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      Topol, Star of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Onscreen and Onstage, Dies at 87

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      Wide acclaim for his portrayal of Tevye helped make him, according to one newspaper, “Israel’s most famous export since the Jaffa orange.”Topol, the Israeli actor who took on the role of the patriarch Tevye, the soulful shtetl milkman at the center of “Fiddler on the Roof,” in his late 20s and reprised the role for decades, died on Thursday at his home in Tel Aviv. He was 87.His son, Omer Topol, confirmed the death. He said in an email that his father had Alzheimer’s disease, which had caused his health to deteriorate over the last year.Topol — born Chaim Topol, he used only his surname throughout much of his professional life — came to international renown heading the cast of the 1971 film version of “Fiddler.” Its director, Norman Jewison, had chosen Topol, then a little-known stage actor, over Zero Mostel, who had created the part on Broadway.The film, for which Topol earned an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award, made him a star. For much of the late 20th century he would be, in the words of The Jerusalem Post in 2012, “Israel’s most famous export since the Jaffa orange.”Topol reprised Tevye in stage productions worldwide for decades, including a 1990 Broadway revival for which he received a Tony nomination. By 2009, he had, by his own estimate, played the character more than 3,500 times.His other films include “Galileo,” the director Joseph Losey’s 1975 adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s stage play, in which he played the title role; “Flash Gordon” (1980), in which he portrayed the scientist Hans Zarkov; and the James Bond film “For Your Eyes Only” (1981), starring Roger Moore, in which he played the Greek smuggler Milos Columbo.On television, Topol played the Polish Jew Berel Jastrow in the 1983 mini-series “The Winds of War” and reprised the role for its sequel, “War and Remembrance,” broadcast in 1988 and 1989.Topol as Tevye in the movie version of “Fiddler on the Roof.” The character is a weary, tradition-bound Everyman who argues with God, bemoans his lot as the penurious father of five daughters and lives warily amid the pogroms of Czarist Russia. United Archives/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesBut it was indisputably for Tevye — the weary, tradition-bound Everyman who argues with God, bemoans his lot as the penurious father of five daughters and lives increasingly warily amid the pogroms of early-20th-century Czarist Russia — that Topol remained best known.“Like Yul Brynner in ‘The King and I’ and Rex Harrison in ‘My Fair Lady,’ Topol has become almost synonymous with his character,” United Press International said in 1989. Over the years, Topol was asked repeatedly whether he ever tired of playing the role.“Let’s face it, it’s one of the best parts ever written for a male actor in the musical theater,” he told The Boston Globe in 1989, when he had played Tevye a mere 700 times or so. “It takes you to a wide range of emotions, happiness to sadness, anger to love.”Throughout his many Tevyes, some critics taxed Topol’s acting as larger than life to the point of self-parody. But most praised his soulful mien and his resonant bass baritone, heard in enduring numbers like “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Tradition” and “Sunrise, Sunset.”By the time Mr. Jewison began work on the “Fiddler” film, Tevye was one of the most coveted roles in Hollywood. The Broadway show, based on stories by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem — with book by Joseph Stein, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and music by Jerry Bock — had been a smash hit since it opened in 1964. It won nine Tony Awards, including best musical, best direction of a musical (for Jerome Robbins) and, for Mr. Mostel, best actor in a musical.“The casting of it was the most agonizing thing I ever went through,” Mr. Jewison told NPR in 2001.Besides Mr. Mostel, aspirants to the screen role included Rod Steiger, Danny Kaye and — in a scenario that can be contemplated only with difficulty — Frank Sinatra.Mr. Jewison’s casting choice was all the more striking in that Topol had not wanted the part in the first place.Topol as the title character in the 1975 film version of Bertolt Brecht’s biographical play “Galileo.” Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesChaim Topol was born in Tel Aviv on Sept. 9, 1935. His parents, Jacob Topol, a plasterer, and Rel Goldman Topol, a seamstress, had fled shtetlach in Eastern Europe to settle in Palestine in the early 1930s. There, Jacob Topol became a member of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization.As a youth, Chaim studied commercial art and trained for a career as a printer. But in 1953, while he was serving in the Israeli Army, an officer overheard him regaling fellow recruits with jokes. He was placed in an army entertainment unit and found his calling there.He spent the next few years touring Israel with the group, entertaining soldiers with songs like “Sprinkler Hora,” a hit in that fledgling state, where making the desert bloom was a national imperative.Discharged in 1956, Topol settled with members of his unit on a kibbutz, where they formed a satirical theater group, Batzal Yarok (the name means “Green Onion”). Its members worked on the land two days a week and onstage for four.“It was great training because we had a very difficult, tired audience,” Topol told U.P.I. “Most of them had been out running tractors and such before performances.”He was later a founder of the Haifa Municipal Theater, where his roles included Petruchio in Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” Azdak in Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” and Jean in Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros,” a role that was originated on Broadway by Mr. Mostel. Topol’s first significant international exposure came in the title role of the 1964 Israeli film “Sallah” (also known as “Sallah Shabati”). One of the first film comedies to come out of Israel, it told the tale of a family of Mizrahi Jews — Jews historically from the Middle East and North Africa — uneasily resettled in Israel.“Sallah” won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film; Topol, then in his late 20s, won the Golden Globe for most promising male newcomer for his portrayal of Sallah Shabati, the family patriarch, a man in his 60s.On the strength of that performance, he was asked to play Tevye in a Hebrew-language production of “Fiddler” in Tel Aviv. Unfamiliar with the show, he went to New York to see Mr. Mostel on Broadway.That, Topol, later said, was where his troubles with “Fiddler” began.“Zero was going wild” — even ad-libbing to the audience — he recalled in a 2008 interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph. “He said things like, ‘Mrs. Finkelstein, are you yawning because I’m boring you or was it because your husband kept you awake all night?’ I didn’t know what to do with myself. I telegrammed back saying there was no way I wanted to be connected to that show.”But on returning to Israel, Topol saw the Tel Aviv production and had a change of heart. He eventually replaced the actor portraying Tevye and played the role for about a year.Topol in a benefit performance in London in 2013. He was recognized for his charitable work, notably helping to found a holiday camp in Israel for ailing children from all ethnic and religious backgrounds. David M. Benett/Getty ImagesAround that time, the first London production of “Fiddler” was being cast. Someone suggested that the old Jewish actor who had played Sallah Shabati might be a worthy Tevye, and they summoned him to England. When Topol, barely 30, walked into the theater, producers thought they had invited the wrong man. But since he had made the long trip, they relented and let him audition anyway.Topol, who at the time knew “about 50 words of English” by his own account, had learned the songs phonetically from the Broadway cast album. He further impressed the producers with his ability to age 25 years simply through the rigorous control of his carriage.“At 29, I knew I had to restrain some muscles to make sure I didn’t suddenly jump in a way that destroyed the image of an elderly man,” he told The Boston Globe in 2009, in the midst of a multicity U.S. tour of the show. “I walked slower, made sure I wasn’t too erect when I danced. It was quite a job. Now, as I pass the age of 55 by 20 years, I feel totally free to jump and dance as much as I feel like.”Topol opened in London in February 1967, to glowing notices. By then he had jettisoned his first name: The English, he discovered, were flummoxed by the guttural consonant of “Chaim” and pronounced his name “Shame” as often as not.In June, with Israel fighting the Six-Day War, he left the production to return home, where he entertained the troops. (He would make a similar decision in 1991, with the outbreak of the Persian Gulf war, leaving the Broadway revival to be with his family in Tel Aviv.)After seeing the London “Fiddler,” Mr. Jewison made the unexpected decision to cast Topol, still a relative unknown in the United States, in the motion picture.“I wanted a third-generation European actor for the role, a third-generation man who understood the background,” Mr. Jewison told The Globe in 1971. “I did not want a Second Avenue version of Tevye” — a barely veiled swipe at Mr. Mostel and his unstoppable shtick.Topol, who underwent two hours of age makeup every day of the shoot — Mr. Jewison did his bit, contributing white hairs from his beard to be glued over his star’s dark eyebrows — made, in the view of many critics, a most persuasive Tevye.Reviewing the film in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote of him: “He’s a rough presence, masculine, with burly, raw strength, but also sensual and warm. He’s a poor man but he’s not a little man, he’s a big man brought low — a man of Old Testament size brought down by the circumstances of oppression.”Topol married Galia Finkelstein, an actress in his army entertainment unit, in 1956. In addition to their son, they had two daughters, Adi Margalith and Anat Barzilai. All four survive him, along with two sisters, Shosh and Tova, and nine grandchildren.Topol was the author of two books, the memoir “Topol by Topol” (1981) and “Topol’s Treasury of Jewish Humor, Wit, and Wisdom” (1994).His laurels included the Israel Prize, the country’s highest cultural honor, which he received in 2015. The recognition came both for his acting and for his charitable work, notably helping to found Jordan River Village, a holiday camp in Israel for seriously ill children from all ethnic and religious backgrounds. Modeled on Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Connecticut, it opened in 2011.Year in and year out, Topol found the role he knew best to be a source of continuing illumination.“I did ‘Fiddler’ a long time thinking that this was a story about the Jewish people,” he said in a 2009 interview. “But now I’ve been performing all over the world. And the fantastic thing is wherever I’ve been — India, Japan, England, Greece, Egypt — people come up to me after the show and say, ‘This is our story as well.’”Alex Traub More

