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      ‘A Perfect Party’ That Celebrates All Its Guests

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      Trusty Sidekick Theater Company has created an outdoor adventure for young people on the autism spectrum.Like many festive occasions, “A Perfect Party for Trees” involves giving and receiving presents: a pine cone, a jar of found objects, a song, even a badger and a bird (both are inventively portrayed by puppets). But perhaps the greatest gift this new play offers its audience is intangible: the freedom to be themselves.The show’s producer, the Trusty Sidekick Theater Company, has created an interactive woodland adventure for children ages 5 and older who are on the autism spectrum. In the show, which is filled with music, young spectators become part of the cast and can participate — or not — while happily defying the constraining conventions of traditional theater. Sit still? This production is a promenade. Be quiet? Please sing along. Don’t get your hands dirty? The plot of “A Perfect Party” includes treasure boxes, filled with trinkets and real dirt, that children can dig into.“It feels like a celebration of this audience instead of a segregation of this audience,” Leigh Walter, Trusty Sidekick’s executive creative producer and the play’s director, said in a recent interview with the show’s creative team. “It’s us, like, going into a public space and throwing a party like we’re throwing a party.”City parks provide the convivial setting. Originally scheduled to debut in June on the Autism Nature Trail at Letchworth State Park in Castile, N.Y. — a coronavirus outbreak in the cast ended that plan — “A Perfect Party” will now have multiple performances, all free, on Sunday at the Little Island Storytelling Festival in Manhattan and Sept. 23 to 25 at Brooklyn Bridge Park. (Email registration is strongly encouraged, though walk-ups are allowed, space permitting.)John Rankin III, left, as the Beekeeper, and Jesse Greenberg as the Bear.Leah ReddyThe show is a birthday tribute to the spirit of the forest. Two quirky characters — the Beekeeper (John Rankin III) and the Bear (Jesse Greenberg) — join forces with Ms. Branch (Naeemah Z. Maddox), a cheerful delivery person who transports both the birthday presents that the cast and the audience create and the offerings that the forest spirit unexpectedly leaves.Arriving in acorn-shaped containers, the spirit’s gifts include the Badger, assembled on the spot from a sock, a cushion and a couple of back scratchers, and the Thrush, whose components are a gourd, a handkerchief and a penny whistle. Designed by Eric Wright, a founder of the Puppet Kitchen, these transformative animals underscore that objects, like people, can play many roles.“We’re trying to create this perfect party for the spirit to come out and visit us,” Walter said. “And all along the way as well, our characters are sort of stumbling along in this story of self-acceptance, really of discovering themselves.”Trusty Sidekick is undergoing its own process of self-discovery. A pioneer in theater for audiences with autism — it has created two such commissions for Lincoln Center, whose Big Umbrella Festival for children on the spectrum is also this weekend — the company is staking new territory with this mobile, open-air play.“I wanted to see what we could do to give all the characters a little story arc and have the audience move with that story arc,” said Marty Allen, the show’s playwright.Because the spectators change locations twice during each 45-minute performance, Greenberg and Maddox, who are also the production’s composers, chose percussive, acoustic instruments that are easily transportable, including a kalimba (thumb piano), a pandereta (hand-held drum) and a West African bell. (At one point, children can choose from a variety of small instruments to join in.) The main musical source, however, is a lightweight glockenspiel, which Greenberg plays with yarn mallets, yielding a softer, more ethereal sound.Cast and audience members celebrating with a collective interactive puppet, the Spirit of the Trees, in a rehearsal of the show’s finale.Leah Reddy “We definitely wanted textures and timbres that would be clear, but not too intense,” he said.Reactions to sound, however, were just one consideration. In creating theater for audiences who might find certain sensations stressful, Trusty Sidekick not only tried out aspects of the show in classrooms of autistic children but also, for the first time, brought people on the spectrum onto the creative team.“There’s the common saying, ‘If you’ve met one person on the autism spectrum, you’ve met one person on the autism spectrum,’” said Andrew M. Duff, the play’s associate director, who was diagnosed when he was 2. In addition to making audience members comfortable by incorporating repetitive gestures and rhythms into the show, Trusty Sidekick will email registering families an intake form about their children’s individual sensitivities. The company can then take the responses into account when performing.Every moment of interactivity is also a choice: Audience members who don’t want to dig with their fingers can use small shovels or simply “supervise”; those who don’t want the treasure boxes’ unearthed trinkets to become gifts can hang onto them during the show.Children might even “chuck the box and dirt,” Duff said. He added, “I think my job, more than anything, was just to encourage our cast and crew to not only be prepared for that, but to look for moments of encouragement in these styles of play.”“A Perfect Party” ultimately teaches that perfection is illusory: In life, the different, the unusual, the flawed can often be the most prized. When a speech to that effect was cut during the play’s development, Twig Hu, the show’s 18-year-old assistant director, who is also on the spectrum, asked that it be restored. “It was important for people to hear,” she said.Trusty Sidekick, which also produces theater for general audiences, wants these children to know that they won’t be judged. However they choose to participate, Allen said, “there’s just not a wrong way to be here with us.” More

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      ‘Heathers: The Musical’ Review: For the Cliques

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      This musical may lack the 1989 movie’s nihilism, but the gags still work and the songs are great — who are we to quibble?The wicked comedy “Heathers” (1989) has not mellowed with age. To the contrary, the film’s acerbic description of deception, murder and high school cliques feels even more brazenly arch in our age of catfishing and banalized violence. Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s musical adaptation pulls its punches compared to the original but it still has some bite, and a quiver of great songs. The show, which opened Off Broadway in 2014, has even acquired an international following of its own — this Roku Channel capture, directed by Andy Fickman, was filmed in London’s West End in May.As in the movie, nice-girl Veronica (Ailsa Davidson) enjoys a brief alliance with a trio of queen bees all named Heather and led by the imperial Heather Chandler (Maddison Firth) — they get the best number, the brilliantly glam-pop “Candy Store.” Eventually Veronica joins forces with J.D. (Simon Gordon), the manipulative loner who is the musical’s biggest casualty: the story hinges on him being unabashedly nihilistic but both the show and Gordon’s portrayal are too timid. Vivian Panka, on the other hand, easily commands center stage as a robotically intense Heather Duke, and nails her solo, “Never Shut Up Again.” That new song is among the changes Murphy and O’Keefe have made since the New York version — some underlining Veronica’s agency, others sanitizing a few lyrics (though there are still healthy helpings of the indispensable profanity). But despite these flashes of timidity and an overlong running time, the musical is a fun romp with plenty of, ahem, killer tunes.Heathers: The MusicalNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. Watch on the Roku Channel. More

