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      in Television

      June Brown, a Mainstay of Britain’s ‘EastEnders,’ Dies at 95

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      As the memorable Dot Cotton, she appeared in thousands of episodes of the hugely popular soap opera over 35 years.June Brown, who appeared in thousands of episodes of the British soap opera “EastEnders” across 35 years, portraying Dot Cotton, one of the more memorable residents of the fictional Albert Square, died on Sunday at her home in Surrey, near London. She was 95.Her death was announced on the show’s Twitter account. In one of many tributes shared by that account, Natalie Cassidy, another star of the show, called Ms. Brown “the best character actress ‘EastEnders’ has ever seen or will ever see.”Ms. Brown was classically trained at the Old Vic drama school and had a decent career in the theater until she and her second husband, Robert Arnold, whom she married in 1958, began having their six children.“Touring was difficult with children,” she told The Daily Telegraph of London in 1995, “so I did a great deal of television work. And, in 1985, ‘EastEnders’ and Dot came along.”Dot was the mother of the villainous Nick Cotton. Ms. Brown was originally contracted for three months.“Then I was asked if I wanted to be a permanent character,” she told The Express of Britain in 2020, the year her character was finally written out of the series. “I had no idea it was going to be for 30-odd years.”Ms. Brown, left, in an episode of “EastEnders” with, from left, Wendy Richard, Ian Lavender, James Alexandro and Natalie Cassidy. AFP/Getty ImagesIt turned out that audiences found Dot, a chain-smoking bundle of prejudices, oddly endearing. The Daily Telegraph, in the 1995 article, called her “the holy-rolling hypochondriac, one-woman moral majority of Albert Square.”Ms. Brown enjoyed creating a flawed character — so much so that in 1993, after playing Dot for eight years, she left the show when she felt the writers were dialing back some of Dot’s more objectionable characteristics.“In the early days Dot was a terrible racist,” Ms. Brown explained in the 1995 interview. “But she gradually became more and more politically correct, which was disastrous for the character and the program. It’s no good having a program that is supposed to reflect society but covers it all up and pretends that everything in the garden is lovely.”She returned in 1997. As the years rolled by, Dot continued to change, becoming less gossipy and more like the fictional world’s matriarch, and Ms. Brown was given some meaty story lines — a request from a friend for Dot’s help with euthanasia, for instance, and Nick’s death from a heroin overdose.A much-praised episode in 2008 was devoted solely to Ms. Brown, as Dot made a 30-minute tape recording for her comatose husband. The Observer called it “an absolutely brilliant 30 minutes of prime time — beautifully written, economically directed and faultlessly, movingly performed by June Brown.”Ms. Brown recently dealt with macular degeneration in real life, something that was incorporated into scripts. The character disappeared in 2020 without much fanfare — Dot moved to Ireland. The show’s producers said a return was always possible, but Ms. Brown wasn’t interested. “I’ve sent her off to Ireland and that’s where she’ll stay,” she said of Dot.In 2001, Ms. Brown and her fellow cast member Barbara Windsor were visited on the set of “EastEnders” by Queen Elizabeth II.Pool photo by Fiona Hanson“EastEnders” Twitter posts said she had appeared in 2,884 episodes.“There was nobody quite like June Brown,” Nadine Dorries, Britain’s culture minister, said on Twitter. “She captured the zeitgeist of British culture like no other in her many years on our screens.”June Muriel Brown was born on Feb. 16, 1927, in Suffolk, England, to Henry and Louisa (Butler) Brown. Her father owned an electrical engineering company, and her mother worked in a milliner’s shop.Ms. Brown’s childhood was marked by loss. A brother died in infancy. She was particularly close to an older sister, Marise, who died of an ear infection when June was 7, an event that affected her more deeply than her parents seemed to realize.“People weren’t concerned with psychology then,” Ms. Brown wrote in her autobiography, “Before the Year Dot” (2013). “Perhaps it was better because you learnt to survive without sympathy.”Ms. Brown grew up in Ipswich. A career in acting was not at all on her mind.“I once played the Virgin Mary at school,” she told The Daily Telegraph, “but only because my teacher thought I’d look lovely in blue.”During World War II she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service — the Wrens — where one of her jobs was showing training films to airmen. She also performed in a touring revue that performed for troops.“We took it ’round the Southern Command area and I really enjoyed it,” she told The Independent in 2010. “I got laughs, and that was when the bug got me.”After the war she studied at the Old Vic and began appearing in plays. By the late 1950s she was turning up in roles on “ITV Television Playhouse” and similar TV programs. In the early 1970s she appeared in several episodes of “Coronation Street,” another long-running British soap.She credited Leslie Grantham, an original “EastEnders” cast member, with suggesting her for the role of Dot.