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      Donald Pippin, Conductor on Broadway and Beyond, Dies at 95

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      As music director, he contributed to the success of acclaimed shows including “Oliver!,” “Mame,” “La Cage aux Folles” and “A Chorus Line.”Donald Pippin, a versatile conductor and composer who won a Tony Award in 1963 on his first try at being musical director for a Broadway show, “Oliver!,” and went on to work on some of the biggest musicals in Broadway history, including “Mame” and “A Chorus Line,” died on June 9 in Nyack, N.Y. He was 95.His former wife, the Broadway performer Marie Santell, confirmed his death, in a hospital. She said chronic obstructive pulmonary disease may have been a factor.Mr. Pippin had more than two dozen Broadway credits, mostly as music director — the person in charge of preparing the orchestra and often conducting it, interpreting the score and coordinating with the director and choreographer — though he was also often credited with vocal arrangements. He was a favorite of the composer and lyricist Jerry Herman, serving as music director not only for “Mame” (1966), for which Mr. Herman wrote the music and lyrics, but also for “Dear World” (1969), “Mack & Mabel” (1974), “La Cage aux Folles” (1983) and other Herman shows.“La Cage” ran for more than four years, but it wasn’t Mr. Pippin’s biggest success. That was “A Chorus Line,” which opened on Broadway in 1975 with Mr. Pippin as music director and ran for some 15 years, a record at the time.Mr. Pippin talked his way into the music director job on “Oliver!,” the musical based on Dickens’s “Oliver Twist,” with few credentials. He’d worked as assistant conductor on the 1960 show “Irma la Douce,” which was produced by David Merrick. When he heard Mr. Merrick was bringing “Oliver!” to Broadway, he hounded his secretary for an appointment, although the two had never met, and told Mr. Merrick that he should hire him. Mr. Merrick did.Mr. Pippin won a Tony Award in 1963 for “Oliver!,” the first Broadway show for which he was the musical director..“You’d better be as good as you think you are,” Mr. Merrick told him, as Mr. Pippin recounted the moment in an interview with the Baylor School of Chattanooga, Tenn., where he went to high school.His self-confidence was not misplaced. The show ran for 774 performances, and Mr. Pippin won the Tony for best conductor and musical director. He was one of the last people to win that award, which was discontinued after 1964.Mr. Pippin’s other Broadway credits as musical director or musical supervisor included “110 in the Shade” (1963), “Applause” (1970), “Woman of the Year” (1981) and another Herman show, “Jerry’s Girls” (1985).The conductor Larry Blank, for whom Mr. Pippin was both friend and mentor, said in a phone interview that Mr. Pippin had a warm personality that was well suited to working with the varied figures in the theater, especially leading ladies like Angela Lansbury (“Mame”) and Lauren Bacall (“Woman of the Year”).“He said to me once that he believed in ‘persuasive accompaniment,’” Mr. Blank said. “He would say it with a twinkle in his eye.”Broadway was only one element of Mr. Pippin’s résumé. He also wrote the score for several musicals, including “The Contrast” and “Fashion,” both staged in New York in the 1970s. In 1979 he was named music director of Radio City Music Hall, a post he held for years. In 1987 he shared an Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in music direction for “Broadway Sings: The Music of Jule Styne.”He also appeared as guest conductor with orchestras all over the United States. One program he enjoyed presenting was a salute to his friend Mr. Herman, featuring songs from “La Cage,” “Mame” and other shows, with Broadway singers joining him. Critics agreed that his long working relationship with Mr. Herman enhanced those performances considerably.The director and choreographer Michael Bennett and members of casts past and present at the record-breaking 3,389th performance of “A Chorus Line” at the Shubert Theater on Broadway in 1983. The show was Mr. Pippin’s greatest success.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“Pippin and the orchestra exposed all of the music’s many subtle and complex orchestrations,” John Huxhold wrote in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch when Mr. Pippin presented the Herman program with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1997.In 2020, when Broadway staged a tribute to Mr. Herman, who had died in December 2019, Mr. Blank, who led the orchestra for that show, said he made sure to ask Mr. Pippin to conduct one of the numbers, the title song from “Mame,” using Mr. Pippin’s original vocal arrangement. Mr. Pippin was 93.Mr. Pippin was born on Nov. 25, 1926, in Macon, Ga., and grew up in Knoxville, Tenn. His father, Earl, worked at an A.&P. and later was a poultry wholesaler. His mother, Irene (Ligon) Pippin, started him on piano lessons when he was 6. At 8 he won a state piano competition, so when he was 9, since he had already won in the younger age group, the contest organizers put him in the division for 10- and 11-year-olds. He won that too.When Mr. Pippin returned to Knoxville in 1996 to lead a program called “Donald Pippin’s Broadway Melody” with the Knoxville Symphony Pops Orchestra, a high point of the evening came when he paid tribute to Evelyn Miller, his first piano teacher, who was in the audience. In her honor, he played Grieg’s Waltz in A Minor, which she had taught him for that first piano competition.Ms. Miller had also come to a preview performance of “Oliver!” in New York in 1963, and Mr. Pippin invited her to a party afterward, where she met the cast members, including Bruce Prochnik, the British boy who played the title character. He autographed a photo for her, trying for something he thought sounded Southern. “To my Tennessee honey chile,” he wrote.Mr. Pippin’s mother died when he was 10, and in 1938 he was sent to the Baylor School, then a military-style school for boys. The school let him bring his Steinway piano, which was installed in the chapel.He graduated in 1944, then served in the Army Medical Corps in occupied Japan. He attended the University of Chattanooga before moving to New York in 1950 to study at the Juilliard School, paying his way by playing in piano bars and at churches.He left Juilliard without graduating to enter the working world and took a job at ABC-TV writing for its musical productions. He found the job frustrating.“The conductors were so inept that they’d just destroy the music by having the wrong tempos,” he told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 1996.That inspired him to learn conducting. He studied with Oscar Kosarin, who had worked on Broadway. Then came “Irma la Douce” and his breakthrough, “Oliver!”He and Ms. Santell married in 1974. They eventually divorced but remained close. Mr. Pippin, who lived in Brewster, N.Y., leaves no immediate survivors.He especially enjoyed his years at Radio City Music Hall.“Nothing’s more exciting than to come rising out of that orchestra pit on those hydraulic lifts and playing an overture at Radio City in front of 6,000 people,” he told The News-Sentinel.His work there found him conducting the annual Christmas show, which featured live animals, including camels. Ms. Santell recounted a story he used to tell about one particular camel, which apparently took a liking to him when they encountered each other backstage. The beast would even sometimes rest his head on Mr. Pippin’s shoulder.In Ms. Santell’s memory, the camel’s name was Henry; when Mr. Pippin told the story to The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y., in 1992, it was Oscar. In any case, what happened during one performance is uncontested: Henry, or Oscar, was led onstage, saw his buddy Don, folded his legs, sat down where he wasn’t supposed to and resisted all entreaties to move along.“He wanted to watch me conduct,” Mr. Pippin explained to the newspaper.Ms. Santell provided the kicker: the note Mr. Pippin received from the stage manager the next day.“To the maestro,” it read. “Do not fraternize with the camels anymore.” More

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      She Won a Tony. But Deirdre O’Connell ‘Can’t Think About That.’