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      For France’s Protesters, the Streets Are the Ultimate Stage

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      The country has a long history of demonstrations, which often feature overtly theatrical elements. Our Paris theater critic marched along on Tuesday to soak up the spectacle.In large-scale theater and dance works, bodies moving in space have a momentum of their own; their collective power often feels like it could move mountains. Yet no number of monumental performances can compare to the enveloping force of tens of thousands of people, announcing as they did in Paris this week: “We are the show.”Street protests — a time-honored French tradition — are generally not for the agoraphobic, but on Tuesday, the crowds were the biggest on record this century. France’s Interior Ministry estimated there were 1.28 million marchers, while trade unions said there were 3.5 million. In Paris, the crowds were so large that some protesters branched off on a different course, along the Left Bank.The mountain the protesters were trying to move, for the sixth time in two months, was President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to raise the legal age of retirement by two years, to 64. Yet beyond that particular policy, demonstrations are frequent enough in the country that they have taken on a ritualistic dimension, and often feature overtly theatrical elements designed to grab the attention.In late 2019, the Paris Opera Ballet made international headlines by performing an excerpt from “Swan Lake” in the cold outside the Palais Garnier, to protest a previous attempt at a pension overhaul. The Comédie-Française, France’s most prestigious theater company, joined in with a Molière performance from the theater’s windows and balcony. (Perhaps to avoid a repeat, both institutions’ bespoke pension arrangements are excluded from this year’s proposed changes.)Artists taking an active role in protests is nothing new in France. During the revolutionary events of May 1968, a number of theater venues were occupied, and performances were staged outdoors and at factories. One company from 1968 hasn’t stopped since: the Théâtre du Soleil. That egalitarian troupe, led by Ariane Mnouchkine, is such a stalwart of demonstrations that even protesters who rarely go to the theater look out for their creative street performances.At regular intervals during the protest on Tuesday, Mnouchkine gave the signal for a spectacle she called “the attack of the crows.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesOn Tuesday, its performers were easy to spot from afar, with a giant white puppet, known as Justice, that towered above the surrounding protesters. The slim figure was carried by four bearers on a palanquin, while the company’s actors animated its arms and billowing skirts from the sides. Blood was smeared on Justice’s solemn-looking face, which, like the rest of the puppet, was created by the Théâtre du Soleil’s own technical team.More on FranceRestoring Notre Dame: Experts are trying to revive the centuries-old acoustics of the cathedral, which caught fire in 2019. Here is how the building’s architecture plays a role in the endeavor.Trials by Fire: During her first year as France’s sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra faced chaos and scandals in soccer and rugby. With the Paris Olympics looming, her toughest days may be ahead.Art Invasion: Mosaics by a street artist who calls himself “Invader” have become part of the fabric of Paris. They are everywhere — if you look for them.A Staunch Protester: Jean-Baptiste Reddé has hoisted his colorful signs in nearly every street protest for over a decade, embodying France’s enduring passion for demonstrations.Mnouchkine herself, 84, kept a watchful eye on the proceedings. Justice was created in 2010, she said in an interview, for another strike against pension changes. The puppet has never appeared in a stage production, but she has seen her fair share of demonstrations, including in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015. “We immediately felt that people were happy to have a symbol to rally around that wasn’t just a giant sound system,” she said. “They also want something beautiful, something that carries emotion.”At regular intervals, as the march plodded forward, Mnouchkine gave the signal for what she called “the attack of the crows.” Ten or so members of her company ran forward with black birds on sticks, ambushing Justice. To classical music and thunderous drum beats, Justice leaned forward, then back, fighting the crows off with a small sword; two assistant directors oversaw the struggle, directing the actors in real time. To the delight of protesters, Justice won every time, then took a celebratory spin and gave a bow.Marching not far from the Théâtre du Soleil, a street theater company called Les Grandes Personnes had also brought two oversize puppets, both regulars appearances in their shows: Céline, an older white woman, and K.S., a young Black man. Brought to life by one person each, they bounced along to the sound of horns and cheering marchers, while a nearby performer held a sign that said: “I don’t want to die onstage.”Yet artistic contributions to the march were fewer and farther between than I expected, an impression Mnouchkine confirmed. Two years of pandemic-related closures and cancellations have also left their mark, with fewer theaters willing to go on strike this week.A crow puppet carried by members of the feminist group Rosies.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesPolice on the Place d’Italie, where the demonstration ended.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesPerformers from the street theater company Les Grandes Personnes at the demonstration on Tuesday.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesBringing theatrical craftsmanship to strikes is “a tradition that is getting lost,” she said. While one of the performing arts’ main unions, C.G.T. Spectacle, brought a truck equipped with musical instruments and a sound system, the performances seemed a little subdued.There was more attention to spectacle in the protest style of feminist groups like the Rosies, who draw their name from Norman Rockwell’s feminist icon Rosie the Riveter. Dressed in blue overalls, with makeup that made them look like overworked zombies, the women’s collective has developed a small repertoire of choreographed protest songs, which anyone can learn through videos or workshops.When I spotted them, dozens of Rosies were dancing to Gala’s 1990s hit “Freed From Desire,” which had become “Women On Fire,” with French lyrics about pension reform. From the back of a truck, two women led the motley group, which punched the air to the beat.It was a joyful flash mob, but the strike’s greatest piece of theater remained the spectacle of so many bodies in the streets of Paris — wave after wave, subsuming any individuals, claiming the city as their stage for the day. Many chanted and held signs, but the vast majority simply moved as a collective.Demonstrators on Tuesday protested, for the sixth time in two months, President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to raise France’s legal retirement age.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesMost of the time, there was a warm, carnivalesque atmosphere, but a crowd’s mood can also change at the speed of light. Nearly four hours into the march, some people around me suddenly stood still, then started walking backward. Something in the air had shifted, as if a coup de théâtre were about to change the narrative; press photographers near me took out their safety helmets.Minutes later, when the sea of people parted, it became clear a group of black-clad protesters, their faces hidden, were ready to face off violently with the rows of police officers on the other side of the boulevard. I hurried back to a less volatile area. Later, when I reached the end point of the march, the Place d’Italie plaza was hazy with tear gas and surrounded by police officers, with people streaming confusedly into the few streets that weren’t blocked.It was a staggering sight, like an immersive show gone out of control. Yet the march also brought out communal emotions, together with a sense of freedom and open self-expression, that even the best theater can struggle to replicate. As collective experiences go, I won’t forget this one any time soon. More

