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      in Television

      Immersed in ‘Stranger Things,’ Then Strolling to Beckett

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      Our writer checked out two very different experiences in New York. In Netflix’s TV re-creation, you fight Demogorgons. In “Cascando,” you walk off your existential angst.Before the pizza parlor, before the arcade games, before the ice cream shop and the merch kiosks (so many merch kiosks!) and the photo op with a fiberglass-and-silicone Demogorgon, “Stranger Things: The Experience,” at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, puts on a show.Netflix, which has created other immersive entertainments based on its “Bridgerton” and “Money Heist” properties, co-produced this 45-minute experience with Fever. Based on the teen-horror pastiche “Stranger Things,” it plunks participants, many of them dressed in 1980s finery, into tens of thousands of square feet of Hawkins, Ind. Some rooms have an unfinished feel (did the budget not include ceilings?); others suggest a theme-park-quality buildout. The most fully realized ones are nestled inside Hawkins’s cheery state-of-the-art lab. Ostensibly, ticket holders have signed up for a sleep study. An interdimensional rift soon complicates study protocols. Will these test subjects survive? Of course. They have tote bags to buy afterward.“Stranger Things: The Experience” is a piece of fan service that adopts the vocabulary of immersive theater. While legible, barely, for those unfamiliar with the series, this story has been built for devotees, allowing them to enter into the fictional world. Enterprises like this used to be lower-budget affairs of the do-it-yourself variety, the province of live-action role-players and tabletop gamers. Now for about $58 — less for gutsy under-17s, more if you book on a weekend — Netflix and its partners will do the doing for you.“We look at live experiences as providing fans another way to see themselves more in the stories they love,” Greg Lombardo, the head of live experiences at Netflix, told me in an interview a couple of days after my visit.This show, which runs for about 45 minutes, chugs along like a reasonably well-oiled machine. What eldritch fluids comprise that oil? Best not ask. The cast members who circulate are trained improvisers, skilled at eliciting responses, practiced at batting those responses back. At one point I was harangued by a journalist character — sweaty, anxious, overconfident. Ow.The Upside-Down World of ‘Stranger Things’After a three-year wait, Netflix’s sci-fi series returns with a fourth season.Season 4 Guide: As in seasons past, this go-round is full of nods and Easter eggs to 1970s and ’80s pop culture. Here are the major highlights.Review: “Stranger Things” has gone from lovingly echoing 1980s touchstones to industriously copying itself, our critic writes of the show’s fourth installment.The Duffer Brothers: The “Stranger Things” creators seem to share a brain. But they could never lock themselves in a writing cabin together.David Harbour: While “Stranger Things” was on hiatus, the actor tackled a string of strangely compelling deadbeat characters.While immersive, “The Experience” doesn’t really depend on you. The Demogorgons will eventually explode, whether or not you deploy your extrasensory powers. Which is a letdown. Because there is a fantasy that many of us entertain about the art we love — that we might matter to the art as much as it matters to us. Still, the teenagers and young adults in the room gasped and screamed and unleashed their psychic abilities with apparent delight.“We’re trying to give fans a chance to be the hero of their stories,” Lombardo said. This is pushing it. Eleven, the psychokinetic phenom played by Millie Bobby Brown, who appears via hologram, is the real hero here. The motivating factors of “The Experience” owe less to art than to marketing, and its ultimate goal suggests a branding ouroboros: devotion to the show encourages consumption of the experience, consumption of the experience urges re-engagement with the show.After “The Experience,” with the rift safely sealed, you can consume without the distractions of a plot — which is when “Stranger Things: The Experience” achieves its final and ideal form. There is pizza to be eaten and ice cream to be licked and cocktails to be drunk. Bertolt Brecht used to rail against the culinary theater, a theater that delivered only emotion and sensation, rather than intellectual engagement. Brecht probably never had a drink with a stroopwafel as garnish. I didn’t buy a tote bag, but I did play through the “Stranger Things”-branded pinball game. I think I did pretty well.“Cascando,” an adaptation of a Beckett radio play, comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theater. Upon arrival each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTo wander the streets of Manhattan dressed as a high-fashion druid, a goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNo amusement genius has yet made a Samuel Beckett pinball machine — I imagine a gloomy palette, defective flippers and a high-score list that reads GODOT GODOT GODOT. But those eager for a Beckett brand extension can instead arrive at New York University’s Skirball Center for “Cascando,” an adaptation of a Beckett radio play from the early 1960s. It comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theater, an Irish company with an insouciant approach to the classics.Originally created in conjunction with the composer Marcel Mihalovici, “Cascando” is intended as a passive audio experience. But