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      Plays of Helplessness, and Hope, as the Planet Burns

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      New works by major German-language dramatists at the Kunstfest Weimar festival tackle ethical questions at a moment of environmental anxiety.WEIMAR, Germany — Once again, summer brought with it a barrage of unnatural natural catastrophes: floods, forest fires, droughts, deadly heat waves and mass die-offs of fish and fowl. Much of what climate scientists foretold is coming true. It was against this background that the Kunstfest Weimar, a late summer event that is the largest contemporary arts festival in eastern Germany, took place with an emphasis on climate justice and our collective responsibility to strive for a better world.Helpless in the face of these environmental calamities, many of us are probably feeling a measure of “solastalgia.” That term was coined in 2004 by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who defined it as “a type of homesickness or melancholia that you feel when you’re at home and your home environment is changing around you in ways that you feel are profoundly negative.” Put more succinctly, it is “a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’”“Solastalgia” is also the name of a new play by Thomas Köck that had its premiere last week at the Kunstfest, held annually since 1990 in this small, culturally rich city and shrewdly curated this year by Rolf C. Hemke. A coproduction between the festival and Schauspiel Frankfurt, “Solastalgia” is an artful and elegant lamentation about the state of our planet. Köck, a young Austrian theater maker, finds an arrestingly poetic register for this meditation on the grief and panic that are common responses to seeing nature perish. Essentially a 70-minute-long monologue that Köck, who also directs the energetic and music-filled production, distributes among three actresses, it is by turns humorous, absurd, surreal and horrifying.On a simple, semicircular set, the actresses Miriam Schiweck, Katharina Linder and Mateja Meded, in costumes that seem stitched together from garbage, declaim Köck’s fragmented text, which contains ruminations on Germany’s increasingly ravaged forests and a narrative about a former builder for whom solastalgia becomes not only an existential but also a physical malady. Köck’s text is lyrical and poetic, with rhythms and cadences of overlapping dialogue creating musical effects.For artists who set out to make works about burning issues like climate change, there is always a danger of sliding into righteousness, or sermonizing. Yet there’s a fundamental openness to Köck’s play that prevents it from becoming propagandistic. How ought we mourn the destruction of our habitat? How best do we live with the knowledge that the forests, beaches and oceans we love are vanishing? “Solastalgia” offers few answers, but its barrage of powerful images and incantatory language creates room for poetic and philosophical reflection.Ylva Stenberg, holding sign, as Greta Thunberg in “Welcome to Paradise Lost,” directed by Andrea Moses.Candy WelzThe ecological outrage and anxiety at the core of “Solastalgia” were also central to “Welcome to Paradise Lost,” a musical theater work that might best be described as an immersive environmental agitprop Gesamtkunstwerk. During the performance, the audience follows a cast of actors, singers and musicians through various indoor and outdoor locations in a former electrical power plant on the edge of Weimar’s historic center. Unfortunately, much of “Welcome to Paradise Lost,” adapted from a recent play by Falk Richter, a leading German dramatist, has a hectoring tone that makes it less compelling than the inventive production, directed by Andrea Moses.Although the direct source material for “Welcome to Paradise Lost” is the Persian verse epic “The Conference of the Birds,” in which winged creatures gather to seek an enlightened sovereign, Richter’s text also nods to Aristophanes and Alfred Hitchcock. In Farid ud-Din Attar’s 12th-century poem, the birds travel through a succession of allegorically named valleys where they are confronted with human vices and stupidities. In Richter’s version, the Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg (sung by the young Swedish soprano Ylva Stenberg) guides a chorus of 14 youngsters wearing rubber bird masks on the path of resistance and uprising.As Greta leads her panicked flock, alarmed over the loss of their habitat, their methods evolve. Impassioned yet peaceful gatherings reminiscent of Fridays for Future give way to the disruptive tactics associated with Extinction Rebellion in an exciting smoke- and flare-filled outdoor scene where the birds plot terroristic revenge on humankind. But for all the undeniable energy of the production and the performances, “Welcome to Paradise Lost” isn’t exactly the climate change opera we’ve been waiting for.The music by the local composer Jörn Arnecke has moments of arresting lyricism yet is just as often pedestrian. Most crucially, perhaps, the libretto itself, containing numerous outside texts, including Thunberg’s “How dare you” speech to the United Nations, neither hangs together nor gives any sense of a narrative or a poetic progression. It is loopier and more freewheeling than “Solastalgia” but also has the subtlety of a cudgel, thanks to sloganizing and finger wagging.Shifting registers, the Kunstfest turned from environmental alarm to the scourge of right-wing radicalism in Germany.The cast of “Werwolfkommandos,” directed by Marie Schwesinger.Candy Welz“Werwolfkommandos,” a sobering piece of docudrama directed by Marie Schwesinger, is an almost clinical probe into two recent trials that roiled the nation: the first, of a neo-Nazi who in 2019 assassinated Walter Lübcke, a regional official in the city of Kassel; the second, of the German military officer who had posed as a Syrian refugee and was planning a string of assassinations at the time of his arrest in 2017.Rage-filled yet coolly dispassionate, “Werwolfkommandos” consists largely of verbal reconstructions of the trials. Dressed monochromatically, four steely actors bring sang-froid to the courtroom proceedings. The way the actors keep sifting through the evidence, the arguments and the timelines, and the minutiae of the proceedings becomes infuriating and exasperating, which is, of course, precisely the point. At the end of the production, the house lights go dark, and the actors, their faces uncannily illumined by the glow of their cellphones, recite headlines about right-wing extremism. The night of the premiere, the most recent news item was just three days old.Right-wing terror has a particular significance in Weimar. You have only to venture 20 minutes outside of the picturesque old city, with its monuments to Goethe and Schiller, to arrive at the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald. To travel the six miles between them is to be confronted with the proximity of culture and barbarism that is inscribed in German history.An installation by the American artist Aura Rosenberg, which is part of the Kunstfest’s program, offers a poetic reflection on Walter Benjamin’s essay “On the Concept of History,” which famously interprets a print by the Bauhaus artist Paul Klee, “Angelus Novus,” as the emblem of history, unable to turn away from the catastrophes of the past as it is blown into the future.At the center of Rosenberg’s installation, on view at the Bauhaus Museum Weimar until Oct. 31, is a multilayered video work, “Angel of Paradise,” that literalizes Benjamin’s vision of history as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” in a trippy computer-animated collage. And yet, at the center of the rubble of civilization heaped together onscreen, we find visual echoes of Benjamin’s “spark of hope in the past” that drives us to imagine a brighter tomorrow, despite the calamities of history.A similar hope courses through the works of artists invited by the Kunstfest Weimar to share their theatrical responses to our deeply imperfect present.Solastalgia. Directed by Thomas Köck. Sept. 23 through Oct. 21 at Schauspiel Frankfurt.Welcome to Paradise Lost. Directed by Andrea Moses. Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar. Sept. 18.Werwolfkommandos. Directed by Marie Schwesinger. Oct. 20 through Nov. 4 at Landungsbrücken Frankfurt. More