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      ‘Phantom’ Ends. For Musicians, So Does the Gig of a Lifetime.

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      Last fall, as show No. 13,781 of “The Phantom of the Opera” came to a close, the applause overpowered the thundering music. The members of the orchestra, packed into the pit under the stage, could not see the crowd, but they could hear and feel them.The standing ovation brought Kristen Blodgette, the show’s associate conductor, to tears. She held her red-nailed hands in prayer, in gratitude to the musicians.Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash hit — the longest-running musical in Broadway history — is scheduled to give its final performance at the Majestic Theater next month. These days, since the announcement of the closing last September, the musical “feels more like a rock concert,” said Kurt Coble, a violinist with the show.Mr. Coble is part of Broadway’s largest pit orchestra, which will disappear along with the show. It holds 27 full-time musicians, 11 of whom have been with “Phantom” since it opened in the late 1980s. The consistent work has allowed many of the longtime musicians, who have essentially grown up and older with the show, to build comfortable, even lucrative lives. And that is no small feat for any artist seeking stability in New York City.Crowds waiting to go into “The Phantom of the Opera” in 1988. The show has been on Broadway for 35 years.Jack Manning/The New York Times“Phantom” will end its run at the Majestic Theater in April, and its 27-member pit orchestra — the largest on Broadway — will vanish along with the show.Unlike the actors who have short-term contracts with “Phantom,” full-time musicians get a “run-of-show” agreement, which guarantees their jobs until the production closes. In 1988, when “Phantom” first opened, “there were some wide-eyed optimists who thought the show could run as long as five to six years,” recalled Lowell Hershey, a trumpeter who has been with the production since the beginning. “And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that would be really good.’”“Phantom,” of course, surpassed that prediction. During its 35-year-run, the musical has created more jobs and generated more income than any other show in Broadway history, according to Michael Borowksi, its press representative.The security of the “Phantom” paycheck has helped many of its musicians start families, send children to college, buy property, save for retirement. “Broadway was never meant to be a steady job, but for us, it was a steady job,” said concertmaster Joyce Hammann, who has been with “Phantom” since 1990. “I can’t overstress how unbelievably lucky we have all been for all these years.”“Broadway was never meant to be a steady job, but for us, it was a steady job.” Joyce Hammann, concertmaster“Phantom” maintains a traditional pit setup, a sunken open cave wedged between the audience and the stage. Although live music remains one of the essential elements of a Broadway musical, many producers have sacrificed pits to build bigger stages or increase seating. These days, it’s common to see musicians onstage with performers, or to not see them at all, as many of them work in distant rooms that pipe their music into the theaters.“Even if we want our musicians to be in the pit, the decision lies in how each production believes it will succeed,” said Tino Gagliardi, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. “Unfortunately, they are not always right — the shows that have had the longest runs have been the shows with large orchestras in the pit.”Many producers have given up on orchestra pits, but “Phantom” keeps a traditional setup.Mr. Coble knows how special the pit experience can be. “Sometimes I feel like I am a blacksmith in the early 20th century, people still had horses but not as many,” he said. “But you can never get rid of musicians. You’ll always need live music.”Pit musicians might not be able to see the show as it unfolds, but they have their tradecraft down pat. “Phantom” runs like a clock. The chandelier always swings over the pit, marking the beginning of the show, and then comes crashing down at the climax of Act 1. The patter of footsteps overhead marks the New Year’s Party in Act 2, which tells the musicians to make way for an actor who snakes his way through the pit and sits below the conductor, waiting to fire a shot into the auditorium. Then, when the shot sounds, they cover their ears and wait for the smell of powder, which signals that it is time for them to pick up their instruments again.“I don’t get terribly sentimental over it because it’s a job after all, it’s work, it’s not easy, it’s not a vacation.”Kurt Coble, violinistRegardless of whether they have a chair on Broadway (a full-time contract) or not, musicians are paid per show and are supported by Local 802, a strong union that provides them with health care and a pension, among other benefits. (When Broadway shows went dark during the pandemic, “Phantom” producers continued to pay the health insurance for their chair musicians.)Ed Matthew, a clarinetist, said that when he started playing on Broadway in 1994, he made about $140 a night. As of this month, the base wage for a musician at “Phantom” is about $291 per show.“We have to get along with each other because we are tucked in like sardines in a can.”Ed Matthew, clarinetistBefore getting hired by “Phantom,” many of its musicians juggled jobs. Peter Reit, a French horn player, made fur coats in the garment district, tended bar and sold vacuum cleaners before joining the orchestra in 1987, when rehearsals for the musical started.“I used to do my budget week to week with all my freelance work, and the first thing I noticed when I had this job was that I could now budget month to month, and that was an incredible stress relief,” said Mr. Reit, 63, who retired in 2021. He now teaches music at SUNY Purchase and Vassar College.The orchestra sits close together in the claustrophobic pit.The regular pay and benefits allowed members of the pit to concentrate on other aspects of their lives, like raising children. “Most of the support for my family was based upon what I could earn, and that took a lot of pressure off as a provider,” said Mr. Hershey, the trumpeter.Ms. Hammann, the concertmaster, has an 18-year-old son who grew up in the theater. When he was a baby, he sat with the stagehands while she played the show. “To have had the flexibility when I needed to be home with him, that’s not something one is able to do in many work environments, so it’s been tremendous,” she said.