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      Alexander Zeldin Brings ‘Love’ to the Park Avenue Armory

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      Because his shows are based on research and interviews, and are grounded in pressing social issues, the British writer and director Alexander Zeldin is often said to practice docu-theater.The first part of his “Inequalities” trilogy, “Beyond Caring” (2014), is about zero-hour contracts (a British term for when an employer does not have to offer a minimum number of hours), while “Faith, Hope and Charity” (2019) is set at a community center for the poor and the homeless. Zeldin’s “Love,” which starts previews at the Park Avenue Armory on Saturday, and opened in 2016 at the National Theater in London, takes place in a temporary-housing facility. “The whole project is to write the tragic knot of our time,” Zeldin said.Yet he grimaced when that docu-theater label came up in a video conversation from London, where he was rehearsing “Love” — so popular across the Atlantic that it has traveled to eight European countries since its premiere, including France, Austria and Serbia, and was filmed by the BBC in 2018 — before its American debut.“I don’t see what I do as docu-theater at all,” he said, adding, “My script is about music. It’s about rhythm. Very modestly, that’s the ambition.”For Zeldin, 37, subject and form are inextricably linked. In “Love,” for example, the house lights remain on and the actors portraying the people at the shelter often sit amid‌ or walk around audience members, as if to say they are us and we are them, separated only by circumstance. Meanwhile, the narrative is carefully built in a tragic arc.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.“The structure is very classical and that’s very, very deliberate,” Zeldin said. “It’s rooted in life with an ambition to be judged or experienced as theater, not as testimony.”Amelda Brown during rehearsals. Her character in “Love” is losing control over her mind and body.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesZeldin grew up in Britain as the son of an Australian mother and a Jewish refugee father who was born in Haifa, Israel. His death when Zeldin was 15 created instant turmoil.“I was in trouble at school and all sorts of things that made me find theater, a place where I could have a real concentration of life,” Zeldin said. “I was very drawn to how it was making me feel life with the intensity that I felt in the most intense moments in my own life, which were quite a few at that time.”He started exploring theater at 17; his first play was an adaptation of the Marguerite Duras novel “Moderato Cantabile.” After studying at Oxford, Zeldin roamed the world, soaking up theater cultures and making works in countries like Georgia, Egypt, South Korea and Russia. In 2012 he became an assistant to the revered director Peter Brook and his longtime collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, and started teaching at the London acting school East 15, where he began developing the hyper-real style of the “Inequalities” trilogy.“My script is about music,” Alexander Zeldin said. “It’s about rhythm. Very modestly, that’s the ambition.”Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesA big preoccupation was the austerity programs implemented by Prime Minister David Cameron, so Zeldin hit the pavement and conducted extensive research. For “Love,” he went to shelters and reached out to organizations like the housing and homelessness charity Shelter. He was put in touch with Louise Walker, now 47, who inspired the characters of Emma and Dean, a young couple marooned at the shelter with Dean’s children.After Walker lost her home, Zeldin learned, she and her children ended up in housing that was meant to be temporary but lasted for months. She faced Kafka-esque bureaucratic labyrinths and had to juggle contradictory administrative demands, which we discover with horror in the play. “I do think that the whole system is designed to make you feel extremely uncomfortable and unworthy and just to stay in the squalor that this society put you in,” Walker said in a video chat.“In every part of the process, Alex was like, ‘You’ll be involved and tell me if I’m relaying correctly the things that you’re saying to me,’” she said. “He allowed us to very much tell our story.” (She and her daughter Renée are in the BBC film.)Zeldin wrote sketches of scenes, which he refined into an outline through a series of workshops. “We bring in 30 or 40 people, we pay them to be involved, and then we go out into the world working with families in their homes, understanding their situation,” he said. “Because I was doing so much work with community groups anyway, it felt natural to me that that should be part of the artistic process, that there should be a room, a great radical mix of people in the room.”This is represented onstage as well. While some people in the cast have theater experience — like Amelda Brown, who joined the cast in 2021 and whose character, Barbara, is losing control over her mind and body — some don’t. It’s an important semantic distinction that Zeldin prefers to “professional” versus “amateur.”Hind Swareldahab and Naby Dakhli during a break from rehearsals.Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times“Hind’s a big professional,” he said, referring to Hind Swareldahab, who plays Tharwa, a Sudanese refugee like herself. “She’s performed at the Odéon twice, she’s performed at the Vienna festival, Geneva, the National Theater. She’s got a great C.V. and she’s a brilliant actor, but she’d never been in a theater before she worked with me. She didn’t know there was a front of house, she didn’t know there was a stage. And so that brings you face to face with the question of, What is the theater for? And unless we ask this question, if we rely on habit, we will die.”Swareldahab, 46, who works as a pharmacist, heard about one of the “Love” workshops in an email from the Refugee Council, a charity and advocacy group. She has done the play many times now, and still marvels at its emotional toll. “Every second, every line, we feel it,” she said. “It’s not easy to watch. Every country, people cry. Everything is real. It’s hard to watch.”At the same time, it should be clear that the show is not a huge downer but is about resilience and our shared humanity — and it pulses with the power of a good yarn.“I want theater to be useful to the world, and I passionately don’t think that that is against poetics, against great storytelling, against entertainment, against accessibility,” Zeldin said. “I’m very lucky that ‘Love’ sells out. It’s a show that people want to see, and that’s very important to me.” More

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      Obie Awards Honor ‘English’ as Best New Play

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      A ceremony for the awards, celebrating work Off and Off Off Broadway, will be held Monday, but organizers decided to announce the winners in advance.The Obie Awards, back on track after a lengthy pandemic hiatus, are naming “English,” an acclaimed comedic drama set in an Iranian test-prep classroom, the best new American play staged Off Broadway over a two-year period.The play, written by the Iranian American playwright Sanaz Toossi, depicts four students, each at different stages of life and with different motivations, struggling to master English well enough to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language. The play was staged in New York early last year as a coproduction of the Atlantic and Roundabout theater companies. In The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green wrote, “Both contemplative and comic, it nails every opportunity for big laughs as its English-learning characters struggle with accents and idioms. But the laughter provides cover for the deeper idea that their struggle is not just linguistic.”Strong reviews have led to subsequent productions that are currently running in Washington and Toronto; another production is scheduled to begin performances next month in Berkeley, Calif.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.The Obie Awards, founded by the Village Voice and now presented by the American Theater Wing, honor theater staged Off and Off Off Broadway. This year’s ceremony will be held Monday night at Terminal 5 and will recognize work presented in person or online between July 1, 2020, and Aug. 31, 2022. The Wing decided to announce the award recipients in advance to allow the evening to focus on a celebration of theater’s resilience. Acceptance speeches are being posted on the Wing’s YouTube channel.The Obies, by tradition, do not have established categories; instead, the judges each year give out awards as they see fit. This year the judging panel, headed by the director David Mendizábal and the critic Melissa Rose Bernardo, is giving 37 awards.Among the winners: Martyna Majok, already a Pulitzer winner for “Cost of Living,” is being granted an Obie for playwriting in recognition of “Sanctuary City,” an immigration drama. Presented by New York Theater Workshop, the show got through a week of previews before being forced to close by the pandemic and then resumed performances 18 months later.Performance awards will go to Stephanie Berry and Lizan Mitchell for “On Sugarland” at New York Theater Workshop; Brittany Bradford for “Wedding Band” at Theater for a New Audience; Kara Young for “Twelfth Night” at the Classical Theater of Harlem; and Arturo Luís Soria for “Ni Mi Madre” at Rattlestick Theater. Also, sustained achievement in performance awards will be given to Billy Eugene Jones for “Fat Ham” at the Public Theater and “On Sugarland”; and to Andrea Patterson for “Cullud Wattah” at the Public, “Confederates” at Signature Theater and “Seize the King” at the Classical Theater of Harlem.The Obies are bestowing multiple special citations, including for members of the teams that created “English” and “Fat Ham” as well as “Oratorio for Living Things” at Ars Nova; a musical adaptation of “As You Like It” for Free Shakespeare in the Park; “The Nosebleed” at Lincoln Center Theater and the Japan Society; and a trio of digital, virtual or hybrid productions: “Circle Jerk,” “Russian Troll Farm” and “Taxilandia.” Also getting citations: the comedian Alex Edelman, for “Just for Us”; the playwright Richard Nelson, for his series of 12 plays set in Rhinebeck; and the costume designer Qween Jean, for work on seven shows.A full list of winners is here. More

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      They Invited Shakespeare to the Cookout. They Got ‘Fat Ham.’

