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      Martyrs, Converts and Pious Frauds: Religion Takes Center Stage

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      Three Paris productions — including Ivo van Hove’s take on “Tartuffe” at the Comédie-Française — explore questions of the divine.PARIS — When Molière first presented “Tartuffe,” in 1664, Louis XIV is said to have laughed his head off at the play’s satire of religious zealots. The zealots in question were less amused: “Tartuffe” was swiftly censored and only re-emerged five years later, in an expanded and softened version.The 1669 “Tartuffe,” in five acts, is the classic play everyone in France knows, about a pious fraud who weasels his way into a bourgeois family’s home and attempts to steal both wife and fortune. Yet this month, 400 years after the birth of Molière, the original — or a reconstruction, at least — returned to the stage in a sleek and moody production directed by Ivo van Hove for the Comédie-Française.“Tartuffe” opened France’s yearlong celebration of Molière’s quadricentennial, an event that is no small matter for the Comédie-Française: The house’s permanent ensemble was born in 1680 from the fusion of Molière’s own acting troupe and the players of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. The Comédie-Française considers Molière its founding father, and ensemble members know their way around his wittiest lines like no one else.Van Hove at least gave them something new. The 1664 version of “Tartuffe” was recreated a few years ago by two researchers, Georges Forestier and Isabelle Grellet, using Molière’s own sources. To understand what the play might have been like in three acts, they went back to commedia dell’arte and other 17th-century stories, which the plot of “Tartuffe” partly mimics.The result is a genuinely intriguing alternative to a familiar narrative, but it will take further stagings to reveal its potential, because van Hove’s directing choices are idiosyncratic. His “Tartuffe” has the familiar look of many van Hove productions: dark and minimalistic, here with no wings on the sides of the stage and a metallic platform along its length for entrances and exits.The transitions are especially awkward, with asinine titles projected onto a screen (samples: “Is Madam right?”; “Love, or submission?”) and bombastic sound effects marking the beginning of new episodes. Most of the cast wear suits; at times, when they stiffly convene for family conversations, it feels as if Molière’s characters have landed in the middle of the HBO series “Succession.”From left, Claude Mathieu, Denis Podalydès, Loïc Corbery, Julien Frison and Dominique Blanc in “Tartuffe.”Jan VersweyveldIt’s a shame, because there is much of value in seeing some of the play’s characters through a new lens. Tartuffe, for instance, is more clearly a destitute figure than usual. Christophe Montenez — who was also a highlight in “The Damned,” another van Hove production for the Comédie-Française — is fascinatingly strange in the role, at once lonely and creepy.Yet the actors wrestle with Molière’s text, in part because of van Hove’s deadly serious approach. Throughout the performance I attended, “Tartuffe,” which was written as a comedy, elicited little laughter from the audience; when it came, it felt like an automatic reaction to familiar lines, rather than a reflection of what was happening onstage.Van Hove also sees a love story where there isn’t one. In his production, Tartuffe doesn’t just try to deceive Orgon, the man of the house, and seduce Elmire, his wife; Elmire actually falls for Tartuffe, an absurd development since she is the one to uncover his hypocrisy at the end of the play. This forces Marina Hands, as Elmire, into an acrobatic performance in which she by turns refuses Tartuffe, gives in, and silently apologizes for betraying him. Tartuffe verbally abuses Elmire on two occasions (to the point that she cowers in a corner) before she snuggles up to him. Is it Stockholm syndrome? In any case, this diminishes what is typically a powerful, and very funny, female character.At least this “Tartuffe” is a reminder of just how mordant and modern Molière’s take on religious piety was. As the church’s anger over the play showed, this was a controversial position in the 17th century. On the other hand, Racine and Corneille, who make up French theater’s trinity of classic playwrights with Molière, both wrote religious plays dramatizing their faith in line with church dogma.Those plays are rarely seen today, but “Polyeucte,” a 1641 work by Corneille inspired by the life of a Christian martyr, is back onstage at the Espace Bernanos, a Roman Catholic cultural center. It depicts the religious conversion of Polyeucte, a nobleman, and the initial despair of his wife, Pauline, and his father-in-law, whom the Roman Empire has tasked with persecuting Christians. Directed by a veteran actress, Rafaële Minnaert, the production, a straightforward delivery of Corneille’s text in Roman-inspired costumes, contrasts sharply with “Tartuffe.”Aloysia Delahaut, left, and Romain Duquaire in “Polyeucte,” directed by Rafaële Minnaert.Matthieu Maxime ColinWhile the cast is often overemphatic, Aloysia Delahaut carries the day as a dignified Pauline. For nearly the entire play, Corneille’s rhymed alexandrines are skillful enough to make you think “Polyeucte” warrants more performances. Then, at the end, both Pauline and her father abruptly convert to Christianity, their strong stance against it forgotten. This makes “Polyeucte” feel preachy — a cardinal sin by contemporary standards — which helps explain why it, and other religious works, are so little performed.Still, contemporary theatermakers are finding ways to weave religion into topical dramas. The playwright and director Hakim Djaziri tackles the subject especially openly as a way of understanding major political debates in France. After “Unbalanced,” a play about his own youthful religious radicalization in an underprivileged Paris suburb, he has turned to the real-life story of a white woman who converts to Islam in “Audrey, the Diary of a Convert,” currently at La Scène Libre theater.In a series of smartly constructed vignettes, we see Audrey grow up with an alcoholic mother and a violent stepfather, seeking meaning in the religion of a friend whose happy family she admires. Yet soon enough, she is roped into a violent take on Islamism by characters she meets online. She ends up in Syria, as the wife of a Frenchman who has vowed to fight for the Islamic State.Karina Testa, left, and Arthur Gomez in “Audrey, the Diary of a Convert,” written and directed by Hakim Djaziri.JMD ProductionIt is a lot to get through in 90 minutes, and the Syrian scenes especially feel overly expository, but Djaziri delivers a lot of emotion with the performances of his small yet brilliant cast. Karina Testa captures Audrey’s childlike need for love and meaning, while Arthur Gomez shines in a range of characters, from friends of Audrey’s to extremists.As they do every night, Djaziri and his actors stayed onstage after the performance I caught for a discussion with the audience. He spoke candidly of his own experience of radicalization, and said he felt compelled to respond, through theater, to Islamophobia in France’s public sphere. With “Audrey,” he does this subtly, by depicting the peaceful facets of Islam as well as the hypocrisy of its radicals. After all, the Tartuffes of today need their own plays, too.Tartuffe or the Hypocrite. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Comédie-Française, through April 24.Polyeucte. Directed by Rafaële Minnaert. Espace Bernanos, through Feb. 13.Audrey, the Diary of a Convert. Directed by Hakim Djaziri. La Scène Libre, through March 26. More

