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      An Actress of Many Passions, Now Making History in ‘Wicked’

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      The last time Lencia Kebede lived in New York, in 2015, she was a 21-year-old college intern at the United Nations, taking and translating notes for the ambassador from Guatemala, who was working on an anti-poverty initiative.What a difference a decade can make. Instead of pursuing a career as a human rights lawyer, Kebede is now a working actress in New York defying gravity eight times as week as the first Black actress to play Elphaba full time in “Wicked” on Broadway.It’s a dream role that is also allowing her to tend to her two passions. “The place where Elphaba and I meet,” she said, “is empathy and advocacy for justice.”After her internship, she returned to college and graduated from Occidental with a bachelor’s degree in diplomacy and world affairs. But she knew that she had to follow her musical theater ambitions instead of going to law school.In “Wicked,” a prequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” Elphaba, born with green skin and preternatural sorcery skills, is the young adult version of the Wicked Witch of the West. But the story reveals that she is neither evil nor envious, and instead is a consummate outsider who uses her powers to protect herself and others from the authoritarian rule in Oz.Kebede, whose parents immigrated to the United States in the early 1970s to escape a military coup in Ethiopia, said her own back story is helping her bring a fresh global and political perspective to Elphaba’s heroism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Amid Trump Cuts, Officials Resign From the National Endowment for the Arts

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      Senior officials announced their resignations after the Trump administration withdrew grants from arts organizations around the country.A group of senior officials at the National Endowment for the Arts announced their resignations on Monday, days after the Trump administration began withdrawing grants from arts groups across the nation.Their departures, which come as the endowment has been withdrawing current grant offers and President Trump has proposed eliminating the agency altogether next year, became public on Monday in a series of emails and social media posts.An N.E.A. spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.Among those leaving the agency are directors overseeing grants for dance, design, folk and traditional arts, museums and visual arts, and theater. Also departing are the directors of arts education, multidisciplinary works and the “partnership” division, which oversees work with state and local arts agencies. Those officials announced their departures in newsletters sent out by the endowment starting at midday on Monday.The head of the agency’s literary arts division is leaving as well, along with three members of her team, according to a newsletter sent on Monday morning by LitNet, a coalition of literary organizations.The announcement of the departures left the besieged agency facing even more uncertainty. It is not clear how or whether the agency would issue grants without this tier of officials. A round of grant cancellation notifications that went out Friday night indicated that the agency expected to continue making grants, but in areas prioritized by Mr. Trump.Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater in New York and one of the leaders of the Professional Non-Profit Theater Coalition, said the staff resignations were “worrisome.” He added that while he did not criticize anyone for leaving, he feared the departures could make it easier to eliminate the agency.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The United States vs Ulysses’ Review: The Case That Won’t Go Away

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      When James Joyce’s masterpiece faced banning, the American justice system came to the rescue. A new play wonders if it would today.Though it was a civil case, the defendant faced capital punishment.Or so the defendant’s attorney, Morris Ernst, argued, because his client was a book. And not just any book, but a particular copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” that had been impounded at U.S. Customs and charged with obscenity.“If the book loses,” Ernst proclaimed, “it will be destroyed — burned — hanged by the neck until it is dead.”Ernst’s florid oratory in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses was successful. On Dec. 6, 1933, as soon as the judge, John Munro Woolsey, delivered his decision finding “Ulysses” not obscene — thus permitting a hardback of the French edition to pass through customs — Random House began typesetting an American version, the first to be published in an English-speaking country. Woolsey’s landmark order, along with a foreword by Ernst calling it a “body-blow for the censors,” is included in most copies of “Ulysses” to this day.Lawyers and judges are not typically heroes in literature, and of late almost never in plays. They are mostly depicted as preening and eely. Yet in “The United States vs Ulysses,” a play by Colin Murphy now at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, Ernst and Woolsey (if not Samuel Coleman, who represented the government) are offered as paragons of progressivism in action. Indeed, the playwright has elevated them almost to the level of Joyce himself.And yet for all its worthiness, liberal uplift and pressing topicality, the play, directed by Conall Morrison, proves just how unmatchable Joyce remains. Murphy’s complicated schema, though less complicated than that of “Ulysses,” is ultimately less expressive, as nearly anything would be. Its account of the trial, drawn from transcripts and other historical sources, is but the middle of three shells. The innermost shell is “Ulysses” itself, represented by passages either specifically mentioned in court (like the scandalous “Nausicaa” episode) or thematically relevant to the proceedings (like the fantastical trial of Leopold Bloom, the novel’s main character, in “Circe”).The outermost shell introduces another unlikely hero these days: the media. The play is set two days after Woolsey’s verdict, as the five-person cast of the CBS radio program “The March of Time” awaits the scripts for that evening’s live episode. With the help of sound effects from the foley table — gavel bangs, telegraph taps — the voice actors will play all the roles, both in the courtroom and in the dramatized “Ulysses” segments. Even their director will chip in, playing Bloom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Goddess’ Brings Kenyan Folklore to New York

