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      Shakespeare in the Park Will Stage ‘Hamlet’ This Summer

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      Ato Blankson-Wood will star as the aggrieved prince in a modern-dress production directed by Kenny Leon.Winter has just begun in New York, but already the Public Theater is looking toward summer: The nonprofit announced on Thursday that in June it would begin presenting an extended run of Shakespeare’s great tragedy “Hamlet” in Central Park.The production, which will be the fifth “Hamlet” in the 61 years of Free Shakespeare in the Park, will star Ato Blankson-Wood, a 38-year-old actor who was a member of the ensemble in a production of “Hair” in the park in 2008, and who has since starred there in musical adaptations of “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It.” In 2020, Blankson-Wood was nominated for a Tony Award for “Slave Play.”Kenny Leon, a much-in-demand director who this season directed revivals of “Topdog/Underdog” and “Ohio State Murders” on Broadway, will helm the production, returning to the park after winning plaudits for his direction of “Much Ado About Nothing” during the summer of 2019.“Hamlet” will be the only show in the park this summer — a reduction from the usual two-show schedule prompted by plans to renovate the Delacorte Theater, the open-air amphitheater where Free Shakespeare in the Park takes place. “Hamlet” will run for nine weeks, from June 8 to Aug. 6, after which the major renovation work is expected to begin; this winter, work in some ancillary areas is already underway.The Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said he had been so impressed by Leon’s work on “Much Ado” that he asked him to pick a play he wanted to do next, and they settled on “Hamlet.” “It’s the greatest play ever written,” Eustis said, “so let’s give him a crack at Everest.”Eustis also said he had high hopes for Blankson-Wood. “He’s a gorgeously charismatic performer, and the complexity of his inner life, and his ability to connect with an audience, is going to make him an extraordinary Hamlet,” he said. (Blankson-Wood has a background in musical theater, and the credits for this “Hamlet” include music composition by Jason Michael Webb. “I suspect his beautiful singing voice will not be completely wasted,” Eustis said of Blankson-Wood.)Eustis said that the production would “have a contemporary feel,” but that the exact time and place where it will be set have not yet been determined. He said the cast would be diverse, but that it was “absolutely meaningful to Kenny and to me that our Hamlet is a young Black man who is torn between ideals of revenge and violence and ideals of forgiveness and understanding and even rationality, and in the pairing between those things is finding himself paralyzed.”Eustis said his thinking about “Hamlet” had been influenced by “Fat Ham,” the most recent Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, which is a riff on the Shakespeare play set in the American South, and which will be running on Broadway this spring, produced in part by the Public. “I’m sure hoping that we’re going to be running ‘Fat Ham’ and ‘Hamlet’ at the same time,” Eustis said, “because those two plays talk to each other in a most beautiful way.”In prepandemic years, the Shakespeare in the Park season was followed by a short-run Public Works production, usually on or around Labor Day weekend, which was a musical adaptation of a classic story employing a mix of professional and amateur actors. The last new Public Works production there was “Hercules,” in 2019, but Eustis said there were three in development. He said he expected there would be a Public Works production staged this summer, although he did not yet know when or where it would take place. More

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      ‘Here Lies Love,’ an Imelda Marcos Disco Musical, Will Play Broadway

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      The immersive dance show, with music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, will arrive this summer after a decade of productions Off Broadway and in London and Seattle.“Here Lies Love,” a wild, immersive, disco-driven dance musical about Imelda Marcos, the extravagant and colorful former first lady of the Philippines, will make its long-anticipated trip to Broadway this summer.The show, with downtown roots and dance-floor audiences, will be an unusual fit for Broadway: Its animating idea has been that both the actors and the audience are on their feet, circling one another as they move throughout the production.A sung-through musical written by the pop musicians David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, “Here Lies Love” began its public life in 2007 as an embryonic multimedia song cycle presented at Carnegie Hall. In 2010, Marcos listened to part of the double album with a New York Times reporter (“I’m flattered; I can’t believe it!” she said).Then came the stage productions: in 2012 at Mass MoCA, an art museum in the Berkshires; in 2013 at the Public Theater in New York; in 2014 at London’s National Theater and back at the Public for a second engagement; and in 2017 at the Seattle Repertory Theater.Along the way, it has been transforming from a happening into a show, or at least learning how to do both by adding more chairs for patrons who like to watch while seated. The upcoming production will be staged at the Broadway Theater, one of the largest venues on Broadway, although a spokeswoman said that audience capacity had yet to be determined.The producers said in a statement that they planned to “transform the venue’s traditional proscenium floor space into a dance club environment, where audiences will stand and move with the actors,” but promised that “a wide variety of standing and seating options will be available.”The production will be directed by Alex Timbers, who has been with the show through its stage journey; the set is designed by David Korins (“Hamilton”), and the choreographer is Annie-B Parson, who also designed the movement for Byrne’s previous Broadway venture, “American Utopia.”Timbers has some experience with unconventional staging experiments on Broadway. In 2014 he directed a musical adaptation of “Rocky” in which some patrons were reseated during the show to make way for a boxing match, and in 2020 he won a Tony Award for directing “Moulin Rouge!” with some patrons seated at cabaret tables surrounded by the stage action.The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on June 17 and to open on July 20, which will make it part of the 2023-24 season. Casting has not been announced.The producers, some of whom have been endeavoring for a decade to bring the show to Broadway, include Hal Luftig, Patrick Catullo, Diana DiMenna, Clint Ramos and Jose Antonio Vargas. Ramos, who is also the show’s costume designer, and Vargas, who is a writer and an immigrant rights advocate, were both born in the Philippines, and the show has hired a Filipino American actress, Giselle Töngi, who is also known as G, as a cultural and community liaison. More