this “Cascando,” directed by Gavin Quinn and designed by Aedin Cosgrove, adds a participatory element.Upon arrival each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones. Loosed onto La Guardia Place, a quiet street adjacent to Washington Square Park in Manhattan, participants begin a single-file walk around and through the neighboring blocks. As they stroll, they listen to the text, prerecorded here by Andrew Bennett and Daniel Reardon.To wander the Village dressed as a high-fashion druid, a goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind. But there are no stops along the way, no interactions, no activations. The choreography — a sharp turn here and there — is minimal. At one point, I wondered, with almost breathless excitement, if we would sit. We did not sit.While it makes sense to encounter Beckett’s text via headphones — there are references throughout to a story existing only in someone’s head — the alone-together walk doesn’t illuminate or galvanize the text, which is, like so much of Beckett’s work, heavy on repetition and ellipses. On the rainy sidewalk, meaning slid away.In another city, at another moment, a show like “Cascando” might at least have ornamented the street life. But New York’s typical street life is already a variety of theater, druids or no. As we re-entered the park, I saw a clump of skateboarders look us up and down. We had become part of their story, I thought for a moment, part of their experience. Then they shrugged and returned to their conversation. Just another Wednesday in the Village, bro.Stranger Things: The ExperienceThrough Aug. 21 at Duggal Greenhouse, Brooklyn; strangerthings-experience.com. Running time: 45 minutes for the show, then mingling.CascandoThrough July 3 at N.Y.U. Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 30 minutes. More

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      3 Theaters, 3 Plays, One Cast, All at Once

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      The Crucible Theater in Sheffield, England, is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a mind-boggling logistical challenge that also honors a declining industry in the city.SHEFFIELD, England — Visitors to Tudor Square in the center of this northern English city might spot some unusual figures there this week: a woman sprinting through in a neon boilersuit, or a tutu, or a man running with a box of scissors. And if they look like they’re in a hurry to get somewhere, that’s because they are. These are actors, and they have an entrance to make — on a different stage from the one they just left.“Rock/Paper/Scissors,” running through July 2, is a triptych of plays designed to be performed by one cast, at the same time, in three different theaters. Programmed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sheffield’s Crucible Theater, the trilogy unfolds on that playhouse’s 980-seater main stage, a smaller studio below and across the square at the Victorian-era Lyceum.The project’s logistics are mind-boggling. The 14 cast members appear as the same characters across all three shows, and most of them are on one of the stages, most of time — hence those hurried journeys between theaters. Each play has its own director and technical team, while nine stage managers ensure smooth running backstage.The three plays, which offer varying perspectives on a family saga, are designed to work as stand-alone stories, but watching all three in succession reveals densely interwoven plotlines and character arcs. “Rock,” “Paper” and “Scissors” are all set at the same time, on the same day, in almost the same place: across three different spaces in a run-down Sheffield scissor factory. The crumbling location has resonance in a city that once had a rich industrial tradition of producing steel and manufacturing world-class cutlery, including scissors.From left, Guy Rhys, Lucie Shorthouse and Samatha Power rehearsing “Rock/Paper/Scissors” at the Lyceum theater in Sheffield, England.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe plays open after the death of the factory owner, whose will is missing. Each narrative centers on characters with competing claims on the building, and conflicting visions for its future.Chris Bush, who wrote the three plays to celebrate the Crucible Theater’s anniversary, said they were about offering a “perspective shift” across the three generations. “The same world is shared by three different stories, where heroes become villains and villains become heroes,” she said.To make sure the scripts worked for simultaneous performance, Bush planned them out with a series of spreadsheets, timing the entrances and exits by the word count of each scene, she said.Robert Hastie, Sheffield Theaters’ artistic leader and the director for “Paper,” said, “The precision tuning is more complicated than anything I’ve ever done.” Even scheduling rehearsals proved a headache, he added, requiring careful planning with his fellow directors Anthony Lau and Elin Schofield to divide the 14 actors’ time.Backstage during a recent preview performance, an atmosphere of quiet concentration prevailed. If any play were to start running fast, or slow, or to stop for any reason, it would throw all three out of sync. The team of stage managers were all focused on marked-up scripts and color-coded spreadsheets detailing the more than 80 entrances and exits.A large screen in each of the theater’s backstage areas shows all three stages as well as a giant synchronized clock, so any deviations from the plan can be quickly spotted. The stage managers communicate via radios and WhatsApp, and are