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      Avignon Festival Gets Its Buzz Back

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      With striking premieres in the main program and enchanting discoveries on the supplementary Fringe, the eminent event in European theater is flourishing after some difficult years.AVIGNON, France — After two years of pandemic-related disruption, the Avignon Festival is well and truly back. As the event, a longtime highlight on the European theater calendar, got underway here last week, there were familiar sights everywhere. All around the small city center, buzzing crowds filled the streets, while blasé regulars zigzagged between performers handing out fliers for some 1,570 Fringe productions.That’s 500 more shows than last year, when the open-access Fringe — known as “le Off,” and running in parallel with the Avignon Festival’s official program, “le In” — attempted to find its feet again after the 2020 edition was canceled. While coronavirus cases are rising again this month in France, even masks have been few and far between in the Avignon heat.In the “In” lineup, one world premiere captured the boisterous mood better than any other. “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop at the Belgian playhouse NTGent, is loud, preposterous and extremely entertaining — if a little troubling. It requires superhuman feats from a group of musicians, dressed like sports competitors, who are alternately cheered on and screamed down by performers cast as zealous fans, in front of a mumbling referee.A double bassist plays his instrument horizontally while doing ab crunches; one of his colleagues must jump up and down to reach a keyboard set above his head. A metronome sets the often wild tempo for the production’s “one song,” composed by Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, which the group performs on a loop. It could hardly be more literal: Its opening lines are “Run for your life/’Til you die.”The cast in “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival Near the end of the performance I saw, the physical extremes that Warlop pushes her cast to execute became a little too real. A violinist who plays on a high beam, sometimes balancing on one leg, became disoriented after jumping off the beam and hit her head hard against it. Despite the concussion risk, she climbed back up and kept going, her face tight with pain.When the show ended with much of the cast collapsed from exhaustion, the instant standing ovation for the show was more than earned, yet it also felt like “The Hunger Games” for theater aficionados. Still, it is a classic Avignon production: ripe for debate long into the night.Other productions from the official lineup were less invigorating, but together they made for a respectable lap of honor for the Avignon Festival’s departing artistic leader, the French writer and director Olivier Py. His eight-year tenure has felt muddled, with quarrels about the event’s dearth of female directors and several ill-conceived premieres on Avignon’s biggest stages.That was especially true of productions at the open-air Cour d’Honneur, a majestic stage inside the city’s Papal Palace. This summer, however, Py corrected course with a high-profile and thought-provoking show, Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Black Monk.”“The Black Monk” was first staged at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany, in January, yet much has happened since. A message against a red backdrop during the play’s curtain calls at Avignon — “Stop War” — was a reminder of the conflict in Ukraine and Serebrennikov’s status as a high-profile Russian dissident, who was put under house arrest in Moscow in 2017 and prevented from traveling outside his native country for five years.Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Black Monk.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival Not that war features in “The Black Monk,” which is based on an 1894 short story by Anton Chekhov. Despite its scale — four parts, a running time of nearly three hours and an expanded cast of 22 in Avignon — it is more personal than political in nature, and mainly focused on the descent of one man, Kovrin, into delusion and megalomania.Each part of the show focuses on a single character’s perspective. First there is Yegor, Kovrin’s childhood guardian; then Tanya, Yegor’s daughter, who marries Kovrin. He makes for a terrible husband, unsurprisingly, and in the third and fourth parts, his recurring hallucination — a black monk — takes over the stage as well as Kovrin’s mind.At the midway point, the structure starts to feel repetitive, and a few people walked out as a result. Yet Serebrennikov wisely pivots to a more operatic approach in the second half with a large chorus of singers and dancers, all in black monk’s cowls. The result aptly fills the expansive Cour d’Honneur stage and testifies to Serebrennikov’s obvious craft and passion for the characters, although the choreography remains too generic to fully carry the piece to its intended destination.On other stages, the mood was also bleak, as it often has been under Py. “Iphigenia,” staged at Avignon’s opera house, sneaked in a nod to Py’s successor, the Portuguese writer and director Thiago Rodrigues. The director, Anne Théron, opted for Rodrigues’s 2015 retelling of the myth of Iphigenia, sacrificed by the Greeks in exchange for the wind needed to carry them across the sea to Troy. It is a delicate, evocative version, told by characters who remember — or refuse to remember — the story even as it happens, as if the tragedy was bound to happen over and over again.Bashar Murkus’s “Milk.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon FestivalChild sacrifice also features in Bashar Murkus’s “Milk,” albeit in a very different context. Murkus, a young Palestinian director based in Haifa, took maternal milk as a central metaphor for this wordless work about mourning mothers. The women onstage cradle mannequins, slowly then frenetically; milk flows from the fake breasts they wear, ultimately filling the stage. The result is full of arresting tableaux, despite a subpar musical score.For vibrant, energetic theater, however, the best bet remains to delve into the motley Fringe offerings. This year, for instance, nine companies from the French island of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, banded together to present an invigorating mini-series of shows.David Erudel and Lolita Tergémina in “The Game of Love and Chance,” directed by Tergémina.Sébastien MarchalOne company, Sakidi, is performing Marivaux’s “The Game of Love and Chance,” a classic 18th-century French comedy, in the Creole language spoken on Réunion (with subtitles). Réunion Creole is very rarely heard on French stages, and this vivacious production by Lolita Tergémina, at the