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      Little Amal Arrives in New York, With a Message of Hope and Humanity

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      The 12-foot-tall Syrian refugee puppet traveled from Turkey to Britain last year. Now, she will spend nearly three weeks in the five boroughs taking part in numerous events.As her head peeked out from above metal barriers, Little Amal widened her eyes as she took in the arrivals terminal at Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday. She looked left, then right, clutching her big green suitcase with its rainbow and sun stickers. She was, as newcomers to New York City so often are, a little nervous, and a little lost.But then, some music. As Little Amal lumbered through the terminal, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and its children’s chorus began to perform music of welcome: the final chorus from Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi’s early life, “Satyagraha” — whose title translates loosely to “resistance.”Amal, a 10-year-old Syrian refugee puppet, appeared transfixed by the music — much like the many travelers strolling by with their suitcases appeared transfixed by the 12-foot-tall puppet suddenly towering before them. Still, she was trepidatious, a tad reluctant to approach the orchestra. At least, that is, until a chorus member — a girl wearing a sunflower yellow shirt — went up to her and took her by the hand.Amal and her puppeteers made their way through Terminal 4, and were welcomed by members of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and its children’s choir.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesAmal has traveled across Europe and met with Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Now she has made her way to the Big Apple with big plans. For the rest of this month, she will tour all five boroughs, visiting with children, artists, politicians and community leaders as she begins a search for her uncle, and, her creators hope, helps highlight the experience, hardship and beauty of millions of displaced refugees.Her extended walk through New York City will include more than 50 events of welcome like the one at the airport on Wednesday. She will pick flowers at a community garden in Queens, walk across the High Bridge in the Bronx, ride the Staten Island Ferry, dance in the streets of Washington Heights and find herself amid a Syrian wedding procession in Bay Ridge.“She will render visibility to something people don’t want to see,” said Amir Nizar Zuabi, the artistic director of the Walk Productions, which is presenting the public art involving Amal, along with St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.Amal has already traveled quite a distance — 5,000 miles from Turkey to Britain last year — in search of her mother. And on Wednesday, when she stepped into the arrivals terminal she was greeted by a top-flight welcome committee.Embarking on a U.S. walk: Amal will participate in over 50 events across the five boroughs through Oct. 2.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Opera is about dreaming and it’s also about reflecting our world,” Nézet-Séguin told The New York Times before the welcome. “Especially in the past years and months, the Met has been showing how important it is to welcome everyone to our opera house and also to really, truly respond to our times and connect with everyone in the world.”“I know this is going to be a very moving event,” he added.For those unfamiliar with Little Amal’s story and her journey, here is a look at who Amal is, where she has been, where she is going — and why.The making of AmalAmal, whose name means “hope” in Arabic, is operated by up to four people, including one person on stilts. Designed by the Handspring Puppet Company based in South Africa, Amal is delicate — her arms and upper body are made of bamboo canes — and she sometimes requires maintenance.The puppet is the protagonist in what is ostensibly a traveling theater project meant to remind a news-fatigued public about the children fleeing violence and persecution. Syrian refugees garnered considerable attention in 2015 and 2016 as they fled the country. The Walk in Europe followed a route similar to the one taken by some Syrians who fled.As it happened, Amal began her European walk in the summer of 2021, shortly after the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, which spurred a fresh migration crisis in Europe. Over four months, Amal crossed the continent, stopping at refugee camps, town squares and the Royal Opera House in London. To date, she has been part of more than 190 events in more than 80 towns, cities and villages in 12 countries.Amal and her puppeteers in Calais, France, last October. It was one of many stops she made during a four-month, 5,000-mile journey from Turkey to Britain.Elliott Verdier for The New York Times“We were really taken by the amount of people who took to the streets to welcome her,” Zuabi said during a recent interview conducted via Zoom. “It became very clear that while the governments are talking on a certain level on this issue, the people of the cities are willing to engage.”Now Amal is continuing her journey in New York.“New York’s ethos — or at least the way it perceives itself — is this great human endeavor created by wave on wave of migration,” Zuabi said. “New Yorkers celebrate what they have achieved through this melting pot of migrations and how stories have amalgamated for growth and for culture. Taking Amal here was a way to investigate that and also investigate the United States in a very particular moment.