Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Under the Radar Theater Festival Canceled as Omicron Surges

      by

      Putting off the Public Theater’s annual showcase for experimental work was the latest sign of the variant’s impact on live performance.As a surge of coronavirus cases driven by the Omicron variant takes a growing toll on live performance, the Public Theater on Friday announced it would cancel its Under the Radar festival, originally scheduled to begin on Jan. 12.In a statement, the theater cited “multiple disruptions related to the rapid community spread of the Omicron variant,” including effects on staff availability, cancellations by artists and audience members, flight interruptions and visa processing delays.Mark Russell, the festival’s director, said in a video interview that his team had worked on plans to streamline Under the Radar — the Public’s annual showcase for experimental work, and one of several New York festivals that have formed around the Association of Performing Arts Professionals conference — so that it could proceed despite the surge. But on Thursday morning, Russell said, he took stock of the test positivity rate and number of cases in New York, and decided it would be irresponsible to press on.“It was not a time for a festival,” he said. “A festival is a celebration. It’s supposed to be a coming together to celebrate this work, and it was not going to be a celebration.”Although last year’s Under the Radar was completely virtual, that took months of planning, Russell said, so it would not have served this iteration to attempt to go hybrid or digital so late. Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, said in the interview that all festival artists and staff will be paid as planned.The lineup for Under the Radar was to have included “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner,” by Jasmine Lee-Jones; “Our Country,” by Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff; “An Evening With an Immigrant,” by Inua Ellams; “Otto Frank” by Roger Guenveur Smith; and “Mud/Drowning,” with texts by María Irene Fornés.As part of Under the Radar’s On the Road initiative, “The Art of Theater” and “With My Own Hands,” two monologues by Pascal Rambert, will still be presented by Performance Spaces for the 21st Century in Chatham, N.Y. “An Evening With an Immigrant” is still expected be performed at Oklahoma City Repertory Theater (Jan. 22-23) and at Stanford University (Jan. 29-30), and “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” is still planning a three-week run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington (Feb. 14-March 6).In December, the Public announced that it would require full vaccination and, through the end of January, proof of a negative Covid-19 test to access its theaters and restaurant. With no main-stage performances during that time, the policy was aimed mainly at Under the Radar, which had been scheduled to end on Jan. 30.Another presentation of experimental performance, the monthlong Exponential Festival, will be presented online, on the festival’s YouTube channel and Twitch. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ on Broadway Is Pausing to Avoid Closing

      by

      The musical’s producer, eager to avoid a permanent shutdown amid the virus surge, is attempting a self-imposed nine-week hiatus.In a startling illustration of the financial damage a resurgent pandemic is causing on Broadway, the producer of a new musical adaptation of “Mrs. Doubtfire” has decided to close down his show for nine weeks, saying he sees no other way to save the production.Kevin McCollum, a veteran Broadway producer whose previous credits include “Rent” and “Avenue Q,” said he would close the musical comedy beginning Jan. 10, with a plan to reopen on March 14. The move will cost 115 people their jobs for that period; McCollum said he is committed to rehiring those who want to return.“My job is to protect the jobs long-term of those who are working on ‘Mrs. Doubtfire,’ and this is the best way I can do that today,” he said in an interview. “I can’t just sit idly by when there’s a solution, albeit unprecedented and painful. I can’t guarantee anything, but at this moment this is the most prudent thing I can do with the tools I have.”McCollum said that if he does not attempt the hiatus, the show would run out of money and be forced to close within three weeks. And there is plenty of reason to believe that is not hyperbole: Five Broadway shows in December decided to close earlier than anticipated, including the musicals “Ain’t Too Proud,” “Diana,” “Jagged Little Pill” and “Waitress,” as well as the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man.”McCollum’s move, which will enable the production to stop paying salaries and most other expenses, is a novel Broadway response to the Omicron surge, but has a parallel in London, where Andrew Lloyd Webber has shuttered his new “Cinderella” musical for at least seven weeks. (It is slated to reopen Feb. 9.)“Mrs. Doubtfire,” like all Broadway shows, has been battered by the coronavirus pandemic. The production, in development for years and capitalized for $17 million, had gotten through just three preview performances in March 2020 when Broadway shut down; it was closed for 19 months before resuming previews in October, and then opened in December, bolstered by a nearly $10 million grant from the Small Business Administration.The show opened to tepid reviews — and a pan in The New York Times — but sales were nonetheless promising, McCollum said, until the Omicron variant, which was detected in New York just days before the opening, caused a spike in coronavirus cases. (The Broadway League has stopped reporting show-by-show box office grosses, making it difficult to track a production’s ups and downs with any precision.)As coronavirus cases spread among Broadway workers, “Mrs. Doubtfire” had to cancel 11 performances during the normally lucrative holiday season, continuing to pay workers while losing all box office revenue. And then, McCollum said, the show, like many others, faced a high number of consumers canceling their tickets at the last minute because of concerns about safety, confusion about what was still open and difficulty complying with vaccination rules. (“Mrs. Doubtfire” is a family-friendly show, so it is particularly affected by the evolving vaccine mandates for children.)“You’re asking me to plant a sapling in a hurricane,” McCollum said.So long as “Mrs. Doubtfire” is open, its expenses are about $700,000 a week, whether or not performances actually take place, because employees are paid even if a performance is canceled. And expenses have recently risen because of increased testing, along with additional costs associated with keeping a show going when staff members test positive.McCollum said the show grossed about $900,000 from Dec. 27 to Jan. 2, which was more than its running costs but less than the $1.3 million he had expected for the holiday week. He added he was expecting the show’s weekly grosses to drop below $400,000 following the holidays — always a soft time for Broadway, and now even more so. He said he is hopeful that by March the pandemic will have eased and tourism and group sales will strengthen.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4The global surge. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      12 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2022

