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      Review: In ‘Paradise Square,’ Racial Harmony Turns to Discord

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      In a new musical starring Joaquina Kalukango, the love between Black and Irish New Yorkers in a Manhattan bar is threatened by Civil War riots.Everything in “Paradise Square” is true. Nothing in “Paradise Square” is true.Yes, history shows that in 1863, after Abraham Lincoln extended the Civil War draft to include all white men between the ages of 25 and 45 — Black men being excepted because they were not considered citizens — mobs of disgruntled Irish Americans rose up against Black people in New York, burning buildings and killing many in their path.And it’s true that in the impoverished, piano-shaped district of downtown Manhattan called Five Points, some Black and Irish neighbors who had been living together in relative harmony joined forces to resist the mobs.But in hammering these large-scale events into individual stories, and in manipulating them so performers have reason to sing at top volume and dance nearly nonstop, the uplifting, star-making, overwrought new musical, which opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, turns history on its head. Racism becomes an individual character flaw instead of a systemic evil; resistance, the solitary moral genius of a hero.Chloe Davis, foreground center left, and Sidney DuPont in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn this case, the hero is Nelly O’Brien, or really Joaquina Kalukango, who plays her with enough guts, stamina and vocal bravura to make you believe in a character glued together from the shavings of history. Nelly is the proprietor of a (fictional) Five Points bar and brothel called Paradise Square: “a little Eden” where, as one of the bald lyrics by Nathan Tysen and Masi Asare puts it in the title song, “We love who we want to love/with no apology.”Indeed, Nelly is married to the Irish American Willie O’Brien (Matt Bogart, suitably strapping). His sister (and Nelly’s best friend), Annie Lewis (Chilina Kennedy, absurdly fierce), is married to a Black minister, the Rev. Samuel Jacob Lewis (Nathaniel Stampley). When Annie’s nephew Owen (A.J. Shively) arrives from Ireland, around the same time that Samuel, a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad, brings Washington Henry (Sidney DuPont) to Paradise Square en route from Tennessee to Canada, the joint begins to seem like a rooming house for incendiary plot points.The cast of “Paradise Square” includes, foreground from left: Gabrielle McClinton, DuPont, Kalukango, Chilina Kennedy, Nathaniel Stampley and Davis.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMost of the characters — and there are 10 major roles — seem less like people than ideas with human masks. Willie’s war buddy Mike Quinlan (Kevin Dennis) represents the unemployed Irish workers easily swayed by demagogic politicians. A white pianist and composer who turns plantation tunes into uptown hits (Jacob Fishel) represents, somewhat anachronistically, the problem of cultural appropriation — though it’s a nice touch that some Stephen Foster songs, like “Camptown Races,” are reappropriated in Jason Howland’s music.Another Foster song — “Oh! Susanna” — gets an even more interesting overhaul, insidiously connecting the show’s all-purpose villain, Frederic Tiggens, as he fans the Irish rebellion, to racist Southern tropes. (Foster’s melody is reset with the lyric “You were true to a country that wasn’t true to you.”) Alas, none of Tiggens’s dialogue is as subtle; a vaguely defined “uptown party boss” set on shutting down the “depravity” of places like Paradise Square, he leaves the performer John Dossett little to do but metaphorically twirl his mustaches.If most of the score suffers from a mild case of overstatement — whipping up a series of generic rock ballads and throat-shredding anthems — the book and staging suffer from full-blown emphasitis. The book, credited to Christina Anderson, Craig Lucas and Larry Kirwan, is especially problematic. Based on Kirwan’s musical play “Hard Times,” and apparently rewritten heavily in nine years of development, it strips everything down to the naked basics as it tries to accommodate so many characters along with a checklist of sensitivities.Kevin Dennis, far left, and A.J. Shively, top right, rise up against the draft in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’m a sucker as much as the next critic for liberal pieties, and I appreciate the stance of a musical centered on Black lives that has its heroine say, near the end, “We pass on to you this story on our own terms.” But strong stances do not make up for weak characterization or suggest why such strength is necessary. That the position of the Irish and other white immigrants is not nearly as effectively dramatized as that of the Black characters is morally good but theatrically dull.In that combination, I feel the meaty hand of the producer Garth H. Drabinsky, who seems to have used his influence to shape “Paradise Square” into a likeness of his previous hits. Like “Ragtime” in 1998 and the 1994 revival of “Show Boat,” it frames social unrest as the product of a few representative individuals and tries to fill the inevitable gaps with big sound and stagecraft. It also borrows a famous plot device from “Show Boat” — which is effective here even if the debt goes otherwise unpaid.But unlike those musicals, which were built on the frames of strongly written novels by authors with singular voices, “Paradise Square” feels almost authorless despite its many contributors, and the direction of Moisés Kaufman, known for a strong hand and conceptual coherence, does little to erase the impression of anonymity. (The design elements are likewise merely efficient.) Contingent and anxious, the show seems more interested in saying the right things than in telling a coherent story.DuPont, left, and Shively in the show, which has choreography by Bill T. Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWait — I take that back: It does tell a coherent story, in two ways. One is in the dancing, which employs a kaleidoscopic crash of contextual styles, including step dance for the Irish characters and Juba for the Black ones, to explore, far more subtly than the book, the place where appropriation and joyful sharing meet. (If unlikely as a plot point, the dance-off between Owen and Washington is a high point emotionally.) Again, many hands are at work here, with Bill T. Jones heading a musical staging team of at least five other choreographers, but the result scores its points effectively.The other source of coherence in “Paradise Square” is Kalukango, who somehow alchemizes the remarkable difficulties of the role into her characterization, making it incredible in the good way instead of the bad. Having seen her previously as Cleopatra in “Antony and Cleopatra,” Nettie in “The Color Purple” and Kaneisha in “Slave Play,” I am not exactly surprised, but they were more successful pieces of writing. Nothing really prepares you for the moment when an actor brings everything she has to the stage and essentially writes what needs to be said while you watch. It makes you believe in making history.Paradise SquareAt the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; paradisesquaremusical.com. Running time: 2 hours and 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Macbeth’ performances on Broadway pause after Daniel Craig tests positive for the coronavirus.

