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      Nathan Lane to Return to Broadway This Winter in ‘Pictures From Home’

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      The play, written by Sharr White and directed by Bartlett Sher, will also star Danny Burstein and Zoë Wanamaker.Nathan Lane will return to Broadway this winter, starring in a new play called “Pictures From Home” about the artistic and emotional relationship between a photographer and his aging parents.The play, written by Sharr White and directed by Bartlett Sher, is adapted from an acclaimed memoir by the photographer Larry Sultan, also called “Pictures From Home,” featuring not only staged portraits of his parents, but also interviews with them.Danny Burstein, a Tony winner for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” will play Sultan; Lane, a three-time Tony winner for “Angels in America,” “The Producers” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” will play the photographer’s father, Irving; and Zoë Wanamaker will play the photographer’s mother, Jean.The Broadway production will be the first for the play, which previously had developmental readings at New York Stage and Film, the Cape Cod Theater Project and the Alley Theater in Houston.White, whose previous Broadway plays included “The Other Place” and “The Snow Geese,” said he became interested in Sultan after seeing an exhibition of the photographer’s work in Los Angeles, where White was working as a writer and producer of “The Affair.”“I was totally captivated, and thought, who are these people?” White said. “The more I read, the more I thought it was an epic story and an intimate story, and one that embodies incredible contradictions.”White described Sultan’s parents as displaying “rejecting acceptance” of their son’s long-running artistic project, which he called “a gorgeous exploration of mortality.” He said the play includes some language from Sultan’s book, and some anecdotes gleaned from interviews with Sultan’s widow, Kelly, but that most of the dialogue was invented by the playwright.Sher, a Tony winner for his revival of “South Pacific,” has been working on the project for about a year, drawn to it, he said, as “an extraordinary exploration of the aging process.” He said the play “is fundamentally about art — who gets to depict what, and how you’re represented,” and said the production would make heavy use of Sultan’s photography.Lane, who last appeared on Broadway in 2019, said he had been unfamiliar with Sultan’s work before reading the play, but that he “thought it was a beautiful piece of writing — very funny and very quietly devastating” and said he hoped that its two subjects, “parents and mortality,” would be relatable to audiences.“It has a documentary feel,” he said, “and yet it’s highly theatrical.”The play is scheduled to begin previews on Jan. 10 and to open Feb. 9 at Studio 54. Although that theater is owned by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company, the play will be a commercial production, with Jeffrey Richards as lead producer. More

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      Another Miranda at the Public Theater: Luis A. Miranda Jr., New Board Chair

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      Luis A. Miranda Jr., a political consultant and activist whose son, Lin-Manuel Miranda, composed one of the Public’s biggest hits, “Hamilton,” was named chair of the theater’s board.Long before he joined the board of the Public Theater, and before his son, Lin-Manuel Miranda, composed one of the biggest hits in the theater’s history, “Hamilton,” Luis A. Miranda Jr. recalled the first show he ever saw there: Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”“My first experience with the Public Theater, in 1976, was of a production that could not be more different than everything that was on Broadway,” Luis Miranda, 68, said, recalling “For Colored Girls” and its intimate stories of Black female agency told through spoken word and dance.Now Miranda, a political consultant and activist who has worked in city government and the nonprofit sector, will be taking on a new role at the institution: The theater announced Tuesday that he would be its next board chair.Miranda said that his priorities included the renovation of the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, the home of the theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park program, and support for the theater’s diversity and inclusion initiatives.While many theaters have begun to reckon with being “too white” in recent years, Miranda said, Public Theater had an early start on bridging the equity gap.“We’re not starting from scratch because the theater has a history of cultural transformation and putting onstage diverse actors, diverse writers,” said Miranda, who has been on the board since 2015. But he added that there was more to do and that he would work on initiatives that include antiracism training for board members and the hiring of a senior director of antiracism and equity.“Hamilton” started out at the Public Theater, before transferring to Broadway. “We never thought that Hamilton would be what it has become,” Miranda said.Miranda chairs the Latino Victory Fund, the Broadway League’s Viva Broadway initiative and the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance. At the Public he succeeds Arielle Tepper, who served as chair for nearly a decade. “I couldn’t be happier that he is taking over,” Tepper said.Oskar Eustis, the theater’s artistic director, praised Miranda in a statement for his commitment to the idea that “culture belongs to everyone.” More

