow-ups as “The Last Five Years,” “13” and “The Bridges of Madison County.” “Pastiche” because of his inerrant ear for just the right genre to fit any situation, in this case including Sousa-style marches, work songs, blues, swing ditties for the factory girls, a dainty waltz for the governor’s party. “Dirty” because he roughs them up with post-Sondheim technique, scraping the surface to bring up the blood.Douglas Lyons and Courtnee Carter sing the mordant “A Rumblin’ and A Rollin’” as hysteria about the case grows.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd as one of the few musical theater composers to write his own lyrics successfully, he gives singing actors something to act. He also manages to achieve in a rhyme what would otherwise take a scene of dialogue. As the politicians and journalists foment local hysteria and national media interest in the case, he gives two Black workers in the governor’s mansion a mordant triplet in the song “A Rumblin’ and a Rollin’”: “I can tell you this as a matter of fact/that the local hotels wouldn’t be so packed/if a little Black girl had been attacked.”That the Black workers (Douglas Lyons and Courtnee Carter) are otherwise barely characterized is one of the more obvious signs that the show’s book was written in the 20th century. (Uhry has made some revisions for this production.) Arden addresses this by keeping the ensemble as particular as possible, never letting it devolve into vague masses making generic gestures. And in minimizing the visual elements — the set (by Dane Laffrey) is essentially a high platform on a low one, suggesting a witness box, a cell and a scaffold — he keeps our attention on the people and what they sing.If actual history plays second fiddle to that — by the way, there’s a terrific orchestra of 17 players, just two shy of the plush original — current history steps in as a pretty good substitute. Not just in the guise of revitalized antisemitism, though the show’s first preview, on Feb. 21, was greeted by a small gaggle of neo-Nazi demonstrators.What struck me even more vividly in this well-judged and timely revival is the quick path hysteria has always burned through the American spirit if fanned by media, politicians and prejudice of any kind. When a chorus of white Georgians chants “hang ’im, hang ’im, make him pay,” the words can’t help but echo uncomfortably in the post-Jan. 6 air. And another song, a prayer for a return of the day when “the Southland was free,” sounds a lot like current talk of a second secession.Our historical wounds never really heal over. Though Frank’s death sentence was commuted, he was killed anyway and, as “Parade” points out, never exonerated. That case is ongoing.ParadeThrough Aug. 6 at the Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; paradebroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Dear World,’ Donna Murphy Leads a Righteous March

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      Jerry Herman’s rarely seen 1969 musical is revived in an Encores! production at New York City Center.If the composer-lyricist Jerry Herman loved one thing, it was a brassy dame who bulldozes past all obstacles in her quest for the best possible life for herself. The women at the center of his best-known shows, “Hello, Dolly!” and “Mame,” are pathologically positive, speaking directly to our vanities and vulnerabilities — and are celebrated for it.Who better to teach a larger-than-life lesson than a strident diva in a bold headpiece? Such is the case with Countess Aurelia, the protagonist of his 1969 flop, “Dear World,” which New York City Center’s Encores! has revived in a blissed-out concert production that opened on Wednesday.Led by Donna Murphy, and directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes with laissez-faire humor, it presents a smaller, looser, but still effective Herman elixir.Based on a fable-like Jean Giraudoux play, “The Madwoman of Chaillot,” Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s book follows the Countess Aurelia (Murphy), a Parisian eccentric who spends her days al fresco at the Cafe Francis, learning to love all before her “through the bottom of the glass.” When clouds (whimsically rendered by Paul Tate dePoo III as sparse hangings above his bohemian set of chaises, trunks and old clocks) threaten her outdoor seating, she simply wills them away with folksy charisma.But her peace is disturbed when a young official, Julian (Phillip Johnson Richardson), is sent by the President (a swaggering, delectably petulant Brooks Ashmanskas) to blow up the cafe so they can drill into oil recently discovered beneath. With the water supply already affected, Aurelia leads the charge against the bureaucrats, aided by the friendly Sewerman (Christopher Fitzgerald) and her bosom buddies, Gabrielle (Ann Harada) and Constance (Andréa Burns), the Madwomen of Montmartre and of the Flea Market.From left: Andrea Burns, Murphy and Ann Harada in the revival of Jerry Herman’s 1969 musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s easy to see how this fantastical musical could float away from a less confident, cleareyed director. Here, Rhodes (who helmed Herman’s “Mack & Mabel” for Encores! in 2020) emphasizes the kookiness of his well-sketched characters in a spacey way that makes everything feel, if not logical, then natural. His choreography is similarly simple, and works well for the ensemble, save for a vaguely anti-war, ballet-inspired solo performed during the entr’acte by Kody Jauron, who shines in a miming role.The score is by far Herman’s most relaxed; if “Dolly” is a bottle of Champagne and “Mame” a speedball, “World” is a Shirley Temple (Aurelia herself only ever takes one sip of wine a day). It’s perhaps a side effect from having written new material for the film adaptation of “Hello, Dolly!” that same year, with songs tailored for the close-up rather than the chorus line.The new Encores! music director Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s conducting is mostly swooning and enlivens the work, though she often opts for arrangements that warmly dissolve each number into a Parisian haze rather than charge up a triumphant belt. (Campbell, who did extensive research on the score’s many variations, has directed Philip J. Lang’s orchestrations toward a calmer phrasing than the original.) Only the crystal-clear voiced Samantha Williams, as the yearning waitress Nina, is allowed to soar vocally past the end of her stunning “I’ve Never Said I Love You.”But the intoxicating strength of the show’s leading lady still pulsates throughout — even when, as is often the case with these concert stagings, Murphy had her book in hand for the dramatic scenes. (She had to miss the first five days of rehearsal after testing positive for Covid.) Before curtain, the Encores! artistic director Lear deBessonet made the announcement, almost anxiously, but it certainly didn’t alter Murphy’s ability to deliver what she always does: an endlessly reinvigorating voice at once worldly, incredulous, curious and confident.Murphy’s Countess is a dotty, conscientious woman awoken from her comfort and determined to claim it back. If anything, Murphy’s consulting of the script amounted to a more organically astonished character, searching for the best words of affirmation in the face of encroaching danger. She first breaks through that slumber in the frenzied “I Don’t Want to Know,” which Murphy sings with captivating vulnerability.Christopher Fitzgerald, center, leads the ensemble in a tale that pits locals against the “hoards of pretentious, power-hungry, self-serving men consumed by greed.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd Burns nearly steals the second act in her brief solo, “Memory,” a coquettish dream of past flames. She looks dazzling, as does everyone else, in Toni Leslie James’s lovingly fussy, belle epoque-tinged costumes, and Matthew Armentrout’s wigs, the best of which being Murphy’s powder-white hair to match her blanched makeup.Everyone’s a little loopy in “Dear World” (Aurelia feels the touch of her former beau, Constance hears voices, Gabrielle walks around an imaginary dog), but not as mad as the incoming corporate forces. In Sandy Rustin’s concert adaptation, and under Rhodes’ direction, these aren’t the dust-ridden old biddies for which the original script seems to call for — the three of them look radiantly alive, for starters — but headstrong women who rather mean it when they offer to kill the “hoards of pretentious, power-hungry, self-serving men consumed by greed.”Considering our current climate of reactive, out-loud politics, the melodramatic straightforwardness of Lawrence and Lee’s story doesn’t seem as far-out as it once did. Now, as then, Herman’s tuneful, yes-we-can score holds a steady beat for all to march to.Dear WorldThrough Sunday at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More