      by

      ‘Better Call Saul’ returns, Cecily Strong stars in a one-woman show, and Faith Ringgold gets an overdue retrospective.As a new year begins in uncertain times (again), our critics highlight the TV, movies, music, art, theater, dance and comedy that promise a welcome distraction.Margaret LyonsThe End of ‘Better Call Saul’Bob Odenkirk stars as Jimmy McGill in AMC’s “Better Call Saul,” which returns for its final season this spring.Greg Lewis/AMC, via Associated PressI’ll be sad forever when “Better Call Saul” is over, so part of me is actually dreading the sixth and final season. I never want to say goodbye to Jimmy or Kim — but man, am I dying to see them again. By the time “Saul” returns on AMC this spring, it will have been off the air for two full years. (Bob Odenkirk, its star, recovered from a heart attack that occurred on set this year.) If there was ever a show that knew how to think about endgames, it’s this one, among the most carefully woven dramas of our time. Of course, thanks to “Breaking Bad,” we know exactly where some of these characters are headed but not how they get there or how they feel about it or whom they’ll hurt along the way. Hurry back! But also, go slow.Salamishah TilletA ‘Downton Abbey’ Sequel Travels to FranceThe sequel “Downton Abbey: A New Era” is partly set in the South of France; from left, Harry Hadden-Paton, Laura Carmichael, Tuppence Middleton and Allen Leech.Ben Blackall/Focus FeaturesOK, so yes, it was weird that my friends Sherri-Ann and Amber and I were the only Black people in the theater when we saw the movie “Downton Abbey” in 2019. At the time, we agreed that despite the absence of people of color in the theater and onscreen, we still found delight in the grandeur — the clothing, the castle, the cast of characters, especially the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Violet Crawley, marvelously played by Dame Maggie Smith. Now that we’ve set our calendars to March 18, 2022, for the sequel, “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” I’m looking forward to seeing how the franchise tries to reinvent itself on the cusp of a new era, the 1930s, and how it fares in the current racial moment. (A Black female face pops up in a trailer.) Partly set in the South of France after the Dowager Countess learns she has inherited a villa there, the movie sends the upstairs Crawley clan and their downstairs employees off on another adventure, with another wedding. While Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton,” has a new show, “The Gilded Age,” premiering on HBO in January — which seems to be a bit more thoughtful in its take on race, class and identity — here’s hoping that this sequel to “Downton” takes a bow in grand Grantham style.Jesse GreenCecily Strong in a One-Woman ShowCecily Strong, left, and the director Leigh Silverman; Strong is starring in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” at the Shed.Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesJane Wagner’s 1985 play “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” was custom-made for the chameleonic gifts of her life partner (and, later, wife), Lily Tomlin. Who else could have inhabited its 12 highly distinct characters — among them a runaway punk, a bored one-percenter and a trio of disillusioned feminists — with such sardonic sympathy? When Tomlin won a 1986 Tony Award for her work, it seemed to seal the idea that the performer and the play were forever one. But in the kind of casting that makes you smack your head with delight, Cecily Strong takes up Tomlin’s mantle in a revival directed by Leigh Silverman at the Shed, expected to open on Jan. 11. Strong — whose “Saturday Night Live” characters include Jeanine Pirro, the Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party and, most recently, Goober the Clown Who Had an Abortion When She Was 23 — seems like another custom fit, nearly four decades later.Jon ParelesAfrofuturism at Carnegie HallSun Ra Arkestra will perform its galactic jazz as part of the Afrofuturism festival that starts in February.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesStepping outside its own history as a bastion of Western classical music, Carnegie Hall will be the hub of a citywide, multidisciplinary festival of Afrofuturism: the visionary, tech-savvy ways that African-diaspora culture has imagined alternate paths forward. Carnegie’s series is expected to start Feb. 12 with the quick-cutting, sometimes head-spinning electronic musician Flying Lotus. (One challenge might be the main hall’s acoustics.) Shows at Zankel Hall include the galactic jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra with the cellist and singer Kelsey Lu and the spoken-word insurgent Moor Mother (Feb. 17); the flutist Nicole Mitchell leading her Black Earth Ensemble; and the clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid with her Autophysiopsychic Millennium (Feb. 24); the African-rooted hip-hop duo Chimurenga Renaissance and the Malian songwriter Fatoumata Diawara (March 4); and the D.J., composer and techno pioneer Carl Craig leading his Synthesizer Ensemble (March 19). There’s far more: five dozen other cultural organizations will have festival events.Anthony TommasiniThe Metropolitan Opera Rethinks VerdiThe set model for a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” which is expected to open at the Metropolitan Opera in February.Metropolitan OperaVerdi’s “Don Carlos” may not be a flawless opera. But it’s a profound work; I think of it as Verdi’s “Hamlet.” Written for the Paris Opera, it nodded to the French grand style and included epic scenes and massed choruses. But at its 1867 premiere, it was deemed overly long and ineffective. Verdi revised the opera several times, making cuts, translating the French libretto into Italian, leaving a confused legacy of revisions. The Metropolitan Opera is giving audiences a chance to hear the work as originally conceived in its five-act French version, which many consider the best. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has led superb Met performances of the Italian adaptation, will be in this pit for this new production by David McVicar. The starry cast, headed by the tenor Matthew Polenzani in the title role, includes Sonya Yoncheva, Elina Garanca, Etienne Dupuis, Eric Owens and John Relyea. When performances begin on Feb. 28, be prepared for a five-hour show with two intermissions; I can’t wait.Mike HaleTrue-Crime, Starring Renée ZellwegerRenée Zellweger is starring in the true-crime mini-series “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8 on NBC.