“What more can we ask for than to have had this show for 35 years?”Kristen Blodgette, associate conductorIn the late ’80s, when Ms. Blodgette, the associate conductor, was eight months pregnant with “the first ‘Phantom’ baby,” as she calls her daughter, the show’s conductors, who were all men, wore tuxedos, she said. She opted for a dress. Thirty-four years later and now a grandmother, Ms. Blodgette wears a thick velvet black gown with black socks (and no shoes) because she likes “to feel grounded” while conducting.Broadway chairs may play up to eight shows a week and are required to attend at least 50 percent of the shows per quarter, according to union rules. This allows some musicians to work side gigs for extra money and to pursue passion projects. When Mr. Matthew, the clarinetist, joined the company in the early aughts, he was able to hold onto his job at G. Schirmer, a classical music publishing company. The combined paychecks allowed him and his wife to buy a co-op apartment in Long Island City, Queens, and to save for retirement, he said.“There were some wide-eyed optimists who thought the show could run as long as five to six years. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that would be really good.’”Lowell Hershey, trumpeterMr. Coble, the violinist, joined the pit 25 years ago. Though grateful for the stability, he still yearns for more creative outlets. “I think of myself more like an artisan than an artist because I have very little freedom when it comes to playing music by someone else,” he said.But the flexibility of his work schedule has allowed him to write scores for horror films and to play, as his mother likes to call it, “unpopular music.” When he is not working at the Majestic, he spends his time with the PAM Band (Partially Artificial Musicians), a robotic orchestra that he built to play whatever songs he wants. Now that “Phantom” is coming to an end, he said, “I’ll spend a lot more time on my own project, but it’s certainly not as well-paying as the show.”“You don’t want to take up too much space and you also want to fit in,” said Mr. Matthew, a clarinetist, about the orchestra pit.There are five substitute musicians on call for each Broadway chair. Although substitutes receive the same union benefits as full-time chairs, they lack the consistency of an eight-show week. “Being a sub is hard because you are constantly waiting for the next call, you have no control in your life,” said Nick Jemo, a trumpeter who started subbing at “Phantom” in 2009 before joining the pit full-time five years later. Some subs have been filling in at “Phantom” for more than 10 years, and they keep coming back.“You want to bring your entire being into that show — it’s got everything you’d ever want to express in an instrument,” said Brad Bosenbeck, who started subbing for one of the two viola chairs at “Phantom” when he was 26. Mr. Bosenbeck, now 31 and still a substitute, said he doesn’t take the job for granted. “I feel like the luckiest guy in the world that I get to do what I love and get paid for it.”“Being a sub is hard because you are constantly waiting for the next call, you have no control in your life.”Nick Jemo, trumpeterWith the show’s closing, many of its musicians are thinking about their next chapters. Some believe that “Phantom” might return to Broadway in a few years with a reduced orchestra, like the production in London. A few veteran musicians, including Mr. Hershey, will retire. Ms. Hammann looks forward to teaching, which she started doing when the pandemic kept her away from the pit. Ms. Blodgette will conduct at “Bad Cinderella,” Mr. Lloyd Webber’s new musical. Most say they will try to sub at other shows.“The show closing feels liberating,” said Mr. Coble, who admitted to fantasizing about being a strolling violinist in a fancy restaurant, dressed up as the phantom and playing variations of the score. “I’ll play my last performance like I’ve tried to play every other show, and when it’s over I’ll just move on to something else. I don’t get terribly sentimental over it because it’s a job after all, it’s work, it’s not easy, it’s not a vacation.”“You want to bring your entire being into that show — it’s got everything you’d ever want to express in an instrument.”Brad Bosenbeck, violistThe musicians won’t miss some aspects of the show, like the claustrophobic pit, where they sit so close to each other that if one of them opens a candy bar the rest can smell it. “We have to get along with each other because we are tucked in like sardines in a can,” Mr. Matthew said. “You don’t want to take up too much space and you also want to fit in.” The radio program “This American Life” produced a segment a few years ago about some of these frustrations.Despite the intimate, tense energy of the “Phantom” pit — “it is its own magical elixir,” Mr. Bosenbeck said — most musicians said they didn’t have many opportunities to connect with each other outside the theater. “One of the things that makes this ending bittersweet is that everyone has been in my life for so long and I’ve been in theirs for so long, and yet we didn’t get an opportunity outside of waiting in the bathroom line or arriving early to really speak to everybody,” Ms. Hammann said.The musicians have few opportunities to connect outside the theater, but they have fixed routines while they are working.During these final weeks, as audience members watch the tortured love story onstage, the pit musicians will continue their routine underneath it. A ghostly image of Ms. Blodgette will appear on four small screens scattered throughout the orchestra so musicians can follow her lead. Mr. Jemo, after a temporary stint with “Bad Cinderella,” will return, repositioning his chair to catch a glimpse of his girlfriend, a dancer in the show. One music stand will continue to showcase a collection of miniature toys — a smiling crocodile, a head-shaking turtle, a deer’s face and a tiny plastic hand holding fresh radishes.“I may be the only musician in the world who has radishes in their music stand,” said Karl Bennion, a cellist who accidentally took the vegetable to a show in 2017 and since then has made it a tradition.“I may be the only musician in the world who has radishes in their music stand.”Karl Bennion, cellistThe music stand of cellist Karl Bennion, who has done it up with tchotchkes.In between songs, some musicians will play Sudoku and crossword puzzles; others will read. “A good book can really make going to work even more joyful,” Mr. Jemo said. He and Mr. Hershey, his trumpet partner, had a big French dictionary that sat between them, and often they reached for it at the same time.At the end of every show, musicians will continue to interact with audience members, some of whom like to peek into the pit to thank them as they pack their instruments.“What more can we ask for than to have had this show for 35 years?” Ms. Blodgette asked. “When I started doing this, I was single, I did not have a child, my parents were alive,” she said. “Through all of the chaos of life, this was here.”The security of the “Phantom” paycheck has helped many of the show’s musicians start families, send children to college, buy property, save for retirement. More