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      Barry Grove to Depart Manhattan Theater Club After 48 Years

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      During his tenure, the nonprofit supported works that have gone on to earn seven Pulitzer Prizes and nearly 30 Tony Awards.Barry Grove was 23 years old when, in 1975, he started work as the managing director at Manhattan Theater Club, then a fledging nonprofit producing Off Off Broadway shows in space rented from a Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association on the Upper East Side.Over nearly half a century, as the organization, the art form and the industry have expanded and transformed, he has become a familiar figure both on Broadway, where M.T.C., which primarily presents new plays, now operates the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, and Off Broadway, where the company presents work at New York City Center in Midtown. The company’s annual budget has grown from $172,000 to about $27 million.Grove’s longtime partnership with the company’s artistic director, Lynne Meadow, who is celebrating her 50th anniversary at the nonprofit, has supported work that has won seven Pulitzer Prizes (for “Cost of Living,” “Crimes of the Heart,” “Doubt,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Proof,” “Rabbit Hole” and “Ruined”) and 28 Tony Awards. At the same time, he has taught (most recently at Columbia and Yale) and served on the industry’s most powerful boards (including for the Tony Awards, the Broadway League and the League of Resident Theaters).Now M.T.C.’s executive producer, Grove, 71, is ready to leave. He announced Wednesday that his last day will be June 30. His final shows include two plays on Broadway, “The Collaboration,” which opened in December and runs through Feb. 5, and “Summer, 1976,” which begins performances April 4, as well as two Off Broadway plays, “The Best We Could” and “King James.”“We’ve had an incredible run and an incredible relationship, and have done amazing things,” Meadow said. “I will miss him terribly, and we’re going to continue to try to be great.”As Grove prepares to depart the company, he reflected on his tenure, and the state of the industry. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why are you leaving?Very recently it became clear to me that it was time for me to do this and have some time while I’m still healthy with my wife and extended family, to maybe go back to teaching and some consulting work. I started in the professional theater when I was 19. I don’t know that I’m ready to get into a rocking chair, but I do want to be able to pursue small projects, a lifelong commitment to teaching, service to the community, that kind of stuff.Why did you stay for so long?If I had just landed in a finished theater — big and mature — I might well have gotten tired or burned out much earlier. But from the beginning, I was able to adopt a strategy of “learn it, do it, teach it, monitor it, and then get out of the way.” And so we were able to grow a staff and to grow the institution. With each new idea Lynne had, or new opportunity that the work demanded, there was a new challenge, and it kept me interested, it kept me motivated, and it kept me moved by the power of the work.What is your favorite show that you’ve worked on?This is a question over the years I’ve been asked a lot, and my answer is always the same: The next one.What is the future of the Manhattan Theater Club?I think it’s yet to be charted, but I hope that it will continue to be involved in important new work, and that it can remain a viable not-for-profit that will allow a next generation to do the work they feel needs to be and wants to be done. I’m not looking to tower over the future. I full well expect they’ll take the place beyond where we have and to places I haven’t even maybe dreamed of.What is the state of the play on Broadway?It’s now clear that we’re still not out of the woods on the pandemic aftereffects. The numbers are just down. In addition, there are for the first time in a while, a number of play revivals on Broadway, with very expensive capitalizations and stars, and between them they are seating a lot of people, but many of them are going to close at a loss. And in the meantime it makes for trying to keep the audience at the same size here hard, because the commercial world is spending a lot of money advertising. And beyond that, people are still slow to come back a lot — they’re buying single tickets to shows they want to see, but they’re not buying large subscription packages. We’re not out of the hole.How are nonprofit theaters doing?Everywhere, sales have been disrupted. I’d make a plea to the general public that cares about the theater: If ever there was a time to support your local theater, whichever one that is, now is the time to do that.Will you keep seeing theater?Of course. I need to see the final act of “Julius Caesar” to know how it comes out, because when my mom started taking me to theater in Stratford, Connecticut, she had an appendicitis attack in the fourth act so I never got to see how it ended. More

