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      Lawsuit Says Charity Leader Hired His Former Personal Trainer for Key Role

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      Spending by a charity intended to honor a radio pioneer is being challenged by his granddaughter, who says he was tricked into leaving his fortune to it. The charity denies the charge and says the producer did not trust his family to protect his legacy.Over the course of a decade, Matthew Forman emerged as a public face of the Himan Brown Charitable Trust, a charity with $100 million in assets and a stated purpose of furthering the legacy of Mr. Brown, who had created treasured radio dramas like “Dick Tracy” during that medium’s golden age.As a director and, more recently, a consultant to the trust, Mr. Forman, 41, earned as much as $250,000 annually as he helped distribute millions of dollars in funds to deserving causes, often around Miami, where he was recognized with a community service award and spoke on expert panels.“He was great to work with,” said Isabelle Pike, senior vice president of development at Branches, an organization that works with poor families. “He supported great programming here in South Florida.”But a foundation run by a granddaughter of Mr. Brown’s has challenged Mr. Forman’s qualifications for those roles in court papers that say he apparently had no prior experience in the field when he was hired by the charity’s sole trustee, for whom he had worked as a personal trainer.The challenge is the latest chapter in a long-running lawsuit by the foundation, the Radio Drama Network, against the sole trustee, Richard L. Kay, who helped design the trust as Mr. Brown’s lawyer.Mr. Kay has argued that Mr. Brown created the trust to shield his money from a family from whom he had become estranged. But the suit contends Mr. Kay tricked Mr. Brown, at age 94 in 2004, into signing over his fortune to the charitable trust, whose spending Mr. Kay now controls. Mr. Brown died six years later.Under a new estate plan, the suit argues, most of the fortune that had been designated to go to the Radio Drama Network was instead diverted to the new Himan Brown Charitable Trust.The lawsuit argues that, under Mr. Kay, the trust has paid $1.5 million to Mr. Forman and donated millions more to causes tied to Mr. Kay, like his alma maters, Cornell University and Michigan Law School; his grandchild’s Montessori school; and the 92nd Street Y, New York, where he is on the board. That money, the suit asserts, should have instead been directed to the radio foundation, which Mr. Brown separately created to foster respect for the spoken word.“I really want to let people know who he was and show the kind of work he did,” Melina Brown, the granddaughter, said in an interview. “But it’s not happening.”Himan Brown, right, directing Betty Winkler and Frank Lovejoy at a radio studio in New York in 1943.Associated PressMr. Forman declined to be interviewed but his lawyer defended his qualifications, describing him as a former sales professional who had done well in college and while briefly attending law school at the University of Miami. In 2014, the Miami-Dade County public school system recognized him with a Community Partners Recognition Award for help the trust provided for children in Miami’s poorer neighborhoods. Several other grant recipients in Florida praised him and the charity for their work.“He is a humble, bright, diligent and caring person who is one of the most professional people I’ve worked with in philanthropy,” said Melissa White, the executive director of the Key Biscayne Community Foundation, which has received grants from the trust.The judge presiding over the case, filed in Surrogate’s Court in Manhattan in 2015, has ruled that the administration of the trust and its spending are beyond the scope of the lawsuit, which is focused on allegations that Mr. Kay deceived Mr. Brown into setting it up.But the drama network has challenged that ruling and argues that Mr. Kay’s spending choices, including the hiring of Mr. Forman, are indicative of his self-interest at the time the trust was drawn up in 2004. It did not begin functioning until after Mr. Brown’s death.Mr. Brown had created the radio network, a separate foundation, in 1984, and in a 1999 interview he spoke of it as being part of his effort to revive the lost “art of listening” in an era of reduced attention spans and competing media.The communal experience of radio, where families gathered in living rooms for a broadcast, had its heyday from the 1930s to the 1950s, before the expansion of television. During that time, Mr. Brown directed and produced shows like “The Adventures of the Thin Man,” “Flash Gordon,” “Grand Central Station” and “Inner Sanctum Mysteries,” working alongside actors like Orson Welles and Helen Hayes. In 1990, he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame.Several years before he died, Mr. Brown was sued unsuccessfully by his son, Barry, who said, among other things, that his father had molested him as a child, a charge that his father denied. Barry Brown sued again after his father died, challenging his father’s will in a case in which he accused Mr. Kay of manipulating his father into diverting money into the new charitable trust.But in 2015, Judge Nora S. Anderson of Surrogate’s Court rejected his claim and cited witnesses who said Mr. Brown had “remained clearheaded and firm-minded even through advanced age.”The drama network filed its suit later that year. Mr. Kay’s lawyers argued that the claims of fraud had already been adjudicated. But Judge Anderson decided that the new lawsuit could move forward.In the current suit, Mr. Kay’s lawyers have accused Ms. Brown of trying to claim a larger share of the estate so as to draw larger administration fees. Mr. Kay said in a deposition earlier this year that Mr. Brown had expressly created the new trust to keep the bulk of his money away from Barry Brown and Barry’s two children, including Melina.Melina Brown, left, and Himan Brown in an undated family photograph.via Melina Brown“I cannot be more dramatic about the venom displayed by Himan Brown with respect to his son, and it extended to his granddaughters, as well,” Mr. Kay said.Melina Brown has denied seeking larger fees or that the breach between her grandfather and father ever extended to her. She said in an interview that her grandfather, whom she cared for in his last years, had loved her and wanted her to push forward with his mission to build interest in the spoken word. Before he died, he appointed her as a director of the Radio Drama Network and in his estate left her $3 million and his home in Connecticut.Today, the radio foundation has about $20 million in assets. In the year ending June 2021, it gave $307,500 in grants, including to organizations that support Hispanic theater and storytelling in public schools. Pursuing the lawsuit against the trust has been expensive, with more than $2 million going to legal fees in the past two years, according to tax records.The charitable trust controlled by Mr. Kay holds about $107 million in assets. It distributed nearly $4.5 million in grants in the year ending in March 2021, according to tax filings.Mr. Kay receives yearly compensation as a trustee — $300,000 last year — which he shares with his law firm, Pryor Cashman, which has drawn fees of as much as $400,000 to represent the trust in recent years.Lawyers for Mr. Kay say Mr. Brown’s name is fully associated with gifts made by his trust, like a 60+ Program named for him at the 92nd Street Y, New York. They say that when Mr. Brown was alive, his radio foundation financially supported many varied causes, of which only a few were affiliated with the spoken word. They also point out that the trust has supported multiple speaking engagements, such as appearances by Dick Cavett and Bill