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      The show, which just began previews on Tuesday, hopes to resume on April 8.Daniel Craig, who is starring in the title role of a new Broadway production of “Macbeth,” tested positive for the coronavirus on Saturday, forcing the show to cancel most of next week’s performances.The show, which just began previews on Tuesday and is scheduled to open April 28, had already canceled Friday night’s performance, citing another positive coronavirus test among cast members, when on Saturday it canceled both the matinee and an evening performance, citing Mr. Craig’s positive test. Then, late Saturday night, the production said that it was canceling all performances until April 8 “due to the detection of a limited number of positive covid test results within the company.”Coronavirus cases have recently been rising in New York City, and several Broadway performers have tested positive. In most instances, shows have been able to turn to understudies to keep going, but because “Macbeth” had just begun performances, it had not yet fully rehearsed the understudies.All Broadway actors — in fact, all workers in Broadway theaters — are required to be fully vaccinated. Broadway also currently requires that ticket holders be fully vaccinated and wear masks except when eating and drinking; on Friday, the theater owners and operators said that those rules would remain in place at least through April 30, and that they would decide by April 15 whether to retain, alter or drop the audience protocols after the end of the month.“Macbeth,” of course, is a well-known and much-loved tragedy by William Shakespeare, and this revival has been one of the most anticipated productions of the spring on Broadway. Mr. Craig, who is fresh off his long run playing James Bond on film, had repeatedly said he wanted to be part of Broadway’s efforts to rebound after the industry’s long pandemic shutdown.Mr. Craig is starring opposite Ruth Negga, as Lady Macbeth, in the production, which is directed by Sam Gold. The show does not have much leeway — it is already scheduled to be the last production to open this season, and its opening night is on the final day when shows can open to qualify for this year’s Tony Awards. More

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      A Producer Seeks a Broadway Comeback, Mired in Offstage Drama