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      Review: In ‘Skeleton Crew,’ Making Quick Work of Hard Labor

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      Dominique Morisseau’s 2016 play, now on Broadway, is a swift, well-crafted look at factory workers trapped in an economic “dumpster fire.”The construction of the joke is perfect: A 60-ish woman in the grungy break room of a metal stamping factory lights a cigarette beneath a sign that says “No Smoking Faye” — the “Faye” part added by hand in big, angry letters.Naturally, as we soon learn, she is Faye.So begins “Skeleton Crew,” a play by Dominique Morisseau that in considering the ways we must sometimes break rules, breaks none itself. It’s so adroitly built and written — and, in the Manhattan Theater Club production that opened on Wednesday, so beautifully staged and acted — that you hardly have time to decide, until its brisk two hours have passed, whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. Even then, as in life, you may not know for sure.Start with Faye, who has worked at the factory for 29 years; she plans to hang on until, at year 30, her pension bumps up significantly. As played by Phylicia Rashad in a wonderfully ungrand performance, wearing flannel shirts, big jeans, work boots and a look of sour contentment, she would appear to have her life under firm control — and, as union rep and auntie of the break room, her co-workers’ lives as well. Dispensing wisdom and correcting their foolishness, she models candor and self-reliance, even when, as “Skeleton Crew” in good time reveals, the two come into conflict.You might call Faye’s specialty, like the play’s, clarity about moral ambiguity. And in Detroit in 2008, with the national economy a “dumpster fire” (as a TV news snippet tells us) and the auto industry in particular collapsing, there’s plenty of moral ambiguity to go around.For Reggie, the unit foreman and author of the no smoking sign, the pressure is almost too much to bear. Burdened with advance knowledge that the factory will shut down within the year, it falls to him to keep efficiency high as workers are let go. But despite his tie and white collar, his is a blue-collar soul, and the terrific Brandon J. Dirden shows just how close the contradictory pull of job and community comes to strangling him as he tries to protect the skeleton crew that remains.Boone and Adams in Dominique Morisseau’s play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAside from Faye, that crew includes Shanita (Chanté Adams) and Dez (Joshua Boone), both under 30 and thus with more (or is it less?) to lose than Faye. Theirs is a classic “B plot,” but the comic and romantic contrast their story provides is more complex than its bald structural purpose suggests.Yes, Dez has a longtime crush on Shanita, who is pregnant by a different man. Sweetly, he walks her to her car every day; tartly, she even lets him. But both have existential worries that interlock with and deepen the play’s larger issues. How can Shanita raise a child alone if the bedrock of her self-confidence — her job — crumbles beneath her? How will Dez survive in a world that sees his labor no less than his existence as expendable? (Though all four characters are Black, racism is more of a given than a theme.)These questions do not seem likely to be answered satisfactorily when, with perfect timing, a gun comes into the picture.In truth, some of the plot devices, the neat parallels and red herrings, are, like Faye, a bit creaky with use. But that doesn’t stop them from working; indeed, it’s a pleasure to surrender to classic craftsmanship. Though you can certainly sense Morisseau’s debt to August Wilson in her dramaturgy — “Skeleton Crew” is part of a trilogy of works set in Detroit, as Wilson had his Pittsburgh Cycle — you also sense the brute efficiency of problem plays by Ibsen and the best television procedurals.Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s staging at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, improving in many ways on the one he directed for the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016, makes the most of the larger space and the excellent new cast. Michael Carnahan’s set, expanding in grunginess on his earlier version, turns grime into a kind of pulp poetry, from the peeling linoleum to the succulents striving to survive in a barely translucent window. The costumes, by Emilio Sosa, provide both psychology and sociology even in a limited range of sartorial gestures: a “Juicy” sweatshirt for Shanita, a fleece sweater-vest for Reggie.I was less convinced, as was also the case downtown, by the interludes of robotlike popping and waving (choreographed and performed by Adesola Osakalumi) that, along with Nicholas Hussong’s projections, suggest the harsh and repetitive labor taking place beyond the break room. Instead of enhancing our understanding of the characters, these dance moments, however astonishing, seem unrelated and unspecific, detracting from the play’s insistence on valuing workers, not just work.Dirden and Rashad use every tool their years onstage have put at their disposal.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt its considerable best, “Skeleton Crew” practices that preachment; its characters are not just building blocks in a moral tale but a pleasure for actors to perform and thus for audiences to experience. Especially in the scenes between Faye and Reggie, when Rashad and Dirden get to use every tool their years onstage have put at their disposal, you can’t look away from the many things they’re doing at once. Collegiality, scorn, fear, affection — and a shared history saved for a late reveal — all come into it. What comes out of it is the richness of great performance.If the play itself is sometimes over-rich, it is not underfed. Real things are at stake for characters who expect a respectable reward for labor and loyalty. That their expectations are so rudely disappointed makes it harder to do the right thing in a world that doesn’t, and tragedy could easily ensue.Perhaps what ultimately tips “Skeleton Crew” in the other direction is the way it abjures cynicism in favor of connection. Though Faye at one point says “I don’t abide by no rules but necessity,” it turns out — in a perfectly turned final surprise — that necessity is sometimes a synonym for love.Skeleton CrewThrough Feb. 20 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Broadway Grosses Fall, but Average Attendance Rises, as Shows Close