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      ‘Chushingura — 47 Ronin’ Review: A Sprawling Tale of Loyalty

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      The palace intrigue behind a mythic battle from 18th-century Japan is the subject of this bilingual play in Manhattan.There is no getting around it: This show is far from perfect. Actually, it might be far from a conventional definition of good. The storytelling is erratic, and so is some of the acting; the production values are minimal.Yet during the vast majority of “Chushingura — 47 Ronin,” I was engrossed in the action, eager to see what was going to happen next. It did not even matter that I knew what was in store, having seen three film versions of the basic plot, including the Kenji Mizoguchi classic “The 47 Ronin,” from 1941. More celebrated plays have not exerted that kind of primal pull on me: Sometimes theater can be so elementally simple that it boils down to the basic enjoyment of a good yarn.And this one, about a band of warriors’ vengeful quest, is among the best of all time. The show, at A.R.T./New York Theaters, is a retelling of an event from 18th-century Japan that has spawned an impressively large number of movies (including one surreal misfire from 2013 starring Keanu Reeves) as well as TV series, artworks and comic books. (“Chushingura” is an umbrella term for the works inspired by the so-called Ako incident.)Now it’s the turn of the upstart New York company Amaterasu Za, which produces bilingual works rooted in Japanese sources and art forms. The show’s writer and director, Ako Dachs, also pops up at regular intervals as a narrator in English; the rest of the text is in Japanese, with simultaneous translation projected in supertitles whose synchronization can be haphazard. (The multitasking Dachs also did the period costumes and leads Amaterasu Za.)The tale is set in motion when, as so often happens, someone finally loses patience. Lord Kira (Hiroko Yonekura) is a scoundrel who, on a fateful day at Edo castle, taunts Lord Asano (Yasu Suzuki) one time too many. Asano attacks Kira and wounds him. Nobody dies in the skirmish, but Asano has broken the castle’s rules by “unreasonably” drawing his sword. Not only must he commit ritual suicide, but his estate will also be seized, and his samurai retinue and staff will be dismissed.Back at Asano’s home in Ako, his chancellor, Oishi (Tatsuo Ichikawa), rallies the samurai, now known as ronin because they are without a master, in a campaign to avenge Asano and restore his clan’s honor.While this suggests a lot of action, the vast majority of the show, which takes place on a fairly small stage, is dedicated to chatty palace intrigue, as if we were eavesdropping on conspirators. When there is a possibility that the unseen shogun might reinstate the fallen clan, some of Asano’s followers are bereft at the prospect of losing their excuse to kill Kira. Honor-bound duty has a messy way of turning into personal revenge.Yasu Suzuki, left, who plays Lord Asano, with Hiroko Yonekura.Melinda HallDespite writing that can be confusing — we are not told, for example, how Oishi’s group of 56 ronin ended up just 47, or maybe a supertitle zipped by too quickly — the story moves at a steady clip. And Dachs’s decision to have women play some of the male roles, most prominently Kira, is very effective.Gender-blind casting is, of course, not uncommon in Japanese theater, and Dachs herself is a former member of that country’s all-female Takarazuka Revue company (she is a familiar presence, under the single name Ako, on New York stages, most notably in Leah Nanako Winkler’s “Kentucky” and “God Said This”). That the actors portraying samurai wear headpieces in the traditional “chonmage” style, in which a ponytail is folded back over the top of the head, creates a sense of androgynous uniformity. (Mitsuteru Okuyama did the wigs.)So yes, “Chushingura — 47 Ronin” is far from the best show out there. But right now, this sprawling tale of loyalty to rigid codes certainly is unlike anything else on a New York stage.Chushingura — 47 RoninThrough Nov. 6 at A.R.T./New York, Manhattan; amaterasuza.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      In a Musical About Penicillin, Superbugs Take Center Stage