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      With the musical “Paradise Square” preparing to open Sunday, Garth Drabinsky is hoping to re-establish himself after serving time in a Canadian prison for fraud.Ten days before opening night of his Broadway show, “Paradise Square,” Garth Drabinsky was sitting at a breakfast table at the Peninsula Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, fending off a stream of cellphone calls from members of his production team.That morning’s crisis: Chilina Kennedy, one of the show’s lead actresses, had called in sick (and would be out for nine days after testing positive for coronavirus). Drabinsky decided which of the two understudies should take her place. A few minutes later, he spoke with the director Moisés Kaufman.“You’re happy with the choice?” Drabinsky asked. He listened. “Yeah, right, but make sure that she can really deliver ‘Someone to Love,’” one of the musical’s big ballads. “And the comedy.”The days before an opening are always stressful for a Broadway producer. But few have been under a harsher spotlight than Drabinsky, a storied Canadian impresario whose return to Broadway has generated the sort of drama that even he couldn’t have scripted.First came the pandemic, which delayed the show’s Broadway opening by two years. Then an out-of-town run in Chicago last fall drew mixed reviews and (hampered by the Covid-19 surge) disappointing sales. The show’s preview performances on Broadway have earned only around $350,000 per week at the box office, with most of the seats filled by heavily discounted or even free tickets. That’s not the best omen for a producer who is staking everything on his big comeback after an ignominious fall.He was a brash outsider even during his heyday in the 1990s, when he took a string of Tony-winning musicals to Broadway, among them “Ragtime,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and a revival of “Show Boat.” Then, in 1998, his company, Livent, imploded, and Drabinsky was accused of understating expenses and inflating profits in order to disguise the company’s precarious financial state. He was eventually convicted of fraud and forgery in his native Canada, and served 17 months of a five-year sentence, before being paroled in February 2013.Now, he’s back. And he hasn’t lost his salesman’s bravado, his lawyerly verbosity or his passion for theater, even though his show has faced many challenges, including questions about its financial health.Sidney DuPont, left, and A.J. Shively in the musical “Paradise Square,” which opens Sunday at the Barrymore Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs New York rehearsals started in February, stories began circulating about slow payments, contract problems and a budget ($13.5 million, according to Drabinsky) that seemed on the slim side for a big Broadway musical with a performing company of nearly 40 and a producer known for lavish spending. Actors Equity, the performers’ union, even instructed the cast not to show up for rehearsals one day, so that it could deal with a “failure to provide our members with contracts reflecting their agreed-upon terms of employment” and “a myriad of other significant contract violations,” according to an Equity statement.“When Garth Drabinsky is involved, people are rightly concerned that all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed,” said David Levy, an Equity spokesman. The problems were apparently resolved, but it was hardly the sort of incident anyone wants at the outset of a Broadway run.Drabinsky blamed a delay in delivering final contracts for the dispute, and misunderstandings about what the actors were owed when the show transferred to New York from Chicago. “The Chicago contract froze the deal for New York,” he said. “There was no variation allowed. They were asking for something we were not committed to give.”What’s more, Drabinsky stressed, he is not in charge of the show’s finances — an arrangement made explicit by the limited partnership formed to bring it to Broadway. “I walked away from every element of fiscal control of this show,” he added. “I don’t sign checks. I don’t get involved. I never want to live through the horror of what I went through in 1998 again.”Instead, he’s been working to get “Paradise Square” in shape for Broadway. The show began life nine years ago with a small-scale musical called “Hard Times,” written by the Irish American musician Larry Kirwan, lead singer of the rock band Black 47. It is set during the Civil War, in the gritty Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan, where Irish immigrants and freed Black Americans lived together — and where Stephen Foster (whose music formed the bulk of the score) resided during his final years. The show climaxes with the draft riots of 1863, when white working-class New Yorkers formed violent racist mobs following a draft lottery.Drabinsky loved the concept, but shied away from anchoring the show in Foster’s music, with its romanticization of the slavery-era South. So he set about reworking the piece, hiring the composer Jason Howland to write a new score (only two Foster songs remain), a succession of writers to shift the story’s focus to the owner of a neighborhood saloon (played by the Tony nominee Joaquina Kalukango), and a top-notch creative team, including Kaufman, as the director, along with the choreographer Bill T. Jones.The themes of racial justice and the immigrant experience have long attracted Drabinsky, and their currency has only grown in the years of development, which included a 2019 workshop production in Berkeley, Calif. “When the show began to parallel what was happening today in America and the world, it was sort of freaky,” he said. “And it hasn’t stopped changing. Even to the point that days before our first preview, Russia invades Ukraine. Three million immigrants are now looking for a new home.”Drabinsky also made an effort to diversify the creative team, hiring Christina Anderson, a Black playwright, to revise Craig Lucas and Kirwan’s script, and the composer-lyricist Masi Asare, who collaborated with Nathan Tysen on the lyrics.Still, suspicion of Drabinsky runs high in the Broadway community, where many were burned financially by his company’s bankruptcy.Yet some people clearly are willing to give him another shot. The list of more than 30 producers for “Paradise Square” includes few established Broadway names, but many who have confidence in Drabinsky’s record as a dedicated, hands-on producer. Among them are the former Queens congressman Joe Crowley (who was brought into the project by Kirwan); Matthew Blank, the former head of Showtime who is now interim chief executive of AMC Networks; and Richard Stursberg, a former top executive at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.Drabinsky’s former company, Livent, brought a critically acclaimed revival of “Showboat” to the Gershwin Theater in 1994.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I liked the dynamic of this motivated producer, needy of success, putting it all on the line,” said Jeffrey Sine, another producer, whose Broadway credits include “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” “I think people deserve a second chance.”Or third or fourth. Drabinsky, 72, grew up in Toronto. At age 4 he contracted polio and spent much of his childhood in hospitals, distracting himself with music on his transistor radio — everything from ’50s rock ’n’ roll to Charles Aznavour. He earned a law degree, but soon turned to the entertainment business, building the Cineplex Odeon chain of movie theaters, before resigning in 1989 amid concerns about the company’s financial health.He re-emerged as a theater mogul, parlaying a long-running Toronto production of “The Phantom of the Opera” at his Pantages Theater into a far-flung company, Livent, that owned theaters (in New York, Chicago and elsewhere) and produced the shows that went into them. He pioneered a new business model for Broadway: Rather than cobbling together investors for each new show, Livent was a vertically integrated company that used the profits from its theaters and touring shows to finance the new work.But it all came crashing down in 1998, after the struggling company was bought by the Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz and the investment banker Roy Furman, who discovered bookkeeping irregularities. Drabinsky was fired; bankruptcy followed; and fraud charges were brought against Drabinsky and his longtime associate Myron Gottlieb, both in the Southern District of New York and (after Drabinsky fled to Toronto) in Canada as well.Drabinsky doesn’t like to talk much about that time. His finances were decimated, and his reputation a shambles. A rare bright spot was the Orthodox rabbi who began visiting him in prison. “It came at the time when I was at my absolute lowest emotionally,” he said. “It gave me a bit of a second wind.” He said he and the rabbi have met regularly for lunch ever since.Two years after his release from prison, he received a diagnosis of Stage 4 melanoma, cancer of the skin that had metastasized to his lungs. (After a year of immunotherapy, he said he is cancer free.) He returned to producing with the musical “Sousatzka” (backed by a Canadian company in which he has no financial interest), but that closed in Toronto after poor reviews. And still, Drabinsky was unable to travel to the United States because of the pending indictment against him in New York. That changed in July 2018, when the New York prosecutors dismissed the charges, noting that he had already served time for essentially the same crimes.“Paradise Square” is the sort of serious, original musical that Broadway claims to want more of. Yet without a major star, or a presold brand to market (and little advertising thus far), it faces a tough road. Much is riding on the critics’ reactions, which will come after Sunday’s opening. But Drabinsky remains upbeat, citing the “wonderful” audience response and positive tweets.“I made the decision, in terms of marketing, that our best course was to ensure that we filled the previews to capacity at whatever average ticket price we could get, and let word of mouth take over,” he said.His showman’s optimism is bolstered by a sober, even sentimental, belief in redemption. “There is a spirit in the soul of this country,” he said, “that allows somebody the opportunity to come back and work hard and be able to deliver a cultural work hopefully that will be meaningful. It’s one of the things that fills my heart every day.”Whether “Paradise Square” fills the seats at the Ethel Barrymore Theater will decide if Drabinsky has a future on Broadway — or whether it’s back to square one. More

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      How Stephen Sondheim’s Work Did (and Didn’t) Translate to the Screen