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesThis winter brings more than the usual number of big stars taking time out for the small screen, like Uma Thurman (“Suspicion”), Christopher Walken (“Severance”) and Samuel L. Jackson (“The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray”). The one that piques my interest the most is Renée Zellweger, taking on only her second lead television role in “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8 on NBC. Zellweger can be hit or miss, but her hits — “The Whole Wide World,” “Chicago,” “Judy” — keep her in the very top rank of American actresses. Here she plays Pam Hupp, who is implicated in multiple deaths and is currently serving a life sentence for one of them, in a true-crime mini-series whose showrunner, Jenny Klein, was a producer on solid TV offerings like “The Witcher” and “Jessica Jones.”Jason FaragoAt 91, Faith Ringgold Gets a RetrospectiveA retrospective of the work of Faith Ringgold opens at the New Museum in February and will include “Dancing at the Louvre: The French Collection Part I, #1,” from 1991. Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY and DACS, London, via ACA GalleriesWhen the Museum of Modern Art opened its expanded home in 2019, its most important Picasso suddenly found itself with a new companion: a tumultuous, panoramic painting of American violence that Faith Ringgold painted in 1967. Ringgold, born 91 years ago in Harlem, has never been an obscure figure: Her art was displayed in the Clinton White House as well as most of New York’s museums; her children’s books have won prizes and reached best-seller lists. But she has had to wait too long for a career-spanning retrospective in her hometown. The one at the New Museum, which opens Feb. 17, will reveal how Ringgold intertwined the political and the personal: first in her rigorously composed “American People” paintings, which channeled the civil rights movement into gridded, repeating, syncopated forms; and then in pieced-fabric “story quilts” depicting Michael Jackson or Aunt Jemima, and geometric abstractions inspired by Tibetan silks and embroideries. The show comes with a major chance for rediscovery: the first outing in over two decades of her “French Collection,” a 12-quilt cycle that recasts the history of Paris in the 1920s through the eyes of a fictional African-American artist and model.Maya PhillipsA Viking Prince Seeks RevengeAlexander Skarsgård in a scene from “The Northman,” a story about a Viking prince who seeks revenge for his murdered father, directed by Robert Eggers.Focus FeaturesRobert Eggers has directed only two feature films, and yet he’s already known as a maker of beautifully strange, critically acclaimed movies. “The Witch,” from 2016, was followed three years later by the grim and perplexing “The Lighthouse.” Both established Eggers as a stylistic descendant of the Brothers Grimm, a crafter of macabre fables that descend into torrents of madness. Which is why I’m excited to see his third feature film, “The Northman,” expected to premiere on April 22, about a Viking prince who seeks revenge for his murdered father. Steeped in Icelandic mythology, the story is based on the tale of Amleth, the inspiration for Prince Hamlet, my favorite sad boy of English literature. Eggers wrote the screenplay with the Icelandic poet Sjón, so we can surely expect an epic with epic writing to match. There’s also a stellar cast, including Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe — and Björk as a witch. I’d watch for that alone.Gia KourlasTransformation, Via Tap and Modern DanceA still from Ayodele Casel’s “Chasing Magic”; from left, Anthony Morigerato, John Manzari, Casel and Naomi Funaki.Kurt CsolakThere are times, however rare, when a virtual dance can be just as stirring as a live one. Ayodele Casel’s joyful and galvanizing “Chasing Magic,” presented by the Joyce Theater in April, was just that. Now the tap dancer and choreographer unveils a new version of the work, directed by Torya Beard, for the stage — an actual one — starting Tuesday, barring any Covid cancellations. And the following month, “Four Quartets,” an ambitious evening-length work by the modern choreographer Pam Tanowitz, lands at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Feb. 10-12). Based on T.S. Eliot’s poems, the production features live narration by the actress Kathleen Chalfant, music by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and a set by Brice Marden; in it, Tanowitz continues her exploration of the relationship between emotion and form. It’s true that one is tap; the other, modern dance. What do they have in common? Both have much to say and to show about the transporting, transformative power of dance.Isabelia HerreraThe Rapper Saba Explores TraumaSaba, a rapper from Chicago, will release a new album, “Few Good Things,” on Feb. 4.Mat Hayward/Getty ImagesDiaristic and quietly intense, Saba, a rapper from Chicago, is the kind of artist who navigates grief with a cool solace. In 2018, his record “Care for Me” considered this theme in the aftermath of the murder of his cousin and collaborator, who was stabbed to death a year earlier. Out on Feb. 4, his next album, “Few Good Things,” confronts equally gutting life challenges: the anxiety of generational poverty and the depths of survivor’s guilt. It reprises Saba’s slithering and poetic flows, which breathe out a profound sense of narrative. The beats are still buttery, jazzy and meticulously arranged. But this time around, there is more wisdom — a recognition that living through trauma means finding gratitude and affirmation in the moments you can.Jason ZinomanComedian Taylor Tomlinson on TourThe comedian Taylor Tomlinson in her Netflix special “Quarter-Life Crisis,” from 2020; a new one is in the works.Allyson Riggs/Netflix“Quarter-Life Special,” the debut stand-up special from Taylor Tomlinson, introduced a young artist with real potential. Tomlinson tautly evoked a clear persona (cheerful but not the life of the party; more like, as she put it, “the faint pulse of the pot luck”) and told jokes marked by a diverse arsenal of act outs and manners of misdirection. She covered standard territory (dating, sex, parents, kids) with enough insight and dark shadings to get your attention. Most excitingly, every once in a while, she let her thought process spin out into deliriously unexpected directions, like the story that led her to imagine a test for sadness conducted by the police. “Instead of a breathalyzer,” she explained, “they have you sigh into a harmonica.” This Netflix special made a splash, but it would have probably been a bigger one if it didn’t come out in March 2020. One pandemic later, she has another hour ready, and another Netflix special on the way. She’s now performing it on tour, which is expected to stop in New York in January at Town Hall and then the Beacon Theater. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Theater 80 in New York City Could Become Another Pandemic Casualty