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      “The Mold That Changed the World” focuses on the physician who discovered penicillin. And it offers a message: Don’t take antibiotics unless you really need them.WASHINGTON — Robin Hiley’s eyes rolled when he recounted the night in 2016 that a friend, an infectious disease doctor, asked him what seemed like a crazy question: “Wouldn’t it be a great thing to have a musical about antibiotics?”Hiley, a composer and songwriter who is the artistic director of the Charades Theater Company in Edinburgh, was skeptical. Though the troupe calls itself “theatre with a social conscience,” antibiotics — or more precisely the threat of antimicrobial resistance, which can lead to death when common germs evade treatment — seemed a bridge too far.But the friend, Dr. Meghan Perry, was persistent, passionate about what she conceded was “this wacky idea.” And so it is that “The Mold That Changed the World,” a musical about Alexander Fleming, the Scottish physician and microbiologist who received a Nobel Prize in 1945 for discovering penicillin, is playing this week (through Sunday) in Washington.The show traces the life of Fleming, from his days as a young private in Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps who later became a medical doctor, through two world wars and his famous discovery. It also offers a glimpse into a dark future — one predicted by Fleming himself — where antibiotics no longer work because deadly “superbugs” have learned to evade them.It also has a neat twist: a chorus of real-life health care professionals and scientists, who play soldiers, lab technicians, reporters — singing and dancing with the rest of the cast. They include people like Mario Sengco, a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency who also sings in the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington.Emily Bull, as Rose, comforts a wounded soldier played by Scott Armstrong in “The Mold That Changed the World.”Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times“How often can a musical deliver a lifesaving message to society?” he asked.The danger Fleming foresaw is, in fact, already here. Experts estimate that antimicrobial resistance leads to 1.2 million deaths around the world each year.And the problem — known by its initials, A.M.R. — is getting worse, because the drugs were overused during the coronavirus pandemic, said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The show opens on Nov. 1 in Atlanta, home of the C.D.C.; Dr. Walensky will participate in a panel discussion before the performance.)At a discussion before Thursday night’s performance at the Atlas Performing Arts Center here in the nation’s capital, Dr. Rick Bright, former director of the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, made the story personal: After a cut he sustained while gardening led to an antibiotic-resistant infection, he spent a week in the hospital, and almost lost a thumb. It took seven antibiotics to cure him. Another panelist, the writer Diane Shader Smith, lost her 25-year-old daughter, who had cystic fibrosis, to a superbug infection.In Edinburgh, that is precisely what Dr. Perry was worried about when she pitched her idea to Hiley, who said he gravitates “toward historical stories that have a social impact.” He began reading about Fleming, he said, and “saw this potential of a story and started to begin to understand the global impact of A.M.R. And the seed was sown, so to speak.”The musical features a chorus of real-life health care professionals and scientists, who play soldiers, lab technicians, reporters — singing and dancing with the rest of the cast.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesThey received funding from the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, which in turn led to backing from a powerful figure: Dame Sally Davies, who was then Britain’s chief medical officer. She was so concerned about antimicrobial resistance, she said, that it is now on Britain’s “risk register,” along with pandemics and bioterrorism, as a security threat.The show has had sold-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe festival and has also played in London and Glasgow — with mold spelled “mould.” It opens with Fleming, played by Jeremy Rose, at the end of his life, encountering an otherworldly, barefoot Mother Earth figure named Rose, played by Emily Bull.Rose, the Mother Earth character, hovers over the story as a kind of narrator, bringing Fleming back and forward in time. Two ethereal-looking circus performers, dressed in flowing psychedelic colors, appear throughout the musical, spinning on an acrobat’s wheel. Hiley envisioned them as the “Gram twins,” representing two different types of bacteria: Gram-positive and Gram-negative. (Penicillin treats Gram-positive infections.)The audience sees the young Army private bidding farewell to the London Scottish Regiment, where he has served for 14 years. (“Private 6392, this mess hall honors you!” the cast sings.) Soon it is 1914, and Fleming is in Bologne, France, tending to soldiers — some from his old unit — facing death from exposure to poison and shrapnel wounds that turn into deadly infections.He cries at the uselessness of it all: “These men came to war prepared to die to protect their homeland, their families, their friends — not to be poisoned by gas, gangrene, harmless cuts; infected by horse manure on the fields on which they fought!”Fleming, later seen in his bacteriology lab at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, is a rumpled, earnest figure. He was apparently not the neatest of scientists, and the show riffs on other scientists who frown on his untidy habits. (“It’s clean and tidy we adore,” the chorus, dressed in lab coats, sings. “So sterilize those beakers! Disinfect that glass pipette!”) But that very untidiness led to his world-changing discovery.In 1928, while experimenting with common staphylococcal bacteria, Fleming spotted a ring of mold in a petri dish he had left by an open window while he was off on vacation. He was astonished to see that the mold had killed the germs. But that is not the end of the story.More than a decade passed before his discovery could actually be put to use. It took a couple of polished Oxford University scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, to purify the mold called penicillium notatum so that it could be tested on mice, and then people, and manufactured in mass quantities. They shared the Nobel with Fleming.A panel discussion at the Atlas Performing Arts Center included, from left: the composer and songwriter Robin Hiley; Sarah Despres of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Bethany Brookshire, a science writer in Washington; Dr. Rick Bright; and the writer Diane Shader Smith.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesOne of the biggest challenges in modern medicine is that drug companies don’t want to invest in developing new antibiotics; it is not that lucrative, and if germs keep evolving to evade new drugs, the market potential is limited. In bringing the show to Washington, Dame Sally said, she hopes to persuade Congress to pass a bill, the PASTEUR Act, that would offer incentives for companies to innovate. (The name, a play on the famous scientist Louis Pasteur, stands for Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Up surging Resistance.)“We have a market failure,” Dame Sally said.Looking ahead, Dr. Walensky said, “addressing antimicrobial resistance is going to be the next chapter because it was the thing everybody was worried about before the pandemic.”As “The Mold That Changed The World” winds down, Fleming finds himself in the future, aghast at what humankind has wrought. With so many people taking antibiotics unnecessarily, and farmers using them to prevent and treat disease in livestock and increase productivity, modern medicine is no more equipped to handle bacterial infections than the young Fleming was on the battlefield.The message, Dr. Perry said, is clear: “Don’t take an antibiotic unless you really need it.” She harked back to when she and Hiley were brainstorming at the cafe in Edinburgh, and to the message she had written in block letters atop their storyboard: “Antibiotics are precious.” More