“He’d seen me in an episode of ‘Minder,’” another British show, she told The Daily Mirror in 2003. “I’ll always be grateful to him.”A few dozen episodes into the series, Dot made her first appearance. At the 2005 British Soap Awards, Ms. Brown received a lifetime achievement honor for her work on the show. “EastEnders” has also been seen on various outlets in the United States for years.In 1950 Ms. Brown married John Garley, a fellow actor, who died in 1957. Her second husband, Mr. Arnold, also an actor, died in 2003. Her survivors include five children, Chloe, Naomi, Sophie, Louise and William. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Garbageman’ Review: Just a Couple of Straw Men

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      In Keith Huff’s new play, two friends head to the Jan. 6 insurrection, but this production substitutes unfunny cartoonishness for the characters’ humanity.The title of Keith Huff’s new play, “Garbageman,” shouldn’t be taken at face value, even though Huff pretty much asks you to.The garbageman in question isn’t Buddy Maple, a 30-something white guy who has spent his career in sanitation: first right out of high school, working for his unnamed American city; then, hooked on OxyContin, managing a recycling plant where he found — and kept — a preserved human head that seems to speak to him. After that, he started driving a garbage truck in another town, where he, oops, ran over someone.Nor is the garbageman Dan Bandana, Buddy’s poisonous, well-armed old pal — also addicted to OxyContin, by the way — to whom he relates this series of events the way a person might to a stranger in a bar. Still, Dan is such an obnoxious creep that the surprise in his back story isn’t that his wife has left him. It’s that he was able to persuade anyone to be with him in the first place.The true title character in this dark, meandering sociopolitical comedy is both unseen and unnamed, at least formally. Dan and Buddy call him “The Guy.” They voted for him. And when “Garbageman” takes them on a road trip with Dan’s guns, it’s to Washington, D.C., for the Jan. 6 insurrection. The leathery human head, its mouth permanently agape, is stashed in the trunk.Over the top though the play is, it wants to get at something urgent about a spreading rot in American culture, fed by festering resentments around class, race and gender. But Greg Cicchino’s world premiere production for the Chain Theater in Manhattan has mostly omitted the characters’ human elements in favor of aggressively unfunny cartoonishness that makes “Garbageman” easy to dismiss.The tone isn’t quite one-note, but maybe one and a half. Kirk Gostkowski, the theater’s artistic director, is so relentlessly belligerent as Dan, and Deven Anderson is so blandly flat as Buddy, that it’s hard to believe in them as people, let alone swallow the idea of these two guys as friends. Even when they make a murder pact, nothing seems at stake.Huff, best known as the author of the Broadway play “A Steady Rain,” a box-office hit in 2009 that starred Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman as Chicago cops, has spent his stage career telling Chicago stories. He deliberately leaves the city in “Garbageman” unspecified, but the nearby town where Buddy works is called Gurnee — which in real-world Illinois is home to a Six Flags amusement park called Great America. Huff doesn’t mention that detail, but there’s mordancy in it; this is a play about the state of the nation.The desire to make a broader statement may be why he doesn’t call Dan and Buddy’s hometown Chicago, but it’s a mistake to blur the geography. It leaves productions free not to bother being rooted in particularity, accents and all. The rhythms of Huff’s dialogue are the rhythms of Chicago. Take them away and three dimensions collapse into two, as they have in this production.I could not tell, after seeing it, whether the play might work as written. So I read it in a Chicago accent — with Bill Murray, circa “Stripes,” playing Dan in my head, and John Candy (Canadian, true, but he did Chicago movies, and his accent passed easily for Upper Midwestern) as Buddy. Fantasy casting did the trick: Outrageous comedy suddenly coexisted with pathos. These two extreme screw-ups were still dangerous, even more so now because they had personal appeal.Dan and Buddy are broken American Everymen, but they’re broken Chicago-style.GarbagemanThrough April 16 at the Chain Theater, Manhattan; chaintheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      in Television

      Noah Reid Preps for Parenthood With Plants and Nina Simone