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      Review: A Star Director Takes a Back Seat in ‘The Seagull’

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      Thomas Ostermeier’s surprisingly traditional production of the Chekhov classic came to life via the cast’s performances, and without radical interventions by the director.Konstantin, the aspiring playwright in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” dreams of inventing “new forms” for the theater. Sensitive, moody and a bit ridiculous, Konstantin isn’t exactly a mouthpiece for the great Russian author, although Chekhov was himself out to innovate and reform. His chamber drama, filled with unheroic, frustrated figures propelled by life’s bitter ironies rather than melodramatic flourishes, proved too much for the play’s first audience to bear.Now a canonical work, “The Seagull” remains devilishly tricky to pull off, however, not because Chekhov’s theatrical form still confounds, but because of the difficulty of corralling an acting ensemble to play off each other with naturalness and ease while slipping between Chekhov’s shifting and overlapping emotional registers.In a surprisingly traditional staging of “The Seagull” that opened on Monday at the Berlin Schaubühne, Thomas Ostermeier ceded the floor to the actors, in a production that was free of the directorial interventions or distractions that classic works are often subjected to on German stages. Instead, this production largely came to life with the purest and most economical of theatrical means: the individual and collective performances of the 10-person cast. (The Schaubühne staging is also far tamer than “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” Thomas Bradshaw’s irreverent adaptation, which is transposed to the Catskill Mountains and is currently playing Off Broadway.)That approach may seem surprising for Ostermeier, a director best known to New York audiences for his furious and exuberantly messy reimaginings of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and “Hamlet” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But Ostermeier’s more recent work has largely gone in a tamer, more conventional direction. And so it was with this “Seagull,” which had precious little to do with discovering new forms.There are some updates in this modern-dress production. In the opening scene, Masha, a secondary character who is hopelessly in love with Konstantin, vaped. At one point, the loud engine of a plane roared overhead — the only time the outside world intruded on the characters’ country idyll.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Ostermeier has allowed the Schaubühne’s ensemble of actors to tweak their lines and make them more natural, or contemporary, and this production also includes some rather blunt new meta-theatrical dialogue. (“Why perform the classics nowadays? They sell well.”) The first-act play-within-the-play that Konstantin writes to demonstrate new forms has been rewritten by the actor playing that role, Laurenz Laufenberg. Despite these emendations, this “Seagull” remains surprisingly faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of Chekhov’s original.Alina Vimbai Strähler, left, as Nina, and Joachim Meyerhoff, who plays Trigorian.Joachim MeyerhoffThe most gripping thing about the staging is the space in which it unfolds, an area dominated by a massive plane tree. The seating in the auditorium has been reconfigured and the audience is arrayed around the actors, who perform in front of the imposing tree. Occasionally an actor lies on, or hangs from, its thick branches. Several characters hide behind its mighty trunk; another urinates in it.The actors frequently got up close and personal with the audience members, circling the small stage, or tearing down the aisles to enter or exit, achieving a degree of intimacy that was exciting but not without risk. Experiencing the performances at such close range meant that both their merits and their shortcomings were magnified.Such a gambit only stood a chance of succeeding with a top-flight troupe of actors. However, the cast, drawn largely from the theater’s permanent ensemble, left a mixed impression. To their credit, the cast showed remarkable cohesion — and things never got monotonous — over the duration of a very chatty show, set in a single location. But there was only one standout performance, that of Joachim Meyerhoff as Trigorian, the older writer who ends up running away with the aspiring actress Nina. Meyerhoff, one of the Schaubühne’s finest actors, injected fresh life into his character, a popular second-rater who probably suspects that he’s a hack. His performance was shot through with twitching, neurotic energy, humor, and self-deprecating charm. Whenever he wasn’t onstage, the production glowed less brightly.Laufenberg overdid Konstantin’s temper tantrums in Act I, but found a convincingly pained and broken register for the closing scene. The women in the cast fared less well. As Arkadina, an aging starlet and Konstantin’s mother, Stephanie Eidt’s histrionic performance was pitched halfway between Blanche DuBois and Norma Desmond. As Nina, Alina Vimbai Strähler never fully inhabited her complex and demanding role; her journey from wide-eyed optimism to crushing disillusion seemed largely superficial.“There are no new forms here, but simply bad behavior,” Arkadina comments after seeing her son’s play. The only time you could accuse this production of bad behavior is when Meyerhoff takes a leak against the tree. For the majority of its intermissionless 165 minutes, this “Seagull” is handsome and skillfully rendered, but curiously bloodless, much like the stuffed specimen at the play’s end. More

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      Who Needs a Shave? ‘Sweeney Todd’ Is Back.