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      ‘Life of Pi’ Will Come to Broadway

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      Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s award-winning novel will begin preview performances on March 9.The theatrical adaptation of “Life of Pi,” about the tales of a teenage boy stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger, is coming to New York this spring.Following an energetic run in London, where “Life of Pi” won five Olivier Awards, including best new play, the show will come to Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theater with preview performances starting March 9 and an opening night slated for March 30. Casting has not yet been announced.The show, written by Lolita Chakrabarti and directed by Max Webster, is an adaptation of Yann Martel’s acclaimed 2001 novel, which won the Man Booker Prize and inspired a 2012 film. It uses intricate puppetry to bring the story’s animal characters to life, with the seven performers who play the tiger collectively awarded best actor in a supporting role at the Olivier Awards.In The New York Times, the critic Matt Wolf wrote that the appeal of the production in London’s West End “lies not so much in blunt pronouncements as in the visual wonder of a bare stage yielding to richly imagined life.”In a statement, Chakrabarti called the show “a story of survival which all of us can fundamentally relate to after the effects of the pandemic.” She added that “to be able to tell this story the way I imagined it, to create the world using my references and viewpoint, has been an extraordinary gift.”Before coming to Broadway, “Life of Pi” will make its North American premiere at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University. More

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      Review: Retracing the Path From Middle School Nerd to Rock Goddess