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      When Deirdre O’Connell returned to work two days after winning this year’s Tony Award for best performance by a leading actress in a play, the production staff of her current show, “Corsicana” at Playwrights Horizons, greeted her with a balloon arch and cake. O’Connell, 68, enjoyed it. For a little while, anyway. But “Corsicana,” a lonesome, oblique quartet by Will Arbery, is in previews. It begins press performances soon. O’Connell needed to rehearse. So she put the celebration aside.“I just went, ‘Well can’t think about that anymore,’” she said, later that same day. “I have to work.”Perhaps you saw last fall’s “Dana H.,” the show that won her the Tony, in which she spent a harrowing hour and change lip-syncing a woman’s recollections of her abduction by a white supremacist. Or maybe you have already caught “Corsicana,” in which she seems to unseal her character’s soul as casually as you or I uncap a beer. Or, at some point in the last four decades, you might have witnessed the performances that earned her Obies, Lucille Lortels, and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Prize.O’Connell in “Dana H.,” lip-syncing and “brilliantly pulling off one of the strangest and most difficult challenges ever asked of an actor,” Jesse Green wrote in his review.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut possibly you have never seen O’Connell onstage, so here is what I can tell you: She is an actress of rigor and possibility. She will abandon herself to a character without apology or vanity or self-preservation. Some actors are simply better at the business of being alive, at seeming to present life onstage, and she is one of them.Her absolute focus, Lucas Hnath, the “Dana H” playwright, told me, “creates an opening for something — call it life, call it the spirit. Something ineffable and wild rushes in to fill the space.”Or here is how Les Waters, the director of “Dana H.,” put it: “She is available to life.”O’Connell — Didi, to her intimates — is petite and nimble, with a queenly nimbus of red hair and a default expression, offstage anyway, of intent curiosity. She grew up in western Massachusetts, the granddaughter of a Ziegfeld girl and the daughter of Anne Ludlum, an actress and playwright. As a child, she was, as she put it, “a classic theater nerd,” shy and uncomfortable offstage. “And then strangely comfortable and excited” when performing, she said.Jamie Brewer, left, and O’Connell in the Will Arbery play “Corsicana,” now in previews at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAfter two years of college, she made her way to Boston, apprenticing with an experimental theater company there, and then joining others — in San Francisco, in Baltimore. That scene took a lot out of her. “I felt a little too vulnerable just having my life swallowed up by it,” she said, so in her mid 20s she moved to New York, determined to become what she called “a regular actress.” (Has anyone ever thought of O’Connell as “regular?”) Yet she carried experiment with her. Even in her most controlled performances — “Dana H.” among them — there is something feral, ungovernable at the heart.She spent the next five years pouring drinks, pouring coffee, learning how to audition, learning how to act. In her late 20s, right around the time she found the rent-stabilized East Village apartment (with a bathtub in the kitchen) where she still lives, she booked the national tour of John Pielmeier’s “Agnes of God.” Except for the five years she spent in Hollywood, amassing just enough jobs for a nest egg and a Screen Actors Guild pension, she has rarely been offstage since. Screen acting, it turns out, never gave her what she wanted, a feeling of un-self-consciousness, of surrendering to a role in a way that sounds a little like religion, a little like ego death.“I’m into the numinous experience,” O’Connell explained. “I’m into the thrills.”She hadn’t expected to win the Tony on Sunday night. With good reason. “Dana H.,” which required O’Connell to mouth along to prerecorded interviews with the playwright’s mother, demanding complete submission to the text and its rhythms, is more challenging than most Broadway fare. And it had closed in November, meaning that some Tony voters might already have forgotten it. Besides, three of the four women in her category (LaChanze, Ruth Negga and Mary-Louise Parker) are far better known.O’Connell had watched the Tonys for decades, once in person, but much more often at home, in that same rent-stabilized apartment that she shares with her partner, Alan Metzger, an educator. She knew that at the moment an award is announced, everyone stares at the losers. So as the Tonys entered its final hour, she prepared herself.“I was ready to be so awesome and classy,” O’Connell recalled.But she didn’t lose. And so O’Connell, who had appeared on Broadway only twice before, found herself walking up the aisle of the Radio City Music Hall, in a black jumpsuit from Rent the Runway. On that jumpsuit: “I thought it was going to be a little more Cinderella, but then I was like, I guess not, I guess I’m old,” she said. (None of the designers her producers contacted offered to dress her. Their loss.)O’Connell in her dressing room at Playwrights Horizons. “There should be a pamphlet that helps people get through the days after,” she said of the post-win experience. “You really don’t know how to behave.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesA person could argue that this award was the culminating moment of a nearly five-decade career. And yet, O’Connell — who looked awesome, classy and indisputably shocked — used her 90 seconds of speech time to look forward, manifesting the theatrical future she hopes to see.Holding her statuette, she said, “Please let me standing here be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.”After receiving the award, a golf cart shunted her to one press room, then another. The ceremony had ended by then. She had left her purse at her seat when she walked onstage. “What New Yorker walks away from their keys and their phone?” she said. Still, she managed to reunite with Metzger, and they attended an after-party at the Plaza and a second one at the Omni and then it was after 3 a.m. and she was in a car, heading back to that bathtub in the kitchen.The next day, Monday, she slept late and then read through congratulatory texts and emails, too many to ever answer. Washing dishes, she suddenly felt devastated that she hadn’t thanked Metzger in her speech; she had felt too reluctant to reveal any of her private life. Which is to say, there were a lot of feelings, most of them good.