Chapelle du Verbe Incarné theater, suggests that is a shame. Since the language is heavily influenced by French, a lot of it is understandable without the subtitles, and the translation is full of images that make Marivaux feel fresh again.New French plays often come to Avignon for a trial run, too, and at a theater called 11, the playwright Jean-Christophe Dollé has landed a hit with “Phone Me.” This well-crafted intergenerational story revolves around what now feels like a 20th-century artifact, the phone booth. There are three onstage along with three central characters — a member of the French Resistance during World War II and her son and granddaughter, in the 1980s and 1990s — whose secrets converge in this unlikely setting.Amal Allaoui, left, and Alice Trocellier in “Tales of the Fairies,” directed by Aurore Evain.Mirza DurakovicAmong 1,570 shows, there is a special kind of delight in happening upon a gem like “Phone Me,” or “Tales of the Fairies,” a bright, family-friendly production at the Espace Alya. The director and scholar Aurore Evain is part of a French movement aiming to reclaim the legacy of forgotten female artists, and in Avignon, she has revived two fairy tales by the 17th-century writer Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy.On a pocket-size stage, at lunchtime on a Monday, Evain’s three actors and musicians brought a demanding queen, a kind prince and some very helpful animals to whimsical life. Call it a sprinkle of vintage Avignon fairy dust: There was certainly some in the air.Avignon Festival. Various venues, through July 26.Off d’Avignon. Various venues, through July 30. More

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      ‘Mister Miss America’ Review: A Fight for the Crown

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      The first male contestant in his small-town beauty pageant is determined to win hearts, minds and the crown, in this solo play from the writer and performer Neil D’Astolfo.A boy forced to dim his flame discovers a local beauty pageant that sets off a spark in him again. For gay men of a certain stripe who make icons of tenacious pop divas and glamorous grandes dames, it’s a tale as old as Broadway. The self-proclaimed unicorn is now an unlikely contender in that contest, but he’s determined to win both the crown and the hearts of the town’s residents.In “Mister Miss America,” which opened on Monday night at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the writer and performer Neil D’Astolfo takes us behind the scenes and into the Southern-fried confidence of Derek Tyler Taylor, a flamboyant and fast-tongued trailblazer. Derek, in his mid-20s, is the first male contestant in an old-fashioned Virginia pageant, and though the rules have been bent just enough to let him compete, the extent of his welcome remains uncertain.D’Astolfo turns the audience into Derek’s confessor and personal cheering squad, as the other beauty queen hopefuls in this solo play, produced by All For One Theater, are talked about but not seen. He enters his dressing room shrieking with excitement, but it soon becomes clear that not everyone is as thrilled with Derek’s participation.If a beauty pageant is just a dog show for people, this one is “tops-to-bottoms full of bitches,” quips Derek, who works as an assistant manager at a Petco. His competitors include a top-seeded rival whose bigotry and ultimate hypocrisy represent the obstacles in the way of the sashaying hero’s journey.Derek’s brashness is, of course, a cover for the hurt of rejection. His mom at least stopped throwing things at him when he learned to bottle himself up, he jokes. Like any savvy pageant participant, Derek is poised and in control even as he reveals the bruises beneath his bravado. In a menagerie of toy canines, Derek is a wolf in a sapphire tuxedo with the voracious will of Patti LuPone devouring “Rose’s Turn.”Derek’s elaborate obsession with LuPone, like many of the gay cultural touchstones in “Mister Miss America,” is not exactly original territory. Indeed, as much as Derek cuts a rebellious figure on the small-town stage, his allusions and affinities as a gay man are down-the-middle, almost to the point of cliché.Still, D’Astolfo’s writing crackles with delightful turns of phrase that slip by almost before they register. “Hand to Gaga, I didn’t know it would be such a fuss to enter this here competition,” he swears. But could anyone this fabulous be an abomination? “No way, Mary J!”D’Astolfo is also an immensely likable performer. As Derek, he is haughty but vulnerable, an unselfconscious and assured storyteller, whether tearing into his adversaries or recalling an ill-fated bus trip to see LuPone perform in “Gypsy.” He can land a punchline with his eyes alone.Under the direction of Tony Speciale, the production flips easily between backstage confessionals and the showdown out front, where Derek’s talent is the beloved gay art of lip-syncing. Lighting by Travis McHale does scene transporting work on an uncluttered gray set by the designer Se Hyun Oh, while costumes by Hunter Kaczorowski, sparkling on a rack to the side, lend Derek do-it-yourself flash and flair.As up-to-the-minute as D’Astolfo’s pop references may be, there’s a retro quality to both the setting and the character that feels a step behind the times. If a country boy were looking for inspiration, the only beauty pageant of any relevance he would find on TV in the past decade is one made especially for people like him and hosted by RuPaul.Turning trauma into opulent self-presentation has long been a favored form of queer artists, and it’s more popular than ever. The global “Drag Race” franchise has turned the act of defying gender norms through polished performance and the excavation of personal hardship into mainstream entertainment. That means there’s plenty of appetite for a show like “Mister Miss America” — and that it has a lot more to measure up to than a backwater dog and pony show.Mister Miss AmericaThrough Aug. 7 at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Manhattan; afo.nyc. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Bidding Farewell to His Theatrical Flock