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      “Less is more” was famously one of the composer Stephen Sondheim’s aesthetic credos. But in the case of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” the bloody, quasi-operatic 1979 revenge tragedy that many consider his masterpiece, Sondheim went big in a way he seldom had before and never did again: in the size of the orchestra and performing ensemble, in the sheer quantity of music written for the score, and in the dramatic freight (and body count) borne by the tale of a murderous Victorian-era barber.“Sweeney Todd” has accordingly joined the repertoire of many opera companies, where it holds its own with such 20th-century titans as the Gershwins’ “Porgy and Bess” and Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw.” But in the theater, “Sweeney” has found notable success by getting a haircut. Since the original Broadway production closed in 1980 — an artistic success, winning the Tony Award for best musical, but a financial disappointment, recouping just shy of 60 percent of its costs — its two Broadway revivals were trimmed-down renditions. The first, staged in the round at Circle in the Square in 1989, earned the nickname “Teeny Todd” for its small ensemble and two-piano reduction of the score, while John Doyle’s 2005 production memorably stripped the show down to a 10-member company of actor-musicians.The property’s biggest commercial success was Off Broadway: The Tooting Arts Club’s immersive pie-shop staging at the 133-seat Barrow Street Theater in 2017 became the longest-running “Sweeney,” recouping its investment in 24 weeks, then continuing for a year after that.So the stakes are high for the new Broadway revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, now in previews at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where it is scheduled to open on March 26. With a capitalization of $13.5 million, a company of 25 actors and an orchestra of 26 players, this is “Sweeney” as it hasn’t been seen or heard in New York for 43 years. We’re used to “Sweeney Todd” deconstructed. Can it be reconstructed?And is there a plentiful paying audience, not only for the show’s stars, who include Gaten Matarazzo and Jordan Fisher, but also for Sondheim himself? His death in 2021 led to fresh encomiums for his unparalleled legacy, but that season’s “Company” revival lost money, and last year’s popular “Into the Woods,” now on a national tour, has not announced whether it has recouped.Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Sweeney” (and “Hamilton”), recently acknowledged that the revival constituted a “large risk,” adding that he’s encouraged by strong ticket sales. He did initially wonder, he said, “Does New York need or want another ‘Sweeney Todd,’ only four or five years after the pie shop? And the answer was: Maybe, if we give them something they haven’t seen in 40 years, a full-scale production with a full ensemble and a full orchestra.”Rehearsals of the show at Open Jar Studios in Manhattan. The new production’s larger scale also means the return of the trick barber’s chair and blood packs. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesGaten Matarazzo during rehearsals.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe idea of the revival germinated with Groban, a pop-classical singer who made his Broadway debut in 2016 in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” He approached Thomas Kail, the Tony-winning director of “Hamilton,” about tackling “Sweeney” with a full orchestra, and Kail enlisted Alex Lacamoire, the “Hamilton” music director, and the choreographer Steven Hoggett (“A Beautiful Noise”).During a phone interview two days before previews began, Groban said Sweeney had been on his wish list since he was in junior high and first saw a mid-1990s production by Los Angeles’s East West Players, with Orville Mendoza in the lead. It was also his introduction to the work of Sondheim, who teamed with Hugh Wheeler, the show’s writer.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.“It was a kind of secret language that I just got,” Groban recalled of his early explorations of Sondheim’s musicals. “Even at a young age, when I still needed to grow into so many of the themes he was writing about, I just seemed to understand it on a weird unspoken level.”While Groban’s lush baritone is undoubtedly a good fit for the music, does he perhaps seem a bit too genial and easygoing to play a serial killer whose quest for revenge swells into a sociopathic death wish?“That’s actually one of the reasons I was attracted to doing it,” Groban insisted. He said he figured that “the way to earn a connection with the audience that’s frightening on a deeper level than, ‘Hey, that’s the monster in the room,’ is to find whatever humanity there is between that guy and whoever’s sitting in the audience.”For his part, Kail said he’s leaning into the show’s strains of longing, not only those of the embittered Sweeney but also from his helpmate and desultory romantic partner, the pie-shop proprietor Mrs. Lovett, played by Ashford.“What we’re really keen to explore,” said Kail, “is can you make something thrilling, something entertaining, something hilarious, something scary — and can we also break your heart?”Ashford, who played Dot in the 2017 revival of Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George” (which did recoup its investment), is on a similar wavelength.“I’ve always thought of it as a great love story, though maybe one-sided,” she said. Without ignoring Lovett’s depravity — it is she, after all, who suggests grinding Sweeney’s victims into meat pies, in the tour de force duet “A Little Priest” — Ashford said she is keying in on Mrs. Lovett’s unrequited passion for Sweeney as well as her maternal affection for the orphan Toby (Matarazzo).Not to mention finding connections to the role’s originator, Angela Lansbury. “You feel her breath and her warmth and her humor all over the piece,” Ashford said.The production aims to “find beauty in the underbelly and in the grotesque,” said Kail, above right, with Ashford and Groban.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIndeed, the imprint of the original production, memorialized in a telefilm recording of a 1980 tour stop in Los Angeles, is unavoidable. That’s particularly the case for a production that’s returning to Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestrations, and boasts a towering set by Mimi Lien that, like Eugene Lee’s original set, employs a working crane and moving pieces ringed with cast-iron staircases.But Kail, who was friendly with Harold Prince, the director of the show’s original production, is intent on marking out his own territory.“That production was influenced by Brecht; it was about alienation, distancing,” Kail said. “That approach was enormously effective for them, and it is quite different from what we’re going to try to do.”Whereas Prince found his hook in the grime and tumult of the Industrial Revolution, Kail and his team, which also includes the costume designer Emilio Sosa and the lighting designer Natasha Katz, are looking to “find beauty in the underbelly and in the grotesque,” Kail said. Inspired by the play’s stark dichotomy between “those above” and “those below,” they are trying to embody its levels and hierarchies.Lien, whose scenic designs for shows like “Great Comet” and “An Octoroon” are typically characterized by surprising use of three-dimensional space, was struck by the show’s references to “the great black pit, the hole in the ground, the vermin — this kind of characterization of that underclass population of Victorian London as being like sewer rats, living underground.”In addition to the gantry crane and mechanized set pieces, Lien’s set is framed by a brick archway and an iron bridge that could serve in a production of “Oliver!”Sosa’s costumes, too, are stressing both beauty and division.“If you look historically at the clothing, the cuts and silhouettes are very similar between those of less means and more affluent people,” Sosa noted. “Everyone has a top hat. It’s the condition of your hat that’s variable, that sets where you stand in the scheme of economics.”The new production’s larger scale also means the return of the trick chair and blood packs. (Some past revivals artfully stylized the show’s onstage murders and finessed the mechanics of Sweeney’s purpose-built chair.) Its blood effects are being created by Jeremy Chernick, who helped Elsa’s world transform to ice in “Frozen” and stocked the blood cannons for “American Psycho.”And when I spoke to Hoggett about the show’s movements and transitions he told me, “I spent all day yesterday being slid down the chair into a pit, so I could show all the actors how not to bang your chin and where the floor is. It was great; we were offering $5 rides.”Atop the table, from left, Gaten Matarazzo and Annaleigh Ashford in the revival of “Sweeney Todd” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGroban as the murderous barber Sweeney Todd and Ashford as the pie-shop proprietor Mrs. Lovett in the new production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe extent to which “Sweeney Todd” is itself a kind of thrill ride, a brilliant machine for delivering scares and laughs, remains a question. Sondheim was clear about his inspiration: When he saw Christopher Bond’s blank-verse play in London in 1973, itself adapted from a hoary English legend, the composer saw an opportunity to indulge his intersecting affinities for Gothic horror, melodrama and Grand Guignol. And in later years he was on record as savoring intimate versions of “Sweeney,” not least because they hewed closer to his original vision.But there’s something else in the show’s DNA that may account for its endurance, and may explain why, despite Sondheim’s expressed preference for smaller stagings, he was apparently eager to see Kail’s production. (He died just days before he had been scheduled to attend a reading of the show.)When Sondheim enlisted Prince — who was initially ambivalent about the show’s melodrama and horror until he sparked to its larger social themes — the composer was inexorably drawn into writing something with more epic heft than he might have originally imagined.As Ashford put it: “Every time you work on a great piece, you are exploring an author’s work from that moment in their life. I always thought ‘Sunday in the Park’ was an extension of Steve at a time in his life when he was really examining himself as an artist and what art meant to him.“In this piece, where he was in his life — I can’t speak for him, but it feels like he and Hal Prince were setting the world on fire. And he was like, ‘Here’s everything I got, I can’t wait to show it to you.’”There may be something even more personal at the show’s bloody core that speaks to its emotional size, if not its physical scale. When Sondheim played a bit of the score for Judy Prince, Hal’s wife, she was startled, and told him, “Steve, it’s the story of your life.”I once asked Sondheim what she might have meant, and he replied by drawing an analogy between Sweeney’s vengeful murders and works of art inspired by a sense of having been wronged as a young man. (Sondheim had an infamously stormy childhood.)The clues can be read in the music. The harmonic palette of the “Sweeney” score was influenced by the film music of Bernard Herrmann, a German neo-Romantic who brought utter emotional conviction to his work, whether he was accompanying dueling skeletons or the capering psychodramas of Alfred Hitchcock. The yearning and anguish Sondheim poured into the music of “Sweeney Todd” may finally be as telling as any of the bloody action in the script.Tunick, who said his original orchestrations “leaned on the film music masters heavily,” knew Sondheim well. Whether “Sweeney Todd” expressed something darkly personal about his colleague, Tunick couldn’t say. But he did note significantly: “All of his other shows were brought to him by somebody else, whether it was Hal Prince or James Lapine or whoever. This is the only one of Sondheim’s shows that was his idea.” More