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      The playwright James Ijames and the director Saheem Ali built a “Hamlet”-inspired play, opening in April on Broadway, around their artistic friendship.When James Ijames and Saheem Ali, the playwright and director of the Broadway-bound Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fat Ham,” talk about their projects, they do so in the kind of shorthand of longtime friends: incomplete sentences, phrases punctuated with laughs and a whole vocabulary of glances.It’s a frigid February day, and they have settled into a booth at the Library restaurant at the Public Theater. Ijames is a bit guarded — speaking carefully, his posture showing a certain reserve. Ali radiates energy — beaming as he listens to Ijames, occasionally tapping him on the arm in excitement.“We’re always, always, always ideating, always brainstorming,” Ali said. “It’s kind of wonderful.”Ijames gently contradicts Ali: “Yeah, I am not thinking about anything else.”“You just sent me a new draft —” Ali starts.“That was a while ago!” Ijames protests.“It was like two weeks ago!” Ali insists. Both of them crack up.The back-and-forth is a hallmark of the creative partnership that now finds them preparing to make their Broadway debuts with “Fat Ham,” a co-production of the National Black Theater and the Public Theater. When the show opens at the American Airlines Theater on April 12, it will be the first National Black Theater production to appear on Broadway and the only work by a Black playwright on Broadway this spring.“I remember we announced that we’re coming and then the climate really kind of shifted after that,” said Ali, 44, acutely aware of the commercial pressures that have left new stories by Black playwrights struggling to find staying power on Broadway. “What are we walking into?”A riff on “Hamlet” in the form of a Black family gathering in North Carolina, the story follows a college student named Juicy, who is stuck at a barbecue that doubles as a wedding celebration for his mother, Tedra, and her new husband, Rev, a pit master and the brother of Tedra’s recently deceased ex-husband. Juicy’s the sullen outcast; he’s gay, emotionally aware, intellectual and not the embodiment of Black manhood that Rev expects him to be. When the ghost of Juicy’s father appears, demanding Juicy avenge his wrongful killing at his brother’s hand, the “Hamlet” story commences.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.The show’s world premiere, a filmed production for the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, was streamed digitally in 2021, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The play then had a critically acclaimed Off Broadway run in 2022 at the Public Theater. Just weeks before opening, it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Ijames, 42, who grew up in North Carolina and lives in Philadelphia, where he is the co-artistic director of the Wilma, is known for his examinations of Blackness and how it has been shaped by our nation’s prejudices. He strikes right at the foundations, often drawing on what are now viewed as the hypocrisies of the heroes of U.S. history like Thomas Jefferson (in “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever”) and George and Martha Washington (in “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington”).Ijames’s first play for the National Black Theater, 2017’s “Kill Move Paradise,” imagines a waiting room in the afterlife where four young Black men are trying to understand their deaths.“He’s helping create a visible space for us to bear witness to the trauma, the pain, the amount of lost bodies, but also the amount of hope,” said Jonathan McCrory, the National Black Theater’s executive artistic director. “We needed that. We needed someone to help us rethink and re-articulate the space in which our grief was amalgamating.”It was also the show that brought Ijames and Ali together. Ali, who has since directed Jocelyn Bioh’s “Merry Wives” and a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s classic “Fires in the Mirror,” had attended a table read in 2016. Ijames remembers being drawn to how Ali spoke about the text and interacted with the actors.They didn’t have much face time beyond that first meeting, though Ijames and Ali texted and called each other. (“This was before Zoom” became popular, Ijames noted.) Opening night was the first time Ijames saw Ali’s staging of his work. He loved it, but decided that in the future he didn’t want to miss the chemistry that occurs when the playwright is actually in the room for the rehearsal process.When they decided to collaborate again, Ali and Ijames gravitated toward Shakespeare. Both had developed an interest in the flexibility of the text at an early age; each cited “Romeo and Juliet” as the play that un-ruffed and de-frilled Shakespeare for them, allowing them to see the different language, lives and cultural experiences that could be welcomed into the text. For Ali, it started with performing Shakespeare with his peers in Kenya, where he was born and raised. “It was malleable. It was playable. It was completely adaptable,” he said. “Coming to the States, Shakespeare is this other thing: mostly white people, very few people of color, and they speak a certain way.”He began inviting playwrights to work on Shakespeare adaptations with him. “I was like, ‘I want someone whose profession it is to work on the language. And I can talk about the world and the concept.’”Ijames had already been drafting something along those lines, working on what would become “Fat Ham” in 2017. He had picked his favorite Shakespeare play, “Hamlet,” forming the idea from King Claudius and Queen Gertrude’s wedding celebration in the second scene of the first act.Set at a North Carolina backyard barbecue, “Fat Ham” unpacks themes of homophobia and toxic masculinity in a blend of colloquial language and Shakespearean English.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I was like, ‘What if you could spill all of ‘Hamlet’ into that party, that celebration, and tell the whole story there? What would change? What ultimately would these people find out and explore about each other in that pressure cooker of time?’” Ijames said.The tragedy of “Fat Ham” is multifaceted, rooted not in murder and intrigue but in themes of homophobia, self-hatred and toxic masculinity. Ijames unpacks it all in a chili-and-cornbread combo of colloquial language and Shakespearean English, with characters that reflect an authentic Black experience.“Black people of the diaspora, in America, on the continent, anywhere else in the world — we speak with music, we speak with meter,” Ijames said. IN SPEAKING ABOUT building the show, Ali and Ijames described how they complemented and trusted each other. Ijames mentioned Ali’s transformation of the karaoke scene in “Fat Ham,” staging it with an otherworldly theatricality. The lights shift, the characters’ movements slow down and Ali infuses the scene with what Ijames calls a “physical vocabulary” — an unexpected choreographed sequence that includes metal-style headbanging. Ali noted his admiration for the spaces Ijames provides in the script for the director to extend his imagination. He cited the stage directions at the end, which begin, “The play cracks open.” What the audience sees is what the story evoked in Ali’s mind — and it’s a joyous, glamorous break from what audiences may have come to expect. In other words, a party.“Any time I get to collaborate with him I’m happy, because I don’t have to explain things to him,” Ijames said. “He just understands.”The word “trust” surfaces frequently among the show’s producers and cast members. “Lord knows Black folks endure a lot of contorting to fit in spaces that were not made for ourselves,” said Sade Lythcott, chief executive of the National Black Theater. “So trust becomes almost like the alchemy or the catalyst for how we can communicate to each other and build something as beautiful as ‘Fat Ham.’”Marcel Spears, who portrayed Juicy Off Broadway and is returning to the role, describes an almost psychic “synchronicity” between Ijames and Ali in the rehearsal room. “It’s like mom and dad,” he said.This will also be Spears’s first time on Broadway, and four other cast members are making their Broadway debuts as well. “Everybody’s walking into it with a sense of urgency and pride and joy,” he said.Still, “Fat Ham” faces a commercial environment that is challenging for new productions — especially plays by and about people of color. In the 2021-22 season, Broadway made history with the premiere of seven plays by Black playwrights. Yet many suffered financial losses (though not unusual for Broadway plays, particularly damning for work by already underrepresented artists) and a couple closed early, exacerbated by the surge in Omicron cases.“I’m shaking in my boots! Your boy is nervous,” Spears said with an anxious laugh. He mentioned a good friend, Jordan E. Cooper, the playwright and star of “Ain’t No Mo’,” and the early closing last fall of that show, which had a mostly Black creative team. “I was disheartened because as a Black theater artist, I want our work to be seen as just as valuable and as important and as immediate to Broadway audiences as anything else.”Lythcott, reflecting on those closures, said: “I think the way commercial theaters look at diversifying their audiences and appealing to culturally specific demographics, it still sometimes feels like Black folks are an idea and not living, breathing people. That’s the magic of James’s piece that he wrote: People can identify Tedra and Juicy; those are people that we know.”For his part, Ijames said he hopes that “Fat Ham” will attract a diverse, “game” New York audience who will enjoy what’s happening onstage. His expectations are those of an artist shaped by a scrappier regional theater scene: “We make the thing and then hopefully people come and hopefully it enlivens the community in which we’re making the thing. And so I hope that it’s going to do that. I hope that little stretch of 42nd Street is a little more Southern, a little more country.” More