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      Best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” the enchanting singer-songwriter Jill Sobule is the star of a winsome and defiant autobiographical musical.It is an established fact of human development that most of the people who grew up to be cool and original were nerds for a while, way back when.Case in point: the enchanting Jill Sobule, best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” and currently starring in the winsome and defiant autobiographical musical “F*ck7thGrade.” Seventh grade being, as she tells it, the year when it all fell apart — when she no longer fit in with the other girls at her school in Colorado, and they weren’t shy about telling her so.“They thought I was weird because I had a Batman utility belt and a camera that turned into a 007 gun,” she says, and your heart kind of breaks even as you smile, because she must have been darling, right? Then, with an air of baffled wonder: “I was the only one who wanted to be a spy.”She also dreamed of being a rock star, and longed for the girl she had a secret crush on to reciprocate. But it was the early 1970s, and Sobule didn’t fit the template of sugar and spice and everything nice. The girls who had been her friends rejected her. One of them lobbed a homophobic slur her way.“She didn’t even know what that meant,” says Sobule, who is now 61. “But I did.”Directed by Lisa Peterson, the show — at the Wild Project in the East Village — is described in promotional materials as a “rock concert musical,” a slightly awkward term that is nonetheless exactly right. With a book by Liza Birkenmeier, it truly is a musical, backing Sobule with a three-piece band whose musicians — Nini Camps, Kristen Ellis-Henderson and Julie Wolf (also the music director) — play assorted characters throughout the 90-minute show.Still, the performance on this small stage does feel like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley. The name of Sobule’s three-piece band is Secrets of the Vatican — made up of all girls when it existed only in her childhood imagination, and of all women now, which even in 2022 is rare enough to make a statement.On a set by Rachel Hauck whose principal feature is a wall of lockers, Sobule speaks and sings a slender story of her life, starting with the exultant freedom of pre-adolescence and her rocking ode to the bike she cherished then, “Raleigh Blue Chopper.”“When I was 12, I was a fierce little rocker who wanted to be Jimi Hendrix,” she says with the same sly, sunny, quietly confiding air that the video for “I Kissed a Girl” captured 27 years ago. “I didn’t have to tell anyone what I was,” she adds. “I just was.”The performance on this small East Village stage feels like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley.Eric McNattBut the wider world of the late 20th century was not much more hospitable to ambitious female musicians — let alone lesbians — than seventh grade had been. Sobule remembers a conversation she overheard at her record label in the ’90s, about Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge and how glad the label was that Sobule was straight. Which she wasn’t, as they might have guessed from “I Kissed a Girl,” but she also wasn’t about to clue them in.“I wish I would have said to all of them: it’s a big ol’ gay gay song,” she says. “But I didn’t. I was too scared. I wanted to do the smart thing. I wanted to be arty and transgressive, but I wanted to sell records. The compromising got me nowhere. And then I couldn’t stand my own song.”Shorter, sharper and more theatrical than Etheridge’s current Off Broadway show, “My Window,” Sobule’s is much more intimate in scale — although each pays brief tribute to “Day by Day,” from “Godspell,” with which both musicians’ teen years coincided.“Strawberry Gloss,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Sold My Soul” and “Underdog Victorious” are among the songs Sobule sings from her own catalog. Eventually, so is “I Kissed a Girl.”This is a show for Sobule fans, and for a queer audience, but it’s also for the many nerds who grew up to be the cool people. It will give you flashbacks to middle school, no matter how popular you were; that’s pretty much guaranteed. But it will also give you the cheering company of Sobule and her extremely non-imaginary, rocking-out band.F*ck7thGradeThrough Nov. 8 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thewildproject.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Lucy Simon, Singer and Broadway Composer, Dies at 82