Clinton. Mr. Brown, they say, viewed Mr. Kay as a friend whose judgment he fully trusted in making grants, and they point to personal messages from Mr. Brown to Mr. Kay to illustrate their close relationship.Mr. Forman said in a deposition last month that he had worked as a personal trainer for Mr. Kay and his family in New York, before moving to Florida. He had been working in sales, he said, when Mr. Kay hired him for the trust in 2011, and he acknowledged that he did not have prior experience in philanthropic giving beyond making gifts himself. In court papers earlier this year, he said he had also served at one point as a co-trustee of the trust.New York State does not set specific professional qualifications for employees or consultants of a charity. But experts said charities, especially those with substantial funds, often seek to hire individuals with an understanding of charitable work, topical expertise and experience in fund-raising or grant giving.Matthew Forman representing the Himan Brown Charitable Trust at an event at the University of Miami School of Medicine in 2011.via Key Biscayne Community FoundationLawyers from Carter Ledyard & Milburn, who represent the drama network, were precluded from asking detailed questions about Mr. Forman’s work for the charity during his deposition last month, after Judge Anderson ruled that the suit did not directly concern Mr. Kay’s administration of the trust.But in limited questioning, Mr. Forman said he had worked as an employee of the trust until sometime in late 2017 or early 2018. Tax records show from that point forward a company registered to Mr. Forman, Miami Philanthropic Consulting Inc., began to serve as an adviser to the trust. For the year that ended in March 2021, the consulting company was paid $250,000 by the trust, according to the tax records.Mr. Forman said in his deposition that he had not spoken to Mr. Kay in years, but said he could not give an exact date.He was also asked what he knew about the man whose legacy he had promoted. He said he knew that Mr. Brown had risen from a humble background to become a successful businessman who owned production studios and had stayed vibrant into old age.“He produced radio shows,” Mr. Forman said. “I believe ‘The Thin Man.’ Maybe ‘Dick Tracy.’” More

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      Melissa Etheridge and Jill Sobule Bring Their Whole Lives to the Stage

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      They both first made a splash in the ’90s. They’re now in New York to present new theatrical memoirs that mix storytelling and songs.When musicians as popular and as varied as Brandi Carlile, King Princess, Syd, Hayley Kiyoko and Girl in Red can be so openly, so matter-of-factly gay, it’s easy to forget that the vibe was not quite as welcoming 30 years ago.In the 1990s, singing paeans about making out with other women was a bold move. So when the Kansas-born lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge released the album “Yes I Am” in 1993, featuring the hits “Come to My Window” and “I’m the Only One,” she made a splash. A couple of years later, Jill Sobule, a sly, funny bisexual pop singer-songwriter, released “I Kissed a Girl” — with a video starring the actor and model known as Fabio.Coincidentally, both women are currently settling in New York to present new stage memoirs that mix storytelling and songs. On Thursday, Etheridge starts previews for “My Window — A Journey Through Life,” with a book by her wife, Linda Wallem, at New World Stages. The next day, Sobule follows suit with “F*ck7thGrade” at the Wild Project.Born a few months apart in 1961, the two women have been on parallel trajectories over the years but did not really meet until Sobule joined the musical lineup on the 2019 Melissa Etheridge cruise. “We were getting done in our room, and we were all singing, ‘Come to my porthole,’” said Sobule, whose recent land-bound experiences have included starring in Matt Schatz’s musical “A Wicked Soul in Cherry Hill” at the Geffen Playhouse.On Friday morning, Etheridge and Sobule gathered again over a breakfast of oatmeal, fruit and herbal tea. It was the day after the Denver Broncos had lost an excruciating game to the Indianapolis Colts, and Sobule, a Colorado native and football fan, was still reeling. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The two women did not really meet until Sobule joined the musical lineup on the 2019 Melissa Etheridge cruise.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesWhy did you both decide to look back on your life and music in a theatrical format?JILL SOBULE I have a theater agent, and he said, “You should come up with a concept and maybe something with your songs.” So many of them directly deal with the worst year of my life: seventh grade.MELISSA ETHERIDGE That’s everyone’s worst year.SOBULE I was this badass little girl. I was the best guitar player, but there were no role models for us. And as a little strange girl with queer feelings in the ’70s, the only role models I had for that was Miss Hathaway from “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Or my gym teacher, who looked like Pete Rose.ETHERIDGE My wife’s gym teacher was named Miss Lesby. It’s like something out of “S.N.L.”! One of my major influences was the Archies [they both start singing “Sugar, Sugar”]. I thought, “Why can’t I grow up and be Reggie? I’m going to have Veronica and live a happy life.”SOBULE We wanted to make sure that the show wasn’t just for people interested in my career because most people could give a [expletive]. I’m not that famous. It’s kind of this universal story of a weirdo growing up.What was it like coming of age at a time when it must have been difficult to put words onto some feelings?SOBULE I have a brother who’s six years older than me. I happened to stumble upon one of his softcore magazines, and there was a series of soft-focus photos of girls in a French boarding school. I thought, “Oh my god, how do I transfer to that school?”ETHERIDGE I think the first media I saw was “The Children’s Hour.” All of a sudden I’m feeling stuff. And then she [Shirley MacLaine’s character] hangs herself, because anything gay you saw, they were criminals or killed themselves. I remember Time magazine had something about gay liberation on the front. My father was a high school psychology teacher, and he had a book that said, “Homosexuality — we don’t think it’s a mental illness anymore.” It was kind of nice: Maybe I’m not crazy.Etheridge and K.D. Lang. “It was the drama geeks getting together and having fun,” Etheridge said about Hollywood in the ’90s.Steve Eichner/WireImage, via Getty ImagesHow did you get into music?ETHERIDGE In high school, I was in professional bands. I made money every weekend; I was very independent. I was a security guard in college. I made $7 an hour, and that was hard work, in a hospital. So I went down to the subway — it was in Boston, I went to the Berklee College of Music — I opened up my case, and I played for an hour. And I made seven bucks. So I went, “Well, I can make as much here as I do doing that job.” I never looked back after that.SOBULE When I was in eighth grade, I was the guitar player in our jazz stage band, and we won State because I brought my brother’s Marshall amp and wah-wah pedal, and I did a solo of “2001.” That’s the only thing I’ve ever won in my whole life. Later I was in Spain, and a friend said, “Let’s go busk on the street.” A guy walked by and went, “Would you guys like to play in my nightclub?” I ended up dropping out of school.ETHERIDGE I dropped out of school, too.Is it difficult to tell your stories in a new medium?SOBULE I think it’s a natural progression because we’re storytellers, and now we get to grow it out, we get to be more cinematic, in a way. I was telling my theater friends, “I’m moving on from