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      A Paris Cabaret Makes Way for ‘Cabaret’

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      The 1966 American musical has opened at a venue that for decades hosted one of the city’s most famous revue troupes.For decades, the Lido was one of the glitziest cabarets in Paris, home to extravagant, acrobatic numbers and the Bluebell Girls, a renowned chorus line. Last July, the curtain came down on their feathered headpieces for the final time, and the ensemble was disbanded. Their replacement at the theater this winter? “Cabaret” — the 1966 American musical.On a recent evening, with bejeweled Bluebell outfits still shimmering in window displays by the venue’s entrance, the Lido’s patrons seemed ready for a show. When the Emcee from “Cabaret,” directed by Robert Carsen, introduced the musical’s own ensemble, the Kit Kat Girls and Kit Kat Boys, there were eager cheers, but the lack of topless dancing, not to mention the somber Nazi-era plot, may have come as a surprise to some audience members.Yet the Lido’s move from cabaret to “Cabaret” is no coincidence. It speaks to a larger shift in Paris, where American-style musicals have been on the rise just as historic revues have struggled to maintain relevance.The pandemic only accelerated the decline of mainstream French cabaret, long a tourist attraction at venues like the Lido and the Moulin Rouge: Without out-of-towners, there simply weren’t enough Parisians interested in nostalgic cancan dances to prop up expensive revues. Add to that the genre’s increasingly outdated objectification of women’s near-naked bodies, and cabaret appeared to have fallen out of step with the times.The Lido’s reinvention as a musical theater venue — under a new owner, the hotel conglomerate Accor, and a somewhat silly new name, Lido2Paris — is clearly an attempt to lure back local crowds. To mastermind the transition, Accor hired Jean-Luc Choplin, whose tenure at the Théâtre du Châtelet from 2006 to 2017 saw a string of successes with English-language musicals, including “My Fair Lady” and “42nd Street.”This winter, the Châtelet has again been filled to the rafters, this time for a revival of Stephen Mear’s 2016 production of “42nd Street.” And other venues have been listening to the “lullaby of Broadway,” as one “42nd Street” number puts it. At the Théâtre de Paris, a French-language adaptation of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers” by the director Alexis Michalik has turned into a runaway hit since its late 2021 premiere, and is currently scheduled to run through April.The storytelling in Théâtre du Châtelet’s “42nd Street” is bright, and Broadway in style. Thomas AmourouxWhile performed in different languages — “42nd Street” is in English — “42nd Street” and “The Producers” don’t depart from Broadway habits. “42nd Street” opens with the curtain raising a couple of feet, so all we see are is the ensemble’s legs, tapping away and garnering enthusiastic applause. The storytelling in both productions is bright, with an almost uncanny rendition into French, in “The Producers,” of the upbeat pace of American-style dialogue.“The Producers” didn’t please every critic — the French newspaper Libération blasted its “discriminatory” stereotypes — but as theaters in France struggle to return to prepandemic ticket sales and the cost of living rises, musicals have seemed immune. That includes the French rock opera “Starmania,” recently revived for the first time in decades, but France simply doesn’t have a wide repertoire of musicals to draw on: The genre was long considered minor, and too entertainment-oriented, by French theater makers.That leaves Broadway favorites, and specifically the classics — what’s missing on Paris stages, inexplicably, is more recent musicals, like “Hamilton” and “The Book of Mormon.” Carsen’s “Cabaret” isn’t actually the first version of this musical, with its book by Joe Masteroff, music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, to be seen in Paris this century. A French translation, staged by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall, was presented at another historical cabaret venue, the Folies Bergère, in 2006. But the Lido2Paris’s production, in English with subtitles, is a dry, ominous showstopper.Carsen, a renowned Canadian director, takes full advantage of the venue’s layout: The Lido was designed as a cabaret-restaurant, with tables laid out on three sides of a thrust stage, and the Kit Kat Klub, the Weimar-era Berlin venue around which “Cabaret” revolves, is right at home in this atmosphere.Before its revue closed, the Lido offered a high-end dinner service each night. (Over 150 people were laid off as part of Accor’s takeover, from restaurant staff to the permanent ensemble.) Now audience members have to trek to one of two small bars to buy a glass of champagne and nibbles, which left the auditorium feeling a little deserted.The production captures the nihilism of 1929 Berlin and the steady rise of Nazism, which some characters see as little more than a distraction, starting with cabaret performer Sally Bowles (a role made famous by Liza Minnelli, here given restless intensity by Lizzy Connolly). Clifford Bradshaw, a bisexual American writer who has come to Berlin seeking freedom and inspiration, comes to see the growing political threat — yet fails to convince Sally, despite the love between them.As the sardonic Emcee who presides over both the Kit Kat Klub and the show itself, Sam Buttery is an arresting sight from the opening “Willkommen” — bald with heavy, dark makeup, at once charismatic and blasé.Sam Buttery plays the Emcee in Lido2Paris’s “Cabaret,” and gives the production momentum.Julien BenhamouAll the soloists acquit themselves well, but Buttery and the 15-strong Kit Kat Girls and Boys lend Carsen’s production much of its momentum. The choreography, credited to Fabian Aloise, is brilliantly dynamic, its exaggerated sexual innuendo rendered grotesque by the dancers’ distorted, over-it facial expressions. The choreographed opening of the second act, in which the dancers slowly don shorts, boots and swastika armbands, transforming into a high-kicking Nazi line, is especially chilling.Near the end, in video projections, Carsen ties the rise of fascism in “Cabaret” to contemporary events, with images of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as well as protests in Western countries like France. It’s a somewhat vague conclusion for an otherwise biting production, given that, by this point, the audience has likely drawn their own parallels.“Cabaret” is worth seeing both for its merits and to say goodbye to the Lido as it existed for decades. In early February, it will close for extensive renovation, with a view to reopening next December. A spokesman for the venue said that it would retain some of its hallmarks, like the tables around the stage, and upgrade its technical equipment.The long-term plan, under Choplin, is simple: more musicals. Tourists may not take to this change of programming, since the genre is hardly associated with Paris, but French audiences seem to approve, and the applause at “Cabaret” was warm.Blow to Parisian history or not, for now, American entertainment is winning the argument. More