ready, in the worst-case scenario, to stop all three shows if they have to. (So far, this only happened once in previews, because of a technical fault rather than a timing issue.)The stage manager Andrew Wilcox, center, conferring with colleagues backstage.Mary Turner for The New York TimesNonetheless, the swift entrances and exits — and the knowledge that the cast are having to run across a busy public square to get between the theaters — adds a frisson for both audiences and the actors.One of the cast members, Samantha Power, said she had some entrances “where I am absolutely sprinting across Tudor Square.” She added that this was more of a challenge on a Saturday night, “negotiating all the inebriated people.”Andrew Macbean, another actor in the show, said that during the same journey, “Somebody asked me if I had any spare change.” But mostly, he added, the cast was unfazed. “For us, it’s just one play,” he said. “Three different venues is no different, really, to doing it on three different sets.”Responses to “Rock/Paper/Scissors” have been positive so far, with the shows earning standing ovations and strong reviews. Watching all three plays back-to-back on press day on Wednesday, the performances became a cumulative experience: each new part deepened the audience’s understanding of the characters.The triptych also offers three different answers to a question that is freshly topical after two years of the coronavirus pandemic: What do we do with our empty city center spaces?In “Rock,” presented on the Crucible’s thrust stage, the character of Susie — an aging rocker and the sister of the scissor factory’s deceased owner — puts forward idealistic plans to turn the gritty space into a vibrant new music venue. In “Paper,” at the Lyceum, the owner’s daughter Faye and her wife argue for the most financially lucrative option: selling the building to a developer to turn it into apartments. “Scissors,” in the Studio, is set in a workshop where four young apprentices put the case for maintaining the building as a workshop for hand-making scissors, preserving a local tradition.These arguments will sound familiar to Sheffield residents. Like many British town centers, Sheffield contains many shuttered buildings, including a prominent former department store that city authorities are currently debating how to repurpose. (Options include a soccer museum, bars and restaurants, and housing). The decline of Sheffield’s steel industry since the 1970s has meant that many buildings once used in manufacturing also fell into disuse, although several have been repurposed as street food markets, nightclubs, vintage stores and housing developments.Fifty years ago there were dozens of scissor factories in Sheffield; now, there are just two. One of those that remains, Ernest Wright, lent working machinery to the production, so actors could sharpen real blades during “Scissors.”Hastie said it was “impossible to overestimate how central cutlery is to Sheffield’s sense of self and its sense of pride.” Examining this legacy, as well as considering the future of former industrial spaces, seemed an appropriate subject for a 50th anniversary show at a theater at the city’s heart, he said.“We were very much looking for an idea for our 50th anniversary that had a spirit of adventure and daring,” he said, adding that using the three theater spaces simultaneously fit that bill. “We wanted to see if we’d bitten off more than we could chew.”And have they? “We’re still chewing very hard,” Hastie said.Rock/Paper/ScissorsThrough July 2 at the Crucible, Studio and Lyceum theaters in Sheffield, England; sheffieldtheatres.co.uk.Jabez Sykes and Maia Tamrakar, actors in the production, embracing backstage after an exhausting performance.Mary Turner for The New York Times More

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      The ‘Most Real Richard III There’s Ever Been’

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      The Royal Shakespeare Company has cast a disabled actor to play the “deformed, unfinish’d” king for the first time. The choice has been hailed as a landmark moment.STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England — A raucous party was underway in one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s rehearsal rooms this month as the cast of “Richard III” ran through the play’s opening, dancing in a conga line while music blared and balloons bounced off the floor.Off to one side, the future Richard III sneered at the scene. Shakespeare depicted the king as a scheming hunchback who murdered his way to the British throne, and in this imagining of the play, he is personified by the 30-year-old actor Arthur Hughes. In role, Hughes stepped into the middle of the party, veering through the revelers to deliver the play’s famed opening speech: “Now is the winter of our discontent,” he began.As the speech continues, Richard lists the insults he has faced. He is “curtail’d of this fair proportion”; he is “cheated of feature”; he is “deformed, unfinish’d.” As Hughes declaimed each barb, he angrily squeezed a white balloon. Eventually the pressure became too much. The balloon popped.The moment of tension was made even more powerful by Hughes’s own appearance. He has radial dysplasia, meaning he was born with a shorter right arm, his wrist bending into the body and his hand missing a thumb.The first casting by the Royal Shakespeare Company of a disabled actor to play Richard III has been hailed as an advance in British theater. The play opened in Stratford-upon-Avon on Thursday and runs through Oct. 8.