music to Off Broadway because it’s so lucrative.” [They both roar with laughter.]ETHERIDGE I always hate to say “at our age,” but in this phase of our life to be able to have a different creative expression is fantastic. I came from rehearsal last night, and I could not get to sleep. My brain was so tickled and delighted by what I can do.Melissa, what was it like playing St. Jimmy in “American Idiot” in 2011?ETHERIDGE It was amazing. This was a full Broadway show, and there were so many things that I didn’t really realize I was getting into. Especially when they said, “Now we’re going to rehearse the death drop.” I said, “Excuse me, the what?” I climb up two flights of these stairs that move around, and I fall backwards into two people’s arms. And I’m not a dancer! To me it represented my own fear of stepping into the theatrical world. So I said, “You got it!”SOBULE Theater was a learning curve. I remember the first time a director said, “OK, move stage left.” And I was, “What the [expletive] is stage left?” We have so much dialogue, and I don’t even memorize my own lyrics. I was like, “Can I have a monitor? Did Springsteen have a monitor?” They were like, “You are not Springsteen.” OK, fair enough.Jill, you’re working with the playwright Liza Birkenmeier on your show’s book. And Melissa, your wife, Linda, is helping out. How do you collaborate with them?SOBULE Basically we have conversations, and we figure out how to best put the jigsaw puzzle together. Every day, I’m like, “Let me add this little one-liner.”ETHERIDGE My Covid experience really focused this show because I did a thing called Etheridge TV. I turned my garage into a streaming studio, and every week I would stream five shows. On Wednesdays my wife and I would do a chat show, and on Fridays I would do what I called the Friday Night Time Machine. I started digitizing my old pictures and old videos, and I would show them and tell my life story. I got used to telling it, and my wife started writing it down. But I’m going to still be speaking extemporaneously in the show — I’ll hit the beats so that everything matches right, but I’m not reciting lines.How much excavating did you do in terms of music?ETHERIDGE I’m playing a couple tracks that I hardly ever play live because they were so theatrical, so dramatic that there was never a place for them in my concerts. There’s one from “Your Little Secret” called “This War Is Over” — I think I did it in concert in ’96 and that was the last time. There’s one from “The Awakening” called “Open Your Mind.” You’re going to hear a song I wrote when I was 11 years old, and four or five songs that were never recorded.SOBULE We took out the first song I ever wrote, which was called “Nixon Is a Bad Man, Spiro Agnew Is Too.” I don’t remember the music, but I’m sure it was hot.ETHERIDGE Unfortunately, I did remember the music of mine.Sobule performing in 2000. “When I had ‘Kissed a Girl’ coming out, it was dicey because it was like, ‘Is she a lesbian singer-songwriter?,’” Sobule said.Hiroyuki Ito/Getty ImagesJill, reassure us: Does your show include “I Kissed a Girl”?SOBULE Yeah. People call me a one-hit wonder, and I say, “Wait a second, I’m a two-hit wonder!” When I had “Kissed a Girl” coming out, it was dicey because it was like, “Is she a lesbian singer-songwriter?”ETHERIDGE It was revolutionary. I remember seeing that, my jaw dropped, and I went, “Wow, here we go.” It was punk, it was edgy, it was that MTV cool. Someone called me once, like management, and said, “Your songs are too sexual.” It was the “Lucky” album. I was having a lot of sex, what can I say?I read that you were involved in some fun parties back in the day.ETHERIDGE It was Hollywood in the early ’90s. I happened to know K.D. Lang; Ellen DeGeneres was this stand-up comic, so was Rosie O’Donnell. I met Brad Pitt after he did a little independent film with Catherine Keener, who’s a real good friend of mine. None of us had kids, and we were all young and crazy. There was a lot of smoking and drinking. It was the drama geeks getting together and having fun.What do you do for fun now?ETHERIDGE Fun is getting in bed before midnight. I watch football. [To Sobule] You’re not a Broncos fan, are you? Last night was brutal. I have to hug you.SOBULE My whole family was at the game and they FaceTimed me. I almost didn’t make today, it was so awful.ETHERIDGE I’m with the Kansas City Chiefs: We’re set. In high school we had powder-puff football. We showed up for the first practice — I was the quarterback, thank you very much — and then they came and said, “We’ve got to shut this down, we don’t have insurance,” or something. Because of Title IX, we were supposed to be able to do it, but we didn’t, and it broke my heart.SOBULE The last couple years I’ve been totally into basketball. I like it because there’s so many games and it doesn’t matter.ETHERIDGE Oh no, I like something to be on the line. Every. Play. More

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      Robert Kalfin, Founder of an Adventurous Theater, Dies at 89

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      For two decades, his Chelsea Theater Center was on the cutting edge with productions that could be challenging, baffling or, sometimes, Broadway bound.Robert Kalfin, the driving force behind the Chelsea Theater Center, which for two decades beginning in 1965 presented adventurous plays that were sometimes too innovative for the theatergoing public and sometimes successful enough that they transferred to Broadway, died on Sept. 20 at a hospice center in Quiogue, a hamlet in Southampton, N.Y. He was 89.Philip Himberg, a longtime friend, said the cause was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Kalfin directed countless plays in a career that began in his mid-20s and continued into his 80s. In 1965, he started the nonprofit Chelsea Theater Center and became its founding artistic director, with David Long as managing director and George Bari as production manager.They set up shop in St. Peter’s Church in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, though a strip dance in one of its early offerings got the group tossed out of that church and forced it to move to another. Those were two of several locations it would use over the years, only some of which were in Chelsea.Mr. Kalfin thought the commercial theaters of the day were limited and unimaginative, and he strove to broaden the theatrical landscape.“The mission statement, which I came up with, which was very useful, was ‘We will do whatever nobody else is doing and what we think people ought to see,’” he said in an interview in 2014 for the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project. “That gave me great leeway.”The Chelsea achieved particular prominence once it moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1968. Its productions there were attention-getting, to say the least. A 1969 staging of “Slave Ship,” written by Amiri Baraka (who was then known as LeRoi Jones) and directed by Gilbert Moses, took on racism, leaving Clive Barnes of The New York Times rattled.“The play is set in the hold of a ship and the conscience of a nation,” Mr. Barnes wrote in his review.“The play ends with the symbolic destruction of white America,” he added. “Whitey is got — Black Panther banners are unfurled. This scared and horrified me. I am whitey.”In 1971, The Times wrote an article about Mr. Kalfin’s troupe that carried the headline “America’s Most Exciting New Theater?” Its productions for the rest of that decade cemented its stature as one of the scene’s leading innovators.In 1973, the Chelsea revived the Leonard Bernstein operetta “Candide,” which had failed on Broadway in the 1950s, and gave it a new book, by Hugh Wheeler. Harold Prince directed, and the result was a smash in Brooklyn that became the group’s first transfer to Broadway, where it ran for almost two years.Another great success was “Strider,” Mark Rozovsky’s play with music based on a Tolstoy story about a piebald horse that is tormented because of its appearance. Mr. Kalfin first saw it in Leningrad, and in 1979 he staged an English-language version at the Westside Theater on West 43rd Street. It drew a strong review from Mel Gussow in The Times.