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      A new series of adaptations, documentaries and more examines the different ways the composer-lyricist left his mark on movies.Stephen Sondheim, the unparalleled composer-lyricist who died in November, may have changed musical theater forever, but as a new program at the Museum of the Moving Image argues, he left his mark on film as well. Whether it’s Elaine Stritch’s screen-shattering performance of “The Ladies Who Lunch” in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary “Original Cast Album: ‘Company’” or Madonna’s slinking around and cooing “Sooner or Later” in “Dick Tracy,” Sondheim’s work has given film audiences memorable moments.The museum program, See It Big: Sondheim, assembled by the guest programmer Michael Koresky, the film curator Eric Hynes and the assistant curator, Edo Choi, offers a survey of adaptations of Sondheim’s work and other examples of his contributions to film, including a murder-mystery screenplay and the score to a French new wave film. I spoke with Koresky about Sondheim’s gifts to cinema and why it’s so hard to adapt his work. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Sondheim let people adapt his work freely, which your program shows.He said in many interviews that he is OK with someone massaging and changing and doing things for their own sake, and I think that just shows his generosity and his experimentation ability to allow others to be experimental. You can see that all the way through to 2021. With the Spielberg version of “West Side Story,” you could tell that he was sort of delighted to find that it had this new life.I think it’s up to us, as Sondheim lovers, to [say] when something isn’t working. But because of that, it takes something really different and experimental and strange to be a truly successful adaptation, which is why I think that “Original Cast Album: ‘Company’” is probably the best “adaptation” of a Sondheim musical.What about that film is able to articulate the skill and artistry of Sondheim in ways that some other attempts do not?Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91. Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows. Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview. His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers. ‘West Side Story’: Does the musical, which features some of the artist’s best-known lyrics, deserve a new hearing? ‘Company’: The revival of his 1970 musical features a gender swap.I think with Sondheim, witnessing the artistic process is part of the whole experience, creation is baked into the actual production. When you’re really attuned to the lyrics and the melodies, you’re thinking about how this possibly could have come about. So you’re constantly aware of the richness of the text and the complexity. For a documentary to just be about that literally: You’re seeing people do things over and over again, you’re getting a glimpse into an aspect of musical production that you probably never would have the chance to see. Pulling the strings and looking becomes part of the text. His musicals are so much about their own construction, so I can’t think of a better film based on Sondheim.Was there a particular piece that you wanted to start this series as a kind of guiding ethos for what you wanted the program to say about his legacy?For me, it was the 1966 television program “Evening Primrose,” which didn’t end up in the program, only because it was impossible to find. I grew to love “Take Me to the World,” which is a song I discovered in a piano book. That show typifies everything that I love about Sondheim: the melodies, the strange subject matter, the weird sources of adaptation, the really idiosyncratic, disturbing, bizarre and beautiful. I wanted that to be the discovery for people.We started with the 2021 “West Side Story” because we want to give people the chance to see it on the big screen, since so many people missed seeing it last December.What is it that makes it so difficult to adapt Sondheim to the screen? There aren’t, with very few exceptions, great screen interpretations of his work that aren’t filmed theater productions.He gives you something that you think you understand. Even with “Into the Woods” (the 2014 film), it’s like, “Oh, it’s a deconstruction of fairy tales.” But that’s really not enough to go on. There’s something really profound going on there about sadness and loneliness that is probably really hard to square with the genre trappings. They’re tricky because he’s always doing two things at once. And when you make a film, filmmakers often focus on the spectacle, not realizing that the spectacle has to be elided. That’s really hard to do in film.I was thinking today about which Sondheim works I wish there were movies of. I never want “Sunday in the Park With George” to be a movie, just by virtue of what it is, how it’s produced, what it’s about. What it’s doing feels so New York stage, it would be so strange.Could you talk about Sondheim and Madonna’s cinematic work in “Dick Tracy”?For me, as a little gay boy with his Madonna “I’m Breathless” cassette tape in 1990, it was the essential thing. Period. “Dick Tracy,” the gruff lantern-jawed masculine comic book detective, just does not interest me. But I remember those songs. It’s one of those things that’s a queering agent. “Dick Tracy” really feels like a hybrid of a lot of different sensibilities. I like the way that Sondheim and Madonna’s contributions help to negate the uber-masculinity of the text.And we have to talk about “The Last of Sheila” (1973), which he co-wrote with Anthony Perkins.That’s a tricky one. It’s interesting that they chose an intricate, whodunit murder mystery plot, because how else would you intelligently funnel this Sondheim complexity and idea of overlapping narratives, characters, themes into a genre film? I think that’s what makes it delightful. With Sondheim you see the gears working without it taking you out of the film. It’s a movie about game playing, in which you’re constantly being asked to size up the people involved. It’s very mechanical in a fun way.And in a nasty way that I love, too.One of the game cards in the film reads, “You are a homosexual.” And the way they talk about it is surprisingly casual and sort of progressive. There’s the idea that this is an accusation. But when it’s revealed, there’s a real casualness about it. It’s surprising for “closeted” — at the time — gay men to write.See It Big: Sondheim runs through May 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. For more information, go to movingimage.us. More

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      Review: In ‘I Agree to the Terms,’ It’s Raining Pennies From Amazon