“You can see a despot and tyrant,” Hughes said of Richard III, “but also a little boy who hasn’t been loved and someone who’s shunned.”Ellie Kurttz, via Royal Shakespeare CompanyShakespeare used and amplified Richard III’s real-life condition — the king is thought to have had scoliosis or curvature of the spine — to highlight the character’s unsavory nature. (He is described at one point as a “pois’nous bunch-back’d toad.”) According to Gregory Doran, the director of the current adaptation, the casting of Hughes in the role “sends out a big message, just as not casting a disabled actor would have sent out a different message.”Hughes’s casting comes as the frequency of disabled actors earning major roles appears to be growing in British theater. In July, the National Theater will present “All of Us” by Francesca Martinez, an actor and playwright who has cerebral palsy (Martinez said in a telephone interview that the play would feature three disabled actors, including herself). And Liz Carr, who uses a wheelchair, this year won an Olivier Award, Britain’s equivalent of a Tony, for her performance in Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” at the National.In her Olivier acceptance speech, Carr highlighted some persistent problems. “There’s so many fears of risk of employing disabled actors,” she said, but added the award “proves we can do it, we can project, we can fill a stage.”Jack Thorne, the playwright behind “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and an activist for disabled people, said in a telephone interview that there was “definitely a willingness” to expand disabled casting in Britain. The National Theater was a leader, he said, as were six regional theaters behind an initiative called Ramps on the Moon that stages productions led by deaf and disabled actors.Yet there was still a dearth of lead roles in London’s commercial heartland, he said. “There aren’t West End shows with disabled leads,” he added. In discussions about diversity, the issue was routinely forgotten, he said. Theaters should bring in targets to increase participation, he said.The National Theater, for instance, has experimented with aspirational quotas for women and people of color, but not for disabled people. Alastair Coomer, the theater’s head of casting, said in a telephone interview that new targets were being discussed and that he “would not be surprised” if that discrepancy was addressed.Hughes in a Royal Shakespeare Company costume storeroom. “Richard III” plays in the company’s repertoire through Oct. 8.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesHughes, eating potato chips in a break from rehearsal, said he hoped his casting as Richard III “sets the mold for how the industry can change.”Growing up in Aylesbury, a town about 40 miles northwest of London, Hughes said that he had experienced few barriers to pursuing acting. As a child, he said, he was so enthusiastic in drama classes that he was given prime roles, such as Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”Hughes said that he had read “Richard III” for the first time while looking for speeches to use when auditioning for drama schools. He instantly identified with the role, he added, since the play’s characters view the future king as “not cut out for big parts” because of his looks. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me,’” Hughes said.After drama school, Hughes did not immediately secure an agent — unlike many of his colleagues. “Voices in my head were going, ‘Are you a risk?’” he said, but those doubts lifted after he secured a role in a production by Graeae, a British theater company that casts deaf and disabled actors. Before then, Hughes said, he felt his appearance “was going to hold me back,” but after being surrounded by other disabled actors, he felt empowered. He even started wearing short sleeves to highlight his limb difference, he added.The Royal Shakespeare Company show is Hughes’s most high-profile casting to date. In May, Doran gave an interview to The Times of London that was headlined: “Able-Bodied Actors Cannot Be Richard III.” In a letter of complaint to that newspaper, Doran said that the headline was misleading. His point, he wrote, was that, although anybody could play the role, a disabled actor could “enhance the performance and impact of the production.”Richard III is often portrayed as an almost comedic bad guy, Hughes said, often with a fake “hump and limp.” While not trying to hide the character’s villainy, he hoped to draw attention to his motivations: “You can see a despot and tyrant,” he said, “but also a little boy who hasn’t been loved and someone who’s shunned and outcast and is underestimated.”Mat Fraser, another disabled actor, who played Richard III in a production in Hull in northern England in 2017, said that the king was often played by older performers who could make the king seem a “withered little twig.” But Hughes is young and muscular — better suited to portraying a monarch who died at age 32 on a battlefield, Fraser said. “We’re going to see the most real Richard III there’s ever been,” he added.Hughes said he was already looking beyond his turn as Richard to other Shakespeare roles, and would love to play Hamlet, and Iago from “Othello.”“I’d like to play a role that’s not specified as disabled,” he said. “Obviously, whichever role I play will be disabled by the very nature of me playing it,” he added. “But that’s not the point.”Richard IIIThrough Oct. 8 at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England; rsc.org.uk. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Epiphany’ Review: A Holiday Party, but What Are We Celebrating?