“We are transported by the ingenuousness and the originality of the show,” he wrote. “Looking closely, we even notice a grittiness that might have been appreciated by Brecht and Weill. The play works on two levels, as a kind of Tolstoyan ‘Black Beauty’ — downbeat but finally inspirational — and as a valid commentary on the injustices of civilization.”That show, directed by Mr. Kalfin and Lynne Gannaway, transferred to Broadway and ran there for six months.By then Mr. Kalfin was seeing a change in theater audiences, one that his company had helped bring about.“There’s a whole new generation of theatergoers, and they have become elitist in a very positive way,” he told The Times that November as “Strider” was beginning its Broadway run. “I think they’re bored to death with television, and they’re more demanding of theater now because they’re so hungry for nourishment.”A scene from the Chelsea Theater Center’s production of Amiri Baraka’s “Slave Ship” in 1969. The play’s ending, the Times critic Clive Barnes wrote, “scared and horrified me.”Deidi von Schaewen, via BAM Hamm ArchivesRobert Zangwill Kalfin was born on April 22, 1933, in the Bronx. His father, Alfred, was a real estate developer, and his mother, Hilda Shulman Kalfin, was a teacher.His childhood memories were of being taken not to the theater but to the Metropolitan Opera, where he and his parents generally ended up in the cheap seats, high up and off to the side.“My father would hold onto the back of my pants while I leaned over trying to see center stage,” he said in the oral history.He studied music at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and Performing Arts). As a theater major at Alfred University in central New York, he became part of an ambitious department that was staging Bertolt Brecht and other European writers and experimenting with unusual settings — he was in a production of “Androcles and the Lion” that was staged in a gymnasium transformed to look like a Roman arena.He earned his master’s degree in 1957 at the Yale School of Drama and settled into odd jobs in New York, working for a time in the shipping department at WOR-TV and as a production assistant on a children’s television show in Newark, N.J., that starred a chimpanzee.He directed his first Off Broadway production, “The Golem,” in 1959, at St. Mark’s Playhouse. His other early efforts included “The Good Soldier Schweik” in 1963, which didn’t go well — a producer interfered so intrusively that Mr. Kalfin withdrew before opening night and sought unsuccessfully to stop the production from opening. When it did, William Glover of The Associated Press called it “one of the season’s worst plays.”Mr. Kalfin, right, with Michael David, left, the executive director of the Chelsea Theater Center, and Burl Hash, the production director, in 1973.Manuel Guevaza Jr.At the Chelsea, Mr. Kalfin sometimes left audiences and critics scratching their heads. That was the case with a 1970 musical called “Tarot,” which he staged in Brooklyn. As the credits read, it was conceived by The Rubber Duck and directed jointly by “Mr. Duck” (as The Times called him, tongue in cheek) and Mr. Kalfin.Mr. Barnes hated it. “Pretentiousness is rioting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,” his review began. Yet the Chelsea was respected enough by then that even in that pan, Mr. Barnes felt compelled to note that the group was facing one of its frequent financial crises at the time, and that “it simply must not be allowed to die.”The group did peter out in the mid-1980s, swamped with debt. Before it did, its other notable successes included “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer story of a Jewish girl who passes as a boy; Mr. Kalfin had it adapted for the stage by Leah Napolin and directed it. It opened in Brooklyn in December 1974.It was a tough road to opening night. Mr. Kalfin clashed with Tovah Feldshuh, who played the title character, and withstood complaints from Orthodox Jewish leaders; he also had to strike a deal with Barbra Streisand, who owned the rights to the Singer story, which she would turn into a film in 1983. But the play moved to Broadway, where it ran for 223 performances.Mr. Bari, Mr. Kalfin’s life partner, died in 2013. Mr. Kalfin, who had lived in East Hampton, N.Y., leaves no immediate survivors.After the Chelsea gave up the ghost, Mr. Kalfin continued to direct in New York and in regional houses; he was still working until recently. One of his post-Chelsea projects in New York was directing a Yiddish version of “Yentl” produced by the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater in 2002. Eleanor Reissa played the title role.“Even though he’d directed maybe a hundred shows, every time was like the first,” Ms. Reissa, who had worked with Mr. Kalfin on other shows as well, said by email. “Wide eyed and wide hearted always, infectious joyfulness.” More

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      Review: ‘Death of a Salesman’ on Broadway Makes the Lomans New Again

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      Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke star in a powerful revival of Arthur Miller’s drama, led by a Black cast.A deeply original work that is also deeply influential may yet in time be trite. What once opened eyes comes to seem preloaded behind them, as if part of the general human inheritance.Such has been the ironic trajectory of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” When it premiered on Broadway in 1949, with its depiction of the false hopes of capitalism and the family dysfunction left in its wake, there were fathers for whom “the doctor had to be called because they couldn’t stop crying,” the director Mike Nichols, who saw it then, said. “It was like an explosion.”As “Salesman” spread into the culture with astonishing speed, it helped introduce the seismic re-evaluations of the ensuing decades. But now that we take those shocks to be self-evident, the job of making the play feel as new as it once did is a difficult one for those who would revive it. “Willy Loman” has long since become shorthand for the “low man” in the pecking order. And everyone for whom it was required high school reading already knows the story: how a washed-up salesman’s delusions about American success destroy not just his own life but also those of his wife, Linda, and their sons, Happy and Biff.Short of stunt casting or radical resetting, directors must therefore dig either deeper or wider. Nichols’s 2012 Broadway production, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Linda Emond as Willy and Linda, went deeper, examining the work with microscopic precision and even replicating Jo Mielziner’s original set design and Alex North’s music. The result was a very powerful mounting, and I use the word advisedly: It sometimes seemed like an exhibit.From left, Khris Davis as Biff Loman, McKinley Belcher III as Happy Loman and Sharon D Clarke as Linda Loman.