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      The Builders Association explores the world of turkers, workers performing thousands of weird, low-paying tasks for an online giant.A place where “information is free” and “money isn’t everything”: That’s how Stewart Brand, the longtime editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, foresaw the future of the internet in 1985.That same year, the management guru Art Kleiner said that his “key impression” of the developing medium was “one of civilization.”And in 1996, John Perry Barlow, in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” wrote that the online world was a place “where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”So how’s that going?Cheap are the ironies of hindsight. Yet not as cheap as what happened to a new class of low-wage workers brought about by the internet age — in particular, a group of freelancers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform known as turkers. They are the subject of “I Agree to the Terms,” an online presentation from NYU Skirball that is less a play than an affable, informative lecture-demonstration on last-ditch labor — and an implicit criticism of it.Because this is the brainchild of the Builders Association — written by James Gibbs, one of its “core collaborators,” and directed by Marianne Weems, its founder — the genre bleed is not unexpected. Previous Builders works, including “Alladeen” (a multimedia piece about Bangalore call centers) and “Elements of Oz” (a riff on the MGM movie musical involving smartphone filters you point at the stage), have often mined delight from novel combinations of technology and storytelling.Even so, when I saw “I Agree to the Terms,” on Saturday, the novelty was causing problems. The 45-minute piece was delayed for 35 minutes by what were described vaguely as “back-end problems.”Once the difficulties were resolved, “I Agree to the Terms” went smoothly if not quite compellingly. In the first part, set during the internet’s early days, recitations from those optimistic manifestoes are interspersed with brief recreations of bulletin board testimony about sexism and addiction. The third part, a glimpse at an online future that includes metaverse avatars, virtual reality and a cyberspace bazaar selling human hearts for NFTs, seems merely glib.Only in between do we learn anything new, as our guides, Moe Angelos and David Pence, introduce the so-called MTurk world. Several hundred thousand workers, we learn, operate on that platform, performing menial online tasks for pennies, sometimes as a side hustle and sometimes as their sole source of income.Semi-scripted interviews with four actual turkers personalize the information. Adah from Florida walks us through the MTurk dashboard, which lists HITs (human intelligence tasks) and how much they pay. Michelle, an actor living in the Bronx, performs HITs on the subway, monetizing time that would otherwise be wasted. Noel, who is quadriplegic, can now work from home in New Mexico — as can Sibyl, from Alabama, who tells us she became a turker when her husband’s death left her with $35 and no source of income.“It was this or murdering chickens at the chicken plant,” Sibyl says, adding that the transportation costs for that minimum-wage work would have wiped out her earnings. At least by turking she can make, on a good day, $100, without leaving what appears to be her basement.It is perhaps for that reason she will not brook any criticism of Amazon. “I know you aren’t all sitting there and judging my pimp,” she says, warningly.That’s it for real-life drama, but there is at least some virtual excitement to come. A QR code leads you to an MTurk dashboard created especially for this production. You have 12 minutes to process as many tasks as possible, accumulating “Builders Coin” and approval ratings as you go. Some of the tasks I faced resembled Captcha challenges; others were short surveys, and a few were simply inscrutable. One, I felt sure, was an SAT reject: an analogous relations question with no satisfactory answer.In any case, I completed 14 tasks, earning $7.17, a 93 percent approval rating and a headache.If the Builders were hoping to expose another Amazonian hellhole of capitalism, I’m not sure they succeeded; the experience, being pleasant enough, was at odds with the message. While turking, I felt no more exploited than while solving the daily Wordle.A more telling exercise might have been drawn from the original Mechanical Turk, an 18th-century scam for which the enterprise is named. That was a chess-playing “machine” operated secretly by a person pretzled into its cabinetry. Talk about back-end problems!I Agree to the TermsThrough April 3; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 45 minutes. More

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      A Playwright Makes the Scene in New York’s Living Rooms