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      The Riverside Drive Apartment Where a Broadway Play Was Born

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      “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning script, is set in a rent-controlled apartment that was inspired by the playwright’s own.The world of “Between Riverside and Crazy,” the Stephen Adly Guirgis play that opened on Broadway last month, is confined to a rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment building, where the dark comedy spools out over kitchen table bickering and rooftop joint passing.It’s the kind of New York City apartment that has stayed in the family despite rising rents and a landlord bent on eviction — the kind of apartment that Guirgis himself inherited from his father, an Egyptian immigrant who managed a restaurant at Grand Central and had little else to pass on when he died.Like the one in the play, the real Riverside Drive apartment is a “grand old railroad flat with chandeliers and a river view,” as Guirgis’s introduction to the play reads, with “beautiful fixtures, family mementos and antique furniture competing for survival with dust, stains, garbage, leaks and unattended junk.”About a decade ago, Guirgis started gathering actors there to read his developing play, about a Black New York City police officer who was shot while off duty at a bar by a white officer and has been seeking justice ever since.A fixture of the living room readings was Stephen McKinley Henderson, a friend and frequent visitor whom Guirgis had imagined in the lead role from the beginning. A parade of well-known actors participated in the readings on Riverside Drive along the West 80s, including John Leguizamo, Ellen Burstyn and Chris Rock, whose Broadway debut was in a Guirgis play.“The first time I read it, it was 15 pages,” Henderson said. “And as it grew, it grew on me.”Colón-Zayas and the playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis at his Riverside Drive apartment in 2014, the year the play premiered Off Broadway.Monique Carboni The play that developed from those readings became a patchwork of autobiography and fiction, organized around an idea based on a local news story from the 1990s. Directed by Austin Pendleton, “Between Riverside and Crazy” went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama after premiering at Atlantic Theater Company in 2014 and running Off Broadway for a second time in 2015. (In that production, Ron Cephas Jones, a friend of Guirgis’s who once lived at the four-bedroom Riverside Drive apartment, played the lead character’s son, Junior.)Eight years after its premiere, the play has landed on Broadway — the Second Stage production at the Helen Hayes Theater still stars Henderson, with Common now playing Junior — in a radically altered landscape.Since the actors first gathered at Guirgis’s apartment, police shootings of Black men have fueled waves of protest. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in 2020 reignited the movement, with myriad industries, including theater, facing calls for large-scale racial justice efforts. In addition, rent rates in New York City have been soaring, boxing out lower-income residents from once-affordable neighborhoods, and evictions have picked back up after a pandemic lull.The actors who have inhabited their characters for years say they approach the work with a new depth and personal understanding, but the dialogue remains almost entirely the same. One short line was added, from Junior, a parolee who struggles to get the kind of love from his father that he received from his recently deceased mother.“Pops, it’s 2014,” Junior says, situating the audience in time. Guirgis said he asked that the line be added to prevent references to Donald J. Trump and Rudy Giuliani from sounding outdated.The actress Liza Colón-Zayas, who has been involved since early script readings as a character called the Church Lady, said people who have seen this production and previous ones (including her mother) are convinced that the play has been significantly altered over the years.In the play, a widower fights to keep his home and win a long-running lawsuit against the New York Police Department, as messy relationships and messier politics surface among his housemates and guests.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThough the writing is largely unchanged, the actors approach the work with a new depth and personal understanding in light of the cultural conversation surrounding police shootings since the play’s premiere.