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe latest Broadway revival, which opened on Sunday at the Hudson Theater, goes wider, a notably rich and mostly successful approach. For the first time in a major New York production, the Lomans are played by Black actors. Wendell Pierce, as Willy, is wrenching as he flails and fails to avoid his fate instead of slumping into it from the start. And Sharon D Clarke, as Linda, is so paradoxically shattering in her stoicism that she turns what is usually portrayed as unshakable loyalty into a kind of heedless comorbidity.Miranda Cromwell’s revival, based on one she directed in London with Marianne Elliott in 2019, does more than give us Black Lomans — including Khris Davis as Biff and McKinley Belcher III as Happy. It also, crucially, puts them in a largely white world. Willy’s employer (Blake DeLong), his neighbor (Delaney Williams) and his mistress (Lynn Hawley) are thus more than foils in the usual sense; like Willy, you can never untangle the personal, economic and now racial threads of their behavior. And even if they aren’t bigots, they electrify moments — a card game with the neighbor, a negotiation with the “boss” — in which Willy’s paranoia seems at the same time both fantastical and well founded.It’s even more astonishing that the production achieves this effect with only a few minor alterations to the dialogue. (The college that Biff, a would-be football star, hopes to attend is now U.C.L.A., instead of the University of Virginia, where the first Black student was not admitted until 1950 — and even then, only after a lawsuit.) Likewise, though the play’s web of urban imagery, much written about in A.P. English essays, is duly honored in Anna Fleischle’s skeletal set design, it gets new life when seen in the light of the redistricting and gentrification that squeezed many people like the Lomans out of their homes.It’s therefore central to the effectiveness of the casting that it’s not colorblind. Neither the Black nor the white actors ignore race; they mine it, bringing their characters to fully specific and vivid life. Willy’s mistress has an ear-bending working-class white Boston accent. The oddly formal patois (“Nobody dast blame this man”) of the good-hearted neighbor Charley marks him as a clear outsider. (Williams is excellent in the part.) And Biff and Happy’s take on trash-talking, no less than Linda’s maternal don’t-cross-me commandments — “Attention must be finally paid!” — awakens lines you’ve heard innumerable times, asserting their implacable realness.André De Shields, in a terrifying performance, plays the ghost of Willy’s older brother, Ben.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat awakening reaches a theatrical climax in André De Shields’s terrifying performance as the ghost of Willy’s older brother, Ben. Though dressed like Liberace in a white suit and crystal-studded shoes — the costumes are by Fleischle and Sarita Fellows — he makes every utterance sound like an elaborate curse. When he warns Biff not to “fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way,” he puts such a troubling spin on the words “boy” and “jungle” that you feel you should duck.But what works to ground and intensify the performances does not always work for the production overall. Cromwell’s use of expressionistic devices like silhouettes and frozen poses to suggest Willy’s fragmenting consciousness seems obvious and unmoored, an intrusion of acquired Polaroid memories. And though the wistful music by Femi Temowo — including a beautiful spiritual-like setting of “When the Trumpets Sound” — sets the mood for the impending tragedy, it confuses the tone when used for comic effect, or worse, solace. There is no solace in “Salesman.”In general, the balance of light and dark in this very dark play does not yet feel natural. Biff and Happy, in Willy’s memory, are not just boyish, but clichés of boyishness; aiming to solve this textual problem by underlining it, Cromwell’s direction makes it worse. On the other hand, Willy himself is often so unrelievedly monstrous that you sometimes can’t see past it to the monstrosity of American business that Miller means to indict.Yet nothing can stop the engine of the final scenes, sparking and huffing and pushing the play into great drama. As the lies that bind at last come undone, we see each of the trapped family members liberated to choose life or death or a combination thereof. (The play’s last words, after all, are “We’re free.”) They have nothing left to sell. If you believe, as Nichols said in 2012, that “now everyone in America is a salesman,” you may even feel a shiver of recognition. Made new and unfamiliar once again in this production, the Lomans look like all of us.Death of a SalesmanThrough Jan. 15 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; salesmanonbroadway.com. Running time: 3 hours 10 minutes. More

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      LaTanya Richardson Jackson on Directing ‘The Piano Lesson’ (and Her Husband)

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      As she makes her Broadway directorial debut, she said her “vision is about seeing a deeper way into” what August Wilson intended with his Pulitzer Prize-winning play.LaTanya Richardson Jackson believes in ghosts. Better put: She believed her parents, and grandparents, when they talked about being frequently visited by people who were invisible to the human eye. Such a childhood has not only opened her up to having similar experiences but also made her uniquely qualified to bring one of August Wilson’s most haunting plays, “The Piano Lesson,” back to Broadway this fall.It first premiered there in 1990, and this Broadway revival — the show’s first — will star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington. The play, initially produced in 1987 at Yale Repertory Theater, is the fourth in Wilson’s 10-play series known as “The Pittsburgh Cycle,” which explores a full century of African American life in Pennsylvania’s Steel City.Jackson saw that original production, in part, because she was an actress and lifelong admirer of Wilson’s work. (She later starred in a Tony-nominated revival of Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” in 2009 and made her directorial debut with his “Two Trains Running” at True Colors Theater Company in Atlanta in 2013.) But she was also there to support her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, who was playing the lead character, Boy Willie. He’s also starring in the revival, but as Boy Willie’s uncle Doaker.From left: Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and Ray Fisher in “The Piano Lesson” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where it is scheduled to open Oct. 13.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSet in 1936, “The Piano Lesson,” for which Wilson also won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1990, follows two siblings, Boy Willie (Washington) and Berniece (Brooks), as they debate the fate of their family heirloom, a piano upon which the faces of their great-grandmother and her son are carved. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano and buy the property their enslaved ancestors worked on in the South. Berniece wants to keep it, understanding that the piano itself offers them another connection and liberation from their oppressive past. In contrast, Doaker sees the piano as haunted both by Boy Charles, his dead older brother and Boy Willie and Berniece’s father; and the ghost of the white slave owner, Sutter.On Broadway, Jackson, 72, is best known for portraying Lena Younger in a 2014 revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” and, more recently, as Calpurnia, in the substantially expanded role of Atticus Finch’s sagacious and reserved housekeeper in Aaron Sorkin’s 2019 adaptation of “To Kill A Mockingbird.” But, within African American drama, in regional theaters and on television shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” Jackson has long been a familiar face.