“How do you want to welcome her?” he added. “I truly hope that in this very busy, very hectic city, people will take a moment and come and be empathetic and reach out to each other through this stranger.”As was the case in Europe, many of Little Amal’s stops are planned and include visits with artistic and institutional leaders; other encounters may be more spontaneous. And there are plans in the works, officials say, for a later trip across America.“It’s one big theater show happening for free on your streets,” Zuabi said. “You don’t need to travel far to a fancy theater and get dressed — you can walk down in your pajamas if you want.”July 2021: TurkeyIn Adana, Turkey, children flew flocks of homemade birds around Amal.Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York TimesAmal’s first stop was in Gaziantep, a city in southern Turkey just 40 miles from the Syrian border. It’s where many Syrian refugees have settled. At one point, she visited a park where Syrian children sang to her; another group gave her a handmade trunk, filled with gifts for her journey.August 2021: GreeceAmal met some resistance in Greece. She had planned to visit the Greek World Heritage site of Meteora, known for Orthodox monasteries perched upon towering rocks. But a local council banned her scheduled picnic on the grounds that a “Muslim doll from Syria” shouldn’t be performing in a space important to Greek Orthodox believers. (Amal’s religion has never been specified.)Later, in Larissa, in central Greece, people pelted Amal with eggs, fruit and even stones. Then in Athens, her planned events drew protests and counterprotests.September 2021: RomeDuring a visit to Vatican City to meet the pope, Amal embraced a bronze statue in St. Peter’s Square that depicts 140 migrants, including Jews fleeing the Nazis.Remo Casilli/ReutersUpon arriving in Rome, Amal went to the Vatican, strolled through St. Peter’s Square, hugged a bronze statue depicting 140 migrants and met Pope Francis, a vocal supporter of refugees. She proceeded to the Teatro India, one of Rome’s most well-known theaters, where paintings, collages and digital works by the Syrian artist Tammam Azzam flashed up on a wall behind her. The works were nightmarish visions of the war-torn home she’d left behind.October 2021: FranceAt a town square, with locals leaning out of apartment windows, Amal danced to the music performed by a group of refugee and migrant rappers. Then she headed for the beach, where she was joined by 30 other puppets her size. Joyce DiDonato, the American opera singer, offered a serenade.November 2021: EnglandTo close out her long journey, Amal went to Manchester, where thousands of fans waited for her at the Castlefield Bowl, many expecting her to be reunited with her mother. As she took her final steps, a flock of wooden puppet swallows surrounded her and then, in a burst of smoke, an image of a woman’s face appeared — her mother in spirit, if not person.“Daughter, you’ve got so far — so very far away from home — and it’s cold, so stay warm,” a gentle voice intoned in Arabic. “I’m proud of you.”May 2022: UkraineSince completing her 2021 journey, Amal has traveled to Lviv and to several cities in Poland to visit Ukrainian refugee children and families who were forced to flee after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Sept. 14 and 21: QueensTodd Heisler/The New York TimesAfter her arrival at Kennedy Airport on Wednesday, Little Amal will set out for Jamaica, Queens, with her big suitcase. She may get some help navigating the city from her friends at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. But how will she fare in Astoria when night falls?Little Amal will return to Queens on Sept. 21 to visit Corona and Jackson Heights.Sept. 15 to Oct. 1: ManhattanLittle Amal will not leave New York without seeing all of the sights. While in Manhattan, she has planned visits to Grand Central Terminal, the New York Public Library, Times Square, Lincoln Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral.Later in her trip, she will go to City Hall, and visit Washington Heights, Harlem, Chinatown and several other neighborhoods.Sept. 19 to Oct. 2: BrooklynAs it turns out, Amal has some roots in Brooklyn: In 2018, St. Ann’s Warehouse presented an Off Broadway play, “The Jungle,” that introduced the character of Amal.The play will return to St. Ann’s early next year.“We left like we needed her here,” said Susan Feldman, the president and artistic director of St. Ann’s Warehouse, an organizer of Little Amal’s New York walk.“If you ask me what is the best thing to do, you want to walk with her,” Feldman said. “The best times are when people first see her.”During her time in the borough, Amal will make stops at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Green-Wood Cemetery and several Brooklyn neighborhoods. She will also make multiple visits to St. Ann’s Warehouse, including on her last day in the city, on Oct. 2.Sept. 25 and 26: The BronxAmal will visit Mott Haven in search of the waterfront. She is also interested in crossing the High Bridge but may need help from the community to overcome her fear of heights.Sept. 30: Staten IslandAmal will ride the Staten Island Ferry, and head to Snug Harbor, where she will be welcomed by a parade.Alex Marshall contributed reporting. More