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      In the fall of 2020, a young playwright named Matthew Gasda decided to entertain some friends by staging a one-act drama on a grassy hilltop of Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. The masked audience quickly realized that what they were watching was conspicuously relatable: Performed on a picnic blanket by seven actors, “Circles” presented a group of pandemic-weary friends who gather over wine one night in a city park to catch up on their lives.After the applause, Mr. Gasda, 33, passed around a hat for donations. Then he began plotting his next play.A few months later he unveiled “Winter Journey,” a drama loosely based on Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” in a chilly backyard in Bushwick. Then came “Quartet,” a comedy about two couples who swap partners, which he put on in a TriBeCa apartment. He staged his next play, “Ardor,” about friends who gather for a weekend in the country, in a loft in Greenpoint. He was a long way from Broadway, or even Off Broadway, but he was grateful for the attention.“I’d long been staging plays in New York in anonymity,” he said, “but during the pandemic I became like the rat that survived the nukes. Suddenly, there was no competition.”In the spring of 2021, he fell into a downtown social scene that was forming on the eastern edge of Chinatown, by the juncture of Canal and Division Streets. What he witnessed inspired his next work, “Dimes Square.”“Dimes Square became the anti-Covid hot spot, and so I went there because that’s where things were happening,” Mr. Gasda said.Named after Dimes, a restaurant on Canal Street, the micro scene was filled with skaters, artists, models, writers and telegenic 20-somethings who didn’t appear to have jobs at all. A hyperlocal print newspaper called The Drunken Canal gave voice to what was going on.Mr. Gasda, who had grown up in Bethlehem, Pa., with the dream of making it in New York, threw himself into the moment, assuming his role as the scene’s turtlenecked playwright. And as he worked as a tutor to support himself by day, and immersed himself in Dimes Square at night, he began envisioning a play.From left, Bob Laine, Bijan Stephen, Ms. Grady, Mr. Lorentzen and Eunji Lim rehearse a scene from “Dimes Square,” a new play about a downtown scene.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThe reflected face of the critic Christian Lorentzen during a rehearsal of Matthew Gasda’s “Dimes Square.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThe actor Cassidy Grady, under a flag blanket at the same rehearsal.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSet in a Chinatown loft, “Dimes Square” chronicles the petty backstabbing among a group of egotistic artists and media industry types. It’s filled with references to local haunts like the bar Clandestino and the Metrograph theater, and its characters include an arrogant writer who drinks Fernet — Mr. Gasda’s spirit of choice — and a washed up novelist who snorts cocaine with people half his age.Adding a touch of realism, Mr. Gasda cast friends in key roles: Bijan Stephen, a journalist and podcast host, portrays a frustrated magazine editor; Christian Lorentzen, a literary critic, plays a haggard Gen X novelist; and Fernanda Amis, whose father is the author Martin Amis, plays the daughter of a famous writer.Since the play opened in February at a loft in Greenpoint, “Dimes Square” has become an underground hit that consistently sells out performances. The people who see the show include insiders eager to see their scene committed to the stage, as well as those who have kept track of it at a distance via Instagram. The writers Gary Indiana, Joshua Cohen, Sloane Crosley and Mr. Amis have all attended.The play, which is scheduled to start a Manhattan run at an apartment in SoHo on Friday, also won Mr. Gasda his first big write-up, a review by Helen Shaw in New York Magazine’s Vulture, that compared him to Chekhov and declared: “Gasda has appointed himself dramatist of the Dimes Square scene.”After the appraisal ran online, Mr. Gasda received a text from a friend on his battered flip phone congratulating him on the fact that he had been “dubbed our chekhov.” But even as Mr. Gasda is getting his shot at success in literary New York, something about the noise surrounding his play has been troubling him.The playwright in his Brooklyn apartment.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“I’m thankful for the attention, but the people coming to see the show seem to think the play is complicit with the scene, and that’s getting totally warped by them,” he said. “The play is pessimistic about the scene.”Moments before actors took the stage at a recent performance, audience members sipped cheap red wine and made small talk about the Twitter chatter surrounding the show. As the lights dimmed, Mr. Gasda, wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches and his usual scarf, reminded his guests to pay for their drinks on Venmo.After the performance, as the loft cleared out, one audience member, Joseph Hogan, a 29-year-old filmmaker, offered a critique: “The likability of these characters is irrelevant to me,” he said. “What’s important to me is if their insecurities are relatable. And as a person who moved to this city from somewhere else and is trying to make it here in New York like they are, I feel I can identify with them.”“If they’re not considered likable,” he continued, “then neither am I. And that’s fine with me.”The play’s cast made its way to its usual bar, Oak & Iron. There, Mr. Gasda nursed a Fernet as Mr. Lorentzen passed along an evaluation of the show.“A journalist came up to me and told me she thought you’d be just another Cassavetes rehash,” Mr. Lorentzen said, referring to John Cassavetes, the noted indie filmmaker of the 1970s and 1980s. “But afterward she told me, ‘No, he gets it. He’s doing his own thing.’”“I’ve gotten Cassavetes references before,” Mr. Gasda said. “But it’s not my job to be interested in what people think. My job is to keep secreting and writing.”He took a sip.“It’s great we’re getting attention,” he said, “but it’s not like I’m making money out of this. I still have my day job.”“It reminds me of this story I heard about a guy seeing ‘Einstein on the Beach,’” he continued, referring to Philip Glass’s 1976 opera. “Then the guy needed to get his toilet fixed, so he called a plumber. The plumber shows up, and the guy asks him, ‘Aren’t you Philip Glass?’ Glass tells him, ‘Yeah, but I’m not making money on the show yet.’”Mr. Gasda watches from below as George Olesky and Cassidy Grady act out a scene from his play “Minotaur.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesMr. Gasda’s quest to become a New York playwright began during his teenage years in Bethlehem, where his father was a high school history teacher and his mother was a paralegal. He grew up watching Eagles games on TV with his dad and hearing stories about a grandfather’s days as a steelworker. He became bookish, compulsively reading “Ulysses” and devouring the works of the poet John Ashbery and the novelist William Gaddis.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Syracuse University, Mr. Gasda hopped a bus to Port Authority. He spent his first day walking aimlessly until he stumbled on Caffe Reggio, a Greenwich Village institution that was once a gathering spot for bohemians and Beat Generation poets. And there, even among the New York University students doing their homework, he felt at home. He soon moved into an apartment in Bushwick and started his reinvention.He wrote on a Smith Corona electric typewriter. He rocked the scarf and turtleneck to literary parties. He hung out in the stacks of the Strand and made Caffe Reggio his office, writing parts of over a dozen plays there. To make the rent, he taught English at a charter school in Red Hook and worked as a debate coach at Spence, the Upper East Side private school. He is now a college prep tutor and lives in a book-cluttered apartment in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn.But even after a decade in the city, he could get few people aside from friends and family members to see his work — until his luck changed during the pandemic, when young New Yorkers, weary of Netflix, seemed up for some live theater.Now, in addition to the second run of “Dimes Square,” another one of Mr. Gasda’s plays, “Minotaur,” is scheduled to open soon at a small venue in Dumbo. An early and intimate staging of the production included the actress Dasha Nekrasova, who has a recurring role on “Succession” and co-hosts the provocative politics and culture podcast “Red Scare.”Mr. Gasda at home.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAfter a recent “Minotaur” rehearsal in Midtown, Ms. Nekrasova and another cast member, Cassidy Grady, huddled for a smoke on the street while Mr. Gasda chatted with them. They discussed the debut novel of the moment, Sean Thor Conroe’s “Fuccboi,” as well as the new play that was rounding into shape.“‘Minotaur’ is a kind of Ibsenian drama,” Ms. Nekrasova said. “I’m enthusiastic about Gasda because he represents a burgeoning interest in theater, post-Covid, in the city.”Mr. Gasda slipped into a nearby sports bar. He ordered a glass of Fernet, and as he considered the impending run of “Dimes Square,” he suggested that audiences think about his play differently.“Ultimately, ‘Dimes Square’ is a comedy,” he said. “I’m not trying to send people to the therapist. And I’m not saying I’m better than the people in my play.”“The other side of the play is about striving in New York,” he added. “So it’s about something that’s universal, too.” More