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      In a 34-year run at New York Theater Workshop, James C. Nicola held that directors and writers are equal partners — and helped send “Rent” and “Hadestown” to Broadway.The Tony Awards ceremony had just wrapped up at Radio City Music Hall, and it was time for the parties. But for one honoree, James C. Nicola, the longtime artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, there would be no stop-off for toasts at the Plaza Hotel or after-midnight carousing at Tavern on the Green.Instead, he headed to a nearby parking garage, and settled behind the wheel of a rental van for the 40-minute ride back to the dorms at Adelphi University on Long Island, where he’d be sleeping that night. As far as he was concerned, there was no other choice: He had pickup duty at 10 a.m. for a group of young artists arriving by train for one of the summer workshops that have been a hallmark of his 34-year tenure at one of Off Broadway’s most beloved theaters.It’s not those gatherings that led the Tony committee to give Nicola a special honor. Or at least not fully. It’s also that his 199-seat East Village theater spawned the Tony-winning best musicals “Rent,” “Once” and “Hadestown.” That the recent hot-button plays “What the Constitution Means to Me”and “Slave Play” ran there. And that the theater’s support made a crucial difference to the careers of such writers as Tony Kushner, Lisa Kron and Doug Wright; the directors Rachel Chavkin, Lileana Blain-Cruz and Sam Gold; and many others.Nicola, center, with fellow Tony honorees Eileen Rivera and Ashruf “Osh” Ghanimah at the Tony Honors cocktail party in early June.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Tony came as a bonus after Nicola announced last year that he was stepping down, the first of the very long-serving artistic leaders of major nonprofit New York theaters to do so. And while he acknowledged that the theater-world reckoning over the whiteness of its leadership persuaded him it was time to leave, he departed on July 10 with what seems to be an unblemished record.At 72, his gait has slowed. But his ice-blue eyes still blaze when he gets animated about his affection for anagrams or who might star with Daniel Radcliffe later this year in “Merrily We Roll Along,” part of the last Workshop season he programmed. (The freelance director Patricia McGregor, a Black woman who has had an ongoing connection to the theater, is succeeding him in the top job.)Nicola spent five years working as a casting associate at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Public Theater). Comparisons with Papp and the far-larger Public are inevitably imprecise. But in his own less grandiose, more self-effacing way, Nicola is among the handful of artistic directors to make the biggest artistic impact on the New York theater world since — a magnet for iconoclastic talents who also helped develop a passel of shows with enormous commercial appeal.Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” was part of New York Theater Workshop’s 1995-96 season, a pivotal time for the theater. The cast included, from left: Jesse L. Martin, Adam Pascal, Wilson Heredia, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Rodney Hicks and Anthony Rapp.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNicola at the theater in 1997. A son of the 1960s, he once imagined he’d be a Baptist minister.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore personally, he is one of the last of his kind: a son of the ’60s who imagined he’d be a Baptist minister and made a brick-and-mortar building into a flock and a chosen family.In a video acceptance speech for the Tony, Nicola put it this way: “Our community has aspired to be a sanctuary for a certain species of artist — theatermakers who embrace their divinity, who understand their sacred obligation to lead and inspire us.”And in one of several recent conversations that included breaks between work-in-progress readings at Adelphi and lunch at a favorite Hell’s Kitchen diner, he stood firm in his conviction that idealism is the fuel that kept him going, and that bringing people together to be challenged is the goal.“Nothing makes me angrier than to be called a gatekeeper,” he said.He added: “Nothing makes me happier than to be mad when I leave the theater.”RACHEL CHAVKIN HAD BEEN inviting Nicola and his then-associate artistic director, Linda Chapman, to take in her work since she was an M.F.A. student at Columbia University. After seeing “Three Pianos,” a rambunctious reimagining of Franz Schubert as the center of a drunken posse of musicians and fans, Nicola asked Chavkin and Alec Duffy, one of her collaborators on the show, to his denlike office on the second floor of the East Village building that abuts the theater.“I think he opened by saying ‘I think that’s one of the best pieces of theater I’ve ever seen,’” she recalled in a recent phone call. “Our jaws dropped.”Programming “Three Pianos” into the Workshop’s 2010-11 season was a career-changer for Chavkin, who, while continuing to do avant-garde work with the troupe known as the TEAM, also helped to shape the boundary-busting Broadway musicals “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” and “Hadestown.” (She is co-directing at the Workshop again next season, while aiming another musical, “Lempicka,” for Broadway.)Like Chavkin, the now Tony-winning director Sam Gold earned his union card directing at the Workshop, in 2007. He still recalls Nicola’s support when he wanted to hire a scenic designer with opera-world credits to build what would be an ambitious set for Betty Shamieh’s play “The Black Eyed.”“It’s the kind of thing that a director on their first job doesn’t get to do,” Gold said. “Jim would say, ‘I don’t want to limit your imagination.’”And the commitment went beyond a single show — part of Nicola’s belief that directors are equal partners with playwrights in an American theater system that tends to privilege the latter.David Oyelowo, left, and Daniel Craig in Sam Gold’s 2016 production of “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Over the years,” Gold said, “I’ve had very few people genuinely see me as an artist — who can relate one show to another, as someone with a lifelong project.”Whitney White, who was Gold’s assistant on the 2016 Workshop production of “Othello” that starred Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo, speaks of Nicola as a presence in her life, not just a champion of her work. (White directed Aleshea Harris’s play “On Sugarland” at the Workshop this spring.)“I’ve spoken to him about men and love and theater and everything,” she said. “It’s a fully furnished table.”That’s not easy to find, even in nonprofit theaters that don’t have to obsess over the bottom line. “It’s a different style of artistic directorship — that you’re in community, in dialogue, not just a blip,” she added.NICOLA GREW UP OUTSIDE HARTFORD, Conn., gay and closeted, the oldest of four brothers in a middle-class family. In high school and then for a while at Tufts University, he took private singing lessons, imagining a career in opera or choral music. A year studying abroad took him to the Royal Court Theater in London, where he got interested in directing.Eventually, it helped lead him to the writing of the British experimentalist Caryl Churchill, a Royal Court favorite, whose work he helped champion at the New York Shakespeare Festival and at Arena Stage, in Washington, D.C., where he had a one-year directing fellowship that turned into seven more years as a producing associate.What became New York Theater Workshop had been presenting work around Manhattan for nearly a decade when Nicola raised his hand for the top job. In conversations with Stephen Graham, its founder and current board member, he learned that the theater, which was already funding fellowships for directors, was hungry to have a bigger public profile.