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      Satires Like ‘Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul’ Reveal the Art of Acting Faithful

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      In films like “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul” and shows like “The Righteous Gemstones,” pageantry is the top priority.In church satires there’s always a scene in which a ritual, tradition or show of faith becomes a grand spectacle. The joke isn’t the faith itself but the performance of faith — and a performance of virtue, even when that’s far from the truth. If you can pull off that show without a hitch, heavenly paradise may not be guaranteed. But worldly riches likely will be.In the movie “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul,” which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is both now in theaters and streaming on Peacock, the first lady of a once-popular Southern Baptist megachurch and her pastor husband aim to make a grand comeback after a sexual harassment scandal. When they fail to commit to the performance that in the past had brought success to them and their church, they endure a fall from grace.Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown) is the king and shepherd of Wander to Greater Paths church, where he employs his altar like a stage, delivering rousing sermons during which the spirit may cause him to quiver, shake and strip right out of his church clothes. He sits on a regal throne alongside his wife, Trinitie (Regina Hall). Together they maintain a costly image; Trinitie treats herself to an expensive, elaborate church hat from a shop in the mall, while Lee-Curtis shows off his expansive collection of designer shoes and suits, which he claims helps him with his ministry.Written and directed by Adamma Ebo, the film focuses on Trinitie and how she deals with the consequences of her husband’s sexual indiscretions with members of their congregation. Trinitie already has to put on one kind of performance, as a first lady who supports her husband, honoring their marital vows even when he has dishonored his. But she is also delivering an additional performance: as her husband’s beard. When the film reveals that Lee-Curtis’s transgressions were not with women but with young men, it juxtaposes this reveal with flashback scenes of Lee-Curtis ardently condemning homosexuality to a cheering congregation, showing that he was speaking through a now-transparent screen of hypocrisy and self-hate.The most striking part of the film, however, is how it reads as a bleak, cringe-worthy tragedy rather than a comedy; close-ups of Trinitie’s face show her cracking beneath the surface, and her exasperation and even resentment of her husband form visible watermarks on the perfect portrait of marriage they’ve constructed. Bedroom scenes show Lee-Curtis’s lack of sexual interest in Trinitie, despite her attempts at intimacy. And when Trinitie goes to her mother for marriage advice, she is brusquely shut down, told that even in the current circumstances she can only be a good Christian woman if she stands with her husband until death. Take it from a theater critic: There’s nothing more depressing than watching an unwilling actor trapped on a stage.Walton Goggins on the television series “The Righteous Gemstones.”HBO MaxThis concept is at the heart of many other church satires. In the hilarious HBO comedy series “The Righteous Gemstones,” a family of megachurch royals have their services broadcast on TV, and their masses and church events are as gaudy as festivals; the family even owns a Gemstones-themed amusement park on their sprawling multimansion estate. These Bible rock stars are not just TV preachers, but also recording artists: The siblings Aimee-Leigh Gemstone (Jennifer Nettles) and Baby Billy (Walton Goggins) first rose to fame with their touring religious musical act.In last year’s obscure — and utterly unwatchable — satirical faith-based comedy “Church People,” which features Thor Ramsey, two of the Baldwins (Stephen, William), one of the N*Syncers (Joey Fatone) and Turk from “Scrubs” (Donald Faison), an eccentric megachurch pastor (Michael Monks) comes up with new antics to up the church’s popular appeal, to the chagrin of Guy (Ramsey), a celebrity youth pastor. When a real-life crucifixion becomes the plan for the church’s Easter service, Guy aims to stop the proceedings and return the congregation to the Gospel teachings.Ebony Marshall-Oliver, left, and Cleo King in the play “Chicken & Biscuits.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe religious pageantry in these movies and TV shows is only one part of the satire; at the root is the underlying hypocrisy of the characters. In “Honk for Jesus,” it’s Lee-Curtis’s predatory grooming. In Douglas Lyons’s church comedy play “Chicken & Biscuits,” which premiered on Broadway last fall, it’s the newly deceased patriarch and pastor who, his family finds out during his funeral, has a few sinful secrets of his own. In “The Righteous Gemstones,” it’s Baby Billy and Eli (John Goodman), the iron-fisted commander of the church and the Gemstone family, each acting as upstanding shepherds of the faith to achieve money and celebrity while escaping the more unsavory parts of their past. It’s the immoral — and sometimes illegal — activities of Jesse Gemstone (Danny McBride) and Judy Gemstone (Edi Patterson).And the show’s wackiest story lines are offered courtesy of Eli’s youngest son, Kelvin (Adam Devine), who finds creative ways to fit his repressed homosexuality into absurd pageants of religious ceremony — like forming a group of muscular all-male, scantily clad disciples, the God Squad, who resolve conflicts by having cross-bearing contests.In the sharp, Tony-winning Broadway musical “A Strange Loop,” an usher named Usher is trying to write a “big, Black and queer” musical — the very show we’re watching — despite the disapproval of his parents and the unhelpful intrusions of his inner thoughts. His mother begs him to “write a nice, clean Tyler Perry-like gospel play.” Usher resentfully sings about writing the shallow, stereotypical artwork his mother wants, and near the end of “A Strange Loop,” the whole production transforms into an over-exaggerated, “overblown yet false display / just like in a gospel play,” Usher sings.Larry Owens, center, in the Broadway musical “A Strange Loop.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKnowing that his sexuality is at odds with the church values to which his mother subscribes, he puts on a performance mocking the sometimes cruel and exclusionary standards many church communities hoist onto their faithful. A threatening lit-up cross appears on set, where Usher condemns himself in a fiery sermon of self-hate while his inner thoughts appear as robed choir members singing a refrain of “AIDS is God’s punishment.” He tells his mother this is the only way he can write a gospel play, but she misreads his scathing satire as truth, tells him he can still save himself from the threat of homosexuality.But in the show’s final scenes, Usher drops the mock gospel play as his thoughts confront him about his intentions, how he claims he’s showing the audience “real life.” “And real life is making hateful anti-Black caricatures in a Tyler Perry-style gospel play?” one asks.So much of the meta show is about traversing the line between reality and fiction, and how we write ourselves in the stories of our lives — when we make ourselves valiant or pitiful, strong or weak, the hero or the villain. Usher can’t write his mother’s gospel play because it contradicts his identity; he’s unwilling to be dishonest, even within a fake play within a musical about a writer writing a musical.One of the saddest moments in “Honk for Jesus” sounds like it should be one of the funniest: Lee-Curtis goads Trinitie into praise-miming (which is, inexplicably, a real practice) on the side of the road outside their church in a desperate attempt to attract congregants. Hall deadpans to the camera, in her elaborate pastel-yellow church dress and matching hat, her face caked in a thick white-and-black mime makeup. Trinitie was once queen of the pulpit, and now she’s just the jester. She and Curtis-Lee stand side by side in front of the camera, but her rage is palpable, even beneath the calm facade. He uneasily tries to carry on with the show — to reestablish himself as the good-guy pastor — but his scene partner seems to have gone mute. More