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      In this heady Lincoln Center Theater production, Brian Watkins finds laughs and shivers in a pensive gathering of old friends.I could describe Brian Watkins’s “Epiphany,” which opened Thursday night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, as an existential dinner-party play. Or a satire of academics, armchair psychologists and the general intelligentsia, always trying to find a common language for our ways of living in the world. It could be called a critique of our modern society of self-interest. A statement on grief. Or a ghost story.I could even call it a kind of poem, making music out of abstractions while traversing the past and the present, the real and the surreal. That this heady work, in a Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Tyne Rafaeli, evades any one definition is a testament to its grand ambitions. In one hour and 50 minutes, “Epiphany” astutely captures a wide swath of ideas without losing its grasp on the hilarious and heartbreaking experience of being a person in the world.On a January evening in a secluded old house in the middle of nowhere, Morkan (Marylouise Burke, perfect as a jittery sexagenarian) hastily prepares for the holiday known as Epiphany, her itinerary packed with drinks, speeches, poems, songs, dancing and a goose feast. Which would be fine if anyone had read the full dossier Morkan sent along beforehand — or if anyone, Morkan included, actually understood what this archaic, forgotten ritual is.Thankfully Gabriel — Morkan’s beloved nephew, a revered writer and public intellectual, and the guest of honor — will be arriving to lead the festivities, and also to explain them. When Gabriel fails to show, instead sending Aran (an ethereal Carmen Zilles) in his place, a night of awkward exchanges, misunderstandings and spirited debates evolves into a dreamlike meditation on mortality.Also attending this vaguely defined soiree are Loren (Colby Minifie, currently in the Amazon series “The Boys”), a sober, vegan 20-something, helping with the preparations; Freddy (C.J. Wilson), a middle-aged alcoholic teacher; Kelly (Heather Burns), a pretentious pianist; Charlie (Francois Battiste), a smartly dressed, self-important lawyer; Sam (Omar Metwally), a pedantic psychiatrist with many opinions; Taylor (David Ryan Smith), his comically snide and heavy-drinking husband; and Ames (the reliably dry-witted Jonathan Hadary), an old friend of Morkan’s and her conspicuously absent sister Julia’s.In a rapid series of processions and introductions, we hear the characters before we see them; they ascend from an unseen lower level and appear in the parlor room of an old house.John Lee Beatty’s antique set design, with the main flight of stairs leading up into an ominous darkness, establishes an unsettling mood, strangely removed from the present day. And Isabella Byrd’s ghostly lighting summons an eerie “Fall of the House of Usher” vibe before illuminating a stunning surprise backdrop: We are watching an evening gathering during a January flurry, snow fitfully descending past the gnarled fingers of tree branches outside the towering windows.Members of the company on the “Epiphany” set, designed by John Lee Beatty with lighting by Isabella Byrd.Jeremy DanielThere’s not much action in “Epiphany,” so the play’s dynamism is all in the controlled chaos of the dialogue: interruptions, overlapping voices, heavy pauses. Watkins (whose plays include “Wyoming” and who created the recent time-loop western series “Outer Range”) effortlessly extracts the humor from the partygoers’ pretensions and posturing, which are just a cover for the insecurities they feel in the modern world — and in their own lives.Absurd developments offer punctuation: One character makes inappropriate bathroom jokes, another performs a “purposefully untitled” piano composition, and after one of the guests suffers a dinnertime injury, the others debate which alcohol to use to sterilize the wound.While Watkins leans into scorn for the insufferable urbanites one-upping one another, he seems to treasure the more introspective figures of Morkan and Ames. And there is plenty of beauty in the play’s abstractions; at its heart “Epiphany” is a love letter to the indefinable and unnameable.“As soon as you try and define love as an empirical thing you’ve suddenly lost the essence of love itself,” Aran says at one point in the night. “It’s bigger than our connotations.” And in a rare moment of drunken insight, Freddy recalls how he heard a poet once explain how the creative process is an act of “creating time … that the space between seconds and minutes actually like widens and deepens … as if eternity was inhabiting you.”Empiricism, existentialism, solipsism — “Epiphany” sends a lot of -isms into space, just to laugh at the volley. (“Well now we’re just saying words,” Ames points out.) Occasionally the play seems to fall down the rabbit hole of its own philosophical musings, but “Epiphany” never remains there too long; the humor, which works at several different registers, from barbed irony to tragicomic lampoonery to wacky physical comedy, reins in the play’s haughtier inclinations.Speaking of haughty — audiences may or may not catch the specter of another work within “Epiphany,” James Joyce’s “The Dead,” from his collection “Dubliners.” “Epiphany,” which first premiered in Ireland in 2019, in a production from the renowned Druid Theater Company, replicates some of the characters’ relationships and exchanges in “The Dead,” uses many of the same character names and echoes the general existential theme.References and snippets of the original text may fly right past anyone unfamiliar with “The Dead,” or anyone who hasn’t picked up “Dubliners” since college. No matter. There’s more than enough in “Epiphany” for it to stand on its own. See it and ruminate; this is a play “bigger than our connotations.”EpiphanyThrough July 24 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Transparent’ Musical Highlights Center Theater Group Season