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      in Theater

      A Director Returns (Uncomfortably) to His Working-Class Roots

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      Christophe Honoré’s latest work, for the Paris stage, is part of a recent wave of stories in France about the complex aftereffects of social mobility.PARIS — The French director Christophe Honoré, best known for films including “Love Songs” and “Sorry Angel,” has been making exceptional work in recent years — and international audiences have been missing out on it. The reason? It’s happening on theater stages in his home country.From “The Idols,” a play dedicated to a series of French artists who died at the height of the AIDS crisis, to “The Guermantes Way,” his Proust adaptation for the Comédie-Française, Honoré’s storytelling onstage has a kind of tragicomic immediacy that is instantly recognizable. His latest production, “The Sky of Nantes” (“Le Ciel de Nantes”), applies this sensibility to Honoré’s own family. The resulting journey, back to his working-class roots in the Brittany region of northern France, is fraught, yet poignantly astute.The starting point of the play, running through April 3 at the Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris, is an aborted film. Honoré had long wanted to tell the story of his grandmother Odette and her 10 children — eight of them fathered by an abusive Spaniard, Puig. Honoré went so far as to cast actors and do screen tests; at one point, some videos of these tests are projected on a scrim in “The Sky of Nantes.” Yet the project never came to fruition. Instead, it became a play about the sticky nature of autobiography.Honoré has a stand-in in “The Sky of Nantes”: a young actor, Youssouf Abi-Ayad, who introduces himself as the director in the first line. The play is set in a timeworn movie theater, faithfully recreated on the Odéon stage, its red seats facing the audience. Around Abi-Ayad, six of Honoré’s relatives — Odette and Puig; his mother, Marie-Dominique; and three of her many siblings — have gathered to hear him talk about their family history and the film he is (supposedly) making about it.Honoré’s staging style is playful enough that this meta self-reflection doesn’t weigh the show down. He makes no attempt to recreate things as they might have happened: Instead, “The Sky of Nantes,” like “The Idols,” brings its characters back from the dead and invents new, casual conversations between them. (They are fully aware of their demise but seem unfazed by it.) Regularly, the actors use microphones on stands to deliver pensive monologues, or a song, to the audience, only for others to interject and draw them into spontaneous-seeming banter.And Abi-Ayad, as Honoré, gets interrupted more than anyone else. Fascinatingly, the play makes space for the other characters to disagree with the polished, screen-ready version of their lives he attempts to recount at the beginning. His boorish uncle Roger objects to a poetic description of him contemplating ladybugs on his father’s tombstone, saying indignantly: “I’m not gay!” Soon after, Odette — whose age is superbly conveyed by the much younger Marlène Saldana — offers her take on her marriage to Puig. When Abi-Ayad corrects a word she uses, she berates him for suggesting she doesn’t speak “well enough.”From left, Stéphane Roger, Marlène Saldana, Chiara Mastroianni, Jean-Charles Clichet, Harrison Arévalo and Julien Honoré in “The Sky of Nantes.”Jean-Louis FernandezThe effect is one of dynamic contrast: As in his other plays, it allows Honoré to reconcile impulses — his penchant for literary self-indulgence on the one hand; his love of fantasy and surprise on the other — that film critics have occasionally found contradictory. But the back-and-forth between the director and his unruly characters serves another purpose in “The Sky of Nantes”: It highlights how difficult it can be to narrate the stories of a world one has left behind.Trauma runs deep throughout the play, from violence against women to suicide, and memories of France’s war in Algeria. The life of Honoré’s aunt Claudie is especially tragic and sensitively portrayed by Chiara Mastroianni (a longtime collaborator of Honoré’s, making her stage debut here). Honoré doesn’t shy away from the casual racism and homophobia of some characters, yet he also shows what gave them joy, too, like their fierce, relatable attachment to Nantes’ soccer team.“The Sky of Nantes” adds to a recent wave of stories in France about the complex aftereffects of social mobility, led by writers like Édouard Louis and Didier Eribon. In the role of Honoré — the gay, upwardly mobile grandson who moved to Paris — Abi-Ayad cuts a pained, melancholy figure. He is often seen smoking on the sidelines while the family quarrels, at once detached yet intermittently drawn back to the fold. “I’m mad at myself for changing,” he tells the others when he admits that he couldn’t complete his film. His focus on bourgeois characters throughout his screen career is no coincidence, Honoré says through Abi-Ayad: “I can only betray you.” Without anger, his uncle Jacques replies: “You’re ashamed of us. We’re not chic enough to put into your films.”Honoré allows his mother, Marie-Dominique, the only member of the family who is still alive, to have the last word. Her role is gender-swapped in “The Sky of Nantes,” and affectionately played by Honoré’s own brother, Julien Honoré.At the very end, however, the real Marie-Dominique appears in a short video clip, and reveals her discomfort with the retelling of family stories. “They’re a pain,” she says of her two sons, with a laugh. Here, and elsewhere, “The Sky of Nantes” captures the thorny reality of autobiography — and its heartbreak, too.Bboy Junior, left, and Djamil Mohamed in Julie Berès’s “Tenderness.”Axelle de RusséSo does another new Paris production, Julie Berès’s “Tenderness,” at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, in the suburb of Saint-Denis. With a cast of eight young people, Berès explores masculinity in the #MeToo era, through a mix of real stories and fiction. Onstage, the diverse cast members appear to be drawing from their lives, yet “Tenderness” (“La Tendresse”) was based mostly on research: Together with her co-writers, Kevin Keiss and Lisa Guez, with additional help from Alice Zeniter, Berès surveyed around 50 young men about their relationship to masculine norms.The result illuminates the reality of men’s experiences without requiring the actors to share their own intimate stories, as other theater projects sometimes do. With the help of the choreographer Jessica Noita, Berès also matches movement to the text, and many in the cast are accomplished dancers. Bboy Junior (Junior Bosila Banya), an astonishing slow-motion break dancer, holds impossible-looking handstands as he speaks, while the ballet-trained Natan Bouzy recounts a youthful addiction to online pornography while on pointe.There are scenery-chewing group dances, too, which unleash extraordinary energy, but like “The Sky of Nantes,” “Tenderness” is strongest when it acknowledges the contradictions and complexity of its characters. Both productions speak to larger realities of French society, and just like Honoré’s best films, they deserve to be seen widely.Le Ciel de Nantes. Directed by Christophe Honoré. Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe, through April 3.La Tendresse. Directed by Julie Berès. Théâtre Gérard Philipe, through April 1. More