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      ‘Parade’ Producers Condemn Neo-Nazi Protest at Show About Antisemitism

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      The show’s star, Ben Platt, said the “ugly and scary” display was a reminder of why they are retelling the story of the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman in Georgia.The producers and star of “Parade,” a Broadway musical about an antisemitic lynching in Georgia a century ago, condemned a small neo-Nazi demonstration that took place outside the show’s first preview performance on Tuesday night.The show centers on the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta who was convicted in 1913 of raping and murdering a 13-year-old girl. Responding to an outcry about whether Frank had been wrongfully convicted in a trial tainted by antisemitism, the Georgia governor commuted his death sentence. Months later, Frank was lynched by a mob.Ben Platt, the Tony-winning actor who plays Frank, had already described the musical revival as a timely story to tell at a moment when antisemitic incidents and hate speech have been a part of political and cultural conversations in America.But the appearance of about a dozen demonstrators outside the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, some holding a sign linking them to the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi organization, further underlined the current cultural relevance, the show’s producers said in a statement on Wednesday morning.“If there is any remaining doubt out there about the urgency of telling this story in this moment in history, the vileness on display last night should put it to rest,” the statement said. “We stand by the valiant Broadway cast that brings this vital story to life each night.”Platt, who won a Tony for “Dear Evan Hansen” and also appeared in last year’s brief run of “Parade” at New York City Center, learned about the demonstration on social media after he stepped offstage on Tuesday, he said in an Instagram video after the show.“It was definitely very ugly and scary, but a wonderful reminder of why we’re telling this particular story,” Platt said.The demonstration was also condemned by Actors’ Equity Association, the union representing Broadway actors and stage managers.In a video recorded by a bystander that was posted to Twitter, the demonstrators are seen and heard targeting Frank and the Anti-Defamation League, a group fighting antisemitism that was founded in the aftermath of Frank’s conviction. Some of them stood by a banner advertising the National Socialist Movement. One masked protester handed out fliers that promoted a separate group with neo-Nazi symbols and told people outside the theater that they were about to “worship a pedophile.”Burt Colucci, the leader of the National Socialist Movement, confirmed on Wednesday that local members of his organization had been involved in the demonstration.Frank’s conviction has been the subject of renewed scrutiny: In the 1980s, he received a posthumous pardon in Georgia, and in 2019, the district attorney in Fulton County created a panel to reinvestigate the case.“Parade” had a brief initial run on Broadway in 1998 that was not a commercial success, but the musical won Tony Awards for its book (by Alfred Uhry) and score (by Jason Robert Brown). Its run last year received positive reviews, including from Juan A. Ramírez, who said in The New York Times that it was “the best-sung musical in many a New York season.”The revival, directed by Michael Arden, is scheduled to run through early August.“Now is really the moment for this particular piece,” Platt said on his Instagram video, noting that he hoped the performance on Tuesday would make a more lasting impression than “the really ugly actions of a few people who were spreading evil.” More

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      On London Stages, Finding Something Fresh in Tragedy

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      New productions of “Medea” and “Phaedra” feature outstanding performances from Sophie Okonedo and Janet McTeer as women pushed to the edge.Tragedies are rarely absent from the London stage, but some defining theatrical titles don’t always deliver. It can be tricky to empathize with characters pushed to unimaginable extremes, and mythical landscapes can feel remote.What’s needed is a way of tapping into those works’ primal power afresh. It also helps to have performers with vocal and emotional range. London is offering two such powerhouses onstage right now: Sophie Okonedo and Janet McTeer, both Tony Award winners, though only Okonedo is in a production equal to her gifts.That would be the recently opened “Medea,” at the West End’s new in-the-round theater, @sohoplace, through April 22; performed in modern-dress without an intermission, Dominic Cooke’s expert production reminds us of the elemental fury at the heart of Euripides’ timeless play.The National Theater’s “Phaedra,” through April 8, is a new play from the Australian writer-director Simon Stone that draws from Euripides, Seneca and Racine. McTeer plays Helen, an anxious modern-day politician undone by love, as Phaedra was before her. But the tone wavers on the way to an attenuated close; the show runs nearly three hours.“Medea,” by contrast, charts a merciless 90-minute descent into the abyss, using the 1946 Robinson Jeffers adaptation from the Greek that is the play’s preferred version on Broadway.Daniels plays all the production’s male roles, including Medea’s husband, Jason.Johan PerssonWe hear the sorceress Medea before we see her, pleading for death from somewhere beneath the stage. Her husband, the explorer Jason, has transferred his affections to the daughter of the king of Corinth, leaving Medea to fester in grief and anger, and to plot literature’s most celebrated infanticide. Those children she will murder first appear onstage sweetly eating ice cream cones‌‌ — but that innocence won’t last.When Okonedo does appear, sunglasses hide the eyes. “I did not know I had visitors,” she says, deadpan, taking in the playgoers seated on all sides. (The intimacy of this circular theater opened last fall by the impresario Nica Burns is among its assets.) The effect draws us further into Medea’s plight, rendering us therapists or co-conspirators — or perhaps both.The play’s chorus consists of three women of Corinth seated in the audience who speak up now and again to voice their alarm. But Cooke’s primary innovation is to cast Ben Daniels, a London stage veteran, as all the play’s men. Seen before he speaks, Daniels circles the perimeter of the auditorium in silent slow-motion before stepping into the space to play a smugly dismissive Jason, or any of the other roles. The actor puts a deliciously camp spin on the Athenian king, Aegeus, in marked contrast to Jason’s knife-wielding machismo.The suggestion is of a male-dominated world in which the high-born Medea is doomed by her gender. Her fury, though, is directed at Jason specifically, and she commits the barbaric murder of their sons unseen, emerging afterward in embittered triumph.Throughout, Okonedo displays the suppleness of thought, and the wit, with which Medea surely once bewitched Jason, and the remorseless logic that has led to her monstrous deeds. Medea may go to extremes unknown to most of us, but this production keeps you on her side every step of the way.Chloe Lamford’s set for “Phaedra” at the National Theater encases the action in an revolving cube.Johan PerssonIt’s easy to imagine a younger McTeer as Medea, a role well matched to this fearless actress’s elegantly smoky voice and imposing physicality. As the sleekly attired Helen in “Phaedra,” she suggests a woman of wealth and power who knows how to work a room.That self-assurance is why it’s