“They wanted to change the form,” Nicola said. “What better could I hear?”Under Nicola, the theater staged Churchill’s work eight times, more than any other writer. But no figure is more associated with his tenure than the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove. After seeing his work in Europe, Nicola brought him to direct in the United States for the first time, adapting Eugene O’Neill’s unfinished play “More Stately Mansions,” in 1997.Two years later, his deconstruction of the Tennessee Williams classic “A Streetcar Named Desire” — Blanche, Stanley and Stella each spend stage time in the bathtub — heralded the van Hove/Workshop alliance as one of the most exciting (and divisive) destinations in New York theater.During Nicola’s reign the theater presented eight van Hove productions, capped in 2015 with “Lazarus,” a rock musical with a book by Enda Walsh and songs, new and old, by David Bowie, who was secretly battling cancer during its creation and died during its run.Ivo van Hove has directed eight productions at the Workshop, including the 2015 production of David Bowie and Enda Walsh’s “Lazarus,” with Michael C. Hall and Sophia Anne Caruso.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe circumstances had echoes of “Rent” — a show the theater began developing four years into Nicola’s tenure that had its final dress rehearsal at the Workshop on Jan. 25, 1996. That night its creator, Jonathan Larson, suddenly died of an aortic aneurysm.The “Rent” story — 12 years on Broadway, the Pulitzer Prize, productions all over the world — is show business canon. Royalties from that and other Broadway transfers helped boost the theater’s annual budget from $400,000 to $10 million in the Nicola era. But as he talked about “Rent” and “Lazarus,” Nicola hinted at the ways they might have turned out had tragedy not struck, their creators wrested from the process of art-making too soon.“Lazarus,” which was sped into production and where only van Hove knew of Bowie’s precarious health, was among the most challenging experiences of Nicola’s time at the Workshop. But he pinpoints his darkest days to 2006, when a planned staging of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” a solo play about an American demonstrator for Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer, was pulled.Kushner and Harold Pinter, among others, accused the theater of capitulating to political pressure; the theater maintained it was only delaying the production, which originated at the Royal Court in London. Nicola had to return from Italy to defuse the situation, which he called a “misunderstanding that was threatening to the very heart of the institution.” (“Rachel Corrie” ended up running at another theater.)More recently, debates over representation in the theater world have encouraged in him a greater self-awareness. He pointed to Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” which was championed by his theater and by notable white male critics. He later came to learn that many Black women felt otherwise.“There are impulses that I have that feel like good and positive ones, and then learn that my response is not universal,” Nicola said.“It’s really good to think about the risks and possible outcomes,” he added, “but also not be intimidated by not being able to predict. To not retreat, not get cautious or conservative.”FINISH A 34-YEAR TERM running a major theater and the hosannas will come fast and furious.Besides the Tony, Nicola was celebrated at the Workshop’s annual gala, which had a diner theme in honor of his affection for humble food. There were speeches and a musical performance from some original “Rent” cast members, a drag queen and, for a finale, four veteran stage actresses enacting a “scene” from “The Golden Girls,” a Nicola favorite.“My gratitude to the theater was giving me a sense that the world was bigger,” Nicola said, reflecting on his career. Erik Tanner for The New York TimesWeeks later, several hundred friends and associates surprised him at the theater with a reading of Moss Hart’s backstage comedy “Light Up the Sky,” the last play he had directed at Arena Stage, with a cast that included the playwrights Lucas Hnath, Dael Orlandersmith and Kron; the performer Penny Arcade; and the producers Jeffrey Seller and Jordan Roth. (“I have lived this play my entire adult life,” a grateful Nicola said later.)Uptown and downtown, artful and kitschy — it’s an increasingly illusory divide that Nicola, who soaked up the work of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, has managed to happily bridge, personally and professionally.“He’ll be talking one minute about [the French director] Ariane Mnouchkine and the next he’ll be doing an Ethel Merman impression,” said Wright, whose Grand Guignol-ish Marquis de Sade play, “Quills,” was, along with “Rent,” in the 1995-96 season that brought a new level of starshine to the theater.Nicola proudly cops to being a musical-theater show queen, quoting “Funny Girl” in his gala acceptance speech and later pointing to a lyric from (shocking!) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” as explaining his mission: “We taught the world new ways to dream.”The “director in me” decided he needed a ritual way to bring closure to his time at the theater. So he and friends rode the Circle Line on the Fourth of July. “When I board the boat I will be leaving my old life and when I get off it, I will be entering my new life,” he said beforehand.As to what’s next, all he can propose is “opening myself up to new adventures.”In the meantime, he’s taken to writing letters of thanks, sending them into the world without knowing who will (or won’t) respond.One went to the theater department at Tufts.Another to the Little Theater of Manchester, Conn., where he appeared onstage as the Mock Turtle in “Alice in Wonderland,” and was first dazzled by the art of telling a story to an audience in public.“My gratitude to the theater was giving me a sense that the world was bigger — that there were many other possibilities,” he said. “To that 12- or 13-year-old boy, this is everything he aspired to. It happened.” More

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      A Global Hit, ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ Finally Lands in New York