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The writing didn’t change,” Colón-Zayas said. “The pain, and the years, and what we’ve survived has changed this play in ways that I can’t exactly articulate.”The seed for the story came in 1994, when a white off-duty New York City police officer opened fire on a Black undercover transit officer on a Manhattan subway platform, seriously injuring him. The white officer, Peter Del-Debbio, said he was responding to a shotgun that had discharged and had fired when he saw the plainclothes transit officer, Desmond Robinson, running with a gun.Part of the white officer’s defense was that the Black officer wasn’t wearing his badge or the color that would identify him as a plainclothes officer, so Guirgis remembered the story as the “color of the day” case. Del-Debbio was convicted of second-degree assault and was sentenced to probation and community service.“It always stayed with me,” Guirgis said.Years later, the playwright said, he was visiting Henderson when the veteran actor, having health troubles, remarked that his career would be slowing down.“I just lied and I was like, ‘Oh I started writing two plays for you: one where you’re the lead and one where you’re the supporting,’” Guirgis said. “When I went home I was like, OK, now I’ve got to come up with something.”By the time he started holding script readings, Colón-Zayas, who met Guirgis when they were students at State University of New York at Albany, had been visiting the Riverside Drive apartment for decades. When Guirgis’s mother died in 2006, he recalled, his family returned to the apartment to find Colón-Zayas and other friends cleaning it.After his mother’s death, Guirgis moved into the apartment, getting his father a dog, Papi, for additional companionship. The apartment became a haven for friends who needed one, Guirgis said, including a recovering addict who started to see Guirgis’s father like he was his own.“Anybody who walked into my apartment with me or with my sister was automatically given a blank check of love and acceptance,” he said.Common, right, is making his Broadway debut as Junior. He said part of what attracted him to the role was the message of redemption.Timothy O’Connell for The New York TimesThe unconventional household is intimately depicted in the play. The ex-cop, Walter Washington, welcomes his son’s sweet but clueless girlfriend, Lulu (Rosal Colón), and his friend Oswaldo (Victor Almanzar), who spent time in prison and is trying to stay sober.Like Guirgis did for his father, Junior brings a dog into the household to keep him company; Walter calls the dog by a choice curse word instead of his name, but the emotional attachment is apparent underneath the derision. (Papi, the fox-like mutt that Guirgis had adopted for his father, died recently, and the cast has mourned the loss of an original attendee of those early script readings.)A stubborn and ailing alcoholic, Walter gripes about his housemates and expresses love begrudgingly, but the core of the play is his inclination to welcome them into his home no matter their mistakes.“As with all of his characters, it’s a lesson in, ‘Who are we to judge anybody, really?’” Colón said.Common, who is making his Broadway debut as Junior and has done advocacy work within the prison system, said part of what attracted him to the role was the message of redemption.When he entered the cast as the only newcomer in a tight-knit group of actors, he received a welcome not unlike the kind Walter tends to give: matter of fact but unconditional.“One day Liza came up to me,” he recalled, referring to Colón-Zayas, “and she said, ‘You aight, you aight. You can roll with us.’”(Colón-Zayas was replaced in the role this month by Maria-Christina Oliveras because of a scheduling conflict.)In the play, as Walter fights to hold on to his home and win his long-running lawsuit against the New York Police Department, a series of characters passes through the apartment — ostensibly there to help a solitary widower. Two police colleagues gather for dinner and a serving of nostalgia; the Church Lady comes to chat and give communion.But in “Riverside,” the intentions of the houseguests are never clear-cut. The relationships get messy, and the underlying politics of the story even messier.Henderson’s character is portrayed as both noble and, at times, misguided. He maintains both a righteous grudge against the New York Police Department and a fierce pride for it. His children, biological and not, are both trying to change their lives for the better and backsliding into old ways.Guirgis is well aware that the persistent character flaws have the tendency to rankle some audience members who would have preferred to see their worldviews affirmed more emphatically. But he’s interested in telling a more complicated story, and says he thinks present-day audiences will see that, just as they did in 2014.“If the characters all just have white hats and black hats, then we’re watching a cartoon, and there’s nothing to learn from it,” he said. “I try to make it messy but I try to lead with love.” More