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      The percentage of seats filled on Broadway was up last week, but overall box office grosses fell, as some of the industry’s softest shows closed and the survivors reduced prices.According to figures released Wednesday by the Broadway League, 75 percent of all seats on Broadway were occupied during the week that ended Jan. 23. That’s up from 66 percent the week ending Jan. 16, and 62 percent the week ending Jan. 9, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to take a toll on the industry and the rapid spread of the Omicron variant makes this winter especially challenging.Average attendance is still far below what it was in January 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic, when between 93 percent and 95 percent of seats were occupied.The overall number of people who saw a Broadway show last week (152,135) was down from the previous week (162,566), as shows continue to close — there were 21 shows open last week, down from 25 the previous week. Two more shows closed on Sunday (“Girl From the North Country,” which says it plans to return in the spring, and “Slave Play,” which is transferring to Los Angeles), leaving just 19 shows now running in the 41 Broadway houses.The rising capacity percentage is good news for an industry rattled by empty seats. But it’s coming at a cost, with fewer shows running and the average ticket price falling.Last week, the average ticket price on Broadway was $108, down from $114 the week ending Jan. 16 and $116 the week ending Jan. 9. (In 2020, average January ticket prices were as high as $123.)The falling average ticket price reflects both a lowering of premium prices (that’s the price for the best seats on the most popular nights), and a heavy use of discounts.At “Hamilton,” for example, the top price in January 2020 was $847; now it’s $299. (The priciest premium seat at the moment appears to be at “The Music Man,” which is asking $699 for some center orchestra seats on a Saturday night in February; “Six” is selling some tickets for $499.)But there are also multiple discounts available. The city’s tourism agency, NYC & Company, is now holding its annual Broadway Week (which, despite its name, will last 27 days this year), a popular program that offers two-for-one tickets to all but a handful of shows.And, although the Broadway League is no longer disclosing grosses for individual shows, there are indications that more are turning to discounting as a strategy to get through this winter, when the ordinary seasonal dip has been exacerbated by the pandemic. The TKTS ticket booth in Times Square, which sells tickets at 20 percent to 50 percent off, now periodically features “The Lion King,” which was almost never sold at the booth before the pandemic, as well as other big shows including “Moulin Rouge!,” “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” “Hadestown” and “MJ,” the new Michael Jackson musical. More

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      In 'Black No More,' the Evolution of Black Music, and a Man’s Soul

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      The new show “Black No More,” inspired by a 1931 satirical novel about race relations, has “the point of view of people who are very much products of now.”A Black man in New York City, during the Harlem Renaissance, is hoping for a life without bigotry. This is Harlem after all, a Black enclave, the epicenter of culture and creativity. Here, he’d have an easier time in getting along.Or so he thought. He soon learns that utopia is an illusion, that racism prevails no matter the location. In the North, he discovers, the racism is subtle: He’s somehow not the right fit for his job, though his supervisor, a white man, says he’s doing well. Others think he’s too uppity, so he is let go.Distraught, he undergoes a procedure to turn himself white and retreats to Atlanta. There he sees how prejudiced whites speak of Black people when they aren’t in the room: The “n” word is tossed around with the hard “-er.” He soon realizes that his new skin tone can’t save him, either. The life he wants means nothing if he loses his soul along the way.This is the plot of “Black No More,” a new musical presented by the New Group and inspired by George S. Schuyler’s 1931 novel of the same name. The show, an expansive, Afrofuturistic take on race relations in America now in previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan, is set against an equally vast arrangement of jazz, gospel, R&B, hip-hop and reggae meant to connect the past and present. By using older and newer styles of music, coupled with the protagonist’s struggles to rise above the same discrimination endured today, the show explores how little race relations have progressed.Jones, far right, working on the show’s choreography with cast members, including Lillias White, center.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesAnd it almost didn’t see the light of day.The screenwriter John Ridley, who wrote the show’s book, was inspired to adapt the story after reading Schuyler’s novel over a decade ago, before he’d written his Oscar-winning adaptation of “12 Years a Slave.” “I read it and was really taken with the wit and unbridled satire,” he said. “So much of the writing was timely and timeless and painful and painless.”He initially wrote it as a screenplay in 2013, but couldn’t get financing for a sci-fi-inspired film about Black existence. Someone suggested trying to have it produced as a play, but that also proved to be a tough road. Of the stage directors he reached out to, Ridley said that Scott Elliott, the artistic director of the New Group, was the only one who expressed interest. He read the novel and thought it would work best as a musical. “It had the possibility to be an amazing theatrical satire, but with humanity in it, with real people, not like ‘wink-wink satire,’” Elliott said.There was just one problem: Ridley didn’t like musicals. “I was like, ‘Well, yeah, but that’s OK,” Elliott said. “Let’s go on this journey together and see what happens.” Ridley’s view on musicals changed after meeting with Tariq Trotter, better known as Black Thought of the Roots, and seeing “Hamilton.” He said that show convinced him that musicals can be vehicles for sending a strong message.They enlisted Trotter, who wrote the lyrics and developed the music with Anthony Tidd, James Poyser and Daryl Waters, and the Tony-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones. Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton,” owns the commercial rights. And with all the star power (Broadway veterans, including Brandon Victor Dixon, Lillias White and Ephraim Sykes), it seems “Black No More” could very well be destined for Broadway.John Ridley with the show’s associate director Monet during a recent rehearsal. Marc. J. FranklinAmong other themes, the show holds up a mirror to those in the Black community who aspire to whiteness. The protagonist, Max Disher (played by Dixon), decides to lighten his skin after meeting a white woman, Helen Givens (Jennifer Damiano), in the Savoy Ballroom during a night out. That he’d be willing to sacrifice his identity after a chance encounter with the woman is a longstanding critique of some Black men: No matter how much they’re supported by Black women, they still see dating white women as the ultimate societal prize.The musical also delves into the internal baggage that comes with Blackness, the weight of external pressure applied by those who look like you but don’t know your circumstances. How do you stay true to yourself without disappointing your peers? And what does it mean to be real Black anyway?“For me, the lesson to be learned is that there is a cost,” Dixon said. “There is a cost to the choices we force each other to make to become happy, accepted members of society. It’s time for us to re-examine those costs. Is this the construct in which we can really rise and grow and evolve as a human population?”