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      The splashy show, an example par excellence of what makes modern French musicals distinctive, begins a run at Lincoln Center.When Americans are asked to name French musicals, their go-to is “Les Misérables,” which opened in Paris in 1980 before an extensively retooled English version went on to conquer the world a few years later.That, or some of the films that Jacques Demy directed in the 1960s, like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “The Young Girls of Rochefort.”Usually not mentioned on our shores are the wildly popular homegrown stage musicals that appeared in France in the late 1990s. But now the most famous of them, “Notre Dame de Paris,” is having its New York premiere at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, and will run there through July 24.One of its creators has issues with the terminology used to describe his work, though.“I don’t think of ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ as musical theater,” the composer Richard Cocciante said by video from Rome, where he was preparing for a concert tour in Italy. “For me it’s a people’s opera. That’s because it’s entirely sung-through. We don’t call the numbers arias, though: ‘Belle’ or ‘Le temps des cathédrales’ stand alone as songs,” he added, mentioning two of the show’s many sweeping ballads and its biggest hits.The show, a spectacle with a cast of 30, made its debut in Paris in 1998.Alessandro DobiciBased, like “Les Misérables,” on an epic 19th-century novel by Victor Hugo (which also inspired the Disney animated film “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” to name just one of many adaptations), “Notre Dame de Paris” successfully exploited a distinctively French approach to modern stage musicals.The lyricist Luc Plamondon already had a successful career writing for artists both in his native Quebec (a certain belter released an album of his songs, “Dion chante Plamondon,” in 1992) and in France, where he wrote the lyrics for the musical “Starmania” in the late 1970s. (That perennial favorite is returning to the Paris stage in November.)Looking for another long-form project two decades later, Plamondon thought that “Notre Dame de Paris” would be a fitting source and called up Cocciante, who happened to have a tape of odds-and-ends melodies laying around.“The first song began with him singing ‘Time … da-da-da,’” Plamondon, 80, hummed on the phone. He had been thinking of the scene in the 1956 film adaptation in which Anthony Quinn, as the hunchback, Quasimodo, begs Gina Lollobrigida’s Esmeralda, the object of all the men’s attentions, for water. “He’s chained to the wheel and he goes ‘Belle … belle …’” Plamondon continued, quoting the French word for beautiful. “That gave me the idea to replace ‘time’ with ‘belle’ in the song.”And they were off. “From then on it gushed out of both us,” Cocciante, 76, said. “We wrote ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ in a kind of trance.”Hélène Ségara as Esmeralda in the original 1998 production of “Notre Dame de Paris.”Stephane Cardinale/Sygma, via Getty ImagesIn the French answer to a backers’ audition, he played the score on the piano and sang all the parts for the producer Charles Talar, who signed on and booked a run at the Palais des Congrès in Paris for the fall of 1998.It was fitting for Talar to get that venue, which is not a traditional theater but a cavernous concert hall, because he came from the music industry: He wanted to release an album first, then build on it to sell the stage show. It’s an approach Andrew Lloyd Webber successfully used for “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita,” but overall it’s not common in the United States and Britain, where a show precedes its recording.“He assumed he could activate the networks he had built and use some of the same strategies he used to sell records,” Nicolas Talar said on Zoom, recalling his father’s game plan. (Charles Talar died in 2020.) “The idea was to familiarize audiences with the music before the show started. The specificity of French musicals is that we promote them the way we would promote a pop record. If one or two songs become popular, you’re the star of the moment, you get on television and people want to see you,” he added. “The only way to hear ‘Belle’ live was to see the musical.”That song, a trio for the three men in love with Esmeralda, was released in the spring of 1998, months before the show’s opening, and went on to become the biggest-selling single of the year in France.“There was this miracle — I don’t know how else to describe it — of ‘Belle,’” said Daniel Lavoie, 73, who played the archdeacon Frollo in the original production and is back in the cassock for the New York run. “It was almost 5 minutes, which was inconceivable on the radio at the time because they didn’t play anything longer than 3 minutes. I remember that at our first TV appearance we were asked to do the song again. We knew then we were onto something.”Another number, “Le temps des cathédrales,” was almost as popular — many Americans might have discovered it on the 2015 Josh Groban album “Stages” — cementing the status of “Notre Dame” as the It show that year. And unlike in the United States, where stage personalities don’t tend to make a dent on the Billboard Hot 100, it turned the cast members Garou, Patrick Fiori and Hélène Ségara into pop stars. (Lavoie already had an established career as a singer by then.)“Notre Dame” was so huge that other producers followed in Talar’s footsteps, most prominently Dove Attia, who was behind the popular “Les Dix Commandements” (2000), “Le Roi Soleil” (2005) and “Mozart, l’opéra rock” (2009). That last was among the few to actually, er, rock, which may partly help explain why those shows have not had much of an impact in English-speaking countries, where the tolerance for a high ratio of power ballads seems to be lower than in France, Russia or South Korea.A decisive move by the “Notre Dame” team was to have the cast sing live to recorded tracks, which are still used in productions worldwide, though the New York engagement will supplement them with a full orchestra. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Lavoie said in English, before reverting back to French. “‘Notre Dame de Paris’ was conceived as a show outside of time.”“Notre Dame” has been translated into eight languages and performed in 23 countries, though its producers now prefer presenting it in the original French, which is how its cast of 30 will perform it in New York (with English supertitles). Still, this and similar musicals have faced an uphill battle to win over reviewers at home.