startling to watch her composure crack across a fitful evening that might work better if the production felt less remote. It’s a challenge to connect with the characters through the revolving cube of Chloe Lamford’s enclosed set.Not only must the actors be heavily amplified to be heard, but there are long blackouts while we wait for the various locations to be revealed — among them, a London restaurant, a field of reeds in the English countryside, or the rough Moroccan terrain of the play’s end.The characters at the start talk very fast, as if challenging the audience to keep up. But the gabble ceases with the unexpected appearance of Sofiane (Assaad Bouab) whose father, Ashraf, Helen’s lover, was killed in a car crash; Helen was in the vehicle at the time of the incident, which occurred when Sofiane was still a child.In “Phaedra,” Janet McTeer, left, plays Helen, who has an affair with the son of a former lover, played by Assaad Bouab.Johan PerssonHelen transfers her dormant feelings for Ashraf to the now-grown, and flirtatious, Sofiane, unaware that he is soon also bedding Helen’s daughter, Isolde (Mackenzie Davis, in an accomplished stage debut).The play surprises with its bursts of humor. Playing Helen’s sharp-tongued diplomat husband, the wonderful Paul Chahidi brings whiplash timing to a series of stinging takedowns of his philandering wife, who revels in feeling young again. (It would be helpful, though, to know more about Helen’s political life than the play lets on.)But for all McTeer’s considerable magnetism, this “Phaedra” feels like a messy story of romance gone wrong, modishly dressed up. Helen and her world may belong to the here and now, but it’s the centuries-old tale of Medea that really strikes at the heart anew. More

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      Review: Rude T-Shirts and Rude Awakenings in ‘A Bright New Boise’

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      An early play by Samuel D. Hunter finds the author developing his voice by lending it to the lost souls working at an Idaho Hobby Lobby.For most who attempt it professionally, playwriting is a hopeless job, with few opportunities to break in and fewer to advance. So it’s a pleasing irony that the playwright Samuel D. Hunter, the reigning bard of American economic dead-endism, has managed such a vibrant career.His trophy case is crowded with prizes: Obie, Whiting, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, MacArthur. The film adaptation of his 2012 play “The Whale” is up for three Academy Awards at next month’s ceremony. Even more impressive is that, at just 41, he’s had 11 New York City stage premieres in 12 years, from the jumbly satire of “Jack’s Precious Moment,” his local debut in 2010, to the sublime heartbreak of “A Case for the Existence of God” in 2022.“A Bright New Boise,” also from 2010, was the first of Hunter’s plays to achieve widespread notice, and with good reason. It introduced the radical sympathy of his voice and the quietly despairing people who evoked it. These were characters that few playwrights paid attention to: low-wage earners, many working at local branches of national chains, mostly in Hunter’s native Idaho. They struggle with the fallout of economic devastation and the emotional kind so tied up with it. Searching for faith, they must face its insufficiency.So interpret with caution the title of “A Bright New Boise,” which opened on Tuesday in a taut Signature Theater revival directed by Oliver Butler. It takes place in the break room of a local Hobby Lobby, on a deadly accurate set by Wilson Chin featuring a malfunctioning microwave on the counter and soporific motivational programming on the closed-circuit television. That the programming is occasionally interrupted by surgery-cam videos — a scalpel probing an ear is how this production begins — baldly warns us that we are in for something deeper and more upsetting than mere corporate uplift can obscure.The focus of that upset, we understand at once, is Will (Peter Mark Kendall), a man nearing 40 who is interviewing for a cashier’s position at $7.50 an hour. In 2010, when the play is set, that’s just 25 cents above the federal minimum wage, yet he accepts it willingly. Why?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.The proud, efficient and bilious store manager, Pauline (Eva Kaminsky), is all business; her upswept hair is a pincushion of pens. But Will is clearly in some kind of trouble. He answers her questions haltingly, the holes in his speech and his résumé suggesting the damaged places in his soul. When asked for an emergency contact, even one that “doesn’t have to be local,” he has none to provide.Peter Mark Kendall as Will, and Anna Baryshnikov as Anna, spend evenings reading and writing in the break room after hours.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA bit too methodically, Hunter introduces three of Will’s new co-workers, and here the play, though slightly revised since 2010, begins to betray some early-career awkwardness. One co-worker is Anna (Anna Baryshnikov), a skittery young woman drawn to Will in part because most of the men she meets “are pretty much terrible.” In Will she thinks she recognizes a kindred spirit; they both hide out at closing time — she among the silk flowers; he in scrapbooking — so they can spend evenings reading and writing in the break room.But even though Anna has real grit and sadness to her, she feels peripheral to the deepest currents of the story: a shore bird, not a fish. So, too, is Leroy (Angus O’Brien), a bro-y M.F.A. candidate at Boise State who makes T-shirts featuring aggressive phrases like “You will eat your children” and wears them to work as performance art. (The costumes are by April M. Hickman.) Though it’s Leroy who precipitates the play’s crisis by uncovering Will’s past, the comic and tensioning purposes to which he’s put don’t blend, making him more of a convenience than a character.Only the third co-worker, Alex (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio), is as central to Will’s story as he is to his own. To say how would be to spoil the plot, but Alex is quite a creation: a sullen high school student who has panic attacks, listens to Villa-Lobos on his iPod and is looking for something — in life as in himself — that isn’t a lie or a letdown. When we learn that Will is suffering a terrible disappointment of his own, a disastrous evangelical past he’s trying to shed, we see the crash coming.It’s a mark of Hunter’s patient construction that these Big Issues are usually rooted deeply in the plot, not sprinkled on top of it. In one of the play’s best scenes, Alex, freaking out over a $187 discrepancy Pauline has discovered in his register receipts from the previous day, allows Will to help him search the receipt rolls for the error. There’s no obvious reason that such a dull project — it takes several minutes — should make dangerous, believable, feelingful theater but it does.Actually, the believable part is no mystery; Hunter’s first job was at a Walmart in Moscow, Idaho. Nor is the dangerous part really so surprising: As a teenager Hunter attended an evangelical school for more than four years. He writes about the intensity of fellowship offered by charismatic leaders as vividly as he does the threat to individuality that comes with it. For Will, who came of age in that world, mainstream churches are little more than Hobby Lobbys — national chains selling discount goods.That he engages your sympathy instead of (or along with) your repulsion is the essence of Hunter’s gift. It’s a gift not just of human connection, but of theatrical compaction, a nuclear pressure he applies to people in distress. In that, “A Bright New Boise” anticipates the more sophisticated dramaturgy of his more recent plays, which less and less require extra characters. “A Case for the Existence of God” has only two until its coda.But “A Bright New Boise” sprawls. Despite Butler’s swift and confident staging and the fine work of the cast — and the hilariously corporate lighting, sound and video design — the play sometimes seems like a game of marbles, its five characters, each energized by trouble, banging up against one another in patterns that seem both random and overdetermined.It’s still a compelling play, worth seeing in itself and as a map of what would follow. Also as a map of what didn’t. When Leroy, explaining the philosophy behind his T-shirts, says he’s “forcing people to confront words and images they normally avoid,” you hear him ventriloquizing for Hunter. In a short time, though, the confrontations became invitations, and the T-shirts great theater.A Bright New BoiseThrough March 12 at Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      What to See This Spring in NYC: Broadway Shows, Concerts and More