“Black No More” begins amicably, with a flurry of Black and white ensemble dancers gliding in unison across the stage, surrounding a barber’s chair used for the skin-altering experiment. Out walks Trotter, who plays Junius Crookman, the doctor performing the procedure. He paints Harlem as a deceptive place where dreams don’t always come true. “You’ll find all things … both high and low,” he says in his opening monologue. “Here where every Black baby must try to grow.”The music of “Black No More” largely fits this era, smoothly transitioning from swing jazz to big band to soul. Some of the verses have a rap lilt to them — Trotter, after all, is the lead vocalist of the Roots — but his writing here explores a broad range of musical textures, conjuring old Harlem while conveying music’s full spectrum. After Max becomes white, the music becomes softer and more delicate, sounding almost like bluegrass or folkish in a way. Near the end of the show, two white women sing over what sounds like an R&B track, a genre typically associated with Black women. “Black No More” is full of this sort of cross-pollination.“I’ve always been very big on allowing the universe to sort of write the songs, allowing the material to work itself out,” Trotter said. “These songs represent the different elements of Black music. What we arrived at is something that feels like an education in the evolution of Black music, which, at its core, would be the evolution of American music.”Tamika Lawrence and Brandon Victor Dixon during a dress rehearsal.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesThe Harlem Renaissance is widely seen as an artistic movement in which Black creators like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Duke Ellington made landmark work. Indeed, the Renaissance helped change how Black people were viewed culturally; from it came a new, fearless creative generation. Yet the Renaissance had its detractors. Some said the literature only catered to whites and the Black middle-class. Even one of Harlem’s most famous establishments — the Cotton Club — was only for whites. “Black No More” demystifies Harlem as a mecca by wrapping its arms around it, wiping off the glitter while celebrating its charm.“The show, in my mind, is a critique of a critique,” said Jones, who is also choreographing the new Broadway musical “Paradise Square.” “We’re trying to make a musical about a historical novel, but with the point of view of people who are very much products of now. For God’s sake, we are post-George Floyd.”“Black No More” was originally slated to premiere in October 2020. But then the pandemic shut down theaters, forcing shows to postpone or cancel their runs. And in May 2020, Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by the police officer Derek Chauvin. Protests ensued. Coupled with outcries over the deaths of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, these rebellions felt different. The precinct in which Chauvin worked was burned. In New York City, protesters and law enforcement regularly clashed, intensifying the already-strained relationship between certain residents and the police.Near the end of “Black No More,” over an aggressive rap beat, a white antagonist asserts that Black lives don’t matter, a perceived reference to the modern-day Black Lives Matter movement. Within the context of the musical, he’s upset that his sister got involved with a Black man. Yet the subtle nod acknowledges the cloud of George Floyd hanging over this musical.“We just happen to be in a space where certain audiences are ready to receive what we’re trying to say, as opposed to pre-2020,” said Tamika Lawrence, who plays Buni Brown, Max Disher’s best friend. “There are certain cultures in America — white cultures, specifically — that I think are now ready to have tough conversations and ready to see this kind of art.”Trotter concurred. “I think some people may take offense,” he said. “Some people may be appalled, some may take it as a challenge to widen their scope, to tear some of the bandages off these bullet wounds that we deal with as a society.”“Black No More” is presented with the hope that Black and white people can find common ground somewhere. That we can at least see one another’s differences and be respectful of them.Just don’t do something drastic like change your skin color. As the musical teaches us, the grass isn’t greener.“What it says is, ‘Look at yourself, take a look at where we are, take a look at where we’ve come from, how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go,” Trotter said of the show. “It speaks to a commonality that we all share as humans, as people, as inhabitants of this planet. I don’t think we’re ever going to exist in perfect harmony, but I think there’s a possibility for us to coexist in peace.” More

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      After 16 Years in ‘Hadestown,’ Anaïs Mitchell Emerges With a New Album

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      The singer-songwriter fully plunged into her acclaimed theater project. Since then, her life changed wildly — and she recaptured the desire to record her own music.BRISTOL, Vt. — Eight years ago, shortly before the birth of her first child, the musician Anaïs Mitchell was instructed in a hypnobirthing class to envision her “happy place,” and was flooded with a sense memory from her rural Vermont childhood.She was in her grandparents’ house, which her father helped build, “laying on the carpeted floor in a sunbeam coming through the sliding glass door,” she recalled. Something fragrant was cooking on the stove. Her grandmother quilted while young Anaïs stenciled, crafted, or, later, scribbled lines that would become the basis of her earliest songs.In early January, a now 40-year-old Mitchell stood in that same living room, taking in the house’s rich history. Her wide blue eyes smudged with dark liner, she wore a flannel button-down and a Brooklyn Nets beanie, not an expression of fandom so much as a sartorial homage to the city she used to call home.In the decades since that childhood memory, she’s become an accomplished singer-songwriter and a force behind one of the most successful and celebrated Broadway musicals of the past few years, the eight-time Tony-winning hit “Hadestown.” By this time next year, Mitchell hopes to be living in this house with her husband and children, bringing up her two daughters on the very same family farm on which she was raised.“It’s intense to go home,” she said. “I know everyone; it’s a small town.” When she runs into people she has known her whole life, she admitted, it can be easy to revert to her childhood self. “I was a little scared to move back for that reason,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not the thing you should do.”In some sense, leaving Brooklyn for Vermont was a practical choice: Mitchell was nine months pregnant with her second child when Covid-19 hit New York. “One day I pulled our older kid out of school and the next day we bought a car,” she said. “And then the next day Broadway closed and I was like, we’re leaving. We drove to Vermont and the baby was born a week later at my parents’ farm.”It’s in many ways an ordinary story — how many city-dwellers fled to the country? — but her telling has the narrative beats of an epic myth. In that way, it feels like an Anaïs Mitchell song.Foreground from left, Eva Noblezada, Andre De Shields and Amber Gray in “Hadestown,” which opened on Broadway in 2019 and won eight Tonys.