“Musical theater doesn’t get much critical support in France,” said Laurent Valière, the producer and host of the weekly program “42e Rue” on French public radio as well as the author of a book about musicals. “The press pans it — sometimes with good reason and sometimes not.” (Full disclosure: I have been a guest commentator on the show.)The French hit factory seems to have hit a snag in recent years as it strains to find successors to the blockbusters of the 2000s. There are oddities like the biomusical “Bernadette de Lourdes,” which is based on the true story of a young girl who claimed to see the Virgin Mary and plays in Lourdes, the town where it all happened. In a different vein is “Résiste,” a jukebox musical based on France Gall’s pop songbook that benefited from a live band playing the original arrangements and contributions from the rising choreographer Marion Motin.Still, “Notre Dame de Paris” endures. “Another distinctive trait is that no matter where it’s playing, it’s staged the same way,” said Nicolas Talar, who is now producing the show and copresenting it in New York. (He also has producing credits on Broadway’s “Funny Girl” and “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”)“Sometimes we wonder if the show has become outdated, but the themes are evergreen and the music was intentionally arranged to sound timeless, so we keep postponing making changes,” he added. “So far audiences haven’t complained and the show is doing well, so we’re staying the course.” More

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      ‘White on White’ Review: American Grotesque

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      Robert Quillen Camp’s play, about an antiracist discussion group, starts out naturalistically, but then pivots, with bloody abandon, to the absurd.“This orgy of white monstrosity must cease! Now! NOW!”Barked at maximum volume, the command is hard to ignore. And indeed, it puts a screechy brake on one of the most exhilaratingly bizarre scenes of the theatrical summer, if not year, toward the end of the new show “White on White.”The reprieve is temporary: The action revs up again, and at one point I could not help but gasp in horrified delight, or maybe it was delighted horror — the two are closely intertwined in Robert Quillen Camp’s absurdist, outrageous Grand Guignol, which recently opened at the Off Off Broadway space JACK in Brooklyn.As far as setups go, the one in this show, presented by the Hoi Polloi company (“Three Pianos”), is very familiar: A seemingly innocuous confab makes a hard turn into unexpected terrain. Fictional weddings, funerals, Thanksgivings and Christmases have long had a habit of going off the rails; in recent years the battlefield has moved away from those family-centric occasions to gatherings of various types — work meetings, recovery groups, political assemblies — that tend to end with people blowing a gasket and telling each other what’s what. (Tracy Letts’s “The Minutes,” currently on Broadway, is the latest example, about a small town’s City Council.)And so it is in “White on White,” which takes place during a meeting of an antiracist discussion group hosted by Hannah (Nisi Sturgis) in her suburban home — the participants are white so they can avoid “putting an undue burden on people of color,” as Hannah’s husband, Peter (Brandt Adams), puts it. Most of the audience members sit in a large circle, as if we, too, were in Hannah’s beige, characterless living room. (Mimi Lien is the scenic design consultant.)The first two-thirds of the show — directed by Alec Duffy, who also wrote the music, and Lori Elizabeth Parquet — focus on an exquisitely observed dissection of progressive mores and subtle class friction. Michelle (Rebecca Mozo), a blithely entitled type-A mom, pressures the mechanic O’Reilly (Peter Mills Weiss, “While You Were Partying”) into taking a look at her car, even though he is overworked. O’Reilly is the only one helping himself to the snacks.Peter is sitting in a meeting for the first time, and at first we discover the group through his eyes. Adams communicates Peter’s befuddlement through a seemingly blank face and almost imperceptibly widening eyes as the proceedings grow increasingly odd. The first obvious sign may be when the attendees start singing cryptic ditties with titles like “A Ship Doesn’t Capsize,” backed by Michelle’s partner, Riley (Dinah Berkeley), on an autoharp. When the group’s female members leave the room for a separate conversation, we are left with the men, including Peter, and an ominous pulse grows louder in the background — Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste’s sound design helps create a disquieting atmosphere as the cultish vibe that had been simmering gets closer to a boil.“White on White” appears to target the way some white people find comfort in rituals of performative expiation. Until, that is, they reach the point where self-analysis ends and self-interest begins.But instead of being yet another chatty, naturalistic couch play, the show throws itself into the grotesque, when the essence of whiteness manifests in a burst of body horror as surreal as it is funny. That over-the-top scene does not resolve anything for characters or viewers alike — Camp refrains from offering a cathartic ending — but its go-for-broke delirium is uncommonly satisfying.White on WhiteThrough July 16 at Jack, Brooklyn; jackny.org/white-on-white. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Lea Michele to Star in ‘Funny Girl’ After Beanie Feldstein’s Departure

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      The former “Glee” star will share the stage with Tovah Feldshuh, who will replace Jane Lynch as Fanny Brice’s mother, starting Sept. 6.The actress Lea Michele will take over as Fanny Brice in the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” in early September, the show said Monday, after Beanie Feldstein’s abrupt announcement that she would be leaving the role earlier than expected.Feldstein wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday night that her “dream” run as Brice, a spunky stage performer who shoots to stardom with the Ziegfeld Follies, would end on July 31, instead of the previously announced date of Sept. 25. Without elaborating, Feldstein, whose performance in the role received tepid reviews, wrote that she would leave the musical early because the production had “decided to take the show in a different direction.”The show quickly signaled that it had her successor waiting in the wings, and on Monday, it was announced that Michele — who starred in the original Broadway production of “Spring Awakening” and is best known for her central role on the television show “Glee” — would be debuting in the role on Sept. 6.Until then, the actress Julie Benko, who has been playing Brice as Feldstein’s understudy, will step in. Under a new arrangement, Benko will continue to perform in the role once a week, on Thursdays, after Michele takes over.In an Instagram post after the news was announced, Michele wrote: “A dream come true is an understatement. I’m so incredibly honored to join this amazing cast and production and return to the stage playing Fanny Brice on Broadway.”The show also announced that the actress Tovah Feldshuh, who starred in the original Broadway production of “Yentl,” will be taking over the role of Brice’s doting mother, who is currently being played by Jane Lynch. The show had previously announced that Lynch would be leaving after Sept. 25, but the new announcement moved her departure a few weeks earlier. That timetable means that Michele and Lynch, who were co-stars on “Glee,” will not be performing together.Tovah Feldshuh will replace Jane Lynch in the role of Brice’s doting mother in “Funny Girl.