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      She and her sister Carly Simon were a folk duo in the 1960s. Years later, she wrote the Tony-nominated music for “The Secret Garden.”Lucy Simon, who with her sister Carly began performing and recording as the Simon Sisters during the folk revival of the 1960s, and who then almost three decades later became a Tony Award-nominated composer for the long-running musical “The Secret Garden,” died on Thursday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 82.Her family said the cause was metastatic breast cancer.Ms. Simon was the middle of three musical sisters. Her younger sister, Carly, became a best-selling pop star after their folk-duo days, and her older sister, Joanna, was an opera singer with an international career. Joanna Simon, at 85, died in Manhattan a day before Lucy Simon’s death.Lucy and Carly started singing together as teenagers. Their father, Richard, was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the publishing house, so a heady list of guests came through the household, including Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their mother was Andrea (Heinemann) Simon.“We would go to cocktail parties and bring our guitar and sing,” Lucy Simon told The New York Times in 2015. “And people loved it.”Eventually, she added, they said to each other, “Let’s see if we can pay our way by singing.”Carly was a student at Sarah Lawrence College and Lucy was studying at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing in New York in the early 1960s when, during summer break, they took a bus to Provincetown, Mass. (They had wanted to hitchhike, but their mother squashed that plan.) They quickly landed a gig at a bar called Moors, whose musical act had just been drafted. They arrived for their first show in carefully selected matching blouses.“Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay and lesbian bar,” Carly Simon wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Boys in the Trees.” “What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival.”They called themselves the Simon Sisters, even though, as Carly Simon wrote, “Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled — or dismissed — as just another novelty sister act.”In that book, Ms. Simon recalled the sisterly dynamic during that first foray into performing.“Anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister,” she wrote. “I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.”Soon they had a contract with a management company and were booked into the Bitter End, the Greenwich Village club that gave numerous future stars their start. An appearance on the musical variety television show “Hootenanny” in the spring of 1963 (along with the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Smothers Brothers) further boosted their profile. They appeared on the show again in early 1964.Some years earlier, Lucy Simon had composed a setting of the Eugene Field children’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and the song became a staple of the Simon Sisters’ performances. Released as a single in 1964, titled “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” it reached No. 73 on the Billboard chart. It also anchored one of the two albums they quickly recorded.The two sisters toured for a time, but after her marriage in 1967 to Dr. David Y. Levine, a psychiatrist, Lucy Simon pulled back from performing to focus on their two children. In 1975, she released a solo album, titled simply “Lucy Simon,” followed in 1977 by another, “Stolen Time.” But she found she had lost her zeal for performing.In the early 1980s, she and her husband produced two compilation albums featuring James Taylor, her sister Carly, Linda Ronstadt, Bette Midler and other stars singing children’s songs. The albums, “In Harmony: A Sesame Street Recording” and “In Harmony 2,” both won Grammy Awards for best children’s album.In the 1980s, Ms. Simon took a stab at musical theater, working on an effort to make a musical out of the “Little House on the Prairie” stories. That project never bore fruit, but a connection provided by her sister Joanna led her to one that did.Joanna Simon was for a time the arts correspondent for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, and in 1988 she interviewed the playwright Marsha Norman. She asked Ms. Norman what she was working on, and the playwright mentioned an adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” the Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s novel, and said that she and the producer Heidi Landesman were looking for a composer.Lucy, left, and Carly Simon singing in Shubert Alley along Broadway in 1982. Lucy Simon was later nominated for a Tony Award for best original score, for the hit musical “The Secret Garden.”Nancy Kaye/Associated PressLucy Simon proved to be a good fit for Ms. Norman’s lyrics. The show opened on Broadway in April 1991. Reviews were mixed — Frank Rich, in The Times, said that Ms. Simon’s music was “fetching when limning the deep feelings locked within the story’s family constellations” but not always successful — yet the show was a hit, giving 709 performances over almost two years. Ms. Simon earned a Tony nomination for best original score. (The award went to Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for “The Will Rogers Follies.”)Ms. Simon reached Broadway again in 2015 as composer of the musical “Doctor Zhivago,” but the show lasted just 23 performances.That year, in the interview with The Times, she said that she thought music had the potential to be more emotionally powerful than other art forms, like dance or painting.“There’s something intangible and mysterious about music,” she said. “It can get you more; you can sob more. It’s got a stronger engine.”Lucy Elizabeth Simon was born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan.“We all came out singing,’‘ she once said of herself and her sisters. “And we kept on singing. At dinner we wouldn’t just say, ‘Please pass the salt, thank you.’ We’d sing it. Sometimes in the style of Gershwin. Sometimes as a lieder.”Carly Simon wrote in her book that the pass-the-salt singing started as a way to help her — Carly — with a vexing stammer. Their mother had suggested that instead of speaking the phrase, Carly try singing it. With Joanna and Lucy joining in to encourage their sister, it worked.Lucy and Carly Simon during an interview with The New York Times in 2015 at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.Ryan Conaty for The New York TimesLucy Simon’s greatest hit as a folk singer, the “Winkin’” song, had a self-help element to it. At 14, she was given a school assignment to memorize a poem, but dyslexia made it difficult. She found that she could memorize the Eugene Field poem by setting it to music. Her version was later recorded by numerous artists.Ms. Simon’s credits also included composing the music for a wild 1993 HBO movie, “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom,” which won Emmy Awards for Holly Hunter and Beau Bridges.Ms. Simon’s brother, Peter, a photographer, died in 2018. In addition to her husband and her sister Carly, she is survived by two children, Julie Simon and James Levine, and four grandchildren.In 1985, Ms. Simon was in the hospital for surgery. She told a reporter that her two sisters had turned up to give her support.“When the stretcher came to take me to the operating room, we sang three-part harmony,” she said. “It lifted me.” More