“There should be a pamphlet that helps people get through the days after,” she said of the post-win experience. “Because you’re so suddenly shot out of a cannon, and you really don’t know how to behave.”On Tuesday, after cake, she spent some hours rehearsing the role of Justice, a librarian, an anarchist, a would-be lover, a friend. Sam Gold, the director of “Corsicana,” who in an email noted both her “free and open energy” and her extreme technical precision, gave her notes. She catnapped. Then she performed — baring her character’s soul, without showiness or fuss.“I like the excavating of finding another person inside me,” she said of her process.After bows, she changed her clothes and tidied up. Just past 10 p.m., she emerged into the fetid air of Hell’s Kitchen, greeted a few friends and fans, and went to find a restaurant that was still open.Even offstage, over a mediocre dinner at a sidewalk table on a block that smelled of sewage, it was something fine and rare to be held in her attention, to be, for a moment, her collaborator.This, anyway, has been Arbery’s experience. “It almost feels a little unfair to get to work with someone so good,” he told me.She marveled that she had been able to keep going for typically long hours, at typically low pay, for all of these years. That cheap apartment helped, she said. As did the fact that she has no children, though she is close to Metzger’s. The Tony could have come to her earlier. “I could have taken it at 48. I could have used it,” she said. But she has never felt that she missed out on much. The numinous experience, the thrills, they have always been near at hand. And she is happy to have received the prize now.“I certainly didn’t think that it was going happen this way,” she said. “It wasn’t a plan. But it’s pretty sweet.” More

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      Review: In High-Tech ‘Orchard,’ It’s Hard to See the Forest for the Trees

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      Jessica Hecht, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Chekhov himself too often get overwhelmed by this ambitious Arlekin Players Theater adaptation.A black-clad figure shuffles a curving path through the cherry blossom petals carpeting the ground. Ancient, dignified, slightly stooped, he is searching for his cane in this strange and beautiful landscape where almost everything, including the cherry blossoms, is a shade of swimming-pool blue.The opening moments of “The Orchard,” Igor Golyak’s adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” belong to Firs, the serf turned servant who has been attached for generations to the same house in the countryside, and devoted to the same frivolous family now in peril of losing their beloved home. It is Firs who reliably pierces our hearts at the end of “The Cherry Orchard,” so to start with him here is fitting — all the more so because he is played by Mikhail Baryshnikov with the ineffable magnetism and captivating grace that have always made him a riveting performer, and that now make him the quietly scene-stealing anchor of this ambitious and cluttered production.We don’t know it yet, but that brief interlude — with a single line of dialogue about the weather, and the pleasure of watching Baryshnikov whirl when a wind whips up — is the last we will have before this show starts obstructing our view of the actors with video frequently projected on its transparent downstage scrim.It is extraordinarily frustrating, like trying to watch a play through a black-and-white film: a film that is often showing a close-up of what is happening on one part of the stage while blocking something else — such as Baryshnikov making a choreographed movement that we can’t see clearly even though he’s right there in the room with us. And this theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center is a fairly intimate space; we are not in need of a zoom lens.Baryshnikov, as the servant Firs, and Hecht as Madame Ranevskaya, the lady of the house.Maria BaranovaA clue to the root of the chaos is the giant robotic arm sitting center stage in Golyak’s production for the Massachusetts-based Arlekin Players Theater, where he is artistic director, and its Zero Gravity Virtual Theater Lab. “The Orchard” is a hybrid, meant to provide one experience to in-person audiences and another, more interactive experience to online audiences. One of the show’s multiple cameras, none particularly well deployed, is on that robotic arm. There is also a robotic dog, who is surprisingly charming. (Robotics design is by Tom Sepe.)Experimenting with virtual theater is how Arlekin made a bigger name for itself during the industry shutdown; Baryshnikov and Jessica Hecht, the other star in this cast, first worked with the company online.But the creators of this production are in thrall to technological possibilities they have yet to grasp expertly, which hampers both incarnations. Seeing it in person is better, or certainly it was on Wednesday, when I caught the matinee at the theater and watched the virtual version — which is also live, and supplemented with activities like touring virtual rooms inhabited by Baryshnikov as Chekhov — from home at night. As intended, online viewers miss the beginning of the stage performance; why this would seem like a good idea I cannot fathom.It turns out that those close-ups on the scrim can be helpful if you’re watching the show on a laptop. On the other hand, the online video jerked and stopped so often on my screen, and for so long, that there were whole chunks of action I heard but didn’t see; the video feed cut out before the curtain call; and the scripted online ending mysteriously failed to appear. The ending I watched in person, though, didn’t entirely come off, either, because the final, vital projection never happened.A robotic arm gathers some of the video that is projected live onstage and shown online. In