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      “Life of Pi” and Laura Linney on Broadway, Lise Davidsen at the Met Opera, SZA on tour: Here’s what we’re looking forward to this season.Broadway | Off Broadway | Dance | Classical | PopBroadway‘PARADE’ It doesn’t exactly scream out for the big splashy Broadway musical treatment, does it, this disturbing tale of Leo Frank, accused of the rape and murder of a teenage girl and lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia in 1915? And yet, the original 1998 production grabbed Tony Awards for the book, by Alfred Uhry, and the score, by Jason Robert Brown. Almost 25 years later, Michael Arden directed a well-received Encores! production, starring Ben Platt, that had a blink-and-you-miss-it short run. Thankfully the production is headed to Broadway, again featuring Platt as Frank and Micaela Diamond as his wife, Lucille.In previews; opens March 16 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan.‘SHUCKED’ When the crop starts to fail in the small town of Cob County, an expert “corn doctor” arrives to help, but is he really a huckster? That’s the kernel of this cornpone musical comedy, anyway. Well-received in a premiere run at the Pioneer Theater Company, it promises earworm songs and many laughs — sounds amaizing. The book is by the Tony Award winning “Tootsie” writer Robert Horn, with songs by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. The ubiquitous Jack O’Brien directs.Previews begin March 8; opens April 4 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan.‘LIFE OF PI’ The long, tense standoff between a 16-year-old boy and a Bengal tiger stuck on a lifeboat is a tale of hope and survival first told in Yann Martel’s award-winning 2002 novel. A decade later, it became an Oscar-winning film directed by Ang Lee, and most recently has been adapted for the stage by Lolita Chakrabarti — the 2021 West End production won five Olivier Awards. The kid keeps surviving, so a stop on Broadway seems like a good next step. Hiran Abeysekera, who starred in London, will reprise the role of Pi, with Max Webster directing. No, no actual tigers will be among the cast; the puppetry and movement direction is by Finn Caldwell, with puppet design by Caldwell and Nick Barnes.Previews begin March 9; opens March 30 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, Manhattan.Hiran Abeysekera, left, with puppeteers operating the Bengal tiger in “Life of Pi.”Johan Persson‘PETER PAN GOES WRONG’ What’s the worst that could happen? When the Mischief Theater Company, which staged “The Play That Goes Wrong,” takes on the J.M. Barrie classic about a boy who won’t grow up, a few flying mishaps are sure to happen. This farce, which premiered in the West End in 2015, arrives to Broadway this spring, with Adam Meggido directing the chaos.Previews begin March 17; opens April 19 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan.‘THE THANKSGIVING PLAY’ You can’t please everyone … but you can try! A troupe of super progressive artists creates a culturally sensitive elementary school pageant that embraces both Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage month (without the participation of any actual Native Americans) in this satirical comedy by Larissa FastHorse. After a well-received premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2018, the show arrives on Broadway, with Rachel Chavkin (“Hadestown”) directing.Previews begin March 25; opens April 20 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan.Jennifer Bareilles, left, and Margo Seibert in “The Thanksgiving Play.”Jenny Anderson for The New York Times‘NEW YORK, NEW YORK’ What’s old is new when Broadway hosts a new musical inspired by a 1977 film about young artists with big dreams in the big city after World War II. It ain’t easy, but if they can make it here, they can make it anywhere (or so we’re told). The musical includes classics like the title number, as well as new songs — and a huge cast. The score is by Kander and Ebb, with an original story by David Thompson with  Sharon Washington and additional lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Susan Stroman directs.Previews begin March 24; opens April 26 at the St. James Theater, Manhattan.‘ROOM’ Like “Life of Pi,” also opening this spring, “Room” has gone from best-selling novel to award-winning film and now to a Broadway production. The play, adapted by Emma Donoghue from her 2010 novel about a mother and son held captive in a shed for years, has songs and some theatricalized aspects, like an older alter ego for young Jack. The essence of the story, though, about hope, imagination and resilience, remains the same. The songs are by the Scottish artists Kathryn Joseph and Cora Bissett, and Bissett (“Roadkill”) directs.Previews begin April 3; opens April 17 at the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan.‘SUMMER, 1976’ The casting alone, with Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht, ought to get you to the box office. Set in Ohio in the year of the bicentennial, David Auburn’s latest is about the budding friendship between Diana (Linney), an artist and single mother, and Alice (Hecht), a naïve housewife. As the nation celebrates independence, the women grapple with motherhood, ambition and intimacy and aim for their own sense of freedom. Daniel Sullivan directs.Previews begin April 4; opens April 25 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan.‘GOOD NIGHT, OSCAR’ Sean Hayes plays the impossible-to-describe pianist, performer and incomparable wit Oscar Levant in this new play by Doug Wright. Levant famously did a number of television interviews with Jack Paar when Levant talked openly and perhaps a bit scandalously about his battles with depression and mental illness. The play premiered last year at the Goodman Theater in Chicago to raves like this one from The Chicago Tribune: “It’s a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.” Anticipation is in the air. Lisa Peterson directs.Previews begin April 7; opens April 24 at the Belasco Theater, Manhattan.Sean Hayes in “Good Night, Oscar.”Liz Lauren‘PRIMA FACIE’ On “Killing Eve,” Jodie Comer proved to be transfixing, so this riveting solo show will certainly be a highlight of the spring season. The play comes with trigger warnings — Comer plays a lawyer who ruthlessly defends men accused of sexual assault, but then she suddenly finds herself on the witness stand. Comer won the 2022 Evening Standard Award for best actress for her West End performance in the role. The play, by Suzie Miller, is directed by Justin Martin. STEVEN McELROYPreviews begin April 11; opens April 23 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan.Jodie Comer in “Prima Facie.”Helen MurrayOff BroadwayBEDLAM THEATER Those of us who grew up in New England all thought Lizzie Borden did it — she gave her mother 40 whacks with an ax, and when that was done, she gave her father 41. Or so went the story of the infamous Borden, who was actually acquitted in the murder trial of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Mass., in 1893. Bedlam Theater takes an irreverent look at the story in “Fall River Fishing,” an absurdist dark comedy about unrequited love, self-loathing and disappointment.In previews; opens Feb. 26 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan.Following that play, Bedlam will stage “The Good John Proctor,” by Talene Monahon, a sequel of sorts to Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” focusing on the young Salem women in the time leading up to the infamous witch trials.Opens March 11 at the Connelly Theater.‘BLACK ODYSSEY’ The playwright Marcus Gardley knows his classics and has created imaginative riffs on Molière’s “Tartuffe,” and Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba.” Now he’s going back a wee bit further to Homer’s Odysseus saga, about a warrior who faces daunting challenges in finding his way home. Gardley places us in contemporary Harlem, where the soldier Ulysses Lincoln relies on his ancestors and family history to help him on his journey to reunite with his family. Stevie Walker-Webb (“Ain’t No Mo’”) directs.In previews; opens Feb. 26 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan.James T. Alfred, at right, in “Black Odyssey.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times‘HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF’ After a sorority sister is raped, some college students start their own self-defense class. And as they create a space to release their pent-up rage, they struggle with how best to respond — seek systemic change, or learn to land a palm strike? Or both? The play by Liliana Padilla was developed at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and won the 2019 Yale Drama Series Prize. The Off Broadway production will be directed by Padilla, Rachel Chavkin and Steph Paul.In previews; opens March 13 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan.‘THE COAST STARLIGHT’ This title refers to the Amtrak daily route that runs between Los Angeles and Seattle, with unbelievable scenery along the way. Keith Bunin’s play — which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 2019 — ponders what might be going on inside the minds of several people traveling solo on this train and fantasizes the encounters they might have with one another in a different reality. At least one of them holds a dangerous secret. Tyne Rafaeli directs.In previews; opens March 13 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan.‘THE STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENCIA HART’ It’s hard to believe it’s been 12 years since I was first captivated by this National Theater of Scotland production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This wild tale of a stuffy academic who attends a conference in a Scottish border town and somehow, surrealistically, finds herself dancing with the devil is told with an immersive approach that can be intoxicating for an audience member. You can take that literally — the show is being presented at the McKittrick Hotel in a pub environment, as it was in Edinburgh and at the hotel in 2016-17. The writer, David Greig (“The Events”), has a knack for yearning and fantasy, and “Prudencia” is unlikely to get old anytime soon.Previews begin March 8; opens March 13 at the McKittrick Hotel, Manhattan.‘WHITE GIRL IN DANGER’ Tired of being a “Blackground player” in the soap opera town of Allwhite, Keesha Gibbs is determined to take center stage in this new musical comedy with book, music and lyrics by the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson (“A Strange Loop”). And as you might surmise from the title, there is indeed a killer on the loose in Jackson’s mash-up of soaps and melodramatic movies. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs.Previews begin March 15; opens April 10 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan.From left, Liz Lark Brown, Latoya Edwards and NaTasha Yvette Williams at a reading of “White Girl in Danger.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times‘DÍA Y NOCHE’ This coming-of-age story, set in El Paso, Texas, in 1984, is about racism and class struggle experienced through the unlikely friendship between a Chicano punk-rock kid and a Black upper-middle-class nerd who is gay and closeted. Carlos Armesto directs the LAByrinth Theater Company production, written by LAB actor/playwright David Anzuelo.Previews begin March 18; opens March 26 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan.RED BULL THEATER Even we Elizabethan geeks might not be familiar with “Arden of Faversham,” a 16th-century thriller from the quill of an anonymous playwright (Shakespeare? Marlowe? Thomas Kyd?). A wife is having an affair and, with her lover, plots the murder of her wealthy husband; naturally, things get complicated. Jesse Berger directs the adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat for Red Bull Theater.Previews begin March 6; opens March 16 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan.For 20 years, Red Bull has, thankfully, continued to keep many great classic plays alive for contemporary audiences — they’ll also stage Francis Beaumont’s hilarious comedy “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” directed by Noah Brody and Emily Young this spring.Previews begin April 17; opens April 27 at the Lucille Lortel Theater.‘KING JAMES’ The timing could hardly be better for this show, arriving onstage just a few months after LeBron James broke the all time NBA scoring record. This play by Rajiv Joseph (“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”), which follows two LeBron super fans who forge an unlikely bond during the basketball player’s days with the Cleveland Cavaliers, is a study of the important place sports can hold in some of our lives. I don’t even like basketball (I’m too short), and I still can’t wait! Glenn Davis and Chris Perfetti will revisit the roles they played at Steppenwolf Theater Company, where the play had its world premiere last year. Kenny Leon directs.Previews begin May 2; opens May 16 at Manhattan Theater Club.‘DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES’ This world premiere musical brings together the composer and lyricist Adam Guettel (“Floyd Collins”) and the playwright Craig Lucas (“An American in Paris”) for the first time since their musical “The Light in the Piazza.” Adapted from J.P. Miller’s 1962 film and 1958 teleplay, the story about a couple’s yearslong battle with alcoholism doesn’t sound super uplifting, but the creative team has quite a track record. Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen”) directs the Atlantic Theater Company production. STEVEN McELROYOpens May 5 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan.Dance‘COPPELIA’ In “Coppelia” (1870) the old toymaker Dr. Coppelius is obsessed with creating a female doll so realistic that she can be — and is — mistaken for a human girl. But that’s not enough: Through magic spells, he tries to bring her to life. In 2023, our magic is artificial intelligence, and in Morgann Runacre-Temple and Jessica Wright’s ingenious “Coppelia,” which Scottish Ballet brings to Sadler’s Wells theater in London, Dr. Coppelius is a charismatic Steve Jobs figure in a black turtleneck, dominating technicians and androids as he attempts to create the perfect woman. The heroine, Swanhilda, is a journalist investigating Coppelius’s NuLife laboratory; her boyfriend Franz comes along and, just as in the 19th-century original, falls for the nonhuman Coppelia. The ballet won rave reviews after its debut at the Edinburgh Festival last year. ROSLYN SULCASMarch 2-5, Sadler’s Wells, London.JORDAN DEMETRIUS LLOYD Like so many dance artists, the choreographer and dancer Jordan Demetrius Lloyd has spent the past few years resourcefully creating work outside of theaters. In 2020, he directed the stirring, contemplative short film “The Last Moon in Mellowland,” a poem in images. Last summer, his site-specific “Jerome” drew crowds of dance lovers and curious passers-by to a schoolyard in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. With his latest project — his first evening-length commission — Lloyd returns to the theater, both embracing its familiarity and testing out new directions, as he finds himself “on not the other side but another side of the pandemic,” he said in a phone interview. In “Blackbare in the Basement,” at Danspace Project, he and seven dancers extend on ideas from “JEROME” while considering the particularities of this hallowed downtown performance space and the history of the artists who have moved through it. SIOBHAN BURKEMarch 9-11, Danspace Project, Manhattan.From left, Paul Hamilton, Keely Garfield and Angie Pittman.Whitney BrowneKEELY GARFIELD As a choreographer and performer, Keely Garfield has long blurred the lines between irony and sincerity, the absurd and the profound. Her unpredictable works, unafraid of kitsch, are costume pageants with room for prayer, feats of endurance and bravery that don’t disguise awkwardness and vulnerability. Garfield is also a yoga teacher, an urban Zen integrated therapist and a hospital chaplain. Her newest piece, “The Invisible Project,” is her first to explore explicitly the crossover between her work as a choreographer and her work in wellness, experimenting with how endurance, patience, healing and catharsis can be danced. If compassionate presence is an aim, the cast is ideal: Opal Ingle, Angie Pittman, Paul Hamilton and Molly Lieber. BRIAN SEIBERTMarch 10-12 at N.Y.U. Skirball, Manhattan.TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY The question of how to stay current, relevant, haunts every dance company built on the vision of a single choreographer. What happens when that person is no longer here? Six years after the death of the postmodern trailblazer Trisha Brown, her company has, for the first time, commissioned a new dance from another artist: the Cuban-born Judith Sánchez Ruíz, a member of the Brown company from 2006 to 2009. Now living in Berlin, Ruíz combines a visceral understanding of Brown’s work with her own daring, intensely physical approach to movement invention. In addition to Ruíz’s “Let’s talk about bleeding,” with a score by the Cuban composer Adonis Gonzalez, the company’s Joyce Theater season features two of Brown’s collaborations with the sound artist Alvin Curran, “For M.G.: The Movie” (1991) and “Rogues” (2011). And Ruíz is not the only fresh voice on the program: Five of the troupe’s eight dancers are new. BURKEMay 2-7, Joyce Theater, Manhattan.Thaji Dias and Amandi Gomez from Nrityagram Dance Ensemble.Ravi ShankarNRITYAGRAM DANCE ENSEMBLE About a decade ago, Nrityagram — unsurpassed exponents of the Indian classical form Odissi — came to the Joyce Theater with surprise guests. They were members of Chitrasena Dance Company from Sri Lanka, experts in that nation’s Kandyan tradition. A collaboration among the dancers, all female, brought out both the shared ancient roots of the two styles and their differences: the more sinuous refinement of Odissi, the folksier verve of