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“There’s something in the way her ideas connect and always come back around,” said Josh Kaufman, the musician and producer who plays with Mitchell in the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman. “She has a very lived-in knowledge of traditional music and folk songs. But as a human she’s also incredibly in-the-moment, which allows her to anchor everything in the present.”Once a prolific solo artist, it’s been nearly a decade since Mitchell released music under her own name. But on Jan. 28, she’s returning with a self-titled album, produced by Kaufman — a collection of the most personal songs she has ever released. She sometimes attempted to write her own music during those long, busy years of working on “Hadestown,” but she ultimately “felt like I was cheating on it if I did anything else.”“I’m so proud of what we made and there was so much joy in the making of it,” she added, “but it was also an unsustainable way of living, that level of stress.”Adapted from a humble, low-budget community theater project she debuted in Montpelier in 2006, “Hadestown” brought the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into conversation with such modern phenomena as capitalism, climate change and New Orleans-style jazz.In 2010, Mitchell released a concept album called “Hadestown,” featuring songs from the initial Vermont theater production sung by some of her folk peers: Justin Vernon of Bon Iver voiced Orpheus, Ani DiFranco was Persephone. But Mitchell still dreamed of adapting a more ambitious stage production.“Anaïs is the most specific writer I’ve ever encountered,” the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin said in a phone interview. “So often the process of creating can seem really abstract,” she added. “What is very beautiful about Anaïs is that she lives very openly in the process of turning over words and images, feeling them around in her mouth and on her guitar.”When “Hadestown” opened at the Walter Kerr Theater in April 2019 (taking over for “Springsteen on Broadway”), Mitchell became just the fourth woman to compose the music, lyrics and book of a Broadway musical. The moment was a turning point in her journey with a project she’d been living with for 13 long years. But there comes a time in a show’s life when even the most involved writer must find a new space.“There was a funny moment that happened as soon as the show opened on Broadway, where suddenly I didn’t have a home in the theater anymore,” Mitchell said when we first met up in Manhattan in the courtyard of the Standard Hotel last November. “Literally: It used to be, this is my seat, this is where I go play guitar in the stairwell. And then suddenly the audience is there and there’s nowhere for me.”But this necessary step back from “Hadestown” finally gave her the opportunity to reconnect with the music world from which she’d long been absent, and return to her own, more intimate form of songwriting.“Hadestown” and her stirring 2012 album “Young Man in America” involved a lot of “dressing up in costumes, getting access to some kind of larger-than-life feelings and language, like, ‘I’m the king of the Underworld,’” she said, laughing for a moment as she did her best Hades impression. “I do really enjoy that. But these songs are all me, the stories are my stories. That feels very different.”“A songwriter is kind of a songwright,” Mitchell said. “It’s like building a house that other people will inhabit.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesTHOUGH SHE IS not quite at the level of Ben, Jerry or Bernie, Mitchell is certifiably Vermont Famous — the sort of New Englander who gets recognized in hushed tones at folk festivals and farmers’ markets. Her hair is shaggy and dyed darker than the blonde of her “Hadestown” days, and she speaks in a chiming voice that often sounds innocently wonder-struck, before a joke or a playful bit of profanity suddenly brings it back down to earth.Behind the wheel of her salt-kissed Chrysler Pacifica in January, she pointed out local landmarks on the 15-minute drive between the house she is renting in Bristol and her parents’ farm: her high school; a sign for a local “radical puppetry” company; a humorously and undeniably phallic-shaped headstone that has always made her laugh (“Who chose that?”).Mitchell describes her parents as “hippies, back-to-the-landers.” In the late 1960s, her father, Don, scored a book deal when he was still a Swarthmore undergraduate, for a semi-autobiographical hitchhiking novel he’d written called “Thumb Tripping.” He sold the movie rights, moved to Los Angeles with his young wife, Cheryl, and wrote the screenplay to a pulpy, “Easy Rider”-era film adaptation of his book. He cashed out in the early 1970s and used his Hollywood earnings to buy a 130-acre farm in Vermont’s Champlain Valley.For most of Anaïs’s childhood, her entire family lived on the property, including her grandparents in that wooden house her father helped build for them. Cheryl opposed television, so young Anaïs would sneak over to her grandparents’ place whenever she wanted to watch; she has fond and uncommonly subversive memories of the nightly news with Dan Rather. She rode horses, roamed the woods with her older brother and, like her namesake Anaïs Nin, journaled prolifically.She found those old diaries recently in a box in her grandparents’ house, and the experience inspired “Revenant,” a heartfelt, acoustic-guitar-driven song on the new album that finds her extending a mature grace to her younger self: “Suddenly I saw you there, runny-eyed in a wooden chair/Ran outside to hide your face in the wild Queen Anne’s lace,” she sings. “Come and let me hold you in my arms/Come and get my shoulder wet and warm.”Mitchell went to Middlebury College, and supported herself as a figure model for art classes. “I was always very comfortable nude because no one can see us here, so everyone would skinny-dip,” she said on the secluded farm. When she was 19, one of those gigs led to the sort of meet-cute that might appear in an R-rated comedy: Noah Hahn, a student in one of the classes, turned out to be the man she would marry.They were apart quite a bit in the early years of their relationship, as Mitchell was paying her dues on the road as an aspiring singer-songwriter. But — as she proposes on the new album’s ode to an artist’s muse, “Bright Star” — sometimes longing and distance can bear unexpected fruit. She was driving home alone from a show one night, hoping Noah was waiting up for her, when the melody and a few lyrics of what would become the first “Hadestown” song came to her out of the blue:“Wait for me, I’m coming, in my garters and pearls/With what melody did you barter me from the wicked underworld?”Mitchell and the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin. “Anaïs is the most specific writer I’ve ever encountered,” Chavkin said.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesLIKE THE LONG gestating “Hadestown” (Chavkin compares the pace at which Mitchell works to “watching a tree grow, because it’s so deep, so imperceptible”), one of the most affecting songs on Mitchell’s new album took years to finish writing.