“The star thing,” she told me. “You have to have a mind-set for that. And I just was never willing to do that.”What she has been doing is giving life to complex Black female protagonists on the stage and screen, and now working to unlock the deeper elements of Wilson’s women. Wilson once said he wanted to create a female character in “The Piano Lesson,” which “was as large as Troy was in Fences.” But, in the end, Wilson had to admit that his interests in the themes of self-worth, tradition, and tracing the history of the piano for 135 years took over the plot so much that his female character was “not as large as I intended.”Knowing that, Richardson said she paid homage to Wilson the best way she knew how: by making visible the many worlds, obvious and hidden, his play offers us. She added that her early encounters with the play, as well as Wilson and his other works, empowered her to take those risks here in her Broadway directorial debut.In a recent video interview, Jackson talked about navigating the gender politics of Wilson’s plays, what working with Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington has been like and how she discovered that directing was really her first love. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.You’re the first woman to direct an August Wilson play on Broadway. How has your perspective as a Black woman impacted your approach to his material?August was such a man’s man. When I directed “Two Trains Running” for Kenny Leon’s True Colors company in Atlanta, I told him [Leon], “As a woman, I look at things differently, and what might appear to you as minutiae, I find to be an important point.”I remember telling Pauletta [Washington], who played Risa, “Every time one of those men mention a woman who has died or was killed, you drop something in the kitchen and make a big, loud noise so that they have to stop and think about what they just said.” We can’t just have a conversation about women being cut or stabbed to death like that’s just a regular part of life. Our presence should not be something that’s taken for granted. Our presence is important.In “The Piano Lesson,” Berniece, like Risa, is the only woman in the cast.Yes, Berniece is surrounded by all of this testosterone. I saw the first production of this play at Yale, and I remember asking August after, “Where are all the women? Where are all the parts for women?” And he said, “Well, you know, Joe Turner has women.” I said, “But we’re always singular.” Then, he told me, “I’ll write about them when I really know what I’m saying.”My mentor, Douglas Turner Ward, told me: “Great playwrights don’t always know what they’re writing or what they have written. They attempt to do something, and if it’s great, the spirits visit them, and they just write. It’s a director’s job to see what they have actually written, whether or not it was their intention or not. Usually, with great writers, it’s bigger than what they intend.” And I find that to be so true of August.You embrace the otherworldliness of this story. Why was that important to you?Oct. 2 was the anniversary of August’s transition, so I’ve been thinking about him and his widow, Constanza Romero, and how to approach this story spiritually. I’m telling everybody, “This is a ghost story.” I believe there are other worlds where things are occurring, even if we don’t see them. To manifest that in the play, I felt that every member in that house was fighting their own ghosts. But Sutter [the white slave owner] represents the ghost of racism and the cruel manner we have had to navigate life in this country. August metaphorically shows that this ghost was an albatross around our necks. But I wanted to visually manifest it so that there was no question that we were attempting to exorcise it.Like any good ghost story, the house also seems haunted.I told myself that I had to find a designer who could build a house that was not raggedy but was really broken. August was a genius. In this play, he gave us these two-sided Janus figures. Not just between Boy Willie and Berniece, but [the brothers] Wining Boy and Doaker Charles, and the family and Lymon [Boy Willie’s friend]. And he did so because he believed that our people deserve to be recorded and documented in a classical way. That’s why we call him our Shakespeare.So, when I told our gifted set designer, Beowulf [Boritt], that house had to be split open, he was intrigued. Then when I said, “And the house has no walls.” He said, “I’m going down that rabbit hole with you.” Listen, we don’t change August’s words. That’s sacrosanct. That’s not what this vision is about. This vision is about seeing a deeper way into what he has given us.Mostly known for her work as an actress, Jackson says directing is her true passion: “I wish I were younger. But this is all I want to do now.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe piano is so meaningful to this family, and its symbolism is heightened by its physical beauty. Is there a story behind its design?Other versions of the play always have these pianos with these beautifully carved fresco plaques on them. But, Sam and I — you know I am married to Sam Jackson, right? — well, back in our house in Los Angeles, we have a Tree of Life statue made by the Makonde sculptors from East Africa. They start with a piece of ebony and then pass it among the community members to carve until it is all done. So, I wanted the piano to look like a Makonde statue and Mama’s face had to be the most prominent, and then the little boy Charles. And you know how they made that happen? A 3-D printer.Speaking of Samuel L. Jackson, he starred as Boy Willie in the original production. Now, he is playing the role of one of the uncles, Doaker Charles. What was it like for you to direct him?Sam and I are used to working together and being around each other 24/7. But I realized in this particular context, he doesn’t like to take a note. I had heard that about him before, but I just thought, “Oh, he just doesn’t like to take notes from people he feels don’t know what they’re talking about.” I didn’t think I’d even have to tell him, “That’s the note, brother.” And when I did, he said, “Well, I think I would know how that goes.” And I said, “I’m just bringing it to your attention that it didn’t go the way I would like it to go.”The way that I operate is that there are no stars in the room. We are an ensemble, and we are moving together or not at all. But, it was a true gift that this project came to me with Sam and John David already attached to it.This is John David Washington’s first play. You’ve also known him for a long time, did anything surprise you about his performance?Denzel and Pauletta Washington have been very generous with their children with me, and I love all their children. They, like our daughter, Zoe, are all worker bees. So to watch John David’s career and be able to help develop it is beyond a responsibility. It’s like being given something from God that says, “OK, you take care of and nurture this.” And to him, I said, “We got this. Just trust me. Your instrument is built soundly. We are going to give you the notes, and all you have to do is play them.” And he has exceeded my wildest imagination.This brings us back to Berniece. There are the words on the page, and then what you bring to her character.Or what Danielle [Brooks] brings. I’ve only been trying to guide Danielle toward who I think Berniece is. I’ve seen different renditions of this character, and she is always so angry, almost too angry. And I know she’s frustrated because she lost Crawford, the love of her life, and blames Boy Willie. But there are times that the anger covers up that hurt. So, I’ve told her, “Sometimes I just want to see the hurt because it allows me into you in a different way.” This is a family that loves each other, so she has to have a heart for him, too.Do you want to continue directing?Since I was in sixth grade, I knew that this was something inside of me, and God only knows who or what I could have been or done by now if I had just followed that track. I wish I were younger. But this is all I want to do now. More

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      Review: ‘Hamilton’ in German? It’s a Thrill.