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      The “Schitt’s Creek” star makes his Broadway debut this month in Tracy Letts’s new comedy “The Minutes.”Noah Reid will be on the video call in a minute, his publicist tells me. The 34-year old “Schitt’s Creek” star, who played Dan Levy’s lover, Patrick Brewer, across four seasons of the Canadian comedy, just got home from a rehearsal for “The Minutes,” the new Tracy Letts comedy he’s starring in on Broadway. Then … Bam!He looks like he’s calling from the inside of a greenhouse.“These are my landlord, Marie’s,” Reid, his brown curls tucked in a black beanie, says of the half-dozen plants — there are more out of the frame — crawling up the door and stretching toward the early evening sunlight in pots on a table of his Ridgewood apartment in Queens. “I can’t tell if I’m more nervous for my Broadway debut or to keep these plants going.”“The Minutes,” a dark comedy about a small-town city council meeting that was originally slated for March 2020 at the Cort Theater, opens at Studio 54 on April 17. Reid, who plays the clean-scrubbed outsider Mr. Peel, replaced Armie Hammer, who left the production last spring amid accusations of rape and sexual assault, which he has denied.“It’s probably been four years since I’ve done a play,” said Reid, who has been a frequent presence on Canadian stages. “I’d completely forgotten how much physical, mental and emotional energy it takes.”He has a busy spring on the horizon, taking on the role of Billy Tillerson in the new Amazon Western mystery thriller series “Outer Range,” which he spent seven months filming in New Mexico. (The series premieres April 15.) He also has a sophomore album out, “Gemini,” which touches on his acting experiences and is reminiscent of the stream-of-consciousness style of 1970s singer-songwriters.Over the course of 45 minutes, he shared how Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Great Dictator” relates to events in Ukraine, the show he would play any part in and why his favorite piece of art is hanging on his refrigerator. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Nina Simone’s Live Recordings Her voice feels like it comes out of the center of the earth; it’s like a direct passage to the soul. As a pianist, she can navigate so many different genres: classical, jazz and blues. She plays with such confidence. And that’s what makes her live recordings so incredible, her ability to just, stream-of-consciousness, drop into her complete truth.2. David Shrigley’s “The Book of Shrigley” David Shrigley is somewhere between stand-up comedy and cave paintings. He does these brilliant esoteric, simple drawings — you might even say bad drawings. Part of it is that you feel like you could do the drawing, but you haven’t done the drawing — you haven’t found that moment of truth. There’s something incredible about the simplicity of it.3. Leonard Cohen’s Book of Poems “Stranger Music” When I first heard his music as a kid — this guy with this weird dark voice and these synthesizers — I didn’t understand why anyone would want to listen to this. And then, when I was in high school, I started reading his poems, and I was able to see the humanity, the spirit, the sense of humor. It became clear that music was a way for him to put his poetry into the world in a more easily consumed way.4. Sol e Pesca Restaurant in Lisbon It’s in an old tackle shop about the size of a shoe box on this little road in Lisbon. It feels very tucked away. You go in and sit on this tiny stool, they bring you a basket of bread and you order a few tinned fish items. They put them in a bowl so you’re not just eating out of the tin, and they have Vinho Verde on tap. It’s the simplest, most beautiful meal I’ve ever had.5. The Detroit Industry Murals by Diego Rivera My sister did her master’s in Detroit, and we went to the Detroit Institute of Art and saw these fresco paintings by Diego Rivera. There are 27 murals that are all 360, with a big skylight above you. It’s a tribute to Detroit’s manufacturing industry, and you have people pushing and pulling on machines, the fire and the uniforms. It’s so character driven, and the detail of each individual person — I was dumbstruck. I didn’t want to leave.6. Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” Charlie Chaplin said later that he wouldn’t have made the film if he had known what was going on in Nazi Germany at the time, but I’m glad he did. It was an entry point for me to understand how the arts can both start conversations about meaningful things — and make fun of them. It takes a turn for the serious and he gives this impassioned speech, this kind of plea for humanity at the end that people have been rediscovering and posting on Instagram. It’s one of the great speeches of all time. And it still has so much relevance, especially when we see what’s going on in Ukraine. There’s a line that’s like, ‘You are not machine men.’ It’s a plea to the army to put down your weapons.7. Canyon de Chelly I used to take part in the gold rush of pilot season, when all the Canadian actors would flock down to Los Angeles to try to scare up some work. I would drive down and take a different route each time because I thought it would be interesting to see a little bit of America. I did this walk down into this canyon, in the Navajo Nation in Arizona — it’s about an hour to the bottom — and it’s red soil and trees and there are buildings built into the cliffs from probably 1,000 years ago. I was just standing there and having this tangible realization that this country is ancient.8. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” by Eugene O’Neill When I was in 11th grade, I saw the Bob Falls Broadway production with Brian Dennehy, Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Sean Leonard. I bought the play shortly after and was completely obsessed with it. It’s certainly not my family history, but there are things in every family that it feels that you can’t talk about or, or things that are difficult to talk about or behavioral patterns that drive you crazy. I fantasize about getting to play any part in that play some time in my life.9. Spiral Arc on Lake Huron My parents bought this vacant piece of land overlooking Lake Huron in southwestern Ontario the year I was born, and it became our family cottage. That was in 1987, and over the next two decades, they spent countless hours designing and building the strangest building in Huron County. The neighbors call it the spaceship — it’s shaped like half a heart, and it’s clad in metal and it’s mostly windows and the sun sets over this uninterrupted view of Lake Huron. It’s my favorite place in the world.10. The Ultrasound This is my favorite piece of media at this moment. It’s an ultrasonic photograph of my son in his mother’s womb, and it’s occupying the gallery on my fridge right now. I’m completely obsessed. He’s about four months out from being born. I have a name in mind, but I might have to do some work with my wife to get it over the finish line, so I don’t want to say what it is yet! More

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      in Television

      Review: In ‘Take Me Out,’ Whose Team Are You On?

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      Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play about baseball and homophobia gets a fine revival starring Jesse Williams and Jesse Tyler Ferguson.Not for nothing is Darren Lemming, the fictional center fielder of a team called the Empires, also at the center of “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s gay fantasia on the national pastime.Said to be a “five-tool player of such incredible grace he made you suspect there was a sixth tool,” Lemming surpasses even Derek Jeter — on whom he is to some degree modeled — in versatility, steadiness and the kind of arrogance that, arising from excellence, adds up to charisma. He’s a natural star for baseball and, when he decides to come out as gay, a natural irritant for drama.At its best, “Take Me Out,” which opened on Monday in a fine revival at the Helen Hayes Theater, is a five-tool play. It’s (1) funny, with an unusually high density of laughs for a yarn that is (2) quite serious, and (3) cerebral without undermining its (4) emotion. I’m not sure whether (5) counts as one tool or many, but “Take Me Out” gives meaty roles to a team of actors, led in this Second Stage Theater production by Jesse Williams as Lemming and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as his fanboy business manager.True, dropping a few flies along the way and throwing some wild pitches — forgive the baseball metaphors, which the play indulges with the zeal of a convert — makes “Take Me Out” a bit baffling in parts. It’s not the kind of work that benefits much from postgame analysis, which reveals flaws in construction and logic. But in performance, now no less than in 2002, when it had its New York debut at the Public Theater, it is mostly delightful and provocative. Perhaps especially for gay men, it is also a useful corrective to the feeling of banishment from a necessary sport.Jesse Tyler Ferguson, center, as a business manager overjoyed with his new superstar client who awakens in him a love of the game.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBy that I don’t mean baseball itself but the examination of masculinity through its lens. In “Take Me Out,” Lemming’s announcement that he’s gay, prompted by no scandal and involving no lover, is essentially a pretext for a disquisition on maleness. What it finds in the locker room, where the Empires change, shower, snap towels and squabble, is as despairing as what it finds on the field is still hopeful and good.Connecting them, Lemming is a figure of godlike mystery. Aside from his purely technical skills, he is the kind of person, as his teammate Kippy Sunderstrom (Patrick J. Adams) floridly describes him, from whom mess does not “flow forth.” Lemming assumes that whatever he does will redound to his benefit, and that unlike most people for whom coming out is momentous, his gayness will be just another of “the irrelevancies” in his life, like being handsome and biracial.What he hasn’t counted on is the way, for his teammates, the revelation dims his aura of perfection while exposing cracks in their less perfectly airtight psyches. Their nudity now feels different to them, which is why the audience is asked to consider it as well. (But not the wider world; patrons are required to put their phones in Yondr pouches to prevent photography.) However well built he is, a man wearing nothing is inherently undefended.As a result, the Empires, formerly on track for the World Series, begin to lose cohesion and, soon thereafter, games. Homophobia bubbles up from the dark places of other men’s souls; even Lemming’s closest friend, Davey Battle, a religious man who plays for an opposing team in more ways than one, comes unglued by it. And, with the arrival of Shane Mungitt, a pitcher called up from the minor leagues, the confusion erupts in a shockingly violent act.Adams, left, as the veteran player Kippy Sunderstrom, and Michael Oberholtzer as Shane Mungitt, a talented pitcher carrying a ton of baggage. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet “Take Me Out” is not only about that descent into chaos on the playing field; it is also, in the story of the business manager, Mason Marzac, about the elevation of the spirit in the same locale. Marzac, the kind of gay man who feels he has no place in the heterosexual world or even the gay community — “I’m outside them. Possibly beneath them,” he says — is overjoyed when Lemming, his new client, comes out. In that act he sees the possibility of a reintegration into the mainstream of Americanness, and soon develops a maniacal interest in the game.That his newfound fandom is mostly a way of redirecting an impossible crush does not make it any less meaningful; that kind of sublimation may indeed be an unspoken aspect of many sports manias. Ferguson makes that feeling legible in a softer, less biting take on Marzac than the one originated by the brilliant Denis O’Hare, who won a Tony Award for the 2003 Broadway production. Ferguson brings out Marzac’s woundedness in a wonderfully detailed comic performance that is nevertheless full of yearning and unexpected elation.But if Lemming and baseball take Marzac out of his shell of protective pessimism — one of the many meanings packed into the grand-slam pun of the title — Marzac also takes Lemming out of his shell of aloofness. Oddly it is this element, the most fantastical in real life, that feels most believable onstage, and only in part because the locker-room drama, which involves too many obvious tensioning devices as well as too many morons, slightly collapses as the story develops. A late scene added for this production, between Lemming and two policemen, doubles down on that problem.Williams, left, and Brandon J. Dirden in the first Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, a Second Stage production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut as Lemming and Marzac form a bond — not romantic but not untender, either — the ideas that Greenberg is juggling, about integration on the ball field and integration of the psyche, fully pay off. Williams, a stage novice but a longtime star of the television series “Grey’s Anatomy,” nails the way the glamour of the gifted can keep them from full lives; perhaps the seeming effortlessness of his own career gives him insight into the downside of too much ease.Under Scott Ellis’s assured and sprightly if visually underpowered direction, the other cast members make excellent utility players, moving swiftly between spotlight moments and background work as members of the team. In particular, Michael Oberholtzer, as Mungitt, seems to disappear into his damaged self when he isn’t spewing bizarre biographical tidbits or hatred. And as Battle, Brandon J. Dirden, just off a stellar turn as a factory foreman in “Skeleton Crew,” gives a perfectly etched performance at the other end of the spectrum, finding in his faith a sanctimony that supersedes even love.It is in fact Battle who unintentionally sets the plot in motion, telling Lemming that to be a full human he should want his “whole self known.” Ultimately, “Take Me Out” is about the danger that challenge poses to some people — a danger others may know nothing about. Still, Greenberg shows us, it is crucial to happiness, and not just for gay men, even if it introduces immense difficulties. A game needn’t be perfect to be won.Take Me OutThrough May 29 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      in Music

      How ‘Unofficial Bridgerton Musical’ Beat Broadway at the Grammys

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      With their award for “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical,” two musical theater newcomers won against veterans like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Schwartz.When the lyricist-composer duo behind “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical” stepped onstage Sunday to accept their Grammy for best musical theater album, the list of people they wanted to thank did not start with a record label or producer, but with their social media followers.“We want to thank everyone on the internet who has watched us create this album from the ground up,” said Abigail Barlow, who sings for over a dozen different characters on the album. “We share this with you.”Last year, Barlow had watched the first season of Netflix’s saucy period drama about the elite marriage market of Regency England, along with millions of others searching for escapist entertainment during the pandemic. A 22-year-old aspiring pop singer with a sizable TikTok following, she posted a song that she wrote with a simple but, she thought, promising premise: “What if ‘Bridgerton’ was a musical?”As the spark of an idea started to build, she sought help from a collaborator, Emily Bear, a 19-year-old composer and musician who had been introduced to the world as a 6-year-old piano prodigy but was hoping to prove herself as more than just a former spectacle for daytime talk shows.The pair started building what would ultimately amount to a 15-song album that includes an amorous duet between the show’s leading couple, a comedic solo for the show’s nonconformist tomboy and an opening number that they wrote with a lavishly dressed