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      Ben Platt to Lead ‘Parade’ Revival on Broadway This Season

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      The musical’s exploration of antisemitism is timely, with rising concern about the issue in the United States and beyond.Ben Platt, the Tony-winning star of “Dear Evan Hansen,” will return to Broadway next month to lead the cast in a revival of “Parade,” a musical about an early-20th-century lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia.The revival, directed by Michael Arden (a two-time Tony nominee, for revivals of “Once on This Island” and “Spring Awakening”), had a seven-performance run at New York City Center last fall. Platt plays Leo Frank, a factory boss convicted of killing a young girl in a case tainted by antisemitism; Micaela Diamond, who previously played the youngest version of the title character in “The Cher Show” on Broadway, will co-star as Frank’s wife, Lucille.The show, with songs by Jason Robert Brown and a book by Alfred Uhry and co-conceived by Hal Prince, had a brief run on Broadway that opened in 1998; it was commercially unsuccessful, but won Tony Awards for both book and score. The history it depicts is real: Frank was convicted in 1913, lynched in 1915 (at age 31), and in 1986 he was posthumously pardoned.The musical’s exploration of antisemitism has made it more timely now, when there is rising concern about the issue in the United States and beyond. The City Center production garnered uniformly strong reviews: in The New York Times, Juan A. Ramírez called it “the best-sung musical in many a New York season.”The “Parade” revival will begin previews Feb. 21 and open March 16 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, where the musical “Almost Famous” closed on Sunday. The “Parade” production is planning a short run, to Aug. 6.The revival is being produced by Seaview, a company created by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea that previously produced “Slave Play” and “POTUS,” and Ambassador Theater Group, a large British theater company that operates two Broadway houses (the Hudson and the Lyric) and also produces shows. More

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      BAM Artistic Director David Binder to Step Down in July