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      ‘Crumbs From the Table of Joy’ Review: Dreams on the Cusp of Womanhood

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      In Keen Company’s revival of Lynn Nottage’s 1995 play, a Black girl comes of age amid the churn of social change in midcentury Brooklyn.If Ernestine Crump were a Hollywood actress, she would change her name to something suitably alluring.“Like ‘Sylvie Montgomery,’” she says. “Or ‘Laura Saint Germaine’ — that’s French.”At 17, on the verge of graduating from high school, Ernestine is given to celluloid dreams and other flights of fancy.“But don’t you worry yourself,” she says, all teasing practicality. “When I’m onscreen I sure can act very white. That’s why I’m a star.”In Lynn Nottage’s bittersweet memory play “Crumbs From the Table of Joy,” at Theater Row, the year is 1950. Ernestine (a terrific Shanel Bailey), our narrator, is a recent transplant to Brooklyn, where she lives in a basement apartment with her rigid father, Godfrey (Jason Bowen), and impish sister, Ermina (Malika Samuel). They are a Black family on a largely white block; few of the neighbors will even speak to them.The death of the girls’ mother was the catalyst for the Crumps’ move north from Florida. Each of them is still undone by grief, perhaps Godfrey most of all. A baker by trade, he is newly sober and celibate, clinging to the teachings of the messianic leader Father Divine, whose portrait hangs on the living room wall. (The set is by Brendan Gonzales Boston.)More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This Spring‘The Invisible Project’: The new show by the choreographer Keely Garfield at NYU Skirball is a dance, but it is also informed by her work as an end-of-life and trauma chaplain.Life in Photos: Larry Sultan’s photography, now starring in the play “Pictures From Home” and a gallery show, raise issues of who controls a family’s image.Musical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Asceticism is anathema to the girls’ glamorous Aunt Lily (Sharina Martin), their mother’s sister, who shows up unexpected from Harlem one day. Luggage in tow, flask ever-present, she announces that her own mother has asked her to take care of the girls.“She don’t think it’s proper that a man be living alone with his daughters once they sprung bosom,” Lily says, vividly.And that’s that, despite how objectionable Godfrey finds Lily’s fervent Communism and how disconcerting he finds her sexual availability.In Colette Robert’s quiet, mostly sure-handed production for Keen Company, “Crumbs From the Table of Joy” is a pleasure for several reasons: rarity, for one, this being the play’s first New York revival since its premiere in 1995.There’s also the fun of spotting — in a work that feels, improbable as it sounds, like a cousin to Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” — glimmers of plays to come in Nottage’s oeuvre. Ernestine’s silver-screen fantasies bring to mind the satire “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” (2011), about a trailblazing Black actress in Golden Age Hollywood. And Ernestine’s dressmaker’s dummy, draped with her graduation gown in progress, prefigures “Intimate Apparel” (2003).That dress, prim and white with lace at the neckline, is as much an emblem of achievement and possibility as Lily’s elegant tailored skirt suit — though Lily’s outfit also serves as an armor of bravado over dented dreams. (Costumes are by Johanna Pan.) A revolutionary at heart, and a life-altering inspiration to Ernestine, Lily is a determined counterpoint to the version of Black womanhood that the cautious Godfrey tries to instill in his daughters: chaste, sober, grateful and with only the tamest of ambitions.Lily, alas, doesn’t have the necessary resonance in this production. There’s a hollowness to Martin’s interpretation that unbalances the otherwise strong ensemble and the dynamics of the Crump household, which Godfrey throws into turmoil when he abruptly remarries.Like Father Divine, he chooses a white woman — Gerte (Natalia Payne, excellent), who lived through the war in her native Germany. Their first meeting, by chance, on the subway, is intensely fraught: she, lost, hungry and alone; he, terrified to engage because, as he has told his daughters more than once, “I don’t want to wind up like them Scottsboro boys.”Such are the clamorous forces shaping Ernestine’s coming-of-age. In the middle of the 20th century, in a corner of the big city, she’s figuring out who she wants to be.Crumbs From the Table of JoyThrough April 1 at Theater Row, Manhattan; keencompany.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Review: ‘The Great British Bake Off Musical’ Is Sweet but Underbaked