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      “A Transparent Musical,” with music and lyrics by Faith Soloway, will have its world premiere in May 2023 at Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.The world premiere of a stage musical adaptation of the groundbreaking Amazon series “Transparent” will highlight the 2022-23 season of Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, the company announced Thursday.The production, “A Transparent Musical,” features characters from the original series about a sexagenarian parent in a Jewish Los Angeles family who comes out as a transgender woman. The new musical comedy is billed as “a story of self-discovery, acceptance and celebration.” It will have its world premiere in May at the Mark Taper Forum.The creator of the original series, Joey Soloway, and MJ Kaufman wrote the book, with music and lyrics by Faith Soloway (who wrote for all four seasons of the television series and composed the songs for its finale). The choreography is by James Aslop (“Girls5eva”), and it will be directed by Tina Landau (“SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical”).“My sibling and I have dreamed of creating a stage musical that brings the experiences of being trans and Jewish into a mainstream, pop culture fantasia,” Joey Soloway said in a release.The original series, which was inspired by the siblings Joey and Faith Soloway’s parent’s own transition later in life, was one of the first mainstream shows to focus on transgender issues when it premiered in 2014. It won eight Emmy Awards, and The New York Times’s Alessandra Stanley praised it as “an insightful, downbeat comedy told without piety or burlesque.” It was also the first scripted series to showcase a transitioning transgender character.“A Transparent Musical” will begin performances on May 20, 2023, and open on May 31, with a limited run through June 25, 2023.Center Theater Group, a 55-year-old nonprofit theater, will present the world premiere of Larissa FastHorse’s comedy “Fake It Until You Make It” (Aug. 2-Sept. 3, 2023), about “shifters” — people who exist in a world of self-determined identity. It will also present Jane Wagner’s one-woman play “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” which stars Cecily Strong of “Saturday Night Live” (Sept. 21-Oct. 23); Lynn Nottage’s Tony-nominated truck-stop-set comedy “Clyde’s” (Nov. 15- Dec. 18); and a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” (March 8- April 9, 2023) at the Taper.The productions are part of a Center Group season that includes work exclusively by writers who identify as female, transgender or nonbinary, a majority of whom are artists of color, which took shape after the company was called out last fall for its 10-play 2021-22 season, which included only one work by a woman. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Lessons in Survival: 1971’ Review: The Past Echoes in the Present

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      The writer James Baldwin and the poet Nikki Giovanni are at the center of a crackling work of verbatim theater at the Vineyard Theater.If the year weren’t in the title, you might come close to guessing it from the architecture of the sunken space: a conversation pit lined with couches upholstered in burnt orange, with blood orange carpeting to match. There’s a comfort to the room, a midcentury modern hospitality that invites you to take your shoes off, have a drink, light one cigarette after another, and talk and talk as you try to set the world to rights.And so the writer James Baldwin and the poet Nikki Giovanni do in “Lessons in Survival: 1971,” a crackling work of verbatim theater starring Carl Clemons-Hopkins and Crystal Dickinson. A time-capsule excavation of a moment in 20th-century Black American activist-intellectualism, it recreates a sprawling interview that Giovanni did with Baldwin for the WNET television talk show “Soul!” when he was 47, famous and living in France, and she was 28 and just getting started.“Jimmy,” Giovanni says, in the play’s first line, “I’m — I’m really curious. Why did you move to Europe?”It’s so potent, that familiarity: calling him Jimmy, not Mr. Baldwin. Before he even opens his mouth, he becomes for us not a god visiting from the pantheon but a human being. And in the question that her question implies — Why did a continent an ocean away seem like a healthier place for you, a Black American, to live? — we hear her set up the framework for an ever-thoughtful, sometimes contentious, particularly American dialogue.Directed by Tyler Thomas at the Vineyard Theater, this engrossing 90-minute show arrives at the end of a season of civic and social reckonings on New York stages, which puts it at risk of seeming like an eat-your-vegetables experience. It is emphatically not.Conceived by Marin Ireland, Peter Mark Kendall, Reggie D. White and Thomas, and created with the theater collective the Commissary, it was presented in an earlier version online during the industry shutdown. In person, it is the kind of electric theater that charges audiences with energy: a meeting between public intellectuals wrestling rigorously with the culture, and clashing with each other along the way. The drama is built in. All we have to do is listen.The actors are listening, too, wearing earpieces that feed them the audio of the interview, whose words they speak with the original stammers and hesitations. We hear, briefly, the voices of the real Baldwin and Giovanni captured on that old recording, but the performance is about channeling their essence, not impersonating them.So it doesn’t matter, really, that Clemons-Hopkins — tall, broad-shouldered, bearded, familiar to fans of the HBO Max series “Hacks” as the endearing workaholic Marcus — has such a different physical presence than Baldwin. It’s the writer’s mind that this show is after.Dickinson is riveting as the lesser-known Giovanni, a poised young Black woman with a soft surface and a spine of steel. Respectful of Baldwin, she belongs to a different sex and generation than he does. And she challenges him on his stubborn sympathy for notions of Black manhood that she believes must change.