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      Binder, who was a Broadway producer before joining the nonprofit in 2019, plans to return to theater’s commercial sector.David Binder, the artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, will step down in July, as the venerable institution faces ongoing turnover and the challenge of pandemic-era rebuilding after decades of stability in its leadership team.BAM, which began presenting work in 1861 and describes itself as the nation’s oldest performing arts center, long played a key role in New York’s cultural life, presenting adventurous theater, film, music and dance from artists around the world. But the institution was quieter than some at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and Binder’s departure will follow the 2021 exit of the institution’s president, Katy Clark, and the 2020 death of its board chairman, Adam Max.Binder joined BAM as artistic director in 2019, making his tenure significantly shorter than those of his two predecessors, Joseph V. Melillo, who spent 35 years at the institution, and Harvey Lichtenstein, who led BAM’s artistic work for 32 years.Similarly, on the institution’s executive side, Clark left BAM after five years in the post (keeping an apartment the institution helped her purchase); she had succeeded Karen Brooks Hopkins, who had spent 36 years at the institution, including 16 as president. BAM’s current president is Gina Duncan, who started just last year, after a year in which that position was vacant.Binder, who had been producing Broadway shows as well as arts festivals before joining the institution, said he was leaving voluntarily and is planning to return to commercial producing after leading the nonprofit’s artistic programming through the upheaval of the pandemic as well as the change in the organization’s executive staff.BAM said Binder would continue to consult for the organization until next January as it searches for a new artistic leader. Binder began working with Melillo when his appointment was announced in early 2018.“I feel like I’ve accomplished what I set out to do there, and I want to get back to making work and producing work,” Binder said in an interview. “I want to keep growing.”Duncan characterized the transition similarly, saying, “David decided to move on, and I appreciate him letting me know now.” She added, “We have a strong team in place, and I have time to do a search and find someone to be my artistic partner.”Binder’s departure comes as many performing arts institutions around the nation are seeing turnover at the top — New York’s theater leaders have tended to hang on longer than most, which is a source of criticism as well as stability, but there is wholesale change unfolding in San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere.Binder, who is 55, has drawn some buzzy work to BAM, which primarily presents shows developed by other companies.Last year’s pandemic-delayed production of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” which starred James McAvoy and transferred from London, was both a critical and a popular success, becoming the best-selling show in the history of the BAM Harvey Theater. And this month, BAM was the only institution with two shows on The New York Times’s list of things critics are looking forward to this year: the theater critic Jesse Green wrote about anticipating a production of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” with Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan in the starring roles, and the dance critic Gia Kourlas wrote hopefully about BAM’s U.S. premiere of Pina Bausch’s “Água,” a piece created two decades ago in Brazil.Binder arrived at BAM saying he wanted to bring in new artists — his first Next Wave festival there, in 2019, featured only artists who had not previously performed there. Over the course of his tenure, Binder said he will have presented more than 50 debuts of artistic companies as well as solo performers.Ticket sales during his time have generally exceeded projections; BAM says it is attracting new audiences, and there have been multiple programming highlights: Simon Stone’s “Medea” adaptation, produced by BAM, starring Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale; a new spring music series, curated last year by Hanif Abdurraqib and this year by Solange; and an annual artist residency program.“Through the pandemic and through the leadership changes, I feel that the team and I at BAM have stayed focused on putting fantastic work on our stages, and when we couldn’t do it on our stages, we did it outdoors or site-specific or virtually. And the work we’ve done has been really successful,” he said. “We always tried to mix it up: We had the National Theater of Korea’s opera of ‘Trojan Women,’ and ‘Kiki and Herb Sleigh’; we had the Lithuanian opera ‘Sun & Sea,’ which won the Golden Lion at Venice; and we also hosted the world premiere of Madonna’s ‘Madame X’ tour.”In the commercial arena, Binder is best known as the lead producer of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which won the Tony Award for best musical revival in 2014. Binder said that he would soon announce that “Hedwig” was “finally coming to the West End in a big way.”Beyond “Hedwig,” Binder is among a handful of commercial producers who have continued to focus on the production of plays, which tend to be riskier than musicals. He says he plans to resume work on his longtime effort to bring the German director Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “An Enemy of the People” to Broadway. (Last fall, Binder brought Ostermeier’s “Hamlet” to BAM; that production was in German, but “An Enemy of the People” would be presented in English.)Binder said he was also working with the innovative British director Jamie Lloyd, who helmed the “Cyrano” revival at BAM, to develop a new play that he was not yet ready to describe.BAM, like other arts organizations, shrank during the height of the pandemic, but is now nearly back to where it was, according to a spokeswoman: Its current annual budget is $56 million, up from $55 million prepandemic; it has 222 full-time staff positions, down from 256; its most recent Next Wave festival had 13 shows, down from 16 prepandemic; and last spring, BAM presented 17 shows, up from 16 during the final prepandemic spring.“I think we’re doing as well as one can, given the circumstances of the world,” Duncan said. “We’ve had some success in audience growth, and our membership numbers are starting to increase again. Everything is heading in the right direction, and now it’s a matter of time.” More

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      Frigid Fringe Festival Is ‘Uncensored’ No More After Pulling a Work About Gender