Broadway ensemble flitting around the stage in their heads.Bear produced and orchestrated the album herself, using her computer and an electronic keyboard to create the sound of a full symphony orchestra.More Coverage from the 2022 Grammy AwardsThe Irresistible Jon Batiste: The jazz pianist is an inheritor more than an innovator, but he puts the past to use in service of fun.Old, but New: Despite nods to Gen Z, this year’s show favored history-minded performers like Silk Sonic, H.E.R. and Lady Gaga.The Fashion: An exuberant anything-goes attitude was a reminder of why red carpets are fun in the first place.Zelensky’s Speech: Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, addressed the audience in a prerecorded video. Here’s what he said.On Sunday, with about six years of musical-theater writing experience between the two of them, the Gen Z songwriting duo beat out a list of powerhouse Grammy nominees that included Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cinderella”; Conor McPherson’s “Girl From the North Country,” built around Bob Dylan songs; and a Stephen Schwartz musical.“It’s hard to comprehend fully — like, we did this from our bedrooms,” Barlow said in an interview on Monday.“In my head, there was no way this was going to happen,” Bear added. “We just wanted to put out the album for the people that followed the whole process of it.”And there were a lot of those people, weighing in from every corner of the theater-loving internet. Barlow and Bear would livestream their songwriting sessions from Los Angeles, inviting fans to weigh in. Followers shared ideas for staging and choreography, Playbill designs, viral videos of them singing half of a duet and even a pitch to be the show’s intimacy coordinator.Phoebe Dynevor and Regé-Jean Page in Season 1 of “Bridgerton” on Netflix.Liam Daniel/NetflixThe TikTok videos gained approval from Julia Quinn, the author of the “Bridgerton” books that inspired the TV series; the cast members of the show; and Netflix, which gave Barlow and Bear’s lawyers the green light for them to make their songs into an album, the duo said.The original videos remain on TikTok, and the independently produced album is on Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services, but the musical has yet to actually be staged. (This is far from the norm for the musical theater album category, which has typically gone to big-name Broadway musicals such as “Hamilton,” “Jersey Boys” and “The Lion King.”)Speaking on a video call from their hotel rooms in Las Vegas, where the Grammys were held, Barlow, now 23, and Bear, 20, discussed their album’s unanticipated success, their practice of collaborating creatively with fans and where their careers are headed (starting with a Broadway-bound musical that they can’t yet discuss). Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Abigail, what was it about “Bridgerton” that made you want to turn it into a musical?BARLOW The opening scene is so theatrical. I could just see each part of the stage lighting up in my brain. And then I kept writing down lines of dialogue that sounded like song titles. The phrase “ocean away” was the first one that made me run to my piano.Where were you each at before this came into your lives?BARLOW We were both really depressed. It is hard to break into the music industry, and I was ready to give up. I was applying for record-label receptionist jobs and crying to my parents because they had been helping to support me in Los Angeles and they were like, “You need to get a real job. We can’t help you anymore.” It was a really hard decision to try to chase after it just one more time.BEAR We were like, “Did we pick the wrong career?” I feel like we were putting out great music but no one was listening to us, no one was taking us seriously.Then, all of a sudden, you’re creating a musical that’s getting a ton of public engagement and videos that are getting millions of likes on TikTok. That’s one form of approval, but how does it feel getting this form of institutional approval from the Grammys?BEAR The powerful executives follow what the people want. Of course it feels good when someone who brushed you off for the same exact music you were writing two years ago now wants to buy it. But it’s more than that. We want to make way for all of the other incredible female — and not even just female — composers who love their craft.Some artists might bristle at your strategy of inviting in fan feedback as you create the work, leaving it open to significant influence from the audience in the middle of the creative process.BARLOW I’ve been livestreaming while singing and songwriting for an audience since I was a teenager. It’s like a muscle; the more you do it, the better you get at it. Emily has classic training and is incredibly educated in her craft. I am not, so it was just sort of my process to gain an audience’s perspective on what they thought and how I could improve.BEAR If you think about it, it was like we were workshopping instantly. We were getting live feedback in real time for people that would be coming to the show or buying the album.Do you think you’ll continue that way of doing things now that you have this institutional approval?BARLOW We’d love to, but we have some exciting projects after “Bridgerton” gave us a