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAfter Barbra Streisand originated the role of Brice in the original 1964 production, the show evaded a Broadway revival for decades, partly because comparisons with Streisand’s star-making performance seemed hard to escape.It has been no secret that Michele — who opened each chapter of her 2014 memoir, “Brunette Ambition,” with a Streisand or Brice quote — had interest in the role. A central plotline of her character on “Glee,” a cutthroat captain of the high school glee club on which the show is based, involves playing Brice, giving Michele the chance to perform songs like “People” and “I’m the Greatest Star” during the series.The “Glee” co-creator Ryan Murphy had gotten the rights to “Funny Girl,” thinking that Michele’s character would audition for the role on the TV series and then, perhaps, Michele would star in the show in real life. In a 2017 appearance on Andy Cohen’s talk show, Michele said they had been considering collaborating on a Broadway production after the end of “Glee,” but it felt too soon because she had just performed many of the songs on the TV show.“But I feel really ready to do it now,” she said on the show, “so maybe we can do it soon.”That dream did not come to fruition — until now.Michele was 8 years old when she made her Broadway debut as Young Cosette in “Les Misérables,” but spent more than a decade focused primarily on television. Michele sang at last month’s Tony Awards during a reunion performance with other original cast members of “Spring Awakening.”In 2020 the meal-kit company HelloFresh terminated its partnership with Michele after a former “Glee” castmate, Samantha Marie Ware, who is Black, tweeted that Michele had been responsible for “traumatic microaggressions” toward her. Michele released an apologetic statement on Instagram saying she did not recall making a specific comment that Ware wrote about, but adding that she had been reflecting on her past behavior. “Whether it was my privileged position and perspective that caused me to be perceived as insensitive or inappropriate at times or whether it was just my immaturity and me just being unnecessarily difficult, I apologize for my behavior and for any pain which I have caused,” she wrote.The current production of “Funny Girl,” which opened in April at the August Wilson Theater, has had strong ticket sales, grossing an average of about $1.2 million each week during the 14 full weeks since it started performances. The show’s only nomination at last month’s Tony Awards was for Jared Grimes’s role as Brice’s friend, Eddie Ryan, a tap-dance extraordinaire who aids Brice’s rise in show business.Grimes will continue in his role, as will Ramin Karimloo, who plays Brice’s suave love interest, Nick Arnstein. More

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      Review: Danai Gurira Makes a Sleek Supervillain of Richard III

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      At Shakespeare in the Park, athletic stamina and action-hero charisma muddy the meaning of a play about disability.Richard of Gloucester may be the killingest character in Shakespeare, personally knocking off or precipitating the deaths of more than a dozen people who get in his way. To be fair, he does so over the course of three plays, while top competitors like Macbeth and Titus Andronicus have just one.Still, lacking a prophecy, a particular vengeance or a bloody-minded wife to flesh out his motives, Richard remains the most mysterious in his evil; to make a success of the fabulous mess that is “Richard III,” you must decide what to do about that.The tonally wobbly and workmanlike revival that opened on Sunday at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park doesn’t decide. Whether Richard chooses his evil in reaction to the world’s revulsion — a “lump of foul deformity” is one of the nicer descriptions of him — or whether he was merely born to be bad is a question the Public Theater production, starring the tireless Danai Gurira as Richard, does not reach. We never learn what Richard means by the word “determined” when, in his first speech, he says that “since I cannot prove a lover/I am determined to prove a villain.” Is he bent on villainy, or was he pre-bent?Actually, in Robert O’Hara’s staging, that speech no longer comes first. In a sign that he will focus on action and not psychology, O’Hara instead opens with the gruesome final scene of “Henry VI, Part III,” the immediately preceding play in Shakespeare’s chronicle of 15th-century royal intrigue. In O’Hara’s characteristically droll take on awfulness, Richard coolly stabs King Henry to death, for good measure stuffing the corpse’s mouth with the royal pennant and wiping his knife on it too.As a means of showing us that Richard intends to replace the Lancasters on the throne with the Yorks — including, as soon as possible, himself — this is highly effective. And Gurira, the fierce General Okoye of the “Black Panther” films, certainly never disappoints as an action hero. Looking like a supervillain in black knee-high boots and stretch denim trousers, with her hair shaved into heraldic patterns, she is unflaggingly energetic, vocally thrilling and, as events become more hectic, more and more convincing.But for much of the play, the flash and fury of her performance, with its surface swagger and glary stares, too often feel like decoys. As Richard schemes his way from the sidelines to the throne, dispatching two young princes along the way, we get his gall but not his emotion, even as his words tell us that he understands the monstrousness of his methods. “Was ever woman in this humor wooed?” he asks after proposing marriage to Lady Anne, whose husband he has just murdered. As staged by O’Hara, the seduction is humorous in the comic sense too, involving a trick knife, a humongous ring, and a moment when Richard, sitting on the corner of the bier, brushes some part of the inconvenient body aside as if it were a crumb.From left, Richard’s aggrieved mother, the Duchess of York (Monique Holt), with Anne (Ali Stroker) and the ensemble member Thaddeus S. Fitzpatrick in “Richard III.