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      The Frigid Fringe Festival in New York said it would no longer bill itself as “uncensored” after deciding not to move ahead with a performance it deemed anti-trans.Since its 2007 founding, the Frigid Fringe Festival in New York has selected the plays it produces randomly, like many other fringe festivals around the world that aim to highlight voices from outside the theatrical establishment. It boasted that it was both “unjuried,” since it did not rely on gatekeeping panels, and “uncensored.”But that changed this past fall, when Frigid decided for the first time that it would not stage one of the productions it had chosen. A staffer at the festival had red-flagged the work, “Poems on Gender,” after its author, David Lee Morgan, submitted a blurb drawn from the show that began: “There are two sexes, male and female.” Further investigation led organizers to conclude that it “featured material we deem to be anti-trans.”In canceling its production of “Poems on Gender,” Frigid announced that it would stop calling itself “uncensored,” and that it would reserve the right to withdraw future plays. “Our commitment to freedom of expression does not obligate us to lend our efforts to platform what we consider to be hate speech, or even just very offensive and hurtful speech,” it said in a news release. It added, “In this case we choose to just say no.”The festival was “uncensored” no longer, becoming the latest example of a wider rebalancing in the worlds of culture, publishing and academia, as many institutions that once emphasized freedom of expression and artistic license have curbed speech that they deem hateful or offensive to members of marginalized groups.Morgan, a busker and spoken-word poet based in London who performs “Poems on Gender” as a recited monologue, said in an interview that he did not expect Frigid to tolerate absolutely everything. “If I were presenting a recruiting film for the Ku Klux Klan,” he said, “I’d be astounded if they’d be fine with putting it on.”On Being Transgender in AmericaFeeling Unsafe: Intimidation and violence against gay and transgender Americans has spread this year — driven heavily, extremism experts say, by increasingly inflammatory political messaging.Puberty Blockers: These drugs can ease anguish among young transgender people and buy time to weigh options. But concerns are growing about their long-term effects.‘Top Surgery’: Small studies suggest that breast removal surgery improves transgender teenagers’ well-being, but data is sparse. Some state leaders oppose such procedures for minors.Generational Shift: The number of young people who identify as transgender in the United States has nearly doubled in recent years, according to a new report.But he disputed that his show, which he performed last year at the prominent Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was deserving of censorship. “Is it reactionary?” he said. “Is it anti-trans? Is it bigotry to say there are two sexes, male and female?”Erez Ziv, a founder of Frigid New York and its managing artistic director, said he could not ask his increasingly diverse staff, which includes several transgender and nonbinary people, to be part of a production that denied their realities. The Frigid Fringe Festival, which will run in February and March, supplies shows with theatrical space and publicity, and tech and front-of-house workers. Productions keep all box office revenue. (Frigid relies on grants and small fees from the productions.)“In November, I boastfully said to an entire room full of fringe producers in North America that I would allow a show to happen no matter what,” Ziv said. “But then it happened: We actually got a show that I just couldn’t ask my staff to work.”“I support free speech,” he added. “I think all speech should be legally protected, but not all speech should be platformed.”David Lee Morgan said he did not believe his work “Poems on Gender” deserved censorship: “Is it bigotry to say there are two sexes, male and female?”Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesBefore deciding, Ziv, who never reads production scripts for Frigid, viewed several online videos of Morgan performing other works. He also consulted a colleague: the co-artistic director at Frigid, Jimmy Lovett, partly because Lovett is trans.Lovett said that some of Morgan’s online performances of related works were “very minimizing of our experiences” and framed transition-related surgery and other medical care as “damaging to the body rather than necessary and healthy for the individual.”In sometimes elliptical language, “Poems on Gender” raises questions about how some people define their genders (“You tell me I can’t be your friend/Unless I believe you are a real woman/I can’t do that”) and about transition-related medical care (“You took a rainbow and forged it into a knife”).Morgan, who grew up in Washington State, describes himself as left-wing and feminist and said that “Poems on Gender” was partly inspired by conversations with trans friends from the spoken-word poetry scene. “I’m looking at people I have a lot of respect and unity with, and then seeing where we disagree,” he said, noting that he believes some of the friendships have ended because of his views.Frigid’s evolution away from its stage-anything ethos is striking, because the festival exists precisely to ensure that even unusual or outré works get a chance to go up in New York City.Fringe festivals share a mandate to elevate edgier voices. The concept originated when troupes that were not invited to the first Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 put on a counter-festival, which a journalist later described as “round the fringe of official festival drama.” They have earned a reputation for giving opportunities to new talent: the hit Broadway musical “Six,” about the wives of Henry VIII, was written by college students and was one of the 3,398 shows the Edinburgh Festival Fringe put on in 2017.Xela Batchelder, a veteran fringe producer who studied fringe festivals for her Ph.D. dissertation, said that generally “the audience is the curator,” and that it would be a challenge for festivals to begin deciding which works to stage and which to rule out. “It’s going to be very hard for the arts organizations and the artists trying to figure out how to work through all this,” she said.The fringe model has been tested in recent years. The Chicago Fringe Festival, which like Frigid selected works entirely by lottery, faced backlash in 2017 for staging “A Virtuous Pedophile.” (Its author, Sean Neely, said the play did not advocate pedophilia.) The outcry was “very detrimental” to the festival, said Anne Cauley, its executive director at the time, and the festival’s largest foundation sponsor declined to renew its support the next year. The festival ceased after 2018.The Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals, whose guiding principles call for convening no juries for selecting plays and allowing no interference with artistic content, added a new plank in 2017 that said, “Festivals will promote and model inclusivity, diversity and multiculturalism.”A spokeswoman for the association, Michele Gallant, said that Frigid, which is one of its members, had still abided by the principle that says “festival producers do not interfere with the artistic content of each performance,” because it had not altered the show — but simply pulled it entirely.Morgan still hopes to take “Poems on Gender” to other fringe festivals.He won the Canadian association’s lottery in November, which gives him entry to fringe festivals next summer in the cities of Victoria and Vancouver, in British Columbia. The Vancouver Fringe declined to comment, and an official at the Victoria Fringe did not respond to a request for comment. More