person, the images often prove distracting to a viewer captivated by the performers.Maria BaranovaWhat about the play, though? Well, that’s exactly the problem: You have to hack your way through an enormous amount of distraction merely to get to it, and even then the production doesn’t have the storytelling clarity the play needs to land. On the sidewalk after the matinee, I overheard some audience members who had never seen “The Cherry Orchard” and were left none the wiser, in terms of plot, after “The Orchard.”This disjointed production gives the impression of not being especially interested in comprehensibility. For all its projections (designed by Alex Basco Koch), significant passages of dialogue in American Sign Language, Russian and French go untranslated.Still, it is pretty to look at, with Anna Fedorova’s set ravishingly lit by Yuki Nakase Link, and the actors clad in Oana Botez’s elegantly contemporary take on period costumes. And Hecht is a gorgeously frothy Madame Ranevskaya, the lady of the house: sentimental and self-absorbed, with a decorative layer of ever-pleasant femininity and a spritz of teasing sexiness.During Wednesday night’s performance, when Hecht broke off to take a few live-chat questions from the virtual audience, she remained in character as a viewer reported a long-frozen computer screen.“I am so sorry,” she said, noting that a solution would require someone versed in such things. “I can only speak of matters of the heart.”One would think that this production might speak eloquently of matters of the heart — not only because Chekhov’s play does, but also because the Kyiv-born Golyak and his Arlekin, with its immigrant origins, are no strangers to the reality of having to leave a beloved home and build a life elsewhere.Aside from Madame Ranevskaya’s less-favored daughter Varya, played by Elise Kibler with a touching hopefulness, there’s not much in this production beyond sweet, funny, delicate Firs to suggest a heart at all.But, ah, Firs — so certain all his life that if he looked after this family, they would do the same for him. When the truth dawns at last, with the shock of disillusion, he collapses into human wreckage. Even in utter stillness, he is fascinating.The OrchardThrough July 3 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Manhattan, and online; theorchardoffbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      To Preserve La MaMa’s Legacy, a Shift in Leadership Styles

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      Championing collaboration and digital projects, Mia Yoo is forging her own path at the experimental theater incubator.Artistic directors tend to be in the spotlight twice: When they are appointed and when they leave. But looking at what happens several years into a tenure — especially one that includes a global pandemic — can be a helpful exercise for anybody interested in arts management.After a decade as the artistic director of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, in the East Village, Mia Yoo has somehow established continuity with the aesthetics and priorities established by her predecessor, Ellen Stewart, while also forging her own path.With the theater’s 60th season nearing its end (it’s currently presenting “God’s Fool,” a new work about Saint Francis of Assisi by the dance-theater master Martha Clarke), Yoo sat down to chat about two things in constant conversation, or perhaps in a constant tug of war, at her institution: the past and the present.The first still looms over La MaMa, which for decades was closely identified with Stewart, its gung-ho, charismatic founder. Over 50 years, she nurtured La MaMa into a performing arts incubator of international repute. And then, in 2011, she died.“I always say Ellen could have burned this place down if she wanted to, because she built it,” said Yoo, who picked up the artistic-director baton when she was in her early 40s, about the same age Stewart was when she created LaMaMa in 1961. “I know she wouldn’t do that, but there’s a part of me that thought she could because she created it. Now it’s up to us as a community to make sure that it continues.”Ellen Stewart in 1965. She nurtured La MaMa into a performing-arts incubator of international repute. “Now it’s up to us as a community to make sure that it continues,” Yoo said.Sam Falk/The New York TimesOn a recent afternoon, she guided me through a hard-hat tour of La MaMa’s flagship four-story home at 74A East Fourth Street. The 19th-century building, which the company purchased in 1967, is in the middle of a $24 million gut renovation — financed by the city and state of New York, as well as various foundations and donors — that will finally bring it up to modern standards. The performance spaces are being upgraded, an elevator is finally being installed to ensure accessibility, and a data network will support the latest in video and audio technology.Throughout the seemingly never-ending construction — the reopening has been pushed several times and is now scheduled for this fall, or maybe spring 2023 — shows have continued to be made. That’s because Stewart had the forethought to invest in real estate: La MaMa owns 88,000 square feet spread over four buildings within walking distance of one another, as well as a property in Umbria, Italy, that is used for playwriting and directing workshops.Yoo and I had moved on to 66 East Fourth Street, which houses the company archive and the mainstage Ellen Stewart Theater. Sitting in the first row, Yoo warmly greeted children from the Brooklyn United Music and Arts Program, an after-school project that has been working with La MaMa since 2015. The children were preparing for a performance of their show “B.U. Live” later that day.Yoo herself has come of creative age at La MaMa. Starting in the early 2000s, she worked with Stewart — “there was something symbiotic and mutual in terms of what we were wanting to create,” she said — and eventually her mentor anointed her the new artistic director. No exploratory committee, no national search: Stewart decided that Yoo would be next, and that was that.In the ensuing decade, Yoo has steered the ship very differently from the way Stewart did — and, as it turned out, more in sync with the behavior expected from artistic directors these days.