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      The hit musical arrived in Hamburg with its verve, ingenuity and idealism intact. And it gains unexpected depth from being staged in Germany.HAMBURG, Germany — Early on in “Hamilton,” Aaron Burr offers the founding father of the title some “free advice”: “Talk less. Smile more.”In the German-language premiere of the blockbuster musical that opened here on Thursday, that line is one of the few retained in English — and a flummoxed Hamilton immediately asks what those words mean.There’s a slinking, mischievous irony to Burr’s advice. This is one of the wordiest musicals in the history of theater, a show so drunk on the exuberance of its language that it almost never stops to catch its breath. As much as it is a musical tour de force, “Hamilton” is a love letter to the English language’s tonal richness and malleability. So, when Hamilton prompts Burr for a translation in this early exchange, it teasingly registers as a meta-commentary on the artistic challenges facing the production — and as both a taunt and a dare.The “Hamilton” cast in Hamburg comes from 13 countries, including Brazil, the Philippines and the United States.Johan PerssonEver since a German-language version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Pulitzer and Tony-winning “Hamilton” was announced, a number of urgent questions have swirled about. How, in God’s name, could this, of all musicals, convince in German, a language with a vastly different syntax and repertoire of sounds? In a theater landscape that lacks diversity, where would producers find the mammoth multiracial cast the show requires? And why should German audiences even care about the story of an American founding father whose likeness on the $10 bill most here would not even recognize?A lot could have gone wrong. So I’m pleased to report that “Hamilton” has transferred to Hamburg with its verve, ingenuity, idealism and courage intact. The show here is every bit as electrifying as the one currently running on Broadway, and it gains unexpected depth from being performed in Germany, and auf Deutsch.Perhaps most fundamentally, this “Hamilton” is a masterpiece of translation. The translating team of Kevin Schroeder and Sera Finale spent four years working on the German version of Miranda’s densely wordy and rhythmically propulsive lyrics. (In the end, Miranda vetted the final version of each line himself). The result is some of the most vivid, fresh-faced and dynamic German I’ve heard in the theater in a long time. Schroeder and Finale approached their herculean assignment with unstinting resourcefulness and shrewd musical instinct.The punning, exuberant text results in a genuinely German version, a “Hamilton” eminently, entirely at home in the language. Nearly every word in translation rings true.This makes it possible for the large cast to convincingly inhabit both show’s musical landscape — with its mix of hip hop, R&B, pop and show tunes — as well as its inner world. Although David Korins’s brick-and-wood set is identical to the one used in the six English-language productions, directed by Thomas Kail and currently running worldwide, the performers succeed in making it their own. Indeed, the German cast seems to rejuvenate the 7-year-old show, whose haunting lighting by Howell Binkley, frequently stage rotations and energetic, near-constant dancing (Andy Blankenbuehler’s Tony Award-winning choreography) mirror the torrid flow of language.Gino Emnes, center, as Aaron Burr.Johan PerssonCasting “Hamilton” in German was nearly as difficult as translating it, and the talent scouts at Stage Entertainment, the show’s producer in Hamburg, have assembled an impressive cast whose members hail from 13 countries. The Broadway-caliber performers bring the requisite bluster, lyricism and wit to their assignments. And they all get that, fundamentally, “Hamilton” is a show about collective energy and cooperation — the hard work of democracy — rather than showboating.Benet Monteiro, who is from Brazil, plays Hamilton with wiry, coiled-up energy. He’s a man constantly overheated, which is what makes him tick, and is his tragic flaw. Gino Emnes, who is Dutch, is charismatic and elegant as Burr. Daniel Dodd-Ellis, an American, does double duty as Lafayette (with an outrageous French accent) and Jefferson. Another American, Charles Simmons, cut a striking figure as Washington.The late 18th-century America of “Hamilton” is very much a guy’s world, but the show has a trio of finely drawn female characters, sung here by the lyrically accomplished Berlin-born Ivy Quainoo (as Eliza Hamilton), the American-born Chasity Crisp (Angelica Schuyler) and the Filipino-Swiss actress Mae Ann Jorolan (as Peggy Schuyler/Maria Reynolds).If the translation is a rare artistic accomplishment, this casting feels like a milestone in this country. Theaters throughout the German-speaking world — both commercial theaters and the publicly funded playhouses common throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland — have not made the push for onstage diversity that companies in the United States and Britain have. And these countries are as not as ethnically homogeneous as they are often taken for; indeed, they are all becoming less white and more diverse. Even so, the theater scene here has been slow to adapt to reflect this emerging demographic reality. With few exceptions, the huge theater scene here remains overwhelmingly white and native-born.Charles Simmons, center, in the role of Washington.Johan Persson“Hamilton” in Germany takes on a different charge than it does in today’s America. To see the Broadway show is to be transported to a prelapsarian time before the wreckage of the Trump years, the murder of George Floyd and the Capitol Hill insurrection. In a painfully divided country, “Hamilton” can feel like a quaint artifact from a simpler time, an encapsulation of the hope, however naïve, for a colorblind society that celebrated individuality, difference and the contribution of immigrants.Sitting through the show in Hamburg, my impressions were different. Although the history in “Hamilton” is not Germany’s own, it leaped off the stage with force, immediacy and clarity. Who cares if local audiences only have a passing knowledge of the Federalist Papers or can’t tell James Madison from John Adams? “Hamilton’s” ability to transcend the specific cultural context of its inception is the ultimate proof that it is a great work of art with universal significance.Hearing Miranda’s work lent a new vitality through a new language — acted, sung and danced by a multiethnic, multinational cast, the like of which has never been assembled in Germany before — was edifying, riveting and inspiring. I hope that Hamburgers thrill to this German “Hamilton” as much as I did. They would be crazy not to.HamiltonAt the Operettenhaus in Hamburg, Germany, for an open-ended run; stage-entertainment.de. More

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      ‘Complicity’ Review: A Muddled #MeToo Drama

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      A new play by Diane Davis at the New Ohio Theater addresses the topic head-on, but clumsily, our critic writes.It has been about five years since the rise of the #MeToo movement. Debate remains on the cultural shifts it has wrought and whether these shifts will last.More laws are on the books now, more men have been jailed or fined. Others have been swiftly canceled. And then uncanceled almost as quickly. But what of the people who enabled these men?This is the subject of “Complicity,” a new play by Diane Davis at the New Ohio Theater in Greenwich Village, which addresses the topic head-on, but very clumsily, as in mismatched heels. The drama concerns, though never shows, Harry Wickstone, a legendary producer, and the hold he maintains over the women and men unlucky enough to orbit him. Two of them are Tig (Katie Broad), a naïve ingénue, and Lilia (Christian Paxton), her more seasoned co-star. Five terrible minutes in a luxury hotel room send these two women on radically different paths before the play forces them back together and then tragically apart.This brief description renders “Complicity” as a more coherent work than it truly is. Its story arcs need smoothing, its characters clarifying, even in their basic details. Tig has a sister, Sima (Nadia Sepsenwol), equally inexperienced, who somehow acts as her agent. What official role does Nigel (Zach Wegner), Harry’s fixer, play at the studio and what does he want of Lilia? (Tonia E. Anderson plays a television host: Christian Prins Coen and Ben Faigus appear in several small roles.) Davis struggles to illustrate how Hollywood works, how people work. But it’s less of a struggle than a slap fight, without clear winners.Katie Broad, left, and Nadia Sepsenwol, as sisters. The play is less of a struggle than a slap fight, without clear winners.Ashley Garrett PhotographyUnder Illana Stein’s direction, little gels. Some scenes, like a talk show sequence, are played for realism. Some, like