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      Alan Cumming Uses Dance to Get at the Truth of Robert Burns

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      GLASGOW — Rain pours down, thunder growls, lightning flickers. Fragments of melancholy melody emerge from the tumult, and a lone, silhouetted figure appears onstage, moving his upper body in sinuous circles, entwining his arms and gesturing with slow deliberation. Then he walks forward, opens his arms and smiles impishly. “Here am I,” he announces.Here he is: The Scottish poet Robert Burns, embodied by the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in the one-man dance-theater show “Burn,” coming to the Joyce Theater on Sept. 20.Conceived by Cumming and the choreographer Steven Hoggett, “Burn,” which had its premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival in August, is an unlikely hybrid: A movement-focused show performed by a famous actor with no dance training, about a man whose medium was words.Why dance? Why Burns?Cumming answered those questions at some length a few days after that Glasgow performance, in a video interview from Aberdeen, where — between performances of “Burn” — he was filming the second season of a Scottish travel series with the actress Miriam Margolyes. To boil it down: He loves a challenge, he loves dance even more, and he had been thinking about taking on another physically demanding role since reprising the role of the M.C. in “Cabaret” eight years ago. (He won a Tony Award for the performance in 1998.)Vicki Manderson, left, did the choreography with Hoggett (back to camera). Here, they are rehearsing with Cumming iin Glasgow.Tommy Ga-Ken Wan“When that ended in 2015, I was 50,” he said. “I felt sad to think I’m never going to be as fit as this again, this is it. Then I slowly began to think, No, I have one more thing left in me.” He added, “I put it into the universe.”The universe responded. In 2018, he went backstage at the Joyce Theater after watching “The Tenant,” choreographed by Arthur Pita, the partner of his old friend and flatmate Matthew Bourne. While chatting with Pita, Cumming was introduced to Linda Shelton, the executive director of the Joyce. “She asked me if I had any dancey ideas,” Cumming said. “I do!,” he answered.He had been thinking about Burns at that time, he said, prompted in part by writing an autobiography and revealing dark aspects of his own past. “It made me think how we don’t have a holistic picture of our icons,” he said. “Burns is everywhere in Scotland — on statues, milk bottles, chocolate boxes — he is a sort of Scottish DNA wallpaper. But we don’t really know who he is. Somehow, at that moment, the two things, Burns and dance, merged in my mind.”He told the Joyce team that he wanted to do a dance-theater piece about the poet with the choreographer Steven Hoggett. But he neglected to mention he hadn’t yet asked Hoggett.“It’s true,” Hoggett said in a video interview from New York, where he is working on a coming production of “Sweeney Todd.” The two men — friends since 2007, when they collaborated on the National Theater of Scotland’s “The Bacchae” — were having dinner one night when Cumming asked him what he thought about the idea. “I said it sounded fantastic and he should do it,” Hoggett recounted. “He said, ‘Good, because you are doing it, too.’”Cumming wanted to work with Hoggett, he said, because the choreographer comes from an experimental background (he founded the physical theater group Frantic Assembly) and has extensive experience working with actors. “He brings that energy and aesthetic to the more commercial work,” Cumming said, “a more narrative-led, Pina Bausch-y way of letting bodies tell a story.”Cumming, right, said that Hoggett, left, brings “a more narrative-led, Pina Bausch-y way of letting bodies tell a story.”Tommy Ga-Ken WanCumming and Hoggett began a residency at the National Theater of Scotland, which produced the show with the Edinburgh International Festival and the Joyce. Although their first idea, Hoggett said, was to look at Scottish male identity, they changed focus entirely after Kirsteen McCue, a professor of Scottish literature and a director of the Center for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, talked to them about the poet. McCue suggested they read his letters and the research of her colleague, Moira Hansen, who posits that Burns might have suffered from bipolar disorder.“They guided us to his mental health, to his relationship with his patron Frances Dunlop, to things that aren’t so sexy, but fascinating,” Cumming said. “When you read the letters — and there are two thick volumes — you realize he is much more fragile, more florid, sometimes obsequious to rich people, a bit stalker-y to women, often depressed.”The men began to work on movement that could evoke Burns’s states of mind, and in the process started to “find out what Alan’s body did and didn’t do,” Hoggett said. “He wasn’t going to learn a rond de jambe,” he added, referring to a step in the basic ballet vocabulary.Instead they did exercises around some of the content of the letters: farming, writing, joy, love, lust, depression. “What happens to the body when you’re using farming implements? What does his joy feel like, where does it spring from?” Hoggett said. “What does it feel like, in the body, to be inspired?”Every day, they would do an hourlong warm-up, then try out various exercises. Together with Vicki Manderson, who choreographed the piece with Hoggett, they would create material and construct movement phrases.“He would try anything,” Hoggett said of Cumming. “I encouraged him to really feel whether something felt right and fit on his body.”Hoggett said of Cumming: “He would try anything.”Tommy Ga-Ken WanIt was hard both physically and mentally. “The sheer pain of it,” Cumming said, grimacing. “It was intense.” It was also scary, he added, to go into rehearsal and not have a structure. “Steven is used to just making things up in the room,” he said. “But actors like to have a script!”Asked whether it had been difficult to memorize movement sequences, and eventually an hour of choreography, Cumming clutched his head in his hands. “I kept thinking, I memorized the whole of ‘Macbeth,’ I can do this!” he said. “But of course, getting the muscle memory of movement into your body is entirely different.”He learned that to tell a story with your body, “you have to think in a different way, let the story touch you in a more nonlinear, visceral way,” he said. “It was an incredibly emotional thing to do. I felt very vulnerable, which is what I want to be.”And, gradually, he became more sure of himself. “The exercises, zoning into the themes we were focusing on in the show,” he said, “gave me more confidence about my body and storytelling. It was a shock to me that some of the movement started coming from me.”He also realized, he said, that he was playing both Burns and the Alan Cumming that people know. “I am asking people to look at me in a different way, and also to look at the character I play in a different way,” he said. “The form really helped tell the story.”Cumming and Hoggett knew early on, Cumming said, that they wanted to use the genre-defying music of the Scottish composer Anna Meredith, whom they both admired. “We press-ganged her a bit,” Hoggett said. “Then she came to a few workshops, saw how forensic we were being with her music, and sent us a lot of stuff that hadn’t been released before.”Meredith, whose memory of those workshops involves “mainly doing a lot of Scottish country dancing with an expert who had come to work with the men,” said that she “loved the ambition of the show,” and the way it revealed unusual aspects of Burns. The score, she said, is made up of both existing tracks and older, sometimes experimental, work that “I hadn’t found a home for.”Cumming working with Manderson.Tommy Ga-Ken Wan“It’s a mix of acoustic and electronic,” she said, “some tracks untouched, others needed edits or extensions to fit the exact length of Alan’s words and rhythms.”Working with Meredith to shape the score also helped in creating a structure for the show, when the men reconvened at Cumming’s home in Scotland last summer. “By then, we had pared down the topics we felt were important to telling the story of who Burns was,” Cumming said. He ticked off key points: Burns’s upbringing on a farm; starting to write; his relationship with Jean Armour (who would be the mother of nine of his 12 children); his affairs with Mary Campbell and others; his poverty, depression, and his love for Scotland and its stories and themes.“To label ‘Burn’ as dance might be stretching a point,” Mark Fisher wrote in The Guardian, adding that Cumming has nonetheless “dared to put himself in an unfamiliar place.”As several reviewers pointed out, there is not a great deal of Burns’s famous poetry in the show. Instead Cumming and Hoggett focus on the autobiographical content of Burns’s letters, evoking the highs and lows of his emotional life through their words, digital projections (Andrzej Goulding), dramatic lighting (Tim Lutkin) and occasional stage magic, as quills scroll independently across a manuscript and a dress rises from the floor to incarnate a character.“When Alan is 90 years old, he can recite Burns poetry in a rocking chair, under a spotlight,” Hoggett said. “And he can do that beautifully. But we wanted to go further and do a show about the man and the way movement can reveal a reality that words often hide.” More

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      Six Lyrics That Show Why ‘Hamilton’ Is Tough to Translate