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      In London, a stage show based on the popular TV series tries to capture the warmhearted appeal of the original.The first question you’re likely to ask about “The Great British Bake Off Musical” is, surely, “Is it sweet?” Such a tone, dusted with lots of sugar, has been crucial to the success of the popular TV program this new stage show adapts, and which pits amateur bakers against one another to see who can perfect the petit four or come up with the most luscious Key lime pie.And the show, which opened on Monday at the Noël Coward Theater for a limited run through May 13, really is generous-spirited. During its two-and-a-half hour running time, the musical’s likability is never in question, even if its craft sometimes is: You can’t help wishing the creators had been as exacting with their own material as some of the contestants are with their ovens.Newcomers to this milieu should know that “The Great British Bake Off” first aired in Britain in 2010 on the BBC, before moving to the commercial broadcaster Channel 4, and spawning various offshoots along the way: “Junior Bake Off,” for one, to showcase those adolescents, and younger, who have a penchant for pastry. (In the United States, the original is known as “The Great British Baking Show.”)This stage iteration, written by Pippa Cleary and Jake Brunger and directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, was first seen last summer in the spa town of Cheltenham, in the west of England, and has been put together in conjunction with Love Productions, the company behind the TV show.On home turf, the TV series has regularly made headlines, but you don’t have to be familiar with the so-called “Hollywood handshake” — the gesture of approval from Paul Hollywood, one of the judges — to grasp the terrain of the musical. Devotees of its small-screen original will note various in jokes, not to mention the visual match that has been achieved between Hollywood and Prue Leith — his bespectacled fellow judge — and the musical’s co-stars John Owen-Jones and Haydn Gwynne.Owen-Jones, right, and his fellow judge in the musical, Haydn Gwynne, left, look remarkably like the TV show’s judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith.Manuel HarlanBut perhaps the biggest appeal of the TV material is the cross-section of British society the competitors represent. The musical, perhaps inevitably but also rather drippily, whisks dollops of uplift into the mix. You get a comic number in which the two judges appear as dueling scones alongside life lessons elsewhere about “the recipe of me,” and it’s suggested that baking can make you feel better about yourself.An introductory sequence announces, with mock-biblical fervor, the birth of flour and sugar. And before we know it, we’re in the show’s iconic white tent — Alice Power designed not just the sets and costumes but also the cakes — and meeting the disparate group of eight bakers who will be whittled down to one winner. Their fates are accompanied by continual innuendo about soggy bottoms, spotted dicks and any other culinary double entendres that might induce a snicker (let’s not forget cream-filled buns).The self-regarding Izzy (Grace Mouat) is so sure of her success that she gets a dance number, “Obviously,” in praise of her own bravura. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the nervous chatterbox Gemma (Charlotte Wakefield), a depressive health aide from Blackpool whose climactic anthem, “Rise,” draws directly from the “Wicked” playbook of self-empowerment. In keeping with the “Wicked” theme, the older, notably fastidious Russell (Michael Cahill) speaks separately of people “coming into your life for a reason” — a familiar sentiment from the earlier show. The pie-themed musical “Waitress” hovers in the wings, as well.From left, Hassan (Aharon Rayner), Izzy (Grace Mouat) and Kim (Zoe Birkett) are some of the characters in the musical. Manuel HarlanThere’s something of a rummage-sale feel to Cleary and Brunger’s eclectic score, which draws upon such diverse sources as Cole Porter (a jaunty duet for the judges) and Stephen Sondheim: The wonderful Gwynne starts the second act with a sequined dance number that could have come from “Follies.” She also reprises the cartwheel that wowed audiences some years back in “Billy Elliot,” and when she speaks of dipping “your little finger in my raclette,” the image sounds notably lewd.Hassan (a winning Aharon Rayner), an immigrant based in Wembley, northwest London, hankers for the smells of Syria, his onetime home, while Francesca (Cat Sandison), a teacher with infertility issues, sings of how panforte and panettone are part of her Italian heritage.I wish it weren’t quite so preordained that the outspoken, thrice-married Babs (the redoubtable Claire Moore) would get a lusty showstopper in which her libido is revealed in all its power; the song’s title, “Babs’ Lament,” nods directly toward “Guys and Dolls,” a revival of which happens to be previewing across town at the moment.And as soon as we have glimpsed the widower Ben (Damian Humbley, in characteristically fine voice), it’s clear the contest will find him a companion: he’s even got a precocious 9-year-old daughter, Lily, to urge him on his amorous path, though not before she rather implausibly rattles off a list of today’s ills, the war in Ukraine among them.This musical occupies a different, more innocent world — one in which strudels are restorative and, as the show puts it, “cake is the cure.” I’m as fully on board with that message as anyone. What’s needed is more art to accompany the heart.The Great British Bake Off MusicalThrough May 13 at the Noël Coward Theater in London; bakeoffthemusical.com More

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      in Movies

      A24, the Indie Film Studio, Buys New York’s Cherry Lane Theater

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      The studio’s first venture into live performance follows the move by Audible, Amazon’s audio subsidiary, to stage works at the nearby Minetta Lane Theater.A24, the independent film and television studio barreling into next weekend’s Academy Awards with a boatload of Oscar nominations, is making an unexpected move into live performance, purchasing a small Off Broadway theater in New York’s West Village.The studio, which until now has focused on making movies, television shows and podcasts, has purchased the Cherry Lane Theater for $10 million, and plans to present plays as well as other forms of live entertainment there, in addition to the occasional film screening.A24, whose films include the leading Oscar contender “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” is not the first film studio to make such a move: the Walt Disney Company has been presenting stage productions at Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theater, which it leases from the state and city, since 1997. But Disney, of course, is an entertainment industry behemoth that has mastered the art of multiplatform storytelling.A more comparable move, perhaps, was that by Audible, an Amazon audio subsidiary that since 2018 has been leasing the Minetta Lane Theater, in Greenwich Village, for live productions which it then records and offers on its digital platform. And Netflix, the streaming juggernaut, has in recent years taken over several cinemas, including the Paris Theater in New York, as well as the Egyptian and Bay theaters in Los Angeles.The A24 acquisition, coming at a time when many theaters are still struggling to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, suggests a vote of confidence in live performance. A24 plans to present some events celebrating Cherry Lane’s centennial this spring, and then to close the theater for renovations before beginning full-scale programming next year.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Much remains uncertain about how the company intends to use the theater. A24 declined to make anyone available to speak on the record about the acquisition, but an official there said that the company had not yet decided whether it would develop work for the stage, or present work developed by others. The official, who was granted anonymity to describe the company’s plans, said that the studio hoped the theater would allow it to strengthen existing relationships with writers and performers who work on stage and screen, and to develop new relationships with comedians and theater artists.A24 plans to retain the theater’s existing staff while adding to it with its own team, the official said, and as part of the renovation it plans to install technology so the theater can be used for film screenings.The official said A24’s theater venture is a partnership with Taurus Investment Holdings.“I really believe my theater is going into the right hands,” said Angelina Fiordellisi, who has owned the theater since 1996. “They love to develop and produce the work of emerging writers, and a lot of their writers are playwrights. I can’t imagine a better way to bring future life to the theater.”Fiordellisi, 68, has been trying to sell the theater for some time. “I don’t want to work that hard anymore,” she said, “and I want to spend more time with my family.”The purchase, which was previously reported by Curbed, includes three attached properties, including a 179-seat theater, a 60-seat theater and eight apartments, on the Village’s picturesque, curving Commerce Street. The Cherry Lane, in a 19th-century building that was a brewery and a box factory before being converted to theatrical use in 1923, bills itself as the city’s longest continually running Off Broadway theater.In 2021, Fiordellisi agreed to sell the property to the Lucille Lortel Theater for $11 million, but the sale fell apart. Last week, Lortel announced that it had spent $5.3 million to purchase a three-story carriage house in Chelsea, where it plans to open a 61-seat theater in 2025. The Lortel organization also has a 295-seat theater in the West Village.The Cherry Lane will now be a for-profit, commercial venture; Fiordellisi had operated it through a nonprofit, occasionally presenting work that she developed and more often renting it to nonprofit and commercial producers. Fiordellisi said she will convert her nonprofit to a foundation that will give grants to playwrights and small theater companies. More