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      ‘Back to the Future’ Musical to Open on Broadway Next Summer

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      The show, now in London, has a creative team that combines veterans of the film with some Broadway stalwarts. Performances will begin on June 30.Filmdom’s most famous DeLorean is getting ready to park itself on Broadway.A musical adaptation of the hit 1985 film “Back to the Future” is planning to open on Broadway next summer, its producers announced Friday. (Look at your calendar: Friday is Oct. 21, which is when devoted fans celebrate “Back to the Future Day.”)The musical, with a creative team that combines veterans of the film with some Broadway stalwarts, has already had a life in Britain.It had an ill-timed opening at the Manchester Opera House on March 11, 2020; that production closed a few days later because of the coronavirus pandemic. The show then transferred to London last fall, where it has had much better luck: It won this year’s Olivier Award for best new musical, and it is still running at the Adelphi Theater.The beloved science-fiction film, about a teenager who travels back in time in a DeLorean and disrupts the lives of his future parents, spawned sequels and a variety of spinoff ventures, and also contributed to the fame of its star, Michael J. Fox.“Back to the Future: The Musical” features a book by Bob Gale, the screenwriter who co-wrote and co-produced all three films, and songs by Alan Silvestri, who composed the film’s score, as well as Glen Ballard, a record producer and songwriter. The musical also includes pop songs featured in the film, including “The Power of Love.”The director is John Rando, who in 2002 won a Tony Award for “Urinetown.”Two members of the London cast have signed on to reprise their roles on Broadway: Roger Bart as the inventor Doc Brown, and Hugh Coles as George McFly, the protagonist’s father. Casting for the main role, of the teenager Marty McFly, has not yet been announced.The musical is scheduled to begin performances June 30 and to open Aug. 3 at the Winter Garden Theater, which is now home to a starry revival of “The Music Man” that is planning to close Jan. 1.The musical, with Colin Ingram as its lead producer, is being capitalized for $23.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Gale, who has been working on projects related to “Back to the Future” for more than four decades and is the de facto guardian of the franchise, said he is delighted to finally be working on Broadway, more than 15 years after Leslie Zemeckis, the wife of the film’s director Robert Zemeckis, saw “The Producers” and suggested “Back to the Future” could also be musicalized. “Broadway is the gold standard — musical theater was really invented there — and I’m delighted that we are finally going to get our shot on the Great White Way,” Gale said.Gale said the creative team has been making tweaks to the script and the set as it prepares for a Broadway run, incorporating lessons from the productions in England. They are small changes, he said, “but little things add up.”“One thing people appreciate about the movie: the more they watch, the more details they see,” he said. More