Kandyan. They danced to different drummers and found a new harmony. The two companies return together to the Joyce with a new program, “Ahuti,” or “Offering.” One change is the presence of men, who come from the Chitrasena side — bare-chested, virile, spinning end-over-end through the air. They are a novelty in Nrityagram performance, introducing a complementary energy and adding to a larger-than-usual cast, a more populous party. SEIBERTMay 9-14, Joyce Theater, Manhattan.ClassicalCARNEGIE HALL Last year, the Vienna Philharmonic’s Carnegie visit was upturned by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the last-minute dumping of its guest conductor, the Putin-affiliated Valery Gergiev. Things should be much calmer when the orchestra returns for three days of works by Schoenberg, Strauss, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Bruckner — all led by Christian Thielemann, a master of this repertoire (March 3-5). Another Carnegie staple, the English Concert, brings Handel’s oratorio “Solomon” (March 12); later, its fellow period ensemble Les Arts Florissants, led by the essential William Christie, comes with an all-Charpentier program for Holy Week (April 26).Among visiting pianists are the gracefully intelligent Alexandre Tharaud, playing works including his transcription of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (March 26); Seong-Jin Cho, who heroically flew in to salvage those Vienna concerts last February (April 12); and the mighty Beatrice Rana, taking on Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata (April 20). Other recitals include the cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s multimedia Bach show “Fragments” (April 1); the continuation of the Danish String Quartet’s Schubert-inspired “Doppelgänger” project, with a premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir (April 20), who has also written the latest installment of the flutist Claire Chase’s sprawling, multi-decade initiative “Density 2036” (May 25). Chase appears as well as the soloist in Kaija Saariaho’s “Aile du songe,” with Susanna Mälkki and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra (May 9).Other ensembles are bringing local premieres to Carnegie: the Philadelphia Orchestra, presenting John Luther Adams’s “Vespers of the Blessed Earth” with the vocal group the Crossing (March 31); and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which over two evenings is performing Thierry Escaich’s Cello Concerto, with Gautier Capuçon, and Thomas Adès “Air,” for violin and orchestra, with Anne-Sophie Mutter (April 24 and 25). The Met Orchestra continues its tradition of postseason Carnegie appearances, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, in Brahms’s “Ein deutsches Requiem” and a program that includes Renée Fleming and Russell Thomas in Act IV of Verdi’s “Otello,” as well as the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s “Lear Sketches” (June 15 and 22).Susanna Mälkki conducting at Carnegie Hall.Chris LeeNEW YORK PHILHARMONIC The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, whose career continues to thrive in the face of a terminal brain cancer diagnosis, returns to the Philharmonic podium to lead the local premiere of his “Meditations on Rilke” and Schubert’s “Great” Symphony (March 9-12). Then, the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, leads Messiaen’s immense “Turangalîla-symphonie,” featuring Jean-Yves Thibaudet as the piano soloist (March 17-19), followed by Bach’s similarly expansive “St. Matthew Passion,” with vocalists including Nicholas Phan, Davóne Tines, Paul Appleby, Tamara Mumford and Philippe Sly (March 23-25).More firsts come in the New York premiere of Felipe Lara’s Double Concerto, featuring Claire Chase on flute and Esperanza Spalding on bass and led by Susanna Mälkki (March 29-31); the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition winner Yunchan Lim’s Philharmonic debut in Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with James Gaffigan (May 10-12); the U.S. premiere of Chick Corea’s Trombone Concerto, led by Marin Alsop and featuring the orchestra’s principal trombone, Joseph Alessi (May 25-27); the world premiere of Julia Wolfe’s large-scale “unEarth” (June 1-3); and the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert” (June 8-10).METROPOLITAN OPERA Earlier this season, the Met announced that it would devote more resources and calendar time to contemporary works and, inevitably, new productions. But revivals are still the bread and butter of a repertory house, and many this spring have something to look forward to. When Robert Carsen’s elegant production of “Falstaff” returns (March 12-April 1), it will feature as the decadent title character the German baritone Michael Volle — a solemn presence known for embodying Wagner heroes like Wotan and Hans Sachs — in his first Verdi role. Carsen’s similarly clean, and sobering, “Der Rosenkavalier” (March 27-April 20) will be a vehicle for the soprano Lise Davidsen, the Met’s reigning diva, who is making her role debut as the Marschallin.Lise Davidsen, at right, in “Ariadne auf Naxos.” This season she will make her role debut as the Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.”Marty Sohl/Met OperaYannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, has been largely absent so far this season, but will take the podium for Puccini’s “La Bohème” (April 21-28, then May 2-14). And the conductor Thomas Guggeis, turning 30 this year and on a rapid rise abroad, as the general music director of Frankfurt Opera and a substitute for Daniel Barenboim in a high-profile Berlin “Ring” cycle last fall, makes his Met debut leading another Wagner work: “Der Fliegende Holländer,” in the first revival of François Girard’s obtuse 2020 staging (May 30-June 10).PARK AVENUE ARMORY Recital spaces are preciously rare in New York, and few can compare with the Armory’s intimate and acoustically rich Board of Officers Room. There, the French baritone Stéphane Degout, with the pianist Cédric Tiberghien, will present an evening of art songs from composers including Fauré, Schubert, Debussy and Lili Boulanger (April 3 and 5). The tenor Allan Clayton — revered abroad and recently celebrated locally in the title roles of “Hamlet” and “Peter Grimes” at the Metropolitan Opera — comes next with the pianist James Baillieu for a program of works by Schumann and Nico Muhly, as well as Clayton’s countrymen Henry Purcell, Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten (April 27 and 29). Later, the young pianist Pavel Kolesnikov brings his account of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, which he has performed alongside the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, as well as an eclectic mix of works inspired by Joseph Cornell’s “Celestial Navigation” (May 22 and 24). JOSHUA BARONEPopWEYES BLOOD The clarion-voiced Natalie Mering, under the name Weyes Blood, makes intricately wrought Laurel Canyon folk-pop updated for an era of millennial unease. She wrote many of the songs on her stirring 2022 album “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow,” as hymns to the collective epidemic of loneliness brought on by the pandemic. Mering’s music is intimate but sweeping; she uses her own personal experiences to access larger and more generalized undercurrents of emotion. It will be heartening to hear a song like the anthemic single “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” performed live, with a venue full of voices proving the communal sentiment of its title. LINDSAY ZOLADZMarch 3 and 4 at Brooklyn Steel.Weyes Blood performs at Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona, Spain, in 2022.Jordi Vidal/Redferns, Getty ImagesSZA In the details of a song and in the shape of her career, SZA’s timing has been utterly her own. To sing about relationships and ambitions that unfold as messily as everyday life, SZA — Solana Imani Rowe — writes melodies and lyrics that seem to be spilling out spontaneously: crooning, pausing, suddenly racing, then curling neatly into a hook. Her recordings have arrived with the same kind of unpredictability. She released her debut album, “CTRL” in 2017; five years later, in 2022, she expanded it to a deluxe version that was half again as long, then went on to release an entire new album, “SOS.” In the meantime, an ever-expanding audience found their own lives in her songs: in their desires, jealousy, doubts, seductions, setbacks and triumphs, and in their leisurely grooves. SZA is touring arenas this year, and singalongs will likely join her, phrase for eccentric phrase. JON PARELESMarch 4 and 5 at Madison Square Garden, Manhattan.YO LA TENGO Since forming nearly four decades ago, the Hoboken indie-rock legends Yo La Tengo have been staggeringly consistent: The trio of Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew never seems to tire in its search of eclectic new elements to bring into its ever-expanding sonic