“They have almost polar opposite leadership styles,” Lois Weaver, a member of the long-running performance company Split Britches, said in a video chat. “Ellen was very, very much in charge: It was her theater, she had the last word, she made all the decisions. She loved her family very, very much, but it was a very, very tough love. Mia’s leadership style is a collaborative style, and her love is an extended-care kind of style. She looks after the well-being and the welfare of each of the artists and also the staff: They make collective and collaborative decisions rather than slightly autocratic decisions.”The company archive is housed at 66 East Fourth Street, where the mainstage Ellen Stewart Theater is also located.Olivia Galli for The New York TimesThis has led to management that is less top-down than Stewart’s reign — not easy when it would sometimes be more expedient to just tell someone to do something.“I tried to create an environment where we get consensus from a lot of different people, and a lot of people then ultimately become invested in how we’re moving forward,” Yoo said. “We have a lot of different programs: a play-reading series, a puppet series, the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, the Coffeehouse Chronicles series, and each of them has its own person running it,” she continued. “I try to give them as much freedom as possible.”The programming director of the Club, one of the spaces at 74A, and the curator of La MaMa Moves!, Nicky Paraiso embodies both this collaborative approach and the institution’s constant negotiation between an awe-inspiring legacy — which nurtured the careers of Harvey Fierstein, Sam Shepard, Diane Lane, Al Pacino and even David and Amy Sedaris — and the future. He appeared in the Jeff Weiss show “Dark Twist” at La MaMa in 1979, but unlike others, he essentially never left. This has helped give him a bird’s-eye view of curating as he and Yoo try to figure out how to balance the needs and approaches of different generations.“I’ll say, ‘Do we keep presenting such and such an artist? Are they doing the same work that they were doing 20 years ago?’” Paraiso said in a video conversation. “And Mia would say, ‘Ellen created this space for people to nurture their art and then they become part of the family of La MaMa.’”As with every company, the programming can be uneven, though the ratio of hits to misses seems to have improved from where it was toward the end of Stewart’s tenure. And this has been accomplished by striking a delicate balance between older artists and newcomers.In the first category is Split Britches, which has been presenting shows at La MaMa for much of its 40-year existence and in October will present “Last Gasp: A Recalibration,” an in-person production of its acclaimed pandemic video project “Last Gasp WFH.” And then you have someone like the 30-year-old multidisciplinary artist John Maria Gutierrez, who in May performed the solo show “Rockefeller and I Part 1,” contrasting his experience as the son of Dominican immigrants with the life of John D. Rockefeller Jr., on the sidewalk outside 66 East Fourth Street.“We believe,” Yoo said, “that if we create an environment and a platform for artists to explore and experiment in ways that they themselves didn’t even think possible, that potentially groundbreaking work could happen.”Olivia Galli for The New York TimesWhen he was still in high school, Gutierrez was mentored by the composer, writer and director Elizabeth Swados, a pillar of La MaMa. He graduated from New York University and he, too, found his artistic home in the East Village, joining La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company. “It was after Ellen had passed and I was the newest member,” he said in a video chat. “It was Mia who brought me in and checked up on me. She kept inviting me into her office and asking, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’”Yoo also bet on the future when it came to exploring technology’s impact on the performing arts.In a 2011 article introducing her as the new head of La MaMa, The New York Times noted that “Ms. Yoo is championing a high-tech project called CultureHub that allows theatermakers in different countries to work together by video conference. She calls this system, which allows for life-size images, ‘Skype on steroids.’” (When he was president of the Seoul Institute of the Arts, Yoo Duk-hyung — Yoo’s father, whom Stewart had adopted — spearheaded CultureHub as a joint project with La MaMa.)Fast forward to March 2020, when the city’s live-performance venues shut down amid the pandemic. LaMaMa did, too, but it immediately pivoted to online programming that included everything from children’s shows to new work and chats with legacy and emerging artists. Unlike the majority of its New York brethren, La MaMa not only knew what livestreaming was but also had the infrastructure to implement it.Just like Stewart had invested in physical assets, Yoo had staked a claim on the virtual world. “I believe that artists need to be a part of that conversation — it can’t be just technologists and corporations that are in that internet space,” she said. “It’s not going to just be about money or about power, but about how we explore our humanity.”As La MaMa remained virtually busy — it’s worth noting that Yoo did all this while being paid about $65,000 in 2020, while some high-profile artistic directors making many times that salary essentially hibernated — the company also reinforced its commitment to what it calls a Radical Access Plan. According to its “envisioning statement,” a declaration of intent, that plan includes physical and economic accessibility, opportunity, representation and relevance.The work itself has remained eclectic as ever, reflecting not so much on our world’s increasing fragmentation as the idea that art can still play a unifying role. “We want curation of art at this time to be about this multiplicity of perspectives and aesthetics and forms,” Yoo said. “We believe that if we create an environment and a platform for artists to explore and experiment in ways that they themselves didn’t even think possible, that potentially groundbreaking work could happen. And, potentially, new forms could be born.”Yes, she can sound terminally optimistic, but come on — isn’t that infinitely better than the alternative? More