      by

      Battered by a coronavirus lockdown and conflict over a loan, Theater 80 could become another New York City casualty of the pandemic.There are fewer and fewer places left in New York City where you can walk through a door and feel transported back in time. Among them is 80 St. Marks Place, a Prohibition-era speakeasy converted into an Off Broadway theater in the early 1960s.Inside the front door there are still hooks embedded in the brick where steel plates were once hung to buy time during police raids. The lobby walls are covered with framed, autographed photos from dozens of famous actors, including Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and Myrna Loy.A narrow hallway connects the theater lobby with William Barnacle Tavern, where you can still get absinthe from a bar that has been in place since the 1920s. The performance space itself, Theater 80, is intimate, with a 199-seat capacity. You can hear someone speaking at a normal volume from anywhere in the room.The space of William Barnacle Tavern, which is connected to the theater, was once a Prohibition-era speakeasy.Zack DeZon for The New York TimesBut like so many of the city’s treasures, the theater, the tavern and the Museum of the American Gangster, on the second floor, are all facing extinction because of the pandemic.Lorcan and Genie Otway, who own the connected buildings at 78 and 80 St. Marks Place and live in an apartment upstairs, are now scrambling to prevent a mortgage investor from auctioning them off.“The shutdown offered us no protection from creditors, which I think is unconscionable,” Lorcan Otway said during a recent tour of the building and its underground tunnels, through which contraband was smuggled during the 1920s and ’30s.Otway, whose father bought the buildings in 1964, said that the theater, museum and tavern were in good financial health until March 2020, when they were shuttered by a state mandate that affected virtually all corners of the performance and service industries. Shortly before then, he had taken out a $6.1 million mortgage against the properties to settle an inheritance dispute, pay legal fees and finance needed renovations.With the pandemic lockdown and a precipitous decline in revenue, that loan went into default and was purchased by Maverick Real Estate Partners about a year ago. The firm, according to court documents, has closed over 130 distressed debt transactions, with a total value of over $300 million.The lobby walls are covered with framed, autographed photos from dozens of famous actors.Zack DeZon for The New York TimesOtway, who dug out the theater space with his father when he was 9 and had turned down numerous offers by developers over the years, said that he had hired an attorney to renegotiate the payment terms, but the original lender stopped returning his phone calls and sold the debt to Maverick without his knowledge.Maverick, Otway said, then raised the interest rate to 24 percent, from 10 percent, bringing the roughly $6 million debt to about $8 million. The company did not respond to messages asking for a comment.Joe John Battista, the artistic director of the 13th Street Repertory Theater, is familiar with a conflict like this. His company was recently evicted from the space it has called home since 1972 after a majority of the building’s shareholders locked it out.“Real estate is real estate, but this is the arts,” Battista said. “There ought to be some special attention paid when the city stands to lose a piece of cultural history like this.”Theater 80 hosted plays throughout the 1960s, including the pre-Broadway run of the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” From 1970 until Otway’s father died in 1994, the space was used to screen movies; for a time, it was New York City’s longest continuously running house devoted exclusively to revival films.City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and remembered seeing Shakespeare at Theater 80 when she was a teenager. “This is a heartbreaking story,” she said, adding that the complexities of running even the smallest business in New York now require a team of experts.“This is a huge advantage to the larger developers, the real estate companies, the financial institutions that can both take on this cost and hire a team to manage it,” Rivera said. “And the detriment is, not just to the small landlords and the deterioration of assets to people of otherwise moderate means, but also to the community at large who lose the landlords who are interested in providing beneficial things.”The 199-seat theater is so intimate, you can hear someone speaking from anywhere in the room.Zack DeZon for The New York TimesArthur Z. Schwartz, a lawyer with a reputation for representing underdog clients, said that there needs to be some type of legislative change to rein in distressed mortgage purchasing.“Beside the fact that you have a predatory lender who set this up so there was basically no way he would ever be able to make the payments, then shift it from being a mortgage to being some kind of commercial paper,” Schwartz said. “That lets you get around a lot of the stuff we have these days protecting mortgagees because of Covid.”John McDonagh, an old friend of Otway’s, has scheduled a benefit performance of his show “Off the Meter,” a comedic monologue about his decades of driving a yellow cab in New York, with all the profits benefiting Theater 80.“I’m just trying to help save a theater that Covid, gentrification and big bankers are trying to take,” said McDonagh, whose show runs Jan. 21-23 as part of Origin Theatre Company’s 1st Irish Festival.“St. Marks Place without Theater 80 would be like Houston Street without Katz’s Deli,” McDonagh said. “It would always feel like something was missing from the East Village.” More