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      In “Goddess,” an original musical about a mysterious singer in Mombasa, Kenya, Moto Moto is not just an Afro-jazz nightclub, it’s a great equalizer, where Kenyans of all faiths, tribes and social classes shake and spin their bodies in rapture.“I’ve literally met the loves of my life on dance floors,” the director Saheem Ali said. “So I understand the power of a life-changing event that happens in a space of communal dancing and joy.”It’s that electric sense of belonging that Ali sought to recreate in “Goddess,” now in previews at the Public Theater after an 18-year development process.“My first child is Liban,” Ali said to his cast on the first day of rehearsal for “Goddess.” “He was born in 2006.”“My second child is ‘Goddess,’” he said, referring to the musical. “And she was born in 2007. Eighteen years, never again for one show.” (It arrives on the heels of his Broadway production of “Buena Vista Social Club,” the lively stage adaptation of the beloved 1997 album that is set in Havana nightclubs and was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including for Ali’s direction.)Creating an original musical from scratch is its own tall order. And at the heart of this passion project is the African folklore myth of Marimba, the goddess of music who created songs from heartbreak. It took Ali years to find the right collaborators and hone the plot.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Sinners’ and Shows like ‘Severance’ Give an Old Form New Life

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      Online, onstage and onscreen, performers are playing multiple parts. The effect of watching someone shape-shift can be both thrilling and unnerving.The much-anticipated season finale of one of my favorite sitcoms was recently derailed when its creator, Shawna Lander, ran into a few snags. In the story I’ve been following for months, a peppy if scatterbrained woman named Jennifer McCallister has gone into labor after a pregnancy that’s transformed her relationship with her sister-in-law (also named Shawna) from antagonistic to amiable. Meanwhile, Jennifer’s mother, Barb — passive-aggressive to a comically villainous degree — is getting drunk on margaritas at a local Mexican restaurant and terrorizing the wait staff when she gets a call to meet Jennifer at the hospital.But just as Jennifer was about to give birth, the story stopped. Lander announced that due to technical difficulties and illness, the audience would have to wait a few days to see what shenanigans Barb got up to, and whether this birth would help her and her son, Jennifer’s brother John, smooth over their rocky relationship. Illness foils shooting days all the time, but typically one creator’s bout of fever wouldn’t force audiences to wait well past the target air date to find out what happens. The difference with Lander’s show, which chronicles the ever-sprawling antics of the McCallister family — most sketches are actually stealth explorations of relationship dynamics — is that Lander is the show. She writes it. She produces and distributes it. She directs and shoots it.Michael B. Jordan as the twins Smoke and Stack in “Sinners.” He’s one of many performers this season playing multiple parts in a production.Warner Bros. PicturesAnd, most important, like several actors in hit TV shows, big-budget films and Tony-nominated Broadway productions this season, she plays every single character: Jennifer, Barb, Shawna, John, other male partners, assorted friends, the waitress, even Shawna’s two small children. They’re all Lander in wigs and different shirts, shot in close-cropped vertical framing for platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where she posts under the handle @shawnathemom. Her performances are so funny and specific that it’s shockingly easy to forget it’s all just her.The McCallister family saga boasts considerable viewership. The chronicles are followed by two million TikTok users, with nearly a million more on Instagram. Add it up, and that’s a bigger audience than watched the Season 3 premiere of “The White Lotus.”Lander’s format — playing every part herself, with shots framed and edited so the characters seem to be conversing with each other — involves a visual vocabulary familiar to comedians on vertical video platforms, who often post satirical sketches about corporate life or marriage. Just recently, a creator who goes by Sydney Jo posted the multi-episode “Group Chat” series, in which she played the multitudinous members of a friend group experiencing mounting drama over one girl’s boyfriend, culminating in a “Real Housewives”-style reunion episode. The series was such a viral hit that Sydney Jo was invited onto the “Today” show to talk about it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pierre Audi, Eminent Force in the Performing Arts, Dies at 67

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      After turning a derelict lecture hall into the daring Almeida Theater, he had a long career as a director and impresario in Europe and New York.Pierre Audi, the stage director and impresario whose transformation of a derelict London lecture hall into the cutting-edge Almeida Theater was the opening act in a long career as one of the world’s most eminent performing arts leaders, died on Friday night in Beijing. He was 67.His death, while he was in China for meetings related to future productions, was announced on social media by Rachida Dati, the minister of culture in France, where Mr. Audi had been the director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival since 2018. The announcement did not specify a cause.Mr. Audi was in his early 20s when he founded the Almeida, which opened in 1980 and swiftly became a center of experimental theater and music. He spent 30 years as the leader of the Dutch National Opera, and for part of that time was also in charge of the Holland Festival. For the past decade, he had been the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York.The Almeida Theater in London. Mr. Audi was in his early 20s when he founded it in 1980, and it soon became a center of experimental theater and music.View PicturesAll along, he continued working as a director at theaters around the world. Last year, when the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels cut ties with Romeo Castellucci halfway through his new production of Wagner’s four-opera “Ring,” the company turned to Mr. Audi as one of the few artists with the knowledge, experience and cool head to take over such an epic undertaking at short notice.“He profoundly renewed the language of opera,” Ms. Dati wrote in her announcement, “through his rigor, his freedom and his singular vision.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The National Endowment for the Arts Begins Terminating Grants