foot in the door and we still have to keep it hush-hush.BEAR Which is totally against our M.O., and it’s a little frustrating because, as we’re writing this music, we want to share it with everyone. What’s better P.R. for a project than getting people on board early? By the time it comes out, they know the music, they feel invested, they were there when it happened.And you did “Bridgerton” without a record label?BARLOW In the beginning when it first started to blow up we had a few conversations with labels, but none of it felt right. We knew that we wanted to capitalize on the moment, and we knew that the faster we released it the better.BEAR We would have gotten an orchestra and a cast, and that would have taken a lot of time and a lot of money. And why sign a label deal and not own all of our masters and publishing? We were like, eh, let’s just put it out ourselves. And I remember the night the album came out and we just saw it climbing the charts. We had fans who were constantly bugging us to release the album, so we knew we would have listeners, but I didn’t quite expect that much.How likely is it that the musical gets staged?BEAR It’s a bit out of our court because we don’t own the I.P. We feel like it would fit perfectly onstage. We see it so clearly. Netflix, you know where to find us. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Downstate’ and ‘Catch as Catch Can’ in Playwrights Horizons New Season

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      The company has announced five works for its 2022-23 lineup, which will include Agnes Borinsky’s “The Trees,” directed by Tina Satter.“Downstate,” a Bruce Norris play that The New York Times’s chief theater critic, Jesse Green, has called a “squirmy moral-thrill-ride,” will make its New York premiere in October as part of Playwrights Horizons’s new season, the company announced on Monday.As Adam Greenfield, the artistic director for Playwrights Horizons, put it: “If theater is here to catch us off guard, to shake our foundations, to make us rethink our values and realize the ways in which we’re hypocrites,” Norris can really point that all out.“I sometimes think he’s like the Molière of our time,” Greenfield said in a recent Zoom interview.The 2022-23 season will be Greenfield’s first full, in-person season since assuming the role of artistic director in 2020. And the five-show lineup, which features coproductions with Page 73 Productions, MCC Theater and WP Theater, is packed with themes emerging from the pandemic lockdown, including a variety of perspectives on “normalcy.”The lineup includes Mia Chung’s “Catch as Catch Can,” a drama in which two white, working-class New England families examine what Greenfield called “the slipperiness of identity and the way identity can fall apart or collapse,” and the debut of Agnes Borinsky’s “The Trees,” a parable of two siblings who fall asleep in the park and wake up literally rooted to the landscape.“Catch as Catch Can,” which, in 2018, The Times called a “tender horror story,” returns in October. This time, it is being staged with an all Asian cast playing the Irish and Italian working class — with actors also playing double roles of father and daughter, mothers and sons.“The Trees,” which will premiere in February 2023, is special to Greenfield. He knew this Borinsky play was the first work he wanted to program when he became artistic director.“She sees the world sweetly despite seeing all of the reasons not to,” he said. The play, which, Greenfield described as involving two people who turn into trees and the community that forms around them, will be co-produced with the incubator theater company Page 73 Productions (the company’s latest work was the spooky political drama, “Man Cave”).The earthy Off Broadway production will have plenty of shine from Broadway visionaries. “The Trees” will be directed by Tina Satter, whose fall 2021 Broadway docudrama “Is This a Room” received critical acclaim. And the last time Playwrights Horizons and Page 73 teamed up, it was to debut “A Strange Loop,” which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for drama and opens on April 26 for its own Broadway run.The other shows, slated to debut in March 2023, are the world premiere of Julia Izumi’s “Regretfully, So the Birds Are,” (a coproduction with WP Theater), described by Greenfield as a surprise-filled “Swiss Army knife of a play” with “a delicious sense of goofy comedy” centered on three siblings making sense of unreliable parents.Also in March is John J. Caswell Jr.’s “Wet Brain” (co-produced with MCC Theater), a candid drama that follows siblings (also a set of three) struggling to find language for closure and grief — in outer space. It’s a science fiction version of the American family play that, Greenfield said, “explodes open.” More

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      ‘Balkan Bordello’ Review: A Tragic Tale Reborn for a Time of War