the women’s various breakdowns, are played with an embarrassing expressionist bent. Rarely do these scenes convince. Overacting is rampant, presumably with Stein’s encouragement. Even when the actors aren’t speaking, they cycle through various expressions. At times the actors seem to be in entirely different productions — one playing a scene sincerely, one archly.It is an unhappy irony that in a play about collusion they could not collude on a house style. The design is more coherent, but only in the slapdash sense that the producers seem to have skimped on budget and time. Scenes are underlit, projections of time and place appear and disappear before they can be read. The cheap costumes are a puzzle with few satisfying solutions, the sets wincingly flimsy.Here is one more irony. Five years on, amid the noisy and bad-faith hand-wringing of whether the movement has gone too far or not far enough, the producer Harvey Weinstein’s case stands firm. So many women came forward and their stories were presented with such lucidity and compassion by journalists — New York Times journalists among them — that his guilt was substantiated, despite his great power.Women, finally, were believed. Punishment was meted out. As stories like these go, this stands as the surest, plainest, least ambiguous story imaginable. And even so, “Complicity” blunders so much in its telling.ComplicityThrough Oct. 15 at the New Ohio Theater, Manhattan; newohiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘1776,’ When All Men, and Only Men, Were Created Equal

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      A revival of the musical about the Declaration of Independence underlines the gender imbalance among the Founding Fathers — and everything else.A transformation that’s either wondrous or scandalous, depending on your taste, occurs less than a minute into the Roundabout Theater Company’s otherwise disappointing Broadway revival of “1776.”Barely a line has been uttered or a note sung when the performers, who identify as female, transgender and nonbinary, and are wearing more-or-less contemporary streetwear, hike up their black tights and white socks to simulate breeches, don buckle shoes in place of clunky boots, step into frock coats of various colonial cuts and become (thanks to Emilio Sosa’s outstanding costume design) our Founding Fathers. That includes Elizabeth A. Davis, who makes a very visibly pregnant Thomas Jefferson.Though some will see the casting — which is diverse not just in gender but also in race and ethnicity — as a stunt and a travesty, I’m in the wondrous camp. Neither the 1969 musical nor (as “Hamilton” has proved) history itself is so frail as to crumple under new ways of looking at our theatrical and national past. Anyway, if you prefer, you can simply ignore the fact that these fathers aren’t men, and focus — or try to — on the plot, which encompasses nothing less than the months of negotiations and maneuverings that led, just barely, to the Declaration of Independence.But if you are willing to allow yourself a double vision, as the directors Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus clearly hope, you can take independence a step further. The white maleness of the characters becomes a semi-translucent screen through which we see the many other people, including people like the cast, whom the Declaration never even considered.Sara Porkalob, center, as the pro-slavery Edward Rutledge, who dissects John Adams’s hypocrisy in the song “Molasses to Rum.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor me, that double vision is the best thing about the production, which opened on Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. In theory, it deepens the ideas being batted about in the hot, fetid, fly-infested Philadelphia summer. So the “obnoxious and disliked” John Adams, as played by Crystal Lucas-Perry, who is Black, is not just an abolitionist on principle but in essence. And when Sara Porkalob, as the pro-slavery Edward Rutledge, dissects Adams’s hypocrisy in the song “Molasses to Rum” — showing how the North benefits from the slave trade as well as the South — the fact that she is Filipino American both intensifies and complicates the argument.If that sort of complication were itself great theater and not just a promising premise, this “1776” might be amazing. That the production is instead so overpumped and overplayed as to be hardly comprehensible is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the musical, which is plenty complicated as written — if not so much in its few and often trite songs, by Sherman Edwards, then at least in Peter Stone’s book, a masterpiece of condensation without diminishment.At first dismissed as Bicentennial-era pageantry, “1776” has survived all the ensuing upheavals of American history precisely because it is, within the confines of the genre, remarkably sophisticated about the forces at play in forging a nation from colonies harboring antithetical philosophies — and in forging a musical from similarly unlikely and conflicting raw materials. An Encores! production in 2016, which featured a racially diverse cast but the usual gender assignments, showed it could be modern and yet thoughtful and moving.But the current revival seems interested in the cast’s experience at the expense of the audience’s. I can understand that impulse, especially when creating space on a major stage for actors who rarely get it.Still, the best interpretations are those that, regardless of the performer’s professional history, find feeling in the specific actions of the text rather than in their personal feelings of exclusion from it. The Broadway veteran Carolee Carmello thus creates the character of the Pennsylvania holdout John Dickinson mostly by holding back on the outrage and offering smiles and politesse in its place. And as Abigail Adams, the Broadway newcomer Allyson Kaye Daniel is gently firm and dryly touching, achieving a lovely, modest balance in those contradictions.Carolee Carmello, center, as the Pennsylvania holdout John Dickinson. She’s joined by, from left: Oneika Phillips, Gisella Adisa, Porkalob, Sushma Saha, Nancy Anderson and Eryn LeCroy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore often, though, the performances are so vastly histrionic and unchecked by the social situation (this is Congress, after all) that they seem inside-out. Adams jumps on tables to make points. Patrena Murray so emphasizes Benjamin Franklin’s winky sententiousness that he seems like a joke, not a brilliant tactician. Eryn LeCroy makes of “He Plays the Violin” — a dainty minuet in which Martha Jefferson sings of her love for Thomas — a full-on psychodrama.It does not help that the new arrangements and orchestrations, aiming to refresh the songs’ profiles in the way the casting is meant to refresh the story, merely make them muddy — and make many of the lyrics unintelligible.If that’s not always a great loss, it certainly detracts from the show’s most powerful number, “Momma, Look Sharp.” A simple minor-key air sung from the point of view of a dead young soldier, it is performed here (by Salome B. Smith) as a belty anthem, complete with a moaning and heaving ensemble and a figure apparently representing Momma. (She’s looking! She’s crying!) When performers mime the emotions we should be having, the storytelling contract has been broken.Nor do Page (who is also the show’s choreographer) and Paulus (who has directed Broadway revivals of “Pippin” and “Porgy and Bess”) show much interest in the show’s humor. As some of it is ribald and sexist — probably accurately so — they prefer to defuse it by winking as if to say: Don’t worry, we don’t mean any harm. What a wasted opportunity! In dealing with such material, a nonmale cast might mean harm in the best way, forcing us to think about the character of men in their time and ours, and providing the kind of added value a regendered revival seemed to promise.Instead we get subtracted value. I don’t mean for the cast, who deserve the opportunity, or even for the theater as an industry and an ecosystem. As the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar said in a New York Times round-table discussion about putting history onstage, there is merit in “moving people into the center of narratives who have never been there for the public to see.” I agree. And if those narratives sometimes fail, well, so do most others; we might as well be open to everything.But underlining one’s progressiveness a thousand times, as this “1776” does, will not actually convey it better; rather it turns characters into cutouts and distracts from the ideas it means to promote. The musical even shows us that. It’s only when Adams stops yelling and starts plotting that he begins to turn the tide toward ratification. Just so, theater makers should have enough faith in the principles of equity and diversity to let them speak for themselves. Are they not, as someone once put it, self-evident?1776Through Jan. 8 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More