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      Little Amal, a Refugee Puppet Who Traveled Europe, Will Visit New York

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      Last year, the 12-foot-tall Syrian girl trekked from Turkey to Britain to find her mother. This fall, she’ll visit all five boroughs.Little Amal, a 12-foot-tall puppet depicting a 10-year-old Syrian refugee, has seen about a dozen countries, visited London’s Royal Opera House and other sightseeing destinations, and even met the Pope.But this fall, Amal will embark on an entirely new adventure, crossing the Atlantic for the first time in a trip to New York intended to promote an open embrace of refugees and immigrants.Amal is scheduled to arrive at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Sept. 14, with plans to travel to all five boroughs, visiting with children, artists, politicians and community leaders along the way, according to an announcement on Thursday from the Walk Productions, which is co-producing the visit with St. Ann’s Warehouse.Her original 5,000-mile journey from Turkey to England last year — which included visits to migrant camps — was designed to highlight the plight of millions of Syrian refugees in Europe who traveled long distances across the continent to flee the country’s civil war. The project was supposed to end there, said its artistic director, Amir Nizar Zuabi, but about two-thirds of the way through the journey, the creative team realized that Amal could have a future beyond those specific geopolitical circumstances.“She became an excuse for communities to come together and be kind to a foreigner,” Zuabi said, “and by doing that, understand something about themselves — understand what there is to celebrate in their communities.”The towering puppet — which is operated by three people, including one person on stilts — will visit St. Ann’s, and several other New York cultural institutions will be involved in her trip, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center and the Classical Theater of Harlem. The visit, which has a budget of over $1 million, is planned to conclude in early October with a trip to the Statue of Liberty.In 2018, St. Ann’s presented an Off Broadway play, “The Jungle,” that inspired the character of Amal. First staged at the Young Vic Theater before transferring to the West End, “The Jungle” is based on what its writers, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, observed when they set up an interactive arts center in a migrant camp in Calais, France. The play will be returning to St. Ann’s next February.Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s, said she first saw Amal’s effect on the public during a trip last year to an elementary school in a Paris suburb, where the students started screaming and following her around as soon as they laid eyes on her.“She became a bit of a Pied Piper,” Feldman said. “It was very magical.”Although Amal’s presence is not overtly political, Feldman said she felt that the visit to the United States would send an important message in a country where immigration has become a “political football” and migrant children have faced perilous living conditions.To Feldman, Amal’s visits in Europe felt like a parade of innocence and hope. “To have that in the streets in a very visible way could be very beautiful,” she said.Designed by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, Amal is quite delicate — her arms and upper body are made of bamboo canes — and has needed plenty of maintenance over her months of travel, Zuabi said. Earlier this year, she visited young Ukrainian refugees in Poland.But New York is not likely to be her last journey: Amal has had requests to visit countries around the world, he said, and there are plans in the works for trips elsewhere in the U.S. next year. More

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      ‘Sing, Dance, Act: Kabuki Featuring Toma Ikuta’ Review: A New Path

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      Cameras follow Ikuta, an actor on popular Japanese teen dramas in the 2000s, as he learns Kabuki’s expressions and movements from a friend.Toma Ikuta grew up around people who excelled at performance. While appearing on several popular Japanese teen dramas in the 2000s, Ikuta attended high school with other young actors and singers, so many of whom rose to fame that Ikuta and his best friend, the Kabuki actor Matsuya Onoe, bonded over not getting as many acting gigs as their peers. As Ikuta grew older, watching his classmates pursue their careers beyond the teen idol phase began to take a toll on his own self-esteem: “There was jealousy,” he admits in the new Netflix documentary “Sing, Dance, Act: Kabuki Featuring Toma Ikuta,” adding, “or rather, I felt ashamed for the first time.”The film, directed by Tadashi Aizawa, follows Ikuta, now in his mid-30s, as he works to fulfill his lifelong dream of acting in a Kabuki performance, where he feels that he truly belongs. His passion for the art form was inspired by Onoe’s late father, also a prominent Kabuki actor, and it’s Onoe himself who leads the production and teaches Ikuta the fundamentals of Kabuki-style expression and movement, including roppo, the dramatic way that Kabuki performers may exit the stage, and mie, the distinct poses that actors settle on during moments of emotional intensity.Even for viewers with no relationship to Ikuta or his prior roles, “Sing, Dance, Act” provides a fascinating look into Kabuki theater and the particular sets of skills that are required to pull off such idiosyncratic performances. And it’s undoubtedly satisfying to watch Ikuta, initially unsure of himself, transform into a promising Kabuki actor who leaves even the pros in admiration. In perhaps the film’s clearest window into what makes Kabuki mastery so elusive, a renowned Kabuki actor points out how impressed he was by a single, subtle turn that Ikuta made during one of his scenes. “I doubt anyone else noticed it,” he admits. But “as a professional,” he adds: “Wow, he pulled it off!”Sing, Dance, Act: Kabuki Featuring Toma IkutaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      In London, a Twist on ‘Legally Blonde’ and ‘Oklahoma!’