    • 75 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Our Favorite Arts Photos of 2021

      by

      After 15 months of darkness, live music returned. In New York, Foo Fighters reopened Madison Square Garden.Photograph by Tim Barber for The New York TimesOur Favorite Arts Photos of 2021These are the pictures that defined an unpredictable year across the worlds of art, music, dance and performance.Laura O’Neill More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      On Broadway Stages, the Beautiful Rooms Are Empty

      by

      In recent musicals, hyperdesign is outstripping writing and direction for clarity, expressiveness and excitement.When Bobbie’s balloons are more fascinating than she is, your production of “Company” has a serious problem.I’m speaking of the inflatable Mylar numerals that, in the current Broadway revival of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, keep drawing the eye away from the main character as she is feted by friends on her 35th birthday.Those balloons — stand-ins for Bobbie’s disappearing youth — aren’t the only scene stealers. Bunny Christie’s ingenious design for the revival is filled with visual gimmicks that in representing the production’s themes keep crowding out the characters.During the song “Another Hundred People” — a barbed tribute to the missed connections of urbanity — large neon letters that spell the show’s title start wandering about the stage, as if stalking the cast. Eventually, three of the letters regroup to spell “NYC”: a neatly made point, though I couldn’t help wondering what happened to the other four.Then there’s the warren of interconnected spaces, some joined by trap doors, that paints Bobbie’s path to companionship as a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Chutes and Ladders.But for all the cleverness of Christie’s designs, they don’t so much nourish Marianne Elliott’s production as overwrite it, filling its many dramatic holes with eye candy.That’s no news on Broadway, which never met a conceptual problem it couldn’t attack with confetti cannons and other weapons of what we might call hyperdesign. Spectacular effects are part of the brand, and when used smartly can both thrill and inform.Yet, looking back at the shows that have opened or reopened in the last few months, it seems to me that designers, bringing evermore astonishing prowess to bear, too often outshine the work they are meant to support. As if to compensate, the stories are getting dimmer; their beautiful rooms, to paraphrase Kafka, are empty.In “Diana, the Musical,” Buckingham Palace was thinly suggested by some electric bulb tracery.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTake “Diana, the Musical,” which I won’t rake over the coals again except to say it was phony from first to last. (It closed, after just 49 performances and previews, on Dec. 19.) Nor were its sets especially assertive: Buckingham Palace and other locations were thinly suggested by some electric bulb tracery.But apparently having decided that what audiences would want most from a fantasia on the life of the People’s Princess is a jaw-dropping parade of extravagant costumes, the producers budgeted accordingly. The 38 outfits designed for Diana by William Ivey Long dramatized how she transformed herself from kindergarten teacher to royal frump to executive princess to international fashion plate far better than the writers did.No wonder those dresses — and the quick-change artistry that in one scene allowed her to change them six times — won applause. Unfortunately, in the process, the character herself was rendered about as expressive as a clothes hanger. That was almost literally so in her wedding scene, as Jeanna de Waal, who played Diana, disappeared inside a gown built like a cage.A clever enough metaphor, but why was the costume design forced to do so much work that the story should have done itself?The problem is even more evident in Lincoln Center Theater’s production of “Flying Over Sunset,” though it is a far more interesting musical. In Act II, its book, by James Lapine, imagines a weekend at the end of the 1950s during which Cary Grant, Aldous Huxley and Clare Boothe Luce experiment with LSD simultaneously. Their hallucinations are meant to address the unresolved conflicts carefully set up in Act I.But how do you dramatize a hallucination? Even if you can describe it in words, it will never be as interesting to those not tripping as it is to those who are.How do you dramatize a hallucination?“Flying Over Sunset,” starring, from left, Robert Sella, Harry Hadden-Paton, Carmen Cusack and Tony Yazbeck, tries to pull it off with psychedelic light and sound design.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLapine’s book does not overcome that obstacle, but as the director, he has been able to assemble a team of designers who at least get close. In this case, it is not the set or costumes doing the heavy lifting so much as the lighting (by Bradley King) and projections (by 59 Productions) working in concert with the sound design (by Dan Moses Schreier). In their hands, psychedelic imagery, amplified footfalls and intensely colored light become a trip in themselves, peeling away the skin of everyday life to reveal a richer world inside.It’s not a real solution, though; the often-beautiful imagery has the side effect of making ordinary perception, unenhanced by pharmaceuticals, seem banal. As soon as the characters talk, the illusion of richness evaporates. If it’s arguable whether the trips change the characters, as Lapine posits, it’s certain that they do not change us.“Flying Over Sunset” left me trying to decide whether muscular design takes over because the ideas are too frail or the ideas retreat because design hogs all the attention. Either way, it’s a predictable problem, and some productions have developed workarounds. “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” for instance, is smart enough to keep dialogue to a minimum as it inundates the theater with sound and color. If it ever lets the audience come up for air, the silliness of the story might be revealed as the wrong kind of distraction.Which is not to say there’s a right kind of distraction. A show with enough on its mind, with a minimum of muddles and longueurs, doesn’t require bombarding with extraneous sensory excitement. That doesn’t mean it should be visually dull, even if for economic reasons that’s often the case.Take “Kimberly Akimbo,” one of the finest and most feelingful new musicals of 2021, with music by Jeanine Tesori and words by David Lindsay-Abaire, based on his 2000 play. The Atlantic Theater production might have been even better with a more exciting design to support those feelings and a bigger frame to set off the prodigious performance by Victoria Clark as a teenager who ages too quickly. Perhaps we’ll have the chance to find out, if the show, which is scheduled to close on Jan. 15, transfers to Broadway in the new year.“Kimberly Akimbo” might have been even better with a more exciting set design to support the wonderful performances by Victoria Clark, left, and Justin Cooley.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn other words, Broadway pizazz is not the problem; often enough, it’s the solution. A set that can change locations instantaneously, or costumes that pin down time and class with almost taxonomic exactitude, can anchor while also heightening the illusion of life.That’s true even in nonmusical plays that have become much more visually abstract in recent years. You seldom see sofas and kitchen sinks onstage anymore, and even more seldom miss them. The 164 years of American commerce covered by “The Lehman Trilogy” take place convincingly in a rotating glass box.But for the most part, hyperdesign is a hint that something fundamental is missing. Often that missing element is the conceptual discipline that allows a piece of theater, even when set on an empty stage, to hang together and score its points. You can see it working perfectly in shows as wide ranging as David Byrne’s “American Utopia” (with its sleek aluminum chain curtains) and “Dear Evan Hansen” (with its hypnotic walls of online data) — productions in which design and direction go hand in hand.And you can see it, perhaps most vividly, in “Six,” which turns conceptual discipline into a fetish. Each of the wives of Henry VIII depicted in this sing-off gets her own theme color, song genre and pop star queenspiration. And though the set is minimal — it might have worked just as well for “Diana” — the lighting (by Tim Dieling) and costumes (by Gabriella Slade) are rock concert maximal, expressing the story’s ambition to thrill.Which it totally does, because sometimes the secret to effective design is proportion — and knowing when we really need the confetti. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Jeanine Tesori’s Gift: Conjuring the Storytelling Potency of Music