“Little Big Girl” is partially about the tension she experienced returning to her hometown, appearing to the outside world as a grown and accomplished woman while, internally, still feeling like that same scrappy little Anaïs she was years ago. But the song is roomy enough to tap into a more universal sentiment — how strange it is that we all “keep on getting older” while still feeling “just like a kid.” Or, more specifically, that the world treats you as an ever-aging woman when you sometimes feel as defenseless as a little girl.“There’s so much art made by people in their 20s about the ups and downs of your love life,” Mitchell said. “I’ve been there and I love that music. It’s very deep and real. But there’s also all these other elements of being the age I am now, and being a mom, and relocating myself in the world and in my family. I want to be able to write about that stuff, too.”Mitchell knows this kind of work can be too easily dismissed as “culturally irrelevant mom art,” as she put it. But the remarkable specificity of her songcraft and the expansive, almost mythic scope she brings to her human experience as a wife, mother and 40-something woman demand to be taken seriously.“On her other records, it’s someone else’s epic poem that she’s running through her own beautiful sense of language and harmony,” Kaufman said. “On this one, she’s looking back like, ‘I have my own epic poem here. There’s these people, these relatives, my kids, my long relationship with my husband, my long relationship with my songwriting.’ It’s a self-portrait, but like any compelling self-portrait it’s vulnerable enough that you almost feel like you’re looking in a mirror. It resonates deeply because it’s so honest.”Ideally, Mitchell said, “the song could live on without you.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesFOR ONE NIGHT in November 2021, Mitchell once again had a designated seat in the theater when she attended the reopening of “Hadestown” following its pandemic closure. “It just made me miss the process of working on that show so much,” she said later. “I spent the first act of the show spinning wheels in my head like, ‘What musical could I write next? I need another story!’” She is content for now to focus on her work as a solo artist and with Bonny Light Horseman, though the thought of never writing another stage show after “Hadestown” would be like if she “went to grad school and then didn’t use the degree.”Mitchell doesn’t see such a clear delineation between the two artistic worlds she straddles, though. “I do think there’s a common denominator with writing for the theater and writing songs,” she said. “Ideally, the song could live on without you. You don’t have to sing it, someone else could sing it. I love that. Someone singing it at their wedding, or at a funeral, or at a protest.”She reached for a bit of lingual antiquity and metaphor that tracks closely to her own move to Vermont. “You know how you spell playwright as playwright, like you’re building or constructing something?” she asked. “A songwriter is kind of a songwright. It’s like building a house that other people will inhabit.” More

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      Review: A Shorter ‘Long Day’s Journey,’ Now With N95s

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      The Eugene O’Neill classic, set in 1912, is just as powerful in Robert O’Hara’s revival, set in our own age of disease and lockdown.Eugene O’Neill, whose insanely detailed stage directions for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” specify even the titles of the books on the shelves, somehow forgot to mention the Purell. Also the N95s.Yet there they are, prominent props in Robert O’Hara’s warp-speed Covid-era revival, which opened on Tuesday at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Far from cheapening a classic work with random relevance, they help define (or at any rate don’t get in the way of) a beautifully acted and affecting interpretation for a new age of disease and lockdown.In the Tyrone family, closely based on O’Neill’s, disease and lockdown are already a way of life. For James (Bill Camp) the disease is spiritual; a could-have-been Shakespearean who (like the playwright’s father) got trapped in an immensely popular melodrama, he is embittered by success and a skinflint by nature. His older son, Jamie (Jason Bowen), has just the opposite problem: A failure at everything, he beggars himself by carousing as if he weren’t.For the other two members of the household, the disease is literal. Partway through the play, the younger son, Edmund (Ato Blankson-Wood), receives a diagnosis of tuberculosis from which he believes he will never recover. His mother, Mary (Elizabeth Marvel), having been improperly treated by a cheap doctor after Edmund’s difficult birth, is addicted to morphine. Her most recent rehabilitation miserably collapses over the course of the long day of the title.That day, according to O’Neill, is in August 1912; the setting is the family’s fog-infested waterfront home on the Connecticut coast. There, James estivates sourly between tours, talking big and doing little, watching helplessly (or unwilling to help) as Mary’s fear for Edmund undoes her.Her relapse is all the more painful because of the hypocrisy that informs it; it began, after all, as a result of James’s stinginess. And though the three men drink at least as insatiably as Mary drugs, only her addiction is seen as a character flaw: an elective humiliation that has turned them all into emotional — and nearly literal — hermits.From left, Jason Bowen, Bill Camp and Ato Blankson-Wood in the play, which is being performed at the Minetta Lane Theater and will be released later as an audio play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn O’Hara’s production, though, the Tyrone lockdown is only partly about shame; it is also about precaution. When Mary tells James that “this will soon be over,” and that his theater season — another tour of his tired old play — “will open again,” we hear it differently with our pandemic-primed expectations. How many productions have recently had to reassure us they will open again?And all it takes to turn Edmund’s tuberculosis into Covid is the discreet suppression of the word “consumption” from Jamie’s question after his brother visits the doctor: “He thinks it’s … doesn’t he, Papa?” We fill in the blank as we please; the coughing is the same either way.That’s successful if relatively minor surgery. But can a revision that cuts about half the text, reducing its running time from nearly four hours to slightly less than two, still be “Long Day’s Journey”? Certainly the O’Neill estate, which permitted the changes, thinks so, in part because O’Hara, as he writes in a program note, has not added “a single word” in the process of imagining “this glorious play into the future that we are all currently living through.” The contemporization is achieved entirely by suggestive or visual means.At first, the effect is humorous, as when James shows up in cargo shorts bearing Starbucks and Mary, demonstrating her improved health, does yoga. Soon, though, the jokes deepen, creating a feeling of double vision as we notice both our time and O’Neill’s at once. The density makes a four-person play feel crowded; Clint Ramos’s living room set, littered with discarded Amazon delivery boxes, nails the relentless clutter of a self-indulgent family trapped together for months with no maid. (She too was cut.)Nor do the house’s upper stories, as revealed through voids in the living room wall, offer relief from the creeping claustrophobia; in one of the openings we see Mary repeatedly shooting up. (To judge from the spoon and flame, she’s using heroin now instead of morphine.) If this, let alone her vomiting, feels too literal, the astonishing projections by Yee Eun Nam are almost phantasmagoric in their abstraction. They vividly suggest the solace that blossoms from the needle, a solace that is at least in part a dissociation from reality.Marvel in the upper level of Clint Ramos’s set, with abstract projections by Yee Eun Nam.