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      The updated musical version of the popular film challenges preconceived notions about the protagonist’s appearance. A take on “Oklahoma!” similarly offers a twist on a classic.LONDON — Some well-known musicals are looking notably different on the London stage these days, and that’s a good thing.It might seem difficult to imagine the theatrical version of “Legally Blonde” featuring anyone but the familiar interpreters of Elle Woods onstage — the likes of Laura Bell Bundy on Broadway, and Sheridan Smith, who won an Olivier Award for her performance when the 2007 Broadway musical later came to the West End.But along comes the ever-adventurous Open Air Theater in Regent’s Park to refashion this popular title anew, in a revival on view through July 2. Directed by Lucy Moss, who won a Tony Award over the weekend with Toby Marlow for writing the hit musical “Six,” this Elle and her stage colleagues are a diverse assemblage who include a transgender nonbinary performer (Isaac Hesketh) in the high-spirited supporting role of Margot.This time, Elle is played by Courtney Bowman, who was Anne Boleyn in the West End production of “Six.” Bowman, who describes herself as Afro-European, has said that she was pleasantly surprised that she was even being considered for the role of the feisty, pink-clad Valley girl portrayed by Reese Witherspoon in the 2001 film of the same name.Bowman, as might be expected, has embraced Moss’s willingness to break with preconceived notions of Elle and has responded to the challenge with a sweet and stirring performance that asks the audience to question what it means to be blonde. (Not everyone was so pleased: The show made headlines several times over when a Sunday Times of London review, critical of the casting, incurred the wrath of both the theater and Moss, who responded on the red carpet at the Tonys.)Not that Elle as a character is in any way changed. Here, as before, she is the shrewd and savvy outsider — a ditzy-seeming sorority girl in fact possessed of steel — who ends up making an indelible mark at Harvard Law School. And so what if the person playing her looks different from previous Elles?If anything, the casting of Bowman only amplifies the inclusive, can-do message of this collaboration between Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin (music and lyrics) and Heather Hach (book). This isn’t the first time that British theater has taken a less than conventional approach, and those wanting the “blonde” referred to in the title will still find it in Bowman’s braided wig. Laura Hopkins’s tiered set, for its part, includes a curtain that seems intended to complement Elle’s appearance at every turn.Michael Ahomka-Lindsay and Courtney Bowman in “Legally Blonde.” Pamela RaithUpdated to the present, Moss’s take on “Legally Blonde” mentions the Kardashians and Timothée Chalamet, and Elle’s résumé is described as “interactive,” in keeping with technology that wasn’t available two decades ago. Sometimes, the tongue of the production is somewhat too firmly in its cheek: The role of Bruiser, Elle’s beloved Chihuahua — given to an actual pooch in previous productions — is played by Liam McEvoy, costumed much like a human “feline” from the film adaptation of “Cats.”Elsewhere, the narrative hasn’t aged well. After #MeToo, it’s difficult to believe that Callahan (Eugene McCoy), Elle’s predatory law professor, would have made it quite as far as he has, but at least the audience didn’t boo McCoy at the curtain call at a recent performance, as tends to happen in London musicals featuring a notable baddie. And at times, the show is too busy for its own good: You yearn for quieter, more reflective moments that put camp to one side and allow for the proper flowering of feeling between Elle and Emmett (the likable Michael Ahomka-Lindsay), the Harvard Law teaching assistant who soon displaces the callow Warner (Alistair Toovey) in Elle’s affections.Among the female supporting cast, Vanessa Fisher is in notably strong voice as Vivienne, Elle’s rival in love (and more) who is revealed to have a heart, and Nadine Higgin would raise the roof with her feisty, crowd-pleasing performance as Paulette, the randy hairdresser of bend-and-snap fame — if this alfresco venue had a roof to raise. (Oddly, her mock “Riverdance” moves don’t really land this time, perhaps because that cultural phenomenon no longer has the same prominence.)The other night, the cast as a whole sounded somewhat tinny, especially at the start, as if perhaps battling the intense amplification needed to counter the noise of helicopters overhead and the like. But an initial feeling of excess subsides as the evening continues toward a second half that gives Ellen Kane, the choreographer, a chance to let rip.“Whipped Into Shape” allows Lauren Drew’s Brooke her moment of stage glory as a murder suspect who turns out to be the fiercest of fitness trainers. And the ensemble number “Gay or European?” — a potentially provocative song that the cast treats with such cheerful absurdity that you can hardly imagine it causing offense — exists alongside a passing reference to Beyoncé, whose singular moves would seem to have inspired the company as a whole.Bowman charms throughout in a casting gamble that pays off. “I had to find my way,” Elle says at the end, and you have to commend a theater culture that has led this performer to this role, even if Bowman, too, has probably had to navigate unpleasantness in the process. As Elle could have told her, determination and talent, happily, can win the day.On another stage in this city, a second, even more time-tested musical is being viewed afresh. “Oklahoma!,” at the Young Vic through June 25, brings to London the startling reappraisal of the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein classic that won a 2019 Tony for best revival. The London iteration is even more impressive than the performance I saw at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Directed by Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein, the production combines several members of the New York company with some welcome newcomers, both American and British, including the Broadway actress Marisha Wallace, who has a riotous time as the libidinous Ado Annie, the good-time gal who famously “cain’t say no.”From left, Greg Hicks, Marisha Wallace and James Davis in “Oklahoma!,” directed by Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein at the Young Vic.Marc BrennerA particular revelation is the English actress-singer Anoushka Lucas as Laurey, the farm girl who catches the eye of both Curly (Arthur Darvill), the swaggering cowboy who opens the show with “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” and Jud Fry (a sad-eyed Patrick Vaill), the obsessive, desperately lovesick farmhand. Lucas brings a palpable anxiety to the role that emphasizes an underlying darkness to material we may first think of as buoyant. The story, as ever, relates who will get to take Laurey to the box social, but it exists within a more threatening context than we are used to from so traditionally upbeat a musical theater mainstay. (The jubilant exclamation point of the title isn’t there by accident.)You quickly note the guns in full view on the set, which in turn link up to a climactic act of violence not found in the time-honored plot: The rejiggered ending — not to be revealed here — connects with a United States now as ever in the woeful path of gunfire. The glorious songs are intact (Lucas, in particular, does her numbers proud), but the production is inseparable from the superlative Vaill’s indrawn and wounding presence.If you exit “Legally Blonde” cheered by its giddy finale, this “Oklahoma!,” to its credit, makes you question those worrying recesses of human behavior that are beyond the realm of punctuation.Legally Blonde. Directed by Lucy Moss. Open Air Theater, Regent’s Park, through July 2.Oklahoma! Directed by Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein. Young Vic, through June 25. More