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      in Music

      Review: In ‘Oratorio for Living Things,’ the Song Is You

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      Heather Christian’s rapturous new music-theater work turns a tiny amphitheater into a vast cathedral of sound.At the Academy of Music, where the Philadelphia Orchestra used to play, longtime subscribers were sometimes rewarded with a chance to move from floor-level seats to raised gilded boxes at the back of the horseshoe. After my parents took that step, my mother soon regretted the change. It’s true she saw the players better from above, but she’d felt them better from below, where the buzz of bassoons and the blast of tubas came through the wood directly to her feet, turning symphonies into seismic events.I thought of her vibrating metatarsals — and so much else about the rapture of intimate art — while sitting in the wooden amphitheater housing “Oratorio for Living Things,” Heather Christian’s profoundly strange and overwhelmingly beautiful new music-theater piece at Ars Nova’s Greenwich House theater. Tightly packed in the small, steep, egg-shaped bowl designed for the space by Kristen Robinson, six instrumentalists and 12 singers make music there that shakes the 100 audience members like a 90-minute earthquake.That seems appropriate for a work about profound human issues: our place in history, our place in the universe. At least that’s what I think it’s about, judging from lyrics I snatched from the sweep of sound and from reading the libretto later. Even then, I was not always sure I could pass a test on its content; though an author’s note in the program explains that the subject is time at three scales — quantum, human and cosmic — much of what was billed as quantum or cosmic felt distinctly human to me.Foreground from left: Divya Maus, Quentin Oliver Lee and Barrie Lobo McLain. Much of the text in Christian’s work is sung in Latin.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesNo matter. If the text is sometimes baffling and hermetic, it is confident enough in its oddness that you do not worry about crashing when it flies close to the twee line. Though I apparently didn’t recognize the “ballet of Chloroplasts and Mitochondria” that forms a part of an early section called “Oxygen + Photosynthesis,” I enjoyed it anyway. For Christian, ideas are fuel; it’s not that “these words mean nothing,” as one lyric coyly suggests, but that their meaning is not apprehensible through our usual interpretive circuitry. Unknowability, being part of the message, is necessarily part of the medium.As if to emphasize that, and draw parallels to traditional oratorios, much of the text is sung in Latin — but in this case translated backward, by Greg Taubman, from Christian’s English originals. Even when the words are contemporary, they are often drawn from unusual sources, including an accounting of how we spend our lives (13 days sneezing, 10 minutes giving bad directions to strangers) and a phone line Christian set up to solicit “memory mail”:“I was like 5 years old and both my parents were working late all the time,” one starts.“It’s 1964 or 1965, Beatles time, and I’m carrying a plate of spaghetti,” starts another.Kirstyn Cae Ballard, foreground, in the music-theater piece, which consists of several centuries of musical styles.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesWhat’s haunting is how the oratorio form and Christian’s private cosmology elevate such banal statements to an almost sacred plane. Alternating in the classical manner between massed choral singing and solo arias — all exquisitely performed under the music direction of Ben Moss — she throws several centuries of musical styles into the pot and swirls them around. The ear passes through currents of plainchant and gospel, blues and electronica; you may catch wisps of Orff and Reich, Holst and Massenet, in much the way you spot faces in a crowd scene.Yet this is not concert music. The production, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, highlights thematic cohesion and theatricality even without a traditional story. Both the set and the performers are draped in varieties of deep-space blue, as if to suggest a shared chemistry between people and their environment. (The beautiful costumes are by Márion Talán de la Rosa.) The sound (by Nick Kourtides) and lighting design (by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew) are likewise saturated, picking out voices and faces — great ones to begin with — to emphasize the shifting dynamic of individuals and groups.Even better, Evans has found a way of working with the singers so that every syllable sung, even the seemingly meaningless ones, feels as if it were informed by specific emotion.From left, Ballard, Ben Moss and Carla Duren in the 90-minute production.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesBut what is that emotion? Traditional theater often tries to bind audiences by pushing them toward a shared response, whether horror or hilarity. Christian is not working in that vein. As in earlier pieces like the requiem “Animal Wisdom” and the Mother Teresa cantata “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” she focuses on personal expression instead of story, content to let the formal elements shape the larger experience and leaving listeners free to make their own connections.In less skilled hands this could result in chaos or camp, but even her Mother Teresa, played by a man in drag with a ring light for a halo, avoided that trap. “Oratorio for Living Things,” which was shut down by the pandemic after two preview performances in March 2020, takes similar risks to get as close to spirituality as a contemporary theater piece dares. Near the end, after some sort of cataclysm brings the music to a halt, we are asked to stand in silence for a while, “feeling where we are on this New Year’s Eve of the cosmic year.” The performers admit that we may find this embarrassing: “We’re all embarrassed,” they say.But I — who usually slide under my seat when dragooned into acts of audience participation — was not embarrassed at all. I felt instead the kind of awe I feel in cathedrals, where the architecture itself forces one’s thoughts upward and outward. Or perhaps I felt more as my mother did when beautiful music came through her soles. Just so, in “Oratorio for Living Things,” Christian provides the notes but your body is the song.Oratorio for Living ThingsThrough April 17 at Greenwich House, Manhattan; arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More