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet we know that anyway; the play as typically performed demonstrates it over and over. Mary’s addiction is part of a closed system in which each of the Tyrones victimizes and is victimized by the rest, all the while explaining and apologizing and defending. (That’s part of what justifies its usual unusual length.) What O’Hara gets so right, regardless of the apparent setting, is the relentless rhythm of placation and perturbation. These are people who can’t help pulling one another’s scabs off, then trying to stick them back on.If you want to think about our own recent lockdown in those terms, this production, even in its relative brevity, certainly allows you to. And if you want to think about what O’Hara meant by casting white actors as the Tyrone parents and Black actors as the sons — he says he meant nothing — you are welcome to do that too, though you probably won’t get very far beyond merit.But if you aren’t interested in a contemporary medical or racial gloss, the great thing about this “Long Day’s Journey” is that you need only close your eyes. Indeed, because the revival has been produced by Audible, the Amazon company that creates spoken audio content, once the stage production closes on Feb. 20 that will be the only way you can experience it.What I think you will find with the visual information stripped away is a very accomplished, and surprisingly faithful, reading of the play. If it loses some of its cumulative power in the abridgment, its moment-by-moment power often increases in recompense. Bowen and Blankson-Wood get the alternating current of the brothers’ connection just right. Camp, unlike many Jameses, plays the real man, not his melodramatic stage incarnation. These are performances that are not only stageworthy but streamworthy.And certainly Marvel’s vocal characterization of the deteriorating Mary — lilting then wheedling then ratlike then hollow — is one you will not soon get out of your head. You may even feel infected by it. Do they make Purell for the ears?Long Day’s Journey Into NightThrough Feb. 20 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; audible.com/ep/minettalane. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      Sondheim’s ‘Assassins’ Ends Run Early Because of Coronavirus Cases

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      The Classic Stage Company’s production of “Assassins,” the Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman musical, became the latest show to cut its run short because of the coronavirus, announcing Tuesday that it would cancel its remaining performances.The Off Broadway musical, which began previews in November and had been running for roughly 12 weeks, had been scheduled to continue through Jan. 30. In a brief statement, Classic Stage Company said the handful of remaining performances this week had been scrapped because of “positive COVID-19 tests within the company.”Sondheim, who wrote the music and lyrics for “Assassins,” died on Nov. 26, adding resonance to the timing of the revival and creating a spike in demand that made the show one of the toughest tickets in New York this winter. On the evening Sondheim died theatergoers flocked to the Lynn F. Angelson Theater — where “Assassins” was playing — and to other Sondheim sites, including the Broadway theater where a revival of “Company” was playing, saying they felt drawn to the venues and sought a way to memorialize the songwriting titan.The production, directed by John Doyle, had been fully sold out before Sondheim’s death; in the aftermath, the number of people regularly entering a digital lottery hoping to score $15 tickets ballooned, with roughly 5,000 people entering on some days in the hopes of nabbing one of the small theater’s 196 seats.All ticket holders will be refunded for the cancellations, the company said. More

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      Touring Through Omicron: Broadway Shows Hit Bumps on the Road

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      The “Mean Girls” tour made it to Oklahoma before it was knocked out by the coronavirus. At first, the production had been able to keep going by flying in alumni from its Broadway run, but ultimately the number of company members testing positive was just too high, so earlier this month the show decided to cancel its remaining shows in Tulsa, and then postponed the runs that would have followed in two Wisconsin cities, Madison and Appleton.When the show hit the pause button, Jonalyn Saxer, the actress playing Karen Smith, found herself with two weeks off and no home of her own — like many actors, she gave up her New York apartment and put her stuff in storage when she signed on to tour. The show offered to fly her wherever she wanted to go, and she chose her parents’ house in Los Angeles.“I was home over Christmas, and when I left I said, ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back,’ ” she said. “Two weeks later, I was like, ‘Hi Mom and Dad!’”The lucrative touring market for Broadway shows is being jolted by the Omicron surge, as coronavirus cases increase in parts of the country even as they have begun to fall in the nation as a whole.This past weekend, productions of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” in San Francisco and “The Prom” in Baltimore were canceled because of positive tests in their companies.“Hamilton” has been particularly hard hit: This month it halted all four of its American touring productions, in Buffalo, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and San Antonio, because of positive coronavirus tests.The phenomenon is in some ways similar to what happened on Broadway, where so many theater workers tested positive in December that half of all shows canceled performances on some nights. But there is a key difference: Whereas on Broadway, there has also been a damaging drop in ticket sales, elsewhere in the country, producers say, attendance has generally remained steady.Gabrielle Bappert checked the vaccine cards of ticket holders at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis before a performance of “Come From Away.”Tim Gruber for The New York Times“Touring, when we can perform, is going great — the audiences are showing up, and the audiences are enthusiastic,” said Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton.” “Touring is not going great when Covid sweeps through our company, which has happened to every one of our tours.”For actors, touring now involves less sightseeing, and more risk management, than it once did.“It’s the highest of highs, because we’ve been waiting for a year and a half to be back doing what we love to do, but it’s not the same,” said Saxer, who tested positive for the virus in November when her tour was in Spokane, Wash., and recovered while quarantining there.