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      Shauneille Perry Ryder, Pioneering Theater Director, Dies at 92

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      As a Black woman, she blazed a path Off Broadway with an intuitive grasp of “how a story should be told, particularly a Black story,” Giancarlo Esposito said.Shauneille Perry Ryder, an actress, playwright and educator who was one of the first Black women to direct plays Off Broadway, most notably for the New Federal Theater, died on June 9 at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 92.Her daughter Lorraine Ryder confirmed the death.Ms. Perry Ryder, who was known professionally as Shauneille (pronounced shaw-NELL) Perry, directed 17 plays at the New Federal Theater from 1971 to 2006, each a part of the company’s mission to integrate artists of color and women into mainstream American theater. The theater, founded in 1970 by Woodie King Jr. in Lower Manhattan and now housed on West 42nd Street, has been a mecca for Black actors and directors.“She was personable with actors, but she put her foot down,” Mr. King said in a phone interview, referring to her attention to detail. “I’m so glad she worked with New Federal. She gave us a great reputation. In our first 10 years, we had a hit each year, and at least three or four were directed by Shauneille Perry.”In 1982, she directed Rob Penny’s “Who Loves the Dancer,” about a young Black man (played by Giancarlo Esposito) growing up in 1950s Philadelphia who dreams of becoming a dancer but who is trapped by his mother’s expectations, his environment and racism.In The New York Times, the critic Mel Gussow wrote that the play “has an inherent honesty, and in Shauneille Perry’s production, the evening is filled with conviction.”Mr. Esposito, who had been directed earlier that year by Ms. Perry Ryder in another play, “Keyboard,” at the New Federal, recalled her “very intuitive expression of how a story should be told, particularly a Black story.”“I was a young, green actor who had chops,” he added, in a phone interview, “but she taught me that acting is physical. The explosion that comes out of me in the second act came together under her direction.”Ms. Perry Ryder also directed Phillip Hayes Dean’s “Paul Robeson,” which traces the life of the titular singer and social crusader; “Jamimma,” by Martie Evans-Charles, about a young woman who changes her name because of its connection to servility and who is devoted to a man who she is told will never do much more than “wear rags or play instruments”; and “Black Girl,” by J.E. Franklin, about three generations of Black women, including a teenager who yearns to dance.“If you’re Black, you know about these people in any city,” Ms. Perry Ryder told The Times in 1971, referring to the characters in “Black Girl.” “We are all a part of each other.”She won at least two Audelco Awards from the Audience Development Committee, which honors Black theater and artists, and in 2019 received the Lloyd Richards Director’s Award from the National Black Theater Festival, in Winston-Salem, N.C., named after the Tony-winning director of many of August Wilson’s plays.Shauneille Gantt Perry was born on July 26, 1929, in Chicago. Her father, Graham, was one of the first Black assistant attorneys general in Illinois; her mother, Pearl (Gantt) Perry, was a pioneering Black court reporter in Chicago. Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote “A Raisin the Sun,” was one of Shauneille’s cousins.While attending Howard University — where she received a bachelor’s degree in drama in 1950 — Ms. Ryder Perry belonged to a student theater group, the Howard Players, which performed Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” on a tour of Scandinavia at the invitation of the Norwegian government. “We were the only Black company to tour those marvelous countries,” she told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1971.She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1952 at the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago (now a part of DePaul University). As a Fulbright scholar in 1954, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Dissatisfied with the curriculum, however (“they were always doing ‘Cleopatra,’” she said), she transferred to the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art.Back in Chicago she began acting — she was in a summer stock play, “Mamba’s Daughters,” with Ethel Waters — while also writing for the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender. In 1959, while on a trip to Paris that she had won through an Ebony magazine essay contest, she met the author Richard Wright, who, she recalled, asked her, “They still lynching people back in the States?”“I remember telling him, ‘They do it a little differently there today,’” she told The Times in 1971. But the next day she read about a Black man who had been accused of rape and taken forcibly to a jail cell; his body was later found floating in a river. “I kept wondering to myself,” she said, “‘What is that man saying about my analysis of things?’”And she wondered what she would do when she got home.At first she continued acting. She appeared in various Off Broadway plays, including Josh Greenfeld’s “Clandestine on the Morning Line” (1961), with James Earl Jones, in which a pregnant young woman (Ms. Perry Ryder) from Alabama strolls into a restaurant looking for the father of her child.Edith Oliver, reviewing the play in The New Yorker, praised Ms. Perry Ryder’s “lovely performance,” writing that she gave her role “such quiet, innocent strength and apparent unawareness of the character’s pathos that we almost forget it, too.”Frustrated with the roles she was offered, Ms. Perry Ryder turned to directing, first at the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, with a workshop production of Ms. Franklin’s “Mau Mau Room.”“I got the feeling that maybe there’s a place for me,” she told The Times.Two years later, she directed “The Sty of the Blind Pig” for the Negro Ensemble Company. In the drama, a blind street singer in 1950s Chicago goes to a house on the South Side looking for a woman he once knew.Emory Lewis wrote in his review in The Record that Ms. Perry Ryder “had marshaled her actors with loving attention to period detail and nuance.”Ms. Perry Ryder, left, in 1971 while directing “Black Girl,” a play by J. E. Franklin, right, about three generations of Black women. Produced by the New Federal Theater, it was staged at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street in Lower Manhattan. Bert Andrews Her theater work continued for more than 40 years, including writing and directing “Things of the Heart: Marian Anderson’s Story,” about the brilliant Black contralto; directing and rewriting the book for a 1999 revival of “In Dahomey,” the first Broadway musical, originally staged in 1903, written by African Americans; and writing a soap opera for a Black radio station in New York City.In 1986, Ms. Perry Ryder joined the faculty of Lehman College in the Bronx, where she taught theater and ran the drama program. At Lehman, she staged “Looking Back: The Music of Micki Grant,” a revue based on Ms. Grant’s theatrical works, which include “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope.” She retired in 2001.In addition to Lorraine Ryder, Ms. Perry Ryder is survived by two other daughters, Gail Perry-Ryder Tigere and Natalie Ryder Redcross, and four grandchildren. Her husband, Donald Ryder, an architect, died in 2021. More