      by

      In shows like “Caroline, or Change” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” the composer excels at translating her astute insights about characters into music.Jeanine Tesori can take apart music and put it back together as well as any composer who’s put note to paper. She can write a recitative worthy of Janacek, or a pop tune that could have charted on 1970s AM radio. She can conjure a gospel number, a tap soft-shoe, or a folk-rock confessional like a seasoned pro.And as the co-creator of “Caroline, or Change” (now in a widely acclaimed revival on Broadway) and the Tony-winning “Fun Home,” she has helped to expand the boundaries of the American musical in a way that recalls such forebears as Stephen Sondheim and Elizabeth Swados.But you don’t come away from a Tesori musical — not the soulful “Violet,” the jazzy “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” the snarky “Shrek the Musical,” the meta-cultural “Soft Power,” nor the offbeat “Kimberly Akimbo,” now in a well-reviewed premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company — marveling at her formal innovation.For all her formidable tools and training, Tesori understands that “craft is the conduit for a really fresh and profound encounter with human experience,” her “Fun Home” co-writer Lisa Kron said. “It’s not an end in itself.”Said David Lindsay-Abaire, with whom she adapted “Shrek” for Broadway, and who adapted his play “Kimberly Akimbo” with her: “She thinks like a playwright. She understands story and narrative and character, and the architecture of a scene.”It’s not just structure she’s attuned to, said Tony Kushner, with whom she wrote “Caroline, or Change,” but subtext as well.“She either comprehends or intuits, not what necessarily is the most obvious choice for dramatic action or dramatic events, but what’s under the surface, where the real meaning of a piece lies,” Kushner said. “I’ve never met anybody more wide open to that, or more emotionally intelligent about human beings than she is.” While that’s surely a fine quality in any person, here’s the key: “She has this absolutely uncanny ability to translate that into music.”From left: Nya, Sharon D Clarke, Harper Miles and Nasia Thomas in the Roundabout Theater’s revival of “Caroline, or Change” at Studio 54.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis is the mystery of Jeanine Tesori — of any composer for the theater, really. Where does the music come from, and how does it work its magic? A nonverbal language with the power to move us, sometimes literally, music can be wed to words and characters in ways that feel definitive, clarifying. As Lindsay-Abaire put it: “I don’t know if pure is the right word, but something less diluted. You hear the characters’ emotions and know what’s going on inside those heads and hearts,” dramatic content that in nonmusical plays “you rely on the actors to communicate.”George Brant, with whom Tesori is adapting his play about a female drone pilot, “Grounded,” for the Metropolitan Opera, said that Tesori is “able to get at the guts of the piece and transform it into something that still feels like itself, but more.”The question of music’s storytelling potency is sharpened in Tesori’s case because, unlike Sondheim or many of her generational peers (Jason Robert Brown, Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel), she doesn’t write lyrics. Instead, she has worked with playwrights to shape not only her show’s scripts but bracingly original songs as well, in idioms and character voices as wide-ranging as the musical genres she references.Looking at her list of collaborators, Lin-Manuel Miranda said: “It’s as if she’s made it a mission to bring every serious dramatist to swim in the musical theater pool. But the other side of that is she’s bending their skills to our art form, and innovating our art form with every at bat.“It’s how you know she’s the best,” he added “because she works with the best and makes them sing.”It’s not as if she has a cookie-cutter style, though. As Lindsay-Abaire said, “The fact that the lyrics are all so different — that Tony’s are Tony’s, Lisa’s are Lisa’s, mine are mine, is a testament to Jeanine embracing her collaborators and our voices. It’s not like: This is how Jeanine teaches all these playwrights to write lyrics.”For her part, Tesori — who recently turned 60 but retains a youthful bonhomie, with “Fun Home” wallpaper patterns tattooed on her forearm — has a firm grip on what her strengths are.“I’m not a lyricist at all, but I’ll say what my gift is: recognizing lyrics in the sea of words,” Tesori explained during a recent interview in her office at City Center, where she serves as a creative adviser. She immerses herself in her collaborators’ verbiage in various ways. She asks for what she calls “noodles,” which Kron described as “bits of lyric that didn’t make it into the lyric I built for her.” Tesori also has them read their lyrics aloud to her, sometimes “two or three times,” as Kron recalled, to glean intention from inflection.Then, Tesori said, her mind goes to work on fragments of material, in a process she compared to the sequence in “The Queen’s Gambit” when the lead character envisions complicated chess moves on the ceiling. “Things start clicking into place,” Tesori said, “and I think: Oh, there! There!”“Meryl Streep disappears into her characters. You sort of know that she’s there, but also you don’t. I like doing that too,” Tesori said. “I feel like my job is to get out of the way of how they sing.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHer facility with a wide range of musical styles can be traced to a diverse musical education. She started piano lessons at age 6 with a teacher, she said, who let her play any musical style. “He did not judge anything, and that was really the lesson,” she said. After a rebellious break from music during her teen years, and a brief flirtation with pre-med classes, she studied music at Barnard College and soon got work as a Broadway pit pianist and freelance music director.Most formative, though, was her partnership with Buryl Red, a Baptist choral arranger with whom she ran a music company for 25 years until his death in 2013. Assisting Red on countless recording sessions in Nashville and around the world, she absorbed a range of musical influences, in particular gospel, that have served her well in such scores as “Violet” and “Caroline, or Change.”This broad palette isn’t mere versatility for its own sake. Her colleagues talk about her rigor at winnowing their material, while her peers praise the results. The composer Stephen Schwartz hailed “her ability to always sound like Jeanine and yet to write very specifically for whatever character or milieu that she’s doing,” while Miranda said that she “serves character absolutely and rigorously.”Said LaChiusa: “I never hear the composer screaming, ‘Look at me!’ Instead, I hear, ‘Listen to these words,’ and ‘Feel this character’s joy, this character’s sorrow.’”Honing in on character may get closer to the heart of the matter. By comparison, Tesori recalled of a famous collaborator on the 2006 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Mother Courage,” for which she wrote music. “Meryl Streep disappears into her characters,” she said. “You sort of know that she’s there, but also you don’t. I like doing that too: I want them to be musicalized, not me. I feel like my job is to get out of the way of how they sing.”In the case of “Kimberly Akimbo,” Tesori gives the title character — a teenager with a disease that ages her prematurely — bittersweetly introspective songs, while the callow teenagers and needy adults around her sing in a range of prickly, searching pop and rock. And in the quasi-operatic “Caroline, or Change,” she breathes life not only into the Black and Jewish characters but also into several inanimate objects, from a beatific moon to an angry, mournful city bus.Tesori knows how to translate feeling into song so well that she was even brought in as a vocal producer on the new “West Side Story,” at the screenwriter Kushner’s recommendation. She coached performers on the Bernstein-Sondheim songs, which they recorded in a studio before a frame was shot, and she followed up on set to make sure they maintained consistency.“I love the treasure map of looking into a score as if you’re singing it into being,” she said of the film, though she could also have been describing the kind of information she encodes in her own work. “So you’re not singing ‘West Side Story,’ you’re actually expressing something a character needs in that moment. The tritone in ‘Maria’ is part of an expression, not a famous motif.”Searching for a pre-verbal language to express big feelings, especially unexpressed ones among family members, may be how her musical antennae were formed. Gesturing to the family struggles at the center of “Fun Home,” “Caroline” and now “Kimberly Akimbo,” Tesori said, “I love a household — the counterpoint of the attic, the living room, and the basement.” Growing up as one of four girls in a Sicilian American family on Long Island, she recalled, “There was beauty to it, and there was great chaos to it, and they were all happening at the same time, depending on which fader was up.”She remains tied to her Long Island roots, and photographs of her grandparents are prominently displayed in her office. Her grandmother’s ageless quality, she said, informed her work on the lead character of “Kimberly Akimbo,” while her immigrant grandfather’s thwarted career as a band composer and arranger — he had to pump gas to make ends meet — is part of what fuels the “urgency” she feels about making music.Though Tesori doesn’t typically originate projects, she is careful in choosing them. When David Henry Hwang pitched her the idea of “Soft Power” — a reverse “King and I,” in which a Chinese diplomat becomes an adviser to an American politician — she said she immediately knew: “This is so ambitious and worth failing at, worth spending the four or five years they all take, no matter what.”Victoria Clark, center, as the title character in “Kimberly Akimbo” at the Atlantic Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHwang said she dug with complete commitment into both the show’s irony and its sincerity, and above all she “forced me to take my character seriously, and face my own trauma.” (Hwang was stabbed on a Brooklyn street in 2015 in what was possibly an anti-Asian hate crime.) The show, originally produced in Los Angeles in 2016 and at the Public Theater in 2018, is still aiming for Broadway.With Tazewell Thompson, she wrote the opera “Blue,” about the police killing of a young Black man, which premiered at the Glimmerglass Festival in the summer of 2019. Planned for 2020 stagings scotched by Covid, the opera has new 2022 dates at companies in Seattle, Pittsburgh and Toledo, Ohio, with more commitments to follow. Thompson joined Tesori’s other collaborators in marveling at her ability to make music speak emotionally.“It comes completely from her being in touch with the world, having her ears and eyes always open, watching, peering, getting involved,” Thompson said.That kind of openness can be draining, she said, citing the Sondheim song “Finishing the Hat” for the way her mind will tend to wander to her work. “I feel like I’m always chasing music; I think about it almost all the time,” she said with a note of desperation.While she maintains strong relationships — not only with her colleagues but also with her 24-year-old daughter, Siena, whom she co-parented with her ex-husband, the musical director Michael Rafter — she admitted she struggles with work-life balance and thinks about retiring all the time.“I find it a really hard life,” she admitted. “The loneliness of writing is very difficult. When students say, ‘I want to write for the theater,’ there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Run!’ And there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Stay.’”Making music has been a craft Jeanine Tesori has learned, clearly, but hearing the world as music may just be how she is wired.“Someone came to ‘Kimberly,’ this incredible woman, and she said, ‘Oh, I thought it was WON-dah-ful, it’s bee-YOO-tee-ful,’” Tesori said. The compliment was nice, sure, but “all I could hear was timbre of her voice. I started notating it in my head.” More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Hugh Jackman Announces He Has Covid-19