“It’s not like we can say ‘Let’s go check out this cool bar,’ because actors all around are losing their jobs because someone tests positive,” she added. “It does raise the stakes.”Christine Toy Johnson, an actor in the “Come From Away” tour, said she had not eaten inside a restaurant since July.“In some cities, we’re in hotels and we’re the only people wearing masks,” she said. “It’s very stressful — I’m not going to lie. But it’s also been an exciting time to be back in the theater, making art again.”There are currently about three dozen shows moving from venue to venue, stopping at a mix of nonprofit performing arts centers and for-profit theaters in nearly 300 North American cities, according to Meredith Blair, the president and chief executive of the Booking Group, an agency that arranges touring shows. The shows bring in a lot of money: those featuring union actors (there are also tours with nonunion casts) grossed $1.6 billion at the box office in 2018-2019, which was the last full season before the pandemic; that’s just slightly less than the $1.8 billion spent by theatergoers attending Broadway shows in New York City during the same period, according to the Broadway League.While there has been a damaging drop in ticket sales on Broadway, producers say that attendance has generally remained steady elsewhere in the country.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesThere appear to be several reasons the touring audience has remained more stable than the Broadway audience. Most of the venues that present touring productions depend on locals, rather than visitors, so they are less vulnerable to the drop in tourism that has walloped Broadway. Many of the touring venues have large numbers of subscribers who, remarkably, retained their subscriptions throughout the pandemic. And some venues are in parts of the country where residents have been less inclined to make changes to their routines because of Covid.“There’s a huge difference between New York and the audience on the road,” said Rich Jaffe, a co-chief executive of Broadway Across America, which presents Broadway tours in 48 North American markets. “On the road, they consider these venues their theaters — it’s a big part of their communities, supporting jobs and creating economic ripple effects for local downtowns that are quite significant. If we have a show, the audience is there.”Many North American tours are bypassing Canada because of government-mandated capacity restrictions there. But in the United States, where there are generally no capacity limits, venue operators seem pleased with how things are going, despite the bumpiness of Omicron.“We’ve already presented five weeks of touring Broadway, and we’ve had great attendance — our audiences are showing up enthusiastically,” said Joan H. Squires, the president of Omaha Performing Arts, which hosted touring productions of “Cats” and “Hamilton” in the fall and then “Dear Evan Hansen” in the days before and after the New Year’s holiday. Squires wound up scanning tickets at the door for “Dear Evan Hansen” because too few volunteer ushers were available, but she attributed that more to winter weather than Covid concerns.Most shows are requiring that audiences wear masks, except where such requirements are barred, and vaccination rules are up to local jurisdictions.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesThe biggest brand names, as always, are selling the strongest. And “Hadestown,” which won the Tony Award for best musical in 2019 and began its tour in October, is starting strong. “‘Hadestown’ arrived just as we were starting to see Omicron spike, and it far exceeded our targets for attendance and sales,” said Maria Van Laanen, the president and chief executive of Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in Appleton.Presenters in some cities describe a softening of sales as Omicron hit. “We certainly noticed a slower pattern of buying over the holidays — in any other year, we would have been completely sold out, but that obviously wasn’t the case because there was some hesitancy,” said Jeffrey Finn, the vice president of theater producing and programming at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. “That said, I’m watching a big upturn as we head toward the spring with the hope and expectation that Omicron won’t be as present.”Safety precautions vary across the country. Most shows are requiring that audiences wear masks, except in cities where such requirements are barred; vaccination rules for audiences follow local government protocols (actors and other theater workers are required to be vaccinated).Keeping tours going has required shows to add staff members. “Hamilton” now employs seven “universal swings,” who are versatile performers ready to travel anywhere they are needed to fill in, up from four before the pandemic; “The Lion King” has brought in three additional swings.After canceling three performances, “Come From Away” returned thanks to a blended cast that included veterans of every production, including Broadway, Australia, Canada and Britain. Tim Gruber for The New York Times“Come From Away” offers a particularly vivid case study in the creativity also required to keep shows afloat. The company got hit by Covid earlier this month as it arrived in Minneapolis, where it was scheduled to spend two weeks.“We went 15 weeks without any problems, but then Omicron came and started to wreak havoc,” said Johnson, who has been with the tour since 2018. “At one point half the cast was sidelined.”The producers canceled three performances, which bought them enough time to bring in actors from California, New York and Toronto, and the show then resumed with a blended cast that included alumni not only from Broadway but also from productions in Australia, Canada and Britain.“It’s the never-ending Rubik’s Cube of trying to keep a show up and running,” said Sue Frost, a lead producer of “Come From Away.”Among those who flew in was Happy McPartlin, a standby in the Broadway cast, who had just recovered from her own case of Covid. “I said, ‘Of course,’ because that’s what we do here,” she said. “I knew the state we were in. We had a couple of bad weeks where the numbers were not in our favor, and one of the people from the tour came in and saved us. I said, ‘If you guys need me, I’ll do the same for you.’”Not all of the cancellations have been short-lived. In December, “Ain’t Too Proud” canceled two weeks in Washington; “The Lion King” missed 12 performances in Denver, while “Wicked” canceled six performances in Cleveland. “Hamilton” shut down for a month in Los Angeles, and upon its reopening next month, it is now scheduled to stay just six more weeks, rather than running into the spring as initially anticipated.“I almost forgot about Covid for a little bit because we got so used to it, and it was so much fun to do the show, but then Christmas Eve we had so many positive tests we couldn’t do the show, and we canceled a half-hour after it was supposed to start,” said Nicholas Christopher, who plays Aaron Burr in the Los Angeles production of “Hamilton.” Christopher had moved from New York to Los Angeles for “Hamilton”; he, his wife, and their new baby all tested positive in December, and then he found out the show’s Los Angeles run was ending.“It’s very eye-opening, and very humbling, and makes me appreciate what we do even more, because it’s been taken away so many times,” he said. “It’s almost like PTSD, having the show be shut down again. It still feels like a dream that I’m ready to wake up from.” More