“Be careful as a woman what you demand of a man,” he warns, but she is having none of it — a resistance that got her finger snaps of approval from the crowd at the performance I saw.Baldwin and Giovanni are united, though, in having no use for white critics, so take my admiration for this show with that grain of salt. But do go, and do pause in the lobby, where one corner has been turned into an installation by You-Shin Chen, the show’s set designer, and Matt Carlin, its props supervisor, with a loop of period video clips full of famous Black faces and retro advertising (by Josiah Davis and Attilio A. Rigotti) playing on a vintage console TV.It will transport you straight back to the era of the interview, when Giovanni and the expatriate Baldwin were determined that Black Americans should take rightful ownership of their white-run country.“I do know that we have paid too much for it to be able to abandon it,” he says, with an eye on the ancestors. “My father and my father’s fathers paid too much for it.”“I’ve paid too much for it,” she says. “I’m only 28.”Lessons in Survival: 1971Through June 30 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      Velcro or Snaps? The ABC’s of Stripping for a Cause

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      Broadway Bares began as a response to the AIDS crisis. Thirty years later, the one-night-only burlesque spectacle remains a potent, frisky fund-raiser.Jerry Mitchell was a 32-year-old Broadway hoofer causing a sensation each night by dancing nearly naked in “The Will Rogers Follies” when he had an idea: To shake his bare bum for a good cause.It was 1992, near the height of the AIDS crisis. Mitchell recruited seven fit fellow dancers from other Broadway shows, and on a rainy Sunday night at Splash, a since-shuttered gay club in Chelsea, they took turns undressing on the bar to raise money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Two shows and a tray of tequila shots later, the novice strippers had collected $8,000 — and the burlesque spectacle Broadway Bares was born.“There were people who were confused as to why we were using a strip show to raise money for AIDS,” Mitchell, who is now a Tony Award-winning director and choreographer, said in a phone interview. “It was coming from a place of innocence,” he said, and of paucity: He didn’t have the money to attend big-ticket AIDS charity events, “but I had the drive and desire to help my community.”Broadway Bares became a hit, outgrowing one establishment after another and becoming steadily more polished, until “we weren’t just a benefit,” Mitchell said. “We were a Broadway show.” On Sunday, that show will celebrate its 30th anniversary at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan, with performances at 9:30 p.m. and midnight.Putting together the event — which involves more than 500 volunteer theater artists, among them performers, designers and stage managers, many busy in current Broadway shows — is a complex and hectic game of logistics, topped by a final rehearsal sprint in which the entire, one-night-only production comes together in a matter of days.From left, Nick Kenkel, an executive producer of the show; the director Laya Barak; and the associate director Jonathan Lee.Matthew Leifheit for The New York TimesAt one of those rehearsals this week, at a studio near Times Square, nearly 30 dancers were spinning, kicking and pretending to rip off their pants. Laya Barak, the director of this year’s show and a creator of the opening number, reminded everyone to “keep it sharp” and “reach from the shoulder.” More pressing, though, was the choreography of clothes. “Whatever your strippable is, that has to travel with you,” she told a group, meaning they needed to cart away their discarded layers. Other items were to be handed off to other dancers or chucked offstage.“Are you wearing a jock or a G-string?” she asked one dancer of his attire for the show, which bares a lot but stops short of full-frontal nudity. He wasn’t sure; costumes were still being constructed and wouldn’t be ready until Saturday.That meant Collin Heyward, the lead dancer in another piece, and his castmates wouldn’t get to practice removing his clothes until the day before opening. At the rehearsal, Heyward, who made his Broadway debut in “The Lion King” in February, attacked the hip-hop choreography with confidence but admitted to being anxious about the stripping. “It has to be seamless,” he said. “That’s an added pressure.”With about a dozen dance routines, each with its own choreographer, Broadway Bares is a high-profile platform for emerging dance makers. The routines use a variety of styles, including hip-hop, Latin dance, ballet and aerial arts, often mashed together into new combinations. But burlesque remains the core of the artistic ethos and attitude.“Burlesque isn’t only about being naked,” Mitchell said. “It’s about being funny. The humor is the heart.”Still, the endgame is getting naked. And that has its complications.Sarah Marie Dixey working on a costume. “I’m very fond of snaps and magnets,” she said. “They don’t really get tangled in anything.”Matthew Leifheit for The New York TimesThe “lead strips,” as the featured dancers are known, might have as many as five layers to remove. The first one is easy, like a hat or coat. “Then it gets a little tricky,” said Nick Kenkel, who has been involved with the show for nearly 20 years and is now an executive producer. A T-shirt might get ripped away (prepared with a small cut to ease tearing), followed by a dancer’s pants, but “you have to do it in a way that the tight boxer shorts underneath don’t pop off,” he said.Minding such fragile costumes and perfecting their precisely timed removal is a new skill for dancers more used to focusing on counts than on discarding clothes. “If you’re not pulling hard enough, it can ruin the strip,” said Jonathan Lee, the associate director and one of the choreographers for Broadway Bares.That’s where the costume designers come in, with their tricks and tools to construct clothes that are “comfortable to dance in but aren’t going to break at the wrong moment,” the designer Sarah Marie Dixey said. Quick-rig costumes use a variety of fasteners, each with pros and cons. Dixey called herself “an anti-Velcro person,” adding, “I’m very fond of snaps and