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      A direct transfer of words was never going to work for such a complex show. So the team involved got creative.How does one translate “Hamilton” into another language? That was the challenge facing Sera Finale, a rapper-turned-songwriter, and Kevin Schroeder, a seasoned musical theater translator, when they were asked to collaborate on a German version of the show — the first in a language other than English.The project turned out to be just as complicated as they had feared: complex rhyme schemes, elaborate wordplay and so many songs. There were drafts and demos and revisions; a member of the “Hamilton” music team, Kurt Crowley, learned German to help coordinate the process, and ultimately Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator, had to approve or reject each line.Here are six lyrics that demonstrate some of the challenges the team faced as they sought to preserve the meaning and melody of the original, but in a language with different sounds and syntax. The first line is the original English lyric; the second is the German lyric; and the third is the so-called back translation, which is what the German words literally mean in English.Avoiding HyperboleBurr: How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a/Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten/Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor/Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?“Alexander Hamilton” (English)Gino EmnesBurr: Wie wird ein Bastard/der vom Schoß einer trostlosen Dirne kroch/Aus ’nem gottverdammten, verlor’nem Loch in der Karibik/Ohne Titel, ohne Mittel, ohne Werte/Am Ende doch ein Held und ein Gelehrter?(How does a bastard/Who crawled out of the lap of a bleak harlot/From a goddamned, lost hole in the Caribbean/With no title, no means, no merits/In the end still become a hero and a scholar?)“Alexander Hamilton” (German)Gino EmnesThese are the first words from “Alexander Hamilton,” the musical’s opening song, which introduce the title character with a description of his humble upbringing. The challenge here was to maintain the original lyric’s directness without overstating the case or demeaning the West Indies. The original proposed German lyric referred to Hamilton as a “Bastardblag,” an arcane word meaning bastard brat, to his mother as a “Hure,” meaning whore, and to the islands of Hamilton’s upbringing as “verdreckten,” meaning filthy. Miranda thought those words went too far, and asked for them to be dialed back. “The first draft was almost Trumpian,” he said, alluding to a coarse phrase the former president used to refer to Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations. “To me that’s not the intent of the lyric. I never wanted to comment on Nevis, or St. Croix. It was just this really small part of the world. That’s an example of something that could easily get lost in translation if you’re not on it.”✣ ✣ ✣Quoting Rap SongsBurr: Ah, so you’ve discussed me/I’m a trust fund, baby, you can trust me.“The Schuyler Sisters” (English)Chasity Crisp and Gino EmnesBurr: Schiess mich über’n Haufen, doch/Du bist’n Babe, ich möcht’ dein Badewasser saufen.(Shoot me down but/You are a babe, I’d like to drink your bath water.)“The Schuyler Sisters” (German)Chasity Crisp and Gino EmnesThe original “Hamilton” score includes a number of quotations from American hip-hop songs. Most of them were cut from the German version because the translations made them unrecognizable. But, in an effort to accomplish the same effect, the translators inserted several quotations from German hip-hop songs into the German score. In a section of the song “The Schuyler Sisters,” when Aaron Burr flirts with Angelica Schuyler, the translators found a place to insert a phrase meaning “You are a babe, I’d like to drink your bath water,” from a 1995 German song “Ja klar,” which was a hit for Sabrina Setlur, who rapped as Schwester S. Miranda, who listened to each German song quoted before approving the citations, said he views “Hamilton” as a love letter to hip-hop, as well as to musical theater, and that he considers the hip-hop quotations as a point of entry for some audience members. “A hip-hop fan who comes in, maybe, with their arms crossed, hears those references and goes ‘OK, the person who wrote this obviously loves this culture and loves the music’,” he said. “And so we wanted to continue to reflect that.”✣ ✣ ✣New ImageryAngelica: So this is what it feels like to match wits/With someone at your level! What the hell is the catch?/It’s the feeling of freedom, of seeing the light/It’s Ben Franklin with a key and a kite/You see it right?“Satisfied” (English)Chasity CrispAngelica: So kribbeln Schmetterlinge, wenn sie starten/Wir beide voll auf einem Level, offene Karten!/Das Herz in den Wolken, ich flieg’ aus der Bahn/Die Füße kommen an den Boden nich’ ran/Mein lieber Schwan!(So that’s how butterflies tingle when they take off/We’re on the same level, all cards on the table!/My heart in the clouds, I’m thrown off track/My feet don’t touch the floor/My dear swan!)“Satisfied” (German)Chasity CrispThe original language is packed with American metaphors and idioms that just don’t translate. So the translators were given license to come up with their own turns of phrase. This example is from the song “Satisfied,” in which Angelica Schuyler, preparing to toast Hamilton’s marriage to her sister, recalls the first time she met him. The images are completely different (and the references to Ben Franklin are gone) but the meaning remains. “That section sounds fantastic, and gives the same feeling of falling in love for the first time,” Miranda said. “The metaphor may be different, but it keeps its propulsiveness.”✣ ✣ ✣Prioritizing MeaningEliza: You forfeit all rights to my heart/You forfeit the place in our bed/You sleep in your office instead/With only the memories/Of when you were mine/I hope that you burn“Burn” (English)Ivy QuainooEliza: Du nahmst dir das recht auf mein Herz/Den Platz hier in unserem Bett/Ich lösch unser leben komplett/Dir bleibt nur die Asche/Du warst einmal mein/Ich hoffe du brennst(You took the right to my heart from yourself/The place here in our bed/I am erasing our life completely/All that’s left for you is the ashes/You used to be mine once/I hope that you burn)“Burn” (German)Ivy QuainooThere were many moments when Miranda et al. allowed the German translators to bend the original meaning in order to preserve lyricism and melody. But there were other moments when they insisted on literalism, and the end of the song “Burn,” in which Eliza Hamilton expresses her outrage at her husband’s infidelity, was one of those. The translators initially sought to have Eliza repeat “brenn’n,” a shortened form of the word for “burn,” throughout the song. But that meant changing the final line of the song from words meaning “I hope that you burn” to words meaning “All this shall burn.” Miranda rejected that idea, insisting that Eliza direct her anger squarely at her husband. So now the song ends with “brennst,” which is not a perfect echo of the word used earlier in the song, but which preserves the original meaning: “You burn.” “I really just wanted to make sure the last line was personal: ‘It’s not about the world — it’s about you. This is what you did, and these are your consequences’,” Miranda said.✣ ✣ ✣Protecting ChoreographyHamilton: Teach me how to say goodbye/Rise up, rise up, rise up/Eliza“The World Was Wide Enough” (English)Benet MonteiroHamilton: Weitergeh’n und Abschied nehm’n/Frei sein, frei sein, frei sein/Eliza(Move on and say goodbye/Be free, be free, be free/Eliza)“The World Was Wide Enough” (German)Benet MonteiroIn the show’s penultimate song, “The World Was Wide Enough,” Hamilton dies. As that moment nears, he repeats the phrase “Rise up,” perhaps alluding to ambition, or revolution, or perseverance, and pictures his wife. The German translators at first proposed a lyric that preserved the internal rhyme of the lyric, but altered its meaning, using the word “leise,” which means quietly, and which beautifully echoes the name “Eliza,” to replace “Rise up.” But choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler objected, because the movement at that moment has the ensemble becoming more active — more “rise up” than “quietly” — and he felt it was important to preserve the relationship between the words and the movement. The translators went back to the drawing board, and came up with something less poetic but more protective of the dance concerns. “The complicating factor is that Andy choreographs to lyric, so when the lyrics underneath the movement have changed, what adjustments have to happen?” Miranda said. “I’m trying to keep those connected.”✣ ✣ ✣A Pointed AdditionHamilton: America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me“The World Was Wide Enough” (English)Benet MonteiroHamilton: America, durch deine Brust pumpt Sklavenblut, Moral und Wut.(America, through your breast is pounding the blood of slaves, morality and rage.)“The World Was Wide Enough” (German)Benet MonteiroThe German translators saw an opportunity to interpolate a reference to America’s troubled history with slavery. “Our version is kind of a German perspective on America,” said Kevin Schroeder, one of the translators. “He’s saying ‘unfinished symphony,’ and that also implies there are some flaws.”Audio production by Arjen Mensinga and More

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      A Bollywood Favorite Is Remade for the Stage, Raising Eyebrows