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd bodies, not just body counts, are crucial in “Richard III.” It’s worth noting that Ali Stroker, this production’s Anne, uses a wheelchair. Richard’s aggrieved mother, the Duchess of York (Monique Holt), uses sign language. So does one of the assassins, played by Maleni Chaitoo. Gregg Mozgala, in two important roles — Edward IV, who succeeds the dead Henry, and Richmond, the play’s hero, who eventually kills Richard — has cerebral palsy.Though they all have excellent moments, the admirably diverse casting only underlines for me the problem of a Richard who is not disabled. For centuries, of course, that has been the norm; mostly the role has been played by actors sporting more-or-less absurd humps, lumps, prostheses and braces to simulate the “bunch-back’d toad” described in the text. When Arthur Hughes, an actor with radial dysplasia, took the role at the Royal Shakespeare Company this summer, he was thought to be the first disabled person ever to do so at that theater.It is nice to dream of a time when disabled actors are employed so frequently, and in so many kinds of roles, that we need not discourage others from playing this one. And it’s true that the historical Richard probably suffered from nothing more than scoliosis, as an analysis of his recently discovered skeleton suggests. Shakespeare, I’ve said before, was a poet, not an osteopath.But what was once the norm can now seem a kind of ableist mummery, which this production attempts to sidestep by offering a Richard with no physical impairments at all. When other characters, and even the man himself, scorn his disabilities and mock his ugliness, we are forced by the evidence of our senses to treat the derision metaphorically. (Richard, we tell ourselves, is morally toadlike, not physically so.) And though I usually enjoy being asked to see familiar characters in unfamiliar skins, in this case the sidestep blocks access to the deepest elements of the drama.Those elements are what keep the otherwise ragged “Richard III” in the repertory. The verse is extraordinarily pungent and the questions obviously eternal. When a production has us asking to what extent Richard’s evil is the product of people’s hatred of him, as opposed to his prior hatred of himself, it forces us to ask the same of our own leaders. In this season of our discontent, the scene in which Richard cynically holds up a Bible as a ginned-up crowd clamors to make him king is one you may find familiar.Though we don’t get to ask those profound questions in this production, there are nevertheless compensations. The staging itself is lovely, with Myung Hee Cho’s revolving circles of gothic arches speeding the action and suggesting the inexorability of Richard’s rise and fall. (The arches are lit in beautiful pinks and purples by Alex Jainchill.) Dede Ayite’s witty mixed-period costumes score sociological points at a glance, from Anne’s tacky trophy-wife regalia to the doomed young princes’ spangly gold sneakers.Glistening too are some of the performers in secondary roles, which, in this play, means all roles but Richard. Sanjit De Silva turns Buckingham, the king’s chief enabler, into a hopped-up hype man, high on the fumes of ambient amorality. Paul Niebanck makes a powerful impression as Richard’s brother George, who incorrectly believes he can talk his way out of anything. And as Queen Margaret, the widow of Henry, Sharon Washington demonstrates with brutal efficiency how specific hatred can soon become general, blistering everyone, even herself, in its path.But these coherently interpreted characters do not add up to a coherent interpretation of the play, which wobbles between shouty polemics and a kind of Tudor snark. It may be that “Richard III” is in that sense uninterpretable; written to flatter Shakespeare’s royal sponsors, who were descendants of the victorious Richmond, its brilliance has always borne the sour odor of propaganda. That sourness is not sweetened by the fact that, to modern noses, the good guys smell a lot like the bad ones. If history plays cannot untangle for us what history itself leaves a jumble, they should at least help us figure out why.Richard IIIThrough July 17 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Ain’t No Mo’’ to Take Flight on Broadway

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      The play, by Jordan E. Cooper, is a biting comedy set in an America that offers to relocate Black citizens to Africa.“Ain’t No Mo’,” an uproarious and piercing comedy that imagines a moment in which the United States offers to relocate Black people to Africa, will be staged on Broadway this fall.Lee Daniels, the Hollywood director, producer and screenwriter, is shepherding the production as a lead producer; this will be Daniels’s first Broadway venture.The play, written by and starring Jordan E. Cooper, was previously staged Off Broadway at the Public Theater in 2019, where Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called it “thrilling, bewildering, campy, shrewd, mortifying, scary, devastating and deep.”The new production is scheduled to begin previews Nov. 3 and to open Dec. 1 at the Belasco Theater. The Broadway production, like the Off Broadway one, will be directed by Stevie Walker-Webb; several members of the design team are new to the show.The play is structured as a series of comedic vignettes held together by scenes at an airport, where a lone flight attendant, played by Cooper, is helping passengers board a so-called “reparations flight” at Gate 1619 (the year enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia). The vignettes explore race in America; Green described it as “nothing less than a spiritual portrait of Black American life right now, with all its terrors, hopes and contradictions.”Daniels, whose projects have included the TV series “Empire” and the film “Precious,” said he went to see the show at the Public while scouting for writers, and was blown away. “I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing or what I was seeing — it was the boldest thing that I’d ever seen onstage, and it worked,” he said. “It examines the value of Black lives in our culture in a way that we have yet to see, ever.”Daniels, describing Cooper, who is now 27, as “Norman Lear meets James Baldwin,” worked with the playwright on the BET sitcom “The Ms. Pat Show” (Cooper was credited as showrunner, creator and executive producer). Daniels said he was determined to bring “Ain’t No Mo’” to Broadway, in part because when he was starting out he didn’t think it was possible for a Black writer to get to Broadway, and in part because “white people have been anointing certain plays, and this is not that.”Daniels is lead producing the play with Brian Moreland (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”), who said, “Jordan E. Cooper has found a way to unlock a very difficult conversation with laughter and joy. The season that’s coming is a heavy season, and it’s going to be fun to have a comedy on Broadway.” More