magnets. They don’t really get tangled in anything.” From the performer’s perspective, a consensus emerged: “Snaps,” Lee said. “Always snaps.”Mishaps are inevitable, but “these are people who do this all the time,” Dixey said. “Not necessarily stripping, but being onstage and able to problem-solve in the moment.”Mechanics aside, stripping “was a challenge for me artistically,” said Aubrey Lynch II, a former dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and “The Lion King” who performed in several early Broadway Bares shows and is now a dean and a director of education at American Ballet Theater. Despite any initial hesitation, Lynch said that what he experienced onstage was freedom — which “added another layer of performance to my toolbox and strangely strengthened my self-esteem.”Jason Tam and Bonnie Milligan rehearsing for this year’s show, which is called “XXX,” a nod to its age and its naughtiness.Matthew Leifheit for The New York TimesThat’s a lesson Mitchell is happy for performers to learn. He sees undressing onstage not as a vulnerable act, but an empowering one. “You’re in the driver’s seat,” he said he tells dancers, reminding them that “the audience is on your side. They’re rooting for you. If you’re comfortable, they’re comfortable.”The Broadway Bares routines, which are three to four minutes long, convey a mini narrative, and have been inspired by things like Greek myths and board games. Some choreographers have also used the dance to comment about societal issues.In this year’s production, titled “XXX” — a wink at both the show’s age and its naughtiness — Lee reimagined a superhero number from the 2002 event to include characters like Black Panther (danced by Heyward) and Shang-Chi with dancehall music, Afro beats and stepping. “I wanted to honor what we have gained in the past 20 years,” he said.While the inaugural Broadway Bares featured only well-toned, cisgender men, the next year’s event included women. Later iterations have gone on to feature transgender performers, disabled dancers and all expressions of sexuality. “We’ve even had straight performers,” Mitchell joked. (For all the representation onstage, though, the audience remains mostly gay men.)When Jessica Castro was invited to create a dance this year, she knew she wanted to embrace body positivity. She cast as her star Akira Armstrong, a plus-size dancer and the founder of Pretty Big Movement dance company. “It’s about celebrating all backgrounds, all body shapes, all types,” Castro said, adding that she found stripping to be an act of agency. “It’s a shedding of all these ideals, all these constructs that society has put on us.”Over the 30 years of Broadway Bares shows, AIDS has become a manageable condition, especially for those with access to health care and preventive drugs. But the devastation it caused New York’s tight-knit theater scene is a part of Broadway history that is woven into the show’s mission.The event is “both a fund-raising and an educational opportunity,” said Tom Viola, the executive director of Broadway Cares who attended the first Bares at Splash. (It has raised more than $22 million to date for Broadway Cares to support health and social services for entertainment professionals both locally and nationwide, crucially during the coronavirus pandemic.)As part of the rehearsal period, the organization helps dancers, most of whom did not experience the worst of the AIDS epidemic, “understand the anger, sorrow, loss and stigma that first propelled us into action,” Viola said. At this week’s rehearsal, dancers were given profiles of beneficiary organizations and encouraged to step up their own online fund-raising efforts.And while Barak is concerned with all the usual elements of directing a show of this scale, she is also asking: “How do we keep that flame going into the future to continue raising money for Broadway Cares and continue this tradition of community?”But in the meantime, back at rehearsal, she was ready for another run-through.“Going from the pants strip!” she yelled. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Trevor: The Musical’ Review: He’s Coming Out

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      A bullied eighth grader learns to shine in this filmed version of the stage musical streaming on Disney+.Trevor is a fictional boy with real world impact. In 1995, “Trevor,” a 23-minute film about the bullied eighth grader, won the Academy Award for live action short; three years later, its creators founded the Trevor Project, a crisis intervention organization for L.G.B.T.Q. youth, and recently allowed the story to be reworked by the stage director Marc Bruni into an adamantly chipper Off Broadway musical that ran last fall for eight weeks and lives on in Robin Abrams’s energetic and tonally discordant filmed recording.Set in 1981, the story is dated by design to evoke a less permissive, more inarticulate era. Trevor (Holden William Hagelberger) fumbles to explain his feelings for a football jock (Sammy Dell), even to himself. “It’s like, I’m like, I don’t know,” he croons. For help, the confused boy cries out to his goddess Diana (Yasmeen Sulieman) — Ross, not the Roman — who appears, sequined and shimmering, to belt out her biggest hits (which get louder applause than the show’s original songs).Adult performers are vastly outnumbered by a strong company of singing and dancing children, who in the school scenes form phalanxes and mazes, physically cornering Trevor into being isolated and judged. These classmates’ talent show intrigue and crossed crushes only exist to pad the thin plot. The book and lyrics writer Dan Collins is better at his insight into the young characters’ melodramatic point of view — none of them can imagine this rather rote story has ever happened to anyone else.In different times, the original short injected morbid comedy into Trevor’s habit of pretending to off himself for attention. Today, the suicide element has been softened, though one wonders if this generation’s more attuned and sensitive kids will find this staging of “Trevor” quaint, kitschy — or perhaps still universal.Trevor: The MusicalNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More