universe. Still, the band sounds particularly inspired on its latest (and 17th!) album, the richly enveloping “This Stupid World,” which flickers from despair to hard-won hope and moves fluidly between jammy abstractions (“Sinatra Drive Breakdown”) and succinctly rendered indie-pop (“Fallout,” “Aselestine”). Both of those sides of “This Stupid World” are likely to translate well live, but the new album probably won’t be the set list’s only focus — naturally, their back catalog runs pretty deep. ZOLADZMarch 18 at Brooklyn Steel.SOLANGE Futuristic R&B, righteous jazz, gospel, performance art, poetry, sculpture, film and opera are all part of a generation-spanning seven-event series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music curated by Solange Knowles for Saint Heron, her project to preserve and celebrate Black culture. Named “Eldorado Ballroom” after a historic Black music hall in Houston, the series begins March 30 with a concert headlined by the ambitious, electronics-loving songwriter Kelela, along with the adventurous R&B songwriters Res and KeiyaA. On April 7, the long-running gospel group Twinkie Clark and the Clark Sisters are paired with a program of spiritual choral compositions by Mary Lou Williams. And on April 8, the pioneering free-jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp shares a bill with the poet Claudia Rankine and the avant-garde vocalist Linda Sharrock, in her first New York City concert since the 1970s. The whole series offers deep, promising connections. PARELESBegins March 30 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. More

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      Adrian Hall, Who Invigorated Regional Theater, Dies at 95

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      As founding artistic director, he made Trinity Rep in Rhode Island a leader in theatrical innovation. He then made his mark in Dallas as well.Adrian Hall, who as founding artistic director built Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., into one of the premiere regional theaters in the country, and who did similarly important work in Dallas and elsewhere, died on Feb. 4 in Tyler, Texas. He was 95.Trinity announced his death in a statement. A neighbor, Ruth Barrett, said Mr. Hall, who lived in his native city, Van, Texas, east of Dallas, died in a hospital.Curt Columbus, Trinity’s current artistic director, called Mr. Hall “a visionary artist, not only in the way he challenged the aesthetic limits of the stage, but also in the challenging subject matter he produced.”Mr. Hall led Trinity from its founding in 1964 until 1989, presenting one inventive production after another. For the last six years of that tenure, he was also artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, another important regional house.In the 1960s and ’70s, with the establishment not only of Trinity but also of houses like American Repertory Theater in Massachusetts, the Guthrie in Minneapolis and Steppenwolf in Chicago, the regional theater movement that had begun a generation earlier under Margo Jones in Dallas and others solidified. Mr. Hall and his counterparts championed bold works innovatively staged.“His work was rooted in the work of the founders of the movement who came before him, especially Margo Jones, but then burst it wide open,” Kevin Moriarty, executive director of the Dallas Theater Center, said by email. “Like them, Adrian was deeply committed to creating a body of work with a company of actors who were resident in a community, rather than pick up actors for hire.“But,” he continued, “his unique approach to theatrical narrative and design was a significant aesthetic departure. Fusing the European influences of Brecht and Grotowski with a deep American sensibility (even more specifically, that of a gay Texan maverick), Adrian created theater in which actors confronted the audience directly.”In the early days of Trinity, that audience often consisted of high school students. In 1966, Mr. Hall received federal funding for a three-year program he called Project Discovery, which bused students from throughout Rhode Island to Providence to experience theater. In the first season, he mounted shows like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” thinking that the students would be interested in seeing plays they might be reading in class.They weren’t. They slashed seats, vandalized the bathrooms, threw things at the actors.“It was my moment of truth,” Mr. Hall told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “Even though I was frightened of them, I knew it was a battle unto the death with me. I had to make them listen.”“That,” he added, “is when I fired the cannons and sprayed them with water.”The reference was to the company’s adaptation of “Billy Budd,” the Herman Melville novella. Mr. Hall staged it in 1969, with the theater transformed into the H.M.S. Indomitable. The set was the work of Mr. Hall’s longtime collaborator Eugene Lee, who died on Feb. 6. (“Lee’s Indomitable is a masterpiece of stagecraft,” Kevin Kelly wrote in a review in The Boston Globe, “and it wouldn’t surprise me if she sailed.”)For that and other productions, Mr. Hall altered the theater seating in ways that made the students feel part of the action, an effort to shake them out of their indifference.“It seemed to me I had worked all my life to make theater possible, and the audience was saying, ‘We don’t want no part of it,’” he told The New York Times in 1975. “And so I began right then to move outside of the proscenium and to surprise those little devils, to throw things at them, to challenge them, to intimidate them.”That approach became a signature of Mr. Hall’s work. By 1972 The Times was calling him “probably the most interesting director now working in the American regional theater.” Fifteen years later, the newspaper described the Texas-born Mr. Hall as “regional theater’s most charismatic evangelist, preaching the gospel of the nonprofit theater and warning against that devil, Broadway, with a driven fervor that is as Southern as tent meetings and as brashly Texan as a fur coat at the Cotton Bowl.”For some directors, the text of a play guides the presentation. But for Mr. Hall, and others in the regional theaters of the day, the director’s vision was paramount.“He brought his own unique aesthetic to a play,” Mr. Moriarty said, “focusing on the violence of a visceral experience in a shared, rough space, rather than creating illustrations that attempted to represent reality.”In 1981 Trinity won the Tony Award for regional theaters.Mr. Hall on the set of “The Tempest” at the Dallas Theater Center in 1987. For the last six years of his tenure at Trinity, he was also artistic director there.Mark Perlstein for The New York TimesMr. Hall was born in Van on Dec. 3, 1927, to Lennie and Mattie Hall. His father thought he should follow in his footsteps and become a rancher; his mother envisioned him as a preacher. Instead he read a lot, acted in school plays and, after graduating from high school at 16, enrolled at East State Texas Teachers College in Commerce.In 1947, he took a fateful trip to Dallas, where he met Ms. Jones, who was attracting attention with the repertory theater she had started there.She suggested that he apply to the Pasadena Playhouse’s theater arts school in California. He was accepted, and studied for six months there before returning to the teachers college. He graduated in 1949 and, from 1951 to 1953, served in the Army, where he started the Seventh Army Repertory Company, “doing grim little plays like ‘Darkness at Noon’” all over Europe, he told The Boston Globe in 1986.In the 1950s and early ’60s, Mr. Hall directed in New York City, the Catskills and elsewhere before getting the call from a group of Providence business people who were trying to turn an amateur theatrical group, Trinity Square, into a professional one.He leaves no immediate survivors.Mr. Hall had a big personality and sometimes clashed with theater boards; his reluctance to set his full season in advance was one source of friction, since that made it hard to market subscriptions. A split with the Trinity board led him to leave Providence in 1989 and devote his full attention to the Dallas job, only to have that end when he clashed with the board there the same year, after which he became a freelance director.“Every once in a while,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989, “an Adrian Hall will meet an unmovable object such as the Dallas Theater Center board.”If his personality set him apart, so, to some, did being openly gay. It also influenced his work.“Being gay, well, it’s an outsider status, no matter what anyone else says, and part of me really likes that,” he told The Globe in 1986. “It keeps me on edge, keeps me aware of what it’s like not being fully accepted, what it’s like being scored and thought less of because you’re different.“I identify with society’s rejects. Always have. That’s what my work’s about.” More