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      In this international production, you can check into the Balkan Express Motel, if you dare, and fulfill an ancient generational curse.To Orestes, the discord between his parents is part of “the family dysfunction.” That’s true as far as it goes, but it does gloss over some gruesome details: his military commander father, Agamemnon, sacrificing Orestes’s sister, Iphigenia; and his mother, Clytemnestra, avenging her favorite child’s death by killing Agamemnon when he returns home from war.It’s the sort of history that might leave a person haunted, and so it does in the angry and eloquent “Balkan Bordello,” a contemporary retelling of Aeschylus’ “The Oresteia” by the Kosovan playwright Jeton Neziraj. When Agamemnon’s ghost steps out of the fog one night, like Hamlet’s restless father come to sic his son on the one who wronged him, more bloodshed quickly follows.Harm begets harm in this cursed cycle of violence and retribution, with one generation’s grievances handed down to the next in a society devastated by war and living in its long, ugly aftermath. In theory, then, “Balkan Bordello” is unusually well suited to this moment, when so many anxious eyes are on the myriad blossoming horrors of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Directed by Blerta Neziraj, the playwright’s wife, at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater, this show does look splendid, on a set the color of blood and rage, lust and heat. The production’s very provenance — as a collaboration involving La MaMa; Qendra Multimedia in Pristina, Kosovo; Theater Atelje 212 in Belgrade, Serbia; and the international group My Balkans — is emblematic of hope.And its cast of 10 includes two Serbian actors who deliver performances of thrilling magnetism — Svetozar Cvetkovic as Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s pompous, prolific poet lover, and Ivan Mihailovic as a war veteran who returns alongside Agamemnon, with the captured Cassandra (Verona Koxha, a Kosovan actor) slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain.But there is a chaos to the production that has nothing to do with the disorder of the little world it depicts, inside Clytemnestra’s Balkan Express Motel, where she and Agamemnon raised their children. On Thursday night, the show felt under-rehearsed and underconfident, with spotty sound and some American actors seemingly uncertain of their lines.The greater frustration, less likely to resolve itself, is that the set (by Marija Kalabic and Nico de Rooij), so flatteringly lit (by Yann Perregaux and de Rooij), is too far-flung for the play’s intimate, intricate machinations. In its vast space, the staging muddies the storytelling.Audience members sit at either end, a few at cafe tables — an unwise choice for people who don’t want to become part of the show, particularly those who would cringe at being urged to get up and dance. Wherever you sit, some of the action is likely to be lost on you because of sightlines and distance and occasional onstage tumult.Smoothly translated by Alexandra Channer and performed in English, with much of the dialogue projected (also in English) on an upstage backdrop, the play is nonetheless a smart and striking take on “The Oresteia.” Its surreal qualities are amped up by Gabriel Berry‘s madcap costumes — Aegisthus, in jacquard jacket and velvet pants, is an absolute dandy; Clytemnestra wears golden shoes — and Gjergj Prevazi’s choreography, into which characters erupt, sometimes while still seated at cafe tables.But there is a kind of abstraction to the performances by the members of La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company, in contrast to the immediacy of the Balkan actors’ work. George Drance’s Agamemnon exudes a hail-fellow-well-met energy, without any of the smoothed-over barbarity you might expect. Even with Cassandra, his human war prize, he lacks menace.Admittedly, the charismatic, fully realized performances by Cvetkovic and Mihailovic put the scales of the production out of whack. Kushtrim Hoxha, a Kosovan actor, is also strangely compelling as Pylades, Orestes’s choreographer friend from Berlin — a representative of the non-Balkan Western world and its condescension toward the region.While Clytemnestra (Onni Johnson) and Orestes (Eugene the Poogene) both end up with blood on their hands here, Mihailovic is the one who brings a sense of simmering violence and physical danger into the room. When he makes a furious, stomping exit up the risers on one end of the stage, the threat of savagery reverberates in his every footfall. When Pylades asks him about his experiences in the war, his answers are unnerving, but the slow smile on his face is even more so.It is left to Aegisthus, the poet, to rail against the war and what it has wrought. “Oh my people,” he writes. “Beware the warlords, my people.”Not that he is innocent, of course. Before Clytemnestra does away with Agamemnon, her lover has his own thirst for blood.“I like to imagine his body cut into pieces, his eyes staring out like a dead fish,” Aegisthus says, with an even-tempered hatred that makes him entirely terrifying. “But all that matters is that he’ll be over with. He’ll be done, and we’ll live happily ever after.”That’s the eternal fantasy, isn’t it — that just one more act of violence will even the score, and retribution will cease. Spoiler/not spoiler: Aegisthus ends up murdered, too.“They’ve sent me to hell by mistake,” his ghost says. “I have filed a complaint.” More

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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