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      Some have taken issue with the reframing of the musical, which now focuses on the love story of an Indian American woman and a white American man.SAN DIEGO — It is one of the most successful Bollywood movies of all time. Though released in 1995, it still plays daily at a movie theater in Mumbai. Its songs are a mainstay at weddings. Its lead actors became Bollywood superstars. And now “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge,” or “DDLJ,” has hit the stage.“Come Fall in Love — The DDLJ Musical” is currently in previews at the Old Globe here before a planned Broadway run. Fans of the film had been abuzz after producers announced the stage adaptation last fall, but when the show’s cast was revealed this summer, social media lit up with criticism. The news that a white actor, Austin Colby, would play the role of Rog, who was known as Raj in the film and played by the Indian star Shah Rukh Khan, led many fans of the movie to accuse the musical of whitewashing.The show’s creators say they want to tell the story of two cultures coming together. But critics of the casting decision see a missed opportunity. Amid increasing demands for more inclusive hiring and storytelling in the entertainment industry, South Asians are still underrepresented onstage and onscreen.“Just when you think we are moving on wards & upwards we are right back to square one,” Andy Kumar, an India-based performer known as VJ Andy, wrote in a tweet. “Why can’t our stories be told as they are? Without a white wash??” On Instagram, negative comments were sprinkled among the responses to Colby’s excited post about his casting. “Haven’t y’all colonized enough,” one user wrote. Another commented: “It is embarrassing that as a white man you are willingly stealing opportunities from men of color. This isn’t something to be proud of.”The chef Vikas Khanna, who was born in India and lives in New York, has also expressed his disapproval on social media. “They took away a star from us,” Khanna said during a video call. “All these guys would have gone in for auditions and the parents would have been: ‘My God, my boy is going to be Raj!’” More on IndiaA Predator’s Return: Scientists are bringing cheetahs back to India to see whether the animal’s population there can be restored after being hunted into extinction.Economic Trends: As global economic growth slows sharply, with many major economies gripped with worries of recession, India has been a conspicuous exception as its economy continues to grow.An Electric Vehicle Push: India’s success with two- and three-wheeled electric vehicles that sell for as little as $1,000 could be a template for other developing countries.Keeping the Milk Flowing: Indian scientists are getting creative in an effort to help the country’s dairy producers, and animals, adapt in a hotter world.“Doing this, you’re making our kids feel less than,” he added. “Let’s not move back. We’ve worked really hard to be on the stage.”“DDLJ” was one of the first Indian films to center on a love story between nonresident Indians (known as N.R.I.s), a reflection of the large numbers who were emigrating. It focuses on two young N.R.I.s living in London — the party boy Raj (Khan) is rich, entitled and Western, quite the opposite of the old-fashioned Simran (Kajol) and her hardworking traditional father, who says to Raj in the film: “You call yourself an Indian? You give India a bad name.” But when Simran ‌returns to India for her‌ arranged marriage, Raj and Simran try to persuade her father‌‌ to let their love conquer all. In addition to the central love story, the movie also resonates because of its focus on love of country and family.The film “touched a nerve” with N.R.I.s who were “navigating between two or three cultures,” Rajinder Dudrah, a professor at the Birmingham Institute of Media and English, explained in an interview. Individuals were having to grapple with the tension between Indian tradition and Western ideas just as this movie was highlighting them. “The idea of ‘dil hai Hindustani,’ the heart is Indian,” was also conveyed in the film, Dudrah added, “meaning that no matter where in the world you were, if you were of Indian descent, you had an attachment to India.”Narayan, with ensemble members, in the musical, which has nods to the film and a similar narrative arc.Jim CoxWhile there are nods to the film — pigeons, fields of mustard flowers, a mandolin cameo — and the narrative arc remains, this “DDLJ” is decidedly American. Raj has been transformed into Roger (or Rog), and the leads now live in Massachusetts, meeting as Harvard students in Cambridge. Aditya Chopra, who directed the movie, is also directing the stage show; the book and lyrics are by Nell Benjamin, who wrote screen-to-stage adaptations of “Legally Blonde” and “Mean Girls.”In August, Chopra posted a statement on Instagram explaining his original vision for the film involved a white male lead. (Apparently his first choice was Tom Cruise.)‌ “The most powerful way to depict a country’s culture and values is to see it from the perspective of someone who does not belong to the same culture,” Chopra wrote, explaining his goal is to showcase Indian culture to a global audience. “That is the starting point of ‘Come Fall in Love,’ the story of Indian Simran, her culture and heritage through the eyes of American Roger.”In an interview earlier this month, Benjamin said she was not surprised by the reaction “given the lack of representation” in the theater, but the uproar was still unsettling. “I was distressed that people thought that Adi [Chopra] or me or anyone would want to whitewash this movie,” she explained. “That would suggest that ‘Oh, well, when we do it, she’s going to fall in love with this guy because he’s better than the options.’ That’s not the story. I believe people who come to see the show will get that.”The musical’s writers stressed that the production still showcased a predominantly South Asian cast, including Shoba Narayan, who plays Simran, and a production spokeswoman said that South Asians represented more than 50 percent of cast members.Benjamin said the creators had considered writing the male lead as an Indian American or a half-Indian man but believed it would have been an “easy choice” that wouldn’t have worked as well. “If you don’t excavate it, you don’t add value to it,” she said, adding that Chopra “is perfectly capable of doing the exact movie as a musical, developing it in Mumbai and then renting a theater in New York, but that’s not what we wanted to do together.”Not everyone was critical of the direction the stage musical has taken. The Bollywood screenwriter Shibani Bathija (“My Name Is Khan,” “Fanaa”) saw the advantages in changing the lead’s ethnicity to make the story work for a general audience. “I think having him be South Asian would be more problematic, because where is all this objection coming from,” she said, referring to the family’s disapproval of the central couple’s relationship. The United States focuses less on caste and class differences than India or Britain, she said, so the possible differences between two South Asians would not be as apparent to an American audience. “If you hadn’t watched the film, you wouldn’t get it,” she said. “There would need to be another level of explanation that maybe wouldn’t serve the creative.”The musical’s composers, Vishal Dadlani and Shekhar Ravjiani, known as Vishal & Shekhar, also disagreed with the criticism. Ravjiani said they were proud to represent India through the musical, for which they have created an 18-song score. (The two did not write the film’s original songs, which have become classics, and only a few melodies from the movie are briefly heard in the musical.) Dadlani reiterated that Chopra wanted to tell this specific story and that it was “ridiculous” to say that “just because you’re an Indian filmmaker, you should write the story differently.”“It’s not about color, it’s not about white or brown,” Dadlani added. “It’s about a boy who’s in love with a girl and whose family is different than the girl’s family.”However, Benjamin, interviewed separately, thought of color as a storytelling tool. She explained that in her view, “with the change to Rog, you’re talking about color” and discussed how Roger’s “whiteness” gave him privilege, making things easy for him, until he faced Simran’s father.Despite the criticism of the show, among the three dozen or so audience members interviewed in San Diego, the response was mostly positive — from those familiar with the film and those who weren’t.One of the few dissenting voices was Shebani Patel, who flew in from San Francisco to see the show: “I was not pleased with the casting. I don’t hate the show, but it’s not our show.” More