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      The endowment told arts organizations that it was withdrawing or canceling current grants just hours after President Trump proposed eliminating the agency in the next fiscal year.The National Endowment for the Arts withdrew and canceled grant offers to numerous arts organizations around the country on Friday night, sending a round of email notifications out just hours after President Trump proposed eliminating the agency in his next budget.The move, although not unexpected, was met with disappointment and anger by arts administrators who had counted on the grants to finance ongoing projects.In Oregon, Portland Playhouse received an email from the endowment just 24 hours before opening a production of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” an acclaimed work that is part of the playwright’s series of 10 dramas about African Americans through the course of the 20th century. The N.E.A. had recommended a $25,000 grant for the show, which would have paid about one-fifth of the production’s personnel costs.“Times are tough for theaters — we’re already pressed, and in this moment where every dollar matters, this was a critical piece of our budget,” said Brian Weaver, the theater’s producing artistic director. “It’s ridiculous.”The emails were sent to arts administrators from an address at the endowment that did not accept replies. “The N.E.A. is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the president,” the emails said. “Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities.”The emails went on to say that the endowment would now prioritize projects that “elevate” historically Black colleges and universities, and colleges that serve Hispanic students. The emails also said the endowment would focus on projects that “celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster A.I. competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Wonderful Town,’ a Party for Writers and Weirdos

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      An awkward Encores! revival of the 1953 musical celebrates the bohemian life of Greenwich Village in the years when oddballs could still afford to live there.Betty Comden was from Brooklyn, Adolph Green from the Bronx, Leonard Bernstein from Boston. All were born in the 1910s. Yet the mind’s eye first spies them huddling around a Greenwich Village piano in the early 1940s, cracking one another up while writing topical sketches for the Village Gate. They called themselves the Revuers.That off-the-cuff, show-off spirit is what they tried to capture in the warm and silly “Wonderful Town,” their 1953 musical set in and around the Village’s crooked streets and rattletrap apartments. Though nominally about the wacky New York adventures of two sisters from Ohio — based on Ruth McKenney’s autobiographical New Yorker stories — what it’s really selling is something the authors knew firsthand: the joy of finding the place where misfits fit and eggheads shine.But the piece is as jury-rigged as a candle in a Chianti bottle, as rickety as those Village Gate revues. Bernstein goes loco with congas and rags, just because he can; Comden and Green, less interested in character logic than in fun, let a football player rhyme “learned to read” with “André Gide.” And with a devil-may-care book by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, based on their earlier play “My Sister Eileen,” “Wonderful Town” is an almost random contraption, barely hanging together even when shaped by a light and loving hand. It got that treatment in Kathleen Marshall’s 2000 Encores! production, starring Donna Murphy, which transferred splendidly to Broadway in 2003.The Encores! encore that opened on Wednesday at City Center — just the third time in 31 seasons that this invaluable series has returned to a former title — does not reach any of the highs of that earlier production. Anika Noni Rose as Ruth, the older sister, and Aisha Jackson as Eileen, the younger, are well cast, and each has endearing moments. The magazine editor both women fall for is beautifully sung by Javier Muñoz. The choral work is up to the high house standards. But except when it dances, the staging, by Zhailon Levingston, is shaggy and leaden and fatally lacking in laughs.It pains me to say that because his main idea is good. Though we like to think of diversity as a one-way street, always improving, scruffy Greenwich Village welcomed a greater variety of people (and rats) in 1935, when the story is set, than it does today with its wraparound terraces. Levingston builds on the script’s comic portrait of impoverished bohemianism — its beret-topped painters, shrink-wrapped Martha Grahams and street-corner Carusos — to celebrate the racial and gender mix the authors omitted from their hymn to Christopher Street as “the place for self-expression.”But though his feel-good update is more easily accommodated than you might expect, it does not itself make “Wonderful Town” wonderful. Rose’s way with a throwaway line, and Jackson’s delightful bubbliness are too often undercut by pictorial vagueness and weird-pause pacing that leave you wondering what’s happening and whether the next thing will ever arrive. Even when the sisters dig into the haunting harmonies of Bernstein’s “Ohio” with palpable longing for an easier if emptier life, the weirder-than-usual sound design makes it seem like they’re singing about a home on Mars, not in the Midwest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More