      by

      Hugh Jackman, who is starring as Professor Harold Hill in “The Music Man” at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway, announced on Tuesday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus.“I just wanted you to hear from me that I tested positive this morning for Covid,” Jackman said in an Instagram video. “My symptoms are like a cold: I have a scratchy throat and a bit of a runny nose, but I’m fine. And I’m just going to do everything I can to get better, A.S.A.P., and as soon as I’m cleared, I’ll be back onstage.”Shortly after Mr. Jackman posted his video, “The Music Man” announced on Instagram that all performances would be canceled through Saturday. Tickets can be refunded or exchanged where they were purchased. Performances will resume on Sunday, and Mr. Jackman will return to the show on Jan. 6. Several other Tony winners star in “The Music Man” alongside Mr. Jackman: Sutton Foster as Marian Paroo, Shuler Hensley as Marcellus Washburn, Jefferson Mays as Mayor Shinn, Jayne Houdyshell as Mrs. Shinn and Marie Mullen as Mrs. Paroo.Preview performances for “The Music Man” began on Dec. 20, with opening night scheduled for Feb. 10.While “The Music Man” has managed to stay open, other shows have not. The New York City Ballet announced Tuesday that it was canceling its remaining performances of “The Nutcracker.” The producers of “Ain’t Too Proud,” a jukebox musical about the Temptations, also announced on Tuesday that their show will close on Jan. 16. The show has not run since Dec. 15, citing coronavirus cases. It is planning to resume on Tuesday, Dec. 28, and hoping to run for three more weeks before closing for good. Last week, the musicals “Jagged Little Pill” and “Waitress,” as well as the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man” announced that they had closed without so much as a farewell performance — all were already on hiatus because of coronavirus cases among cast or crew.The efforts of “The Music Man” to stay open had just been highlighted on Thursday night, when the actress Kathy Voytko, a swing and an understudy for Marian Paroo in the musical, filled in for Ms. Foster, who had Covid, at the last minute. After the show, the actress and dancer Katherine Winter posted an Instagram video of Mr. Jackman praising understudies and swings as “the bedrock of Broadway.”“Kathy, when she turned up at work at 12 o’clock, could have played any of eight roles,” Jackman said at the curtain call. “It happened to be the leading lady. She found out at 12 noon today, and at 1 o’clock she had her very first rehearsal as Marian Paroo.”As the coronavirus and its Omicron variant spread, understudies and swings are becoming more important than ever: Shows are relying on them to step in for sick or unavailable leads.“This is unprecedented,” Mr. Jackman continued. “It’s not only happening here at the Winter Garden, but all over Broadway. This is a time we’ve never known.” More